Sweeter Than Sin (33 page)

As she walked down the street, odd glances came her way.

Some of them paused, lingered.

Abruptly she remembered her glasses.… She wasn’t wearing them.

She came to the intersection at Main Street and somebody bumped into her. Looking up, she found herself staring into a pair of familiar eyes—dark brown, velvety soft and intense. The man looked away and then abruptly he looked back at her. “Hey…”

Tate.

Oh, shit.

Tate Bell.

She gave him a vague smile and started across the street.

He caught up with her on the other side of the street. “Do I know you? You look really familiar.”

Lana just shrugged. “Maybe.”

She wasn’t going to lie, but she wasn’t ready to start renewing acquaintances yet, either. With another vague smile, she continued her walk. The house off Clifty Drive was still a bit of a walk, and she was so anxious to get there, she felt like taking off and running.

It felt like hours before she found herself on his porch.

A big, rambling old truck was parked there, a Lincoln Town Car. The windows were open, curtains fluttering in the breeze. Taking a deep breath, she lifted a hand, knocked.

No answer.

She knocked again. “Max!”

Deflated, she turned away and pushed her hair back, staring out over the river, squinting against the bright sunlight reflecting off of it. Part of her wanted to continue to bang on the door, but she’d already knocked. Maybe he was helping Miss Mary. Maybe they were around back.

“Shit.” Lana looked back at the door. Frustrated, she moved closer, peered through the narrow windows that bracketed the door on each side. They were covered with sheer curtains, but maybe she could at least see if he was there. If he was there, she would just park her ass here until he opened the door.

She squinted, straining to see in the dim house. Nothing moving.

Her gaze bounced off the thing on the floor twice without really seeing it.

But the third time, she looked back. Stared.

Pale.

Thin.

Hair sprayed around the skinny body like a fan.

Sucking in a breath, she backpedaled.

“Turning into a Peeping Tom, sugar?”

Spinning around, she stared at Adam. “You…” She gulped. “You were sleeping.”

“I was. Now I’m not. What are you—hey!”

She caught his arm, nervously digging her nails into his skin. “Look.”

He stared inside and she knew the second he saw.

He jerked back, moved in front of the door, and she got the answer to an ages-old question.

No, it really wasn’t as easy as one-two-three to kick a door in. It took him three tries, but Adam did manage to kick the door in and they both rushed in, only to damn near trip over themselves as they caught sight of Max lying just a few feet in front of the door.

It had been Mary they’d seen.

But Max had been hurt, too.

“Check Max,” Adam said, moving down the hall, pulling his phone out, his gaze scanning the house.

Lana reached out and her heart practically stopped when she touched warm flesh. Warm … but cooling.

“Max.”

No answer. But under her fingers she felt a faint, faint pulse at his neck.

She looked up, saw Adam bent over Mary. He shook his head.

“I have to call nine-one-one.”

Lana slowly lifted her head, stared at Adam.

“I can’t wait. If you’re going to leave…” His voice trailed off.

“Call them.” She brushed Max’s snow-white hair back from his face and then eased him onto his back, staring helplessly at the wound in the mid-section of his chest. She had no idea how to help him. “I’m not leaving.”

He was so pale.

She remembered how he’d looked that night, like a tired old avenging angel. But still strong.

He was a broken one now.

“Lana—”

“Call them. Now.” She looked back at Adam. “I’m done running.”

Adam held her gaze, nodded once.

*   *   *

There were cops everywhere.

Cops. It looked like every uniformed officer in town was running around and he caught sight of Lieutenant Shaw Kramer standing just the right of the doorway, his dark face grim, his grizzled gray head bowed as he talked onto his phone.

Caine Yoder had about as much use for cops as he had for preachers, doctors and other so-called trustworthy souls.

He didn’t trust them any further than he could throw them.

There were very, very few people he trusted in this life.

And one of them lived inside that house.

No, Caine didn’t have much use for Max Shepherd, but he did trust the old man, and his heart hammered as he strode across the manicured lawn. Over the years, Max hadn’t been able to keep up with the yard the way he liked. So Caine had done it.

Once Max had tried to pay him for it.

Caine had ripped the check into shreds, left the pieces fluttering in the wind as he walked off.

He had no words he wanted to offer the man, and Caine wouldn’t forgive him for a lot of things.

But Caine knew the old man had tried to help.

And now …

Something inside Caine died a little as a couple of the uniformed officers turned to look at him.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, pasting that blank, polite smile on his face. It had been the mask he’d hidden behind for twenty years now.

Not a soul had ever seen past it.

But then again, nobody had ever really tried.

*   *   *

As much as he hadn’t wanted to spend the morning dealing with Layla Chalmers, this was even worse.

He’d just been sitting down to start going over her statement when Dispatch put through the call from Kramer.

A call from Kramer was going to be an important one, one he had to take. He’d been prepared to hear there was another murder, maybe. So close on top of Willie T.’s, well, it would have been a shock.

But he hadn’t thought to hear that it would have been Miss Mary or that Max would be clinging to his life.

Now he was sitting in the hospital, trying to get answers from a woman who had no interest in giving them to him. It was like trying to get water from a stone. She’d given him her name—he didn’t know if he believed her.

It was possible. Weirder things had happened—weirder things, crazy things,
evil
things were happening in his town, but that didn’t mean he was just going to believe such a bizarre story without so much as a by-your-leave.

Lana Rossi. Here. After all this time, and just in time to save Max.

Or at least give him a fighting chance?

He didn’t think.

And unless Max made it through surgery, he wasn’t even going to be able to ask the old man, either.

“I think,” Sorenson said, leaning forward, his elbows braced on his knees as he studied the woman’s face, “that maybe we should take this from the top.”

The woman calling herself Lana didn’t even seem to hear him.

Her face was ghostly white, her dark hair falling forward to frame her features as she stared down the hall. He recognized that expression. It was the look he’d seen any number of times. Like if a person stared at those doors long enough, hard enough, the doors would talk and tell them what they needed to know.

The look of a woman in shock. But a lot of things could put a person in shock. Coming across a person near death. Or killing a person.

“Ma’am.” He put enough force behind the word that his voice echoed in the quiet, chilly hall. Churches and hospitals, sometimes they carried an eerie, almost surreal sort of silence. He thought it was almost a hallowed sort of ground, people carrying on serious, solemn tasks … tasks that sometimes ended in death. Or life.

She swung her head around and he found himself staring into a pair of pale-grey eyes.

It could be,
he mused. It could very well be Lana Rossi. Jim Rossi had eyes like that—they could pin a person in place, darken from the color of the mist to pewter in a blink. Her hair was dark, but if he wasn’t mistaken, the roots were starting to show and those roots weren’t as dark as the rest. He tried to picture it, how she’d look twenty years older. Harder. Sadder.

She blinked and looked back down the hall, like she just had no use for him. No time to think about him, no time to entertain his question.

She’d have to make room in that mind of hers for him. All there was to it.

“You want me to believe,” he said, making his voice as caustic as possible, “that out of the blue, Lana Rossi shows up, just in time to save old Judge Max.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you believe,” she said, looking back at him. Her voice was pitched low, husky. And her eyes were full of disgust, frustration and fury. None of it was directed at him, but he felt the impact just the same. “And I’ve been here for a while. Not my fault none of you can take your thumbs out of your ass to notice.”

“Been here awhile, you say.” He stroked his jaw as she looked away, dismissing him yet again. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to get a lick of cooperation out of her until she had news on Judge Max.

Sorenson’s gut told him she hadn’t been the one to hurt Max. He couldn’t go by his gut, though. He had to go by what he could prove. Just then, there was precious little of that.

While he admired the loyalty, he needed to get some information out of her so they could
find
who’d hurt the old goat and killed his wife. Poor old Mary. The woman had been helpless and harmless.

“You realize,” Sorenson said, trying a different tactic, “what it’s going to do to him when he wakes up and realizes that somebody took his Mary from him. She was his world. The reason he got up in the morning. And somebody killed her.”

A sigh shuddered through Lana.

“I know that,” Lana said softly. She covered her face with her hands. Moments passed. Then she looked up at Sorenson, and the vulnerability on her face stabbed at him, right in the heart. And he saw it, clear as the day, the girl she’d been.

It was her, all right.

Which only opened up an entire world of more questions, questions he didn’t want to look at. Not considering some of the information he was sitting on. The last person likely to have seen Diane Sutter, David Sutter, Pete Sutter, was sitting in front of him.

And she was also wearing Max’s blood.

Those grey eyes didn’t seem to hide a cold-blooded killer.

But …

“I need you to take me back through what has happened today.” He kept his voice genial. Calm. Tried not to think about anything else. “Start with when you decided you were going to go see Max. And why.”

Lana opened her mouth, but just then Adam stepped up, covered her shoulder with his hand.

Sorenson decided then and there he just needed to pound his head against a hard surface. Stupid tired, running on no sleep, and the shock of seeing one of his oldest friends dying in front of him—no excuse. None.

“Don’t say anything,” Adam said, his voice flat. “You got a cop looking at you like that, you say nothing without a lawyer.”

“If she’s done nothing wrong, there’s no reason to need a lawyer,” Sorenson said. And he knew it was a lie. Whether Lana had hurt Max or not, she needed a lawyer, and bad.

Adam’s mouth curled in a sardonic smile. “Yeah, well, why don’t we just save that chat for when she
has
a lawyer, Chief?”

“Maybe we should just have it now. She can get herself lawyered up and we can get this done.” Sorenson was fed up with this bullshit. Rising from the chair, he pinned Lana with his gaze. He was no small man and she stayed in the seat, looking tired and worried, but she didn’t look at him. “Lana? You hear me? You can either talk to me about what happened today or we can just head on down to the station and talk about today, talk about twenty years ago. Talk about a lot of things that need to be talked about.”

She slid him a look from those foggy grey eyes. Her lashes dropped low, shielding her gaze from him. “Talk now … or you’ll haul me in and … what? Make me talk about what, exactly?”

He took his time crossing the floor, well aware of the fact that she watched every step. She didn’t squirm or look away, and something about the way she watched him made him think she’d had more than one or two run-ins with the law before. She slid a brow up and leaned back in the chair, smirking at him.

“How about what happened at the Frampton house twenty years ago, Ms. Rossi? You were there. You know it. I know it. And as of right now, you appear to be the only survivor of whatever happened that night. I have at least one dead body that I’d like to discuss with you. So … we can either talk about Max. Or we can talk about the Sutter family. Pete, Diane, David. How do you want to do it?”

The tread of booted feet came striding up the hallway, close and getting closer.

Lana stared at him, an insolent smile on her face. “Get your questions together. I’ll have my lawyer answer them.”

Sorenson straightened up. “I guess you just have to do this the hard way. We’ll have that talk, Lana. I’m going to find out what happened to the Sutter family.”

“I guess—” She shrugged, looking away in mid-sentence.

And the final words died on her tongue.

*   *   *

Caine had pictured finding a lot of things when he got to the hospital. Kramer wouldn’t tell him shit. He’d caught a few bits and pieces from the uniformed cops, but nothing had been concrete and he hadn’t wanted to waste time.

He’d imagined finding people gathered around, already grieving.

He’d imagined finding yet
more
cops who wouldn’t tell him anything.

He’d been almost positive he’d find Noah there, and that was what Caine had hoped to find, because Noah
would
tell him something.

But Noah wasn’t there.

The cops were, just a few of them, gathered around Kramer in one waiting room. The big guy himself, Sorenson, waited in another one, a bit farther down the hall. He glared down at a dark-haired woman as he prattled on, the words connecting but not making sense.

“… right now, you appear to be the only survivor of whatever happened that night. I have at least one dead body that I’d like to discuss with you. So … we can either talk about Max. Or we can talk about the Sutter family. Pete, Diane, David.…”