Wicked Game (11 page)

Leaning a hip against the counter, twisting off the faucet that seemed to forever drip, he remembered how it had been twenty years earlier in the big room downstairs. Carrying his drink, he walked to the staircase and took the worn steps down to the basement with its low-hanging ceiling and monster of a furnace, then ducked through the doorway to the big rec room where the pool table hidden by its old burgundy faux-leather cover still stood.

In his mind’s eye, he saw Jessie as she had been. Seated atop the table, staring straight at him, she’d slowly and deliberately unbuttoned her shirt, then slid it off her shoulders.

He’d lifted a hand in protest, their anger at each other still simmering. “Wait…”

“Shh!” she warned, a finger to her lips before she leaned forward just a bit, offering him an intimate view of her cleavage, then unhooked her bra, her gorgeous breasts free as she wiggled out of it, her hazel eyes cool with calculation and hot with fury.

“Jess—”

“You’ve got a hard-on for Becca,” she said in that low, sultry voice that turned him on. It was the same accusation that had instigated their fight earlier in the day. A fight that everyone at school knew about, he’d subsequently learned, when the cops later sought him out and asked about its cause.

For a moment it was as if she were in the room with him now. Still sixteen. Still angry. And he hadn’t been able to resist her. She’d pouted and toyed with him, then grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him down on the table with her. Her lips had been hot and moist, her tongue rimming his lips, her fingers eager as they pulled his shirt over his head, then ran feather-light over his muscles.

It had been fast after that. Both of them stripping away each other’s pants and underwear. He’d wrapped his arms around her, kissed her breasts and then, despite all his promises to himself, he’d made love to her with all of the heat of his youth, lost in the warm, the mystery, the sheer feminine thrall of her like he’d been since the first time they’d come together, his knees pushing hard against the felt-covered slate.

Afterward, sweating, gasping, while he lay naked on the hard surface, she’d pulled herself away and dressed quickly.

“You don’t have to go,” he said, levering up on an elbow.

“Yeah…yeah, I do.”

“Jessie—”

“Don’t say it, okay?” she insisted, knowing that he was going to promise that he loved her and for the moment, he did, but that was it…only for the moment. They both knew it. She yanked on her clothes and regarded him with sober eyes while he lay on the burgundy felt table, staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own teen angst.

“I’m going,” she said, pulling her hair through the neck of her shirt and shaking out the long strands.

“You could stay.”

“I don’t think so.” She started across the room.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Maybe.” Her tone was fatalistic.

“Oh, for the love of God, stop that,” he said in a flash of anger. He hated the way she sometimes acted like they were only living for the day, that there would be no tomorrow. “Why do you always do that?”

“Because you don’t care!”

Hudson swore under his breath.

“Don’t lie to yourself,” she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “And quit trying to make yourself the good guy. You want out of this…whatever it is we’ve got going.”

Before he could stop himself, Hudson bit out, “You’re the one who wants out.”

She laughed. “Oh, right.”

He was already reaching for his pants.

“What about Becca?” she demanded.

“What about her?”

“You think I don’t know?” she charged, one foot on the stairs, her head twisted to watch him as he struggled with his zipper. “I see things, y’know. I do. And I see the way you look at her.”

“I’m sick of fighting,” he muttered, angry at her. At himself. At the fact that there was more than a grain of truth in her charges.

“Me, too. But…there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Stop being a bastard. I think I might be…in serious trouble…”

Jessie was silhouetted by the light from the staircase and there was something in her expression that gave him pause. Something darker than their petty argument, something that made her bite her lower lip, as if she were afraid of the next words she might utter. She gazed down at the bottom step, the one his father had replaced, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the new boards or nails holding the stair in place. She was somewhere else. Lost in her own thoughts.

“What?” he asked.

“Trouble. Serious trouble.” She wouldn’t look at him.

Swallowing hard, he prepared himself for the fact that she might be admitting she was pregnant.
No matter what she tells you, you have to be a man, Walker. Tough up.

She looked up at him, worry and more—terror?—shadowing her eyes. “Trouble’s coming to find me,” she said almost inaudibly over the rumble of the furnace and the frantic beating of his own heart.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Bad trouble.” She ran a hand nervously through her hair, pushing the golden brown strands from her face. Her fingers trembled slightly. “I don’t know what I was thinking…I…I should have stopped. But I just couldn’t.”

“Stopped what?”

“Searching.”

“Searching for
what
?” he asked, totally confounded. She
wasn’t
pregnant? Relief washed over him, but still he was confused. He crossed to her and reached for her hand resting on the banister.

Instead of explaining further, she changed her mood in her quicksilver way. As if by sheer willpower, she straightened up, then winked at him slyly and said, “You’re not over me, no matter what you think. You’re hooked.”

Hudson stared down at her. She was like that. One way one moment, completely changed the next.

“I’m in your blood,” she said.

And then she was gone.

She’d run up the stairs and out the back door, and as he’d followed and reached the porch, he heard the engine of her car turn over. From the porch he watched the glow of her taillights disappear in the rising fog.

Now he trudged back up the stairs, hearing the ancient boards creak under his weight.

He’d never seen her again.

And what had he done after Jessie disappeared that night twenty years ago? Mourned? Grieved? Longed for her return?

Well, maybe he had a little, in the beginning. Then there had been the questions from the cops and the wondering, always the wondering what had happened to the girl he was supposed to have loved.

But in the end he’d sought solace, comfort, and a chance to forget in sex with Becca. Yes, it had been a few years later, but it hadn’t felt right. He’d wanted to drown himself in her, but Jessie’s face, her voice, her ways…had never gone away, not completely.

Had it been his own guilt eating at him? Undoubtedly. But that feeling had been real and raw enough that it had forced him to give up on Becca. Forced him to discover a new life. Forced him to move on.

I see things…
That’s what she’d said, what Tamara had echoed tonight at the restaurant. It was as if they, the friends who’d known her, understood that she was different, a bit ethereal.

He drained his glass, left it in the sink, then walked into his living room and threw himself down on the sofa. The blank screen of the television stared at him but his mind was viewing a film of its own making.

Were
those Jessie’s bones found in the maze? The only news released through the media was that they belonged to a young female victim. Nobody was saying whether they’d been lying there twenty years or if they were newly deposited. The police were mum, and the story had been eclipsed by more recent local news: a murder apparently from a burglary gone wrong; flooding along lower elevations from a rapidly melting snowpack; a defendant in a criminal trial suddenly hauling off and smacking his own lawyer in the face.

Hudson sighed. He’d been running for years from thoughts of Jessie…and Becca. He’d been running for years from his own feelings. Regardless of what was decided about the bones found at the base of the Madonna statue, maybe it was time to remember, think, even conjecture. Figure out what happened, if anyone could.

It was time to stop running.

“Hey, Mac!”

McNally pretended not to hear Detective Gretchen Sandler’s demanding nasal tone. For the love of God, that woman’s voice was like the scrape of nails on a chalkboard. Truth to tell, she bugged the shit out of him.

He was bent over his computer screen, though he wasn’t near as adept at researching on the ’net as he acted. Sure, he could get what he needed from the electronic equipment that had grown and expanded and reached over the whole department like some alien plant life, invading every aspect of law enforcement, even here in Laurelton. But he still liked to examine real evidence, preferred tromping across crime scenes, and he got off on mentally putting pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle in his brain until he reached that “Aha!” moment.

“Mac!”

“What?” He didn’t look up.

“Don’t act like you can’t hear me,” she said from her desk, which was less than three feet behind him. “I’m zippo on fifteen-to twenty-four-year-old missing females through 1993. Either nobody cares that she’s gone, or we’ve got to go back further.”

“Go back further,” he said, trying not to snap.

He sensed something behind him, something quiet and building. Glancing around, he saw that Gretchen was barely holding in suppressed amusement, as were some of the younger men and women in the department, who, upon seeing his dark expression, moved back to their stations. Gretchen, however, was Mac’s latest partner, a woman who’d earned her job as a homicide detective because she was damn good at her job. Damn good. Just ask her. And she resented being saddled with a has-been, obsessed nut job like Mac who’d earned his promotion to homicide detective out of virtue of simply hanging around long enough. This, of course, was Gretchen’s opinion, not Mac’s.

But it might be a lot of the rest of the department’s as well.

“Maybe I should go back to 1989,” she suggested. “Isn’t there a vic named…oh, let’s see if I can remember…” She snapped her fingers. “Jezebel Brentwood?”

His temper spiked and he bit out, “Maybe you should have started there.”

“And keep you from your obsession? No way. I’ll let you begin at that end and meet you in the middle.”

“If I had DNA on Jessie Brentwood, it would only be a matter of waiting for the results from the bones.” He swivelled in his chair and gave her what he hoped was a cool look, but he felt a muscle working in his jaw.

Gretchen was in her early thirties with creamy, mocha-colored skin and straight black hair, a product of her Brazilian mother, and a pair of icy blue eyes, colder than Mac’s own, a product of her father, apparently, one Gretchen had never known. Or so she’d claimed. “You’re that sure.”

“You got any other missing girls from St. Elizabeth’s?”

“I got a few from the surrounding area.”

“You sure like making it hard on yourself to prove a point.” Mac turned back to his computer as Wes Pelligree, a tall African American detective everyone referred to as Weasel, nudged an unwilling, rain-sodden suspect in damp sweatshirt, dirty jeans, and cuffs toward his desk. Hands chained behind his back, the perp had dirty bare feet, lank, greasy hair, a pimply face, eyes at half mast, and a sneer showing bad teeth, and he reeked of his own puke. An obvious drug bust. But then Weasel had a knack for nailing scumbags who sold meth and crack. Rumor had it his older brother, the one who had dubbed him with the nickname in the first place while Wes was still in grade school, before he’d grown to six-three, had died of an overdose before Wes was out of the Academy. Ever since then, Wes Pelligree had been on a mission.

Which was bad news for the drenched white guy protesting his innocence.

Gretchen, standing too close to his desk, watched them pass and wrinkled her nose as the suspect dropped loudly into a side chair at Weasel’s desk. Phones rang, conversation buzzed, and police personnel in uniform or plain clothes weaved through the maze of desks and cubicles that were crowded into a central area with little privacy and few windows. A heating system that had been “upgraded” sometime in the mid eighties was rumbling and blowing air that was five degrees too warm.

“When are we getting some data we can use?” Gretchen demanded. “The lab techs on vacation, or what?”

“Gotta be patient.” Mac was growing tired of always explaining everything to her. She knew it anyway, but liked to hear herself talk.

“Twenty years patient? I don’t think so.”

She walked off and Mac slid a look after her. She was easy on the eyes. Great figure, nice butt, slim waist, and decent enough breasts, he supposed, but she worked really hard on being unlikeable. He watched a couple of other detectives throw her a glance as she passed. None seemed particularly warm and fuzzy. Mac might be the butt of a few jokes because of his obsession with Jessie Brentwood, but Gretchen was the coworker to avoid. No sense of humor. No big-picture thinking. No fun. She dotted all her i’s and crossed her t’s and fell all over herself in her eagerness to catch the high-profile cases—the few that came along here.

Gretchen Sandler was loaded with ambition, and she didn’t care who got trampled in her climb to the top.

“Humph,” Mac grunted at the computer screen. Though he didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought of him, if those bones proved to be Jessie Brentwood, he’d go from being the goat to the hero of the department.

The same couldn’t be said of Gretchen Sandler.

The afternoon was dark gray and the wind was shrieking around and under the eaves of Becca’s condo. She’d finished up some work on the computer for Bennett, Bretherton, and Pfeiffer, and had luckily not lost any of the documents when the lights had flickered. Climbing out of her desk chair, she worked the knots out of her neck while Ringo, who’d been sleeping curled under her desk, climbed to his feet and stretched. Becca grabbed her now-tepid cup of tea and tossed it down the sink. She was cold inside and out and the storm wasn’t helping.

Deciding to take a bath to warm up, she ran the taps. The lights flickered again. Grabbing her battery-powered radio, she lit the three candles she had arranged in a pewter holder on the tile countertop, just in case. Ringo watched her machinations with interest, his head cocked this way and that.

She’d turned off the lights, opened the shades high over the window of the tub for a view of the sky, and was just climbing into the steaming water when the lights quit altogether, plunging the condo into total darkness aside from her flickering tapers.

Great.

Through the window she saw the limbs of shivering birch trees as they scratched the glass. She gazed past them up at the threatening clouds, then looked over to the fir trees across the way, the same trees that Ringo had barked at on Valentine’s Day as if he’d sensed a mass murderer lurking in the shadows. That had been the same day she’d had her vision, the same day she’d learned of the bones discovered at St. Lizzie’s.

Shuddering, she switched on the radio and caught sight of bottles of bath oils displayed on the counter. She’d bought them primarily for their colors, glowing aqua and deep gold, but now she picked one up, opened it, and poured the liquid underneath the faucet. She was just sinking down into the water again when she felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cool air on the wetness of her skin. Glancing out the window, she focused on the fir trees.

Was someone there?

Watching her?

Seeing the candlelight on her skin?

Instantly she yanked down the blind, her pulse rocketing. Was her imagination running away with her? She seemed to feel eyes watching her at every turn.

“At least you’re not going nuts,” she murmured to the dog.

Turning off the taps, Becca sat quietly, almost suspended, in the hot water. The bath oil was scented, and a light, airy aroma filled her nostrils. It was soothing and after a couple of minutes she relaxed again, listening to the muted classic rock music filtering through the room.

Ringo tiptoed over to the bath mat and curled himself down into a ball. She was glad for the company, because there was no more vulnerable feeling than to be in a bathtub, naked and wet. But was there a more glorious feeling than to practically feel each tightly wound muscle individually loosen?

Becca closed her eyes and let her mind wander. It went to its most natural place: Hudson Walker with his chiseled features and slow-spreading smile, irreverence showing in his expression. Before she could fantasize about him for the most fleeting of seconds, Jessie’s visage appeared, clouding her image of Hudson, coming between them now as she had so long ago. Absently Becca picked up a washcloth and ran it over her neck.

Twenty years earlier Becca had been asked by McNally about the last time she’d seen Jessie Brentwood, had been quizzed like all the others about any and all details they could remember about Jessie the week before she ran away. “Ran away,” Becca repeated to herself now. She’d believed that’s what had happened to Jessie. Even with all the speculation, she’d truly believed Jessie had just run away. It was the most logical explanation. She’d done it before; everyone knew it. Jessie made no secret of the fact.

But if the bones in the maze were Jessie’s then she hadn’t run away. She’d been at St. Lizzie’s all along. Just under the ground. At the feet of the Madonna. Something had happened there that had ended her life.

Becca’s brows furrowed. She didn’t like this new perspective. What
did
she know about Jessie? She clearly remembered the last time they’d spoken. It had been at school. And it had been about Hudson. Jessie had been standing on the front steps of the school as Becca headed outside, juggling her backpack as she’d shouldered open the glass doors to the gray day beyond.

“Hey, Becca,” Jessie said, kind of quietly, thoughtfully.

Becca had looked at her askance. She and Jessie weren’t exactly close friends, though they ran in the same crowd. And because Jessie was Hudson’s, Becca always felt a bit awkward around her. They hadn’t ever taken their friendship to any meaningful level. In fact, they rarely spoke directly to one another. She waved a hand in the general direction she was heading. “I’m…late…”

“I know something,” Jessie said. “Something I shouldn’t, maybe.” She was eyeing Becca closely, as if waiting for something to happen. A gust of wind blew up, teasing Becca’s hair, making her aware that no one else was around. The walkways and lawns leading up to the front doors were empty, not a soul visible.

“What do you mean?” she’d asked and tried not to notice how eerie the late afternoon sky was—steel gray clouds with burgeoning purple bellies hanging low in the sky.

“Sometimes you have enemies you never even knew existed. Sometimes they’re right in front of you.”

“I’m not sure…what you mean…” Becca felt a jolt, slightly alarmed. It was as if Jessie were reading into her mind about her feelings for Hudson.

“And sometimes they’re not,” she said abruptly, looking away, across the parking lot, her gaze off to a middle distance that probably had nothing to do with the dented Chrysler parked too close to a fire hydrant. “I just have this feeling, you know. Like a storm’s coming. Do you ever think that way? That you get feelings and they come true?”

“A storm is coming,” Becca said, glancing up at the dark heavens and playing dumb. Didn’t Jessie know about Becca’s visions? Hadn’t someone told her?

Jessie skewered her with a disbelieving look. “Not
that
kind of storm, Becca. You know what I mean.”

Oh, God. Fear curled through Becca’s blood. “I, uh, I’ve gotta go. Really.”

Jessie didn’t look away, though her hair blew over her face. “Don’t be too trusting, Becca,” she warned. “Watch your back.”

Becca had practically run down the steps away from Jessie.

And then Jessie had disappeared. Mysteriously. The runaway back on the road. Or so everyone had thought, including Becca. But Becca’s parents had become overly frightened and even more protective of their daughter. They’d never really known Jessie; Becca and she hadn’t been that close of friends. But they knew Jessie was a runaway and they seemed to think Becca might have picked up some of Jessie’s ways because they constantly checked to make sure Becca was happy after Jessie’s disappearance.

Happy…

Now Becca thought back to her latest vision. How Jessie had mouthed something to her, something Becca couldn’t hear. How she’d been at the edge of a cliff, her toes over the rim, how she’d been frozen in time, the same age as when she’d disappeared. Was that because that’s how Becca remembered her? Or because that’s the age she’d been when she died…

The wind threw the birch branches at her window, clattering and tapping. The radio switched songs and Rick Spring-field started singing about how he wished that he had Jesse’s girl. Becca’s mouth twisted at the irony. How she’d wished that she had Jessie’s boy.

And how she wished that she still had Jessie’s boy’s
baby.

She pushed that thought aside with an almost physical effort. No good would come from her wishing and hoping for the past to realign itself. It just wasn’t going to happen.

The electricity switched on, bedroom lamps showing through the open door to the bathroom. Climbing out of the tub, Becca had to nudge Ringo off the mat with a wet toe to make some room. She toweled herself off and grabbed up her underclothes, jeans, and a blue sweater. Padding into the bedroom, she pulled on socks and a pair of sturdy hiking boots. Without really knowing what she intended to do, she grabbed her raincoat and keys and purse and headed to her car, throwing a look toward the stand of firs on her way out.

There was nothing there. No malevolent force. Just branches wavering in the brisk wind, emitting a sad soughing filled with regret.

Becca climbed in the Jetta and headed away from the condo into a heavy sky that was growing blacker by the minute. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. Dark as sin already.

Becca told herself she was going out to grab a coffee or a soda as she headed west from her Portland condo. But she passed every coffee shop and fast-food restaurant as night crept up on her. Her hands tightened upon the wheel, her gaze glued to the wet pavement, shimmering in the beams from her headlights. She passed cars and trucks driving in the opposite direction, turned off the main road as if pulled by an unseen force, because not once, consciously, did she admit to herself where she was headed, where she was drawn.