by Lisa Jackson
It had been a long, rewarding day.
And he’d caught glimpses of her.
Eve.
Beautiful.
Seductive.
Deadly.
Oh, to want her, to feel her pliant, soft body beneath his. To smell her. Taste her. Feel the heat of her skin rubbing anxiously, eagerly against him. He would love to hear her moan, see her writhe in fear and ecstasy as he mounted her, claimed her, thrust so deep into her she’d gasp and the cords of her beautiful neck would stand out…inviting. He would do anything he wanted to her beautiful body, and she would accept him, understand their destiny. She would kneel before him, licking her already wet lips…ready to take him in.
He felt his cock twitch, threatening to harden, and he clamped his jaw tight.
There was no time for this kind of fantasy, not yet.
Later…Oh, yes, later…
For now, he had to concentrate.
He had work to do.
She would wait.
He knew where she was.
Earlier, he’d followed her. After assuring himself that she had indeed driven into the city and not to this remote farmhouse, he’d turned off the freeway on the outskirts of New Orleans, doubling back a bit and driving unerringly to a spot where he could park his truck. His pickup was now hidden behind a dilapidated old barn on a forgotten piece of soggy farmland near the swamp.
From the truck’s hiding place, he’d walked nearly two miles through thickets, woods, and open pasture. He’d seen the massive dark shapes of dozing cattle, startled a flock of sheep into bleating for a few seconds before he’d slipped from their pasture, and crossed two streams, ever intent upon his mission.
The Voice had warned him that there might be a dog guarding the premises. If so, he would take care of the mutt as easily as he would kill his victim. The Reviver would have to be wary. He slipped his bowie knife from its leather sheath then held it in his mouth.
Through the thin veil of fog, he loped up a small rise to the far side of the pastureland and spied an aluminum gate. Too noisy to open or climb over. Again he stretched the wire between the fence posts and slipped noiselessly to the other side.
He paused.
Listened.
Stared into the darkness.
He sensed no one outside, heard only the sound of his own heartbeat and the soft sigh of the wind rustling the branches of a willow tree and causing an ancient windmill to creak as the wooden blades slowly turned.
The house was only thirty feet away.
The porch light was off, but there was no dark shape lying near the door, no sound of a dog padding in the darkness, no smell of canine feces or urine or hair.
Ever wary, his hand on the hilt of his knife, the Reviver walked noiselessly through the weeds then hurried across parallel ruts of a gravel and dirt drive. At the garage he paused, every muscle tense. Slowly he swept his gaze over the unlit floorboards and stairs of the back porch. Still no mutt was visible.
Good. He pulled on a pair of thin black gloves and stretched his fingers. Then the waiting was over.
On the balls of his feet, he silently crept up the stairs to the back door. Paused. Checked the windows, peering through the glass. The kitchen itself was dark, but enough light spilled into the room from the hall. The room was neat. Uncluttered. Except for the bottle of whiskey, uncapped and sitting on the counter. Good. Just as expected. The Reviver moved his gaze slowly over the rest of the neat expanse and located the tiny light glowing on an area that was obviously used for a desk. Plugged into an outlet and next to an open notebook that was either a calendar or day planner or the like was a cell-phone charger with the phone inserted, the tiny red light glowing like a beacon.
He moved to the door.
Above the thin doorjamb he found a hidden key.
Just as the Voice had told him.
Barely breathing, the Reviver inserted the key.
With only the tiniest click of metal against metal, the lock gave way and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.
Perfect.
He pocketed the key and took his knife from his mouth, holding it ready. Barely breathing, he stepped over the threshold and into the dark kitchen.
He was inside.
Eve made the call.
Dressed in her cotton nightgown and robe, she stood in the kitchen, warming one hand on a cup of green tea and holding her cell phone to her ear with the other. She’d promised Anna Maria she’d phone, and even though it was closing in on eleven, she was going to make good.
“Hello?” Anna’s voice was clear and chipper. Of course. She was a night owl, always had been, and didn’t understand people who rose before dawn.
“Hey, it’s me. I made it back. Safe and sound.”
“I was beginning to wonder,” Anna said.
“Tell Kyle.”
“I will, when he gets back.”
“He’s not there?”
“Uh-uh. He just missed you this morning, ran into the house, took one call, and left not long after you did. Some emergency at work. A breakdown of some computer system he set up for a local bank. They suffered a major crash. Their entire system is down, and with all of the identity fraud and scams out there, the owner of the bank freaked. Insisted all of the computers in every branch have to be up and operational by the time the bank opens tomorrow, so Kyle’ll be pulling an all-nighter.”
“You’d think they’d have a backup system.”
“Probably do, but Kyle’s their guy.” She sounded totally disgusted with the situation.
“Bummer.”
“Don’t get me started.”
Eve didn’t dare. She knew the drill. As much as Anna professed to believe in wedded bliss, her own marriage was a train wreck; she was just too stubborn and too Catholic to do anything about it. “Listen, I’m about ready to call it a day, so I’ll talk to you later.”
“Have you called your father?”
“No,” Eve said quickly then bit her tongue. She and Terrence Renner hadn’t been on good terms for a long while. “I’ll call him in the morning.”
“Right after you get the puppy?”
“What? Oh.” Eve smiled at Anna’s clever way of calling her a liar. “No, right before.”
Anna laughed. “Good. I’ll talk to you in a couple of days. Bye.”
“Bye,” Eve said, but the connection was already severed. Anna had hung up.
Making a face, Eve considered dialing her father and letting him know she was in New Orleans then decided it could wait until morning. Even if he were still awake, Terrence would have already downed a couple of stiff drinks.
She’d prefer to talk to him when he was sober.
Adding a little hot water from the kettle to her cup, Eve sipped at her tea then stared some more at the newspaper articles still scattered over the scarred oak table.
You should go to the police.
She read the clippings over again, taking mental notes. Faith Chastain’s obituary, over twenty years old, was included, and within it were the names of the loved ones she’d left behind: her husband, Jacques, and two daughters, Zoey and Abigail. Abby Chastain. Why did that name ring a dim bell?
Who had done this? How? There was no evidence that her car had been broken into. No windows smashed, no locks pried or jimmied. It was almost as if someone had used her own key to get inside.
A duplicate?
Her insides turned to ice. If someone had somehow gotten hold of her key ring, then any of her keys could have been copied, including the keys to this house.
She heard a scrape.
The sound of a fingernail sliding against glass.
Her heart clutched before she realized that it was the sound of a branch against a window on the second floor. Still, she dropped her cup onto the counter, and tea slopped over the sides of the rim. She didn’t care. She ran up the stairs, stopping at the landing. Sure enough, the wind had picked up, rattling the limbs of the trees outside, causing a small branch to rasp against t
he glass. That’s what she’d heard. No one was trying to get in.
Forcing her pulse to slow and her mind to think clearly, Eve concentrated on the keys.
Don’t go there, Eve! Don’t think anyone can let himself into your house at will. Your keys were never stolen. They were never missing. Someone slipped into your car when you inadvertently left it unlocked. And they did it today. You know that. Otherwise you would have found the packet earlier, when you put your sunglasses into the glove box.
She tried to think dispassionately about the guy in the wraparound shades. She’d panicked at the sight of him, imagined him to be the embodiment of evil tracking her down. When she’d calmed down a bit, she’d blown off her fear as the bothersome result of an overactive imagination, but was it really? Could he be the culprit, the one who’d left her the clippings?
If only she’d seen his license plate.
“Get a grip,” she said, then nearly tripped on Samson, who was lying on the bottom step. “Careful there, guy.” She picked him up and carried him back to the kitchen.
Turn these clippings in to the police.
Eve grimaced. The local detectives already thought she was at least three cards shy of a full deck. Taking in this bundle of news articles would only up the ante on the theory that whatever brains she once had were destroyed when a bullet ricocheted against her skull.
Maybe the police could pull off fingerprints, find out who broke into your car and left the envelope in the glove box.
All too clearly Eve remembered the harsh, no-nonsense visages of Detectives Montoya and Bentz and the skepticism of the Assistant District Attorney who had been chosen to prosecute Cole.
“You’re certain about this?” ADA Yolinda Johnson had asked Eve, her dark eyes narrowing. She was a slim, smart African-American woman of about thirty-five who wasn’t about to walk into the courtroom without all of her facts straight and her ducks in a row. Eve was seated on one side of a large desk, Yolinda on the other. The office was small and close, no window open, and Eve had been sweating, her pain medication beginning to wear off. “Mr. Dennis shot you.”
“Yes.” Eve’s insides had been in knots, and she’d worried a thumb against the knuckle of her index finger.
“But you don’t remember anything before or after the attack, is that right?” Yolinda had clearly been skeptical, her lips pursing as she tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the legal pad lying faceup on the desk.
Eve’s stomach tightened. “That’s…that’s right.…I mean, I remember being with Cole at his house—”
“In his bed, Ms. Renner. Let’s not mince words. The defense attorney certainly won’t.”
Eve’s head snapped up, and she met the other woman’s gaze evenly. “That’s right. We’d been in bed.”
“You were lovers.”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“I received a call from Roy…Roy Kajak. He was insistent we meet. He said he had some kind of ‘evidence,’ whatever that meant. But then…then it gets kind of blurry.”
“Mr. Dennis didn’t want you to go.”
“That’s right.”
“He barred the door.”
“Yes…”
“Did he follow you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see him leave the house?”
“I…I don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure, are you?” the assistant DA had accused, leaning forward across the desk.
“No.”
“So it’s all a blur. Until you saw Cole Dennis leveling a gun at you through the window.”
“Yes.”
“Even though it was dark.”
“Yes!” Eve’s guts had seemed to shred.
Yolinda frowned, her lips rolling in on each other. Her pencil tapped an unhappy tattoo. She stared at Eve a long minute that had seemed punctuated by the ticking of a clock on the credenza behind her neat desk. “Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this, okay? The jury will understand why you don’t remember anything after the shooting. You were wounded. Passed out. Unconscious. That works. But possessing no memory leading up to that moment in time is a problem.”
“I can’t lie.”
Yolinda held up her hands, stood, then walked to the small window. “The last thing we want you to do is lie, but you’re going to be asked some tough questions while you’re on the stand.” Turning, she rested her hips against the window ledge, her dark gaze boring into Eve’s. “The fact is that you’ve got credibility issues, Ms. Renner. You were taken to the hospital, unconscious, and, along with other medical treatment, you were examined for rape.”
Eve had nodded. Braced herself. Felt as if the air in the room had suddenly gone stale. She knew what was coming.
Yolinda’s voice softened a bit. “You weren’t raped, Eve. We know that. There was no bruising or tearing consistent with rape. But you had semen in your vagina.”
Eve met the ADA’s hard gaze. She’d been through this before, but it was still difficult to hear. “I’d been with Cole,” she said softly.
Yolinda nodded. “Some of the semen belonged to Cole Dennis. But there was other semen as well. Other viable sperm. Definitely not belonging to Mr. Dennis.”
The first time she heard that horrifying information, the blood rushed to her head and made her feel like she would pass out, throw up, or both. With an effort, she just stared back at the ADA.
“And it was not from Royal Kajak.”
Eve swallowed but still said nothing. What was there to say? What kind of comment could she make? And how could she not remember something so vital? This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. True, she had holes in her memory—a dark, blank nothingness surrounding the night of Roy’s murder—but she knew herself well enough to understand that she would never sleep with two men within hours of each other. Never.
You weren’t raped. We know that.
Then how ???
“I only remember being in bed with Cole,” she finally managed to get out, sounding as confused and shattered as she felt.
Yolinda shrugged and exhaled a long-suffering sigh. “You see my problem, don’t you? If I get you up on the stand, and you ‘don’t remember this’ and you ‘don’t remember that’ and you don’t even remember who you slept with, how’s that gonna look to the jury? What do you think Cole’s attorney, Sam Deeds, is gonna do with that testimony on cross-examination?” Eve shook her head, and Yolinda continued tersely, “I’ll tell you what he’ll do. He’ll go at you, over and over again, get you tongue-tied and angry, so that you look like you’re either stupid or a bald-faced liar. Then, when it’s already awful, he’ll just keep pushing you, so that you get defensive and look like a two-timing bitch.”
“It was only Cole!”
“That’s not what the evidence says.”
They were at an impasse. Eve’s paltry excuse of “I can’t remember,” though the truth, was not going to sit well with the jury.
Yolinda nodded as if they’d come to some kind of agreement. “Even if we can convince the jury that you’re telling the truth about your amnesia, the idea that you slept with two men within twenty-four hours will be planted. Add to that, you’re trying to pin a murder on a jealous boyfriend. That’s how Deeds’ll play it. And he’ll have clean-cut, smart, innocent-looking Cole Dennis at the table, looking for all the world like the wounded party—the choirboy whose girlfriend was two-timing him with another man she can’t, or won’t, name.” Yolinda pushed herself upright and walked to the desk, found a file in her top basket, and slid it over the polished wood so that it landed, open, in front of Eve. “This will be one of Deeds’s exhibits. It’s the DNA report. Two different semen samples taken from you. It won’t help that the sperm wasn’t Kajak’s. If anything, that will only make it worse, because you claim you can’t remember whose it is.”
“Stop.” Eve knew she was being goaded, but she couldn’t take it a second longer. “I get it. I see your point. But I haven’t slept with anyone
but Cole in two years.”
“Then how?
“I don’t know!” Eve shook her head. “It…had to have happened…after…after I got into the cabin.”
“But you saw Mr. Dennis at the cabin. Was there someone in between the time you left Mr. Dennis at his home and went to meet Mr. Kajak at the cabin? Before Mr. Dennis arrived?”
“No.”
“Was there someone else there?”
“No.”
“Who was he, Ms. Renner?”
“No one!”
“Someone after you claim Mr. Dennis shot at you at the cabin?”
“No. I didn’t have sex with anyone!”
“How do you know, Ms. Renner? You don’t remember.”
“Then it…it was afterwards….”
“At the crime scene? Or the hospital? When the police were crawling all over the place, or in the ambulance ride when you were still unconscious? Could you pick out the EMT with whom you had sex from a lineup?” Yolinda hammered at her. “You know, those people who saved your life? Which one of them did you have consensual sex with?”
Eve’s eyes stung. “I’m telling the truth.”
Yolinda nodded. “We can’t use your testimony, Eve. You see that, don’t you? Not unless I want to completely destroy my case.” With a sigh, she said, “We’re done here,” and that was the end of it.
And Eve had no more answers now than she had then.
The old man was drunk.
So it wouldn’t take long.
Hidden in the shadows of the aging trellis in the side yard, the Reviver checked his digital watch. Twenty minutes had passed since he’d slipped into the house, taken care of business, and then noiselessly walked outside again. His victim, who had been in the den and listening to some radio program, was none the wiser that he’d ever had a visitor.
Yet.
That was soon to change.
Everything had gone perfectly, just like clockwork. Just as the Voice of God had instructed.
He watched through the window. The kitchen was now lit, the open bottle of Jack Daniels in the sink, a tray of ice cubes left on the counter, the few remaining in the tray beginning to melt.