Once Dormant

by Blake Pierce

  Jenn could see some kind of struggle going on in the water among the pilings.

  What on earth?

  In the shadowy morning light, she was able to make out two men fighting—one of them slim and tall, the other huge and bulky. Whatever was going on, Jenn knew that she had to stop it.

  She plunged into the water and struggled through breaking waves. When she reached the combatants, Jenn saw that one of them was Brandon Hitt. He was holding a hammer in one hand and pushing someone’s head underwater with the other. Two fat hands were pushing back at him.

  Before Brandon could notice she was there, Jenn found her balance and threw a swift punch at his face. Her blow sent him reeling back into an oncoming wave.

  Jenn grabbed at the figure submerged in the water, worrying that whoever it was had drowned already. But Brandon quickly recovered his footing, and raised his hammer to come after her again. His snarling expression revealed his intention to kill.

  Just then a gunshot rang out.

  A familiar voice yelled, “Freeze right there, Brandon Hitt, or the next one won’t be into the air.”

  She turned and saw Agent Paige standing in the water’s edge, her revolver pointed directly at Brandon. And she wasn’t alone. Bill, Chief Crane, and Dominic were all thigh-deep in the surf, pointing their weapons at Brandon.

  “They won’t miss,” Jenn warned her opponent.

  Brandon dropped the hammer and raised his hands, looking defeated and exhausted.

  Jenn reached again for the bulky human shape that was still submerged.

  She grabbed hold of a shirt and pulled a face to the surface.

  The man scrambled to get his footing, clinging to a piling and coughing so hard he seemed about ready to vomit.

  Jenn recognized him at once.

  She said, “Why, Amos Crites—as I live and breathe! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Crites managed to say, “I’m doing your job, it seems to me.”

  His voice broke down in a fit of coughing.

  “Come on,” Jenn said, helping him struggle back onto the shore. She saw that Riley and Chief Crane were putting Brandon into handcuffs. Bill had gotten Sam wrapped up in a blanket he must have gotten from the car, and he was talking on his cell phone—calling an ambulance, Jenn was sure.

  Crites grumbled, “I’ve been following you Feds around all night, ever since poor Vanessa Pinker got killed, watching you bumbling around getting nowhere. I got worried about Sam Kuehling once she took off on her own, and I started trailing her, and when I saw what kind of trouble she was in down here …”

  Gasping for breath as she supported Crites’s enormous bulk, Jenn pointed at Sam and said …

  “Well, it looks like you saved Sam’s life. Thanks for that. And I saved yours. You’re welcome. And you might want to thank the Feds for scraping the bottom of the barrel for the likes of me.”

  Crites’s coughing faded and he stared at her.

  He finally seemed to register that he’d been saved by a black female FBI agent.

  Crites shook his head and growled as he collapsed onto the sand.

  Jenn couldn’t help but laugh as she thought …

  God sure does love irony.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  As Sam started to wake up, she realized that she was aching all over. Her head was splitting with pain.

  Where am I? she wondered.

  She opened her eyes, and her surroundings started to come into focus …

  Oh, yeah. The hospital.

  She’d been in and out of consciousness since her ordeal at the pier. She remembered being brought to the emergency room, where her head wound had been stitched and bandaged, and a doctor had run tests to make sure her concussion wasn’t serious.

  She noticed that some people were standing at one side of her bed. They were Agents Paige, Jeffreys, and Roston. Then she realized that someone on the other side of the bed was holding her hand. She turned her head slightly and saw her father smiling down at her. He looked like his old lucid self.

  “Dad!” she said, surprised by the weakness in her voice.

  Her father nodded and said, “That’s right. They sprung me from jail as soon as they found out who the real killer is. And you’re the one who led the Feds to him. I’m proud of you, Punkin.”

  Sam sighed, remembering how she’d allowed herself to get drawn into Brandon’s trap. It didn’t feel like anything to be proud of.

  She said, “All I did was get myself into trouble.”

  Agent Paige spoke up. “I wouldn’t say that. You and your father solved the Bonnett killings. That’s quite an accomplishment all by itself.”

  Sam felt a glow come over her. The praise, especially from that particular agent, sounded sweet to her ears.

  Then Agent Paige said, “Agents Jeffreys and Roston and I are headed back to Quantico. We just stopped by to check in on you before we left.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Sam said. “But what about Brandon?”

  Agent Jeffreys said, “He’s in another hospital room, getting his shoulder wound taken care of. Chief Crane is with him, and he’s under heavy guard. He’s been drugged up for his pain, and he’s talking like crazy.”

  Sam said, “But why did he do it? Kill those people, I mean?”

  Agent Roston said, “It’s a long story. But when he was a young teenager, he seems to have developed some kind of a close relationship with the original killer, Wylie Pembroke. And he found out what Pembroke had done. After Pembroke killed himself, Brandon made some kind of warped decision to carry on his work.”

  Sam lay staring at the agents, trying to make sense of what she’d just heard.

  Agent Paige said, “Don’t worry, we’ll know the whole truth pretty soon. Not that we’ll ever entirely understand why he did what he did. In our line of work, we get used to dealing with things we can never fully understand.”

  Then someone else came through the door. It was Amos Crites.

  “I see you’re looking better,” Crites said in his rumbling voice.

  Sam remembered glimpsing Crites grabbing hold of Brandon just as he was ready to land a fatal blow of his hammer.

  “Thanks for what you did for me,” she said.

  “It was nothing,” Crites said with a shrug. “I should have figured out something was wrong with Brandon Hitt long ago. I’ve known him and his family from way back. One day when he was a kid, Brandon told me his dad was hitting him with a hammer, and I threatened the old man so bad that he left town for good.”

  Crites shuffled his feet and continued …

  “I guess I was the only one in town who noticed how Brandon got close to Wylie Pembroke. I thought it was a good thing for both of them.”

  With a low growl, Crites added, “Boy, was I ever wrong.”

  Then he drew himself up again and said, “Anyway, this whole nasty thing is over with, and I’m damn glad of it. Folks just can’t go around killing people for no good reason. It would’ve gotten bad for business before long.”

  Crites pulled out a cigar and almost lit it. Then he seemed to remember where he was, and he put the cigar back in his pocket.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I like it when property values drop, but only temporary-like, so I can buy up cheap. A few more murders and things might have gone sour around here permanently. I wouldn’t like that.”

  As he turned to go, he found himself facing Agent Roston.

  He scowled sharply at her, and she broke into laughter.

  What’s that all about? Sam wondered.

  Without another word, Amos Crites left the room.

  “We’re going now too,” Agent Paige said, patting Sam on the shoulder. “You’re a talented young woman. You might have a future in our line of work. I’d like to stay in touch.”

  Barely able to believe her ears, Sam managed to gasp out a thank-you.

  When the agents left, Sam saw that her father had fallen asleep in his chair.

  Poor Dad, she thou
ght.

  What a terrible night he’d been through. And when he woke up, would he have any idea what had happened? Sam felt sick at heart as she thought about how his condition was going to worsen for the rest of his life. But she was also determined to spend as much time as she could with him from now on.

  Sam was almost ready to drop off to sleep herself when Dominic arrived with a bouquet of flowers.

  “Hey,” Dominic said quietly, trying not to awaken her father. “It’s nice to see you looking better.”

  Dominic suddenly seemed more attractive than she’d ever noticed him to be before.

  “You don’t look so bad yourself,” she said.

  Then she felt herself blush …

  Oh my God. Did I say that aloud?

  Anyway, it was certainly true. She’d sensed for some time that Dominic had a thing for her, and his jealousy toward Brandon had pretty much proved it. And now she was surprised at how glad she was to see him.

  Dominic sat down beside the bed and said, “The doctors say they’ll be keeping you here for a couple of days, just for observation. That means I get to spend some quality time with you.”

  She took Dominic’s hand and squeezed it.

  “That sounds nice,” she said.

  She thought with a smile …

  Maybe I had to get smacked with a hammer to find out how I feel about him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  As the FBI plane landed at the Quantico airfield, Riley found herself thinking about her flight down to Mississippi just yesterday. So much had happened since then, she’d had no time to consider the dream she’d had during that trip.

  In that dream, her father had told her …

  “You can be right about something, and wrong about it too, both at the same time.

  “Absolutely right, absolutely wrong.”

  Riley sighed at the memory. Now she knew how true those words had been. She’d sensed from the start that there was some deep connection between the murders of the Bonnett family and the killings of Gareth Ogden and Vanessa Pinker.

  Her feelings at the crime scenes had confirmed that feeling—that the new murder was some kind of continuation …

  She shivered a little as she remembered what her father had said …

  “‘A continuation.’ An interesting choice of words.”

  She’d been convinced that the new killings weren’t the work of some mere copycat, and that had turned out to be both true and not true.

  By his own account, Brandon Hitt hadn’t been trying to duplicate Wylie Pembroke’s horrid crime of passion.

  He’d been trying to improve upon it.

  He’d been trying to perfect it.

  Chief Crane had called her during the flight to tell her that he’d managed to get in touch with Wylie Pembroke’s ex-wife, who was now living in Minneapolis. Crane said the poor woman had become hysterical when he told her all that had happened. Back when the Bonnett family had been killed, she’d suspected that her husband had taken his hideous revenge for her affair with Cosmo Bonnett. Feeling both fearful and guilty, she’d fled Rushville never to return.

  But in the end, she hadn’t been able to escape her past.

  Riley wondered about Wyatt Hitt. It was no fault of his own that his father had left, his mother had died, and his brother turned out to be a cold and calculating killer. What chance did that young paperboy have to escape his past?

  Fortunately, Wyatt wouldn’t be left to foster care. Chief Crane had said that Amos Crites was taking responsibility for the boy’s future. Crites had spurred a local church group into action and a good solid family was taking Wyatt in. Maybe the boy would be able to overcome his awful start in life.

  Riley knew that it wouldn’t be easy for Wyatt. After all, Jilly was still affected by terrible things that she’d been through and Riley would hardly describe her own early life as stable and solid.

  Then Riley smiled and relaxed a little. In spite of Riley’s frequent absences, Jilly was maturing fast and learning to deal with her occasional lapses into self-doubt. And of course Gabriela was a rock-solid influence. And Riley and Blaine could be on their way to … well, maybe a good solid family of their own.

  The plane taxied to a stop, and Riley, Bill, and Jenn headed for the exit. As they stepped out of the plane, they saw Special Agent Brent Meredith standing below on the tarmac, his arms crossed and with a frown on his face.

  Bill murmured to Riley as they went down the steps …

  “I don’t guess he’s here to congratulate us on a job well done.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he is,” Riley said with a sigh.

  She remembered the team chief’s fury on the phone upon learning that she’d gone AWOL, and that Bill and Jenn had covered for her …

  “There’s going to be hell to pay for all three of you when you get back.”

  When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Meredith growled at Riley …

  “I want a word with you.”

  Then he said to Bill and Jenn …

  “I’ll talk to you two later.”

  Bill and Jenn gave Riley sympathetic and worried looks and continued on their way.

  Meredith said to Riley, “Is your car here?”

  “Yes,” Riley said.

  “I’ll walk you to it,” Meredith said.

  They walked in silence for a few tense moments.

  Then Meredith said, “Tell me why you came back in the middle of a case.”

  Riley realized there was nothing to tell him but the truth. She explained as simply as she could that she’d found out that her younger daughter had been cutting herself, and she’d thought she needed to get back to her.

  “How is your daughter now?” Meredith asked.

  Riley was surprised by the question.

  She said, “OK, the last time I saw her. She’d going to need counseling, though.”

  Another silence fell as they walked together.

  When they reached Riley’s car, Meredith just stood staring at her. Then he said, “You should have told me.”

  Riley was truly taken aback now. She didn’t know how to reply.

  Finally she said, “Would it have mattered?”

  “That’s not the point,” Meredith said. “It wasn’t your call. You should have told me. I’ve got to be in the loop.”

  They held each other’s gazes for a moment.

  Riley wondered …

  Is this the only reprimand I’m going to get?

  Then Riley said, “OK.”

  As she climbed into her car, Meredith added …

  “You guys did a good job in Mississippi.”

  “Thanks,” Riley said.

  As she started to pull away, she saw that Meredith was still standing nearby watching her with folded arms. As she studied his expression, something started to dawn on her.

  He cares about me.

  He cares about Bill and Jenn too.

  More than that, she sensed that Meredith admired the bond that had grown among Riley and her two partners—even when that bond meant covering for each other’s foibles and mistakes.

  Above all else, Riley sensed that Meredith was lonely—a lonely man in a lonely job.

  He envies us, she thought. He envies what we have.

  It seemed strange to her—strange and sad, but also somehow rather lovely.

  She drove on past him and continued on her way home.

  She thought that next time she would tell him about whatever she was doing.

  *

  Later that day, Riley and Blaine were sitting on her back deck watching their three girls playing with the dog and cat. They were sipping soft drinks and eating snacks that Gabriela had prepared to welcome Riley home.

  Out of earshot of the kids, Riley had just finished explaining to Blaine what had happened with Jilly.

  “Jesus,” Blaine said. “She seems just fine now.”

  “I know,” Riley said. “Let’s hope it lasts. I think it will. She just needs a little help to
get through things.”

  A silence fell between them.

  Then Blaine said, “I knew something was wrong with Jilly when I drove your daughters home. But I …”

  His voice faded for a moment, and then he continued …

  “But I didn’t know what to do or say. Should I have talked to her? Should I have tried to draw her out? I’m not her father—at least not yet. I don’t know the boundaries. I don’t know how to navigate all this. I don’t know the rules.”

  “Neither do I,” Riley said. “There’s no instruction manual for what we’re trying to do—putting our two families together.”

  They squeezed each other’s hands and watched their children quietly for a few moments.

  Then Blaine said, “I’d better get back to my restaurant.”

  Riley nodded and said, “I haven’t slept in a long time. I may go to bed soon.”

  Riley and Blaine stood up and kissed each other lightly.

  Blaine said, “Riley … let’s take things slowly. I mean, with you and me. Make sure we do it right.”

  “OK,” Riley said, feeling a lump in her throat.

  Blaine called for Crystal, and the two of them left. As Riley continued watching her two daughters playing, Blaine’s words echoed through her head …

  “Let’s take things slowly.”

  It sounded like such good advice. But no matter which way she looked, there were family emergencies to rush back for, murderous monsters to thwart and capture, dire matters of life and death, and crises that looked small but somehow seemed as desperately urgent as anything else in her life.

  Riley sighed deeply and sadly and replayed those words again in her head …

  “Let’s take things slowly.”

  She wished with all her heart that she could take all kinds of things slowly …

  If only life would let me.

  NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!

  ONCE SHUNNED

  (A Riley Paige Mystery—Book 15)

  “A masterpiece of thriller and mystery! The author did a magnificent job developing characters with a psychological side that is so well described that we feel inside their minds, follow their fears and cheer for their success. The plot is very intelligent and will keep you entertained throughout the book. Full of twists, this book will keep you awake until the turn of the last page.”