Under Suspicion

by Lee, Rachel

  The other officer, Mel Gasper, drew him aside. “Listen, Gil,” he said. “I want to talk to you about this before you talk to them.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s just it. Nothing we can arrest him for. But frankly, I don’t like it. It might just be a prank.”

  Gil’s impatience soared. “Just tell me, Mel.”

  “He buried her in the sand near the waterline. You know.”

  “Yeah.” Gil clamped down on his impatience. “Okay.”

  “Well, the thing is, once he had her buried, he told her he wasn’t going to dig her out. By the time we found her, a couple of the waves had rolled over her head. She was pretty hysterical.”

  Gil’s jaw clenched, but before he could say anything, Mel gripped his arm. “Don’t do anything stupid, buddy. Kids pull pranks all the time. You won’t get anywhere with it legally.”

  Anna watched Tebbins move silently across the living room toward a hallway. When he disappeared from sight, she started to wonder wildly if she should hide.

  But it couldn’t be anything, she told herself. Nobody would be stupid enough to break into a cop’s house. Nobody. Not even her stalker.

  Then she heard two gunshots.

  Gil crossed the parking lot toward his daughter and Jamie. Mel was right beside him. He took some small pleasure in the fact that Jamie backed up a pace when he saw Gil’s face.

  “Daddy,” Trina said tearfully, and moved toward him. He waved her back with his hand. “In a moment. First I have some words for Jamie.”

  Jamie’s face settled into an angry, resentful frown, but he at least showed enough survival instinct to keep his mouth shut.

  “Here’s how it’s gonna be,” Gil said to the kid. “You’re never going to come anywhere near my daughter again. Because if you do, I’m going to make you sorry. My job won’t matter. Nothing will matter. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  Jamie tried a sneer. It didn’t quite succeed. “You can’t do that. It’s illegal.”

  “There’s an older law,” Gil said, his voice like honed steel. “You hear me? An older law. Fathers protect their daughters. And I won’t give a damn about consequences.”

  Jamie looked at Mel and the other cop. “He threatened me. He can’t do that.”

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Mel said. “What about you, Dave?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Jamie searched their faces again, but apparently didn’t find them any friendlier than Gil’s. Then he turned to Trina. “You’re an ugly, fat cow anyway. Run home to Daddy.”

  Trina burst into tears, but it was her father’s arms she threw herself into.

  “Time to clean up the beach,” Mel remarked.

  Dave nodded. “Get out of here, jerk,” he said to Jamie. “And don’t let me see your face in this town again.”

  St. Pete Beach was small enough to make that threat real.

  Oh, God!

  Anna leapt up from the couch and wondered what to do. Run? But she’d be all alone on the street. And what if Tebbins was hurt? She couldn’t leave him.

  Her heart was galloping like a horse in a quarter-mile heat. Part of her was praying desperately that Tebbins would come back down that hallway and tell her he’d caught an intruder. In broad daylight. Right.

  It had to be the stalker. Had to be. Crazy as it sounded, he’d found out where she was. Tebbins must have shot him. But why didn’t he come back?

  Oh, God, she had to hide. Looking around, she tried to decide where was the best place to go. The thought of tearing out onto the street all alone, where anyone could find her unprotected, chilled her as much as the possibility of what might be going on in the back of the house.

  But at least she could run.

  And leave Tebbins, possibly wounded, to the mercies of whoever was back there.

  No.

  Gasping air in great gulps, she retraced Tebbins’s earlier steps to the kitchen, taking care to make no sound. A knife. It wasn’t as good as a gun, but at least it offered some protection. And her pepper spray. On the way by, she pulled it out of her purse.

  Call 9–1-1? In the kitchen, she pulled the phone off the hook and let it dangle. She punched in the numbers, knowing someone would be sent to investigate. That was when she realized she didn’t hear a dial tone.

  Grabbing the handset, she lifted it to her ear. No. No dial tone.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a second, telling herself to calm down, to think. She couldn’t leave Tebbins. He might be grievously wounded. She had to go back there and see if she could help him.

  Forcing herself to take one quiet step after another, with a butcher knife in one hand and the pepper spray in the other, she left the kitchen cautiously.

  Sticking her head out carefully, she peered down the hallway. She couldn’t see a thing. Three doors, two on the right and one on the left were open. At the very back was another open door, through which she could see a wooden desk and bookshelves.

  She should turn and run. The thought hammered at her with every heartbeat, but awareness of Tebbins’s possible state kept her from doing so. She’d never forgive herself if he died because she ran. Never.

  She took the first step down the hallway. Whoever it was might be gone. Tebbins might have scared him off with his gun, even if the detective had been shot. Trying to remember what the two reports had sounded like, she thought they might have been different. From different weapons.

  So Tebbins could be hurt, and the intruder could even then be running away. Or waiting for Anna to burst out of the house.

  True terror was a strange thing. It wasn’t like the nerve-stretching uneasiness that sometimes kept her on the edge of her seat for a good movie. Part of her mind, as if stepping back, was amazed at how calm she was. At how aware she was of things that didn’t seem important.

  Every sound, even her own breathing, was loud now. The softness of the hallway carpeting, which she never would have noticed otherwise, felt like pillows beneath the soles of her shoes. The knife in her hand felt strangely light, as if gravity had disappeared.

  At the first door, she paused and listened. Nothing. She was about to step inside and check it out when she heard a groan from down the hall. Tebbins. He was hurt.

  Tightening her grip on the knife, she moved more quickly. If he was bleeding, every second would count. She had to find him.

  The moan had sounded as if it came from the end of the hall, from the room with the desk. Stepping out of her flats, she started tiptoeing that way.

  Then she heard a sound behind her.

  Whirling, she came face-to-face with a man she knew. In one of his hands was a gun. In the other was the Pocal dagger.

  The steak sandwich looked like something out of an ad. Not one of those crummy little things with thinly sliced meat that tasted like cardboard sitting on a hamburger bun, but a genuine slab of steak a quarter-inch thick trickling hot juices all over a fresh hard roll. Heaven.

  Jeff dug in, flavor bursting in his mouth, juices trying to run down his chin. His radio, clipped to his belt, crackled with cross talk he attended with only one ear.

  He was on his second bite when his heart stopped. Units were being asked to respond to an alarm at Tebbins’s address. The security company said the phone line was dead.

  Jeff hesitated. He didn’t have to go. Others were responding. The steak tasted good and he was starving. It was probably a false alarm, anyway. Most of these home security alerts were.

  But he was on duty. Supposed to protect the woman he’d left at Tebbins’s house. Swearing silently, he choked down the food in his mouth, tossed twelve bucks on the table, and headed out to his car.

  It still wasn’t as bad as Roxie on a tear.

  He had a gun and the Pocal dagger. She had a butcher knife and pepper spray. They stared at each other, and somewhere behind Anna, Tebbins groaned again.

  “Lance,” she said, disbelievingly. “Lance.” Lance Barro, the pleasant, kind, helpful grad stude
nt who had volunteered countless hours at the museum in addition to his work as a part-time docent. Lance Barro, the quiet, inoffensive, reliable workhorse.

  But he looked different. Of average height and average looks, he usually almost blended into the background. At that moment he wouldn’t have blended into any background. His cat green eyes were hard, hot. Strange. His face was drawn tight, until it looked as if his skin were stretched over the bones beneath.

  “Lance,” she said again. Some instinct told her to try to reach the likable person buried somewhere inside him, the one hiding behind a predatory veneer. Even as she spoke, though, her brain was calculating methods of escape. It could find none. He stood between her and the doors. And he had a gun.

  The realization filled her, and seemed to flip some internal switch. She was going to die. The only question was how.

  “Lance?” she said again.

  “Anna,” he said, almost caressing her name as he spoke it. “You know why I’m here.”

  She knew then what a mouse felt like when a hawk snatched it from the ground and carried it away. The body might struggle, but the mind and soul were resigned. Far away. Beyond the fear she should be feeling.

  “No,” she said. It was as if someone else spoke.

  “Of course you know,” he said almost gently. “You’re the sacrifice. It’s the only way to save everyone else.”

  “Everyone else?”

  “It’s the curse, Anna. You know that. Your father found the tomb.”

  Part of her was trying to make sense of what he said, but part of her was still scurrying for ways to escape. Except that gun looked so big, and it was pointed right at her.

  “Make it easy on yourself, Anna,” Lance said. “Drop the knife. I’ll make it as painless as I can.”

  “Painless?” She repeated the word incredulously. “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head slightly. “You know I’m not. I need your heart. Your living heart. You can either give it to me, a true sacrifice, one that will make you godlike, or I can shoot you in the leg and take it anyway.”

  God, she couldn’t believe someone was actually saying these things to her. But what she did know was that she had to find some way to use what he was saying against him.

  She spoke, her hand tightening on the pepper spray. “Only a warrior can be offered.”

  He shook his head. “You know better than that, Anna. Anyway, the curse demands more.”

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “You?” Startled, she almost lost her death grip on the knife.

  “My parents and my friends died in the refinery explosion. I almost did, too.”

  That cast a new light on what he was doing, one that didn’t reassure her at all. Her mouth grew even drier. “I’m sorry. But… hasn’t there already been enough death?”

  “The curse has to be satisfied. You owe it to the rest of us, Anna. It was your father who caused it all. Drop the knife now, or I’ll have to shoot you.” He aimed the gun at her legs.

  She dropped the knife. It thudded on the carpet beside her. Never in her life before had she felt so defenseless.

  Casting about desperately for a means of escape, she tried to buy time. “You’re the one who talked to Reed Howell.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just had to be sure you understood what was happening. You had to have time to prepare yourself.”

  “Prepare myself?” The gun. She looked at it. He needed her living heart. Maybe he wouldn’t dare to shoot her if she moved too quickly for him to take careful aim. He wouldn’t dare kill her with the gun.

  “For your offering,” he said, as if that were intuitively obvious. He was getting impatient. “Come on, Anna. It’s your fate. And it’s the only way I can save myself and the others.”

  “What others?”

  “All the survivors of the earthquake and explosion.”

  “But… why are you at risk? You didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “It’s the curse,” he said, as if that explained it all.

  Realizing he was trying to save himself, and not just some amorphous “others,” galvanized her. He wouldn’t dare shoot her.

  Drawing a deep breath, she leapt toward him, spraying him in the face with the pepper spray. He howled and stumbled to the side as she shoved past him. A few of the droplets got on her skin, burning like fire. A bit got into her left eye, searing it so badly she couldn’t keep it open.

  But what she noticed more was the fiery sensation in her left arm, followed by a throbbing that felt almost like a hammerblow.

  He had stabbed her.

  But she didn’t have time to think about that now. She could hear him cursing behind her as she ran down the hall into the living room. He’d be blinded for a few moments, long enough, she promised herself. Long enough.

  As she passed, she knocked over lamps and tables, creating an obstacle course to delay him as he stumbled after her.

  Reaching the door, she threw back the dead bolt and ran out in the rapidly deepening twilight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jeff Ingles rounded the corner onto Tebbins’s street in his cruiser and slammed on the brakes as a woman spilled out of a hedge. He felt the rapid-fire jerk of his antilock brakes and the sharp jolt against his seat belt as the Crown Vic halted. Heard the terrible thud as she fell against the hood of his car.

  In awful slow motion, he watched her blood smear over the hood as she sprawled onto the car and slid to the ground. I was stopped! a futile voice in his head cried out. I didn’t hit her! It didn’t matter. He watched the face of the woman he’d been assigned to protect disappear below the hood, her bloody hand the last to slip away.

  He barked into his radio as he shoved the door open and rounded the fender. She lay on the street, copper hair streaked and matted with a deeper copper, her eyes barely registering him. Her lips moved, and he bent closer, hardly aware that the spurting spray from her arm soaked him. Her lips moved again.

  “Tebbins,” she whispered.

  He clamped his hand down over the wound, pressing with all his might to stop the arterial bleeding, heedless of all the training that warned him not to get blood on himself. Too late, he thought distantly. She might die. Cocking his head, he spoke into the microphone on his shoulder, telling dispatch he needed an ambulance and backup right now. Now!

  Another cruiser rolled up. “Check the house,” Ingles called out. “The assailant may still be inside. Possible officer down.”

  The officer nodded, drew his gun, and headed for the door, pausing only a moment as more backup arrived. Ingles noted them only from a corner of his eye. His focus was on the woman. “Ma’am, what happened?”

  She whispered again. “Tebbins.”

  And then her eyes closed.

  She’d gotten away. The cops had arrived too quickly, and she’d gotten away. He was terrified as he crept through backyards, keeping to the thickest growth, hoping that night’s curtain would fall quickly, granting him its protection.

  He was terrified that she would die before he took her heart. He was terrified that he had failed his mission. He was terrified the cops would catch him and put an end to his attempts to satisfy the curse.

  Lance Barro was more terrified than he had ever been in his life.

  Anna knew who he was. If she lived—and he hoped she would because he still had to deal with the curse— she would identify him, making his life impossibly difficult.

  Oh, damn, he had screwed up badly. Badly. He never, ever should have tried to take Tebbins and Anna at the same time. Where was his brain? What was he thinking?

  He should have waited. He should have been more patient. He should have thought things through instead of allowing fear to goad him into acting precipitously. He should have realized that trying to deal with both of them at the same time would only make it more likely that he would fail.

  He wondered, if Anna died would Nancy be a
sufficient sacrifice? Why not? They were twins. Offering both of their hearts would have been better, but maybe just the one would do. It bothered him, strangely enough, that if Nancy hadn’t appeared by happenstance, he might never have known Anna had a twin. If he sacrificed only one of them, would he still satisfy the curse?

  Realizing his own thoughts were getting muddied, he hid behind a Dumpster in a darkened parking lot at the rear of a strip mall.

  He couldn’t go home, but that was okay. He had anticipated the moment, and had emptied everything important from his apartment. He’d known he’d have to go on the run when he was done. So he went on the run a little sooner. No big deal.

  But he needed to go to ground for a while. Seriously needed some time to calm down and reassess the entire situation. His whole plan had blown up, and everything he’d done to try to patch it had only seemed to make things worse.

  So he’d have to make a new plan. Lull them into a sense of security. Then he would strike.

  Feeling better, he went into an electronics store, blending with the people, looking at games he had no intention of buying.

  Gil got to the hospital around midnight and found himself faced with Tebbins’s partner, a young man named Vance Newman. Newman didn’t impress him much.

  “They’re both in surgery,” Newman said. “She’s got a severed brachial artery, he’s got a chest wound. They think the shot might have nicked his lung.”

  “Jesus.” Gil absorbed the news with more difficulty than he would have imagined. Tebbins… well, he’d thought he didn’t particularly care for the man, but apparently he was wrong. Worry squeezed him. And Anna. Thinking of Anna set off an almost intolerable ache deep inside him. “What happened?”

  “The way we figure it,” Newman said, “is she attacked him.”

  “She attacked him?” Gil was stunned.

  “That’s how it looks. She must’ve shot him. We found the gun in the hallway.”

  Gil shook his head. “What about an intruder?”