“Sorry…let ya down.”
“Sure you are. Don’t worry, Nolan. She’ll come. And this time, there might be better ways to show your old girlfriend who’s boss before I deal with her, once and for all.”
Something between a roar and a scream came from the woods, and the sound of movement. Ashlyn started to move out from behind the tree, but she felt something grab her from behind. She’d never had a lot of direct contact with Kurdy during the investigation, but in the aftermath he’d been brought in for questioning, and she’d seen him at the station. He’d cleaned up since then, hair a respectable length, clothes with a tidiness that defied the fact that he’d been on the run since allegedly murdering his wife and children.
He had a shotgun in his hand.
“Sorry,” he whispered as he raised his gun and swung it down against her head. She staggered backward as the dots of color obscuring her vision grew until they overlapped and blurred together before everything went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
She’d been gone too long.
The first three times he’d thought that, Tain had told himself to relax, that she’d only been gone for a few minutes. Then it was ten minutes. Then fifteen.
Now, half an hour later, he couldn’t wait any longer. He marched down the hall to the back entrance and pushed the door open.
The car was gone.
He turned and walked back down the hall, fighting the urge to break into a run. His cell phone rang.
“Ashlyn—”
“Uh…sorry, Tain. It’s Sims.”
“What do you want?”
“Look, Constable Hart asked me to follow up on something—”
“I know. The second canvas.”
“No, since then. I already told her about that. She wanted me to check on who’d recently purchased a property in Nighthawk Crossing.”
Tain stopped walking and started listening to what Sims was saying.
“—same Parker who rents the apartment near the crime scene bought it.”
“Wait, Sims. Is this the same Parker—”
“Used to be with the Port Moody police. I told Ash, uh, Constable Hart that when I called before.”
“How long since you called, Sims?”
“Forty, forty-five minutes.”
Tain closed his eyes. “So why’d you call me this time, instead of Ashlyn?”
“I tried to call her, but I keep getting a message saying that the cellular customer is out of the service area.”
Tain closed his phone without another word and ran into Winters’s office. “She’s gone out there.”
Winters looked up. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. The guy who bought Campbell’s old property is a former cop with a grudge against us. Her. He was charged with assaulting Ashlyn a few months ago, but they didn’t have enough to get a conviction.”
“Christ, Tain, I thought you were the loose cannon,” Winters said as he grabbed his coat. “We’re not making the same mistakes again.”
“Too late for that.”
“What I mean is, we all get Kevlars, and we take enough backup.”
Tain looked at the nameplate outside the sergeant’s office and thought of the one that used to be there. Thought of the man who’d paid the price for his impulsiveness and nodded.
He’d take the risk for his partner, but it wasn’t something he could ask of anyone else.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The return to consciousness was accompanied by a throbbing pain in her head. It screamed as she tried to open her eyes, and she lifted her fingers to her temple.
A goose egg was already growing where she’d been struck. And there was dampness, blood from the gash.
Ashlyn forced her eyes open. The dark blotches morphed into recognizable forms, and she realized she was on the ground, where she’d been standing when struck, looking up at the trees.
She sat up. Her gun lay in the dead leaves beside her.
She grabbed it as she forced herself to her feet.
Why?
The last few moments before the blackness were hazy, but starting to come back.
Parker’s taunting.
Craig taking the bait.
Kurdy…
Why hit her and leave her?
Why not kill her?
Why not take her to Parker?
She stood for a moment. There was nothing but an eerie silence. She took a step forward, swayed and reached out with her hand.
There was a body lying in the clearing and another on the ground not far away. Ashlyn staggered back as she processed what she was seeing. The stillness, the pool of blood oozing out over the ground…
It was too late for him. She forced herself forward, and when she stood over Parker she could see his blank eyes stared up at nothing.
Dead. No question, but she still kicked the gun away and bent down to check that he had no pulse. That was when she saw the other gun. Set on a rock.
The gun that had been in Kurdy’s hands.
A faint moan from the other body to her left broke the silence. She knelt beside Craig and pulled his hand back from the wound, then gently unwrapped the shirt he’d tied around it and kept her focus on his injuries. It took less than a moment for her to rewrap the wound.
It wasn’t until he lifted his hand again and touched her arm that she met his gaze.
It was one of those moments when no words were necessary.
She pulled out her cell phone and fumbled with it until she got it open. No service. As she flipped it shut, she looked up at him and fought the urge to reach for her forehead. The shooting pain mercifully settled to a dull ache. “Can you walk? We need—”
“Ash…”
“Shhh. Save your strength,” she said, vaguely aware of the sounds of footsteps in the forest. Someone shouted, “Over here,” while someone else called in on a radio for an ambulance, and then she felt a presence behind her.
“What the hell happened?” Winters asked.
Tain knelt on the ground beside her.
“Kur—” Ashlyn turned, the dull ache turning to a roar again with the sudden movement. The clearing was empty. “Kurdy shot Parker.”
“What?” Tain asked. “Why?”
Why. The question always asked.
The one they seldom could answer.
“How is he?” Tain asked.
She swallowed. “Clean shot through and through, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”
Craig lifted his bloody hand back up and put it over hers. For the first time since before her assault she looked him in the eyes and saw the ghost of a smile before his eyes flickered and closed.
In the aftermath of a police-involved shooting, there are a lot of questions to answer, and a lot of time is spent on paperwork and procedure, crossing every t, dotting every i. When the victim is a police officer who’s been suspended everything triples.
At least, that’s how it felt to Ashlyn. She’d been through it before, after she shot and killed Craig’s partner.
This time, she had a weapon in her possession that she claimed she hadn’t fired—gunshot residue tests had supported her claims, but that wasn’t conclusive proof, and although none of her fingerprints were found on the gun, that was only more circumstantial evidence.
Emma Fenton had her exclusive and was only too happy to raise questions about Ashlyn’s actions and whether she was responsible for Parker’s death, but what was undeniable was the set of footprints found at the scene. Footprints that didn’t match hers, Craig’s or Parker’s.
And the skin and blood they found on the butt of the shotgun. Skin and blood that matched Ashlyn’s.
When the tests were completed, another unexpected detail emerged: the bullet that had torn through Craig’s shoulder and lodged itself in his Rodeo had been fired from the same gun that had been used to kill Hank Jeffers’s wife and children. Whatever Parker’s game, he’d used Kurdy. Maybe to try to get them involved, maybe to draw them back to Nighthawk Crossing. Kurdy had b
een innocent of the crime he’d originally been suspected of, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d killed Parker, and whatever he knew about the case would remain unknown until the day the police caught up with him.
Ashlyn was pretty sure it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
Tain and Ashlyn walked toward the hospital doors.
“Everything okay?” Tain asked.
She knew he was wondering how she felt about going to visit Craig, but she avoided the subject. “That depends. Are you going to quit?”
“You know me too well.”
“I think after what happened to your daughter, you thought being a cop would help you make sense of it all. That you’d be there to save other children from Noelle’s fate. When we stood over that little boy’s body last year, you looked down at Jeffrey Reimer and realized you couldn’t save them. All you could do was deal with the fallout after it was already too late.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
“You know, Parker’s mistake was that he thought you’d want an explanation. He didn’t just want to win. He wanted you to know he’d won,” Tain said as he opened the door to the hospital.
“Sometimes, we don’t get answers, Tain,” she said as she stepped inside. She turned around to face him. “Sometimes all we do is clean up a big mess.”
He let the door fall shut behind him. “You’re okay with that? What if we’d known the truth about Millie eighteen months ago?”
Eighteen months ago, when Tain had broken through the front door of the cabin, he’d ducked just in time to avoid having a shotgun blast rip his head apart. In the seconds it took for Bobby Hobbs to realize he’d missed, Tain had lunged forward and knocked Hobbs back onto the floor. Bobby had lost his grip on the shotgun, which had gone spinning across the floor toward the back door, which Ashlyn had just entered. Craig had been right behind her.
Tain had his hand wrapped around Hobbs’s throat, and she pried him off the suspect. It wasn’t until she’d pushed him back and Craig had cuffed Hobbs and removed him from the cabin that Ashlyn had looked up, still catching her breath, to see the petite blonde girl in the corner of the room, wearing an old-fashioned white nightgown.
“Millie? Millie Harper?”
Ashlyn had reached out toward her, but the girl slid down into the corner of the room, eyes wide with fright, hands rising to cover her face.
“It’s okay, Millie. He’ll never hurt you again. We’ve got you. You’re going to be okay now.”
“Please.” The girl looked up, tears streaming down her face. “Please. Please let me die.”
Millie had been put on a psych hold hours later, when she grabbed a pair of scissors and tried to stab herself in the chest.
It made sense. After what she’d been through, Millie would struggle with guilt, would wrestle with why she’d been rescued and the other girls had died.
Ashlyn had assumed Millie never got pregnant, which was why she’d survived. It had never occurred to her that Millie had murdered her baby, a sacrifice to prove her devotion to an abductor who believed the only way she could truly prove her worth was to give up the most important thing in the world.
Her own child.
Parker had learned her secret and exploited her vulnerability. The sacrifice Millie had made to save her own life had ultimately destroyed it.
Ashlyn was torn between the guilt she felt over Millie’s death and the disgust she felt over what Millie had done. She knew she shouldn’t blame Millie; the girl had been abducted, raped and held captive for months, but that didn’t change the fact that every time Ashlyn thought about Millie murdering her own child she felt the rage boil up inside her, and when it passed she was left with nothing but her own emptiness.
She stopped outside Craig’s hospital room.
“When Noelle’s mother killed her, how’d you learn to forgive her?” she asked.
Tain pushed the door open and started to walk inside.
“Who says I have?”
Rave Reviews for Sandra Ruttan and The Frailty of Flesh!
“The talented Ruttan turns a spotlight on the gritty reality of law enforcement…and the result is truly convoluted and disturbing.”
—RT Book Reviews
“The Frailty of Flesh tore me asunder. Rarely has a novel of such art and skill reduced me to a wreck…It’s a kick in the head that is underwrit with sheer compassion.”
—Ken Bruen, Shamus Award-winning
Author of The Guards
“Brave, dark and utterly convincing, The Frailty of Flesh is guaranteed to break the hardest of hearts. An absorbing read.”
—Allan Guthrie, Theakston Award-winning
Author of Hard Man
“The Frailty of Flesh is not only one of the best procedural thrillers I’ve read in a long time…but the ending knocked me right out of my seat. Ruttan captures the nature of crime in a way few thriller writers ever manage…this is vivid, impressive, gut-wrenching stuff.”
—Russel D. McLean, Crime Scene Scotland,
Author of The Good Son
WHAT BURNS WITHIN
“Ruttan manages to keep multiple leads and seconds on the same page admirably: she doesn’t drop too many clues in their laps or allow the tension to flag…The straight proceduralism from Ruttan serves the story well through the rewarding climax.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Well worth adding to any mystery collection.”
—Library Journal
“One absolute wallop of a novel…A totally mesmerizing narrative and a plot that literally burns off the page.”
—Ken Bruen, Shamus Award-winning
Author of The Guards
“A taut, crackling read with switch-blade pacing.”
—Rick Mofina, Bestselling Author of A Perfect Grave
Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers) Page 61