by Rachel Lee
“Tell me about yourself,” she suggested. “I heard what a good investigator you are, and everybody seems to like you, but I don’t know anything else about you.”
“If you listen at night, you know I snore.”
That drew another laugh from her.
“We could play truth or dare or whatever the kids call it,” he suggested.
“About as likely as playing strip poker.” As soon as the words were out, she wondered what devil had caused her to speak them. At least Cade didn’t miss a beat.
“Too much chance of frostbite,” he replied. “This place is drafty. Okay, about me. I was ranch raised like a lot of young people in this state. My dad was a foreman on one of the bigger spreads, up near Gillette. The place got turned into an oil field about the time I was graduating from the police academy.”
“You wanted a more exciting life? And what about your parents?”
“They’re gone. Dad had a heart attack about six months after he got laid off from the ranch. He didn’t know how to do anything else, and he couldn’t find work. I blame it on stress.”
“And your mom?”
“Grief took her about a month after my dad. She just sat down in a chair after the funeral and hardly moved again.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
He looked up from the game box he was putting the lid on. “I was pretty sorry for me, too, but not for them. They were done. Might as well have put it on a neon sign. Their way of life and everything that gave them purpose was gone.”
She nodded. She thought she could understand that. “Did your dad mind that you wanted to join the police?”
“Hell, no. I grew up hearing that he wanted me to get out just as quick as I could. Make something better of my life. I don’t think he hated what he did, not at all. I think he loved it. But I think he also didn’t see much of a future in it for a young man. Agribusiness was moving in, small ranchers were on the way out, oil fields were chewing up the land. I think he saw the handwriting on the wall, at least from where he was. So they were proud I decided I wanted to be a cop.”
“That’s good. That’s really good.”
There was a smile in his eyes as he pushed the game to one side and looked at her. “What about you?”
“Not very many parents are happy when their eighteen-year-old daughter announces she’s enlisting in the army.”
He tilted his head a little. “Big fight?”
“More like big fears. Maybe they were right to be afraid. But I’m still here, they’re proud of me, and they’re still living in the one-horse town I grew up in. Texas, if you want the state. I just wanted to escape to bigger and more exciting things.”
“I guess we both succeeded.”
She shook her head. “Nothing more exciting that sitting locked up in a snowstorm waiting for another shoe to drop.”
He threw back his head and gave a deep laugh. “Okay, I can’t argue against that. But at least it’s temporary.”
Silence fell again, except for the storm battering the outdoors and the incessant sound of the forced-air heat trying to keep up. Talk about being at loose ends. She glanced at Cade again and saw him studying her with a faint frown.
“What happened to you, DeeJay?”
She stiffened. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I get that your CO screwed you royally, and I can’t imagine that would make you very fond of men in general, but there was more, wasn’t there? What turned you into a caped crusader until you got yourself into trouble?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do.”
For an instant, she hated him. Really hated him. But that passed in a flash as she realized it wasn’t true. “Soul-baring time?” she finally said tightly. “Maybe you wanna tell me why you didn’t want to work with me. Was it just because I was new, or because I was a woman?”
He gave a low whistle. “Wow. You do have a thing about men.”
“And you’ve got one about women.”
“Only as partners.” He hesitated. “And it’s nothing to do with you. I was partnered with a woman once before. It became a heavy-duty problem. She wanted to take it beyond the professional. I wasn’t interested. So she made some accusations. Lucky for me, Internal Affairs put us under a microscope without telling either of us. They dismissed her complaint as unfounded. She had to look for another job.”
DeeJay looked down at her hands, lying side by side on the table. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I got through it, although for a while I was mad enough to chew iron and spit nails. I wouldn’t treat a partner that way.”
Remembering the quick way he had withdrawn from their kiss on the mountain, she believed him. Not good, he had said.
“I shouldn’t have kissed you this morning,” he went on. “And if anyone should know better than to do that, it’s me.”
“It just happened,” she said quietly. “I’m not holding it against you. I didn’t exactly stop you. So don’t worry about it.”
He shook his head quickly. “Actually, I’m not. I’ve already figured out one thing about you.”
“What’s that?”
“You may be a prickly pear cactus, but you’re an honest one. You wouldn’t lie. Hell, it keeps bugging you that we’re undercover so you have to lie.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“It’s necessary. We’re trying to save lives here.”
She nodded but still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She felt she owed him equal honesty but didn’t know if she could force the words out.
“DeeJay?”
The words burst from her as if driven by irresistible force. “I was raped.”
Silence greeted her words, followed by some quiet cussing from Cade. Then he said, “So you set about to right the world’s wrongs?”
“As much as I could,” she admitted, blinking to hold back unwanted and rare tears. “What really pissed me about the whole thing, though...it wasn’t just the rape. It’s what happened when I reported it. I heard all about the good of the unit, and damaging an excellent soldier’s career, ruining my own... Oh, I heard it all.”
“So it got swept under the rug?”
“So deep you’re only the fourth person to hear about it.”
He stood up abruptly and walked out of the kitchen. She heard him taking long heavy strides into the living room, back into the bedroom and around again. Pacing. She hated sitting there feeling so emotionally naked and wondering what he was thinking.
She should have kept her secret. Should never have admitted her deepest secret. Hell, she was a soldier, a former MP. She knew all about keeping necessary secrets.
She wished she could walk out of this house into the storm and get her equilibrium back. She had buried the whole thing so deep herself that eventually she had decided it was a good thing she’d been talked out of pursuing the matter. It had propelled her instead to help out other victims. That was a good thing, right?
She kept men at a safe distance and hunted those who transgressed, and never again had she let any man, no matter his rank, talk her out of pursuing an investigation. Overall, she really didn’t like men. At least not many of the ones she had served with. Too many of them seemed to think women owed them something, and she wasn’t dishing out for any of them.
But Cade seemed different, so she couldn’t dismiss his reaction, whatever it was. She guessed she’d know shortly if he was like others of his gender. God, she hoped not.
Because in some crazy way she needed him to be different.
* * *
Pacing like a caged lion wasn’t helping a damn thing, Cade thought as he strode furiously in tight circles. He kept seeing DeeJay’s face as she told him she’d been raped, had seen a
naked vulnerability she probably shared with no one. She had trusted him with that, and instead of being in the kitchen with her, doing and saying whatever supportive things a person should be doing at such a time, he’d strode away to try to walk off his fury.
There was no walking it off. At this late date, there was nothing to do about it, either, but right then he’d have loved to get his hands on whoever had hurt her that way. All of them, including the officer or NCO who had told her she’d kill her career if she accused her rapist.
They were like bookends, he and she, he accused of misconduct he hadn’t committed, she unable to get justice for real misconduct. For a crime. No wonder she’d been willing to risk her career on that sensitive case. She’d not only become a crusader, but she’d become a voice for those who might otherwise be silenced.
God, it was ugly.
He had to get a grip and go back to her. He couldn’t leave her sitting there wondering what he thought, whether she repulsed him now, or if he was seeing her in a class with his old partner who had falsely accused him.
Get a grip, he told himself again and stepped down firmly on his fury before returning to DeeJay.
* * *
DeeJay heard Cade’s return. She looked up almost fearfully and noted how he filled the doorway. He was tall, and his shoulders were broad, tapering to narrow hips and long legs. A perfect specimen of manhood. Despite feeling as if she’d exposed herself to huge danger by telling him the truth, she couldn’t help but notice. Despite years of building calcified layers of self-protection, beneath them a woman still lived.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“I never asked you to leave.” She waved vaguely at the chair and refocused her attention on the coffee she still clutched as if it were a lifeline. What had possessed her to blurt the truth?
The chair scraped on the floor as he sat. Outside the wind howled like a banshee bringing a horrible portent of doom. Ice rattled on windows, sounding like the taps of skeletal fingers. Nature was conducting a massive assault at the moment, and even being indoors wasn’t making her feel safe.
“I got angry about how you were treated,” he said, keeping his voice quiet. “I figured you didn’t need that. You’ve probably been there yourself countless times, so what can I add? Just that I hate rapists. Loathe them. And that I wish you could have gotten justice. But I’m no fool. So many rape victims don’t. I am, however, really impressed by the way you turned it around to help others. Not everyone would do that.”
DeeJay shrugged. “It just made me see things clearly. There’s a big institutional problem in the military when it comes to rape. You know. It’s been in the news.”
“I know. And it’s not just in the military.”
She lifted her eyes then, amazed that he understood. “No, it’s not.”
“Anyway, I’m truly sorry that you didn’t get the support you needed when you most needed it. You were violated in more than one way.”
“Thank you.” There seemed to be nothing more to say as she tried to stuff it all back into the dark mental box where she had kept it locked up all these years. Dragging it out didn’t fix anything—it just upset her all over again, reminding her of how vulnerable she could be against someone of greater size and strength. It also reminded her that she was never safe, even with a comrade. She couldn’t afford to live that way or she’d be cowering in a cave somewhere.
The important thing was not to be ruled by fear. Ever.
“I guess you’re not a misogynist,” she finally said.
His eyes widened. “Me? No way. Did I do something?”
“Only your reaction to having me as a partner. Now that I know why, I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time.”
A slow smile split his face. “I was wondering how we were going to be able to jolt along.”
“You’re right. I’m a prickly pear. I probably see slights where none are really intended. But mainly I want to make sure I’m treated as an equal. I guess I can go overboard sometimes.”
“I never met anybody who couldn’t, if the right buttons are pushed.” He got up, emptied the dregs from the coffeepot into the sink and started to make fresh. “Part of it was what happened to me with that woman. Part of it was that I knew nothing about you. I had no idea if you’d be a help or a hindrance.”
She nodded. “Have you decided?”
He faced her. “You’re a damn good investigator, DeeJay. We can leave it there if you want. A good partner.”
“Except for my carping about the cold.”
He came back to the table and sat. “Secret? It’s too damn cold for me, too. And I lived most of my life here. Still, there are at least a few weeks every winter when I wonder why I didn’t take a job in a warmer place. So carp away.”
She put her mug down at last, no longer needing to hang on to it. “I just need to adapt. I’m adaptable.” She closed her eyes, trying to finish the journey from her past into the present. “Part of me still wishes we’d climbed up to the crime scene. The rest of me knows it would have been a waste of energy after all this time. Buried under snow, whatever may have been left rotted...but it feels like unfinished business.”
He reached for the envelope containing the photos, opened it and spread them out across the table. He moved the game box to the floor. “They haven’t changed, but maybe we missed something. It sure seems to be nagging at you.”
There were so many photos that they all partially concealed others, but that was typical of crime scenes. Every angle, different light, some zooms and some from farther back. She gathered the ones that focused on the whole scene and laid them out. The net, the carefully wrapped bodies, the overall scene front, back and side.
They hadn’t changed, but he was right, they were nagging at her. She turned them a little, studying them, trying to reach whatever it was they reminded her of.
“The net,” she said finally, noticing something. “Was it deliberately draped that way or had it come loose in places?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled out more papers and began sorting through them, a whole stack of reports from the crime-scene team proper. The ones who were supposed to go over everything with a microscope.
She kept staring at the netting, moving from view to view, turning the photos this way and that.
After what seemed a long time, Cade looked up. “Nothing in the reports.”
“Okay.” She kept looking, photo after photo.
Cade picked up the phone, and she listened with only half an ear as he spoke to Gage. No one would know, she thought. Because no one would have thought of it. Whatever it was. She spoke, interrupting something Cade was saying to Gage. “Did anybody take any overheads of the scene?”
Cade repeated her question into the phone. “He doesn’t think so, DeeJay.”
“Okay.” She took one of the photos and turned it so that she was looking at it almost end on. Then she saw it and her heart slammed.
“My God!”
“Wait one,” Cade said into the phone. Then he turned to her. “What?”
“He looked at his vics from above. Were there any deer stands up there? Did anyone look for any sign that someone had been up in the trees?”
Cade spoke into the mouthpiece again and, a moment later, answered her. “They assumed the signs of climbing were a result of hanging the net. Evidence of some deer stands, but there was nothing and the signs were old.”
As they would be, years after he’d moved on. She nodded. “Maybe. Maybe.” But the more she looked at the photos from the end, and nearly upside down, the more convinced she became. Her heart was hammering. Useless information, probably. But then again.
“Call you back,” Cade said and hung up. “Tell me, DeeJay.”
“See how I’m holding these?” She pushed some his way. “You try it. He may sometimes hav
e viewed his trophies from below but I think most of the time he liked to look at them from above. Do you see it? That’s one big spiderweb.”
* * *
Night settled in. They’d closed the curtains against the stormy world, not that there was anything to see out there. Night or not, the blowing snow caught any available light, fracturing and reflecting it until the darkness seemed almost bright. Cade took over the task of making dinner, broiling some chicken breasts to add to the precut greens they’d bought, tossing in some ripe olives, slicing red onions.
A spiderweb. She was right. Whether they’d be able to do anything with that, he didn’t know. She was still absorbing the photos, but now that he’d looked at them from her perspective, he couldn’t see it any other way.
A damn spiderweb. What did that mean about their killer? He ran in mental circles, trying to find something.
“He wrapped the bodies the way a spider does,” DeeJay said from the table. “Plastic in lieu of silk. But now this damn display makes sense. Does this guy think he’s some kind of spider?”
“I’m asking myself the same question. Do you like grated Parmesan in your salad?”
“I like anything in my salad.”
He was stumped, as stumped as he’d ever been. “What could the connection be? Nobody knows how a spider thinks. If it thinks. For Pete’s sake, what is he thinking?” And that was what they needed to get to.
“I don’t know.” She fell quiet for a while.
He checked the chicken breasts, and turned them. Good smells had begun to fill the room, making the blizzard outside seem a little farther away.
“If he’s doing the same thing now,” she said after a bit, “then he needs to be doing it somewhere he can look down on them. That means a big building, unless he’s back in the woods.”
“Plenty of big barns out there, some of them big enough to have even a third floor. We can’t check them all.”
“Of course not. I’m thinking out loud.”
“Even if he’s not back in the woods, it doesn’t have to be a barn. There are some old silos out there to this day. Hell, he could do it inside a house somehow.”