“That’s where he went down.” Teesdale pointed.
One long scuff mark marred the hillside. Carl’s journey was not a straight fall, but a steep, protracted roll, interrupted by small rock formations and scrubby brush. Nothing large enough to grab onto or stop Carl’s descent in progress.
Brax squatted, resting his elbow on his knee, to study the dusty trail. “You say it’s pretty well used?”
Teesdale came down to his level. “Couple a hikers a week maybe. I’d be damn surprised to find it devoid of footprints.”
Brax could make out layers of faded shoe prints. A light breeze blew over them, shifting the puffy dirt granules as if they were snowflakes. If there had once been a tread to match to a shoe, it was probably long gone even before they’d found Carl’s body. A fine layer of dust coated everything in Goldstone, from the cars to a trailer’s white siding, and it took barely more than a breath to move the fine stuff around.
Shoe prints weren’t going to solve the case. The most they’d provide was icing on the cake once a shoe to match to was found.
Simultaneously, they rose and stepped to either side of the path, Teesdale taking the cliff side and Brax the opposite.
If they were lucky, they’d find a bloody rock that had been used to crush Carl’s skull before he was pushed over the side.
They weren’t lucky. They found nothing. Teesdale took a couple of pictures of partial prints. If a scuffle had ensued, any evidence in the sand was long gone.
Having made slowly decreasing circles around the area, they finally stood above the very spot Carl had fallen. Brax squatted for a closer examination of the sector. You saw a hell of a lot more at ground level than if you stood, looking down.
Most important was what he didn’t see. “There are no shoe prints here.” As if someone had cleared the area.
At the edge of the path, Teesdale hunkered. “Interesting.”
Brax turned on the balls of his feet. “In fact, there aren’t any from here”—he pointed approximately five feet above the fall site—“to there.” About another five feet back down the path. From the base of an oddly shaped rock to the edge of the drop.
“Well, hell. Ain’t that cause for speculation?”
As evidence, it sucked, but a killer was never caught by one spectacular find. It was always the small things which, when added together, could be brought to put pressure on a suspect until he or she cracked under the mounting weight.
Retreating, watching to make sure he stepped into the footprints he’d already made, Brax backed up. And kept going even as his feet felt the slight rise. He had no idea what he’d see, if anything at all. But he’d been trained to survey a scene from every angle and from every possible level—ground, waist, eye, and above, if you could. Each gave a different perspective.
Ten feet back up the hillside, he dropped to a hunker once more, one foot flat, the other taking his weight on the ball.
The plateau, the path, the rock. One side still in shade, the other in the heating sun, the rock rose at an angle from the hillside. For a moment, he almost smiled. Wide at the base and cylindrical, with a slightly rounded bulge at its peak, it jutted like a hardened penis.
He didn’t think Teesdale would appreciate the analogy, and it certainly wasn’t appropriate to the mission. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the rock.
It reminded him of something. Yeah, yeah, a cock. But something else. Something at the edge of his mind.
Jesus H. Christ. It was the rock in Simone’s fantasy. The first stop where the woman had pushed her partner back against that rock and taken him in her mouth.
Shit.
“Think we’re done here,” he said, rising to his feet.
Teesdale glanced up. “We are?”
“Yep.” Brax considered pushing on up the trail, but he couldn’t remember all the landmarks in the fantasy. The landmarks themselves had left the least impression during his read-through. His mind had focused on other, more vivid details. “I’ve got to get to the bank when it opens.”
First, he had a more immediate connection to investigate. Like why Carl had requested a fantasy that took place on the very trail from which he’d fallen to his death.
Chapter Nineteen
Her mother had emerged from the bedroom fifteen minutes later, draped in yet another pantsuit, this one emerald with a flowing train behind it. She’d artfully arranged herself on the sofa, the orange material a perfect backdrop to the emerald silk. Della had refused to leave, sitting on the opposite end of the couch basking in Ariana’s reflected glory.
Simone had refilled the coffeepot three times, visited the bathroom twice, and turned on the swamp cooler. It didn’t help.
“Simone, you’ll really shouldn’t wear yellow. It makes your skin sallow.”
She almost jumped up to exchange the yellow tee for pale peach. But Jackie gave her a look. Don’t you dare.
“Simone, you have lipstick on your teeth. I can see we’re going to have to take you for another makeup application lesson at Guittard’s when we get home.”
She ran her tongue across her front teeth until it hurt.
“She’s such a pretty girl, isn’t she, Della? Of course, if she’d had Jacqueline’s looks and my talent, she could have been a star. But Simone’s got her own special charms.” Ariana beamed as if she’d said something wonderful.
What charms? According to her mother, she was fat, she needed a facial badly to reduce blotchiness, and her hair had turned to straw in the dry desert air. She wasn’t sure how much more of her mother’s exalted presence she could take without going stark raving mad. Or melting into a puddle of gooey tears.
She almost welcomed the telltale crunch on her gravel drive and the sharp slam of a car door.
She knew without seeing that it was him. Brax. Her hero. Come to her rescue. Standing at the door, she took in his brisk stride up her front walk, her chest swelling with emotion. Oh my, oh my, he was so...
Pissed.
He grabbed her by the arm even as she opened the screen door.
“We have to talk.” He stopped, suddenly noticing the four pairs of eyes focused on him. “About that bag I brought over last night.”
“The bag?”
“Yeah. The paper bag.” He widened his eyes with meaning.
“Oh. The bag.” Her hand fluttered, then she managed to point to the back of the house. “I put it away. In the guest room.”
“Let’s get it.” His teeth clamped sharply.
Carl’s fantasy. What could he possibly want with the fantasy now? They’d been through all that last night. He’d gotten over his initial anger. Hadn’t he?
Obviously not, if the pinch of his fingers on her upper arm meant anything. He didn’t hurt her, but neither was he letting her go anywhere without him.
She let him lead her down the hall, past her office to the guest room. The silence in the living room beat at her nerve endings. Brax pulled her in and closed the door.
Thank goodness she’d made the bed.
“Where is it?”
“In the closet.”
He followed at her heels, then breathed down her neck as she pulled the bag from its hiding place. He took it from her numb fingers, then dumped the contents.
Her panties landed smack-dab in the middle of the bed.
They both stared for two long, slow heartbeats, long enough for Simone’s face to reach conflagration stage. “I hid them in there last night. I guess I forgot.”
He spoke after the longest time. “I didn’t forget. Not a thing. Sorry I barged in like that.”
“My mother already thinks you’re unforgivably rude.”
He laughed, a short bark. “No extra harm done then.” Taking her hand in his, he pulled it to his lips for the briefest brush of his lips. “We have to go through the story again. I saw the rock, right where Carl must have fallen. It’s real. And I’m wondering how many other landmarks in there are real.”
Real? “What rock?”
&
nbsp; He pulled her close, chest-to-chest. “The rock. Where you wrote that she—”
“Oh my God, that rock.” The blow-job rock. She would never, ever write another fantasy in her life. Well, not for anyone she knew. She did have to make a living, after all.
“I want to go back up there. I want to see what’s at the end of that trail.”
“It’s a big cave.” Carl had her end it there, before the couple went inside. “Do you think it’s real, too?”
“Highly likely. I want to know why he was so specific. You said he gave you the physical details to use.”
“Yes. What does it mean, Brax?”
“Hell if I know. That’s why I’m going up there. Someone killed him on the trail he told you to write about. It could be simple coincidence, but that story is like a map, and I want to follow it to its conclusion.”
“I shouldn’t have deleted all his emails. We could have used those. It would have been easier.”
He unrolled several scrolls and arranged them by number, stopping to glance down at the script. “It would have been easier on me.” He looked at her, his gaze deep blue. “Reading this the first time damn near killed me.”
What exactly did that mean? She wasn’t stupid. She knew all about lust and anticipation and that the way to a man’s heart wasn’t through his stomach. But still... “Do you think I look insipid in yellow?”
“What?” A line furrowed between his eyebrows.
“Nothing. I...” I am totally stupid and moronic asking a question like that at a time like this. Her cheeks heated with the silly schoolgirl insecurities that question revealed.
“It makes you look...” He struggled for the right thing to say. “You take my breath away whatever you’re wearing.”
That was still about sex. She wanted, needed more, but was afraid to ask for anything. She pointed to the neatly scripted scrolls. “Do you want to follow it like a treasure map?”
Simone flattened the first page even as it struggled to snap itself into a tight roll again.
A map. That’s exactly what her fantasy was. Brax pointed. “See that view you’ve described?”
The rise of the hills off to the left, the muted sound of highway traffic, and the courthouse clock tower.
“I saw it when I was coming back down. This is the same trail.” Brax looked at her. “Did he tell you to write it that way?”
“I told you last night. He gave me all the details to use. Except the...”
Except the sex parts.
* * * * *
The sex parts. Yeah, Simone got to make up those for herself. Yes, Brax knew. How the hell could he forget? Those were the parts he’d damn near memorized despite himself.
Page three. He found himself smoothing it out almost reverently. His favorite page. Damn. The effect was worse with her citrus scent swirling around him and the warmth of her arm pressed to his as they knelt together at the side of the bed. He leaned over to read.
The huge cylindrical stone jutted out from the mountainside like a phallic symbol of the gods, casting its shadow over the gorge below. Long, wide, with a rounded cap at its peak, it resembled an erect cock, beckoning them to worship at its base. She pushed him back against the rock, her hand flat against his chest, sliding down through the buttons she’d opened. Her fingers trailed his abdomen to the snap of his jeans.
He knew what was coming. His body knew it, too. The Simone effect. His jeans were suddenly a tad too tight and heat rose to his face.
“Uh, that’s the rock,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. Yeah, the rock. Think about that. Not what her characters were doing on the rock.
Taking him in her mouth, she circled the tip with her tongue.
Shit. Think about the meaning of the rock, he told himself. “Picture the jut of it out over the path.”
“Yes. Carl called it a phallic symbol.”
Damn. It was that all right. With Simone next to him and her words on the page tempting him, the symbol was overpowering, and her words like the call of a seductive siren.
“And the vista view from that rock.” The view, yeah, that’s what he’d noticed right off. “It’s the same.”
“The same as what?”
He hesitated too long.
“That’s where Carl fell,” she said for him. He nodded, and she closed her eyes. “Are you sure it had to be...”
In Cottonmouth, murder had never become routine. But it hadn’t been a shock since his first year in the department when he’d found Dick Monahan’s body at the bottom of Lucas Tinsin’s bonfire. Property-line dispute.
“It was the same spot,” he said.
Carl’s keys had not slipped out of his pocket, and the wind hadn’t miraculously swept clean the very quadrant of plateau from which he’d made his tumble.
The hazel of Simone’s eyes deepened to stark green magnified by the shimmer of tears. “They’re all my friends, Brax.”
You never wanted to find that the smile and good humor of someone you knew could harbor the soul of a killer. You’d bait a trap, thinking you had total control over the outcome. You’d avoid facing it until suddenly other lives hung in the balance.
Even then, a man didn’t always learn his lesson. His lesson had started with murder in Cottonmouth. He was learning it all over again in Goldstone. Anyone was capable of anything if the circumstances were right and the anger burned hot enough.
Anger such as Maggie’s.
“Don’t.” Simone stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.
His mouth dried up. “What?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
She couldn’t know the depths to which his mind could sink. Especially the depraved notions he had about his own sister.
“Maggie didn’t do this,” she said. Emphatically. With a hint of terror.
He struggled to breathe. How could she read his mind so easily? He took her shoulders in his hands, holding her still. “I don’t blame her if she did. Bad things were going on in her marriage. I ignored them.”
“You can’t blame yourself for Carl’s death.”
He turned the statement around on her. “Didn’t you blame yourself because of a fantasy and an email?”
“You showed me I was wrong. I still feel bad, but then I think of what you told me.”
Christ. There was such an overwhelming wealth of trust in her statement. Trust he wasn’t worthy of. “It’s not the first time I’ve minimized a situation.”
“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. It only works in hindsight.”
Another time, he might have laughed. How could he explain that a cop couldn’t afford hindsight? “I didn’t come to Goldstone for a vacation.” One could actually say he’d been running away. Like Simone. Like everyone else in Goldstone.
“Why are you here then?”
He steeled himself, then gave her a confession he’d given to no one else. “I let a friend get murdered.”
“Did you kill him?”
He rubbed her arms almost absently. “You know that’s not what I meant. He was killed. It was preventable if I’d been paying attention the way a cop is supposed to.”
She put a hand to his cheek. “I think you did everything in your power. I know you did.”
If only things were that simple. In Simone’s world, maybe they were. “The truth is that I didn’t.”
“If you didn’t kill him, and you didn’t know he was going to be killed, then it isn’t your fault.”
“Simone—”
She stopped him with a soft kiss. “You can’t save everyone from the bad things that will happen to them, Brax. I wish I hadn’t written that fantasy. But I’m not sure Carl would be alive even if I hadn’t. And I’m not sure your friend would be alive if you’d done anything different. You can’t be sure either.”
Just as Teesdale couldn’t save an eight-year-old girl. But he could save his own child. And he’d done it by coming to Goldstone and giving her a safer life.
“You can only do your best, and I
know without a doubt that’s exactly what you did. But you can’t do your job if you blame yourself for things you can’t control.”
He knew that. It was damn near the same thing he’d been telling himself.
“I know you know that,” she said, though he hadn’t said anything. “But you don’t believe it.”
“Are you some sort of mind reader?”
She put her face to his chest and shook her head. “No. But you tend to think like me. So I’m telling you the same stuff I always tell myself.”
They were alike? Sweet, innocent Simone? And him? “It was my job, Simone, and I failed.” Christ, how did she get him to admit these things aloud? “Your guilt over that fantasy and what I did are two completely different things.”
She looked at him, then whispered, “Are they?”
He opened his mouth to shoot off a quick retort. She gently covered his lips with her palm. “Think before you say it. Is the guilt, not the circumstance, really that different?”
Asked that way, he suddenly wasn’t so sure.
She must have seen that uncertainty in his eyes. Or read his mind again. “Don’t answer now,” she said. “Just think. Very carefully.”
He tipped her chin up and lightly kissed her nose. “I’ll think.” He would. Later. When he knew what had happened to Carl. For now, the revelation eased something deep inside him. Her simple acceptance of his biggest mistake was more than he’d believed possible.
Simone smiled, flipping his heart with her dazzle. “Let’s talk about Maggie and the ridiculous notion that she pushed Carl.”
“I don’t—”
She ignored him. “You know, if Maggie was angry, she’d have shot Carl right then and there, not followed him up a mountain trail looking for a perfect place to push him off.”
Jesus, the way her mind worked. Icy logic confirming exactly what he wanted to hear.
Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) Page 26