Lilah didn’t hear it coming. Until pain shrieked through her scalp. Her head jerked back. A hand mercilessly wrenched the roots of her hair. Her assailant grabbed her arm and twisted it up behind her back, her shoulder bursting with fiery agony. She never had a chance to grab the gun.
Her eyes teared. Her attacker’s hand rose in her line of vision, her orangewood stick gripped in the fist like a knife. She screamed. The stick plunged. Piercing. Tearing. Burning her skin. She grabbed for her throat with one hand, gasped, tried to suck air but couldn’t. Then she panicked. Kicking. Flailing. Bucking. The distant sound of shattering glass. The scent of disinfectant and seared flesh. The bright flash of light as her lamp crashed to the floor, the pop of electricity as it cracked against the brick. Her chair flipped out from beneath her, and she went down on her knees. She couldn’t even scream. Her limbs seemed weighted with concrete as the light around her started to fade.
Oh God. The tinny taste of blood. The numbness of her fingers. The blinds in front of her blurred. She should have left them open. She should have gone for the gun sooner.
Instead, she was going to die.
*
The detective’s mouth was a thin, white line. “Lilah Bloom was a real fighter. She died hard.”
Max shuddered. She could have closed her eyes and seen the dream all over again. The ghosts of Lilah’s fear, pain, and helplessness jabbed at her. The worst was what she hadn’t seen: the face of Lilah’s murderer.
The morning sun had only just come up, the porch light was still on, and the detective’s blond hair looked almost white. Like he’d seen a ghost. Or one too many dead bodies.
“In the end, she suffocated on her own blood.” Witt used full sentences. He was as bothered by Lilah Bloom’s murder as Max.
“And you show up at my door at six o’clock in the morning to tell me this?” she snapped, mostly because of the dream, but also because she wouldn’t have been upset if he showed up at six for something else entirely.
“You were the last person connected with Wendy’s case to see Lilah alive.”
Max gripped the handle of the screen door and literally quaked in her slippers. Which was one of the reasons she hadn’t opened the door for the detective. Letting him in was tantamount to making her nightmares a reality.
Lilah Bloom is dead. Your nightmare is reality. Cameron whispered close to her ear.
“I damn well know that,” she said to both of them.
“Repeat for me every word Lilah Bloom said to you.”
A sudden spurt of guilt stiffened her spinal cord. “You don’t think this was my fault?” Just as quickly, without waiting for his answer, she shook her head. “Of course not. I only talked to her.”
“What did she say?” His tone was no-nonsense. This was the man a suspect would meet in an interrogation room, the one who would barrel through any roadblocks in his quest for justice. The authority in his voice actually made her hot. Damn, she hated these inappropriate thought bursts when Lilah Bloom was dead.
“I told you yesterday. She went on and on about Hal Gregory. Have you talked to him?”
“He has an alibi.”
“Don’t tell me. The father-in-law again.”
Witt was silent a moment, narrowed his eyes. “You know too much, Miss Starr. Way too much.”
“It’s a logical deduction, Detective.”
“Yes, but you’re in the right places at the right time. A good detective has to ask himself why.”
Her legs were bare beneath the long, cotton sleep shirt. She felt naked, exposed. But her body buzzed with awareness. Not good, especially considering why the man was at her front door.
“Seems to me I’m in the wrong places at the wrong time.”
He didn’t laugh. She was completely serious.
“No one at Hackett’s remembers calling your agency, Miss Starr. No one at your agency remembers getting a call.”
Jeez, he’d talked to Sunny, too. Hard to believe, but the man was investigating her.
Though the screen door was between them, Witt took a step closer. Jaw unshaven, eyes weary, he hadn’t changed the teal shirt he’d worn yesterday. For some odd reason, she wanted to smooth the tired lines from his brow.
Get a grip, she told herself.
She could slam the door in his face, but he’d be back. He was a bulldog. Evasiveness had been Max’s best strategy throughout this whole Wendy affair. Except with Witt. He just didn’t let her get away with it.
Tell him the truth. Cameron’s insistent whisper irritated her. “I haven’t got a clue what the truth is.”
“The truth is Wendy Gregory had a nylon cord wrapped around her neck so tight it cut her flesh. The truth is Lilah Bloom was stabbed in the throat, her air passage occluded by her own blood, resulting in suffocation. The truth is you’re too damn interested in both of them for mere coincidence.”
Max clutched at the base of her throat reflexively. For just a moment, she felt searing pain, couldn’t breath, and the detective’s features faded in front of her. “It was an orangewood stick,” she whispered.
Silence. Total. She couldn’t hear the trucks on the freeway or the crickets or the distant honk of horns. She couldn’t even hear Witt breathe.