She’d had a momentary lapse in there, revealed too much, that was true, but it wouldn’t happen again. She meant to keep her secrets to herself, though from herself was more like it. As a girl, hiding things deep down inside had been work. Now it was as natural as breathing, as natural as lying about her true feelings. She hadn’t lied about the boys. She hadn’t lied about the men and why they’d beaten her. She’d lied about the profound nothingness she’d felt. More than a lack of emotion, it was a dark void that sucked in all her feelings, turned her into a blank wall, into ... nothing.
She hadn’t thought she’d ever admit that she’d simply lain there and let them do it. Not when she was thirteen and not when she was thirty. And the most terrifying question of all, was how many other things had she simply lain down for? God, the thought ... one chink in the armor that surrounded her and she’d lose control of her finely knit web of ... lies she told herself?
Well, tonight she’d put one helluva big chink in that armor herself.
But she damn well intended to shore it all back up, to fill her blank wall with a man’s touch.
She’d dressed for the Round Up, she fully intended to go, and she certainly planned on getting laid. Properly. For more years than she could remember, she’d striven to connect emotionally. In the end, she’d only connected on a power level. She’d come to accept that. She wanted control, wanted power, but most of all she wanted something beyond that dark void sucking her down. It didn’t matter one bit if later it all turned to shit.
Because in the morning, Jules would still be dead, and he’d died because of her obsession with Bud Traynor.
She reached in her blazer pocket, pulled out her keys, crunched across the drive in her high heeled shoes, and shrieked when Witt appeared out of the shadow of a tree just by the street.
Witt. Shit. She didn’t need this, not now. “I gotta run. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She tried to breeze by him, but he caught her arm. “Hey, wait just a minute.”
She allowed herself to be pulled to a stop, but stood on the sidewalk tapping her foot and looking deliberately at his hand until he dropped her arm. She pulled her jacket around her. The night was suddenly cold.
“Had a case,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked.
His rumpled brown suit looked almost black in the night. He must have gone home to change after he’d left her that morning. He smelled of talcum powder and ... something else. She knew that odor. It clung to his clothes, to his hair, and to the depth of his eyes. She stared at his hands. The powder was embedded in the cuticles of his nails and the fine lines of his fingers. Latex gloves had powder in them. He’d been at a crime scene. A homicide. He saw faces like Jules every day. Every single day. And the scent that festered in his clothes was the scent of death. She wondered if it festered in his soul.
Can you really close the front door on it, Witt, really?
“Only just heard about Jules,” he went on as if they hadn’t stood silent for several seconds. “I’m sorry.”
A car passed. She watched the fading taillights. “What for?”
“I should have been there for you.”
Shades of Cameron. She couldn’t deal with any of that. She spread her hands and shrugged. “Like I said, what for?”
He regarded her a moment, then tipped his head to the side. “You’re pissed I wasn’t there, aren’t you?”
She went for flippant. Maybe he’d eventually get the hint. “I handled your cop buddies quite well on my own.”
“Max. I would have been there if I’d known—if I could have been.”
God, she wanted him to leave her alone. Wanted him to stop being so damn solicitous—before she made the unthinkable mistake of throwing herself at him. She lifted her hands in a who-cares gesture. “Why are you explaining? It doesn’t bother me.”
He scraped a big paw down his face. “I don’t feel much like fighting tonight, okay? Why don’t I simply tell you what I learned?”
Her heart picked up its pace. “You found Nadine?”
He shook his head, sadly, she thought. “No, Max. Maybe you oughta try looking in a few more dumpsters.”
She stepped back as if he’d slapped her, and her ears buzzed like she’d taken it across the side of the head.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Bad day.”
And he was sorry. She could see it in the wariness of his blue eyes.
She took a deep breath and tried not to hold it against him. “Did those cop friends of yours find Snake? I couldn’t very well ask them under the circumstances.”
He shifted his feet. “Yeah, they did.”
She waited. He forced her to ask. “Yeah, and?”
“He didn’t have a license number, and Jake Lloyd said the locket wasn’t the one his wife always wore.”
Whammo. She felt his words like a blow. That couldn’t be. He had to be wrong. “But it was a heart, just like the one she wore that night—”
“Hers was engraved on the back. Snake’s wasn’t.”
It was dark, and it was cold. She barely kept her teeth from chattering. “But—”
“When he said Dracula and Frankenstein dumped her ... ” He stopped. She couldn’t see his eyes in the shadows they stood in, but she felt the pity in his voice. “They let him go.”
She shuddered. It traveled down her spine and left a deep cold burning at the base. Wrong again. Who might die this time? “But those were masks,” she said through gritted teeth. “You saw them in the video.”