While all serial killers were heinous, this one had been particularly so, targeting entire families camping in the Cascade Mountains. Last month, his partner, a divorced father of three who hadn’t been able to overcome the nightmares of all those other murdered children, had committed suicide, leaving Donovan with what both his shrink and police chaplain had diagnosed as survivor guilt.
Putting a name to his problem hadn’t done much to help, and while talking about those crimes as he’d forced his way through the speech, he’d wondered how many of the conference attendees in the standing-room-only audience were concealing the same problem. Afterwards, feeling the walls closing in on him, Donovan had passed on the special agents’ invitation to have drinks in the bar, reluctantly agreeing to a rain check when he returned to Honolulu on his way back to the mainland.
Now, sixteen hours into an already over-long day, as his shoes filled with sand and he melted under the tropical sun, Donovan had come to the conclusion his mistake had been buying into Nate’s sales pitch that palm trees, sparkling beaches, turquoise waters, and stunning women were exactly what he needed to regain his mojo.
So far—except for the aerial view of lush green mountains from the commuter flight to the island of Kauai, where he’d boarded a ferry for the thirty-minute ride to Orchid Island—the only foliage Donovan had seen was the tall, tasseled sugarcane flanking the road the taxi driver had turned onto soon after leaving the ferry terminal.
After what seemed an eternity of tearing along in a cloud of red dust, with the man apparently determined to hit every pothole in the dirt road, steam had started rising from beneath the hood of the ancient taxi. While the driver waited for whatever consisted of a motor club on Orchid Island to arrive to repair the radiator, Donovan had begun walking.
That had been twenty long, hot minutes ago, and with his recently injured ankle aching like a son of a bitch, he’d made the decision that if he didn’t reach Nate’s beach house (which he hadn’t owned the first and only time Donovan had been here) within the next thirty seconds, he was going to throw himself, fully clothed, into the Pacific Ocean. Then, once he had cooled off, he was going to trudge back up that damn cane road, flag down the first car he saw, and beg, if necessary, a ride to the ferry terminal, where he could begin the long journey back home to Portland.
It was then that he saw her.
At first, Donovan wondered if the vision might be nothing but a mirage, the product of his heat-crazed mind. She was clad in a brilliantly flowered bikini top and cutoff jeans, her skin tanned to a warm, dark honey, her hair sunlit strands of glistening copper, gold and bronze. If she had been perched on a rock jutting out of the water, instead of sitting atop the roof of the vine-covered house, Donovan could have easily believed that he had stumbled upon a mythical siren. If she wasn’t a hallucination, she was definitely a sign that things were looking up.
* * *
Lani Breslin recognized him immediately. He had, unsurprisingly, grown older, and the frown lines cut between his brows had her wondering if his devastating smile had diminished in wattage. Not that she was at all interested, having gotten her fill of that smile years ago.
At the moment, however, the individual trudging through the sparkling coral sand was definitely not at his charismatic best. He had discarded his gray suit jacket and tie and rolled his starched white sleeves up to the elbow, but his attire was far more suited to Oregon rain than the tropical Orchid Island sun. And his shoes—black wingtips, for heaven’s sake, Lani thought critically—were definitely not proper beach footwear. No wonder he was limping.
Since the only two residences on this stretch of isolated beach were her own cottage and this one, Lani put down her hammer with a resigned sigh and waited.
From her vantage point above him, she noticed the almost imperceptible straightening of his spine and the squaring of broad shoulders. He’d come a long, long way in the past fifteen years. Not only was former Portland patrolman Donovan Quinn now a detective, from what her brother had told her, he was the top candidate for chief of the Portland Police Bureau at the same time he was being actively recruited by the FBI.
His ability to slip unconsciously into a public persona of masculine authority was, along with the suit, evidence that he was no longer that reckless young cop she’d met so many years ago. He’d changed. But hadn’t they all? Nate’s name now appeared on all the bestseller lists, and she certainly wasn’t the petulant, self-centered teenage girl she’d been back then.
Still, Lani was somewhat saddened by the idea that Donovan had changed so drastically. All the professional success Nate had told her about hadn’t been kind to him. His six-foot, broad-shouldered frame had lost weight to the point of being almost gaunt.
“Hello,” he called up to her, dropping his luggage onto the sand. “I’m looking for Nate Breslin’s cottage.”
Of course he was. Remembering Nate’s promise to send her something special for Christmas, Lani vowed to give her older brother a piece of her mind at the very first opportunity.