“I will kill you if you don’t drop that knife. I promise you that,” Titus said. The man still didn’t move. They stood there locked in a silent battle of wills where neither one seemed willing to give a quarter.
Suddenly Hector fell against Titus, then brushed past him before falling face-first on the floor of the kitchen. Blood flew up as his body hit the tiles. Titus was pushed to his right. The man in the wolf’s mask spun on the balls of his feet and threw the knife at Titus’s head. Titus simultaneously ducked and fired at the man in the wolf’s mask. His shot went wide and cracked the glass of the patio door in the rear of the kitchen.
The man in the wolf’s-head mask ran full-speed at the patio door and crashed through the glass even as the door was still spiderwebbing from Titus’s shot. Titus ran to the door and started to fire, but there was no light in the backyard. The man in the mask had disappeared like a ghost into the yawing maw of the night.
Kellie was still screaming in the closet.
Titus went to Hector first. That last burst of adrenaline had allowed the man in the wolf’s mask to escape. That ill-fated attempt to rescue Kellie would be the last thing Hector ever did on this side of the veil. His skin was already cooling to the touch.
Titus went to the closet and opened the door.
Kellie fell into his arms still screaming, still pleading for him to save her, to help her, to keep her safe. He realized he had failed one of those requests, the most important one of the three.
* * *
Titus sat in his SUV with the door open as Carla and Davy stretched yellow crime scene tape around the cottage. Trey came to the SUV and stood near the open door.
“Kellie says they were here with your episode booted up when the door got kicked in. She said she ran for the closet as Hector confronted the guy. She didn’t hear a car, so I guess we can assume he parked down the road a piece and came up through the woods.”
“Didn’t want them to hear the engine,” Titus said. His voice was flat as a pancake.
“Yeah. So he was really wearing a wolf mask?”
“Yes. Dressed in all black with his sleeves taped inside his gloves. About five-foot-ten, maybe one-ninety to two hundred pounds. He was strong. I shot that window, but he blew through it like it was crepe paper,” Titus said.
“Why you think he came out here?” Trey asked.
Titus held his hat by the brim and let it move back and forth.
“He was trying to hurt me. Kellie and I are friends.” He paused. “We used to date. I’m surprised you don’t know that. Everyone else does. The killer knows. That’s why he came here,” Titus said.
“Nah, I knew that, but why go after your ex? Why not go after Darlene, not that I want him to go after Darlene,” Trey said.
“People were talking about Kellie. She was the new gossip,” Titus said.
“Well, Carla is taking Kellie over to the Hampton Inn and spending the night with her. She wants to leave first thing in the morning. Are we letting her go?” Trey asked.
Titus stepped out of the SUV and stood to his full height. “Yeah. If we need her, we can always get her back. We got Hector’s info. I’ll notify his people.”
“Hey, why don’t you let me do that? You don’t really want to have to explain to them what happened here, do you? They don’t need the gory details,” Trey said.
“No, I’ll do it. I have to do it,” Titus said.
“You said he wanted to hurt you. Why just you?” Trey said.
“He’s focused on me. He blames me for breaking up his little triumvirate. I challenged him on the phone. Challenged him through Dayane. He called again today and I pushed him about his birth mother. Called him by his true name. The name Elias gave him.” Titus put on his hat.
“He called again today? When were you gonna tell us that?” Trey asked.
“Tomorrow at the daily meeting,” Titus said. He turned to look at the cottage. At the splintered door.
“He said my flock wasn’t safe.”
Titus put on his hat.
“I guess he was right.”
* * *
* * *
By the time he got home, his father and Marquis were asleep. He climbed the steps and peeled himself out of his uniform. He put his gun in the nightstand. He’d have Trey write up the report of the discharge of a weapon during an attempted arrest. If the rule didn’t apply to him as well as his team, then what use was the rule?
He lay back in his bed and stared at the ceiling.
The killer was a friend of Cole Marshall’s. He was sure of that, but it was looking like he was a secret friend. A friend he wasn’t seen with out in public. Dayane knew, but she was gone. Either scared off or face-up in a hole in the ground. He had never been so close to catching this bastard and never so far away at the same time. If he had gone after him instead of comforting Kellie, he might have caught him. Might have pulled off his mask and seen his face. The face of a monster who walked on two feet. But could he have looked at himself in the mirror if he hadn’t pulled her out of that closet?
Titus pulled the blanket up around him. He didn’t know how the man in the glass would have looked at him if he hadn’t.
He heard his cell phone vibrate on the nightstand. He grabbed it and checked the time. It was a little after 1:00 A.M.
It was Darlene.
“Hello?” Titus said.
“Hey,” Darlene said.
“Hey, you all right?”
“I should ask you that. Heard somebody got killed over at your friend’s cottage,” Darlene said.
Titus grimaced. There was an ache in her words. “Yeah. Somebody tried to break in.”
“Can you come over?” Darlene asked.
“I … I mean, you sure? I don’t want to put you in danger, Darlene. This guy seems to have it bad for me,” Titus said.
“I need you to come over. Can you do that for me?”
* * *
Titus pulled up next to Darlene’s car. Her little sedan was on his left, and on his right was a row of boxwoods that her dad had used as a property line since they’d moved in back in 1998. Darlene had told him that getting the Parker boy down the street to trim them for him now that his arthritis would no longer allow him to do it was one of the saddest days of her dad’s life.
Titus got out of his Jeep and walked up to the front step. Darlene came out and met him before he could knock on the door.
“Y’all okay over here? Is somebody bothering you?” Titus asked.
Darlene shook her head. He saw that her eyes were red. “No. Daddy was sleeping with his shotgun right up until they left.”
“Left? What do you mean, left? Where’d they go?”
“Patterson’s Walk over in Williamsburg. It’s a senior living place. We closed down the flower shop on Tuesday. Just haven’t told anyone yet.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve helped them move. I could have—”
Darlene cut him off. “What, Titus? What could you have done? You’re working on this Spearman thing. And you should be working on it. People are scared to death. This is what you have to do. It’s who you are. I know that. So I didn’t bother you.”
“You wouldn’t have been bothering me, Darlene.”
Darlene bit her bottom lip, then wiped at her eyes with the back of her damaged hand. “Titus, I’m leaving too.”
Titus leaned against the railing on the step. “What do you mean, you’re leaving? Where you going? What about us? What are we gonna do?”
Darlene smiled a wistful smile. “When we started seeing each other, I knew that you carried a lot on you. I could almost see it weighing down those broad shoulders. I told myself I could help you through it. And I tried. God knows I tried, Titus. ’Cause you, more than anybody I know, deserve to be happy. But you don’t wanna be. For some reason, you think you gotta suffer. And I’m not the woman you want to help you out of that hole you made for yourself.”
“Didi, don’t say that. I … I love you. Whatever’s going on, we can work it out,” Titus said.
“You don’t love me, Titus. You want to. And I want you to so bad, but it ain’t there. I’ve been trying to hold on to you, and that’s like trying to grab smoke. When my parents told me they was moving, I think I realized I’ve been … spinning wheels here for too long. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’ve never been on a plane. I’ve never been out the Mid-Atlantic. I would tell myself I was staying for my parents. Then we met and I’d tell myself I was staying for you. But my parents done moved on, and we … I don’t know what we are anymore.”
Titus took her hands in his. Felt the warmth there. “We’re in love, that’s what we are.”
Darlene pulled her hands away. “You keep saying that, because you’re a good man and you think you have to. But … I mean, I’m glad you was there to save your friend, but why was you there at ten o’clock at night?”
Titus felt his mouth go dry.