If You See Her (12 page)

Her voice hitched, catching in her throat as the memories started to slam into her, fear building. She paused, closed her eyes. She had to get through this—had to. Swallowing, she counted to ten and then whispered, “I saw something behind Law, a shadow. Just a shadow,
somebody behind him. I, uh … I … I think I must have passed out. I was so scared. I … um, well, I don’t do fear well. And I was
so
scared … but I wouldn’t have done this.

“Not with him hurt.” She found herself staring at Law’s battered face. If she’d woken up, seen her best friend—her
only
friend—lying there, hurt and needing help; no. She knew she wasn’t very strong, but she knew she wouldn’t have decided to go and slit her wrists. “Not if Law needed help. No matter how scared I was.”

Then she looked at the sheriff, braced, prepared for him to dismiss her, to brush it off.

Instead, he nodded. “Okay. I don’t know what more we can do other than take a report, but we will do that.”

“You …” She swallowed. “You believe me?”

He sighed. “Ms. Carson, I didn’t think you had hurt Law, but somebody went to considerable trouble to make it look like you had. This? Well, it’s not a surprise that somebody decided to try to take things even further. It’s sickening, yes. But not surprising.”

You don’t know me …

Why did those words keep ringing in his head hours later?

Scowling, Remy tried to focus on the screen, but he was having a damn hard time. He needed to be ready for a case in the morning, and the last thing he needed to be doing was thinking about Hope Carson—who was no longer any of his concern, really.

You don’t know me
.

No. He didn’t, and it would be best if he kept it that way.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he focused on the computer once more and made himself read.

For the next couple of hours, he had some level of success focusing on his job—he handled several phone
calls, talked to a judge, took a call from his mom and had to promise he’d come by for lunch on Sunday.

Her heart was breaking over Brody—she’d seen the trouble with the boy for a while, but neither of them had had any luck getting Hank to see it.

Maybe they could feel guilty together, he brooded.

He also managed to instill the terror needed to get some information he should have already had.

He was on a roll, really.

And then somebody knocked on his door.

Without looking away from the paperwork he was now dealing with, he called out, “Come in.”

Nielson came in and Remy said, “If this is anything else about our current mess, it has to wait. I’ve got other shit I do need to deal with.”

“Just wanted to drop this off. You can add it to the current mess.” Nielson tossed a report down on Remy’s desk and then sauntered out.

Remy told himself to ignore it.

He looked back at his paperwork.

And then he found himself thinking about Hope’s appearance in Nielson’s office that morning.

The low, determined sound of her voice as she said, “Let’s get this over with.”

And the complete, utter terror that underlined her words.

“Shit.”

He grabbed the report.

Forty-five seconds later, he found himself seeing through a sheen of red.

That cool, logical voice in his head—the lawyer in him—had no trouble being cool and logical.

Troubled woman, remember?

That borderline personality—attention isn’t solely focused on her now and this would be one hell of a way to
get
attention back on her. Sympathetic attention at that
.

Throwing crazy shit into the mix and she doesn’t need to have a reason
.

But his gut said otherwise.

And Remy believed in listening to his instincts. He’d always been one to listen to his instincts. They didn’t tend to steer him wrong, and that was a damn good thing.

Carrington County, Kentucky, was so damn small and their resources were stretched pretty damn thin—more often than not, he ended up taking a more active role in checking things out for the cases he’d have to prosecute than he would if he’d worked in Lexington or Louisville.

His instincts had insisted there was a problem with this whole picture, and damn had they been right. From the get-go, something about this hadn’t sat right with him.

He’d tried to brush it off, tried to convince himself that she had just snowed him—born manipulators were good at that, he knew.

He tried convincing himself he was just so tied up because he had a personal attraction to her and that was doing bad things to his brain.

But it hadn’t felt right.

He should have listened to his gut—one time he hadn’t done it, and shit, had he ever been wrong.

Blood roared in his ears. His hands clenched into fists and he had to unclench them before he ripped the report apart. Slowly, carefully, Remy laid it down.

Slowly, carefully, he stood up and started to pace.

Jamming his hands into his pockets, he paced the worn carpet of his office and tried to wrap his mind around what lay on those sheets of paper. Simple, so damn simple—it shouldn’t mean so much to
him
.

Personally.

This was just a job, after all.

Right?

According to that report, Hope Carson hadn’t been the one to take the knife to her wrists.

Which meant … they had yet another victim.

And while that should infuriate him as a civil servant—and it did—while it should bother him on a personal level, just for the sheer wrongness of it—and it did—it shouldn’t leave him shaking, feeling shattered, like he somehow had to put himself back together.

Shouldn’t leave him fuming and raging … or worse, all but thirsting for blood.

But there he was.

He was shaken … on a level he couldn’t quite understand.

He was shattered … because he hadn’t seen this.

He was enraged to the point that he wanted to tear something apart.

It wasn’t supposed to affect him personally? Screw that.

From the second he’d laid eyes on that woman, she’d affected him on a personal level and he’d be damned if he could completely understand it, but there was no denying it.

His gut knotted. He knew what had happened that night, all too well.

If Ezra and Nielson hadn’t decided to go out and check on Law’s place, she would have bled to death.

Not because she’d chosen to, either.

Son of a bitch
.

“C
AN
I
ASK WHY YOU WANT MORE INFORMATION
about my wife?” Detective Joseph Carson stared out the window.

“Ms. Carson is no longer your wife,” Remington Jennings said, his voice easy and relaxed.

He had that slow, laid-back Southern drawl, rich and smooth. Joey didn’t really like hearing the man say his wife’s name. At all.

“We may be estranged, but I have hopes that Hope and I will eventually work things out.”

“The divorce has been final for two years. That’s a bit more than an estrangement,” Jennings said.

“Our personal affairs don’t really concern you. And I’m still trying to understand why a Kentucky lawyer is trying to get even more personal background information on my wife. Her history is private—you have no need to know any more than I’ve already shared.”

“Well, there’s been some interesting updates, some light shed on recent events—it turns out there was an attack on Ms. Carson and I’m just looking for anything that may shed light on it.”

Joey echoed. “An attack—I thought she’d tried to kill herself.”

“As I said—there was some light shed on recent events,” Jennings said.

“Hmm. Regardless of whatever light you think you saw, that attack was likely self-inflicted. I’ve already told you. Hope is troubled. I love her, but she’s deeply, deeply troubled.”

“I question whether she really is all that troubled,” Jennings said in that neutral tone lawyers managed so well.

The one that managed to sound like it was saying
fuck you
, but it said it so smoothly, so politely. He wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the bastard.

“She spent months in a mental institution. She overdosed on liquor, anti-anxiety pills, and antidepressants. She had to have her stomach pumped. She tells terrible, terrible lies and lives in a delusional world of her own making, one where she’s happier to paint herself as a victim. She is a chronic liar, a user, and a manipulator. Mr. Jennings, yes, she really is
that
troubled.”

There was a brief pause, followed by, “Well, if she has that many flaws, I have to ask myself, why would you want her back?”

“Because she’s mine,” Joey said simply.

“Yours? I thought the days of owning our wives ended quite some time ago.”

Joey gripped the phone, squeezed it until the plastic cracked. But he kept his voice cool and level as he responded, “You misunderstand me, Mr. Jennings. I love her. There is no logic in matters of love. For all her flaws, for all her problems, I love Hope and I want her back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have to get back to work.”

He hung up the phone and continued to stare outside.

This, he decided, had gone on quite long enough.

Hope Carson really did need to come home.

Remy hung up the phone.

In the past day, he hadn’t had any luck getting solid information on Hope’s past.

Not that he’d expected he would.

Patient confidentiality was blocking him, as he’d expected.

And her obnoxious ass of an ex-husband wasn’t helping much.

He’d tried tracking down some friends from her hometown, but … well, there weren’t any. At least not since high school.

No work history that he could find—he suspected she’d been working under the table for the past two years. It was the only way he could figure she’d been supporting herself.

No volunteer work. Throughout her marriage, the only person who had any regular contact with her was her husband. Already that was painting an image that left a bad, bad feeling in Remy’s gut.

Coupled with her skittishness around people, particularly men …

Anger started to pound and pulse inside him, but he tucked it away, pushed it aside so he could think, function. He couldn’t make any decisions based on his assumptions, couldn’t go forward based on what he
thought
might have happened … and even if he could, right now there wasn’t anything he could do, not as far as his job went.

It was late Friday and he had spent much of that day in court. What hadn’t been spent in court, he’d spent on the phone, trying to learn more about Hope. Not that he really had to have that information—there was nothing he really
needed
to do about the report Nielson had given him.

Once they had a suspect, yes.

But until then?

Assuming that even happened.

Turn it off. Go home
, he told himself.

Yeah, that was what he needed to do. The past few weeks had been hell on wheels in his small county, dumping far more shit on his plate than he normally had to handle. He ought to go home, collapse on the couch, order a pizza, and zone out with a beer and a movie.

That was what he
should
do.

But after he left the office, it wasn’t his sparsely furnished, empty apartment he found himself driving to.

No, he was speeding down the winding two-lane highway that led to Law Reilly’s.

Law.

Shit.

What was her history with Law?

Was
there a history with Law?

There was a connection there. He remembered the way she had looked in the sheriff’s office just yesterday. Like she had been about to completely panic, her eyes all but black in her face, her skin pale, her breathing coming too fast, too hard.

She’d been fighting a panic attack—a bad one.

Remy had seen them, more than once. She’d been getting it under control, fighting to get a grip on it. Law had rested a hand on her shoulder, a friendly, easy gesture, and said something to her, and she’d settled, steadied.

What was between them?

And why the hell did it matter to him so much?

Didn’t he have enough on his plate right now? A killer running around his town. A wife-beater to prosecute. His nephew …

Even thinking about the kid made his heart ache.

Come Monday, Brody was going to a residential treatment center in Lexington, a place where he could get a
grip on the anger and the grief that was eating him alive. He’d be home in a few weeks, Remy hoped.

He hated doing it, but Brody needed some serious, serious one-on-one intervention and Hank, shit, his brother just wasn’t up to it.

And Hank—that was another problem.

His brother had to get his head out of his ass and wake
up
.

Ever since Sheryl had died, the man was so focused on his grief, so focused on anything and everything but his kid. That was a huge part of why Brody was so messed up right now.

And then there was Mom. She was now miserably unhappy and blaming herself because she hadn’t seen what was going on with Brody, even though it wasn’t her fault.