In the Waning Light (17 page)

Meg shucked off her father’s slippers and bent down to tug on her boots.

“You’re hurt,” he said, noting the pink imprints her socks left on the tiles. “You’re bleeding.”

“Must have been a bit of glass. It’s fine.” She stood up. He saw that she’d wrapped a handkerchief around her left hand. It, too, was spotted with blood. “You got my keys?” she said.

“They’re in my truck.”

She stared. “I—I need to get to the hotel. I need my keys.”

“Come. I’m taking you home.” He took her arm and one of her bags. It was heavy with her laptop and books.

“Blake, no. I need to—”

“Forget it. Either I’m taking you to the medical center, or I’m taking you home to get a look at those feet and that hand of yours myself. Medic, remember. And you need somewhere safe.”

“I’ll be perfectly safe at a hotel . . .” Her voice died as she caught sight of the lurid graffiti under a harsh klieg light. Her house looked like a set from some nightmare horror movie, drips of blood crawling down from the untidy letters into the dead flowerbed choked by weeds, a bed her mother had once tended with such care.

Go Home Bitch. Fuck off, Bitch
.
Killer’s daughter!! White trash. Gonna kill you, Bitch.

“When . . . will you know what kind of blood it is?” she said to Kovacs, her voice hoarse.

“Lab should have results pretty soon.”

“When can I wash it off?”

“I’ll let you know when we’re done.”

Blake took her arm. “Thanks. If you need anything she’ll be at the marina.”

“Be careful, Meg,” Kovacs called out behind them as they started down the path.

She stalled dead in her tracks, spun around fiercely. “That another threat, Deputy?”

“Just doing my job. Protecting the citizens of this county, making sure they stay out of harm’s way.”

She opened her mouth, but Blake pressured her arm. “Meg. Enough. Come.”

He put her bags in the back of his truck, and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed in and sat staring at her defiled house with its shattered windows, illuminated with the CSI lights, the pulsing blue and red emergency lights, the dark forest hulking behind, mist swirling.

Blake’s neck muscles were tight as he fired the ignition.

“It’s just a house,” she whispered. “Just a house.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Meg?”

She looked at him. His chest torqued.

“It’s
not
just a house, Meg. It’s your family home. It’s a vessel full of memories. They live in there. You have a
right
to feel violated, angry. No one has a right to do that.”

“Jonah said I should get rid of it. That I was holding on to the ghosts—that I needed to let them go.”

Irritation, and yeah, a spark of hot jealousy crackled through him. He geared his truck, reversed, and turned down the street, his beams cutting twin tunnels into the mist as he drove. “Guess that’s why he’s the shrink and I’m not. I don’t have a problem with holding on to memories. You need to tell me what happened, Meg. What’s with those boxes? What’s gotten up Kovacs’s nose?”

“Me. I’ve gotten up his nose. Me and Sherry’s story.”

He shot her a glance. She sat silent for several beats, fiddling with that ring of hers.

Frustration, desire to
do
something burned in him. “Megan, you
need
to tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s personal stuff.”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap—”

“Blake, I don’t want to involve you. You have a son who needs you. I . . . I’ve screwed up your life too much before. I . . . just need to do this on my own. I have my own life, a . . .” Her voice wavered. She rubbed her hands over her face. “Please. Just take me to the hotel.”

“You have a fiancé? Is that what you’re trying to say?” He dug in his pocket, handed Meg his cell phone. “Here. Call him. Tell him to come. And when he gets here I’ll let you go to a damn hotel. In the meantime, you’re coming home with me, where at least I can protect you.”

“Oh jeeze, what, because you’re now a trained soldier with a gun?”

“Damn right.”

She stared.

“It’s more than you’ll get at the Whakami Bay hotel. Someone could have killed you tonight, Meg, and clearly the cops are not feeling terribly helpful toward you for some reason, and you have yet to explain why.”

He turned into the marina driveway, and they bumped down the steep gravel track to the bay. Fog was more dense down on the water, a thick, tattered soup in the dark, bouncing back the lights of his truck, closing halos tightly around the lamps along the dock, as if trying to strangle them dead. The beam from the Shelter Head lighthouse arced through mist at the point. The horns sounded, mournful.

“Who’s with Noah?” she said, noticing a light burning in the marina office.

“Geoff. He’s sleeping on the sofa downstairs.” It would be dawn soon. He had to think about Noah’s breakfast, making his lunch, getting him to school.

She turned in her seat. “Blake . . . how did you know to come tonight?”

He inhaled deeply, turned off the ignition. He was in no mood to rehash the anomalies of his brother’s story, and he had every mind to hammer it out with him later. “Geoff told me. Listen, Meg, before we go inside, I’ve got to know what’s going on. And don’t go telling me it’s not my business, because it is. That selfish this-is-my-circus-my-monkeys, no-one-else-can-understand card is not going to work anymore. This is not just about you.”

She stared. “Oh, that is so not fair.”

He placed his hand over hers. Her skin was ice cold. She was shivering. “We need to get you warmed up, get a brandy into you to cut the edge off that adrenaline withdrawal that’s going to kick in any moment. And I need to look at your feet, but first you’re going to tell me about those file boxes.”

She sucked in a chestful of air, and exhaled slowly. “My mother’s,” she said, finally. “They’re full of transcripts—the police interrogations of Tyson Mack, Sherry’s autopsy report, crime scene photos. My mom got most of it from Lee Albies, who was Ty Mack’s pro bono legal counsel. Albies had started mounting her case in the event that Ty was charged.”

“What was your mother doing with them?”

“She’d come to believe that someone had tipped my dad off to Tyson Mack’s hiding place on purpose, knowing he would probably go and kill Ty. Someone wanted Ty dead, and the case dropped, and they used my dad like a loaded gun.”

“Whatever gave her that idea?”

“My dad. He let slip to my mom on a visit that someone told him where Ty was hiding, but he would not reveal who, because he believed the blame was solely his to bear. So, my mom began her own investigation in the hopes of easing my dad’s sentence when his case finally went to trial. Her journal details her progress, and it shows how she slowly came to think that maybe Ty Mack didn’t do it.” She paused, looked up. Her eyes gleamed in the dark. “I think my father might have gone to prison for killing an innocent man, Blake.”

Blake’s brain reeled as he listened to Meg recount how Irene had caused a fire, and how the safe was discovered when contractors ripped out the bookshelves to get at the subsequent water damage. She told him about the other DNA profiles that had been found in condoms left at the scene, as yet unidentified. And how one of those DNA profiles matched hairs found in Sherry’s pubic hair. He heard about the pregnancy, and the mystery of the paternal DNA, which matched neither of the other two sets of unidentified DNA found on scene, nor Tommy Kessinger’s DNA profile. And how Ike Kovacs sat on that information.

“None of this proves that Ty
didn’t
do it,” he said.

“But it does raise questions about reasonable doubt, ulterior motive, possible police tunnel vision.”

He stared at the little light burning downstairs, thinking of Geoff. His being on the point that night. Meeting someone else. Someone whose identity remained a mystery. Him finding Geoff in the boathouse. How his brother had left town a few weeks after the murder, never to return. The flotsam sack he’d found near Meg, who’d been close to dead, lolling in those waves.

It all suddenly took on dark context. And it complicated his need for honesty with Meg right now because it butted hard against his reflex to protect his brother. Protecting Geoff was hardwired into him. And honestly, whatever secret Geoff was keeping, he did not—could not—have hurt Sherry.

“The other thing,” Meg said, “after reading my mom’s journal, and seeing how driven she was to get to the bottom of this, how she was working against a ticking-clock deadline for my dad’s trial, I can’t see how she could suddenly have committed suicide.”

“What . . . exactly are you saying?”

“Her journal details fears about being followed, her house watched, someone trying to break in. She was scared. Scared enough to report it to Ike Kovacs. My mom felt someone might want to do her harm.” She paused. “I think my mother might have been murdered, Blake. I think she was getting too close to the truth, and someone needed to silence her.”

Lori-Beth wheeled herself in front of Henry’s desk computer. She glanced nervously over her shoulder, then clicked it on. She’d never done this before. She never touched Henry’s things in this office, and he knew it.

The monitor flared to life.

What was she looking for? Something, anything. Henry was scared. She could smell it on him, and it made her sick with nerves. He’d been acting weird, getting calls at strange hours that upset him, going out early in the morning. And tonight he’d said he was going to meet a business colleague for a drink. While waiting up and worrying about him, she’d heard about the Forest End shooting on the radio—their community was one of few that still had a human in the studio 24/7, following up on reports from police scanners. Henry had finally come home after 4:00 a.m. Drunk, reeking of booze. He’d passed out on their bed fully clothed. Something he never did.

She clicked open his web browser, and tried to open his history. His cache had been cleared.

Why? What did he have to hide? Her hands froze over the keyboard as she heard a car outside. A car door banged. Her heart raced. She couldn’t move fast in this chair, so she sat still like a mouse in the dark, bathed by the soft glow from the monitor. The back door opened, closed. Panic kicked. She heard a door close down the passage, in the guest suite. Then all went silent. The antique clock on the wall
tick-tick-ticked
. She waited. Nothing.

Relief washed softly through her. Just Sally coming home. She must have gone to see that late-night movie at that artsy club she was talking about. Sally always had trouble sleeping.

She reached to click off the computer, but stopped as something caught her eye. An icon on his desktop.

“Meg, that’s just crazy. Your mom’s death was an overdose. They
were
her pills that she took. You were sleeping down the hall. No one else was there.”

It was growing colder inside the truck cab with the engine off, but Blake wanted to have this out with Meg before running into Geoff, whom he’d left in the house with Noah.

“I don’t know—I just can’t believe she took her own life. Not after what she wrote right up until the night before she died. She didn’t want to abandon me, Blake. She
cared
for me.” Her voice caught, and Meg took a moment to corral her emotions. Compassion surged into Blake’s chest. It came with an ache to hold her close, to comfort her. He exhaled heavily and ran his hands over his hair.

“In her own words, my mother was trying to protect me from all this. She loved me.” Meg wavered, again trying to control her voice. “And I never knew. Her taking her own life just makes no sense now.”

“This is big, Meg. Shit.” He turned to her. “If, just
if,
Ty Mack didn’t kill Sherry—
if
it’s true that someone wanted Ty to go down as a scapegoat, and to use your dad to silence everything, it would mean that a very dangerous criminal could still be out there. And your poking around the case could threaten him. If, just
if
your mother did not take her own life . . . this is serious. You could be in serious danger.” His gaze locked with hers. “You’re staying here,” he said firmly. “Until we figure this out. You’re going to show me those documents, and I’m going to help you get to the bottom of this.”