The Bride Collector (31 page)

“No, I didn’t mean it that way!” he said, reaching his hand out and touching her lightly on her shoulder. “I love
Hell’s Kitchen,
trust me. We all love watching a taskmaster whip a bunch of losers into shape. I just…” His eyes searched hers. She could
think of little besides his hand on her shoulder, and when he removed it she missed it.

“You what, can’t imagine me in a kitchen?” she asked.

He grinned wide. “I can, actually.”

They talked and laughed and he touched her one more time.

Then he wanted to know about her writing. Her stories.

“Really? They’re just stories. I don’t tell them to anyone.”

“You’re kidding. They’re you! Now you have to tell me. And I want to know everything, not just the basic plot.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We have all day. Trust me, they know how to find us if they need either one of us. Tell me about your first novel. Who knows,
maybe one of these days it will be published and I’ll have been the first person on earth to know the story. I insist!”

Paradise hopped to her feet. “Okay.” Her heart was pumping in her chest. “Okay, but you have to promise not to laugh.”

“I can’t help but laugh with you.”

“Okay, but not at the way my story goes or because you think it’s silly.”

“I promise,” he said, standing. “What’s it called?”

They started walking, and he stayed right by her side.
“Horacus,”
she said. “It’s about a world two thousand years from now called Horacus.” She told him the plot and he demanded to know
more. What the people on Horacus did at night, what they wore, what were their wedding ceremonies like? What did their bedrooms
look like, what kind of Internet did they use, what brand of toothpaste did they use?

Delighted beyond her wildest expectations, Paradise told him. Everything. She told him more than she’d ever told anyone about
her stories.

By the time she’d finished with Horacus, another hour had passed and she felt embarrassed for hogging so much of the time.
So she impulsively grabbed his hand, led him to the closest bench, and sat him down.

“Now,” she said, facing him on the bench. “Tell me about
you.
”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. If you’re going to earn my trust completely, you have to share your secrets with me.”

He chuckled and shook his head.

“What?” But she was smiling wide, too.

“I can’t trick your mind into coughing up the goods, huh?”

“Well, yes you could try to trick it. It would have to believe, without doubt, that you trust me implicitly so that I, in
turn, can trust you implicitly. For that I need secrets. Your deepest, darkest secrets. Maybe not darkest, but, yes… Something
like that.”

He laughed and covered his face. “Boy, oh boy…”

“What?”

He just shook his head, still shaking with laughter. So she reached out and pulled his hands away from his face. “What?”

What she saw struck wonder in her mind. His face was red, grinning like a schoolboy’s, and his eyes were bright like the sun.
She couldn’t help but chuckle with him. He was delighted.

Brad wasn’t laughing due to humor. He was actually delighted by her. And his face was red because he felt embarrassed by just
how much she delighted him.

Could that be right?

They finally gathered themselves, and he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “My, oh my, I haven’t laughed
like that for a while.”

“It doesn’t get you off the hook, my stud.” Dear, what had she said? She began to blush. “I say that only as a means to perpetuate
our attempt to trick my brain. You know. Make it think we’re close enough to use silly words like that.”

He just grinned like a kid and shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe this was all happening.

“Tell me about yourself.”

Brad took a deep breath, settled into the bench, and told her.

He spoke about growing up in Austin, Texas, in a family with two sisters, no brothers. His father worked as a criminal defense
attorney, which explained why he’d chosen to join the FBI, though on the other side of the case. He spoke about UT football,
watching as a child going to the games, then as a student with a tennis scholarship. Drinking on 6th Street and making a fool
of himself that first year.

He eventually moved to Miami, where he took his first job with the FBI. It was a strange story in so many ways, strange because
Paradise knew it was absolutely normal.

Compared with her own childhood, something he hadn’t asked about, his young years had been a vacation. The cars, the parties,
the friends, Sunday Mass, confession. He and some friends had once locked a priest in the back room, and he’d taken the stage
in the priest’s robes. For half the service, the congregation assumed he was a visiting priest. He’d been an absolute rascal
once. Oddly enough, the stunt endeared him to her. He wasn’t quite the clean-cut man he projected.

But Paradise couldn’t shake the stark difference between them, and it reminded her that she was the freak here. In the protected
walls here, she was the sanest of the bunch, but one step past the gates and she was nothing but a basket case. How could
she ever meet and love and marry someone, unless he lived here, at CWI?

“Are you okay?” he asked when she fell silent after a long string of questions.

An image of her and Brad walking down the aisle of the chapel on the other side of the campus hung in her mind. At the last
minute he spun and faced the congregation.
Just kidding! Ha, ha, ha!

Then to her, seeing her shock.
What? Come on, Paradise, you didn’t really think I was serious, did you? I can’t live here, you know that.

Brad would never do that, of course. In fact, he would take any man who would do that and flush him down the toilet. Which
was the real problem here: Brad was a beautiful, gorgeous, sensitive man and he was, forever, completely out of the reach
of a piece of trash like her.

She should be running from this place for the sake of her sanity. Instead she was sitting here falling in love with him. Oh
no, it was true, she thought with some alarm. She didn’t know what falling in love felt like because she’d never done it before.
But the warm, thrilling, frightening emotions now bubbling up through her must be it.

She probably already
had
fallen for him!

“… me what you’re thinking?” he was asking.

She shook the thoughts free, realizing she must be staring, white-faced. “Sorry.” She swallowed. “Can you tell me about Ruby?”

He grew quiet and looked at the fountain. But she wasn’t ready for him to be silent on this topic. So she pressed him.

“You loved her…”

“Yes.” His voice was tight and he lowered his voice to hardly more than a whisper. “More than you can imagine.”

“I’m pretty good at that,” she said. “Was she beautiful?”

“Really, Paradise, I’m not sure we should—”

“Was she prettier than me?”

She knew of at least four or five responses that could ensue. The backpedaling, or the denial, or the out-and-out lie, or
the clam-up.

He faced her, eyes searching her face, her body. “No,” he said. “Only in the way she dressed and the way she made herself
up, but that’s the easy part. Inside, she was as messed up as you.” He looked at the trees. “And as me.”

What a beautiful answer, she thought. He meant it as a compliment. He was saying that she was on the same level as him rather
than throw lies at her.

Everything about him was beautiful.

“She killed herself because she didn’t think she was beautiful,” he said.

A sudden and heavy silence settled over them. His eyes were locked on nothing, misted with emotion, and Paradise knew where
he was going. But she didn’t want to stop him. A terrible empathy tugged at her heart.

“It wasn’t your fault, Brad.”

He sucked air in through his nose, closed his eyes. A tear leaked from one corner and she felt even worse for him. Tears flooded
her own eyes. She knew nothing about love and tenderness, and even less about how to be a woman with a man, but he was here
and he was crying and she had to help him.

“You’ve never loved another woman since?” she asked.

The words broke a dam in his soul. He set his elbows on his knees, lowered his face into his hands, and started to sob. What
had she said?

What was she to do? She could only say what came to her mind. That was her gift, Allison said. She could look at a single
leaf and see the whole tree. So she said what she saw now.

“You’re afraid that you can’t love another woman because in your mind no woman can measure up to Ruby. But that’s not why
you haven’t been able to love another woman. It’s because you’re a kind man and you can’t bear the thought of hurting another
woman by making her feel like she isn’t beautiful. Because that’s why Ruby took her life.”

Her words didn’t encourage him.

“But that was her choice, not yours. Life is worth living because of the risks, Allison always says, and I think she must
be right. And I think it’s the same with love.”

Now he was sobbing quietly into his hands, elbows on his knees. He suddenly leaned closer to her, put one hand down and rested
it on her knee, the other hand still covering his face.

The contact might as well have been a current of electricity through her bones. She sat perfectly still, head swimming through
a thick sea of sorrow and elation and fear and wonder.

He was letting his pain go. Here. With her.

She wanted to throw her arms around his head and hold him close and tell him not to cry, not to feel sad, because she would
love him. She would hold him and protect him and never let the monsters in the dark come up behind him and pull him back.

Paradise couldn’t do that. Not yet. She had to control herself. But she could and she must touch him. And so she did. She
slowly lowered her hand onto his head and gently smoothed his short, wavy blond hair.

Then she hushed him, but her hushing was interrupted by her own sobs, not of sorrow, but of relief. Her control began to slip
and rather than fight, she leaned over him, rested her head on his, and together they wept.

They sat like that for what must have been a long time, although Paradise lost track of time in this small envelope of hope
and safety. Of love. Gradually they both quieted and Paradise thought she should sit up because she was holding him down.
But she didn’t want to.

She was here because Allison wanted her to risk falling in love, and she was doing that. She was here because Brad thought
she was beautiful, even though she needed help with her face and hair and clothes. She was here because she’d touched a dead
body and seen the man with the dark hair who looked a little like Clark Kent without the glasses and who was leaning over
Melissa telling her how beautiful…

Paradise gasped and jerked upright.

Brad sat up and stared at her. “Are you okay?”

She faced him. “I remember.”

He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “You remember what?”

“I remember what I saw. The man who killed Melissa!”

“You do?” It seemed to be the farthest thing from his mind.

“Yes!” Paradise jumped to her feet, ecstatic. “I do, I do. I can see him now, as clear as day.”

Brad stood up, stunned. “That’s… Are you sure? We have to get you down to the office immediately. We’ll need to reconstruct—”

“No, I can’t go. Of course I can’t go. But I can draw him. I told you, I’m a good artist. Or they can come here.”

“Of course. Yes, here. Do you know who it is?”

“No. Nobody that I can remember.”

She’d broken out! Allison would be thrilled. Paradise started to walk back toward the center. “I need to draw now, before
I forget!”

CARS CAME AND
went from the underground parking garage next to Rain Man’s condo, and Quinton watched them all from the protected darkness
of his 300M, which he parked in a corner space that was reserved. He’d picked the spot two days earlier after noting that
it remained empty into the early-morning hours. From his vantage through his window, he could see the yawning ramp that headed
up to the street.

He’d placed a sun-blocker on the inside of his front windshield to keep prying eyes from seeing his form behind the wheel.
A single security camera recorded all vehicles that came and went from the garage, but he’d parked his car on the street at
4:00
PM
, manually snipped the camera cable, then taken up his position in the garage, knowing that it was too late in the day for
a repairman to be dispatched. By the time they fixed it in the morning, his work here would be finished.

Watching Rain Man’s domicile over this last week, Quinton had confirmed his assumption that Brad Raines was the kind of man
who would work late into the night in his misguided effort to find the Bride Collector.

He’d seen the agent’s BMW parked at CWI earlier in the afternoon, then watched for a few minutes as Rain Man walked to the
pond with Angel’s sister. His heart had crashed about his chest like a hard rubber ball.

The seventh favorite had to come of her own free will, without compromise, and though he’d fretted and fussed over the detail
for weeks, God had surely provided the way.

The lengths that people would go to for the sake of a loved one were disturbing to him and uplifting at once. Being created
in God’s image, humans shared a seed of his unconditional, infinite love, though most had done their best to stomp that seed
underfoot with greed and self-preservation.

Yet when the final test came, most would go all-out to save their child or husband or wife or brother or sister. Now Quinton’s
errand depended on that seed blossoming to life. He’d been sent to collect her, and she would come.

He tapped the steering wheel with his gloved hand. His gun rested in the passenger seat, ready for when the time came. He
prayed that no one else would be in the garage when it did—he had no desire to kill or even see anyone else tonight. His focus
was pure and fixed. He was about God’s work and God’s work only.