The Watcher (18 page)

Kate began shivering and he put his arm around her waist, guided her back to the living room. He sat on the sofa, one arm around her shoulder, the other holding her hand.

“Tell me.”

She breathed deeply, composed herself. “There were early snows that year, and the searchers finally gave up because of the weather.” The words tumbled out of her mouth like hard stones. “Her body wasn’t discovered until spring. When the snow melted, a park ranger found her in an abandoned cabin ten miles from where the family lived.”

Tears brimmed around her eyes, but didn’t fall. “Nearly all of the trace evidence was degraded by then. There were no viable samples. No blood, fibers, finger-prints, nothing. The animals – ” She stuttered to a halt.

Slater pulled her closer. “How did she die?”

“Her throat was slit, but she died from multiple stab wounds after being beaten – “

“How old?”

“She was seventeen.”

She began shuddering, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably as if the memory of that long-ago girl was too much for her to bear.

He turned her gently towards him. “Why are you so sure we can match DNA with the last victim?”

Kate’s eyelashes were spiked with tears as she looked up at him. “The profile is the same as the two girls here—the postmortem beatings and stabbings, the clothes, the unmarked face – and I think we can match trace evidence now. I’ve been looking a long time, Slater, and I think there are others.”

He sat very still. He’d been willing to concede a serial killer, but one who’d been active for that many years? It was inconceivable. He stared at her shattered face and realized the truth. “It’s personal, isn’t it? You’re connected to all of this somehow.”

She took a deep, shaky breath. “Until I found Mary Stuckey, I thought the girl who was killed in Idaho in 1993 was his first victim.” She swallowed hard on a deep shudder. “She was my sister. My twin sister Kassandra.”

Shock slammed through Slater like electricity, but he held her tight as her body racked with sobs. Tears soaked his shirt. Leaning back into the corner of the sofa, he tugged at the throw that dangled over the edge and drew it over them.

Christ Jesus, what was going on?

His mind was a muddle of conflicted emotions. How could she have kept quiet about this? Part of him wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. Cops didn’t hide information from other cops. There was nothing that could’ve spared Jennifer Johnston, but what if they’d known about the Idaho girl earlier? Could they have saved Alison Mathews?

He stared at Kate’s closed eyes. He wanted to grill her like a suspect, but he understood her loss, the devastation of losing a twin sister, what motivated her to search all these years for a killer.

A hard lump settled in his chest, a familiar chill that never quite left. He knew the unbearable grief of loss so deep it cut like a knife. He didn’t have to imagine it. He knew about sorrow that sliced the heart with a thousand tiny blades. He knew about losing someone you loved more than life itself.

Christ, what a dilemma.

Later, when Kate eased her head into his lap and fell into a deep slumber, he nodded off too.

Slater woke to the sound of the heater kicking on at the same time his body reacted to the weight against him. Kate stirred and fluttered her eyelids, but didn’t wake up.

Sometime in the night, she’d removed her sweater, and he’d pulled her into an embrace. He traced a finger down her cheek, over her mouth.
What was he going to do about her?

She stirred in his arms and opened drowsy lids. “You’re still here.”

“For a while.” Slater nodded toward the large front window of the living room. “It’s nearly morning.”

The storm of yesterday had left a bright sheen on the streets and pavement. Faint fingers of dawn crawled across the carpet and onto the sofa where they sprawled. She stirred against his body, her eyes dark pools in the hazy light. She wet her lips, and suddenly the need to console her leapt into desire.

He shook himself back to reality, cupped her face, and tapped a finger on the tip of her nose. “Time for me to go.”

“Don’t leave,” she whispered as he moved to stand up. “Stay a while.”

He started to shake his head, but her mouth pressed against his and undermined his good intentions. Bad idea, he thought as he kissed her back, groaning her name. She folded herself into his body and held him around the middle while he shifted so that he could pull her hips to his groin. For a moment he lost himself in the allure of her mouth and body.

What began tentatively flamed into a heady plundering of mouths and ended in a torrent of passion that overcame them like uncontrolled fire. She smelled like citrus and the clean odor of soap, and beneath it all, her own heady, Kate-fragrance. He nuzzled the slender column of her neck and impatiently pushed down the shoulder of her tee shirt to taste the smooth skin at the swell of her breast.

“Touch me,” she instructed, moving his hand between her legs. “I want you to touch me, make me feel safe, just for the moment.”

He could barely hear her as he kissed the tender flesh beneath her ear. “Ah, Kate, you have no idea how much I want you.” He hadn’t realized until this moment how true it was.

“Touch me,” she demanded, moving against his hand.

He unsnapped her jeans, slid them down her hips, and tossed them onto the floor. Pushing aside the filmy lace of her panties, he rubbed his thumb against the warm, soft flesh of her inner thigh. She groaned as he traced his tongue along her lower lip, nipping the tender flesh.

“I want to feel safe,” Kate panted into his mouth.

His heart thundered in his chest like drums gone wild. Too fast, he thought, and tried to slow his ragged breathing. Lips close to her ear, he whispered hoarsely, “Slow down. This is too fast, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped out without warning.

Kate pushed back and straddled his legs. “You don’t want to?” Behind the pugnacious jaw and furrowed brow, he detected a tremor. “You’re turning me down?” “Never,” he groaned and scooped her up, carrying her through the nearest open door—luckily it was the bedroom—and tumbling onto cool, white satin. He fumbled to pull the tee over her head.

“Damn shirt,” he muttered.

She laughed softly, and he covered her mouth. He might’ve heard her say something, but he was too aroused to make out the words.

The next minutes were a fumbling torrent of desperate hands and even more desperate mouths pressed hotly against moist flesh. Kate’s chilly façade dissolved into something hot and explosive. He reveled in the taut smoothness of her body, amazed at the primitive force behind her lovemaking.

Stripped and lying between her legs, he lifted her hands above her head, holding them in one fist while he kissed her hard. She tangled her legs around his waist and arched to meet him, staring into his eyes with limpid, unfathomable pools. He reared back and plunged deep into her. Only when he spilled himself into her did she shut her eyes and shudder her release.

Afterward they lay side by side, their bodies damp. His heart thumped feverishly, his body deeply sated as he closed his eyes. He woke an hour later with Kate’s naked body in his arms, her warm backside tucked against him. Feeling the steady beat of her heart beneath his hand before he drifted off again, his last thought was that he’d crossed an irrevocable line. In spite of his determination to maintain a professional distance with Kate, in spite of her dogged, stubbornly annoying independence, he’d walked right into a trap of his own making.

He couldn’t be sorry as his arms closed around her warm, soft body. He felt content for the first time in many years.

Chapter Twenty

“Tell me about your sister,” Slater insisted.

They were lying side by side in Kate’s queen-sized bed, part of her rented furniture plan. Slater’s huge body dwarfed the space.

“Kassandra? I told you about her last night.”

He propped his head on his hand and watched her as she pulled the sheet over her bare breasts and sat up. “No, you said she was your twin, and she died when you were seventeen. That’s the bare facts.”

Kate glanced at him over her shoulder. His face was serious and gentle at the same time, and she found she wanted to tell him everything, to purge the memories and expiate her guilt. Taking a deep breath, she began.

“Kassie and I were identical twins.” She smiled at the memory of her sister. “Sometimes I’d glance quickly at her, in a movie or at the mall, and I’d think for a split second that I was outside myself
looking
at myself.”

“Like looking in a mirror.”

She nodded. “Later, when I was in graduate school, I learned it’s a common experience between twins. Same egg, same sperm – one person if the fertilized egg hadn’t split.”

“Same personality?”

“That’s where we were different. As long as we didn’t speak, if you looked at me, you saw her. It’s a cliché, but we were so alike even our parents couldn’t tell us apart.”

“Until you spoke.”

“Yeah, and we were polar opposites in temperament.” She frowned and shook her head, still amazed all these years later at how close and how different they’d been. “I was the risk-taker. Kassie was content to watch from the sidelines as if she experienced the thrill of life through my adventures. She played the piano for the choir. I played soccer.” She grinned at Slater. “I was excellent at sports.”

“I adore tomboys,” Slater said, nuzzling her neck.

“Once when we were little I got hurt and Kassie pretended to be my nurse. We’d been playing cowboys and Indians with Tommy Hinchey. She sat on the back porch steps watching the show. I was the Indian. I grabbed an axe and ran with it, tripped and the axe blade gashed my knee.”

Kate lifted the sheet to show the thin white scar above the patella. “Lucky I didn’t destroy my knee cap.”

Slater traced a finger over the scar and up her thigh. “And such a sexy knee cap.”

A shiver ran through her like the thrill of a roller coaster descent. Something had shifted between her and Slater, and she didn’t know yet how she felt about it. She stared at his brown fingers resting possessively on her hip and felt her muscles quiver. He ran his large hand over her rib cage, distracting her in a delicious bone-watery way.

“Pay attention,” she chastised.

Slater smirked and folded his hands behind his head.

“Kassie wouldn’t leave my side during the entire extent of my injury,” she continued, “from the ambulance to the hospital, through the stitches and bandaging. At home she slept in my bed for two weeks.”

She felt tears pooling at the corner of her eyes. “She was a wonderful sister. I was feisty and pushy, but she was so sweet-tempered. Everyone adored her.”

“I can believe the pushy part,” he teased.

She didn’t laugh. “Kassie
shouldn’t
have been the one to die,” she whispered, staring into Slater’s steady eyes.

He leaned forward. “What do you mean? You can’t blame yourself for your sister’s death.”

“You have no idea how sensitive she was. I – sometimes I was just mean to her. Like kids are.”

She lifted her shoulders and hugged her legs to her chest. “She didn’t hang out with my crowd. I was the athlete and she was in choir and band, and well, high school was hard on her.”

“Why do you think you’re to blame?”

Feeling agitated, she jumped off the bed and wrapped a robe around her. She felt cold to the bone, colder than the weather dictated.

“Why do you think your sister’s kidnapping and death were
your
fault?” Slater picked his shorts and trousers off the floor and slipped a tee-shirt over his head.

How could she make him understand? “Kassie trusted anyone,
everyone.
Don’t you see? I was tougher, street smart, more savvy than she was. I would have been able to get away.”

“But he didn’t kidnap
you
, Kate. He took Kassie.” He spoke slowly as if to a child. “There’s no way you can be sure you’d have gotten away.”

“Yes, I can. Kassie was sweet and kind. Trusting. She would’ve gone with anyone who’d told her his dog was missing, or whatever. And besides – ”

“What?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be her,” she whispered.

“What do you mean it wasn’t
supposed
to be her? You think it was supposed to be you?”

Tears scratched at her throat. “I had the responsibility of walking Shamus that day, but I talked Kassie into doing my chore because I’d been playing soccer all week. I was tired – or lazy. I begged her. I knew she wouldn’t refuse. I fell asleep and didn’t even know she hadn’t come back until my parents returned from town.”

“So you blame yourself,” he said flatly.

“If I’d done my job,
I
would’ve been the one walking Shamus at 5:30 on a winter’s evening when it was too dark to be outside, not her.” She flung her hands wide. “Don’t you see?
I
would’ve been the one this maniac went for.”

She swiped at tears with the heel of her hand. “I would’ve been able to get away and both of us would’ve been safe.”