Ties That Bind (18 page)

“You look lost and terrified,” he said quietly.

“It’s a place I’ve been too many times in my life,” she said, quite sure he didn’t know how close to home he was hitting with his comments.

“Why are you so determined to do it alone, Sam? You know it doesn’t have to be that way. You can let me in. I’m begging you to let me in, but you just keep pushing me away. I want to be a part of your life. Just … let me help you.”

“I don’t know how,” she answered softly, then went back to eating her salad. Her hunger was gone. But she intended to finish every last bite while he watched.

*   *   *

“No, I want to be there for you, Mary Ann. Just tell me when. What should I wear? And actually, where is the wedding being held? Where should I be?”

“Hell. You should be in hell, sinner!”

“Huh?”

“And now, because you have sinned, an innocent will die—”

“Huh? What is happening, what is—”

Why was there so much blood? Why was Mary Ann curled up in a ball, sobbing, sobbing, then suddenly quiet? How did this happen? She’d just infiltrated the most notorious polygamous clan in Utah. She was invited to the wedding! How had this happened? The blood … The blood was Mary Ann’s. And she was dead.

Dead.

Sam looked down at the gun in her hand and wondered how it had got there. What had happened?

“You did this,” her father said to her. “This was you, Sammy. It was always you.”

*   *   *

Sam sat up with a start, her heart pounding, sweat slicking the T-shirt to her body. Her underwear was soaked through, and she got up from the bed to change, shivering a bit. It had been a few months since she’d had this dream, reliving Mary Ann’s death. Of course, in real life, Sam had shot no one. But she had wanted to. She had wanted to destroy the man who had let an innocent girl die. And Sam wasn’t convinced that Gage hadn’t signed the girl’s death warrant by removing her from the case.

But it was you, Sam. You gave her hope. You let her think you could get her out, and that wasn’t your job. That wasn’t what you were there for. Gage isn’t to blame for that.

Great, now even Callie was taking sides.

“What do you know?” Sam huffed at the empty air, and headed into her bathroom, turning on the shower and stripping bare to wash off the sweat and bad dreams.

After showering, she found a new pair of dry, clean underwear and opened a second drawer to pull out an oversized T-shirt.

One that said it was from Wasatch Brew Pub. One that she had “stolen” from Gage.

“So what, it’s a perfectly good T-shirt,” she said to herself, and crawled back into the bed, moving to the other side to get away from the dampness of the sheets. Of course, her thoughts moved to Gage, and she immediately knew putting this T-shirt on had been a bad idea.

“What’s up with you girls, anyway?” D-Ray had complained one day while they were sitting in McDonald’s, D-Ray snarfing down food, Sam just picking at a salad. “My girl, she comes over and she steals my T-shirts and pajama pants. She takes them home. Why can’t she just buy her own? Don’t get it. It makes no sense.”

And Sam couldn’t explain it to him, because a man wouldn’t get it. Because even after three or four washings a man’s T-shirt still had that man smell, and a significance that could not be duplicated by buying a man-sized T-shirt and some pajama pants. She wished she could still smell Gage on this shirt, but she’d had it for at least a year. Too many washings. And yet she could feel him. And it was keeping her awake.

“Dammit,” she swore as she got up and stripped off his shirt. She found another, left over from a 5K run. “Dammit.”

You want him,
Callie’s voice said from inside Sam’s head.
You want him here now. And he wants you.

Talking to Callie again. All cops were a little crazy. That’s how they ended up on the job.

“Good night, Callie. I’m going to bed now. Please let me sleep.”

There was no answer. Because there never was when Sam spoke back. Callie only told her what she didn’t want to hear.

A sharp rasping noise from the back part of her town house made her still. She listened carefully, all her instincts on alert. It was quiet, all but the roaring of her heartbeat in her ears, and she slowly calmed down.

Probably the damned cocker spaniel from across the street.

She turned back to her bed and a sharp rap on glass caused prickles to run up her spine. She grabbed her sidearm from the table next to her bed and carefully eased out into her living room, shadowing the walls to the kitchen, trying to make out any shape in the dark night.

The glass patio door was closed, but she could see something smeared across it. Someone or something had been there and left behind a trail. A dark trail. They might still be there.

She eased back into her bedroom and picked up her cell phone, quickly dialing Dispatch. Only when two uniformed police officers had covered the backyard did she flip on the inside kitchen light and the patio light.

The two officers, both young, stared at her through the glass. One had a look of distaste on his face. The trail was blood.

A dead rat body, minus its head, was on the patio. The head was about a foot away, perched on a stick that had been driven into the grassy ground.

TWENTY-SIX

Sam slept little and woke early, heading out for a run with a cloudy head and a heavy heart.

Her footsteps pounded on the pavement in the early light of morning, and the rhythmic beat reminded her of the ventilator that was keeping Whitney alive. Sam cringed and tried to think of something else, but the case had become too personal.

Personal. Her shoulders sagged as she fully realized what this meant. With her niece one of the victims, the chief would most likely remove Sam. The only chance she had was to keep it together, not betray any sign of weakness. This wasn’t a big-city police department, and they didn’t have a lot of detectives to turn to: just her, D-Ray, and a cop who was already nearly semi-retired, whose only desire was
not
to leave the office—or to leave as little as possible. And Gage. Her only hope to stay involved was to play nice and by the chief’s rules.

She’d played off the dead rat as teenage vandalism, and both young officers seemed inclined to believe her. It would go in the reports, of course, but maybe the chief wouldn’t see it. A harmless teenage prank. Harmless, unless you were the headless rat.

Was that a message? Who would stoop to that level?

Oh, maybe Lind Harris?

The force was small and didn’t have a lot of other options, so as long as she didn’t let it become personal she should be just … But how would she do that? Not let the fact that her niece was lying in a coma, hooked up to a ventilator, affect her?

How was she supposed to pull this off?

Lie your ass off, and stay on the case.

Sam made her way into work an hour later, a cup of Starbucks coffee in one hand and the newspaper in the other. It was a cloudy, rainy summer day, perfect for her mood. The sky had been threatening all morning, but the rain hadn’t started up until a few minutes before she pulled into the Kanesville Police Station parking lot.

Now she sat in her chair at her desk and tried to focus. In front of her were various reports, all pieces to the puzzle, none of them fitting together. The crime lab hadn’t come back with anything positive on the necktie. There were lots of prints on the computer from the seminary building, but none that were registered in the BCI database. Not surprising, considering this was not
CSI
and life rarely happened like it did on television. Every once in a while, just occasionally, Sam wished it would. Everything except hearing from her dead sister, like that one show on television that she could never sit through. The dead should not talk. It was unseemly.

Whit’s evidence was not here, of course, and Sam would be lucky if she didn’t get pulled off the entire case before getting a chance to look through it. She’d already talked to D-Ray and he’d told her there was nothing that indicated Whitney’s injury was anything but an attempted suicide. Nothing.

“Nothing,” Sam said with disgust, throwing the report on her desk and rubbing her eyes, then instantly regretting it. Now she would have black mascara rings. Always an attractive look.

“You said there wasn’t going to be anything,” D-Ray reminded her, his voice rising above his cubicle walls.

Sam stood and walked over to the entrance of his enclave, trying to ignore the smell of grease and the general disarray on his desk. D-Ray worked best this way—it was his MO. How, she didn’t know.

“I have nothing on Jeremiah. It looks like a suicide.”

“The tie wasn’t around his neck,” D-Ray reminded her.

“Yeah, only because our favorite dickwad removed it.”

A dickwad who might be taking his personal hatred toward me even further than sneers and nasty comments.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Yeah, I do. And you do. And so does anyone with a brain, and if the press were to get a hold of it—”

“Sam,” D-Ray said, the warning in his tone unmistakable, raising her hackles. “I see that look, and I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m siding with Lind Harris and all his idiots, but I’m not. You get the press in on this and you’ll just complicate things. Make it ten times worse. Throw a raccoon a scrap and you know what happens? They come back for more. And more. And when they don’t get what they want, they get ugly. They dig holes, and turn over garbage cans, and make messes, and worst of all, if you confront them, they will attack. There is no real purpose served by that tie being around his neck. Either way, you know how he died.”

Sam turned away angrily, knowing that part of D-Ray was right and part of him was morally, repugnantly, unethically wrong … unfortunately, all characteristics the rest of the system shared with him.

She retreated back into her own cubicle with a huff and sat down heavily in her chair. She heard D-Ray move in behind her, and she took slow, steady breaths, determined to be cool and calm when she faced him again.

But her desk phone rang, and she picked it up, pulling on a professional face.

“Girl, you are running out of time.” Pamela Nixon. Right now she was pretty close to being the last person Sam wanted to talk to. “I get no calls. I get no e-mails. I get no text messages? Where is the love?”

“Ugh, Nixon, this is not a good time.”

“When is it ever a good time for this kind of shit, Sammy? But I have a hot story, and I have to run with it. Suicide pact it is, since you’ve given me nothing else—”

“Oh, knock it off,” Sam said, knowing the irritation in her voice was thick and terse. “You and I both know that this is no suicide pact, and writing that it is will do nothing more than cause mass hysteria in this town. Is it really worth it to you to have the story?”

“To have first dibs at this
huge
story, Sammy? Of course it is. The only thing holding me back is my genuine love and respect for you.”

Sam snorted and D-Ray stood up and gave her a quizzical stare over the top of the cubicle wall. She waved him away.

“You have twenty-four hours, and then I’m writing this one the way I see it. With a little bit of both. That, of course, is only going to make you look like a fool and totally incompetent at your job, which I have no desire for. Thus, consider this your heads-up. I need a call in twenty-four hours, or the story goes live, and your reputation goes with it.”

There was a click on the other end of the line, and Sam cursed at the phone. D-Ray stood up and looked over at her again, then quickly popped back down into his chair, apparently not liking the look on her face. She didn’t imagine it was good.

Pamela Nixon
was
a bitch. But if she didn’t write about the story, someone else would. Sam had to find something. The press would quickly turn into that raving pack of raccoons if she didn’t.

Wait, D-Ray is in his cubie! Then who is standing behind me?—

“You ever hear of the choking game?”

“Huh?” Sam asked, twirling around in her chair, the question surprising her. Gage stood in her cubicle entrance, larger than life, and she felt a flush on her cheeks. She tried to steel herself against reacting to him. He was standing so close, just inches from her. In her cubicle. Uninvited. Granted, there was no door, but still …

“I asked you if you’d heard of the choking game.”

“No, I haven’t heard of it,” she said rapidly, looking at him through tired eyes. She hadn’t slept well after getting back from the hospital. She’d cried the whole way home, thoughts of how terrified Whitney must have been hammering her mind.

The rat incident hadn’t helped. Salty tears pricked her eyes. She pursed her lips and fought them.

Gage seemed to notice her near loss of composure and his eyes softened. Then he seemed to make a decision—to continue with work as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“Leave it to kids to always come up with new and innovative ways to get a rush or get high. When the thrill rides at the amusement park don’t do it anymore, they move on to different things. Sometimes those things are very real, very illegal drugs. And other times the thrill can seem so innocent. Like sniffing glue, or even spray paint cans. They know it’s not safe, but they do it anyway. The choking game is one of those things.”

“And how does this choking game work?”

A part of Sam wanted him out of her cubicle and far away from Kanesville, but a bigger part of her realized that wasn’t going to happen. It had come down to need. They needed him on this case, as much as it rankled.

But that didn’t mean Sam had to engage with him on anything else.
Just the case.

And she wanted to know what he was talking about. A “game” would answer a lot of questions about how three—four, with her own niece—relatively healthy, seemingly happy teenagers just decided to commit suicide one day. It would also mean there was no serial killer. But that was too easy. And Gage had already told Sam he believed these were murders. But a theory like this one might be enough to keep Pamela Nixon off their case, while they investigated the real story.