Fatal Burn by Lisa Jackson
And yet he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
Even when she’d about come unglued he’d ignored her protests. Which was unlike him. He wasn’t one of those men who thought they knew best, who was always pushing other people into his way of thinking, who disregarded anyone else’s point of view.
But here he was, driving down the lane leading to her house, fingers wrapped around the steering wheel in a death grip as he wondered what he would face at her doorstep.
An irate Nate Santana?
One of her brothers?
He steeled himself for whatever confrontation was headed his way, but when he rounded the final bend and the beams of his headlights illuminated the house, the place looked serene. No cars or trucks were parked in the lot. No interior lights flashed on when he pulled to a stop.
He cut the engine andyanked on the emergency brake.
“Thanks for the ride…I guess,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and opening the door. The overhead light switched on and he saw how pale she was. The cuts on her face, though healing, were pronounced, the bruising under her eyes deepened by dark smudges from lack of sleep.
“Get some sleep. You can get your truck in the morning.”
“My truck! Could I use your phone one last time? I’m sorry. I’ve lost my cell.” She lifted a helpless hand, then dropped it. “Haven’t had time to find it, and my head’s so overloaded I’m afraid I’ll forget this call by the time I get inside.”
“No problem.”
He handed his phone to her and she punched in a number.
She was still seated in the truck, one leg resting on the running board, her faded, worn-out jeans stretched tight. “Hey, are you still at the scene…? Yeah, really awful…I can’t imagine, and Robert…I know…Look, I saw Mom, and she was pretty upset, but Oliver came over to pray with her, or whatever it is they do, and I think she’ll be okay…Hmmm…Listen, could I ask a favor? Can you move my truck? I was blocked in. Couldn’t get it out…I caught a ride…from Settler.” She glanced at him quickly, then nodded, as if whichever brother was on the other end of the line could see her. “No worries. I’m okay…The keys are in the ignition. I’ll see ya tomorrow. Thanks, Aaron.” She flipped the phone closed and handed it to Travis. “Mission accomplished.” Sliding out of his truck, she stood and faced him through the open door. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“No, I mean for everything.” She offered him the ghost of a smile, a hint of warmth. Her otherwise beautiful face was now wracked with grief, pain and sheer exhaustion.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’d ask you to come in,” she said lifting a hand, only to drop it to her side. She didn’t finish her thought but he knew he’d overstayed his welcome as far as Shannon Flannery was concerned.
“Another time. I’ll be back tomorrow. I mean, later today.”
“To see if we can get the dogs to pick up Dani’s scent.”
He nodded, sobering as he thought of his missing daughter. He realized with a tiny jolt that the more he was with Shannon, the more he recognized her resemblance to Dani. He glanced to the house. “You got someone to take care of you?”
“I’ve got Khan.” She smiled. The first genuine one he’d witnessed. At whatever she saw on his face, her smile deepened.
“Okay, Hot Shot,” she said, “you’re the one who’s been digging around in my personal life, the guy who’s been checking me out with field glasses and Internet research. Do I have someone to take care of me?” She slammed the truck’s door shut, looking at him through the open window. “You tell me. It’ll be on the test tomorrow.”
She lifted a hand in good-bye, then she made her way to her door, unlocking it and slapping on the exterior and interior lights before bending down to the mutt of a dog at her feet. The ball of fur with the ragged ear wiggled and whined as she looked up at him, smiled again, then slipped inside and shut the door behind her. He heard the lock slide into place with a loud and definite click.
So where was Santana? Travis wondered as he fired up the engine. Why wasn’t he with Shannon tonight? Since he hadn’t driven with her to the fire, why wasn’t Nate Santana, her lover, waiting up for her?
As Travis turned his truck around in the gravel lot, he checked for another vehicle, but the parking area was empty. Santana could have parked in the garage, but Travis had a feeling the guy wasn’t on the premises. He glanced at his watch. It was late. Hours after midnight. Where was he? And where had he been on the night Shannon had been attacked?
Trying to make sense of it all, he scanned the outbuildings, his gaze landing on the blackened rubble of what had been the shed.
Who was behind this?
Jesus-God, where was Dani?
Frustration and fear gnawed at him. Swearing beneath his breath, he punched the accelerator, the tires spraying gravel in his frustration.
The days were slipping through his fingers. The monster who had his kid was getting bolder and more deadly. Now another woman was dead and Travis was damned sure that Mary Beth Flannery’s demise was somehow linked to Dani’s disappearance.
He only hoped his daughter was alive.
Oliver was alone.
The cathedral was empty, almost eerily so.
Quickly sketching the sign of the cross over his chest, he knelt on the cold stone floor, his knees aching immediately, an old soccer injury unforgiving.
He embraced the pain. Wished he could endure more. Then perhaps, the evil would be banished from his soul for all of eternity.
Instead it lingered, an oozing, dark cancer spreading through him.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he prayed desperately.
High over the altar, the Son of God looked down on him. Wounded, bleeding, a crown of thorns upon His head as He suffered on the cross. Jesus was unmoving. Cast in plaster and paint. Staring.
Oliver made the sign of the cross again and begged the Spirit to enter him. Pleaded for goodness to fill him. Craved for forgiveness.
But his eyes strayed to the floor beneath the windows where shadows played and danced.
Brilliant beams from the rising sun pierced the stained glass and cast splintered, colorful images upon the cold stones of the cathedral’s floor.
The patterns of color reminded him of the kaleidoscope his brother Neville had been given.
How many hours had he stared through the eyepiece to watch the dancing, changing, swirling patterns? But Neville had been selfish with the toy he’d bought with his birthday money and he’d hidden the intriguing tube in a slit in the mattress of his upper bunk.
Oliver had found it.
And kept it.
When Neville discovered his treasure was missing, he’d accused Oliver of the crime, but Oliver had lied and sworn he’d seen Aaron hanging around their bunks, poking and prodding. Oliver had convinced Neville that Aaron was the culprit and Neville had never guessed differently.
But then Aaron had always been such an easy target.
Oliver had then hidden his prize in the bole of a hollow oak tree at the edge of the park three streets over from their house. There had been a path through a patch of woods and old-man Henderson’s backyard that led to the small, dedicated piece of land where a rusted swing set and a jungle gym near a baseball diamond was considered a playground. But there had been the one special tree. He’d spent hours in the limbs of the gnarled oak, looking through the magical glass and letting his mind spin with all the distorted images.
He’d never confessed his sin to his twin.
But then, he’d never confessed a lot of his sins. For he was poisoned inside. He knew it now. The torturing thought burned through his brain. He whispered a prayer, but his eyes strayed to the patterns of color on the floor that reminded him of other places. Dark haunts. Creaking corridors with stained glass images of Jesus and Mary and the disciples…He felt a weird, nearly seductive tingle move through his blood and he thought of the dark place…the lonely place…the spot where in hi
A hospital they’d called it.
Our Lady of Virtues.
But he knew better.
Hospitals were for healing.
That place—with its dripping faucets, creaky stairways and hidden, evil hallways—was for harming. A cool breeze would creep through the apse, as if something cold and unholy had passed by. He’d felt it more than once.
He glanced down at his wrists, saw the scars, now twenty-five years old, and felt a violent rumble deep in his soul. He hurriedly bent his head and once more began to pray.
Fervently.
Desperately.
Needing God to hear him and keep the demons at bay.
But it was a lost cause.
The demons would return.
They always did.
The phone blasted beside her bed and Shannon reluctantly reached to answer it. She gave up on any hope of sleep. It was only nine-thirty in the morning and she’d already endured a call from her mother, saying she and Oliver would be over later in the day with Shannon’s truck, another call from Lily, shocked at Mary Beth’s death, and a third from Carl Washington wanting an interview. She’d no sooner hung up on the reporter when the phone rang again.
“Hello?” she answered tensely, ready and armed to tell Washington to quit harassing her.
“How are you?”
Travis Settler. She recognized the strong voice immediately. Stupidly, her pulse jumped a bit and she remembered how she’d seen him last, in the pickup, in the dark, so close she could have touched him.
She scooted back on the bed and rested against the headboard. “I’m okay.”
“You get your truck back?”
“One of my brothers is bringing it over.”
“Good. I thought we should get started with the dogs.”
He sounded anxious. She didn’t blame him. “Give me an hour. I’ve got a few chores to do.”
“You got it.” He hung up and she pushed herself off the bed.
“No rest for the wicked,” she muttered and Khan lifted his bad ear but didn’t move from his spot on the quilt. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ about you.” She ruffled his coat, then headed for the shower. Her headache was still drumming in the back of her skull and her eyes felt gritty. The few hours of sleep she’d caught between nightmares of Mary Beth had been few and her shoulder ached a little.
The hot water of the shower felt good and she managed to wash her hair without getting too much shampoo in her eyes or disturbing the stitches on the back of her head. She left her hair alone, deciding to let the damp curls air dry, then brushed her teeth and swiped on lipstick and mascara.
The image in the mirror staring back at her wasn’t exactly Hollywood-glamorous but was fresh-scrubbed, which would just have to do.
She dragged on a pair of clean, worn jeans, and pulled a V-neck T-shirt over her head. Her ribs and shoulder felt better than they had since the attack.
“Clean living,” she told Khan as he stretched on the bed. She ducked into the bathroom and shook out a Vicodin from the bottle. She thought about the day ahead. Travis Settler was first on the docket, then she’d have to deal with her dogs, her mother, her brothers and who knew who else. Closing her fist around the tablet, she decided to hold off on taking anything stronger than over-the-counter stuff. She didn’t want to spend the rest of the day dull-witted. She wasn’t much of a pill popper, and she wanted to wean herself as quickly as possible off the medication. If the pain got to be more than she could handle, then, okay, she’d take a dose, if not, she’d “soldier on,” as her father had so often said.
Her father.
She thought fleetingly of him and wondered what he would say or do in a situation where fires were being set, people dying…Patrick Flannery had been a man of action, oftentimes bending or nearly breaking the rules to serve his purpose. More dedicated to his career than to his wife and six children, he was a no-bullshit individual whose hard drinking and rule breaking had eventually cost him his job.
“Oh, Pop,” she whispered, conjuring up his face and almost hearing him say, Buck up, Shannon. Life’s not always easy, but it’s always interesting.
Unfortunately, sometimes “interesting” meant painful. She had only to remember the horrid image of Mary Beth’s burned body being hauled out of her home.
Shannon put the tablet back in the bottle, shoving it into the medicine cabinet and shutting the mirrored door.
She settled for a couple of ibuprofen. “Breakfast,” she explained to Khan, swallowing the pills dry, then leaning over and chasing them down with a drink from the tap.
With the dog leading the way, she headed downstairs and started making coffee. As the machine gurgled and dripped she fed Khan and glanced out the window. The sun had long risen and through an open window she felt a warm, dry breeze, the promise of yet another day where the temperature pushed a hundred degrees in this year of drought and fear of forest fires.
Like the year that Ryan was killed.
She tried not to remember that breathless, hot Indian summer where there was talk of electrical brownouts, low reservoirs of water. The fires had been relentless, crackling and feeding in the surrounding hills.
And with the heat and fear came quick tempers and anger. She’d seen it in Ryan’s face, known that telling him she intended to divorce him would only add to his rage, that the restraining order she’d managed to get was in his eyes little more than a piece of paper.
There had been no getting away from him, nor from his fury. Even her brothers hadn’t been able to protect her. Nor had they been able to keep her baby safe. No one had. Her throat tightened as she remembered a time she’d sworn to forget. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of her second pregnancy, and the old sadness and anger invaded her soul. Her fingers clenched around the edge of the counter. How she’d wanted that child, even though he had been fathered by her estranged husband, had been created in a loveless marriage that had been rapidly and surely crumbling apart. That child, her son, Ryan Carlyle’s son, had been the one good thing to come from the unhappy, violent union. She bit her lip. Like a whipsaw, guilt cut through her because if she looked deep into her own soul, and faced the naked truth that stalked her relentlessly, she knew that she wasn’t sorry that Ryan was gone. Maybe not even sorry that he was dead.
After fishing in the refrigerator for some creamer to no avail, she poured herself a cup of coffee. Sipping, she searched for her cell phone but couldn’t find that either. Then, with Khan barreling ahead of her, she walked outside and noticed that Nate’s truck, again, was missing, not parked in its usual spot. She started to worry about him. That worry changed to perplexity when she went to check on the horses and saw that they’d already been fed, watered, then let outside where they were currently grazing on dry bits of grass or standing next to each other, swatting flies with their tails.
She glanced at the windows of Nate’s apartment. Where was he? In all the time that she’d worked with him, he had been an early riser, taking the animals out at dawn, depending upon the season. Lately his schedule had been off and he’d been gone more than he’d been on the premises.
It was true they both did their own things with the animals and rarely checked in with each other…Yet this was far outside the bounds of their usual routine.
Weird.
So out of character.
Or was it? What did she really know about him? Not a whole helluva lot when you got down to it. So what was he up to? What was with the odd hours?
Realizing she couldn’t do anything about it now, she decided to talk to him later, if and when he showed up during her waking hours. Whatever his reasons for his odd hours, they were his business.
Unless he’s somehow involved in the fires…
“No way,” she muttered, angry with herself. Opening the door, she was immediately greeted by a series of excited barks, yips and even baying from Tattoo, the lone bloodhound that was a part of her pack. One by one, she greeted th
Tattoo gave off a deep bark.
Cissy, an intense border collie whose face was half white and half black, barely listened. She was focused on stalking Atlas. The larger dog didn’t intimidate her in the least and now Cissy, eyes trained on Atlas, lay in wait, her body immobile and pressed into the ground as the big dog ignored her and relieved himself on a fence post.
“Sorry, Cissy,” Shannon said. “I don’t think Atlas ‘gets’ you. It’s a male thing.”
The border collie cocked her head as if she was truly understanding, while the others, after running off some energy, swarmed around Shannon’s legs. There were only five dogs, aside from Khan, all of which she owned. Usually she had at least twice as many, those she trained and those she boarded, but, over the past three months, in anticipation of moving, she’d whittled down the number of dogs on the premises to those she owned.
As they stretched their legs, rolled in the dry grass and sniffed around the pen, Shannon couldn’t help but look over the ruins of the shed, dark and ghastly, an anomaly on this bright day. Who had started the fire that had ruined the shed that held only leftover feed, tack that wasn’t used and a few pieces of nearly forgotten equipment? Why?
She glanced to the paddock where the horses were grazing and noticed Molly, nose to tail with a dappled gelding. Both horses’ tails were switching, their ears in constant movement as they swished at bothersome flies.
Who was the culprit who had set the shed afire, then waited to assault her? Remembering the attack, she tensed, feeling the man’s strength, sensing his rage.
She bit her lip and her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. If her assailant had wanted to kill her, it would have been a simple matter of shooting her while she was trying to set the horses free. If the would-be assassin had been worried about noise, the gun could have been silenced. Or he could have jumped her and slit her throat, or used the pitchfork to impale her rather than beat her senseless.