LITMIR.BIZ

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watched until she was out of sight around the next curve. Then he pulled out his cell phone and pressed the speed dial for his office.

      Alexander Quinn answered on the second ring. He didn’t bother with a salutation. “Did you find her?”

      “Yes.”

      “Any clue why she didn’t show for the memorial?”

      “Oh, she showed for a memorial. Just not the one at the cemetery.” That strange flutter he’d felt in his chest earlier recurred. He tried to ignore it.

      “I didn’t hire you to be cryptic.” Though Quinn’s voice barely changed tone, Cain knew his boss was annoyed. In fact, something about this case had been making the old spymaster cranky from the moment Joyce Lindsey had showed up at Quinn’s detective agency, The Gates, and hired him to look into the deaths of her two children.

      “Sorry.” Cain started walking along the narrow shoulder, keeping an eye out for cars coming around the blind curve. “I found her at the roadside memorial her mother-in-law maintains.”

      “Thought those weren’t legal in Tennessee.”

      “What’s legal and what’s tolerated can be two different things.” Cain paused as he reached the small white cross. “From what I hear, Joyce Lindsey sets up a new one almost as fast as the state can remove the old one.”

      “She’s lost a great deal.” Coming from almost anyone else, the comment might have been a statement of sympathy. But Quinn was anything but sentimental, and what Cain heard in his voice was unease.

      “You think you were wrong to take her case?”

      “Cases,” Quinn corrected. “She lost two children. But I don’t need to remind you of that, do I?”

      Cain tightened his grip on the cell phone. “No, you don’t.”

      “She wants justice. I don’t blame her for that.”

      “But?”

      “But she seems very sure she already knows the answers,” Quinn answered. “I wonder whether she’ll accept a truth that conflicts with what she already believes.”

      “Just a second.” Hearing the sound of a vehicle engine approaching around the curve, Cain edged away from the shoulder of the road, taking care not to get too close to the drop-off. A sturdy thicket of wild hydrangea offered a hiding spot; he crouched behind the thick leaves until the truck passed. He caught a glimpse of Sara Lindsey’s fine profile before sunlight bounced off the driver’s window with a blinding glare. The flutter in his chest migrated down to his lower belly, and he knew instantly what that feeling was.

      Desire. Raw, visceral and entirely unwelcome.

      “You think she wants us to confirm her beliefs rather than find the truth,” Cain continued after the truck was safely past, dragging his mind out of dangerous territory. “For instance, if we find that her daughter-in-law didn’t cause the accident—”

      “The police looked into the accident pretty thoroughly. They found nothing to prove the widow was at fault.”

      “So they say,” Cain murmured, remembering the flicker of guilt he’d seen on Sara Lindsey’s face as she looked back at the small white cross before heading up to the overlook.

      “You think they missed something?”

      Cain started up the mountain, where he’d left his own truck parked at the overlook. “Maybe. It would help a whole lot if Sara Lindsey could remember anything about that night.”

      “How sure are you that she doesn’t?”

      A three-year-old memory pricked Cain’s mind. Sara Lindsey, bloodied and panic-stricken as she lay strapped upside down in the crumpled truck cab. She had looked straight at Cain, but he could tell she wasn’t really seeing him. Her breathing had been fast and labored, but she’d managed to find air enough to scream her husband’s name in terror, over and over, until she’d gone quiet and still, falling unconscious.

      He shut the memory away, not wanting to let it taint his present investigation. “From all accounts, she and her husband had been happily in love since they were both in grade school. Even the people who think she must have caused the accident don’t reckon she did it on purpose.”

      “And the sister’s death?”

      “We know Renee’s death was murder,” Cain said grimly. “We just don’t know who did it.”

      “Joyce Lindsey still thinks you did it, doesn’t she?”

      Cain crossed the road to the wider shoulder on the other side while there was no traffic approaching from either direction. “You should have told her you were assigning me to the case. She’ll find out sooner or later. Nothing stays secret in a town this small unless you bury it.”

      “I didn’t want to give her the chance to say no.”

      “She’ll just fire you later rather than now.”

      “We’ll deal with that when it happens.”

      “What’s this case to you, Quinn? Why are you misleading a client in order to keep investigating?”

      “It’s not what the case is to me, Dennison. It’s what the case is to you.”

      Cain pressed his mouth to a thin line, torn between irritation and an unexpected flicker of gratitude. “I’ve lived this long without answers.”

      “Too long. You almost turned down a job with The Gates because of what happened here in Purgatory eighteen years ago. Nobody should have to live his life under a constant cloud. Believe me.”

      Cain almost laughed. Quinn’s whole life was lived smack-dab in the middle of an impervious cloud of secrecy and lies. Little of what Cain knew about his boss’s life and history was reliable. Quinn had spent two decades in the CIA, fabricating an identity as impossible to penetrate as a Smoky Mountain midnight.

      He sighed. “Okay, fine. But how am I supposed to investigate Renee Lindsey’s murder when half the town still thinks I did it? Who’s going to be willing to talk to me?”

      “You had an alibi. There was never any evidence to implicate you. You weren’t charged with anything.”

      “Small-town gossip doesn’t deal in evidence and legal outcomes.” Cain reached the summit of the hill, where a scenic overlook offered parking for a half dozen vehicles and an observation deck with a panoramic view of the Smoky Mountains. “People know what they know, the truth be damned.”

      As he unlocked the cab of his Ford F-150, he spared a moment to gaze out across the spectacular mountain vista. The sight tugged at something deep inside him, something he’d have sworn died years ago when he’d shaken the dust of Purgatory, Tennessee, off his boots.

      Yet, thanks to Alexander Quinn, here he was again, back in the hills he’d left behind, ready to face a past he’d long been determined to forget.

      What the hell was he thinking?

      “Don’t you want to know who killed Renee Lindsey?”

      If Cain didn’t know better, he might have imagined a touch of sympathy in Quinn’s soft question. But Cain did know better. If there was any emotion in Quinn’s voice, it was carefully planted there for a reason. To disarm him, perhaps. To get him to spill his own secrets.

      To prod him into doing whatever it was Quinn wanted for whatever reason he wanted it.

      “Of course I do,” Cain answered, keeping his tone businesslike and free of the emotion that burned like a furnace in the center of his chest.

      Of course he wanted to know who’d killed Renee Lindsey. In his own way, he’d loved her almost as much as her family had. And when he’d found her body at the base of Crybaby Falls, he’d felt so much rage he’d thought he’d combust. She’d been a sweet girl. A good girl, despite her foolish

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