LITMIR.BIZ

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and got drunk—a dozen people saw him in the bar, talking crazy. The Louvels were going to pay. And he came back and killed Aimee…because she was the only Louvel he could find.” God, and how she blamed herself for that.

      She’d been down by the river with Cole that night, both of them desperate and aching. Her sister had offered her comfort, even her help. Aimee had insisted that she could fix everything. But all Bryn had been able to think about was losing Cole. Wade would have to leave Azalea Bend to search for new work, and his family would go with him. She might never see Cole again, despite his promises to write and call. And if her parents found out she was trying to keep in touch with Wade Dempsey’s son…

      She’d gone to Cole instead. And Aimee had waited for her. Bryn had come back to the house in time to hear her sister’s screams. She’d never known for sure where her parents had gone that night, but they’d been fighting and Patsy had driven off in the car. Her father had chased after her. Everything about that night had been awful.

      They’d come home around the same time as Bryn. And then things had just gotten more awful.

      “Those threats, they were empty words,” Cole replied. “He’d been unjustly fired and he went crazy. He got drunk. That doesn’t make him a murderer.”

      “Are you going to tell me why you’re here, Cole?” She couldn’t take much more. Remembering that night…it always killed her a little more each time. “We had this conversation fifteen years ago, and I can’t see one good reason to have it again.”

      Cole leaned forward, his forearms resting on the solid polished mahogany of the desk that had once belonged to her great-grandfather. His voice lowered, as if meant only for her even when the two of them were alone in the house anyway.

      “My mother went to her death wanting to believe my father was innocent—but fearing somewhere inside herself that he was guilty.” His eyes bored hard into hers. Emotion lurked in those lithoid depths, but it was unreadable. “She was haunted by that question, Bryn.”

      She didn’t know what to say. Her family had been haunted by that night, too. What was Cole getting at?

      She knew he was getting at something.

      “Before she died, she told me something she’d kept secret all my life. She was pregnant with another man’s child when she married Wade Dempsey. He married her and gave me a name, and that’s why she stayed with him all those years, even with his philandering. Wade was sterile, couldn’t have any children of his own, but he treated me like his flesh and blood and she loved him for that. But she wanted me to know that I wasn’t the flesh and blood of a killer. She was ashamed, Bryn, and she didn’t want me to be ashamed, too.”

      “She must have been proud of your accomplishments,” she said carefully, shocked by his revelations. Sympathy she didn’t dare reveal tore at her heart. “You’ve made something of yourself. Why should you care what anyone thinks about anything in Azalea Bend now? It’s history, Cole. Let it go.”

      When he continued, it was as if he hadn’t heard her. His voice remained oddly flat and expressionless. “I realized I’d let her down, and I’d let down the man who loved me enough to give me his name. The least I could do is try to clear his—not for my sake, but for my mother’s. I began to research Aimee’s case. Reading documents, police reports. The court transcripts of your father’s trial. I read everything I could get my hands on, and one question stood out in my mind.”

      Bryn’s uneasiness increased. His sheer matter of factness continued to prickle alarm up her spine.

      She waited.

      “My father’s face was scratched as if he’d been in a life-or-death struggle that night,” Cole went on. “The forensic report was strangely silent on this fact. Scrapings from Aimee’s nails should have linked those scratches to my father. But no such evidence was ever presented in court.”

      “Forensic science was not the same then as it is today,” Bryn countered. “This was fifteen years ago, in a small town. We don’t have murders in St. Salome Parish on a regular basis. This wasn’t a conspiracy, Cole. It was a small town grappling with a big-city crime. If scrapings weren’t taken from beneath Aimee’s nails—”

      “But scrapings were taken.”

      “You just said—”

      “I said the evidence wasn’t presented in court. I didn’t say the evidence didn’t exist.”

      Chapter 4

      Bryn swallowed thickly. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a gracile cloak masking unnamable trepidation.

      Cole looked at her, his gaze suddenly as frightening as a hot summer storm. “I mean the scrapings were taken. And the evidence was suppressed. The information was removed from the forensic report.”

      Bryn’s stomach muscles clenched. “How can you know this?”

      “Because I contacted the coroner who autopsied Aimee’s body. I asked him why no scrapings had been taken.”

      All the blood seemed to run out of Bryn’s head. She felt light, sick. She had to hear what Cole had to say, though. There was no stopping now.

      “Randol Ormond is nearly eighty years old,” Cole told her. “But he’s got all his wits about him. He left Azalea Bend several years ago and now lives in a senior-care center in Tampa. He wasn’t hard to track down. I flew there, spoke with him face to face. And he told me the truth. He removed the evidence from Aimee’s report—though he wouldn’t tell me why or on whose authority. But I can guess.”

      “Maybe he’s lying.” Even she knew her words sounded desperate.

      “He doesn’t have long to live, Bryn. He’s got cancer. He has no reason to lie. The truth does nothing but stain his reputation. He’s been carrying a load of guilt for fifteen years, and he was only too ready to let it go.”

      “Maybe he said what you wanted to hear. People change their stories sometimes. People lie for all kinds of reasons.”

      “I know that only too well.” Cole’s quiet voice was jeapordous now. “You know as well as I do that your father had more than one reason to shoot mine. And that only one of those reasons would get him out of a jail sentence—and that was pinning Aimee’s murder on Wade Dempsey. A jury let Maurice Louvel off for taking a father’s justice. But a husband’s justice…That would have been a little more difficult to win, even for a Louvel.”

      Bryn had to force her next words from numb lips. “Did you expect me to tell the world that my mother had an affair with your father? Even you didn’t believe it was true.” But oh, he had wanted her to say it anyway. And she’d refused. And he’d never forgiven her.

      A stiff beat passed. “It never mattered what I believed about that, Bryn. It only mattered what your father believed. And you and I both know what he thought that night. We know he didn’t fire my father because of negligence on the job. He fired him because he suspected he’d slept with his wife. And when he found my father with Aimee, he shot him dead. After that, there was no backing down. If Wade Dempsey wasn’t a murderer, then Maurice Louvel was, wasn’t he, Bryn? The town came to Maurice Louvel’s rescue. Any evidence that pointed to someone else being Aimee’s killer was shoved away because the jury might not have been so sympathetic to the man on trial for murder. Not just the fact that your father had more than one motive to shoot mine. Now there’s more. Now there’s the forensic report that was suppressed—and who do you think suppressed it, Bryn?”

      She felt more ill by the second. She knew where he was headed. Drake’s father, the prosecutor responsible for the case against her father. “That’s a loaded charge, Cole. And all you have is a grudge and the word of an old, dying man to back you up.”

      “I have more than Randol Ormond’s word.” Suddenly the emotion in his eyes was too clear. And it wasn’t bitterness or anger. It was pain, pure and scorching. “He still had the original report in his private

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