LITMIR.BIZ

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hands. “If I’d known it was going to be this way—”

      “What would you have done differently?” he goaded. “Go on, say it.”

      “She’s just a child. What I did is not her fault.”

      “Maybe not. But I can’t help how I feel.”

      “Yes, you can. Why won’t you just admit it? This isn’t about Sarah. It’s about punishing me.”

      Ashe’s blood pumped fiercely as he watched Sarah’s mother rise and rush from the room. His curiosity was at a fevered pitch. He thought he knew everything about Sarah, but here was a new morsel, a secret that would need to be uncovered then studied and savored.

      He returned his attention to Sarah’s father and felt something dark gathering inside him. The old man had no idea what waited for him as he stared broodingly into the flames.

      After a while, he nodded off, and Ashe thought how easy it would be to slide up the window, slip into the house and take a stick of firewood to the old man’s skull. Or a knife to the thick, beefy neck. He could almost feel the warm blood spew over his hands, and for a moment, the desire was almost too much to resist.

      But vengeance was worth waiting for and the time had to be right.

      After all, the worst punishment wasn’t death. It was losing the thing prized above all else.

      Seven

      By mid-morning on Tuesday, the temperature had climbed twenty degrees, and the trees around Esme Floyd’s house were dripping from the melting ice. The sun was finally out, but the wind still carried a sharp bite.

      Shivering, Lukas Clay reached back inside the squad car to grab his heavy jacket. A cup of coffee would have hit the spot, but he wasn’t about to turn around and drive back downtown. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could head home and catch a nap.

      His job as chief of police in a town of barely three thousand people was normally uneventful, but the past thirty-six hours had been intense. An ice storm in this part of the country was always serious business. Very few drivers or vehicles were equipped to handle the treacherous roadways, and overhead power lines were always susceptible to falling tree branches.

      As soon as the bad weather set in, Lukas had mobilized a task force consisting of two full-time and four part-time officers to patrol the outlying areas to make sure no one, especially the elderly, got stranded in the freezing temperatures. He’d been out all night himself and had just been on his way home when Esme Floyd’s call came in. There’d been a disturbance at the DeLaune place the night before.

      Lukas folded his sunglasses and slipped them in his pocket as he glanced around. Backed up to an old pear orchard, Esme’s cottage was raised off the ground on brick pillars and underpinned with weathered lattice-work. Eyes gleamed from the darkness beneath the house, and a second later, an orange tabby shot through the slats and leaped to the top of a woodpile, where a black-and-white tomcat lay sunning.

      Smoke curled up from the brick chimney, and as Lukas tracked the wispy stream, he spotted a buzzard circling the woods behind the orchard.

      Something dead back there.

      He watched for a moment, his eyes watering in the wind. As the vulture floated serenely on the air currents, a shotgun blast startled a flock of blackbirds out of the treetops and halted Lukas in his tracks.

      The echo of gunfire vibrated against his chest. His heart jumped once, twice, three times before settling back to its normal beat.

      Jesus, get a grip. Just somebody out hunting rabbits.

      He’d been stateside for, what? Nearly two years and still the sound of gunfire—or a revving car engine—could propel him straight back to the war.

      An army psychiatrist had assured him that it wasn’t uncommon for the effects of PTSD to linger or even worsen over time, but Lukas had finally figured out for himself how he needed to deal with the aftermath. He’d have to find a way to compartmentalize his time in Iraq, the same way he had everything else in his life. It was just like cleaning house. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

      Some of those memory boxes—like his childhood—were to be opened rarely and with great caution, although he supposed he hadn’t had it any rougher than a lot of kids. Southern boys were raised with certain expectations. Once you accepted your place, once you mastered the pursuits deemed manly enough by a culture still mired in the past, you were rewarded for your trouble with jealousy and bitterness because your old man suddenly saw in you the passing of his own youth. Your triumphs became his failings, and he would do anything to prove he was still the better man even if it meant breaking you in ways you could never have imagined.

      Sometimes the rivalry lasted well beyond the grave. How else could he explain his decision to come back here? Lukas wondered. Or even his career choice. Why follow in his father’s footsteps if the idea of besting the old man’s accomplishments didn’t still hold some twisted appeal?

      Not that it was going to be easy to live up to—let alone surpass—his father’s reputation. William Clay had been a legend in Union County for as long as Lukas could remember. He’d served as county sheriff for the better part of twenty-five years, and in all that time, only one major case had gone unsolved.

      Lukas glanced over his shoulder, a momentary spurt of adrenaline nudging away his fatigue. Fifty yards behind him, the DeLaune house rose like a stately specter, its pale walls and gleaming windows a constant reminder of the town’s darkest secret.

      Sixteen-year-old Rachel DeLaune hadn’t just been murdered. Her body had been mutilated, the crime scene desecrated with satanic symbols. And in spite of his father’s best efforts, the killer had never been caught.

      Not yet, at least.

      A thrill of excitement slid up Lukas’s backbone even as he shuddered in dread. Something about that house always gave him the creeps. He couldn’t explain it. It was a fine old place, beautiful in the spring and summer when the roses and crepe myrtle were in bloom. But in the dead of winter, surrounded by an army of skeletal trees with their limbs quivering in the wind, the house looked cold and bleak and abandoned.

      Some said it was haunted. Some even claimed they’d seen Rachel’s ghost at an upstairs window staring down at them as they passed by on the street.

      But Lukas didn’t believe in ghosts. Not the kind that came back from the grave anyway. The only thing that had ever haunted him was his past.

      Which was why he’d locked it away.

      Turning back to the cottage, he stepped up on the concrete porch and knocked on the door. As he waited for someone to answer, he watched the buzzard’s spiral tighten over a spot in the woods where the quarry lay dead or dying.

      After a moment, Esme Floyd drew back the wooden door and peered at him through the storm door. She was tall and thin with posture as straight as a yardstick and eyes that snapped with intelligence. The cotton dress she wore was crisp and spotless, her hair an improbable shade of silvery blue.

      “Miss Esme, I’m Lukas Clay. I hear you reported some kind of disturbance at the DeLaune place last night.”

      “Lukas Clay? Well, Lord have mercy. I liked to not recognized you.” She slipped on her glasses as she examined him through the door. “You used to take after your daddy, but I swear, you the spittin’ image of your mama nowadays. Except for them eyes. Dark as muscadines. You got your daddy’s eyes, all right.”

      She fumbled with the latch, then pushed open the door for him to enter. Stepping into her little house was like crawling into a blast furnace. The warmth was a welcome respite from the wind and cold at first, but after a few minutes, Lukas felt as if someone had cocooned him in a thick layer of wool. The cloying heat took his breath away, and he quickly peeled off his gloves and unzipped his jacket.

      “Better take off that coat,” Esme warned. “Else you freeze to death when you go back outside.”

      Lukas

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