Killer's Prey

Why was he pressing her this way? But as much as she wanted to turn her back on him, she realized something else: he was going to keep after her until he got whatever it was he wanted. And he must want something or he wouldn’t be after her like this.

Almost closing her eyes so she could pretend this wasn’t a police car, she walked around the vehicle, reaching for the door handle then sliding in by feel.

At once she wished she hadn’t. Scents had always triggered impressions in her, and in this car she could smell fear, anger, anguish and alcohol, each scent bringing to mind imaginings of earlier passengers in this car. She clenched her teeth, battling down the torrent of feelings.

She kept her eyes closed, seeking the quiet mental sanctuary she had created for herself, a place she visualized as utterly empty and still. A place where the hyperawareness of odors usually couldn’t reach her. Where nothing could reach her.

Jake said nothing as he drove the three blocks to the diner. She couldn’t get out of that damn car fast enough, and she was walking through the door of Maude’s before Jake had finished locking up.

Maude stayed open until midnight, the only place in town that did other than one convenience store and the truck stop. She was by herself, behind the counter, taking care of paperwork. All day long this place was full, but Nora couldn’t help wondering why Maude bothered to stay open this late in a place where the sidewalks rolled up by 9:00 p.m.

Maude straightened on the chair she had pushed behind the lunch counter, blinked as she saw her, then actually smiled. For Maude that was as unusual as Mount Rushmore moving to another state.

“Well, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, Nora.”

She managed a smile. “Hi, Maude. Keeping busy?”

“Enough to get by, which is more than some can say.” His eyes shifted as Jake entered behind her. “Evening, Chief.”

Chief? In spite of herself, Nora turned to look at Jake. “Chief?” she repeated.

“The town took a wild hair recently. Before you know it, we have a city police force,” Maude answered, her voice souring to her usual grumpy mood. She sniffed her disapproval.

“Really.” Nora slid into a booth, absorbing this information, wondering if she had lost what was left of her mind. Having midnight coffee with a man who had crushed her ego and was now a police chief to boot? Yes, she must have lost the dregs of her sanity.

“It’s no big deal,” Jake said. “The city council decided they needed a little more authority or something. I don’t know. I have six officers, is all, and we spend a lot of time cooperating with the sheriff.” He shrugged.

“I thought you were a rancher.”

“I still am. At the rate things are going, I may be back at it full-time soon.”

“Why?”

Jake smiled faintly. “It was a power grab by the city council. They didn’t like feeling that the sheriff was running everything, the town included. I sometimes think we’re a sort of auxiliary.”

“Useful as teats on a bull,” Maude grumbled.

Nora figured he was minimizing it but didn’t know why. “It must be expensive to have a police force.”

“Not with federal grants. It helped swell the city budget. Maintaining it may prove to be different.”

“So why did you do it?”

“I was already a part-time deputy. This pays a little more. Ranching isn’t what it used to be.”

Little was what it used to be. “Are the politics of it hard?”

“Nah. Gage Dalton is a good man. He doesn’t mind that we help him patrol the streets in town. His budget is tight, too. And I give him someone else for the city council to holler at.”

Maude brought them both coffee and thick slices of apple pie heavily laced with cinnamon. Nora looked around the diner, mostly to avoid looking at Jake, and felt the intervening years slip away. If it hadn’t been for some wear and tear around the edges, she could have believed she was still in high school. Red vinyl booths, a couple of battered wood tables, stools at the counter, some of which had been patched with duct tape.

But finally she couldn’t avoid looking at Jake any longer. God, he was handsome, more handsome by far than in their youth when she had often been content to just stare at him. The years had favored him, and experience, good or bad, had etched a few faint lines.

By contrast, she knew how she must look to him: emaciated, too pale, her once-thick blond hair now thin and lifeless. Stress and mistreatment could do that to a person. Her blue eyes, unfortunately like her dad’s, were three sizes too big for her shrunken face.

“You’ve been through hell,” he said bluntly.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I can understand why,” he answered. He picked up his mug and sipped his coffee. Apparently he still liked it black.

She reached for a little container of half-and-half and poured it into hers. Then she added a second for safety’s sake. No telling how her stomach would react to the assault of Maude’s strong coffee at this time of night, especially when she was feeling wound as tight as a spring.

Her hand was shaking, and Jake took the second creamer from her hand and poured it for her.

“Look,” he said as he dropped the container on the saucer, “I know you have plenty of reasons to hate me. Hate this whole town, I guess, but most especially those of us you grew up with. We were merciless. But we’re not kids any longer, Nora. And most folks think you got a hell of a raw deal.”

“Thanks,” she said shortly.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him tilt his head. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to feel again the impact of his good looks.

He sighed audibly. “All I’m trying to say is that you may find folks here are easier to get along with than it must have seemed to you back in our school days.”

“Really.” She tried to keep the tone noncommittal, even though she wanted to ask him what made him think she wanted to get along with anyone in this town. Funny how painful even the oldest scars could become when faced directly with their source again. In just this short period of time, her distant past had reared up to claw at her nearly as strongly as her recent past.

But then, it all came down to the same source, didn’t it? Everything bad that had happened to her, far past and near past, had happened because she was different. Cursed, as her dad had said more than once.

Jake sighed. Apparently the tone hadn’t been as noncommittal as she had hoped.

“You’ve been hurt,” he said finally. “Badly. And I get as much blame as anyone. I’m sorry.”

She glanced at him then and wished she hadn’t, because with that one look she remembered something she hadn’t allowed herself to think about in more than a decade: Jake had been one of the few kids she had grown up with who hadn’t picked on her throughout her childhood. In the end he had proved to be no better. But for many years he had refrained from the name-calling, the nasty pranks, the ugliness that had framed her days. Not until the very end had she realized that he’d thought the same hideous things about her.

She said nothing, because she wasn’t going to ease his conscience and accept his apology. After what she had been through, apologies seemed like empty words.

“Nora.”

Her gazed skipped back to him, then away.

“Nora,” he said again. “What would you think of me if we didn’t have a past? If we were meeting for the first time?”

“I’d hate you,” she said flatly. “I’d hate you just because you’re a cop.”

* * *

Jake supposed he deserved that. Even without all that had happened to her in the past months, he would have deserved that. But leaving the past out of it, given what she had endured from the police in Minneapolis, he could well understand her reaction.

He left her alone and began to eat his pie, trying to think his way through this, something he should have done before impulsively picking her up and bringing her here.

He’d been a bastard twelve years ago. He knew that. He could still cringe inwardly in shame at the way he had thrown all those epithets she’d been hearing for years in her face when she’d been utterly vulnerable, counting on him, at least, to be a friend. He still didn’t know exactly what had possessed him to be so cruel, but who could understand the mind of a twenty-year-old male anyway? Not even the male involved, evidently. There was more than one stupid act in his youth, although his treatment of Nora probably topped the list.

He ate another mouthful of pie, hardly tasting it, wondering what he could say to start building a bridge he never should have destroyed in the first place. It was clear she didn’t even want to hear an apology.

Finally he said the only thing he could think of. “I wouldn’t have suspected you.”

Her face lifted and she looked straight at him. He felt a pang as he once again saw how thin and pale she had become, how worn she looked. Even her beautiful blond hair seemed to be on the brink of death. He didn’t know, might never know, all that had been done to her.

“Really?” she asked, her voice brittle. “Even my defense attorney wouldn’t agree with you.”

His head jerked a bit, as if she had slapped him. “What do you mean?”

“He agreed with the cops. I’d worked with the guy’s kid, so I must have known him. Must have had an affair with him. Must have tried to conceal his identity to hide the affair. Must have obstructed justice. Never mind that I never met him, only his wife.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sure. Everyone was sorry afterward. But that didn’t get my job back. It didn’t protect me from the endless hounding of the press. It didn’t spare me from people who believed that simply because I was arrested I must be involved somehow. Do you have any idea how that felt?”

“I can’t begin to imagine.” And he honestly couldn’t, although he was trying.

“So they finally let me out, and the D.A. said something to the press about how they had proved unequivocally I was in no way involved with the man before the attack. People avoided me like the plague for all of a week, and then the media were all over me all over again, demanding to know my relationship with the man, what I’d done to make him so mad at me and then...and then...” She stopped, breathing hard, her voice breaking.

“And then he threatened you.”

She looked down, her long hair veiling her face. “Don’t go there,” she whispered. “Don’t go there.”

“You should have had protection.”

“Well, I didn’t. He was an upstanding member of the community, no flight risk... Yeah, I heard it all. Even I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to make those threats.”

He wanted to reach across the table and take her trembling hands, wanted to promise her a safety no one could promise her.

But before he could say or do anything, she pushed herself out of the booth. “I’m going home. Now.”

Home. The place that had been part of her misery when she had been growing up her. To a dad who had been less than a dad. A dad who had treated her as harshly as her schoolmates.

Maude caught his eye and he saw a frown there as Nora hurried toward the door. Okay, he’d been stupid again, and Maude had heard it all.

Jake hurriedly tossed bills on the table, then followed Nora into the night.

“Wait,” he called after her. “Wait. I said I’d take you home.”

“I don’t want anything from you. Nothing!”

From the looks of her, he doubted she had the energy to keep up that pace, and certainly not for three blocks. Hopping into his cruiser, he did the only thing he could: he followed her.

She didn’t even glance over at him as he drove beside her. She made it to the next street and started up the gentle slope toward her father’s house. Just a couple more blocks.

But she didn’t make it. The small hill defeated her. Her steps slowed, and then she stumbled. He threw the car into Park and climbed out, rushing to her side.

It wasn’t just weakness that was giving her problems, he realized, but the anger, as well. She was gasping as if she’d just run a marathon.

She had enough strength to glare at him, though. He didn’t care. This time he was going to do something right.

Without even asking, he scooped her off her feet and carried her to his car. Ignoring the way her fists pounded weakly at him, he managed to free a hand and open the door, thinking that she couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet.

Bending, he put her gently on the seat, and even though she refused to look at him, he touched the side of her face gently.

“Nora,” he said softly. “Nora, honey, you’ve got to take it easy. You’ve been so ill....”

“I’m not your honey!”

Then she coughed, and started panting again.

“Easy,” he said as he would have said to a restless mare. “Easy. I’ll get you home.”

He climbed into the driver’s seat, but before he put the car in Drive, he turned to look at her. “It’ll take time to get your strength back. Give yourself time.”

She gave a short nod, but still wouldn’t look at him.

Okay, he thought. This was it for tonight. He’d just get her home, see her safely to her door, then leave her alone for now.

Everything else would just have to wait.

Chapter 2

Nora awoke with a start in the morning. Confusion filled her momentarily as it often did now that her nights were plagued with nightmares about the attack and the threats to repeat it. Then she recognized the drab, faded curtains on the window, saw the thin slices of a gray morning slipping by them, and knew.

She was at home, at her father’s house. Once the worst place in the world to be, and now only the second-worst place. That didn’t say much for it.

She didn’t want to get up, but she rarely did any longer. She felt tired, lacked energy, lacked the desire to do anything anymore. Depression. Pills for it stood on her nightstand, and she took them only because the alternative was worse. But she had a reason to feel depressed, and she wondered if pills could really help that.

The sheets on her old bed smelled musty enough that she suspected her father hadn’t washed them. They probably hadn’t been washed since the last time she’d been here, for her mother’s funeral. It wouldn’t surprise her.

She listened, hoping it was late enough that her dad would have gone to work. She had nothing to say to him, and he had nothing to say to her. Not anymore.

Unfortunately, the late-night coffee, little as she had drunk of it, insisted she get up anyway. Pulling on her robe and slippers, she left her room and padded to the ancient bathroom off the kitchen. It hadn’t changed. Not one bit. Except maybe the tile had been regrouted. She couldn’t be sure.

A glance at the clock when she emerged told her she was safe, at least for now. It was ten after nine, and her father was surely behind the pharmacy counter now.

It was at once a relief and a disappointment. Being alone with her own thoughts was a bad place for her these days. Too much pain, too much despair, too much anger and no answers in sight.

She reheated some of the coffee that was left in the pot on the stove and sat at the ancient table, cradling the mug, annoyed that her dad hadn’t even remembered that she liked half-and-half.

But that was him. Fred Loftis, penny-pincher extraordinaire. From the way they had always lived, no one would guess he was as successful as any businessman in town. Hand-me-down clothes for Nora, all of them chosen from church rummage sales where he’d allowed the purchase of only the ugliest of them. How much fun it had been to always be the girl in school who looked like a ragamuffin from the Great Depression—or an old lady oddly cased in a young girl’s body.

A twisted young girl’s body. The years of wearing that damn hideous brace for scoliosis hadn’t helped, nor had it helped that when she’d needed eyeglasses he’d always insisted on the cheapest frames. Not one bit of fashion in her life. He’d carped about the cost of them, too, and about the cost of the scoliosis brace and the doctors, but he hadn’t been able to get out of that without gaining the disapproval of the town.

If there was one thing her dad really cared about it, it was his public reputation. He was a God-fearing, righteous nineteenth-century man, whose frequent discourses on sin and vanity in the small church where he was a deacon had managed to convince everyone in town that dressing his wife and daughter in modest, ugly clothes had made sense—given his beliefs.

But that was the thing about small towns. They made room for every kind of eccentric short of the criminal. Their kids, however, were far less tolerant.

Nora squeezed her eyes shut. She had enough to deal with in the here and now, she didn’t need to be wandering to the distant past. Of course, being with her father wasn’t helping that part one bit. She wondered if she had enough left in her savings to find a small place to rent.

But then the fear clamped her so hard she could barely breathe. After that man had attacked her, after his hideous whispered threats on the phone, she couldn’t stand being alone. Even here, in this house that echoed with the past and seemed so far removed from the life she had been building in Minneapolis.

They’d put one of those electronic bracelets on him after the threatening calls. He could only leave his yard to go to work. That should keep him confined, shouldn’t it? Although even her own lawyer couldn’t explain why they hadn’t just jailed him pending trial. Not to her satisfaction, at any rate.

But she was a thousand or more miles away right now, and if he strayed so much as a hundred feet the cops would be all over him. So said that lawyer. But after his threats, it was hard to believe. The guy was crazy. Clearly. He’d had no good reason to attack her in the first place. How could she believe he wouldn’t do something crazy again?

She realized her fingers ached from gripping the coffee mug, and as she crashed back into the present she had to face the fact that her day was empty. Empty hours scared her because they gave her too much time to think.

But how could it possibly have been any better locked up in her old apartment in Minneapolis with that man in the same town?

No, that would have been worse. She needed to find a job, that’s what she needed. If only she felt stronger, and looked stronger. Right now she doubted anyone would want to hire the scarecrow she had become.

Even though her appetite had never come back, she forced herself to look in the refrigerator for something to eat. She was supposed to eat six times a day. Small meals, but six a day until she started to feel hungry again.

Nothing looked good. Nothing. She finally grabbed a package of cinnamon rolls, her father’s one weakness, and cut one roll in half, leaving the other half in the package. If she could get this down, she’d be doing good.

Then maybe she would have the energy to take a walk, something else she was supposed to do every day to recover her strength. Hemmed in by orders, all for her own good, she had to force herself to obey them. She’d have preferred to find a dark corner and curl up.

Except... Well, that wouldn’t be good, either. In a dark corner she’d be even more alone with her thoughts and memories.

Trapped. As surely as a lab rat in a cage, she felt trapped, and she didn’t know how to break out.

She felt a weak sense of triumph when she swallowed the last of the roll. Thank goodness the coffee washed it down or it might have stuck. Going to her bedroom, she found some jeans, a flannel shirt and her walking shoes. She had just pulled her jacket off the peg by the door when the phone rang.

She hesitated. She knew who it had to be. But with a sigh, she answered it.

“Get down here, girl. I could use someone on the register for a few hours.”

Wasn’t that just like her father. Get down there and get to work, just as he had demanded of her in high school. And somehow those words released a surprising and unexpected burst of resistance.

“No. I have to go for my walk. The doctor said.”

Then she hung up and experienced a sense of satisfaction, something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

The phone rang again, but she ignored it. She slipped her jacket on, grabbed the spare key and left the house.

Winter tinged the air. Although there was no snow, nor any sign of it, she could almost smell it coming. Some aroma in the air had changed, something she had never been able to pinpoint, but she could always tell. Conard County was slipping quickly into winter.

And then what? she wondered dismally. Living with her father was apt to drive her even more nuts than it had before after so many years of ordering her own life. He wouldn’t allow her that independence. He’d feel that since he was supporting her she owed it to him to follow his rules in every respect, from how she dressed to working for him and doing chores for him. He wouldn’t give her an ounce of independence. He never had.

He’d claim she owed everything to him. One of the biggest and most momentous decisions of her life had been to go to college on her own. Paying every penny for it herself. Building a life as far away from here as she could get.

Getting contact lenses. Learning to wear more attractive clothing. Finding confidence first through her school achievements and then through her job performance. Then one sicko had come along for reasons known only to him and had stripped all of it away, including her job. Because notoriety had made the school system ask her to quit, with the excuse that parents had questions about her.

Well, why wouldn’t they have when the police had had so many? She wasn’t sure who had wounded her more, her attacker or the damn cops and their doubts.

Or the school administration that had refused to stand by her after her years of excellent work for them. They had promised her a stellar recommendation.

Although she could understand the school, she thought as she walked slowly down the hill toward the more level part of town. Parents were talking, afraid of what their children might hear. The guy might be crazy enough to come after her again. What if he came after her at the school? And besides, she was honestly in no condition to counsel anyone. She couldn’t even counsel herself right now.

In fact, she was in no condition to work at much. Still, it had hurt, but how many months of disability would the school be looking at? How many months before she was capable of providing adequate counseling? How many months before the parents stopped worrying?

And how many months before the trial, while it would never quite fall from the news or people’s minds? Followed by the resumption of her notoriety.

Hell, she couldn’t really blame the school for all of this. Her severance pay sat in the bank, not enough for anything long-term, her disability checks would continue just a few more weeks, but now that she had resigned, they would dry up. Bills continued to roll in, like her credit card and her student loans. It might be months yet before her victim compensation was approved.

She heard the growl of an engine behind her again and didn’t even need to look to guess who it was. Jake. Why the hell couldn’t he just leave her alone? Seeing him was like picking the scab on a wound that refused to heal.

It was Jake, all right. She didn’t even turn to look as he drew up alongside her and slowed down to pace her.

“Wanna go horseback riding?”

That stopped her in her tracks. Slowly she turned and saw that today he was in his tan Jeep. “Riding?” she repeated. Her mind couldn’t quite make the leap.

“Riding,” he said. “I know you used to love horses. Well, I’ve got a couple that could use a walk today. Why don’t you join me? We’ll go out to the ranch and ride.”

“Are you out of your mind?” The words came out sharply.

He cocked his head, still motoring beside her. “Actually, no. Wandering the streets here in town will bore you pretty fast. Being all alone is probably even worse. I’d like the company.”