Mercy

One of the regulars at the large table at the front said, “Hell’s bells, it almost looks as if Beartooth has been invaded by an army.”

“They must be lost,” one of the ranchers joked. “Either that or Nettie Benton is going to rebuild the store.”

“Not likely,” Kate said as she stared across the street at the activity. “She sold that property to marry the sheriff.”

“Well, something’s coming up over there,” a rancher noted. “But who in his right mind would invest in Beartooth? One good wind and the whole town could disappear overnight.”

As Callie looked around the café, she saw that everyone was watching the men unloading building materials across the street.

Everyone but the cowboy at the table in the corner. He was looking at her.

* * *

ROURKE COULDN’T TAKE his eyes off Caligrace “Callie” Westfield. The blurry police photos hadn’t captured her beauty. She looked angelic, from the wide brown eyes to the freckles that bridged her nose and highlighted the tops of her cheeks.

Not only did she look like an angel, she also had an innocence about her that was almost palpable. She wore jeans, an apron over a turquoise T-shirt and a pair of sneakers. As he noticed earlier, she was slimmer than she’d appeared in the photographs, more athletic and in better shape. Rourke estimated that she stood about five and a half feet tall.

He knew looks could be deceiving. Ted Bundy proved that. But he was still having a hard time believing this woman was a serial killer—or even intimately involved with one.

As the owner, a pretty brunette he’d heard called Kate, took his breakfast order, Rourke told himself that he’d been right to question his judgment about coming here. This case had gotten to him. Or maybe Laura was right and Caligrace Westfield had gotten to him from a few grainy snapshots. But right now, he was more than intrigued by the woman.

He hadn’t anticipated his reaction to her—or hers to him, now that he thought about it. For a moment when their eyes had met, he’d thought she recognized him. It was more than possible since he’d been the lead detective on several homicide cases that had gotten him on the nightly news before he’d left the Seattle P.D.

Seeing her in the flesh made him even more curious about her. According to her history, the longest she’d ever worked in one place was here in Beartooth. His P.I. said she lived upstairs in an apartment over the café. Like the other buildings in town, it had been constructed of stone, stood two stories and appeared to be one of the original businesses in town.

The fact that Callie had moved so many times in the past seemed to indicate that she was running from something. He’d thought he had a pretty good idea from what when he’d left Seattle.

Now he wasn’t so sure. But he’d gotten this far. He wasn’t ready to give up yet. He could feel the clock ticking, though. He was already a couple of days into his two weeks. He needed something concrete—and quickly.

* * *

IT TOOK LAURA FULLER all night before she found the homicide case. While she’d kept copies of all of hers, she hadn’t filed them in any order once she’d moved on to others. So she’d had dozens of boxes to go through. Now spread out on the floor, the papers made her apartment look as if a bomb had gone off. Good thing she didn’t have friends who stopped by unannounced.

Her head hurt, her fear growing with each file she set aside as she worked her way through a history of the career she had loved.

When she found it, her fingers froze an instant before they began to tremble. She moved from the floor to the table. Sitting down, she took a breath and then opened the file folder.

On the surface, it was like any other case.

This one had been before she was made a homicide detective. She’d been assigned to crowd control and hadn’t known any more details than those looky-loos who’d stood gawking behind the crime-scene tape.

Later she got to go door-to-door, asking if anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious. It was always the same. Little old ladies would remember some strange man they’d noticed, but gave vague details or such good details that finding him had only taken her to the local grocery, where he turned out to be the young man who delivered her groceries every week.

Dead ends, all of them.

No wonder she hadn’t remembered the case. While her notes had been in the file with her name on them, it hadn’t been her case. She could see why Rourke had wanted to solve it for her, though. She had worked tirelessly on her own time, trying to track down a witness to the murder.

Amusing, she thought as she read her notes. She hadn’t known anything about the murder victim except that he was a single male, drove the local bus and lived in an old run-down apartment house. No wonder the case had gone cold. She’d put more time into it than anyone else and had gotten nothing. No witnesses. Or at least no one who would talk.

When she’d made Homicide, she’d put it all behind her and wouldn’t have remembered the case at all if not for Rourke. The other two murders that he’d found weren’t in her jurisdiction.

Dumping the photocopied contents of the file onto her table, she sorted through her notes, the reports and the two short newspaper clippings she’d put into the file about the case. She couldn’t help but smile to herself at how much she’d been into all this. She’d wanted desperately to learn, to be the best, to go the furthest.

Ironic that this case would be the one Rourke would stumble across and decide he had to solve. As she reached the bottom of the paperwork, she saw the corner of a photograph and pulled it out.

A shockwave rattled through her. She’d remembered taking photos of the crowd gathered behind the crime-scene tape, but she’d thought she had put them all in the original file at the department. And yet here were more photos. At first they appeared to be identical to the ones Rourke had shown her.

But the closer she looked, she saw that these weren’t duplicates. In fact, there were four photographs instead of three, and several were shot from different angles than the ones Rourke had shown her.

She felt sick. Why had she kept these and not put them in the police file? What had she been thinking?

Shaken, Laura stared at the shots she’d taken. There had to be something about them that had made her do this. But she could find nothing in them that would warrant her basically stealing them from the department.

She quickly looked for the young woman she’d spotted in the photos Rourke had shown her. With a start, she saw her. The woman was looking right at the camera in all four of these shots. Right at Laura.

A chill ran the length of her spine. She hugged herself as she stared at one of the photos and the odd expression on the woman’s face, suddenly filled with a horrible premonition. The woman almost looked as if she—

Her cell phone rang, making her jump.

Let it be Rourke.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_bf5bf53e-ac99-5cd6-94a4-84b62e772339)

IT WASN’T ROURKE CALLING. The woman’s voice was old and weak, almost a whisper. “Laura?”

Laura glanced at the clock. It was after midnight. She swallowed back the lump that rose in her throat. “Mother?”

“No, honey, it’s her neighbor Ruthie. You don’t know me. Your mother gave me your number and asked me to call you. I’m sorry it’s so late.” When Laura said nothing, she continued, “She’s real sick, honey. She...she says she’s dying.”

Laura was surprised. Not that her mother might be dying, since she’d often complained of being unwell. No, Laura just hadn’t expected anyone to notify her. Most of the time, she felt as if her mother had already died. Hadn’t she once told Rourke that her mother was deceased?

“Thank you for letting me know,” she said, wishing her mother hadn’t given some stranger her number. Why couldn’t she have done them both a favor and just died quietly in her sleep?

Laura recoiled at her uncharitable thoughts. A stranger would think she was a horrible person. A stranger, though, wouldn’t know her mother.

“She wants to see you,” the neighbor said. “Your mother says there’s something she has to tell you. Something you need to know and that it is very important.”

For a moment, she tried to imagine anything her mother could tell her that would be of any interest to her. To apologize for what she’d done and hadn’t done as a mother? Too late for that.

But even as Laura thought it, she knew there were things that her mother could tell her, things she didn’t want to hear.

“She said it has something to do with when you were twelve.”

Laura felt her blood run cold. The last thing she wanted was to relive her childhood. It had been bad enough the first time. She definitely had no desire to talk about the year she’d turned twelve.

“I hope that makes sense to you,” Ruthie said. “She didn’t elaborate. The truth is, I hardly know your mother. I was surprised when she called to ask for my help. She’s always stayed to herself, making it clear she didn’t want to...socialize with any of her neighbors.” Silence. “She really is very upset about this, afraid she was going to die before she speaks with you.”

Her mother had secrets she needed to get off her chest before she died? Laura thought of blanks in her memory, the black holes of time she couldn’t recall. But when she thought of her childhood, she couldn’t have been more grateful for those lost memories. Why open up old wounds?