Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

“So what’s with you and Anspaugh?” Brandon asked as they walked down the corridor. “You cheating on me? Messing around with somebody else’s hard drive?”

She laughed softly. Brandon was hot, but he was also young, probably no more than twenty-five or -six. Not to mention a player. Their relationship was strictly platonic, meaning she could appreciate his hotness without actually being burned and enjoy his playfulness without being played.

“Seriously. What’s up?”

“I’ve been lending a hand now and then on the Lovesprettyboys investigation.”

His trendy glasses couldn’t conceal the sympathetic look in his eyes. Brandon knew Lily’s story; everyone on the team did, except the new guy, Lambert. “I see.”

Immediately defensive, she explained, “I asked Wyatt if I could work it on my own time before we caught the Reaper.”

She should have known Brandon wouldn’t leave it alone. One brow arched in frank disbelief. “And he said yes?”

Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she hesitated before replying, “Yes. He did.”

He pressed harder. “Recently? Even after the site went dark and the investigation turned to the users of it, not the owners?”

She didn’t answer. Here was where it got particularly sticky.

“I get it. And begging forgiveness is easier than asking permission?”

“Something like that.” She didn’t ask Brandon to cover for her. She wasn’t totally sure she’d done anything wrong, but just in case, she wasn’t about to drag him into it with her.

“Okay. I guess you know what you’re doing. Please, though, don’t let it get to you.” His handsome face growing more serious, he added, “If it starts to get in your head, promise me you’ll walk away.”

A laugh, small and bitter, escaped her mouth. “Oh, my friend, you don’t even want to know the kinds of things that go on in my head.”

She began walking again, telling him without words the subject was closed. Though Lily appreciated his warning, and knew it came from a good place, she was far beyond being warned. He hadn’t worn her shoes, lived what she’d lived. Few people had or ever would in their lifetime.

I’m doing okay. As long as I have the job, I’m fine .

Yeah. The job. It kept her moving forward, one foot at a time, one case at a time, one scumbag at a time.

There would be more than that someday. There had to be. They said after every nightmare came another dawn, and Lily Fletcher believed it.

She had to. Because God help her if it wasn’t true.

Sixteen and dead.

Sixteen and murdered.

Sam couldn’t speak for a moment after the FBI special agent in her kitchen broke the news. In fact, she couldn’t quite breathe. Or hear. Or think.

Rising from her chair, she walked as if in a daze to the sink. She leaned over it, turned on the faucet, and splashed cold water on her face, needing to clear her head and get a grip on her emotions. Sam kept her back to the man whose professional expression had not entirely hidden his sympathy. He knew she had barely known Ryan Smith. Yet he also knew she was devastated by his death. Which said either that the man had very good intuition, or that Sam was very bad at disguising her feelings.

“Are you all right?” he asked from behind her.

Sam nodded, saying nothing as she grabbed a paper towel and dried her face. The cold water had snapped her out of her moment of shock, though she didn’t turn around right away. She wanted a little more time, a second or two to pretend she had merely imagined a nice young kid she knew had been murdered.

Then she remembered something. “ Wilmington.” She spun around. “I saw a story blurb online about missing Delaware teens found in a frozen pond.”

He nodded once, confirming the suspicion.

She shuddered. What a horrible way to die. “How can you be so sure he didn’t fall through the ice? How do you know he was murdered?”

“Trust me.”

Two words she never wanted to hear coming out of a man’s mouth again. “I don’t even know you.”

“I mean, trust me when I say there is no way it was an accident.” His jaw flexing, he bit out a reluctant explanation. “They were bound.”

She closed her eyes briefly as her stomach churned and her throat tightened.

“They,” she mumbled, acknowledging the rest of it. “Were they random victims? Or was the other boy someone Ryan knew?”

“His best friend.”

Two teenage boys. This was more awful by the moment. “His friend-not the friend he was writing to ask me about? Not the one who was being taken in by an e-mail scheme?”

Agent Lambert nodded, his sympathy still evident. And suddenly she realized why he was here. Why he was asking these questions. Why he had come to her. It was more than the fact that they’d exchanged a few e-mails. Much more.

“My God. Were they killed by whoever was trying to scam him?”

He didn’t answer her question, countering with several of his own. “Is there anything else you can remember about your interactions with Ryan Smith? Did he mention even in passing where he might be headed that night or who he was meeting?”

“That night?” she asked, gulping as she realized the hits hadn’t stopped coming. “The night he IM’d me?”

“Yes.”

She shuffled to her chair and sank onto it. Like most people, Sam read the news; she was aware awful things happened to people every single day. She’d been touched by tragedy herself, with the accidental death of her father when she’d been only eleven.

But these were just kids. Nice, friendly kids whose only crimes had been gullibility and loyalty. Kids who’d ended up on the bottom of a frozen lake, never to go to their senior prom or set off for college or meet the right girl and get married. All that possibility-gone.

And if she hadn’t gone out for a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and some damned ice cream, and had been home to answer Ryan Smith’s instant message, they might be alive today.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Lambert said. He moved behind her, but she didn’t turn around, not even when he dropped a hand onto her shoulder and gently squeezed.

It was the first intimate touch she had received from a man in almost a year.

Even Uncle Nate-her late father’s partner in the force, whom her mother leaned on for everything except romance-did nothing more than shake her hand when they saw each other. As if he recognized the mental barricade she had erected between herself and any man.

This man hadn’t seen that barricade. And Sam found herself going very still, trying to decide how she felt about it.

When she’d pictured being touched again by a male of the species, she’d had typical divorcée daydreams. Running into her ex and his skank-ho with Josh Duhamel on one arm and Johnny Depp on the other. That would be good. Not this. Not comfort from a complete stranger.

But then, never in her darkest dreams had she envisioned getting caught up in a double murder investigation, or that her heart would feel on the verge of breaking over a sweet teenager she barely knew.

“You can’t blame yourself,” the agent said, his hand still heavy and warm on her shoulder. “The scam was convincing. I think the other boy would have gone no matter what you said, and Ryan would have tagged along with him. They had that kind of friendship.”

She nodded, appreciating the words, knowing they could be true. She had Tricia, her own through-thick-or-thin friend, and they would do anything for each other. So maybe her being home and trying to talk Ryan out of going with his buddy by IM wouldn’t have changed a thing.

But maybe it would have.

“You okay?”

Sam tore her thoughts off the dark imaginings of the boys’ final moments and became more aware of the pressure of his strong hand on her shoulder. It didn’t feel threatening or inappropriate. This man was a stranger, however. Besides, she had spent the last several months telling herself she would never lean on another man again.