Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

The feelings filled her, ached in her bones, in her muscles, like a virus. Loss. Such a terrible sense of loss, an emptiness as hard as steel inside her. It had been only a matter of hours, and yet the sense of loneliness was crushing.

Why? That one question arose again and again. Savannah's death seemed so senseless, so sadistic. What kind of God could allow such cruelty? Why? It was the same question she had asked twenty years ago, when her father had been taken away from her. No one had had an answer for it then, either.

That was perhaps the worst of it. She was a person with a logical, practical mind. If a thing made sense, had a reason behind it, she could understand at least. But things that struck from out of the blue defied logic. There was no reason, no explanation she might find some comfort in. That left her with nothing, nothing to cling to, not even hope, because in a world where anything might happen at any time, unpredictability shoved hope aside and left fear in its place.

"I hate this!" she whispered, her face pressed into Jack's shoulder. "I hate these feelings. God, I wish I'd never come back here!"

Jack rocked her, tightening his arms around her. "It wouldn't have mattered, angel. It wouldn't have changed anything."

Laurel thought of the trinkets the killer had left for her and wondered. Would he have sent them to someone else? Would he have killed some other woman's only sister?

Regardless of the answer, she was caught with the burden of guilt; someone died either way. Responsibility pressed down on her, just as it had in Scott County. She thought she would have given anything for the chance to get out, but she knew she wouldn't take the chance if it were offered. She was trapped by her own sense of duty and honor, stuck here in yet another nightmare.

"I'd undo it for you if I could," Jack said softly.

Jack, who claimed to be nobody's hero, would have gone back and changed history for her. Laurel slipped her arms around him and held on, knowing he wasn't the man to anchor her life to. But the need and the knowledge clashed inside her, and need won out for the moment.

"We can go away for a few days," he whispered. "Get away from it. I know a cabin over on Bayou Noir-"

"I can't." Laurel sat back a little, blinking up at him through her tears. She swiped a hand under her eyes and combed her hair back with her fingers. "I-I can't go anywhere. There are things to do-arrangements-" She swallowed hard and let the real reason come to the fore. "I have to find out who did this. Someone has to pay."

"And you have to be the one to catch him?" Jack said sharply, her sense of responsibility rubbing against the grain of his selfishness. He wanted her safe and all to himself, if not forever, then for a little while. "We've got a sheriff for that."

"The killer isn't sending the sheriff trophies from his conquests," she said bleakly. "He's sent me three."

The news hit Jack with the force of a baseball bat, leaving him incredulous, a little dizzy, a little sick. A murderer had singled her out. He sat back on his heels, his jaw slack, his fingers tight as he held her at arm's length. "He's sent you what?"

"An earring. I don't know whose. And Annie Gerrard's necklace. This morning I found a necklace of Savannah's in my pocketbook."

"Jesus Christ, Laurel! That's all the more reason to get the hell out!"

"That's what you'd do, Jack?" She arched a brow, studying him hard enough that he dropped his hands and glanced away. "Cut and run? I don't think so. For all you like to play it that way, I don't think you would. I know I can't."

"You'd rather end up with a silk scarf knotted around your throat?" he said brutally, his hands shaking at the idea of anyone's hurting her. The concern set everything inside him shaking. He never should have gotten involved with her. Of all the women he could have had, he'd fallen for the one who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.

"I don't fit the pattern," she said. "I'm not promiscuous."

"You been sleeping with me, haven't you, 'tite chatte?"

Laurel scowled at the sardonic edge in his voice. "That's different."

He gave an exaggerated shrug. "How is that different? You hardly know me, we go to bed together, we have sex. How is that different? You think this killer is gonna split hairs?"

"Stop it!" she snapped, hating him for belittling what they had had together. Even if he didn't want to call it love, it was more than sex. It certainly wasn't in the same category as what Savannah had shared with the likes of Ronnie Peltier and Jimmy Lee Baldwin. Her fingers curled over some of the papers he had swept off his desk in his rage, and she snatched them up and threw them at him, a gesture that was more symbolic of futility than fury.

"You amaze me," Jack said, grabbing hold of his anger with both hands. Better to be angry than afraid. Better to push her away than to cling to her when he knew he'd lose her in the end anyway. "You think you're Wonder Woman or something. Every bad thing that happens, you think you could have stopped it, you think you have to solve it, win the day for justice."

"Oh, excuse me for being a responsible person!"

"That's not responsibility, that's arrogance."

Laurel gasped as the jab stuck deep. "How dare you say that to me!" she said, her voice a trembling whisper that rose in pitch and volume with each word. "You sit up here in this private prison you bought yourself, drinking your liver into a knot, taking the blame for someone else ending their own life! Everything that happened was your fault-but, no, it's not really your fault because your father was a son of a bitch. Let's get him up here and we can have us a real finger-pointing session."

"We can't," he shouted, leaning over her.

"Why not?" she yelled, meeting his glare.

"Because I killed him!"

Like a marionette whose strings had been cut, Laurel plopped down on the floor amid the drift of manuscript pages and scribbled notes, stunned speechless.

"With my own two hands," Jack whispered, lifting his hands for examination, the long, elegant fingers spread wide as he turned them this way and that.

He rose slowly to his feet, a strange calm settling inside him. He had wanted to be rid of her. Wasn't that what he had told himself as he walked the deserted streets of town in the gray mist before dawn? Loving her hurt too much, and the end, which was inevitable, would be excruciating. This was his chance to make the break, his chance to show her once and for all just what he was. Then she could walk away from him.

"He hit Maman one time too many. He knocked me aside too many times without ever thinking one day I wouldn't be puny and weak."

He stared right through her, into his past, seeing it all once more-the shabby kitchen that smelled of grease, his mother cowering by the stained sink, Blackie going after her with his arm raised.

"I grabbed an iron skillet off the stove-it was the first thing that came to hand-and I hit him, smashed his skull in like an eggshell," he said flatly, as if he needed to unplug all emotion to be able to tell the story. "I don't think I meant to kill him," he said, though after all these years he still wasn't sure. Christ knew he had wished Blackie dead often enough, to put an end to the fear and the shame. "I just wanted him to stop hitting Maman. I was finally big enough to make him stop. That's all I wanted-for him to stop, for him to leave us alone."

He sniffed and held his breath a moment, fighting the rise of childhood feelings and gathering the old bitterness as fuel to go on. "And while my mother sat on the floor with blood running out of her broken nose, crying over this man who had abused her and her children for seventeen years, I dragged his body out to our bâteau. I took ol' Blackie for a ride into the swamp, tied an anchor around his middle, and dumped him in the deepest, darkest water I could find. No need for a decent burial when he was going straight to hell anyway. No need to drag the sheriff into it. We all just pretended he went out on a bender and never came back.