J.T. Ellison - What Lies Behind

“Sounds like a typical fourth year to me. Too much work, not enough time for actual living.”

He shook his head briefly. “You’re probably right. But then he and his new lover end up with knife wounds. She’s dead, he still might die. There’s a case to be made for murder-suicide, but...it doesn’t feel as random as it might otherwise, I guess. Tell me, what do you know about curing cancer?”

Chapter 6

McLean, Virginia

ROBIN WAS STILL. She hadn’t moved since the wee hours, since the phone call and coffee and news and seething spiral of black oppressive knowledge had shut her down.

Riley sat next to her, not touching, whistling something under his breath. Rachmaninoff, she thought, or wait, no, it was one of the songs from the movie soundtrack of Braveheart .

Maybe she’d been asleep, drifted off, maybe she’d been sunk into meditation. She realized she was hearing him, the soft sibilance of his lips, so close, but never farther away, and shook herself slightly. The sun had come up. The sky to her west was hazy, the color of weak tea. The rustlings of the night creatures was long past. It would rain today.

Real. It was real. Amanda was dead.

A searing pain filled her chest. Red, she was red, everywhere. It rushed over her body, biting, stinging. She reached out to touch it, surprised when her finger touched skin, and the red absorbed into her, disappeared.

Not now, Robbie. You can’t go down that hole again.

Riley had told her everything when he arrived, about the boy who’d killed her sister, that she’d been taken to the D.C. morgue, that there would be an autopsy. That the boy who killed her had tried to kill himself, too, but was still alive.

Her legs were asleep. She’d stacked them beneath her before she’d gone into her empty place, the place she went to cope with anything overwhelming or hurtful, or when the synesthesia got to be too much. The empty place had gotten her through Afghani jails and snakebites and gunshots and torture. Had gotten her through her father’s death. It was a wellspring of nothingness, a virtual blank spot in her psyche filled with nothing but soft, calming white noise. She entered it when the pain was too great, and emerged when her subconscious recognized she could deal with things again.

It was a valuable tool. One she hadn’t thought she’d need ever again.

Swallowing, she realized the cup of coffee was still in her hand. The dregs were cold but she was parched. She let the chewy thickness linger in her mouth, realized she would never again drink the brew without thinking of her sister, a gash in her neck, dead in Georgetown.

Red, red, red.

Stop.

She shut her eyes briefly, and the moment passed. It had taken her years to learn how to control her curse, her gift, her otherness. Now it came to her gently, when she allowed it, pastels and soft things, but fear or horror killed her ability to control it. And she needed to be in control right now.

Amanda was supposed to die very, very old, or in the field somewhere, a hero’s death, not at the wrong end of a knife less than five miles from her sister’s loving arms.

Why hadn’t she said she was coming to the States? Why hadn’t she called? Robin would have protected her, done anything for her. Even if there was animosity between them, they were all that was left.

Amanda had called. A month prior. And you were too far up your own miserable ass to help. This is your fault.

There would be no tears, but her throat thickened, and she swallowed hard, again and again, until she realized the bile was rising; there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She jumped up and vomited over the railing.

Riley jumped up, too, one hand on her back, the other entangled in her long blond hair, pulling it back. He made shushing noises as if she were a child who’d had a bad dream. And she let him comfort her, using the only language either of them knew anymore—the dirty grayness of grief that helped with the shock of losing someone you love too soon.

When her stomach had finally settled, she sat back on the chair and met his eyes. They were pretty eyes. An odd shade of blue, dark and deep as the ocean, they were his best feature. The rest had been handsome, once, before. Before a knife to the forehead and ten years on the ground in too many countries to count wore even that out of him, and left him weary, battle torn and hungry for things she could barely give him. He was like a piece of granite, carved from the earth, silent and deadly.

“You’re back,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but the interrogatory was evident. She’d scared him, collapsing in on herself like that, only to emerge choking and flailing over the rail.

“Yes. Do they know why?” she asked, surprised at how rusty she sounded, like a pipe left years in the rain.

He shook his head. “It’s too early. If the boy wakes up, the police will certainly question him. But he’s barely hanging on.”

“She called me. At 3:23 this morning. She didn’t say a word.”

Riley frowned. “Not possible. She was already gone.”

Robin picked up her cell phone. Showed him the incoming call.

“Someone has her phone,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. It was probably one of the cops, checking her contacts for someone to notify.”

“And when they found your name, and you answered, they decided not to tell you?”

“Maybe I’m not listed as her next of kin.”

He touched her arm. “Robin. You are. You know you are.”

“It was a murder-suicide, you said.”

“There was a note. You’re sure you’ve never heard of Thomas Cattafi?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t. And a note, that’s not enough to go on. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone else with them. Someone that killed her, and tried to kill him.”

“What was she working on again?”

At that, Robin sucked in her breath and looked away. “You know I don’t know. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. She called me a month back, said she’d gotten into some trouble, wanted me to come bail her out. I was up to my ass in alligators with the failed meet in Kirkuk. There was no stopping to help her. So I said no. Told her she needed to learn how to deal with these things herself. That’s the last time we talked.” Hazy green clouds surrounded her head. The letters N and O rotated slowly, turning white in the mist.

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

She sniffed once, hard, then snapped to, waving her hands to dissipate the cloud. It went away dutifully, and when she opened her eyes again, she saw nothing but the backyard she loved, with the feeders and flowers grown out of control, the water, roaring past. Her very own jungle. Control.

“Riley, we need to investigate. Get Alicia to run the call logs into my phone. I don’t care what sort of excuse she needs to make, who she needs to promise what, just find out where my sister’s phone was when she...when it was used to call me.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’ll need clearance—”

“Riley Dixon, when is the last time you asked for clearance to run a phone call?”

His jaw flexed, the muscle in his cheek jumping. She’d hit a nerve. Good. But she softened her voice the tiniest bit.

“I don’t know what Amanda was up to. But I will find out what happened to her. Are you going to help me or not?”

“I’ll help you, Robbie. But I can’t promise you’re going to like where this leads. What if she’s involved in something bad? What if you find out there’s some sort of attack coming, and she’s a part of it?”

She nodded, and stood, arms tight around her waist.

“Riley, she’s not. She’d never be involved in anything to hurt us.”