Anne Stuart - Into The Fire

She stayed in the shadows, silent, motionless, horrified. He saw her anyway, his head jerking up as he peered into the darkness.

“Who’s there?”

He wasn’t alone. The small figure of a man stood in the doorway, blocking the light from spreading out onto the little tableau. The man on the ground was groaning, cursing, but smart enough not to move. And Jamie wondered if she had time to run.

She wasn’t going to run, she reminded herself. She had a bad habit of running from trouble, and this was what she’d been determined to face.

She stepped out of the shadows, moving up to him. He wouldn’t know who she was, of course. He’d barely been aware of her back then, and he hadn’t seen her since that night so long ago, when both their lives had changed. She’d be the last person he expected to show up on his doorstep.

She was right about one thing. “What are you doing here?”

He knew exactly who she was. It was one shock on top of another, and she came out with the only answer she could muster. “I’m looking for answers.”

“Nate’s dead,” Dillon said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.

“I know that. I want to know why.”

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This one’s for Spike and Yoshiki.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

I t was a cold night in November, and the heater in her old Volvo had died forty miles back. Jamie stared straight ahead into the darkness, ignoring the warning lights on her dashboard, ignoring everything but her final destination. She’d put soothing New Age music on the CD player, but it hadn’t managed to calm her. She’d grown even more tense, trying to fight the soporific effects of the soft music, until her hands were numb from gripping the steering wheel.

What the hell was she doing here? Nate was dead, murdered three months ago—coming here wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t stop the pain.

She focused on the road, trying to stay alert after seventeen hours of driving. Nate was dead and no one could tell her what happened. He’d been found bludgeoned to death in an old garage in Cooperstown, Wisconsin, and no one seemed to give a damn. The police had given up after what had been only a cursory investigation. It was a drug deal gone wrong, they said. They had more important things to spend their time on. Three months had passed and everyone had forgotten.

Everyone but Jamie Kincaid and her mother. Nate had come into their family when he was ten years old, his own parents dead in a tragic fire, and he’d always been more of a brother than a cousin. More of a son to Isobel and Victor Kincaid than a nephew. Maybe even more of their own child than Jamie, it had seemed at times, but she always quashed that paranoid, disloyal thought. Her parents loved her, just as they loved Nate. Everyone loved charming, feckless Nate, with his glorious smile and easy charm. And he even looked like her parents, with his dark Kincaid good looks and brown eyes. A resemblance the paler, adopted Jamie had always lacked.

It didn’t matter, never had mattered to her. There was enough love in their small family to go around, no matter what disasters befell them. And disasters had followed Nate like a vengeful guardian angel. Ending in his own murder, a thousand miles from home, a thousand years away.

The police didn’t care. Isobel did. After she’d learned of his death, she’d sunk into a deep, angry depression, not eating, not leaving the house, mourning her lost nephew with a fierce, almost biblical passion. But both Isobel and Jamie needed answers before they could let him rest in peace. And after a bleak, broken Thanksgiving, Jamie had gotten in her old car and driven a thousand miles to get those answers.

If she’d thought twice about it she never would have left Marshfield, Rhode Island. The roads had been crowded with holiday travelers, rushing to and from warm family gatherings. Her car was on its last legs, barely reliable enough to get her to and from work at the small private school where she taught. It wasn’t up to heroic efforts, and it was telling her so.

The windshield wipers had stopped working hours before. Fortunately the rain had stopped, as well. She’d passed the Wisconsin state line hours ago, left the interstate to wander on the dark, wet roads outside the city. It seemed like the final indignity, to die in Wisconsin, Jamie thought. Nate was such a flamboyant, larger-than-life character—he should have died spectacularly. Not in some squalid room over top of a garage.

But Dillon Gaynor had seen to it that he had. Nate’s lifelong best friend, his nemesis, the person who’d dragged him into the gutter and held him down there. The man Nate had called Killer. Who might have lived up to his name three months ago.

The police had even taken him in for questioning. But they’d let him go. Never filed charges and simply closed the case when other, more important issues took their attention. And the question that haunted Jamie was simple. Had Dillon Gaynor gotten away with murder?

Sometime in western Pennsylvania she’d wondered what the hell she was doing, going after a man she knew was capable of killing. A man who’d scared the shit out of her when he’d been a teenage delinquent. She hadn’t seen him in twelve years—he hadn’t even bothered to come east for the memorial service for his oldest friend. Even if he hadn’t beat her cousin to death, he was still guilty. He’d kept Nate supplied with drugs, he’d taken him down the dark path that had ended in a sordid death. He was to blame, even if he hadn’t actually killed him. And she would have been happy never to see him again.

But by Ohio she’d stopped thinking about it. She needed answers, her desperately grieving mother needed them. And Dillon wouldn’t dare hurt her. He might be little better than pond scum, a high-school dropout with a record and an ongoing history of trouble with the law, but he was very, very smart. Almost frighteningly so. He’d be too smart to commit another murder and think he could get away with it.

She even had a plausible excuse for coming. Dillon was holding on to a box of Nate’s possessions, and despite Isobel’s increasingly virulent requests, he hadn’t bothered to send it back to them. God only knows what was inside—maybe the Patek Philippe watch that had been handed down through generations, maybe some clue to what happened. Or maybe dirty laundry and unpaid bills. It didn’t matter. Isobel was fixated on having anything that had ever belonged to Nate, and after that bleak Thanksgiving meal Jamie had agreed to go and get it.

Exhaustion set in by Indiana. She’d been surviving on black coffee and Ritz crackers, and the blinding headache was such a familiar companion that it almost felt like a friend. She tried turning off the New Age tape to listen to the radio, but all she could get was angry hip-hop or mournful country music. The classical music station put her to sleep, so she cracked the window and turned the New Age music back on. She gripped the steering wheel tightly.

Illinois had passed in a blur. She didn’t even mind Chicago driving, when she usually panicked over city traffic. It was late by then, the commuters were home in bed, and she sped through, half daring the police to stop her.

No one did. She was close now, within just a few miles of her destination. She had an address, she had a map, she had determination.