“What?”
He flicked a finger toward her. “Oh, nothing, it’s just funny. I lost mine, too. Can’t find it for the life of me. Had to pick up a new one in town this morning.”
A strange sensation crawled the length of skin from Annie’s tailbone to the nape of her neck as she stared at him, but Walt seemed not to notice as he turned back toward the lake, pulling his feet out of the water with a contented sigh.
“We better get on back,” he said, reaching for his sneakers.
But Annie couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and time itself seemed to slow as Walt wedged his feet into his shoes. One at a time, he knotted the laces with little twists of his hands as she stared at his wrists, at the tattoos from his military days that she had seen a hundred times and thought nothing of.
SEMPERon one wrist,FIon the other.
Always faithful.
Chapter 40JAKE
Jake sat slumped in his chair behind the desk, his forehead resting on the stack of empty forms.
They were a prop, nothing more. Blank citations that he’d been scribbling away at when Annie came in for the mere appearance of having something to do, when the honest fact of it was that he’d been too ashamed to look her in the eyes.
What a mess. This whole investigation was a lousy, rotten, knotted, miserable mess, and all he had to show for it were the deep sets of crow’s-feet around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Jake turned his head, gazing at the clock on the wall as his lids grew heavy with impending sleep. Reluctantly, he let them close.
Somehow, in the span of mere days, he’d managed to lose his best friend and alienate his work partner, too.
Daniel and Annie.
He sure hadn’t seen that one coming, but greater than the personal resentment he felt over Annie’s hiding their relationship was the unsettled knot it left in the pit of his stomach. The entire case he’d built against Daniel revolved around his relationship with Jamie, arelationship that Annie claimed never existed. Was it possible that he had misinterpreted what he’d seen in the truck?
There was a sudden thud against the glass door and Jake snapped his head up to find the dusty imprint of a wing left behind by a bird that had collided with the pane.
For the first time in days, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
It was a fitting metaphor. He was the bird and last night was the glass. The moment Daniel opened the door to reveal Annie standing there in the living room…Smack.
Jake’s eyes dropped to the lighter, still lying where Annie had slammed it down on the desk with the claim that it belonged to Jamie’s killer.
He was sure he’d seen it before, but where?
He reached for it and turned it over in his fingers, eyes drawn to an imperfection in the plastic. Yes, it was that little nick near the bottom that was triggering something in his mind, something that had instantly sparked when Annie first held it out in her hand, though the recollection it evoked had been faint and fleeting, and he hadn’t quite been able to drag it out of the fog.
His thumb found the starter, and absently, he flicked the lighter once, twice, three times. On the third attempt, a flame flickered brightly to life, and with it, a memory—searing, lucid, and devastating.
He was back up at the boathouse, sitting on a stump beside his father. The air smelled of cedar pitch from the log their chain saws rested against, and Jamie Boyd had just jogged into the clearing. Jake watched his father, Walt’s green eyes lingering on Jamie as he flicked his orange lighter once, twice, three times, before it lit. As he pulled the cigar away from his mouth and exhaled a cloud of smoke, his fingers fumbled with the lighter, and he dropped it. Jake reached down to pick it up, the plastic freshly nicked.
The heat from the flame was burning his thumb, the room was starting to spin, and Jake was out of his seat, chair tumbling behind him as he flung the lighter away, sending it skittering across the desk.
“No!”
The world was caving in beneath him; the firm ground on which he’d dwelled a minute ago no more solid than shifting sand.
It wasn’t possible. His father could not have murdered Jamie Boyd… but… but the way he had stared at her across the clearing with that cigar between his lips… and what were the odds of the killer dropping another such lighter, identically colored and nicked in the exact same place?
Impossible. They were impossible odds. The lighter belonged to his father, and there was only one reason why Walt Proudy would have been back in those woods.
Jake was around the desk in an instant, through the door of the station, and leaping off the sidewalk for the cruiser. With shaking hands he managed to yank open the door on his second try and fumbled with the key in the ignition until, at last, the engine turned over and he shot backward out of his parking space, roaring toward Main Street and praying through his panic.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please let me be wrong.”
