Anahera shoved her fingers through her hair, her heart a drum in her chest that hadn’t stopped thudding since Siobhan Genovese’s revelation. “Vincent’s always been such a straight arrow.” With a wife who didn’t have a single friend in town and whose online presence was doll-like perfection.
Her stomach churned.
“I’m more likely to get the truth from him if I can talk to him alone.” Will took a corner, his headlights flashing off the reflective barriers. “I’ll see if I can convince him to meet me tonight, but if not, it’ll be tomorrow.”
“I won’t say anything.” Anahera might be loyal, but she’d never again be foolishly trusting and blind. “Some of us used to wonder if Vincent felt trapped by his parents’ expectations, but he always did such a good job of appearing happy that we bought it.”
Will increased his speed to pass a tanker rumbling along the road. “Everyone has secrets,” he repeated after completing the maneuver. “It’s often the people who look like they have no secrets at all who turn out to have the biggest ones.”
Anahera’s mind returned to Siobhan Genovese’s elegant living room and to the conversation she hadn’t fully understood. “Tell me about the inquiry,” she found herself saying, the hushed darkness of the night enveloping them in a cocoon where questions could be asked and secrets revealed.
Will’s hands tightened on the steering wheel to the point that his bones pushed white against his skin. “I was in charge of keeping a woman and a three-year-old child safe in the buildup to the woman giving testimony against a man.” His words were clipped, a cop giving a report. Nothing but the facts.
“He was her husband and the father of her child, but he also happened to be a serial rapist who got careless—his wife began to notice the washing machine running in the middle of the night, after her husband got home ‘from work,’ saw rope, gloves, and duct tape in his car, and lined up his absences with the violent rapes in the area.”
He passed another tanker, this one festooned with lights that turned it into a traveling star. “When she questioned him about it, he punched her five times, knocking out three front teeth, then kicked her in the stomach and left the house. She took her son and came to the station with blood on her shirt. I was the detective on the case. I told them they’d be safe. I was wrong. Daniella and Alfie are buried in a private family cemetery on a vineyard in Marlborough.”
So many things not said, so many truths buried in the details. “Their killer’s the one you were accused of beating?”
“I did beat him.”
“Did your superiors cover it up?” She wouldn’t blame them if they had—because sometimes, the law didn’t work; sometimes, lines had to be crossed.
“No. He refused to testify.” Will’s smile was grim. “Apparently, he found God two months into his time on remand, right as the inquiry began. He called me, said he deserved what I’d done to him and he not only wouldn’t be cooperating with the inquiry, he was recanting his statement about police brutality and blaming his injuries on a bar fight earlier that night. I told him I didn’t need the fucking favor.”
Will’s jaw worked. “I was ready to walk into the inquiry and say I did it. Only reason I hadn’t already done that was because the prosecution team on the rapes was worried it’d bring my credibility into question, give the defense a way to attack my work on the case.”
He released a harsh exhale. “In the end, I never had to talk to the inquiry board. My superior officer got the entire thing dismissed for lack of evidence. The official letter came this week, closed the book on the whole thing.
“No one much argued with the decision—turns out rapists who carve up their elderly victims, then murder three-year-old boys aren’t popular with anyone. Even the media barely reported on it. Nobody asked me what it felt like to know I owed my continued career to a murdering rapist.”
She got it, saw why he was in Golden Cove. “Alcohol? Drugs?”
“I almost beat up another asshole, then another. My partners had to hold me back. You can work out the rest.”
Anahera had the niggling feeling she was forgetting to ask something important, but the shape of it stayed frustratingly out of her reach. And since she understood about nightmares and about not wanting to look back, she took Will’s lead and dropped the subject. “I think Siobhan would’ve made a good murderer.”
Will’s fingers eased on the black of the steering wheel. “Most people wouldn’t think so.”
“That’s exactly why she’d be a good one. She’s cold, ruthless, but she looks the part of the rich old lady. No one would ever suspect her.” Pausing, she looked out at the blackness beyond; they were well out of civilization and in the heart of an unforgiving landscape that offered no second chances. “Have you looked into her dating or marital history?” She returned her attention to the cop who told no lies but didn’t tell her everything all the same. “Any suspicious disappearances or deaths?”
Will’s grin was a sudden thing; it changed his whole face. “Never married, self-made woman. Tough as granite.”
“And with a strange sense of morality,” Anahera said. “She balked at murder, but a suspicious disappearance didn’t even register on her radar.”
A smoky ballad poured out of the radio as the night grew darker around them, the singer’s voice husky and soulful.
Anahera’s skin rippled with a sudden cold. “This was the song we danced to at our wedding.” Will didn’t care about her and Edward and maybe that was why she could tell him. “I wore a long white dress that I used all my savings to buy and he wore a tuxedo. We got married in a small hotel ballroom decorated like a winter wonderland, with thirty of Edward’s family and friends who’d flown over, and my closest friends, in attendance.” She’d had no family by then, no one she acknowledged anyway. “And we danced to this song.”
It had been a fairy tale come to life, one against which Anahera’s battered and scarred spirit had no defense. “Have you ever been married?”
“Came close once, but then Alfie and Daniella were murdered, and I wasn’t quite right in the head for a while. She couldn’t handle it. I don’t blame her for that. She didn’t sign up for a messed-up cop who was placed on administrative leave while the inquiry ran its course.”
“What happened to in sickness and in health?”
“We hadn’t taken any vows yet. And we all have our breaking points.”
“Yes.”
“What’s yours?”
But Anahera shook her head. “Enough confessions in the dark, cop. You keep my secrets and I’ll keep yours—but let’s not pretend that we’re anything but two broken people who happened to run into each other.” There was nothing else, no strong foundation on which to build.
“No,” Will said, his eyes on the dark beyond the windshield. “But I’m still going to ask if you want me to come in tonight.”
Anahera hadn’t yet decided on an answer by the time he brought the SUV to a stop in front of her cabin. Then the high beams of his headlights picked up the figure slumped on the porch, and the question was moot.