“Nothing about her nightgown,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Surely to God they kept it.”
Zach’s eyes were unfocused right now, too. Seeing another time, another place. “She was naked. The nightgown was underneath her. Like...he spread it on the grass because it was damp.”
Considerate of him, Bran thought but didn’t say. “There was no semen. The nightgown might not tell us anything.”
“He’d have touched it.” Zach sounded as if he was strangling.
Bran, too, was having an unusually difficult time separating what they were saying from his memories of Sheila. It was true she’d been pretty. She would have grown into true beauty if she’d had the chance.
But that was the adult looking back. Then, all he’d known was that she was the sweetest kid. Even stuck with more responsibility than he’d wanted for watching over her, Bran had never resented the little girl with the sunny nature. When he remembered her, she was always smiling or giggling. He thanked God he wasn’t burdened with the memory of her corpse.
For all that he’d dealt with in the years since, working as a cop, Bran’s mind still boggled at the idea of a man seeing a child that age as sexual...and then putting his hands around her neck and killing her because he couldn’t afford to let her talk.
“I’ll try asking,” Zach said.
Bran stared at him without comprehension for a moment. Try asking for what? Then he remembered. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. That would be good. Worse comes to worst... I don’t know. Maybe we’ll have to hire a lawyer to put them on the spot.”
“Or find a journalist who’s willing to ask hard questions, maybe wants to follow the working of a cold case.”
Bran grunted. He wasn’t much of a fan of reporters, having seen too much insensitive and intrusive behavior in the past. But the right one...yeah.
“Worse comes to worst...” Zach agreed.
The two men sat in silence for a minute. Finally, Zach pushed himself up and went to the refrigerator. “Want another?”
“Sure.”
Bran accepted the can, pulled the tab and took a long swallow before deciding to change the subject. “It’s been a good stretch—what, a week?—since anything has happened. You think Hayes’s group has given up?”
“No.” Anger tightened Zach’s face, making the bony angles sharper. “God, I hope not.”
“What?”
“Think about it. Even if Hayes is charged, it might not be for months. It could take another year for a trial to happen. Tess won’t be safe until that son of a bitch has been convicted and the prison doors have slammed shut. Unless—” his hands flattened on the table and he leaned forward, his gaze boring into Bran’s “—we catch him and his friends in action, intimidating a witness. If we do that, we can end this.”
Bran stared at him, taking in the feral expression he’d never seen before. “You’re not afraid for yourself.”
“Should I be?”
He laughed, more in disbelief than anything else. “You’re in love with her.”
Zach didn’t look away but he managed to wipe his expression clean. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is all about her now.”
“It’s about Antonio Alvarez.”
“You’re not seeing her on the sly?”
Guilt flickered in Zach’s blue eyes, giving him away. His mouth tightened. “And if I am?”
“What, it’s just sex?”
“No, it’s—” He swore. “I don’t know. You know I’m not big on the idea of love and happily-ever-after.”
It wasn’t as if Bran ever imagined himself in love, but he felt something now he finally identified as pity. He’d lost his mother, brother and sister, but he, at least, had stayed in the same house, the same school, kept the same friends. Bran hadn’t been yanked into the unfamiliar, Dad had never remarried. Bran had been older than Zach, too, when the split happened.
In contrast, Zach had grown up with constant moves and new schools. His only parent didn’t know the meaning of the word “fidelity.”