Forbidden Temptation

Chapter Thirteen

A chill rippled over Daniel as he waited for Rose’s reaction. The day was quickly waning, purple shadows creeping across the floor of Rose’s foyer. Her dark eyes glittered in the dimming light, wide and liquid with a chaos of emotions.

“She’s dead?” Her voice sounded fragile.

He forced the word out. “Yes.”

“How?”

“She was murdered. Her face was carved up and her throat slit.”

Rose’s gaze fell. She released a slow, shaky breath.

“They found her the next morning in a nearby park. It wasn’t far from here, actually. Just off University Boulevard.” He watched her carefully, waiting for her to put it together.

“Orion,” she whispered.

“That’s what I want to find out.”

She looked at him. “You must’ve been the prime suspect.”

He could let her think that. It would have been the obvious suspicion, that the fiancé who jilted her the night before she died might have tried to end the engagement in the most permanent way possible. He could nod and skim over that aspect of what happened, and Rose would never know. After all, nobody else knew what he’d done that night.

But the sympathy in her eyes was more than he could bear.

“I might have been, if anyone had known about the breakup,” he said. He pressed his lips together, watching the slow metamorphosis of her expression from pity to confusion to horrified realization.

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

He closed his eyes. “She’d run away, into the night. I’d thought she was going to a friend’s house down the street. I’d let her go, relieved the confrontation was over. I’d gotten in my car and drove home.”

“So nobody knew she was gone.” Her voice was faint.

“She’d had a room at the back of the house. There had been a wraparound porch there where we’d meet at night after her mother had gone to bed. I’d knock on the window. She’d climb out to meet me.” The sudden sweetness of the memory caught him by surprise. There had been good times. He’d let himself forget them. “That’s what I’d done that night, so nobody else had known I’d been there. When she’d run away, I’d thought about knocking on the front door to let her mother know, but-” He stopped short, ashamed of his motives.

“You didn’t want to face her and explain everything.”

“That was my usual M.O. in those days,” he admitted, remorse burning a hole in his gut. “Taking the easy way out. Danny Hartman, dragging everyone else into trouble while he slid out of the noose with a smile and a smooth explanation. Keeping quiet seemed…easier. So that’s what I did then.”

Rose leaned heavily against the wall. “And they had had no idea at all-”

“Until she showed up in the park the next morning.”

Rose’s eyes closed again. She looked ill.

“I knew, I should’ve told, but her mother had been a mess. She’d leaned on me a lot. Said she’d thought of me as her son.” He shook his head. “I was an extension of Tina to her. I was what she’d felt she had left of her daughter, and I couldn’t take that away from her by telling her what had really happened that night.”

“But it could have affected the police investigation.”

“It wouldn’t have.” He sank against the wall opposite Rose. “Of course, I can’t claim I knew that at the time. I’d let myself get caught up in the lie and, after a certain point, when guilt began to get the best of me, I was trapped. I couldn’t change the official history of Tina Carter and Daniel Hartman. Too much had already been built on that foundation. The truth would have hurt a lot of people.”

“Including you.”

He hated the disappointment in her voice. “Don’t worry. I didn’t get away unscathed.”

“I guess, it explains your obsession with Orion.”

“I just want to know if he’s the one who killed her.”

“What if he’s not?”

Daniel didn’t know. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

Rose rubbed her temples as if she had a headache. She looked tired, and he remembered that neither of them had had much sleep in the last couple of days. They were in no condition to have this conversation.

He pushed himself away from the wall. “You need food and sleep, in that order.”

She started to demur, but he took her arm and turned her toward the kitchen. “It’ll take a minute to heat up dinner. We can talk in the morning after we’ve both had some sleep.”

He got the take-out from the refrigerator and spooned the food onto a pair of plates. While Rose sank into a chair at the kitchen table, watching him with her chin resting on her hand, he filled a couple of glasses with iced tea and finished heating the food.

“Why did you tell me?” Rose asked as he pulled the second plate from the microwave oven. He didn’t need her to clarify; he knew what she was asking.

He picked up the drinks and put them on the table, looking down into her curious eyes. “Because I needed to.”

Her gaze softened. “And I was in the right place at the right time?”

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You were the right person at the right time.”

She caught his hand, threading her fingers through his briefly before letting go. She turned her head toward the window, her profile outlined in tangerine light from the dying sun. “Detective Carter didn’t even let on that Tina was dead.”

“Frank has…issues about Tina,” he said, wondering how much of his old friend’s secrets he should reveal.

“It can’t have been easy to lose his sister so young.”

“There was more.” Daniel sighed, realizing he needed to talk about the past more than he knew. “Tina was his mother’s favorite. She didn’t even try to hide it. When Tina died, it was like she’d lost her only child.”

“Poor Frank.”

“Mary Frances made a shrine of her daughter’s room. Kept it immaculate. All her old clothes pressed and hung in the closet. All her stuffed animals and cheerleading trophies lined up where she’d left them. Frank hated that room. Couldn’t bring himself to go in there. Kept expecting to see Tina’s ghost, sitting on her bed like always. And then he’d know he was the ghost. The kid nobody remembered.”

Rose shook her head. “That’s horrible. Does her mother still keep the room the same?”

“Mary Frances died earlier this year. That’s why Frank moved back to Birmingham.”

“He’s living there in his old home?”

“Until he gets it ready to sell.”

Rose ran her finger over the rim of her glass. “Well, if Jesse Phillips is Orion, you and Frank may know the truth about what happened to Tina sooner than you think. And then maybe he can find some peace.”

A flutter of apprehension tightened Daniel’s gut. She was right. If Jesse Phillips had killed Melissa and Alice and the other women who’d died here in Birmingham, he could be the man Daniel had spent the last few years of his life trying to find. The long search for justice-for redemption-could be over.

Then what?

He tabled the unnerving question and retrieved the warm plates of food. He grabbed a couple of forks from the drawer by the sink and carried everything to the table, setting the shrimp dish in front of Rose. “Eat.”

She picked up the fork and pushed the shrimp around the plate. “Daniel, if you don’t believe I’m seeing death veils, what’s the alternative? I’ve been right about four murders-how do you explain that?”

He put down the fork he’d just picked up and looked across the table at her. “How long have you seen veils?”

Her brow wrinkled. “I think I was five or six when I saw the first true-love veil.” Her lips curved. “On my parents. I didn’t know what it was then, of course. I just remember seeing it made me feel safe.”

“That early,” he murmured, surprised. He’d figured she’d been older, maybe entering her teens. Five years old was pretty early to have that sort of facility for understanding human behavioral cues.

Then again, a child with parents who loved each other might know, instinctively, that their being together was something right and special. He’d known it about his own parents, hadn’t he? Felt, from a young age, that they were more than just two people who loved him. They’d been a unit. A team. When his father had died six years ago, his mother had turned into someone he didn’t know anymore, a half person who had to learn how to be whole all over again.

And he’d done nothing to help her, choosing to deal with his own loss by running. Just as he always had.

Guilt stabbed him low in his chest.

“I figured out what the true-love veils were later, when I discovered boys,” Rose added, a smile in her voice if not on her lips. “I dispensed boyfriend advice to my older sister Lily and her friends. I was always right. It freaked some of them out-most of them. Lily got so mad at me for driving away her friends with my weirdness.”

“I thought she had some weirdness of her own.”

“She did.” Rose stabbed a shrimp and held it up in front of her, studying its plump curve. “But, by then, she was hiding it. Hiding from it, I guess I should say.”

“So you gave good advice to the lovelorn.”

“Uncannily good,” she said, her voice dry. She put the fork back on her plate, the shrimp still impaled. “Sometimes people didn’t want to hear that they were making a mistake.”

“How did it work?”

“The veils?”

He nodded.

Her brow crinkled with thought. “I just…saw them. One person’s face superimposed over another person’s face.”

“The faces of soul mates.”

The crinkle in her brow deepened. “I always thought so.”

“Until the Granvilles.”

Her gaze darted up to meet his. “McBride told you about that?”

“No. I learned about that from the mayor of Willow Grove.”

A look of dismay flitted over her face. “You called the mayor to check up on me, too?”

“Early on. Before you and I-” He didn’t finish.

“How is Mayor Chamberlain?”

“Talkative.” Daniel twisted his fork in the lo mein noodles on his plate, forcing himself to eat, though his earlier hunger had faded into a sort of queasy emptiness.

Rose picked up her fork again and ate the speared shrimp. The next few minutes passed in silence as they slowly made a dent in the food on their plates.

Finally, Rose put down her fork. “McBride didn’t believe in Lily’s visions when they first met.”

Daniel took a sip of tea. “I know.”

“He had his reasons-good ones.”

“His daughter’s kidnapping,” Daniel guessed, making an intuitive leap.

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m surprised he told you about that.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then how-”

“I’m a criminal profiler, Rose. I connected the dots.” He smiled. “Did you think I had some sort of psychic gift?”

He must have used the wrong words or the wrong term, because she stiffened.

“I’m not scoffing at you,” he said quickly.

Her lips tightened. “Yes, you are.”

He caught her chin, forcing her to look at him. “No, I’m not. But, I guess, I am trying to make a point.”

She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look away, either, so he continued.

“I think you’re a profiler, too.”

Her eyes ticked open a little wider.

“Untrained, unorthodox-but isn’t that really what you do? Don’t tell me the true-love veils or the death veils do it all. Insight doesn’t just pop into being, fully formed like a gift from God. What you saw in those people-call it whatever you want-came from you. Your instincts. Your insights. Your ability to read human behavior, body language, verbal cues, all of it. You had it, and then, when you got it wrong with the Granvilles, you lost faith in it. So you think they went away.”

“I think they went away,” she repeated, her eyes narrowing.

“You didn’t think you could trust your instincts about relationships, anymore, after what happened with the Granvilles.”

He could tell by the look in her eyes that he was right. He pushed forward, needing her to understand what was becoming so plain to him the more he thought about it. “You lost faith in your instincts, so you didn’t see true-love veils anymore.”

“You think I never saw true-love veils, at all,” she murmured, her back straightening. “You think I was just reading body language and-and that’s where I’m not following.”

“Did you ever stop believing in magic?” he asked, meeting her wary gaze. “When you were a kid, I mean.”

She looked down at her plate. “You think I’m delusional.”

“No, I think you have a different definition of insight.”

She shook her head. “I know what insight is. Insight is what tells me you’re scared to death of buying into anything you can’t measure or quantify or stick under a microscope.” She leaned toward him. “What happened, you saw Bigfoot in the woods and all the other guys laughed at you?”

Now she was spooking him. “I saw the ghost of my grandfather at his funeral,” he said. “Or, what I called a ghost at the time. But, now I know, I imagined seeing him because my memories of him were so strong and my emotions were so high.”

“So the veils are my mind’s way of explaining what my intuition is trying to tell me?” She arched one dark eyebrow. “I’ll give you this-it’s an elegant explanation. Simple, but broad, covers any number of possible phenomena. Of course, it would work better if I were still twelve years old, but-”

The trill of a cell phone interrupted her. She fell silent, her gaze tangling with his. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, checking the display. It was Steve, working late. He thumbed the phone on. “What’s up, Steve?”

“I found something interesting about Jesse Phillips. I’ve e-mailed it to you. See what you think and call me back if you want me to keep digging.”

Daniel hung up and looked at Rose. “I’ve got mail.”

ROSE PEERED OVER Daniel’s shoulder, scanning the e-mail from his assistant. “He changed his name?”

“Looks that way,” Daniel murmured. “Twelve years ago he was Jesse Pennington.”

“Is that significant?”

“Maybe.” Daniel jotted a quick note to Steve, asking him to dig deeper into the background of Jesse Pennington and closed the e-mail program.

“Do you think the security company knows?” she asked.

“Probably wouldn’t matter unless he had a record as Jesse Pennington.”

“So this might be unimportant?”

Daniel shook his head. “Too soon to say.” He opened his phone and dialed a number. After a pause, he said, “Captain Green, it’s Daniel Hartman. You may know this already, but I’ve come across some information about Jesse Phillips.”

As Daniel told the captain what he’d learned, Rose sat back in her chair, a strange numbness working its way through her limbs. “Thirteen years ago. That’s about when the murders started, right?” she asked Daniel when he hung up the phone.

“Yes.”

The numb sensation reached her fingers and toes. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

Daniel turned to look at her. “There’s no way to say at this point-”

“I started getting the notes the day after I met Jesse Phillips at the neighborhood meeting. He put the security systems in Alice’s apartment and Melissa’s house. Plus, I’ve seen multiple death veils in his presence, twice now.” She raised one trembling hand to her mouth, as if she could hold back the helpless smile curving her lips. “It has to be him.”

“He’s looking better for it,” Daniel admitted, putting his hands on her knees. “But if he’s Orion, he knows what he’s doing. It’ll take solid evidence to put him away-a lot more than just doing his job and changing his name, both of which are perfectly legal. Don’t drop your guard yet.”

She caught his hands in hers. “Can’t I be happy for a few minutes? Can’t I feel normal for one night?”

His thumb brushed the back of her hand. “As long as you can feel normal without leaving this house, yeah. Have at it.”

She smiled at him suddenly. “Do you dance?”

His eyebrows quirked. “No.”

She laughed, jumping up and pulling him to his feet. “Well, tonight, you do.”