Hide From Evil (26 page)

Boots turned at the sound of Krista’s voice, flattened her ears against her head, and bared her teeth in a menacing hiss.

Sean rose to his knees to let her up and she pushed to her feet. “Yeah, feeling’s mutual, you stupid cat,” Krista muttered as she checked to make sure nothing had fallen out of the files she swiped.

As she crossed the office, Boots held up a threatening paw, claws exposed. “I take it you two aren’t friends?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say she always knew I resented her for not being an Australian shepherd, but she hates everyone. Even Elinor, who got her when she was six weeks old.”

As she said it, Boots turned her attention to Sean and trotted over, her tail whipping a salute. She stopped at his boots and looked up at him with a meow, and the next thing he knew, the damn cat was weaving her way in and out of his feet.

He looked at Krista, who was staring, open mouthed, and shrugged. “Animals tend to like me.” He bent down to absently scratch the cat’s ears and he felt its purr rumble up his leg.

He felt a smile tug at his mouth at the suspicious look she gave the two of them, almost like she thought he’d somehow put the cat up to it. He bent and gave the cat a scratch between the ears. “We should get out of here. Let’s take Nate’s file and whatever he has on Karev to Ibarra’s and figure out our next move.”

She tucked the files under her arm and headed to the front door. She shut and locked the door and they headed across the drive, back to the pedestrian gate at the top of the driveway.

The wrought iron creaked as the gate swung open, and he could hear the crunch of gravel under her booted feet. As Sean stepped onto the sidewalk next to her, he did an automatic scan of the street.

His stomach nearly bottomed out when he saw the squad car heading down the street toward them.

“Shit,” he whispered. He grabbed her hand and started walking down the sidewalk toward it.

“What are you doing? Our car’s the other way.”

“And the last thing I want to do is lead the cops to it.”

“But they saw us come out of Dad’s place.”

He kept walking, his pace brisk but not rushing. He tucked his chin into his collar against the wind and hoped the cop would take them for a couple walking down the street, away from the giant mansion neither of them lived in…

The cop tweaked the siren just as they passed him. “Fuck,” Sean muttered and picked up the pace.

Behind them a car door slammed. “Hey, can I ask you a couple questions?”

Sean took off in a flat-out run, adjusting his pace to make sure Krista stayed with him. He heard the squawk of a radio, the sound of a car door, and the squeal of tires as the squad car whipped around.

The siren pealed through the cold air as they sprinted around the corner.

“This way.” The squad car screeched around the corner just as Krista pulled Sean between two houses and through a back yard that opened into a heavily wooded area that bordered one end of the neighborhood park.

Branches slapped his face as he followed Krista, who seemed to know where she was going despite the lack of any trail. He could hear sirens coming from two different directions now. The first officer on the scene must have called for backup.

They came out of the woods about a block from where they had parked the car, near the park’s playground. Fortunately the park was deserted, no curious eyes to wonder what they were doing as they squatted behind a Dumpster and watched one of the squad cars go screaming by.

“Do you think they recognized us?” Krista asked, panting from the run.

“Either way, if they pick us up we’re screwed.” He waited a couple of seconds. He could still hear the sirens in the distance, but they didn’t seem to be coming any closer. “You ready to make a run for it?”

Krista nodded, and on his signal they both took off flat out across the park and down the block to where Ibarra’s vehicle was parked between a Saab coupe and a Volkswagen station wagon.

The sirens were getting closer—the cops must be doing a loop through the park, but with no cover and the car only a dozen yards away there was nothing to do but run. He skidded to a stop and unlocked the car. He and Krista both scrambled inside.

The sirens were blaring now.

“Go, go,” Krista whispered, frantic.

“Wait,” Sean said and scrunched himself down on the floor, ignoring Krista’s cry of pain as she banged her hand on the gear shift when he yanked her down.

“What—”

“I’m pretty sure they didn’t see us get in the car.” But “pretty sure” wasn’t a hundred percent and he was taking a big goddamn risk. “If we go screaming out of here like a bat out of hell, they’ll know it’s us. And whatever you’ve seen in movies, a high-speed car chase in a populated area is no fucking picnic.”

“What if they get out to check the car? We’re sitting ducks.”

As she said it, the sirens abruptly silenced and blue-and-red light flashed through the interior.

Sean could hear the low rumble of the squad car’s engine and the intermittent static of the radio.

“Keep driving,” Krista whispered, echoing his thoughts.

Sean watched the lights bouncing off the interior and tried not to think about the fact that the doors were shut and the windows rolled up tight. A bead of sweat trickled down his neck and his chest started to go tight.

“I think they’re going,” Krista said.

The lights moved through the car and finally faded. Sean closed his eyes and forced himself to stay on the floor for another minute before checking. As soon as he was sure the cop car was gone and another wasn’t about to come hurtling around the corner, he turned on the ignition and opened the driver’s side window wide.

Krista opened her window too.

Sean sucked down half a dozen lungfuls and then forced himself to roll the windows up until there was only an inch-and-a-half crack in each to let in air.

At Krista’s cocked eyebrow, he said, “It will look a little strange if we’re driving around with the windows down in this kind of weather.” Sure, native Seattle-ites were used to the cool spring weather, but most didn’t drive around with the windows wide open when it was barely sixty degrees and threatening rain. “And the windows will help obscure us from the traffic cameras.”

In case the cops decided to monitor the cameras in the vicinity, Sean pulled a ball cap over his short hair. He picked his way carefully back to the house Ibarra owned in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood, avoiding as many stoplights and busy intersections as possible.

Krista stared nervously out the window, but after several minutes with no cops following them down the side streets, she relaxed a few degrees. Her face was still grim, her eyes shadowed as she stared sightlessly out the window.

Sean couldn’t help but try to comfort her. “I know it’s a blow, finding out your father’s messed up in all of this, that he was working with Nate…” Though he knew it led to danger, he couldn’t stop himself from reaching across the gear shift to put his hand on her leg.

She let out a mirthless laugh and covered his hand with her own. “It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

“I get it. He’s still your father. No matter what your differences, it has to hurt.”

“You’d think I’d be immune by now, and yet, in the back of my mind, I’m always hoping…” Her voice trailed off. She shook her head and a hard glint appeared in her stare. “Let me tell you why nothing my father does should surprise me anymore.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She didn’t know if Sean would even care, but she had to make him understand what had happened, make him see she was nothing like her father or any other stereotypical scumbag lawyer. “When I was a junior at U-Dub, my college roommate and I went to a party after the Washington-Oregon game. It was at the Delt house, which is the football fraternity, so things got pretty wild. But Nicole and I didn’t go too crazy, at least not compared to some people.”

Sean kept his eyes on the road, but his curt nod told her he was listening.

“We were drunk, no doubt about it, but not sloppy, not to the point we were going to do anything stupid.” Krista let out another little laugh. “Nicole hated to throw up.
Hated
it. So she was always really careful when she drank not to push it too far. I wasn’t always as smart,” she said, watching her finger trace a circle on her leg. “But lucky for me, the couple times I got out of control I had Nicole there to hold my hair.”

“Nice,” Sean said with a faint smile.

“Anyway, it was the usual. We were drinking, dancing, flirting with the guys. Eventually the players showed up, and Jason Worley came over to dance with Nicole.” Just saying his name made her feel like acid was being poured down her throat. “He was the wide receiver for the Huskies and his father is a big-shot software mogul.”

“Ted Worley?” Sean asked, recognizing the name of the billionaire who’d only recently retired as CEO of one of the largest software companies in the world. She could tell from Sean’s face that he knew exactly where this was going, that maybe he even remembered some details of the case that had been splashed on the covers of the local papers.

But to his credit, he didn’t interrupt or try to speed her to the conclusion, as though he knew she needed to spew it all up at once before the black bile of what happened that night threatened to poison her. “That’s the guy. Handsome, rich, star football player. Who wouldn’t want to date him, right?

“Then”—she broke off as a lump in her throat threatened to cut off her oxygen. This was when the story got hard. “This guy I liked from my political science study group showed up. We went outside to talk. One thing led to another, and when I went to tell Nicole I was leaving with him I couldn’t find her. Another friend said she’d seen her go upstairs with Jason.

“So I took poli-sci guy home, and we fooled around a little bit until I decided it was time to send him on his way. Nicole still wasn’t back, but I just figured she was having a good time and would come home in the morning.”

She closed her eyes against the memory of what happened next. “She came home around ten-thirty the next morning, and right away I could tell something was wrong.” Nicole’s face had been gray, which could have been attributed to the usual hangover pallor had it not been for the haunted look in her big brown eyes.

“I asked her what happened and she just shook her head. But then she went to take her shirt off I saw…She had all these marks on her back and above her bra. I got closer and realized that he’d
bitten
her, hard enough to break the skin in a couple places. He’d also choked her. I could see the marks on her neck.”

The guilt gnawed at her, as fresh and bitter as it had been that morning.

Sean must have seen it. “You couldn’t have known that was going to happen.”

Krista shook her head. “We had an agreement. We were supposed to look out for each other…I knew enough about rape cases that I didn’t let her take a shower. So we packed up her clothes and went to the clinic. They did a rape kit and the police took her report. I thought that would be it.”

She shook her head, marveling anew at her naïveté. Now, after seven years in the PA’s office and dozens of rape cases, she knew firsthand how incredibly difficult they could be to prosecute. Especially cases of acquaintance rape.

But what Jason had done, the brutality he’d inflicted, had been so extreme, Krista couldn’t see how anyone could ever imagine that that was consensual.

“The police arrested Jason later that day.” Her one bright moment in the horrible ordeal. “And he retained my father as his lead counsel two hours later.”

Sean’s breath left his lungs on a harsh curse. “I had just gotten out of Ranger school right around then, so I only heard bits and pieces from the news. But I didn’t remember that part.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty screwed up, right? I begged him to drop Jason as a client.” She smiled bitterly as she remembered that exchange. Her sobbing, pleading with him on the couch, getting more hysterical by the second as she listed in gruesome detail exactly what Jason had done to Nicole. Looking back now, she realized it was the last time she’d ever lost control in front of her father. “He didn’t even bother feeding me the line that everyone has the right to an attorney. He just told me that Ted Worley had called him personally, and he couldn’t refuse such an important opportunity regardless of how I felt about the matter.”

“Selfish bastard,” Sean bit out and then clamped his mouth shut. “Sorry, I know he’s your father and all, but that’s stone cold.”

Shame at what came next made Krista drop her gaze to the polished hardwood floor. “He tore Nicole apart. I don’t know why I was so shocked when Jason got off. I mean, even then without any experience, I knew enough about acquaintance rape cases to know how it went. But what he did to her—” She swallowed hard, squeezing her eyes against the sting of tears. “The bites, the bruises. Sean, he tore her inside. How could anyone in their right mind ever think Nicole would have
wanted
that? But my father got all these witnesses to say how they’d seen her drinking and dancing with him, and how she’d followed him upstairs willingly. Even I couldn’t deny that.”

“He made you testify?” Sean’s voice was equal parts shock and fury, his knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel. “What kind of fucked-up sociopath does that to his own kid?”

Krista shook her head. “I volunteered as a witness for the prosecution before my father could get to me. And to be fair, he wasn’t nearly as tough on me as he’d been on some of the other witnesses. But it didn’t matter.

“He didn’t even make it to trial,” she continued. “The judge dismissed all the charges after the evidentiary hearing.”

“What happened to Nicole?” Sean asked.

“She dropped out and I heard she transferred to the University of Montana. The last time we spoke was the day she moved out of our apartment. She didn’t keep in touch, for obvious reasons.”

Sean’s hand gave her thigh a gentle squeeze. “What happened to her wasn’t your fault,” Sean repeated. “You couldn’t have known what he was going to do.”

Krista turned her hand so it was palm to palm with his, savoring the feel of callused skin and the warmth that traveled up her arm. “Logically, I know that’s true, but I can’t help but feel I should have seen or sensed something to clue me in to what he was capable of. But I didn’t. You want to know something sick? I was actually a little jealous that he chose her over me. Part of me wanted to be hooking up with Jason Worley that night instead of the guy from my poli-sci class.” She’d never admitted that out loud before. “I still wish he’d chosen me, but for different reasons.”