Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (19 page)

Over breakfast the
next morning, Riley and Bill barely spoke to each other for a while. Riley wasn’t
sure where the tension was coming from. Sure, they were still discouraged over
last night’s failed attempt at catching the killer. But there was more to it
than that. She couldn’t put her finger on it.

“We’ll get him,”
Bill finally said, chewing on a piece of toast. “From what Opal told me about
him, he’s got his weaknesses.”

Riley didn’t reply.
She remembered the aging prostitute who’d still been sitting in Bill’s car
after the killer got away. Bill had discussed the situation with her while
Riley was in the bar. From what he’d said, Opal sounded like a shrewd observer
who knew what she was talking about.

Still, Riley felt
bitterly disappointed that the evening had been such a bust. Her own hasty
disguise hadn’t worked very well, and she’d let three whores slow her down
enough to let the subject get away. And although Bill had glimpsed several
groups of men leaving the convenience store, he’d hadn’t been able to pick out
the suspect among them. A lot of truckers fit the description they had gotten
from Ruthie and several of the prostitutes.

It seemed that T.R.
was white, a little heavy in build but average in height. His age was somewhere
between thirty-five and fifty, and he often wore a baseball cap. Some of the
women had mentioned thick blond hair brushed forward. Ruthie had found no
useful picture of him on her security camera footage. And of course, they really
had no reason to believe that the man was anything more than a nuisance to the
hookers.

Having to wake
Morley up last night to phone in the bad news had been especially embarrassing.

And this morning
Bill was looking at her in an odd way. Riley didn’t know what to make of it.
She took another swallow of coffee and tried to clear her head.

Suddenly, Bill
reached across the table and put his hand on hers.

“I mean it, Riley,”
he said. “We’ll get him.”

He didn’t let go of
her hand. She knew that this was more than a reassuring gesture. Under
different circumstances, she might have welcomed it. But she was in no mood for
it right now. No mood at all.

She growled, “Bill,
you’d better move your hand away if you want to keep it.”

But Bill didn’t move
his hand. He only smiled.

“C’mon, Riley.”

“C’mon what?” He
squeezed her hand and looked directly into her eyes.

No doubt about it—he
was making a pass at her. It wasn’t as brazen as her own drunken phone call a
few months back that had nearly wrecked their friendship. But it was a pass
nonetheless.

But why right
now?
Riley
wondered. Then she remembered the expression on Bill’s face when she’d joined
him after they lost the suspect—a look of interest she hadn’t given any thought
to at the time. But now this morning that look made an unpleasant kind of sense
to her.

“This is all because
of the part I was playing last night,” she said. “Because of how I was dressed
and how I behaved.”

Bill blushed a
little. She knew that she’d called it exactly right. She jerked her hand away.

“You thought I
looked hot because I looked like a hooker,” she said. “High heels and bare skin
made you feel all warm and fuzzy?”

“So what if it did?”
Bill said.

Riley could hardly
believe her ears.

“So what if it did?”
she echoed. “Bill, listen to yourself.”

“Well, you know it’s
more than that,” Bill said. “You know I’m attracted to you all the time. And
don’t pretend it’s not mutual. There’s something between us. Isn’t it about
time we stopped pretending that there’s not?”

Riley felt the truth
in those words, but she also felt a little sick with disgust. She thought back
to Jaybird and Calvin Rabbe, two men who weren’t capable of seeing women as
human beings.

Was it possible that
Bill had something in common with them? Did her longtime partner harbor the
same tendency to think of women as sex objects? Were all men like that deep
down—the straight ones, anyway?

“It’s not mutual
right now,” she said firmly.

“You’re
overreacting.”

Riley was about to
launch into a heated tirade about how she wasn’t overreacting at all. But her
phone buzzed. Seeing that the call was from April, she answered it.

“Hi, dear. What’s
going on?” she said.

To her alarm, she
heard her daughter sobbing.

“I saw him,” April
said.

“Saw who?”

“Peterson. He’s
alive. He looked right at me. He recognized me.”

Riley’s heart was
pounding.

“What’s wrong?” Bill
asked. He had seen the change in Riley’s expression.

Riley didn’t answer.
She needed to get away so she could talk to April alone. She left the hotel
restaurant and walked toward her room.

“You know that’s not
possible, April,” she said.

And of course, it
wasn’t possible. She remembered as if it were yesterday. April herself had
struck Peterson down with a rifle stock, and then Riley had caved in his
forehead with a sharp rock. Finally there had been his dead eyes gazing up at
her as river water trickled over his face.

But even then, she
couldn’t believe it until April said …

“Mom. He’s dead.”

Peterson was dead,
all right. It had only been because of Brent Meredith’s sympathy and discretion
that Riley hadn’t gotten a stiff reprimand for the force she’d used. But she
understood what April was going through all too well. Riley herself had
experienced a flashback just last night at the Iguana Lounge, and she still had
nightmares about being caged and threatened with flames.

April was still
sobbing. Her gasping voice on the phone sounded terrified.

“We were getting off
our tour bus just now,” she cried. “There he was, right in the street. He
looked straight at me. He grinned. I know he’s going to kill me. I need your
help.”

Those last four
words—”I need your help”—stung Riley’s heart. It didn’t matter that Peterson
was dead. April
did
need her desperately. But here she was, all the way
across the country.

“Have you called
your dad?” Riley asked. “He’s probably in DC now.”

“No. I didn’t think
of him.”

Riley sighed. She
knew that after a lifetime of emotional distance April had scant reason to want
to call her father.

“I need you, Mom. I
need you right now.”

Riley didn’t know
what to say. April seemed to have forgotten that Riley was in Phoenix. And that
was the last thing April needed to hear right now.

“Let me talk to your
teacher,” Riley said.

A moment later,
Riley heard a different voice on the line.

“This is Lorna
Culver. Is this April’s mother?”

“Yes, this is Riley
Paige.”

The woman’s voice
sounded terribly agitated.

“Ms. Paige, I don’t
know what to do. She’s calmer than she was a minute ago, but she was completely
hysterical. You’ve got to get here right away.”

“I can’t,” Riley
said. “I’m in Arizona.”

“Well, I’ll take her
right back to the hotel,” she said. “But I can’t be responsible for her while
she’s in this state of mind.”

Riley wanted to yell
at the woman.

Can’t be
responsible? Isn’t that your job?

But she kept her
voice under control.

“Give me your cell phone
number,” she said.

During the
conversation, Riley had gotten back to her room. She wrote down the number on a
pad and told Ms. Culver her own number.

“I’ll call April’s
father,” she told the teacher, then ended the call.

She paced anxiously
back and forth as she called Ryan’s cell phone number. She was relieved when
she got her ex-husband and not his answering service.

“Hi, Riley,” he
said, trying to sound cordial. “How are you? It’s been a while.”

It was all Riley
could do to keep herself from bursting into tears.

“Ryan, it’s April.
She’s in Washington, and she’s having an attack of PTSD. It’s from the whole
awful thing with Peterson. She’s—”

Ryan interrupted
her.

“Wait a minute. Slow
down. What’s she doing in Washington?”

Riley sat down on
the edge of the bed. She took a long, slow breath.

“She’s on a class
field trip,” Riley explained, speaking slowly and carefully. “She’s been there
since Saturday. It’s supposed to be a whole week.”

She wanted to add,
And
if you cared at all about your daughter, you’d know that already.
But she
stopped herself.

She continued. “She
thought she saw Peterson—the man who abducted her. She didn’t, of course. He’s
dead. But this is serious, Ryan. I’ve been through my share of PTSD and believe
me, it’s terrifying. You’ve got to go help her.”

“Why me? Why can’t
you go?”

“Because I’m in
Phoenix, Ryan. Phoenix,
Arizona.
I’m working on a case. I just can’t get
there.”

“Well, I’m in
Philadelphia. I’m working a court case. I can’t get there either.”

Riley couldn’t keep
her voice from shaking with rage.

“You
can
get
there, Ryan. You can fly there in an hour. Hell, you can drive there in less
than three hours. I can’t get there that soon. I can’t get there at all.”

Ryan replied in a
patronizing tone that Riley had heard thousands of times.

“This is your
responsibility, Riley. And it’s your fault she’s going through this. It’s that
damn job of yours. You’re the one who put her in harm’s way. You couldn’t just
stay at home and be a normal mother. You fly back to DC. Right now. This isn’t
my problem.”

Riley fought down a
stream of curses and still said nothing.

“Did you hear what I
said, Riley?”

Riley knew that
there was no way to get him to face facts. He’d always assumed his right to be
distant. His work was always too important for him to get caught up in everyday
problems. His job was to be successful. His job was to make rich clients even
richer. He’d never accepted that Riley’s job of catching monsters was at least
as important.

“Riley?” Ryan said. “Did
you hear me?”

She had to find
another way to help April, and this was a waste of time. She hung up.

If I never have
to talk to that bastard again, it’ll be too soon,
she thought.

To make things
worse, he’d hit her where it hurt, the very core of her guilt and self-doubt.
Might life have been better for all three of them—Riley, April, and Ryan—if she’d
never become an agent? But what would she have become if she had stayed at
home? One of those secret drunk housewives? How could that have been better for
anybody?

Worst of all, how
could she have failed to see this coming? She’d convinced herself that April
was doing fine. But of course it was too good to last. From her own experience
with PTSD, she should have known better. There was no way April could have
recovered so quickly and easily. She couldn’t possibly be fully free of the
trauma of her captivity or the added trauma of helping her mother kill her
captor.

An image flashed
through Riley’s mind.

It was her friend
Marie Sayles, suspended in mid-air, hanging by her neck from a cord tied to a
light fixture on her bedroom ceiling.

Riley’s mouth went
dry at the memory. Marie, too, had been held captive by Peterson. Her fear of
her tormenter drove her to suicide. Riley had desperately tried to talk her out
of her fear on the phone, assuring her that Peterson was dead. But it made no
difference.

“You killed his
body but you didn’t kill his evil,”
Marie had said just minutes before she took her own life.

And Riley knew that
April was experiencing exactly the same despair at that very moment. She might
do anything to escape her terror. Her greatest danger was to herself.

Just then she heard
a knock at the door. When she answered it, Bill was standing outside.

“Riley, are you OK?”
he asked.

Riley was relieved
to see him. She vaguely realized that she’d just been angry with him. But at
this moment, she couldn’t even remember what it was all about. It seemed like a
long time ago.

“Come on in,” she
said. “It’s April. She’s having a PTSD attack.”

Bill nodded
sympathetically. Riley knew that he didn’t need to be reminded of the trauma
that April had endured.

“Bill, I don’t know
what to do,” Riley said. “Ryan refuses to help. And here I am, thousands of
miles away!”

“What about Mike
Nevins?” Bill said.