The Off Season (25 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Harris started awake, disoriented and uncomfortable, his neck cramped from the angle of his head against a sofa cushion. Rubbing away the ache, he looked around to get his bearings.

The fire and the furnishings around him brought everything rushing back. What he’d done. What they’d done together.

But how long had he been sleeping, in a house awash with darkness? And what sound was it that had wakened him—the closing of a door? Something being dropped?

Something’s wrong,
his instincts told him, his stomach tightening and his breathing coming faster. His pulse thrumming at his throat, he wondered whether this disturbance he was sensing was a figment of his imagination. Or just guilt washing over him for breaking every vow he’d made since first seeing Christina again?

Stay professional. Stay focused. Don’t risk hurting her again.

And above all, no matter what, don’t dare fall in love.

But, remembering the feel of her in his arms, her sweet sigh of satisfaction before her body had melted into sleep, he couldn’t make himself regret being with her. He’d felt such contentment washing over him, a peace that he’d never guessed existed. A rush of warmth that he realized came from hope.

So where’s she gone? And what the hell was that noise?

Needing to check things out, he dressed quickly, warning himself not to be too quick to imagine the worst. Not when, likely as not, she’d only gone to check on Lilly or use the bathroom upstairs.

Once dressed, he reached for the nearby chair where he’d laid the concealed-carry gun he wore off duty, along with its under-waistband holster. Reached for it and felt a shock that traveled, balls to skull, when he found it missing.

“Shit!” He reached around, fumbling for a lamp. Before he found a switch, a high, small voice came from the staircase.

“Where my mommy? Mommy gone.”

“Lilly?” Jesus. He lunged toward her, every short hair behind his neck rising, and his heart crashing as he spotted the tiny silhouette behind the stairwell banister posts. Had she gotten his gun in its holster? Could she have possibly figured out on her own how to release the safety?

Going for the shortest distance, he reached through the posts and grabbed at her. With a cry of alarm, she flattened herself against the opposite wall—out of his arm’s reach.

Pulling back so he could come around the banister and climb the stairs to meet her, he said in the calmest voice he could manage, “Stay right there. It’s all right. I just need to—”

She tried to scramble upward to escape him, but she was crying so hard—wailing now—that he was easily able to grab the struggling child and check to make sure she wasn’t holding anything, least of all a loaded semiautomatic.

Breath coming in gulps, he thanked God. “It’s all right. It’s okay, Lilly. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself, that’s all.”

But what if she has already?
If the sound that woke him was the crack of gunfire? If the reason Christina hadn’t responded to the sound of her child wailing was that she was lying somewhere, somewhere nearby, her staring eyes already sightless as blood pooled around her head?

As he struggled to contain the wriggling toddler, he felt for the light switch. “Christina! Christina, where are you?”

No answer, or at least not any that could be heard over Lilly’s protests.

“Want Mommy! My mommy!” she cried as she fought to escape.

Finding the switch, he flipped it, flooding the stairwell and entryway with light . . .

And solving at least one mystery as he spotted his gun, still in its holster, lying on the living-room floor beneath the chair where he’d put it. It had to have been knocked down somehow or kicked aside as Christina went wherever she’d gone.

But there was no damn way, no way in hell, she would have left her daughter behind.

“Shh, honey,” he told Lilly. “Let me put you down a minute, and we’ll find your mother.”

The little girl stopped crying, her fine, blonde hair a fuzzy halo around her head. “Find Mommy?”

“I promise. Absolutely.” He came back down off the stairs, where he set her down before retrieving and strapping on the Sig Sauer.

“What that?” Lilly asked.

“It’s for some grown-ups only,” he explained, as he’d explained to Jacob whenever he locked the weapon in his gun safe at home. “I’m the police. We keep you safe from bad guys.”

“Bad people like kill Katie-Mommy?”

“Like them, yeah,” he said, once more wondering where the hell she’d heard such a thing and what it really meant.

With his gun secure, he reached for her again, but Lilly ghosted out of reach, heading toward the kitchen and calling for her mother.

“Don’t go in there,” he warned, thinking that all the heavy plastic might be covering up the island and the torn-out counters, but there were likely to be nails and splinters, all kinds of hazards for a fast-moving toddler to get into. He thought, too, of that off smell, the faint odor of decomposition. If an unlucky rodent had gotten caught among the folds and suffocated, it stood to reason that all that plastic could prove dangerous to a child as well.

Stopping short of the kitchen, Lilly instead scaled a bar stool, one of three that stood against a pass-through countertop that looked into the space. Pushing aside more plastic and a dusty piece of cardboard, she smacked at something with a flashing green light. Something he didn’t recognize until the answering machine began to play a message.

“Oh, dear, Liz—this is Nelda. I was so awfully sorry when I got your message. So disappointed and sad to hear you’re too ill to come with us on the trip.”

Harris froze, his brain spinning at what the woman was implying. Because surely Christina would have known had her mother canceled her trip to Europe.

“I’ve had food poisoning myself before,” continued Nelda. “Terrible, and you’re absolutely right. There’s absolutely no way you could get on a plane in that state. So you just concentrate on feeling better, sweetheart, and be glad we all bought trip insurance. Call that doctor daughter of yours now and get her to fix you up. And after we get back, we’ll bore you with all our pictures and start planning our next trip.”

“Grandma,” Lilly said. “That Gramma? She come home?”

Harris only stood there, his heart belting out a breakneck rhythm. Because how could Christina’s mother, Elizabeth Wallace, come home from her vacation when it seemed she’d never left?

Without answering her question, he scooped up Lilly and started upstairs with her, praying Christina had only gone back to her own bed, taking the dog with her. And praying that the subtle odor his nose had caught, the smell of flesh corrupted, was really no more than a mouse trapped somewhere, rotting.

He’d made it only up the first two steps when he heard the unmistakable sound of a key sliding into the front door.

He turned, relief crowding into his throat. “Christina?” Where on earth could she have been, without a car at her disposal?

Instead, Annie came in, her blonde hair pulled back and her blue eyes confused when she spotted Harris holding Lilly.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Where’s Christina?”

“Auntie Annie!” Lilly cried happily, wriggling until he put her down.

“I’m not sure,” Harris answered as Lilly wrapped her arms around Annie’s legs. “I fell asleep, and when I woke up—I was just going up to check. But I thought you were gone for the—”

“Hey, sweetie.” Annie ruffled Lilly’s hair before returning her attention to Harris. “I realized she was right. I was being a selfish jerk leaving her alone here.” As she looked him over, she gave him a knowing look. “But she wasn’t quite as alone as I thought, was she?”

“Somebody had to pick up groceries.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “Your shirt’s untucked and buttoned up wrong, Harris. And I know it’s not from—” She cut herself off, blinking hard, her body stiffening. “What the hell was
that
?”

A moment later, Harris heard it, too, an anguished cry from the rear of the house that had him drawing his weapon from its holster. Adrenaline surging through his system, he nodded toward the child and ordered, “Take her upstairs. Lock yourself in the bedroom.
Now.
”

Face draining of color, Annie didn’t argue. Grabbing Lilly, she started upstairs, the child crying as she wailed, “Bad people. Hurt Mommy!”

As Harris headed for the kitchen, he hoped to hell Lilly was wrong. Prayed that Christina had only slipped on the ice taking the dog out, since he realized that with all the commotion, the greyhound would have most likely come downstairs to investigate.

As he pushed through plastic sheets toward the back of the kitchen, the smell of death grew stronger, along with what sounded like a woman sobbing as though her heart had been ripped to shreds.

As he found the back door left ajar, dread filled his chest, as cold and wet and heavy as fresh-poured concrete. He had a premonition, even before he flung it open, of what he would find out on the house’s back porch, of what would pull those wrenching sobs from the woman he’d been holding in his arms such a short time earlier.

“Christina, are you hurt?” he asked, seeing her at the bottom of the steps down to the backyard. The greyhound was pacing and whining behind where she knelt, still in her bathrobe, leaning over what could only be a body.

The porch light streaming down highlighted her face as she looked up at him, her face raw with anguish.

“A-all this time,” she said, “I didn’t want to call her on her trip be-because I didn’t want to spoil her vacation. And she—she’s been right here, lying—lying under the steps. Max found her when I let him out. He came down here and wouldn’t—wouldn’t leave this spot. I—”

Recognizing that Christina was in shock—and probably half-frozen—Harris rushed to her and pulled her to her feet and into his arms. “God, Christina, I’m so—I’m so sorry.”

Though it lay mostly in the shadow of the back porch, however, his first glance told him the person whose body he was looking at hadn’t died of natural causes. Despite the freezing and exposure, the signs of violence and head trauma were unmistakable . . .

And horrifyingly similar to those he’d first seen on eighty-three-year-old Walt Gunderson after his assault.

Shivering racked Christina’s body, tremors so violent she felt as if her flesh would tear from her bones. For Lilly’s sake, and Annie’s, too, she fought to pull herself together, to draw on those same reserves that allowed her to keep her emotions in check while she did what needed to be done.

But it was no use. She was far too cold, inside and out, to offer any comfort. Even when Annie began to scream once he’d told her, fighting to get past Harris, who refused to let her near the back door—near the
crime scene
.

Not understanding anything except her mother’s and her aunt’s tears, Lilly wailed in sympathy, in a scene more nightmarish than anything Christina could remember. The ringing in her ears that had started when she’d dragged the body—
not the body, Mom
—from beneath the steps intensified, drowning out the noise just as the tears in her eyes blurred her vision.

Her thoughts detached like balloons, bobbing untethered beneath the ceiling as Harris scooped her up and said something she couldn’t understand to Annie and Lilly. He carried her upstairs, Annie showing him to her old bedroom, where Lilly had earlier played and slept. Grunting as he stooped, he laid her in the double bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

Max stood quivering near the bedside with his tail tucked to his belly and his brown eyes bulging. Like her sister and her daughter, the sensitive greyhound clearly needed reassurance. Reassurance that Christina was too shattered to give them.

Harris hugged her hard, and she focused on his moving lips, struggling to make his words come into focus. “I know you won’t believe this right now. I know that I can’t fix this. But I swear to you, I’ll see you through it. And I will do right by her.”

Christina tried to answer, but there was a lump in her throat, too hard and sharp for speech.

And in his face, those gold-flecked hazel eyes she knew so well, she saw that he knew. He understood, and he meant every word he was saying.

“Help is on the way,” he said. “All you have to do is breathe. Breathe for me. Nothing else right now. Okay?”

Her shaking eased a fraction, enough to let her nod in answer. He smoothed the hair from her face and then turned to her sister. She was holding Lilly, who’d gone quiet, clinging as she sucked her thumb and stared with wet blue eyes.

“I need you to stay in this room, all of you,” he said. “Warm her up if you can. She’s freezing cold, and I have no idea how long she’s been out there.”

Wiping away tears, Annie said, “I—I can run a warm bath for her.”

“That’s a good idea, but I need you to wait for now. I’ll let you know as soon as my deputies and I can clear the house.”

“Clear the—what—what happened to our mother?” Annie asked, her voice hitching every few words. “Do you—please, just tell me. Tell me what you think.”

Harris shook his head. “Too soon to say. I only know there was a message saying she’d canceled her trip due to illness.”