You Betrayed Me (The Cahills #3) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,115
bedroom window.
The class ring had been his entry into this new world. His first, but far from the last, and now Rivers couldn’t help but use whatever this insight was to his advantage.
Now he was a little calmer, the perspiration on his forehead receding.
Letting out a sharp breath, Rivers picked up the work gloves, once tan leather, now stained on the palms, the stitching stretched, a small hole near the index finger of the right hand. He slipped the gloves over his hands and closed his eyes, seeing images of James driving a tractor in the spring, lifting baled trees onto a trailer while snow was falling, riding a horse through the woods, another horse beside him, a woman rider laughing as they splashed through the icy banks and slow-moving current of a stream. But he couldn’t make out the woman’s face, nor the color of her hair, nothing about her.
The image shifted, and he felt anger, dark and seething, saw the axe lifted high, then come crashing down, splintering wood, sending kindling spinning. Another chunk was placed on the chopping stump. Another ferocious swing. Crrraaack! Pieces of wood splitting and flying away from the blade. And again. And again. He felt the sweat, the strain of muscles as the axe was swung hard and fast, sensed the anger burning through the axe-wielder’s blood.
Anger at a woman.
Hate. Rage. Blind fury.
Megan’s face floated into view, no longer a smiling girl with honey-colored hair and a quick, sexy smile. Now . . . red-faced, teeth bared, she screamed, “You don’t love me. You never loved me!” They were outside, near a stable where horses peered from their stalls. She picked up something—a grooming brush?—and hurled it at him. It bounced against the wall, near a stable door, and the chestnut in the stall shied and reared, neighing in fright.
“Are you nuts?” James demanded, and as he calmed the horse, Megan ran out of the stable through an open door into the night. It was winter. Snow lay on the ground. But it was not the night she disappeared.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Rivers switched his thoughts to the night of the altercation, the night Megan had vanished. He saw nothing, felt nothing. Whatever secrets the gloves held about the evening Megan disappeared, they were keeping.
Rivers stripped them off, pulling them inside out. This is certifiable, you know it is.
He noticed the stain then, a dark red blotch on the inside of the left palm. Blood. Cahill’s? Or someone else’s?
“Fuck.” He couldn’t take them to the lab without admitting he’d picked up the pair out of protocol, not collecting them as evidence. And they were tainted with his own damned DNA. Even if they could be tied to the crime, if the blood was maybe Megan’s, which seemed highly unlikely, a defense attorney would turn him inside out on how he’d procured the gloves. There was no explaining it away. Furious with himself, he tossed the gloves onto the counter, walked around a post to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and pulled out another bottle of beer. He was sweating and breathing hard, as if he’d picked up that damned axe in his first vision and swung it, over and over again.
“Dumb ass,” he muttered before opening the bottle and taking a long, cold swallow. Closing his eyes, he counted to fifty. Then a hundred. His heart rate slowed, but he still felt beads of sweat around his hairline.
Shaking off the images, he carried his beer to the living room window and past the small yard to the street beyond. Snow was falling, thick and heavy, dancing in the blue glow from the streetlamp. One of his neighbors on the far side of the cul-de-sac was backing out, garage door rolling down, crimson brake lights flashing as the back tires of the old Cadillac reached the sidewalk. He snapped his blinds shut and rubbed the back of his neck, then finished his beer.
Rivers knew he was missing something, something he couldn’t feel in the personal items. Something just out of reach.
Oh, hell.
Maybe Astrid had been right.
Maybe he was sick. Or perverted. Or bat-shit crazy.
Stealing personal things, trying to get a sense of the owners from them, nosing around in their most private thoughts, attempting to learn more about an ongoing case, risking his reputation and his job . . . that wasn’t the definition of sanity.