Lawman. Part 20

"After that," she continued, "I stopped going out at all. Unless you can call helping Barbara and Rick can vegetables every summer after harvest a social life. What do you want to know about it?" she asked bluntly.

"Anything you remember," he said, averting his face.

"I don't like remembering," she said with quiet honesty, putting the ice chest down. "I still have nightmares."

He recalled the one she'd had at his house. It made him feel even more guilty, now that he knew the truth. "Cash said Chet told him that your abductor had you for three days, and that you've never talked about it."

"He's right. I've never told a soul. Not even Chet Blake, right after it happened." Her face closed up tight. "If you're hoping to have me identify a subject in a lineup or in mug shots, you're out of luck. He kept me blindfolded the whole time."

"He talked to you."

She swallowed. Nausea rose in her throat. "Yes." She sounded as if the word choked her.

"You can remember his voice."

She chewed on her lower lip. "He said I looked like his stepmother. He had a picture of her as a child."

"What?"

"He said he wet the bed and she made him wear dresses and a red ribbon in his hair. He said she sent him to school like that when he started, and the teacher sent him home again. Everybody laughed. He tied my hair up with the ribbon, but later, just after he tried to strangle me, and he couldn't, he tied it around my neck." She swallowed down nausea. It was hard to remember this. "The ribbon wasn't long enough. He had white hands, very white, and he couldn't pull the ribbon tight enough to kill me. He said it was her fault his hands didn't work right. He was furious. He pulled out his pocketknife and stabbed me, over and over..."

"It's all right," he said, his voice quiet, rea.s.suring. "Don't force it."

She was shaking. She had to fight for control over herself.

Garon watched her, concerned. He didn't touch her. He knew that if he did, she'd connect it with what was done to her. He let her fight her demons.

He pulled out his BlackBerry and his stylus, and started keying in notes. Suddenly he remembered how she'd almost collapsed at the police station in Palo Verde when the chief there had mentioned red ribbon.

"The child in Palo Verde was strangled with a red ribbon," he murmured.

"Yes," she said after a minute. "That was when I started to suspect that it was the same man, when the police chief said he used a red ribbon." She looked up at him, her face pale. "I never read anything about red ribbons in the other child murders."

"We always hold something back," he reminded her, "to make sure we've got the killer and not some lunatic looking for dark fame. You said he mentioned his stepmother. Was that all?"

"Yes," she replied, looking up. "He was using a computer, though. I heard his fingers on the keyboard. He used it a lot."

That might be helpful. He noted it with the stylus. If the man still used computers, it might be a way to track him. If he was a pedophile, he must have access to the p.o.r.nography Web sites. The FBI had cyber detectives who tracked down child p.o.r.nographers and locked them up.

"He said that he loved little children." She said the words as if they were some huge, cosmic joke.

"Three dead children in three years," he was saying to himself. "Maybe as many as eleven, one a year since you were abducted. But you lived. Why did you live?"

Her slender shoulders rose and fell. "The police came sooner than he expected. He taped my wrists and my ankles together with duct tape. Then he carried me out to a field somewhere and tried to choke me, but he couldn't do it with his hands. He couldn't do it with the ribbon, either. He had thin fingers, white fingers, and they were limp and cold. So he wrapped duct tape around my mouth and nose. Then he opened his pocketknife and started stabbing me. It hurt so much, and blood went everywhere...I tried to scream, but all I could do was mumble. I started kicking at him. That spooked him and he stopped. But I knew he'd finish me off if I kept struggling. So I kept very still, held my breath and played dead. The sirens came closer. He hesitated for just a minute, as if he wanted to make sure I was gone, but there wasn't time. He took off running. With the duct tape over my nose and mouth, if the police hadn't spotted me when they did, I wouldn't have been able to tell them anything. I'll never forget how good it felt when they took the duct tape off and I could get air in my lungs at last. But it really hurt. One of the knife wounds punctured my lung."

He was listening, forcing himself to concentrate on the details, not on the terror Grace must have felt. "Duct tape. He couldn't strangle you, so he tried to smother you. He hadn't killed before," he said absently. "He didn't realize how hard it is to strangle someone with bare hands."

"That's what I thought," she replied. "My grandmother talked Chief Blake into suppressing the story, so the newspapers wouldn't get hold of it. Well, they did get hold of it," she admitted, "but they printed that a mental patient hurt me, not seriously, and that I had amnesia and couldn't remember a thing. They said my doctor said I'd never regain my memory. If the killer read the paper at all, he knew that I wasn't a threat. But I was afraid he'd do it again, to some other child. I couldn't make my grandmother understand that. She refused to ever let me talk about it again. I've lived with that, all these years. If they'd pursued him, maybe all those other little children would still be alive, too."

"It took a task force over twenty years to catch the Green River Killer in Washington State," he reminded her. "They had clues and at least one living witness, too. It didn't help them catch him. Ted Bundy killed college girls for years, and they couldn't catch him, either. Even if you'd told the police everything you knew, chances are your attacker would still be killing. Serial killers, especially organized ones, are intelligent and cagey. They're hard to find, even with all our modern tools."

"Maybe so."

"You should come home."

Home. She remembered all over again how he'd embarra.s.sed her there. She glared at him. "My cousin Bob has offered me his guest room for as long as I want to stay with him. When my grandmother's will is through probate, I can put the house on the market."

He hadn't counted on that response. He felt terrible. "You have friends there who would miss you."

"Victoria isn't that far to drive. They can come up here and visit."

"Then let me put it another way," he persisted somberly. "No killer forgets his first victim. He knows who you are, and he can find out where you are. If for some reason your name is connected with the killer, and he starts worrying that your memory might have come back, he might decide to stack the odds in his favor. We found DNA on his last victim, but we didn't publicize that. For all he knows, you're the only living human being who might be able to identify him. He might decide to come full circle."

"He might come after me and kill me, you mean," she said very calmly.

His jaw tautened. "Yes."

Her lips curled down. "There's an optimistic thought."

"Stop that. Life has its benefits. You might marry," he added.

Her gray eyes met his dark ones. "What would be the point?" she asked. "I can't have a child."

He felt as if she'd hit him in the stomach. "Plenty of marriages succeed without children."

She laughed coldly. "Really? You were attracted to me at first," she recalled. "You liked being with me, and taking me places. Then when you knew I couldn't bear children, all of a sudden I became a one-night stand with disposability potential."

He was shocked at her perception of why he'd broken it off with her. "That's not true," he ground out.

"Sure it isn't." She turned and picked up the ice chest again. She felt sick at her stomach and weak as a kitten. It must be the lost hours of sleep ruining her health. "If you're through asking questions, could you leave?" she asked pleasantly. "I have a busy day ahead of me. Cousin Bob wants me to brush his cat."

The sarcasm brought a twinkle into his eyes that he tried not to let her see. "At least, think about what I've said." he strained his mind for inspiration. He pursed his lips. "Your roses are starting to bud out. They'll be eaten alive by bugs if they're not sprayed, and without fertilizer you may not have one decent stem."

She glared at him. "I can transplant them up here."

"They won't like it here."

"How would you know?" she asked indignantly. "Do you talk to roses?"

His dark eyes actually twinkled. "Not when I think anyone might overhear me. I work for the FBI. Talking to roses might get me transferred to the Antarctic."

"The FBI doesn't have an office there," she returned.

He shrugged. "They have offices all over the world," he corrected. "They might decide to open one in a far away cold place if they catch me talking to a bush."

She rubbed at a spot of red mud on her cutoffs. "Actually scientific studies have been done on plants using audio pulses, such as cla.s.sical and rock music. They actually react favorably. They do feel sensation. It's not even surprising when you consider the structure of a single leaf," she added absently, scrubbing at the red spot. "There are guard cells that protect the leaf from invasion by parasites..."

His eyebrows arched. "I thought your education ended at high school," he remarked, surprised by her knowledge of botany.

She gave him a cool look. "I thought you knew better than to take anyone at face value."

His eyes narrowed. "Come home."

"No!"

"Give me one good reason why you won't."

"Because you live next door to me!" she said with pure venom.

"I'll have a fence put up so you can't see me," he promised.

Involuntarily, a laugh tried to get out of her throat. She smothered it. "Your cousin is old and infirm, isn't he?"

"Well, yes," she replied.

"So what if this animal comes looking for you up here?"

She drew in a small, quick breath. "I don't know."

"I have a big gun," he pointed out, pulling back his jacket to display it. "If he comes looking for you at home, I'll shoot him with it."

She wanted to go home, but she had cold feet. She couldn't bear to look at him, because it hurt too much. She'd gone headfirst into dreams of a shared future, and he'd encouraged her, only to shove her right out of his life in the cruelest way possible. People would pity her, all over again. She'd have to work at convincing the town that his lack of interest didn't bother her. She'd have to see him with that Jaqui woman.

He could almost see the pain and the apprehension on her face. He remembered too well the amount of damage he'd done to her. He knew he couldn't make up for it all at once, but he could protect her, and he would. It was naive to believe that the killer wouldn't be curious about the child who lived. Especially since apparently he'd killed children all around Texas in the past three years. Garon felt that Grace was in danger.

She knew she was walking a thin line. Enough people in Jacobsville knew something about her ordeal in the past. n.o.body knew who the killer was. He could walk into town and order coffee at Barbara's Cafe and just listen to people around him. Evidently he could blend right in. She recalled his voice. It was faintly cultured and he sounded to her like an educated man, not some backwoods idiot. His hands hadn't been those of a laborer, either. They'd been scarred. He kept them covered with thin leather gloves most of the time he'd had her in his power.

"His hands," she murmured aloud. "They were scarred..."

He put that down on his PDA. "You may not realize it, but even these small details you remember might be enough to help us catch him," Garon added after a minute. "You're the only witness, Grace. You might save lives."

She nodded solemnly. "I suppose so."

"Miss Turner has missed you."

"Has she?"

"I'm sure she'd enjoy having you back."

"I guess so."

"If rosebushes have feelings, yours are probably grieving already," he added solemnly. "I imagine they're brokenhearted. They'll cry and some pa.s.serby will hear them and check himself into the hospital for a CAT scan."

This time the laugh did escape, even though she stifled it immediately.

He smiled. "I'll even loan you a truck and a man to drive it, so you can get fertilizer and pesticides to use on your roses."

"Barbara has a truck," she said, avoiding the offer.

Which Marquez would be happy to drive for Grace, on his day off, Garon realized with a twinge of something unfamiliar.

"Well?" he persisted.

She finished rubbing the spot. It was still there. It probably wouldn't come out, anyway. Red mud was usually permanent. She glanced at him. "If you'll promise to give me a schedule of your daily routine so I won't risk appearing in the same place you do, I'll come home."

"Cut it out," he muttered. "I'm convinced that it was coincidence. I overreacted."

"Gee, was that an apology?" she asked with mock surprise.

"I don't make apologies unless the director phones me personally and orders me to."

"I figured that out for myself."

"When?"

She frowned. "When, what?"

"When are you coming back?"

She nibbled her lower lip. "Tomorrow, I guess."

"Good. I'll stop by your house and tell the roses on my way home."

"Nice of you," she said.

"I have lots of good qualities," he a.s.sured her.

"You keep them well-hidden, of course," she returned with a mocking smile.

"No use wasting them on a woman who'd enjoy putting out a contract on me," he told her.

"Unfortunately I can't afford a hit man, on my salary," she said.

"Why don't you go to college and get a degree? You could earn more."

"Why don't you go home and stop trying to run my life?" she asked him. "I don't need career counseling."

"You drive a car that is an accident about to happen, and you dress out of thrift shops," he muttered.

She flushed. "How do you know where I get my clothes?"

His teeth clenched. He shouldn't have said that.

"Spill it!" she demanded, hands on her hips.

"You wear that d.a.m.ned blue wool dress everywhere. Otherwise, you wear the same pair of jeans with a.s.sorted sweatshirts. It doesn't take rocket science to figure it out."

"I can't see why it should bother you how I dress," she said sweetly. "You can rest a.s.sured that you won't ever have to be seen in public with me again."