Wicked Game Read online

  “A bunch of kids found bones at the base of the Madonna statue inside the maze at St. Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Human bones. A human hand popped up and reached from the grave at them, or so they thought. It’s Jessie, Hudson. Now we know. Now we finally know.”

  Hudson held the phone so tightly he saw his own knuckles bleach white as Renee went on to say that she was spear-heading a get-together at Scott and Glenn’s restaurant to talk things over with some of the “old gang.” Hudson heard her as if from a distance as images of Jessie Brentwood, the same ones that he’d carried inside his mind for twenty years, flashed across the screen of his memory.

  “I’m going to write about this,” Renee had told him. “I’ve already been on it, actually. This is a hell of a story.”

  “Is it?” he’d asked.

  “You’ll be there, right?” Renee responded.

  “To talk about whether or not the bones are Jessie’s?” He’d had trouble processing.

  “And some other stuff. I’ve got a lot invested in this. It’s…a kind of personal quest.”

  Hudson had squinted at the phone, but before he could ask her what she meant, she swept on. “Damn it, Hudson, I’m tired of writing drivel for the Star. I think if I have to write one more insipid article about whose house is for sale, who got a traffic ticket, or who’s upset with his neighbor for cutting down a tree, I might puke. This, the story of the body at St. Lizzie’s, is big, and I’m part of it. We all are. I think we’ve finally found Jessie.”

  He’d tried to listen more to his sister, but his emotions had gotten the better of him and he thought about Jessie. Sixteen years old. The first woman he’d ever slept with.

  “Catch me, Hudson, if you can,” Jessie had sung out as she’d run through the maze of thick laurel. Her footsteps had been light, her breathing shallow, but he’d tracked her down easily as she’d tried to lose him in the intricate pathways. She’d failed, of course, maybe even let him catch up with her. To Jessie, everything, even lying in the thick grass under the stars in the shadow of the church spire and tearing off Hudson’s clothes, had been a game.

  Jessie, are you dead? Are those your remains? Did you die beneath the Madonna?

  “The bones they found, they’re female? Young?” he asked Renee.

  “Nobody’s saying, yet. But who else?”

  “It could be anyone—”

  “No, Hudson, it couldn’t. It’s Jessie, trust me. And it makes sense, right?”

  “Nothing makes sense.”

  “I’m just about at the ranch. See you in a minute.” And Renee had come in moments later, saying, “I’ve got a few more calls to make, maybe you can help me…?”

  “I’ll call Becca. She knew Jessie. But that’s it. The rest of this is your show.”

  That caught her up. “Becca,” she said, but didn’t say what was really on her mind, though it was probably along the same lines she’d spewed when he’d gotten involved with Becca a year or so after high school. “Rebecca Ryan? Are you nuts? Oh, God, Hudson, get real. Are you a sadist or what? Becca’s only one step further away from the loony bin than Jessie was. What is it with you and beautiful, out-of-touch women?”

  “Enough,” he’d said, but Renee wasn’t to be stopped.

  “You know, brother dear, if you tried, you could do better. Lots better.”

  Hudson hadn’t thought so twenty—no, sixteen years ago—and he didn’t think so now. After Renee left he called Tamara for Becca’s number, then Becca herself, inviting her to his sister’s gathering. He’d wanted to see her again. Face her. Face his own feelings…

  And the hell of it was, she was just as intriguing and beautiful as before. Maybe more so. Renee was probably right, he thought as he searched inside a cupboard and pulled out a half-full bottle of scotch. He twisted off the cap, found a short glass, and poured in a splash.

  No one—not even himself—could separate Becca from what had happened to Jessie. They would just be forever linked. The only two girls from St. Elizabeth’s whom he’d dated and, eventually, slept with.

  One had run from him, perhaps met her death.

  The other he’d pushed away.

  “Oh, hell,” he muttered under his breath as he lifted his glass and took a sip. He caught the pale image of his reflection in the window over the sink and noticed the tense lines evident on his face. He’d hoped his inadequate apology tonight was enough to at least explain his behavior; he didn’t expect it to make up for anything.

  Because the truth of the matter was he’d treated Becca thoughtlessly. Worse than that, he’d treated her purposely thoughtlessly. How was that for an oxymoron? He’d wanted her to dislike him. He’d been so attracted to her, even when he was with Jessie, that when he and Becca had actually gotten together, he’d never been able to feel right about it. A part of him had believed Jessie was still alive and watching him. Jessie had accused him of being attracted to Becca. It had been the basis of their last fight, the last time he’d seen her before she disappeared.

  Leaning a hip against the counter, twisting off the faucet that seemed to forever drip, he remembered how it had been twenty years earlier in the big room downstairs. Carrying his drink, he walked to the staircase and took the worn steps down to the basement with its low-hanging ceiling and monster of a furnace, then ducked through the doorway to the big rec room where the pool table hidden by its old burgundy faux-leather cover still stood.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Jessie as she had been. Seated atop the table, staring straight at him, she’d slowly and deliberately unbuttoned her shirt, then slid it off her shoulders.

  He’d lifted a hand in protest, their anger at each other still simmering. “Wait…”

  “Shh!” she warned, a finger to her lips before she leaned forward just a bit, offering him an intimate view of her cleavage, then unhooked her bra, her gorgeous breasts free as she wiggled out of it, her hazel eyes cool with calculation and hot with fury.

  “Jess—”

  “You’ve got a hard-on for Becca,” she said in that low, sultry voice that turned him on. It was the same accusation that had instigated their fight earlier in the day. A fight that everyone at school knew about, he’d subsequently learned, when the cops later sought him out and asked about its cause.

  For a moment it was as if she were in the room with him now. Still sixteen. Still angry. And he hadn’t been able to resist her. She’d pouted and toyed with him, then grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him down on the table with her. Her lips had been hot and moist, her tongue rimming his lips, her fingers eager as they pulled his shirt over his head, then ran feather-light over his muscles.

  It had been fast after that. Both of them stripping away each other’s pants and underwear. He’d wrapped his arms around her, kissed her breasts and then, despite all his promises to himself, he’d made love to her with all of the heat of his youth, lost in the warm, the mystery, the sheer feminine thrall of her like he’d been since the first time they’d come together, his knees pushing hard against the felt-covered slate.

  Afterward, sweating, gasping, while he lay naked on the hard surface, she’d pulled herself away and dressed quickly.

  “You don’t have to go,” he said, levering up on an elbow.

  “Yeah…yeah, I do.”

  “Jessie—”

  “Don’t say it, okay?” she insisted, knowing that he was going to promise that he loved her and for the moment, he did, but that was it…only for the moment. They both knew it. She yanked on her clothes and regarded him with sober eyes while he lay on the burgundy felt table, staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own teen angst.

  “I’m going,” she said, pulling her hair through the neck of her shirt and shaking out the long strands.

  “You could stay.”

  “I don’t think so.” She started across the room.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Maybe.” Her tone was fatalistic.

  “Oh, for the love of God, stop that,” he sai
d in a flash of anger. He hated the way she sometimes acted like they were only living for the day, that there would be no tomorrow. “Why do you always do that?”

  “Because you don’t care!”

  Hudson swore under his breath.

  “Don’t lie to yourself,” she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “And quit trying to make yourself the good guy. You want out of this…whatever it is we’ve got going.”

  Before he could stop himself, Hudson bit out, “You’re the one who wants out.”

  She laughed. “Oh, right.”

  He was already reaching for his pants.

  “What about Becca?” she demanded.

  “What about her?”

  “You think I don’t know?” she charged, one foot on the stairs, her head twisted to watch him as he struggled with his zipper. “I see things, y’know. I do. And I see the way you look at her.”

  “I’m sick of fighting,” he muttered, angry at her. At himself. At the fact that there was more than a grain of truth in her charges.

  “Me, too. But…there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Stop being a bastard. I think I might be…in serious trouble…”

  Jessie was silhouetted by the light from the staircase and there was something in her expression that gave him pause. Something darker than their petty argument, something that made her bite her lower lip, as if she were afraid of the next words she might utter. She gazed down at the bottom step, the one his father had replaced, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the new boards or nails holding the stair in place. She was somewhere else. Lost in her own thoughts.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Trouble. Serious trouble.” She wouldn’t look at him.

  Swallowing hard, he prepared himself for the fact that she might be admitting she was pregnant. No matter what she tells you, you have to be a man, Walker. Tough up.

  She looked up at him, worry and more—terror?—shadowing her eyes. “Trouble’s coming to find me,” she said almost inaudibly over the rumble of the furnace and the frantic beating of his own heart.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Bad trouble.” She ran a hand nervously through her hair, pushing the golden brown strands from her face. Her fingers trembled slightly. “I don’t know what I was thinking…I…I should have stopped. But I just couldn’t.”

  “Stopped what?”

  “Searching.”

  “Searching for what?” he asked, totally confounded. She wasn’t pregnant? Relief washed over him, but still he was confused. He crossed to her and reached for her hand resting on the banister.

  Instead of explaining further, she changed her mood in her quicksilver way. As if by sheer willpower, she straightened up, then winked at him slyly and said, “You’re not over me, no matter what you think. You’re hooked.”

  Hudson stared down at her. She was like that. One way one moment, completely changed the next.

  “I’m in your blood,” she said.

  And then she was gone.

  She’d run up the stairs and out the back door, and as he’d followed and reached the porch, he heard the engine of her car turn over. From the porch he watched the glow of her taillights disappear in the rising fog.

  Now he trudged back up the stairs, hearing the ancient boards creak under his weight.

  He’d never seen her again.

  And what had he done after Jessie disappeared that night twenty years ago? Mourned? Grieved? Longed for her return?

  Well, maybe he had a little, in the beginning. Then there had been the questions from the cops and the wondering, always the wondering what had happened to the girl he was supposed to have loved.

  But in the end he’d sought solace, comfort, and a chance to forget in sex with Becca. Yes, it had been a few years later, but it hadn’t felt right. He’d wanted to drown himself in her, but Jessie’s face, her voice, her ways…had never gone away, not completely.

  Had it been his own guilt eating at him? Undoubtedly. But that feeling had been real and raw enough that it had forced him to give up on Becca. Forced him to discover a new life. Forced him to move on.

  I see things… That’s what she’d said, what Tamara had echoed tonight at the restaurant. It was as if they, the friends who’d known her, understood that she was different, a bit ethereal.

  He drained his glass, left it in the sink, then walked into his living room and threw himself down on the sofa. The blank screen of the television stared at him but his mind was viewing a film of its own making.

  Were those Jessie’s bones found in the maze? The only news released through the media was that they belonged to a young female victim. Nobody was saying whether they’d been lying there twenty years or if they were newly deposited. The police were mum, and the story had been eclipsed by more recent local news: a murder apparently from a burglary gone wrong; flooding along lower elevations from a rapidly melting snowpack; a defendant in a criminal trial suddenly hauling off and smacking his own lawyer in the face.

  Hudson sighed. He’d been running for years from thoughts of Jessie…and Becca. He’d been running for years from his own feelings. Regardless of what was decided about the bones found at the base of the Madonna statue, maybe it was time to remember, think, even conjecture. Figure out what happened, if anyone could.

  It was time to stop running.

  Chapter Six

  “Hey, Mac!”

  McNally pretended not to hear Detective Gretchen Sandler’s demanding nasal tone. For the love of God, that woman’s voice was like the scrape of nails on a chalkboard. Truth to tell, she bugged the shit out of him.

  He was bent over his computer screen, though he wasn’t near as adept at researching on the ’net as he acted. Sure, he could get what he needed from the electronic equipment that had grown and expanded and reached over the whole department like some alien plant life, invading every aspect of law enforcement, even here in Laurelton. But he still liked to examine real evidence, preferred tromping across crime scenes, and he got off on mentally putting pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle in his brain until he reached that “Aha!” moment.

  “Mac!”

  “What?” He didn’t look up.

  “Don’t act like you can’t hear me,” she said from her desk, which was less than three feet behind him. “I’m zippo on fifteen-to twenty-four-year-old missing females through 1993. Either nobody cares that she’s gone, or we’ve got to go back further.”

  “Go back further,” he said, trying not to snap.

  He sensed something behind him, something quiet and building. Glancing around, he saw that Gretchen was barely holding in suppressed amusement, as were some of the younger men and women in the department, who, upon seeing his dark expression, moved back to their stations. Gretchen, however, was Mac’s latest partner, a woman who’d earned her job as a homicide detective because she was damn good at her job. Damn good. Just ask her. And she resented being saddled with a has-been, obsessed nut job like Mac who’d earned his promotion to homicide detective out of virtue of simply hanging around long enough. This, of course, was Gretchen’s opinion, not Mac’s.

  But it might be a lot of the rest of the department’s as well.

  “Maybe I should go back to 1989,” she suggested. “Isn’t there a vic named…oh, let’s see if I can remember…” She snapped her fingers. “Jezebel Brentwood?”

  His temper spiked and he bit out, “Maybe you should have started there.”

  “And keep you from your obsession? No way. I’ll let you begin at that end and meet you in the middle.”

  “If I had DNA on Jessie Brentwood, it would only be a matter of waiting for the results from the bones.” He swivelled in his chair and gave her what he hoped was a cool look, but he felt a muscle working in his jaw.

  Gretchen was in her early thirties with creamy, mocha-colored skin and straight black hair, a product of her Brazilian mother, and a pair of icy blue eyes, colder than Mac’s
own, a product of her father, apparently, one Gretchen had never known. Or so she’d claimed. “You’re that sure.”

  “You got any other missing girls from St. Elizabeth’s?”

  “I got a few from the surrounding area.”

  “You sure like making it hard on yourself to prove a point.” Mac turned back to his computer as Wes Pelligree, a tall African American detective everyone referred to as Weasel, nudged an unwilling, rain-sodden suspect in damp sweatshirt, dirty jeans, and cuffs toward his desk. Hands chained behind his back, the perp had dirty bare feet, lank, greasy hair, a pimply face, eyes at half mast, and a sneer showing bad teeth, and he reeked of his own puke. An obvious drug bust. But then Weasel had a knack for nailing scumbags who sold meth and crack. Rumor had it his older brother, the one who had dubbed him with the nickname in the first place while Wes was still in grade school, before he’d grown to six-three, had died of an overdose before Wes was out of the Academy. Ever since then, Wes Pelligree had been on a mission.

  Which was bad news for the drenched white guy protesting his innocence.

  Gretchen, standing too close to his desk, watched them pass and wrinkled her nose as the suspect dropped loudly into a side chair at Weasel’s desk. Phones rang, conversation buzzed, and police personnel in uniform or plain clothes weaved through the maze of desks and cubicles that were crowded into a central area with little privacy and few windows. A heating system that had been “upgraded” sometime in the mid eighties was rumbling and blowing air that was five degrees too warm.

  “When are we getting some data we can use?” Gretchen demanded. “The lab techs on vacation, or what?”

  “Gotta be patient.” Mac was growing tired of always explaining everything to her. She knew it anyway, but liked to hear herself talk.

  “Twenty years patient? I don’t think so.”

  She walked off and Mac slid a look after her. She was easy on the eyes. Great figure, nice butt, slim waist, and decent enough breasts, he supposed, but she worked really hard on being unlikeable. He watched a couple of other detectives throw her a glance as she passed. None seemed particularly warm and fuzzy. Mac might be the butt of a few jokes because of his obsession with Jessie Brentwood, but Gretchen was the coworker to avoid. No sense of humor. No big-picture thinking. No fun. She dotted all her i’s and crossed her t’s and fell all over herself in her eagerness to catch the high-profile cases—the few that came along here.