“I don’t think you understand,” the detective said slowly. “We’re investigating a double homicide. The suspects are you and Miss Chauveau.” He pronounced her name correctly.

  Eric froze. Homicide? The victims were now the suspects?

  “It must have been Chauveau,” Devane said. “Or he’s a very good actor.”

  The bedroom door opened. Desi emerged. She had slept in her duster, and it was rumpled, her hair unbraided and tousled, the right side of her face turning purple. She held her left hand under the sling, supporting her right arm. Her face was drawn with pain and fatigue. Before she could say anything, Detective Colton said, “Desirée Catherine Chauveau? You are under arrest for the murders of Guy Andrews and Fraser McHenry. You have the right to remain silent.”

  Eric raised his hands in protest. “Whoa! Wait a minute!”

  Desi gazed at the two officers. Except for a slight nervous twitch in her right eye, she was perfectly calm. “They’re dead?” she asked.

  “As a doornail,” Devane confirmed.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Anything you say will be used against you in court,” Colton continued.

  “Don’t say anything,” Eric urged Desi, before he turned back to the two men. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. The two guys who raped her were killed?”

  “I wasn’t raped,” she said irritably.

  “Yes, she was. How did they die?”

  “Their heads were split open,” Devane said with great relish. “With an axe.” Detective Colton gave Devane a dirty look. He presumably wasn’t allowed to give such details to suspects.

  “Does she look like she could do that?” Eric asked, gesturing to the petite woman at his side. “Even with two good arms?”

  “Did you find my purse?” Desi asked, ignoring Eric.

  “Yes,” Colton said.

  “Can I have it back?”

  “Yes, as soon as we’re done with it. You have the right to consult an attorney and have that attorney present during questioning.”

  “I’ll call my father’s lawyer,” Eric said.

  “Don’t think you’re off the hook either,” Colton told him. “You’re not under arrest at this time, but we want you to come with us for questioning.”

  “He didn’t do anything,” Desi said. “He was trussed up in the trunk of his car.” The stiffness of her mouth made “trussed” sound childish and ridiculous.

  “Please remain silent,” Eric urged. “Can I stay with her while she’s being questioned?”

  “Not unless you’re her attorney.”

  “I don’t need an attorney,” she said.

  “Yes, you do,” Eric insisted. To the officers, he said, “I assume you’ll let us get dressed first.”

  “Yes, of course,” Colton said.

  “Don’t get cute, though,” Devane added. “Climbing out the window is definitely uncool.”

  Eric started toward the bedroom, ushering her ahead of him, but Colton objected. “I can’t let you talk to her right now,” he said. “One at a time.”

  “I don’t think she can get dressed by herself,” Eric said, thinking of jeans and underwear and buttons. “She has a broken collarbone.”

  “I’ll help her,” the deputy offered eagerly.

  Eric held up a restraining hand. “Yeah, right. You’ll have to get a female officer.”

  “No, I can do it,” Desi said wearily. She went into the bedroom. She was gone long enough for Colton to get edgy. When she came back, she still wore the duster, but she had smoothed it out and combed her hair, and she was wearing slip-on shoes. She was flushed, as if she had gone to considerable effort. She stood awkwardly silent while he hurried into the bedroom to dress in jeans and a polo shirt. When he returned, the three in the living room hadn’t moved, as if frozen in a tableau.

  Devane unhooked a pair of handcuffs from his belt.

  “You’re not going to handcuff her,” Eric told him.

  The deputy glanced at Desi doubtfully and reached for her left hand.

  She jumped and backed away from him.

  Eric glared at Devane. “I don’t care if you think she’s a suspect. You guys are supposed to know how to treat rape victims these days. She’s injured, and she doesn’t want to be touched, especially by a strange man.”

  “I was not raped,” she said.

  “Is that a rope mark on your wrist?” Colton asked her.

  “Wait for your lawyer,” Eric advised.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can we go? I want my purse back.”

  ****

  Eric sat in a small interrogation room, not much like the ones he had seen on TV. Neither Colton nor Devane was present. Instead, a pudgy young deputy named Logan asked questions in a coolly dispassionate tone. Eric described what had happened to him and what he had seen.

  “She denied she was raped, but you believe she was?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Half-naked with blood on her legs, yeah. But maybe it wasn’t her blood. She washed it off, so we’ll never know. An axe does a lot of damage, y’know?”

  Eric suppressed a shudder. “I don’t think she did it,” he said. “I don’t think she could.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what people can do,” Logan told him. “Adrenaline is a powerful drug.”

  “Even if she had done it, it would have been self-defense.”

  “Don’t think so,” Logan said. “They were hit from behind.”

  “Both of them? Those two big guys—have you seen Desi? She’s like five-four and slender—I don’t know what she weighs, but probably half what those guys did. Anyway, what did she do—chase them on foot and then come back to find me?”

  “She wouldn’t have had to chase them far. They were killed in the cabin.”

  “What? No. They couldn’t have been. Their pickup was gone when we left.”

  “Was it?” Logan made a note. “Are you sure it was theirs?”

  “I assumed it was, but…”

  “Did you get the license number?”

  “No, I didn’t even look. I had no reason to. They were really killed in the cabin?”

  Logan shrugged. “They were found in the cabin, and it sure looked like they were killed there.”

  Eric sat back, his brain refusing to absorb this news. “They left and came back? And somebody killed them, or they killed each other?”

  “Don’t think so,” Logan said again. “I think your girlfriend did it. Who had a better motive? Except maybe—” He leaned forward. “Somebody did that to my girl, I’d like to take an axe to them.”

  “So would I. But I was tied up and unconscious until a few minutes before we left, and we were together the rest of the time.”

  “Which makes her your only alibi. You didn’t go back to the cabin?”

  “No, she didn’t want to… Oh, Jesus.” He put his hands to his head. He had assumed she resisted returning to the cabin because she had been raped in there. Did she instead know the bearded trespassers lay dead inside? Had she killed them and had the presence of mind to move their pickup? Or did one of them drive it away beforehand? If it wasn’t theirs, was somebody else around? The killer or a possible witness? Or was the pickup a red herring? He had been hit in the head—could he even be sure he would have remembered where it had been?

  Logan showed him an array of photographs and asked if he recognized anyone. He studied each one carefully, taking his time. The axe-wielding stranger was instantly identifiable. Eric touched the goose egg on his head before he put a finger on the picture. “This one,” he said.

  “Where do you recognize him from?” Logan said, sounding bored.

  “He was—he hit me with the axe.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. He had smiled and said it was a pretty day and—wham! It didn’t make sense that the attack was so quick, as if it was premeditated. Was he only cutting firewood to pass the time? What exactly had he done to Desi? One of them must have hit her in the face…

  “Anyone else?” Logan asked.

  Eric struggled to focus. The ringing in his ears made him feel dizzy and disoriented, but he had been fine a minute ago. This bastard, this motherfucker…

  “Mr. Leidheldt?”

  He concentrated on the pictures one at a time. If the red-haired guy was among them, he didn’t recognize him. He tried to call his face to mind, but the man with the axe had held his attention, and he had only glanced at the other man for a second. Eric hesitated over one possibility but wasn’t sure enough for legal purposes. “No, sorry,” he finally said, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair. He ran his gaze over the array one more time. “These look like mug shots—are they?”

  “They weren’t choirboys.”

  Chapter Three

  Three days passed before Eric saw Desi again. She was booked, questioned, and transferred to the jail ward of Carroll County Hospital. He wasn’t allowed to visit her.

  With their idyllic weekend shattered, he should have gone back to work, but his job as Chief Information Officer at Rocha Design Systems required more concentration than he could summon. He called in sick and consulted his own physician, who was appalled that Eric had driven a car immediately after he regained consciousness but agreed with the Nickels ER doctor that he should recover fully in a few weeks. His physician prescribed rest and aspirin and plain old common sense.

  Eric checked in frequently with John Barnes, the criminal attorney his father’s lawyer had referred him to, to make sure everything possible was being done to protect Desi’s rights and get her out.

  Barnes told him she had finally submitted to a rape exam. “I’m not sure whether she didn’t think she had a choice or was intimidated into it or changed her mind, but she did it.” The results were none of Eric’s business, covered by doctor-patient confidentiality, but they had a bearing on the case, so the lawyer had the information and, no doubt because he considered the senior Leidheldt, not Desi, his client, passed them on. It was of course too late to find foreign DNA inside her or skin cells under her fingernails, but she had bruises on her thighs and “significant vaginal tearing.”

  Those words hit Eric harder than he would have expected. They made it too easy to imagine the brutality of the attack, already suggested by her broken bones. Had he on some level believed her denials or wanted to? Why deny the brutality that was her best defense against a murder charge?

  “What about the morning-after pill?” he remembered to ask. “Was it too late?”

  “It might still have helped,” Barnes said, “but it’s most effective if taken within twelve hours. In any case, she refused.”

  Those three days were the worst of Eric’s life. He had lived contentedly alone in his apartment before he met Desi, but now the rooms echoed with a terrifying emptiness. He had emotions he couldn’t begin to express without her around to listen to the words. When he thought about her, about what had happened to her, how she had looked, what she must be feeling now, he wanted to break something—to smash glasses, shatter a window, throw things across the room, break every bone in the bodies of the monsters who had dared to violate his beautiful, generous, loving Desi.

  On the third day after her arrest, she was finally released on bail. They had given her back her clothes and her purse. She even wore lipstick. He expected her to be still unwilling to be touched, maybe even more so after her jail experience, but she came right into his arms and hid her face against his shoulder. He held her gingerly, conscious of her injuries. “Take me home,” she whispered.

  In the car, he broke the silence that had settled between them. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, but did you tell the police everything?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember what you told the police, or—”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they rough on you?” he asked. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.

  “They didn’t mean to be.” She sighed and looked out the window, away from him.

  “Did they bring in a female officer?”

  “Um, one was there. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Her gaze flicked toward him for a second and then dropped to her lap. Her unbraided hair swung forward, shielding her face. “What’s going to happen now?” she asked.

  He didn’t understand the question. “What do you want to happen?” he asked slowly. “Whatever you want to do, that’s what we’ll do.” He meant what he said. If she wanted to jump bail and hitchhike to Canada, he would go with her. She had talked about the possibility a lot in the past, half seriously. She had been a foster child, growing up in the system, and dreamed of going to Montréal to find her birth father.

  She had something more mundane in mind this time. “Sleep,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep in…there.”

  “You haven’t slept in three days?”

  “Was it three days?”

  “Yes, it was. I didn’t sleep much either. I missed you.” He reached out to pat her hand but restrained himself just in time.

  Her head came up. “I’m so tired, Eric. I just want to sleep.”

  “Okay. You sleep, and I’ll do the laundry and whatever other exciting chores I can find.”

  ****

  Desi slept straight through lunch and dinner, which Eric ate standing at the counter in the kitchen, too restless to sit still. He was glad to have her where he could keep an eye on her, where he knew what was happening to her. Too much had happened he wasn’t privy too, and he was used to her telling him whatever came into her head. Everything she said interested him just because she was saying it, but the best part was she trusted him with all her feelings and observations. He had never loved anybody else in quite this way. He wanted to keep her, but not possess her. She was too independent for that, too strong-willed.

  About ten o’clock, when he was watching TV with the volume low and wondering if he could lie beside Desi without disturbing her, she came out of the bedroom and joined him on the couch. He pretended not to notice how carefully she sat down. She wore a plain cotton nightgown with a high neckline. Her sling was somewhat grubby, and he wished he had thought to wash it while she was asleep. “Hi, sleepyhead,” he said. “Do you want something to eat?”

  “I can’t braid my hair,” she said fretfully.

  “Do you want me to try?”

  She smiled faintly. “No, but thank you.”

  “You must be hungry. What sounds good?”

  “I can’t eat. I tried, and it really hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. How about a smoothie or some nice hot soup?” He put his hands on his knees, ready to get up.

  She lifted her left shoulder in a one-sided shrug. “Maybe a glass of milk.”

  “Do you want chocolate in it?”

  “Yeah, I do. You are such a nice guy.” She managed a tiny smile. “I’d kiss you if I could.”

  “I’ll take a rain check,” he said. He strode into the kitchen, stirred cocoa into a tall glass of milk, and brought it to her with a straw. She had the remote in her hand and switched channels at random. She put it down to take the glass, murmuring her thanks, and he picked it up and changed to the ten o’clock news.

  Almost immediately, a familiar picture flashed on the screen—a dark-haired, fortyish man with a full beard. Desi jumped and spilled milk down her front. “Shit,” she said with feeling. Eric switched off the TV and dabbed at her nightgown with a tissue. She stiffened but didn’t jerk away.

  “I’m sorry.” He lay a hand on his heart. She didn’t answer and sat with her head lowered, sipping her chocolate milk. When the silence had stretched too long, he asked tentatively, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.” She was instantly angry. “What do you want to know? Were they bigger than you? Did I enjoy it? Is that what you want to know?”

  “No, I don’t need to know anything. I just want—whatever you want. I want you to feel better. I want—”

  “Okay, fine, I will try to feel better for you. I’ll work on it.” A slight movement of her right shoulder made her wince.

  “I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad at me. I know I’m not doing a good job with this. I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. I love you so much.”

  She had tears in her eyes. “It hurts to talk,” she said. “It makes me tired. I love you too, but I think…” She carefully set the glass on the coffee table and slid the engagement ring off her finger.

  “Oh, Desi, please don’t.” Tears stood in his eyes too. Something horrific had happened to her, but this was the real nightmare—that the atrocity could tear them apart.

  She held the ring out and when he didn’t take it, she tried to press it into his hand.

  “No,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I’ll buy you a better one, but I won’t take it back.”

  “A better one?” she asked. “That’s what you think I need? A better ring? Those are real diamonds.” She put the ring on the coffee table.

  “I know. It’s me you don’t want,” he said. “Because I couldn’t protect you? Because I’m a male chauvinist jerk who doesn’t understand what you’re going through?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. She struggled to her feet.

  “Desi, finish your milk,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m going back to bed. I’ll move out tomorrow.”

  “And go where?”

  “I have friends I can crash with.”

  “Yeah, I noticed them all lining up to bail you out,” he said. He didn’t know where this—this anger—was coming from. He hurt too much to be rational.

  “Oh, did I forget to thank you for bailing me out?” she asked, rigid with fury. “Thank you, Eric. Thank. You. I’ll pay you back.” She retreated into the bedroom.

  Eric sat where he was for only a minute. He wasn’t going to take this, not without a fight. He followed her. She lay on her side, crying softly into the pillow.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. He stroked her hair.

  “I don’t want your pity,” she said, flinching away from his touch.

  “I know. You don’t want anything from me,” he said, but he didn’t stop. He bent and kissed her forehead, avoiding her cheekbone. He could tell she didn’t like the contact, but she kept still—she suffered it. “I’m sorry. I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

 

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