Deadly Reckoning. Elle James

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СКАЧАТЬ let their small children play in the water near the lighthouse, preferring to take them down the coast to a less dangerous beach. But the teens and young people on vacation at Cape Churn didn’t always stop to check the conditions or adhere to the warnings.

      “Have to wait for the M.E.’s determination. Can’t imagine she’d go in alone, though, and not with the water as cold as it’s been.”

      “Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “And if it was an accident, that wouldn’t explain why she’s naked, when her friends described her as wearing jeans and a hoodie.”

      The M.E. straightened and walked toward the chief, stepping over the yellow tape. “Tom.” He peeled the rubber gloves from his hands and turned to stare down at the victim.

      “Gordon.” The chief nodded toward the woman’s body. “Murder?”

      “That would be my bet. I can’t say for certain until the autopsy is complete, but there’s bruising around her throat. I’ll get the report to you ASAP. Until then, I’d be looking for a potential killer.”

      The M.E. left the chief and Gabe and climbed the steep path behind them.

      “I hope you didn’t think you’d left the big-city problems behind you in Seattle.” The chief stared out at the ocean.

      “That’s what I was wishing for.” Gabe shook his head. “I came home for a quiet, safe place to live.”

      “We don’t always get what we wish for. I told you when you signed on we were normally quiet, but sometimes we have blips on the radar. The blips always seem to come with the fog. You know as well as I do that some of the more superstitious locals call the fog the Devil’s Shroud.” He shot a glance toward Gabe. “What was the weather like last night?”

      “Foggy,” Gabe answered, his tone flat, matter-of-fact. He’d almost forgotten the Devil’s Shroud tales the old-timers spoke of in whispers as if by speaking of it aloud, the shroud would gain strength.

      Tom shook his head. “That damn fog can be a real curse. It can hide a lot of sin.”

      Gabe couldn’t argue with the chief. Fog provided great cover for someone intent on committing a crime. “I’ll canvas the area around the lighthouse. Maybe someone saw or heard something.”

      “You do that. And next time there’s a fog, keep your loved ones close. We may have a killer on the loose, and I don’t want you taking any chances. You hear me?”

      “Yes, sir.” Gabe believed in caution—especially with a case as serious as this one. He wasn’t naive about small towns, but he really hadn’t anticipated a murder in his hometown of Cape Churn. He felt as old as Judd Strayhorn as he ascended the path to the road above and climbed into his cruiser. So much for letting Dakota have free rein on his bicycle. Just because the killer’s first target had been a woman didn’t mean teenage boys were any safer.

      Gabe gritted his teeth. Yet another reason to argue with the teen he still didn’t know any better than he did when the boy’s mother dropped him off four months ago.

      Dakota was testing him, he knew it. What Dakota didn’t know was that Gabe didn’t give up. And given that Dakota’s mother had, Gabe was more determined than ever to make his relationship with his son work. The boy wasn’t on his own yet, and he needed to know he had a home to go to, even if he resented the man he refused to call Dad.

      Gabe crept along the road headed north toward the lighthouse, stopping at the few vacation cottages and homes along the way. Most remained deserted, the summer season not fully kicked off. Schools in Seattle and Portland were still in session. In Gabe’s mind that gave them approximately two weeks to find the killer. After that, they’d have a boatload of potential victims converging on Cape Churn for summer vacation. More people to sift through, and more crime to keep them busy.

      With mostly the local population to deal with at this time, how hard could it be to find a killer in a town of less than eight thousand people?

      Kayla stood at the edge of the cliff her cottage rested on, her easel propped between the rocks, oil paint stiffening on her palette, a light, cool breeze flipping her hair into her face. She scanned the horizon, hoping for something to catch her eye and spark her inspiration. To her far left, about a half mile away, another jut of rocky cliffs pushed out into the ocean.

      Through the trees behind the edge of the cliff loomed the shadowy outline of a building. She couldn’t make out much, but Kayla made a mental note to ask Jillian Taylor, the real-estate agent, who lived up there.

      But no matter where her gaze fell, nothing grabbed her, and no matter how hard she tried to concentrate, the colors wouldn’t take form on the canvas. Last night’s scream echoed in her head, over and over. She’d assumed it was a lingering part of her dream. The fog had completely swallowed up her house, she couldn’t even see as far as the defunct lighthouse that stood a hundred yards from the cottage.

      With conditions like that, if someone truly had been in trouble outside, she couldn’t have done anything to help her without risking falling off the cliff.

      When Kayla had come out that morning, the sun had burned off the remaining fog and she saw no evidence of a woman, or any of the youths she’d seen yesterday evening, going down to the small stretch of sand below the extremely steep cliffs surrounding the lighthouse.

      She’d been too wary to check out the trail they’d used to descend to the beach below. Although her pregnancy wasn’t outwardly visible yet, she could feel the changes in her body, the way her center of gravity was shifting. Steep steps on an unfamiliar trail was a risk she wasn’t willing to take unless absolutely necessary. Instead, she’d stood at the edge of the cliff and stared down, panning the narrow strip of beach butting up against the rocky cliffs. Nothing stood out. No sign of people. Just nature at its most rugged and beautiful.

      The splendor of the rocky coast, the drifting clouds and the steely gray of the ocean called to the artist in her. In a burst of optimism, she’d run back to the house, grabbed her easel, brushes and paints out of the car and hurried back out to paint the edge of the world.

      But as soon as she’d taken the brush in her hand, her throat closed up just as it had the night she’d been attacked. Her muse refused to come out of the dark and dance in the daylight.

      Kayla stood in the sunshine, her hand holding a paintbrush and a palette filled with blobs of oil paints in varying colors of the earth and sky, and nothing came to her.

      Tears filled her eyes and she recognized the new sense of tightening in her throat as the sobs she’d held back since the attack. The fear she’d spent the last two weeks suppressing. It was one thing to be uninspired to paint while she was still in Seattle, with all of its noise, its unfriendly bustle, its shadowed alleyways and crush of strangers. But this was supposed to be a place she could recover, a place to banish her fears and get on with her work. If she couldn’t paint here, then that meant there was a chance that the attack outside the gallery had shaken her enough to kill her muse.

      Kayla’s hands trembled, the tremors jarring the brush from her fingertips. It fell to the rocky ground at her feet.

      As she bent to retrieve the brush, a large male hand got to it first.

      Kayla screamed and jumped back, the palette filled with paints clattering to the ground. Her hip caught the leg of the easel, jolting it so hard the canvas caught the breeze and flew over the edge of the cliff to crash against the rocks below.

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