Absolute Fear. Lisa Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ never stolen. They were never missing. Someone slipped into your car when you inadvertently left it unlocked. And they did it today. You know that. Otherwise you would have found the packet earlier, when you put your sunglasses into the glove box.

      She tried to think dispassionately about the guy in the wraparound shades. She’d panicked at the sight of him, imagined him to be the embodiment of evil tracking her down. When she’d calmed down a bit, she’d blown off her fear as the bothersome result of an overactive imagination, but was it really? Could he be the culprit, the one who’d left her the clippings?

      If only she’d seen his license plate.

      “Get a grip,” she said, then nearly tripped on Samson, who was lying on the bottom step. “Careful there, guy.” She picked him up and carried him back to the kitchen.

      Turn these clippings in to the police.

      Eve grimaced. The local detectives already thought she was at least three cards shy of a full deck. Taking in this bundle of news articles would only up the ante on the theory that whatever brains she once had were destroyed when a bullet ricocheted against her skull.

      Maybe the police could pull off fingerprints, find out who broke into your car and left the envelope in the glove box.

      All too clearly Eve remembered the harsh, no-nonsense visages of Detectives Montoya and Bentz and the skepticism of the Assistant District Attorney who had been chosen to prosecute Cole.

      “You’re certain about this?” ADA Yolinda Johnson had asked Eve, her dark eyes narrowing. She was a slim, smart African-American woman of about thirty-five who wasn’t about to walk into the courtroom without all of her facts straight and her ducks in a row. Eve was seated on one side of a large desk, Yolinda on the other. The office was small and close, no window open, and Eve had been sweating, her pain medication beginning to wear off. “Mr. Dennis shot you.”

      “Yes.” Eve’s insides had been in knots, and she’d worried a thumb against the knuckle of her index finger.

      “But you don’t remember anything before or after the attack, is that right?” Yolinda had clearly been skeptical, her lips pursing as she tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the legal pad lying faceup on the desk.

      Eve’s stomach tightened. “That’s…that’s right…. I mean, I remember being with Cole at his house—”

      “In his bed, Ms. Renner. Let’s not mince words. The defense attorney certainly won’t.”

      Eve’s head snapped up, and she met the other woman’s gaze evenly. “That’s right. We’d been in bed.”

      “You were lovers.”

      “Yes.”

      “Go on.”

      “I received a call from Roy…Roy Kajak. He was insistent we meet. He said he had some kind of ‘evidence,’ whatever that meant. But then…then it gets kind of blurry.”

      “Mr. Dennis didn’t want you to go.”

      “That’s right.”

      “He barred the door.”

      “Yes…”

      “Did he follow you?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Did you see him leave the house?”

      “I…I don’t think so.”

      “But you’re not sure, are you?” the assistant DA had accused, leaning forward across the desk.

      “No.”

      “So it’s all a blur. Until you saw Cole Dennis leveling a gun at you through the window.”

      “Yes.”

      “Even though it was dark.”

      “Yes!” Eve’s guts had seemed to shred.

      Yolinda frowned, her lips rolling in on each other. Her pencil tapped an unhappy tattoo. She stared at Eve a long minute that had seemed punctuated by the ticking of a clock on the credenza behind her neat desk. “Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this, okay? The jury will understand why you don’t remember anything after the shooting. You were wounded. Passed out. Unconscious. That works. But possessing no memory leading up to that moment in time is a problem.”

      “I can’t lie.”

      Yolinda held up her hands, stood, then walked to the small window. “The last thing we want you to do is lie, but you’re going to be asked some tough questions while you’re on the stand.” Turning, she rested her hips against the window ledge, her dark gaze boring into Eve’s. “The fact is that you’ve got credibility issues, Ms. Renner. You were taken to the hospital, unconscious, and, along with other medical treatment, you were examined for rape.”

      Eve had nodded. Braced herself. Felt as if the air in the room had suddenly gone stale. She knew what was coming.

      Yolinda’s voice softened a bit. “You weren’t raped, Eve. We know that. There was no bruising or tearing consistent with rape. But you had semen in your vagina.”

      Eve met the ADA’s hard gaze. She’d been through this before, but it was still difficult to hear. “I’d been with Cole,” she said softly.

      Yolinda nodded. “Some of the semen belonged to Cole Dennis. But there was other semen as well. Other viable sperm. Definitely not belonging to Mr. Dennis.”

      The first time she heard that horrifying information, the blood rushed to her head and made her feel like she would pass out, throw up, or both. With an effort, she just stared back at the ADA.

      “And it was not from Royal Kajak.”

      Eve swallowed but still said nothing. What was there to say? What kind of comment could she make? And how could she not remember something so vital? This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. True, she had holes in her memory—a dark, blank nothingness surrounding the night of Roy’s murder—but she knew herself well enough to understand that she would never sleep with two men within hours of each other. Never.

      You weren’t raped. We know that.

      Then how???

      “I only remember being in bed with Cole,” she finally managed to get out, sounding as confused and shattered as she felt.

      Yolinda shrugged and exhaled a long-suffering sigh. “You see my problem, don’t you? If I get you up on the stand, and you ‘don’t remember this’ and you ‘don’t remember that’ and you don’t even remember who you slept with, how’s that gonna look to the jury? What do you think Cole’s attorney, Sam Deeds, is gonna do with that testimony on cross-examination?” Eve shook her head, and Yolinda continued tersely, “I’ll tell you what he’ll do. He’ll go at you, over and over again, get you tongue-tied and angry, so that you look like you’re either stupid or a bald-faced liar. Then, when it’s already awful, he’ll just keep pushing you, so that you get defensive and look like a two-timing bitch.”

      “It was only СКАЧАТЬ