Chapter 12 #3
“Forget it.” She gulped the merlot, needing some form of relief that didn’t include . . . him. She blocked the images trying to burst through the thin barrier she used to protect herself from the past. Under normal circumstances she was very good at that.
“This incident involved a man.”
That cruel voice . . . the vile whispers in the dark she had tried so hard to forget . . . still echoed in her head. “Give it up, McBride,” she tossed back, playing off his suggestion. She couldn’t let him hear the internal reaction in her tone, that would only egg him on.
“Took place at or during college.”
She stilled. How could he know that?
“Aha. I’m right.”
“You’re guessing,” she countered, her voice way, way fragile. A dead giveaway.
“Didn’t have to guess.” He sipped his wine. “Your photo album told me.”
She bit her lips together to prevent asking how the hell her photo album had told him anything.
“Lots of snapshots during high school, a few before that, and then nothing until the academy photos. That’s a sizable lump of time. Important time. College days.”
Her throat tightened, and her stomach rebelled at even the idea of more of the wine. Her heart rate had kicked back up to post-nightmare pounding. She should call Worth. Find out what the holdup was.
“Tell me, Grace,” McBride whispered through the darkness, his voice soft and cajoling. “It’s just you and me. Partners. You can’t possibly have any demons uglier than mine.”
Her lips quivered, and before she could stop herself she said it. “Nameless.”
The word resonated through her, making her insides writhe with equal measures of fear and disgust.
The initial silence told her he hadn’t expected that. “You were the final victim . . . ?”
Oh yeah. Surprise. Shock. Horror. Worth’s reaction had been the same. She hadn’t wanted to tell him, either, but Pierce had insisted. Either she told Worth or he would.
Damn Pierce. She had trusted him and he had let her down.
“But . . .” McBride hesitated, that too-discerning mind no doubt analyzing every tiny detail he had learned about her to date. “Grace. That’s not your real name.”
“It’s my mother’s maiden name.” She had been born Vivian Taylor. Changing her name, changing colleges, it had been the only way to endure what came after survival. Living with it.
McBride stood. She tensed. He moved to the edge of the deck and braced his hands on the railing, peering out at the darkness.
A half minute or so elapsed, long enough for her to squirm. She shouldn’t have told him. Major mistake.
He turned, leaned against the railing. “What the hell are you doing with the Bureau?”
“My job,” she snapped. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m damned good at it.”
“When you don’t freeze up.”
That was a low blow. She held back her first reaction to his statement, and then she hugged her arms around her knees and told him the truth.
“My past has nothing to do with the present. The Bureau is my life now. I’m not looking back, McBride.
It isn’t healthy.” As you should well know, she considered tacking on but didn’t.
“How many years of therapy did it take for you to get this deep into denial?”
That was it. She dropped her feet to the deck and stood. “I’m calling Worth.”
McBride pushed off the railing, took a step toward her. “I was deep into an abduction case of my own at the time you went missing, but I heard some of the details. He kept you two weeks, didn’t he?”
When she didn’t answer, he took another step toward her. She refused to be intimidated. She was finished with that. This conversation wasn’t happening.
“How many times did he rape you?” He went on with his heartless interrogation.
The rage she had thought she could hold back erupted inside her. How dare he ask her that? “Shut up, McBride. Just shut up.”
“Every day?” he pushed ruthlessly. “Twice a day? More?”
Fury overrode her common sense, and she took the final step, got into his personal space for a change. “That’s right, if you must know. Every damned day. I lost count of the times.” She laughed, a dry, nasty sound. “And I killed him. Just once,” she qualified, “but that was all it took.”
More of that deafening silence. They stood so close she could feel the tension running through his body, could smell the sweet wine on his breath.
“You were what,” he murmured, the sound harsh, “number twelve or thirteen?”
Number Thirteen. She shook with the words shuddering through her. “Thirteen victims in five years. I guess I was his unlucky number.”
The voices and images tried to intrude. The blood all over her .
. . the taste in her mouth. She shuddered and fury twisted her lips, made her want to scream, but she held it back.
She had learned how to do that with the fear too.
Only once in a while did she screw up and let those old emotions get the better of her.
Like freezing up in front of McBride. If Worth found out .
. . her career would stall, and she would never get a chance at reaching her full potential.
Damaged agents weren’t reliable in the Bureau’s opinion. She was glaring at a prime example.
Hell yeah, she spent a hell of a lot of time pretending the past hadn’t happened. And she wasn’t changing that strategy now.
“Did you ask for this assignment? To come back home and prove you could live only a couple of hours away from where it happened?”
Answering that question would just give him another avenue to explore. She was not going there.
“You were attending college in Nashville, right?”
He just kept right on digging . . . forcing the issue.
Damn him.
“Or was it Memphis?” he prodded.
“Lipscomb,” she admitted, knowing he wouldn’t stop until she did.
“I was barely into my freshman year, a month shy of my eighteenth birthday.” The memories howled inside her like an imprisoned beast. She wrapped her arms around her middle to hold herself steady.
Nameless, Satan himself, had stolen her out of her warm, happy life. He had taken over her whole world.
He. He or them? She still couldn’t put the idea out of her head that there had been two of them.
The whispered voice had felt different at times .
. . as if there were two different men taunting her.
But when the police had discovered her and the body, there was only one.
All DNA and trace evidence had pointed to him.
There was absolutely no evidence of a second unsub .
. . just the confusing voices in her head.
But her shrink had insisted that the creation of the second persona could have been an attempt by her mind to escape the evil .
. . to pretend she’d had an ally or to excuse her inability to escape her captor sooner.
So, she’d changed her name and spent the next nine years pretending not to hear the voices . . . pretending she wasn’t that person anymore. Pretending made it go away.
During that time, she transferred to Boston College, to escape all of it—even her overprotective parents.
She had cut ties with the friends she’d had her entire life and never once looked back.
She joined the Bureau and graduated at the top of her class.
Now, six months back in Birmingham and she hadn’t called a single one.
Took pains to ensure that if she ran into anyone she used to know, she looked away or hurried in the other direction.
Her parents didn’t fully understand her decision, but they honored her wishes. Unlike this Neanderthal.
“Is that why you came back here?” he persisted.
“I asked for Baltimore.” She closed her eyes a second and concentrated on banishing the images and voices. “But I got Birmingham.” She knew who to blame for that. Her mentor and friend, Special Agent Collin Pierce. Maybe one of these days she would actually forgive him.
“Couldn’t be coincidence,” McBride guessed. “Sounds like someone wanted you to deal with the past. Does Worth know?”
That was all he was getting.
“Your turn,” she demanded. She couldn’t talk about this anymore. She had told him too much already.
“Fair is fair,” he confessed. “Hit me.”
Her cell phone trembled against the tabletop, the drone cutting through the tension.
She considered not answering it. McBride damn sure wasn’t getting off this easy. If Worth had the security detail in place at the hotel for McBride, he could leave her a voicemail.
Ring number two.
“You have to answer it,” McBride suggested.
“We had a deal, McBride. It’s your turn.”
“It may have to wait.”
That he looked so smug and that he was inarguably right only made the statement more infuriating.
A third ring.
Dammit.
She snatched up the phone and accepted the call. “Grace.” It was Worth all right. The information he barked into her ear sent a cold chill deep into her bones. “Yes, sir. We’ll be right there.”
Closing the phone, she faced McBride, dread mounting at warp speed. “We have to go to the office.”
“Tell me there isn’t a new email.”
“There isn’t a new email.” Her fingers felt limp around the phone. He was not going to take this news well.
“What the hell is it, Grace?”
His usual cocky tone had gone cold and impatient.
“At five thirty this evening, WKRT aired a story about you that was picked up by all the networks. Worth found out a couple of hours ago; he’s been running damage control with Quantico since. He’ll brief us both when we—”
“What kind of story?” McBride demanded. “I don’t want to hear it from Worth. I want to hear it from you.”
Vivian braced for his reaction. “An anonymous source provided details as to why you were right in the Braden case and your superior, Andrew Quinn, was wrong. Some of the details in the story were straight out of your final report, McBride. The original version, not the redacted one.” She swallowed back the bitter taste that rose in her throat.
“An hour ago, Derrick Braden went to Quinn’s home and shot him once in the head, then shot himself. ”
Silence.
Standing so close, she could not miss, even in the meager moonlight, the disbelief and shock that played out on his face.
Vivian could only imagine how many times Braden had replayed those final days before his son’s murder.
How many times had he asked himself what he should have done differently?
What the Bureau should have done differently?
Now the world knew some of the answers to that last question .
. . and Derrick Braden hadn’t been able to live with it.
McBride shook his head, denial etched in the planes of his face. “Braden couldn’t have—”
“He did.”
“But—”
“We have to get dressed and go in.” She turned away, her movements stilted. This couldn’t be happening. This entire situation was going off the rails.
“Wait.” He clutched her arm, hindered her escape. “What else did Worth say?”
Telling him the rest would only add insult to injury. She would rather he hear it from Worth.
“What?” he demanded.
“Director Stone called.” She didn’t have to explain that Stone was currently the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. McBride would know that. Anyone who watched the news would know that.
“And?”
“He wants you disassociated with the Bureau and off this case.”