Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #1)

  Chapter 3

  The teenage girl who opened the door looked as though she might slam it in Bill’s face. Instead, she whirled around and walked away without a word, leaving the door open.

  Bill stepped inside.

  “Hi, April,” he said automatically.

  Riley’s daughter, a sullen, gangly fourteen-year-old, with her mother’s dark hair and hazel eyes, didn’t reply. Dressed only in an oversized T-shirt, her hair a mess, April turned a corner and plopped herself down on the couch, dead to everything except her earphones and cell phone.

  Bill stood there awkwardly, unsure what to do. When he had called Riley, she had agreed to his visiting, albeit reluctantly. Had she changed her mind?

  Bill glanced around as he proceeded into the dim house. He walked through the living room and saw everything was neat and in its place, which was characteristic of Riley. Yet he also noticed the blinds drawn, a film of dust on the furniture—and that wasn’t like her at all. On a bookshelf he spotted a row of shiny new paperback thrillers he’d bought for her during her leave, hoping they’d get her mind off her problems. Not a single binding looked cracked.

  Bill’s sense of apprehension deepened. This was not the Riley he knew. Was Meredith right? Did she need more time on leave? Was he doing the wrong thing by reaching out to her before she was ready?

  Bill braced himself and proceeded deeper into the dark house, and as he turned a corner, he found Riley, alone in the kitchen, sitting at the Formica table in her housecoat and slippers, a cup of coffee in front of her. She looked up and he saw a flash of embarrassment, as if she had forgotten he was coming. But she quickly covered it up with a weak smile, and stood.

  He stepped forward and hugged her, and she hugged him, weakly, back. In her slippers, she was a little shorter than he was. She had become very thin, too thin, and his concern deepened.

  He sat down across the table from her and studied her. Her hair was clean, but it wasn’t combed, either, and it looked as if she had been wearing those slippers for days. Her face looked gaunt, too pale, and much, much older since he’d last seen her five weeks ago. She looked as if she had been through hell. She had. He tried not to think about what the last killer had done to her.

  She averted her gaze, and they both sat there in the thick silence. Bill had been so sure he’d know just what to say to cheer her up, to rouse her; yet as he sat there, he felt consumed by her sadness, and he lost all his words. He wanted to see her look sturdier, like her old self.

  He quickly hid the envelope with the files about the new murder case on the floor beside his chair. He wasn’t sure now if he should even show her. He was beginning to feel more certain he’d made a mistake coming here. Clearly, she needed more time. In fact, seeing her here like this, he was, for the first time, unsure if his longtime partner would ever come back.

  “Coffee?” she asked. He could sense her unease.

  He shook his head. She was clearly fragile. When he’d visited her in the hospital and even after she’d come home, he’d been frightened for her. He had wondered if she would ever make her way back from the pain and terror she’d endured, from the depths of her longtime darkness. It was so unlike her; she’d seemed invincible with every other case. Something about this last case, this last killer, was different. Bill could understand: the man had been the most twisted psychopath he had ever encountered—and that was saying a lot.

  As he studied her, something else occurred to him. She actually looked her age. She was forty years old, the same age he was, but back when she was working, animated and engaged, she’d always seemed several years younger. Gray was starting to show in her dark hair. Well, his own hair was turning too.

  Riley called out to her daughter, “April!”

  No reply. Riley called her name several times, louder each time, until she finally answered.

  “What?” April answered from the living room, sounding thoroughly annoyed.

  “What time’s your class today?”

  “You know that.”

  “Just tell me, okay?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  Riley frowned and looked upset herself. She looked up at Bill.

  “She flunked English. Cut too many classes. I’m trying to help dig her out of it.”

  Bill shook his head, understanding all too well. The agency life took too much of a toll on all of them, and their families were the biggest casualty.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Riley shrugged.

  “She’s fourteen. She hates me.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “I hated everybody when I was fourteen,” she replied. “Didn’t you?”

  Bill didn’t reply. It was hard to imagine Riley ever hating everybody.

  “Wait’ll your boys get that age,” Riley said. “How old are they now? I forget.”

  “Eight and ten,” Bill replied, then smiled. “The way things are going with Maggie, I don’t know if I’ll even be in their lives when they get to be April’s age.”

  Riley tilted her head and looked at him with concern. He’d missed that caring look.

  “That bad, huh?” she said.

  He looked away, not wanting to think about it.

  The two of them fell silent for a moment.

  “What’s that you’re hiding on the floor?” she asked.

  Bill glanced down then back up and smiled; even in her state, she never missed a thing.

  “I’m not hiding anything,” Bill said, picking up the envelope and setting it on the table. “Just something I’d like to talk over with you.”

  Riley smiled broadly. It was obvious that she knew perfectly well what he was really here for.

  “Show me,” she said, then added, glancing nervously over at April, “Come on, let’s go out back. I don’t want her to see it.”

  Riley took off her slippers and walked into the backyard barefoot ahead of Bill. They sat at a weathered wooden picnic table that had been there since well before Riley moved here, and Bill gazed around the small yard with its single tree. There were woods on all sides. It made him forget he was even near a city.

  Too isolated, he thought.

  He’d never felt that this place was right for Riley. The little ranch-style house was fifteen miles out of town, rundown, and very ordinary. It was just off a secondary road, with nothing else but forests and pastures in sight. Not that he’d ever thought suburban life was right for her either. He had a hard time picturing her doing the cocktail party circuit. She could still, at least, drive into Fredericksburg and take the Amtrak to Quantico when she came back to work. When she still could work.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” she said.

  He spread the reports and photographs across the table.

  “Remember the Daggett case?” he asked. “You were right. The killer wasn’t through.”

  He saw her eyes widen as she pored over the pictures. A long silence fell as she studied the files intensely, and he wondered if this might be what she needed to come back—or if it would set her back.

  “So what do you think?” he finally asked.

  Another silence. She still did not look up from the file.

  Finally, she looked up, and when she did, he was shocked to see tears well up in her eyes. He had never seen her cry before, not even on the worst cases, up close to a corpse. This was definitely not the Riley he knew. That killer had done something to her, more than he knew.

  She choked back a sob.

  “I’m scared, Bill,” she said. “I’m so scared. All the time. Of everything.”

  Bill felt his heart drop seeing her like this. He wondered where the old Riley had gone, the one person he could always rely on to be tougher than him, the rock he could always turn to in times of trouble. He missed her more than he could say.

  “He’s dead, Riley,” he said, in the most confident tone he could muster. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t know
that.”

  “Sure I do,” he answered. “They found his body after the explosion.”

  “They couldn’t identify it,” she said.

  “You know it was him.”

  Her face fell forward and she covered it with one hand as she wept. He held her other hand across the table.

  “This is a new case,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with what happened to you.”

  She shook her head.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Slowly, as she wept, she reached up and handed him the file, looking away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking down, holding it out with a trembling hand. “I think you should go,” she added.

  Bill, shocked, saddened, reached out and took the file back. Never in a million years would he have expected this outcome.

  Bill sat there for a moment, struggling against his own tears. Finally, he gently patted her hand, got up from the table, and made his way back through the house. April was still sitting in the living room, her eyes closed, nodding her head to her music.