The Third Victim Part 84

starting out, and I was a seventeen-year-old girl from the wrong side of town. No one gets out of life without a few regrets."

"So you went back to your mother," Quincy deduced.

"No. I just went home. I didn't know what else to do. But I guess she just needed time to think about it. I'm not sure. Later that night Lucas came over. Drunk what else was new? They had a huge fight and she threw him out, yelling at him to keep his stinking hands off her daughter. I think that's the first time I felt proud of my mother.

The first time I had hope that things might be better.

"Then I came home the next day, and Lucas had shot off her head."

"And Shep was remorseful?"

"Not when he arrested me. But Bakersville didn't have any female officers, so he had to take me to Cabot County for processing. There a woman made me strip so she could bag my b.l.o.o.d.y clothes as evidence. And I ... And I was pretty damaged from what had happened. When she left the room, I heard her tell Shep that either my boyfriend really liked it rough or I'd spent a long night with the h.e.l.l's Angels. Poor Shep.

It couldn't have been fun to realize what a mistake he'd made."

"Did he give you the shotgun, Rainie?"

"No. At that point, I think he simply saw the error of his ways.

Between my condition and the neighbor's report on the time of the gunshot, they put out an APB on Lucas. They figured he'd flee the scene, but I wasn't convinced. He didn't have a lot of money, he specialized in being a mean son of a b.i.t.c.h. I think ... I think I just knew he'd come back. That had been the point. My mother was dead. Now he could do as he pleased.

"I didn't have any more weapons. I wasn't old enough to legally buy a gun. The shotgun was the only thing I knew about. So I went downtown.

I waited until six o'clock when the sheriff locked up the office for the night. I knew the volunteer officers were out on patrol. If any other business came up, the department's answering machine told you how to reach the sheriff at home, so everything was deserted and safe. I broke into the sheriff's office."

"There wasn't an alarm?"

Rainey raised a brow.

"In Bakersville? Who's dumb enough to break into a sheriffs office, anyway? Even now, one of us forgets to lock up half the time. It's not like we have a decent coffee maker to protect."

"You have evidence, though."

"In a separate evidence locker in the back. These days we use a safe.

Very solid, hard to penetrate. Fourteen years ago, however, it was a basic lockbox. I picked it open with a hairpin. And I took my shotgun home."

Quincy sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose. He obviously knew where things were going from here.

"Lucas showed up," he said.

"He walked right up to the sliding gla.s.s door before seeing me. And then ... he smiled, like this was going to be even more fun than he'd thought. He slid open the door. I shot him at point-blank range in the chest. Wouldn't you know it? He died with that same G.o.dd.a.m.n grin on his face."

"Why didn't you call the cops, Rainie? You could've claimed self-defense."

"I was a kid. I didn't know the legal system. I just knew my heart, and in my heart it wasn't self-defense. He had hurt me. He had taken away my mother. And I wanted him dead. I wanted him wiped from the face of the earth. And I'd taken my mother's shotgun home, just for that."

"You buried him under the deck."

"Took me all night."

"And then you ran away," Quincy concluded. She nodded.

"I took off for Portland and spent the next four years trying to drown every image in my head."

"What about his car, Rainie? What about any neighbors reporting the sound of a gunshot ' "My neighbor had left for a fis.h.i.+ng trip. There was no one around."

"Fine, what about the fact that one minute Lucas was in Bakersville and the next he disappeared? What about the fact that your mother's shotgun just happened to disappear from the evidence locker one night, only to magically reappear sometime later? This doesn't sound like

rocketscience to me. Shep should've been searching your place by the end of the week, tops. You didn't even hide the body well."

Rainie didn't say anything.

After a moment Quincy sighed.

"He let it go, didn't he? No harm, no foul. Remind me never to let Shep feel as if he owes me a favor."

"It's a small town, Quincy. And small-town policing ... The rules are sometimes different. What goes around comes around. It's not always just, but it can be right. For the record, to this day Shep and I have never spoken of it."

"Of course not. That would make it conspiracy."

"I was prepared to pay for what I'd done," Rainie countered immediately.

"In many ways, that might have been better. I could've gotten it out in the open. I could've faced it, put it in perspective, paid my dues.

Instead .. ." She faltered for the first time.

"Lucas had a wife and a kid. I took him from them. For fourteen years, they haven't even known what happened to him. I should've known that. Even if I hated him, I shouldn't have forgotten that he was human. Rodriguez is right: there are certain barriers we shouldn't cross, and one of them is the willingness to take a life."

"He would've gone after you that night," Quincy said gently.

"But that's the point, Quincy. I'll never know. I killed him first, and that makes me no better."

"Rainie ' She held up a hand.

"No plat.i.tudes. I did my deed. Now I'm going to get to pay for that.

Responsibility and accountability. They're not such bad things. You know why I dug him up that night?"

"Why?"

"Because I was afraid Richard Mann would take him away from me. When we first got the call about a man bragging that he had proof I'd killed my mother ... I don't know. I just flashed to Lucas, under my deck, and this strange dream I'd had the night before of a man standing there, the man in black. Suddenly, I was terrified. That it had been the killer on my back deck. That he had discovered the body and when I walked into Dave Duncan's hotel room, that would be the first thing I'd see -Lucas's corpse waiting to greet me. But then I walked in, and the room was empty, and ... I realized I wasn't relieved. In fact, I was even more anxious. What if he still knew, what if he'd taken the body, and then .. . then I'd have no proof of what I'd done, and I needed that proof. I needed to confess what happened. Danny had made that clear to me."

"So what happens now, Rainie?"

She had to take a moment. In spite of her best intentions, the answer to that question made her throat close up. She worked on clearing it.

She still sounded husky as she said, "The mayor asked me to resign last week."

Quincy looked immediately pained.

"You know," she said more briskly, 'there's just something about a cop with a corpse under her deck that people don't like. And here I'd finally managed to impress a tight-a.s.s like Sanders. But Luke's in charge now. He'll do a good job."

"You could move, start over someplace else."

"Not if I plead guilty. Things like that are hard to explain away during a job interview.