Hide From Evil Page 3

  “Leave that here,” Benson said. Krista shrugged and handed over the copy. Maybe if he took more time to study it he’d finally see what she did.

  Mark Benson waited until Krista had shut his office door behind her before he reached into the bottom-right-hand drawer of his desk. He grabbed the bottle in the back without looking.

  He kept the bottle of fifty-year-old Macallan to commemorate his greatest victories, like the day Sean Flynn was pronounced guilty and Krista had knocked back two fingers with him in celebration. At the time they’d been flush with the triumph of nailing a sadistic killer to the wall.

  He also kept the bottle for the days when things went to utter shit. Like when, two years later, Sean Flynn’s conviction had been overturned and the whole thing had blown up in their faces, and the open-and-shut case had revealed itself to be more complicated than anyone ever could have imagined.

  When he’d gone for the death penalty, he’d believed with every fiber of his being that Flynn was guilty. He’d had no idea that conviction would land him in a quagmire of shit with no visible way out.

  The public relations nightmare that had ensued after they’d sent an innocent man to death row had been hell. The Seattle PD and the prosecuting attorney’s office were painted as a bunch of bloodthirsty incompetents, and even Krista’s work to make sure Sean was cleared of all charges hadn’t done much to repair their reputation.

  If only that was the worst of it. But right now his image issues were the least of his problems. And Krista’s unrelenting crusade to discover the truth about Nate Brewster threatened to send it all erupting to the surface, spewing forth like lava, destroying everything. Destroying the lives and careers of countless others.

  Others who understood that sometimes people had to die to keep their secrets safe.

  Damn it.

  Despite their efforts to make it look like the murders and the prostitution ring began and ended with Brewster, there were too many loose ends for Krista to track down and tie together.

  Now they were calling on Mark to stop her, to help them get this mess cleaned up before the whole world found out how deep the rot really went.

  He wished he could tell them they had nothing to worry about, that Krista would never find anything, that they were safe. He squeezed his eyes against the burn of tears. Krista, damn her, was one of the only people smart enough, relentless enough, to piece together the truth if she wasn’t stopped.

  And she wasn’t going to stop on her own. She’d made that clear when she walked out the door.

  He stared at the phone. Maybe he should play dumb. Pretend he had no idea what Krista was up to, act blindsided when she went public with her accusations. As soon as the notion crossed his mind, he dismissed it. If Krista wasn’t stopped in her tracks, the fallout would be immeasurable. Starting with him, destroying his family before it spread like a virus until the whole damn city fell apart.

  It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet, but he knew he needed the whisky’s bracing effects to handle what he needed to do next.

  He poured himself half a glass of scotch and swallowed it in two gulps. The next glass he sipped more slowly, thinking about Krista and the way she’d come out of law school, figurative guns blazing in the name of truth, justice, and the American way.

  Young and fresh with her startling, old-Hollywood ice-princess beauty—not that she’d ever tried to use her looks to get ahead. A real ballbuster, but with a heart of gold and an unshakeable core of integrity under her no-nonsense attitude. Making her way in the boys’ club with a no-bullshit demeanor that had the toughest gangbangers reluctant to face her in the courtroom.

  She reminded him of himself thirty years ago, full of zeal and passion. Before he’d learned the compromises and tradeoffs he’d have to make to climb this high. Before he’d realized who really controlled the system of so-called law and order in which he worked.

  He swallowed the last of his scotch, his hand shaking as he reached for the phone. The liquor churned in his stomach like acid and he hesitated. Maybe there was another way. Maybe he could throw her a bone, let her carry on her investigation while making sure she was fed enough misinformation…

  No. They wanted her stopped. They’d made that clear. And he knew Krista too well. He could toss her all the false leads he wanted, but as long as she was digging, she was bound to discover something.

  He’d had his chance to stop her and he’d failed, and in the meantime she’d already discovered too much. Brewster had done a damn good job moving his money around, but Krista had easily connected the dates with the deposits. It was only a question of when, not if, she figured out who had been paying him and why.

  Now Mark needed to man up and accept the fact that a woman he looked on as a daughter would be lost as collateral damage in the aftermath of Brewster’s death. That was just the way it needed to be.

  He picked up the phone and dialed. “It’s me. I tried to get her to drop it, but she won’t let up.”

  “I’ll see it’s taken care of. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  “Wait,” Mark said before the other man hung up. “Promise me they won’t…hurt her.” Images of Brewster’s victims flashed through his head and his throat burned with bile. The other people they used were capable of equal brutality.

  “I make it a practice not to micromanage,” the man said. “You’ll know when it’s taken care of.”

  The line clicked. Mark barely got his head to the trash can before the scotch came spewing back up.

  Thunk. Crack. Thunk. Crack. Krista followed the rhythmic sound as she picked her way down the rutted driveway to what she hoped was Sean Flynn’s cabin. When Megan Flynn, Sean’s sister, had told her Sean was living in their family’s hunting cabin outside the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Winton, it had only taken a quick call to Stew to track down the address.

  Problem was, about an hour out of town the GPS on Krista’s phone had crapped out, displaying an endlessly spinning pinwheel instead of the designated route. Luckily, it didn’t take too long for her to find someone in town familiar with Sean to direct her to his cabin.

  At first, the man working behind the counter in the combination gas station, grocery store, and post office had eyed her with suspicion. “What do you want with Sean?” he’d asked when Krista asked if he knew where she could find his cabin.

  “I’m a friend of his,” she lied. “He’s expecting me.” Also a lie, though to be fair she had left him four voice mails in the past two days, explaining that she urgently needed to talk to him about what had happened to Jimmy Caparulo. If Sean didn’t want people showing up on his doorstep, he should return their calls and tell them so.

  “Go around the south side of the lake and take Forest Service Road Twenty-Two,” the man working at the gas station in Winton told her. “About a mile in, there’ll be a fork in the road. You’ll wanna go left. Follow the road up the hill until the paved road ends, and about five miles in you should see a red mailbox. That’ll be the Flynns’ place. And as long as you’re goin’ up there, give him this.” The old guy handed her a pile of mail neatly stacked and bound together with a rubber band. “This is all that came in for the week.”

  She took the woodworking catalogs, a couple of bills, and offers for credit cards and tossed them on the front seat of her Toyota. She followed the old man’s directions exactly, but eight miles past where the paved road ended there was still no sign of the red mailbox. Her low-slung sedan had threatened to bottom out half a dozen times on the rutted road, and Krista was about to give up and head back down the hill. Then she spotted a rusted-out box balanced precariously on top of a rotting wood post. There were about two square inches of red paint still visible on the side, but it was the closest thing to a mailbox she’d seen in miles.

  The driveway was deeply rutted and after only a few yards she knew her car wouldn’t make it without severe damage to the undercarriage. She’d pulled her car over and grabbed Sean’s stack of mail from the passen
ger seat.

  Now she winced as her big toe slammed into an unseen rock and a couple of magazines slipped off the pile. She snatched them up, cursing as she wondered why someone would live like this, all alone in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a dirt road that probably closed down after the first big storm of the winter.

  A nervous flutter settled in her belly as she made her way down the drive. She didn’t kid herself that Sean felt anything but hostility for her.

  As the driveway curved, the woods gave way to a grassy meadow and Krista gasped, her anxiety forgotten for a moment. Okay, she wasn’t exactly outdoorsy, but she couldn’t deny the stunning view of the lake in the distance. The mountains still topped with white in late spring rose up like sentinels from the lake bed. Even she could put up with the boondocks for a few days if she got to look at that view every morning.

  There at the end of the drive was Sean’s cabin, a small but sturdy looking log structure with a porch that wrapped around it, with seats on the east-facing side to take advantage of the breathtaking view. A stream of silvery smoke piped up from the metal chimney on top.

  On the other side of the cabin was a huge metal shed with an ancient blue pickup truck parked out front. She followed the thunk-crack sound to the back of the shed, and as she rounded the corner she stopped dead as Sean Flynn came into view.

  The thunk-crack was from the ax he wielded as he split firewood on top of a thick stump. Impervious to the chill of the mountain air, he’d stripped off his shirt, and Krista’s mouth went dry as his muscles rippled and bunched with the steady swing of the ax. The tattoo on the inside of his right forearm undulated as his big hand gripped the handle. The skin of his back and shoulders was a deep burnished tan, and as Krista took a step closer she tracked a bead of sweat as it rolled down the deep groove of his spine to the waistband of the jeans hanging off his narrow hips.

  Oblivious to her presence, he tossed the wood onto the growing pile and bent to grab another thick log. Krista couldn’t stop herself from staring at the hard line of his glutes flexing against the soft denim.

  Heat curled in her belly and rose in her cheeks. She forced an image of Jimmy Caparulo’s bloody headboard into her brain. She was here to talk to Sean, not ogle him, and hopefully get some much-needed answers in the process.

  She cleared her throat to get his attention, and it was hard not to gape all over again when she was hit with the full force of Sean’s piercing green stare. He really was an amazing specimen of masculine beauty. Krista had been struck by it from the beginning, but it was easy to ignore when she believed he was guilty of brutally raping and murdering a woman.

  Then, his chiseled features and black Irish beauty had made him all the more repulsive, as she’d convinced herself he’d used his good looks to charm Evangeline Gordon into trusting him, paving the way to her doom. Now that she knew beyond a reasonable doubt he was innocent…she was anything but repulsed.

  After several seconds she realized his full lips were moving and she forced herself to focus.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said, dark eyebrows drawn tight over the bridge of his nose.

  Krista kept her gaze locked on his face, not on the arrow of dark hair that bisected what had to be an eight-pack ridging his abdomen. She held out the stack of catalogs. “Mail call.”

  The green eyes narrowed, and Krista could feel the hostility radiating off him. “You didn’t come all the way here to deliver my mail.” His grip tightened around the ax handle, and Krista’s skin prickled. She knew in her gut Sean wouldn’t hurt her. Still, she was out in the middle of nowhere with a man who hated her. And he was holding an ax.

  Krista took a step back and rolled onto the balls of her feet in case she needed to run. Maybe cornering Sean on his own turf wasn’t such a bright idea after all.

  Her tension uncoiled a notch when Sean leaned the ax against the stump and reached for the shirt draped across the back of a plastic lawn chair.

  Krista bit back a sigh when the muscles disappeared under a layer of blue-and-black flannel. “You’re right. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You didn’t need to come all the way out here.”

  “I called. Several times.”

  “Maybe you should have taken the hint when I didn’t call back.”

  He turned his back and started stacking the logs against the side of the cabin, underneath the overhang of the metal roof.

  Krista moved closer and picked up the scent of clean sweat and wood smoke emanating from him. “I assume you’ve heard about Jimmy Caparulo?”

  Sean froze for a second and then resumed stacking. “Megan called me right after it happened.” He shook his head. “Goddamn crazy Jimmy,” he muttered, but Krista could hear the catch in his voice.

  “What if I told you I’m not sure it was a suicide?”

  He straightened and pinned her with a hard stare. “What are you talking about?”

  “I spoke to Jimmy the afternoon before he died,” Krista said. She was close enough to see the bump on the bridge of Sean’s nose from where it had been broken. She didn’t remember him having it during the trial. It must have been another souvenir from prison. She watched him closely, gauging his reaction to her news. “He told me he had information about Nate Brewster, but he couldn’t tell anyone before because Nate threatened to hurt Jimmy’s aunt if he told. I was supposed to meet with him Wednesday night, but he never showed. When I went to his house, I found out he was dead.”

  “And you think someone killed him to keep him quiet?” Sean raised a skeptical brow.

  Krista shrugged. “It seems like kind of a crazy coincidence, don’t you think?” She could read nothing in Sean’s stare. “Any idea what he wanted to tell me?”

  Sean shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “When he talked to me, he said he should have said something sooner, that it would have helped you.”

  His mouth pulled tight, and Krista fought the urge to smooth the deep lines that grooved his cheeks. “He sure as hell could have helped me by not testifying at my trial, but he’s a good three years too late for that.” He blew out a frustrated breath. “Jimmy was messed up. He saw some things…We all saw some things…” Sean’s voice trailed off and his gaze blurred, became that thousand-mile stare. The look of a man who was there but not there, too caught up in the horror replaying in his head to see what was in front of him.

  He shook his head to clear it and ran a hand through his dark hair. It had grown beyond the short buzz he’d worn in prison, long enough to wave a little as the sweat dried. “I’m sure Jimmy thought he knew a lot of things, but I guarantee it was just paranoid ramblings. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some work I need to finish up.”

  Krista reached out and grabbed his arm as he went to turn away. Corded muscles rippled under her fingers, the heat from his skin singeing her palm. She snatched her hand back as an electric buzz pulsed through her body. “I don’t think Brewster was acting alone when he framed you and killed those women,” she said.

  Sean folded his arms across his chest. “One phone call from Jimmy told you that?”

  “No. But Brewster’s computer was tampered with after he was killed and before the police seized it. We could tell files had been deleted, but so far no one has been able to restore them.” She pulled out another copy of the bank statement Benson had blown off. “And two days ago the investigator I’ve been working with found this.”

  Sean’s eyes narrowed as she pointed out the correlation between some of the large deposits and the other murders.

  “Nate was a sick bastard, and who knows, maybe he was working for hire. But even if that’s true, what does that have to do with me?”

  Krista drew back. Even when she’d been convinced Sean was evil incarnate, she’d never thought him thick. “Other people might have been involved in covering up for Nate after he framed you for Evangeline’s murder. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

  “I’m out of prison and the man who tried to k
ill my sister is dead. That’s all I care about.” But the cold, closed look on his face was that of a man who didn’t care about much of anything at all. “If what you think is true, I’m sure the cops are more than capable of getting to the truth of it.” Was that a note of sarcasm in Sean’s voice?

  “They’re not investigating, and that’s the problem,” Krista said, irritated that she had to tilt her head back so far to look him in the eye. “You’re the only link I know of between Nate and Jimmy, and if there’s any chance—”

  Sean cut her off. “I don’t know anything. And even if I did, the last thing I want to do is dig all that shit up again. Now, I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave.”

  Krista shook her head like she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “If I’m right, the people working with Brewster are still out there, getting away with it, getting away with hurting Jimmy—”

  “People get away with shit all the time,” Sean said coldly. “And innocent people take the heat for things they don’t do. You know that as well as I do.”

  That arrow hit her straight in the chest and exploded on impact. “Then you should want to make this right as much as I do.”

  Sean shook his head. “If you need to clear your conscience, that’s your problem. I just want to get on with my life and forget the last three years ever happened.”

  Ignoring her protests, Sean turned his back and walked to the shed. Krista followed after him, cursing as her foot hit a stray log that hadn’t made it into the woodpile. “Sean, wait.” She tried to catch him as he went through the door. The door slammed in her face with a metal clank, followed by the snick of a bolt sliding home.

  She tried the door. Sure enough, the bastard had locked her out. She pounded the metal wall with her fist, cursing as pain radiated up her arm. A second later she heard the high-pitched whine of some kind of power tool surging to life.