He nodded. “I understand. But I still need you down there. He may give us something to follow up on. Two are better than one, and we need to get back here as quickly as possible. And you know the case better than anyone. Will you observe the interview?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“Good.” He glanced at his watch.
“But-”
“No buts. You’d better run upstairs and grab your toothbrush, or we’ll have to share.”
As Zack said it, he realized he wouldn’t mind sharing a lot more with Olivia than just a toothbrush.
Brian paced his rat-hole apartment late into the night. He didn’t want to meet with his attorney and a Seattle cop in the morning.
Especially not after what he’d done.
They didn’t know. They couldn’t know. He’d left no fingerprints, no one saw him, there was nothing to connect him to the killings. But his skin prickled and he couldn’t help but feel that his crimes were plastered all over his face.
His attorney had talked him into the meeting.
“Look, Brian,” Miles had said after Brian hemmed and hawed about going down to the police station, “I understand how you feel. I got the D.A.’s office to give you immunity. Nothing you say will be used against you. And if you help them catch this killer, you’ll be a hero.”
“But I don’t know anything! I wasn’t there. I didn’t know the girl. I told you I had nothing to do with it.”
“I believe you, Brian. But the cops think someone you knew may have framed you. Stolen your truck and used it in the crime. Don’t you want to know who’s responsible for your imprisonment?”
“The cops are,” he had mumbled. But ultimately, he agreed as long as he didn’t have to go to the police station. Miles arranged for them to meet at the public defender’s office in the courthouse.
Brian couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind that someone he knew had sent him to prison. Who hated him that much? He didn’t have a lot of friends left in town when he’d come back from Vietnam. Those who didn’t go to war went to college or moved away or looked down on him. He didn’t hang out with the same guys anymore. Someone he worked with at the warehouse? One of the gang of vets he’d met at the club where he’d drunk too much that fateful day?
Dawn crested over the bay before he dozed off. A sick feeling ate at him throughout the night.
Had he killed two people for nothing?
CHAPTER 20
Zack drove from the hotel they’d stayed in outside the San Francisco airport thirty minutes south to Redwood City. Olivia commented that the area had changed dramatically since she’d last visited, but didn’t seem inclined to talk about her childhood.
“When was the last time you were here?”
“Twelve years ago, when I graduated from Stanford.”
“Stanford? Really. What was your major?”
“Criminal justice, psychology, and biology.”
“Three degrees? Wow. So that makes you… what, thirty four? No-you’d be thirty-nine.” She was five when her sister was killed.
“It’s not polite to talk about a lady’s age.”
“Went to college late?”
“Something like that.”
Zack stopped pushing. He’d hoped she’d open up and share what had been troubling her, but maybe she was reluctant just being back in the area where her sister had been killed. Remembering her parents-that her mother killed herself.
“Is your dad still here?”
She shook her head. “He sold the house and moved as soon as I left for college.”
“That must have been hard on you.”
“It was harder living in the house after Missy was killed.”
“You don’t want to talk about it.”
He felt her eyes on him and he glanced over, taking in her tired eyes and pale skin before turning his attention back to the road.
She spoke after a time. “My mother never got over Missy’s death. She wouldn’t let us move; she wouldn’t let anyone touch anything in Missy’s bedroom. I tiptoed around the house so she wouldn’t see me, because when she looked at me I saw hate in her eyes.”
“She didn’t hate you.”
Olivia didn’t say anything, and Zack reached over and squeezed her hand. She flinched, but didn’t pull away.
“Why don’t you like being touched?”
“I don’t know,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “I suppose-well, after Missy died I sort of disappeared. To my mom and my dad. It was easier for them that way.”
“You were five!” He couldn’t help but feel hostility toward the parents who’d neglected their living daughter because they were grieving for their dead one.
“When my mother committed suicide I asked my dad if we were going to move. He just shrugged. I think if I had been old enough and put the house on the market myself, he wouldn’t have cared.”
Olivia paused, looking down at Zack’s hand wrapped over hers. Strength radiated from his body, and she was emboldened. She’d never told anyone what happened the day her mother committed suicide.
“I found her body.”
“How old were you?”
“Six.” She closed her eyes and pictured her mother’s bloody remains. Her mother had taken sleeping pills with a vodka chaser, but may have survived that. To ensure her death, she’d put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
“She shot herself. In Missy’s room, on the anniversary of her death. I heard the shot. Dad was at work. I’d just gotten home from school. There was so much blood. On the wall behind Missy’s pretty white bed. All over her dolls and toys. Everywhere.”
“Oh God, Liv.”
Suddenly he pulled off the freeway. Olivia opened her eyes and was surprised when Zack turned off the ramp and into the parking lot of some business. He shut off the ignition.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up,” she began.
He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. At first she thought he was angry with her, and maybe he was, but not for the reason she thought.
“Stop saying you’re sorry.” His voice was low and gruff, full of restrained emotion.
She was drawn toward Zack, his dark eyes searching hers, as if sharing his vitality, his strength.
“Liv, you’ve been blaming yourself for something that is simply not your fault.”
“I don’t blame myself.”
“Don’t you?”
What did she really think? “I don’t know.”
“Who, then? What’s eating you up inside? Your father? Your mother?”
A tear leaked from an eye, the unfamiliar wetness sliding down her cheek. “I blame Missy’s killer for taking her. God for creating him in the first place. I blame me for not stopping him. I blame Missy for not leaving the park when I wanted to. My father for walking around the house like a ghost. And my mother for… for looking at me as if I should have been the one to die!”
Zack gathered Olivia in his arms as she cried silently, her body heaving but little sound escaping, as if she were fighting each tear. God, he wanted to take her pain. He would gladly shoulder the burden of her anguish if he could.
His mother had dumped him. She’d left him because it was convenient. She left Amy because it was convenient. He’d had a hard time with it when he realized his mother loved her freedom more than her children. He’d felt abandoned by his mother, but Mae had never made him feel unwanted or unloved.
Everything became clear to him. Olivia’s reaction to Brenda Davidson and little Amanda. Her obsession with the case. Her reason for joining the FBI in the first place. Justice was a powerful motivator, and while she’d believed her sister’s killer had been behind bars until recently, she was fighting for the living victims as well as the dead.
She’d spent her life fighting for victims like her.
He smoothed her hair, breathed in her freshness. He kissed her temple. Then her cheek. He tilted her chin so she looked him in the eye. Her lip quivered and her cheeks were bright with emotion.