even during his brief marriage, wondered what it would feel like to have someone love you like that.
It was unlikely he’d find out, and seemed even more so with his fortieth birthday looming up ahead.
His body heat seemed to be helping her. Faith’s shivers came less often and she was warming up, nose, hands, cheeks. Meagher finally showed up with a mug of cocoa, flushing when he encountered his boss’s glower.
Ben shifted Faith, bundled like a mummy in the comforter, to the sofa beside him and helped her grasp the mug. She sipped, and let out a sigh of relief as the hot liquid reached places he couldn’t.
Ben stayed where he was, keeping her against his side and reminding her to drink, until a commotion at the back door announced the arrival of Char and Gray. Only then did he murmur in Faith’s ear, “Your sister’s here,” and stand up.
She looked at him for a moment, as if she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes were no longer blank, but rather filled with so much emotion, such horror, he almost wished he hadn’t stirred her to life again.
Involuntarily he reached out, but the movement was abortive because Char flung herself across the living room and enveloped her sister in her arms.
“Faith. Oh, God. Faith, honey.”
Ben backed away, leaving them to it. He had to do his job. He just wished his chest wasn’t so tight with anguish that every breath he drew hurt.
Turning to face Gray didn’t help.
Like Ben, Gray Van Dusen was a tall man, over six feet and broad-shouldered. A few years younger—maybe thirty-four, thirty-five—Gray had brown hair streaked lighter by the sun, a pair of level gray eyes and an easy, relaxed style that could morph into hard-ass in an instant. Right now, his pitying gaze shifted from his fiancée’s sister and went cold and hard when he looked at Ben.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know yet. When I got here, Faith was in shock. I didn’t want to leave her until Charlotte could take over.”
After a moment, Gray nodded in concession. Faith was more important to him, too, than any investigation.
“I’ve got to get on with it,” Ben said abruptly to the room, and walked past Gray as if he weren’t there.
In the kitchen, he determined that Meagher had, astonishingly enough, called for a crime-scene crew—borrowed from the county as the small city of West Fork didn’t have much need for one of their own—and the medical examiner. Both were en route, the young officer reported.
Ben nodded and, reluctantly, started upstairs.
Before he’d taken over, West Fork police would have turned the case over to the sheriff’s department because they had no officers experienced in homicide investigation. He might yet have to do that, if there seemed to be any doubt about tonight’s events—he knew he was emotionally involved, whether he liked to admit it or not. If it turned out the dead man wasn’t Hardesty, or Hardesty hadn’t been carrying a weapon, things could get messy.
A couple of the steps creaked under his weight. Had Faith’s ex spent enough time at the house to know to avoid them? Or were those faint sounds what had woken her?
In the hall at the top of the stairs, the first room on the right was Don Russell’s. Unsurprisingly, it had an air of disuse. On the left was Charlotte’s, where Ben had talked to her when she was recuperating from Hardesty’s last assault. Bathroom beyond, also on the left. And finally, Faith’s bedroom.
The door was wide open. The overhead light wasn’t on, but the bedside lamp was. Had Faith turned it on? If it was Meagher, if the idiot had done a thing in here but verify Hardesty was dead, Ben would string him up by his thumbs.
Ben pulled on the latex gloves he carried in his glove compartment, but didn’t have to touch either knob or door.
The body lay sprawled beside the bed. In fact, the dead man had been so damn close to the bed when the bullet—bullets?—struck, he’d slid down the side of it, fountaining blood on the quilt. Shit, Ben thought; from the quantity of blood, she’d likely gotten him right in the heart.
He pictured her at the range, taking methodical shot after shot, never flinching, her hands steady. Had she been envisioning this moment when she pulled the trigger? Seen her ex-husband in the white paper target?
Reality, Ben had long since learned, was one hell of a lot more brutal than anything the imagination could conjure.
He eased into the room with a sideways step to avoid walking where the intruder had. Sticking to the perimeter, he circled to a position near the foot of the bed and squatted on his haunches so he could see the face.
Rory Hardesty, Ben saw with relief. No mistake there, except on Hardesty’s part. He’d misjudged Faith, bigtime.
At first Ben couldn’t see any weapon, which worried him. Not to say Faith hadn’t had reason to shoot the bastard; he’d hurt her badly enough with his bare hands before, and it was well-documented. But this would be cleaner if he’d carried a gun or.
Ah. The knife had fallen out of his hand and lay in the shadow just under the bed. It was an ugly one with a thick black rubber grip, designed for the military or hunters, if Ben was any judge. The blade was at least eight inches long. He was willing to bet it would turn out to be the same knife Hardesty had used on Charlotte.
Oh, yeah. This one was open-and-shut, but he knew that wouldn’t make it any easier for Faith to live with what she’d done tonight.
He retreated as carefully as he’d entered the room. Now, how the hell had the son of a bitch gotten in? The easiest way would have been to knock out a pane of glass on the back door and reach in to unlock the new dead bolt, but he hadn’t done that. He clearly hadn’t made enough noise to wake either Don or Faith until he was upstairs and so close that in another few seconds Faith could have died.
Ben swore under his breath, pausing at the top of the stairs to get a grip on himself. He couldn’t let anyone see him falling apart at the idea of that knife descending toward Faith Russell’s breast. Or her throat.
Or—God—would Hardesty have wanted to carve up her face to punish her?
He actually shuddered and wanted to go back and kill the bastard all over again. He wished he’d done it in the first place. He could handle killing in a way he was terribly afraid Faith wouldn’t be able to. Especially not when the man she’d shot was someone she’d once loved.
Finally confident he could hide everything he felt, Ben went downstairs where both his officers waited with thinly disguised anxiety.
“Have you looked for the point of entry?” he asked.
Both heads bobbed. Burgess and Meagher exchanged a glance. Jason Burgess, who’d been a cop for two whole years, was the one to answer. “Yes, sir. The laundry room, sir.”
The door was behind the stairs. The window above the washer and dryer was missing its glass. The frame wasn’t large; it would have been a squeeze, but doable. This might have been the only room in the house with a closed door, which would have helped make the entry quiet. Also, Ben determined by prowling, the staircase and a storage space beneath it that was packed with boxes lay between the laundry room and the living room where Don had been sleeping. The pile of boxes would have offered dandy sound insulation.
He went outside, fetched a flashlight from his car and circled the house, where he found a painter’s stepladder under the window. The glass had been removed almost whole and leaned carefully against the house. Cut, presumably, although he didn’t see a tool.
He wondered if Hardesty had intended to reclaim the ladder once he was done inside and drive away to start his life anew, freed of his vicious compulsion once Faith was dead. Or would he have sat down on the side of the bed and called 911 himself, then waited for the arrival of the police as domestic abusers who killed sometimes did? Unless he proved to be carrying a handgun, too, which Ben wouldn’t