gestured with the beer bottle. “I’m not so sure. If somebody is targeting women because you loved them, he hates you bad. It’s not like this guy is telling the world what an asshole Will Patton is. This is something that eats at him. Takes the stomach lining, then his soul.”
“I’ve put people away…”
“But you hadn’t, back when Gilly was killed.”
“Mendoza…”
“We’re just supposing.”
“That he didn’t kill her.”
“Or that somebody, somehow, put him up to it. Maybe it took that somebody six years to work up the nerve to do the dirty work himself.”
Will wanted to reject a suggestion so unlikely, but he’d spent enough years in the D.A.’s office to know anything was possible.
“Do you remember that guy who set the fires because he blamed my grandfather for his mom’s death?”
Travis accepted the seeming non sequitor. “I remember.”
The first fire had been set inside a pickup truck chosen because it looked exactly like Police Chief Ed Patton’s. The worst was Aunt Abby’s townhouse. She’d barely escaped with her life. Even Will, just sixteen, had been targeted. His bike, parked outside the grocery store, had been squirted with gasoline and set afire.
He remembered how he’d felt, knowing someone had been watching him, following him, hating him. For a while, until they caught the guy, Will had lived with the heightened perceptions of a soldier in a war zone. He’d searched the faces of people in line at the store or sitting in the bleachers at basketball games, been painfully conscious of anyone walking behind him, of every driver behind the wheel of an approaching car. It was like looking through a magnifying glass, so that his vision was both abnormally sharp and a little skewed. He hadn’t trusted that anything was as it seemed.
If he bought into this theory, he would once again feel like an infantryman walking down the street in Fallujah and realizing he’d forgotten to put on his body armor. The smiles of old friends would look like the veiled faces of Iraqi women whose dark eyes were unreadable to that soldier.
Even with friends, he’d have to wonder what he wasn’t seeing, what he might have done to provoke hatred so virulent.
He didn’t want to revisit that kind of paranoia. Every cell in his body rejected the idea that someone he knew, maybe even someone he’d gone to school with, could do something so hideous.
He unclenched his jaw. “You’re reaching. All of you are reaching. This doesn’t have anything to do with me. It has to do with that sick bastard who murdered Gilly, may he rot in prison until the gates of hell open for him.”
“You may be right.” Travis opened the refrigerator and handed Will another beer as if it were an olive branch. “Let’s just hope we find out before another woman gets murdered.”
“Amen to that,” Will agreed, and popped the lid from the bottle. Goddamn it, but his hand was still shaking.
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