She walked across the street as realization began to rush through her.
God, why hadn’t she made the connection before now?
For years she had watched Mark Flannigan treat Cami like shit, and had agonized over how a father could be so cruel. Why hadn’t she remembered the darkly handsome man with the gentle smile and big hands?
Why hadn’t she remembered, during that time, the day she had come home from the park with a neighbor to find her mother sobbing as though she were dying? Aunt Beth had been crying as well and Uncle Jonah had been grief-stricken.
She unlocked the pharmacy and stepped in, careful to lock the door behind her, holding her breath as she heard a car easing down the street.
She prayed it wasn’t Mr. Keene, or the police. She would hate to have to explain why she was here. Even if she did have the key, she didn’t have permission to be in before it was time to open the pharmacy.
Moving quickly to the back, she began to fill the prescription as those memories continued to ease forward from whatever shadowed recess they had been hiding in.
She was still shocked, dismayed that she hadn’t remembered that summer so long ago. She should have. Because she remembered her father showing up not long after that and he and Uncle Jonah fighting over something Mark had called a “whoreson” and “wife-stealing brother.”
It was beginning to make sense. So much was becoming more clear.
She had been pushing so many memories back over the years, trying to keep the truth at bay. She hadn’t wanted to remember, though it was something Cami deserved to know. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t destroy her. Cami still had the hope that the day would come that Mark would accept her as a daughter and part of the family.
The fact that he never would wasn’t lost on Jaymi, or Jonah, if she could remember the past well enough to recall the screaming match they had gotten into.
Why? Why had she forgotten?
That question tormented her as she finished filling the prescription, capped it, and printed out the label before peeling the paper from it and sticking it onto the bottles.
The antibiotic would take at least twenty-four hours to kick in, but the cough medicine would ease her labored breathing and the horrible coughing.
Did Cami take her susceptibility to bronchitis from her natural father? Jaymi wondered as she made her way to the back door.
And if her mother had loved this other man so much, why had she taken Mark Flannigan back and allowed him to treat their daughter so dismally?
It was a question she intended to ask him the minute she arrived at the house in the morning. She would make a special trip before work just to throw her knowledge into his face and demand custody of Cami from both her parents.
She’d had enough. She wasn’t about to allow Cami to be treated so cruelly, or endangered while ill again.
Re-entering the security code, Jaymi opened the back door to the pharmacy, eased out, and turned back to lock the three locks on the door and reset the code.
The door was almost closed, the keys ready to shove into the lock.
There was no warning.
There was nothing to alert her.
One minute she was filled with righteous indignation over the treatment her sister had received for as long as she could remember, and the next second, everything was black.
* * *
The lone dark figure, black mask pulled over his face, his eyes filled with sorrow, looked up to the camera that was almost hidden above the door.
He knew what would be seen later. Rich, sapphire blue eyes.
Picking Jaymi up in his arms, he turned away and laid her carefully in the backseat of the stolen pickup before tying her hands snugly behind her back. Her ankles were secured with another length of rope and gray tape placed over her lips.
He stared down at her, just for a second, before reaching out and pushing her hair back from her face.
He’d tried to warn her, he really had.
She’d pushed too far, though. When she had begun calling his phone, he knew she suspected. He should have known she would catch on quickly, she was really smarter than the others. Smarter, and with the clear advantage of having known him most of her life.
With a last pang of regret he closed the door to the back of the king crew cab pickup before moving to the driver’s side and getting into the vehicle.
He stayed on the back streets, easing through them and making his way to the end of town before pulling the mask off and driving the speed limit the rest of the way.
He didn’t have far to go. There was a small gravel and dirt road that led to where he’d told the other man to meet him. Once there, he would turn her over to the killer whose lust for blood made him exceptionally easy to use and to control.
The man wasn’t good for much else but killing. He’d fried his brain with too many drugs years before, and existed on autopilot until he scored the next fix. Give the man a fix and he obeyed every command given and didn’t remember a second of it the next morning.
For the first time since the killing had begun, he knew he wouldn’t be participating. He usually took that first taste of them, raping them while they still had some fight to them. But he couldn’t, not with Jaymi.
He couldn’t hurt her himself.
He couldn’t stay and watch her be hurt.
He’d have to trust the drugs to have done the work this time as efficiently as they had the past five times.
Jaymi would be the last nail in the Callahans’ coffin. Once her body was found along with another, more significant piece of evidence, the Callahans wouldn’t be able to excuse their way out of murder.
There was no way to save her. There would be no way to save the Callahans. And the truth of the events that began this tale twelve years ago would continue to rest in peace along with the bodies of the grandparents that had set the events in motion.
He’d killed them. He’d been forced to kill their sons and their sons wives that snowy day as they returned from Denver. He hadn’t wanted to, but he’d had no choice. What they had been doing, and what they had found in that safe deposit box no one had known JR and Eileen Callahan had rented, could have destroyed them all.
Him included.
He couldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t let them destroy everything he had killed the cousins’ parents for.
And it could have ended there.
It should have ended there.
And it would have, if only Jaymi hadn’t realized who was calling. And if he wasn’t certain she would figure out he was killing as well.
All for the greater good, of course, he told himself as he had been telling himself since that first life had been taken. It was all for the greater good.
But this time, with this woman, he knew the lies were catching up with him.
It wasn’t for the greater good.