time was personal.
“You don’t want to go in there, son.”
Dylan glanced over his shoulder to see Detective Paul Zito break from a cluster of patrolmen and cut across the lawn. Dylan’s work as a private investigator brought him in contact with the homicide veteran often enough that the two had formed an unlikely friendship.
On the third Tuesday of every month, they met by the river at Shady’s for beer and cards. Nothing rattled Detective Paul Zito. Nothing fazed him. Dylan couldn’t remember a single time when the irreverent cop had looked the least bit uneasy. Certainly not stricken.
Until now.
Dylan’s heart rate accelerated. Dread twisted through him. And for a moment, he wanted to turn and walk away. Walk far. Like she had. He wanted to get back in his car and drive, get on with his life. He wanted to pretend the only woman who’d ever crawled under his skin didn’t lie dead inside.
But that was the coward’s way out, and while Dylan had been called many names in his thirty-two years, coward wasn’t one of them.
“Trust me,” Dylan said when Zito joined him on the tulip-infested walkway. “This has nothing to do with what I want.”
The homicide veteran frowned. “Technically, I can bar your sorry ass from taking another step. This is a crime scene. You have no right to be here.”
“I’m family. That gives me every right.”
“So that’s what you’re calling it these days?”
He ignored Zito, stared at the front door. It hung open, allowing light to spill like blood from a starkly white foyer. A wide staircase swept toward the second level. She was in there. He wondered where. If she’d suffered. If she’d known.
A primal emotion he didn’t understand bled through the indifference he struggled to erect. The last time he’d seen her—Christ, he didn’t want to think about that night. Until the scanner report, he’d done a damn fine job of blotting it from his mind. But now he had to wonder. If he’d known it was to be their last, would he have done things differently?
He didn’t want to think about that, either.
Needing to do something, anything, he stooped and snapped off a bloodred tulip. Indifferent, he reminded himself. Objective.
At the sight of his cousin’s white Ferrari parked in the street, his gut clenched. He could only imagine how Lance must feel, the shock and the grief. Lance and Bethany had long since gone their separate ways, but once, he’d pledged to love her forever.
“Where’s Lance? Is he inside?”
“In the living room.”
Dylan pushed past Zito. “How’s he holding up? Is he okay—”
“Christ, Dylan. I thought you knew.”
The tone, more than the actual words, stopped him cold. He’d heard that tone before, the sunny day eighteen years ago when the police chief had shown up on his grandfather’s doorstep.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I don’t want to be standing here any more than you want me to, but I didn’t want you to hear from strangers. There’s been a terrible accident…”
Adrenaline spewed nastily, prompting Dylan to turn toward Zito. The white porch rail and neatly trimmed hedges blurred, but the grim-faced detective looked carved of stone.
“Knew what?” Dylan bit out.
“There was some kind of struggle,” Zito said. “Someone took a fire poker to the side of his head. He probably never even knew what hit him.”
“Never knew what hit him?”
His friend frowned. “Looks like the end came pretty damn fast.”
Horror slammed in, hard. Shock numbed the pain. Lance. His smooth, invincible cousin. The St. Croix prince. Dead. Just like so many St. Croixs before him.
“The ex called 911,” Zito added. “She was pretty incoherent.”
The point-blank statement jolted Dylan back from the whirring vortex like a frayed lifeline. “B-Bethany?”
“The first officers on the scene found her in the living room wearing a torn nightgown.”
“She’s alive?”
“Found the body…or so she says.” Zito glanced at a small notebook in his hands and shook his head. “Story’s got more holes than the ozone layer.”
Dylan swore softly. For the past forty minutes, images of Bethany hurt and bleeding, dead, had tortured him. Now…
Lance.
Jagged emotion cut in from all directions, but Dylan didn’t miss Zito’s insinuation.
“You think she did it?”
“It’s her house, her fire poker, her ex. The blood was on her hands.” Zito shrugged, shook his head. “I count my blessings when Pam was done with me, she was content to sign a few damn papers. Don’t know why people have to complicate a good divorce with murder.”
Blood on her hands.
The image formed before he could block it, turning everything inside him stone cold. Disbelief surged. Too well, he knew how misleading Bethany’s porcelain-figurine exterior could be. Intimately, he knew there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish, if she put her mind to it. Hell, she’d cut him out of her life with the ruthless precision of a heart surgeon. But murder?
“Where is she?” He needed to see her, to—
To nothing.
Zito flipped his notebook shut. “Out back, by the pool.”
“Is she…hurt?”
“A nasty blow on the side of her head, but no concussion.”
Dark spots clouded Dylan’s vision. “Someone hit her?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she hit herself.”
Revulsion knocked up against disbelief. He’d heard worse, a young woman slashing her throat with a steak knife to cover the fact she’d killed her lover, but Bethany…
“I want to talk to her.”
“This is a crime scene. I can’t have you contaminating—”
“Her, damn it! I want her.”
Zito cocked an eyebrow.
“You’ve already taken her statement,” Dylan reminded, fighting a pounding urgency he didn’t understand. “What do you think I’m going to do? Tell her how to change her story?”
Zito’s dry smile said just that. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Ten
