Closer Than Blood

images came to her slowly. The water boiled and roiled . . . a seemingly toxic brew. She was naked and she wasn’t alone. She felt a man’s hands on her waist.

“I’m going down,” he said. His voice was husky, deep. She watched as he lowered himself in the water, as she arched her back and spread her thighs apart. She turned and spoke in the direction of some bushes.

“Now,” she said.

“All right,” another voice answered, also male, but much younger. She clamped her thighs around the man’s head and grabbed his hair with both hands. She pressed with all her might. The man, who’d gone down to please her, was fighting under the roiling waters.

“Hit him now!” she said. An oar dropped into the hot tub. A small amount of red bloomed in the water.

“Let’s get him in the car,” she said.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Kitsap County

“Tori! What am I going to do now?” Lainie and Tori stood outside their car. The smell of gasoline and the crunch of broken glass, torn leather, and acrid striations of burned rubber fell over Banner Road like the remnants of an S&M parade gone terribly wrong. Or, at the very least, more wrong than usual.

“We’ve got to get Jason out of the car,” Lainie said. Her blue eyes were nearly black as her pupils soaked in every drop of light in the darkness of the stretch by the Banner Jump. The fun of the rise and fall of the car had ended in a nightmare. Airborne had become terror. The sisters, working in tandem, battered and bleeding from the crash, hoisted the limp teenage boy from the overturned car and laid him out by the roadside.

“Is he alive?” Lainie asked. She was shaking and bleeding from a small gash in her forehead.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was going too fast. We were having fun. I thought it was fun.”

“He’s alive,” Tori said, bending closer.

“What am I going to do? I’m going to go to jail!” Tori put her hand on her sister’s shoulder. She was bleeding, too.

“He’s going to be fine.” Lainie was crying then, bending over Jason and looking up at Tori.

“I already have one ticket! I’m going to be in so much trouble. I’m going to go to jail!” She was referring to a minor-in-possession ticket that she got after a party in Manchester earlier in the year. Their father had gone ballistic and Tori had reveled in the fact that “Lainie the Perfect” had gotten a little taste of being on the outs. Lainie, inconsolable and in full panic mode, was crying as she bent over her sister’s boyfriend. Tori went to turn off the ignition. She looked up to see the headlights of an approaching car. The sheriff already? Couldn’t be. It would take ten minutes to get anyone out in that southernmost part of the county. She squinted in the headlights as the vehicle parked on the opposite side of the road. The door opened and the driver stepped onto the pavement, which was glittering with glass.

“It’s that druggie Mikey Walsh,” Tori said.

“That’s okay,” Lainie said.

“Jason’s alive. He’s going to be all right.”

Jason Reed’s voice was weak. Not really a whisper, but the kind of soft voice one uses when speaking from the heart, which he was. Tori cradled his head in her arms, while Lainie went over to talk to Mikey Walsh.

“I’m not gonna make it,” he said.

“You are, too,” Tori said.

“Help will be here in a few minutes. God, I hate this county!”

“I made a big mistake,” he said.

“It wasn’t your fault. Lainie went too fast.” He shook his head.

“No, not that.” Tori heard Mikey talking with Lainie, telling her to calm down.

“This is my fault! All my fault!” She leaned closer to her boyfriend.

“I don’t love you, Tori. I love Kendall. But I screwed things up.” She didn’t think she heard him correctly and she leaned closer. She wanted to scream at Lainie and Mikey for talking so loudly.

“What are you saying?” she asked. His pale blue eyes were open, staring at her, unblinking. He spoke and his words trailed off to a whisper, caught up in the wind of the night, but indelible in Tori’s memory.

Tori O’Neal was crouched over Jason Reed as Mikey Walsh rounded the Taurus. The young man who was tweaking and partying just moments before was now in a sweat. He held his arms close to his chest in an attempt to control his pounding heart. He didn’t know what to do. He thought of the drugs in his vehicle, and he’d hoped that if the sheriff came, they’d consider him a Good Samaritan and not someone who they needed to bust. Why didn’t I take the Valley Road? I could have avoided this mess. It appeared as if Tori was consoling Jason, though she was not saying anything. Her eyes were rimmed in red. Even in the stabbing beam of the headlights across the road, it was obvious that the unthinkable had just occurred.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Jason is dead!” By then Lainie joined them, slumping onto the gravel roadside and crying so loudly that the nearest neighbors surely would have heard her, even if they’d missed the sound of the breaking glass, twisting metal, and the skidding tires of the crash itself.

“Oh, God,” Lainie said.

“What have I done?” Tori reached for her sister and hugged her.

“You didn’t do anything,” she said.

“I was driving. This is my fault.” Lainie studied Tori’s face. She was offering a solution, an unselfish gift if ever there was one. Had she heard her right? “What are you saying, Tori?”

“I’m saying that I was driving. This accident is on me.” As Tori spoke, she caught a glimpse of something in Mikey Walsh’s expression. She was adept at reading people. Better than her sister. But she wasn’t sure what it was that his drugged-out and fearful expression meant. Just how much had he heard? How much had he seen? Mikey turned to Lainie.

“I thought you said you were driving.” Lainie was practically on top of Jason’s body, sobbing. She looked at Mikey and started to speak, but Tori cut her off.

“Are you on something right now? Do you need to have a drug test when the sheriff gets here? Or are you just stupid? I was driving. I said so.” Lainie never told anyone about what happened that night. There was no point in it. She was sure that Tori would get off without having to go to jail. It was an accident and she’d never done anything wrong. What she didn’t know was that the Kitsap County authorities had reached their limit when it came to teenagers and their dangerous joyriding around the county. Tori O’Neal was going to be the example that everyone remembered.

Mikey Walsh had been a loose end and a pathetic one at that. The former speed-freak-turned preacher had been lurking in the darkness of Tori’s memory for fifteen years. She reviled loose ends. She knew from experience that she alone was the only one worthy of being a witness to whatever it was she’d done. As she packed her suitcase, she knew that her plan had its share of risks. But the rewards were so very great. Two million reasons would easily tip the scales in favor of taking the risk. She wasn’t sure if she was being watched by the police, reporters, anyone. With Darius Fulton’s arrest and the refusal of bail, eyes were not on her right then.

“He called me from the jail,” she told Kaminski.

“Threatened to kill me. He said that if he couldn’t have me, no one could.” Despite all of that, Tori was not a woman who wanted to take any unnecessary chances. Not when she was so close to the prize. When Lainie arrived to “help” after the shooting, Tori sized up the one attribute that she needed to alter. Her hair. Lainie’s hair was at least two shades darker, and shorter. It was the kind of haircut and color that screamed “average” and she knew it wouldn’t be hard to mimic. Tori went into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and a box of honey wheat hair coloring. A few snips, a slathering of the drugstore-brand dye, and it was over. It took all of a half hour to alter her appearance from stunning to merely attractive. It was a trade-off she was willing to make for a very short time. The matter of her breasts, however, was a slight problem. They were larger than Lainie’s. She purchased a bra that, while uncomfortable, would minimize what her surgeon had given her. Tori didn’t mind binding them. They were never for her anyway. Finally, she put on a little black dress that was a duplicate of the one that Lainie had bought at Nordstrom for the class reunion. It was not something that Tori would ever have picked for herself. Lainie’s taste in attire was lackluster—from dress to heels to accessories. She was a road map to mediocrity. Always had been. She studied herself in the mirror. Something wasn’t right. What was it? Tori smiled at her reflection.

“Oh, yes, that,” she said aloud. It was a small detail, but one that might be noticed. She picked up a rattail