would be if she asked him if he had also heard Lauren or maybe felt her presence in the room with them.
Probably best not to do that while he was driving.
Carefully, so as not to attract his attention, she shifted her eyes to her left and studied his stern countenance. He’d offered to drive the short distance and she’d accepted because the idea of walking even one block seemed too onerous a task. Looking back on that decision, she realized it hadn’t exactly been a smart one. Moments before, he’d attacked her. Hours earlier, he’d been suspected, albeit briefly, of causing a violent death.
His dead sister vouching for him-what did that really mean? Cass never had siblings so it was hard to know how far loyalty would take them. Would the dead lie to protect someone who was still living? It was a sobering thought, but she quickly dismissed it.
The dead had always been honest with her. It was the living she couldn’t trust.
Reaching up to massage a pressure point at her temple, Cass closed her eyes and hoped to ease away her tension headache. The stress of everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours had finally borne down on her until it was hard to distinguish the pain of contact with the dead from the real thing.
Since this pain wasn’t going away as quickly as the former usually did, she had to assume it was the real thing.
“You okay?”
“Hmm,” she answered. It was the sort of noncommittal answer that hopefully didn’t elicit more conversation.
“Seriously…If I hurt you…”
“You didn’t.” She opened her eyes and looked at him directly, partly because she didn’t want him to think he’d actually scared her. Even though he had. And partly because she knew he was still freaked out by what he was capable of. There was absolutely no reason for her to put his mind at ease after what he’d done, but she knew he wouldn’t stop until he’d apologized a hundred more times.
He wasn’t an abusive man. She knew it even without Lauren’s assurances. And that was why she’d agreed to get in the car with him in the first place.
“It’s just a headache.”
“Do you get them?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Sometimes. Like most people. It’s not like it’s related to…the thing.” An excellent way to describe her unique and awesome gift to a man who clearly did not believe.
“Oh.”
His cell phone rang and he reached for it in the console between them with the ease of someone who was used to navigating traffic and speaking on the phone at the same time. “McDonough,” he answered.
He said nothing other than a brief thanks after a moment and snapped the tiny silver phone shut.
“We have clearance to get inside her apartment.”
“Wow. When you say you have connections, you mean it.”
“I know people. It’s not like I bribed anyone,” he said quickly.
Cass nodded. “Right. Black and white. White being lawfulness and black being crime. You definitely strike me as the law-and-order sort.”
He turned to take in her expression. “And you’re not?”
“I’ve been known to stray to the dark side from time to time. But only to survive.”
“That’s interesting,” he commented.
“Trust me, it sounds sexier than it is.”
“It doesn’t sound sexy at all. A person shouldn’t have to ‘stray to the dark side’ to survive. That’s what family is for. To help.”
“Maybe that would have worked, if I’d had a family.” That wasn’t really fair, Cass thought. She’d had a family. Her grandparents had cared. But ultimately they’d let her down, and that, she had a hard time getting over.
There was a moment of silence. “I’m sorry,” Malcolm offered.
“Please stop apologizing. You’re going to wear yourself out. Besides, it’s really not necessary.”
“I do seem to be doing a lot of that around you.”
“That’s because you’re a gentleman. It’s in your nature to apologize for things you can’t fix because it’s the only thing left to do. Admit it.”
“I’ll admit that I hate not being able to fix things,” he replied.
“Close enough.”
She watched his jaw tighten, but he didn’t comment further and she was grateful. They were almost there, and she needed to think about what Lauren had wanted her to find.
Cass had received instructions from the dead before. Tell him I love him. Tell her the money is in the suitcase. Tell her not to forget to brush the dog’s teeth. Innocent instructions that meant nothing to her but invariably made whomever she was speaking to weep.
This message, the way it sounded in her head, the way the image of Lauren shifted in her mind, it wasn’t something prosaic. It was important.
Assuming the “they” were the police, and the “it” was some kind of clue, Cass figured Lauren wasn’t wrong in her urgency.
Two nights. Two women. Two murders.
Shaking her head against the sudden rush of dread she felt, Cass figured she’d had enough of the silence. “What did you tell them, your connections, by the way? To get inside her apartment?” she clarified.
“That I need to choose an outfit for the…for the funeral.”
“Oh.”
Funerals were so final. It was one of the most painful obstacles the living had to hurdle during their grief. Although it was better than the alternative. Not attending a funeral could leave a person without the necessary closure. Missing her grandfather’s funeral had been the biggest mistake of Cass’s life. It was easy to see that now. A year ago, it had been impossible.
“They’re going to release her body from the morgue either this afternoon or tomorrow. I’ll need to make arrangements.”
She could tell he was speaking more to himself than he was to her. “What about her mother?”
Malcolm shook his head. “She died a few years ago. Not too long after my father. Other than a great-aunt on her mom’s side, I’m basically the only family she has. Had. God,” he breathed, rubbing a hand over his face roughly as though he could wipe away the pain as if it were dirt.
He couldn’t. And there wasn’t anything she could say to make it better. She shouldn’t even want to try, given both his treatment of her and his suspicion that she was somehow involved. Not to mention nearly strangling her.
Cass reached up to touch her neck. She thought about the pressure of his hand on her skin. The way it had felt. Skin to skin. There had been something different about it. She didn’t want to dwell on it, but her mind kept wandering back. It was like a rush of energy that she had felt flow from his body into hers. Cass hated to overdramatize the sensations and feelings that went along with her gift, but she knew it was important to document each new experience. If nothing else, Dr. Farver had taught her that.
Control came only through understanding.
And it had been a new experience, hadn’t it? Cass thought about the last time she’d touched or had been touched in any meaningful kind of way. The fact that she knew that it was a year ago bothered her. It was a sign of how far she had distanced herself from others.
An image of Claire surfaced, but she pushed it aside. Claire wasn’t connected to Lauren.
“You’re touching your neck. I know you don’t want me to apologize again, but I will.”
Cass turned and saw that he was looking at where her hand rested over what she guessed were some faint bruises. “I don’t. Seriously. Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal, okay?”
“It was to me,” he said gruffly. “I’ve never been so out of control before. Right now I feel like I’m standing on some sort of precipice. I’m not sure which way I’m going to fall.”
“That must be a hell of a thing when you’re used to always being on steady ground.”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
Cass nodded. Despite his hostility she could at least offer him her experience with this. Death was something
