even after seeing what you’d been through this week. Even after knowing how wrecked you were when you told me. And I’m going to spend an eternity in hell for that dream I had about you on your birthday. But if I could call it up again, I’d spend it twice.”
He took my hand and turned it over in his, studying it. “Mara, I have never felt about anyone the way I feel about you. And when you’re ready for me to show you,” he said, brushing my hair to the side, “I’m going to kiss you.” His thumb grazed my ear and his hand curved around my neck. He leaned me backward and my eyes fluttered closed. I breathed in the scent of him as he leaned in and kissed the hollow under my ear. My pulse raced under his lips.
“And I won’t settle for anything less.”
Noah pulled away and drew me up with him. I was disoriented, but not enough to ignore the cocky grin he was wearing.
“I hate you,” I muttered.
Noah smiled wider. “I know.”
57
I COULDN’T GO TO SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, EITHER— that much was obvious. Who knew what triggered the deaths—was a stray thought enough? Or did I have to envision it? And what about the animals that died, even thought I never explicitly wanted them to? What about Rachel?
I needed to rebuild my world and figure out my place in it before I would be safe around the general population. I told my mother that I wanted to stay home, that going back to school yesterday was a little too much for me and I wanted to wait until after my appointment with Dr. Maillard today to try it again. Given my recent behavior, she was happy to oblige.
I made it to lunch without incident. But as I stood in the kitchen midway through making myself a sandwich, someone started pounding on the front door.
I froze. They didn’t go away.
I crept soundlessly to the foyer and looked through the peephole. I let out a sigh of relief. Noah stood on my front step, disheveled and furious.
“Get in the car,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”
“What? What are you—”
“It’s about your father’s case. We need to make it to the courthouse before the trial’s over. I’ll explain, but come.”
My mind raced to catch up but I followed Noah without hesitating, locking the door behind me. He didn’t stand on ceremony and I flung open the passenger door and dove in. Noah backed out of the driveway in seconds, then reached into the backseat and withdrew a newspaper. He dropped The Miami Herald in my lap as he wove between lanes, ignoring the irritated honking that followed.
I read the headline: crime scene photos leaked on final day of palmer trial. I scanned the photos; a few of the crime scene and one of Leon Lassiter, my father’s client. Then I skimmed the article. It gave a detailed overview of the case, but I was missing something.
“I don’t understand,” I said, focusing on Noah’s clenched jaw and angry stare.
“Did you look at the photos? Carefully?”
My eyes roamed the pictures, disturbing though they were. Two of them showed Jordana Palmer’s dismembered body lying piecemeal in the tall grass, with chunks of flesh ripped from her calves, her arms, her torso. The third was a landscape, taken from the distance, with markers showing the position and location where the body was found. The little concrete shed where Noah and I had found Joseph was cast in a penumbral shadow by the flash.
My hand fluttered to my mouth. “Oh my God.”
“I saw it when I went to go buy cigarettes during lunch. I tried to call but there was no answer at the house, and of course you still don’t have a mobile. So I drove straight here from school,” he said in a rush. “It’s the same shed, Mara. Exactly the same.”
I remembered Joseph, lying on the concrete floor in a nest of blankets, his hands and feet bound by twist ties. And how Noah and I were almost too late to save him.
To save him from ending up exactly like Jordana. My stomach rolled with nausea.
“What does this mean?” I asked, even though I already knew.
Noah ran his hands through his hair as he sped, pushing ninety-five. “I don’t know. The photograph they have of Lassiter shows him wearing a Rolex on his right hand. When I saw the documents in the Collier County archives in my mind, whoever was pulling files had the same watch,” he finished, before swallowing. “But I’m not sure.”
“He took Joseph,” I said, my voice and mind hazy.
Noah’s expression was hard. “It doesn’t make sense, though. Why would he go after his own lawyer’s child?”
My mind flooded with images. Joseph, the way he must have looked when he was waiting for a ride home from school the day he was taken. My parents, as they spoke in tense voices about my father dropping the case. My father speaking to Lassiter—
That same night.
“My father was going to drop his case,” I said, strangely removed. “Because of me. Because I was falling apart. He spoke to him that afternoon.”
“Still doesn’t make sense. Your father would have dropped it for sure if one of his children disappeared. The judge absolutely would have ordered a continuance.”
“Then he took him because he’s sick,” I said, my voice a twisted hiss. My mind raced, tumbling ahead before my mouth could catch up. I flashed back to before I knew about the case, before this had all happened. To my brother watching the news one afternoon, as Daniel lifted an unmarked envelope.
“Where did this come from?” Daniel asked.
“Dad’s new client dropped it off, like, two seconds before you got here.”
Lassiter knew Joseph. Knew where we lived.
“I’ll kill him.” I spoke the shocking words so softly I wasn’t even sure I’d said them aloud. I wasn’t even sure I’d thought them, until Noah’s eyes turned on me.
“No,” he said carefully. “We’re going to go to the courthouse and find your father and have the trial continued. We’ll tell him what happened. He’ll withdraw from the case.”
“It’s too late,” I said. The words congealed on my tongue, and the weight of them pulled me down. “The trial’s over today. Once the jury’s out—it’s over.”
Noah shook his head. “I called. They’re not out yet. We can make it,” he said, his gaze flicking to the clock on the dashboard.
I turned the paper over in my hand, examining it as my dark thoughts grew and spread and swallowed up any possible alternative.
“Whoever leaked these photos did it to influence the jury. They did it because my father—because Lassiter —is winning. He’s going to be acquitted. He’s going to be free.”
I couldn’t let it happen.
But would I really be able to stop it?
I had wanted Jude dead, and he was. And I’d killed Morales and Mabel’s owner just by wanting it, thinking about it, about her choking, his head smashed in. I grew nauseous at the imagery, but swallowed hard and forced myself to remember, to try to understand so that if I needed to, I could do it again. The collapsed building, the anaphylactic shock, the head injury; those were the causes of the deaths.
I was the agent.
Noah’s voice snapped me back into the moment. “There is something profoundly wrong here. I know it, which is why I came to get you. But we don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on. We have to get to the courthouse and speak to your father.”
