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“But we do know the right questions to ask.” Christina rolled from the bed and collected the four case folders from the desk. She returned to the bed and sat cross-legged on the edge, the folders stacked in her lap, a legal pad on top of them. She handed him the first folder. “Family members.”
“This is Olivia Dearing, the one that doesn’t have a connection to the coven.”
“That we know of.”
“Right.” He flipped through the pages. “Her parents live in Vancouver, wealthy, reclusive.”
“Is a transcript of the interview there?”
“Yeah. Maybe we should split them up two and two.”
“You know what all of these victims do have in common?”
“Hmm?” She didn’t look up from her pad of paper.
“They’re all only children.”
“Really?” She glanced up. “Do you think that’s significant?”
“It’s a commonality. It’s not too unusual for the younger two, but when the older two were born it was less common to be an only child.”
She jotted something down on her pad. “I think we should look at everything. It’s down on my list.”
Thirty minutes passed and Eric dropped the folder and stretched. “I can’t believe we’re in here working on a Sunday.”
She rolled her shoulders. “It’s safe.”
“Safe? You’re not afraid to go outside now, are you?”
“I meant,” she said, wagging her finger back and forth between them, “it’s safe between us. If we have our work to concentrate on, we can forget the rest of what’s hanging over our heads.”
He broke his pencil in two and chucked it across the room. “I just don’t get why you didn’t tell me.”
“If you could’ve walked out on me last night, left the hotel and never looked back, is that what you would’ve done?”
“And turned my back on my daughter? Never.” His jaw tightened. “I resent that you’d even go there with me.”
“You turned your back on me two years ago.”
“You seem to have a habit of playing fast and loose with the truth.”
She gathered her hair into a ponytail and tossed it over one shoulder. “I didn’t lie to you back then, Eric.”
“Oh, excuse me. I didn’t think to ask the woman I was dating and falling in love with if she happened to have a case file on my father.”
“What does it matter? It was a fascinating case then and it’s a fascinating case now. I didn’t tell you about my notes because I was self-conscious about my interest in the case. I’d always been self-conscious about my interest in serial killers. My mom basically accused me of being a freak. I didn’t want to hear that from the man I loved.”
“Can’t you understand how I felt when I found out? It was ten times worse that you’d been hiding it from me, and then Lopez was there suggesting you were planning to write a book. Our relationship felt like a sham.”
She looked down at her fingers pleating the bedspread. “It was never a sham. I just felt like it was one of the many coincidences in my life that I happened to wind up on a task force with you. If we hadn’t hit it off, if we hadn’t fallen in love, that would’ve been the end of it.”
“But we did and we did, and that’s when you should’ve told me about your little obsession, and then it became a pattern because you neglected to tell me about your pregnancy.”
She covered her face with her hands. “I’ve gone over it a million times. I’ve regretted it a million times, but I can’t wave a magic wand and change it.”
“I can’t wave a magic wand and erase all my feelings of resentment that you kept me from Kendall, and worse, kept her from me.”
She shoved one of the files off the bed. “So, we work.”
He rubbed the back of his neck where it felt as if every muscle was knotted. “I’m going to get some food, and then I’m going to follow your example and hit the gym. I finished the report for the P.D. and Rich.”
She waved at him. “Knock yourself out.”
* * *
HE DIDN’T QUITE knock himself out, but he got in a good workout, and then walked through the double doors of the gym to the pool where he slipped into the bubbling hot tub.
He adjusted his position so that the jets hit his lower back. Had he really made it so difficult for Christina to tell him about her pregnancy?
He’d made it clear to her that he never wanted kids. Now that he had one somewhere out in San Miguel, that claim sounded ridiculous and childish. But how was Christina supposed to know he’d do a one-eighty when confronted with the certainty of fatherhood?
