AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kris stared at the water, waiting for the familia
r dark humps to appear, but they didn’t.
“You can’t have any kind of life with him.”
Kris forced herself to look at Marty. “Why not?”
“He’s a monster.”
“You just said yourself—Dougal Scott was the monster. Liam’s just…” She glanced back at the loch. “Liam.”
“Hell!” Marty muttered.
“What?” Kris’s gaze flicked around the clearing; she peered into the trees, half-afraid she’d see Mandenauer coming out of them.
“You’re crazy about him,” Marty said. “No going back now.”
“No.” Kris watched the water again. “There isn’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Love him,” she said. “It’s all I can do.”
*
Marty cleaned up the scene. He seemed pretty good at it. Really, there wasn’t all that much to take care of. He retrieved a few shell casings, along with Dougal’s camera and tripod.
“I doubt anyone’s going to come along anytime soon. If they do…” He shrugged. “It’s not like we have a body to dispose of.”
“What about Dougal’s disappearance?”
“He’s a serial killer. No one’s going to care.”
“No one knows that.”
Marty’s face hardened into one she didn’t recognize. No longer the brother she remembered or even the man she was coming to know, but the Interpol agent who dealt with crap like this every day. “They will when I get done. I’ll say I pieced the truth together, then confronted him. He flipped, tried to kill me; I shot him, and he fell into the loch.”
Kris had thought to keep everything quiet, but loose ends were better tied up. It wasn’t as if they’d be blaming an innocent man for crimes he hadn’t committed, and the victims deserved justice; their families deserved to know what had happened to them.
Together Marty and Kris made their way to his rental car. It wasn’t an easy trip. Through the trees, down a nasty slope, across a craggy hill, Kris was leaning on her brother heavily by the time they reached what constituted a road in this part of the loch.
He helped her into the passenger seat and she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, Marty had rounded the bend near the cottage. Alan Mac sat on the porch. Kris groaned. All she wanted was to go back to sleep.
“Don’t worry,” Marty said. “The constable will be so inundated with the work this mess is going to cause, he won’t have time to bother you.”
“He’ll need a statement.”
“I already took it.” Marty stopped the car. “All you have to do is sign. Once I type it up.”
Kris put her hand on her brother’s. “Thanks.”
“I’m not going to disappear on you, Kris.” His eyes, so like her own, were earnest, and for the first time in a long time she believed every word that he said. “I promise.”
“What the hell?” Alan Mac pounded a huge fist on Marty’s window.
Marty winked, and they got out of the car.
As Alan Mac was a guardian and would no doubt hear the truth from Liam anyway, Marty told it. Together they got their stories straight while Kris continued to stare at the loch. She couldn’t help herself; she needed to see Liam. But he didn’t appear.
