Will had long ago stopped wearing regulation police wear to work this remote town, favoring work boots and jeans paired with a shirt, over which he currently wore a waterproof jacket. He had no trouble clambering down one of the paths from the cliff.
Kyle didn’t hear him until Will was nearly by his side. Jerking, he looked at Will with pale brown eyes identical to his brother’s, but unlike Vincent’s shining gold, Kyle’s hair was a light brown threaded with blond. “I think the ocean’s taken her,” he said in a calm voice. “It does that. Just takes people. She’ll never be found.”
“You seem very sure.”
Kyle smiled, as if Will had made a joke. “I didn’t do anything to her,” he said. “I didn’t need to. I knew she’d fuck up her own life sooner or later.”
So, Dominic de Souza had been right. Kyle Baker, it seemed, had more in common with Daniel May than his own brother—and he’d decided that it wasn’t worth turning on the charm for Will. No doubt because Will hadn’t let the graffiti incident just slide.
“You don’t have a positive opinion of Miriama’s intelligence?” he asked in the same even tone he’d used to date.
Kyle shrugged, his slightly overlong bangs sweeping across his forehead in a way that had the town’s teenage girls swooning. “Look, no offense to Matilda, but she likes to date losers. I guess they’re the only ones who’ll go for a used-up old chick like her, but whatever.” Another smile. “With that as an example, you really think Miriama was going to finish the placement and become a world-famous travel photographer like she wanted?”
Was. Wanted.
“You don’t believe people can rise above their circumstances?”
“You kidding? Look at Anahera Rawiri. Everyone thought she’d made it, was living it up in London, but she’s back with her tail between her legs, sleeping in the same crappy shed where her mother kicked the bucket.”
Anger licked Will’s spine. He suffocated it as fast as it had flared, depriving it of the oxygen it needed to grow. He’d almost beaten a man to death the last time he’d given in to the red haze of anger.
Will still didn’t know if he’d done the right thing in allowing that monstrous bastard to live, but he couldn’t go around killing every asshole he met—the world, unfortunately, was full of them. “How exactly did you think Miriama would mess up her life?”
“Hook up with some loser who beat her, get pregnant, and live in this town until she died.” Kyle’s smile never faded. “Looks like she proved me wrong by drowning while still a success.”
“Let’s talk about that success.” The wind whipped at Will’s hair. “You both applied for the internship, but she won it.”
No flicker in the smile, but Kyle’s voice turned ice-cold. “The board that decided it fell for her tits and ass.”
“Must’ve pissed you off.” Money was one thing, but being invited into an industry fraternity quite another—Kyle couldn’t buy his way into the environment that had warmly embraced Miriama. “Seeing someone like Miriama be welcomed by people you view as your peers.”
“I knew I’d get there,” Kyle said. “I have the drive and the staying power.” Another smile, this one lighting up his eyes. “I also know how to make people want to be around me.” It was like watching a switch being turned on. Kyle was suddenly the town’s golden boy again, all politeness and down-to-earth personality. “Even you’d like me if I wanted you to like me.”
It was too bad you couldn’t arrest people for being psychopaths. Because many psychopaths ended up never committing a single crime, instead becoming successes in fields that rewarded a lack of empathy. Maybe Kyle would head in that direction.
And maybe he’d already killed.
“Did Miriama like you?” He deliberately used the past tense to feed into Kyle’s mentality.
Kyle sneered, switching off the charisma as easily as he’d switched it on. “I didn’t need to lower myself to a piece of trash. I’ve got much better meat gagging for it.”
He was pushing it now, Will thought, using deliberately crude language in an effort to provoke Will. Why? What would that get him? Was it possible the nineteen-year-old wanted a reason to complain to Will’s superiors?
Given Will’s history, such a complaint could lead to his suspension or removal.
And without Will here to keep it active, Miriama’s case would slowly slip off official radar, just another woman who’d taken off for a more adventurous life. It wouldn’t be malicious and it wasn’t that his fellow cops were bad at their jobs, but they didn’t know Miriama, hadn’t seen the light in her expression when she spoke of her upcoming internship.
The last time Will talked to her had been when she’d brought him a piece of carrot cake, which felt like a lifetime ago. He’d told her she’d make him fat. She’d laughingly said it wasn’t a possibility, not with all the “long, angry walks” he took on the beach. “We have to make sure you don’t waste away, even if you are a cop.”
He hadn’t known until then that anyone had spotted him striding down the beach during the early morning hours before true dawn. She’d probably seen him from along the clifftop running route, a long-legged young woman who dreamed big and who was well on the way to achieving those dreams despite a bleak start in life.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” he asked the young psychopath in front of him.
“Just to stop wasting your time. It’s not like you have the budget.”
“Thank you for the advice,” Will said with deliberate mildness.
Kyle’s face tightened a fraction before he turned to stare back out at the water.
“By the way, Kyle.” He waited until Vincent’s brother turned toward him before he finished what he had to say. “Perhaps you should talk to Anahera about her failures.”
Walking away before Kyle could ask him any questions on the topic, Will allowed himself a faint smile. It faded in the next wave of wind, the sand gritty in his teeth… and the ghost of a three-year-old boy whispering in his ear.
22
The rain began to pound down around four that afternoon. It still took an hour for everyone to return to the fire station, the toughest of the tough staying out till the last possible moment. Despite having been gone for eight years, Anahera recognized pretty much everyone from before she left.
The only exceptions were three outsiders who’d moved in during her time away. Strangely enough for a self-absorbed and pretentious ass, Shane Hennessey had joined in the search, pairing up with a local who knew the area like the back of his hand. The soulful, moody-eyed novelist straight out of a gothic drama was drenched to the skin when he came in.
Anahera passed him a mug of hot coffee, having become Matilda’s assistant in the task. The other woman had rallied and was once again making coffee and ensuring everyone logged their searches on the map Nikau had put up.
“Thank you,” Shane said with a smile, Ireland rolling through his words so thickly that Anahera could almost see the velvet green hills. “It’s pissing down, isn’t it? But that’s the rage of the wild for you.”