Dying to Please Read online

  The first shot barely missed Cahill's head. He fired at the muzzle flash, then the second shot caught him high on the chest, with a kick like a mule. He was wearing his body armor, but the impact knocked his breath out and he sprawled across the floor, unconscious.

  “Cahill,” she whispered, standing at the top of the stairs and staring down at the wide expanse of the foyer, and Cahill's body lying limp and unmoving on the granite floor.

  She went numb. This wasn't happening. Not Cahill. The bastard couldn't have taken Cahill from her, too.

  She swayed, reaching out, and half stumbled against a gray metal floor lamp standing sentry beside a black enameled table.

  Not Cahill.

  The rage was a red tidal wave, rising in one massive surge and seizing her in its grip. She wasn't aware of pulling the floor lamp free from the plug. She wasn't aware of moving. She went down the stairs with a steady, purposeful stride, gaining speed as she went.

  “Densmore.” That wasn't her voice. It sounded like something from The Exorcist, deep and raw. She reached the bottom of the stairs. “You bastard, where are you?”

  There was movement to her right, in the shadows. She swung in that direction and saw Densmore materializing from the darkness into the dim light, like a phantom, a demon. His face was twisted with fury. “I told you not to speak to me that way,” he hissed, his hand rising.

  She didn't care. The rage suffusing her made the heavy floor lamp feel like nothing in her hands as she stepped forward, into the pistol, into the bullet, swinging the lamp like a baseball bat. If Cahill was dead, she simply didn't care anymore what happened. The explosion of the shot was deafening in the cavernous foyer, a blast of hot wind along her left side just as she slammed the base of the floor lamp into Densmore's skull. He crashed backward into the wall, a fine spray of blood flying from his head, his chest, and she swung the lamp again, and again, screaming wordlessly.

  “Sarah! Sarah!”

  The bellow finally pierced her consciousness. The lamp was suddenly too heavy to hold, and dropped from her nerveless fingers. Slowly, numbly, she turned as Cahill struggled to stand. He was holding a hand to his chest and wheezing, but she didn't see any blood.

  “Easy, sweetheart,” he said. “The son of a bitch can't die more than once.”

  EPILOGUE

  CAHILL SLUNG HIS JACKET OVER HIS SHOULDER AS HE entered the house. He was in a good mood; the review board had ruled the shooting a righteous one, and he was no longer on administrative leave. He'd missed doing his job, though for the first week he'd been glad enough to take it easy; even through body armor, a slug gave the body a beating and left a hell of a bruise. At first he thought it had cracked a couple of ribs, too, but they were just bruised—as if there were any “just” to it. He'd felt as if the mule had not only kicked him, it had then turned around and stomped on him.

  He and Sarah had recuperated together. He was fine, and Sarah's mother had called to let her know that her father had indeed had a bad case of heartburn, so she didn't have that to worry about. And physically Sarah was fine. She'd been living with him since they were released from the hospital early the next morning, after he'd been x-rayed and poked, and the cuts on his hands sutured. His wounds were simple in nature. Sarah though—

  On the surface, she wasn't badly hurt. Some cuts on her hand, one requiring four stitches, but the others had been minor. The welts that striped her smooth skin and left raw, bleeding patches had been treated the way you'd treat a skinned knee, with cleaning and an antibiotic ointment over the worst patches. No matter how long he lived, he'd never forget the sight of her coming down those stairs, steady and unstoppable, naked and so covered with blood his heartbeat had faltered, but her eyes had glittered like black fire in her white face. She'd been carrying that heavy floor lamp in one hand, roaring for Densmore, and when the bastard started to shoot her, she hadn't paused, just waded in with that lamp like she was DiMaggio going for the long one. Cahill, struggling for breath, still woozy, was amazed he'd been able to make the shot. He'd barely missed Sarah, and the bullet had exploded Densmore's heart. Densmore had been dead before the lamp ever hit his skull, not that a little thing like that had stopped Sarah.

  By the time Cahill could get to her, he could hear sirens as squad cars converged on the house. He'd have to open the gates for them, he thought, but right now he needed to take care of Sarah. He'd taken off his shirt and put it on her, and she'd just stood there staring down at Densmore and the hole in his chest. She'd turned then, her expression already growing remote as she said, “Damn you, Cahill; I wanted to kill him.”

  He'd wanted to hold her, but there wasn't any way he could put his arms around her without causing her pain. Instead he'd held her left hand, the one that wasn't cut, getting blood all over her from his own cuts. He'd moved the lamp aside, and been astonished at its weight. Most people would have needed two hands to lift it, much less swing it.

  After he opened the gates, he and Sarah were carted off to the hospital, and since then he'd been on administrative leave, so he hadn't been involved in any of the investigation or mop-up. The other guys, though, had kept him informed.

  Densmore had planned that Sarah wouldn't ever leave that room. They'd found tiny cameras everywhere, even in the bathroom. She'd have had no privacy at all. The room, like the house, was a fortress. Its windows were unbreakable, and didn't open. The door had been reinforced steel. The only reason Sarah had been able to escape that night was that, in his hurry to see about the intruder, Densmore had left the door unlocked.

  Who knew what made a sick bastard like that tick? Everyone who knew him said he seemed like such a nice man—yeah, they always were—on the quiet side, a little shy, but a shark when it came to business. He did tend to become obsessed with little things, though, and could turn nasty if everything wasn't done to his satisfaction. According to his secretary, he'd gotten more obsessive over the years, to the point that she had to have her chair sitting in one precise spot or he went into a rant.

  His personal papers had been more revealing. Evidently sweet, shy Trevor Densmore had killed his own father over a business disagreement. Why he'd document a thing like that was anyone's guess, since if he hadn't already been dead, it would have been one more nail in his coffin—Alabama was a death penalty state, and this would have been a death penalty case—but the department psychologist read the papers and said the contents were an almost perfect example of how the mind of an egomaniac worked. Trevor Densmore thought he was smarter than everyone else, better than everyone else, and deserved only the best. That was it in a simplistic nutshell: Densmore thought he should have whatever he wanted, and he had no internal brakes when it came to getting it. If there was an obstacle, he either moved it, or he destroyed it.

  Evidently, when he'd seen Sarah on television, he'd developed an instant obsession with her—Cahill could kind of understand that, given his own feelings about her—and had set out to obtain her. When she refused his first offer out of loyalty to the Judge, he'd removed that obstacle by killing Judge Roberts. But she still hadn't accepted his offer; she'd gone to work for the Lankfords, which had enraged him because he thought the Lankfords were so far beneath him. Killing people meant no more to him than stepping on a bug; they were unimportant, nothing. What mattered was getting what he wanted.

  Cahill wished he could kill the son of a bitch again. What he'd done to Sarah . . .

  She'd been withdrawn since then, and he couldn't reach her, even though it had been over three weeks; the bruises and welts had faded and healed, the sutures had been removed, and they'd lived together under the same roof the entire time, but he couldn't reach her. She'd retreated to someplace inside herself where he couldn't go, and it was driving him crazy.

  When he'd first seen her, naked and bloody, he'd taken a second kick to the chest, thinking Densmore had raped her. He'd asked her if that was so, before the first patrolman came in with weapon drawn, and she'd shaken her head. But the assault she'd suffered