Alaskan Mountain Pursuit Elizabeth Goddard (best short novels .TXT) 📖

“She’s okay,” Clay said. “I’m not letting her out of my sight for longer than it takes to use the bathroom.”

“Keep it that way.” Noah’s voice was nearly vibrating with tension.

“So it’s him.”

“Him? You found a guy?”

Neither man answered. She understood, gradually. “Ohh. You didn’t find anyone. But now you think it’s the...serial killer.” The last two words she had to force from her mouth, and even as she did she could hardly bring herself to believe this was her real life. That the words serial killer had any place in her vocabulary.

Noah exhaled. “I’m almost positive.”

“Because we know now that there was a second victim—like his usual pattern?”

Noah hesitated, then nodded. Summer narrowed her eyes. Her brother wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth, either.

“What other reason do you have?”

Noah looked at Clay. Neither one of them said anything.

“You’ve got to stop keeping things from me. It’s not making me any safer.” Surely they’d respond to that line of argument, since it was such a high priority for both of them.

“Fine.” Noah took a breath. “A forensic artist in Anchorage was able to generate a sketch of the suspect based on the description you gave us.” He reached into the backpack he’d set on the floor and motioned for them to follow him to the back kitchen, where the family had a private eating area.

They did so. Summer took her seat, trying not to get her hopes up that the sketch was accurate and detailed enough to be useful. She’d have drawn it herself but she didn’t draw people, the nuances of facial structure and expression had always eluded her, and though he’d had a mask covering all but his eyes, she’d still feared she wouldn’t get it right if she did it herself. But as an artist she knew what an almost impossible proposition it was to draw something based on someone else’s description.

Noah set the manila envelope down on the table and opened it.

And there he was, staring at her behind the mask he’d worn. Everything, down to the expression in his eyes, was right. Summer shivered.

“That’s him.”

Noah nodded. “It also matches the only possible description we had of the serial killer. One of the women who ended up dead, Holly Wilcox, was seen with a man a few hours before her death, walking on one of the multiuse trails in Anchorage. A bicyclist remembered him and gave a description that was, unfortunately, too vague for the artist to work with, as talented as he is. But when I asked him if what he’d drawn for you fit that other man, he thought it did.”

“Interesting that she was seen with him and no one noticed a struggle or anything,” Clay mused.

“She knew him, then,” Summer said. “Right?”

“Possibly.”

“And you think he’s the man who’s killed those other women and is after me.” Her mind was refusing to wrap all the way around this new bit of news. Maybe the human mind wasn’t made to absorb so much in such a short period of time, because try as she might Summer couldn’t quite get herself to acknowledge that this was her reality.

“What else?” she asked, even though she wasn’t sure what else she could handle.

The two men looked at each other again, but right before Summer was ready to let her frustration explode again, Clay took her by the arm. “We’ll be back,” he said to Noah, leading her back farther into the private part of the house and stopping in a hallway where he stood across from her, facing her.

“You’ve got to stop asking to be told more than you need to know.”

“I’m the victim...attempted victim, whatever the correct terminology is.” She shoved back a piece of her hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and lifted her chin a little, doing everything she knew how to do to project confidence and certainty, hoping to convince Clay that she was strong enough to handle this.

Clay only shook his head.

“Do you know anything about cases like this, Summer? Do you even have a clue what Noah is dealing with?”

“I don’t,” she admitted. It was as far from her comfort zone as anything could be. But it was happening to her, and Summer was not the kind of woman to back down from a threat, or hide from it. Much as some people might prefer to live with their heads in the sand, that wasn’t Summer.

“Everything we saw today was just a glimpse. Do you realize that? There’s so much more that will go into the investigation. Autopsies. Analyzing time of death, exact cause of death, whether there was any other trauma... I don’t want you to hear those details. And neither does Noah. But even if he did, I’d fight him on this.”

“Why? Why do you care so much?”

“Because you’re the kind of person who shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

“I’m not some fragile Southern belle, Clay. I’m an Alaskan woman who has dealt with life and death more than you could probably guess and has faced down both, when they seemed equally scary, and barely flinched.”

A slight hint of a smile crossed his face. “First, if you think Southern belles are fragile, you haven’t met one. I should introduce you to some of my friends. Second, I’m sorry you’ve had to do that. I have no doubt you did it well and bravely, but I’m the one in charge of protecting you right now and if I can protect your heart and your mind as well as protect your physical life, I’m going to.”

Summer swallowed hard. Her heart was pounding, higher in her throat than it should be from the intensity of this entire conversation. Much as she was worried about her physical life and her mind, it was her heart that had her on shaky ground right now. It was time to stop denying she felt any attraction for Clay Hitchcock. Her only course of action now was to remind herself of