“Okay? No! Are you kidding? I just found a dead body, for Christ’s sake! A murder victim! Someone I know who had his throat opened up ear to ear.” She let out a breath and it came with a sob. “What do they say? It’s like déjà vu all over again.” She couldn’t stop the tears nor keep her hands from shaking. She grasped the wheel even more tightly.
“I think you should pull over. We’ll have someone come to you.”
“No . . . forget it.” She didn’t want to see anyone. And slowly she was calming down. The more distance she put between herself and Margrove’s trailer, the more in control she felt. Or at least she told herself she did and dashed her tears aside with one hand. “I am not going back there.”
“I need to talk to you. Face-to-face. About what happened, what you saw.”
“What I saw was a dead body. Merritt’s body.” Margrove’s blood-soaked corpse appeared behind her eyes again and she shuddered, the horrifying image burned into her brain.
“Nothing else?”
“No! Just . . . just him.”
“What were you doing up there? Did he contact you?”
“No . . . no, I was looking for Jonas and figured Merritt might know where he was, but Merritt wasn’t answering my calls or texts, so I tracked down his wife and she told me about this place in the mountains. When I got here, I found him.” Her voice squeaked and she sniffed. “That was it. End of story.” She was crying again, tears raining down her face, blurring her vision. “It was like before,” she admitted, gasping. “Like that Christmas.” Blinking, she tried to focus, but the images swirled in her mind. Donner lying dead, blood staining the carpet beneath the leaning Christmas tree; Sam Junior near the fireplace, the embers still glowing; and Jonas, looking up at her, rasping out, “Get help,” as “Silent Night” played over and over.
“Kara!” Thomas’s voice cut into the reverie and she saw that she’d let the Jeep drift into the oncoming lane. Her heart nearly stopped.
“Kara,” the detective ordered, “pull over!”
She jerked on the steering wheel. Overcorrecting. Edging toward the sheer cliff on the passenger side. The Jeep seemed to float as she eased off the gas, her heart knocking, her throat closing in on itself.
“I’m sending a deputy—”
“No.” She shook her head as if he could see through the wireless connection. “No, no, I’m fine,” she lied, gaining control of the vehicle again. She just wanted to get home. No matter how irrational that was, she wasn’t going to wait by the side of the road for some cops to come and what? Take her with them? Haul her to the station to ask a kajillion questions? Make her leave her Jeep unattended here in the middle of nowhere? No way. No fricking way! “I’ll be . . . I’m okay.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line and in the silence she heard the first sound of sirens in the distance, getting louder heading up the mountain on this very road. “You’ll go straight home?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll stop by after I check out the scene.”
She realized that the Subaru in front of her had disappeared around a far corner, its taillights no longer visible in the snow. When had that happened? Where? She been so caught up in her conversation that— Another vehicle appeared, headlights cutting through the snowfall, roaring up the hillside. A pickup with a camper top. Hauling ass.
“As long as you don’t ask me to go back there. To the trailer,” she bartered with Thomas. “Because I won’t. I can’t. And I don’t need any lectures about the fact that I should have stayed there, with the body, you know. He was dead. I checked. Even though I knew he was dead, I felt his wrist. Couldn’t find a pulse on his neck because his damned throat had been slit.” She choked out a sob, remembered the awful gash, a macabre red smile that had cut deep.
“I think you should find a spot and—”
“I said no!” she said firmly, her hands aching from their grip on the steering wheel. “You can come to my house. That’s . . . that’s fine.” It wasn’t, but it would have to do. Kara ended the call and kept driving, fast and steady, not missing a beat when three cop cars screamed by, their blue and red lights flashing through the snowfall.
Only then did she let out her breath.
Only then did she relax her grip on the steering wheel.
Only then did she hear a rustle, the sound of movement in the car.