Page 52 of Deadly Secrets
Roman touched her back and she flinched. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” She ran a hand over her eyes. “Just a little tired.”
“Everybody take a break,” Roman said, keeping his attention tuned in on Brooke. “Stretch your legs, grab some lunch, whatever. We’ll regroup in thirty.”
Her fingers trembled slightly as he took her hand. “There will be twelve total,” she muttered. “It’s a cube, so six sides, with each new killer adding his mark to one side. There will be twelve sigils in all, The Reverend and eleven of his followers.”
Her worried eyes met his. “There’ve been three mass suicides so far. There will be nine more, Roman. Nine!”
Jesus. She seemed so sure. He glanced back at Harris and Harris nodded, agreeing with her logic.
“Come on.” He drew Brooke away from the board. “Let’s get you some water.”
“I don’t have time for water. I need to figure out how to stop this bastard.”
“Brooke, we’re doing all we can.” He guided her away from the others and down the hall. Bright sun came through the floor-to-ceiling window at the end. “We’ll hit the streets this afternoon.”
Inside his office, he led her to the couch, grabbed a bottle of water from his mini fridge, and tugged her down beside him. Even her lips were a pale version of their normal pink. He opened the plastic lid. “Drink.”
She did, and then handed the bottle back to him. “I never recalled that cross before. Do you think Emma can help me remember more?”
“Can’t hurt to try. The question is, are you ready to remember what happened that night?”
“Of course I am.”
He was no shrink, but he knew she felt safe with him. Getting her to talk about the situation surrounding that night might prime her for Dr. Collins to dig deeper. “Why was your house in foreclosure?”
A perplexed look crossed her face. “What does that have to do with anything?”
He acted nonchalant. “Just curious. You mentioned your mom was passed out that night when you checked on her. Alcoholism?”
A bob of her head. “My dad left when I was nine, on my birthday, in fact. There was another woman.” She looked down at her fingers in her lap, twisted them together. “Mom drank heavily after he left. Things fell apart. She was sick a lot, couldn’t keep a job.”
“What happened after that night? Where did you guys go?”
“Nowhere initially. Due to what happened, some people from church put together a fund and paid the bank some of the back mortgage Mom owed on the house. The police didn’t want us to go far until the investigation was over. My dad showed up, talked to her about custody, and a lot of secrets came out. I probably would have been better off with him, but I couldn’t leave Mom. She needed help and I was the only one she had left.”
“Secrets?”
Her focus darted to the left, landing on his weights. “I heard them arguing. They thought I was asleep. Mom kept saying the bad man had finally come for me. She was drunk again. Dad told her to shut up, that she was delirious, and that the bad man story was a sham to play on their sympathies and keep them quiet about…”
Bad man? Was that some reference to the killer? Was it someone Brooke’s mother had known? Or was her father correct, and the woman had been drunk and making it up?
Brooke’s fingers entangled themselves again, twisting and wrenching so hard, Roman feared she’d dislocate her knuckles.
He reached out, took her hands in his and held them. “Brooke, it’s okay. Breathe. Do you know who this bad man was? Why your mom was scared of him?”
Her chest hitched. She blinked several times as if holding tears at bay. “It had something to do with my…my adoption.”
She was adopted? There’d been nothing in her file about that. “You never mentioned you were adopted.”
She pulled her hands out of his and launched herself off the couch. A turn around the open space of the room and she stopped at his Everlast Powercore bag. “I don’t know much about it myself. Didn’t believe it even when I heard them talking about it that night, and yet, so many things made more sense after that. Like the fact, I don’t actually favor either of them. And there are no pictures of my mother pregnant with me or of me in the hospital after I was born.”
Her fingers stroked the bag that he had punched and kicked out his frustrations on many times. “Apparently it was a private adoption, very off the books, probably illegal. The woman, my birth mother, was an American living in Paris who traveled a lot. She got pregnant, didn’t want me, and arranged for me to be adopted back here. I don’t know who did the paperwork, but it was good enough not to show up on your background check, so that says a lot, doesn’t it? For all intents and purposes, I was born to Krissy and Everett Heaton here in America.”
For the most part, that was true. He had a few sources, though, that knew things even Homeland didn’t. “Did your parents ever admit to it?”
“My father went back to his new family, my mother lived in a hazy world of alcohol and fear, and I was too scared to ask. I was years older when I finally confronted them. My dad told me that I misunderstood their argument that night. My mother claimed she didn’t remember anything and that she’d said a lot of things that weren’t true, trying to keep my dad from taking me away from her. They both lied, of course. There was too much detail, too much conviction in my mother’s voice that night. I overheard her say my birth mother feared for her life and the life of her child and that’s why she had to get me out of the country. Out ofEurope. The bad man would get us both if she didn’t. That’s why the adoption had to be so hush-hush. No one could know about me.”
