Page 7 of Mountain Murder

He closed the short distance between them. Every cell in his body warned him that getting close would compromise his own boundaries when it came to her, but it was hard to avoid her gravitational pull. “What’s not possible?”

“A little while ago, I had a patient who’d built up an imagined relationship between him and me during of our sessions together,” she said. “It’s not uncommon. Therapy is a very vulnerable place. You have to trust the person you’re talking to with your deepest and darkest secrets and be comfortable exposing those pieces of yourself to another human being. It’s heavy and cleansing at the same time, and there’s a very real connection that needs to be there, but…”

An unexpected wall of defensiveness pulled Lance’s shoulders back. “Your patient wanted to take what you two had past professional.”

“He kissed me.” She turned away from him, as though humiliated by her admission. Hand in her hair, Audrey was trying to distract herself from whatever emotions wanted attention right then. He could see it in her face, her avoidance. Her dismissal. “I don’t exactly remember how it happened. Only that I was so embarrassed I didn’t see the signs before then. I ended our sessions right there. He didn’t take it well. He destroyed my office. I threatened to call the police.”

“So when you said it was impossible a former patient might be holding a grudge, you actually meant probable,” he said.

“I meant what I said.” She faced him, that legendary calm back in place. “I know Jake. He might’ve made assumptions about our relationship and maybe been presumptuous about whether I’d be receptive to more happening between us, but he wouldn’t kill someone to get to me. It doesn’t fit with his history. He grew up a victim. We were working on dealing with his abusive childhood. I don’t know how else to explain it without breaking confidentiality, but I know he wouldn’t do this.”

“People will do whatever it takes to numb the effects of rejection, Audrey.” The last conversation between him and his sister clawed from the box he’d scrambled to contain over the past year. Him sitting in a cell. Her on the other side with tears in her eyes. She’d looked at him as though she hadn’t even recognized him. Refused to pay bail. Refused to accept the man he was now.

Audrey didn’t have an answer to that. Didn’t even seem to breathe.

“I want to walk around the property. See if I can get a read on whoever was in here last night.” Lance followed her lead along the same corridor he’d run after her last night. Only this time, his defenses didn’t have control of him.

“I just need to check on Hank,” she said. “He’s my emotional support animal.”

The scent of hay mixed with dirt, pine, and manure infiltrated his senses as they headed for the stables. Sitting on over half of the Ford family acreage, the recovery center had recruited an array of therapists, actors, yoga instructors, and ranch hands to care for the land and the residents in becoming whole.

Chickens, a couple of cows, a handful of horses, and an entire litter of new pups provided emotional support to those who needed something to care for when the act of caring for themselves got to be too much. A calm example meant to ground and keep him in the moment when he found himself getting too close to the edge of losing it.

Turned out, horses didn’t like him much, and the pups weren’t interested in holding still. He’d had some luck with the cows at his therapist’s insistence, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to fantasize about eating his emotional support animal.

Lance catalogued the outdoor security as Audrey headed toward the back of the building, where her bedroom window faced east. Cameras had been installed every twenty feet or so. The place was run on top-of-the-line security with no evidence of a malfunction, according to Ford, and nowhere for an intruder to hide. So how the hell had the bastard gotten into Audrey’s room?

She pulled up short beside one of the pens and bent at the waist for something inside.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“This is Hank.” Audrey hefted a piglet into her chest, letting its snout slobber along her neck and chin. Excited snorts had her closing her eyes against the onslaught with a wide smile, and a visceral transformation happened in front of Lance’s eyes. Years of secrets and the worst humanity had to offer seemed to melt right out of her. Leaving nothing but the woman underneath the invisible shield. And, hell, if she wasn’t beautiful. “He’s mine. I’m in charge of taking care of him.”

“That’s not an emotional support animal,” he said. “That’s what I eat for breakfast.”

She hugged Hank tighter. “You wouldn’t dare.”

No. He wouldn’t. Not when he could see how much she obviously cared for the piglet, but shit, he couldn’t stop his mouth from watering, either. “Fine. He can come with us. I promise not to roast him.”

Her smile gutted him as easily as a blade to the soft tissues of his organs, and Lance’s heart nearly stopped cold. He followed the sharp angles of the massive, modernized building for something to focus on other than the twist of his insides. Locating Audrey’s bedroom window, he crouched to get a better look at the ground.

Undisturbed.

“There isn’t anything out here.” Audrey’s button-down shirt sleeve collided with his arm as Hank struggled to be set free. Her voice lost the even tone she’d taken on the past few minutes. “Does that mean…”

“The killer didn’t break into the building.” Lance straightened, studying the faces of the other residents back at the stables. “He was already inside.”

CHAPTER FOUR

No amount of time with Hank was going to drain the ice from her veins.

If the killer hadn’t come through her window last night, that meant he’d figured out a way inside. Without being caught on the cameras. Without triggering the alarms on the doors.

Audrey watched as her piglet ran after his siblings around his pen. The cold steel of the gate enclosing the animals kept her mind from spiraling, but it wouldn’t last forever. She couldn’t ignore the simplest explanation of how the killer had gotten inside. No matter how much she craved her denial.

One of her fellow residents could be a murderer.

The staff was going nuts. Answering questions for the police, offering grief counseling, making sure residents were taking care of themselves. They hovered around the cafeteria and stopped patients in the hallways. Emergency sessions were open for signup plastered all over the communal walls. The twenty-two—now twenty-one with Inez gone—residents had come here to feel safe. To heal. To move forward with their lives.

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