10

Jarod didn’t know whether Miss Parker was embarrassed because she had screamed or whether she was just eager to hide her fear, but the rage that she displayed a moment later, was unprecedented. He hadn’t known that it was actually possible to be that angry.

“I am going to find that bastard and make him pay!” she yelled from between gritted teeth while she stood in front of the kitchen counter, fist clenched and breath coming raggedly.

Jarod himself was unsettled by the image that had greeted them upon entering the room.

There was a typed letter that had been pinned to the kitchen appliance, consisting only of one sentence: “It’s your fault.”

There were bloody fingerprints all over the paper but Jarod’s expert’s eye told him that they were by far too small to be those of an adult. Miss Parker, who had once been the security expert of the Centre and thus was trained in all sorts of fields, seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

She now stood silently, one hand on her hip, the other one in her face.

Jarod deemed it best not to disturb what appeared to be a moment of calming-down and walked into the kitchen for closer inspection of the evidence.

Nothing had been touched or broken. It seemed that the person had just come in and posted the note on there. There were no wet footsteps and absolutely nothing seemed out of place.

The letter itself looked quite innocent- except for the blood, of course. The sheet of paper was not quite a normal size. It seemed as if a slim strip of paper had been ripped off at the top. Examining it more carefully, Jarod found what seemed like the rest of an “H” in bold black letter. It was something he couldn’t make sense of.

The blood was dried, so it had been smeared on the paper a while ago. He couldn’t tell from whether - assuming it had been her- Amanda had touched the paper on her own accord or whether her hand had been forcefully placed there to accomplish the effect.

He turned around to see Miss Parker.

“You didn’t let me take my gun,” she said gloomily, although her rage seemed to have gone, for which Jarod was glad. You simply couldn’t talk rationally to her when she was that upset.

“This is not a matter that is in your own hands.”

“Self-administered justice is in my genes. I grew up at the Centre.”

“So did I,” he answered pointedly.

“Playing the saint again?” she snapped. “I don’t believe you if you say that you never wished to blow anyone’s brains out!”

Was that the woman who had been so tender with Amanda earlier that evening? Or were it some maternal instincts that had been dormant up till now?

She was beautiful when she was angry, but she would have killed him, had he voiced his thoughts. She didn’t need a gun to hurt someone seriously. She had proved that quite a few times already.

“I just don’t believe in violence, Parker,” he defended himself.

“Oh you don’t? Then how do you explain that you torture the people that you believe are the villains when you’re once again trying to help...” she mimicked an admiring tone in her voice “... the weak and abused?”

Jarod held up a calming hand because he didn’t see the point in fighting with her right now.

“I don’t torture them. I don’t hurt them.”

“You make them believe that you want to kill them. Torture is not always physical, Jarod- you of all people should know that.”

There was silence for a moment because Jarod didn’t know what to say. There was a hint of triumph in Parker’s eyes when for once he couldn’t come up with a retort.

She menacingly stepped closer to him and the hint of her scent that wafted towards him made his skin tingle with uneasiness rather than the usual arousal. He only noticed that it had actually been that, now that it felt different for the first time.

“You make yourself believe that you’re any better than me and the rest of the Centre crew, but you’re not. You think that just because you’ve been educated by Sydney, you have remained untouched by the evil that fills that place to the brim, but you have not. Sadism is everything but a positive character trait, Jarod. Did you know that?”

Her voice was low and seemed to fill the room so that her voice came crashing against Jarod from every corner of the room.

“I’m so sick of you playing the hero and being admired by everyone when you’re just as bad as me. You stopped being a victim a long time ago. The good forgive. You don’t.”

“Neither do you,” he interjected weakly.

“I never said I was a good person. I admit my faultiness. You can’t.”

She smiled a cruel smile that was closer to a sneer than to anything and he felt himself shudder not because she looked so mean, but because she was right.

He had not only deliberately hurt her feelings, but also had played with people’s fears and made them scream with agony. They were bad people alright, murderers, rapists, thieves... and they probably deserved just what they got, but Miss Parker was right. He was not the avenging angel, the knight in the shining armor, that he pretended to be. He had been touched by the evil that you breathed in with the air in the Centre, but he couldn’t admit it.

The hard stare had suddenly disappeared from her eyes and she allowed him to see what lay beneath it all- she looked hurt.

“So stop telling me how bad a person I am, when you’re not any better.”

Suddenly she was the woman he had seen with Amanda again and he watched her as she picked up the note and turned it around in her hands.

“We should call the police about that,” she said, one hand touching her stomach as if she was trying to get rid of a feeling of sickness.

Jarod, though, hadn’t made the transition quite so quickly. He stepped closer to Miss Parker, and took the piece of paper from her hand, putting it aside swiftly. Before she could protest, he had locked his gaze with hers.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

She didn’t hesitate for even the shortest of moments. Instead her answer came so quickly that Jarod wondered whether she had been waiting for the question.

“Because you did what I didn’t dare to do and you keep rubbing it in my face.”

“Did what?” he asked back, tired of her rude manners.

“Run away.”

He was stunned for a moment since he had always believed that she was just unwilling to give up the relative security of the Centre.

“If you want to go, why don’t you?”

She looked as if she wanted to say something, then held back. In the moment of silence that ensued, he read the answer in her eyes: She was afraid.

“They’d want to spill my blood, Jarod. It’s what ties me to that place.”

“Are you sure?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, but he looked innocent enough not to have added a deeper meaning to his question.

“You’re afraid they’d kill you,” he assumed, when she failed to answer.

She raised her chin, eyes blazing: “Don’t be ridiculous, Jarod. I am not afraid of anything. Freedom's just not worth dying for.”

Although he knew that she was lying, he was kind enough not to point it out to her.

There was more uneasy silence, then he finally stepped towards her and lightly touched her elbow with his fingertips. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, but at least she didn’t break his arm.

“It’s no use ripping each other apart, Miss Parker. What we need to do is find Amanda.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him.

“But how? I don’t have the foggiest idea who did this and why.”

They looked at the blood-smeared piece of paper on the kitchen-counter that would have their fingerprints all over its edges already although they’d both been careful.

“I can test this one for fingerprints and run it through the FBI’s database,” he finally said. She looked at him quizzically.

“Do I want to know how you got access?”

“If you want to hear a whole lot of technobabble, you may.”

She shuddered. “Sounds like one boring long monologue. I usually call Broots if I feel like one of those.”

They shared their first true smile since they’d nearly kissed earlier on.

“I suggest you try to catch some sleep while I am at the task,” he said but she shrugged.

“I suggest I’ll have a few liters of coffee and go over the whole thing again. There must be something we’ve missed... by the way: Do you have one of your nice red notebooks on her father’s case or do you just write them to torture me?”

He grinned as her sentence had been delivered like a joke, taking some of the edge of her earlier hard words. He silently promised himself to think about the whole thing again later and come up with some way to make it up to her. She was right. He had been self-righteous.

How came he kept hurting her feelings without even noticing? Maybe that was the reason that she was always in his face when they met?

Miss Parker felt better after a quick shower and a change of clothes. Now dressed in jeans and a tight black cashmere-sweater along with high heels and her usual make-up in place, she felt a lot more like herself. As usual when she needed to be strong for herself, she turned to the persona she liked to show off to the world. Beautiful- strong- fearless and kind of menacing. That was what she wanted to look like for people. Her personal insecurities were nobody’s business. And since she had failed to hide them from Jarod of all people, she at least needed to keep up her appearance.

Ignoring the fact that it was seven thirty in the morning, she savored a small glass of the cooking-sherry Jarod had for some reason bought and put in the kitchen cabinet. She didn’t want to know what he needed that for and she actually didn’t like sherry, but hell she needed a drink.

Pulling a face at the taste that differed considerably from her usual scotch with soda (on healthier days), she turned to the little red notebook Jarod had left for her on the coffee-table. She usually dreaded the sight of them, but this time she found herself eager to explore its contents.

The first pages were covered in various newspaper-articles that described how a neighbor had found Amanda’s mother dead in a pool of blood while her daughter had been sitting mere inches from her, beyond crying and staring at her mother’s corpse with empty eyes.

The search for the murderer seemed to have been fruitless since there had been no suspects. Her estranged soon to be ex-husband had had an alibi, having been on-duty at the hospital. He had also agreed for Amanda to be put into psychiatric care, but had seen her every day.

The next pages were covered in Jarod’s handwriting. He had jotted down information, some relevant, some that had later turned out the be meaningless.

Amanda’s mother had left her father and not even her friends had known what had so suddenly destroyed what seemed to have been a rather happy marriage for almost ten years. Neither of the two had started any new relationships.

Only when Jarod had found out that Amanda’s father hadn’t been in the on-call room of the hospital all night from a nurse who had only realized herself that a long gone trainee nurse who’d had a crush on the doctor, had covered for him, when he hadn’t been present for the only emergency that had come in that night. Since it had not been grave but a mere false alert of a pregnant woman who hadn’t been in labor after all, nobody had noticed. The nurse had never made the connection. From that point Jarod had helped himself to the doctor’s keys and raided his apartment that had contained a still blood-stained shirt. A DNA-Analysis later, it had been clear that Amanda’s father was guilty as sin. He had confessed what he’d done after one of Jarod’s little plots involving a confrontation on a bridge and a -miraculously- lose crash-barrier. Now he was set for trial, safely looked away behind bars and thus unable to kidnap his daughter or throw rocks at people and windows.

After turning the last page, she leaned back, sighing and finishing the last of the awful sherry. This was going nowhere. Maybe they were just faced with some lunatic who enjoyed worried people and terrified little girls...

She picked up Amanda’s teddybear and suddenly found herself to be very emotional. It felt as if her own young self was again trapped in a hopeless situation and she realized that she had to find Amanda as much for the girl’s sake as for her own.

She had only caught a glimpse of her dead mother in the elevator, but Amanda had been forced to witness how her own father had killed her. No wonder she had refused to speak since. Miss Parker remembered the feeling of her throat contracting at the sight of the lifeless body on the floor, covered in blood. What if that feeling had simply never left Amanda? Was she still terrified? Or did she refuse to give her father away to the authorities? Miss Parker herself knew best how irrational a daughter could be in loyalty to her beloved father. Especially a girl as young and innocent as little Amanda.

She looked up to the door opening and felt guilty against her will because Jarod had caught her with alcohol.

“Is that my cooking-sherry?” he asked and she cocked an eyebrow at him, hoping that it would suffice to tell him not to go down that road.

“Did you find anything?” she asked quickly, before he could start another one of his lectures about the influence alcohol supposedly had on ulcers.

“No. There are fingerprints apart from ours and some small ones that look like Amanda’s, but they didn’t get a match.”

“So the person who did this is either sure he’ll never be caught or really dumb.”

Jarod nodded and sat down next to Parker, thoughtfully staring at the teddybear for a moment, then turned to Parker.

“Did you find anything we’ve missed?”

She shrugged. “Nothing valuable. Although I’ve been wondering whether the nurse might have something to do with it. She supposedly had a crush on Amanda’s father. Maybe she’s up to something.”

Jarod shook his head regretfully. “I am sure she’s not. The poor girl finished her training a week after the murder and was on her way to her new job in Alabama when she died in a road accident. Tragic.”

Miss Parker sighed, her last hope gone for now. Although, as usual, the alcohol had a somewhat calming effect on her, she felt dissatisfied, as if trapped in a nightmare.

“There must be something we can do.”

“There’s not. And I suggest we fly under the radar of the police for the moment. They’ve seen too much of us already and if they care to check us out and do some digging, they might realize that both our names are false.”

Miss Parker nodded and looked outside where the sunrise was obscured by clouds that promised more rain for the day.

“Shall we drive back to the children’s home?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something we failed to see there.”

She shook her head. “It’s hopeless. All we can do is wait for results or for the kidnapper to give us another clue.”

After another moment of silence Jarod couldn’t help it anymore and finally cut to the chase.

“About what you said earlier...” he began and ignored the alarmed look that flashed in her eyes. “I thought about that one and I wondered... you must have felt betrayed by me. I mean, we used to be friends and then I ran away and you were forced into that role of the merciless huntress. I have been laughing in your face all this time and you must have felt...”

She cut him off: “Don’t try to fix me. I’m not broken. I was just fed up with your self-righteousness.”

She wasn’t easy to read and he couldn’t tell whether she meant it.

Parker looked at Jarod and hoped that he wouldn’t realize that he had hit home with what he had said. As cheesy as it had sounded, he had finally understood what had made her so angry all those years, what had fueled her on her hunt for him.

Now that he had finally apologized for his demeanor she felt that she should apologize, too, for calling him “labrat”, for throwing insults at him, for telling him how pathetic he was and making him feel how much she supposedly hated him.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

His earlier words echoed inside her head and made her wince. He actually thought she hated him. He couldn’t be farther from the truth. Had she truly hated him, she wouldn’t have come here, she wouldn’t have tried to kiss him and she wouldn’t have been upset because of him.

How could a genius like Jarod not realize it?

Truth was that she just didn’t want to apologize. She didn’t dare to tear down the last barrier between them because she was just too afraid of what might happen. Right now she could still tell herself that he didn’t want her because of what had happened. If she confessed that she had done him wrong too, they would have to be friends. And she couldn’t stand being his friend. She actually couldn’t stand being anyone’s friend. Opening up to and liking someone meant displaying weak spots and that meant being prone to being hurt.

“I think we should go back to the hospital and try to find out whether anyone has noticed anything unusual about Amanda,” Jarod said.

Miss Parker nodded, fully aware of the fact, that their search was very likely to remain fruitless since the police had surely had the same idea. It was just that they both couldn’t stand having to simply wait- and being alone with each other.

The hospital was busy with people even this early in the morning and Jarod and Miss Parker weren’t caught when they snug into Amanda’s now empty hospital room and examined the window that had been secured with tape and cardboard.

Their quick search of the room - as expected- didn’t turn up anything else than Amanda’s patient’s file. Miss Parker flipped through it aimlessly, not knowing what she expected. That the kidnapper had left any greetings for them?

She turned the pages grimly, then found a date that caught her eye. It had been only a day before Amanda’s mother had been killed. Her father had obviously dropped Amanda off after a hospital visit when she’d had a routine check-up done, then went home and come back the next day to slaughter Amanda’s mother. Miss Parker felt fury rise inside her. How could he? Be nice one day and come back with a killing-wish the next? How evil was the world? And why did she feel so damn reminded of that one Christmas when her father had given her mother an expensive necklace and kissed her neck while helping her put it on, then beat her so badly the next day that her neck had been bruised just where his lips had touched her bare skin the day before?

She swallowed and felt the sudden desire to simply take Amanda in her arms and tell her that she could do it if she herself had done it. Some people were damaged goods, but there was still a way to not fall apart.

“Hey. Are you okay?” She felt Jarod’s hand on her shoulder, and for the first time, thought it reassuring. Before she could stop herself, she had put her hand on top of his.

“It’s just...” she forced herself to stop and quickly closed the file, replacing it where she had found it. “I’m okay. Just a little tired.”

Jarod felt his skin tingle where her hand had been and tried to hide his feelings behind a shrug.

“Let’s go and have a look around to see which medical staff was on duty yesterday evening.”

She nodded and followed him out, the images of her beaten mother blurring with those of Amanda’s mother inside her head.

Marcus Jones stood down the corridor and watched Miss Parker leave. Her business-card was still in his pocket, her scent in his nose. After all those years he had never thought he could be infatuated with anyone else, but now...

He watched her walk ahead of Jarod and wondered what she had to do with him. He actually liked Jarod, but he felt somewhat at odds with him now that he had to consider him a rival. He mentally slapped himself, telling himself to focus. This was not the time to fall in love with someone and ponder possible rivals.

Not after what had happened.

...to be continued...