Killer Bear Read online

  But they were adults now. And they’d been such good friends for so long. Maybe it was time to bury the hatchet. “What’s Mark been up to?” she casually asked Liam.

  Liam paused, and she thought she saw his shoulders tense. “Mark Harris?”

  “Yeah. He lived right there when we were kids.” She pointed.

  “Still does,” Liam replied tersely.

  “Oh, nice. Maybe I’ll go over and tell him I’m back.”

  Liam pulled into her parents’ driveway and shut down the engine. “Allie, you don’t want to do that.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Mark’s…well, he’s not a good person.”

  “What are you talking about? We grew apart, yeah, but we were best friends when we were kids.”

  “Well, you’re not kids anymore.” Liam got out of the car, slamming the door a little harder than necessary, and walked around to the trunk to get Allie’s suitcase.

  Allie peered out the window. She could still see Mark’s house from here. She couldn’t repress her curiosity. Liam clearly thought she should stay away from Mark, but Allie had a sixth sense that something was amiss.

  Her recent termination had brought memories of how many times Mark had been there for her in the past when she’d needed a friend. If her intuition was correct and something was wrong, maybe it was her turn to do the same for him.

  3

  “Absolutely not!” Dani leaned forward and slapped the palm of her hand against the table. “You cannot go over to Mark’s house, Allie. Off-limits. No way.”

  They were seated around a table at O’Hallory’s. Liam, who had waved from behind the bar when they’d come in, had just brought over a beer tower from which Allie and her friends were now tapping their own drinks. To her left sat Dani and Bill, the newlyweds, and to her right were Vicki and Oliver. Allie would have felt like a fifth wheel anyway, but the fact that each time one of them said anything, the other three nodded along like it was common knowledge was making her feel like even more of an outsider. Now, in response to Dani’s declaration about Mark, they all wore grave expressions and murmured agreement.

  “What’s the big deal?” Allie asked, tapping herself a refill. “If I go over there and he’s weird or annoying or something, I’ll just go home.”

  “He’s not weird or annoying.” Dani was shaking her head emphatically. “He’s creepy.”

  “It’s true.” Bill wiped the foam mustache off his upper lip. “We didn’t even invite him to the wedding.”

  “What does that mean? You were never friends with him, were you? Why would you invite him to the wedding?”

  Oliver laughed. “They invited everyone to the wedding. I think Dani was just trying to pad the guest list so she’d get more presents.”

  Dani balled up a cocktail napkin and tossed it at him. “You take that back, Oliver Green.”

  “How many people were on your guest list again?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Right, and how many people were in our graduating class?”

  “I have a big family!”

  Everyone laughed. Allie could tell that this was an old conversation, revisited frequently when people felt like teasing Dani. Even she was laughing along. “You have to admit, it was a good party,” she giggled.

  “Oh, the best,” Vicki agreed. “I hope my wedding is half as pretty as yours was, Dani.” She turned to Allie. “You really should have been there. It was so great. Dani looked amazing in her dress.”

  “I would have liked to make it.” Allie was lying. In truth, she had missed the wedding deliberately. It was strange to think back just a few months, to when she had been standing in the well-appointed kitchen of her Manhattan apartment holding that invitation. She’d considered attending for a moment, but what would there be for her to talk about with all those people from her past? They would have nothing in common anymore, not now that she was a successful New York litigator and they were still stuck in Cedar Rapids. She had sent back the RSVP with her regrets.

  And now here she was, sitting around a table with them and tapping cheap beers. The wedding had been the event of the year for them. Allie had robbed herself of an experience, in their view, by missing it.

  Maybe they were right. Maybe she had.

  “So why wasn’t Mark invited to the wedding?” Allie boldly steered the conversation back to a topic she was more interested in. She hoped Dani wouldn’t pick up on the fact that her feelings for Mark, never quite forgotten, had been slightly rekindled when she’d driven by his house earlier. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking of him all day. Dani definitely had a nose for that kind of thing. Allie would have to be careful.

  But it was Vicki who answered, leaning in and lowering her voice to a hush. “You don’t know about Mark?”

  Allie shook her head, drawn into the intrigue by Vicki’s strange behavior.

  “It was reported nationally, but I guess you might not have gotten it in the New York papers,” Oliver said.

  “I keep up with you all on social media…”

  “Oh, none of us ever talked about it there. It was way too gristly. No, see...Mark’s mother and father were murdered last year.”

  “What?” Allie’s stomach sunk. Her hand flew to her chest

  She had known Mark’s parents well. When they had been friends as children, it had been common for them to run into and out of one another’s houses grabbing juice boxes and ice pops from one another’s refrigerators. She could call to mind Mark’s mother’s smiling face, his father’s deep voice saying see you later, Allie-gator as she ran back through the front door to continue her game with Mark. “They were murdered? What happened?”

  “Well…” Dani was clearly savoring the chance to tell the story, “…in the middle of the night, the police showed up outside the house. We think Mark must have called them, even though nobody knows that part for sure. Right, hon?” She turned to Bill.

  Bill nodded steadily, not commenting. His eyes were fixed on Allie, and she had the distinct feeling he was evaluating her reaction to this story. What was he looking for?

  “Anyway,” Dani continued, “the next day it was all over the news. They were found savaged in the living room of their own home. Whoever did it was absolutely brutal.” She shuddered. “The blood was everywhere. We never saw what the bodies looked like—”

  “God, I wouldn’t want to,” Oliver put in, going for another drink.

  “—but the living room was absolutely splattered. It was like a Jackson Pollock painting.”

  “Poor Mark,” Allie whispered. “He was the one who found them?” No wonder lawn care hadn’t been a priority. He must be so messed up about his parents. It sounded like her sixth sense was right. She could really use an old friend. She felt a fluttering in her stomach—a friend like her.

  Dani’s eyes were wide as saucers. “Not ‘poor Mark,’ Allie. Mark’s the one who killed them.”

  Allie almost spat out her beer. “What?”

  “Dani,” Vicki chided, “we don’t know that.”

  “We as good as know it.” Dani waved Vicki off. “The police brought him in for questioning. He was the only suspect they ever had. They just couldn’t find the evidence to make the charges stick.”

  “So the case never went to trial?” Allie thought back over the many murderers and psychopaths she had faced down in court. Every time, there had been something about them, an indefinable quality that had separated them from normal people. She had seen the emptiness in their eyes and known she was looking at a murderer. It wasn’t a look she’d ever seen in Mark’s eyes. Even when he had shunned her and told her to stop following him around, when he’d been the cruelest to her she’d ever seen that empty look of a killer. But then, she’d been young...she hadn’t learned, yet, what it was like to look into the eyes of a cold-blooded murderer.

  Could Mark really have done such a thing?

  She looked around the table, taking in the expressions of her friends. Dani was practi
cally salivating over the story. Oliver looked deeply uncomfortable, wringing his hands in his lap. Vicki was chewing on her lip anxiously, and Allie got the feeling the conversation was scaring her a little. Bill just sat there, stoically sipping his beer, as if he had heard this story too many times to be moved by it, his eyes still raking over Allie.

  “No,” Oliver said, finally. “It never went to trial. Mark was released from police custody, and he went back home—where he lived with his parents—and rumor has it he mopped up their blood and just went right on living there.”

  “I don’t see how that isn’t all the evidence the cops need,” Dani said. “He mopped up their blood and went on living there? How depraved would you have to be? If something ever happened to my parents…” she knocked on the wooden bar table, “I don’t think I could ever set foot in the house again.”

  “People cope with things differently.” The comment was Bill’s first contribution to the discussion.

  “Yeah,” Dani said. “Normal people cope one way, and crazy psychopaths cope another way.”

  “You have to admit, it’s pretty weird that he still lives there.” Vicki shuddered visibly, her fingers clinging her beer mug. “Every time I picture him cleaning up after his parents’ murder it makes me queasy.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything, though.” Allie’s lawyer brain took over. “Okay, so it’s weird. But, you can’t send people to prison for being weird.”

  “If you could, this guy would have landed there years ago.” Dani laughed and socked Bill’s arm lightly.

  “I’m serious,” Allie pressed. “Why are you all so convinced of Mark’s guilt? I know this might not be common knowledge, but it’s actually really common for the police to question the person who discovers the body in a murder case. That doesn’t even necessarily mean he was a suspect. And they clearly decided not to pursue legal action against him, so...why shouldn’t I go over there?”

  Everyone around the table shook their heads again. “Allie, you can’t.” Oliver’s tone very serious. “Listen, he never comes out of the house anymore. We don’t know what he’s like. I know you had a crush on him in high school—”

  “I did not have—”

  “Oh, you did so,” Dani said, draining her beer. “Give it a rest. We all know.”

  “The point is,” Oliver cut them off, “however you felt about him then, you need to look out for your own safety. He’s gotten creepy and reclusive. It’s not worth the risk.”

  “Besides,” Vicki said, “there was no one else in the house the day his parents were killed.”

  Allie sipped her drink and didn’t say what she was thinking—that if Vicki’s assertion were true, the cops would have had the evidence they needed to go to trial. There was more to this than her friends were saying, probably more even than they knew.

  Of course, she thought resignedly, it would be just her luck if the one guy she’d ever really liked, the one person she’d eve kinda wanted to see again on her return to Iowa, turned out to be a psychotic murderer.

  4

  In the middle of the night, the phone rang.

  Allie fumbled for the nightstand, where she’d left it plugged into the charger. She squinted at the screen, struggling to make out the number without her contacts. It was an unknown caller, and to judge by the area code, it was local. Who would be calling her from Cedar Rapids?

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded gravelly and unpleasant in her own ears, and she cleared her throat and tried again. “Hello?”

  “Is this Allie James?”

  “Who is this?”

  “The Allie James who went to McKinley High and Columbia?”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “No, wait,” the voice said quickly. “I’m Frank Toomey. I was in high school with you?”

  Allie racked her brains. “I don’t remember you.”

  “We didn’t hang out. You were in the advanced classes.”

  That much was true. “What do you want?” Allie asked warily.

  “You’re an old friend of Mark Harris, right?”

  “We were friends when we were kids.”

  “Uh-huh. I’d heard you were back in town. Mark and I are co-owners of the auto shop,” Frank explained.

  Allie said nothing. She was torn between ending the call and urging Frank to make his point faster.

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said. “Here’s me rambling on, and you must be wondering why I’m calling you in the dead of night.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” Allie admitted.

  “Thing is, you’re a lawyer, isn’t that so?”

  “You need a lawyer?” Allie had not expected this. She had come back to Cedar Rapids to lick her wounds. She certainly didn’t expect clients to come knocking at her door in the middle of the night.

  “Not me,” Frank said. “Mark.”

  Allie almost dropped the phone. “What?”

  “He was arrested tonight.”

  “On what charges?”

  Frank hemmed and hawed and seemed uncomfortable. “It was a terrible thing, months ago, don’t like to talk about it much when I can help it…”

  “The murders?” Allie asked quietly.

  “You know about it?”

  “I’ve heard. I thought there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges against him.”

  “I guess some new evidence came to light. Anyway, he’s down at the station. They’re going to send the public defender over, but...well, I thought I’d appeal to old times and give you a try first.”

  “Who’s the public defender?” Allie was already pulling on pants.

  “Evan Jeffries.”

  Allie groaned aloud. Jeffries had been a smug, intolerable teenager in high school, and she couldn’t imagine him as anything else now. He was much less intelligent than he thought himself to be. Allie doubted his ability to give Mark the defense he deserved, especially given that most of the town appeared to have prejudged him and found him guilty. “All right. I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Thank God for my savings, Allie thought as she stood before the desk sergeant half an hour later and wrote out a check for the exorbitant amount of Mark’s bail. She was taking a serious hit in doing this, but her gut instincts told her it needed to be done. She would have the opportunity to reconnect with her old friend, maybe even to prove his innocence to the rest of the town. Deep down, she couldn’t believe him guilty of the things he’d been charged with.

  “This will take a few hours to process,” the desk sergeant said. “We’ll release him as soon as we can. You might as well go home.”

  “I’d like to see my client before I leave.” Allie was pleased to hear some authority in her voice. She had been worried she’d lost that when she’d left New York.

  The desk sergeant shrugged and led her back to a small holding room. Another officer was standing guard outside, looking bored. “Mr. Harris’s attorney,” the desk sergeant said, and the guard nodded and unlocked the door.

  Allie drew in a breath.

  Gone was the boy she remembered from childhood. The man sitting before her was large and well-built and muscular, with sun-bronzed skin and callused fingers. His head was down and his hair hung into his eyes. He was breathing deeply, steadily, almost deliberately, as if trying to keep calm. His hands were flattened on the table, palms down.

  As she took in his hands, her eyes were drawn upward to his forearms, and she stifled a gasp. They were badly scarred, thick welts snaking their way up and disappearing into his rolled up sleeves. What kind of accident could cause scarring like that? Unthinking, she stepped forward, trying to get a better look, and Mark sat back as if pulling away from her and shoved his sleeves roughly down to his wrists.

  She took another step closer. “Mark?”

  He looked up.

  As his eyes met her, time stopped. She felt…

  Eyes locked, his hands clenched slightly, his knuckles jerked up as if he were trying to grip the tabletop. His deep, steady b
reathing became noticeably irregular, and, Allie realized, hers was too. She couldn’t break eye contact with him. She didn’t want to. It was hypnotic. It was—

  He looked away. The temperature in the room seemed to drop five degrees. “What are you doing here?”

  “Frank called me.” Allie took a deep breath trying to calm her racing pulse. “I’m here as your attorney.”

  “I didn’t ask for an attorney.”

  “You’re legally entitled—”

  “I can’t afford you.”

  “It’s pro bono,” Allie said, although she hadn’t considered it beforehand. “It won’t cost you anything.”

  “I don’t want you, all right?”

  Wow. The rejection stung, after what had happened in New York, but she pressed on. “It’s either me or the public defender. Frank tells me that’s Evan Jeffries. You remember him, don’t you? Do you really want him defending you?”

  Mark didn’t answer. He pushed away from the table, braced his elbows against his knees, and hunched over. Allie felt a surge of sympathy. Of course he was lashing out. How must he feel, to be locked up for the murder of his own parents? She couldn’t even begin to imagine. And after so long with no one believing in him, of course he was yelling at her when she tried to help.

  She pulled out the chair opposite his and sat down. “Mark, listen. I know you. I know what you’re accused of, but I know you. You’re not a killer. I’ve seen plenty. Hell, I’ve put plenty of them away. You aren’t anything like them.” She moved to cover his hand with hers.

  He jerked away. “You know me? You don’t know me. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “What are you talking about? We were friends for years, Mark. I know we’ve grown apart, that I’ve been away for a while, but you can’t possibly think I don’t know anything about you.”

  “People change.” His eyes flashed. “More than you realize. Do you think you can tell who’s dangerous just by looking at them? Do you think you’ve never gotten it wrong?” He was leaning across the table toward her now, his stare deep and penetrating. “I’m not who you think I am, Allie.”