Page 13 of Hunting the Crossbow Killer

“It is what it is. But…thanks.”

She leaned forward, her gaze searching his. “I know this is difficult, but could you tell me about the night of the fire?”

He winced and shoved back from the table. “Give me a minute.” He strode into the main part of the great room and stood in front of the large picture window that framed the incredible beauty of the Smoky Mountains in the distance.

When Malone joined him, quietly standing beside him as he looked out the window, he couldn’t help putting off the discussion about the fire just a little longer. Instead, he told her, “Elly loved the mountains. She wanted to spend our honeymoon in a cabin in Gatlinburg. I wanted to take a cruise, soak up the sun on a beach. We went to Gatlinburg. How could I not? It made her happy. And she was pregnant with our first…” He swallowed. “With our only child. It’s the least I could do. She was already experiencing morning sickness. It was easier on her to be pampered on the back deck of a mountain cabin than to sit out in the hot sun by the ocean.”

He could feel her staring at him and he shifted uncomfortably.

“Your voice changes when you talk about her,” she said. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

He frowned. “Of course I did. That’s why I…why I let her go.”

“Because of the fire.”

He nodded.

“Tell me what happened. Please.”

He drew a shaky breath, then motioned toward one of the couches. “I need to sit down for this.”

Once they were seated, to his surprise, she helped him ease into the conversation about that awful night by talking about more mundane things that really didn’t matter. She asked abouthis business, things he and Elly did, the first few years of life as young parents with a rambunctious son running them ragged.

“Earlier you mentioned your parents try to keep in touch, even from Ireland. What about your grandparents? Or are they all gone now?”

“If by gone you mean have they passed away, no. They’re all remarkably healthy for their ages, doing really well. But after I…confessed…they cut me out of their lives. I’m an only child, no siblings. The only family who speaks to me these days is my parents, and then, only rarely. As I said, they aren’t in the best of health.”

“I’m sorry.”

He glanced at her, surprised to hear the empathy in her voice, see the sorrow in her eyes. He gave her a curt nod of thanks and looked away again, staring toward the mountains, which were beginning to mist over, giving them the smoky look for which they’d been named.

“We’d only been in the house for a few weeks,” he finally began. “The business had taken off. I was making millions, investing the profits and making millions on top of that. I never expected the high-end custom furniture market to be that lucrative and successful. But it was. I took it international and it really exploded. I had over a hundred people working for me at the time, far more now in several locations around the world. In spite of that, all Elly wanted was a slightly bigger house than our starter home so we’d have room for more children. But I wanted a statement home, something grand that reinforced the image of success.”

He shook his head in disgust. “My ego and pride had me overrule her desires that one time and insist on getting a mansion in the foothills outside of Nashville in one of the upper-crust neighborhoods. It was huge, beautiful, but old. The inspection pointed out dozens of things that needed to beupgraded. One of those was the electrical system. It was original to the house and the inspector warned it wasn’t capable of handling all the modern smart appliances and technological toys that people have these days. We could have waited, had the electrical completely redone before we moved in. But I didn’t take the inspector’s warnings seriously enough. I thought we had time, that we could do the renovations after we were settled.”

He shook his head in self-disgust. “Obviously, I was wrong. I was working late one night at my company, meeting with my more senior craftsmen about new equipment and tools they felt we needed. Once all of that was wrapped up, it was past the dinner hour and dark outside. I could see the flames lighting up the night sky before I even turned down our street. Firefighters and police officers were everywhere, lights flashing, hoses pouring water onto the second story of our home. I jumped out of my car and tried to run inside, but they held me back. I screamed at them that my wife and son were in there. One of the policemen told me they’d been rescued, that my son was fine and with a neighbor, but that my wife was at the hospital.”

He squeezed his hands into fists. “Rescued. That word scared the hell out of me. What did it mean? I was afraid to ask. I checked on Niall, then sped to the hospital. Once there I…” He closed his eyes, reliving the nightmare yet again as the horrible images bombarded his mind.

“Elly,” he whispered, his eyes still closed. “My God. Elly.”

She was in the burn unit, soot and burns over large swaths of her body. But it was her silence that was more terrifying than screams of pain would have been.

“Aidan?”

He opened his eyes, glad that the agent had brought him back from the darkness. Not that he’d thank her for it. “I told you to call me Mr. O’Brien.”

“And I told you to call me Grace.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. Then he blew out a shaky breath and gave her a sanitized version of what Elly had suffered.

“The fire started upstairs. An electrical short. Elly was downstairs and heard Niall screaming. She ran and didn’t realize there was a fire until she reached the landing. Flames were between her and our son’s room. She ran right through them to get him. She…she grabbed the comforter off his bed and soaked it in the shower, then covered both of them as she ran through the flames again to the stairs. They’d just reached the bottom when a beam fell on her. Niall was able to scramble out from under her and run outside. The firefighters had to pull the beam off her and take her out.”

Malone gave him another one of those empathetic smiles he didn’t begin to deserve. “She was paralyzed, correct?”

“From the chest down. She had to be on a ventilator to breathe. After months of treatment in the burn center, she was well enough to go home. But the vent was permanent. She’d die without it. She had partial use of her right arm, and she could turn her head, blink her eyes. Little else. In some ways the paralysis was a blessing because she didn’t suffer as much as she would have during burn treatments. But she’d have traded the pain to be able to walk again, to breathe on her own, to hold her son.”

“How do you know that?”

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