Powers of Arrest (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 2)

“I want to come back to class,” he whispered.

She told him all the ways that would be a bad idea, impossible even. She couldn’t imagine having him as student right now, and the university had suspended him pending the investigation.

She looked around. The store was crowded even on a Wednesday afternoon. She was safe. Except for the fact that he knew where she lived.

“I need to graduate. I need to get a job.”

“I can’t fix that, Noah. You can’t take the NCLEX until you’re cleared of this, anyway.” The national licensing examinations.

“Cheryl Beth, I need something to do. To keep my mind off this. Brooks is going to do everything he can to put me in prison for something I did not do.” His eyes were suddenly older, exhausted.

“What happened out there that night, Noah?”

“I keep trying to remember.” He carefully touched the back of his head. “They said I had a mild concussion, but I keep having headaches. It still burns where they used the Taser on me, and I don’t feel right. It’s hard to keep it all in my head.”

“You screamed something like ‘hostiles! I have wounded!’ What were you t

hinking?”

He leaned his hands against a shelve and stared at the floor. “I don’t remember. Sometimes, after my deployments, I have flashbacks…”

He seemed sincere. But she pressed on: “Did you have a knife with you that night?”

“No!”

“But you were in the Army, right? You’re good with a knife.”

“That doesn’t mean I would kill those girls. I was crazy about them.”

“Nothing but an an innocent boy from Corbin, Kentucky,” she said.

“You don’t believe me.” He roughly ran his hands down his face. “If you don’t believe me, I’m sunk.”

“Do you know I’m from Corbin, Noah? Is that something you found on the Internet, too?”

“You are? Good lord.”

“It’s a small town. Tell me somebody I might know.”

“I’m a lot younger than you,” he said. “No offense. You’re very attractive.” He shook his head. “Shit, I can’t say the right thing here.”

“Corbin.” She heard the sternness in her voice.

He stared beyond her. She was about to walk away when he spoke again.

“When I was three years old, my father killed my mother, okay?”

She stopped and watched him again. He seemed to age before her eyes.

“My earliest memories are their fights. Both of them screaming as loud as they could. Him slapping her. He finally used a shotgun. I saw it happen. The whole thing. I saw her brains and blood against the wallpaper of the kitchen. I didn’t know that’s what they were, I remember the colors and textures and her head was…” He stopped speaking and the muscles in his neck tensed.

He was breathing heavily, holding his hands tightly at his side. “Then he killed himself. I remember everything. Forget anything you’ve heard about little kids not remembering trauma.” He fought tears as he gave the date, his parents’ names and where they lived, a couple miles out of town. “You can look it up. After that, I was sent to live with my uncle and aunt in Lexington. When I was eighteen, I joined the Army.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. The year he gave was long after she had left Corbin. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, Hank Brooks thinks I have my daddy’s homicidal bloodline. That’s the way he put it.”

When he had composed himself, he said, “On Monday, I keep remembering waking up in the grass, then seeing Lauren and Holly. They were maybe twenty feet away, but I could already see the blood. I got to my feet and went to them. I checked their pulses but they were both dead. Cold. Oh, god…”