The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Read Online Free PDF Page B

me that several times
already.”
    “I’m serious,” he added.
    “I know you are.”
    “For one thing, it’s only been a coupl’a
weeks.”
    “I know.” I nodded assent as I spoke.
    The pair of weeks he was referring to
amounted to the period of time it had been since I had played a
fairly significant role in the capture of a serial rapist. In and
of itself a good thing, except that due to various factors in the
investigation—both seen and unseen—I hadn’t been coming across as
particularly stable lately. Of course, considering my gift—or
curse, depending upon how you viewed it—it was the unseen that
really caused the problems.
    “And then there’s…” he began, but seemed to
purposely allow his voice to die away on the wind. I noticed then
that he was staring past me and at Felicity.
    What he left unsaid was the fact that the
rapist had come after her, actually managing to effect a kidnapping
if for only a few short hours. Even though we’d stopped him before
he could go any further, in her case, it made it only slightly less
traumatic. In light of those events, I could certainly understand
his concern.
    I looked over at my wife and saw that she was
still staring upward, oblivious to our exchange. “I know, Ben.
Believe me, I know.”
    “You know, Rowan, we set you two up in that
apartment for a reason.”
    The point he was trying to make was simple:
Porter was going to be after me, no two ways about it, and my
friend didn’t want me out in the open.
    Of course, if your aim is to kill Witches,
you might as well go after the real thing, and I definitely made no
bones about being just that. Considering everything that had gone
on in my life over the past couple of years, I was just about as
far “out of the broom closet,” so to speak, as one could be.
Therefore, I was not very hard to accuse. I had already admitted it
in public—which, by the way, Porter had been sure to remind me of
as he pronounced my condemnation and attempted to throw me over the
side of a bridge with a noose around my neck.
    Thankfully, much of that night had now become
a blur. I still had nightmares about it and probably always would,
but they were finally starting to fade into two-dimensional
representatives of what they had once been. Dulled and flattened,
they were much easier to take than the full-blown, Technicolor
reenactments. Still, I was looking forward to a future when they
would be visited upon me with less frequency.
    I knew that day wouldn’t come as long as
Porter was free.
    Of the things I recalled clearly from that
night, I knew that in my bid to escape I had shot him. I definitely
remembered pulling the trigger, and there was even a blood spatter
at the scene that provided physical evidence that I’d hit him.
Nevertheless, when the police arrived, there was no body to be
found.
    No lifeless remains.
    No hard and fast proof of his demise.
    I had blacked out at almost the same instant
the handgun had discharged, so I was no help in the eyewitness
department. At the time, Ben had been convinced that Porter had
fallen from the bridge to a certain death in the icy river below.
The other members of the Major Case Squad on the scene
concurred.
    For them, it was all over but the
paperwork—one of my friend’s favorite clichés and one that I’d
heard him quip several times before.
    But for me… Well, I was the proverbial odd
man out. I held the one dissenting opinion in their clutch of
optimism. Something in the back of my head told me that Porter was
still alive, that the wound I’d inflicted was not so grievous as to
take his life, and that he had disappeared into the fog—not the
water. That inkling had eventually become an issue of extreme
contention between Ben and me—to the point where I finally just
kept my nagging intuition to myself.
    Well, for the most part anyway.
    Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I
was the one with the correct answer to the sixty-four thousand
dollar question: Eldon