Stop Me (Last Stand #2)(65)
Author: Brenda Novak

Again, Romain didn’t answer. He stared at the press as if he wasn’t even seeing them. Then his gaze cut to Moreau, smiling and talking in front of some other cameras a few feet away. Because of the pandemonium, Jasmine could only catch bits and pieces of what he was saying, but she got the gist. “Justice would…in the end.”

A shot suddenly rang out and Moreau dropped. Everything happened so fast, it was difficult to tell who had done what.

Backing up, Jasmine played the scene again, keeping her eyes on Romain’s hand. He came down the steps, the reporter approached, Huff grabbed him by the elbow and tried to pull him away. There was a brief sighting of a hand with a gun, the blast, and then Huff and several others swarmed Romain and pushed him to the ground.

Replaying it again, frame by frame, Jasmine watched the hand come up a fraction of an inch at a time until she stopped it where the gun was about to go off.

Was it Romain’s hand? Or Huff’s?

She couldn’t tell. It was a tiny detail in a very large picture. She needed to take the clip to a video specialist, have it magnified to see if there were any distinguishing characteristics on that hand.

“Where’d you get this?”

Jasmine had been so absorbed in what she was doing she’d forgotten to worry about Romain. Still holding the remote, she turned to see him standing in the doorway between the kitchen and living room.

“Susan gave it to me.”

A muscle flexed in his cheek as he stared at the screen. “Don’t go digging around in my past,” he said. “What happened on those courthouse steps has nothing to do with your sister. Stick to what might help you find her.”

She wanted to find the real Romain as much as she wanted to find Kimberly.

She couldn’t abandon this now. It mattered. She didn’t want to believe he could lose control to such a degree, regardless of circumstances. “Did you do it?” she asked.

“Leave it alone.”

She put the remote aside and stood up. “Tell me.”

“Of course I did it!” he snapped. “Who else would care that much?”

“Huff had access to that weapon, too.”

Romain’s hands were dripping. Grabbing a towel from the counter, he dried them. “I did it,” he said and stomped out.

Jasmine replayed the segment once more. She told herself what he might or might not have done was none of her business. She was trying not to get too involved with him. But she couldn’t keep herself from following him out.

He sat on a stool in a small screened-in porch attached to the back of the house, taking oysters out of one bucket and tossing them into two others.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He tapped the shell of the oyster he’d just picked up and threw it into the bucket to his right.

“Are we not speaking?”

With a glance in her direction, he scowled. “I’m separating the live ones from the dead ones.”

“Knocking on the shell tells you that?”

“If they’re alive, they close up. The dead ones can’t be eaten.”

She saw another stool near the periphery of the small lean-to and pulled it closer. The coat he’d lent her for the motorcycle ride was in the house, but she didn’t want to go back for it now. “What if the shell’s closed to begin with?” she asked, folding her arms against the cold.

“If it’s dead, it’ll be a clacker—it’ll make a different sound.”

They sat without further conversation, with only his tapping and the clunk of each oyster hitting its respective bucket to break the silence. Jasmine thought Romain might ignore her indefinitely, but after several minutes, he surprised her. “I don’t remember actually pulling the trigger, okay?”

She watched several more shells move through his capable hands. “Will you tell me what you do remember?”

Head down, he kept working. “I remember wanting to do it. I remember seeing Huff’s gun and realizing how easy it’d be. Then people started screaming and several men, including Huff, forced me to the ground.”

“Have you seen that tape?”

He looked up at her. “Of course I have. Susan insisted I watch it a few hundred times.”

“She was there. She saw it all.”

“She was there, but I can’t imagine she saw anything very clearly. There was so much noise and confusion, so many people. I can’t even describe it to you, not the way it really was.” He shook his head, the expression in his eyes troubled. “It was unreal.”

“If you don’t remember pulling the trigger, why did you plead guilty?”

Another shell hit the bucket. “Because I don’t remember not pulling the trigger. That day was mostly a painful blur. And I wanted to wipe that self-satisfied smile off Moreau’s face. Pam was gone so I didn’t have that to stop me. Adele was gone, too—because of him. I had nothing left to lose.”

“Have you taken that DVD to anyone who might be able to magnify it?”

Finished with the oysters in the original bucket, he opened the back door to dump out the remaining water. “No. I didn’t see any reason to put Huff at risk. Then or now. He had a family, I didn’t. And whether or not I was the one who shot Moreau is merely a technicality. I wanted him dead.”

“Wanting to do something and actually doing it aren’t the same thing, Romain,” she said.

He loomed over her and his voice fell. “When the desire is that great, it’s close enough.”

Jasmine stood. “No, it’s not.”

“He’s gone and the world is better off because of it,” he said. “It’s over.”

Jasmine wished he didn’t appeal to her the way he did, but it was all she could do not to touch his cheek, not to crave his kiss. Part of her didn’t care what he’d done, what he might do, whether or not she’d get hurt—and that made it a frightening compulsion. “But if Moreau was framed, Huff might’ve killed the wrong man…or caused you to do it. He might’ve been responsible for the real culprit going free.” She clutched his arm. “Let’s find out who did what, okay? Let me take this to a specialist and see if he can determine who fired that gun.”

His eyes dropped briefly to her hand. “Why?” he demanded. “So we learn it was Huff. That’s not going to tell us who really killed Adele. It’s not a good use of time or money.”

She felt the warmth of his skin through his long-sleeved T-shirt and it seemed to burn her cold fingers—and start fires in other places, too. But she refused to succumb to that desire. “Are you sure it’s time and money you’re worried about?”