The Dying Breath: A Forensic Mystery

the colors that spun in a kaleidoscope of blues and greens, browns and every shade of white, this world she was not ready to leave. “I don’t need this— thing . Cut me free and I’ll show you. Kyle, I think you were right about us all along.” Her breath was coming in gasps as she said, “You said you loved me.”
    He snorted. “But you don’t love me. I already told you, I’m smarter than you are, even with that famous forensic brain of yours. You can’t play with my mind, Cammie. I can see all of your moves.”
    The mountain was coming on fast.
    “Kyle— we belong together . Why don’t you—try to see if your life is worth living! Why die before you’re sure?” The strangled words sounded so false she didn’t dare to believe he would buy any of it. But something behind his eyes seemed to flicker. A pause. A tiny consideration.
    “Kyle!”
    “Stop saying my name. You’re saying my name so I’ll see you as a person. I know the tricks.”
    “I’m not trying to trick you.” She was frantic now—ready to promise him anything if he would just put his foot on the brake. “I mean it. I swear !”
    Thrusting out his jaw, he stared straight ahead. “So you think you have . . . feelings . . . for me.” There was an almost imperceptible change in his tone. Some of the arrogance has gone, replaced by something akin to sadness.
    The chink hold was all she needed. “I know I do.”
    “You said you cared for me. On the phone. You said you’d be there if I gave myself up, but it wasn’t true.”
    “That’s because they made me say that. I wanted to go but they wouldn’t let me.”
    “The police . . .”
    “They told me what I had to do. They wrote down the words and they were standing right there. What would you have done?”
    “I wouldn’t have lied to you. You and me—I let you live, and then you turned against me.”
    Cameryn almost laughed at the absurdity of his words. He wouldn’t lie to her, but he would kill her in a murder-suicide, send them sailing over the side of the mountain to certain and irrevocable death. But she couldn’t let her mind even register anything more than the toehold she’d gained. With a wavering breath she said, “Let me prove it to you. There’s a pull-off coming up. Take it, Kyle. Turn in and stop the car.”
    “I don’t think I can do that.”
    They were racing toward the mountain. The tall peak cast its shadow onto the meadow, turning the snow a shimmering blue in the half-light and then, too fast, the shadow swallowed them whole. And then they were there. The mountain loomed above them and the switchback road with its sheer, unprotected drop began. To her left, an ever-deepening chasm. To her right, an unyielding wall of granite.
    “It’s up ahead. Pull over! Please, please, just give me one minute! Please , Kyle!”
    “Why?”
    “Let me prove it to you!”
    The vertical stone loomed above her so expansively she could no longer see the sky. If her hand had been free she could have reached out and touched it. Years ago miles of rock had been jackhammered away to create the thinnest precipice, a thread of asphalt more dangerous than any other highway in Colorado.
    Kyle’s voice was suddenly low. “How can I believe you?”
    This was it. Closing her eyes, she said, “Because you were right all along. You knew me better than I knew myself. And we don’t have to die. You are my anam cara .”
    “I am?”
    “Yes.”
    “You wouldn’t lie to me?”
    “No.”
    And then, miraculously, the car began to slow. She opened her eyes to watch as he removed his foot from the gas pedal. Centrifugal force propelled them, the Jeep’s tires squealing as he made one hairpin turn, but his foot, hesitant at first, moved to the left to gently press upon the brake. The smallest of hesitations that could mean her life.
    Not daring to speak, she waited, frozen, aware anything else she said now might be wrong. She knew this road. Three turns ahead lay the pullout, her sliver of hope.
    Ten seconds later there it was—the crescent carved into the mountain, big enough for a single vehicle. She didn’t blink. She did not dare to blink, to break the spell of the slowing car.
    And then, as if even he didn’t know what his body was doing, Kyle pulled the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes, skidding into the snow until they stopped in a movement so sudden Cameryn felt her neck lash forward and then back. In the silence she could hear them both panting as Kyle