Kyra’s hand shook a little as she set down her tea. Her own private message to Toby Dog’s invitation to play had gone unanswered so far. Did she really believe he was some kind of serial killer recruiter?
“Maybe you should confront Fiona about it tonight. Clue her in on the dangers of communicating with strangers online and make her delete the account.”
“That’ll endear me to her.”
“You don’t want to be her dear. You want to be her father. I can tell you, there were times I hated Quinn and Charlotte, or I thought I did.”
“I know you’re right. I’ll have my father-daughter talk with Fiona tonight, while you have yours with Quinn. And now—” he shoved aside the basket with the remainder of his sandwich inside and stacked the printouts in front of him “—I need to respond to a killer.”
For the next hour, they hunched over the table and crossed out words, rephrased sentences and debated psychology until they agreed on a finished statement for Copycat Three.
“There.” Kyra shoved the marked-up papers into her purse. “I’ll call Sean this afternoon and ask him to run it tomorrow.”
Jake pulled out his wallet and left a couple of bills on the table. “Are you also going to try to convince him to give up his source for your story?”
“I’ll give it a try, but I’m sure he won’t budge.” Kyra hitched her purse over her shoulder and made for the door.
When they got back to Jake’s car, he checked his work phone and then stuck it in the holder on the dash.
Eyeing the display, Kyra asked, “Nothing new, huh?”
“Nobody’s confessed, if that’s what you mean.” He turned on the engine, and his phone rang. He tapped to answer without looking at the display.
With his phone on speaker, the woman’s voice flooded the car. “Jake, as long as you’re seeing that...killer, I don’t want her anywhere near Fiona.”
Chapter Seven
Jake scrambled for the phone, dropping it on the console as he jabbed at the speaker button. When he pressed the phone against his ear, he hissed, “You’ve got some nerve, Tess.”
Kyra relegated the rest of the one-sided conversation to background noise as she crashed from the high of the response from her colleagues on the task force to a painful low. She’d always worried her background would taint her, render her not good enough in other people’s eyes. Tess had just offered confirmation of that.
Jake ended the call and slammed his phone into the cup holder. “I’m sorry, Kyra. She had no right to say those things.”
“But she did have a right.” Kyra pinned her hands between her bouncing knees. “Fiona is her daughter.”
“Like you would somehow infect Fiona.” He swore and swung out of the parking space in the strip mall. “I could’ve objected to her husband Brock all these years. Cheated on his own wife with Tess, breaking up two marriages and families.”
“Brock didn’t kill anyone, did he?”
“He wouldn’t have the guts to stand up to someone like you did.” Jake’s jaw set into hard lines, and Kyra loved him for his ardent defense of her—but it didn’t change anything.
“Tell her I’ll stay away.”
His head jerked to the side. “What? No. She doesn’t have a right to control my dating life.”
Kyra put her hand on Jake’s corded forearm, the tail of his tiger tattoo exposed by his rolled-up sleeves, almost pulsing. “Just for now. Just while Fiona’s with you. We can still see each other at work, and we’ll figure it out when Fiona leaves. Maybe Tess will have calmed down by then.”
“I have no idea how she found out. She doesn’t even practice criminal law, so I don’t think she’d be trolling the internet for blogs like LA Confidential.”
“Fiona told her.”
Shifting in his seat, Jake flipped up the AC. “Why would she do that?”
Kyra swallowed. She hadn’t meant to blurt out those words. “Maybe the news about me scared her.”
She doubted much of anything scared Fiona, but Kyra shouldn’t have shown her hand that first night. She should’ve pretended that Fiona was pulling the wool over her eyes as much as she was over her father’s.
Jake said, “I’ll talk with her.”
“Not about me.” She squeezed Jake’s solid thigh. “Don’t try to talk her out of anything. She’ll only dig in.”
Jake grunted. “You’re the therapist.”
When they got back to the station, they went their separate ways and Kyra contacted Sean Hughes to talk to him about Jake’s response to Copycat Three.
Sean’s excitement for the story squelched any residual awkwardness over the blog he’d posted about her. After she emailed Sean the copy of Jake’s communication, Kyra sat back in her seat and lowered her voice, cupping the phone against her face.
“I suppose you’re not going to tell me where you learned about my past, are you?”
“Sources and all that, Kyra. I can’t. I’d lose all credibility. Not even Megan, your friend, would reveal that to you.”
“I know.” She tapped a pen on the edge of her laptop. “Just be careful.”
“Careful?”
“I’ve had some strange communications with someone who knows all about me. This same person seems to be connected to the current copycat slayings. If he’s the same person who clued you in to my history, I’m telling you he’s unstable. He may have even been responsible for the death of a homeless woman he used to reach me. When he was done with her, she died in a hit-and-run accident.”
Sean caught his breath over the phone. “You have proof of this?”
“I do not. I have only my suspicions, but he’s not someone you want too close to you.”
“Probably not someone I want to cross, either.”
She pounced on his words. “So, you’re saying it’s the same person?”
Sean clicked his tongue. “I’m not saying anything like that. Truth be told, my source is anonymous, but I was able to back up everything he...or she told me. That’s all I’m saying.”
“If you feel he or she has pertinent information about these current crimes, that’s a different matter. Lives are in peril. You have a duty to come clean—just like if one of my clients threatened to do harm. I could step away from patient confidentiality and report that.”
“I understand my duty, Kyra. It’s nothing like that.” He coughed. “How have the revelations gone for you today? I hope you’ve seen the comments on the blog. Most people are applauding you for taking out a dirtbag and lauding you for helping families of other murder victims. You’re coming through this smelling like a rose.”
“It’s been fine. No hard feelings.” Except it probably ruined any chance of a relationship with the man she loved.
“Good to hear it. I’m not completely heartless.”
“Just run the response tomorrow and work with the police for a change.”
“I’m always willing to work with the police...as long as they stay in their lane.”
Kyra glanced up at Clive, standing at her desk and raising his eyebrows to his bald pate.
Smiling, she held up one finger to him. “Gotta go, Sean. This time I’m looking forward to the blog tomorrow.”
Once she’d hung up, Clive said, “Hope I didn’t interrupt you. Was that the LA Confidential blogger?”
“It was. I heard you didn’t find any prints on the note.”
“No luck this time.” Clive shuffled his feet. “I wasn’t here when you came in this morning, so I just wanted to add my support to all the rest you’ve been getting from the team.”
“Thanks, Clive. That means a lot.”
The warm glow in her belly stayed with her the rest of the afternoon, but all the support in the world wouldn’t compensate for losing Jake. His daughter had to come first.
Before she wrapped up, she made the call
she’d been dreading.
Quinn answered on the first ring. “Took you a while to get back to me. I would’ve been worried, but I knew you’d be at the station and have Jake to look after you.”
“I can look after myself, Quinn.” She might have to if Jake’s ex forced him out of her life. “But I’m fine. Everyone at the station has been great.”
“I didn’t doubt that, but...do you have plans tonight?”
“I think I do now.”
“Rose sent over some stew, and I can’t hope to eat it all myself. You can come over anytime.”
“I have a group after I leave the station, but when that’s over I’m all yours.”
Kyra didn’t have a chance to talk to Jake the rest of the day, and he’d be spending his evening with his daughter. Would Fiona admit to her father that she’d been the one who’d given her mom a heads-up about Kyra’s lurid past? Kyra thought Fiona might welcome her relationship with her father to get him off her case while she stayed with him. She’d underestimated the girl.
Kyra finished her work at the station, conducted her group session at the office and headed home to change before visiting Quinn. He’d tried to protect her for so long, but a shifting world of quick internet searches, hacking and social media had made that impossible—even for him.
She put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. On her way out the door, she grabbed a hoodie. When she reached Quinn’s house in Venice, the sun had already dipped halfway into the ocean and a damp marine layer had started seeping into the canals, the moist droplets it brought clinging to her eyelashes and the loose strands of her hair.
She possessed a key, but she knocked on Quinn’s door out of courtesy. As it got harder and harder for him to move around, she hated calling him to the front door. “It’s me, Quinn.”
“C’mon in.”
She used her key and poked her head inside the house. “Smells good. I didn’t bring a thing with me. I was in a rush.”
“I already told you—” he waved a spoon in the air from the kitchen “—Rose provided everything the other day. She even dropped off homemade bread.”
“Rose is working hard to impress you, Quinn. I hope you invited her to share the stew with you when she brought it over.”
“Of course, I did. What do you take me for? You’re getting the leftovers, but if Rose’s trying to replace Charlotte, it’s just not gonna happen.” He dropped the spoon and held his arms wide. “Now, get over here.”
She let her bag slip to the floor and practically skipped across the living room to the kitchen. Wrapping her arms around Quinn’s waist, she rested her head against his shoulder, and he stroked her hair as he used to do when she was a kid running away from her latest disaster of a foster home.
After the support and acceptance of her colleagues at the station and the warm emails from her clients, she hadn’t realized how much she needed this comfort from Quinn. He was the only one who could truly understand.
More than ten years of a carefully crafted identity shattered by a blog post.
Quinn wasn’t as sturdy as he used to be, though, and he’d staggered back a bit under the enthusiasm of her greeting. She pulled away from him and kissed his weathered cheek. “Thanks for getting it.”
“I know the revelations didn’t hurt you professionally, Mimi—may have even helped—but I don’t like it.” He turned away from her and grabbed two bowls.
“I know you don’t, Quinn.” She patted his back. “But even if The Player is still alive and paying attention to all this, he has no reason to come for me. He got away with murder, several murders. He’s not going to risk anything now.”
“You’d better believe if he’s alive, he’s paying attention.” He picked up the spoon from the sink and shook it under her nose, sending droplets of gravy flying onto his white cabinets. “Are you kidding? He’s probably following these copycats with breathless excitement.”
She hated it when Quinn talked about The Player as if he were a part of their lives. He was imprisoned or dead. He meant nothing to her today.
“Be careful with that thing.” Reaching around Quinn, she picked up a dish sponge from the sink and ran it under the faucet. Then she dabbed at the spots on his cabinets. “The Player might be salivating over all the death in his name, but he has nothing to do with me.”
“I know. Don’t pay any attention to the old man rambling in the corner about his one failure.” Quinn took two steps around her with the bowls in his hands and set them down next to the stove, where a pot simmered and emitted mouthwatering aromas from its bubbling depths.
“Let me fill those. Take the bread and have a seat.” She took the ladle from his hand and dipped it into the stew. When she’d filled the bowls, she brought them to the table, where they joined slices of crusty bread. “It almost feels like fall around here.”
Holding up a can of beer, Quinn said, “I don’t have any wine for you.”
“That’s okay. You’d think I’d be dying for a few drinks after getting outed by Sean Hughes, but everything went surprisingly well.” She spread butter on a piece of warm bread, and it soaked in immediately.
“If it hadn’t gone well for you at the station, they would’ve had me to answer to—Castillo knows that.”
“Captain Castillo?” She bit into the bread.
Quinn reddened to the roots of his silver hair and shoved a spoonful of stew into his mouth.
Kyra brushed the crumbs from her fingers onto the bread plate. “Has Castillo known my identity all this time?”
Quinn swallowed and patted his lips with a napkin, covering the lower half of his face. “He’s the only one. I didn’t tell him. He just...knew.”
“Makes sense.” She shrugged. “He was around then. He worked on the case, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
“Is that why...?” She stirred the chunky contents of her bowl. “Never mind. There was one roadblock to my happiness today.”
“Not Jake, he already knew. Why would he be upset?”
“His ex-wife.”
Quinn clutched the handle of his spoon with a curled fist. “What did she have to say about it, and how’d she find out? She doesn’t even live here, does she?”
“She lives up north, Monterey.”
Quinn’s spoon clinked against the bowl as he dropped it. “It was his daughter, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure she told her mother all about the woman her dad is dating.” Kyra twisted her lips and took a sip of water.
“Don’t worry about it.” Quinn reached over and patted her hand. “As a therapist, you know it’s not unusual for kids to sabotage their parents’ dating lives. You never had to resort to that because Charlotte and I presented a united front at all times—even if we weren’t all that united behind the scenes, sometimes, but as you never lived with us, you never saw any of that.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, but the ex took it to heart and called Jake to read him the riot act about me.” She left off the part where Tess had referred to her as a killer. Quinn didn’t need to hear that.
“You and Jake can cool it while his daughter’s here. You were going to do that anyway, right? Then the ex will come around, and the daughter will come around, and the two of you can get married and start a family of your own.”
Kyra choked on the bread in her mouth and had to wash it down with water. “Is that what you have planned for me?”
Quinn’s faded blue eyes softened. “Why not? I like Jake. I trust Jake. He can take care of you when I’m gone.”
That was the second time Quinn had mentioned Jake taking care of her.
She sealed her lips. Quinn wouldn’t want to be reminded that she took care of him a lot more than he took care of her these days. “You’re not going anywhere, and I can take care of myself. Isn’t that why you taught me to use a gun?”
“
Don’t get your hackles up. I know you can handle yourself, but there’s nothing wrong with having someone on your side while you do it. Charlotte and I took care of each other—until the end.”
“I know you did.” She sniffed and scooped up another spoonful of stew to blame it on the steam rising from the bowl. She and Quinn hadn’t gotten so sentimental since Charlotte’s passing a few years back.
“How’d that blogger get your story? Aren’t the Department of Children and Family Services records confidential anymore?” Quinn ripped apart a piece of bread as if it were Sean Hughes’s body.
“You know they are. It’s different today, Quinn. People get access to records in all kinds of ways—some of them illegal.”
He waved the bread at her and the crumbs showered the tablecloth. “Even I know about that LA Confidential blog. He’s anti law enforcement.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” She shoved the remaining contents of her bowl around, delaying dropping the next shoe for Quinn. “He’s interested in crime. He’s interested in law enforcement. He calls out injustices.”
“There’s no injustice in an officer like Jansen working undercover. He was with a hard-core biker gang who could’ve killed him.”
“To give Sean credit, he didn’t reveal Jansen’s identity until his assignment ended.”
“Don’t like it.”
“Then you’re really not going to like this. The LAPD has decided to use Sean’s blog as a channel of communication between Jake and Copycat Three.”
Quinn snorted beer out of his nose and made a grab for his napkin. “Is that what they’re calling him?”
“It’s going to make him angry.”
“Must’ve been your idea.”
“It was.”
He dragged the napkin across his nose and dropped it in his lap. “I can understand why you’d want to use the blog, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Still, I’m glad Jake has a vehicle to reach out to the killer. Copycat Three has an ego, and it’ll trip him up.”
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