by Jami Alden
Kathy’s eyes widened with alarm. “Is that true? You think he’s gonna come after her?”
Detective Petersen shook her head. “We have no reason to believe that.”
Megan was glad—a little shocked but glad—that Kathy seemed to have dropped her usual gruff attitude for a more maternal one toward Devany. At the same time, she suddenly felt a little lost. She wasn’t needed here anymore.
She looked up, blinking, and found Cole staring at her. She hardened her expression, not wanting to give him any more reason to feel sorry for her. “I should go,” she said, telling herself she was happy to get as far away from Cole as possible. The man was a master at messing with her already-fragile equilibrium.
She reached for her coat, then froze as long fingers closed around her upper arm. Even through the thick cotton of her sleeve, she could feel the heat of that touch. Racing through her veins, sparking reactions in every nerve cell, generating sensations she had no business feeling on a night like this.
With a man like him.
“Unless there’s something else you need from me, Detective,” she said, tilting her chin up to glare at him.
Big mistake. Because the frown tightening his mouth and the sincere concern in his dark, heavy-lidded eyes nearly sent her to her knees. The way he said, “I’m sorry to hear about your brother, Megan,” in that low, raspy voice that made her want to fling herself into his arms and cry on his big, brawny shoulder. Then drag him back to her apartment, beg him to strip her naked, pin her to the bed, and make her forget for a week, a month, a year, the black hole of despair her life had become.
Instead she seized on that despair, used it to fuel her anger at Cole. That he had the balls to apologize, to actually try to comfort her in all of this, was unbelievable. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are.” She jerked her arm from his hold, then grabbed her shell and shrugged it on.
Tears clogged her throat and she knew that in about thirty seconds she was going to break down and cry. The last thing she wanted was for Cole to see her so weak.
Again.
She managed a good-bye and a promise to call Dev in the morning and hurled herself out the door.
Cole followed her to her car. With her blurry eyes and shaking hands, she couldn’t get the door open before he reached her.
His hand closed over her shoulder and he spun her to face him. “Megan, dammit, I am sorry.”
“Spare me. You put Sean in jail yourself. You believe he’s guilty. You are not sorry that he’s going to die.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through. I never wanted to see you hurt.”
She let out a watery laugh. “And yet you didn’t do anything to keep it from happening.” She took off her glasses and scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You didn’t even bother to return my calls, because you were afraid it would make you look bad to be in contact with me—” She snapped her lips closed. Now was so not the time to let on how badly his abandonment of her after Sean’s arrest had crushed her. She spoke again, her tone calmer. “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. I don’t need you to believe Sean.” She put her glasses back on. “But I do want to know something about what happened here tonight.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked slightly back on his heels. In the faint glow of the streetlight, she saw one thick brow arch. “I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Do you think this is the same guy who killed the woman outside of Renton last month?”
“We won’t know anything until we get the medical examiner’s report. And even then you know I can’t give out those kinds of details yet.”
“Right. Always by the book. No matter what.” She shook her head and turned to unlock her car, wondering why she’d bothered to ask.
Cole watched Megan’s taillights disappear, still reeling from the gut punch that had hit him the moment he’d recognized her. her clt poleaxed, same as the first time he’d laid eyes on her nearly three years ago when she’d crashed—literally—into his life by backing her little Honda into his unmarked squad car in a parking lot near the courthouse.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m running late for family court. I’m an advocate and one of my kids is about to be sent back to his aunt’s house, which is a totally bad idea since I know for a fact that her boyfriend is running a meth lab in a trailer on the property. I totally didn’t see you backing out.”
Normally he wouldn’t have responded with anything but irritation at her breathless excuses. But something about her dark, wind-whipped, wavy hair; glossy, pink mouth; and sparking green eyes washed his irritation away in a matter of seconds. Add a set of tight, trim curves and world-class legs, showcased by her knee-length skirt, and he was ready to let her take out his other taillight if it meant he got to look at her a little longer.
But he wasn’t about to let her off scot-free. “You might have seen me if you weren’t peeling around the corner like Jeff Gordon,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Since you were backing out, technically I had the right of way, Cochise.”
Just like that, he’d been toast. So when she gave him her phone number, supposedly to exchange insurance information, he knew he was going to use it to ask her to dinner. And even when he was trying to convince himself that she was too young, too wide-eyed and idealistic for a cynical bastard like himself, every male instinct was firing on all cylinders, demanding he grab hold and never let go.
Instincts that roared to life again, things he had no business feeling given their history and the grisly circumstances that had brought her crashing back into his life tonight.
He and Petersen had briefly stopped at the crime scene to take a look before going to the witness’s trailer. They both wanted to get the girl’s statement while everything was still fresh and raw in her mind. The longer she had to think about it, the more the memories would fuzz as her brain started to fill in missing pieces until she forgot things that were there and started believing things that weren’t.
The patrolmen had been short on details—like the witness’s name—when they called it in. It had never occurred to him that the “woman identifying herself as the girl’s advocate” would be Megan.
He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and deeply inhaled the cold night air, trying to calm the blood rushing through his veins. Adrenaline made him jumpy. Always did when he was called to a scene. Seeing Megan had kicked it into overdrive, along with a whole host of other things he was unprepared to deal with right now. They had a dead woman, tortured, raped, and killed. This was no time to deal with the need that twisted him in knots every time he so much as thought of Megan.
Forget actually getting close enough to touch her soft skin, smell her flowery musk scent. One look at her—pink lips pressed tight, stubborn chin pointed in the air as she’d mouthed off to Detective Petersen—and he was practically shaking with the need to pull her into his arms. Because under all that bravado, he knew there was an ocean of pain, thtening to consume her. She’d fought its pull for the last three years.
And now it had gotten even worse.
“Good news, Cole. Flynn’s going to get it.”
His former partner had called Cole. Under normal circumstances, Cole might have shared his sense of triumph, that rare satisfaction he got when he really nailed the bad guys. No plea bargains, no deals cut, no endless taxpayer dollars spent keeping a worthless turd alive on death row while he filed appeal after appeal.
But he couldn’t shake thoughts of Megan and what this must be doing to her. He’d brushed it aside, told himself her grief was collateral damage, nothing he could help or prevent.
Seeing her tonight had brought it back into razor-sharp focus.
Gravel crunched behind him. “Is her involvement going to be a problem for you?” As usual, his partner cut straight to the quick. Cole turned to face Petersen. The streetlights bounced off her sculpted features and light blond hair.
“Of course not,” Cole replie
d. He could feel her studying him, and he shoved all thoughts of Megan aside and schooled his face to reveal nothing. Petersen had worked vice for years before moving to homicide, and she could read almost anyone like a book. Her skill was invaluable, but he didn’t want her using it on him.
He breathed a silent sigh of relief when Petersen’s phone rang.
“Crap, it’s Karen. I need to take this.”
Saved by the lesbian. Petersen had married her partner, Karen, a little over a year ago, and now they were expecting their first child. Like any cop’s wife, Karen got nervous every time Petersen walked out the door. As they walked back to the abandoned trailer, Cole listened to Petersen’s side of the conversation, the way she tried to keep the frustration out of her voice as she assured her wife she’d be home as soon as humanly possible.
Cole didn’t envy his partner. The few relationships he’d sustained over the course of his career had been full of similar complaints about how much he worked and angry phone calls demanding he come home.
Unlike Petersen, who believed she could have some kind of work/life balance in this job, Cole had acknowledged early on that he was more committed to his job than he ever could be to a woman, and that being the case, it was probably best to keep himself unattached. It sure as hell made long nights like this easier to endure. It was no big deal to work till 4:00 a.m. when you had nothing but an empty house to go home to.
The crime scene buzzed with activity. In the time he’d been questioning Devany, the coroner’s truck had arrived, joining the ambulance and paramedics who’d been dispatched before it was clear their presence was unnecessary. Cole donned latex gloves and slipped disposable booties over his shoes and entered the trailer. A flash of light came from down the hall. The crime scene technician was in there taking pictures.
He and Petersen entered the bedroom and were greeted by the coroner, Dr. Mark Pineta. “Based on the core temperature and the tackiness of the blood, I’d say she was killed sometime after ten p.m.,” Pineta said, not wasting any time on small talk.
“Devany didn’t miss it by much,” he murmured.
Pineta nodded curtly. He was a short man in his early fifties, his Filipino heritage evident in his complexion and dark, almond-shaped eyes. Pineta had been the King County coroner for over fifteen years. As such, he’d seen just about every type of dead body imaginable, and now he delivered the preliminary facts of the woman’s death with the same level of emotion he would have given to reading a laundry list.
“The victim died of exsanguination, caused by the cutting of her jugular and carotid.”
Another flash popped, illuminating the savage slice the killer had made along the right side of the girl’s spine. “That wound was made antemortem, as were the cigarette burns on her breasts and stomach. The ones on the buttocks, however,” he said, “were delivered postmortem. I’m confident the autopsy will reveal other pertinent details,” he said meaningfully.
Cole nodded. He felt only a mild sense of revulsion. His first dead body had made him puke and haunted him for days. The years had toughened him, and now he was able to take the facts, the sights, even the smells of death, and file them away. Rather than dwelling on the horror, he’d learned to use them as tools to help solve the case. To an outsider, he knew he looked callous, jaded. Robocop, Megan had once teased him. But he knew the hardening was part of becoming a better cop.
Still, it was never easy to see a vic close up. Particularly one who had been so savagely brutalized.
“And this wasn’t the first time someone cut her,” Pineta continued, indicating a set of marks across the woman’s right shoulder blade. There was a pattern of raised, pale scars—several years old by his guess—and on closer look, Cole could see that it was a crescent moon surrounded by four tiny stars.
“Intentional scarification,” Cole said, making a note. While tattoos were now as common as pierced ears, the average tattoo parlor didn’t offer the more extreme alternative. If they could pin down the artist who did this, maybe that would lead to something.
Cole did a quick sketch of the mark in his notebook and continued his examination of the victim. She hadn’t been moved from the bed. She was on her knees, her legs spread at an awkward angle. Her chest rested on the mattress, her bound hands trapped beneath her. Her face was turned to the side. A gag was tied around the lower half of her face, and Cole could see the tufts of material sticking out of her mouth. The killer had stuffed another bandana in her mouth to muffle her screams.
Blood pooled under her head and had streamed onto the floor below, where it was drying in a sticky black puddle.
Cole leaned in closer to look at her face. Above the gag, her features were delicate, her nose small, her cheekbones high. Her eyes were dark and deep set, lending her features an exotic cast.
“She was beautiful,” Petersen said.
“And young,” Cole added.
“I’d guess her around twenty, twenty-one.” Pineta nodded.
Barely more than a kid.
Cole straightened and caught Petersen’s eye. She quirked a brow and sighed. “So do we call the feds?”
“Let’s wait until the autopsy is complete,” Cole said, though he knew in his gut he was only delaying the inevitable.
But she was just like the others. Four in less than a year. With nothing in common other than that they were beautiful and in their early twenties. Two were still unidentified.
No one seemed to know anything about them—who they were, where they’d come from. Like they didn’t exist until Fate dropped them into the hands of the sick fuck who tortured them, raped them, and finally cut their throats so they bled out facedown on the bed.
Tension pulled at his shoulders and Cole sighed. They had their work cut out for them. After the third victim, the feds had gotten involved, as it was determined they had a serial killer on their hands. This was the first victim to turn up in his jurisdiction, but Cole had followed their investigation closely and knew full well there had been little progress made.
He took another look at the beautiful, nameless girl lying dead and shook his head, unable to deny the truth. The Seattle Slasher had found another victim.
Megan Flynn.
All these years he’d forced himself to keep his distance, unsure of his ability to control himself if he got too close.
Tonight she’d been so close, like a gift dropped from the sky.
His hands shifted on the steering wheel of the car he’d boosted from a strip mall parking lot located two streets down from the trailer park. Blood raced through his veins, euphoria from the kill sending him higher than any drug. But tonight he was even more exhilarated.
Because of her.
He almost hadn’t lingered at the scene, knowing it was risky, thanks to the girl who had stumbled into the trailer. He still had been naked and in the process of packing up, about to crack the fucking dog’s neck when the girl with dark, purple-streaked hair had burst in.
He’d slipped into the closet and watched, waited. A smile stretched across his face and he had to stifle a laugh as he remembered her scream of terror, the way she scrambled out with the stupid dog in her arms.
He was relieved when she ran screaming, eliminating the complication of having to kill her too. And avoiding complications had helped him maintain a perfect record after all this time. He’d taken on a dozen cleanup jobs over the years, and still the cops had no fucking clue about him. Even with his particular methods and practices.
But goddamn, he wished he’d had the camera turned on the girl when she realized the image on the television was real. The expression on her face, the abject terror when she realized she was in the room with a blood-soaked body…
He’d known the smartest move was to leave, but he couldn’t resist the urge to slip into the dense woods surrounding the trailer park and take out his high-powered binoculars and wait for the cops to arrive.
He loved this part, the Keystone Kops routine that inevitably followed when one of hi
s victims was discovered. Rushing around like morons looking for clues they’d never find. Nine months and they still had no idea who they were looking for. The press had even given him a name—“the Seattle Slasher.” Stupid of them, since his kills extended far beyond the city limits.
And with many more than the five victims he’d left for them to find. Fucking idiots, thinking they could pigeonhole him, profile him. They had no clue what he was capable of. They had no clue how hugely they were being played. No one did.
He watched the scene play out, knowing exactly what would happen. Clueless cops would do a ham-handed assessment of the crime scene before calling in the equally clueless feds.
So predictable. And yet he never tired of loitering around, waiting for the victim to be found, watching the chaos that ensued.
But tonight, to his shock, before the first squad car had arrived on the scene, Megan had appeared in his field of view. Big green eyes, dark tumble of curls down her back. The subtle curves just hinted at by her loose clothes. So beautiful she made his heart stop. So close, he’d reached out a hand as though he might touch her.
It was a sign. It had to be. He always knew she was meant to be his, from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her. And recently with the news of Sean Flynn’s pending execution, he knew the time for them was getting close. Now it seemed Fate had stepped in to bring them together even sooner.
They’d tried to keep him away from her, tried to convince him that he couldn’t control his baser urges, that if he got too close to her, he’d lose control and hurt her. Perhaps even kill her. He would put them all at risk, and it would be impossible to protect him.
He’d played along, let them send him away, pretend he agreed with them even though they were blind to the truth—that he and Megan belonged together. That she and she alone had the power to change him, to save him.