by Karen Rose
“It won’t do any good,” Abe said and she looked up at him. “They called your cell phone while you were asleep. Said they’d be getting in touch with you every day until you had an answer. They don’t care how you get it, they just want to know who the killer is.”
Every day. She controlled the feeling of helpless panic and made her voice steady. “Can you trace the call?”
Abe shrugged. “I already made the request, but I can almost guarantee we’re talking about a stolen or disposable cell phone.”
“Can’t you pick Conti up?” Aidan asked. “Use any excuse. You know it’s him.”
Abe’s lips thinned. “It wouldn’t do any good, and he’d sue us for false arrest. He’s behind this, but he’s not doing this himself. Spinnelli’s already been warned by the brass not to pick him up until they have something that will stick.”
Kristen stood up. “Well then, let’s find out who’s doing it for him. My first guess would be the man who was with him the day he pushed Julia up against her car. His name is Drake Edwards. He’s Conti’s right-hand man. Rumored to be one sick bastard.” She looked down at Kyle. “Did you see any distinguishing marks on any of the men who did this?”
Kyle’s swollen lips twisted in a grimace. “Only the ones I put on ’em myself. I didn’t see any of their faces, but one of the guys should have a really bad bruise on his left cheekbone.”
“I’ll call it in,” Abe said.
Becca waved her hands. “Enough of this sitting around. Sean, you get plates down to set the table. Aidan, you can carve the roast. Annie, I need you to help me peel some more potatoes. I’ve got to stretch dinner for four more plus the children.”
Kristen took a step back. “Becca, I—”
Becca silenced her with another hand wave. “Hush, Kristen. You and Abe I planned for. It’s the rest of my brood that I wasn’t anticipating.”
Becca’s insistence was reflected in the faces of the other Reagans. They weren’t throwing her out. She felt the knots in her stomach slide free. She was still part of this amazing family. “Then let me peel some potatoes.” She glanced at Annie. “If you don’t mind.”
With an encouraging smile, Annie handed her a knife and they got to work.
Tuesday, February 24, 7:00 P.M.
The sun had gone down and still he sat, thinking, wondering, remembering in the darkness of his kitchen. The picture of Leah was to his left, the stack of bullets to his right, and in the center of the table, the fishbowl, still filled with names. So much evil in the world. He was only one man whose time was drawing to a close. Three cards sat in front of the fishbowl. He didn’t need to turn on the light to be able to see their names. Their names were permanently etched in his memory. A judge, a defense lawyer and a serial rapist. He closed his eyes, remembering the look on Leah’s face the last time he’d seen her alive. So very, very alone. Because of the judge, the lawyer, and the rapist. They all deserved to die.
And they would. But he’d have to be careful. Once he killed the judge, they’d start to narrow it down. Once he killed the defense attorney, they’d figure it out. The rapist himself would suspect and run away. And he’d be left without his vengeance.
That could not happen. So how to kill them all so that the others didn’t suspect they were next? But he wanted them to suspect, just a little. He wanted the lawyer to hear the judge was dead and be afraid. He wanted the rapist to feel hunted, to feel terror as had his Leah.
He wanted each man to know why he was being killed.
And he wanted each one to feel a great deal of pain.
He sat there in the dark, running through various scenarios, finally returning to his original plan. He would hunt down each one like the dogs they were, disable them, then bring them here. He would hunt them quickly, efficiently. But once captive, he would kill each one slowly, until they begged for mercy.
The mercy they received would be equal to the mercy they showed Leah.
In other words, there would be none.
Tuesday, February 24, 10:00 P.M.
Kristen’s eyes widened when they pulled into her driveway. The cruiser was conspicuously absent. “What happened to Truman?”
“They needed to pull him back onto patrol. Half a dozen guys called in with the flu and Central was scrambling to fill their shifts. I told them it was okay.”
There was silence for a moment from the passenger seat. Then quietly she said, “Because you said you’d stay with me.” They hadn’t discussed it until now. In his mind it had been a given, but he could practically see the wheels of indecision turning in her head and he understood. The other two nights he’d stayed had been special cases. Both times she’d been attacked. Last night, his own father had stayed, a respectable guard. But tonight was different. Just a man and a woman alone in her house. To say he hadn’t fanta-sized the possible outcomes would be a lie. One part of his brain was fantasizing at this very moment and he was grateful for the darkness that surrounded them. “I’ll sleep on your couch.”
She leaned back, turning only her head to look at him. “You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation. “Until you decide otherwise, yes.”
One side of her mouth lifted. “So it’s up to me?”
He didn’t smile. “Totally.”
“Will you at least kiss me good night?”
He did smile at that. “Just don’t ask me to tuck you in. My principles are only so strong.” Without giving her time to comment, he helped her down, then reached for the laptop bag she had in one hand and the Marshall Field’s shopping bag in the other. “What’s in the bag?”
“Magazines,” she said over her shoulder. “Annie and I were talking about redoing my kitchen while we were peeling potatoes. She loaned me the magazines so I could get some ideas. I’m thinking about tearing out a wall and doubling the size. Maybe doing a French Provincial style. You can take a look at the pictures and tell me—”
She broke it off with a startled exclamation and a second later he saw why. The side of her house by her kitchen door was covered in black spray paint. Blade graffiti, six feet tall. A long horizontal line trailed toward the back of her house, a stylized arrowhead at its end.
“I’ll get a light. Stay here.” He deposited the bags at her feet, got a heavy flashlight from the SUV, then carefully walked along the edge of her house, his weapon drawn, shining the light on the snow until he found what the gang had left behind. “Shit.”
“What?” she said from behind him and he jumped.
“Dammit, Kristen, I told you to stay by the door.” But it was too late. His admonition was interrupted by her sharp intake of breath.
“Oh, Abe, no.”
“Hold this and don’t move.” He handed her the light and pulled out his cell phone and hit Mia’s speed dial. “Come to Kristen’s,” he said. “We just found Aaron Jenkins.”
Chapter Eighteen
Wednesday, February 25, 8:00 A.M.
“Let’s get started,” Spinnelli called from his position by the whiteboard. The side conversations ceased. There was a subdued energy in the room, Kristen thought. They finally, finally had a lead to follow, but they also had a new body in the morgue. Aaron Jenkins’s throat had been slit, his body left to freeze in the shadows of her backyard. The gang members must have driven by her house and seeing no cruiser in front, seized their opportunity. The threat was clear. Anyone helping the vigilante was fair game for gang retribution. And Kristen was still at the top of their list.
The conference room table was filled. The core team was there plus Julia, Todd Murphy from Spinnelli’s department, and Miles Westphalen, their staff psychologist. “What do we have, people? Abe?”
“A name to go with our bullet,” Abe said. “Hank Worth. Problem is, he’s been dead for sixty years.”
Spinnelli’s marker squeaked as he wrote the name. “And?”
“Genny O’Reilly, his intended,” Mia said. “She up and married someone else two months after he s
hipped out. I may have seen too many old movies, but that sounds like she fell for the old I-may-not-come-back-from-the-war line and found herself eating for two. If that’s the case, their child would be about sixty.”
Spinnelli considered it. “Sixty seems a bit old for our humble servant.”
“Many sixty-year-olds are quite fit,” Westphalen said mildly.
Spinnelli smiled. “Point taken, Miles.”
“Well, whoever we’re dealing with,” Jack said, “has to have above-average strength. How much did the heaviest victim weigh, Julia?”
Julia pulled out her notes. “Ramey weighed 220. Ross King, 251. The others were all lower. But I think he used a cart or gurney or something with wheels.”
“Why?” Abe asked sharply.
“There were no signs of dragging the bodies. No scratches on their backs, no bruising at the ankles, wrists, or under the arms that would be consistent with grabbing and pulling with any force. There were marks from the rope he used to bind their wrists and ankles, but that looks very different from a grabbing bruise. If he used a gurney, he wouldn’t need that much strength. He’d just need to roll them.”
“But could a sixty-year-old even roll a man that big?” Jack asked.
Mia held up her hand. “First, let us check the records to see if Genny O’Reilly had a child at all before we get carried away on his possible age. Then we’ll check marriage and birth records on her children’s children. Hank and Genny’s grandchildren would be anywhere from twenty to forty years old and that’s just the right age.”
“If this lead proves true,” said Miles thoughtfully, “your killer would have had to know his biological father’s identity to get the bullet mold or at a minimum the Worth family’s maker’s mark. I’m wondering about the man Genny O’Reilly married. How would he react to having a child that wasn’t his? How would the child be treated? If there were other children born later, would the first child, the bastard child, be singled out? It could lead to feelings of resentment and anger.” Westphalen shrugged. “Or it could mean nothing.”
“Get Genny O’Reilly’s records and find out,” Spinnelli said. “What else do we have?”
Abe leaned forward. “The old man, Grayson James, said he and Hank Worth would go up to Worth’s father’s property and practice their shooting. Mia, do you remember the other day when you thought he might have a private target range?”
Mia’s eyes gleamed. “We can check property records for land owned by the Worths.”
Spinnelli’s marker squeaked as he wrote. “What else?”
“I’ve been working on identifying the chain he used to strangle Ramey,” Jack said. “We made a cast of the ligature marks and I found a few men’s chains that are similar in size.” He laid three chains on the table. “The one closest to the plaster cast is the middle one.”
“Dog tags,” Spinnelli said. “I’ve seen men wear their dog tags on a chain like this.”
Mia brought a chain from under her blouse. “Like this?” A set of military ID tags hung from the end of the chain. “My dad gave me his tags when I joined the force. Said his tags kept him alive in ’Nam and hoped they’d keep me alive in uniform.”
“We already thought he could have been military, being a sharpshooter,” Abe said, excitement in his voice. “It makes sense.”
Spinnelli paced from the whiteboard to the table and back again. “Good, good. Track him down and if you run into any problems with military records, let me know. I’ll get the governor involved.” He grimaced. “It’ll give him something to do so he’ll stop calling the mayor who’ll stop calling me. Anything else?” No one said anything and Spinnelli pointed to Detective Murphy, who’d been sitting quietly. “Murphy, update us on Muñoz’s gun.”
“We canvassed the pawnshops,” Murphy said. He was a serious man with a rumpled suit. Kristen knew him to be a good cop. Methodical. “We found the gun late last night.”
“Any useful prints?” Abe asked.
Murphy nodded. “Yeah, they were in the system. Street punk, goes by Boom-Boom. We’ve got out an APB. Hopefully we’ll find him and hopefully he saw something useful Monday night.”
Spinnelli capped his markers. “And I’ll get Aaron Jenkins’s juvie record unsealed. Now that he’s dead, there shouldn’t be a problem.”
Mia stood up. “Records opens at nine and I want to be first in line. You ready, Abe?”
Abe pulled on his coat and Kristen had to look away before her mouth started watering. They’d done nothing sexual the night before and somehow that made her wish they had. First they’d dealt with CSU, then the Medical Examiner’s Office as they’d picked up Jenkins’s body. Then when everyone had gone, Abe kissed her good night, a long, liquid, yearning kiss after which he patted her behind and sent her off to bed. He’d bedded down on the sofa, just as he’d promised, leaving her heart thundering and her mind wondering what would have happened had she asked him to tuck her into bed. He’d checked on her several times during the night and each time she’d been so tempted to ask him to stay. But she didn’t, and when sleep finally came, her dreams were full of hot images that still had her nerves humming.
“I’m driving, Mitchell, so I can pick lunch.” He stopped by Kristen’s chair and bent down to murmur in her ear, “Don’t go anywhere by yourself. Not even to Owen’s. Please.”
Her heart clenched at the tender worry in his eyes. “I promise. I’ll stay here all day.”
Abe straightened. “Maybe not all day,” he said cryptically.
“Abe,” Spinnelli said soberly, “I heard about what happened to your dad last night. Until we can get something concrete on Conti, be careful, all of you.”
Wednesday, February 25, 10:00 A.M.
“All those?” Abe asked, eyeing the stack of huge volumes.
“We’ll be here for days.”
The clerk, whose name was Tina, shot him a sympathetic look. “The marriage licenses from the forties aren’t computerized yet,” she said. “But it isn’t as bad as it looks. What’s the name and the date?”
“Genny O’Reilly,” Mia answered, looking over the woman’s shoulder. “She got married sometime in the fall of 1943.”
Tina slid index cards in the volume to mark the pages. “It will be between these cards. If you look yourselves I can find those property listings you were looking for.”
“We’ll look for Genny,” said Mia. “You can help us find land owned by a man named Worth. We don’t know exactly where it was, just that it was north of the city.”
Tina bit her lip. “You have a first name, maybe?”
Abe shook his head. “Our source just called him Mr. Worth. His son’s name was Hank, if that helps. Maybe Hank was a junior.”
Tina shrugged. “I’ll do my best. Happy hunting, Detectives.”
When she’d gone, Mia slumped into a chair. “We have to stop all these late parties.”
Abe opened the big book. “What’d the surgeon say when you left your date early?”
“He was a bore. I was ready for any excuse for him to take me home.” She cocked a brow. “And you? Once the infantry marched away last night, how was your evening?”
Long. He thought of Kristen now, of the way she’d looked last night. She’d been at her kitchen door, locking it as the last person left, prudently setting the alarm. She’d turned and just that fast the very air was charged, practically sizzling as they’d stood at opposite ends of her kitchen, staring. Then she’d simply walked into his arms as if she’d been doing so all her life. He’d kissed her. And kissed her. And God help him, he’d kissed her some more, until she was trembling and so was he, his hands clamped on her hips, wrestling with his best intentions. In the end he hadn’t dragged her against him as he’d so longed to do. He’d gently pushed her away, then turned her toward her bedroom with just a “good night.” If she’d even hinted she wanted him to join her, he would have. He would have scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bed and helped her have another… watershed moment.
But she hadn’t hinted. She’d walked away, stopping once to look back and the look in her eyes was worth more than ten watershed moments. It was trust mingled with heated want, and the combination triggered something inside him so profound…So he’d let her walk away and listened to her get ready for bed, his body still clenched and aching. She hadn’t slept until after three A.M. He knew because he’d checked on her, quietly, every half hour. He wanted to think he was checking because he’d been worried. She’d been shaken at finding Jenkins’s body in her backyard, at the implicit threat. He wanted to think that, but he knew he was hoping that she’d change her mind and ask him to stay. She’d wanted to. He could see it in her eyes. But she hadn’t and in the end she’d curled up and slept like an angel.
While he felt like anything but. He wanted her with a fierceness that left him breathless. He’d thought about it a great deal as he’d lain awake, staring at the blue-striped wallpaper from her uncomfortable sofa. She was a beautiful woman, no question of that, but he’d met other beautiful women in his life. Kristen had something more, something deeper—integrity, courage, kindness, a tender heart that she hid so well. A heart she was just now allowing to be seen. A heart that he wanted for his own.
In only a week she’d stolen his.
He looked over to find Mia studying him intently, understanding in her round blue eyes. She was an attractive woman as well, but he didn’t want her. He wanted Kristen.
“I could tell you to be careful with her, but I think you know that,” Mia said soberly.
Abe frowned. “Why? What do you know?”
Mia lifted a shoulder. “I’ve suspected for a long time that there was more to Kristen’s dedication than simple zeal for justice. I went as far as to check once, to see if she’d filed a complaint. I have a very close friend who counsels women for these things. I thought maybe Dana could help Kristen. But there was no complaint here in Chicago.”
“I wanted to check,” Abe admitted.
“But you want her to tell you herself. Be patient, Abe. She’s been alone for a long time. It takes some time to get used to having someone to lean on.”