by Lyn Gala
“Do you really think some demon wanted him out there creating trouble and attracting police attention? My guess is that if there are other demons around, they aren’t Monagas fans.”
If the demons were like deer hunters, that meant they wanted their territory to themselves and they wanted it quiet. “There’s a file on the backseat. Pull out the picture and see if he looks familiar to you,” Paige told Brady. Without a word, he reached into the back and grabbed the file. Flipping it open, he looked at the various booking pictures of John Monagas.
Almost immediately, he shook his head. “This guy doesn’t look familiar at all.”
“Not even from the ceremony?”
Brady still shook his head. “No way. A lot of the faces are fuzzy, but I think I’d remember this guy. I thought killers were supposed to look average so they didn’t stand out in the community. This guy looks like a serial killer.”
Paige actually thought Monagas looked pretty average, but she didn’t say that. “That’s funny because technically he’s just a serial rapist. If he were a serial killer, the FBI would be way more helpful. But hey, raping is just a woman thing, so they don’t get that involved.”
Frowning, Brady flipped the file shut. “Your cynicism is showing.”
“That’s my realism. As a man you just have trouble recognizing it.” The pain of the moment slipped back into the background as the needs of the present allowed Paige to push aside her worries.
Brady rolled his eyes. “Okay, let’s assume that the demons who did my ceremony aren’t fans of John Monagas the demon. Where does that leave us?”
For a long time, Paige stared out the window. This case didn’t come with easy answers. “With one seriously fucked-up case.”
“That’s been true since day one.”
“Yeah, but it’s more fucked up now. What are we supposed to tell the department? Hey, we have a gang war, only with demons instead of gangs! Even better, I can prove it. Look at the dead guy walking around.” Paige pressed her hands into her eyes and tried to push back against all the thoughts that buffeted her.
“I’m hoping you’re being sarcastic.” Brady tossed the file back into the backseat.
Paige sighed. “Mostly. It pisses me off that this asshole is walking around and we can’t tell people what we know. We’re just supposed to let him get away with this.” She wasn’t being fair and she knew that. They weren’t letting Monagas get away with anything because they were out chasing him. However, it would be a lot easier to chase him if they had help.
“If you want to tell them, we can,” Brady said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. She could see his fear in the way he sat stiffly and clenched his hands. It said a lot about him as a man—or as a demon—that he would face that fear rather than letting John Monagas get away.
“This would be a lot easier on me emotionally if you would just be more demonly,” Paige pointed out. No wonder her feelings were so mixed up when Brady kept sounding so not-evil.
“Demonly?” Brady had the nerve to actually sound amused.
“Cruel, vicious, murderous maybe,” Paige continued. She punched his arm. “If you weren’t such a decent, caring creature, it would be a lot easier to dismiss you as a monster and stop liking you,” Paige pointed out.
Slowly, the tension drained from Brady’s body as he smiled at her. “You like me? Even knowing I’m a demon?”
Paige rolled her eyes and got out of the car. Brady got out his side and she waited until she’d locked and slammed the door to continue the conversation. “You’re turning into a teenage girl, Brady.”
He waited as she came around the car and then he punched her arm back. “Hey, this has been just as hard on me as on you, Silver. I have earned the right to one or two hang-ups.”
Paige rolled her eyes and headed for the space between two rambling old houses. “Look for signs that one of these houses is being used. In Memphis, Monagas broke out a back window and used each house as a lair until he grabbed a woman off the street. Then he’d move on to a new lair. It made him almost impossible to catch.”
“That would. How do you do a geographical profile with that kind of mobility?”
Paige looked at Brady and wondered if he really cared.
The old Brady would have. The old Brady used to read every file he could get his hands on. The old Brady probably wanted to go into the FBI and do profiling someday and Paige felt bad that she’d never asked him what he planned for his future. How had this Brady described it though? The old Brady had installed a handicapped rail in the bathroom, and when the demon moved into the house, he just hadn’t bothered taking it down.
Clearly there was more than one railing that the demon hadn’t bothered to take down, but did he really care about profiling Monagas or her or anything that the real Brady cared about?
Brady turned around and looked at her. “Are you coming?”
Paige shook off her morbid thoughts and headed after him. “Yeah. And if anyone sees you, I fully plan to pretend you’re a figment of their imagination.”
“I’m not going to let anyone see me,” Brady said with a derisive snort. “Trust me, the phrase ‘run like hell’ is my new mantra. Right now, though, the only running I want to do is running this bastard down. Just don’t kill him quick, Paige.”
She stopped. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she wasn’t going to be able to arrest Monagas, but Brady was right—they were going to have to kill him.
Brady kept right on going like he hadn’t noticed her sudden discomfort. “I want to find out if he knows anything about demons or if he can tell me why I got pulled into this. If I’m stuck in the middle of some sort of demon gang war, I’d like to know before I wake up with a horse head in my bed.”
“That was the mob, not a gang,” Paige said absentmindedly as she trotted to catch up to him. God, she hated people with long legs—or even normal-sized legs. Her short legs were not cut out to keep up with people.
“Still, I’m not happy being in the middle of crap I don’t understand.” Brady sounded more coherent and a lot angrier than Paige had heard from him since he’d shown up at her house. Either the extra food had given him more energy or the demon was settling in to the new house.
“I know how you feel,” Paige said with a sigh as he darted ahead again and raced toward the backyards. She definitely knew how he felt. There was a whole lot of crap she was stuck in the middle of herself, and for the first time since she was eight years old, she didn’t know how she was supposed to get herself out of it.
Chapter Fifteen
“Paige!”
Paige trotted to the back of the old ranch house with aluminum siding flaking off in long sheets. The back screen had been popped off and she stuck her head in the dark hole. “Brady?” She knew Brady wouldn’t let her walk into a trap, but she hoped he was keeping in mind that as a human she really didn’t want to get bit by some rabid raccoon.
“In here,” he called. “He’s been here.” Paige could feel adrenaline start to flow and her mouth went dry. She slid the safety strap off her weapon and took a deep breath in preparation. She would do what she had to in order to protect this community and Brady. She could have a nervous breakdown later.
Paige climbed awkwardly through the window and found herself in a dim hall with seventies flowered wallpaper peeling away from old plaster. Brady’s voice came from the right and she turned and followed the hallway, trying her best to ignore the smell of cat urine and age. No one had lived in this house for a very long time.
“He was here.” Brady held up an empty box of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The bright red and white lettering hadn’t even dulled yet. It couldn’t be more than a few days old. Probably. Paige was not normally involved in the forensics part, so she couldn’t say that for sure.
“Do you think he’s still using this place?”
Brady shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?” Paige looked around and saw a nest made out of old dusty pillo
ws and a rough blanket. Most of the fast-food trash was gathered around a plastic crate near the window and beer bottles were lined up on the fireplace mantle. It was a disgusting mess, but she wasn’t sure it was an abandoned disgusting mess.
“Because the toilets don’t work and he was not very…um…fastidious.” Brady gestured toward the corner and Paige’s stomach turned as she realized that the suspect had used it as a toilet. Well, the lab guys would have a lot of DNA. Now she just had to figure out a way to call them in. The worst part was that the whole house smelled so bad that she hadn’t specifically noticed that mess. “The pile hasn’t been used in three or four days,” Brady said.
“I do not want to even think about how you know that.”
Brady grimaced. “It smells old.”
“It just smells—period. How can you tell whether it’s old or not?”
He made a face. “I just can.”
Paige studied him for a second, but as far as she could tell, he was being serious. “As far as superpowers go, the ability to identify the age of shit by smell is not terribly impressive. I’d suggest you keep that superpower to yourself,” she suggested.
“I asked for the x-ray upgrade, but they were out of them. Just think, if I could’ve gotten that superpower, I could have…” He didn’t say anything, but he looked her up and down to make it perfectly clear what he would be using x-ray vision to check out.
Paige pinned him with a glare. “We’re working here.” The awkward, flirty side of her partner hadn’t shown up in a while and she really wasn’t prepared to deal with it now.
“Working.” Brady cleared his throat. “Right. I’m on it.”
Paige studied Brady curiously. For someone who claimed to be working, he was still spending a lot of time looking at her and then pretending to not look at her.
It was getting harder and harder to remind her body that she had made a firm commitment to not sleep with Brady. After all, she wanted sex and he wanted sex and it was getting harder to remember why they weren’t having sex.
If nothing else, she should just keep in mind that she didn’t want sex here. First, it would be disgusting, and second, it would provide some very disturbing evidence when Forensics finally did find this place. There were some places that she just did not want her DNA showing up. This was near the top of that list.
Paige wandered over to the dirty and frayed curtains and pushed them aside. She had a clear view of Grant Street. “Look familiar?” she asked Brady.
He walked over and looked out the crack in the curtains. Paige realized her mistake the second his body was pressed close to hers. She could feel herself getting warm and she shivered as a bead of sweat slid down her spine. “Is that our third crime scene?” Brady asked, seemingly oblivious to her reaction. Either that or he was turning into one hell of a good actor.
Paige swallowed and forced herself to focus on the case. “That’s where someone grabbed the third girl.” She nodded toward the white house down the street. The woman had just been leaving her aunt’s house late one night when the rapist grabbed her. The aunt had moved in with family in Tallahassee, but Paige could see the brightly colored flowers in their wooden barrels on the aunt’s porch. They were starting to wilt, and the house looked empty now.
“So he’s using the same MO as in Memphis?” Brady asked.
“That’s about the only piece of luck we’ve caught in this case. So now we know how he’s spotting the girls, we just have to find his new lair.” Hell, if the profiler had half a brain, he should be able to have the patrol officers canvass the abandoned houses and find the new place without her getting involved. But calling him in meant admitting she had run a rogue investigation and it meant patrol officers canvassing abandoned houses without knowing that their suspect was a vampire.
“Paige, does that look familiar?” Brady turned just enough to lay a hand on her shoulder.
Paige peered out through dust-streaked windows and saw a blue sedan cruising slowly down the street. It was the sort of nondescript vehicle that wouldn’t even attract her attention under normal circumstances, but there had been too many references to a blue sedan for this to be a coincidence.
“Go get my car,” Paige said, tossing him the keys. “I’ll take the front.” She moved through the rubble of the living room, kicking a McDonald’s bag out of her way as she went for the front door.
Brady was already gone, his movement so silent that his absence surprised her. The front door opened onto a small enclosed sunroom and Paige had to fight rust and years of dirt to get it open. Whoever had been squatting in this place definitely used the back. Paige eased her way out on the porch and pulled her weapon.
The blue car stopped and Paige looked around to see if Brady was pulling her car around yet. If their suspect took off, she couldn’t chase them down by foot, that was for damn sure. The driver-side door came open, but the nearest streetlight was a block away and the long shadows distorted everything. She couldn’t identify the driver’s features. She had no idea if this was Monagas or some factory worker coming home after a very long shift.
One of the screened panels on the sun porch had rotted away and Paige eased out and onto the lawn, using the trunk of a pine tree to hide. The driver moved toward the center of the road. Paige had only seen a mug shot of Monagas, so she couldn’t say whether it was him or not. However this man’s silhouette looked familiar as he moved cautiously forward.
Paige eased around the trunk of the tree and pulled her weapon. “Hunter?” Surprise pulled the word out of her before she could edit herself.
The figure stopped and looked at her, and even in the dim, slanted light of the distant streetlamp, she could see Hunter’s familiar face. “Silver?” He sounded as confused as she was.
Hunter glanced at something off to the west, and before Paige could say anything or even gather her thoughts, he turned and raced back for his car. Tires squealed and smoke rose as the old blue car struggled to get away from the curb fast enough.
Paige brought her weapon up, fully expecting a full-on assault from some direction. It took her a second to realize that Brady was charging toward the car. Her vehicle was nowhere in sight, but Brady’s lips were pulled back in a snarl and his strong legs were covering the distance inhumanly fast. Paige’s heart leaped into her throat as she saw the raw power hidden under Brady’s skin.
“Brady!” she yelled after a second.
He didn’t even slow down. With only a quick glance in her direction, he continued to charge after the car. Hunter hit the end of the street, turned right and accelerated. Brady cut across a lawn, darting between two trees and leaping toward a fence. His leap took him so high that his foot caught the top of the six-foot fence and he propelled himself into someone’s backyard. A dog started barking madly.
Shit! Paige turned and ran for her car. Yeah, she knew Brady was more than a little pissed at Hunter’s shitty trick, but she definitely didn’t want anyone ending up dead. Deader, anyway. She got to her car before she realized Brady had her keys. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.” Paige got on her knees and felt around under the car for the little magnetic box where she kept her spare.
This endless series of disasters and frustrations was starting to annoy her. And when she got annoyed, she tended to make sure that everyone else was as miserable as she was. Now she just had to find her idiot partner and share the misery. And hopefully she could get there before either Brady or Hunter ended up dead. Pulling the spare out of the little box, she got in and started the engine. At the first intersection, she realized how very screwed she was. She had no idea which way they’d gone. Praying, Paige picked a direction and hit the gas.
Chapter Sixteen
By the time the dawn stained the dark sky, Paige’s eyes felt scratched and her whole body ached with a need for sleep, but worry kept her from driving home. She also couldn’t keep driving around town hoping to randomly find Hunter and Brady. Glancing at the clock, she pointed her car toward the station and hoped like
hell that she got there without hitting any pedestrians.
The parking lot was half-full when Paige pulled in and parked in her normal spot.
“Paige?” She turned to find Alex staring at her with more than a little concern. He stepped forward, raising his hand as if he wanted to offer some comfort, but something in her expression made him drop it back down to his side. “No offense, but you look like shit. Are you trying to get a referral to the shrink? Because if you aren’t, I really suggest you call in sick and go get some sleep before the captain sees you.”
“I don’t need sleep,” Paige lied. But what she really needed was to find her moron of a dead partner and then kill him deader. After a million lectures about backup, he’d gone off on his own and he hadn’t even bothered to call. When she found him, she was going to take his phone and shove it so far up his ass that he was going to cough up microchips. She hadn’t been this angry since her mother’s death. Paige stopped, closed her eyes and tried to gather a few emotional reserves.
Alex moved closer. “Seriously, Paige, you’re starting to freak us all out with this shit. Go home. Go get drunk. Go out to the woods and shoot at trees. Go sign up to talk to the shrink—I don’t care, but do something.”
Paige opened her eyes and looked at Alex. He was a good man. Why hadn’t she ever noticed what an incredibly good man he was? Most of the time, she thought of him as one half of the Alex and Veronica comedy hour as they annoyed the life out of each other.
A better question was why hadn’t she noticed what a good man Brady had been before he’d died? Why couldn’t she stop thinking of him as Brady now that he was dead? Questions spun through her brain like spiders leaving behind silk that tangled in her thoughts. Yeah, she needed therapy. First she had to find a therapist who would talk to her about dead people without signing the commitment papers.