Neither had hurting people. Least of all someone she cared about.
“I didn’t want to tell you!” she called out after Sam, but her words just seemed to bounce against the closed door.
Sam couldn’t hear her.
Sam was gone.
Chapter 6
Two days later found Sam sitting at his desk in the precinct, feeling more dead than alive. Sleep had, for the most part, eluded him and the hours all seemed to bleed into one another.
If it hadn’t been for the department’s calendar on his desk, he wouldn’t have known what day it was.
His eyes growing progressively more blurry, Sam scrubbed his hands over his face. He caught himself wishing he could somehow scrub them over his mind and his waning energy level, as well, to somehow restore them to their former full running capacity.
After having managed to get—and use up—his second and then third wind, at this point he was beginning to feel like one of the living dead.
Leaning back in his chair, he felt the lump in his back pocket and remembered he’d been forced to shut off his cell phone. Somehow, reporters had managed to get his personal number and thought nothing of calling him at all hours of the day and night. After a while, it had begun to drive him crazy, which was when he’d decided to shut it off.
The phone on his desk rang as well, but those calls were usually from the general public, private citizens who claimed to have important information on the man the press had—running with what little input it did have—whimsically dubbed the Alphabet Killer.
If he believed even half the incoming calls, sightings had been made everywhere. It was amazing how one person—presumably a man, although Sam was ruling nothing out—could be in so many different places at the very same time.
Still, bizarre or not, all the calls had to be checked out. Given the limited number of people on the force, everyone now had a backlog of places to check out and callers to interview.
Still, there was nothing else currently going on in the county that came close to this kind of importance, so all the department’s energy was focused on following up every clue, every shred of possible evidence. The reasoning was that the killer had to be somewhere and he had to be stopped. Since the killer wasn’t invisible, someone had to have seen him, which was why every call had to be checked into.
“Sam. Hey, Sam.”
Only extreme self-control kept Sam from jumping when he felt the hand on his shoulder.
Swinging around in his chair, he was ready to spring into a defensive mode only to see the man with his hand on his shoulder was his older brother, Trevor.
The first thing Sam thought was that the FBI had a lead. But he refrained from asking, waiting for Trevor to state his business himself.
“Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to startle you, but I did call your name. Where were you?” Trevor wanted to know, peering into his brother’s face.
Sam said the first thing that came to mind, not wanting to admit he’d taken a momentary mental break because he was bordering on exhaustion.
“I was going over pictures of the crime scene,” Sam said, nodding at the photographs on his desk.
“Damn, I don’t know how you do it. If that were my fiancée who was murdered, it would be tearing me up inside,” Trevor confessed. “By the way, I called your cell phone to let you know I was coming by, but it went straight to voice mail.”
“I shut off the phone,” Sam explained. “The vultures from the press were having a feeding frenzy. I figured if I had to say ‘no comment’ one more time, I couldn’t be held responsible for my next action.”
The lead FBI profiler laughed dryly as he dropped into the chair next to his brother’s desk.
“I hear you.” Trevor looked closer at his younger brother. “You look like hell, Sam. When did you last sleep? For that matter, when did you last eat?” he wanted to know, concern coming through his solemn tone.
“Did you come here to play mother?” Sam asked his brother.
So much for brotherly chit-chat, Trevor thought. He got down to business. “No, I came here to tell you in light of what’s going on and all the similarities between the two cases, I took a quick trip to Oklahoma and paid Big J a visit,” he told Sam, referring to their father’s older brother. “I thought maybe he might have some idea if there was ever anybody who might have fantasized about copying dear old dad’s MO, either back in the day, or now.”
His interest aroused, for a minute Sam forgot how exhausted he was. “And?”
“And he had nothing to offer,” Trevor replied, none too happily. “According to Big J—and I believe him—he hasn’t seen the old man since before Matthew was sent to prison to serve out his sentence. When I talked to him, Big J seemed kind of skittish. And when I asked him what was wrong, he finally told me that he didn’t want to go down on record as even having talked to me about his younger brother. I think he’s afraid of retaliation by Matthew’s followers.
“Or maybe,” Trevor continued, “if there is some new copycat serial killer out there, the new guy might feel he has to kill anyone who badmouths the original serial killer.” Trevor replayed his own words in his mind and shook his head. “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” he asked, mocking himself.
If only.
“Not when it comes to the old man,” Sam replied. “At this point, I’d believe anything’s possible.”
He stared darkly at the corner of the paper peering out from beneath the photographs he’d spread out on his desk. The report he’d just read when Trevor had walked into the room. The report was from the medical examiner’s office.
It had managed, if anything, to put him into an even darker mood than he’d already found himself in.
Because the report had, indirectly, labeled him a fool.
For the moment, Sam pushed the paper back underneath the photographs, telling himself he’d deal with what was there later.
When he raised his eyes, he saw Trevor was looking at him. Dark eyes met even darker ones.
“Seriously, man, you should get some rest and something to eat,” Trevor advised.
“Later,” Sam said dismissively. He’d take care of his physical needs later. Right now, taking care of this was far more important. “You think this’ll ever be behind us?” he asked Trevor out of the blue. “This crime spree the old man conducted?”
“It was behind us,” Trevor pointed out, then added, “People started to forget. They started to trust us again,” he recalled. “Look at our family. We got back together, most of us found places in some form of law enforcement—the authorities were willing to allow the past be the past. We’ve got to do the same,” Trevor told him with emphasis.
“It’s not that easy,” Sam protested, curbing his annoyance.
“Yeah, it is,” Trevor countered. “You just have to think positive. And eat, you’ve got to eat,” Trevor told him, giving his face a quick, brotherly pat as he rose to his feet. “That’s an order.”
“I don’t take orders from the FBI,” Sam told his brother.
“This wasn’t from the FBI,” Trevor informed him. “It was from your older brother who, by the way, knows best. I’ll be back to check on you,” he told Sam just before he walked out.
“I’ll make sure I won’t be around,” Sam responded, raising his voice so it would follow his brother out of the office.
Sam gave it to the count of ten, glanced back toward the doorway to make sure his brother was gone, then slipped the report out from beneath the photographs. Holding it in his hands, he looked at the autopsy report again.
He’d already read it three times and knew the words by heart.
The words confirmed the fact that he had been played for a fool.
Leaning forward, Sam took his cell phone out of his back pocket, turned it on and looked at it. A q
uick check of his voice mail told him he had forty-two messages. Turning his cell phone off again, he put it back into his pocket.
Selecting several of the most recent calls that had come into the office claiming to have seen this new serial killer, he folded the papers and rose from his desk.
There was some place he needed to stop before he got back to work.
* * *
She wasn’t there.
When he stopped by Zoe’s place, she didn’t answer the door when he rang the bell. A quick survey of the area told him that her car was gone.
As was Annabel’s.
Fishing out his cell phone, he turned it on. Pressing a single number, he called his sister first. After all, he had dispatched her to spend a couple of nights with Zoe. The official reason was to make sure she remained safe and to guard Zoe in case this newly minted serial killer decided to veer from the alphabet and just go on a killing spree.
Unofficially, having Annabel stay with her was to help Zoe deal with the trauma of her sister’s murder as well as being the one who had discovered the body.
If something was wrong, Annabel would have called and told him, he reasoned.
That still didn’t calm his nerves.
“Where are you?” he demanded without bothering to identify himself to his sister when she answered her cell phone.
There was no need. Like everyone else in the department, Annabel would have recognized that growl anywhere.
“I’m at work, hunting for the Alphabet Killer like everyone else,” Annabel told him. “Why?”
He winced at the gimmicky name she’d used. It was the kind of thing that caught on with the public like wildfire and fueled imaginations.
“Why aren’t you with Zoe at her place?” Sam wanted to know.
“Because Zoe isn’t at her place,” Annabel pointed out. “She told me that she didn’t want to miss work. When I couldn’t talk her out of it, I figured she’d be all right in a public library. Did I figure wrong?” she asked hesitantly.
“No, but you should have called to tell me what you were doing,” he said just before he terminated the call. The second he did, the phone began to vibrate insistently again.
Damn, but Annabel was fast, he thought.
Pressing the green accept bar on his phone without looking at the caller, Sam answered the call by saying, “It’s okay, Annabel.”
There was just the slightest hesitation on the other end of the call before a male voice asked, “Detective Colton? This is Dallas Jenkins of the Houston Chronicle. I’ve got some ques—”
The man never got any further with his inquiry.
Biting off a curse, Sam disconnected the call and then turned off his phone again. He knew he really should stay connected. Who knew what call he might miss by having his phone off? But twenty years ago, police detectives stopped at pay phones to make a call or used the transmitters in their squad cars to communicate. Doing without a cell phone was just his way of taking a trip down memory lane, he reasoned.
It was also his way of hanging on to his sanity, he silently added. Dealing with the press was liable to send him off in directions that wouldn’t be advantageous to the investigation and right now, the investigation was of paramount importance—right after he got this one bit of business out of the way.
Driving down Main Street, he made his way to the town’s public library. And found Zoe there, just as Annabel had said.
He stepped into the shadows to observe her for a minute, wanting to see what was so important that Zoe would risk her life to come back to it.
Zoe was helping a rather frazzled-looking student. It quickly became apparent the student was there to do research for a paper due the following morning—first period.
Standing off to the side and out of the way, hidden by the shelves, Sam eavesdropped as Zoe gave the teenager a few tips to help him with his research as well as a great deal of encouragement. Sam quickly gleaned the report was on Texas’s battle for independence.
Waiting for Zoe to finish talking to the student, he began to actually listen to what she was saying. Listen with growing interest. That he did managed to really surprise him.
When the student finally went to finish working with the information she had helped him gather, Sam came out of the shadows and into Zoe’s line of vision.
“You actually made history sound interesting,” he told her.
There was admiration in his voice, something that went a long way toward bolstering Zoe’s own sagging self-esteem.
“History is interesting,” she told him with a measure of enthusiasm.
If they could have gone on talking about history, she would have felt a great deal more at ease. But she knew he wasn’t here about that. She could tell by his stance he wasn’t here about something else, either. Something far more important than her ability to make an interesting subject even more interesting.
“You’re not here to tell me you caught the killer, are you?” she asked, disappointed.
He wasn’t going to insult her with any sort of promises about the future. Although he intended to pursue this killer to the ends of the earth, if he said anything like that, it would just sound like an empty vow. He was a man of action, not words.
“No,” he told her. “I’m not. But how did you know that?”
Because I know everything about you. What makes you break down and smile, what makes you angry. What you won’t talk about. Everything, she silently emphasized.
“You have a certain look on your face when everything comes together for you,” she explained. “It’s half triumphant and half peaceful, for lack of a better word.”
It surprised him, but she was right.
Sam looked at her, puzzled. To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t been around Zoe all that much. They’d gone to the same schools—he knew because they were close to the same age and because everyone in Granite Gulch had attended the same set of schools—but he couldn’t really recall being around her or even seeing her very much.
But there was no point in questioning Zoe about any of that now. He had more important things to concentrate on than that.
“I came to check on you,” Sam told her. “I thought you’d be home.”
She laughed quietly, as if the answer embarrassed her. “I can’t hide at home forever. Besides, keeping busy is the best therapy. There’re only two of us working the library floor and I can’t have Alice doing all the work. That wouldn’t be right,” she concluded.
She was a great one for right and wrong, Sam couldn’t help thinking. It was a shame some of her better traits hadn’t rubbed off on Celia. He still wouldn’t have asked her to marry him, but being forced to do so wouldn’t have felt like such a hardship to him.
He was veering off the track, he reminded himself. He needed to get this over with. He owed it to Zoe. “I wanted to apologize to you.”
Zoe’s mouth dropped open. Recovering, she almost stuttered as she said, “Excuse me?”
“I owe you an apology,” Sam told her. “I shouldn’t have jumped all over you like that the other night. After all, I forced you to tell me what you and Celia were arguing about. It’s not like you willingly volunteered the information.”
She bit her lower lip, looking at him with concern shining in her eyes. Zoe wasn’t savoring his apology. She was reliving his pain when he’d found out the truth.
“It wasn’t right for Celia to lie to you like that. I told her she had to tell you the truth and she just laughed at me. That’s when I stormed out. I was coming back to try to convince her one last time she couldn’t build a marriage on a lie.” The sigh that escaped her lips sounded more like a barely suppressed shudder. “But since she’s dead, I should have left it alone and not mentioned the argument. There was no longer a need for you to know the truth.”
She was being protective of him even after he had shouted at her. The woman was just an endless source of surprise to him.
He didn’t think they made people like that. His mother had been like that, but his mother had been from another era. In his estimation, modern women were more concerned with being their own person and that came ahead of their concerns about others.
Men were the same way, Sam thought. He knew he was. It was a wonder the two genders ever got together anymore.
“I would have found out she lied anyway,” he told Zoe after a minute. He didn’t want her to waste any more time beating herself up about it.
“How?” she asked him in surprise. “I don’t think anyone else knew what she was doing. It would have put a damper on her marrying into the Colton family. Celia was smart enough to keep quiet about the deception. She only told me because she was confident I wouldn’t tell anyone if she asked me not to. Family loyalty and all that,” Zoe said in almost a dismissive tone. The latter caught Sam by surprise. “What Celia didn’t count on was my being so horrified at the deception she was trying to pull off.”
Sam was certain she would have undoubtedly kept the secret if he hadn’t pressed her so hard to tell him. Zoe might have held truth to a high standard, but she was first and foremost loyal.
There was also one other little detail that both she and her sister had overlooked.
“There was something else Celia hadn’t counted on,” Sam told her.
Zoe frowned, thinking. She couldn’t come up with anything. “What?”
“Being murdered,” he told Zoe without any emotion in his voice. “By law, every murder victim has to have an autopsy performed on them.”
Zoe’s eyes widened as she looked at him. She knew what he was going to say next, but she was hoping against hope she was wrong. So she waited until he actually put it into words.
She didn’t wait long.
“And Celia’s autopsy gave us the cause of death—which was no mystery. It also made no mention of the fact that she was supposed to be three months pregnant—which was a mystery. Unless, of course, she’d never been pregnant to begin with,” he concluded, looking pointedly at Zoe. “Which, apparently, she wasn’t. You did tell me the truth back there, didn’t you?”
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