Shades of Temptation

by Virna DePaul

  “Who’s next?” Jase asked.

  “Dr. Odell Bowers, a reconstructive surgeon. He’s practicing near Coit Tower.” He followed the directions Carrie gave him. “Weird,” she said. “This is the same building I used to visit for my physical-therapy appointments.”

  “You haven’t had one in a while.”

  “No. I’ve been a little busy.”

  He shot her a chiding look, but before he could speak, she interrupted, “I know. I’ll make an appointment soon. I’m not going to ruin all the progress I’ve made by being careless now.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Still, as she followed Jase up the stairs of the building, she was conscious of how her leg was dragging slightly behind her. When she reached the top, she was even breathing a little harder, and the evidence of her weakened stamina nearly made her cringe.

  Though she tried to be discreet about it, Jase caught her rubbing the side of her leg.

  “Need another massage?” he asked mildly as they maneuvered their way to Dr. Bowers’s second-floor office.

  “Nope. I’m good.”

  “I guess instead of asking the question, I should have just said I’d give you a massage. After all, you said you were going to be more amenable to my suggestions from here on out.”

  He held the door of Bowers’s office open for her. As she walked through, she reminded him, “I said maybe I would. Convenient of you to forget that small detail.”

  Laughing, he shrugged. “Convenience has nothing to do with it.”

  They stepped up to the reception desk where a harried-looking young woman was talking on the phone. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I already told you I don’t know when Dr. Bowers will be back in the office. I’ll call you back as soon as I—” She gritted her teeth when the other person on the line hung up on her.

  She hung up the receiver and started jotting down some notes but didn’t acknowledge them in any way.

  Jase cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said.

  The woman didn’t even look up. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re with the Department of Justice and we need to speak with Dr. Odell Bowers right away.”

  The minute he mentioned they were from the DOJ, the woman’s head snapped up. “Are you cops?” she asked. “Finally. You’d think with the number of times I’ve called you guys that you would have arrived before now.”

  Carrie stepped forward. “We’re special agents with the Department of Justice, not patrol officers. But you’ve asked for help from the police. Why?”

  “Because my boss hasn’t shown up to work for the past couple of days, and I can’t get ahold of him. I’ve been fielding phone calls and visits from angry patients and I’m sick of it, but I need the job. I don’t want to leave things completely hanging and then have Dr. Bowers fire me when he gets back from whatever he’s been doing.”

  Carrie looked at Jase, who said, “We need to know everything you’ve told the police. You can tell me that while Special Agent Ward looks around Dr. Bowers’s office. We’ll also need his home address.”

  * * *

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Carrie and Jase were racing to Dr. Bowers’s home in the Presidio. According to the receptionist, Marlene Harrison, Dr. Bowers was ruthlessly efficient when it came to keeping to his office hours and scheduled appointments. In the six months that she’d been working for him, he’d never called in sick. Yet he wasn’t answering his home phone or his cell phone, and he hadn’t answered his door when Marlene had stopped by his house the night before.

  She should count herself lucky that she hadn’t. After all, there was little doubt in Carrie’s mind that Dr. Odell Bowers was in fact The Embalmer. A quick search of his medical records had revealed a link between the first three victims—they’d all been prospective patients. Each of them had come in for an elective cosmetic-surgery consultation and had disappeared within a few weeks of their appointment.

  There’d been no credit-card bills or cancelled checks evidencing payments to the same doctor because the initial consultation with Bowers had been free; up to that point, there’d been nothing to charge them for. But that visit had been enough for Bowers to set his sights on them and get their personal information. Address. Phone number. Maybe he’d even arranged to meet them for coffee to talk over their options. Granted, the phone records of the victims should have resulted in a match if they’d each called Bowers’s office number at some point, but it was entirely possible they’d called from a third-party line or walked in to make an appointment.

  “He knew what he was going to do to them the moment he met them,” she said. “Those damn movies…”

  They’d found no evidence of how Bowers had first seen Kelly Sorenson, but they’d found a collection of DVDs in one of Bowers’s office cabinets that hinted at why he’d done what he had to her and the others.

  Odell Bowers had been a huge horror-movie buff. Marlene said he often spent his lunch break watching a movie and had even invited his staff to sit in with him a few times.

  “We thought it was weird and he stopped asking after the first few times,” Marlene had said.

  Halfway joking, Jase had asked, “Did any of the movies happen to involve slicing someone’s eyelids off?”

  “Are you kidding?” Marlene had retorted, rolling her eyes. “That one was his favorite.”

  The movie was about a family who moved into a new house that, unknown to them, had been a mortuary. As soon as the family moved in, the young son had started to act strangely. Somehow, a former serial killer was involved, and the family discovered his collection of dried-out eyelids under a floorboard of the boy’s room.

  “I’ve always hated horror movies,” Carrie said as they pulled up to Bowers’s residence.

  “Me, too,” Jase responded.

  They waited for their backup team from the SFPD to arrive. With several officers covering other access points, Jase and Carrie made their way to the grand front entrance flanked on either side by fancily trimmed topiary trees.

  “The guy likes his creature comforts,” Jase remarked.

  “Yes,” Carrie said. “I bet he has a fancy home theater room with a huge flat-screen TV to watch his movies.”

  “Don’t malign the benefits of home theater technology simply because of one sicko, Ward,” Jase chided back. Their teasing banter was meant to relieve some of their tension, the same way cops often used black humor at crime scenes to deal with the horrific things they encountered day in and day out. It was yet more proof of how comfortable they’d become working together. It was hard to believe that the case they’d been so vigorously pursuing could very well be solved in a matter of minutes.

  “We’re going to get him,” Jase said. “And it’s going to be because of you, Carrie. I’m damn proud of you.”

  She felt more than a small amount of pride at his words. Carrie mirrored Jase’s stance, bracing her back against the wall and holding her weapon at the ready. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Jase. I mean that. Now let’s get this guy.”

  * * *

  BOWERS INDEED HAD a first-class theater room, with a giant screen, blackout drapes and cushy recliner chairs. Despite the ample seating, Jase suspected Bowers didn’t socialize much. There was a clinical sterility to his home. Finely furnished, yes, but everything ruthlessly in its place. He got the distinct impression that visitors would be unwelcome simply because they might mess things up. Track dirt in. Muddy up the shiny surfaces of his tables with fingerprints. Bowers would abhor the unpredictability of it.

  They’d announced their presence but Bowers didn’t appear to be home. Still, to insure he wasn’t hiding inside, they cleared each room, one by one.

  “Garage?” Carrie asked.

  Jase spotted the most likely door, and nodded toward it. They motioned one of the SFPD police officers over. Together, they opened the door, unsurprised by the steep flight of stairs that led down to the garage. From the doorway, Jase saw the back end of a polished black vehicle. On the
other side of the stairs, however, was another door. He pointed to it.

  “We’ll go down together,” Carrie said. She turned to the officer beside them. “You make sure to cover us from up here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Normally, Jase would have teased her about being called “ma’am” by a fellow cop, but his nerves were too intense for that. They took the narrow stairs slowly, pacing each other back-to-back. “Check the car first,” Jase said.

  “Right.”

  As he kept his gun pointed toward the closed door, Carrie checked the vehicle.

  “Nothing. You’re clear on this side.”

  “Okay.” He tried the door handle. It was locked. “Dr. Bowers,” he called. “This is Special Agent Jase Tyler with the California Department of Justice. I’m here with backup. Open the door.”

  Nothing. No sounds. No attempt to open the door.

  “I’m coming in,” he yelled. Raising his foot, he kicked in the door. They went through together, weapons drawn.

  They entered a huge finished basement that appeared to have been converted into a makeshift operating room. It was loaded with steel tables and drawers of tools and shelves of bottles. Immediately in front of them lay a body.

  Carrie caught sight of the feminine kimono and gasped. “He killed another woman.”

  “No,” Jase said. “It’s a man. Look at the face. The hair.”

  It was Bowers. Dressed in feminine clothes with makeup on his face. Makeup that had been applied with the same heavy hand as the rest of The Embalmer’s victims. There was one big difference, however. In Bowers’s case, the makeup was marred by the blood running down his temple. He’d sustained a major head wound.

  Everything they’d discovered—the weirdly renovated garage, Bowers’s makeup, what his secretary had told them about his favorite movie—it all pointed to Bowers being The Embalmer. The man who’d murdered four women. The man who’d taunted and eluded the cops for so long. Yet now…

  Cautiously, Jase checked for a pulse, confirming what he already knew.

  Bowers was dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WASN’T IT WRONG to celebrate someone’s death, even if the death you were celebrating was a serial killer’s? The question nagged at Carrie the entire next day.

  She had a friend who was a deputy attorney general for the DOJ. Renee responded to death-penalty appeals, and sometimes those appeals raged on for decades. One time, her friend had called to tell her a death-row inmate had died in prison. Carrie couldn’t even remember how he’d died. The thing that had stuck with her the most was her friend’s relief.

  Wasn’t it wrong to celebrate someone’s death, even if the death you were celebrating was a serial killer’s?

  Carrie wasn’t celebrating, exactly. It didn’t matter that Bowers had been a killer. He’d obviously been a man driven by some pretty powerful ghosts. They hadn’t found a kiln in his basement. What it did have, though, was a half-dozen deep drawers, the kind often seen in the movies when someone visited a morgue to identify a body.

  To their profound relief, there weren’t any bodies inside. They did, however, find pictures. Copies of the same pictures Bowers had sent to the police. Pictures of three women.

  Mary Johnson.

  Theresa Steward.

  And Cheryl Anderson.

  He’d been a killer, a smart one, a vicious one, yet now he was dead.

  The cause of death? That was a question for the coroner to explore. Bowers had suffered blunt force trauma to the head, but the wound had been generic enough that, for all they knew, he’d slipped and hit his head on the basement’s tile floor. Unlikely, but it seemed just as unlikely that someone had caught Bowers by complete and utter surprise, especially given the way he’d been dressed, and killed him. Unless, of course, he’d had a partner… But that didn’t seem likely, either. Not only was there no evidence of a partner being involved, but Bowers’s crimes had had a distinctly personal quality to them.

  Speculation about Bowers’s motives would rage on, but Carrie was betting it had to do with the death of his sister, Laura, who’d died several years ago in a car accident. Laura, with the light brown hair. Laura, who’d been a teacher. Laura, who’d been so badly injured in the car wreck that she hadn’t been able to have a normal funeral service. No viewing. No burial. Could it be that Odell was using his victims, preparing their bodies for burial in a way he hadn’t been able to prepare Laura?

  Of course, that didn’t explain why, if he loved his sister, he’d actually hurt his victims by keeping them alive during the embalming process, but that was an explanation they were obviously never going to get.

  She was just glad Odell Bowers couldn’t hurt anyone again. That gladness wasn’t completely free of regret, however. She’d been glad she’d managed to shoot Kevin Porter before he’d killed her, after all, but she’d regretted having to do it. Likewise, she was glad whenever she closed a case and managed to obtain some justice for a person whose life had either ended or been torn apart because of the carelessness or cruelty of another human being. But she regretted the necessity of obtaining that justice in the first place.

  What she didn’t like was that her regret often mingled with guilt.

  In this particular case, the guilt wasn’t necessarily pinpointed at herself so much as society in general. What failing had caused Odell Bowers’s madness to spiral out of control? To push him to the point of feeling so utterly rejected by those around him that he had to escape inside a dark and deranged mind to find comfort? At exactly what point did someone cease to be the angsty teen she’d told Jase she’d been, or the troubled teen who took drugs and joined gangs like Kevin Porter had been, or a cross-dressing boy who loved his sister like Odell Bowers had been, and become something monstrous?

  But it didn’t matter. Guilt was guilt, and frankly, Carrie was sick of feeling it.

  Wasn’t it wrong to celebrate someone’s death, even if the death you were celebrating was a serial killer’s?

  Maybe, but right now, that’s what Carrie and her teammates were doing. At the very least, they were celebrating the fact she’d found a serial killer and closed the case. What that meant in the grand scheme of things she’d just have to figure out later.

  No one outside DOJ or SFPD was celebrating Bowers’s capture, however. Or his death, for that matter. For now, they’d decided to keep the circumstances of his death a secret. Amongst his things, they’d found Kelly Sorenson’s green business card, but that was the only evidence they’d found linking Bowers to her murder. And, of course, because he’d likely been murdered himself, they didn’t want to give his potential killer more information than he or she already had.

  She glanced at Jase, and from the relaxed but slightly distant expression on his face, she wondered if he was thinking and feeling exactly what she was, including a hint of disappointment that there was no longer a reason for them to be working 24/7 together on the same case. With a small smile, she extricated herself from Commander Stevens, Simon and DeMarco and made her way to him, where he was sitting by himself at the bar in McGill’s.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Hey yourself,” he said. “What are you doing over here? You should soak up more accolades. You deserve it.”

  She shook her head, not in denial or false humility, but…well, she wasn’t quite sure why. “I meant what I said back at his house. Before we went in. We solved this case together. I wouldn’t have been able to work out all the details and come to any sort of conclusion but for you.”

  He took a drag from his bottle and winked at her. “Right. The fresh air and drive cleared your head and got you thinking creatively. I remember.”

  But despite his teasing tone, there was a somber cast to his mood that matched her own.

  “What we do, it never heals us, not completely, does it?” she asked him. “Not the victims. Not society as a whole. Not whatever demons are chasing us, pushing us to do this job in the first place.”

&n
bsp; “Nope,” he agreed. “Not completely. But no one escapes life unscathed, Ward. That just isn’t how it works.”

  His words rang true. And the way he looked at her, intense, deep, caring…it reminded her of the last time she’d truly felt safe and content. When they’d made love.

  They’d managed to ignore that little incident while tracking down The Embalmer, but now that he’d been caught…now that their official partnership was over, what would happen? Would they continue to ignore it? Pretend it never happened?

  Instinctively, she knew Jase was through pushing her. That he was waiting for a sign from her about how to proceed. As they always did where he was concerned, her desire warred with practicality.

  She wasn’t what he needed. He needed a woman to balance out his job, and since she was part of the job, she couldn’t give him that. He’d realize that soon enough, which meant she needed to be smart. As it was, she’d barely survive Jase walking away from her, but she would survive. So long as she stayed realistic and remembered who and what she was.

  But that didn’t mean he had to walk away tonight.

  It didn’t mean she couldn’t have one more taste of the pleasure and safety he’d shown her. After everything they’d been through and witnessed in the past few days, she deserved that much, didn’t she?

  “That’s how life works,” she agreed. “But even so…we have to take our pleasure where and when we can. Isn’t that what you said?”

  Surprise flickered across his face before his heated gaze pinned her in place. “That’s what I said.”

  Clearing her throat and looking around to make sure no one would overhear her, she said, “Are you all talk and no action? Or do you feel like taking me back to your house—back to your bed—and proving your point to me one more time.”

  He considered her words, and she knew it wasn’t the offer he was actually contemplating, but her deliberate reference to making love to him one last time. As in, never again. As in, now that the case was over, things were going to go back to normal between them, with him dating his women and her…well, her dating no one.