Such a Pretty Girl

by Tess Diamond

  It was sweet. It was caring.

  It was just like him.

  “I like the fact that old books have history,” she said. “Once, I found a love letter from the 1940s pressed between the pages of a copy of Pride and Prejudice I picked up in London. It was like something out of a movie.”

  She watched him as he observed her space, wondering if he was cataloging the little touches, if they helped him figure her out the way spending time at his cabin had helped her understand him.

  “You live a carefully curated life, don’t you?” he asked, finally, turning to face her. “Everything’s got a place. Everything’s neat and tidy and beautiful. Like you.”

  “I guess you could say that,” she said.

  “But here”—he tapped the files and papers spread across her coffee table—“you get a little messy.”

  She looked down at the files, another reminder of the people she’d failed so terribly. “My kind of work is always messy,” she said. “People are messy.”

  “See, I’d say people are simple,” Gavin said. “There’s good, there’s bad, and there’s really evil. And you spend a lot of time in the heads of the really evil. It’s got to get to a person after a while.”

  He was looking at her like she was a puzzle he wanted to solve. It made her want to open like a flower. To let him see all of her. To step forward and kiss him again.

  But she couldn’t. She needed to focus. They both did.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said. “Why don’t you order some food? I’m going to take a shower. The room with the green door at the top of the stairs is the guest room. Make yourself at home.”

  Before he could say anything, she’d hurried out of the living room and up the stairs. Once she was in the safety of her bedroom, she leaned against her door, breathing deep.

  She shouldn’t have kissed him. That was stupid. She’d just been overtaken with the urge, helpless to resist it.

  She needed a shower to clear her head. Grace closed her eyes, and all she could think about was his mouth against hers.

  Maybe a cold shower.

  Her bathroom was connected to the master bedroom, an opulent room with a giant cast-iron tub and soft green deco tile from the 1920s. She stripped off her clothes as steam billowed through the room. Standing in front of the large oval mirror that had a border of delicate blossoms etched into the glass, she began to undo her hair from its many pins. By the time she’d untangled her braids and finger-combed her hair long and loose, the room had heated up. She stepped into the water, closing her eyes as she tilted her head back, letting the water soak through her long hair. If only her problems could swirl down the drain as easily as the water.

  She knew if she started thinking about the case, she’d crumble. She needed a moment, a respite. Just for a second.

  So her mind wandered. Right to Gavin Walker.

  He was just down the hall. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. She couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  About that night, two years ago.

  He had been so charming. Every woman in the room had been drawn to him, but the second his eyes met hers, she knew he was going to end up leaving with her.

  It was in his smile as she came forward from across the ballroom, his warm approval of her boldness.

  It was what she liked most about him—that not one inch of Gavin Walker was intimidated by her. Not then, and not now. He respected her, liked her, admired her, even—if the glint in his eyes when they connected over a theory, tossing ideas back and forth rapid-fire, was any indication.

  They’d danced together, that night, at the ball. She’d thought she knew, that she could predict the way it would be between them, as their bodies moved to the music.

  Later on, when he tumbled her down into his sheets, his mouth insistent, maddening, so, so skilled, she’d realized she had completely underestimated him.

  He’d been a talker—it surprised her, because she hadn’t taken him for one before they fell into bed. And it hadn’t been that typical porn-like dirty talk that so many men thought was hot. No, Gavin Walker made the woman he was with feel cherished. His words, muttered in short, awe-filled bursts, accompanied by that touch that burned her up, were all about her.

  Now he was back in her life, and it scared her. Because she could feel herself falling. She could see herself loving those words of his, believing them, and those hands—that worshipful command of her body.

  She finished her shower, towel-dried her hair, and pulled on a pair of bamboo-cloth yoga pants and a soft blue sweater that slipped off one shoulder. She kept her hair loose and damp down her back—she never had the patience to stand there for a half hour and blow-dry it. There was a little hurricane of nerves inside her stomach as she went back downstairs and found Gavin sitting on her couch, looking big and warm and so handsome.

  “I found your takeout drawer,” he said. “Ordered us Thai.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, sitting down clear on the other end of the couch from him. She knew he noticed, because his eyes crinkled, amused.

  “I also put a call in to Harrison. He’s sending a sketch artist over to work with the jeweler tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get a hit off facial recognition.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “We need to go over the rest of the evidence. He didn’t choose his victims by happenstance.”

  “You think there’s more of a pattern than him finding women who look like you?”

  “He might work in a job that puts him in contact with a lot of people,” Grace suggested. “Or one that gives him access to personal information. Maybe some sort of administrator.”

  “He has to be stalking his victims,” Gavin said thoughtfully. “He had their routines down, knew when Janice ran, knew when the Andersons were both home, knew when Nancy would be in her apartment. Did you look at her work schedule Zooey sent over? The woman practically lived at her office. That made her predictable but gave him a very small window when it came to targeting her.”

  “There must have been easier victims,” Grace mused, opening her laptop and bringing up the files Zooey had sent both of them.

  “Finding women who look like you is clearly his number one priority,” Gavin said.

  But Grace wasn’t so sure. She felt like she was missing something, like there was a connection she wasn’t seeing. She just couldn’t figure out what it was. She reached over to her side table, where her reading glasses were. She’d taken her contacts out for her shower and hadn’t bothered to put them back in. She slipped her glasses on, then clicked through the evidence files Zooey had put together on each victim’s last few weeks.

  “I’m guessing you think otherwise,” Gavin said and Grace looked up guiltily, realizing she’d gone quiet and contemplative.

  She flushed. “Sorry,” she said.

  “You don’t need to apologize for getting in the zone,” he said. “We all do it. You should see Sunday dinners at my parents’ place when all their boys are working on different cases. My mama likes to say you can drive a freight train through the silences. What are you thinking?”

  “The women who look like me—it’s obvious,” Grace explained. “And I would understand if it was a compulsion. Some serial murderers do have compulsive preferences when it comes to victim type. But if it were a compulsion, he’d be a purist about it. He wouldn’t deviate from his type—ever. He wouldn’t have killed Mr. Anderson. Our unsub could’ve easily waited until Mr. Anderson was out of the house—we know he stalks his victims. So why didn’t he just wait until she was alone, if he’s so obsessive about the women looking like me?”

  “So it’s another red herring?” Gavin asked.

  “To keep us from digging deeper. There’s another reason why he chose these people. We just have to find it.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’s our food,” Gavin said. “Let me get it. We’ll eat. And then we’ll get to work.”

  Chapter 17

  There was something incredibly intimate
about being in Grace’s home, eating with her on the enormous dove-gray linen couch that was way more comfortable than it looked.

  She’d come downstairs with her still-wet hair pushed over her shoulder, damp strands dipping into her eyes as she leaned over the laptop. With her hair down and wet, her face free of all makeup, and those glasses perched on her nose like some sort of adorable librarian, she looked different. Young. Innocent. Vulnerable.

  This was a version of her he’d never seen; gone was the FBI agent, gone was the crack shot, gone were the perfectly tailored clothes and bold slash of lipstick she wielded like weapons.

  This was just her—relaxed, at home, comfortable.

  She’d never been more beautiful.

  Until she stole the last piece of chicken satay, and then he had to declare her his sworn enemy as she laughed and snapped the skewer in half, then handed one piece over.

  But eventually, the last delicious mouthful was gone, and they got to work. Gavin took the stack of files on the Andersons while Grace combed through Janice’s and Nancy’s lives. She preferred to sit on the floor, her legs crossed and the papers spread out in front of her in a pattern only she could understand.

  “Where did Megan Anderson go to college?” she asked.

  “Reed, in Oregon,” Gavin answered.

  “Damn, I was thinking maybe he was picking women from the Ivies—Nancy went to Yale and Janice went to Harvard . . .” She glanced down at the paper in front of her. “Janice was a sorority girl and everything.”

  “This . . . what we’re doing,” he said.

  “Victimology,” she supplied.

  “Right.” Of course she had a fancy word for it. “You really think it can tell us something we don’t know about our unsub? It’s not like this guy has been subtle.”

  “That’s why I’m sure there’s an answer in the victims,” Grace explained. “What he’s been doing? The different methodologies of killing, leaving the diamond earrings, sending us these misogynistic messages through his positioning of the corpses? That’s all deliberate. It’s a narrative he’s trying tell us. He’s in control of it. He’s all about messages. There’s a connection between his victims. He wants me to find it.”

  “Another piece of his puzzle,” Gavin said, staring at the papers.

  “Not just that,” Grace said. “He thinks he’s in total control, but they never are. Someone can be the coldest damn killer in the world, the most experienced, and they’ll still be making choices they’re sure aren’t part of a behavior pattern, but they are. All it takes is the right profiler to see it. The right profiler sees all.” She gestured at the sea of papers in front of her. “I need to see all.”

  He felt the urgency behind her words. It mirrored his own. “Well, I’ve got the Andersons’ schedule narrowed down,” he said. “They were on a green cruise—those big boats that look like pirate ships and are all wind powered—for a month. They’d been home for only two weeks when he killed them.”

  “That’s our window,” Grace said immediately. “So we need to cross-reference all their schedules and the GPS coordinates from their phones.” She grabbed her laptop and typed furiously for a second. “He chose them and stalked them during those two weeks,” she said. “Nancy was probably the easiest, because he could just tail her from her office.”

  “She pretty much went only from work to home,” Gavin said, reaching over and scanning the hard copy of Nancy’s GPS coordinates they’d pulled from her phone. It was the same two, over and over. “Except here,” he said, tapping a date within their two-week window, where it deviated. “Where is this?” He pulled up his phone and typed the coordinates in. “Car wash,” he said.

  Grace’s head snapped toward him. “Car wash?” she echoed. “Janice had a car wash receipt in her pocket.”

  “Was it Leckie’s Motors?” Gavin asked.

  “Yes,” Grace said, her eyes lighting up. She entered the coordinates into the app she had analyzing the GPS coordinates and then let out a triumphant laugh. “Got you!” she hissed at the computer, and then her cheeks turned red as she realized Gavin had witnessed her little moment of glee.

  “Let me guess, the Andersons took their car to get washed at Leckie’s too.”

  “A week before he killed them,” Grace said, pointing at the screen. “He’s using the car wash to find his victims.”

  It made sense, and Gavin said as much.

  “High turnaround rate, people are waiting around as the employees clean the cars—he’d blend right in,” Grace said.

  “You think he’s posing as a customer?”

  Grace shook her head. “He’s got to be an employee,” she said. “It’s so much easier to go unnoticed. Plus, it gives him access to the cars. One look at the registration in their glove compartment while he’s vacuuming out the passenger seat, and he’s got their address.”

  Damn, she was right. They’d made it easy for him. “And then he stalks them until he’s got the rest of their routine down.”

  Grace glanced up at the Georgian clock on her mantelpiece. It was nearly midnight. “I’ll leave a message for Paul,” she said. “There’ll be no one at the car wash this late. There’s no use in going in now—we might tip him off.”

  “He could be working tomorrow,” Gavin agreed, the wheels of his mind turning. “Best to just show up, use the shock factor. If he’s working, he’ll start getting really nervous once we talk to his boss and start going through employment records. Might make him easier to spot.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” Grace said, getting up from her seat on the carpet, raising her arms to stretch. The movement lifted her loosely knit sweater, a tantalizing glimpse of curved waistline appearing. “I want to get this guy before he has a chance to use that fourth pair of earrings,” she said.

  “We will,” Gavin said, even though he knew it was foolish to make that kind of promise. But he couldn’t help it, not with her. Not when she had that look in her eyes—guilt mixed with worry.

  She took on each victim as a burden and a responsibility—each case not only a puzzle to be solved but a personal mission of justice for each one. She walked through their lives, even lived them alongside their spirits in a way, so that she could bring their killers to justice. And at the same time, she was putting herself in their killers’ heads, figuring out every single murderous, perverted urge, every move that brought them closer to another kill.

  It was a heavy weight to carry. He admired the hell out of her for carrying it with such, well, grace.

  God, she was turning him all sappy. He found himself not really caring, because she was here, and so was he.

  The moment—where her eyes were on his, their bodies instinctually angled toward each other, even though they were standing feet apart—lingered a little too long, kicking up the tension in the room tenfold. Gavin shifted from foot to foot, waiting.

  It had to be Grace who made the first move this time. He had to be sure she wanted this as much as he did.

  “We should go to sleep,” she said softly, unable to tear her gaze from him.

  “You’re right,” he said, despite that being the last thing he wanted.

  He wanted to keep her up all night. He wanted to spend hours in her bed, between her thighs, until she didn’t know any words but please and his name. He wanted to fall asleep curled around her and wake up in the morning with her ridiculous fairy-tale-princess hair tangled all over his face.

  She licked her lips, a tiny, innocent movement that shouldn’t have been erotic, but God, it was. He shifted again—for different reasons this time.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” she said, turning and walking toward the stairs.

  “I’ll do one more door and window check,” he said, even though he’d done one an hour ago.

  As Grace’s footsteps faded upstairs, he went through the downstairs of the house, checking all the windows and the front and the back door, which led down to a small greenbelt. He was grateful for the time, trying to gather himself
, to calm his raging . . . need.

  He made his way upstairs, about to turn toward the guest room when something down the hall caught his eye.

  She was leaning against what had to be the door to her bedroom, her palms pressed against the wood, waiting.

  Excitement surged through him, his blood going hot, his cock hardening as they just stared at each other from across the hall.

  A silent challenge. She knew exactly what she was doing.

  But he didn’t want to play games.

  He just wanted her—all of her. No hiding. No artifice.

  And no waking up without her in the morning.

  “Grace,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. That’s probably how she wanted to play it, let the need consume them, gasps and moans the only sound. Words complicated things.

  Feelings complicated things.

  He closed the space between them, and his hands traced the curve of her jaw, his lips brushing just barely over hers.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked, his hips pressing into hers so she could feel what she’d done to him. Her fingers fisted in his shirt, her gasp of breath feathering against his lips, making him even harder. “Invite me in, Grace,” he rumbled against her cheek, his stubble scraping against her skin, eliciting a shiver, “and you get everything you want.”

  He knew it was a request she was helpless to deny.

  Chapter 18

  Grace expected him to fall on her like a starving man, to press her against the wall of her bedroom and ravish her. She’d been picturing something hungry and maybe a little rough, in the good way.

  But instead he closed her bedroom door behind him and leaned against it, looking at her with those brown eyes.

  “Come here,” he said.

  Normally, she would protest at the request. She’d roll her eyes. She’d make the man come to her.

  But there was nothing normal about her and Gavin. Not then and not now.