by J. R. Ward
Stepping into the shower, he closed his eyes and let the spray fall down his head and shoulders and face. Soap. Rinse. Shampoo. Rinse.
He was standing in the steamy, wet heat when he felt the draft: Sure as if someone had opened the window by the toilet, the blast of air shot over the top of the plastic curtain and brushed across his skin. Goose bumps came when called, popping out across his chest and shooting down his legs and back.
The window hadn’t been opened, however.
And this was why he’d removed the glass wall of the shower and covered that built-in mirror over the sink. Those two things had been the only changes he’d made to the house, and the unimprovement had been for his own sanity. He’d been shaving for years without his reflection.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he said, closing his eyes and keeping them that way.
The draft swirled around his legs, feeling like hands roaming over his flesh, going higher, fondling his sex before hitting his abdomen and his pecs, up to his neck . . . his face. . . .
Cold hands ran through his hair—
“Leave me alone!” He threw out his arm and shoved the curtain aside. As warm air greeted him, he bore down at his core, trying to kick the intruder out, kill the connection.
Stumbling over to the counter, he braced his arms and leaned down, breathing hard and hating himself, hating this night, hating his life.
He knew damn well that it was possible, if you had multiple personality disorder, for a part of you to break free and act independently. Sufferers could be completely unaware of the actions their body had taken, even if it involved violence—
As that headache started kicking his temples like tires again, he cursed and dried off; then pulled on the flannel shirt and NYPD academy sweatpants he’d slept in the night before and left on the back of the toilet. He was about to go downstairs when a quick glance out the window held him in place.
There was a car parked across the street about two houses down.
He knew every vehicle in the neighborhood, all the trucks, vans, SUVs, sedans, and hybrids, and that shadow-colored, late-model American nothing-much was not on the list.
It was, however, exactly the kind of unmarked that the Caldwell Police Department used.
Reilly was having him surveilled. Good move—exactly what he would have done in her position.
Might even be her in the flesh.
Hitting the stairs, he hesitated at the front door, drawn to go out in his bare feet, because maybe she, or whoever it was, had some answers from the scene. . . .
With a curse, he pulled himself out of that bright idea and headed for the kitchen. There had to be something to eat in the cupboards. Had to be.
Pulling them open and finding a lot of shelf space and nothing more, he wondered exactly what grocery-fairy he thought had magically come and delivered food.
Then again he could just throw some ketchup on a pizza box and chow down. Probably good for his fiber intake.
Yum.
Two houses down from Detective DelVecchio’s, Reilly was behind the wheel and partially blinded.
“By all that is holy . . .” She rubbed her eyes. “Do you not believe in curtains?”
As she prayed for the image of a spectacularly naked colleague to fade from her retinas, she seriously rethought her decision to do the stakeout herself. She was exhausted, for one thing—or had been before she’d seen just about everything Veck had to offer.
Take out the just.
One bene was that she was really frickin’ awake now, thank you very much—she might as well have licked two fingers and shoved them into a socket: a full-frontal like that was enough to give her the perm she’d wanted back when she’d been thirteen.
Muttering to herself, she dropped her hands into her lap again. And gee whiz, as she stared at the dash, all she saw . . . was everything she’d seen.
Yeah, wow, on some men, no clothes was so much more than just naked.
And to think she’d almost missed the show. She’d parked her unmarked and just called in her position when the upstairs lights had gone on and she gotten a gander at the vista of a bedroom. Easing back into her seat, it hadn’t dawned on her exactly where the unobstructed view was going to take them both—she’d just been interested that it appeared to be nothing but a bald lightbulb on the ceiling of what had to be the master suite.
Then again, bachelor pad decorating tended to be either storage-unit crammed or Death Valley–barren.
Veck was obviously the Death Valley variety.
Except suddenly she hadn’t been thinking about interior decorating, because her suspect had stepped into the bathroom and flipped the switch.
Hellllllllo, big boy.
Ifont sio many ways to count.
“Stop thinking about it . . . stop thinking about—”
Closing her eyes again didn’t help: If she’d reluctantly noticed before how well he filled out his clothes, now she knew exactly why. He was heavily muscled, and given that he didn’t have any hair on his chest, there was nothing to obscure those hard pecs and that six-pack and the carved ridges that went over his hips.
Matter of fact, when it came to manscaping, all he had was a dark stripe that ran between his belly button and his . . .
You know, maybe size did matter, she thought.
“Oh, for chrissakes.”
In an attempt to get her brain focused on something, anything more appropriate, she leaned forward and looked out the opposite window. As far as she could tell, the house directly across from him had privacy shades across every available view. Good move, assuming he paraded around like that every night.
Then again, maybe the husband had strung those puppies up so that his wife didn’t get a case of the swoons.
Bracing herself, she glanced back at Veck’s place. The lights were off upstairs and she had to hope now that he was dressed and on the first floor, he stayed that way.
God, what a night.
She was still waiting for any evidence that came from the scene, but she’d made up her mind already about Kroner’s injuries. There were coyotes in those woods. Bears. Cats of the non–Meow Mix variety. Chances were good that the guy had come walking through there with the scent of dried blood on his clothes and something with four paws had viewed him as a Happy Meal. Veck could well have tried to step in and been shoved to the side. After all, he’d been rubbing his temples like he’d had pain there, and God knew head trauma had been known to cause short-term memory loss.
The lack of physical evidence on him supported the theory; that was for sure.
And yet . . .
God, that father of his. It was impossible not to factor him in even a little.
Like every criminal justice major, she’d studied Thomas DelVecchio Sr. as part of her courses—but she’d also spent considerable time on him in her deviant-psych classes. Veck’s dad was your classic serial killer: smart, cunning, committed to his “craft,” utterly remorseless. And yet, having watched videos of his interviews with police, he came across as handsome, compelling, and affable. Classy. Very non-monster.
But then again, like a lot of psychopaths, he’d cultivated an image and sustained it with care. He’d been very successful as a dealer of antiquities, although his establishment in that haughty, lofty world of money and privilege had been a complete self-invention. He’d come from absolutely nothing, but had had a knack for charming rich people—as well as a talent for going overseas and coming back with ancient artifacts and statues that were extremely marketable. It wasn’t until the killings had started to surface that his business practices came under scrutiny, and to this day, no one had any idea where he’d found the stuff he had—it was almost as if he’d had a treasure trove somewhere in the Middle East. He certainly hadn’t helped authorities sort things out, but what were they going to do to him? He was already on death row.
Not for much longer, though, evidently.
What had Veck’s mother been like—
The knock
on the window next to her head was like a shot ringing out, and she had her weapon palmed and pointed to the sound less than a heartbeat afterward.
Veck was standing in the street next to her car, his hands up, his wet hair glossy in the streetlights.
Lowering her weapon, she put her window down with a curse.
“Quick reflexes, Officer,” he murmured.
“Do you want to get shot, Detective?”
“I said your name. Twice. You were deep in thought.”
Thanks to what she’d seen in that bathroom, the flannel shirt and academy sweats he had on seemed eminently removable, the kind of duds that wouldn’t resist a shove up or a pull down. But come on, like she hadn’t seen every aisle in his grocery store already?
“You want my clothes now?” he said as he held up a trash bag.
“Yes, thank you.” She accepted the load through her window and put the things down on the floor. “Boots, too?”
As he nodded, he said, “Can I bring you some coffee? I don’t have much in my kitchen, but I think I can find a clean mug and I got instant.”
“Thanks. I’m okay.”
There was a pause. “There a reason you’re not looking me in the eye, Officer?”
I just saw you buck naked, Detective. “Not at all.” She pegged him right in the peepers. “You should get inside. It’s chilly.”
“The cold doesn’t bother me. You going to be here all night?”
“Depends.”
“On whether I am, right.”
“Yup.”
He nodded, and then glanced around casually like they were nothing but neighbors chatting about the weather. So calm. So confident. Just like his father.
“Can I be honest with you?” he said abruptly.
“You’d better be, Detective.”
“I’m still surprised you let me go.”
She ran her hands around the steering wheel. “May I be honest with you?”
“Yeah.”
“I let you go because I really don’t think you did it.”
“I was at the scene and I had blood on me.”
“You called nine-one-one, you didn’t leave, and that kind of death is very messy to perpetrate.”
“Maybe I cleaned up.”
“There wasn’t a shower in those woods as far as I saw.”
Do. Not. Think. Of. Him. Naked.
When he started to shake his head like he was going to argue, Reilly cut him off. “Why are you trying to convince me I’m wrong?”
That shut him up. At least for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “Are you going to feel safe tailing me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
For the first time, emotion bled through his cool expression, and her heart stopped: There was fear in his eyes, as if he didn’t trust himself.
“Veck,” she said softly, “is there anything I don’t know.”
He crossed his arms over that big chest of his and his weight went back and forth on his hips as if he were thinking. Then he hissed, and started rubbing his temple.
“I’ve got nothing,” he muttered. “Listen, just do us both a favor, Officer. Keep that gun close by.”
He didn’t look back as he turned and walked across the street.
He wasn’t wearing any shoes, she realized.
Putting up the window, she watched him go into the house and shut the door. Then the lights in the house went out, except for the hallway on the second floor.
Settling in, she eased down in her seat and stared at all those windows. Shortly thereafter, a massive shadow walked into the living room—or rather, appeared to be dragging something? Like a couch?
Then Veck sat down and his head disappeared as if he were stretching out on something.
It was almost like they were sleeping side by side. Well, except for the walls of the house, the stretch of scruffy spring lawn, the sidewalk, the asphalt, and the steel cage of her Crown Victoria.
Reilly’s lids drifted down, but that was a function of the angle of her head. She wasn’t tired and she wasn’t worried about falling asleep. She was wide-awake in the dark interior of the car.
And yet she reached over and hit the door-lock button.
Just in case.
CHAPTER 4
As the demon Devina wandered up and back across cold concrete, her path was not straight, but full of curves. Winding in and out of rows of bureaus, the discordant tick-tocking of hundreds of clocks drowned out the clip-clip of her Louboutins.
Everything had been given a place here, her collection safely moved into the basement of this two-story office building. The location was perfect, just outside of Caldwell’s downtown, and to appear legitimate and uncontroversial, she projected an illusion that a human resources firm took up the space above where she was pacing: As far as people were aware, a hustling, bustling business had rented the place to accommodate its expansion.
Stupid humans. As if in this economy anyone was hiring or could afford hand-holding when it came to filling jobs.
Pausing by a Hepplewhite bow front that had been made in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1801, she ran her hand over the mahogany top. The original finish was still on the piece, but then again, she’d kept the thing safe from sun and water damage since she’d bought it over two hundred years before. In its drawers were baskets full of buttons and rows of spectacles and jumbles of rings in boxes. The other bureaus had similar objects, all personal items fashioned out of various metals.
Aside from her mirror, this collection of hers was the most precious thing she had. It was the tie to her souls down below, the tethering security she needed when she felt insecure or stressed-out here on earth.
As she did now.
The problem tonight, however, was that for the first time since she’d started hoarding aeons ago, she was not calmed, nor reassured, nor eased. Walking around this repository of objects, she was summarily unaided by the addiction that had long proved to e so useful.
And what seemed even worse? This evening should have been “a seminal moment,” as her therapist called them, a time to center herself and savor her accomplishments: She had won the last round against Jim Heron, and even though he and Adrian and Eddie had infiltrated her previous lair, she had safely gotten her things installed in this new, secure facility.
She should have been fucking ecstatic.
But shit-on-a-shingle, even the scent of fresh death drifting over from the bathroom gave her no pleasure: To protect her mirror, she needed so much more than what ADT or Brinks monitoring had to offer, and the new sacrificial virgin she’d strung up over her tub was bleeding out nicely—getting ready to be useful, not just decorative.
Everything was going her way, at least on the surface, and yet she felt so . . .
Ennui, she believed it was called . . . and what a lovely name for such a crappy, unmotivated state.
Maybe she was just exhausted from setting everything up after the move. She had about forty bureaus full of acquisitions from all eras of humanity, and whenever she was forced to reestablish herself in another place, she was compelled to touch every single object one by one, reconnecting with the essence of the victim that lingered in the metal. She had yet to start on the contact ritual, however, and was a little surprised at herself. Usually, she could focus on nothing else until she fractured time, stepped into the space between minutes, and completed the lengthy process.
She supposed her therapist would have seen this as progress, considering the compulsion was typically prompt and undeniable: These precious items, from ancient Egypt to Gothic France to the Civil War and the present here in the States, were what tied her to home when she was so far away.
Still, there was no panicky rush to snuggle up with what was hers for eternity. All she seemed to want to do was mope around and pace.
It was all Jim Heron’s fault.
He was just too defiant. Dominant. Extraordinary.
He had been chosen by her and that supercilious sonofabitch Nigel because Hero
n was equal parts good and evil—and as she had learned through the ages, when it came to mankind, evil always won. In fact, she’d assumed that drawing him over to her side would be nothing but a tedious bore, the kind of thing she had done to men and women since time had cast its first hour so very long ago.
Instead . . . it was she who had been sucked in and seduced.
Heron was just so . . . unownable. Even when he had turned himself over to her and she had been playing with him, her minions swarming him, her true nature revealed . . . he had been unbowed, unbending, unyielding.
And that strength made him unattainable.
She had never known that before. From anyone.
The thing was, it was in her very nature to take over: She was a perfect parasite, niggling her way in and replicating her essence until what she had entered became hers forever.
Heron’s challenge to her was intoxicating, a slap in the face, a breath of fresh air. But it also seemed to deflate the importance of everything else.
Pulling open a drawer, she took out a thin gold bracelet that had a little dove charm dangling off of it. The inscription on the inside was in cursive and just precious. From parents to a daughter. With a date from the year before. Blah, blah, blah.
She hated the name Cecilia. She really did.
That irrelevant virgin . . . what a thorn in her side. The purpose of that Barten girl had been to protect the mirror. Now the little shit had some kind of connection with Jim—
Just as she was going to crush the fragile memento, a waft of warmth went through her, as if a lover’s touch had passed not just over her flesh, but through to her very bones.
Jim.
It was Jim. Calling to her.
Ditching the bracelet, she hip-checked the drawer closed and ran down the row to an ornate floor-length mirror that functioned only to check her appearance. As she went, she changed her form, assuming the body of a gorgeous brunette who had gravity-defying breasts and an ass with more ledge than a bookshelf.
Fluffing her hair, she smoothed her black skirt, and decided the hem was too long. Willing it upward, she pivoted and flashed her smooth thighs and perfect calves.