by J. R. Ward
He didn’t mind a hard fight, as long as it was a fair one—and this business with Devina going outside the rules was getting ridiculous. Meanwhile, Jim had all but sold himself to that demon for information, and to top it off? Nigel, their coach, didn’t seem in a big hurry to throw a protest upstairs.
The whole thing sucked ass.
Reaching down, he snagged the badge and shoved it in his pocket. When Jim looked like he was going to protest, it was a case of whatever-buddy: “Sorry. You’re going to need some time before the stank is fully out of you. Touch this now? We’re going to have the same problem all over again, only worse.” He pointed his finger right into Eddie’s face. “And fuck. You.”
’Cause it was obvious there was going to be a round of no-you-don’ts from the angel.
“I’m just going to take the badge back.” Kinda. “DelVecchio wakes up with it go and he’s going to feel like he’s losing more of his mind. You want that? Good. Glad you agree.”
Before either one of them could tune up again, he went into his and Eddie’s room, and stripped down—with a struggle. Leathers were tough to get off in the first place, but with the lemony wash? Like frickin’ glue.
“Swear to me,” Eddie said from the doorway, “that you will not touch him. In any way.”
Adrian pulled on a fresh pair of fatigues and snagged the badge from his other pants. “Swear to God.”
The sound of someone trying to cough his liver up was exactly the conversation ender they needed. Jim was in for a hell of a ride, and although Eddie didn’t look like nursemaid material, the bastard was great at it—something Ad had learned firsthand.
“I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.” Adrian smiled. “Trust me.”
Eddie just rolled his eyes and went back into the other room, no doubt to hold a wastepaper basket under Jim’s heaving.
In the blink of an eye, Adrian was on the front lawn of DelVecchio’s little slice of home-sweet-home. The wind had come up and was blowing from the north, and the cold, crystal-clear Canadian air that came from over the border tingled in his sinuses.
No reason to knock. He just shifted himself into the living room, where DelVecchio was still asleep on the couch.
Placing the badge on the floor next to the guy’s gun and holster, Adrian knelt down and reached out a hand. Passing his palm over DelVecchio’s face, he lulled the man into an even deeper sleep, soothing the poor bastard.
The resulting trance revealed the truth: unfettered by consciousness, the extent of Devina’s possession was obvious: she was all over every inch of him.
They might be too late already, Ad thought as he started to circle his hand over the guy’s head.
“Hey, my man,” he whispered. “I want you to go back to last night. Into the woods. Go back to the woods. Into the woods by the motel. In and among the pine trees. You’ve parked that bike—which, P.S., would it kill you to go old-school? A Beamer? Really? You might as well be straddling a Cuisinart.” When DelVecchio’s brows twitched, Ad figured a debate on motorcycles could wait. “You’ve parked that Eurotrash POS and you’re walking through the forest. You’re looking for Kroner. You’re waiting for Kroner. Tell me what you’re doing.”
Ad kept up with circling. “Talk to me. What are you doing—”
“I’m going . . . to kill him.”
The words were soft and spoken through a mouth that barely moved.
“With what,” Ad prompted. “Tell me everything, buddy.”
“My . . . knife. I have . . . my knife with me and I’m . . . waiting. . . .” DelVecchio frowned again, but this time it seemed more like he was staring off into the distance even though his eyes were closed. “I know he’s going to show.”
“And when he does—what do you do?”
While Ad waited for the answer, he prayed for a miracle. He’d seen the report on the news so he knew that someone had done a serious number on that Kroner character. If somehow it could be anyone other than Veck, at least they’d be headed in a better direction.
“I palm my blade . . . and I step forward. I’m . . . going to kill him. With my knife.” The guy’s right hand twitched at his thigh, then formed a fist as if gripping a dagger. “I’m going to—There’s someone else here.”
DelVecchio held his breath and didn’t move at all on the couch, just as he must have done out in the woods.
“Who.” When there was no reply, Adrian wanted to shake the guy’s box of marbles to clear up the cognitive jam, but instead just continued circling his palm. “Who is it?”
DelVecchio seemed to struggle at that point, shaking his head from side to side and wincing. His hand crawled up his chest and rubbed his temple. “I can’t . . . remember . . .”
Someone’s been inside his chrome dome already, Adrian thought. Patching over the memories.
Fucking hell. There was only one species on the planet that could do that—and was also capable of tearing a human male apart with its teeth—
“Vampire.”
As the word came out of DelVecchio’s piehole, Adrian cursed. Yup, great. Just what they needed at this already crowded party.
With the way things were going, who was next? The Easter Bunny and the Tooth-frickin’-Fairy?
Nah, not their luck. More like Wolfman Jack and the Mummy.
CHAPTER 14
When the following morning came, Reilly woke up right before her alarm clock went off, and it was hard to know whether that was a good or a bad thing.
She’d been in the middle of an erotic dream, one that had put her and Veck back on the kitchen table. Except there had been no pizza interruptus this time. She’d ended up totally naked, with Veck on top of her, the two of them on a wild ride that—
Her clock’s buzzer started yapping like a Yorkie.
“Shut. Up.”
As she silenced the damn noise, she decided, “good thing” on the early wake up. Even though her body felt cheated, those were hardly the images she needed to go into HQ with.
Shower. Blow-dry. Dress—with white cotton underneath her clothes, thank you very much.
Grabbing her travel mug, she was in her car and heading into work just in time to hit the traffic on the Northway. And what do you know, being stuck in gridlock with hundreds of other morning commuters was exactly the kind of forced introspection she didn’t need.
God, mothers were right about so much: Brush your teeth and floss before bed even when you’re exhausted; wear a hat when it’s cold even if you think you look like an idiot; eat your veggies even if they’re boring, because you need the fiber and the vitamins.
And don’t get involved with coworkers even if they are hot as hell and have magical hands and lips.
As she rolled along at a snail’s pace, her mind rode a seesaw that tilted between what had been playing through it as she’d woken up, and the nightmare that had been last evening when the sex had stopped short and sanity returned.
Talk about your polar opposites—
When her phone went off, the first thing she thought was, Please let it not be my mom. The pair of them were close but they’d never had a psychic connection, and now was not the morning to start.
Except the screen wasn’t showing home. “Detective de la Cruz?” she said as she answered.
“Morning, Officer. How are you?”
Frustrated. On so many levels. “Stuck in traffic. Yourself?”
“Same crap, different direction.”
“You have coffee?”
“Better believe it. You?”
“Yup. So this is almost like being at the office.”
There was a sipping sound and then a swallow. “So I have news.”
“And here I thought you were calling just to say good morning.”
“Kroner’s turned around.”
Her grip on the wheel tightened. “Define ‘turned around.’ ”
“His doctors just called me and they’re floored. Sometime last night, everything changed. His vitals are steady and strong, an
d get this: He’s frickin’ conscious.”
“Holy . . . I have to talk to him.”
“They’re not prepared to accommodate a lot of visitors, but they’re allowing us to send one representative over there. And it’s my recommendation that you not be the one who goes in.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You are his target. White woman, in her twenties—”
“I’m late twenties.”
“—and so I think we could get farther with a man—”
“I can handle him.”
“I want him to talk, not get distracted by all the things he wants to do to you.”
Well, wasn’t that a gruesome thought.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t get with him. It’s just this could be our one and only shot to hear his side of things. I don’t trust things that can’t be explained, and his doctor doesn’t have a clue why the bastard is still alive—much less awake.”
Reilly cursed, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t see his point. Besides, he wasn’t a chauvinist.
Then again, there could be another angle—although she felt like a shit for bringing it up. “Any chance you don’t want me to hear what he has to say about DelVecchio?”
“I am not protecting Veck. If he committed a crime, he will be dealt with just like anyone else—trust me. And I will let you know immediately when my guy gets out so you can follow up. Okay?”
It was hard to doubt the logic, and impossible to doubt the man.
“I want to know everything.”
“You will, Officer. I swear it on my mother.”
“Call me.”
“Soon.”
As Reilly hung up, she tossed the phone onto the empty seat beside her. The good news, she supposed, was that they were going to find out what the hell had happened in those woods—theoretically. Serial killers were not necessarily known for candor when they were finally caught.
Changing lanes and putting her directional signal on, she got ready to take her exit. And once she was off the highway, she made better time, although it turned out the delay with the traffic had been a good thing. When the graceless heft of headquarters finally loomed up ahead, she was ready to get to work—and see Veck.
They’d had one slipup. Fine. But it didn’t have to be repeated, and she wasn’t going to let it affect the job she did. There was a lot at stake, and she was not about to be distracted or get sloppy and unprofessional just because she was attracted to her partner.
Sissy Barten, and the other victims, deserved so much better than that. And the likes of Kroner required nothing less.
“You look like shit.”
Veck glanced up from his office computer’s screen. Bails was standing in front of his desk with a satisfied expression on his face and his jacket in his hand.
“Thanks.” Veck eased back and wanted a cigarette. “And you look like someone just gave you—”
“A blow job, right?”
“I was going to say ‘a winning lottery ticket.’ What’s doing?”
“Guess who’s wakey-wakey.”
“Given the BJ reference, I don’t want to know.”
“Kroner.”
Veck sat forward. “Impossible.”
“Well, then, de la Cruz is talking out of his ass, because he just told me to go down and see what the bastard has to say. Guess he rallied last night.”
Veck burst out of his chair before he knew his thighs had gone to work. But it was a waste of vertical impulse: He was going nowhere. At least not in an official capacity.
Veck parked it again. “Fuck.”
Bails leaned in, his face dead serious. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll tell you everything. Which reminds me—you won’t believe the evidence taken from Kroner’s impounded truck. The cataloging alone is going to take another day, at least—there’s so much of the stuff. Cross-matching it to victims? You’re talking a year, probably. At least the FBI is being cool and actually working with us instead of against us.”
Shit, he needed to check in with that agent.
Veck took a suck off his coffee mug. “I can’t believe Kroner’s alive.”
“Miracles happen.”
“I guess you could call it that.”
“It is. He’s going to set you free, my friend. Trust me.”
Veck wasn’t at all sure of that, but whatever. Offering his knuckles for a pound, he said, “Go get ’em, brother.”
“You got it. I’ll call you when I’m through.”
As the guy turned to leave, Reilly appeared in the doorway. She looked composed, professional, serious . . . all those things that someone in a business environment should be. Between one blink and the next, however, he saw her undone on her kitchen table, head back, breasts exposed, panty hose off, and skirt around her waist.
Veck rubbed his aching head. He’d woken up with a pounder at the temples, the vague tendrils of a terrifying dream lingering in his mind—and that wasn’t the half of it. He’d had the eerie conviction that someone had been in his house during the night. He’d checked doors and windows, though—all good; no break-ins. Nothing out of place, either.
After Bails nodded to Reilly and took off, she walked over. “Good morning.”
“Morning.” Veck glanced around. Nobody was paying any attention to them, and that seemed like a miracle—he felt like they both had neon signs around their chests that read, WE HOOKED UP LAST NIGHT. But apparently only he and Reilly knew the damn things were there, because she was surreptitiously looking at his fellow detectives, too.
“You ready to go through the Barten file?” she said, as she put her things on the desk next to his and handed him a printout.
The pages were neat, bundled, clipped at the corner. Clearly reprinted.
Swiveling his chair toward her, he wondered what had happened to the two reports from last night. No doubt she’d had to throw them away after they’d been crushed underneath two heaving bodies and then shuffled off onto the floor.
He rubbed his head again. “You hear about Kroner?”
“De la Cruz called me.”
“I’m surprised you’re not going in to interview the guy.”
“Oh, I will. You can bet your life on it.” She unclipped her stack and spread out the various stapled sections. “So as I was reading through this, something bothered me.”
He caught himself staring at her mouth and wanted to kick his own ass: Not only was it inappropriate, but it felt disrespectful.
“What’s that?” I’m sorry about last night. “Where are you in the report?”
“The anonymous tip line section. Page two—there was a caller who said he saw Sissy get into a black car at the Hannaford.”
“Got it.” I shouldn’t have put you in this position. “Yeah, no follow-up, though. Guy didn’t leave his name.”
“I’ve been thinking about what her mother said about her. Sissy doesn’t strike me as the type to do something like that. She was not someone who would get into the car of a stranger.”
“Maybe the tip was wrong, or a lie.” I wish I could tell you I don’t want you, but I can’t. “Wouldn’t be the first time, and with no follow-up possible?”
Now her eyes fully met his. “But that’s the thing. Why weren’t there other people who saw her after she walked out the door into the parking lot? She left her car there, right? Why didn’t anyone else see what happened when she left—especially if there was a struggle? There were employees retrieving carts, customers coming and going. If we assume Sissy had to be forced into a vehicle, someone should have seen a struggle, or something out of the ordinary.”
Scanning the other tips, he nodded. “Yeah, and the layout of that supermarket . . . there’s nothing across the street or to either side, really. It’s set off the road, so it’s not as if she would go walking off anywhere.”
“Someone should have seen something.”
Christ, it was almost like what had happened to him with Kroner: nothing but aftermath . . . surrounding a wh
ole lot of blank hole.
Maybe there was something in the Caldwell water that was making people forget.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, reordering his pile. “And tau, b one step at a time.”
As he thought about Bails talking to Kroner, he took out his cell phone and put it on the desk in case the guy called in.
Sissy Barten definitely fit the profile of the killer’s victims, and was one of only two reported missing persons in the city who did: Kroner had never gone for males, children, or anyone over thirty, and the other girl who was on the list had been reported as gone almost a month ago, so she might well be outside the time scope.
Sissy was it, Veck had a feeling.
Sissy was his way back into the Kroner case.
CHAPTER 15
“But I didn’t touch him.”
Jim was naked and shaving in his bathroom as the argument that had started up between Ad and Eddie hours ago continued next door in their room. It was kind of like having a TV on in the background—only their version of commercial interruptions were showers, dressing, breakfast runs, etc.
He got the impression the pair of them had done the back-and-forth forever. They were damn good at it, too . . . very creative. And to think he’d once been impressed with his own F-bombing.
“Next time, be more specific,” Adrian added. “You can’t smack my ass on this one.”
“Did you stop to think that what happened to Jim could have gotten into you? There was no one to help you.”
“I didn’t fucking touch him!”
Dog was ringside for the show, sitting in the open connector, his scruffy head going left and right as one of the boys spoke and the other followed up. The little guy seemed perfectly happy to just hang and play witness to the volleying. Maybe he thought it was the live version of an Animal Planet show; who knew.
Shaking his head, Jim braced his palms on the counter and leaned into the mirror. Last night’s go-around with that badge had been a wake-up call. Devina had tricks and minefields he still had to learn about . . . and there was no question that Veck was sucked up into all this—