by Gayle Wilson
“He saw you because…he was trailing me? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“You have a better explanation?”
She didn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that because it terrified her. “Maybe he’s figured out your pattern.”
“My pattern?”
“You show up wherever he’s operating. Don’t you think he’s smart enough to figure that out by now?”
“Except I haven’t. I was in Detroit where my sister was killed. And then not again until now. Not until this one.”
“But…you worked with the task force,” she said, trying to remember what Bingham had told her.
“I talked to them. Because of Makaela, I had some credibility. In any case, they were willing to meet with me.”
The “credibility” he had just mentioned might also have come from his background. Even the detective had seemed impressed with that.
“Then why now? Why here?”
“Because they were in on this one early. And because someone at the Bureau was willing to call me.”
If he really hadn’t been on the scene of the murders before, then he was probably right. The only thing that would have attracted the killer’s attention to him was the fact he’d been following her. And in order for the killer to know that…
“He’s been following me,” she said softly.
Sean didn’t respond. Not verbally. But she could tell from his expression that’s what he believed.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, clinging to the truth she’d reiterated over and over. She’d given an interview that was supposed to deal with holiday depression. In response to an unexpected question, she’d made some general statement about sociopaths. How could that have caused a murderer to come after her?
She could appeal to the police for protection. With the entire city to watch, and without any kind of proof…
Of course, there was the writing on her car. Sean was the one who’d suggested she tell the cops about it. Not that it had done any good.
They hadn’t taken it seriously. No one had. Even Gary had thought the message was a joke.
“So you’re it? You’re my only hope?”
He didn’t react to the sarcasm. At least not with anger. Another emotion moved behind those blue eyes instead, but she didn’t know him well enough to be able to identify it.
“Look—”
“Then do it right,” she interrupted. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
His eyes narrowed. He tilted his head, as if unsure of what he’d just heard. “What?”
“I’ll pay you. To protect me. That way we both get what we want.”
The side-to-side motion of his head had begun before she finished. His mouth opened, as if he intended to argue, and then he closed it.
She could almost see him thinking. If he were as bright as she thought, he would arrive at the conclusion she just had.
They wanted the same thing. He wanted to catch the man who had killed his sister. And if the Inquisitor really was stalking her, she wanted someone to stop him. Why they shouldn’t be working together—
“You want to hire me to protect you?”
“All I’m suggesting is that it’s to our mutual benefit to work together. And that I’m willing to pay you very well to do what you planned to do all along.”
Ten
Sean tried to think of something discouraging to tell her. Something that would make the arrangements she’d just suggested ridiculous. Only, there wasn’t anything.
He had been keeping an eye on her in the hope the killer was stalking her. This afternoon he’d been given proof that what he had hoped for was a reality.
So why wasn’t he jumping on her proposal with the eagerness it deserved? She was offering him access to her every move and asking nothing in return.
If the killer had come after her while Sean had her under surveillance, he would have intervened. He would never have let Makaela’s murderer do to another woman what he’d done to her. Not if it was in his power to prevent it.
Besides, he hadn’t started this with the intent of getting proof to convict this bastard. If he found him, there would be no need for a trial.
“If he knew I was watching you 24/7, it might drive him off.”
He didn’t really believe it was that simple. Just as he didn’t believe that the killer’s victims were chosen at random.
For what it was worth, that the Inquisitor wasn’t strictly opportunistic was a conclusion the task force had also come to. They hadn’t gone public with that belief on the theory that it might make local law enforcement less vigilant, something nobody wanted.
“So that I’d no longer be a target? Forgive me if I say that, from my perspective,” Jenna said, “that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
At least she was honest. Besides, the bastard already knew he was here. It was a given, then, that he also knew he’d been following her.
“It’s obvious he doesn’t care if you know he spotted you,” she went on. “He would never have called you if he did.”
“He wouldn’t have been able to resist. There’s a certain one-upsmanship that the FBI mentions in its profile. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.”
“He’s smart enough to have eluded everyone for this long.”
“A lot of that’s been luck. The locals not knowing what they were dealing with until it was too late. No database of organized knowledge about him. All of which has now changed.”
“And his own intelligence,” she reiterated stubbornly. “Don’t sell him short.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Doctor?”
It pissed him off that she was telling him how to think about Makaela’s killer. He’d spent weeks studying every particle of information about those murders that he could get his hands on. Months working his way into the confidence of the people on the task force, the people who had the expertise Jenna Kincaid had admitted she didn’t possess. Now, after reading the local papers, she was pretending to be some kind of expert on what this guy was, as well as on what he was likely to do in any situation.
“Absolutely a professional opinion. Mine and the Bureau’s. According to them, he’s highly organized. Careful. Methodical. Repetitious. And because of that, he’s gotten away with fourteen murders in the past seven years.”
“Fourteen that we know of,” he corrected.
“All the more reason to credit him with having a very good brain.”
“I don’t ‘credit’ him with anything.” He repeated her word, mocking it.
“Then you won’t get him. Not if you refuse to treat him with the respect his intellect deserves.”
“What he deserves—”
“Nobody’s arguing that he’s a Boy Scout. You can believe he’s as evil as you want because he is. All I’m saying is that you discount his intelligence at your peril.” Her pupils dilated suddenly, her mouth remaining open after the last word.
He could read in her face the realization she’d just made. Whatever mistakes he made in dealing with the Inquisitor would not be at his peril, but at hers.
If he agreed to do what she’d asked, that’s what he’d be risking. Not just his chance at avenging Makaela’s death, but the life of another woman.
A woman who, in spite of his intentions, had become real to him. Too real. Someone he’d talked to. Someone who, despite everything he’d said that first day, he’d come to respect.
She had guts. Enough to challenge him at every turn, even before she had known who he was or what he was doing. As she had when he’d called her. And last night in the parking lot.
The question was: Did she have the courage to undertake the game she was proposing? It was one thing to acknowledge intellectually that a killer was out to get you, to “slice and dice” you, as she had so graphically phrased it.
It was something very different to deal on a daily basis with the idea on a visceral level. To admit to the possibility that someone really wanted to torture yo
u to death. To make you scream in endless, mindless agony.
Just as the woman he’d listened to tonight had screamed.
He had almost forgotten why he’d come down to the police station. There was another victim out there. Another woman in that madman’s hands. As he stood here bargaining with Jenna Kincaid for her safety, that woman, whoever she was, was suffering the same brutal torture his sister had. The rage he’d felt when he viewed Makaela’s body roared through him, as powerful, and as painful, as it had been then.
“I need to talk to Bingham,” he said, turning away.
She put her hand on his arm to stop him. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Sorry. That’s not why I came. That’s not what I do.”
“Protecting someone? But you could, couldn’t you?” For the first time there was a note of pleading in her voice. “You think you have the skills to stop him. A man who’s murdered all those people.”
That wasn’t a matter of “belief.” He knew he had those skills. Just as he knew from experience that he could kill.
Especially this man.
“Yes.”
“The same skills required to protect someone.”
“Look, I can’t guarantee—”
“I understand that. Believe me. If he is targeting me…” She took a breath, allowing the sentence to trail. When she began again, it was something different. “All I’m asking is that you try. I’ll pay whatever you want, including expenses.”
It wasn’t something he even had to think about. He had prepared for this mission, and that had included making sure he had the resources to carry it out. He didn’t need—or want—her money.
“There are some things that aren’t for sale, Dr. Kincaid. And some people.”
He could tell from the change in her expression that she knew she’d made a mistake. Apparently she was a good enough therapist to realize she shouldn’t have offered him money. Not for anything connected to his sister’s murder.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t good enough to know that the next incentive she tried wasn’t going to be any more successful.
“Then I’ll get that restraining order,” she said. “You may have friends on the task force, but this is my town. I’ve lived here all my life. I have friends, too. Some of them very well connected. I promise you I’ll do everything in my power to keep you away from me. I’ll lie if I have to so that the police will offer me around-the-clock protection from him. But it will effectively be from you as well.”
As threats went, this one wasn’t all that impressive. In this situation, the locals would be spread too thin to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance, no matter who she knew.
He could still keep an eye on her, even if the cops beefed up their patrols around her apartment. If she got some judge to sign an order to make him keep his distance, he wouldn’t obey it. And this time she’d never know he was there.
Just as she would never have known if he hadn’t felt obligated to tell her that she’d made herself a target. As he had acknowledged before, that was a mistake.
“If you’ll give me your word that you’ll do the best you can to protect me,” she said, her voice persuasive, “then I’ll help you get what you want. I’ll help you get your sister’s murderer.”
“Makaela. Her name was Makaela.”
“Makaela,” she repeated. “I’ll help you. Just please…do this. For me. And for Makaela.”
She was using his sister’s death to try and get what she wanted. That should have made him more determined than ever to do this his way.
Still, he couldn’t deny that on some level she had gotten to him. Maybe because he really believed he was the best hope she had. Maybe the only hope.
He would wonder later what he would have told her if his cell hadn’t rung. Restraining his inclination to curse the interruption, he took the phone out of his jacket pocket and flipped open the case. It was halfway to his ear when he remembered the phone call this afternoon.
The bastard couldn’t have this number.
Of course, he would never have imagined that the killer could track him to the hotel where he was staying, either.
If you hadn’t given yourself away by approaching Jenna Kincaid, he wouldn’t have.
Forcing his hand to complete the motion it had begun, he pressed the phone to his ear. He waited a couple of seconds, making sure he could trust his voice to pronounce the necessary word without trembling. “Hello.”
“Ray Bingham, Sergeant Murphy. Where are you?”
“About fifteen feet from your office.”
“Then I’ll open the door for you.”
The connection was broken, leaving him once more with the sound of a dial tone in his ear. He lowered the cell, closing it before he shoved it into his pocket.
“Bingham?” Jenna asked.
“He got impatient.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, the intensity of the conversation they had before the interruption seeming to weigh on them both. She didn’t ask him again, and because he’d had no good answer, he chose not to return to the question.
“I thought you were coming in to see me, Sergeant Murphy.”
They turned to find the detective watching them from the end of the hall. He looked confused, but neither of them offered an explanation for what they’d been doing out here.
Almost unconsciously Sean glanced down at her again. In the last few seconds she had somehow managed to regain her composure.
Her eyes met his unflinchingly. At least they weren’t pleading with him to save her life anymore. And before they could, he stepped past her, walking toward the place where Ray Bingham waited.
“You should probably hear this, too, Dr. Kincaid,” the detective said.
Sean’s expression must have revealed his frustration over that invitation. As he approached, Bingham said under his breath, “She’s gonna hear it soon enough, anyway.”
Sean didn’t look back to see if she was following. He walked to the open door of the detective’s office and sat down in the leather chair on the other side of the cluttered desk.
Bingham closed the door as soon as his second guest came through. Then he grabbed a straight-back chair from against the wall and placed it beside the one Sean was sitting in. He indicated with a gesture that Jenna should take it.
Jenna’s eyes again met Sean’s before she did, but he couldn’t read what was in them. All he knew was that he didn’t want to describe the phone call that had brought him here in front of her. The experience was too raw. And too personal.
He had thought he’d come to terms with the manner of Makaela’s dying. Not with the fact that she was dead, of course. Or that someone had taken her life in the most brutal way possible.
Only with the fact that it was over and done, and that there was nothing he could do to bring her back. All he could do was take out the bastard who had murdered her.
And keep him from ever doing that again to another woman.
That had always been part of what drove him. Not just his sister’s death, but the determination not to let her murderer do to another family what he had done to theirs.
So why in hell did you refuse Jenna Kincaid’s plea that you do exactly that?
“We just got a call,” Bingham said. “A twenty-year-old student at UAB, Carol Cummings, has been reported missing. She was supposed to attend a study session for a group project on Tuesday and never showed up. A friend got concerned because it wasn’t like to her let her classmates down. The friend went to Cummings’s apartment several times and couldn’t get anybody to answer the door.
“She finally checked with some of the girl’s teachers and found out Cummings hadn’t been in class all week. Nobody can remember seeing her since last weekend. Long story short, the friend alerted the administration, who called the girl’s parents. They’ve filed a missing person’s report.”
The knot in Sean’s gut was back. The one that formed whenever he learned there had been another
victim.
Despite the detective’s conviction that the sounds he’d heard during this afternoon’s phone call had been taped, he had known then what he was listening to. He just hadn’t had a name or a face for this one. Now he knew at least one of those.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean something’s happened to her, you understand,” Bingham went on, as if he were trying to convince himself. “At that age, there are a lot of things that could explain somebody ditching a few classes. She may have hooked up with someone last weekend and decided to go out of town with him—”
“Dark hair, dark eyes?”
The detective’s mouth snapped shut with Sean’s brusque interruption. His lips tightened before they pursed. When he opened them again, he didn’t deny the reality of what Sean had asked. “Yes to both.”
“Son of a bitch.”
There was silence in the room after his uncharacteristic outburst. The uncomfortable kind that says nobody wants to talk about the subject under discussion. Yeah, well, neither did he.
“Where’s the last place she was seen?” he asked, deliberately breaking it. None of them could afford to indulge in that sensibility.
“Five Points South,” Bingham said. “She and a friend had gone to Dave’s from the library. The friend had to leave for a date. Carol stayed, saying she’d catch a ride with someone going back downtown.”
“You said it’s too soon,” Jenna said. “You said he would still be enjoying the success of the last one.”
“That’s why I believe this isn’t connected. It doesn’t fit the pattern.”
“As we know it,” Sean said.
“Meaning?”
“That all we have on some of the victims is an approximate time of death. Some of the bodies were too decomposed when they were discovered to tell us much.”
“Callie Morgan’s was found two weeks ago. And according to the coroner, she’d been dead for less than four days. I don’t think anything we know about this guy indicates that he kills this frequently.”
“Sometimes…” Jenna began, and then stopped, her eyes meeting Sean’s. She hesitated, licking her lips before she continued. “As I said at the start, this really isn’t my field, but…Sometimes whatever compels them grows stronger as they achieve success. Like someone addicted to a drug, they need more and more to reach the high they crave. What worked in the beginning doesn’t satisfy them as it once did. For some killers, that means more brutality or a great humiliation of the victim. A better posing of the body. For others…For others it may mean that they just need to kill more frequently.”