by Justine Dare
"Nice try," Durwin said. "But I checked with the company you were driving for. There's no record of a callout for a repair."
"I fixed it myself."
"Convenient."
"It would have been stupid to call someone. It was only a gladhand rubber, but by the time 1 figured out what was wrong, found the spare, replaced it, and got rolling again, I was down an hour. Then I hit traffic coming into Frisco."
"You have any proof of that? Like the old part?"
He gave her a dubious look. "Of course not. I threw it away. It was useless, and I don't like things cluttering up my truck."
She leaned back over the table. "It's not looking good, Marty. You've got motive. You've got no alibi for the Koslow murder, never had one for the two before that. And we just blew your alibi for the first murder out of the water."
"I had a breakdown, damn it!"
"And no proof of that."
"I didn't do it," he said. "Any of it."
Lynne glanced at Durwin. His eyes flicked toward the door. She gave him a barely perceptible nod and said nothing as he opened the door and walked out. She began to follow, then looked back at Marty.
"I feel really sorry for your sister, Marty. If she does come out of that coma, she's going to be all alone."
"You can't be serious!"
Alex heard Regan's exclamation as he walked past the front porch. He stopped, glanced over to where Mitch was busily trimming the hedge along the front sidewalk, then put down the ladder he'd been carrying and went quietly up the steps.
"He's going to anger-management classes,
Regan. He really means it this time." It was Irish, he thought.
"Fine. After he's finished the classes, start with supervised visits."
"But he wants to see me now."
Regan's voice went chilly. "You've talked to him?"
"No, no, I wouldn't break the rules, you know that. But he gave my sister a note to give to me."
"I thought your sister hated him."
"That's what I mean. She says he's different now. Besides, he wouldn't dare hurt me now."
"Why?"
"Because of the Avenger."
There was a pause before he heard Regan say, in an incredulous voice, "You're trusting the man who beat you for three years because you think he's afraid of a serial killer?"
Whatever Trish said was too quiet for Alex to hear.
"And when they catch him? Maybe it is Mindy's brother, and they already have. What keeps him in line then?"
"You don't have to yell at me," Trish said, sounding thoroughly chastened.
There was a moment of silence, then Regan's voice again. Quieter, but Alex could still hear the tension in it. "I'm sorry for that, Trish. It's just hard for me to believe you'd want to risk yourself again. Think about it, will you?"
He heard footsteps headed his way, and backed up. Not quickly enough, as Regan barreled out the door and almost ran him down.
"Whoa!" he said, grabbing her arms to steady her.
"Sorry," she muttered.
"You," he said, "look like a woman who needs a break."
"That's an understatement. I'm going to see Mindy, then stop by the office."
"I'll drive you."
She looked at him. "Why?"
"Because you're upset. Because I'd like to check on Mindy, too. Because I'm feeling lazy and want a break myself."
"Oh."
"Right answers?"
A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. "Acceptable answers." She even let him drive.
"I don't know what Mindy will do if it turns out to be Marty."
"It won't be easy," he agreed.
She sighed. "I was just glad we didn't have to turn him in."
It would have been awkward for her, Alex knew. But the hospital staff had remembered his outburst, and when the news came that Joel Koslow was dead, they'd called it in themselves.
Mindy's condition hadn't changed, although the staff said they were being careful not to mention anything about Marty around her, just in case. Alex said a few words to her, all the while wondering what kind of man could do this to a woman who was all of five feet two and weighed maybe a hundred pounds.
He left Regan to sit with her for a while, and when she came out, he started to walk down the hall with her.
"You don't have to go to the office. I can actually walk from here."
"And get home how? Come on, if it's that close, it's no trouble."
She gave in, and within a couple of minutes she was directing him to pull into a small business building—a CourtCorp-owned building, he realized—and up to the glass storefront at one end. It was unobtrusively labeled "Rachel's House Information and Donation Center," and in the windows were taped lists of emergency and hot line phone numbers.
He followed her inside, past a large, spinning rack of brochures and flyers. It looked like any other office, except for the high front counter, and the fact that the only way to get behind it was through a locked doorway on one side. She greeted a young woman on the way in, then unlocked the door and led the way into the office area behind the high counter.
There were two desks, one with two multi-button phones, one with three. On the opposite wall he saw a large bookcase that held, from a quick glance, everything from road map books to what looked like a copy of the California Penal Code. On the nearest wall next to the door was a wall rack full of the same brochures and fliers. Yet what caught his eye was a large, framed photograph.
He stopped in front of it, staring at the image of a lovely young woman with a smile on her lips that spoke of bright summer days and an endless, exciting world ahead. Underneath was a small brass plaque. Rachel Carreras, murdered at twenty-one by the man who swore he would never hurt her again.
"So that's why it's named Rachel's House?" he asked Regan.
She nodded, and he saw both wistfulness and pain in her eyes as she looked at the picture. "She was my best friend since we were seven. I put it here because for so long after she died, I couldn't remember how she really looked. All I could think of was what was left of her face when I found her."
Alex's gut knotted. "You found her?" That hadn't been in the file, or he'd somehow missed it. Of course, Regan hadn't meant anything to him then.
"Oh, yes," she said, for the first time since he'd known her a touch of bitterness coming into her voice. "Her boyfriend made sure of that. He knew I didn't like him, didn't trust him, that I tried to get Rach away from him. So he took her body and posed it so it was the first thing I saw when I walked in the door."
Alex swore fervently under his breath.
"I only knew for sure it was her because of the necklace she had on. He'd raped her, beaten her, slashed her throat and then her face, until you couldn't even tell it was a face."
"My God."
He wanted to fix this for her, more than he could remember wanting anything. And it made him crazy to know he couldn't. There wasn't a damned thing he could do. Something a female cousin had once said to him echoed in his mind. She'd told him when they were teenagers, after he'd waded in and straightened out a boyfriend who'd treated her badly and she'd nearly slaughtered him for it, that sometimes a woman doesn't want you to fix it, but just to listen. So he listened.
"I couldn't understand what she saw in him. She hadn't grown up with that kind of treatment, knew it was wrong. But he . . . fascinated her somehow. She'd break away, but then she'd go back."
He saw the pain in her eyes. It wrenched at him, and he felt that off-balance sensation she seemed to bring on.
"I even wondered if he'd drugged her or something, gotten her addicted and kept her supplied. But after . . . we found out she was clean. It was him she was addicted to."
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Just listen, he told himself.
"I kept thinking if only I'd done more, if I'd just figured out the right way to get her away from him, she might—"
"Stop." He pulled her into his arms, n
ot caring that there was another person there. "You did everything you could. You couldn't do it for her, Regan. No matter how much you wanted to."
"I still can't," Regan said into his shirt, her voice shaky. "I can't do it for any of them."
"But you're doing everything else that can be done." He hugged her tighter. "Give yourself a break, Regan."
He turned her to face the photograph. With a gentle finger he tilted her head back, making her look at it.
"That doesn't look like the kind of friend who would want you to live in guilt the rest of your life over her."
There was a long, silent moment before he heard, softly, "She wasn't. Until she met him, she was the most alive person I knew."
He didn't know what to say, decided saying nothing was better than saying the wrong thing just now. So he just held her.
At last she pulled away. Alex noticed then that the young girl named Danielle had discreetly retreated to one of the two offices in the back corner of the big room.
He could almost feel her putting her mental armor back on as she drew herself up, not looking at him.
"Let me do what I came for," she said almost to herself. Then she did look at him. "Thank you," she said quietly.
"You're welcome." He smiled at her because he couldn't think of a thing to say beyond that.
She walked into the other office at the back of the room, talking as she went.
"I want to see if the police reports on Donna and her son have finally arrived. There's something about that whole situation that just doesn't feel right."
He'd seen little of either the woman or her son, so he had no idea what Regan meant. "Like what?"
"I'm not sure. She just doesn't seem ... I don't know. As scared as most of the women with a child to protect who have come through."
"Maybe she just feels safe now."
"Maybe. We're still waiting to find out the official version of what happened to send her running."
"You mean you don't know?"
"No. Those are the reports I'm waiting for. She just came in with the boy, said her husband abused them, and had tried to kill her. In a case like that, we help first, ask questions later."
She turned and called out to the girl up front. "Danielle? Did that stuff regarding Donna Grant ever come in?"
"No, not yet. Mrs. Tanaka called them today, and they told her they were still having trouble finding it. She left you a message about it."
"Great," Regan muttered.
He watched with interest as she read the note she found on the desk, frowned a couple of times, then set it aside and went through a stack of paperwork with quick efficiency.
"Is it always this much work?"
"It would be worse if we weren't private. You can't imagine the paperwork involved with state or federal funding."
"Don't give me that bullshit! Where is she?"
The booming male voice from the front office made Regan go still. Her hand was on the phone, to call the police Alex guessed, when a loud thud and a scream whipped her head around.
"Danielle!" Regan leapt to her feet and started for the door of the back office, heedless of the possible danger. Alex barely managed to hold her back.
"Don't make it worse. Call the cops, let me go out. Maybe a man will calm him down."
He moved before she could protest, and as he stepped out the office door he heard her dialing the phone.
"I said I want that address, and I want it now!"
Calm him down? Alex thought as he stopped dead at his first sight of the outer office.
On the other side of the counter was a man who looked to be in his fifties, with salt and pepper hair receding from his forehead and a bushy mustache. He was small, wiry, but his size didn't matter.
He was holding a knife to Danielle's throat.
CHAPTER 11
Lynne dropped the stack of domestic-violence reports on her desk. Nick had finally given her his own notes, but she'd told him again she needed to go through the actual reports herself to get it all straight in her head; you never knew what tiny detail might be significant later. She'd asked him for the reports a couple of times more, but he kept forgetting to give them to her so she'd finally dug through his desk and retrieved them herself.
They had a good, solid suspect in Marty, but she knew that didn't mean she could quit looking. Following the roofer's suggestion, she'd examined Pilson's local history and found the thirty-eight-year-old—which had surprised her, she'd thought he looked over forty—solitary man fit the profile a little too well to ignore: few friends, a boring dead-end job as a night-shift supervisor at a local toy manufacturer. She planned to ask Regan about him soon.
She was going to make darn sure nothing could be second-guessed in this investigation. They were a small department unused to dealing with murder at all, let alone a string of them, but they weren't going to embarrass themselves if she could help it.
She settled in, thinking wryly that all those people whose images of cops came from movies and television would be bored out of their minds by the plodding, paperwork-laden reality. Those moments of pulse-pounding excitement came, of course, but you paid for them with hours of desk-bound routine.
Nearly halfway through the pile, she came across a report with a familiar name. Laura, the woman from Rachel's House who had been rather vocal when Lynne had first gone there, saying the police "told me I should just drop it because if it went to court no one would believe me."
Curious, she thumbed through the pages to the supplemental, written by the officer who had followed up the primary. She frowned as she read that Laura Dennis had supposedly refused to press charges, saying it was all a mistake. That didn't sound at all like what she'd heard from Laura herself.
More out of curiosity than anything else, she went back to the first report in the pile and started again, this time starting a fresh page of notes. Slowly a pattern emerged amid the pages of names, dates, locations, and details she compiled.
She finished with the last report, sat back in her chair, and let out a pained sigh. Report after report of domestic violence, of assaults and occasionally even batteries on women by men. And all tied together with an ugly thread they all had in common. Every woman had been talked out of pressing charges, or into denying it had ever happened.
And in all but two of the kissed-off cases, the officer doing the persuading had been Nick Kelso.
This was the absolute last thing she needed. In more ways than one. It would have been a difficult burden at any time, and now, in the middle of this investigation, it was horrible.
No wonder Nick had wanted to go through these reports himself. And, she thought, realizing it only now, no wonder he'd been so reluctant to give them to her. He'd known there was a chance she'd see the pattern.
If he'd done it only once or twice, she could have chalked it up to laziness, not wanting the hassle of taking the report, the statements, documenting injuries, and letting yourself in for what would be an ugly court case. Or even something as simple as catching the call near the end of your shift when you had important plans after work. It happened, she knew, even though it shouldn't.
But not this. Not on nearly every call.
He must have been in my office three times a day, asking to be put on the case.
The captain's words came back to her, and the sick feeling in her stomach grew. Had Nick truly pushed so hard to get on the case just to try to keep anyone from discovering that he'd been sabotaging abused women the entire time he'd been in patrol? And why? Why would he have done it in the first place?
She rubbed wearily at the back of her neck with one hand. She was glad Durwin was downstairs hammering away some more at Marty, and that she had the office almost to herself. It was going to take her a minute to gather this up and shove it out of her mind. No murder investigation was easy, a serial murderer was obviously worse than most, and now this.
If life could get any worse, she didn't want to know how, she t
hought, lifting her left hand to add to the massage that wasn't helping to loosen the knots of tension in her neck and shoulders.
"You're still wearing your wedding ring."
She froze. For an instant she cursed herself for tempting fate, even though she'd known this was coming.
Slowly, she lowered her hands and turned to face the ex-husband she had once hated.
"Take it easy, there," Alex said to the knife-wielding man. Regan watched from the office, her attention split between the awful scene before her and the voice of the police dispatcher in her ear. Alex was walking toward the man, holding his hands up to show he meant no harm.
The furious man's arms tightened around Danielle, and the girl whimpered as the knife nicked her and drew blood. He must have pulled her right up and over the counter. That had to be the noise they'd heard, Regan thought.
"I'll kill her. Right here, unless you tell me where she is."
Regan's grip on the phone tightened. "He hasn't seen me yet. I don't think he knows I'm here or calling you," she told the dispatcher, who reassured her help was already on the way.
"I don't work here, so you'll have to tell me who you mean," Alex said calmly.
"Don't try to fool me. You're one of those wimps who believes all this crap about women being victims when all they need to do is keep their damn mouths shut."
"Hey, look, man, I was just walking by." She heard a joking note come into Alex's voice as he added, "Saw the cute girl, figured I'd check her out. You know how it is."
The man-to-man, macho approach, Regan thought. "No, I don't know who he is," she whispered into the phone. "I've never seen him before." She answered the questions as best she could as the dispatcher compiled information on the dangerous situation.
"So, who is it you want? Maybe I can help," Alex said casually.
"Are you kidding? They guard those bitches like they were the queen of England. But I'll find her, so help me."
"This your wife you're looking for? She sneak out on you?"
Alex's voice was commiserating now, inviting the man to see him as a partner, not an enemy. Even from here Regan could see it was working. The man wasn't quite as frantic as he'd been seconds ago. Danielle was still terrified, but she'd ceased struggling, as if she sensed she was better off if the man was focused on Alex.