Avenging Angel

by Justine Dare

  "I did check my pager! But when I called, I got your voice mail. Then I called the station, who told me you'd be coming in with Kelso, that he'd tried to kill you!"

  "This went down first. I tried calling from here, but I kept getting your voice mail."

  "I was on the phone with records all the way here," he said.

  "What—" Lynne suddenly stopped, and looked at Regan and Alex. "I'm sorry. Excuse us for being rude. This," she said, gesturing at the newcomer, "is sheriff's investigator Garrison. He's been on loan for this case. Your case, I mean."

  She's feeling pretty edgy right now, about her ex-husband being on loan to work the Avenger case....

  Regan glanced at Alex, who looked as if he was remembering those words as well. And if she was any judge, there was a lot of unresolved business between these two. Lately, she felt like an expert on unresolved business.

  "Regan Keller, I presume," the man said, and she nodded, shaking the hand he held out.

  "Hi," Alex said, and held out a hand. "Alex Court

  ."

  The man nodded as he shook it, as if he'd al­ready known.

  "He took down our suspect for us," Lynne said. "Did a fine job of it, too."

  Alex shrugged. "I had help," he said, nodding at Regan.

  "How'd you tumble to it?" Drew asked. Alex explained about the machete. "Court Cor­poration did a cursory background check on him,"

  Alex added, startling her. She hadn't known that. "He'd already been working for the previous owner of this house for over a year, so I guess we didn't dig deep enough,"

  "He was well established," Drew said. "Chances are, you wouldn't have found him out anyway."

  "I wonder what set him off?" Alex said.

  "Something, obviously. We can't find any record of anything criminal prior to this."

  "I think it had to be Rosa Norman," Regan said. "He liked Rosa. She loved his garden more than anyone."

  "She was the wife in the first case?" Drew asked.

  "Yes. The one who was nailed to her own floor," Lynne said.

  Drew grimaced. "That would do it for me."

  "I still can't believe it." Regan shook her head. "I feel like a cliche, but it's true, Mitch was so gentle, and quiet."

  "No alcohol or drug problems you knew of?"

  Startled, Regan glanced at Alex. She hadn't put that part together yet. "I . . . there was . . ." she began, fumbling.

  "We found some cocaine, a while back, hidden outside the house," Alex answered. "We had no way of knowing whose it was. The hiding place wasn't used again, nor any other I could find. Prob­ably didn't want to risk it after we had video cam­eras installed outside."

  She hadn't even known he'd been looking. There was so much she hadn't known.

  "That would fit," Drew said. "He probably needed it to get revved up for a kill. By the way,

  Howe's not his real last name. It's Howlett. That's the call I was on, on the fingerprint ID. He must have changed it. Probably because of his father."

  His words suddenly reminded Regan. "Has his mother been told? I don't know what this will do to her. They're very close."

  "Close? It was all his mother's fault, remember?" Alex said dryly.

  "What's this about his mother?" Drew asked, frowning.

  "He said she told him to do it," Regan answered, and explained what Mitch had said.

  "She didn't tell him to do anything," Drew said.

  "That's a relief," Regan said. "I can't believe any mother would really do that."

  "We can't say she wouldn't have," Drew said, "but Mitch Howlett's mother died twenty years ago."

  Regan gaped at him. "What? But he was always talking about her, taking her flowers from our gar­den, Mindy even sent her a card on her birthday!"

  Drew shook his head. "Part of it was the truth. She did kill her husband, Mitch's father, apparently after years of abuse. But then she killed herself. That's when he was fingerprinted, as a matter of routine."

  Stunned, Regan shook her head. "I can't believe it. He talked about her as if she were alive, and he saw her every day."

  "Maybe he did," Alex said.

  Lynne nodded. "Maybe. Maybe he needed some­body to account for the voice he 'heard' telling him to kill."

  "For us. For Rachel's House. To defend us. Like he couldn't defend his mother." Regan shivered.

  Alex slipped an arm around her and she leaned against him.

  "Don't feel responsible, Regan," Lynne said. "Chances are, if he hadn't fixated on Rachel's House, it would have been something else."

  "You know, I almost feel bad for him," Regan said. "Even if he's insane, even if he just used this as his excuse to kill, he only killed those who re­fused to change. He did what a lot of us have thought about, even wished sometimes we had the guts to do. How can I blame him?"

  "A lot of people think about killing, but never do it," Drew said. "Something holds them back, some line within them they don't cross. Mitch doesn't have that line."

  "They weren't people to him, they were things. To be exterminated." Lynne seemed to hear her own words, and her mouth twisted. "They're not much more than that to most people, I think."

  "Mutants," Regan said. "That's what he called them."

  Drew nodded and said again, "That would fit."

  "Will he—I mean, with the death penalty ..." Regan began.

  Lynne looked at Drew. "You're the expert. What do you think?" Whatever problems were between them, they clearly didn't involve professional re­spect, Regan thought.

  "Based on my experience, I'd say a good lawyer could get him declared mentally incompetent to stand trial."

  "The rest of his life in a mental institution?" Alex asked.

  "Better than dead." Drew shrugged. "Some peo­ple are genuinely happier out of the real world."

  "Court Corporation will see he gets help," Alex said. "Be it lawyer or doctor or both."

  "Maybe you could get us a secretary for all this paperwork?" Drew asked, an exaggeratedly hope­ful look on his face.

  "They already support half the department's worthy causes," Lynne said. "I think we're stuck. So we'd better get started."

  "Don't forget the dirt," Drew said.

  "Got it."

  Lynne had already gathered samples from vari­ous parts of Mitch's garden, saying it was for evi­dence, along with some stained pieces of tarp out of the truck they also impounded. She'd told them they suspected the cloth had been used to mask footprints, but that wasn't for public consumption. Honored by her trust, they'd quickly agreed.

  Now Regan watched them go almost regretfully, because she and Alex would be alone and she was nervous. But when she saw them stop at the bottom of the sidewalk, and saw Drew pull Lynne into his arms in an embrace she could sense the fierceness of even from here, Regan forgot her own nerves.

  "They may be exes officially, but somebody for­got to untangle them," Alex said. "That was more than just cop to cop when he came in. You don't go that crazy unless you care."

  She turned to face him. "No," she said steadily, "you don't. Unless you care a lot."

  "They seem like a good match. I hope they—"

  Alex broke off suddenly, his eyes narrowing, as if only now had her pointed tone registered. "Regan?"

  "I really, really didn't like feeling like a fool, Alex."

  He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes. "I know."

  "But when I was afraid he was going to kill you, I realized Marita was right. Compared to that, you maybe dying, nothing else mattered much."

  His eyes opened. "Regan," he said again, whis­pering this time. "Does this mean I'm forgiven?"

  "It means I'm open to the possibility," Regan said.

  "I guess that's a step," Alex said.

  "So let's move to the next step," Regan said, looking at him from beneath half-lowered lashes.

  "Which is?"

  "Convince me."

  The convincing, Regan thought, was going along nicely.

  She watched A
lex walk across his bedroom, un­concernedly naked. And rightfully so, she thought; he was beautiful. Scars and all.

  A lovely warmth spread through her as she thought of the last couple of days he'd spent work­ing on that convincing. And the nights. Oh, yes, the nights...

  He sat on the bed with the morning newspaper in one hand, and two mugs of coffee carefully held by the handles in the other. She liberated one mug as he handed her the paper.

  "What's the latest?" he asked as she unfolded it.

  They'd found that much of the public felt the same ambivalence they did. They didn't want to approve of murder, but they were having a hard time feeling outraged because the victims were who they were.

  "About the same, all the arguments we've been hearing," she said as she scanned the front-page ar­ticle.

  "Vigilantism, victims deprived of due process, and the other side pointing out that every one of them had been tried and convicted before and it hadn't saved their own victims from more abuse?" Alex asked.

  "Yes." Regan grimaced. "You'd think in there somebody would point out that an innocent man also got murdered. No matter what justification, there is nothing that makes it worth that."

  That was the bottom line for Regan. Even if for most others it seemed to be that whatever these men had done, their crimes didn't carry the death penalty. And if she couldn't help thinking that their murders had possibly prevented others, committed by them, Regan also knew that could never be proven.

  "They still have the lid on about Mitch?"

  She nodded. "They're not saying anything else about him or any evidence, nothing that might jeopardize the case."

  Lynne had called them to say a search of Mitch's apartment had turned up conclusive evidence, in­cluding the "trophies" most serial killers took from their victims, but wouldn't say what they were. She'd just wanted them to know it was certain they had the right man. Regan thought it was good of her to call, and Alex agreed, saying he might just suggest his mother mention Lynne's fine work to her friend the chief.

  Regan, thinking that reading the paper in bed over morning coffee felt very domestic, was about to hand Alex the paper when something caught her eye.

  "What?" Alex asked.

  "This has to be it," she murmured.

  "Has to be what?"

  "What happened to Lynne that day. Remember, she said some guy tried to run her off the road? It was a cop!"

  Alex blinked. "A cop? The guy she said they'd thought was the Avenger?"

  Regan nodded, quickly reading the rest of the ar­ticle, which had received almost as much room and as big a headline as the Avenger story.

  "Nicholas Kelso," she read. "He was suspected of being the Avenger because of things Lynne dis­covered during that investigation."

  "But he wasn't, so why would he try to kill her?"

  Regan looked up. "Turns out he murdered his fiancé when she broke up with him. And he found out Lynne was asking his friends questions about her."

  "So he thought they were going to find him out?"

  She nodded. "It quotes Lynne as saying she discovered during the Avenger investigation that he'd been brushing off domestic-violence reports for a long time. That was what started her interest in him."

  "So he must have known she would keep digging. She's a good cop," Alex said.

  "The real deal, as Marita would say. I hope she and Drew can work things out."

  "So you are a closet romantic."

  She knew this was the moment. She'd forgiven him for the deception, they'd kissed—and a lot more—and made up repeatedly. She'd asked for time to think about the rest and he'd given it to her, with­out pressure, without demands. But now it was time.

  "Speaking of Marita," she said, and saw by Alex's expression he thought she was changing the subject. "She told me something interesting yester­day. She told me not to blow it."

  "Blow ... what?"

  "Us."

  His uncertainty turned to a smile. "She did?"

  "She said we give them all hope."

  "We give me hope, too," he said.

  And Regan thought those simple words the most romantic she'd ever heard. An indication, she thought with an inward smile, of how far gone she truly was. And the shiver that went through her simply looking at him was exclamation point at the end of that realization.

  "Look," he said, "I know that life in the Court circus can be crazy. But my traveling can change. It's about time anyway, I'm really tired of living out of a duffel bag."

  "Never mind that," Regan said, "it's about that scar collection." She'd seen them all now, and pried the story behind most of them out of him, from the helicopter crash landing in British Columbia to the hostage situation in Colombia. "I'd just as soon you didn't add to it."

  "That, too," he said, as if it were a given. "No more recklessness."

  "Good."

  "So ... will you?"

  "What exactly are you asking me?"

  'To join the circus?" Alex grinned at her. Then he reached out and took her hands, his expression turn­ing serious. "Remember what you said, that you thought one of the best things about being rich would be to be able to help anyone you wanted to? You could do that. Of course," he added with an echo of that earlier grin, "you'd have to put up with me."

  "I would?"

  He looked disconcerted, then rueful. "Actually, probably not. Mom's ready to set up a charitable foundation, to do just that kind of thing. She'd love to have you run it. With or without me."

  "Hmm," Regan said thoughtfully. "I've been with you. I've been without you. With is better."

  She got a smile out of him then. But his voice was solemn as he asked, "Can you do it, Regan? Can you make room in your life for something be­sides a cause?"

  "If that something is you," she said. "I love you."

  He reached for her then, pulling her down beside him. For a long, quiet moment he just held her. And then, softly, he said the last words to be said. "I love you, Regan Keller."

  And later, as she found the daytime could be as sweet as the night, Regan had the silly thought that she'd joined the circus, and she hadn't even had to run away.