by Lisa Childs
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“Exhaustion,” the E.R. doctor diagnosed.
“I would guess he hasn’t slept in days. Maybe longer …”
Guilt flashed through Alaina, but then she doubted he would have slept last night even if she hadn’t invaded his fortress. And she doubted that exhaustion really had anything to do with his collapse.
She had nearly passed out herself when she’d felt his emotions the night before. And he had understood her reaction, probably because he was empathetic himself. Probably had always been. That was why he locked himself away from the world. He couldn’t deal with all those emotions.
She hadn’t felt anything he’d felt back at the crime scene. She’d only seen the emotions chase across his face, with grimaces of horror and pain. And then the life had left him as he’d passed out cold.
“Can I see him?” she asked, needing the visual reassurance that he was all right.
“Of course,” the doctor said. “Follow me.”
She started forward, only to have a strong hand close around her arm and jerk her back.
“You’re not going anywhere until we talk,” Vonner said, his face flushed with anger. “Go ahead, Doc. She’ll catch up with you later.” He dismissed the young resident.
She’d forgotten Vonner was there in the waiting room with her. He had showed up as the ambulance had been pulling away from the crime scene, with Trent and her in the back. She’d ridden with him, unable to leave his side until the doctors had taken him back to the E.R. She’d been surprised that Vonner had followed them to the hospital. He hadn’t said anything, just silently paced, while they’d waited for word on Trent’s condition.
“I have to talk to him first,” she said. “I have to find out what happened to him.” Even though she was pretty certain she already knew. But she needed to know what he’d felt. Emotions weren’t something that could be processed like the other evidence at a crime scene. It could be the missing piece they needed to form a clear picture of the killer.
“You have to talk to me first,” Vonner insisted, “and explain to me what the hell you’re doing.”
She tugged, trying to free herself from his tight grasp. “I’ll be right back—”
“And it’ll be too late,” he warned her. “I’ll have gone to the director and reported you. I should have already talked to him when I found out you weren’t really sick yesterday.” He snorted in derision. “Then again, maybe you are, because you, of all people, should know better than to get involved with a murder suspect.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alaina insisted even as heat rushed to her face as the memories of just how involved she’d gotten with Trent flashed through her mind.
Vonner laughed now, with bitterness instead of amusement. “You came with him. In his helicopter.”
They hadn’t landed on the roof of the apartment building. They’d taken a rental car from the hangar he’d rented at the airport. “How do you know where I was?”
“I traced the GPS in your cell,” he admitted. “I know you were with him.”
“Vonner—”
“Do you even know my first name?” he wondered aloud. He pulled her closer, so that her body pressed against his long, taut one. “Do you know anything about me?”
She knew his first name, but after everything that had happened, and her concern for Trent, she couldn’t think of it. “I—I …”
“Vince. It’s Vince, Alaina.” He shook his head. “You’ve been holding me at arm’s length, using work as an excuse, arguing that it wouldn’t be professional for us to get involved.” He wrapped an arm around her back, keeping her tight against him as he lowered his head.
But Alaina twisted away from him, disgusted at the thought of any man but Trent kissing her or touching her. “Vince—”
“How professional is it for you to take up with a murder suspect?” he asked.
“I haven’t taken up with him.”
“I know where you were,” he reminded her. “You weren’t out sick. You were with him.” He sighed and pushed a hand through his thick, dark hair. “But that is sick. How could you be with him, knowing what he might be?”
“You’re wrong about him.”
“You were the one who insisted he could still be the killer,” he said, flinging her suspicions back at her.
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“I haven’t changed mine,” he said. “If anything, his little freak-out at the scene only makes him look guiltier.”
“He was with me last night. All night,” she admitted since Vonner already knew. “At his estate. He couldn’t have killed her.” Unless he’d slipped away while she’d been sleeping …
He chuckled. “You say the words, but you don’t believe them, Alaina. I can see the doubt in your eyes. You don’t know for sure that it’s not him. You don’t really know anything about him.”
“I do.” She knew she hadn’t slept long enough for him to have flown to Detroit, killed a woman and flown back to the U.P.
Vonner shook his head. “Damn, look at him. Really look at him. Can’t you figure out who he is?”
The Thief of Hearts? It wasn’t who he was now, but she couldn’t deny that he might have been.
“His manservant’s Igor,” Vonner explained. “He’s Dr. Frankenstein, and you can bet that somewhere in that spooky castle he calls home, he’s hiding a monster. I think it’s inside him. And I don’t want you there when the monster comes out.”
She shook her head, refusing to believe the worst of Trent. “He’s not a monster.”
“Then how do you explain those books he writes?” he challenged her. “Even if you alibi him for this murder, he’s still to blame. He started this all up again with those damn books!”
That was what Trent believed, too, and his guilt overwhelmed her. But was this killer really copying the murders in Trent’s novels? Or had he just started killing again, exactly like he had killed before?
Just because Alaina and Trent lived new lives now didn’t mean the killer did, too. He could be living the same life he had always lived—as the original and only Thief of Hearts….
God, he’d thought she would be smarter in this life. She was a federal agent, for crying out loud. She should have been too smart to make the same mistakes she had in her past life.
“It’s your fault,” he raged at her, but she couldn’t hear him. Even if she could, she wouldn’t listen. Just like last time. “All those other women are going to have to die again because of you, Alaina, because …”
She’d fallen for the wrong man again. And since she would not willingly give him her heart, he would just have to take it, still beating, from her chest.
Just like last time.
Chapter 12
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said as Trent followed her down the corridor leading to the morgue.
But he had to stick close to her; he knew now that there was someone out there who posed a greater threat to her life than he did.
“I’m fine,” he assured her. As fine as he could be when he knew she was in danger. Again.
“You checked yourself out against doctor’s orders,” she reminded him, her voice sharp with disapproval.
He grinned, knowing his cockiness infuriated and distracted her. “I don’t like being told what to do.”
Her lips remained in a tight line of disapproval and concern. “But you ripped out the IV before it was done, and you needed that.”
Trent laughed. “An IV, no matter what the hell they put in it, is not going to help what’s wrong with me. We both know that.”
“Yes,” she said as she stopped outside the door to Autopsy. “And that’s why you shouldn’t go in here. You fell to your knees when you were in there with the last victim. You experienced everything she felt last, didn’t you?”
He didn’t bother lying. “Yes.”
“That’s how you knew exactly what had happened to her and how she had died
?” she asked, easily accepting what his own parents, not to mention countless school counselors and child psychologists, had failed to understand.
“Yes,” he admitted. “How did you think I knew? Because I killed her?”
“I didn’t know you then,” she said, not bothering to deny her suspicions.
Trent appreciated her honesty. While she might have the same soul as the detective’s wife, she was not the same woman. She would not betray him again. But he couldn’t be certain that, if he had the soul of the killer, he wouldn’t betray her.
“You don’t know me now,” he pointed out. And neither did he, really.
“After last night, I think we know each other pretty well,” she said.
Heat flashed through him with his desire for her. He wanted her again. No matter how many times he’d had her the night before, he had to have her again.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, resisting the urge to drag her up against him, to hold her close and kiss her like he needed to kiss her. Instead, he focused on the emotions he’d experienced at the hospital and asked, “How well do you know Vonner?”
“Agent Vonner?”
He nodded. He’d felt the man in the waiting room, felt the anger and frustration rolling off him. Though weaker, it had been eerily similar to the killer’s emotions that Trent had felt at the crime scene. “Yeah, how well do you know him?”
She shrugged. “He only got assigned to the case with me a few months ago. I don’t really know much about him.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I’m not interested,” she said.
“Maybe you should be.”
Her eyes widened with surprise. “What? You think he and I would make a good couple?”
Jealousy and possessiveness tightened the muscles in his stomach and had him clenching his jaw. Her lips curved into a smile, and he knew that she was still attuned to his emotions. That she felt what he felt …
But right now it was Vonner’s emotions that concerned him. He remarked, “I think I would suspect the motives of anyone who wanted to get close to this case.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know he requested the assignment?”
“I didn’t know that for certain, until now,” he said with a wink.
She reached out, as if to smack him, but pulled her hand back before she touched him. He obviously wasn’t the only one who didn’t trust himself.
He continued. “Why would a guy like him, young and ambitious, want to be assigned to a cold case?”
Her blond brows drew together. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Maybe because he knew it wouldn’t stay cold for long?”
She sucked in a breath. “I hadn’t considered …”
“Vonner as a suspect?” he finished for her. “No, you were too busy considering me.”
“Another thought occurred to me,” she said. “Another suspect.”
“Who?” he asked.
Again self-disgust filled him for having passed out. What if the killer had been there? Sure, there had been uniforms guarding the perimeter of the crime scene. But if the killer could be Vonner, it could have been one of those men, too. Trent had left her alone and vulnerable. Even though she could take care of herself, she’d been distracted by having to take care of him.
“Who’s your new suspect?” he asked.
“The real killer.”
“What do you mean?” He should have been relieved she no longer suspected him, but he wasn’t as easily convinced of his innocence.
“Until I met you, I figured he was still alive,” she shared.
“Then you met me and you had a new suspect.”
“But I think my first notion, my first instinct, was right,” she said. “I think he’s still alive. I don’t think he died like his victims and like the detective died.”
“We have no proof that Kooiyer is dead, either,” he reminded her. No proof that Trent had been the lawman instead of the lunatic.
“No, we don’t. We need more information.” She stared at him, her gaze narrowed and pointed.
He had been working that morning, but he wouldn’t share any more of what he’d written with her until he knew how it ended. Instead, he gestured toward the door to the morgue. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“You should wait for me in the hall,” she insisted. “You don’t have to go inside. You don’t have to go through all that again.” She stopped for a moment, then asked him, “What exactly did you feel back there? Did you feel him?”
He nodded. “Rage, hatred, madness …”
“What you’d expect from a sadistic killer.” She reached out and squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry you had to experience that. But you don’t have to feel this … what she went through.”
“I don’t have to,” he agreed. “But I need to. We need to get this over.” He would like to be as certain as she was that he hadn’t been the killer thirty years ago. But while she could feel his emotions, she couldn’t see the images he saw—the memories that had to have been his. So if he had been the one who’d started it all, it was appropriate that he would be the one to end it.
Alaina glanced from the mutilated body to Trent. Like at the apartment, she couldn’t feel these emotions of his. Because they weren’t his.
She could see them, though, on his handsome face as the color drained from it, leaving only the dark circles beneath his deep-set eyes.
“How’d she die?” she asked.
Dr. Rosenthal shook his head. “I haven’t had a chance to do much more than look at her.”
“I was asking him,” she said, turning again to Trent even though she hated putting him through this again.
“It was more violent than last time.”
“She has defensive wounds,” the doctor said, lifting the victim’s hand with its shredded nails.
“But he choked then stabbed her,” Trent continued, his voice rough, “just like the other woman.”
“Penelope Otten.” As she said the name, something tugged at her memory. A screen name. PennyForYourThoughts. Could she have been …? “And this woman is Cordelia Stehouwer.” She searched her mind again, trying to find a connection.
“They really have nothing in common,” she mused aloud. “Penelope was a redhead, like those women who were murdered thirty years ago. But Cordelia is a blonde.”
“Like you,” Trent said.
Alaina shivered as his fear for her safety rushed over her. She opened her jacket, reminding him that she carried a gun. As hard as Cordelia had fought, Alaina could and would fight harder if she actually became the target of the killer.
“He didn’t stab her when she was passed out,” Trent said, his voice thick with horror. “He waited until she regained consciousness …”
Like the killer had with the other victim, and like the killer had in all Trent’s books. Alaina flinched as she remembered the scene she’d just read. But it hadn’t been just a scene in a book; it had been her murder.
The doctor, studying the skin around the jagged wound in the victim’s chest, remarked, “I see something they had in common.”
“Yeah, they’re both missing their hearts,” Alaina said, anger and frustration coursing through her. Trent’s and hers.
“No, it’s the skin around the wound,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “There was an old scar. They both had old scars over their hearts. I can’t understand what they’re from. I thought maybe transplants, but I checked the first victim for transplant meds. She had nothing in her system. But then the scar looked old. It was so faint I nearly missed it.”
Delray. That was what Cordelia had called herself online, on the website that Alaina had anonymously launched a couple of years ago and on which other women had anonymously posted. That must have been how the killer had chosen them. He had found the website Alaina had created, and he had done what she’d been unable to do. He’d tracked down the anonymous posters and made them his newest victims. But they weren’t new victim
s; he’d already killed them once.
Just like in her previous life, these murders were her fault. These women were dead because of her, because of the mistake she’d made.
If not for the uniformed officers guarding the crime scene, he could have taken her there … where he’d already killed once. He could have taken her like he had before, right out from under her lover.
The man was weak. Why couldn’t she see that she’d chosen the wrong lover? Why didn’t she realize that she needed a real man in her life? One who would not neglect her as she’d been neglected before.
He wouldn’t neglect her. He was just getting ready for her. He had to kill the other women first. It was their destiny to die again, like they had before.
Just like she was his destiny.
Chapter 13
“Where’s Agent Paulsen?” the director asked as he settled into the chair behind his desk.
Not where Trent wanted her. Not back at his estate, locked away in his fortress so that the killer could not get to her. Frustration gnawed at Trent’s control. He didn’t need to be here, but he had been summoned. He would have ignored the summons if not for wanting some answers himself.
“She’s still not feeling well,” Trent said. And now it was no lie. She had gotten physically sick at the morgue, sick with guilt. It clutched at him also.
Those poor women.
“So she’s really sick?” Graves asked, a gray brow lifted in skepticism. Behind the man stretched the bright lights of the city—and the people in that city whose emotions pummeled Trent.
Behind Trent only a glass wall separated him from the rest of the Bureau. Only one man’s emotions pummeled him from there with nearly the same violence with which Vonner wanted to physically pummel him.
Tension pounded at Trent’s temples and the base of his neck. “Yes, Agent Paulsen is sick, but she’s still working the case.”
Trent knew it, even though he had told her to stay put and wait for him and to keep her apartment door locked and open it only to him. Hell, he’d suggested that maybe she shouldn’t even open it to him.
“What about you?”
“I’m here,” Trent pointed out as he paced the spacious office, his concern for Alaina’s safety making him anxious. He stopped before the director’s granite-and-glass desk and asked, “Why did you ask me to come?”