Blood of Saints

by Maegan Beaumont

  “Shut up,” she said quietly, closing her eyes for a moment, hands fisted in her lap. “Just shut the fuck up.”

  Truth hurts, don’t it? He’s probably glad you’re gone. I bet he sleeps better at night knowing you’re out here with me, getting what you deserve—

  “Hey.”

  Sabrina opened her eyes and turned to find Church wedged into the space between the door and its jamb, watching her. How long she’d been there was anyone’s guess.

  Long enough to know you’re shithouse crazy.

  “Where have you been?” she said, each word laced with barely contained frustration.

  Church flashed her a sugary smile. “Aw, did my Kitten miss me?”

  “I’m not your kitten,” she ground out, careful to keep her tone from spiking. “I texted you almost two hours ago.”

  “You gave me quite the honey-do list, partner.” The smile on Church’s face faded slightly. “I’ve been busy.”

  “I’m sorry—you’re right.” She forced herself to relax, to pretend she wasn’t scrambling to keep herself together. “Did you bring Graciella Lopez in for questioning?”

  “Yeah, about that …” Church said, slipping fully into the room before shutting the door with a sharp click. Snugged against her hip was the box Croft had given her the night before. “She’s gone.”

  You sure you want to open that thing again? Play show-and-tell with what’s inside? Let everyone know exactly what I did to you?

  “Gone?” She tore her gaze from the box and focused her attention on Church. “What does that mean—gone?”

  “It means I was already at her house when you texted me,” Church said, sliding the box onto the table in front of her. “The place was completely empty. Neighbor said a truck pulled into her driveway around three a.m. and a bunch of men piled out, loaded her up—along with everything she owned—and left.”

  Always one step behind, aren’t you, darlin’?

  Sabrina was out of her seat before she had time to think, Wade’s laughter bouncing around her skull, pushing her past Church to fling the door open. She strode down the hall, aware that the heated conversation between Santos and Alvarez had dried up and they were both watching her, mouths hanging open.

  “Agent Vance?” Santos called out to her a moment before she ground to a halt outside the interview room they’d put Vega in. “Agent—”

  Her hand closed over the door handle, she jerked it upward, and the door flew open to reveal Paul Vega, pacing the short length of the room, thumbnail anchored in his mouth while he tried to chew it off. The second the door opened, he stopped pacing and dropped his hand to look at her.

  “Is he here?” Vega said, aiming his gaze past her, trying to glimpse salvation. “Did my attorney—”

  She jabbed a finger at the chair he’d probably vacated the moment they closed him in. “Sit down.”

  “No.” Vega shook his head. “You can’t do this. I invoked my right to an attorney,” he said, a slight tremor in his voice. “I’m not going to say a word until he gets here.”

  “That’s fine.” Sabrina smiled, aware of the small crowd that had gathered in the hallway behind her. “As a matter of fact, I don’t want you to say a word. I just want you to listen.” She jabbed her finger at the chair again. “You should really take a seat, Mr. Vega. You’re gonna want to be sitting once you hear what I have to say.”

  Vega clamped his mouth shut and circled the table to do as he was told, glaring at her the entire time. They stared at each other for what felt like forever before he finally cracked. “I don’t—”

  “Shhh …” she said, pressing the finger she’d used to point him into his seat to her lips. “You don’t get to talk. You get to listen.” She leaned against the doorframe, listening to the mumble and whispers of the small clutch of uniforms and detectives standing behind her. The majority thought she’d lost it. Santos included.

  “While you’ve been pacing around like a caged animal,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ve been doing my homework on you. You’re a very interesting man, Paul.”

  Vega opened his mouth but she wagged her finger at him. “Hush now,” she said, and he closed it with an angry snap. “Says in your file that your mother died giving birth to you. After that, your biological father just walked out of the hospital and never came back.”

  Vega peeled his glare from her, sticking it to the wall in front of him instead. “Fuck you, lady,” he snarled at her. “You don’t know shit about me or my father.”

  “I know he blamed you for your mother’s death. I know he took one look at you and decided that living a life in third-world squalor was preferable to being your father.” She pushed herself off the doorjamb, letting her arms fall to her sides as she moved toward the table he sat at. “I know you were adopted by Jorge and Isabel Bautista. Lucky break for you since Isabel Bautista was Isabel Vega before she married. I guess ol’ Jorge didn’t want to share the family name with a boy who wasn’t his flesh and blood, huh? Had to take your adopted mother’s maiden name? But then Arturo had no interest in the family business, so it was given to you.”

  He shook his head, jaw clenched. “Graciella raised me,” he ground out. “And no one gave me anything. I earned every square inch of it.”

  “Funny you should mention her,” she said, giving him a brief half smile. “Mrs. Lopez is gone. Let me guess … Mexico?”

  Vega’s head whipped in her direction, mouth opened again but this time he clamped it shut before saying a word.

  “How’d it go down, Paul? You sent her there, set her up real nice and pretty in appreciation of all those years of keeping your sick, twisted behavior a secret?” She shook her head, the half smile planted on her mouth at odds with the frigid glare she was icing him with. “Gotta hand it to you, I figured you’d just cut her up and dump her like you did the rest of them.”

  He looked like she’d just spit on him. “I’d never hurt Graciella,” he said to the table between them. “And she knows that.”

  “I bet Rachel Meeks thought she knew the same thing,” she said evenly, jerking his gaze upward.

  His head came up. “This is about Rachel?” he said, aiming a look out the door and into the hallway. He was looking for Ellie, she’d bet her life on it. “I don’t know what you’ve—”

  “It’s about all of them, Paul.” She sharpened her glare, let it dig under his skin until he was fighting to keep himself in his chair. “All the women you’ve killed.”

  Vega shook his head, palms pushed flat on the tabletop between them. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, tearing his gaze away to look at his hands.

  “Maybe you didn’t.” Sabrina shrugged. “Maybe Nulo did the killing.” She said the name casually, watching Vega carefully for his reaction. “Is that how it goes, Paul? Is Nulo the one who has the guts to do what you can’t?”

  The name had his head rocking back on his neck, eyes narrowed. “Where did you—”

  “Please tell me that you haven’t been questioning my client outside my presence, Agent Vance.”

  Sabrina looked up to find the man she’d seen standing over Father Francisco in the garden at Saint Rose earlier that morning. He stood in the open doorway, a gaggle of cops behind him, watching the exchange with an odd mix of awe and apprehension.

  She smiled as she stood. “I asked your brother several times to be quiet,” she said with a shrug. “He’s not very good at following directions.”

  Bautista flashed a set of bright white teeth, suit crisp despite the wet, oppressive heat outside. “Apparently, neither are you,” he said, motioning for Vega to stand up. “Come on, Paul, we’re leaving.”

  She watched as Vega pushed himself away from the table and stood. “What were you doing at Saint Rose this morning?” she said it on impulse, not really expecting an answer.

  Surprisingly, Bautista
smiled. “I suppose I go to church for the same reasons most practicing Catholics do,” he said, his tone telling her that the question was ridiculous. “Good afternoon, Agent Vance.”

  “I’m going to find her, Vega,” she said, all pretense at humor stripped away. “I’m going to find Graciella and when I do, she’s going to tell me everything.”

  Vega stopped in the doorway, despite the protesting jerk Bautista gave his arm. He gave her a quick, cold smile before he let his lawyer pull him down the hall.

  Forty-nine

  Berlin, Germany

  As soon as the elevator door slid closed, Ben reached into his pants pocket and retrieved the strange-looking key he’d taken from his father’s desk. It’d been little more than childish impulse that’d pushed him to do it. Curiosity over what kind of things his father kept hidden behind locked doors.

  He opened the access panel next to the rows of lit buttons and lifted the key, fitting the blades into an oblong opening in the panel as wide as his finger. Giving it a turn, he watched the illuminated buttons go dim. A second later, the elevator car began to move. It traveled downward, passing the ground floor and underground parking levels.

  “Okaaay …” he said, hand moving to his waistband out of habit. There was nothing there. He’d stopped carrying when he agreed to his father’s insane plan.

  People have to trust you, Benjamin. They have to see you and feel safe. How can they do that if you’re armed all the time?

  Thinking about the conversation now, he almost laughed. Instead, he reached into his pocket again and pulled out the folding knife he’d used to break into his father’s desk. Flipping it open, he pressed it close to his thigh, concealing it from view while the elevator descended farther and farther.

  “Curiosity kills more than cats, Bennie-boy,” he said out loud, and this time he did laugh. Mason used to say that to him when they were kids. The hand he had wrapped around the hilt of the knife started to ache, responding to the memory. His fingers had started to stiffen from lack of use, the pad of scar tissue in the middle of his palm thickening and hardening as months of inactivity floated by.

  Golf games and fundraisers were making him soft.

  He flexed his fingers, felt the crackle and pop under his skin before he tightened them around the knife until his knuckles screamed and the back of his hand felt as if it wanted to split wide open.

  The elevator stopped moving a moment before its doors slid open. He reached up with his free hand to pull the key from the access panel, exiting the car seconds before the doors crept closed.

  The room was large and stark white. Walls, floor, and ceiling insulated in a slick, shiny material. He recognized it for what it was almost instantly. Lifting his arm, he moved the sleeve of his suit jacket to get a look at his watch. It had stopped.

  Created by FSS’s R&D department, the material was embedded with fiber-optics half as thin as a hair. Trillions of them webbed together, they emitted a signal that killed all things electrical. EMP in a wallpaper, it could be painted over or woven into the fabric of a suit. Disguised in a thousand different ways. You’d never even know it was there, until you tried to call for backup and realized that you’d been absolutely cut off from the outside world.

  He’d been trying to get his hands on it for months now.

  Dropping his arm, Ben took a look around, his gaze instantly landing on the box. It looked to be five feet square, about eight feet tall, made of thick, molded glass that was set into the floor and anchored in place from the outside. The box was also a creation of FSS, built to his father’s specifications. The glass was four inches thick and bulletproof. The bolts that locked it into the floor were as big around as his forearm, and they rested on top of pressure plates buried in six feet of solid concrete. Tampering with them would result in … well, Ben wasn’t sure what, but he was sure it would be pretty fucking horrible. The bottom line was that the box was escape-proof.

  He knew because he’d spent six months of his life trying to find his way out of one exactly like it.

  In the center of the box stood a man. Hands cuffed behind him, naked as the day he was born save for the black hood on his head.

  Here, kitty, kitty.

  Strolling across the room, Ben noted the absolute absence of sound. Nothing made noise. Not his shoes as he walked, not the knife in his hand as he worked it closed.

  Up close he could see them. More fibers were buried in the glass. Still, he half expected to be rendered mute as he raised his hand and used the hilt of his knife to knock on the glass. The deep, muffled sound raised the head of the man inside the box, but that was about it. There was no panic. No fear. Just an air of impatience that made Ben smile.

  Using the hilt again, Ben pressed a button set flush into the glass of the box. “Can you hear me?” Ben said, leaning against the thick glass.

  The man inside the box nodded. The feeling of impatience thickened, making Ben wonder how long it’d been since someone had been in to tend him. His answer lay in a puddle at the man’s feet.

  Trading his knife for the key, he inserted it into the lock just below the intercom. “Fantastic,” he said, giving it a turn. “You wanna get out of here?”

  Fifty

  Yuma, Arizona

  “I want you to follow him.”

  Sabrina stood at the second-floor window of their conference room watching Vega climb into the passenger seat of his lawyer’s Audi R8 Spyder. Reverse lights flashed a second before the convertible sped off, blowing the stop sign without even so much as a cursory brake tap.

  Douche bag.

  As soon as the car disappeared, she turned away from the window to find Church sitting at the long, heavy table, feet kicked up, a pile of papers in her lap. “Did you hear me, Church? I said—”

  “I’ve been following him since yesterday afternoon, Kitten,” Church said without so much as a glance in her direction. A slight smirk brushed across her mouth. “Or at least I’ve been following his cell phone.”

  Of course she had. “And?”

  “And …” Church shuffled through the papers on her lap, exchanging them for the journal that was buried underneath. “Nothing. No incriminating phone calls. No trips to his cozy, out-of-

  the-way, serial-killer lair,” she said, finally looking up. “Maybe he’s not the guy.”

  Sabrina was beginning to wonder the same thing but she shook her head. “Or maybe he’s just smart enough to leave his phone at home.”

  Church shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, flipping the journal open. “It’s the best I can do.”

  “I’ve seen your best,” she said, annoyance sharpening her tone. She needed to catch Vega in the act, and as much as it pained her to admit it, she’d need Church’s help to do it. “This isn’t it.”

  “Okay,” Church said, flipping through the journal’s pages. “It’s all I’m willing to do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, I’m not here to catch a killer,” Church said, running her finger down the length of the page before turning it. “You’re here to catch a killer. I’m here to make sure Livingston Shaw doesn’t send his T-1000s to Sarah Connor your ass.”

  Hearing Shaw’s name reminded her of the man in the stairwell. The same one in the church this morning. He’d been following her, she was sure of it. She opened her mouth to tell Church but quickly changed her mind. If she told Church, she’d do her job—which, according to her, was kill half of Yuma and haul Sabrina back to Montana. As much as she wanted to go home, she couldn’t. Not until she nailed Vega to the wall. As for her newly acquired shadow—she’d take care of him on her own.

  You sure you want to go home, darlin’? What’s there, anyway? A man who resents you for getting his sister killed? A couple of kids who hardly talk to you? Hell, even the dog would be better off without you.

  “Without Graciella Lopez, I’m
not sure how I’m going to do that,” she said carefully.

  Church looked up and smiled. “I’m not going to Mexico.” She glanced back down at the page she was reading, running her finger down the length of it. “And neither are you.”

  “You let me meet Croft on my own,” she said in a complaining tone so irritating it made her want to kick her own ass. “And nothing happened.”

  “Did I?” Church said, a you’re adorable smirk on her downturned face, telling her what she already suspected. Church had been following her last night. Probably snatched Croft the second she left him at the truck stop.

  “She needs to be found, Courtney.”

  Church laughed, her finger stopping midpage. “Using my first name to capitalize on our perceived relationship—you must be serious.”

  “This is serious, you sociopath.” Sabrina’s gaze swept across the table, settling on the box next to Church’s feet. “He killed another girl last night, only this one must’ve really pissed him off because he set her on fire after he punched a hole in her skull.”

  “We’ll find him, Sabrina,” Church said to her, her tone suddenly serious. “We just have to keep digging.”

  “All the digging in the world isn’t going to give us what we need, which, just in case you missed it, is Nulo’s real name,” she said, her frustration spiking. “Right now, I don’t have anything but a bunch of half-baked speculations. That means all we can do is wait for this asshole to kill again and hope we get lucky. That’s not something I’m willing to do.”

  “I can’t help you,” Church said.

  “You won’t help me,” she said quietly. “Big difference.”

  “I operate within the parameters I’m given, Kitten.” Church shook her head. “Ben understands that about me … which is why he left me very little wiggle room.”

  “Then call him.” Ben wouldn’t drop this case in her lap and then tie her hands completely. He wouldn’t do that.