by Nikki Duncan
He quirked a brow, but didn’t argue as he moved more carefully to Lionetti. In the kitchen, huddled at the table, sat a handsome man turned haggard by the grief riding his features.
“Dr. Grayson found Ms. Walker and called 9-1-1.” Lionetti quietly filled Aidan in on what he’d done since arriving on scene. “The victim has a rash identical to the woman from the alley. The EMTs called her death and then left after we called the medical examiner’s office.”
Lana listened to Lionetti’s run-down, but studied Dr. Grayson, with his Indian coloring drained from his face. Even slumped in grief, the man’s height was average at best. And the shaking hands he continually ran through his ink black hair were clear. No scar. No birthmark. No skin discoloration.
Her mind snapped back to her door. To when she was touched.
When Aidan finished with Lionetti, before he could approach Dr. Grayson, Lana stopped him again with a hand on his arm. When his attention shifted to her, she nodded toward the living room. Sure he’d follow, she headed there.
“You’re intruding.”
“Only to say he’s not the killer,” she whispered.
“You have proof after watching him for two minutes?”
“It only took a glimpse of his hands.” She reminded him about the video of when Lance was touched and the memory of hers. “I don’t think the heartbroken man in there would mark his hand before trying to kill people. And why report Maria’s death and not the others?”
“A fair observation and question, but hardly enough to rule him out.”
Did he not get it? Was he being resistant to give her a hard time or to prove he didn’t really value her input?
“Maybe he’s tired of killing and wants to be caught. Maybe she was the last straw.”
No. Aidan couldn’t be right. If he was… Well, he just couldn’t be. She couldn’t have read Maria and, by extension, Dr. Grayson wrong. She’d have to rethink everything she thought she knew about her skills.
What about the mark on the killer’s hand? If she was wrong, if Dr. Grayson was the killer, where was the mark?
Thrumming her fingers against her thighs, Lana paced the short hallway between the living room where Maria’s body lay and the kitchen where Dr. Grayson grieved. Her blood pulsed faster and faster while she forced her thoughts to steady. The coroner should arrive any minute to take care of Maria, but Lana felt like they were missing something important.
If they were alone, or even alone with his team, Aidan would give her a hard time for the sake of argument. They weren’t alone or with the team. They were on display for Detective Lionetti and neighbors and reporters waiting outside. Maria lay in the living room as peacefully as if she’d chosen the spot for a nap.
No. Aidan wouldn’t be anything less than professional on scene, which meant she couldn’t fight him now. She needed to prove her theory or accept his.
Walking into the living room with her gaze averted from Maria, Lana tried to recall every detail of her attacker and the scene before her as it had been the day before.
If Maria had been in one of her dark-out phases, and appearances suggested she was, the attacker wouldn’t have needed to resort to a hoodie. Then again, since her main allergy was light, and the killer’s touch heightened that…
“When I was attacked I told you about the EpiPen.” Lana stopped pacing, turned to Aidan in time to catch a blink of rage in his eyes.
“Yes.” Clamped control strangled his normally strong tone.
“Maria explained that she was able to work with the more toxic plants because she’s built up a tolerance for them. And she is able to handle sunlight for longer periods thanks to a similar tolerance.”
“Which has nothing to do with an EpiPen.”
“No. But that tolerance and the fact that death isn’t instant could have given her time to go for a medicine.”
“And if Dr. Grayson had killed her and she got away from him,” Aidan picked up the thread, “there would be signs of a struggle.”
Acceptance.
Aidan had just accepted her theory and the thrill of it wrapped her head like a cloud of champagne bubbles. Stumbling and reaching out to steady herself when she swayed, her hand landed on a table where a bright candy-colored ball-shaped flower—a highly toxic beauty—had sat the day before. Lana flinched, yanked her hand away. The table was covered with toxic plants, but the missing one was one she’d actually heard of.
“Lana?”
“There was a potted foxglove here.” She turned a circle, looking at the plants, but it was too dark to see them well. “Can we crack the curtains more to see better?”
“I suppose.”
Aidan went to the front window and pulled back a curtain a few inches. A shaft of Miami evening light brightened the room and striped one of Maria’s arms. The foxglove lay on its side below the table. One bell-shaped bloom had a jagged edge where a tip was missing.
Lana’s stomach writhed with tension that tripped and trembled throughout her muscles. The sensation persisted until even the tips of her fingers felt bruised.
Excitement.
Fear.
They warred inside as Maria’s lesson the day before rushed back.
“If these plants are so toxic, how can you safely handle them?”
“Just as we can acquire a taste for certain foods we can build up a tolerance to otherwise harmful plants. They’re still dangerous, but enough of a tolerance can minimize an otherwise deadly dose.”
Lana grabbed a pencil from her bag and, braced against the choking grip of grief as she neared Maria, she lifted the damaged bloom with the pencil. The jagged marks looked distinctly like teeth.
“What are you thinking?” Aidan spoke with reserve as he crouched at her side.
“Foxglove can slow a heart rate.” Lana turned toward Maria. The friendly smile from yesterday had been replaced by relaxation and a bluish tint. The pustules that had covered Lana’s arm within minutes coated Maria’s left arm and neck.
Bile surged.
Lana swallowed and swayed.
Still kneeling, she reached for the floor for balance. Her hand landed on Maria’s, which felt surprisingly warm. “How long ago did Dr. Grayson call 9-1-1?”
“About an hour ago.” With his forehead scrunching up, Aidan rested a hand on Maria’s neck. “Hmm. With as cool as it is in here I’d expect her to be cooler.”
“Do you think…?”
Aidan was saved from responding to the hope in Lana’s unasked question when Ava and Liam walked in. Detective Lionetti’s scanned Ava’s Greek beauty with admiration. She was stunning, but even before her recent engagement she hadn’t been enough to tempt Liam out of his celibacy.
“Rose Stevens has arrived,” Liam stated.
“Breck is handling her,” Ava finished Liam’s sentence as smoothly as he picked up what she no doubt would’ve said next.
“Kieralyn and Tyler are working the still gathering crowd.”
“While Tyler snaps pictures of everyone hovering.”
During the now-routine back and forth of Ava and Liam, Lana stood. Whatever else she’d felt within the cocoon of working the case slid away, allowed uncertainty to show in her shifting eyes and trembling lips.
“Lana.” Aidan led her a few steps away from Maria. Each distancing step steadied her lips. “Would you go sit with Dr. Grayson? Use your charm to see what you can learn about that plant. Maybe see if he knows if Maria was expecting anyone today.”
“Sure.” She sounded relieved to have the new task, though her gaze that drifted back to Maria suggested a desire to stay.
His need to get back to Maria pursued the pleasure he felt from Lana’s relief and the need to keep it there. That duty was coming in second to Lana pissed him off. She’d faced an ugly scent and held it together when most women would’ve collapsed into hysterics. She’d had the presence of mind to recall details easily forgotten. Details important enough to matter.
When she was well out of earshot, Aidan t
urned to Ava and motioned her toward Maria.
“You’re going soft, Aidan. I like it.” Liam slapped his shoulder.
He ignored his brother. “Ava, do you sense anything from Maria?”
Ava’s eyes flared wide for a beat. No one on the team had asked her to use her empathic abilities before. Partly because the abilities were still developing. Mostly because the team felt that using her ability was a betrayal or invasion.
“I’m sorry to ask, but this is important.”
“I can’t read dead people.”
“It’s possible Maria ingested some foxglove to slow her heart enough to stall the spread of the rash.” Lana hadn’t verbalized as much, but it hadn’t been necessary. That Aidan read her so easily was another thing that pissed him off. He couldn’t get the woman out of his system when they shared thoughts and emotions so readily.
“It would more likely give her cardiac arrest,” Ava argued as she moved to Maria.
“Which wouldn’t be much more painful than the rash if Lana’s initial reaction to the touch is any indication.” Aidan knelt beside Ava while Liam took his position across from them.
Clearing his mind of cloudy doubts, Aidan flattened a hand on Ava’s back. While the touch would’ve undone her when she first discovered her ability, the connections now shored her defenses. “I just need you to see if you can sense anything from her.”
He’d checked for a pulse when he’d first joined Lana at Maria’s side. He’d thought he felt a bump against his fingers, but when a second one hadn’t come he’d thought he imagined it. It wasn’t a question he could leave unanswered.
“The EMTs have been here and gone. They pronounced her?”
Liam’s question came more from trying to figure out how trained medics could miss a heartbeat than from doubting Aidan’s push for investigation. Kieralyn, because of her belief in Lana, had reminded them all of the importance of ignoring logic for the sake of gut instinct.
“Yes.”
Ava settled onto her knees at Maria’s side and lifted an arm into her lap. As gently as she’d brush a tear off the cheek of a baby she swept her fingers over Maria’s arm. An angry red stripe slid into and out of view beneath Ava’s palm. It hadn’t been there when Aidan first opened the blinds, and while the skin could still sunburn after death it didn’t tend to be so severe and in only a few minutes. He held his silence to allow Ava peace.
Ava stopped stroking Maria and instead wrapped her fingers around Maria’s wrist. Eyes closed, breathing slow, Ava focused fully on the victim.
Sitting uselessly on the side to see if an empath could intuit anything from a lifeless body was a change in approach that made Aidan a little uncomfortable. Stranger was the fear riding him about what Ava could discover.
Nothing.
“Liam. Call the EMTs back.” Ava spoke with a softness Aidan barely heard. A softness that bordered on weakness.
“Do we need to call Dr. H for you?” Aidan pulled Ava away from Maria while Liam pulled his phone from his pocket. There was something about the connection between Ava and her fiancé. No one seemed to understand how being with him quickly leveled her after a weakened moment, yet it made them incredibly powerful.
“Just the EMTs.” Ava looked up at Aidan with a tired but otherwise strong plea. “I’m fine. Besides, H still struggles with who we are. The more we leave him out of these things the better.”
“He thinks we exploit you.”
“I’ve told him differently. Breck and Kieralyn have too. He’s working to believe it.”
“But we haven’t earned that much trust.” Aidan didn’t know all of Dr. H’s story, but he knew enough to understand the trust issue. And after seeing how much he’d helped Ava, when her infiltration into his life could be seen as a betrayal, he respected the man. Trust would come.
“Ambulance will be here in five.” Liam slipped his phone back into his pocket.
Tyler came through the front door. “ME’s office is here.”
“Dr. Grayson recalls his office manager behaving strangely.” Lana stepped in from the kitchen and noticed Ava knelt with Aidan supporting her at Maria’s side and Liam holding his phone. She took another step then stopped. “What’s going on?”
Aidan looked between Lana and Maria and Ava and back to Lana.
Puzzle pieces he’d gathered during his visit to Dr. Grayson’s office, the time with Lana, her knowledge of the case, Maria’s past, her actions, Dr. Grayson’s reaction to Maria and his suspicions. He looked again between Tyler and Liam.
“We need a plan,” Tyler stated simply.
Lana glanced toward the kitchen where she’d left Dr. Grayson then stepped farther into the living room. “A plan for what?”
“Assuming you’re right about Dr. Grayson,” Aidan began, “your attacker may believe you’re dead. Though I doubt it. They certainly believe Maria is.”
Lana’s gaze flew to Maria’s still unmoving form. “She isn’t?”
“For the moment, but it’ll be up to the professionals to keep it that way.”
Lana swayed. Aidan stepped forward, rushing faster when her knees buckled. He didn’t get to her before her knees slapped the floor. Aidan’s heart shook with the force of ten bass beats for the second time in as many days. Tyler was there first, but took a hurried and silent step back when Aidan sank to the floor before Lana and took her face in his hands.
She was pale. Her eyes were glassy and largely dilated. Her body quaked beneath his touch as an answering quake, eager to swallow him whole, began in his core.
“Lana?”
“I’m okay.” Her hands rested on his knees—a bid for balance rather than a gesture of closeness. In the eye of the case, in what could only be a momentary pause, the touch slipped in and tied a knot around his heart. “What kind of plan do we need?”
“One that flips things to our favor while allowing the killer to believe we’re no closer to answers. One that gets Maria to the hospital and requires someone to die.”
Chapter Eleven
“I only just met Maria, but she seemed…” Lana choked, swiped at a tear tracking down her cheek and locked her watery gaze with the reporter’s rating-friendly sympathy. It was the only thing about Rose Stevens anyone could almost believe, and only when the camera was rolling. “I wish I had known her better.”
“Do you know what happened, Ms.…” Rose angled her head so her four-hundred-dollars-a-day spa hairstyle fell artfully to the side in a ginger wave. Her skin appeared untouched by hardship, which was absolutely believable. The bright green eyes shining into the camera wouldn’t for a moment be dimmed by anything happening to those around her, unless it had a negative impact on her reporting career.
Lana inhaled, dramatic and choppy. “It looked like a really bad reaction to one of her plants.”
The EMTs and ME techs came out of the house with two stretchers. One with a body bag. One with Breck, Aidan and the rest of their team huddled around so close the patient couldn’t be seen.
Rose’s gaze latched on to Aidan as the group headed toward the ambulance. Lana sobbed loud and suddenly to pull the attention back to her. It worked on the cameraman and Rose.
“Who else was in there, Ms.…?”
“A friend of Maria’s. He tried to help her I think.”
“I’ve heard she was close to Dr. Grayson. Is he the friend in there? What happened to him?” Glee glazed Rose’s tone as she and her cameraman stepped greedily closer to Lana. “Was it a lover’s spat gone wrong? Was he abusive? Was she poisoning him?”
Chunks of curdled disgust rolled in Lana’s gut. Rose Stevens had been at every scene dealing with this case, but more disturbing was her glee at each turn. She was the kind of reporter Aidan judged all journalists by.
Interested only in ratings and how quickly she could get herself to the anchor’s desk for the six o’clock news, Rose went for the glam and gore of a story instead of accuracy or heart. She’d probably run over a dog and her puppies and then report on it
if she thought it would get her airtime.
“Did you catch a name?” Rose asked.
She’d even gone so far as to hold off starting the interview with Lana so she could freshen her makeup and lip gloss. As if the spotlight belonged on her when people were being killed.
“Did you hear where they’re taking him?”
Lana allowed the questions to pile up. Allowed the anonymity of a non-existent byline photo to give her the edge. Of course she knew the answers. She’d have gotten them even if she hadn’t been on the inside, but not by feeding on a grieving person’s heartbreak.
“Ma’am.” Aidan closed the distance between the now closed ambulance doors and her. Pinched anger tensed his face and snapped in his voice as he grasped her arm just above the elbow. “We told you to go home.”
“I’m sorry.” Lana managed to sound apologetic and submissive. Even knowing the purpose of her role in the plan, the perception of weakness irritated her. “She wanted to ask me a couple questions.” With fear-filled eyes she rubbed her arm and looked up at Aidan. “I didn’t mention the similarities to…”
“It was quite harmless, Agent Burgess.” The intimate roll of Aidan’s name slipping through Rose’s lips had the journalist inside Lana perking her ears. That Rose missed what she’d started to say because her focus was so Aidan-centric told a more enlightening story.
“Harmless enough you’re willing to violate a restraining order.”
“You have it on you?”
“Always.” Aidan had looked fierce when he’d busted in to arrest The Killing Cupid. He’d acted aggressive when Lana had been attacked in her home. Now, faced with the reporter Lana would bet was the one who screwed him over, he embodied pure violence.
It radiated off him and had Lana vacillating between stepping closer to calm him or moving back to give him room. A scared and submissive witness in her shoes would most likely want to hear all she could. While staying out of the way. Lana certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance to see Aidan confronted with an ex he clearly hated.
She stayed.