I look back toward the road—his front bumper has a fairly large dent in it, but the damage is all artificial. That’s how Peter seems completely unscathed by the collision.
“You seemed to be in quite a rush,” he says. “You should really be more careful. You wouldn’t want to die without repenting your sins.”
“You’re the one who crossed into my lane,” I argue. “Maybe you should be more careful before you commit sins. I’m sure you think it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but the law thinks a little differently.”
“Yes, the law does not run by God’s laws,” he says.
I tense as he shoves his hands out of his pocket, but all he pulls out is a couple of nails. Then, I realize they’re the same cross-shaped nails that Lauren had found after the police station’s explosion.
He continues, “But God is more powerful than any law that man invents.”
“I may not be a Christian, but I’m fairly certain God supported the idea of not killing people,” I say.
“God is not a static figure whose wishes remain the same,” he says. “If He was, He would have given up His son at the beginning of time—”
“Let’s not forget about Him changing His mind about foreskins.”
Peter shakes his head. “God gave me new commands and I followed them. Tobias, you couldn’t possibly ever understand. Not only are you not a believer, you can’t see the world like God does. I can. The Christian population is decreasing, which means more people are going to Hell. I need to save as many of them as I can. Society has clouded their vision, but my vision is clear and I will not let these people perish in Hell for eternity. My heart is pure and I know you can’t see that, but it’s true. Once you’re in Heaven or Hell, God will open your heart and you’ll see that I was right. You’ll regret ever trying to stop me.”
“You need help, Peter,” I say. “Just surrender. I’m sure you can get off on a guilty by reason of insanity defense. You don’t have to keep doing this.”
“What God commands is law,” he says. “I’m not going to give up the mission He gave me just because some policeman told me to.”
"Well, you're going to have to give up your mission," I say. "Because I'm tired of chasing you all around the city. So—”
I reach for my gun, but I realize it’s not on me. While I’m driving, I keep my gun and my handcuffs in the center console. It would require me to turn my back on Peter to grab them. He may not have a weapon, but I’m not going to risk turning my back on a sociopath.
“—So, why don’t you suppress your crazy for a few seconds while I get my phone out of my car,” I say, hoping he can’t read my face as well as Lauren can. In my periphery, I can’t see anyone around, though I wouldn’t want anyone to get involved with this mental case, anyway.
His fists clench. “I’m not crazy.”
“You know, I was recently told about the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous and the first step is to admit that you have a problem,” I say, taking a step back, closer to my car. “Then, there are some steps about giving control over to God. You should try it.”
“I have given control over to God,” he says, taking a step forward. “Why do you think I’ve succeeded while you have failed?”
I’ll never get to my gun without giving him enough time to attack me.
I run straight at him, grabbing him by the waist and slamming him into the ground. I had always thought he was too thin to have any muscle, but as he tries to shove me off him, I realize that he’s not weak—especially when I take into consideration that every inch of my body still hurts from the crash.
“You might as well just go with my plan,” he says. “Lauren is either already burning for her sins or she’s going to be very soon. You better hope she’s repenting with every second that passes by.”
His hand clasps around my throat. I hit him as hard as I can against the side of his head. His grip loosens, but it takes another hit to his throat before his hand falls away.
As he struggles for breath, cradling his throat with his hands, I jump back to my feet and rush to the car. I open the center console. Everything falls down—from my gun to the handcuffs to a pack of gum. As I grab the gun off the ceiling of the car, I feel a fist slam into the back of my head. I stumble forward, losing my grip on the gun. Peter grabs me around the waist and pulls me away from the gun.
I spin around onto my back, and he lunges forward for the gun. I grab the back of his shirt and jerk him backwards. It barely deters him, but it gives me enough room to pull my elbow up and jab him in the face. He lurches backward, blood pouring from his nose. I pull my leg out from under him and stomp at his chest. He jerks back again, but it’s still not enough to incapacitate him for long. I reach my arm back into the car, searching for the gun, while I keep my eyes on him.
My hands touch cold steel, but as my fingers wrap around it, I realize it’s my handcuffs. I let them go as Peter pulls the two melded nails out of his pocket again. He thrusts himself down onto me, aiming the cross for my neck.
I grab his wrist with one hand as my other hand grasps the handle of the gun. I pull the gun up to Peter’s head. There’s no time to think—I pull the trigger.
There’s an explosion of sound as blood and what feels like bone fragments fall onto my face. Peter’s body collapses on top of mine.
I push him off, stumbling onto my feet. I wipe the blood off my face and neck.
I have to find Lauren.
With Peter’s preference for making everything figurative into something literal, I have to assume his reference of Lauren burning for her sins means she’s in the middle of an actual fire.
She was on her way to her grandmother’s, so I have a good idea of where that fire is.
I lurch toward Peter’s truck. When I look back down at Peter, blood is flowing away from his head, forming what looks like two horns.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lauren
I’ve managed to roll into the kitchen, but the living room is quickly being consumed in flames and smoke is filling the first floor. I need to get this tape off me or I’ll never make it to the front door. I rock my weight until I have enough momentum to get onto my knees. There has to be something sharp in the kitchen that I can use to cut this tape. The only problem is that I can’t open any drawers and I’m still having trouble getting onto my feet.
There’s nothing here for me that I could get to. It’s getting harder to take in a full breath of air, so smoke inhalation has to be getting to me. I have to get this tape off before I black out.
I curl back into a ball and roll back into the living room. The fire has spread past the couch, destroying the carpet and the window tapestry behind it. I roll close to the fire until I can feel the flames stinging my skin. I raise my ankles over the flames, letting them lick against the duct tape. When it doesn’t immediately begin to melt, I lower my ankles until the flames are dancing all around my feet.
I grit my teeth, waiting until I can feel the tape loosening as my eyes feel like they’re burning from the smoke. I shift my feet away from the flames. In order to get my fingers close enough to the tape, I have to pull my legs underneath me. I yank the melted tape off my ankles, the heat singing my fingertips. I can finally get onto my feet.
I’m unsteady—like a new colt, if a horse happened to give birth in the middle of a fire. I make it a few steps before I fall down again. I get back up, but my vision is getting blurry. I stumble forward. I have to get back through the kitchen, down the hall and through the door. It should be easy, but my body wants me to quit.
Giving up is simply easier.
I fall back onto my knees and bow my head. I try to think up a prayer, but all I can think of is a verse from Book of Isaiah: Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. But what happens when I fail to be refined? What happens if I don’t get past this point?
Who am I to question God?
I hear a pounding sound in my he
ad that I think must be the Horseman of Death coming to retrieve me. I feel arms pick me up, and my head rests against his chest.
“Lauren,” Tobias’s voice says. “Lauren, are you okay? Wake up.”
This is why it is said: "Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." Ephesians 5:14.
But I haven’t died. I’m here and Tobias is carrying me down the hallway. I must have been unconscious at some point because the whole house seems to be dancing in flames.
As we’re about to reach the door leading to the outside, I look up to see a burning wood post fall down. Tobias’s whole body jolts as the post slams into his back. I fall out of his arms, crashing back onto the floor.
Barely a second passes by before he picks me up again. As I wrap my arm around him, I can feel the cloth of his shirt is burned away and the flesh on his back is warped from burns. He stumbles out of the house.
The fresh air is a miracle all on its own.
He continues walking with me in his arms until we’re beside a red truck, far away from the heat of the house.
“Tobias,” I mutter, my throat feeling dry. “It’s Peter. It was Peter the whole time.”
“I know,” he says. “Peter’s dead.”
I feel a pang of grief, although I know Peter deserved worse than death.
“He drove me off the road,” Tobias says. “We got into a fight and he tried to stab me with one of his nail crosses—”
“Tobias,” I interrupt.
“What?”
I grab both sides of his face, kissing him with as much energy as I can muster. His hands rest on my waist as he kisses me back. It’s not sexual or even sensual—it’s a celebration of life, of being here together, surviving another close call.
I can hear the sirens of the fire trucks coming. When I finally step away, I see the fire from the house is casting Tobias’s face in a warm glow. Since I’m facing away from the fire and the sun has dipped below the horizon, my face must be cast in darkness, but he still looks at me as though I were shining brighter than any fire. And in my soul, I am.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tobias
FBI agents Hoffman and Ortiz sit across from us in the library as the faint sounds of an elderly woman reading a children’s book floats toward us. Neither of them are the original FBI agent I talked to, so I wonder if he asked to no longer be involved in the case. I probably should have been kinder to him, but I’m sure these two will piss me off enough that I’ll go back to hating the whole FBI with an unnatural amount of intensity.
“So, you’ve known your half-brother, Peter Luctor, for about a decade, but you had no idea he had violent tendencies?” Agent Hoffman, a thin, red-headed woman, asks Lauren.
“If I’d known, I would have tried to get him psychiatric help,” Lauren says.
“She didn’t even know he’d had surgery for his eyes,” I say.
Ortiz raises his hand to silence me. He’s lucky I don’t bite his fingers off.
“I’m sure Detective Williams can answer on her own,” he says.
“And I’m sure you like that hand, but you’re going to be missing parts of it if you treat me like a dog again,” I retort.
“It’s fine, Tobias,” Lauren says. I feel her hand under the table squeeze my knee. “They’re just making sure I wasn’t harboring a violent serial killer. For the record, I wasn’t. You can ask around my apartment, my work, any place that I go to. I barely saw him until my grandmother came down with pneumonia and then we only saw each other because of my grandmother.”
“These serial murders also came to your precinct shortly before your grandmother became sick,” Agent Hoffman notes.
“And we believe that this was all part of Peter’s plan,” Lauren says. “He wanted to keep track of the murders, he knew I was investigating them, and he decided the best way was to use my grandmother.”
“You think he somehow managed to give her pneumonia?”
“I don’t know,” Lauren admits. “He could have just made it worse. He could have done nothing and just saw an opportunity once he was in the hospital. I really could not tell you what was going through his mind at any point.”
“So, he was your half-brother—one of your last remaining relatives—and you didn’t really have any relationship with him?”
“He was also the child my mother conceived after she cheated on my father,” she says. “I didn’t even know he existed until a decade ago. I had mixed feelings about him—many of them negative—and I didn’t feel obligated to insert him into my personal life. We exchanged Christmas cards and we occasionally saw each other because we shared the same grandmother. That’s it. I don’t know many people who would continue to have a relationship with someone like that. It wasn’t anything personal with him—he had seemed perfectly sane to me and I believe he was until a year ago when he had surgery done.”
“You think the surgery caused him to torture and murder people?”
“I think a mixture of factors caused him to lose his mind and maybe getting someone else’s eyes triggered something in his head,” she says. “I don’t know. I never professionally analyzed his behavior and thoughts.”
I lean back in my chair, tapping my fingers against the table. Hoffman glances over at me.
“Detective Rodriguez, I know you’re protective of your partner, but we’re just covering all our bases,” she says. “It’s nothing personal.”
“You’re acting like my partner is a liar,” I say. “That makes it personal.”
“All of Peter’s friends and family will be asked the same questions. The city will be questioning her relationship with Peter.”
“And we’ve dealt with that kind of criticism just fine.” I cross my arms over my chest. “Do I need to remind you that Peter’s closest relationship was with Lauren’s grandmother? She is shocked, but she still believes what happened. Lauren isn’t a liar. She’s a good fucking person.”
Hoffman turns back to Lauren. “Detective Williams, you do seem like a very trustworthy individual. You have an outstanding clearance rate and we’ve heard nothing but praise about you. We just need to do this.”
“I understand,” Lauren says. She squeezes my knee again. I close my hand over hers, indulging in the softness of her skin. “Do you have any more questions?”
“We have one more,” Hoffman says. “Would you be interested in joining the FBI?”
“Really?” she asks, her eyebrows shooting up. “I’m now associated with one of the most notorious serial killers from Detroit and you want me to join the FBI?”
“Your credentials surpass any ugly familial relationships,” she says. “This will blow over and we would be foolish to ignore a great detective. We want the best and that’s you.”
She gestures to me. “What about Tobias?”
“He’s already been asked,” Hoffman drawls. “He refused.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but honestly I don’t want the job either,” she says.
I exhale, not realizing I had been holding my breath before.
“I like Detroit,” Lauren says. “I like the people I work with, and I enjoy solving these cases. The work you guys do is honorable—tracking terrorists, investigating counterintelligence, and everything else—but I belong here.”
Hoffman nods. “Understood. I’m thinking you’re so good at your job because you care about these people. We respect your choice, but if you ever change your mind, please get in touch.” Hoffman slides her card across the table.
“I don’t think that will happen, but I’ll keep that in mind,” Lauren says, pocketing the card.
Hoffman shakes both of our hands. Ortiz shakes Lauren’s hand, but ignores me. Hoffman walks us to the elevator. I press the button to go down after Hoffman walks away. The doors open and Lauren and I step in.
After I press the button for the ground floor and the doors close, she turns to me. “Can I say something?”
“I didn’t know that I could stop you from sayin
g anything,” I say.
She laughs, her tongue slipping between her teeth in the cutest way as she tries to stop.
“Okay, you’re right,” she says. “But I just wanted to say that I love you. I think I loved you the day I met you, it’s just been swallowing me whole for a long time. And that kind of scared me—the idea that I could be so in love with you that I could lose myself. I didn’t want to lose my beliefs or even think about giving up any future children, but—”
“I want to have kids,” I blurt. “With you. I want to have kids with you.”
She flushes. “Look, you don’t need to say that just because I want them.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I was scared about having kids before because I thought this world was a terrible, evil place, but I know you’re right. There’s good in it too, and I think if we had a child, that would be one more good thing. I love you, too. I’ve loved you since the day I met you and it’s swallowed me too, but I don’t mind.”
She swings her arms around my shoulders and kisses me. I can taste her raspberry sorbet lip balm as her kissing becomes more persistent and her hands grab my shoulders to press my body against hers. I slip my fingers into her hair as she leans her head back and I press my lips firmly against her throat.
The elevator beeps as the doors begin to open. I jerk away from her, my hand almost getting tangled in her hair. We’re at the ground floor.
“Should we, uh, get some dinner?” I suggest.
She smiles. “Yeah. I know a place that makes the most amazing chicken parmesan.”
“You make the most amazing chicken parmesan.”
“So, you’ll come?” she asks.
“Absolutely.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lauren (6 years later)
I trace the scar on Tobias’s back, a thin line with shiny, pink skin around it from the fire. The scar is slightly below his shoulder blades and only about an inch long. For some reason, it makes me think that he once had wings and this scar is all that’s left from tearing them out. But I know the truth is that it was caused by a devil, though I suppose it took a devil for us to realize what was sacred.
Vengeance of the Son (A Trinity of Death Romantic Suspense Series Book 3) Page 12