Painted Walls

by Megan Mitcham

  He didn’t want to love her, but…

  Keen pulled himself off the hideous floral bed spread, braced his hands on his knees, and cocked his head, feeling every bit of his thirty-one years and then some. His gaze fell to the junction of her hips. To the scars.

  “Running hasn’t worked.”

  He stood and found her bright green gaze.

  “You have to face him or be destroyed by him. But…it is ultimately your choice.”

  “I’ve been waiting all day to hear you say that. The second part. Then you had to go and use that brain of yours.” She swiped at tears clinging to her lower lashes. Emotions juggled her brows. Ava walked to the bathroom, but paused with her fingers on the handle. Her somber gaze found him.

  “I hate you...because you’re right.”

  He let out a sarcastic grunt.

  “And I love you. We all have our crosses to bear.”

  13

  A va looked past the car’s window at the faint grey morning. Misty fog dissipated in the early morning light. Old farm houses and the occasional batch of horses and cows rolled by in the distance. With little sleep to speak of, coffee and the sheer will of the man driving bolstered her resolve.

  “What did the other paper say?” Ava whispered the first words of the morning, but they shattered the unspoken truce they made the night before, where she didn’t acknowledge what he’d said and he didn’t say any more about it.

  One problem at at time.

  “Deserved him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The first paper said, ‘You never…’ The second said, ‘deserved him.’”

  “I never deserved who?” She turned in the seat and eyed Keen. Most certainly she’d never deserved him, but why would her tormenter hone in on him?

  Because you love him, idiot.

  Ava rubbed the center of her chest. “You need to go back to Miami. He can’t hurt you.”

  Keen’s hand shot up to catch the coffee that slipped from the top of his cup. A garbled curse slipped his closed mouth. His tongue sneaked out and collected the excess liquid that stained the lip. He coughed. The cup sank inside a holder.

  “I don’t think he was talking about me.”

  “You don’t?”

  “You do?” If his brow furled any higher the thing would create drag and slow their progress.

  “I just thought… Well, you’re the only him that’s ever been in my life.”

  “The only one?”

  Yep, the needle on the speedometer descended. Two cars flew past them.

  “I pushed you away and I trusted you more than I trusted myself. If it didn’t work with you, how would it work with anyone else?”

  “Ava.”

  She waved him off with a hand. “Who do you think he was talking about?”

  “Your father.”

  “Preston,” she gasped. “I need to call my parents—”

  “Not your dad. Your biological father.”

  “Oh.” She flopped against the seat. “And I’m the big shot profiler.”

  “You’ve never been this close to a case.”

  Ava prodded the taut muscles at the back of her neck. She let his words marinate. Once again, he was right.

  “Okay. If I wasn’t so close to this I could wrap my head around it. But I am too close. I can’t grab hold of anything right now. Why are we going to talk to my father? I know I have to and I’m working on accepting that. But why?”

  Keen battled with the rolled sleeves of his dress shirt. His gaze hit the centerline, the rows and rows of needly trees, and then the car about a mile in front of them.

  “Just spill it. I won’t shatter. My behavior over the last twenty-four hours hasn’t suggested it, but—”

  “Are you still cutting yourself?” His gaze bounced to her and held for four dangerous seconds.

  Perhaps she would split into a million little pieces.

  “You are the strongest person I know, Ava, but I think that strength has cost you. I’m not judging…not you anyway.”

  “Who are you judging?”

  Whiskers scraped under the rough stroke of his hand. “Me,” he bit. “God dammit! Some of those were old scars—”

  “They all were. I’m not cutting myself. I haven’t in a long time.”

  “But you did while we were together and…” Something caught in his throat. Ava tried to redirect the conversation, to let him know he shouldn’t judge himself for any of her horrible mistakes, but her throat thickened at the sight of tears gathering in Keen’s narrowed eyes. “And I didn’t know.” The steering wheel squeaked under his punishing grip.

  “I loved you, but I was a horny bastard, too worried about how to get into your panties to worry about why you wouldn’t let me.”

  “You never pushed me.”

  “But I—”

  “Look.” Her voice and resolve strengthened. “You didn’t know because I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t do it for sympathy or attention. I did it to forget for a while that I was the daughter of Bloody Red Hardy. I did it because it hurt less than the emotional pain I let him and other people cause. But you? You were the reason I stopped.”

  Ava folded a leg into her seat and turned toward Keen. “I used you.”

  “What?” he scoffed.

  “I used you to numb the pain. Your devotion damn near eradicated it until our relationship grew too charged, too real. Until I fell in love with you.” She drew a wobbly breath. “I was terrified that you would see my scars and try to fix me…because I needed fixing.”

  “We all do,” he growled.

  “After I sabotaged us, I found a psychiatrist. She helped me work through things enough to fool the rest of the world into believing I was balanced, normal, but I never believed it. Not until I let someone into my life.”

  Keen’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t say anything.

  “My best friend, Annelise. She helped me in ways I can’t even articulate...”

  “And someone took her away from you in the cruelest possible way. Killing her would have hurt, but not as much as seeing her, knowing she’s alive and well and…”

  “And never going to forgive you for taking her sister away from her,” Ava supplied.

  “Something like that.”

  “No. To answer your question, I’m not cutting myself and I won’t, not ever again.”

  His gaze found hers. “If you ever feel like you want to, tell me?”

  She nodded.

  “Back to your question. I read the reports from the original Blood Red Murders on the plane to DC. I’d read them before, quite a lot after we split.” He gestured to a file shoved into the console between them. “After reading this report on the open investigation, I knew we had to see your father.”

  Keen checked the mirrors, and then changed lanes to pass the car they’d caught. “The copycat’s scene was a perfect recreation of Hardy’s very first murder. The one in Lafayette. The body was in the same position, head and arms hanging off the foot of the bed, throat and wrists sliced open. There was no blood on the bedding or floor. A lock of red hair had been laid on the spine just below the shoulder blades. And there was no blood on the wall.”

  “That’s right.” Ava’s world tilted once again. She gripped the center console in a pitiful attempt to steady herself.

  “The first two murders were different than all his others. The bodies were drained, but he didn’t start painting the wall until the third one. Only people close to the investigation know that.”

  Ava loosened her hold and latched onto the details of the case. “They kept the story under wraps for the first year, while agencies tried to catch him. By the time the story broke he was known for painting the wall.”

  “Yep,” he agreed. “The fact that he hadn’t painted the first two was never released.”

  “The media loved the dramatics too much. They made it seem like he lined out the edges and painstakingly brushed the victim’s blood over each inch of the wall. Let’s fa
ce it, he was no Hieronymus Bosch.”

  “What?”

  “Who. He was a famous painter. He depicted horrific images of hell. Real gory stuff. Hardy’s work was as gruesome just not as precise. No way to paint an entire wall with a few pints of blood.” Ava picked up the file, the one Keen had gotten from…she didn’t know where. “How’d you get this?”

  “You don’t want to know.” His gaze sliced her way in warning.

  “You know I do.”

  “My tech guy in the Miami office. He could lose his job for giving you that information.”

  “More than that. He could go to jail for it.”

  “What? How?”

  Again with the eyes. Ava cocked one of her own and waited.

  “Smokey has restricted access due to a less than stellar background.”

  “Why would the Bureau hire him?”

  “Maybe because I tampered with his record and then recommended him.” Keen’s proud shoulders bounced. “Then again, they could have just seen the potential in his abilities.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?” she shrieked, but tossed up a hand. “Wait, you’re right. I don’t want to know.” A cockeyed smirk curved the edge of Keen’s mouth. For a while they sat in silence, until desperation for information got the better of her. “Okay, why, why would you risk your job for this man?”

  “He got mixed up with some bad people. Started with small favors. When the favors got bigger, the far side of legal, he tried to cut and run. They killed his family. Wife. Son. He helped me and Nathan demolish the organization from the inside. It was our first big case as a team. We got promoted and raises, all that. But after, he had nothing.”

  “So, you gave him something.”

  “Yeah, a thankless job with shitty pay and even worse hours.”

  “You gave him a reason to live. You’re good at that, giving people a reason to live.”

  “You didn’t need a reason. You had the reason and the drive.”

  “But you showed me that I could.”

  “I just handed you a mirror, Ava.”

  “It was more than that.” Her head shook. “You showed me myself through your eyes.” Keen shifted his gaze toward the driver’s window, but she didn’t stop. “I’ve never been more beautiful than through your eyes.”

  His gaze shifted between trees and road. It never quite made it back to her. Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything, but if she’d learned anything over the last forty-eight hours and lonely eleven years it was that time was fleeting.

  A few miles later she shrugged, thumbed open the report, and read, which she should have done sooner. She should have been thinking about the case instead of the personal aspects of her dilemma. Solving the murder was the only way to get out of this mess.

  She steeled her backbone and flipped through the crime scene pictures, pictures of her friend-by-proxy positioned ritualistically across the foot of the bed where she’d lain with her husband so many times before. Ava imagined them whispering in the night about their plans to bring another life into the world, but stopped. It wouldn’t help solve the case. Her gaze honed in on the lock of hair. Again, it wouldn’t help.

  Finally she found the report and read. When she finished the first she smacked the open file onto the console between them. “Okay, you still didn’t answer my question. Why Hardy?”

  “I believe whomever copied him learned from the source.”

  She recalled the pictures, the perfectly gruesome way it matched his first murder, right down to hair color and the skin tone of his victim. “It certainly seems that way.”

  “He knows who did this.” Keen stabbed the air with a finger. “It’s like his hand and mind stretched beyond the prison walls, like he committed the murder himself. His signature is too much on everything to think he didn’t have a hand in it somehow. He’s been training a disciple, molding and crafting him for years. We’re going to find out who it is and we’re going to use the catch to get it out of him.”

  “The catch?”

  “Have you finished the Ackerman report?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Turn the page.”

  Ava held at his steady gaze with her own before letting it slip to the file. Her stiff fingers slipped off the edge of the paper. She flexed them and tried again. The leaf turned and her eyes nearly fell onto the page.

  She snatched the file from the console and held the first picture so close to her face the stench of ink stung her nose.

  “Holy shit.”

  14

  The rain fell like fat tears on the windshield of the silent car. Well, quiet except for the rumble of huge drops crashing onto the roof. Keen swore a few of those suckers left dents in the metal.

  Through the blur of water on glass Ava’s wide eyes locked on the brick sign. Louisiana State Penitentiary. Cheerful yellow flowers, out of place among bars and razor-wire, obscured the bottom line: Burl Cain. Warden. To their left and right a massive expanse of land stretched, decorated with steel, concrete, and more flowers and shrubs.

  Angola. Just the whisper of its name made hardened convicts weep. Its past lay marred in brutality and blood. Its future was bright, if you asked some. Its days numbered, if you asked others.

  Fisted white knuckles rested in Ava’s lap. When she started wringing them like soaked rags Keen placed his hand over both of hers. For a long minute he simply studied the scared child trapped inside the strong and hauntingly beautiful woman’s body, the FBI agent tackling yet another monstrous case, the lover unable to let herself be loved. He wouldn’t patronize with false comforts.

  The flecks of steel grey in her green eyes stood bold in the cast of the day and sheen of unshed tears. Her eyes, those innocent eyes, skewered his gut.

  “You are feathers and steel, Ava Shepherd. I know you can do this.”

  “It’s been nearly thirty years since I saw him. That’s nearly thirty years of running and hiding who I am because of him.”

  Her eyes lightened. She pushed back the emotions. A cold shield slid into place.

  “I’m tired of running. I’m ready to face my father.”

  SHACKLES BOUND his feet to the floor. A pair of cuffs secured to a small U-bolt locked his hands to the table. He sat in the small room, stark with the exception of a religious scene hanging on the wall. Daniel in a gloomy den crowded with lions. Rays of light shone behind him, stretching wide. Hope in the darkness.

  Keen nodded to the guard and stepped into the doorway. A smug sneer covered the killer’s face. Prison had worn the young, handsome man into a leathery, snaggle-toothed facsimile. But the eyes, the ice cubes with pupils, they hadn’t changed from the dead gaze he’d studied in pictures.

  “The last time they let me out of the box for a surprise visit I was thirty-nine. My lawyer came to tell me we’d lost my final appeal. You aren’t an evangelist or a lawyer.” Bloody Red Hardy tilted his head sideways and stared. “You’re a soldier.”

  “I’m Special Agent Hunt.”

  “Nah. You’re a soldier, parading as an agent. That’s good for you. I have some respect for men in uniform who lay their life on the line for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I can’t abide men who dress in fake uniforms and pretend to defend this country by catching those of us just trying to pursue our happiness.”

  Ava’s hand pressed against his shoulder blades urging him forward. Yeah, he dragged his feet, giving her time to adjust to the idea of seeing the deranged man who’d once been her dad. Apparently, she’d leapt the hurdle and embraced the descent. She stepped to his right and Hardy’s glass eyes followed the movement.

  “What about women who dress in fake uniforms and pretend to defend this country by catching those trying to pursue happiness?” Her words were crisp and sure.

  Slowly, like permafrost melting in spring, the killer’s blank gaze melted away. Hardy blinked for the first time.

  They sat across from James Red Hardy. Keen’s muscles tensed. He waited for the man to lunge, to be
at his hands against the table, to spit his rage. Silence shrouded the room for a long time.

  “Ruby?” Red rimmed the man’s green eyes. His cheeks and ears blushed. The grit in his jaw slackened. “My Ruby?”

  “I quit being your Ruby the day my mother figured out you were a murderer.” Ava folded her hands and rested them on the tabletop. This Ava didn’t look like she knew how to ring her hands.

  “My only regret was not being able to see you grow. And here you are, a woman. And as beautiful as your mother. Just as strong.” An honest-to-God tear slipped down the man’s lined cheek.

  “My mother had to be strong because you were weak.” Anger edged her voice.

  “You know I would have never hurt you or your mother?” Hardy’s head shook. “Not my girls. Never my Ruby.”

  The man had no idea how he’d hurt his daughter. Keen’s hands clenched.

  Ava released a muffled snicker, which drew his gaze. “You could have slit my throat and hurt me less than you have.”

  Hardy lurched in his chair. The metal creaked from his whiplash. His nose wrinkled as though he finally registered the stench coming off his body. He shook his head so vehemently, Keen thought he might be trying to rid himself of the image of his little girl hurt and bloody. “How can you say such a horrible thing?”

  “How could you do such horrible things?” Ava yelled.

  “I needed their blood, Ruby. It’s a sickness, I know, but I never wanted yours.”

  Keen decided to give Ava some time to deal with the reality of her father. He relaxed against the chair. “So, are you one of the reformed ones, penitent over your crimes?”

  As Hardy’s gaze slid from his daughter’s to Keen’s all caring fled. The man’s slacked jaw clamped shut. He could practically see the reflection of his knotted tie in the man’s glassy eyes. “I’ll take that as a no.” No surprise there. “Tell me about your involvement with these latest Blood Red killings.”