Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Allison Brennan

  “I’m ready.”

  Two NYPD officers followed Suzanne and Panetta up the stairs to Whitney Morrissey’s loft apartment. Suzanne knocked on the door. “Whitney, it’s Suzanne Madeaux with the FBI. Remember me? We need to talk.” She waited. “Whitney, open the door.”

  There were no sounds of movement, but they proceeded with caution. Panetta nodded to the officer to unlock the door with the master key they’d retrieved from the property manager. It worked one lock, but not the other.

  “She has to make this difficult,” Panetta mumbled and called the locksmith waiting downstairs.

  Five minutes later, they were inside Whitney’s apartment.

  The officers searched the two-room apartment and quickly ascertained that Whitney wasn’t inside.

  The living area was as Suzanne remembered it: bright, airy, with art everywhere. She put on gloves and walked through, not seeing anything that struck her as odd. Whitney’s art was truly exceptional. She stopped in front of a large, incredibly detailed charcoal drawing of a street scene: a row of town houses on a tree-lined street, people walking, a hot-dog vendor on the corner.

  What had been the tipping point in her obsession with Wade Barnett, turning her from stalker to killer? That he was sleeping with other women? That his brother had pulled her art grant? Or that Barnett was sleeping with her cousin, Alanna?

  “Suzanne.” Panetta motioned for her to come into the bedroom.

  She stopped in the doorway. She couldn’t speak. She’d never seen anything like this—no level of obsession came even close.

  One wall was covered with corkboard on which hundreds of drawings were pinned. But it was the subject matter that was so disturbing: image after image of Wade Barnett and Whitney Morrissey.

  Most of the drawings were of Wade. Some were just his face; others looked almost like photographs, with Wade sitting in a coffee shop by the window, the perspective from across the street. Or Wade at Yankee Stadium cheering. Or Wade at a party. There were other people in the pictures as well, but they were indistinct compared to Wade, who seemed to have a light shining on him.

  Then there were the drawings of Wade and Whitney, most of them highly erotic. Suzanne would have admired the level of attention and detail if the whole scene weren’t so deeply disturbing.

  His face was everywhere, in all sizes. On every wall and surface. She looked around the room, and noticed something painted on the ceiling. She walked over to the bed and looked up. Whitney had painted a portrait of Wade Barnett over her bed.

  Calling Whitney Morrissey sick seemed both obvious and a gross understatement.

  “We need to call in my ERT unit,” Suzanne said. “They’re waiting outside.”

  “And you should probably call in Ms. Kincaid,” Panetta said, looking at Whitney’s slanted art desk. He’d turned on the small lamp that cast a bright light over the surface.

  A sketchbook was open to the first page: a familiar image, not just because it was Wade, but because it was Wade and Alanna at the Yankees game, the same photo that had been published in the newspaper. Except for one stark difference.

  Alanna’s features had been exaggerated to the point of being monstrous. Her large eyes were made larger and off-center; her long nose had been drawn longer, with a hook at the end; the hand that had rested on Wade’s shoulder had grown warts and hairs. Her hair, which had been blown out by the wind, was now snakes, all looking to attack Wade. Every detail was so perfect, yet grotesquely twisted.

  “There’s more,” Panetta said, turning the page. It was Erica Ripley, behind the counter where she worked, talking to Wade. Out of her mouth flowed bile that dripped onto the counter.

  Suzanne had seen a lot of tragedy in the ten years she’d been an FBI agent. She’d even seen a dead body when she was a kid, something that had had a lasting impact on her. But somehow, the twisted art of Whitney Morrissey disturbed her on a far deeper level. Blood, violence, murder—Suzanne understood the basic dark side of human nature. But the vicious mind of an obsessed killer who used her talent to distort reality into something so perverse it became a scene from a horror movie? Suzanne was unusually shaken.

  She and Panetta stepped out of Whitney’s bedroom and already she breathed easier. She called Andie, her head ERT. “We’re ready for your team, and Lucy Kincaid.”

  Sean talked to the NYPD guard at length before he was comfortable enough to leave Kirsten under his watch.

  Evelyn and Trey were taking turns sitting with her. She’d responded to the new antibiotics, awakening for the first time since she’d been admitted right after Evelyn arrived. Now the doctors were scheduling surgery to repair the damage to her feet and remove glass and rocks that had become embedded under her skin. Kirsten would be moving to a private room tonight.

  Sean stepped into the room and told Evelyn he was leaving, but that the guard would be on the door until Whitney Morrissey was arrested.

  Evelyn rose, tears in her eyes, and hugged him. “Thank you, Sean.”

  “You should thank Trey. He’s the one who went from hospital to hospital until he found her.”

  “I’m just so happy to have her back. I’m going to take her back to California. New start. Go to college. Try and get my life together so Kirsten can have her own life, too.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Sean was about to leave when he saw Trey sitting in a plastic chair in the hall, his head in his hands. Sean sat next to him, put a hand on one shoulder. “You’re tired. Maybe you should go back to the motel and sleep a couple hours.”

  He shook his head. “I just don’t know what to do now. I love her. I don’t want to go back to the way it was.”

  “It’ll never be the way it was.” Sean wasn’t one to be giving advice—until Lucy, he’d never gotten past the superficial stage in any relationship. But if he had learned anything in the six weeks he and Lucy had been together, it was that he’d become a better person. He needed Lucy, and he’d do whatever it took to make her happy.

  “We’ve all made mistakes, but what matters is who you are inside. You’re a good man, Trey.”

  Evelyn stepped out and waved to Trey. “She’s awake again and wants to see you.”

  Trey rubbed his wet eyes and smiled. “Thank you, Sean.” He followed Evelyn back into Kirsten’s room.

  Sean wished he could be more elated at the good news that Kirsten was alive and would survive her ordeal, but he knew she was going to have a long, tough road ahead of her. Physically, she’d heal. But the emotional and psychological damage of her online activities, coupled with finding her friend dead and being the target of a serial killer—those would take much longer to fade.

  But Kirsten was safe, and Sean took heart in that.

  He left the hospital and drove to Whitney Morrissey’s Brooklyn apartment, where the police were serving their warrant. Lucy had sent him a message thirty minutes ago that Whitney was gone, but that there was ample evidence of her guilt.

  He pulled up behind an NYPD police car and parked. He was stopped by a patrolman as he tried to walk down the sidewalk, and waved to Suzanne, who was standing in front of Morrissey’s building. She pretended to ignore him.

  Sean knew she was furious with him for talking to Wade Barnett, but they’d saved time in getting the information, and he hadn’t screwed up her investigation. However, he decided not to mention that to her because it would probably irritate her even more.

  He didn’t see Lucy. “Officer, I’m expected,” he said.

  The cop didn’t budge. “Sure.”

  “Agent Madeaux and Detective Panetta.”

  The officer looked over his shoulder. “They’re in conference. You can wait.”

  Fortunately, it had stopped raining, but it was cold and everything was wet.

  He walked a few feet away and called Suzanne with his cell. He watched her look at her phone, then across the street at him, then pocket it.

  He hung up and dialed again. On the third try, she answered, her eyes on him.
r />   “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No you’re not.”

  “Okay, I’m not sorry. But let me through anyway.”

  “I don’t know how Lucy puts up with you. You’re really annoying.”

  “And handsome and charming and I drive a cool car.”

  He saw her smile, but she quickly hid it. “You owe me big-time for not slapping you with a misdemeanor.”

  “The paperwork wouldn’t be worth it.”

  She hung up on him. For a moment he thought she really wasn’t going to let him through, but then a detective approached and said, “Mad Dog said you can go upstairs if you wear gloves, don’t touch anything, and stay out of her way.”

  “Mad Dog?” Sean took the latex gloves the cop handed him.

  The detective grinned. “She’s something else. Google her when you get home.”

  Sean walked up the stairs to the third-floor apartment. He found Lucy in the bedroom with Andie Swann, the head ERT. They were cataloguing drawings.

  Lucy had emailed him a heads-up about the shrine to Wade Barnett in Whitney’s bedroom, but he wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer volume of drawings, or the painting on the ceiling.

  “A psychotic Michelangelo?” he said.

  Lucy glanced over her shoulder. She was in her cool, professional mode. Her face was blank and serious, her eyes dark, intelligent, and observant. He’d seen her like this before. She closed off her emotions so completely she was almost like an android. He didn’t like it, even though he knew it was for self-preservation. He much preferred the Lucy who’d made love to him with heart and passion last night.

  It was a sudden revelation, striking him as if God himself had put the knowledge in his head with the force of lightning. Lucy needed him to save her from herself. She wanted this life fighting the bad guys and saving the innocent, and she was so good at it, Sean would never expect her to walk away. But the violence, the intensity of the work, the inhumanity of the psychopaths she understood in ways even Hans Vigo couldn’t, would kill her spirit until she wasn’t able to shed the robotic shell she erected when she was working. He’d seen her shields go up in a fraction of a second, and it took hours—sometimes days—to bring them down.

  In some ways, Lucy was a lot like his oldest brother. Sean barely knew Kane. A lifelong soldier, he’d been a mercenary in South America for at least the last fifteen years. He was hard as a rock, cold, and calculating. Sean never remembered him smiling or relaxing. He was always on alert, always at attention. He’d taken it upon himself and his team of dedicated men to rescue Americans kidnapped for ransom out of the country; he fought human trafficking in the trenches, sometimes as brutally as those who bought and sold human beings. If Kane had any humanity left, Sean hadn’t seen it, except in the cause he was fighting.

  Lucy had that same capacity: to close herself off so completely, to shut down her own emotions, in order to do a job few people wanted and few people did well. Like Kane, she was a mercenary, but instead of doing it for money or a political cause, she did it for justice. She didn’t have to be in this killer’s obscene bedroom helping the FBI gather evidence that they hoped would lead to Whitney Morrissey’s capture. But Lucy was here because she could help. She wanted justice for the victims as much as she wanted Morrissey stopped simply because it was the right thing to do, and she had the skills to do it. And maybe deep down, she had to do it to give her past, and her future, purpose.

  Sean had to provide her a wall of protection so she could let down her shields and be truly happy, truly free, when she wasn’t working. She needed to feel safe and loved every day, every night, so she could work these hard cases and not lose her empathy, or her humanity.

  He walked behind her, touched her lightly on her back, kissed her hair. He looked at the sketchbook Andie and Lucy were going through. On the page was Wade Barnett, naked, being pulled by ugly witches with warts on their faces and boils on their backs.

  “Well, and here I thought Whitney loved him in a sicko kind of way.”

  Lucy shot him a glance. “Look at the faces.”

  He did, repulsed by the realism; then he saw what Lucy meant. “That’s Jessica. And Kirsten. And Alanna—who are the others? There are nine.”

  “When we show this to Wade Barnett, he’ll confirm that he slept with or had an online sexual relationship with all these women through the Party Girl site.”

  “How long has she been stalking him?” Sean asked.

  Andie said, “The first entry in her journal is dated two and a half years ago.”

  “Whitney transferred from a small college in Connecticut to NYU,” Lucy said. “Her first day on campus she bumped into Wade coming out of her advisor’s office. She dropped her purse and he helped her pick everything up. She fixated on him.”

  “Because he acted like a gentleman?”

  “I need to go through her journal in more depth,” Lucy said, “but from what I read, she learned everything she could about him and his family. I don’t know when they actually started dating, but it was months, maybe a year, after that initial meeting. I doubt Wade even remembers it.”

  “Why start killing these women now?”

  “Before Alanna, Whitney didn’t personally know any of Wade’s girlfriends,” Lucy said, slipping into her psychoanalytic role so smoothly that it disturbed Sean. “Before Wade started sleeping with Whitney, she considered other women her competition. She would be prettier, more talented, kinder, not as clingy, more attentive—whatever it was she thought Wade wanted. Wade played around; he wasn’t serious about any of the women he slept with.”

  Sean was distinctly uncomfortable, but he didn’t think Lucy noticed. He hoped she didn’t. Before he’d met her, he was a lot like Wade. Not the wild parties or drugs or cybersex, but Sean had a different girlfriend every couple of months. He broke the relationships off smoothly; in fact he was the master of easy splits. He didn’t want to look at that fact too closely; Lucy’s brother Patrick was right about his lack of commitment.

  Lucy went on. “But after Wade became involved with Whitney, everything changed. Now it was her responsibility to make him happy. I’m sure Wade would agree with my assessment—Whitney was the perfect girlfriend at first. Too perfect. She would do anything he wanted, but because she is at her core insecure, she would need constant reassurance that he wanted to be with her. She wouldn’t trust him, so she would follow him. She would have caused at least one scene between Wade and another woman, and that’s likely when he realized she was obsessed. He wouldn’t have called her obsessed. He would have said she was clingy or demanding, but there would have been some public scene that had him breaking it off.”

  “And she still followed him?”

  “Yes. I don’t think there have been many days she hasn’t at least caught a brief glimpse of Wade. At some point, I’m betting while he was drunk, he slept with her again, giving her hope, convincing her that he truly loved her, but all the other women in his life were the problem. It was the faceless women that kept Wade from committing to her.”

  “But Alanna was her cousin,” Andie said.

  “And that was the stressor. I suspect that Whitney knew about the Party Girl website. She stalked him—she would have checked out his computer, read his email, probably knew the password for his voice mail and checked that regularly. But the women Wade had cybersex with weren’t real.”

  “Because they were on the Internet,” Sean said.

  “Right. They could have been anyone and anywhere. Whitney could make up fantasies about who they were, but they weren’t a direct threat to her.”

  “I don’t understand how she knew the identities of the girls on Party Girl,” Andie said.

  “If she had his passwords,” Lucy said, “it would have been easy to log into his profile and see everyone he chatted with.”

  “But when did it turn physical?” Andie asked.

  “We’ll have to ask Wade. Maybe he suggested to one or more of the girls that they come visit him in
New York. We know from analyzing the patterns of sexual predators that they first work their victims online. Eventually, photos and videos don’t satisfy them and they escalate. Wade isn’t a rapist. I don’t see anything in his psyche that he was a predator, but it’s the same escalation. Wade was no longer satisfied with cybersex, so he asked if they wanted to meet in person. Except for Kirsten, who was seventeen, they were all his peers, college-aged girls—no one gets hurt.”

  The way Lucy said it, Sean knew she didn’t believe that no one was hurt in the sex games Wade and the others were playing.

  “But throw in a psychopathic stalker fixated on Wade, and suddenly, everyone Wade slept with was at risk. For a while, Whitney could convince herself that Wade would come to his senses. She told herself that these girls were cruel to Wade. That they were ugly. That they wouldn’t satisfy him sexually. Whatever she needed to believe that justified why he was with them instead of her. She could even pretend they were someone else, maybe even her, because she didn’t know them personally.”

  Lucy flipped through several pages of the sketchbook and stopped on one that was clearly Alanna Andrews. It was obvious to Sean that Lucy had known exactly where it was, probably remembered every image on the pages, and he wondered how long she’d been in here working.

  “Alanna killed Whitney’s fantasy. Alanna was her cousin. Whitney brought her to parties, took her around New York, and I’d bet money that Alanna met Wade through Whitney. Alanna was Wade’s fantasy. She was just as sexually adventurous as he was, but she was a sweet person. She genuinely liked his handicapped brother. She stood up to Wade when he got out of line. He loved her, in his own way, but he wasn’t willing to give up his lifestyle. Alanna was young—they were both young—and neither realized that the parties they enjoyed were part of their problem. Wade didn’t see the difference between sleeping around and the rave orgies, and Alanna didn’t want to share.

  “I suspect they were finding a way to get back together. According to Dennis, they were on-again/off-again. Whitney couldn’t let that happen. Her own cousin took Wade from her. Her flesh and blood stole from her. Alanna fit in with the Barnetts, but Whitney didn’t. The oldest brother, Charles, made that clear when he rescinded her art grant, proving in her mind that she wasn’t good enough. But Alanna was? How dare she take Whitney’s place as princess of the castle!”