Fia frowned, at once defensive. “Did I like him? We weren’t on a date. It was a crime scene.”
“You said he reminded you of the one true love you’ve ever had,” Kettleman said. “Did you work well together? Did you like him? That’s all I wanted to know.”
“We get funny about jurisdiction, the FBI. The case should have been Duncan’s but Senator Malley’s office made a special request that I go to Clare Point. Special Agent Duncan was pretty pissed.”
“You obviously got past that,” Kettleman observed. “You worked on the case together.”
“I don’t know if we got past it, but we did work together for a couple of days. We’re waiting for forensics and the ME’s report right now.”
“So you liked him?” the psychiatrist pushed. “Why do you think that is? Just because he reminded you of Ian?”
Again, emotion caught in Fia’s throat, threatening this time to cut off her ability to breathe. “Yes, I did like him,” she murmured. “Because he reminded me of Ian, but also…. No.” She thought back, trying hard to be objective. “He was different than Ian. Not as volatile. He has a calmer presence.”
“Have you talked to him since you got back?”
Fia shook her head.
Dr. Kettleman glanced at the clock on the end table beside her. “Time’s just about up, Fia. We’ve talked about a lot of things. Anything you think we missed that still needs addressing today?”
“Nah. We pretty much rubbed all the edges raw.”
Dr. Kettleman rose to walk Fia to the door, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Just once I’d like you to give yourself a little credit. You don’t need to come in here to figure out what you want to do about Joseph. You know you can’t risk a relationship with him.” She stopped at the paneled door. “As for Agent Duncan—maybe that’s a risk you are ready to take.”
Fia walked out the door feeling better. Determined to call Joseph and Glen, just not sure what order to do it in.
In the end, she didn’t call either. But she did decide she needed to tackle her demons in order, or in this case, in reverse order. Fia dressed in a short black skirt, killer heels, and a confidence-boosting skin-tight red tank. She added big hoop earrings and slicked her hair back with styling gel before walking out the door.
Her intention had been to cross the river into New Jersey and look for Joseph there, but her instincts told her he was closer to home. He was out there somewhere tonight, somewhere nearby. She found herself going from bar to bar near the apartment they had once shared on the outskirts of Philly.
Of course she had his cell number. She supposed she could have called him, but this needed to be done face-to-face. And she was certain that he knew she was looking for him. He was playing games with her. Toying with her. Joseph had always been all about the hunt, even when she met him.
Tonight, each time she entered a dark, smoky bar, she got the feeling he had just been there. She could almost smell a remnant of his scent in each doorway she entered, as if he had left a trail of bread crumbs for her.
It was last call before Fia dropped down onto a barstool in a place she’d never been. No sign of Joseph, but she knew better than to think he had come and gone from her life that easily. He wanted something from her and if she didn’t find him, he would find her.
The guy on the barstool beside her ordered her a gin and tonic, despite her insistence that she just wanted the tonic. He was wearing a red bandana around his head, a tight black T-shirt and jeans. His wallet was attached to his back pocket with a heavy chain. It wasn’t until she was sipping the tonic she’d ordered herself that she realized she’d walked into a biker bar. She wasn’t even entirely sure what street she was on. She’d become so intent on looking for Joseph that she’d lost track of where she was.
Wandering the streets, barhopping in Philly, probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. What if someone from the Bureau saw her?
Like any of those tight-asses frequented biker bars….
“Hey, babe, you like hogs?” the guy in the red bandana asked.
She glanced at his neck. It was thick. Fleshy. He wasn’t really her type. But he was hitting on her pretty hard. Pushing tonics that he apparently didn’t realize were minus the gin.
Hogs? The Kahill sept kept a wildlife preserve with herds of deer. Over the centuries, they had adapted until they no longer needed human blood; animal would suffice. Blood was routinely harvested from the deer to sustain the family.
It had been a while since she’d tasted pig’s blood. She wondered if the biker would taste like hog.
“You tryin’ to pick me up, sugar?” Fia asked sweetly, turning her full attention to the man she knew would be her next victim.
One hour and three hundred dollars shot in an instant.
The biker led her out a back door into an alleyway that stank of sour milk and rodent droppings. She’d apparently wandered farther afield in her search for Joseph than she realized. It was a seedier part of town than she normally frequented. More dangerous.
The question was, for whom?
As Fia linked her arm through her escort’s, she thought of Glen. Wondered what he was doing. She knew it was absurd, but she had the sudden urge to speak to him…to hear his voice.
The biker beside her made a sound deep in his throat and he clamped his hand around her arm. Lost in her thoughts, Fia responded a split second too late to the sudden danger she smelled as sharply as the gunpowder that had been in the air the night her Ian had come for the Kahills.
The biker shoved her hard against a steel Dumpster and she cried out in surprise as her head hit the metal panel and bounced. The nice bandana biker dude had suddenly turned mean.
Chapter 8
“So what do you think?” Stacy swung his hand in hers as they exited the movie theater and turned onto the sidewalk. “Daddy’s offer to rent the country club is tempting. We could have so many more guests, but Jamaica was our dream.” She squeezed his hand. “I don’t know that we should give up our dream so Mommy can have her bridge club come to our reception.”
Glen tightened his hand around Stacy’s, pulling her up short to prevent her from stepping off the curb as the light changed and cars shot forward. As he waited for the crosswalk to clear, he studied the crowd around him. He’d been doing some research online about decapitations. He had assumed such a violent crime had to involve a drug-induced rage. How else could one human do such a thing to another? But he’d read the files on several cases of decapitation that had taken place in the U.S. in the last thirty to forty years and often the crime was quite methodical. Planned out with definite purposes.
Last night, Glen had considered calling Fia, just to check in. But then he thought better of it. Check in about what? They really had no information to exchange and it wasn’t as if she was dying to hear from him.
He’d been thinking about Special Agent Fia Kahill all week. They hadn’t exactly hit it off. Even once they got past the jurisdiction issue, she’d been so prickly with him. So damned…unyielding. On just about everything. And so protective of everyone in that weird little town of hers.
She was wound pretty tight. Even for an FBI agent.
The WALK sign lit up and Stacy took off, still holding Glen’s hand.
“I think the cost would be the same,” she chatted on. “I mean, sure, we’ve got the plane tickets and the hotel and all, but the whole package for the cabana wedding at that one hotel is only five hundred dollars. Can you imagine just what the catering bill would be at Daddy’s country club?”
Glen flexed his fingers; Stacy was holding too tightly. Despite the hour, it was still hot out and her little fingers were sweaty. He didn’t want to hold hands, but it wasn’t worth getting into an argument over. Not after they’d already disagreed about where to have dinner and what movie to see.
Glen supposed he’d been feeling a little uptight himself since his trip to Clare Point. He just couldn’t get the images of the beheaded postmaster out of his mind. He ke
pt thinking that someone would not commit such a grisly crime just to get a deposit bag with less than two hundred dollars in it, which was their best motive right now. Their only motive.
He wondered if the money was just a cover. What if it was about a piece of mail? The two canvas bags of mail found in the post office, both incoming and outgoing, had been sent to D.C. and looked over before they were sent out. There was nothing out of the usual there. Of course if the killer had taken what he was looking for, there wouldn’t be any evidence, would there? He and Fia had discussed that possibility, but had come to no conclusions. At this point, it was still all speculation.
“So I told Daddy, we’d go ahead and meet with the event planner at the club, just to see what he has to say. What do you think?”
Glen checked his watch. It was late. He’d met Stacy at nine-thirty for dinner because he’d wanted to put a few extra hours in on the computer before leaving work. Then she’d wanted to go to a movie. He’d just wanted to return to work, or go home, have a Diet Coke, and flip on his laptop. The movie had been painfully long; a chick-flick comedy which, in his book, was worse than anything in the unrequited-love or dying-of-cancer genres.
It was almost 2 A.M. and the streets were beginning to thin out. Last call had already come and gone at the bars.
He rubbed his eyes. He was tired. Not getting enough sleep. He shouldn’t have agreed to a midnight movie. What was he thinking? Stacy only worked part-time. She had nowhere to be tomorrow. He’d wanted to get to work early. He always liked to get into the office early when the bull pen was still quiet and he could think.
“Glen?”
He looked down, realizing that was the second time she’d spoken his name. They were standing outside her apartment building. He hadn’t noticed how many blocks they had walked. “I’m sorry.” He took his hand from hers and flexed his fingers. It was too hot a night to be holding hands.
“Did you hear a word I said?”
“Country club or destination wedding in Jamaica? You decide.”
“Oh, baby.” She lifted up on the toes of her sandals and kissed him. “You’re coming up, aren’t you?”
He hesitated.
“Come on, baby,” she whispered in his ear. “You haven’t come up in days, not since you got back.”
Sometimes it was just easier to let the current sweep you along than to fight it. He let her lead him through the front doors.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Fia demanded, shoving the guy back. Bandana Biker Boy was heavier than she was by a good sixty pounds, but she was taller and she bet she could leg press more than he could. Surely he didn’t think he could take her on? Surely he didn’t think she was just some poor, unsuspecting chick in a Versace skirt?
“This how you treat a lady?” she asked him. “Back off!”
“Lady my ass,” he grumbled, reaching out and grasping her neck between one plump thumb and forefinger.
She was really going to be pissed if he broke the Czech crystal choker Fin had brought her back from Europe last year.
His fingers tightened around her throat, beginning to cut off her air passage.
Fia was definitely not in the mood for this tonight.
She drew one hand around, balling it into a fist. She struck him squarely in the temple and he stumbled back.
“Motherf—” His foul language was lost in a grunt of pain as he lunged at her again, and she made a quick sidestep, causing him to hit the Dumpster full force.
“You offer a lady a drink,”—Fia told him, slamming him face-first against the Dumpster again as she twisted his hands behind his back—“you offer to walk her safely to her car.” She raised her knee to pin him against the metal wall so she could reach into the cute little black purse she carried and pull out one of the plastic zipper ties law enforcement used as emergency handcuffs. “You do not lead her into a dark alley and then try to have your way with her. You understand what I’m trying to tell you here, buster?”
He made one last feeble attempt to wrestle himself free, but a well-placed cuff to his left ear calmed him down, and the stale air in the alleyway was filled with the satisfying sound of the handcuff tie tightening over his wrists.
“What the hell? You crazy, lady?”
She grabbed his arm and whipped him around, using another tie to secure him to the Dumpster as she debated what to do next with him. She obviously couldn’t just let him go, but he’d gotten a pretty good look at her. She doubted he could ever identify her looking the way she did now, compared to her FBI file photo, but it would be foolish to take the chance.
She knew what she should do, but the idea turned her stomach a little. She just wasn’t up for sport tonight any longer. And then there was the pudgy neck. The red bandana.
She leaned over him, grabbing his thin ponytail to pull his head back and expose his neck.
“Getting kinky, are we?” he said as she pressed her lips to his throat. “Why the hell didn’t ya just say—”
Fia sank her teeth into his flesh and he made a little yelp of a sound as his knees buckled.
She stepped back and let him fall, his hands flying over his head, his wrists still tied to the Dumpster. She spat out the blood. Then, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she leaned over him and fished in the front pocket of his jeans. She made the call to 911 and then dropped the phone at his feet. He’d be the police’s problem now. She knew they wouldn’t arrest him, not without a witness, and him with no memory of what had transpired after he left the bar with her. But the police would at least keep him in a holding cell overnight, until he sobered up. After a night in jail, maybe he’d be a little nicer to the next chick he picked up in a bar.
As she walked down the dark alley, the sound of a police siren in the distance, she wondered what Glen Duncan was doing right now. Sleeping, if he had any sense. Dreaming, maybe.
It was funny, but she wondered what kind of dream he was having and hoped it was pleasant.
Stacy made a little mewing sound beneath Glen and he thrust into her again.
He wondered if he should give the lab a call tomorrow. Even if they couldn’t put a rush on the few samples of blood, fiber, and soil he sent them, he could at least check to be sure the whole envelope hadn’t been set aside because someone else had called about a more pressing case.
“Baby,” Stacy whimpered, holding him tightly around the neck.
He picked up the pace.
But what if Fia already called the lab? You made too many calls, pissed them off, and you ended up getting your results back the end of next week instead of the end of this.
Maybe he should call her.
“Oh, baby, baby…”
Wouldn’t be any harm in that, would there? Just a quick call to touch base? Let her know what he’d found interesting on past decapitations. Make sure she’d gotten the fax concerning the mail from the post office that had been examined and sent.
“Now…now!” Stacy squealed.
Glen lowered his head, balancing his weight on his hands and feet. She would complain if he didn’t. She said he was too big, too heavy. Of course she didn’t like to be on top, which had been his suggestion as a compromise.
He drove hard into her and released, more out of habit than urgent need. As he lowered his head to kiss her cheek, Stacy tapped his shoulder.
“Get up, you’re all sweaty.”
He rolled off her, onto his back and the clean sheets and she bounced up, pushing down her cotton nightie. “You want to take a shower before you go?”
In the bathroom, he heard her turn on the water. She always showered after they made love. She liked to be clean, she told him.
He lifted his head, settling it on a white lace pillowcase, and wondered if Special Agent Fia Kahill jumped out of bed after orgasm and washed the smell of her lover off her skin.
He somehow doubted it.
Fia was surprised that Dr. Caldwell got his autopsy report to her so quickly. It was properly filled
out, sent by e-mail to be followed by hard copy. For a fifteen-hundred-year-old country doc, he was still pretty sharp.
The report provided the victim’s name and other typical government information, then a description of the state the body was found in. She skimmed all that quickly, moving to the line where a medical examiner must give his or her best guess as to the cause of death.
There had been no wounds on Bobby’s torso, but Fia and Glen had guessed there must have been blunt trauma to the head. With all the blood spray, he had probably been hit with something hard; baseball bats and two-by-fours were both popular with rural murderers. Fia didn’t know exactly how an ME figured out how a person died in cases like this…when the head was gone, but last week Dr. Caldwell had seemed confident he could figure it out. It had to do with when the heart stopped pumping, where the blood pooled, and in what manner. She guessed he might even be a little better at blood analysis than most MEs.
The Cause of Death box simply stated Sanguination (Acute blood loss due to the severing of the jugular.)
She was so surprised that she read it twice. Bobby had died of blood loss from the actual decapitation?
She reached for the little notebook on her desk that she had used at the scene last week, flipped through several pages and punched numbers into her desk phone. She worked her way through an automated answering system.
“Special Agent Duncan,” he said on the other end of the line.
It took Fia a second to regroup. His voice had caught her off guard. Even though she had been the one to call him, she hadn’t expected him to sound so much like Ian. Even more so on the phone than he did in person.
“Agent Duncan…” Feeling foolish, she started again. “Glen, it’s Fia. Fia Kahill.” That sounded silly, too. How many Fias could he have known?
“Hey,” he said, seeming glad to hear her voice. “I was just going to call you.”
“Yeah? What’s going on?” She was surprised by how relaxed he sounded. There seemed to be none of the tension she had felt back in Clare Point. Maybe he’d finally just accepted the fact that they would be handling the case together. Or maybe it was her. Maybe she was more relaxed with a couple of beltways between them. No fear of losing control, having wild abandoned sex with him, and drinking so much of his blood that she turned him into a vampire. Not with all the rush-hour traffic and those beltways to traverse.
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