by Dawn Altieri
“Place looks abandoned,” Mack said.
“Yeah.”
They climbed out of the Tahoe and headed up the walkway. Jake’s hand lay ready on the gun at his waist and his senses were on high alert for any sounds or signs of movement.
There weren’t any.
He went to the door and inspected the notices. “Unpaid oil bill. Foreclosure notice.” He knocked on the door and waited. No one answered. None of the windows had curtains or blinds, and as far as he could see, not a single piece of furniture occupied the entire lower floor. The house appeared empty.
If Sommers wasn’t living here in his lake house, where the hell was he living? Had he moved back in with his parents in New Jersey? Jake checked his phone to see if he’d missed any calls, but Marino hadn’t gotten back to him yet about the other address.
More leaves covered the path along the side of the house leading to the backyard, and several pieces of yard equipment were lined up in a row along the outside wall. Mack tapped a foot against a filthy, rusted lawnmower. “Looks like this has been sitting out here for a while.”
Jake tipped his chin toward a detached two-car garage about a hundred feet beyond the house. “Shall we?”
They approached it slowly, hands still ready on their weapons. Two vehicles were visible through the small windows at the top of the garage door, but with all the grime on the glass, Jake couldn’t make them out clearly. Light filtered in from another window along the far wall of the structure, and he made his way around the exterior until he found a door that had been left slightly ajar.
“Over here,” he called to Mack.
The opening offered only a small amount of space—he’d never make it through the doorway without disturbing it. Lieutenant O’Shea’s voice sounded in the back of Jake’s head, lecturing him about search warrants and breaking and entering…but they’d driven all this way, and he wasn’t about to return to the city without checking everything out thoroughly.
With his gun drawn low, he pushed lightly on the wooden door, and it creaked a loud welcome as it swung inward, stirring up a cloud of dust in the thin beam of sunlight.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath, immediately recognizing the car nearest the door. A late model Mercedes S-Class, black, with charcoal-gray interior.
“What is it?” Mack called from outside.
Jake lowered his weapon and took another step in. “Emma’s Mercedes.” It couldn’t just be a coincidence the scumbag had the exact same model car parked in his abandoned garage.
“I’ll call it in.” Mack pulled out his phone as Jake took a few steps farther in to check the second car.
It was a dark blue Toyota Camry with New Jersey license plates, and it appeared to have been in an accident, although not a major one. The hood and the front quarter panel on the passenger side were both dented, the headlight cracked. Something hung from the plastic cover of the light, but it was difficult to decipher what it was in the dusty beam of sunlight that crept in through the small window.
Jake squatted in front of the car to get a better look, and his heart nearly stopped. It was a navy-blue square of fabric, with torn threads tangled around the cracked plastic of the headlight cover holding it in place.
Part of a pocket from a suit jacket.
Justin Windsor’s missing pocket.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Jake rushed back toward the house, with Mack trailing after him. “He’s our fucking guy, Mack. He’s our guy in the Justin Windsor case, too.” Jake’s heart pounded so hard he could barely breathe.
He dialed Emma’s number, but she didn’t answer. Not surprising that she wouldn’t want to talk to him. He tried Adam’s phone, which went right to voicemail.
“What the fuck?” He finally got Sergeant Mike Perez at the Bayville Police Department on the line, who assured him they’d been running routine patrols in his neighborhood and seen nothing unusual. But Perez would send an officer back to be sure.
Jake’s chest filled with an uneasy sense of relief as he disconnected the call.
“We need the local force out here as soon as possible,” he told Mack. “Tell them to get warrants or whatever the fuck they need to get into this house. And we need forensics. I want the city team out here, too. We don’t miss anything.”
“You got it,” Mack said and lifted his phone.
Fury coursed through Jake. This could not be happening. Deep down, he’d been suspicious of Sommers all along, but he’d let it go, chalking it up to simple jealousy. He’d taken Emma’s faith and trust in Sommers as proof the man could not be a killer.
Once again, Jake had ignored his gut instincts. What the hell had he been thinking?
He ran his hand roughly over his chin before turning back to the house. They were over an hour outside the city. Even farther away from Emma out on the Island. Between Adam and Perez, she’d be safe—she had to be.
Jake needed to figure out Sommers’ next move. He scanned the rundown exterior of the cottage, looking for an easy point of entry.
Fuck it. He started for the back door. “I’m not waiting.”
Mack let out a deep, frustrated breath as he fell into step behind Jake. “Jake, don’t do this. We need to wait for the warrant. They’ll have your badge if you don’t do this by the book.”
Jake spun to face Mack. “You think I give a shit about my goddamned badge right now?”
“You want to put him away, don’t you? You go tearing in there, and anything you find will be inadmissible and useless. You need to calm down and do this the right way.”
Mack’s voice was stern and authoritative, but he wasn’t telling Jake anything he wanted to hear. He stood motionless for a long moment at the rear of the house. The virtual silence of the woods allowed him to clear his head. The rear door into the kitchen—with its multiple, small panes of glass—was the obvious choice. With the butt of his handgun, he shattered the pane in the lower left corner, closest to the doorknob, before turning to Mack behind him. “That was broken when we got here.”
Mack shook his head but remained silent, having apparently accepted they weren’t waiting for any damn warrant.
Jake reached through the hole he’d created, unlatched the lock, and pulled the door open.
“Police,” he shouted, but he received no response.
Stagnant air filled the house, and the humidity from the past few days of early summer rain gave it a particularly musty smell. From the kitchen, two staircases were visible. One across the living room going up, which likely led to the bedrooms, and one near the back door, heading down to the basement. The hardwood floors of the living room were old and scuffed and covered with an undisturbed layer of dust. No footprints or signs of recent activity. He turned to Mack and nodded toward the basement stairs.
Jake pointed his flashlight down the stairwell before descending with his handgun ready, his footsteps echoing throughout the cement and cinderblock room. At the bottom, he scanned the area with the thin beam of light, then signaled to Mack to flip the switch at the top.
The soft buzz of a fluorescent fixture hummed overhead, and Jake found himself inside a makeshift gym comprised of a treadmill, a weight bench, and several racks of dumbbells. Sommers likely spent hours down here, alone with his raging testosterone and his psychopathic delusions about one day having Emma to himself.
A wave of nausea overtook Jake. The thought of another man with his hands on her had always made his stomach churn, but the thought of Sommers getting his hands on her now—
Get your damned head on straight, he admonished himself.
He needed to focus, which was proving more difficult than he’d ever imagined. All at once, he understood the policies barring detectives from working cases in which they had a personal interest. His blurred concentration now assured him those rules made sense.
With his finger al
ongside the trigger guard, he pushed open a door to another room, which he scanned with his flashlight.
Empty.
He flipped the light switch, and the wall before him stopped him cold.
The entire wall was covered in photographs, newspaper clippings, and scraps of paper with handwritten notes on them. He recognized the pictures. He had some of the same images hanging on the board at the precinct. Facebook photos and profile shots of the victims from the online dating site where they’d met their murderer.
Swallowing back the sour burn that rose from his gut, Jake continued around the corner into the last section of the basement, past the furnace and electrical panels. He located another light switch and let out an anguished groan as he found exactly what he’d been expecting.
Emma’s wall.
“Jesus Christ,” Mack muttered from behind him.
Dominating the display, directly in the center, hung a photo of Emma and Matt at their high school prom. She wore a pretty pink dress with pink roses on her wrist, reminding Jake of how breathtaking she’d looked at the gala the night before. Next to that hung her yearbook photo with her cap and gown and her gorgeous smile. God, she was beautiful, even then. Especially then, with her innocence and her carefree eyes.
He tore his gaze away. A metal folding chair and a card table sat in the middle of the room, covered with more photos, scissors, rolls of tape. A set of typewritten pages sat on top of it all. Jake lifted the cover and flipped through the pages. Circled in red ink, the quotes that had been found on the bodies of the victims. Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare. His stomach roiled again as he let the papers drop back to the cover.
It was an essay Emma had written in high school, titled “Love and Death in Literature.”
If he’d just shown her the quotes as she’d asked him to, she would’ve recognized them and told him about the paper she’d written years ago for her senior English class. A class she’d likely been in with Sommers.
Fuck. How had he let that prick slip past him? What the hell kind of a detective was he?
Jake shook his head hard, snapped himself back into focus. Surrounding the large photo were many smaller photos. Possibly hundreds, if he had to guess. His eyes darted from one to the next. Photos from school, with her friends and her family, some with Justin and the Windsors. Sommers had been obsessed with her for years. Jake was amazed it had gone on this long and he still hadn’t actually gone after her.
Down in the bottom right corner, Jake found photos of himself with Emma, leaving the precinct, and her office, and several other places they’d gone in the city before he’d virtually locked her inside his apartment. He ran his palm over his face, taking it all in as best he could. One photo caught his eye, of the two of them returning to her apartment building. She was wearing her hot-pink workout top and black pants—the day he’d accompanied her to yoga class. The day Sommers had broken into her apartment in his fucking Yankees baseball cap.
Next to the photo, Jake found one of Emma’s silk scarves pinned to the wall. She’d worn it to work a few days before the break-in. He pulled the pin out and held the scarf in his hands, lifted it to his face as his hands trembled with rage at the scent of roses and vanilla still lingering on the fabric.
He gripped the edge of the metal chair, and with a furious roar, he yanked it off the concrete floor and smashed it against the wall beside him.
Chapter Sixty-Three
It was late afternoon by the time Matt arrived at the beach house. He’d brought Emma some essentials like clothes that would actually fit her, and she’d broken down, told him everything, and cried on his shoulder just like old times. And then he’d persuaded her to get out of Jake’s house for a while. It was a gorgeous day on Long Island, he’d assured her, and a little sand and sunshine would do her a world of good. With him at her side, she’d be safe.
“There’s my girl,” Matt said as she descended the staircase, freshly showered and feeling better, just as he’d said she would. He ran approving eyes over the pale-blue tank and denim shorts she wore. “Ready?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded weak even to her own ears. She was so tired, completely drained by the events of the last few weeks. “Maybe Jake’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t go anywhere.”
“Come here.” Matt dropped the backpack he’d used to carry her things onto the tattered brown sofa, reached for her hand, and guided her to sit next to him. “We already talked about this. No one knows you’re out here. You’ll be fine. What’s making you change your mind?”
She slumped into the seat. “I just keep thinking how wrong I’ve been about everything so far.” She glanced toward the wall filled with Jake’s family photos, the ones she’d thought represented everything she might have had a chance at with Jake. Yes, he’d told her he loved her, but after his betrayal at the gala, how could she believe him? “I don’t know why I thought it could work. You told me, Rachel told me, Ben told me…”
Matt squeezed her hand so tightly, she jerked her gaze back to him. He dropped it. “Sorry.”
She studied him questioningly for a moment. He seemed anxious, fidgeting more than usual. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m here for you.”
She settled back on the sofa and sighed deeply. “I just can’t believe he would put me in danger like that, without even telling me. And then he told me he loves me. How am I supposed to react to that?”
“He told you he loved you?” Matt snorted as he stood and moved toward the wall of photos. “Was he fucking you at the time? It’s a lot easier to love someone when you’ve got your dick in them.”
She shuddered at the cold tone of his voice, at the bitterness that was so unlike Matt.
“I can’t listen to this anymore.” He faced her again, standing over her, his eyes wild with a mix of emotions Emma couldn’t label. “Why would you even want someone like that to be in love with you? He is using you, Em. You’re nothing more than a witness to him. His ticket to solving the biggest case of his career.”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. Hearing Matt say it that way made it sound so much worse than when she’d thought it herself. “That’s not true. There’s more to us than that.”
“He set you up as bait for a goddamned serial killer. He wouldn’t have done that if he really loved you.” Matt wrung his hands together and paced toward the window. “I would never have done the things he’s done to you. Never.”
A meek, confused sound escaped her. “Wait. What?”
Matt spun toward her once more. “Damn it, Emma. Why wasn’t it ever enough that I was in love with you?”
Her breath caught in a muffled gasp.
Adam emerged from the kitchen, his brow tight as his gaze darted to her and back to Matt. “Everything okay in here?”
“Everything’s fine,” Matt said as he gripped her elbow and pulled her to her feet. “We’re heading out for a while. Maybe we’ll grab some dinner.”
Adam stepped farther into the room. “Okay. I’ll come with you.”
Matt shook his head as he positioned himself between her and Adam. “That’s very generous of you, Officer, but you don’t have to do that.”
Adam moved closer, as though trying to intimidate Matt, but it didn’t seem to be working. “It’s not a problem.”
“Don’t you get it, pal?” Matt leaned toward Adam, his tone harsh and his eyes still wild. “She needs a break from this shit. She’ll be fine. I’ve got her now.”
Matt turned toward the door, but Adam dropped a hand onto his shoulder. “Sorry. I can’t let you do that.”
Matt feigned reaching for the backpack on the sofa, but in a split second, he pivoted toward Adam instead and slammed his fist into his jaw. Adam’s eyes rolled, and his large body crashed against the wall of photos before sliding to the floor.
Emma g
ave a horrified shriek as she dropped to the floor next to Adam, glass crunching underneath her knees. “Matt! What have you done?”
A soft click sounded near her ear, and her blood froze. She peered out of the corner of her eye—
At the barrel of a silver handgun.
A wave of horror washed over her. Images of the three victims flashed through her mind. Women who looked just like her. Women who’d ended up dead. Murdered, by someone she knew. Someone who wanted her.
Oh God.
“It’s you.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
Jake had been right. He’d told her the killer was someone close to her, someone who wanted her and couldn’t have her, someone who would’ve done anything to turn her against him. She’d been too blinded by loyalty and years of friendship with Matt to really listen.
She’d never even considered it could be him.
“Don’t freak out on me, Em.” His voice was cold and emotionless, unlike she’d ever heard it before. He lowered the handgun long enough to roll Adam to his side and snatch the handcuffs from his back pocket. He maneuvered Adam’s arms behind his back and snapped the cuffs into place before pulling the service weapon from his waistband and a small handgun from its holster on his ankle.
Emma stumbled backward and watched in shock. She had to do something, but what could she do? Matt would easily overpower her…and he had a gun. Three, actually.
He pulled a length of rope from the backpack and used it to secure Adam’s ankles, then ripped off a piece of duct tape and slapped it over Adam’s mouth. He fished the cell phone out of Adam’s pocket, threw it on the ground, and crushed it beneath his boot.
He gave Adam’s wrist a strong tug, then turned and aimed the gun at her. “We need to finish our conversation. But not here.” He grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet.
She grabbed the edge of the lamp table with her free hand to steady herself, and her fingers pinched something jagged beneath them. The sapphire earrings.
With the tracking device attached to them.