A Righteous Kill (11 page)

“How do you know that’s what he
always
does? This is only his second year with your church.” Luca challenged. “John the Baptist started killing almost a year to the day after Father Michael showed up in Portland.”

“He’s taken this trip for two years straight.” Even to her, the argument sounded weak. “He brings back pictures and letters from the people he’s helped.”

“We told him not to go
anywhere
. It makes him look suspicious. Besides, he’s the only one without an alibi for
any
of the nights John the Baptist struck.” Luca looked up and met her eyes this time. Snared them, was more like it. “Including yours. He was the last person to see you before you were attacked and, remind me again what he was wearing while you shared that glass of wine?”

Hero looked at her food. “A black cassock… but all priests do.” She hated that he did this. He turned everyone that she loved and trusted into a potential serial killer. Who were they going to suspect next? The nuns? Her brothers? Her parents?

“I’m just saying, don’t trust anybody, Hero. Not while you’re still in danger.”

A small thrill went through her at sound of her name on his lips. “What about you? Can I trust you?”

Luca shuffled some papers and picked up another folder. The silence screamed his answer.

Hero munched quietly for a bit and watched him work. He set down the yellow legal pad he’d held in his lap and picked up another one. Each of the notepads spread around him had dates on the front pages. One of them had the date of
her
attack at the top.

Father Michael’s name was scrawled beneath the date.

Hero didn’t want to look at that one, so she picked up the folder right in front of her and flipped it open. A pair of soft green eyes looked out at her from a hard female face. Across a pair of ginormous fake breasts, a Portland PD sign tagged the picture as a mug shot. The name “Jensen, April” spelled out in white letters above the arrest date. Her haphazardly lined lips tilted into the kind of smile produced by illegal chemicals. Flaming red hair curled wildly around her equally wild eyes.

Abandoning her dinner to the floor, Hero looked at the picture behind it. She gasped. Bled dry and snagged on a piece of driftwood, April’s sightless eyes stared into the camera. Her hair, still half submerged in the river, flowed away from her with the current, still trying to escape the horror her body had succumbed to.

Those eyes. They could have been her own. The water had turned April’s copper hair darker and straightened out the curls. Hero ran her fingers through her own wet, straight, auburn locks.

Behind that unsettling picture, she found others, other women, some mug shots, one high school picture, and a few that looked like they’d been taken by friends or family.

Hero’s chest tightened as she rifled through them, not stopping on any particular one, but searching each pair of eyes for any signs of life. For redemption.

The folder ripped from her grasp and she jumped. “Hey!”

“Don’t.” Luca leaned and snatched April’s picture from her other hand. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“Those were the other victims.” Hero knew they were. She’d seen some of those very pictures on the news before she’d been attacked. She studiously avoided the news now. Even NPR. “Where are their reports? Why isn’t anything else with them in this file?”

“I don’t need their reports.” Luca’s hand tightened on the manila folder.

“Why?” Hero demanded. “Because they’re dead? Or because they were whores?”

Luca’s features hardened.

Where would her report be if she hadn’t survived? Would she be tucked into a gruesome folder and shoved aside? She abruptly wondered which living picture of her would have made it into the discarded file that sat as far away from his body as possible. She’d never been arrested. And maybe it wouldn’t have even mattered. “Don’t you even look in there? Don’t those women still matter?”

Luca stared at her for a full minute, then ripped open the file and held up April Jensen’s mug shot. “
This
is April Jensen. Her birthday is April seventeenth. She was thirty-six years old when she died, but she was still telling everyone she was thirty. She lived in an apartment off Rosemont Street. Parents’ names are Frank and LaVerna Jensen. Their birthdays are October fifth and January second. They live in a farmhouse south of Bend where Frank keeps a bunker full of illegal weapons, food, and Ku Klux Klan robes. He was on the suspect list until he had an alibi for the murders of Jessi Scott and Amber Wilcox. After a secretly rebellious teen life, April ran off with a black man, Antony Hines, who became her pimp.
His
DOB is August Eleventh and he lives in Vancouver. He isn’t John the Baptist, but I did enjoy putting him in jail for a while. April worked the streets for almost two decades and had a bad addiction to pain pills and to the men who would supply them to her. When she was a child, she wanted to be a veterinarian. She still collected horse figurines.”

He stuffed her picture back into the file and grabbed the high school photo. Gritting his teeth, he thrust it in front of her. “
This
is Janelle Kennedy. She was born June fifteenth. She was proud of being a Gemini and had the sign tattooed on her lower back. Her mother died and her father was a stock trader for a bailout bank. His DOB is July twenty-seventh. He lost everything her senior year in prep school so she auctioned her virginity online for a few thousand dollars. In two years she made almost a hundred thousand dollars prostituting herself online and was a freshman at University of Portland studying economics. She wanted to transfer to OSU. She essentially lived down the street from me. Her father had no idea what she did and he now works for a tech support call center in—”

“Okay!” Hero held up a hand. “All right,” she said more softly. “I’m sorry. It’s just been… a really long day.”

Luca shocked the hell out of her by gently taking her wrist in his large hand. His skin was cool and dry against her flesh which still threw off warmth from the extra-hot shower. He silently turned her wrist until her palm faced up.

Hero let him, transfixed by the broad planes and sharp angles of his face. All anger had fled his features, replaced by a curious emotion she could only describe as reverence. She closed her eyes. Blood pounded through her veins, concentrating in the wrist he held, pulsing beneath his long fingers.

“To answer your questions: Yes, they all matter. And yes, you can
trust
that I’ll protect you with my life.” Luca’s murmur slid across her senses like silk over flesh. His other hand enfolded hers, the pad of his thumb running next to the raised ridge permanently slashed through her palm.

She opened her eyes as goose bumps flared over her skin, tightening her nipples and speeding her breath. Hero tried not to think of how close the bedroom was. Or the kitchen table. Hell, the floor would do.

She glanced down. Maybe not the floor. Sex on the case files would be creepy. But the couch…

Luca abruptly released her hands. “I’ll clean these up and take them back to the office. You don’t need them here.”

“No.” Hero tucked her hair behind her ears and stood, taking her food with her. “You work. I have a kiln to load and some bowls to throw. I’ll just work down the hall.”
Trying not to melt into a puddle of hormones
, she added silently. “Just let me know how much I owe you for dinner.”

Luca smiled. “Don’t worry about it, it’s on the Bureau.”

Hero summoned a smile and turned her back, making her way to the studio down the hall from the kitchen that she planned on avoiding for the rest of the night.

The sincerity of Luca’s promise echoed through her.

I’ll protect you with my life…

She prayed it didn’t come to that.

Chapter Eight

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Luca hunched over his unfolded map of Portland and checked his watch. 9:30 a.m.

A caffeine headache pricked behind his eyelids and started to spread over his skull cap. He’d showered, shaved, manscaped, dressed, and read over the detailed pathology reports from Hero’s refrigerator all in the last hour and a half.

A muffled noise from the direction of her door suggested she was awake. Finally. He’d lain up half the night on that godforsaken couch listening to the white noise of her potter’s wheel and her off-key sing along to alternating indie rock and dub step remixes. Luca rubbed at his left eye. Somewhere between midnight and 2 am he’d developed a twitch.

Hero’s door opened and Luca twisted his head around as she lurched into the loft toward the kitchen.

“Good morn—”

She cut him off by lifting her hand and squinting a grumpy scowl at him as she passed. “Don’t talk. Coffee,” she croaked.

Luca shot a glance over the half-wall at the shiny piece of machinery with a myriad of knobs and leavers that seemed to be the centerpiece of her entire mocha-colored kitchen. Which was basically a coffee shrine.

With her eyes still swollen half-shut from not enough sleep and motions that were jerky and dangerous, Hero performed a ritual Luca found so fascinating, he forgot to be miffed that she’d just shushed him.

Besides. She just said the magic word.

Three different whole beans from separate local coffee houses mixed in the grinder while she took down two hand-made mugs, some sugar, a bag of stevia, and poured cold water into the machine.

Luca stood very slowly, careful to make no sudden movements as he meandered toward the aromatic kitchen in the most unthreatening way.

Hero unceremoniously dumped the coffee into the filter and pushed a button. That handled, she leaned her forehead against the cupboard above the sink and let out a groan worthy of the walking dead.

So little Miss Sunshine wasn’t a morning person. Good to know.

Luca popped his head around the door and when she didn’t bite it off, he followed with the rest of his body. She’d yet to look in the direction of her missing fridge, so he was probably safe over there. Leaning his hip against the counter, he studied the back of her. Couldn’t complain about the view.

They listened to the trickling promise of future happiness in silence and Luca was just fine with that. Hero’s hair fell behind her in a tangled braid. He fought the urge to reach out and unknot the elastic. She looked so tiny hunched over like that, her shoulders rolling forward and her whole small, sinewy frame somehow deflated.

The urge to reach out and pull her against his solid body gripped him so hard his skin itched with it. Muscles twitched. Teeth set. He pulled in tight and shut it down, all the while watching her even breaths as she stared through the hair that fell in a curtain over her face as though the dark liquid in front of her offered some kind of salvation.

“What are you still doing here, anyway?” she grumbled. “Isn’t Agent Di Petro supposed to be here at six a.m.?”

A tight, unpleasant reaction twisted in his gut. Just how eager was she to see Di Petro? “Ah, Vince texted me this morning. He won’t be able to make it until noon.”

“Too much victory dancing?” she asked wryly.

“I’m not sure.”

The moment the drizzle slowed to a few bubbles, Hero lunged at the pot and dumped it into both cups. Doctoring hers with a bit of the stevia, she inhaled the steam from the cup before taking a tiny, tentative sip.

Luca watched the rapture on her face. Like a fucking coffee commercial. Consider him sold.

Like some kind of arabican magic, her eyes instantly cleared and she handed him his mug. “Tell me this isn’t the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had.”

“Smells good,” he shrugged and picked up the cup without touching the sugar. A wave of ecstasy overtook his entire body at the first sip. It was still a little too hot, but Luca didn’t care. He wanted the taste branded into his tongue forever. When he opened his eyes, Hero was smiling at him over her mug.

“I know, right?”

“Oh. My.
God.
”

She smirked and turned to push through the doorway, plopping into one of the dining chairs. Luca followed her, still trying to wrap his mind around the awesomeness in his cup.

“How do you make this?” he demanded.

Hero took another sip. “It’s my special blend. I usually reserve it for the morning after.”

Luca almost dropped his mug. Some coffee sloshed onto his map. “Morning after?”

“Well yeah, I like to leave someone with a good taste in their mouth, you know?”

Heat that had nothing to do with the coffee scalded his insides. If this was the morning after coffee, then the night before really must be— His free hand curled into a fist somewhere over the Columbia River as he fought an intense hatred of every man who’d ever tasted this particular blend. His next sip was bitter.

“So, what are you doing with this?” Hero motioned to the map.

Luca stared down at his city, collecting himself. How the fuck did she break his concentration over a cup of coffee? He needed to focus on business, which was keeping her alive.

“These are the residences of all John the Baptist’s previous victims.” Luca pointed to six different black X’s on the map. “These are where we found each of the bodies.” Luca gestured to five red X’s scattered along the riverfront. One had even reached the Ocean and been found in the net of a fishing dory.

Hero reached out and placed her finger on the one green X next to Cathedral Park. “That’s me,” she murmured.

Luca nodded. “You weren’t a body.”
Thank God
, he added silently.

“I like that it’s green.” Hero rubbed at it absently, as though trying to erase the mark. “The black X’s, they’re all concentrated in one area of the city.”

“Yeah.” Luca cleared his throat. “At first I thought JTB had some connection with the University of Portland because all of the women grew up, lived, or—worked their trade at or around the University. You and Janelle were the only women who’d ever actually attended the college, but neither of you finished with a degree and, as far as I can tell, you don’t have much of a connection with it anymore, if at all.”