(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (22 page)

He turns his face toward the camera, and it glitches as he makes eye contact—well, as his sunglasses do. There’s a halo for half a second, and then the whole picture goes black. If it were in color I suspect it might be red.

The coffee finishes brewing as I rewind it again.

“What the bloody hell is going on?” Angie lifts her face, sputtering and moaning. “I wasn’t asleep. I was resting my eyes.” She rubs her eyes and lays her face back down on Rory’s desk.

I grab the coffee and hurry back to the picture. I rewind and watch three more times, but there’s nothing. He’s wearing a generic pair of pants and a hoodie. He looks like a criminal if you ask me, but I know that’s the first choice cops go for when they disguise themselves.

I sit back and watch him walk. Of course he’s familiar to me, I’ve spent months in my head with him. I watch it over and over, knowing it’s him. He knows about the cameras; he knows about using a laser pointer against a camera.

He doesn’t go anywhere else in the store, and he pays with cash. I scan his order of the bed and mattress, raising my eyebrows when I see the purchase was shipped to the fucking townhouse in downtown Seattle. The one the old man owned—the dead old man, who also owned the cabin where the girls were tortured.

Damn!

Someone is using that house still. I close up the computer, remove the thumb drives, and put the papers in my bag, before waking Angie with a nudge. She gets up from Rory’s desk and stumbles out of the office and down the corridor with me guiding her. I will have to go back to Seattle in the morning. And I’m making Angie come along.

I nod at the guards as we leave and head for the car parked out front. She falls asleep in the car, while I plot.

18. Surprise

 I
chew my licorice, watching the house. My cell phone rings again, another angry call from Dash. How do I explain I know what’s going on, that even though I’m not supposed to be doing the job, I can’t let it go? All it does is confirm his hatred for my work. It proves he’s right and that I can’t separate from a file.

I text Angie: Cover for me if Dash calls, huh?

Her response is immediate.

I would if a huge and spicy doctor wasn’t sitting here eyeballing my every move from our little apartment here in Seattle . . .

I wince. “I’ll tell him where I am, don’t bother,” I type. But that isn’t as easy as texting Angie. I watch the house, a brownstone townhouse in an older but wealthy downtown area in Seattle. I can’t believe he flew here. It’s my eighth flight to Seattle in three weeks. Thank God for our plane. Everything is easy and at my disposal, so stalking this house from my rental car is simple. Far simpler than explaining to my fiancé why I can’t let go.

I text the address I am at and the color of my rental car.

We need to talk!

His message makes my insides clench but not enough to stop me from texting: Be astute, please!

I scowl at the word
astute
, not confident I am correct in what it means. I had meant to write
cautious
but my crappy spelling got it autocorrected to
astute
. I send one more message: And by that I mean careful to not be seen!

Thank you, Jane, I am completely aware of what ASTUTE means!

I slump, dropping the phone on the console, and sit back to watch the house again.

The passenger door opens far faster than it should, but he has hate driving him on when he sits in the seat next to me. I can tell by the way he’s breathing. “Hello, love!”

I jump when Rory gets in. “You scared the piss out of me! Why are you here too? Did they fly you down? Did we find something?”

“Too?” He grins widely. “I think the question is what in the bloody hell are you doing here? The cops over there watching the house phoned you in. I was already here, never made it back to DC yet. I was meant to go home a couple of days ago, but the boss man wanted me to ensure everyone is being wrangled and none of the uniforms or Feds are going to leak any information.” He chuckles and sits back. “So what has made you and Angie circle back here? Angie never told me she was coming back.”

“Nothing. Women’s intuition is all. We decided to take a quick trip and see if a couple of stupid leads turned out to be anything.” I scowl at him, not sure he hasn’t blabbed to the police. He always gets chatty with them, whereas I stay behind. He does seem to learn more from them, but I feel like the relationship is reciprocated. Someone leaked that the girl was found; someone let him kill all those other girls. And I can’t rule out Rory. He might have let it slip by accident.

“Women’s intuition?” He wrinkles his nose. “I think it’s something more. I think you found something and you aren’t sharing it.” His eyes flash a little hurt. “Ya know Angie doesn’t keep secrets from me.”

To crack the awkward shell we seem to be encased in, I mutter clumsily, “Yeah, me either. She never told me you were staying behind. In fact, no one mentioned it. Did you volunteer?”

“Wow, that woman doesn’t check her messages. If I had feelings they’d be bloody hurt.” He turns, scowling, and it’s in that moment something feels off.

I laugh, but it’s weird, uncomfortable. He pauses, no longer smiling. His face slowly drops. “You all right, Jane?”

I nod slowly, but my vision starts to fill with a thousand images, each one slowly progressing into something worse. His face, his laugh, his smile, his snarl. The way his teeth gnash when he speaks with a sneer. I swallow hard.

“What is wrong, Princess?” he asks, lifting a hand and dragging it down my cheek. Everything inside of me screams but I sit frozen; a small piece of me is still the girl he tormented. I feel everything she felt, every moment of horror and agony.

It takes approximately seven seconds for me to completely realize he is Mr. X. Mr. X is him. Every piece of the puzzle slips into place.

“How?” The word falls from my lips, my eyes flood with tears, and my brain points out all of the clues that are now so obvious. “I know you tricked Dash into changing the recording when you recognized who Ashley Potter was. You must have panicked when you realized she was alive. That she had survived the river. This is why you got Dash to confuse me by introducing you as the bad guy so you could make a cover for yourself. I see now how you knew we were coming and killed all those girls, and how you used all of your skills to avoid detection. I guess I only have to ask you one thing, Rory. How could you? Being who we are, and seeing what we see, how could you?” I press a button on my phone, something he doesn’t see me do as I pick it up from the console.

“How could I? How could I not? Each one of them was mine.” His eyes lose the Irish charm and roguish flair. Instead, the dark-blue seems to blacken as he tilts his head forward, casting a shadow over his eyes. His smile becomes menacing as evil—the pure evil in his heart—takes over. His eyebrows even arch differently. He is sick, which I can see. “You can’t be surprised, Jane. Not after everything. You were attracted to me in there, in Ashley’s mind. You wanted me. You moaned and writhed while you were in there like I have never seen you do. Angie, that twat, was jealous that you got to have me as your Dr. Russo, Derek the sex machine. You’re the only mind runner I’ve ever seen who uses sex in someone’s head.” He twirls a strand of my hair that’s escaped my ponytail. “You want a dark and scary man to hate-fuck, to conquer you.” His eyes light up. “You like it in there, don’t you? You’ve gotten addicted to riding their minds and feeling their pain. In there you’re a real girl. Having family and friends and a life that’s real, beyond this bullshit lot you’ve been handed. That wanker Dash never deserved you. He sees the light, but I see you, Princess, I see you for who you are. I know you want love in all the wrong places.”

He grips the side of my face, pulling me into him. His lips bubble over with spit, but before he can attempt to kiss me the door is opened and he’s thrown from the car. “What in the hell are you doing?” Dash grabs him but shouts at me. The conversation with Angie over his drooling problem mixes with the spit-filled kisses he gave Ashley. The whole world feels like it crumbles, but I manage to point as my hand shakes and my eyes dart. “It’s—it’s him.”

Dash sees the look on my face and spins, but he’s no match for Rory. Dash swings, and Rory punches him twice, knocking him to the ground, and breaks into a sprint.

I get out, running after him, before I’ve even given it much thought. I point at the police in the car across from us.
“Get them to help us!”

Dash scrambles across the road for the cop car as I kick my legs into high gear.

I’m not like Rory. I’m not crazy. He runs through the traffic once we get onto Queen Anne Avenue from the side street we were on. He slides over the hoods of moving cars and dashes into traffic like a madman, almost as if he’s toying with me. He wants me to come and get him. I stop running, sending a quick video message and calling a number much more powerful than 911.

“It’s Agent Spears, 549621, go for code.”

The phone makes a dial tone just before a man picks up—not just any man, the vice president of the country. “Agent Spears?” he asks softly.

“Mr. Vice President, this is Agent Jane Spears. My partner, Rory Guthrie, is the perp on the Granger Mountain homicides. I don’t know how, but he has just gone rogue on me, admitting to it all. I have sent the recording I made as he spoke in the car.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” The man loses the composure he has maintained through previous crises. Ones I would have lost mine in. The video starts playing. Rory confessing to it all fills the background as the vice president’s breath increases. “This is a situation, Spears. He’s a fully trained op.”

“Yes, sir. He’s gone black. He’s running across Queen Anne Avenue in Seattle, heading east toward the Lake Union houses.” I pause. “He’s wearing a black jacket and dark-blue jeans. I can’t get to him from here. You have to send out cars.”

“Mother of God.”

“Sir, I have everything to take him down, but I need you to send a guard to the house, the townhouse we are watching. There is already one car on-scene, but I suspect the police squad car is full of dead cops. He ran past them without even batting an eyelash. I suspect there are dead people in the house also. I will need as much backup as possible to finish this safely.”

“I will dispatch as many as I can. You get on the local radios and tell the boys in blue what’s what. They are our best chance right now to mobilize. Seattle has SWAT. I’ll take care of that.” He sighs into the phone. “Get your ass back to that townhouse and find me some goddamned answers, agent!” He hangs up the phone, and I watch as Rory becomes a small black dot and then is gone.

I want to chase him. My instincts tell me to chase him. But something whispers to me that he is setting me up. And he knows me nearly as well as Angie and Dash do.

“They’re dead, Jane. Both—dead.” Dash catches up to me, his voice wavering from the exertion of running. When I look back I wince; his nose is clearly broken. He points. “You know how, right?”

I nod and walk over, lifting my hands to his cheeks. Hot tears stream from my eyes as I line up my thumbs along his nose and press my fingers into his cheeks. “One, two—” I shove his nose before saying
three
to trick him into relaxing. The bones snap back into place, and blood instantly starts gushing. He grunts like he wants to scream but keeps it together for me. He lifts his shirt to catch the blood, but his eyes wander to the road. “Where is he? How the hell did this happen?”

“Gone. Not sure.” My voice cracks. “What will Angie say?” I shake my head. She is as dear to me as family.

“I believe I would die inside if I found out it was you who was responsible for so much horror.”

I nod, hating where this will take our team at work. Hating that one of ours has betrayed us. But I don’t have time to worry about it. My body reacts, as it has been taught to. Tears stream down my cheeks as I sniffle and drag my bleeding fiancé back to the townhouse. Another squad car is there already.

“Stop!” One officer has his gun out already as the other is clearing the street and calling for more backup.

“I’m Agent Spears. I’m going for my badge. I am unarmed.” I lift my badge slowly to show the trembling man. He takes it, looking it over many times before putting his gun away. I nod at his radio. “May I?”

He nods. His eyes are filled with tears for his brothers on the force.

I click the radio on. “My name is Agent Jane Spears. You will not know who I am. I work intel. That is all you need to know. Two of your own have been shot in the Queen Anne area.” I point back toward the park for the benefit of the men next to me. “The man you are chasing, the man who killed your friends here today and many others, is Irish, ex–Irish Intelligence. He’s CIA trained, American military trained, and works with the UN for the FBI and Secret Service. His name is Rory Guthrie. His file is being faxed and e-mailed to every one of the police departments in the city and outskirts. It will be limited viewing, but you will have what you need. You will be supported by my unit, and you will assist us so that we can assist you. We want you to have your retribution, but we need to be smart about it. No more loss of life. This is one of ours who has done this; we want our retribution as well, but no vigilante efforts. We need teamwork. Your chiefs are being briefed as we speak. Ror—the killer has gone toward the Lake Union area. He’s a dark-haired male in his midthirties with an olive complexion, dark-blue eyes, and an Irish accent, though he can speak without it. He was last seen wearing a dark jacket and dark-blue jeans. He is six foot two, two hundred and twenty pounds. SWAT is being called in. If you see him he should be considered armed and dangerous; he’s a Caution Victor.” I click the radio off, passing it back to the man, who is visibly shaken but is ready to do his job. “Thank you.”