Closer Than You Think (40 page)

‘I’ll inform you as I make identifications,’ Washington said. ‘And once I know what caused their death.’

Deacon nodded. ‘Thank you. As a heads-up, I’ve got a ground-scanning expert arriving this afternoon to check the O’Bannion land for more bodies.’

‘I pray you don’t find any more. For the obvious human reasons, of course. But we’re running out of room.’ Washington gestured behind her. ‘Even the cold room is filling up.’

Deacon made himself walk to the cold room door, his feet protesting every step. His gut protesting even more loudly. He opened the door and stepped inside, barely feeling the chill.

He wanted to close his eyes. Wanted to run away. But he planted his feet and made himself look. Made himself
see
. Let himself feel. And let his heart break for the senseless waste.

Eight more stretchers filled the room. Eight more bodies, all blonde, young. Nude. In various stages of decomposition. Eight more young women who’d been robbed of their lives.

He heard the door open and close behind him. ‘Can I help you with something, Agent Novak?’ Carrie Washington asked softly.

‘Why aren’t they draped?’ he asked, immediately wishing the words back. He’d sounded accusatory, which he hadn’t meant.

But Washington didn’t sound offended. ‘We haven’t prepared these victims. I’ve called in help from Butler and Warren counties. Butler is eager to help because of Officer Simpson.’

‘We haven’t notified her family,’ he said hoarsely, taking a few steps further into the cold room so that he stood in the middle of the stretchers, four on each side of him. He looked at their faces. Committed them to memory. ‘The MEs can’t make any family notifications or public statements until we’ve cleared them.’

‘The MEs know to keep confidentiality,’ she said quietly, still unoffended. Then she earned his total respect with her next words. ‘Don’t worry, Deacon. We’ll take good care of them. As soon as they’re prepared, they’ll be draped. They’ll have the dignity that was stolen from them.’

‘Thank you, Carrie.’ Deacon’s eyes stung, his nose burned, partly because of the stench. But mostly because of the tears he’d only allow himself to shed here and now. Once he left, he’d have to focus on bringing their killer to justice. ‘You’re running out of room, and we’re running out of time. If we haven’t already.’

‘You think the Longstreet woman is dead?’ Washington asked.

‘If he feels threatened with exposure, it’s highly likely. My only hope that she’s still alive is this.’ He swept his arm to take in all eight of the bodies. ‘He’s a creature of habit. He’ll want his things around him. His tools. He’ll want to be able to torture her.’

‘And prepare her body after she’s dead,’ Washington added in a murmur.

‘Exactly. But the reality is that he can’t have his things around him right now and Corinne becomes a liability if he gets stopped, assuming he’s still on the run. He may have killed her and dumped her body somewhere, just to get away cleanly.’

Part of him hoped so, for Corinne’s sake. Which, frankly, scared the shit out of him. That he considered a quick and painless death to be the best of the possible outcomes told Deacon just how tired and emotionally ragged he’d become. He needed to sleep. To recharge.

I’ll be waiting
. He drew strength from the knowledge that Faith was sleeping safely in his bed. Waiting for him to come home. It was just enough to enable him to step away from the victims. Because they were already sucking him in to their pain. They always did.

‘I’m ready to go,’ he said, and followed Carrie Washington from the cold room. If he wasn’t careful, he’d become too overwhelmed to think. And he needed to keep thinking.

‘I’ll keep in close contact,’ Washington said. ‘Don’t worry about them, Deacon.’

‘Thank you.’ He held the door open for Bishop, both of them stripping mask and goggles off as soon as they were back in the hall. He sniffed the sleeve of his suit jacket and winced. ‘Dammit. I just had this suit cleaned. I need to go home to shower and change again.’

‘Same. But there are showers at the precinct. It’s a lot closer.’ She gave him a look that spoke volumes. ‘I saw a spare suit in your locker. You don’t
need
to go home.’

But he did. Because he didn’t turn off the grief when he walked out of the morgue. He wanted to, but never did. It was pushing at him, a weight on his shoulders, an ache in his chest.

I’ll be waiting.
He needed to see Faith. Just see her. And he didn’t need to justify that to Bishop. Still, he was glad to have an excuse his partner would accept. ‘Yes I do, actually. I have to take Greg home. I brought him with me, because you said we should hurry.’

‘He’s in the waiting room?’ Bishop looked sympathetic. ‘What happened at school?’

Deacon thought of the mess his brother had gotten himself into. And of the pain he’d tried to save Dani. ‘Too long to tell right now. Let’s meet at the precinct in four hours.’

She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. ‘Four? Why?’

‘Because I don’t know about you, but I need a few hours’ sleep.’

She shook her head. ‘We can’t stop. We still haven’t interviewed the creepy uncle yet.’

‘I know. But I also know that I’m not sharp enough right now to truly hear anything he says. I don’t want to miss something crucial because my brain’s turned to mush.’

‘I am tired,’ Bishop admitted grudgingly. ‘I’ll crash at the station for a few hours.’

‘Good. After that, we’ll interview Uncle Jeremy, and then I want to go over the O’Bannion house, top to bottom. There are probably a million places he could have stored their body parts. And we still haven’t found his souvenirs.’

‘Are we sure he kept any?’ Bishop asked.

‘He kept their bodies under glass, Scarlett. He wanted to see them. Relive the experience in between abductions. I have to believe he kept souvenirs.’

‘What did the serial in West Virginia keep?’

‘Wallets. Drivers’ licenses. Jewelry, clothing. Anything and everything.’ And Deacon had handled each and every item with care, making sure they were returned to the families. ‘Nearly all of his victims had some form of ID, which made identification a lot faster.’

She stood there for a moment, studying him. ‘You identified them all, didn’t you?’

‘With a lot of help, yeah.’

‘Who talked to the families?’

‘I did.’ He turned on his heel and started for the front entrance, Bishop was beside him.

‘All by yourself?’

‘No, not always. Sometimes one of the other agents worked with me. Sometimes my boss went with me. I think his involvement was more to assess my psychological state, though.’

‘You liked your boss?’

Some of the tension in his body unwound as his lips curved at the question. ‘Not at first. He didn’t like me either. But I grew on him.’

‘I heard Isenberg tell one of the head honchos that your old boss didn’t want to let you go. That you were his right hand.’

Deacon glanced over at her. ‘Thanks. Even if it’s not true.’

Bishop shrugged. ‘I don’t like you well enough yet to try to make you feel better.’

His lips curved. ‘Thanks. I needed that too.’

‘You went into the cold room. Why?’

‘I needed to see them. I needed to know their faces.’

Bishop sighed. ‘If you let the dead mess with your head, you’ll burn out too fast.’

‘I didn’t let them mess with my head at first. Then I realized that I wasn’t seeing the dead as people, just victims. One just like all the others. That scared the hell out of me, because it put me that much closer to the monster who’d hurt them. He sees them as victims, too. One just like all the others.’

‘That’s not the same at all,’ she protested. ‘We don’t look at them as objects or as conquests. We don’t get off on their pain.’

‘No, of course we don’t. But to keep myself separate from their pain, I had to distance myself from the victims as people. If I burn out, I’ll do something else. But I won’t do this job by stripping the victims of their humanity. It was stolen by their killer. I won’t do the same to them, or to myself.’

Cincinnati, Ohio, Tuesday 4 November, 2.55
P.M.

Voices. Someone is here.
Instantly awake, Faith lifted her head from Novak’s pillow cautiously, her hand sliding beneath the pillow to close over her gun. She heard the louder, agitated voice of a female and the quieter, more muted voice of a male. The male didn’t sound like either of the FBI agents. And it wasn’t Novak. Of that she was certain.

She crept down the stairs, the hand clutching her gun at her side. A peek into the living room had her eyes growing wide. Dani stood with a tall, burly young man who looked just like her and Novak. The boy’s hair was as black as Dani’s, with a white streak just as wide, but the style was spiky like Novak’s.

This would be the troubled Greg. Who was evidently hearing-impaired, because he and Dani were signing to one another furiously, with loudly spoken cursing interspersed between the hand signals. Whatever Greg had done, it was bad. Tears streamed down Dani’s face, her expression a mix of anger and fear. Mostly fear, Faith thought, at a loss how to help.

Where was Novak? Why wasn’t he here to referee?

Finally Dani threw her hands into the air in frustration, before flinging her arms around Greg, holding on tight. ‘You stupid idiot,’ she choked out, brokenly. ‘I love you.’ She pulled back and held the boy’s face in her hands. ‘Why did you do it? Why would you ruin your future like this? I’d’ve been all right.’

He drew back to sign his reply, making Dani weep harder. Then he pulled his sister into his arms and the two of them stood there, rocking together, comforting one another.

Faith’s eyes stung at the sight. The two were clearly close, leaning on each other for support. They were family.
But where is Deacon?

Feeling like an intruder – because she was – Faith backed away.
And not just any intruder
, she thought,
but an armed one
. She was sure Novak would be annoyed to find she’d risked his family’s safety by sneaking up on them with a gun.

Tiptoeing back up the stairs to her room, she slipped her weapon in her purse.

‘I’ll get you another holster, if you want,’ Novak said softly from behind her.

She spun. And gaped. He stood in the master bathroom doorway, wearing nothing but a towel. His hair was wet and spiky, and water still clung to the crisp white hairs on his chest.

Hairs she now knew to be soft to the touch.

His legs were every bit as nice as his chest, just as bronzed, his thighs as solid as tree trunks. She thought about the photo of him and Dani as teenagers, both on bicycles, both smiling for the camera. Obviously it was a sport he’d kept up with.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he said, still quietly, as if he was soothing a feral animal.

She glanced at the bed, knew it would still be warm from her own body. She hadn’t been gone more than a minute. Two minutes, tops. That he’d been in the room while she slept didn’t bother her. That he’d entered undetected bothered her a great deal. ‘How did you get in here? I was just here. I would have heard you in the shower. I would have woken up.’

‘I used the shower in Dani’s room, but I forgot my boxers.’ His cheeks darkened. ‘I was going to ask Dani to get them for me, but then I saw you go downstairs. I figured Dani would introduce you to Greg and you guys would talk a while and that I could get dressed and be gone before you got back.’ He shrugged awkwardly.
Endearingly,
she thought. ‘But you came back too fast. And you were armed. I thought it best not to startle you until you put the gun away.’

She tried not to stare at his body, especially not at the towel that hung low on his waist. Because she’d felt what it concealed. Up close and very personally. She cleared her throat, but her voice was still husky. ‘Because getting shot twice in one day would suck.’

He didn’t smile. ‘Yes, it would. Why did you leave the room with a gun?’

‘I heard voices.’

‘So you went to investigate, even though the agents told you to stay put?’

‘Of course,’ she said lightly, hoping to make him smile. But when she dragged her eyes up to his face, she saw pain in his eyes. She took a step toward him, then stopped herself. If she got too close, she’d be in his arms. And this time, she wasn’t sure she’d have the willpower to stop. ‘What happened, Deacon?’

‘At the school or the morgue?’

She drew a careful breath. ‘You went to the morgue?’

‘Yeah.’ He went to his drawer and pulled out a pair of black silk boxers with tiny red flames. ‘Which is why I had to come home and clean up.’

He disappeared into his closet, and Faith carefully lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed, thinking of the bodies they’d found under the basement floor. Under Plexiglas.

She hadn’t envied the MEs their job, but hadn’t thought about Deacon having to inspect the bodies up close. She should have. He wouldn’t leave that important task to someone else.

The picture of him in that news article flashed into her mind. He would grieve for the victims he’d seen in the morgue, just like he’d grieved for those on that hillside in West Virginia.

He emerged from the closet wearing trousers and a shirt, buttoned to his throat. A tie hung from the index finger of each hand. ‘Blue or red?’

She came to her feet unsteadily, but made herself smile when she approached him. She took the ties and held them up to frame both sides of his face. ‘The blue. It matches your eyes.’

Without a word, he took the tie and started to put it on. He seemed tense. Edgy. Her tiger now paced behind the bars of an invisible cage.

My tiger?
Yes. He was
her
tiger, whether it was wise or not.

She waited until he’d snugged his tie to his collar before reaching for his hand. ‘I never learned to tie ties, but I do a mean button,’ she murmured, bending her head over his left cuff. When she’d released the left, he silently gave her the right. ‘You’d really get me a new holster?’ she asked lightly. ‘You realize you’d only be encouraging me to pack heat.’