Devil in the Deadline (5 page)

“Who else knew about the power plant?”

He shrugged. “Everybody, I reckon. But we could sleep up there with the ladder pulled up.”

“Who would she have let up there with her?”

“Nobody but us.” Another tear escaped his left eye and disappeared into the scruff along his jawline. Violet shot me a clear go-to-hell look and reached up to thumb the tear away, murmuring something I couldn't hear.

I felt eyes on my back until I turned the corner.

Money. Romance. Jealous girl. And an unknown, unhappy past.

I started the car and turned onto East Cary, headed for Grace Street. Aaron better be at his desk instead of on his boat, beautiful summer day be damned.

5
.

  

So many secrets

  

T
he crimson edges of the photo peeping around the file folder in the center of Aaron's desk told me I didn't want to see the pictures. He gestured to a black plastic chair in front of me and sank into his gray one before he spoke.

“What the hell is happening here, Nichelle?” He flipped the folder open and I cringed, but the top sheet, at least, was a detective's narrative. A very long detective's narrative, from the looks of the scrunched-up scribbles covering the page.

“I wish I knew.” I perched on the edge of the chair. “I talked to a few folks today. I have a couple of things I think might help you. And a few questions.”

“Of course.”

“This is a screwy case if I've ever seen one, Detective.”

“Screwy. Scary. Sadistic. I have lots of S words for it.”

I felt my lips turn up in a ghost of a smile. “I take it you don't have any solid leads yet?”

“Not a one. Please tell me you got something.” He tapped a finger on the paperwork, nervous energy thrumming in the air around him.

“A few things.” I pulled out my notebook and flipped it open, running a finger down the first couple of pages before I looked up. “Those folks who called it in? They knew her. Like, were friends with her. I tried to get a lead on her family, and the guy you saw last night told me they killed her.”

Aaron's jaw fell onto his knee, his eyes wide. I gave him a minute to process before I spoke again.

“I'm thinking he doesn't mean literally,” I said. “But I couldn't get him to say anything else. And there was another guy who's part of their group. He and the vic—they called her Jasmine—had a thing going.”

Aaron snatched up a pen and flipped a piece of paper over, jotting notes.

“You didn't get a name for the boyfriend, did you?”

“Not a real one. They call him Flyboy. He said something about the Air Force Academy. Not sure how that'll help you, but it's a teensy lead.”

“I'll take it.” He sat back. “Everything about this has been like trying to find a needle in a barn during hay harvest season.”

“Here's another one for you: Flyboy said they wanted to leave Richmond. There were four of them. Two girls and two guys. They all live on the streets. And they wanted to get the hell out of Dodge and make a fresh start.”

“Where?”

“Colorado.”

“The Air Force Academy.” Aaron made more notes.

I nodded. Aaron was a brilliant detective. But this case had shaken him in a way I'd never seen. “The victim was talking about getting money for them to move. A lot of it. But if he knows from where, he wouldn't say. Oh, and he works off-the-books construction.”

He kept writing. “Gives me something to go on.” Aaron's chest heaved with a sigh and he sat back and dropped his pen. “I'll take anything right now.”

I clicked out a pen. “How is it possible y'all haven't ID'd her yet?” Landers said they had clean prints. The DMV database should have produced a name and former address hours ago.

“She didn't have a driver's license or a criminal record.”

“A dental, then?” Those were harder to match, but with a case like this, the command staff would've lit a fire under whoever was working on it.

Aaron shook his head, running one hand over his close-cropped blond hair. “They've been on it since the middle of the night. There are no matching records.”

I tapped my pen. “She didn't come from nowhere.”

“It looks like she might have. The chief even called in a favor from the damned FBI and got their superbrain people to check it. There's no record of a dental match anywhere in the United States. And the head forensics guy over there says he buys that, because the decay and damage levels in her molars indicate she's never seen a dentist.”

What the ever-loving hell?

“How old was she?”

“Early twenties. Between twenty-one and twenty-five.”

I nodded. “Her friends said twenty-four or five. How does a person get to be that old and never go to the dentist?”

“It happens in poor families more often than people think,” Aaron said. “It's one more question mark hanging over this, and the clock is ticking. Fast.”

“Did you find anything else useful at the scene?”

“A whole lot of blood.”

“No weapon?” No way the killer had been so careless, given the elaborate nature of the murder scene, but I had to ask.

“Nope.”

I stared for a minute at the bluish hollows under his eyes, just a shade darker than his irises. He looked beaten. “It's a hard one to handle,” I said gently. “I didn't sleep well last night.”

The corners of his mouth turned down and he dropped his chin to his chest. “I sent my girls back to school this morning. They got home for summer a couple weeks ago. I made them call around and find places to stay and go back. They're too close to her age. I can't have them here with a psycho on the loose.”

I nodded, unable to imagine how worried Aaron must be to give up vacation time with his daughters. Ticking clock, indeed.

“The guys both said they slept in that loft in the summer,” I said. “They had a rope ladder they could pull up behind them to stay safe. Did you find one?”

He grabbed his pen and scribbled that down before he looked up. “We did not.”

“So someone took it,” I said, writing notes myself. “Who would she have let up there with her?”

Violet.

“There's a girl,” I said. “The other one in their group. She seems very interested in the victim's boyfriend.”

He shook his head, writing more.

“Name?”

“Goes by Violet.”

He nodded a thank-you. “Landers is good. So are the other forty guys we have on this. We'll figure it out,” Aaron said. “I just hope it's before anything else happens.”

“You really think it could be a serial?”

“Off the record?” His baby blues were serious. And scared.

I nodded.

“The way she was cut up, Nichelle...I think it almost has to be.”

My inner Lois Lane bounced. Everything else in me shrank into a ball of terror. Covering a serial killer is like walking blindfolded through a minefield in combat boots. The public has a right to know, but the newspaper has a responsibility to avoid inciting a panic. If they were hunting a psycho, there was precious little I could do to help with the investigation. But I could find out who the victim was, and if anyone she knew had motive. Landers didn't have time to investigate both possibilities. So I'd focus on what he couldn't.

I'd tell him about the journals. After I'd read them.

I tucked my pen away and stood. “Call me if you find anything? I'm going home, at least for a little while. The dog will run away if I don't spend some time on fetch today.”

“Thanks for your help, Nichelle,” he said. “I owe you one.”

“We'll worry about that later.”

He smiled.

I paused in the doorway and turned back. Already bent over the case file, Aaron's brow furrowed, his eyes scanning the paper like he could decode the secret message if he just stared hard enough.

  

I spotted the sleek black Lincoln as I turned onto my street, and my pulse picked up speed despite my best efforts at control.

“You are not excited to see him,” I lied through gritted teeth. “He hasn't even bothered to call in over a month.”

Inching the car toward my house, I grasped for composure.

By the time I turned the key on the kitchen door, my face was set to “studiously uninterested,” and I hoped for more casual than hurt if I had to talk.

The kitchen was quiet. So was the dog. I ambled toward the living room and peeked around the archway to find Joey settled in one corner of my overstuffed navy jacquard sofa, my toy Pomeranian flopped over in his lap. His long fingers ran absently through Darcy's silky russet fur, his dark eyes staring at nothing.

His broad shoulders and clean-shaven profile were sexy as ever. Dammit. I pulled in a slow breath and managed to keep from jumping into his lap (or flinging a piece of my beach glass collection at his head—it was a toss-up, really) by virtue of the same willpower that had kept me from gobbling the two pound bucket of white fudge almonds in the break room Friday. Giving myself a mental gold star, I cleared my throat.

“If it was dark in here and you were wearing that jacket,” I cast a cool gaze at the camel-colored Armani suit coat tossed across my chaise lounge, “I'd have déjà vu, stranger.”

My thoughts rewound almost a year, to the first time I'd met Mr. Mystery. Coming home from a long day, I'd found a strange man in an expensive suit sitting on my sofa holding the dog.

He'd offered me a story tip and scared the crap out of me—but we'd become...something I didn't have a word for...in the months that followed.

At least, I thought we had.

Joey's eyes snapped to me and the dog's head popped up. She gave me a once-over and dropped her chin back to Joey's knee. He did the same and his lips crept slowly into the sexy grin that played a prominent role in my better dreams.

Must. Resist.

I narrowed my eyes and leaned against the doorframe, folding my arms across my chest. “You forget what I look like? Or maybe you're in the wrong girl's house. Got your keys mixed up?”

He shook his head. “I only have the one key.” His voice was low, his eyes serious. “And quite a memory for important things.”

My pulse stuttered. Damn him.

“So, you lost it? Your phone, too?”

He locked his dark eyes with my violet ones, shaking his head slowly.

The utter calm pissed me off.

“Then where the hell did you disappear to?” I half-shouted, my resolve cracking. Why try to act like I didn't care? He wasn't stupid, and he was as good or better than me at reading people. “I called, I texted you. You've been ignoring me for almost five weeks, and now here you sit, petting the dog on a random Sunday like you belong here or something.”

“I don't.” He said it so quietly I almost didn't hear him.

“I'm sorry?” I felt my brow furrow.

His dark eyes lost their playful gleam. “I don't belong here.” He cleared his throat, dropping his gaze to Darcy's collar. “I never did. I tried to stay away. Then I saw your article this morning.”

My thoughts pinged in a thousand different directions. He didn't want to be here. Or felt like he shouldn't, anyway, and I knew him well enough to know that could end whatever we had going on.

But he was here. Because he saw my story.

About the crazy butcher scene and the dead woman.

Shit.

Was he worried about me?

Or did he know something about her?

I latched onto the latter, pushing emotion to one side and holding it at bay with thoughts of the murder scene. Joey couldn't have had anything to do with it. I'd wear ski socks with my Manolos before I'd believe that.

So why was he in my living room?

I pushed off the wall and perched on the edge of the chaise. “Why exactly would my story make you decide to break this vow of silence?”

He twisted his mouth to one side and hauled in a deep breath. “No comment?”

“I'm so not in the mood for games I'd turn down a round of spin the bottle.”

He nodded, a frustrated sigh making Darcy pop to attention. He dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling.

“This can't work. I know it, and I know you know it, too. One of us has to be strong enough to back away. So I try. And then I see this.” He pulled his iPhone from his pocket, brandishing it. My story was on the screen. “What the hell are you doing, nosing around in this? Do you have any idea how dangerous it could be?”

“Aaron asked me to help.”

From the stiff set his jaw took, that was the wrong thing to say.

“I would've chased this story anyway,” I added. “It's horrifying. Which sells a shit-ton of newspapers. And helping the cops catch this guy adds the bigger bonus of being a freaking public service. How could I not ‘nose around in' this one? It practically has ‘Hey, Nichelle, big headline this way' stamped across it in neon.”

“At the risk of giving myself some déjà vu, the headline does you how much good if you get yourself killed chasing it?”

“Why does your brain always jump to that?”

“The same reason you always wonder if I'm the culprit when I try to warn you off a story? Just a guess.” He grinned, and my insides turned to mush.

It couldn't just be easy.

I ducked my head and caught his gaze. “To be fair, I dismissed that immediately today. There's no way you had a hand in this.”

Joey had criminal underworld connections that had come in handy for me in the past. The kind that go with being fairly high up in the Mafia. But he wasn't a murderer. Almost eight years at the crime desk had graced me with a fail proof psycho radar, and Joey didn't fit the bill.

“Thanks.” His wry smile made my lips curve into an involuntary grin. “But I'm still worried. I'm not saying don't write about it, but what the hell were you doing, interviewing psych patients? And where have you been this morning?”

“Talking to people who won't talk to the cops.” I sat back. “They're dealing with street people. And I'm in the very rare position to help Aaron with a criminal investigation, with the bonus that he trusts me enough to let me in on it. I've got stuff no one else can get. It's a helluva lead. I can't walk away.”

“Can't is too strong a word. Won't. But I know better than to argue you should put your life ahead of the story. So I figure maybe I can help point you in a safer direction.”

“Which is?”

“Your detective friend is correct. Whoever did this isn't your garden-variety crime of passion killer.” Joey leaned forward, a line creasing his brow. “If I'm reading between the lines right, your murder scene had a setup. Some ceremony to it. It was planned. Maybe even professional. For the record, Miss Clarke, that's not something I want you anywhere near.”