Devoted in Death (13 page)

He pulled her to her feet. “Unless Peabody hits as well, you can start your route in Missouri, and move back from there if you feel the boy wasn’t their first. Give your brain and your instincts a rest.”

She didn’t argue only because she wanted to let it settle in, stew around in her subconscious. Noah Paston – and she’d add him to her board in the morning – hadn’t been their first.

“Paston,” she said as Roarke tugged her out of the room. “The locals did a thorough job – and when he was found over the state line, called in the feds. Small, rural-type community. People knew the kid. Liked the kid. He’d had a breakup with his girlfriend, and a push-and-shove with the guy she dumped him for, but nothing serious. And the push-and-shove partner was alibied tight, and just didn’t read like a killer.”

In the bedroom she toed off her skids. “He did okay in school, opted to do online courses instead of going to college so he could stay home and help with the family business. Garden center. And he played ball, coached Little League along with his father. People liked him, it comes through the reports.”

“Why not the first?”

“It just doesn’t read for me. It’s wrong place/wrong time again. In general he drove home from the ballfield. He had a small truck. But he lent it to a friend about an hour before practice ended. And he stayed longer to work one-on-one with a kid, walked the kid home. That wasn’t his usual routine, so if somebody was lying in wait for him, he wouldn’t have come when they expected. He took a short cut, since he was walking, or told the kid he was going to, and he headed off in the direction of the back road that would cross a field and over that to his house. That was at dusk. Just getting dark.”

“And these two drive by, see him.”

“Yeah, could be that. Ask him if he wants a lift, ask for directions. Or the woman lures him somehow. He’s an athlete, young, fast. He’s got a baseball bat, but they get him. He’s not an easy target, not really, but they see young, stupid, alone on a back road in the dark. He’s a kid, so it’s not for money. He didn’t have any to speak of. A ’link, and they never found it, a good bat and glove, but nothing of real value. And they don’t rape him or abuse him sexually, so it’s not that.”

“Luck of the draw.”

“That’s how it looks to me.” It was circling in her brain, and she wanted it to sink in. “And the first isn’t going to be like that. The first had a reason, had the fuse that lit up. I haven’t found the first.”

“Why dump the body so far away – over state lines, pulling in the FBI?”

She pulled on a nightshirt. “They were en route somewhere – had a destination in mind for the night. Took him along, likely incapacitated. I have to figure they didn’t think about crossing the state line, didn’t consider that. Just take him a good distance, gives them more time to play.”

Still thinking, she stretched out on the bed, running an absent hand over Galahad’s head when he leaped up to join her. “Out-of-the-way places around there, like with the vic heading to Nashville. An old house, cabin, fishing shack, whatever. Clean it up when you’re done, dump him far enough away from the kill site. Who’d look?”

“You.”

“Now, yeah. Plenty of hindsight now.”

“Then,”
he corrected, and slid into bed beside her. “You’d have considered the route, just as you are now – considered they’d need somewhere to hold him, and you’d have looked.”

“It doesn’t help him now. There’s one in Arkansas, low probability but I want another look. And a second in West Virginia, I think —”

“Tomorrow.” Roarke wrapped an arm around her, tugged her closer. “Let it sit until tomorrow.”

“You just want me to pay up.”

“I had considered letting that debt ride, with considerable interest, but I’m more than willing to take payment now.”

“You’re always willing.”

Eyes on his she traced her hand down his chest, his torso, his belly and found him hot and hard.

“See?” She wrapped her fingers around him. “How do you guys live with this?”

“It’s a man’s burden to bear.”

“Just a few inches, and it rules the brain, the ego and can obliterate common sense.”

“  ‘A few’?” he countered, making her laugh.

“Knew that would get you.”

“Used properly it can rule a woman’s brain, her ego and obliterate her common sense.”

“I guess you’re going to show me how to use it properly.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

He rolled on top of her, but first used his mouth, very properly, on hers.

She let herself sink in, found it easy – where once it had been impossible – to set murder and death aside. To take and to give without the world crowding in.

Just the two of them – or just the two of them after the cat landed on the floor with a thump of irritation – in the big bed under the sky window. Just as it had been only the two of them on the island, through long, sunny days and breezy, balmy nights.

He could take her away, with that mouth, with those skilled hands. They roamed over her now, gliding over her shape as if he’d molded it in glass.

Love, she knew – where once she hadn’t believed – could be quiet and sweet, and still hold the world.

She twined around him, loose and willing, swelling his heart with a sigh that whispered contentment, stirring his blood with the press of her fingers. And he was twined in her – heart, blood and spirit – so intricately woven together they fused into one.

“I love you,” he murmured in English, and again in Irish as her heartbeat thickened under his hand, as her pulse leaped against his lips.

She tightened around him, hard and fast. “You are love to me. You are love.” She framed his face, eased him back just enough to meet his eyes. “Mine,” she said, drawing his lips gently, gently back to hers.

She could drift down, down into that bottomless well of love, into the deep and the breathless. She could float even when sensations shimmered over her, through her, into her. And rise up, drenched, when shimmer turned to spark.

She took him in, took in the hot and the hard, took him with her into the deep and the breathless so they rose and fell together.

Hands clasped tight, beat meeting beat. When they broke, love spilled through them.

She curled against him, holding on to the warm, the shape, drawing in his scent. And her lips curved against his throat.

“Paid in full, pal.”

“I’ll note that in the ledger, with a memo you’ve helped me bear my burden for yet another day.”

She snorted out a laugh as her mind began to fuzz toward sleep. “How’s the brain, the ego and all that?”

“Doing well, thanks. And yours?”

“It’s good. All good. We’re good.”

He stroked her back as she drifted away, felt the bed give when the cat deduced the coast was clear and jumped back up.

He thought, it was good. Very good indeed.

It wouldn’t be good for Jayla Campbell. She was beyond pissed as she trudged her way across Carmine, hunched against the cold. If Mattio hadn’t been such a fuckhead, she wouldn’t have stormed out of the party, wouldn’t be what seemed like miles from her apartment – and without a damn cab in sight.

He’d had his hand –
both
his hands on that blonde’s fat ass, and they’d been rubbing crotches. No excuses this time, no “I was only fooling around” this time, no “But, baby, I was half stoned” this time.

They were down to the
D
done.

She should never have come out tonight away. Early workday, and she didn’t know the neighborhood. She hadn’t known anybody at the stupid party.

She should’ve listened to her roommate and stayed home. But she’d been a little pissed at Kari for saying Mattio was a cheating dickwad. She’d been a little pissed, she admitted now, because she’d known it was true.

Why the hell did he have to be so good-looking, and so good in bed?

Down to the
D
done, she reminded herself, blinking back tears and taking her lumps by texting her roomie.

On my way home – done with this crap. Wait up, okay, if you’re not in bed? Get up if you are. I want wine and whine. J

She blinked at tears that came as much from anger as the loss of the cheating dickwad.

“Hey, miss! Hey, sorry!”

She heard the voice – major twang in it – and kept walking.

“Please, I’m sorry, but I’m really lost. Can you just tell me how to get to Broome? Is that right? Is Broome right?”

The twangy voice hurried up to her, and the woman owning it shivered and bit her lip. “I’m just lost, and I’m awful nervous. If you could just tell me which way to go. It’s so cold, and I can’t find a taxicab.”

“Tell me about it.” Jayla sighed. “Did you say Broome?”

“Yes, with an ‘e,’ is that right? I’m not from New York.”

“Shocked face.”

The woman smiled, then looked down. “Oh, would you look at that?”

Instinctively Jayla looked down, bent over a little.

It hit her like a hammer. Maybe it was a hammer. Pain exploded, the world spun, going red at the edges. She tried to cry out, but only managed a moan.

Something – someone – shoved her, yanked her. She fell hard, hard enough to steal what little breath she had still in her lungs.

“I’ve got her, honey!” The twangy voice came as though through a tunnel, a tunnel flooded with water. “Let’s go, I’ve got her. Told you to let me pick ’em, Darryl. I’ve got a knack.”

Somebody laughed. Even as she whimpered, tried to turn over, the hammer struck again, and knocked her into the dark.

8

Eve woke to the familiar. The scent of coffee, Roarke, already dressed in one of his master-of-the-business-universe suits on the sofa in the sitting area working on his PPC as the screen, on mute, scrolled with financial data she’d never understand. And the cat sprawled over the top of the sofa like some feline potentate.

Really, it didn’t get much better.

She lay still a moment, taking it all in – and still he sensed she’d waked as his gaze shifted to hers.

“Good morning.”

“It feels like one,” she decided.

She pushed up as nothing beckoned more alluringly that the scent of coffee. Since he’d gone for a pot, she walked over, poured an oversized mug, and gave herself that special glory of the first morning sip.

“How many countries and/or off-planet stations have you talked to this morning?” she wondered.

“Only Italy and Olympus. It’s a slow day.”

“In your world,” she countered as it was barely six a.m. “Shower,” she declared, and took her coffee with her.

Next to coffee, real coffee, pulsing jets and raining showers of steaming hot water equaled the finest start to any morning. There were days she didn’t think twice about it – such things had become routine. And other days she remembered, with brutal clarity, the cold, the hunger, the dark spaces, the painfully bright ones.

She had a flash of the room in Dallas – red light from the sex club blinking, the frigid cold because the temperature gauge was broken, the hunger gnawing like a rat in her belly fighting with the avid fear her father would come back drunk, but not drunk enough, and hurt her again.

She’d been eight, with hunger, fear and pain her constant companions.

Why should she think of that now, on a good morning with hot water flooding all over her and the clean, faintly green scent of the shower gel rising up with the steam?

She’d dreamed, Eve realized. No, not her old nightmare, not that horrible night she’d killed Richard Troy as he’d raped her. But he’d been in there, somewhere.

Her first instinct was to dismiss it – she couldn’t claim to be over the years of trauma, but she’d learned how to cope with it, to put it in its place and move on. But dismissing it gave it – him – too much power, and might subvert whatever her subconscious had worked on while she slept.

So she let her mind drift, let her thoughts play back as she stepped from the shower into the drying tube. And while the warm air blew around her, she heard music.

The cello. He’d played the cello. A requiem, Dorian Kuper had called it as he sat, wearing black tie, teasing mournful notes out of the instrument with the bow and his skilled fingers.

A requiem for all.

She’d seen the faces of the dead, sitting quietly in the audience of what had been the opera house, all dripping, glittering chandeliers and gilt. With each of the dead spotlighted in icy-blue light.

See me. Stand for me.

So many of them, she’d thought. Those known victims, the others she believed had been.

And empty seats – for those yet to be known, or worse, those yet to come.

Too many empty seats, she thought as she stepped out of the warm air, took down the robe tidily hanging on its hook.

Richard Troy had walked onstage, grinning that wild grin, a conductor’s baton in his hand.

Let’s liven it up! Time for a happy tune. Killing pumps you up and puts a spring in your step. You should know that, little girl.
 

“Fuck you back to hell,” she muttered, and heard her dream voice echo the sentiment.

That made her smile, if a little fiercely. He couldn’t get to her anymore, couldn’t make her quake and shake.

But the dream, or the memory of it, told her nothing she didn’t already know. There were many, and there would be more.

She went back into the bedroom, noted Roarke had two covered dishes on the table.

It would be oatmeal – something else she’d resigned herself to.

When she walked over, sat beside him, he took her chin in his hand, turned her face to his for a kiss.

Another fine way to start the day. Even when oatmeal followed.

When he removed the warming lids, she saw she hadn’t been wrong. But he’d added a side of bacon, a bowl of fat berries, and another bowl of the crunchy, caramelly stuff. When you added the berries and the crunchy stuff to the oatmeal, had bacon, it all went down easy enough.

“Why does stuff like oatmeal that’s good for you have to be weird?”

“There are many among us who don’t consider oatmeal weird at all.”

“I bet there’s more of us who do,” she mumbled, and disguised it with the berries and crunch.