The Avenger (26 page)

After a few moments, she jumped off him, her breathing appealingly shaky, and hurried into the bathroom. "I'll just be a minute."

Jack swallowed hard and watched her cross the room, an expectant look in her eyes, a tender smile on her lips. As distance lessened the heady scent of her, he told himself to leave, get away from her before it was too late. But the roar of the beast yowled in his head. Nothing mattered but his need to have her. The rush of lust rooted him to the bed.

When the bathroom door opened, the light reflected behind her, and a calm, confident look shone on her face. She was his. She'd always belonged to him. He reached for her and shouted down the roar of the beast.

#

Their lovemaking was nothing like the very first time of heated groping and inept earnestness. Back then Jack's touch had been unsure, but sweet and gentle on her frightened body. This time, clearly an experienced lover, he knew all the right places to kiss and caress. His body was hard against the softness of her flesh and the urgency of their last encounter vanished in the tenderness of the moment.

She felt herself riding a wave of arousal that comforted her, enveloped her in a cocoon of security and solace. He knew exactly the kind of loving she needed to banish the ugly memory of Bill's touch. Jack's long, dark fingers grazed the bruises on her thighs and the scrapes on her knees. He kissed the abrasion on her hip where she'd landed hard on the pavement. She quivered when his mouth moved gently across her stomach.

As his lips moved lower and his tongue swirled around her navel and then trailed a moist fire down to the juncture of her thighs, she shuddered with hot need and lost all desire for caution. She arched urgently against him when his fingers entered her and one hand caressed her breasts until she cried out in the exquisite sensation of pleasure and pain. The first wave of climax pounded over her helpless body.

"Inside me," she groaned, feeling herself peak again as he continued to assault her senses with his beautifully carved mouth, his clever sculpted hands. "I need you inside me. Now!"

He entered her slowly, agonizingly. When he held back as if she'd break, she urged him on. "I'm not fragile," she growled into his ear and thrust her hips hard to increase the rhythm. Unloosening himself, he pounded into her, face buried in her hair, at last meeting her ardor with his own.

"Oh God," she moaned as a wave of unbearable pleasure rose to a peak and took her over the edge in another shuddering climax.

He emptied himself into her with a final violent thrust and then collapsed on her, his heart thundering against her breasts, his body slick with sweat.

After a moment, he rolled off her and lay quietly while their damp bodies cooled. He linked his fingers with hers and stared up at the ceiling. "Did I hurt you?" he asked at last.

She turned on her side to peer at his dark, almost angry face. "No! No, of course you didn't hurt me. Why would you ask such a thing?" She gripped his jaw and turned his face toward her. "What's going on, Jack? Why are you afraid to be with me?"

He took a deep breath and let it out on a straggled sigh. And then the whole fantastic story spilled out. He'd already explained why he hadn't met her at the dugout graduation night, but now the rest of the incredible story spat from his mouth like a bitter herb.

A story of how Invictus had cleaned up the evidence of Roger's death and then whisked him away. The death missions of the last ten years, although she suspected he held back the more egregious things he'd done. The preternatural powers that he unleashed when he hunted a killer during one of the missions. All the pieces of the puzzle that she'd already suspected.

"When I'm with you, Livvie," he added, "somehow these powers intensify. I'm deathly afraid I'm going to hurt you."

She took a giant leap of faith. "You didn't," she said simply. "You didn't hurt me."

The kiss he gave her was more tender than anything she'd known. A vow and a benediction. Her heart began to hope again. After he'd finished the story, Jack held her and dropped gentle kisses on her forehead and temple. She sighed and snuggled closer.

"I still want to talk about the case," she mumbled as her brain drifted off to a dark resting place. "Don't think you can shut me out of it now that I know everything."

#

When Olivia woke two hours later, Jack was rubbing her back with small gentle circles. He propped himself on one arm and over her shoulder watched the long play of her dark lashes against her cheeks. He didn't think the danger to her had completely vanished. He sensed the power barely restrained beneath the surface of his love for her and believed that somehow being with her both unleashed and tamed the beast within. A crazy paradox he didn't quite understand. He hoped he was right. What the hell was he going to do if he couldn't control it?

A satisfied groan escaped Olivia as she opened her eyes and smiled. "That feels good," she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, "but I'm ready to get to work now."

"Later," he whispered, nuzzling her neck.

"No." She smiled and softened the rejection. "I want to go over it while my mind's fresh."

"Livvie . . ." he groaned.

A stubborn set to her face told him this wasn't the time to argue. "Fine," he grumbled, "but don't expect me to service you like a stud any time you ask."

Her laughter trickled behind her from the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, they'd set up an area downstairs in the library. Olivia sat on the chaise surrounded by resource books, papers, and files. Jack leaned against a plush arm chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, and balanced a yellow legal pad on his knee while he took notes.

"As I said before," Olivia explained, "the earlier notes don't indicate much facility with Latin." She picked up one of her texts and opened it to a page marked with a post-it note. "The writing is clichéd and uneven, and there's no logical segue from one note to the next."

Jack pulled a typed paper from his file. A vertical line split the page, with the words of each message in the left column and their translations in the right. He scrutinized the paper. "The first note was 'Hell calls hell,' but we don't know if it goes with the Peterson girl or the Walker man."

Olivia shrugged. "Maybe the killer sees himself as the keeper of the gates of Hell." She tapped a pencil against her teeth. "But if hell is his theme, so to speak, wouldn't he repeat the message?"

Jack massaged his neck. "Okay, here's the next note: 'Never faithful,' found with the waitress, Angela Buckley."

"The first victim, Laura Peterson, was promiscuous, but I was thinking of something else." Olivia told him about the vestal virgins, how breaking their vows meant death by burial.

Jack puzzled over the idea. "Unfaithful could mean another kind of betrayal, like unfaithful to an ideal to an ideal or goal."

When Olivia nodded, he continued, "That could go along with the note found with Keisha." He trailed a finger down the list. "Here, 'fame lives in great things.' Sounds like he's praising someone who accomplishes something."

Olivia ran her hands through her hair in frustration. "Or the notes could be all out of order."

Before Jack could respond, the doorbell rang, and moments later Slater walked into the library. "I just got the cub's autopsy," he said, sitting down in an occasional chair opposite Olivia. "The results were sent to the zoo instead of my office."

He dug in his pants pocket and pulled out a folded note. "It's long so I wrote the message down. The page was small and the writing degraded, but here's what the lab pulled off."

He read aloud,
"'us est ad portas.'
The first part was torn off and never recovered." He looked at Olivia. "What do you think?"

"First,
'us'
isn't complete," Olivia answered. "It's the ending of a word. The rest translates, 'is at the gates.'" Tiny lines formed between her brows. "Someone is at the gates, I think, and
'est'
is singular, so the person at the gates is singular."

"I am at the gates?" Jack guessed.

"No, that'd be
'sum,'"
Olivia answered. "It's third-person singular, and masculine, so it'd have to be ... " Her eyes widened dramatically.
"Deus!"
she exclaimed triumphantly. "'God is at the gates.' That's what it says! That makes sense."

Jack wrote the translation on his note pad. "The message with the two lions, then, is a warning, 'As fierce a lion as possible attacked the beast-fighter' and 'God is at the gates.'"

"And if a section of the note in the cub is left out, there could've been a 'but' in between the two notes: 'As fierce a lion as possible attacked the beast-fighter, but God is at the gates,'" Olivia concluded.

"That makes sense to me," Jack said.

"That's good," Slater grumbled, "because it makes no sense at all to me."

Olivia took the paper from Jack's hand. "You know what it sounds like to me," she said staring at the writing. "Sounds like his messages sort of evolved. The first one was lost, maybe a warning about infidelity, maybe not. But the second one about hell is general, almost like he was trying to get attention rather than send a message."

"He got our attention, all right," Jack said. "But the rest are specific to the victims. What about that?"

She held up her hand. "Just hear me out. The killer was learning his craft as he continued to murder. By the time he got to the latter victims, the notes make more sense because he became more efficient in his delivery. The last two notes are more sophisticated than the first ones."

"What about the other kinds of deaths?"

"In ancient times crucifixion was reserved for criminals or political prisoners," Olivia murmured.

Slater raised his eyebrows. "The lawyer? The way they twist the law around – that's gotta be a crime." He laughed ruefully.

"And the beatings?" Jack asked.

Olivia thought a moment. "The Roman legions had a practice called decimation. They instilled discipline by beating every tenth legionnaire to death. Brutal, but effective."

Jack stood abruptly and looked out the front window, his back to the other two. "I know what he's doing. They're all warnings." Turning around, he continued, "The son of a bitch is punishing the victims for supposed crimes and he's warning them. But
after the fact.
After he's already killed them."

#

The Avenger was sure she knew, that he could read the knowledge in those bright green eyes as surely as he read a storm brewing on the California horizon. He'd seen the emotions flit across her face – speculation, mistrust, suspicion. Clever girl that she was, she'd soon fit the puzzle pieces together.

And if his cohort were arrested, further chaos would ensue. He didn't think his trusted accomplice would crumble under the thug-like interrogation methods of the police, but one never knew.

Now the Avenger had a dilemma. He wanted to destroy the woman, but the man was learning too much about him. They both were clever enough in their own way. The woman was a corruptible vessel. The man possessed knowledge that could damn the Avenger.

Because panic was alien to his nature, psychiatrists would claim he was incapable of normal, human empathy, but they were wrong. The first bubble of alarm wormed its way into his mind. He ignored it. Fear of being trapped belonged to the lower species. He had no intention of being caught. This time, however, he'd be required to draw on the full force of his foresight and intelligence to extricate himself from this tangle.

To eliminate his two primary concerns.

The Avenger pulled his car off the highway and onto the winding, dirt road that led to his refuge – the only place where he could gather his wits about him, refresh his soul, and rejuvenate himself. He turned off the ignition of his McLaren F1 sports car, pulled the side hatch, and jumped out. He wouldn't use the driver this time.

Before he walked up the short steps to the wide double doors etched with stained glass windows on either side, his butler swung open the doors and ushered him into the Penteli marble-floored entry. He tossed his coat to the man and stormed up the circular staircase to the main suite on the second floor. Then he made his way through the passage hidden at the end of the master suite's walk-in closet and upward to the third-level gable-fronted dormer room.

The secret chamber – his Holy of Holies.

He lit seven white candles, one for each day of the week. Seven was the perfect Biblical number. The venerable number of ancient creation. His mother had taught him well.

Mounted on heavy pewter candlesticks, each candle varied in height from votive to a twenty-inch taper. The other relics lay scattered on a velvet cloth of a rich, blood-red hue. He fingered the items one by one and then gently repositioned them in their exact individual places.

One of his favorite artifacts was the watch that had belonged to the lawyer. An old-fashioned pocket watch with a 14k gold chain and tiny diamonds to mark the hours of the clock face, it was a fitting memento for one who made his living by inflating the billable hours in a case. He scrutinized the item religiously before putting it down.

Henry Walker, the first male sacrifice, was an attorney by profession. The Avenger hated lawyers. What was it Shakespeare had said about killing all the lawyers first? The man chortled and continued his work. He'd certainly fulfilled the Bard's suggestion.

He pulled the thick, white, leather-bound album from a free-standing closet under the alcove and sat in a wing chair positioned by the dormer window. Maintaining the scrapbook was a worrisome burden, but a record was the heart of religiosity and common sense told him he couldn't continue his work forever. No one could sustain this frenetic pace. Pulled so many directions with work and
special work.
He carefully pasted in the latest entry. This would, in fact, be the final entry: Olivia Grace Morse Gant.

He thumbed through the pages of the album. An attorney, a waitress, a student. Was his nemesis putting the fragments together even as he sat here in the comfort of his father's old recliner, book on his lap, additional photographs ready to insert into the black photo corners? He touched the pictures of his sacrifices, traced his fingertips over each one as he removed and reinserted it in the book. As he did, he relived the grittiness of the real-life scenes. The splintery boards and cement floors, the drip, drip gooiness that puddled steadily on abandoned fields and the earthiness of fresh-turned dirt.