Plenty of time for fear to set in.
“Laura won’t even ride in elevators,” Alan said, “she’s—”
Mary crumpled. Her legs gave way, and if it hadn’t been for Alan, she would have hit the floor. Monica and Dante reached out, helping the older man to steady her.
“My baby,” she whispered as the tears came faster. “My p-poor baby. All alone in–in the dark…”
Alone in her nightmare.
What scares you?
He’d known. Just like with the other victims.
Monica stared into Mary’s grief-stricken eyes and knew there wouldn’t be time for many more questions. The woman wouldn’t be able to answer anything soon. “Mrs. Billings.” Monica snapped her name out, hard and fast, in an effort to bring her back.
A dazed blink.
“Did Laura say anything to you about—”
The emergency room doors flew open. A doctor came out, a woman with bright red hair and pale skin. “Billings?”
And she lost them.
Monica and Dante stepped back, the better to avoid the trampling as the parents shot forward.
“The bastard knew,” Dante muttered. “When we turn her place, we’ll find a letter, won’t we?”
“Yes.” If the killer was staying to his course.
The doc was talking about Laura, saying she’d been given drugs to help her sleep.
There’d be no questioning the vic then. Hell, probably not for a while. “We’re going to need guards stationed at her room,” she said.
Dante stiffened. “You think he’s coming after her?”
She glanced his way. This time, she was ready for the heat of that stare. Well, okay, maybe not. “Laura Billings is the only victim—that we know of—who has survived this guy’s sick game.” She took a breath. “I don’t think he plays for survivors. He just plays for death.”
A death Laura had cheated.
“Let’s go find Davis. He can put some of his deputies to use.” Then they’d have to call Hyde because he needed to know about Laura. And about the killer out there, playing games with people’s lives.
“How does he do it?” Dante asked, rolling his shoulders. “How does he know what scares his victims?”
Monica held his gaze. “Wouldn’t be too hard, not with so much information being a click away.” Simple, really. “With the first two vics, he could pull up old newspaper reports, sneak access to police records, accident files.” Should be harder. But information came easy now. “Then all he has to do is use the fear to get into their heads.” With Laura, though, that info wouldn’t have been found in a police file. He would have needed more intimate access to gain that knowledge.
“You knew, didn’t you?” He lowered his voice and leaned in too close. “You knew it was another fear trap, didn’t you?”
Fear trap. That’s exactly what it had been. “Why bury a body? This guy wants us to see his work.” The car crash had been shoved right in the faces of the local Sheriff’s department and that phone tip—hell, yes, that had been deliberate. Let me show you what I’ve done. “There was no reason to hide the body, and every reason—”
“To suspect he’d just set up another game for his prey,” Luke cut in. “Trapped in a coffin, sealed in the ground—it wouldn’t get much worse for someone scared of tight spaces.”
And the dark. Because she’d be willing to bet that closet had been dark that long ago day when Laura had been trapped inside. She’d probably screamed for help. Beat against the door with small hands.
No sense denying what they both knew. “More bodies are coming.” At the rate this guy was escalating, blood would flow again too soon. “We need Samantha to do a state-by-state check. Our guy’s killed before, but something—something’s set him off here. He’s killing too fast. This kind of escalation doesn’t happen overnight.” She exhaled slowly. “We find him and we stop him, soon, or else we’ll be spending our days with the dead.”
Dante gave a grim nod, and Monica tried to ignore the echoing sounds of Mary’s sobs.
Fucking bitch.
Alive.
Not the way the game was supposed to end.
His hands shook, so he balled them into fists, and when the FBI a**holes walked past him he ducked into the shadows of the parking lot.
The bitch should have been dead. No damn way should she have been breathing when those suits pulled her out of that hole.
He’d had fun with Laura. He’d sealed her up, but hadn’t buried her. Not right away. He’d let her wait. Let her scream. Let her know what was happening.
Hearing the screams had been even better than seeing her face.
You could hear fear so clearly. Those high, desperate cries, those broken sobs. He’d drunk in the sounds.
Then, he’d dumped the earth on her. Nice and slow. Letting her hear it, letting her know exactly what was happening to her.
He’d timed things so perfectly. Laura Billings should have died in that ground. Died trying to gasp air that just wasn’t there. And she’d been close to death…
So close.
But no, those a**holes had wrecked his plan and now—now he’d have to change the rules.
Laura would still die. She’d been chosen, and her reprieve would be brief.
He glanced over at the hospital as an ambulance sped through the lot, its bright lights flashing and its siren wailing.
Maybe it would be better this way. Laura had feared the darkness and the confinement before. Now she’d fear him.
So when he came for her, the fear would be even sweeter.
“Hyde is sending backup.” Monica tossed her cell phone onto her bed and put her hands on her hips. “He knows the killer’s notes are coming and he’ll have the techs and handwriting analysts work on them right away.”
“Who’s coming?” Luke asked. “Kenton or—”
“Kenton. Hyde wants him to handle the media fallout on this one. Kenton’s good at that kind of thing.” A pause. “And if there’s trouble, he’ll have our backs.”
Absolute certainty in her voice. Huh. He’d always thought she wasn’t the trusting sort. “Close to him, are you?”
Her hands dropped. “I’ve worked my share of cases with Kenton.”
Oh, so that guy was Kenton, but she acted like it would kill her if she called him anything but Dante. “Sleeping with him?”
Her eyes snapped to his and froze him in his tracks.
Jealousy could be one major bitch. Luke licked his lips. “Ah, what I meant…”
She paced toward him, bright spots of color on her cheeks. Her eyes were glacial and narrowed to slits. “I don’t need this crap from you,” she gritted out and jabbed her index finger into his chest.
He caught her wrist and probably held too tight. “My mistake,” he managed. The words seemed to stick in his throat. “Who you sleep with is your business.” Lie, lie, lie.
Everything about her was his business. Had been, from the moment he’d taken her into his bed.
“You think because I had sex with you…” She paused, lifted that chin up another notch, “that I screw all the men I work with?”
Oh, she’d better not. Kenton’s grinning face flashed through his mind.
“Don’t even think it, man. Not going to happen.” Kenton’s words. Had he meant…
She turned away from him. Straightened her shoulders. “I respect Kenton, do you understand that? We’ve been into Hell with some of our cases, and I have never—not once—seen him lose his control. He always does his job, and he does it damn well.”
Control. Oh, yeah, that had always been important to her. Not so much to him.
“And I don’t sleep with agents on my team, okay? I learned a lesson from you. Business and pleasure aren’t meant to mix.”
But they’d mixed so well.
Not sleeping with Kenton. Thank you, Jesus.
“The guy can have a bad sense of humor, but I trust Kenton to watch my back.” The heat was gone, and the control she loved was firmly back. Pity. He’d liked that flare of steam. “I trust him to do his job, a job I’ve seen him do very, very well.”
He gave a hard nod. “You trust everyone on your team, or you don’t trust anyone.” More words from Kenton.
“Exactly.”
“But that trust only goes so far, doesn’t it? Only as far as the job.” Shouldn’t have said it. But, he was the kind of guy who liked to push.
No, he liked to push her.
Monica froze. “Trusting someone with your life—you think that’s easy?”
“No.” The woman could twist and turn everything. She could trip a suspect up in two minutes, could get those confessions to spill so fast. “I think you trust them because it’s your job, but when it comes to the secrets you carry,” and he knew she had secrets because everyone had them, even him, “you don’t trust anyone.”
Now she did glance back. “Leave it alone, Dante.”
“You mean, leave you alone?” He’d tried that. Gotten a lot of sleepless nights and hard-ons as a result. He sucked in a deep breath and caught more of her heady scent. The case. Stick to the case.
Her eyes held his. Dammit, no one should have eyes that blue.
When she came, those eyes had gone blind with pleasure. Hell.
“Sorry,” he growled and eased back. The better to escape her scent. Her.
She didn’t blink. “It’s been a long day.”
A day filled with crime scene analysis. Witness interviews. And a lot of jack shit. Because the killer was good.
Or he had been, until Miss Laura Billings had survived his attack.
“Get some sleep,” she told him in that perfect, you-don’t-bother-me voice. “The doctor said Laura will be up tomorrow. We’ll find out what she knows then.”
Laura had permanent protection now, courtesy of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy would guard her door every minute.
He’d seen Laura before they left the hospital. She’d been out cold, her breathing so soft and slow she’d appeared to be near death. ’Cause she had been.
When she woke, there was no telling what she’d say. Would she remember her attack? Remember the bastard who’d grabbed her and left her for dead?
Her face had been slack with terror when the ambulance hauled her away from the crime scene. A fear like that…“She’s not going to want to talk with us.”
“She has to talk.”
“Vics always hate talking about the attack.” One of the hardest parts of the job. Seeing those shattered stares and hearing the hollow echo of pain in their voices. “They just want to forget.”
“Forgetting’s not easy.” Monica sounded certain. “Just because you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t mean you forget. She’ll talk with us. She’ll tell us everything she knows.” More certainty. “Because she’ll want the bastard stopped.”
Vengeance. That he understood, and he knew the victims understood, too. Sometimes, the thirst for vengeance was all that kept them going.
“Go to bed, Dante,” she said again, her voice softer, but still firm.
He turned away from her. Stared at the white connecting door. Walk away.
He could do it. She had.
He stalked forward and curled his fingers around the door knob. “I know it shouldn’t matter.” This was choking him. “Who you see. What you do.” He wouldn’t glance back because this time, he didn’t want to see the ice staring back at him. “But it does. And after today, when death was so damn close I felt him breathing on my neck when we were digging up that girl’s grave…”
He knew death. No mistaking that chill on his spine.
“Sometimes you want to feel alive. When you see death so much, you just… want to feel alive again.” Being with her had always made him feel alive. Running fast and hot and free. He opened the door and the squeak of the hinges seemed way too loud. “If you wanna feel alive, you know where to find me.”
And that was all there was to say.
• • •
When the door closed, Monica let out the breath that had filled her lungs. She slowly unballed her fists and saw that her fingers were shaking.
Weakness. At a time when she just couldn’t afford anything less than full strength.
But the girl had gotten to her because Monica had recognized the terror in Laura’s eyes. The fear so deep it ate your soul and stole your hope.
Dante had been right. Death had been with them that morning. Laura knew it. She’d felt him coming. Laura’s chest had rattled as the woman fought to breathe—the rattle was proof that they’d been minutes away from finding a corpse instead of a live victim.
When you knew you were going to die, those last moments were the darkest and longest that terror could bring.
She’d seen those moments, seen the fear reflected in other eyes. Eyes that she couldn’t forget, no matter how hard she tried.
Monica looked down at her hands. Those stupid shaking fingers. Another few seconds and Dante would have noticed.
She’d known bringing him on the team was a mistake. She’d tried telling Hyde, but once the boss made up his mind there was no changing it. And, hell, Hyde had been right. He almost always was.
The SSD did need Dante. The guy could get to victims like no other. She’d read through his files, all his supervisors’ reports. He knew how to pry information out of the vics that they’d even forgotten themselves.
“Laura won’t even ride in elevators,” Alan said, “she’s—”
Mary crumpled. Her legs gave way, and if it hadn’t been for Alan, she would have hit the floor. Monica and Dante reached out, helping the older man to steady her.
“My baby,” she whispered as the tears came faster. “My p-poor baby. All alone in–in the dark…”
Alone in her nightmare.
What scares you?
He’d known. Just like with the other victims.
Monica stared into Mary’s grief-stricken eyes and knew there wouldn’t be time for many more questions. The woman wouldn’t be able to answer anything soon. “Mrs. Billings.” Monica snapped her name out, hard and fast, in an effort to bring her back.
A dazed blink.
“Did Laura say anything to you about—”
The emergency room doors flew open. A doctor came out, a woman with bright red hair and pale skin. “Billings?”
And she lost them.
Monica and Dante stepped back, the better to avoid the trampling as the parents shot forward.
“The bastard knew,” Dante muttered. “When we turn her place, we’ll find a letter, won’t we?”
“Yes.” If the killer was staying to his course.
The doc was talking about Laura, saying she’d been given drugs to help her sleep.
There’d be no questioning the vic then. Hell, probably not for a while. “We’re going to need guards stationed at her room,” she said.
Dante stiffened. “You think he’s coming after her?”
She glanced his way. This time, she was ready for the heat of that stare. Well, okay, maybe not. “Laura Billings is the only victim—that we know of—who has survived this guy’s sick game.” She took a breath. “I don’t think he plays for survivors. He just plays for death.”
A death Laura had cheated.
“Let’s go find Davis. He can put some of his deputies to use.” Then they’d have to call Hyde because he needed to know about Laura. And about the killer out there, playing games with people’s lives.
“How does he do it?” Dante asked, rolling his shoulders. “How does he know what scares his victims?”
Monica held his gaze. “Wouldn’t be too hard, not with so much information being a click away.” Simple, really. “With the first two vics, he could pull up old newspaper reports, sneak access to police records, accident files.” Should be harder. But information came easy now. “Then all he has to do is use the fear to get into their heads.” With Laura, though, that info wouldn’t have been found in a police file. He would have needed more intimate access to gain that knowledge.
“You knew, didn’t you?” He lowered his voice and leaned in too close. “You knew it was another fear trap, didn’t you?”
Fear trap. That’s exactly what it had been. “Why bury a body? This guy wants us to see his work.” The car crash had been shoved right in the faces of the local Sheriff’s department and that phone tip—hell, yes, that had been deliberate. Let me show you what I’ve done. “There was no reason to hide the body, and every reason—”
“To suspect he’d just set up another game for his prey,” Luke cut in. “Trapped in a coffin, sealed in the ground—it wouldn’t get much worse for someone scared of tight spaces.”
And the dark. Because she’d be willing to bet that closet had been dark that long ago day when Laura had been trapped inside. She’d probably screamed for help. Beat against the door with small hands.
No sense denying what they both knew. “More bodies are coming.” At the rate this guy was escalating, blood would flow again too soon. “We need Samantha to do a state-by-state check. Our guy’s killed before, but something—something’s set him off here. He’s killing too fast. This kind of escalation doesn’t happen overnight.” She exhaled slowly. “We find him and we stop him, soon, or else we’ll be spending our days with the dead.”
Dante gave a grim nod, and Monica tried to ignore the echoing sounds of Mary’s sobs.
Fucking bitch.
Alive.
Not the way the game was supposed to end.
His hands shook, so he balled them into fists, and when the FBI a**holes walked past him he ducked into the shadows of the parking lot.
The bitch should have been dead. No damn way should she have been breathing when those suits pulled her out of that hole.
He’d had fun with Laura. He’d sealed her up, but hadn’t buried her. Not right away. He’d let her wait. Let her scream. Let her know what was happening.
Hearing the screams had been even better than seeing her face.
You could hear fear so clearly. Those high, desperate cries, those broken sobs. He’d drunk in the sounds.
Then, he’d dumped the earth on her. Nice and slow. Letting her hear it, letting her know exactly what was happening to her.
He’d timed things so perfectly. Laura Billings should have died in that ground. Died trying to gasp air that just wasn’t there. And she’d been close to death…
So close.
But no, those a**holes had wrecked his plan and now—now he’d have to change the rules.
Laura would still die. She’d been chosen, and her reprieve would be brief.
He glanced over at the hospital as an ambulance sped through the lot, its bright lights flashing and its siren wailing.
Maybe it would be better this way. Laura had feared the darkness and the confinement before. Now she’d fear him.
So when he came for her, the fear would be even sweeter.
“Hyde is sending backup.” Monica tossed her cell phone onto her bed and put her hands on her hips. “He knows the killer’s notes are coming and he’ll have the techs and handwriting analysts work on them right away.”
“Who’s coming?” Luke asked. “Kenton or—”
“Kenton. Hyde wants him to handle the media fallout on this one. Kenton’s good at that kind of thing.” A pause. “And if there’s trouble, he’ll have our backs.”
Absolute certainty in her voice. Huh. He’d always thought she wasn’t the trusting sort. “Close to him, are you?”
Her hands dropped. “I’ve worked my share of cases with Kenton.”
Oh, so that guy was Kenton, but she acted like it would kill her if she called him anything but Dante. “Sleeping with him?”
Her eyes snapped to his and froze him in his tracks.
Jealousy could be one major bitch. Luke licked his lips. “Ah, what I meant…”
She paced toward him, bright spots of color on her cheeks. Her eyes were glacial and narrowed to slits. “I don’t need this crap from you,” she gritted out and jabbed her index finger into his chest.
He caught her wrist and probably held too tight. “My mistake,” he managed. The words seemed to stick in his throat. “Who you sleep with is your business.” Lie, lie, lie.
Everything about her was his business. Had been, from the moment he’d taken her into his bed.
“You think because I had sex with you…” She paused, lifted that chin up another notch, “that I screw all the men I work with?”
Oh, she’d better not. Kenton’s grinning face flashed through his mind.
“Don’t even think it, man. Not going to happen.” Kenton’s words. Had he meant…
She turned away from him. Straightened her shoulders. “I respect Kenton, do you understand that? We’ve been into Hell with some of our cases, and I have never—not once—seen him lose his control. He always does his job, and he does it damn well.”
Control. Oh, yeah, that had always been important to her. Not so much to him.
“And I don’t sleep with agents on my team, okay? I learned a lesson from you. Business and pleasure aren’t meant to mix.”
But they’d mixed so well.
Not sleeping with Kenton. Thank you, Jesus.
“The guy can have a bad sense of humor, but I trust Kenton to watch my back.” The heat was gone, and the control she loved was firmly back. Pity. He’d liked that flare of steam. “I trust him to do his job, a job I’ve seen him do very, very well.”
He gave a hard nod. “You trust everyone on your team, or you don’t trust anyone.” More words from Kenton.
“Exactly.”
“But that trust only goes so far, doesn’t it? Only as far as the job.” Shouldn’t have said it. But, he was the kind of guy who liked to push.
No, he liked to push her.
Monica froze. “Trusting someone with your life—you think that’s easy?”
“No.” The woman could twist and turn everything. She could trip a suspect up in two minutes, could get those confessions to spill so fast. “I think you trust them because it’s your job, but when it comes to the secrets you carry,” and he knew she had secrets because everyone had them, even him, “you don’t trust anyone.”
Now she did glance back. “Leave it alone, Dante.”
“You mean, leave you alone?” He’d tried that. Gotten a lot of sleepless nights and hard-ons as a result. He sucked in a deep breath and caught more of her heady scent. The case. Stick to the case.
Her eyes held his. Dammit, no one should have eyes that blue.
When she came, those eyes had gone blind with pleasure. Hell.
“Sorry,” he growled and eased back. The better to escape her scent. Her.
She didn’t blink. “It’s been a long day.”
A day filled with crime scene analysis. Witness interviews. And a lot of jack shit. Because the killer was good.
Or he had been, until Miss Laura Billings had survived his attack.
“Get some sleep,” she told him in that perfect, you-don’t-bother-me voice. “The doctor said Laura will be up tomorrow. We’ll find out what she knows then.”
Laura had permanent protection now, courtesy of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy would guard her door every minute.
He’d seen Laura before they left the hospital. She’d been out cold, her breathing so soft and slow she’d appeared to be near death. ’Cause she had been.
When she woke, there was no telling what she’d say. Would she remember her attack? Remember the bastard who’d grabbed her and left her for dead?
Her face had been slack with terror when the ambulance hauled her away from the crime scene. A fear like that…“She’s not going to want to talk with us.”
“She has to talk.”
“Vics always hate talking about the attack.” One of the hardest parts of the job. Seeing those shattered stares and hearing the hollow echo of pain in their voices. “They just want to forget.”
“Forgetting’s not easy.” Monica sounded certain. “Just because you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t mean you forget. She’ll talk with us. She’ll tell us everything she knows.” More certainty. “Because she’ll want the bastard stopped.”
Vengeance. That he understood, and he knew the victims understood, too. Sometimes, the thirst for vengeance was all that kept them going.
“Go to bed, Dante,” she said again, her voice softer, but still firm.
He turned away from her. Stared at the white connecting door. Walk away.
He could do it. She had.
He stalked forward and curled his fingers around the door knob. “I know it shouldn’t matter.” This was choking him. “Who you see. What you do.” He wouldn’t glance back because this time, he didn’t want to see the ice staring back at him. “But it does. And after today, when death was so damn close I felt him breathing on my neck when we were digging up that girl’s grave…”
He knew death. No mistaking that chill on his spine.
“Sometimes you want to feel alive. When you see death so much, you just… want to feel alive again.” Being with her had always made him feel alive. Running fast and hot and free. He opened the door and the squeak of the hinges seemed way too loud. “If you wanna feel alive, you know where to find me.”
And that was all there was to say.
• • •
When the door closed, Monica let out the breath that had filled her lungs. She slowly unballed her fists and saw that her fingers were shaking.
Weakness. At a time when she just couldn’t afford anything less than full strength.
But the girl had gotten to her because Monica had recognized the terror in Laura’s eyes. The fear so deep it ate your soul and stole your hope.
Dante had been right. Death had been with them that morning. Laura knew it. She’d felt him coming. Laura’s chest had rattled as the woman fought to breathe—the rattle was proof that they’d been minutes away from finding a corpse instead of a live victim.
When you knew you were going to die, those last moments were the darkest and longest that terror could bring.
She’d seen those moments, seen the fear reflected in other eyes. Eyes that she couldn’t forget, no matter how hard she tried.
Monica looked down at her hands. Those stupid shaking fingers. Another few seconds and Dante would have noticed.
She’d known bringing him on the team was a mistake. She’d tried telling Hyde, but once the boss made up his mind there was no changing it. And, hell, Hyde had been right. He almost always was.
The SSD did need Dante. The guy could get to victims like no other. She’d read through his files, all his supervisors’ reports. He knew how to pry information out of the vics that they’d even forgotten themselves.
