скачать книгу бесплатно
She didn’t know how right she was. “What’s done is done,” he said.
“I can give you the name of a colleague of mine to help you with the file. He’s very thorough, and he’s helped private citizens review cold cases. He may have some additional insight.”
Gray shrugged. “Sure, why not? Though it’s not a cold case anymore.”
That caught her attention. “What do you mean, it’s not a cold case?”
“Exactly what you think. I received the call just twenty minutes ago. A young woman disappeared from her Back Bay apartment this afternoon.” He crept closer, watching the effect of his words settle in the lines that were appearing on her forehead. “This time, all of the signs are there. Missing coed. No sign of forced entry. The right kind of flowers. Valentine’s hunting again.”
* * *
Mia’s lungs might as well have been encased in cement. She’d known this day would come. What—did she really believe that Valentine had disappeared for good? That he’d relocated and started killing elsewhere? At best she knew he was lying dormant, possibly finding other outlets for his violent urges, and the fact that he was active again should have come as no surprise. Except that Mia still couldn’t breathe.
“I need to sit,” she managed, then spanned her gaze across the sea of tuxedos and gowns.
“Come with me.”
She didn’t object as Gray took charge, not even when he placed one of his large hands on the small of her back to guide her as if they were intimate friends. She was walking in fog, thinking only about the night her sister vanished. Blood in the hall of her apartment. Broken glass in the kitchen. A front door left wide open. A bouquet of wild forget-me-nots tied with a silk ribbon and left beside a smashed photograph of their family. Mia had been the first to see the scene. Then she called her sister’s cell phone, heard it vibrate on the kitchen counter and called the police.
As wrenching as those first few hours had been, the next hours had been worse, and the hours after that worse still. No initial shock could compare to the reality that her sister was missing and probably dead. Nothing in her education had prepared her for that moment. Just like now, when she could draw on no knowledge to slow the frantic stammering of her heart.
Valentine is hunting. Her stomach roiled.
“Here.” Gray leveled the order and gently guided Mia downward onto a leather chair in the lobby of the hotel, far away from the bustle of the event.
“Thank you.” She leaned back against the chair, cradled by the rounded back and sides. “I knew this moment would come...”
“But that doesn’t mean you were ready for it,” Gray finished, settling himself in the matching chair beside her.
“No. It doesn’t.”
He leaned closer, propping his elbows on his knees and folding his hands as if in prayer. They were quiet for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I’m very sorry, Mia. This is a big night for you, and it wasn’t my intention to upset you.”
She was glad she was sitting down for this. This arrogant man—he was actually apologizing to her now? Mia didn’t know whether to be touched or outraged at the thought that he believed she was so fragile. “I couldn’t have predicted how I would react to that news,” she replied carefully, weighing her words. “How could you have known?”
He tilted his head at her and then looked back down at his folded hands. “Well, one thing is certain.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re correct about not being the right person for this job. I won’t bother you again. Not about Valentine, anyway.” He patted her knee as he stood. “Stay here until you feel better. Take whatever time you need. I’ll let the organizers know what’s going on.”
“You’ll do no such thing. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
She didn’t appreciate that. “And where are you going now?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m wearing this thing.” He gestured at his tuxedo. “I’ve got front-row seats and dinner at a table with the chief of police, so I’m going back into the ballroom for a couple more hours.”
Something about the tone of his voice tipped her off. “No, you’re not. You’re leaving now, and you’re going to work.”
The double take told her she was right. “Like I said, I’ll be at the dinner.” He turned to leave. “It was nice seeing you again. Thanks for the dance.” Without so much as a glance, Gray proceeded back toward the ballroom and into the crowd they’d just left.
In hindsight, Mia would describe the force that compelled her to follow Gray Bartlett as something outside of herself and very powerful. But in that moment, Mia didn’t think about it. Gray clung to the edges of the room, following the walls until he reached the far exit that would lead to the south side of the building. She didn’t congratulate herself for picking up on his lie. She didn’t think of anything as she was pulled along the current of dinner attendees like a drop of water through a pipe, until she and Gray were deposited into the waning sunlight of that summer evening. He didn’t even notice her until then, when he pulled his sunglasses from somewhere and turned his head and said, “You’re following me.” It wasn’t a question, because he knew the answer.
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
Gray turned and marched toward the parking lot. Mia quickened her pace, feeling the effort in the pinching of her high heels. “You’re the one who asked me for help. You said you wanted to help me find closure for my sister. Now you tell me that Valentine is killing again, and I’m supposed to sit around and wait?”
Gray halted and sighed heavily, as if he were dealing with a tedious child. “Mia. Would I like to have your insight on the case? Yes. But you have too many other things to sort out. Let the police take care of this one.” He didn’t bother waiting for a response before turning and continuing on his way.
Mia stood frozen in place between a crosswalk and a traffic island decorated with stumps of peonies and a small tree. She couldn’t be so pathetic as to run after him and demand that he allow her to tag along on his investigation. Except Gray Bartlett was her only remaining connection to her sister, and that meant he was going to be as stuck with her as she was with him until this case was closed. This was about finding answers for Lena.
She took a deep breath. “You need me, Lieutenant.” She practically had to shout it. He was nearly twenty yards away.
Mia’s heart skipped with a twinge of hopefulness when she saw him halt again and slowly turn. She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, concealed as they were by mirrored sunglasses, but she could tell from the set of his jaw and the angle of his broad shoulders that he was going to hear her out. She walked toward him, attempting to look more confident than she felt at that moment and trying not to catch the thin tips of her heels in one of the many cracks in the pavement.
“You know it’s true. Valentine’s a ghost. He walks through walls, abducts women without leaving a clue and brazenly dumps their bodies for the police to find. If this woman is another victim, that makes five.” She stepped forward, closing in on his personal space. “Five victims. You’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that you don’t have a serial killer on the loose in Boston.”
“Who says I care about declaring Valentine to be a serial killer?”
He was lying. She saw it in the twitch of his mouth. “Do you want the publicity that goes along with a serial killer, Lieutenant? The frenzy? Do you want to be the one responsible for fixing that problem?” She said it gently, folding her arms across her chest. “You know as well as I that if this is Valentine, the clock is ticking.”
Now she had his full attention. “Explain.”
“Valentine follows a pattern. He abducts his victims and holds them for between three days and a week. We don’t know what he does with them during that time, but we know they are kept alive somewhere. If this girl was recently abducted, you can try to find her before she winds up like the others. You can try to stop him.” She took one more step forward, coming close enough to catch the smell of his cologne on a passing breeze. “But time is of the essence, and no one knows those files better than I do. That’s why you need me.”
Even through the mirrored glasses, his gaze penetrated to her core. This time she didn’t flush or look away but held that hidden gaze with an intensity of her own. Being accepted into this investigation was about more than finding Valentine or the person who’d attacked her. It was about Lena.
“All right,” he finally said, his lips barely moving. “You can look at the scene and give me your thoughts, but I can’t promise you any additional access.”
Mia nodded. “I understand that.”
“And even if—when—we catch Valentine, I can’t promise we’ll ever recover your sister or find out who attacked you.”
Recover your sister. The police didn’t recover living people. She swallowed. “Got it.”
He lifted the handle to his car and swung the door halfway open, pausing. “I’m heading to the scene. I can show you around later tonight. Say, eleven?”
He was giving her time to accept her award. Mia had ascribed to him all the charm of a roadside motel, but this simple gesture challenged her impression. “Eleven works. Just send me the address.”
“I’ll text it.” He began to climb into the car. “And I’ll be expecting you to blend in with the other cops and not call attention to yourself, so you’ll want to change first. In fact, if you show up in that gown and heels, I’ll send you home and pretend this conversation never happened.”
Mia’s mouth tensed. Had she just reconsidered Gray’s manners? Whenever would she learn to trust first impressions? “Of course I’ll change first,” she said. “But you should know, if you want my help, that I don’t work well with being ordered around. Either you trust me to do what I do and to do it well, or you don’t trust me at all, in which case this arrangement isn’t going to work.”
He paused, and for a moment Mia thought he was going to call the entire thing off. To her surprise, he issued a tense “Fine.”
“Fine,” she echoed, stunned. He’d actually agreed. “Fine. Good. I’ll see you later, then.”
He looked as if he was on the verge of saying something. Instead he closed his door, backed the car away and left Mia standing alone in the middle of the parking lot.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_a23d6959-deb7-5a1a-80ad-6ede91874a72)
Mia took the T to Kenmore Square and walked the rest of the way to the address Gray had texted. Peterborough Street was only a ten-minute walk from the train stop, but she regretted not calling a cab as soon as she neared the footbridge to cross the Fens. Down below her, in that night-blackened, marshy valley, was the perfect hiding place for criminals. Or corpses.
Mia clutched a small can of pepper spray under white knuckles. She’d lived in Boston for twelve years now. She knew how to maneuver a city, and until her attack, she’d felt safe in this one. It’s still safe. She passed the Fens and the rows of gardens planted by city residents, crossed the road and breathed easier. Here the walk was better lit, and she’d have more warning if someone approached her.
She was in the Fenway Park area now, but the Sox were in Baltimore, so the streets were less rowdy, and she missed the smells of hot-dog carts and roasting chestnuts. When she’d first arrived in Boston, this had been a neighborhood for young professionals and college students, but apartment buildings had since been leveled and luxury condos had been constructed in their place. A resident of the Back Bay for years, Mia had observed the gentrification with sadness. She’d always been charmed by the area, and part of that charm had come from the well-worn buildings. But tonight she didn’t lament the fact that so many neighborhood restaurants had given way to noisy bars. Bars meant people, and it was almost eleven o’clock at night.
She didn’t need to check the address again once she turned onto Peterborough. Three squad cars and a CSU van were parked outside a brick building with white marble steps flanked by matching lions. The missing woman’s name was Katherine Haley, but when Mia checked the list of names beside the buzzers, the name next to 3A, her apartment, was blank. She pressed it and waited. After a few moments, she heard a buzz and the click of the front door unlocking. Mia stepped inside to a modest lobby where white marble steps with gray veins were littered with discarded flyers for groceries, postcards for nightclubs and free weekly papers. To the right was a large wooden staircase in good repair, and to the left were a series of small brass combination mailboxes. “You’re five minutes early,” boomed a voice from a few floors above.
She tried to suppress a smile as she mounted the stairs and looked up to see Gray looking down the stairwell. The walk from Kenmore had left her more jittery than she’d anticipated, and it was nice to see a familiar face, even if that face was currently glowering at her. “Is that a problem?”
It was more like a challenge than a question, and predictably, Gray chose to ignore it. “You left your ball gown at home, I see.”
She’d changed into jeans and a plain black T-shirt that emphasized her coppery hair, which fell in tousled waves around her shoulders. She’d even washed off her makeup, leaving her olive skin looking softer, her features muted. Smoky eyes and blush seemed out of place at a crime scene. “Just following orders, Lieutenant,” she replied as she reached the third-story landing.
Was it her imagination, or had he looked her over? In either case, Gray was back to business quickly enough, pointing his index finger at her and observing, “You didn’t bring anything to write on.”
“I don’t take notes. Never have.” Mia was reluctant to reveal to most people that she had a photographic memory. It was an ability that had served her well in school, landing her at Harvard at the ripe age of sixteen, but a photographic memory served only to make her look freakish in social circles.
Like right now. Gray was arching his eyebrow suspiciously. “You don’t take notes? Then how the hell do you keep all the facts of these cases straight?”
The question he was really asking was, how did he know whether he could trust her memory? Mia released a small sigh. “You can quiz me if you want to. Or you could take my word for it. It’s not something I can explain.”
He was about to reply when a dark figure came ambling out of apartment 3A. He saw Mia and broke into a wide, bright smile. “Mia Perez. It’s good to see you.”
Mia smiled, too. Sergeant Joe D’Augostino’s smile was contagious. “Joe.” She stepped forward to give him a kiss on the cheek. “I haven’t seen you in months.”
“You look well, Mia.”
His kind dark brown eyes were warmly familiar, and Mia felt a clutch in her chest. She hadn’t seen Joe since Lena disappeared, when he’d so kindly offered to assist her with anything she needed to get through that time. The few times he’d checked on her, Mia had allowed his calls to go to voice mail and had never responded. She shifted a little at the memory, embarrassed at her own manners.
Gray watched the two of them, clearly impatient at the reunion. “What’s the lovefest about? You two work a case together?”
“I live a few buildings down from her sister,” D’Augostino replied. “Lived.” He shot Mia a glance.
She gave Gray a quick smile. “They were friendly. Joe joined me and Lena a few times for drinks in her apartment.”
“I met Lena in a local place. We used to grab our coffee at the same time every morning.”
“Fascinating.” Gray turned back to the apartment. “Maybe we should work.” He tossed a pair of latex gloves and paper booties to Mia. “Don’t move another inch before you put those on.”
She did as she was instructed, but not before shooting him a look. “All right. I’m suited up.”
“Her name is Katherine Haley,” D’Augostino said. “Twenty-three-year-old grad student at Boston University.”
Mia’s stomach tightened as the familiar scenario unfolded. “Do we know her course of study?”
“English. She’s a doctoral candidate.”
They entered the threshold of a small apartment with wood floors and bare white walls. A few members of CSU were still gathering evidence. Mia walked with the two detectives toward a small living area with a sagging love seat with a white slipcover, a wide brown wooden coffee table and a scarred leather chair. Gray picked up one of the thick volumes stacked on the coffee table. “Looks like some medieval crap.”
Mia lifted the book from his hands. “No, that’s Renaissance crap,” she deadpanned. “These playwrights are from the Jacobean era.” She returned the book to the table. “You disappoint me, Lieutenant. Every good detective should read Shakespeare.”
“Oh, really? And what should every good psychologist read?”
“Shakespeare. He was a tremendous study of human nature.” She pointed to the table. “That’s a pretty high stack of books. Were they like that when you arrived?”
“Nothing’s been touched,” Gray said. “We received the call earlier tonight. The vic was supposed to meet a friend at a bar on Boylston and she never showed. Then her friend tried calling, and when she didn’t get an answer, she came to the apartment. She said the door was open, but just barely, and the vic was gone. Then she saw... Well, I’ll show you.” Gray began the trek around the apartment. “Nothing was off in the sitting area, as you noticed. This is obviously a student apartment. Books everywhere, cheap furniture, posters in plastic frames hanging on the walls. Lots of things that could be easily knocked down or damaged in a struggle.”
“Lots of boxes,” Mia mused, pointing to a stack against the far wall. “And her name wasn’t beside the buzzer downstairs. Did she just move here?”
“Less than a month ago,” said D’Augostino. “She’s lived in the city for about a year, but this is a new apartment.”
“So there was no struggle,” Mia continued, talking to herself.
“You haven’t seen the kitchen. Watch your step,” Gray warned, pointing to an area on the floor. “CSU found some broken glass and water there. I think they got all the glass, but just be careful.”
He led her farther into the apartment, where she could see a white galley kitchen. And, Mia observed with a sinking stomach, blood. Smears on the white cabinets, a well-defined handprint on the floor. Slick, shiny puddles. Members of CSU were photographing and swabbing the scene. “That looks like arterial spatter,” Mia said, nodding at the thick spots and smears across the white refrigerator, microwave and toaster oven. “Are we sure she’s alive?”
“No,” Gray replied. “But we haven’t found her body yet.” At least he was honest.
This explained all of the cops and crime scene investigators for a missing-persons case. Mia reached up to massage her right temple, where a tension headache had started to gather. “Valentine usually drugs his victims,” she said. “He’s never left so much blood at a scene.”
To her left D’Augostino cleared his throat. “Well. There was your sister’s case.”
He looked almost ashamed that he’d said it, glancing down when she looked at him. Mia turned back to Gray and was troubled to see concern in his eyes. Pull yourself together, or he’s going to send you home.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, working to keep her voice calm. “There was blood in my sister’s apartment, too. But nothing like this.”
Gray planted himself right at her side. “You think this is the work of the copycat?”
He was close. Close enough that she could look away and still know he was there, just from the heat rising from his body. “I couldn’t say. Not yet.”
Gray was dressed in plain clothes, jeans and a dark blue polo that suggested the chiseled body below, but the suggestion was enough. He might consider himself the “all work, no play” type, but he’d clearly been logging hours in the weight room. Mia’s heart scampered at the memory of their dance earlier that night. Now all she could think about was how strong his hand had felt in hers, and her mind wandered to thoughts of what it might feel like to touch other parts of him. His biceps. His shoulders.
She’d lived alone ever since she’d started graduate school, and she’d never considered herself in need of a man to protect her. She didn’t need a man now, either, but the thought of sleeping beside someone strong was a seductive one. Maybe she’d rest easy for a change and not wake at every creak and thud in the building.
“That reporter called him Valentine for a reason,” she said, partly to fill the silence in the room and partly to clear her mind of ridiculous thoughts. “It seems his victims invite him into their homes. There’s never an open window or a sign of forced entry, and when there’s blood, it’s usually minimal. Valentine doesn’t like a challenge.”
D’Augostino folded his arms across his chest. “How do you think he gets in? What would make a young woman invite a serial killer into her home?”
“That’s the question.” She continued to walk around the apartment, looking for subtle clues as to what had transpired hours before: dents in the wall, chips in the woodwork or maybe an overturned cup of pens. “We don’t have much to go on. All of the victims were young women, and all of them were graduate students at an area college or university.”
“Smart women,” Gray said. Mia felt his gaze following her around the unit. “But they still let him in. Must be a good-looking guy.”
