No Escape

After a brief hesitation, Heath looked at her. “Do you want me to lie to you? Because what I think doesn’t matter.” The note of sarcasm in his voice surprised her. At first she thought it was directed at her, then realized it was more personal than that.

“I want you to be honest with me. If you can.”

“I can. And I think Gibson killed your sister. Getting someone else to believe that can be difficult. I know. I’ve tried.” He frowned. “A lot of people, evidently, aren’t prepared for that kind of honesty.”

Even though she’d asked for the answer, the words hurt. Lauren wasn’t as ready to hear them as she’d thought she would be. Still, she kept her composure. Being weak in foster homes wasn’t something that let a kid survive. She’d learned to keep her emotions inside and present that hard shell to the world.

“I’m sorry.” Heath blew out a breath.

“It’s fine.”

“No, no it’s not. A person shouldn’t have someone taken away from them like that.”

Lauren heard the note of wistful hurt in his words, and she knew that she wasn’t alone in her pain and misery. As a foster child, she’d learned to read tones and expressions and body language at an early age. That was part of the self-preservation tool set. “Who did you lose?”

The wince and the slight hunching of his shoulders, like a boxer who had just taken a blow, let her know her instincts had been dead-on. This wasn’t just a case to the detective. “A friend.”

Lauren nodded toward the canvas. “Is she on there, too?”

He ran a big hand across his stubbled jaw and took a breath. He didn’t bother looking at the canvas. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s a visual victimology. My friend doesn’t belong with those others. When Gibson killed her, it was different.”

“What was different?”

“The motive for the murder. Gibson made Janet’s death personal because she’d made her pursuit of him personal.”

“How did he make it personal?”

Heath leaned back against the wall. Green flakes stirred restlessly in those gold eyes, but he looked tired. She hadn’t noticed that earlier in the coroner’s office. Looking at him now, seeing him better, he looked slightly pale beneath the new redness from the sun.

“We worked a homicide in Atlanta. A real-estate agent. Thirty-two-year-old mother of three.”

“‘We?’”

Heath drained the rest of the bottle and set it on the window ledge. “Yeah. Janet and me.”

“She was a police officer.”

“Detective. Like me. She was working as lead on the Celeste Morrow murder, working the case with her partner. She used me as a sounding board. We did that for each other when we caught cases where we got stuck and needed an outside opinion. Janet let me have a look at the case.” He stared at the wall, but Lauren knew he wasn’t seeing it. “We both knew the serial killer was a sociopath. All the traits were there. Random killings. Nothing tying the victims together. But the killings were usually savage.”

Memory of the crime scene photos on the canvas played inside Lauren’s mind. There had been so much blood. “My sister was drowned. She didn’t die like those others.”

“No. She didn’t. But I learned that Gibson’s name came up in the investigation.”

“He was identified by the picture she took with him.”

Heath nodded. “I’ve been monitoring Gibson, trying to stay up with him, but he vanishes whenever he wants to.”

“Inspector Myton doesn’t think Gibson had anything to do with Megan’s murder.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked him. He didn’t come out and say it, but he let me know he thinks you’re obsessed and perhaps not in your right mind.”

Heath smiled disparagingly. “Inspector Myton isn’t interested in ruffling any feathers, Miss Cooper. People die down here all the time. Sometimes they’re Americans. Myton accepts that. Part of the cost of doing business. Eventually all of that goes away. If Myton can catch someone red-handed, if that someone isn’t so connected that they’re practically untouchable, he’ll put that someone behind bars. I’m convinced that’s the truth.” Heath looked at her. “The problem down here is that money plays. That’s the name of the game. If someone has enough money, they can get away with murder. And a guy like Gibson has plenty of money.” He paused. “He’s clever, too. Otherwise he’d never have gotten to Janet.”

Lauren wondered if the two of them had been involved. It wasn’t unheard of, especially with the kinds of hours police personnel worked. She wasn’t going to ask, but something must have shown on her face.

“We were just friends.” Heath looked a little embarrassed, then hurt followed. “Actually, we were more than that. Janet was my FTO. Field training officer. She worked with me when I made detective. She got me started on my investigations, and she was there during some rough patches.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Outside the window behind Heath, street noises filtered in. People walked by. Cars passed on the streets, rubber squeaking on hot pavement. Someone upstairs was playing the television or a music system too loud.

“How old was she?”

Heath scowled. “What?”

“How old was your friend? If she trained you, she must have been older, right?”

“Eight years.”

“Making her forty or so.”

“About that.” Heath’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at her with increased interest. “Janet doesn’t fit on that victimology board because she called Gibson’s lawyers and left a message saying she knew what he was doing, that she was going to stop him.” Pain turned his voice hoarse for a moment. “I didn’t know till afterwards. The lawyers’ number turned up on her cell phone records.” He drew in a breath. “Gibson killed Janet to prove that he could do it under our noses and get away with it.” His voice turned hard. “But that’s not going to happen. He’s going to pay.”

Desperately, Lauren sought to turn the conversation away from Heath’s dead friend. She was afraid that he would shut down, and right now she wanted—needed—information about Megan’s death. “The other women on that—” she pointed at the rolled canvas “—are in their twenties.”

“Yeah.” Heath sat up a little straighter and looked as if he was regrouping. “They are. Like your sister. Gibson has a thing for younger women. He’s older—”

“Forty-three. I know.”

He focused on her with new intensity. “How do you know so much about him?”

“I know magic.”

“Sure you do.”

Still annoyed at Heath and wanting to wipe that smug look off his face, Lauren put her left hand to her temple and closed her eyes as she tilted her head back. “Think of your address.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. I’m going to read your mind.”

“You’re a mind reader? I didn’t know mind reading counted as magic.”

Using her right hand, Lauren palmed Heath’s driver’s license from the wallet she’d taken from him earlier. She opened her eyes, took her hand away, and looked at him. Then she gave the address she’d noticed on the driver’s license earlier.

He studied her with indolent eyes, not saying anything.

“Well, is that your address?”

For a moment, he didn’t say anything. The defenses went up. She saw that in the way he held his shoulders, the way he tilted his head to look at her. “How do you know so much about me?”

“Like I said, magic.” Lauren raised her right hand, palm forward so he couldn’t see the driver’s license trapped by its edge between her first two fingers.

“I’m not a big believer in magic.”

With a flourish, Lauren shook her hand and his driver’s license appeared at the end of her fingers. For a moment, Heath didn’t know what to say. Before he could recover, she flicked her wrist and sent the plastic rectangle spinning at him.

Surprisingly, like a cat snapping a moth out of the air, Heath caught the license in his left hand. After he perused the plastic rectangle, his eyes turned to slits. His free hand slid down to his pants pocket, then he looked shocked. “You picked my pocket and stole my wallet at the morgue.”

“I borrowed your wallet.” Lauren reached into her pocket and removed the article. She tossed it to him. Before she’d arrived at his hotel room, she’d photocopied all of the documents at her hotel and left the copies tucked away in her room. Heath knew a lot about her. It only seemed fair that she have the same opportunity.

With the same easy skill he’d shown in catching the license, Heath caught the wallet. He glanced through it quickly. Satisfied that everything was there, he shoved the wallet into his pocket. His eyes narrowed. “Picking pockets isn’t a skill most people have.”

“It’s just a riff on sleight of hand stuff. I work at a magic store.”

“Where?”

“In Chicago.”

“You sell magic tricks?”

“Yes. I guess you don’t know as much as you think you do, Detective Sawyer.” Lauren hated that Heath’s lack of knowledge about the field made the shop sound pedestrian. “But they’re not the kind of tricks you’ll find for some kid’s birthday party. Professional magicians come there to buy equipment, to talk with each other, and to design new illusions.”

Heath leaned his head back against the wall, relaxing a little, or maybe only providing a deception. “Has Gibson ever been there?”

“No.”

“Why? Is he that good?”

“I don’t know. The guy just appeared on the scene one day and streaked to the top of the heap. A lot of people want to know where Gibson learned his craft. If anyone knows, if anyone is helping craft his illusions, they’re not talking.”

A frown twisted Heath’s features. “People have been trying to figure that out?”

“Sure. The guy’s a celebrity in a field where secrets are prized. Every magician wants to know what’s in every other magician’s bag of tricks. Especially if that magician is as successful as Gibson. The fascination for magic only gets deeper if you’re actively involved in the field.”

“I’ll take your word on that.” Heath leaned forward in his chair, dropping his feet to the floor and resting his elbows on his knees. “You’ve never met Gibson?”

“No.”

“Your sister hadn’t, either? Until the other night?”

Lauren thought for a moment. “Not that I’m aware of.”

Heath nodded. “Somewhere, somehow, they crossed paths. I’d like to know if it was just here, or if it was somewhere else.”

“If nothing connects the victims you say Gibson has killed, what makes you so certain he is the killer?” Lauren couldn’t believe she was asking that question so calmly, but at the moment she felt dead inside. All of the hurt and pain was pushed back, waiting in the distance like gathering storm clouds. The anger was still there, though. She wanted to know who was responsible for what had happened to Megan.

“Janet and I talked about this case for weeks. I can’t even remember which of us came up with Gibson, or how we tripped to the fact that Gibson was playing in each of the cities where those victims were killed. We’d starting checking newspapers in those cities during the time periods of those murders. We found Gibson.”

“If you were looking in the newspapers, you probably found a lot of overlapping things.”

“We did. But Janet liked Gibson for it.”

“Why?”

Heath’s lips tightened for a moment. “She was good at what she did. She could make creative leaps that other detectives never got to. Sometimes you get a serial killer who kills over a wide range of areas. Usually he turns out to be a sales rep, or maybe a long-haul trucker. We even considered that, but nothing fell into place. Then we found Gibson. And everything fit. Especially the White Rabbit card.”

“Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”

“Yeah. The guy enjoys playing his sadistic little games. It’s his signature. He claims his victims.”

“Then why didn’t you go after him?”

“We couldn’t. We tried making our case to other law enforcement departments, but nobody wanted to go after Gibson. Everything was circumstantial and he wasn’t even in-state anymore. Chasing after him would have been expensive, and police departments have budgets that television cop shows don’t have to worry about. We couldn’t prove that Gibson had any kind of contact with any of the victims. No sightings, no meetings. No forensic evidence. Nothing.” Heath looked at her. “Not until that picture of him with your sister. That’s the first concrete clue we’ve had. And it’s down here in this place where I have no jurisdiction.”

“What are you going to do?”

Heath shook his head as if to clear it and stood. “No more questions, Miss Cooper. I shouldn’t have told you as much as I have, but I felt I owed that to you.” He folded his arms over that broad chest, and she could still see the lost hurt shining in his eyes.

“You came down here before Megan died.” Lauren kept her voice level. “You had a plan then.”

“I still do.” Heath walked to the door and opened it. “Time for you to go.”

Lauren wanted to stay and argue, but she also wanted to stay and comfort him, and be comforted. Detective Heath Sawyer was the only person she knew in Jamaica. She didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to have to go back to the hotel room and talk to her mother, but she knew she had to do that. She was already late in doing it.

And she had to make arrangements for taking Megan home.

She nodded and walked to the door, pausing only a moment to look at Heath. “Thank you for being honest with me. It… helps.”

He winced at that but didn’t say anything about his earlier duplicity. “Have a safe trip home, Miss Cooper.”

She turned and walked toward the elevator.

Downstairs and out of the building, Lauren slid behind the steering wheel and set her purse in the passenger seat. She felt the vibration of her phone inside while she was reaching for the keys to the car. She checked the caller ID.

Mom.

She hesitated only a moment, then put the phone back in her purse. She knew her mom would be worried, but Lauren didn’t want to try to talk to her until she was in her hotel room. There, at least, she would have some privacy.

After sliding the phone back into her purse, she glanced back at the hotel room where Heath Sawyer was staying. The curtain was pulled slightly to one side, and his profile shadowed the light.

Resolutely, Lauren put the car into gear and pulled away, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Gibson. Imagining him as a serial killer seemed like some kind of fantasy.

So was the idea of never seeing Megan again, but that one was dark and terrifying.

Chapter 4

At the window, Heath watched Lauren Cooper drive away and vanish into the dark streets, only realizing then how late it had gotten. Only a few blocks over, a neon fog pooled above an area near a beach where the tourists gathered. Over there the music would be too loud, college kids and twentysomethings just out in the world would be dancing and celebrating summer, beer and liquor would flow, and no one would know that the White Rabbit Killer had taken another victim.

Maybe knowing wouldn’t even slow them down. They were there to party.

Pensive and irritated, Heath thought about grabbing his jacket and heading out into the cool night, just blowing through an evening by trying to sink into the magic of the island. That would have been wasted effort, though, and he knew it. If things went well, he’d only end up more restless than ever. If things went badly, he could end up in a fight. He knew himself, and he knew the dark mood he was in.

It had been years since he’d exhibited that kind of behavior, but he knew he was next door to it now. He could feel the techno trance of the club music in his veins. That was where he would gravitate to. Trance, industrial heavy metal, something that would bang through him, something that would amp him up even more.

Country music would be worse. Those songs were loaded with pain, and he’d do his best to drown it. He’d done it before. The only reason he’d become a cop was because he hadn’t known what else to do after four years with the Marines right out of high school. He hadn’t wanted the military life his father still enjoyed, but he’d wanted something physical, something where he’d make a difference. He’d taken the police exams, thinking that if the cops didn’t want him, he’d re-up with the military.

Atlanta P.D. had taken him, though, and he’d found work that he could do that wasn’t the same thing day in and day out. He didn’t see himself as a hero. He was a guy who helped paint that thin blue line between the civilians and the savages. He’d liked busting heads, maybe a little too much.

Detective Janet Hutchins had taken an interest in him. She’d seen that he had an eye for investigation, didn’t just take the first answer he was given, and that he checked the facts. She’d gotten Heath groomed for his detective’s shield, then partnered with him for three years till he made Detective 2nd and got a junior partner of his own.

That was two years ago. The junior partner had been Jackson Portman.

Heath turned away from the window and pulled out his cell phone. He pulled Jackson up on speed dial, then punched the call through. It rang only once before the connection was made.

“There you are.” Jackson sounded relieved.

“Here I am.”

“Thought you were gonna leave me hanging just when things were getting interesting.”

“No.”

“You still got company?”

“No. I need you to do something for me.”

“Sure. First, tell me about Lauren Cooper. That’s how this favor thing works. You do something for me, I do something for you. How did that woman know so much about you?”

“She read my mind.”

Jackson snorted derisively. “Bro, the stuff she knew, even you don’t know without checking. What’s your gym membership number?”

Heath didn’t say anything because he didn’t know it. Case numbers he knew, phone numbers of snitches he knew, but not so much numbers involving his personal life.

“Well? Time’s ticking.” Jackson whistled, an off-key version of Final Jeopardy!

Heath grimaced, knowing that once Jackson was armed with the facts of what had happened, his partner would never let it go. “Back at the hospital when I was checking out the murder down here, I bumped into Lauren Cooper. She’s the dead woman’s sister. While we were in a heated discussion, she lifted my wallet.”

“Lifted your wallet.” Jackson sounded hollow, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Yeah, it means she picked my pocket.”

“I know what it means. Just surprised you’d slip up like that. It ain’t like you, bro.” Some of the colloquial accent was gone from Jackson’s words. He was deadly earnest now. “You really don’t have your game, Heath. You should come back home. Let’s sit down and sort this out. We still own one of the White Rabbit murders.”

“Two. We own two.” Neither of them mentioned Janet’s name.

“Come home. We have enough to buy into the investigation and leverage some muscle from the captain. Let’s dig into it together. If I have to, I’ll get some leave and we’ll work the investigation together.”

“The investigation is down here. This is where Gibson goes to hole up. He’s got a place down here. I found it. I just can’t get close to it.”

“All right. That’s something we didn’t know. How did you find his place?”

“Gibson made a mistake. The dead woman took pictures of his house and uploaded it to her Cloud. I got a chance to look at the data dump from her iPad, accessed the pictures, and found the house.”

“So he took the woman to his house?”

“Yeah.”

“Can’t the locals get a search warrant?”

“Gibson says he put the woman in a cab, waved goodbye, and he never saw her again.”

“Uh-huh. And they decided not to press him on that?”

“They don’t have any proof that that wasn’t what happened.”

“They find the cab driver?”

“No.”

“They look?”

“Myton says they did, but this is a tourist area. A lot of people take cabs every night.”

“You think the locals are protecting him?”

“They’re being careful. Gibson is rich. They don’t want to ruffle any feathers until they have a lock.”

“You did mention this guy is a probable serial killer? Probably gonna kill again?”

“Yeah. The cops here I’ve been talking too aren’t big fans of the American justice system, and they’re even less happy about Georgia detectives wandering in off their beats to poke around in their business.”

“That would be a problem. So tell me about Lauren Cooper. Did she look hot to you? ‘Cause from what I’m looking at here, she looks seriously hot.”

“Can I quote you on that to your future second missus?”

“Lord, no. That woman’s jealous enough.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Her file. Since she called in, knew so much about you, I thought it was only fair we know stuff about her. Only expected to get a hit on her from the Chicago DMV. That’s where she told me she’s from. Turns out she’s had a little bit of a record.”

That surprised Heath, but then he thought about how easily she had picked his pocket. Even on his worst day, he wasn’t the easiest guy to pull something like that on. “What record?”

“Breaking and entering and assault. From what I see, she broke into a guy’s apartment and punched him out in Chicago three years ago.”

“For what?”

“Says here she claims the guy stole an illusion she was working on. She’s some kind of magic designer or something. The guy claimed that they came up with this thing together, that there wasn’t a clear title to anything. The judge dropped the hammer on her because it was a home invasion. She ended up doing some community service—magic shows at old folks’ homes and orphanages—and had her record expunged. Are they serious about the magic thing?”

“She does magic.”

“She must be good at it if she can lift your wallet. ‘Course, her looking like she does, I could see how you got distracted.”

Heath ignored that. “Actually, the magic angle is what I want you to look into. Gibson picked up the woman down here. She’d taken her sister to a magic show Gibson put on in Chicago. Check and see if any of the other victims had a connection to magic in any way. Maybe Gibson is culling from a more select group than we thought.”

“Looking for relatives of people who jones on magic?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a look.” Jackson hesitated for a moment. “Something you told me when you first started training me to work homicide—stay detached. Look at everything from the outside. The minute you crawl inside of an investigation, you lose all perspective. I’m gonna tell you now, because you’re my friend and I love you like a brother and you’re likely gonna be my best man when I wed my second Missus Portman, that you’re all kinds of up inside of this investigation. The captain came out asking what did I know about you impersonating a coroner. I told him I didn’t know nothing.”

“I can’t be detached from this one. Gibson killed Janet. Look into those cases and let me know what you come up with regarding the magic angle.” Heath broke the connection and tossed the phone onto the rumpled bed. He got a fresh beer from the refrigerator and stood at the window looking out again, trying to figure out what his next move was going to be.

Instead, to his surprise, he couldn’t keep his thoughts away from Lauren Cooper and how she’d felt struggling against him. He closed his eyes and could smell that berry vanilla scent again. Then he forced his eyes open and sipped his beer.

There was a thread here. Nobody killed that clean. He was going to find it, and he was going to use it to strangle Gibson.

“There.” From the backseat of the Jaguar X351, Gibson pointed at the low-rent hotel off the beaten path of the city. “Pull into the parking lot.”

In front of him, behind the steering wheel, Roylston resettled his bulk, looking like a steroid-infused earthquake in motion. Dressed in a black business suit, his skin dark and his head shaved, he could have passed for a native to the island. Only the Boston accent marked him as an outsider. During the three years he’d been with Gibson, Roylston hadn’t ever spoken much, and never mentioned anything personal. As far as Gibson knew, the bodyguard/chauffeur didn’t have a life outside of protecting him.