Alone in the Dark (32 page)

‘That thing still runs?’ he asked, then froze. ‘Shit,’ he added in a mutter.

Stunned, Scarlett slowed to a stop in front of Delores’s house, turning in her seat to stare at him. He averted his face, assiduously staring out the window. ‘Marcus? Look at me.’

‘I don’t think I want to,’ he mumbled, startling a laugh from her.

‘Well you damn well better, anyway.’ She waited until he had, guilty expression on his face. ‘How do you know about my Tank?’

‘I might have seen it . . . in your driveway.’ He winced. ‘Once or twice.’

She continued to stare. ‘You drove by my
house
?
Twice
?’

‘Or so.’

‘How did you even know where I live?’

His wince became an annoyed glare. ‘Please. Don’t insult me. A five-year-old could find your address. I didn’t stalk you. Didn’t sit outside and watch you. I just . . . drove by.’

She was torn between being appalled and idiotically aroused. ‘How many times, Marcus? How many times is “or so”?’

‘Four times in nine months. That’s all.’

‘But . . . why?’

His gaze dropped and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he exhaled on a deep sigh. ‘I was curious.’

She swallowed, trying to dislodge her heart from her throat. ‘About?’

He looked up, met her eyes, and it was like a sucker punch straight to her sternum. ‘You.’ His mouth curved. Not quite a smile, but so damn sexy that she couldn’t tear her eyes away. ‘Why? Weren’t you curious too? Even just a little?’

Her face grew hot, despite the cool air coming out of the car’s vents. ‘Maybe a little,’ she admitted, then closed her eyes. ‘Or maybe a lot.’ Her eyes still closed, she flinched when his thumb glided over her cheek, but when his palm cupped her jaw, she leaned into his touch. ‘Okay,’ she conceded huskily. ‘A whole lot.’

His deep chuckle sent a shiver down her spine. ‘Good. I was starting to die over here.’

She opened her eyes to find him watching her with a satisfied smile, his eyes grown dark with arousal. ‘Don’t die,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

His smile faded. ‘I won’t.’ His thumb swept over her lips once before he drew his hand away. ‘I think your friend knows we’re here.’

Scarlett jerked so hard that her back smacked the armrest on the driver’s-side door, her face now flaming with embarrassment. She’d completely forgotten where they were and why they’d come. And he was right. Arms folded across her chest, Delores leaned against one of the columns supporting her front porch, a patiently benevolent expression on her face. At her side sat an enormous dog whose head reached past her hip. The dog would have looked big sitting next to anyone, but it dwarfed petite Delores, who couldn’t be more than five feet tall.

‘Goddammit,’ Scarlett hissed. ‘This is going to be public knowledge within about five seconds after we leave.’

Marcus sat back in his seat, a frown crunching his brow. ‘Did you plan on hiding me?’

‘No,’ she answered, flustered. ‘I just . . . Hell, Marcus. I’m private about things like this. Not like I’ve had to be very often,’ she rolled on, inwardly yelling at herself to shut up.

‘How many times is “very often”?’ he asked, purposely using her own words against her.

‘Two,’ she said honestly, then shrugged. ‘And a half.’ Because Bryan didn’t really count as a whole relationship. He’d just been . . . convenient. Which had been wrong for both of them.

Marcus’s dark eyebrows shot up, his eyes gleaming. ‘A half? What the hell is a half?’

‘Don’t even go there,’ she warned, ripping off her seat belt. ‘Come on. We have work to do.’

‘Yes, sir, Detective, sir,’ he barked, then smiled, causing her to stare stupidly once again. ‘As long as you know that we’ll finish this conversation once we leave here,’ he said silkily, ‘seeing as how it’ll be public knowledge anyway.’

‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered. ‘Whatever. Let’s figure out who owns that damn poodle.’

Fourteen

Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday 4 August, 12.00
P.M.

Ken stood at his living room window, watching as Burton gently lowered Reuben’s sleeping wife into the front passenger seat of her car. He wasn’t certain if Burton’s care was due to genuine affection or simply to keep from putting any marks on her body. He wasn’t convinced of Burton’s loyalty, but he had to admit that the man was a professional in all the ways that counted.

Ken’s cell phone rang as Burton drove away, the caller ID belonging to Demetrius. ‘I was getting worried,’ Ken said tersely.

‘Aw, you do care,’ Demetrius drawled.

‘Where are you?’

‘In Loveland, for God’s sake. On foot, in the damn woods. You owe me fifteen hundred bucks.’

‘What the fuck, Demetrius? Why?’

‘Because these Testonis were brand fucking new and now they’re ruined.’

Ken gritted his teeth. One of these days he was going to kick Demetrius’s fancy shoes up his friend’s ass. ‘I meant, why are you in Loveland, walking through the woods?’

‘Because that’s where O’Bannion is. He’s with some chick cop.’

‘Fanfuckingtastic,’ Ken muttered. ‘Why are they in the woods?’

‘They aren’t. I am. I got to O’Bannion’s office after she’d gone in, so I don’t know when she got there. She came out at 11.20, stood on the sidewalk staring at her phone, then went back in. A few minutes later she came back out with O’Bannion. They got in her car and drove away, her at the wheel. It’s a CPD unmarked. They turned into a private drive. If I’d followed, they would have made me, so I parked and hiked through the damn woods. Hold on, I’m sending you a picture of the cop. I think you’ll find her . . . interesting.’

Ken’s phone buzzed with the new text and, putting Demetrius on speaker, he opened the picture. Then blinked. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah,’ Demetrius agreed. ‘She’s a looker, all right.’

Demetrius, as usual, was the master of understatement. The woman was tall, with a thick black braid wound intricately around the back of her head. She was . . . exceptional.

For the first time in a long time, Ken’s mouth actually watered. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

Demetrius chuckled. ‘Probably not. You never think as kinked as I do.’

Ken rolled his eyes. ‘I’m wondering how much we can get for her. Maybe even pair her up with Stephanie Anders and sell them as a set.’

‘You sell all the best toys right out from under us,’ Demetrius grumbled. ‘I bet she’d be a real fighter in bed. She moves like a coiled spring. I could test her first,’ he said slyly.

‘We’ll see,’ Ken said, frowning as he studied the picture more closely. ‘She looks familiar. Do I know her?’

‘Yeah, you do,’ Demetrius said, suddenly all business. ‘She looked familiar to me too, so I had DJ dig up some pictures of her for me.’

Demetrius’s son DJ had – much like Sean and Alice – proven himself extremely trustworthy over the years.

‘She’s a homicide detective,’ Demetrius went on. ‘She’s working the murder of the girl in the alley this morning. Detective Scarlett Bishop. She transferred to that CPD/FBI task force a little less than a year ago. MCES or some such shit. She worked the serial killer case last fall.’

Ken put it together. ‘She’s the woman who came to visit O’Bannion in the hospital. She was also at his kid brother’s funeral.’

‘Yep. The photos DJ found were ones I took of her at that funeral and outside the hospital back in November.’

‘Did DJ run a background?’

‘He did. She’s squeaky clean.’

‘No cop is squeaky clean. I’ll have Sean do some deeper checking, see what he can find. Why are Bishop and O’Bannion in Loveland?’

‘I have no idea,’ Demetrius said, sounding puzzled. ‘They came to an animal shelter. It’s called Patrick’s Place.’

‘An animal shelter? O’Bannion’s adopting a dog?’

‘I don’t know. It didn’t appear that they were there on any case-related business, though. I think they’re . . . involved. O’Bannion woulda had his tongue down her throat in another few seconds if the lady they were visiting hadn’t come out on the front porch.’

‘Shit,’ Ken muttered. ‘A cop and a reporter. Together.’ It was a bad combination.

‘That’s what I thought. We take him out and she’ll come after us and then it’ll be so long to a low profile. Unless we take them together. What do we know about the Anderses? What’s O’Bannion’s link to them? How did O’Bannion find out about the girl he met in that alley?’

‘I’ll find out. I’ve still got the three Anders in the basement.’ Ken glanced at the security monitor on the counter. All three of his captives were trying to escape their bonds. Which would accomplish nothing more than marking their skin with rope burn. They would not break free of Ken’s knots. ‘The mother is the lynchpin holding them together. Chip and little Stephanie will tell me what I want to know once she’s incapacitated. Stephanie knows something, but she’s holding on to it because Chip believes someone will soon miss them and go to the cops.’

‘Someone who?’

‘Maybe the poodle’s handler – you know, for dog shows – but we’re not certain of that. Decker just left here to make sure no one was hiding in Anders’s house. He would have gone sooner, but it seems that Chip’s bullet did a lot more damage to our guard than he originally thought. Took him quite a while to get the guy stitched up.’

‘Do we need to switch places? You can pull in O’Bannion and Bishop. I can get answers out of the Anderses.’

‘I think I can manage,’ Ken said dryly. ‘The Anderses are just a bit more stubborn than most. I hooked Marlene up to my shock box, but none of them broke. I gave them a breather to let them stew while I was taking care of Miriam.’

A short silence, followed by a sigh. ‘Reuben’s wife knew about us?’

‘Oh yeah. She trusted Burton enough to come with him willingly, but when she saw where he’d brought her, she started scratching at him, trying to make him let her go. She screamed that she didn’t want to have anything to do with the devil who had corrupted her husband. She ripped up the wounds that Marlene put on his face and cut a few new gouges of her own. So I made her some tea, laced with enough sedative to take out a moose.’

‘She drank it? After drugging Jason Jackson, she really drank something you gave her?’

‘Not voluntarily, but my knife at her throat convinced her to accept my hospitality. She settled down quickly, told me what I basically wanted to know and fell asleep. Burton’s taking her and her car to a cheap motel. He’ll dump her in a room and write an appropriately passive-aggressive email to Reuben on her phone, saying she didn’t want the kids to come home from school and find her body. Then he’ll leave her car at the motel. If Reuben had trackers put on his own vehicles like Burton says he did, and if he’s still alive, then he’ll find her car and her body soon enough. Fireworks to come, complete with Reuben’s wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘That I was a perverted bastard who had seduced her husband into my perversions,’ Ken said. ‘She said that her PI was on to us too. I told her that her PI was already dead. That made her a little more cooperative. Burton pulled her laptop and searched her email. She’d documented what she knew and emailed it to herself. It didn’t appear that she’d sent it to anyone else. I suppose she wanted to be able to access it from anywhere in the event that she had to run or we stole her computer. She’d been through Reuben’s files that he’d locked away. She’d made a duplicate set of keys. She claimed not to have killed him, though. But she was losing lucidity pretty fast by that point.’

‘Has Sean got any leads on where Reuben and Jackson could be?’

‘None,’ Ken said. ‘No credit card usage, no plane or bus tickets purchased or cars rented. He’ll keep looking. He’s checking all the aliases Reuben’s used in the past.’

‘And if Reuben’s come up with a new alias that we don’t know about?’

It was certainly possible. Ken had several that his team didn’t know about. Just in case he had to run quickly. ‘Then we hope he trusts Burton enough to contact him. I have the only uninjured member of Reuben’s team following Burton.’

‘To make sure he actually dumps Miriam in a motel room like you told him to?’

‘Yes. They have history, Burton and Miriam. I’m not sure if it’s because he knew her back when he and Reuben were with Knoxville PD, or if they’ve gotten cozy recently. But also so that Burton will have a way back. His next task is to search Reuben’s car that I had towed.’

‘We still sending someone up to New York to follow the girl Reuben was banging?’

‘I don’t think I will. We’re running too thin in the security department. If he’s on his way to see the girl, at least he’ll be busy for a while and out of our business. If he’s left the country, Sean has the best chance of tracking him. And if he’s dead, then the problem is solved.’

‘Idiot,’ Demetrius muttered. ‘Couldn’t keep his dick zipped. What about the other two trackers that were disabled at the Anderses’?’

‘The daughter claims to have done it, but I don’t believe her. I’m about to go downstairs and give it another go. I’m not going to waste much more time on them. Especially now that we know that O’Bannion’s cozied up to a homicide detective. Dealing with them is going to be the most important thing. Did you get the gun?’

‘Yes. Anders’s girl was shot with a Ruger P89.’

‘I’ll have Decker check Anders’s gun cabinet while he’s there, to see if it looks like anything of that caliber is either missing or has been recently fired.’

‘He should look for the ammo. The Ruger was loaded with Black Talons.’

‘Huh. You don’t see BTs very often anymore except with collectors. Chip did have an extensive armory. Stands to reason he’d collect ammo too. Where did
you
find BTs?’

‘In my collection. I bought ’em back in the nineties, when everyone thought they were armor-piercing cop-killers. But it wasn’t true,’ he added in a dejected tone that made Ken grin.

But Ken sobered abruptly as he was struck by a thought. ‘Wait a minute. How did O’Bannion walk away from being shot at that range by hollow-point bullets?’

‘He was wearing Kevlar,’ Demetrius said.

Ken narrowed his eyes. ‘Really? Sonofabitch went in prepared. He knew the girl was trouble.
How
did he know?’

‘Does it matter? Once I kill him, he can’t tell anyone else whatever it is that he knows.’

‘He knew enough to track her to that alley. I told Decker to go into the office and listen to the audio feed from the girl’s tracker after he’s done checking out the Anders house, but knowing O’Bannion’s out there with a cop, I don’t want to wait that long. I’ll have Sean get started on it right now. O’Bannion may have already told people what he knows.’

‘Especially that brother of his,’ Demetrius muttered. ‘Goddamn troublemaker.’

‘No argument there. But even if he didn’t tell his brother, he could have told Bishop.’

‘I thought of that when I saw them together. So they both have to go?’

He sounded so hopeful that Ken chuckled. ‘Yes, Demetrius. Both O’Bannion and Bishop have to go. The brother too, just in case. But you can’t leave any bullets behind in any of the bodies.’

‘Got it. So who
did
kill that girl in the alley? Anders?’

‘No, I don’t think Chip or Marlene knew she’d gotten out. They paid for her. I doubt they’d risk their investment. But the daughter – Stephanie – knows what happened.’ Ken glanced at the security monitor. The eyes of all three Anderses were closed, exhaustion lining their faces. ‘Looks like they’re taking a nap. Time to wake them up and finish this.’

‘I’ll call you when I’ve taken care of O’Bannion. After that, his brother.’

‘Stone,’ Ken murmured, remembering all too well the newspaper headline with Stone O’Bannion’s byline –
High school teacher found with kiddie porn stash
. He, Demetrius and Reuben had needed to do some fast cleanup, taking risks they never would have taken had the O’Bannion brothers not come so close. ‘Make those O’Bannion boys hurt. A lot.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Demetrius said quietly. ‘I will.’

Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday 4 August, 12.15
P.M.

Delores Kaminsky was indeed a hugger, Marcus thought as he was dragged down into the petite woman’s embrace. And she was far stronger than she looked. He patted her back awkwardly as she held on hard.

Finally she let go and rocked back on her heels to look up at him with a smile that made him smile back. ‘It is very nice to meet you, Marcus.’

About thirty-five, she had china-blue eyes, porcelain skin and short blond curls. Standing no more than five feet tall, she resembled one of the antique dolls Audrey had collected as a girl. The enormous dog that had been watching him like a hawk since they’d approached curled up at her feet, apparently welcoming him as well.

‘Likewise, Delores. I understand that I’m the last O’Bannion sibling to have the honor of meeting you.’

Her bright blue eyes twinkled. ‘Well, we were both busy there for a few months, what with ICU and rehab. I’ll forgive you this time. Besides, you’re here now and you’ve brought my favorite homicide detective, so all is forgiven.’ She leaned up on her toes to whisper loudly, ‘But next time, kiss her, okay? I think it’d sweeten her up.’