Darker Than Desire (14 page)

“This is sex. We have this.” She stepped back and let the water rinse him off and then she went to her knees, taking him in her mouth. When she bit him, he swore and grabbed her head, started to fuck her mouth. It was fast and desperate and he came almost immediately. She rose, stared him in the eyes. “We have that … and that's trust.”

She lifted a hand and placed it on his cheek. “You know as well as I do that there's more between us. You can deny it all you want, but denying it doesn't make it any less true. I'll wait until you're ready to stop fighting it.”

Then she turned back to the shower to wash up.

Whether he'd let her stay or not, she didn't know.

But she'd put the thoughts in his head and she did know one thing—he'd have to think about it now.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

The face in the mirror looked harmless.

Most people never looked more than once.

As it should be.

It was particularly handy now.

Moving through the hospital was easy. Getting inside Max's room wasn't. The cop at the door didn't move. Waiting for him to take a break proved tedious.

Patience, though, was a virtue.

The one who watched knew how to wait. It was, after all, something long practiced. This had started more than twenty years ago. What was a few minutes? A few hours?

Finally, that patience paid off.

There was a fight down the hall, between an irate father and a stepfather. When the fight went from verbal to physical the opportunity arose.

Moving inside the room, the one who watched looked around, eyed Maxwell Shepherd. He was still, looked almost small under the bedclothes, and he was asleep.

That made it even easier.

A pillow, held over the face.

He fought, but in addition to being patient, the one who watched was strong. It took very little time.

In just under moments, the one who watched returned to the door and checked outside. The cop was still struggling with a man on the floor. People were focused on them.

It was that easy to slip in, then slip out.

That easy to take a life.

*   *   *

“Where do we stand?”

Jensen Bell didn't sit in the police department with the chief. They also hadn't met in the coffee shop the way they had more than once in the past.

They each had a cup of coffee, but they'd picked it up from a nearby gas station, meeting at the little gazebo down on the river. “Missy Sutter came in to talk. Finally.”

Sorenson didn't speak. He knew Missy Sutter, the widow to one Charles Sutter, Jr., had been in to see Jensen. Sorenson didn't know the particulars of that conversation, yet.

“She still insisting that Charlie was too good, too sweet, to be connected to Cronus?” Sorenson's voice was sardonic, his lip curling on a sneer.

Jensen looked down at her feet, her heart twisting as she remembered the battered, bruised look on Missy's face. “No,” she said on a sigh. Then she reached into her bag and pulled something out, turning it over to Sorenson without a word.

The evidence bag did nothing to limit his view of the top picture.

“Her parents apparently left her a cabin down at Rough River in Kentucky. It was still in her name. Missy isn't from around here, so we didn't know about it.” Jensen grimaced, the cop in her pissed off that she hadn't unearthed that detail—yet—but her focus hadn't really been on Missy but on her dead scumbag, child-molesting husband.

He hadn't died hard enough.

“She found these there?” Sorenson asked, his voice neutral.

“Yep.” She slanted him a look. That neutral tone was even more dangerous than if he'd been yelling. “She didn't know, Chief. She really didn't. She didn't even drive herself home. She had a friend with her and that friend ended up driving her home. The woman—her name is Denita Albi—is the one who packed up all the pictures, talked her into coming to the police department.”

“She didn't want to come?”

“It's not that.” Jensen thought of the pale, quiet zombie of a woman she'd spoken with earlier that day. “She was almost completely shutdown when we spoke. I asked her questions and she answered in this monotone, but when she looked at me, she was looking through me. That son of a bitch managed to break her, even from his fucking grave.”

“You really believe she didn't know?”

“No.” Jensen took a sip from her coffee, more to wash away the taste of gorge that kept trying to crawl up her throat than anything else. “Look at the pictures, Chief.”

He blew out a breath and then tugged out a pair of thin gloves from his pocket, donning them before he started to flip through the pictures. When he reached the very last one, he stopped.

It was a picture of a smiling boy, maybe nine. He had Missy's eyes. That was the one thing Jensen had noticed on her own, before asking Missy about him.

Missy hadn't been able to answer.

It had been her friend Denita who'd responded.

That's her baby brother, Tyler. He lives with her twin, Mitchell. He still lives here, in her parents' home. He got custody of Ty after her folks died.

Sorenson stared at the picture for a long, long time before he looked up at Jensen.

“Who is this?” he asked softly.

“It's Missy's little brother.” Jensen barely managed to resist the impulse to hurl her coffee at something. Resisted, barely, the urge to scream, to pummel something. Violence pumped hard and heavy in her veins. “She didn't want kids, something they fought about, a lot, but mental illness ran in her side of the family—her mother was bipolar and Missy had issues with depression. Then her parents died, and Charlie started to fixate on her brother.”

“Fixate.”

Jensen took another sip from her coffee. “Yes. That's what she told me. Tyler is what made her really come out of that dazed state. She's furious now. Charlie and her fought, over and over, about that kid. Now she finally understands why.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” She pulled out the other evidence bag and handed it over. “He did one useful thing, though.”

Sorenson frowned as he gingerly pulled out the faded brown journal, flipping through it. The details noted in it had his face going white, lines bracketing his face.

“How is this useful?” he asked grimly.

“Well. Missy says she didn't look at it, said she couldn't. Neither did the friend.” She slid him a grim smile. “The way
I
see it, there's a good chance nobody knows about this. It's possible we could let it slip that we found key evidence that will likely lead to the arrest of the rest of Cronus. Anybody willing to testify against the others will get a more lenient deal.”

“You want us to bluff them into turning on each other.”

Jensen arched a brow. “You got a better idea?”

“No.” He smoothed a finger across his left eyebrow. “No, I do not. Let me think this through, Bell.”

“Okay. If there's nothing else, I think I'm going to head out to the judge's place. I hear David Sutter is staying there, and it's about time we pin him down and ask those questions that need to be asked.”

She turned to go, but the chief's voice made her pause.

“Use care, Detective. We've got lots of questions, but that's not a man who'll respond well under too much pressure. Too much of it, and he'll go nuclear on us.”

She nodded and then continued down the sidewalk to her car.

*   *   *

Trust
.

David brooded over it, hours after she left.

He was still brooding over it when Jensen Bell pulled into his driveway.

He eyed her narrowly over the long, slim cigar he'd been trying to enjoy.

He didn't offer to put it out as she came toward him, just continued to puff on it as she came to a stop in front of him.

“You do realize we've been trying to get you to come in and give your statement,” she said bluntly.

David lifted his face to the sky, studied the endless blue. “You do realize I have little use for statements. Even less for cops.”

“You have good reason.”

That had him looking back at her.

She arched a brow. “Surprised? I know some of the slime who have been wearing a badge. I want to beat them bloody. I'm waiting for the day they stand before the judge and end up getting slapped with a
guilty
verdict and they end up in the general population. However … I still need your statement.”

“About what exactly?”

*   *   *

The man was beautiful, Jensen had to admit. A woman would have to be blind not to notice it.

He was also either deliberately obtuse or an idiot.

The cool blue eyes—a surreal shade of pale blue surrounded by a darker rim of near indigo—weren't the eyes of an idiot, though. Jensen had tangled with this man before, the night of the fire, and she knew when she was talking to somebody with less than average intelligence.

That wasn't David Sutter. Caine Yoder. Whatever the hell he called himself. He could be Peter Pan and leading a merry little band of Lost Boys and she wouldn't give a damn.

She wanted his fucking statement. Once she could eliminate him—from
all
of the cases linked to him, and hell, did she have a lot of cases she could link to him—then she could move on to the others. But she couldn't do shit until he stopped fighting her.

Hooking a thumb in her belt loop, she tapped her nails against her thigh and studied him.

He stared right back.

Typically, people didn't like it when a cop just stared.

Actually, in her experience, people didn't like it when anybody just stared.

David didn't seem to give a shit.

She suspected he would sit there for the next hour and let her stare and he'd stare right back. His face would never yield a damn thing. While interesting to contemplate, it wouldn't get her anything.

“Look. I don't have time to dick around with you,” she said abruptly. “You don't like cops. You don't trust us, and that's understandable. I won't go into detail about how much I'd like to go back in time and stop Sims from putting a bullet through his brain—he should have gone to court and he should have gone to jail. But he won't answer for his crimes.”

Taking a step forward, she held David's gaze. “There are others who are going to get away with it if we can't build a case against Cronus. Not to mention that both you and Lana Rossi are going to have a hell of a lot of trouble in your lives if we don't get some answers about the night you two disappeared. There is information
you
know about the night your mother died, information you know about every fucking dirty secret in this town, and I know it. I can see it on you.”

“Can you really?” His tone was bored.

But flames burned in his gaze.

Something subtle, and lethal.

“Do you
want
them to get away with what they've done?”

He lifted a heavily muscled shoulder. “Seems to me that somebody has been busy lately. Dealing out their own form of justice.”

A dark, ugly smile curled his lips as he looked back at her. “I don't think there will be as many skating by without answering this time, Detective Bell.”

He knows
. The realization hit her, hard. The cop in her wanted to demand he tell her, and now. If he didn't, she could just haul him in. But that same part of her held back—David was too smart. Too sly. And too angry.

She understood that anger. The man who'd killed her mother was currently sucking down painkillers and getting a book or two a week as cancer ate away at him. He hadn't been tried for her death. He might answer to God, but he wouldn't answer here and the injustice of it all sucked.

Frankly, justice sometimes
sucked
, but Jensen believed in her job, at the heart of it.

Which was why she didn't make that demand. The man in front of her would shut down. She knew, without a doubt, he would rather go to jail than tell her any damn thing. He might, eventually, tell her on his own timetable, but that was a maybe.

Refocusing, she blew out a controlled breath.

“Let's put all of that to the side. I didn't even come here, specifically, to discuss any of that. We need to talk about that body that was found over there.” She nodded to the Frampton house. Trinity Benningfield's place. It was going to be torn down. Noah had passed the news on to Adam and Jensen had heard it from her sister—Chris worked at the bar Adam owned. The small-town grapevine made sure everybody in town would hear about it in no time flat.

David didn't look at the house. He continued to stare at her. A few weeks ago, he'd worn his hair in that bowl-like haircut she was used to seeing on the Amish who came into town. It was cut shorter now, almost brutally so, with nothing to detract from the harsh, beautiful lines of his face. Nothing to protect a person from the unyielding power of his gaze, either.

Now, as he continued to study her, Jensen realized she had to fight the urge to look away. That made her mentally square her shoulders.
The jackass.
She wasn't going to play these games with him.

A few more seconds passed and then he said, “The body. You mean my mother.”

“Your mother,” she prodded. “Yeah. Let's talk about her.”

“I don't see the point. She's been dead twenty years, give or take.”

Blowing out a breath, Jensen did a silent count of ten. “That is just
what
we need to discuss. How she came to
be
dead, why she was put down there, why the authorities weren't notified, why you disappeared. All of that. That's why I need your statement.”

*   *   *

Jensen Bell, he'd heard, was like a dog with a bone.

It looked like they'd given him to her for a chew toy.