Where Evil Waits (25 page)

A
GENT
H
OGAN PUSHED ASIDE
the first set of pictures and laid out a second.

“Here are the ‘special’ murders,” he said to Kara. “In the order you received the packages: Evelyn Camp, nine months ago, from Charleston—a pearl necklace. Then there are two items from victims we haven’t identified yet, but there’s almost no chance in hell they’re alive.” He laid out photos the FBI had apparently taken of the woman’s watch and the lady’s gloves—the next two gifts Kara had received with the horse cards. “Next is Tony Fietti, six months ago from Chattanooga,” he said, adding a photo of the engraved pen. She flinched; she had just learned about him this morning. “And after him is another gift we haven’t yet matched to a victim.” The man’s tiger-eye ring.

“And now, Megan Kessler,” Luke said. “She’s the seventh.”

Hogan added her picture along with the photo of the barrette Kara had never actually seen. It had been delivered to the FBI instead of coming to her, but it was the same story. Sending it to the FBI only showed that the killer wasn’t going to be waylaid by Kara’s hooking up
with the authorities. In fact, he seemed to revel in it. And Photoshopping Kara’s face to the body only showed that he was—

She swallowed, terror knotting in her throat. “He’s finished, isn’t he?” she asked. “He’s coming for me now.”

“When he does,” Luke said, “he’ll find me.”

Kara tried to take comfort in that. Even so, the fear didn’t go away.

Mike Hogan leaned back, his gaze on Kara. She knew he was looking for a reaction, something that suggested that seeing it all laid out like this might somehow make sense to her.

It didn’t.

She touched the top picture in the right column. “Evelyn Camp,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

Hogan pulled out his notes. “She was a retired school-teacher with three grown children. She was twice-divorced and lived with her twin sister. She was out walking her dog—a shih tzu.” There was more, and Kara listened. She listened for anything,
anything
that might ring a bell.

Then to Tony Fietti. She’d already learned some of it from Luke and the information Agent Hogan added didn’t make things any clearer.

And Megan. They didn’t know a lot about her, he said; two FBI agents had been dispatched to speak with her parents this morning. Hogan had wanted to go but deemed it more important to meet Kara and start picking her brain, and it dawned on her that right now, even as they spoke, Megan’s parents were being told that their daughter was missing and police didn’t know where she was but it was likely she’d been strangled with—

Kara looked up. “Where are their bodies?” she asked, and looked back and forth between the two columns of
pictures. “These, on the left… We have those bodies, even Penny Wolff, who was strangled like these others. But these…” She looked up and found Hogan and Luke sharing a glance. Clearly, their minds had gotten there before hers had. “He’s doing something with them, isn’t he?” she asked, her stomach twisting. “That’s what you think.”

“It’s a good bet,” Hogan said. “It seems unlikely to me that if he’d just dumped them the way he did Penny Wolff, that none of them have been found yet over the course of a year. And, there seems to be a delay between the times they disappear and the times he sends you the messages. Like he’s doing something that takes a while and doesn’t contact you until he’s finished.”

“Oh, God.”

Luke shook his head, looking back and forth between the two sets of pictures. “Andrew is in both groups. He wasn’t strangled with barbed wire and we had his body, yet Kara received a gift and a card for him and both messages:
TRUTH
with the sunglasses and
Look what you’ve done
with his picture—at different times.”

Agent Hogan took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I can explain that, except to say that Andrew might have been so important the killer taunted you
both
ways. Andrew started it all. He was your husband. Taking him out of the picture and blaming you for his death was one hell of a way to hurt you. And then the killer hung on to Andrew’s sunglasses for a whole year, apparently for the sole purpose of tormenting you.”

“So it’s more than just personal,” Luke said. “It’s sexual. He
wants
Kara.”

“Maybe, but that’s the problem with profiling: We look for patterns, we
live
for patterns, and sometimes, we find them where they don’t exist. The bottom line is that
logistics still matter to killers, sometimes more than patterns or even reasons. A serial killer who specializes in knives may use a gun now and then, or a car. A guy who kept trophies from his victims may have simply found one trophy in storage he’d forgotten about—like the sunglasses. Most of the time, at least some aspects of the killings don’t follow suit and when we make too much out of a deviation, we can be led astray.”

“But if that’s the case,” Kara said, “then there may not be a pattern here at all. He may have gone to Charleston feeling the urge to kill and Evelyn Camp just happened to be a person who walked by. Maybe it was the same in Chattanooga, with Fietti, and the same with Megan Kessler. For God’s sake, the whole thing could be random.”

“Does it feel random to you? Or does it feel like he’s trying to tell you something?”

She quailed. He was right: Not everything fit, but there was a message here. Something Alexander wanted her to know and take the blame for.
TRUTH.

A terrible thought niggled into her brain, the one no prosecutor dares to ponder. “A defendant,” she said. “Someone I prosecuted but who wasn’t guilty.”

Hogan shook his head. “Mann looked into that first thing. I know that would make sense, but we can’t find anyone who looks like that. And no one named Alexander.”

Kara let out a breath and it felt as if all the energy went from her body. She didn’t know where to start.

“Here’s a list of names—common derivatives of Alexander,” Hogan said, giving her the list. Alexander, Zander, Al, Alex, Lex, Lexi, Sandy… She’d never thought of some of them as variations of Alexander before. “There are three groups of people I’d like you to go through. Start with your cases at work—that’s the biggest pool of
people who may have a bone to pick with you and there are records that are fairly easy to search. Then, rack your brain in the group of people you would call family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors. I have to assume you two have already ruled out any men you’ve dated.” Kara nodded, not looking at Luke. “Lastly, go back in your history. Think back to the places you lived before Atlanta, acquaintances in college or graduate school, like that. Tag anyone you can think of with a name related to Alexander. But especially tag anyone who fits the profile.”

“The profile?” she asked.

“You’re looking for someone who’s physically strong and in need of control. He’s smart, and is getting fulfillment by proving it. Someone with time and money. Someone around your age, give or take a few years, and probably white. Someone who may have worked on a farm or a farm supply store or anyplace he might have come in contact with barbed wire. Someone who is socially competent and probably sexually competent, but who has issues with rage—

“Who killed cats when he was little and hates his mother.” Luke’s hands fisted. “This is theory, damn it; that’s all it is. You’re asking her to find a pretend person.”

“He’s not pretend. And he doesn’t hate his mother,” Hogan said. “He hates his father.”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s killing both men and women, without sexual assault. That doesn’t sound like mother-rage. Besides,” he added, looking at Kara with those clear blue eyes, “this is someone who hates
you
. He wants you to suffer, and he’s willing to spend everything he has to see that happen.”

“I get that,” she said. “I just don’t understand why.”

“That’s the easy part, Kara,” Hogan said. “He wants you to learn the truth.”

W
E’VE GOT A PROBLEM,”
Knutson said, coming in from the back room where he’d been on the phone. Kara looked up. She’d searched the files of her cases for Alexanders, like Agent Hogan had asked her to. She’d found two so far, but neither was a good candidate. Luke had been working on a set of maps, both on paper and on a computer program. He looked up when Knutson came in, and Hogan came from the kitchen holding a page that curled in his hand. Fresh out of the fax machine that now sat on the peninsula.

“The farmer in Mississippi who found Penny Wolff’s body sold the story to a tabloid,” Knutson said. “The local newspaper picked it up. Their weekly Thursday paper came out with a special Sunday edition this morning reporting that the body Morris Sledge found was strangled with barbed wire. Sledge gave an ‘exposé’ detailing the marks he saw on her neck and is claiming the local sheriff’s office is conspiring with Georgia officials to keep that information from the public.”

“They are,” Kara said. It happened all the time: Police withheld details of a crime.

“Not anymore. It’s already made the morning news.”

“Christ,” Luke said. “The press will have a field day with this.”

“Done,” Knutson said. “Megan Kessler’s family chimed in. They’re confirming that they’ve been told she probably died the same way. Pretty soon the whole damn country will be up in arms over the Barbed Wire Strangler.” He looked at Luke, and something passed between them that Kara thought was a warning:
Keep your head down, Varón.

Luke cursed. He pushed back from the table and began pacing. Kara knew he felt like a caged bear: He couldn’t work openly on the drug ring anymore and risk Collado recognizing him from his time in South America. And he couldn’t work openly on Kara’s case and risk being recognized as an FBI agent. He was trapped.

Knutson jerked his chin at Luke. “Come talk a minute?”

They stepped outside and Kara felt Hogan studying her. His intensity was akin to Luke’s: powerful and concentrated, bone-deep. She spared a thought to wonder what his life must be like, day in and day out immersed in the study of the most twisted minds on earth. It seemed to have taken a toll on him.

“I’m trying,” she said, feeling his gaze like the gavel of a judge.
Guilty: Murder by association.

He came forward, holding the page from the fax machine in his hand. “See if this helps,” he said, and flattened it on the table in front of her.

Kara frowned. It was a sketch, an artist’s rendering of a man. Thirty-five-ish, cropped blond hair, wide cheekbones. He was muscular with wide, sloped shoulders in a long-sleeved shirt. His eyes stared at her with menace.

The drawing alone brought a shiver to her skin. “This is him?” she asked, and couldn’t believe the fractured sound coming out of her throat was her voice. “Alexander?”

“Ronald Gibson agreed to sit down with an artist. He hadn’t seen Alexander for almost a year, but this is what he remembers.” Hogan waited, anticipation rolling off him in waves. Kara studied the picture. This was the man they were looking for. The man who’d run Andrew down in a car, killing an FBI agent at the same time. The man who’d killed Louie and Penny and who paid Ronald Gibson to set up the hit on John Wolff in prison. This was the man who’d sent Kara gifts and notes for the past year, and who had killed a twenty-two-year-old girl the night before last with his ‘special’ barbed wire garrote. This was the man who threatened Aidan and sent them into hiding.

This was the man who was planning to strangle her next. She would be one of his ‘special’ kills.

And she didn’t know who the hell he was.

Tears gathered in her throat. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, there’s something familiar about him but… God. I don’t know.”

Luke came back in the front door. He saw Kara’s expression and beelined to the table.

“Fuck,” he said when he realized what she was looking at. “This came from Gibson?”

Hogan nodded.

“I can’t tell,” Kara said. “I mean, those artists’ drawings… they’re always so generic. I can’t tell.”

Luke bent down and kissed her head. “It’s okay,” he said, shooting Hogan a fuck-off glare. “If you’ve met him, it’ll come to you.”

She looked up. Knutson hadn’t come back. “Was that about Collado?”

“He’s moving,” Luke said. “He’s asking to meet with Montiel and me before he gives the go ahead to move the drugs.”

A stab of fear got her in the chest. She cursed herself for feeling it. She had no dibs on Luke. He had every right to finish the job he’d been working on for more than a year here in the States and long before that in Colombia. Frank Collado had shot him, put him in prison, left him to rot. Luke deserved the chance to be there for Collado’s demise—especially since he was largely responsible for it.

“Okay,” she said, and pushed back from the table to stand. She
was
okay. She didn’t need Luke to stay with her.

But, oh, she
wanted
him to, and that realization set her heart spinning.

Get over it. There were a lot of things she’d wanted from the men in her life over the years. Acceptance from her father. Devotion from Andrew. Protection from Luke. Ironic that he was the only one who’d delivered, more so than she had ever dreamed he would. But now he had work to do. She couldn’t complain: He was leaving her in good hands.

She rose up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Be careful. Please,” she whispered.

He blinked, then his eyes went glacial. “Be careful?” he snarled. “Where the hell do you think I’m going?”

She was taken aback. “Collado—”

“Fuck Collado.” He spun away but in the same breath, spun back. Angry. “Jesus, Kara. What do you think you are to me, just another case? Because that’s not what I was thinking.”

Her pulse trip-hammered.
Really?

Luke’s breathing deepened. “Mike,” he said without
looking up, and Agent Hogan said, “Going,” and retreated into the back room. Luke continued to glare at Kara, his hands opening and closing at his sides, as if trying to keep himself from touching her.

She tried to explain. “I just thought—”

“You thought we’d play around in bed for a night and then it would be business as usual. I’m not Varón, damn it.”

Something in Kara’s chest fluttered. She hadn’t thought of their night as playing around and then business as usual, but now, trying to justify her own assumptions, she realized it was because she hadn’t
thought,
period. Like some needy, frightened, sex-deprived creature, she’d allowed herself to be swept away by Luke: his strength, his safety, his sexuality. She hadn’t done it mindlessly and she wasn’t sorry. But neither had she dared to view it as anything more.

“It’s time to make a decision, Counselor,” he said, his voice edged with emotion. “It’s not about whether I chase Alexander or whether I chase Collado: I made that decision in the alley and you can’t change it. I’m staying with you until this bastard with the wire is caught. You don’t have any choice about that.”

A windfall of relief swept through her. Her conscience tried to argue that she should be ashamed of that, but she batted it down. “Then, what decision?”

He looked at her as if trying to see to the bottom of her soul. “It’s what to do after. I’ll catch this killer and keep you and Aidan safe. But for the first time in my life, I can see past the end of a case. I can see who I am and what I want.” His gaze dropped to her lips, then climbed to her eyes again and heated. “I’m pretty damn sure it’s you.”

Kara’s bones melted. “It’s only been… days—”

“It’s been a lifetime.” He took her shoulders, seeming
to finally lose a battle within himself not to touch her. His fingers bit in hard, his arms tight with restraint. “The first night we spoke in that alley, you claimed to know what kind of man I was. You were wrong then, and you were wrong just now, thinking I’d leave. So, you need to make a decision.”

Kara’s heart gave a shiver. Luke would let someone else take in Collado in order to stay with her until this was over. And maybe longer. It was a heady sensation, and strange, to be touched that she’d made him so angry. But she was touched, nonetheless. “I’m sorry,” she said, and tried to pull herself together. “How about if I take it under advisement?”

Luke cursed, then swooped down, his lips crushing hers, his arms gathering her up against him so that her toes barely touched the floor. He kissed her hard, with a wealth of pent-up emotion rattling through his limbs, her spine bent back and her face tipped up to his. There was nothing tender, just an explosion of primal need that stole her breath and laid claim to something deep in her body, and when he was finished her lips felt swollen and bruised and longing for more.

And she knew she’d been delivered a message: Don’t doubt him. He was here to the end.

He set her to arm’s length just as the door opened behind them. Hogan cleared his throat. “Sorry,” he said. “But you need to see this.”