by Nalini Singh
His smile reached his eyes. “All that repressed anger, you know? God, it was fun to have an outlet. Best gift the bastard ever gave me.” Affection in his voice, so real she might’ve believed it if she hadn’t already realized that Vincent put on emotions like other people put on clothes. “The hiker was really cute and she was all smiley and she said hello with that accent, and I had a rock in my hand and I just smashed her head in with it.”
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Anahera flinched.
But Vincent wasn’t finished. “She didn’t die, not straightaway. She kept on trying to talk even though I’d smashed one of her eyes almost out, and only half her mouth was moving. I sat beside her for a long time, stroking her hair, and telling her it would be all right. My mother used to stroke my hair and tell me it would be all right.” A dreamy look to him. “After.”
“After what?”
A sly smile. “After my father tucked me in at bedtime like a good dad. A picture-perfect dad.”
Nauseated, Anahera said, “Did he—”
“Talking about them is boring.” Plastic smile, unwavering aim. “My hobby’s the interesting thing. After the hiker started gurgling blood, I picked up my rock and smashed her and smashed her and smashed her until her face was pulp.” He shrugged. “I know, not very sophisticated, but in my defense, I was only fourteen.”
“Why were you so angry at your mother that day?” Anahera whispered, realizing that though he chose victims who reminded him of his horrific first sexual experience with a woman, his rage came from a far different source. “What did she do?” Or not do.
“I don’t remember. And I told you”—he looked straight down his arm at her with eyes that held nothing—“talking about the bastard and his bitch is boring.”
Anahera changed tack. “What happened to the hiker’s body?”
“I finally realized I’d been an idiot.” Vincent made a face. “I hadn’t taken any precautions or made any plans. Dumb teenage lack of impulse control.” He smiled, asking her to smile with him. “Eventually, I dragged her off the path and covered her up with leaves. I figured she’d be found, but my pretty, smiley girl hadn’t logged her hike with anyone, was still there the next day when I came back with a shovel and an axe and a tarp. Do you know how hard it is to chop up a body? Blood and viscera everywhere.”
“You didn’t.” It came out a rough whisper.
“Scout’s honor.” Vincent grinned. “I took off all my clothes before I started, put them in a plastic bag; and I brought water to wash in. It took me hours to carry the pieces out in my daypack.”
“Where is she?”
“Buried in the bush behind the house. Cadaver dogs never came that far when they finally did a search.”
“Is that why you decided to target more hikers? Because they were less likely to be missed at once?”
He nodded. “I met the second one on the trail and she came with me when I said I could show her a secret local waterfall. I managed to get her close enough to my burial ground to keep all of her—and I didn’t use a rock that time. No broken bones.”
And Anahera knew. “The skeleton Shane found.”
“I dug her up after my dear departed parents weren’t around to spy on me, then spent weeks cleaning up her bones. I kept her in my basement workroom that Jemima knows never to go into.” Another one of those lopsided grins. “But that first summer, I was still a kid, took the third one too soon in the same area. After I saw how the cops swarmed, I decided I’d have to be clever, not hunt so close to my home ground.”
Anahera frowned. “Did you put the bracelet in our cave on purpose?”
“Yes. Showing off to my friends.” His smile faded. “I was sorry later, when none of you wanted to go back there to hang out.” Voice quiet, poignant with sadness. “I was happy in that cave.”
“I don’t understand one thing,” Anahera said, wondering if she’d imagined the flash of movement in the trees behind Vincent’s shoulder.
“What?”
“You must’ve had other victims between that summer and your first trip abroad on your own.” After killing three times in a single summer, Vincent couldn’t have gone dormant until he began traveling internationally. “And you pointed it out yourself—we live in a small country. Why did no one make the connection between all the victims?”
“I’ve never been stupid, Ana, you know that.” It was a chiding statement. “I sat down and thought about what made me happy and realized I didn’t have a racial preference. Māori, Tongan, Italian, Indian, I found pictures of women with the right look and imagined . . . playing with them. The joy, the release of tension I felt was the same.”
Anahera curled her fingers into her palms, flexed her feet.
“I favor nicer girls and spend the most time with them”—Vincent’s eyes skimmed her body with a chilling kind of warmth—“but the right whore will do to plug the gap, especially if she’s young and relatively unspoiled.” Roughness in his voice there, before it smoothed out to calm control again. “Age can vary from nineteen to a young-looking thirty-five or so. I did kill younger teenagers, but that was when I was a kid myself. You’d be surprised how many nice girls will meet a good-looking rich boy for a secret date.”
He shrugged. “Once I understood all that, it was easy to vary things up so I was satisfied, but no one would see a pattern. Take a good churchgoing girl, follow it up with a cheating soccer mom in another town, throw in a hell-raising runaway—no pattern, nothing to see.”
“Except you,” Anahera pointed out. “Someone should’ve noticed a boy whose name kept turning up again and again.”
“I told you I got clever,” he replied. “I did my research before each kill, had a place to dispose of the body.” Pride now, iridescent beneath the golden smile. “The churchgoing girl went into a fenced-off geothermal pool so hot she’s probably sludge by now. I drove the soccer mom’s SUV into a lake—it wasn’t found for years. Runaway’s buried in the woods on a friend’s farm. We met in town and I convinced her we’d smoke dope together if she snuck into the barn after lights-out.”
Vincent had been smart, scarily so. No signature, no attempts to play with the police. For him, the hunt wasn’t an act of blinding rage. Neither was the body dump. No, the rage came in between, after he had the women under his control.
A man like that could hide his crimes for decades.
But his intelligent choices had left him with no way to tell the world what he’d achieved. Anahera, however, was a captive audience he planned to silence.
Fuck him.
She’d use his arrogance to save herself. The arm with which he held the stun gun had to be getting tired. All she needed was a second’s inattention as he readjusted position and she’d take her chances. It had to be harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one, especially if that moving target was weaving and dodging in an unpredictable way.
“How many?” she asked, not looking in the direction where she’d seen movement. If someone was out there, she wasn’t going to give them away to Vincent.
“You know,” he said after a long pause, “I’ve never counted, but I think it must be something like twenty-seven.”
He was lying.
Whether it was the low number for a man who’d killed three times in a single blistering summer, or that he hadn’t counted, there was a lie in there somewhere. But then again, Vincent was a psychopath who’d successfully fooled people his entire lifetime. Lying was part of his oeuvre.
“Stop pulling my leg, Vincent.” His arm had to start quivering soon. “You were the best of us at keeping track of things. That’s why we always asked you to be the judge in any challenge.”
He gave her that beatific smile with no hint of evil to it, and moved the Taser from one hand to the other so fast that she had no time to react.
Keep him talking, she told herself instead of panicking. Give yo
urself time to think. It wasn’t hard to follow the instruction—because even though she was standing face-to-face with him while he threatened her, she still found it difficult to believe that the boy she’d once raced across the sands had turned into a monster.
Her questions were infinite.
“Busted,” he said with a huge laugh. “But the number is my special secret. No one will ever know what I’ve done. Not the whole of it.”
“Were you always like this?” The question came from deep inside her. “When we played as children, did you go home and torture animals?”
He tilted his head partially to the side. “Could be I was born this way,” he said and his eyes were laughing again, his amusement inexplicable and slippery. “Or could be it was the third bedtime tuck-in or the thirtieth that did it.” Another shrug. “Personally, I’m going for nurture over nature—my baby brother is definitely having a hard time hiding his crazy these days. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him. I dealt with the problem, didn’t I?”
Cold fingers on Anahera’s neck. “Where’s Kyle, Vincent?”
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“He burned down your cabin, Ana. I’m sorry.” Streaks of red on his cheekbones, his tone abashed. “Such a petty, vindictive little shit—and he wasn’t smart enough to change out of his kerosene-splattered jeans before he came home. I didn’t make clever choices all these years to be brought down by a spoiled brat who thought he was the big bad in the family.”
“Did you look him in the face when you killed him?”
“No.” Several golden strands of Vincent’s hair lifted in the slight breeze before settling back down. “Do you think I’m a monster? He was my baby brother. And if he’d kept on being a good little psychopath and hiding who he was from everyone, I’d have been a proud sibling. But no, he had to go and start playing asinine ego games.”
No doubt Vincent would brush off Kyle’s disappearance by saying his brother had gone traveling abroad. Nothing strange in that. Nothing strange in Kyle settling down in another country, either.
No, Vincent wasn’t stupid.
Anahera had seen no more movement, accepted that she’d fooled herself in her desperation. “So,” she said, “what do you plan to do to me?”
“My tastes have become far more sophisticated than with my first . . . lover.” A softness to his gaze, memories of murder and pleasure. “There’s no fun in just bashing in a woman’s face. It’s the difference between sculling a mug of cheap beer and savoring a fine wine. These days, I like to take my time.”
“I’ll be missed,” Anahera warned. “Just like Miriama was missed.”
“I told you, I had nothing to do with her death!” It was the first time he’d lost his temper, his voice rising and his hand shaking on the Taser.
A loud noise sounded in the trees at the same instant.
Vincent swung that way instinctively—and Anahera took the chance to run.
“Ana!” he shouted from behind her, but she kept on moving in an erratic weaving pattern, her feet pounding the earth and her lungs bursting.
“Drop it.” The words were cool, calm—and accompanied by the sound of the safety being disengaged on a gun.
Skidding to a halt, Anahera looked back and saw Will standing less than seven feet behind Vincent, a rifle pointed to the back of Vincent’s head. “You’re too smart to risk it,” he said when Vincent didn’t drop the Taser.
“You’re not authorized to have a gun.” The words were bitten out. “I checked with my source. Your paperwork’s still pending.”
“And you’re not authorized to have a Taser,” Will replied in that mild tone that gave nothing away. “There’s no way I’ll miss at this range. In case you’re hoping I’ll blow out your brains so you can go down in a blaze of glory, you should know I intend to shoot out your spine. I’m sure the prison hospital staff will be gentle as they turn you over so you don’t get bedsores, and when they reattach your catheter.”
Anahera couldn’t see Vincent’s face, but she could imagine the expression on it. To a man who’d been a prince, then a king, the idea of being helpless in anyone’s hands would be an enraging one. And, when it came down to it, Vincent Baker was a coward.
She wasn’t the least surprised when he dropped the stun gun.
“Turn around,” Will ordered. “Hands behind your head.”
Vincent obeyed, his eyes meeting Anahera’s across the clifftop clearing as Will closed in on him. “I guess our date will have to wait,” he said, that perfect, innocent smile on his face. “We would’ve had so much fun.”
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Vincent’s arrest pounded a shock wave through Golden Cove. Especially when it came out that there was a recording of him confessing to his heinous crimes. Will had turned on the recorder on his phone partially through the standoff, and the device had picked up both Anahera’s and Vincent’s voices. Not everything but enough.
“Thank God,” Anahera said to Will four days later, when they finally had a chance to be together.
Will had been caught up in the logistics and legalities of making sure Vincent would never again walk free. The one thing he hadn’t had to explain was illegal use of a firearm. Because the rifle he’d used to disarm Vincent was one of the decommissioned pair that hung in his rental; it wasn’t capable of firing even a single shot.
As for why Will had brought it with him—he’d run into Evelyn Triskell just as he was leaving the house. She’d stopped her car while passing his place, and yelled out a “Yoohoo!”
It turned out she’d gone for an early morning coffee-and-croissants run to Josie’s. But what she’d wanted to tell Will was that, on her way back, she’d glimpsed a hoodie-clad figure cross the road in the distance, moving from the hillside bush track to a track that Will knew led to the cliffs.
“The one he came from, it’s no doubt a messy track to run at the moment,” Evelyn had said. “Rain always turns it into a bog for at least a week, usually causes a rockfall or two along the way.” Pursed lips. “It’s probably one of the local boys wanting a challenge, but you really should do something about blocking off that track while it’s unsafe.”
Will’s instincts had kicked in.
“I memorized the track routes during the search for Miriama,” he’d said afterward, his eyes like chips of slate. “I knew the track Evelyn was complaining about started at the Baker property. I figured it had to be Kyle. I could see him setting the fire to get back at me—and I knew that’s where you must’ve gone.”
“I thought I’d be safe in bright daylight.”
Will had nodded. “Evelyn’s sighting was why I parked on the road and walked in through the trees. I didn’t want my presence to provoke the asshole into doing something stupid if he’d just come to admire his handiwork.”
He’d taken the gun because he knew both Vincent and Kyle had a firearms license and Evelyn hadn’t been able to tell him if the jogger she’d seen had been holding anything.
Anahera owed her life, at least partially, to the town gossip.
Anahera, too, had been trapped in an endless loop of police interviews. She hadn’t balked, not even when she was asked to repeat details for what felt like the ten billionth time. She’d do anything in her power to keep the world safe from Vincent.
Now, at long last, the two of them sat naked in Will’s bed, having stripped off each other’s clothes the instant after walking in the door. Anahera didn’t need to be a psychologist to know it was the need to celebrate life that had driven them to the most primal sex she’d ever experienced.
Limbs heavy in the aftermath, she sat with the sheet tucked up over her breasts while she bit chunks off a family-size bar of chocolate she’d dug out from Will’s pantry. It was apparently courtesy of an elderly townswoman who thought he was too thin. He, in turn, was halfway through a cup of coffee so dark she’d worry it’d keep him up all night except that they were
both so exhausted that sleep would come whether they wanted it or not.
“I didn’t delay helping you just to get more damning footage,” Will said.
“I know.” He wasn’t built that way. “I’d still be thanking you even if you had. Vincent needs to be locked up forever.”
Will rested his free hand on her sheet-covered thigh. “He was so calm. I needed him unbalanced enough that he’d fall for a noise in the bushes and you would have time to get out of range—then you said that about Miriama being missed.”
“I think his calmness through it all is what I’m having the hardest time handling.” Closing her own hand over his, she ran the pad of her thumb over his knuckle. “It’s as if his actions had no real impact on him.”
“I’m sure the prison shrinks will have a field day with him.” Will absently stroked her thigh. “They found Kyle’s body in the trunk of Kyle’s own car—Vincent told us he intended to bury his brother far from Golden Cove, in another isolated section of bush.”
“Is he still insisting he had nothing to do with Miriama’s death?”
Nodding, Will said, “Shrinks are convinced he’s lying to himself because he killed the woman he loved—as much as someone like Vincent can love.”
“You don’t agree?” Anahera put the unfinished chocolate bar on the side table.
“I don’t know.” Folding his arms behind his head, Will stared at the opposite wall. “He’s open about his other crimes to the point of bragging. Didn’t blink when walking me through how he pulled off his parents’ murder—or how he slit Kyle’s throat. But he becomes enraged if I so much as mention Miriama in connection with his other crimes. Hasn’t once budged from saying he never hurt her.”
Anahera blew out a breath. “Is there anything you can do to find out if he’s lying or not?”
