His brow lowered, and the corners of his mouth drooped until he seemed more sad clown than raging bull. “You think a man like Luke Jericho cares about me—his useless bastard half brother?”
The self-loathing reflected in that comment only reinforced her suspicion that Dante was carrying far too much guilt around—guilt that belonged elsewhere—like on his father’s shoulders, for example. And from what Dante had told her, Luke did care about him. Lowering her voice to a soothing tone, she reminded him of his own words. “Didn’t you say that even though your father left his entire estate to your brother—”
“You mean my half brother. Remember, I’m a bastard. My mother was my father’s housekeeper.”
She steepled her fingers and rested her chin atop them. “Didn’t you say Luke has set his lawyers working to divide the estate equitably between the two of you? Didn’t you say Luke’s invited you to move back to the family ranch?”
“He’s trying to buy me off.”
She shook her head. “I don’t see why he’d need to do that. I won’t pretend to know what’s in Luke’s mind and heart, but judging by his actions, I’d say he’s trying to build a relationship with you. I’d say he’s trying to be a good brother.”
When Dante raised one hand to press his fingers against his eyes, she noted a faint tremor. As a rule, though she knew of certain exceptions, serial killers weren’t prone to nervous tremors—not with all that ice running through their veins.
Her head was clearing, and the facts were shifting into a new, if confusing configuration. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but she was beginning to suspect Dante’s antics were more a cry for help than a true threat to her safety. In this moment, he seemed calm enough that she dared a confrontation.
“Dante, what’s this all about?” Then in a firm tone, she added, “I’m willing to hear you out, but I don’t like playing games.”
He reached for the newspaper, rolled it up, and began slapping it into his open hand.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
She couldn’t see the headline, but with each slap, the words she’d read earlier echoed in her mind.
Serial. Killer. Claims. Fourth. Victim.
Her own hands still trembled, so she kept them hidden beneath the desk. Her body didn’t seem to be getting the message her brain was sending:
He’s doing his damnedest to scare you. Don’t react.
The sound of the fan’s whirring and the slapping of the newspaper set her teeth on edge. Deliberately, she relaxed her jaw and waited while Dante struggled with his demons. At last, he dropped the paper and met her gaze. Tears had formed in his eyes, and his lips twitched into an apologetic smile. Whatever game they were playing, she was about to learn the rules.
Her heart picked up speed.
“I’m him.”
Her cheeks went numb. “You’re who?”
He passed one hand over his face. “Him. I’m the Santa Fe Saint. I killed those people.”
The whirring of the fan in the quiet room grew so loud she had to stop herself from covering her ears. The numbness in her cheeks spread to her mouth and tongue, and she couldn’t swallow or speak. Her skin felt waxy, and she pinched her arm like a child trying to wake herself from a bad dream.
Then Dante started to cry in earnest, to sob really. He sobbed and shuddered until blood, just a trickle, leaked from his nose onto his face. She frowned. A psychopath wouldn’t feel remorse. He simply wouldn’t. Was Dante’s display of emotion real, or just another show put on for her benefit?
If Dante was feigning his distress to trick her, he was not only the embodiment of a textbook, conscienceless killer, but a consummate actor to boot.
But if his emotion was real . . . then he most likely was not a killer at all. And if Dante wasn’t the Santa Fe Saint, why would he confess?
As desperately as she tried to make the pieces of this puzzle fit, they weren’t falling into any known psychiatric algorithm.
“I-I’m not certain . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t want to accuse him of lying and risk angering him. If he was indeed the Saint, he could turn on her in a heartbeat, and she’d have no defense other than screaming out that window and hoping she wasn’t dead by the time help arrived.
And yet she didn’t believe he was the Saint. Not completely anyway.
Dante spread the newspaper, almost reverently, on her desk and laid out his case for her. “See right here.” He jabbed the headline with his index finger. “It says the police are closing in on the killer. They’re about to make an arrest.” He looked up at her with pleading eyes. “You have to make it stop. I can’t sleep, knowing they’re coming for me.”
A fresh trickle of blood joined the drying stain under his nose, and he wiped it off with the back of his sleeve. “I can’t go on hiding in the shadows, looking over my shoulder, waiting for the moment the cops handcuff me and haul me down to the station. Last night, I locked myself in the closet, in case they came for me. I mean, they might say I tried to escape and shoot me. It happens, you know.”
Filling her lungs with a deep breath, she looked past him and tried to focus on what he was telling her. His words seemed paranoid, delusional. As if he was convinced the authorities were out to get him, and he wanted her to hand him over, here and now, in a place where he felt safe. That meant he hadn’t come to harm her. He’d come because he needed her help. Her pulse still thumped in her ears, but it was growing slower and softer. “You believe the police are closing in on you.”
“Yes.” He huffed out a breath, as if relieved she was finally getting it. “It says so right here in the Gazette.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. She needed to choose her next words carefully. “Not exactly. The paper doesn’t say the police are closing in on Dante Jericho.”
“Yes. It says so.” He jabbed his finger harder.
“Dante, the headline says the police are closing in on the Santa Fe Saint. It doesn’t say they’re closing in on you. Have you been interviewed by the police regarding these murders?”
“No.” He wrung his hands.
“Have you been interviewed by the police regarding anything at all?”
“Yes. Yes.” He nodded emphatically. “They called my home on the pretense of wanting donations for the policemen’s ball. But I can see through their tricks. I know that phone call was merely a ruse to get me to incriminate myself.”
“Dante, do you remember how we talked about the fact that some of what you believe may be a distortion of truth, a trick of your mind?”
“The police are the tricky ones.”
His thinking was circular and distorted, containing loose associations—like the thinking of a man with a very tenuous hold on reality. At last, here was a clinical diagnosis she recognized. Dante was displaying clear signs of a thought disorder, of impending psychosis.
She tried to remember what she’d read about false confessions, but most of what she knew applied to coerced confessions, not voluntary admissions of guilt. This was uncharted territory for her. “You’ve admitted to me already that you feel guilty for many things that we know are not your fault. Such as the fact that your mother died in a car accident.”
“But it is my fault. Her life was ruined when she got pregnant with me.”
These deep-seated beliefs could not be expunged with a simple reassurance, but her heart was heavy with the need to offer one anyway. “Your mother’s death is not your fault.” As she reached out her hand, palm up, she pushed away the memory of her own sister’s suicide.
He dug out her cell phone and placed it in her open hand. Her breath released in a relieved rush, but she took no pleasure in what she knew was coming next. “Do you actually remember committing these crimes?”
“I just said so. Do you want me to tell you all the details?”
She put up one hand
to stop him. “No. You need a lawyer before you talk to . . . the police.”
“Then you will call them? You have to call them—before I kill again.” And then he smiled . . . and she knew he knew he’d won. “You don’t want another dead body on your conscience now, do you?”
Her shoulders sagged under the weight of Dante’s confession. Even if she might consider betting her own life that the man before her was not the Santa Fe Saint, and she wasn’t at all sure she’d make that particular wager, she could never bet someone else’s.
The matter was out of her hands.
The moment Dante said he would kill again, whether she believed him or not, she was morally and legally bound to report him to the police. The statutes were clear on this matter. If a patient presented a danger to others, doctor-patient confidentiality no longer applied. She had a duty to warn.
Her hands were steady, but the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach left her fighting off a dry heave. Dante slumped in the chair across from her, his cheeks and chin streaked with dried tears and blood.
He’d grown up unloved, unwanted. He believed he was nothing. He believed he’d killed his mother merely by being born.
Her heart squeezed painfully, and her knees rattled against the bottom of her desk.
Either she was currently cloistered in her office with a demented serial killer, or she was about to send an innocent man—an innocent man with whose welfare she’d been charged—to prison.
She powered on her cell and hit 911.
THREE
Sunday, July 21, 7:00 A.M.
Once again, his brother, Dante, had broken his promise to breakfast with the family. Luke crumpled a napkin in his fist and turned his attention to his mother, who slouched across from him, clanking her spoon around in a cup of hot chocolate. He tapped his fingers together, then ran them over the cool surface of the mosaic table that’d been in his family for generations. There, a river of blue and violet tiles raged across a white background while light from the east window bounced off the vibrant mosaic chips. His jaw tightened. If these shattered bits of broken glass could lose their sharp edges and come together to form a functional pattern, surely his fractured family could do the same.
His brother’s absence, while disappointing, was hardly a surprise. Luke didn’t know whether Dante had simply overslept, or if he hadn’t come home at all last night, but Luke didn’t intend to let anything spoil the morning. His gaze flicked to the panorama outside the breakfast room’s east window—his favorite view of Gran Cielo. To him, a good day started off sipping a man-up cup of Aileen’s blackest coffee while perusing the morning paper and watching the high grasses undulate across his family’s ranch. The way the soft hills of his land battled and finally surrendered to the hard peaks of the distant mountains pleased him, and he liked nothing better than watching the sun come up, and as its first order of business, turn the snowcapped summits of the Sangre de Cristo Range bloodred to match their name.
He loved Gran Cielo for its beauty, but even more for its toughness. He loved the way the hard ground fought back at planting time because that made a man strong. He loved the way the summer heat cooked a man’s bones because that called him up before dawn and drove him home in time for dinner with his loved ones—not that Luke’s father had ever made it home by dinner . . . or breakfast much, either. Thanks to his father, life on Gran Cielo had been harder than most.
But life’s not supposed to be easy.
Not unless you’re keen to turn out soft.
Besides, not counting the bachelor penthouse he’d occupied in his college days, Gran Cielo was the only home he’d ever known. He’d been born right here on the ranch. That little alcove off to the right was where he’d rushed into the world and thrown an entire set of monkey wrenches into his mother’s elaborate birth plan. A million times she’d sat at this very table and scolded him:
I was supposed to give birth in the new hospital downtown. I was supposed to be attended by the finest physicians. Here, she usually paused to whither him with a particularly disappointed look. I was supposed to get an epidural. You’ve always been so willful, Luke. What kind of a Jericho has the common manners to be born at home?
And then she’d wrap her arms around him and give him a loud smacking kiss on the cheek, and he’d know his mother was secretly proud of managing to bring him into this world all on her own. Just as his mother would always be his mother, Gran Cielo would always be his home, and everything about the place felt right to him. Everything, that is, except that damn casita—the tiny house Dante and his mother, Sylvia, had occupied.
He’d burn the thing to the ground if only Dante weren’t so attached to it.
But there was no need to ruin this day or any day dredging up the past. Banishing the thought of the casita and all it represented, he shaded his eyes. By now the sun was shining bright and lucky as a dime on a sidewalk, flooding the room with warmth and filling Luke’s heart with hope for the future. Hope for his family. “Beautiful day for riding, Mother.”
She slurped her chocolate and gave her cup one last round of her spoon. Then she let out a lingering sigh, just like she used to do when he was a kid.
“I’ll take that as a no to the ride.”
Back in the day, his mother’s pity-me sigh meant she’d just finished with her latest romance novel and would have to wait an eternity for the next installment in her favorite series. This morning, the sigh meant she’d just finished with her latest husband and had no intention of waiting long for another.
“Mom?”
Finally, she seemed to notice he’d spoken and turned her fabled blue eyes on him. The local press liked to describe Rose Jericho’s eyes as the color of robin’s eggs—and she liked to blush and point out how hackneyed the phrase was to anyone who’d listen—her hairdresser, the bank teller, even the parish priest: My eyes, a bright blue reminder of spring? Have you ever heard such drivel?
He never let on that he knew she loved the flattery. Hard to argue with a spot-on comparison and even harder to argue with a happy mother, especially since happiness had been so hard for her to come by.
“I think the gallery would be the best venue for the benefit, don’t you?” Her brassy tone smacked of feigned cheerfulness. She set down her spoon and stared dismally into her empty cup.
“I’ll leave the venue to you. I don’t have time for minor details. I lasso the donors. You plan the party. That was our deal, remember?” He shoveled a spoonful of corned beef hash into his mouth.
“No thank you, Aileen.” His mother held up a well-manicured hand to indicate she didn’t want a second helping of waffles, and the cook promptly forked the extra onto Luke’s plate, then left the room.
“Choosing a venue is hardly a minor detail, sweetie. Don’t pretend this event isn’t important to you because I know better.”
It was true he’d been planning the Big Brothers and Big Sisters benefit for the better part of a year, and he’d put a lot of energy into securing a guest list that contained both the wealthiest and the most generous members of Santa Fe society—these being two distinct groups. It was also true his secretary was more than capable of handling anything and everything related to the benefit, but no one could throw a party like his mother, and more importantly, having just left her fourth husband, Rose Jericho needed a distraction. Otherwise, Luke was liable to wind up with yet another stepfather in short order. His mother was a serial monogamist, and her cooling-off period was growing shorter between victims.
She picked up a set of bifocals she was breaking in and promptly set them down again, pulled her long blond hair back, and snapped it absentmindedly into a ponytail. In the right light, his mother looked thirty, and she knew it. She pushed the bifocals as far away as her arm would reach. “I’m onto you, you know.”
“No idea what you mean.”
“I mean you’re ha
nding me something to do so that I won’t moon and mope about Bernie.”
He hadn’t expected her not to see through his ruse, but he had expected her to play along. This was their dance, and she knew the tune well. She was supposed to follow his lead, pretend she didn’t know he was trying to cheer her up. It irked him she wouldn’t just go with the flow.
He let loose his best imitation of her pity-me sigh. “I truly need your help, Mother. Because you’re right, this benefit is important to me. And I am sorry about Bernie.” He slathered syrup on his waffles and spoke with his mouth full. “I don’t understand why you don’t just date these men. Why do you have to marry them? It’s costing you a small fortune.”
“You’re one to talk about throwing away your fortune. And don’t speak with your mouth full. I raised you better than that.”
“I’m not judging you.” He wasn’t. “I’m merely curious as to why you keep . . .”
“Making the same mistake over and over again? Because I believe in love, and I believe in marriage.”
“So you keep getting divorced? Bernie’s a nice guy. Maybe you should’ve stuck it out a while longer.”
She slid lower in her chair. That wasn’t fair of him. He knew how hard she was trying. And she’d stayed with her first husband, his unfaithful father, more than eighteen years, until Luke was in college. That hadn’t been easy on her. He knew because it hadn’t been easy on him, either. Now, at the age of fifty-four, his mother had decided to go on a no-holds-barred search for her soul mate, her one true love, and he didn’t want to stand in her way. It was just that seeing her sad every time things went south made Aileen’s best cooking taste more like unsalted mush than gourmet cuisine.
Crossing her arms on her chest, his mother looked at him slyly. “Speaking of love, are you bringing that Heaven woman to the benefit?”
He gulped his coffee too fast and singed the roof of his mouth. So this was the game his mother was looking to play. “No, Mother, I won’t be bringing Celeste. I’m sure it’ll devastate you to know I haven’t been out with her in months.” And it’d been far longer than that since he’d grown tired of her.
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