“Your first time should have been with someone special,” he bit off, “not me.”
“Someone special is you,” Zoe insisted, whispering the words.
He felt a million things at that moment. Mostly he felt unworthy. But he couldn’t resist saying, with a touch of humor, “You really know how to play hard to get, don’t you?”
Before she could frame an answer, he pulled her back under him and allowed himself to get lost in her just one more time.
In all honesty, he had no other choice. He wanted her too much and she had completely undone him with that look in her eyes. She saw him the way he wanted to be, not the way he knew he was.
Chapter 14
Long after the lovemaking had ceased and the euphoria it had created slipped into the shadows, Sam lay awake, listening to the woman beside him breathe.
Things had been stirred within him tonight, things that were better off left dormant. His life had become streamlined, especially now that he wasn’t getting married, wasn’t going to be a father with a child to round things out.
What just happened tonight brought a third dimension into his two dimensional life. He wasn’t sure if he could handle that. And he was better off, he thought, if he didn’t even try.
He waited until he thought Zoe was asleep, and then he quietly slipped out of her bed.
He was still somewhat astounded they had made love two more times tonight, winding up in her bed the last time strictly because she had asked him to make love with her there.
He felt he owed that to her. To give in to the small request, seeing as how she’d turned his whole world upside down and made him feel, just for a little while, as if he was just a normal guy. As if he wasn’t being weighed down by the vast amount of baggage he had been dragging around in his wake for so long.
Dressing as quickly as he could without making a single sound, Sam picked up his shoes, ready to tiptoe out to the front door before he put them on and risk making any noise that could, inadvertently, wake Zoe up.
But just as he was about to leave, Sam couldn’t resist just one more moment with her.
Bending over, he lightly brushed his lips against her forehead.
He couldn’t help thinking that was how it had all started tonight and somehow, it seemed fitting it was the way it ended, as well.
As he turned away and headed out of the bedroom, he didn’t see Zoe smile to herself, didn’t know that this one single act of tenderness on his part put an entirely different light on his leaving her this way.
Zoe watched him leave through eyes that were closed down to narrow slits, then hugged her pillow to her.
It was all good, she thought. Whatever happened next, this was all good.
* * *
Sam went in early the next day. He had a serial killer to catch and a possible new lead to follow up on.
He wasn’t prepared for what was waiting for him at his desk.
Zoe.
The takeout coffee he had picked up on his way to the station nearly slipped from his fingers and that would have added a new black coat of thick sludge to the already aged, cracked flooring.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded gruffly.
Questions crowded his mind. Was she going to say anything about the way he had left her without a word last night? Was she here to tell him last night had brought a new dynamic between them that he had to take into account now?
“Reading the letters you brought back from prison,” Zoe answered simply, her quiet manner temporarily shooting holes through all his uneasy questions and his even more uneasy reaction to seeing her here. “I didn’t finish my stack yesterday.”
And then he realized something else.
“But I left all the letters locked in my desk,” he protested.
Even as he pointed it out, Sam covered his left pocket, feeling for the keys he’d deposited into it. They were still there.
Zoe smiled up at him brightly, looking as if her explanation was simplicity personified. “I used to get locked out of my desk at the library a lot. One of the students who came in to do research on a regular basis for his PhD paper felt sorry for me and showed me a trick using a nail file and a long, thin nail—like the kind used to hang up pictures, not the kind found at the end of your finger,” she clarified. “It doesn’t hurt the lock,” she promised, glancing at the desk drawer she had unlocked.
Sam shook his head as he sank down at his desk. The chair’s creak of protest hardly registered.
“You keep amazing me,” he confessed.
It only made her smile widen. He forced himself to look away. Otherwise, he wasn’t going to be able to focus on his work.
Sam nodded at the stack of letters she had on the table before her. “Find anything?”
Zoe shook her head, obviously frustrated. “Not yet. A few more letters from the relatives of his victims, but most of the others either want to have his baby, or be just like him, but confess they don’t have his—” she paused for a moment before saying, “let’s call it guts,” she decided, not wanting to use the actual word she found in a lot of the letters.
“You ask me, he was totally gutless, taking out his shortcomings and insecurities on men who looked like my uncle because he couldn’t accomplish anything worthwhile on his own,” Sam told her bitterly. His words echoing back to him, Sam stopped and collected himself. He couldn’t let himself go off on that track. Nothing would get done, then. “Since you’re here, why don’t you go on reading those letters, see if anything pops out at you?”
His tone of voice alerted her. “You sound like you’re going to be doing something else.”
“I’m going to see if I can come up with some kind of a connection between this Johnny Vine character you brought up last night and the other two women who were recently murdered.” Since she looked interested, he continued to explain a little of his procedure. “I thought I’d start by cross-referencing the files, see if his name pops up in either one of the victims’ lives. Or if I can find any sort of a connection between the two women and your sister.”
She noticed he didn’t refer to Celia by name, or mention anything about her having been his fiancée. She assumed it was deliberate.
That was a chapter of his life better left closed, she thought, until such time—if ever—that Sam could deal with the lie he’d been fed by her sister in order to get him to agree to marry her.
“Sounds good,” Zoe agreed as she went back to reading the letters in the stack in front of her.
He paused a moment, looking at her as Zoe picked up the first letter and began to read. “You don’t have to agree with everything I say, you know.”
“I know,” she answered. “And I don’t.”
He’d yet to hear her really disagree with him, but he let that go. It would be better for both of them if he just did his job.
* * *
Stifling an exasperated noise, Sam leaned back in his chair, pushing it as far back as it could go without making him fall. He scrubbed his hands over his face, wishing, not for the first time, he could find some way to revitalize his flagging energy.
It was beginning to feel as if he had been going around in circles forever. Going around in circles and getting nowhere.
Zoe had sat quietly in her chair this entire time, reading letter after letter, making no comment about any of the contents she came across because she didn’t want to disturb him. Some of it had turned her stomach. She took Sam’s unintelligible noise now to mean he had either come to a dead end, or had opted to stop here and take a break.
Either way, the need for her self-imposed silence was over.
“Nothing?” she questioned, knowing he wouldn’t have sounded that way if he’d triumphantly stumbled across a connection between the women and Johnny, or the women and her sister
. The last she’d heard, none had existed between any of them. Not the women, not Johnny, but she was always hoping for miracles.
Last night should be enough of a miracle to satisfy you for a long, long time, a little voice in her head pointed out.
“Nothing,” Sam said with disgusted finality as he slammed shut the top drawer he’d just opened purely for the satisfaction of having something to slam that wasn’t breakable. His temper had already cost him enough over the past couple of years. It seemed that when it flared suddenly, frustration would take over and breaking something seemed to be a way to alleviate that pent-up feeling.
You’re not a damn kid anymore, he upbraided himself. Only kids have tantrums. Grow up, for God’s sake.
Sam blew out a breath and further elaborated, “No, no connection.” He straightened up and pulled his chair back up to his desk.
“What’s next?” she asked, curious. She wanted to be ready in case Sam suddenly jumped to his feet and took off.
“Next we bring him in for questioning, find out if somehow he fell through the cracks and he’s actually got a history for some other awful crime,” Sam answered, biting the words off.
He really hadn’t expected it to be this easy, but once in a blue moon, things actually fell into place.Given his personal and professional background, he told himself he should really have known better.
“Maybe I should go through Celia’s things at her condo,” Zoe suggested, “see if I can find anything that might be useful. I’ve put it off because I wasn’t up to looking through her things,” she confessed, “but now that you think there’s a chance we could find something that might point to her killer that way, I’ll do it. I can go now,” she volunteered, unconsciously squaring her shoulders as she started to get up.
“We can go now—or in a little while,” Sam amended, stopping her in her tracks. “I’ve got a couple of things to look into first. You just keep on doing what you’re doing,” he told her as he rose to his feet.
“You’re going to leave me behind, aren’t you?” Zoe asked quietly.
Although she’d asked Sam the question, she really didn’t need him to say anything. She already knew the answer.
The fact that she did—he could see it in her face—just about blew his mind. Just what the hell was going on here?
He stood there, as if his feet were suddenly glued to the floor, staring at Zoe in wonder. He wasn’t transparent, so what was the deal here?
“What made you ask that?” he wanted to know.
“I’m also a student of body language—there’s not all that much to do when you’re a librarian,” Zoe explained in almost an aside. “Your body language is very obvious. It says you’re planning to take off the second you make it out of this room.”
Sam sighed. So much for maintaining secrecy, something that had always been of tantamount importance to him, born of the days where everything he or his siblings did was taken apart and examined by an all-invasive public who thrived on dissecting the lives of people who had, through no fault of their own, been thrown into the public arena.
Since he was going to her sister’s condo, maybe having Zoe there with him and the investigative team he was bringing with him would be useful. He’d only spent one night at Celia’s place himself. Zoe undoubtedly knew where her sister kept things in her home far better than he did.
“C’mon,” he told her with resignation. “If you’re coming, let’s go.”
Zoe didn’t need any more encouragement than that.
* * *
Sam expected to find some sort of a telltale clue amid Celia’s things. Zoe expected to be of help to him. Neither one of them expected to find what they did once the door to the condo was unlocked.
“What the hell—? It looks like a hurricane went through here,” Sam remarked, looking around the interior as he stepped across the threshold.
Nothing had been left standing in its original position.
Bookcases were emptied of their books, throw pillows that belonged on the sofa, or on the two beds in the bedrooms, along with upholstered cushions had their stuffing hacked out by someone who was very obviously searching for something and growing increasingly agitated the more that “something” apparently eluded him.
Sam turned to the small team of forensics investigators who were standing behind him at the condo’s entrance and set them loose.
“See if you can figure out what it was that whoever ransacked this place was looking for. Maybe he missed it somehow, or at least left one of his prints behind. Maybe a partial print,” he added.
None of those limited scenarios sounded very promising to him, but he had to at least appear to try to find something, had to authorize the thorough sweep of Celia’s residence just in case there was something the killer overlooked or neglected to take with him.
“Can you think of anything this guy could have been looking for?” he asked, turning to Zoe.
She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall in a helpless shrug. “If this is Johnny’s work and he went through Celia’s things, looking for something, I don’t think it would look this bad. I just can’t see him being this desperate about anything. Celia could drive a person crazy,” she readily agreed, “but this is a whole new level of crazy,” Zoe commented, wading through the scattered debris. “Besides, the couple of times I saw him, Johnny seemed so laid-back, he could have made a turtle seem agitated and uptight in comparison.”
The man didn’t exactly sound like someone Celia would have had hanging around her, Sam thought. The woman he had known sought excitement, not boredom.
“Why would Celia be willing to have this guy come back into her life time and again, the way you indicated he did? What was the big attraction with this guy?” he wanted to know.
Zoe honestly had no real answer to that. She proceeded cautiously with the sliver of a theory she did have to offer. “Well, he’s good-looking, but that definitely wouldn’t have been enough for Celia.”
He agreed with Zoe there. From what he’d come to find out about the woman he’d almost unwittingly married, there was only one attraction for her.
“Was he well off?” he asked Zoe, making a mental note to look into the man’s finances the first moment he had the opportunity to do so.
“There were times she said he threw money around,” Zoe recalled. “But the last time I saw him with her, he looked like he was down to his last ten dollars, so my guess is the answer’s no, he wasn’t. Most likely, his way of ‘earning’ money wasn’t really aboveboard. He really didn’t strike me as the most savory character,” she confessed to Sam.
As a matter of fact, now that she thought of it, outside of Sam, her sister’s taste in men wasn’t very good at all.
Sam stopped cautiously picking through the clothing that had been dumped out of Celia’s dresser drawers and onto the floor. Rising back to his feet, he pocketed the handkerchief he’d used to not get his own prints on things although he knew they had to be here somewhere in the condo. After all, he had spent that one night here. He’d been drunk and probably drugged as well, but he’d still touched some things.
He was going to have to give his prints to the forensics investigators to rule him out, Sam thought. He walked back into the living room with Zoe close behind him. Damn, but this was a mess.
“I think it’s time we hauled this guy in for questioning,” Sam said, stopping to pick up a framed photograph that was lying, facedown, on the tiled floor. Flipping it over, he saw the glass was cracked and shattered in places.
It was the photograph he had grudgingly agreed to. It was taken at a studio of the two of them and had been the photograph sent to the local newspaper, announcing their engagement and upcoming wedding.
Staring at it, he still couldn’t believe any of this—his involvement with Celia, the baby that first was, then wasn’t the
re—had taken place.
He allowed the framed, now glassless photograph to fall onto the sofa.
When he looked up, he saw Zoe had been silently watching him. He had no idea what was going on in her mind, only that the look in her eyes was one filled with sympathy.
The woman just wasn’t real, he thought. Anyone else would have either made some sort of a disparaging remark about her sister’s underhanded ways, or asked something typical, like did he still, after all this, have any feelings for Celia?
At the very least, she might have attempted to sweep him mentally away from all this by bringing up what had gone down between them last night.
But Zoe had done none of these. She’d just given him his space.
And he was grateful, even if he didn’t tell her.
“C’mon,” he said. “There’s nothing for us to find here. If there is anything, forensics will find it and get back to me. Do you know where this Johnny Vine lives?” he asked her.
Zoe shook her head. “Celia never said anything directly. She did mention he lived in town somewhere.”
“Can’t be too hard to find,” Sam concluded. “The guy’s got to have some kind of a paper trail available. Driver’s license, credit card, something,” he said as he led the way out of the chaotic condominium and past the forensics team.
Zoe was quick to join him, relieved to be getting out of the unsettling scene and all but suffocating condominium. If there was any residual guilt over having figuratively “abandoned” her sister, being there for Sam far outweighed it in her eyes.
Sam needed her, whether the man realized that fact or not.
Celia, she thought, never did.
Chapter 15
Though Johnny Vine’s head never moved, his eyes slid around the corners of the interrogation room with the effortless movements of a snake, taking in everything in its path.
Apparently Vine, Sam thought, was not the laid-back man Zoe seemed to indicate he was. Vine might look sleepy, but Sam was willing to bet very little got past the man. An obvious bodybuilder, the six-foot Vine wore a dark blue T-shirt that clung and made love to every muscle on his upper torso.
Colton Copycat Killer Page 15
