Before You

by Jenna Bennett

  “That wasn’t what happened yesterday.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, and I added, “If he doesn’t see me tonight, will he take another girl and beat her up, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Ty said, his voice tight.

  “Should I go out and show myself, so he doesn’t?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  I must have looked undecided, because he added, “Please, Cassie. I can’t do my job and worry about you at the same time. If you’re out there, I’ll only be able to concentrate on that.”

  That was rather flattering, to be honest, and it gave me the inkling of an idea...

  But before I could grab it and take a better look at it, he’d put his hands on my shoulders and continued. “Please stay here tonight and let me watch out for other people.”

  Those green eyes looking down at me were the color of emeralds. I opened my mouth to tell him OK, I’d stay at the hotel and let him do his job, but I couldn’t get my voice to cooperate. I just stood there, staring up at him, caught like a rabbit in a searchlight.

  It looked like he hesitated for a second, but then he bent his head and brushed his lips over mine.

  It wasn’t much of a kiss. Just a quick touch, light and undemanding. Gone almost as soon as I realized it was happening.

  I could feel it all the way down to my toes.

  And he knew it, too. When he saw the look on my face, his lips curved. His hands moved from my shoulders up to my cheeks, and then he kissed me again.

  And kept on kissing me. Until my head swam and my knees shook and I had to grab fistfuls of his shirt so I wouldn’t melt into a puddle on the floor in front of him.

  Finally he leaned his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. “Please stay inside tonight, Cassie.”

  His voice was husky.

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

  “Thank you.”

  He gave me one last kiss, this one on the tip of my nose, and straightened.

  “Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “What were you planning to do tomorrow?”

  “More sightseeing.”

  He didn’t answer, and I added, “I can’t stay in my room for the rest of spring break, Ty. I won’t. This may be my only chance to see Key West. I want to enjoy it.”

  He nodded. “I’ll pick you up at ten.”

  “Really?” He’d spend the day with me?

  “I don’t think anything’s gonna happen to you during the day. But I don’t think anything’s gonna happen to anyone else, either. And I’d rather stick with you.”

  “I’d rather stick with you too,” I said, and watched him walk out before I took the elevator up to my room.

  SIGHTSEEING WAS more fun with Ty than alone. It’s always nicer when you have someone to share stuff with. I guess maybe that was Mackenzie’s reasoning behind her demand that we not see much of each other this week: without girlfriends, we’d be forced to find other company.

  Ty was great company. We even ended up taking a trolley tour, although not a haunted one. During the day, the trolley was cheerful and red, and did sightseeing tours. It did point out a few of the supposedly haunted houses that Carmen had mentioned the other night, though: the Audubon House, the Marrero Guest Mansion—where the owner’s widow, the beautiful Enriquetta, was kicked out and left to live on the streets—and the Hard Rock Café. And of course it took us past Sloppy Joe’s Bar and Captain Tony’s and several other more or less well-known establishments.

  Augustus and Jehosephat were just Jeff and Arthur today, out of their ghostly costumes and makeup. Nothing scary about them. Although Jeff’s eyes lingered on my legs when I climbed into the trolley. “He gives me the creeps,” I muttered to Ty when we sat down.

  He grinned. “I hate to tell you, Cassie, but I look at your legs, too.”

  “You don’t drool.”

  “I try not to.” He winked.

  I was wearing shorts, because it was warm and I wanted to be comfortable. But as I caught Jeff glancing at me in the rearview mirror again, I wished I’d gone with the jeans.

  “You don’t think he...? Or both of them?”

  Ty shook his head. “Profiling says single individual, not a team. So chances are not. But I’ll have Fuentes check his background—both of their backgrounds—if he hasn’t already.”

  I nodded. “What about the guy at your motel? The one who reads the cartoon porn?”

  “Already cleared. He worked the late shift Sunday night.”

  “So you thought he was creepy, too?”

  He shrugged. “I’d rather investigate a lot of innocent people than miss the asshole who’s doing this because I’m too afraid to do my job.”

  Right.

  “Did anything happen last night?”

  “Not that we’ve heard about,” Ty said, looking like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “No new victims?”

  “None we’ve found.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s good that another girl wasn’t raped. But it doesn’t get us any closer to catching this creep.” He made a frustrated sound and shoved his fingers into his hair. “He may have gone underground. Maybe beating up that girl on Tuesday night changed something for him, and he’s done for this year.”

  I nodded sympathetically. It was your classic Catch-22. Of course nobody wanted another girl to be assaulted, but unless something happened, there was no way to figure out who the guy was and to catch him. So far, he’d left precious few clues.

  “I was thinking last night,” I told Ty as the trolley made its way through the streets and Jeff’s voice droned over the speakers.

  “Yeah?”

  “You said yesterday that it looks like this guy has focused on me. The first victim was a blonde in a pink dress, on a night when I was a blonde in a pink dress. And the second victim was assaulted in the cemetery, after you and I had walked through the cemetery.”

  He nodded.

  “On Tuesday night, I was drugged, but I got away. And another girl—another blonde—was beaten and I assume raped.”

  He nodded.

  “On Sunday and Monday, you walked me home, so he couldn’t get at me. On Tuesday, I got away from him. I have no idea how, but I must have.”

  He nodded.

  “But I’m nothing special.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Ty murmured, with a look that made my heart skip a beat and then start staggering.

  I forced myself to sound calm. “You know what I mean. I’m OK-looking, but I’m not especially pretty. Or sexy. There are a lot of prettier girls. And I haven’t done anything to catch anyone’s attention.” Like dancing on the bar or pulling my top off so everyone could see my breasts. And yes, that had happened.

  He shook his head.

  “So I thought... is it possible that he singled me out not because of me, but because of you?”

  He blinked.

  “I’m nobody. But you’re somebody. You’re the FBI agent the Key West police called in to catch this guy. And you talked to me on Sunday night in Captain Crow’s. Nothing had happened yet then. But that night, another blonde in a pink dress was raped.”

  “Damn,” Ty said softly. I imagined he was probably thinking it through and seeing what I was seeing—or thought I was seeing—but I kept talking just in case.

  “So is it possible that if you’d talked to a brunette that night—if you’d talked to Quinn—it would be brunettes with long, straight hair who were getting raped?”

  “Fuck.”

  “What I mean is, did this guy pick me to focus on because you focused on me?”

  “Fuck. Shit. Damn.” His voice was flat, so lacking in emotion I knew he had to be seething. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

  I’d take that as a yes. “Did you test that glass you took away from me that first night?”

  He nodded.

  “Was there anything in it?”

  “Nothing t
hat shouldn’t be. You’d had your back to it for a while, so I took it away just to be safe. But nobody tried to drug you that night. Damn.” He started his litany of curses again. I left him to it.

  He was still cursing when the trolley pulled up outside the East Martello Fort Museum, home of Robert the Doll.

  It was a big brick building that looked like—and once was—a fort. “Constructed during the Civil War by the U.S. Army,” Jeff said as we all made our way out of the trolley and into the parking lot, “to protect Key West against a potential Confederate sea assault. It was abandoned in its unfinished state by the end of the war. It was used for Army and Navy training during World War Two, and in 1950, the Key West Historical Society opened it as a museum. We’ll spend forty five minutes here. If you want to take a picture of Robert the Doll, remember to ask nicely.”

  He grinned. Most of the others glanced at him over their shoulders as they trudged toward the entrance to the museum. He caught my eye and winked.

  Ty was still bent over his phone, texting furiously. I guess he was communicating silently with Detective Fuentes, telling him our new theory. It was so obvious to me I couldn’t believe no one had thought of it, but it seemed they hadn’t.

  “Are you coming in?” I asked when his thumbs stopped moving.

  He looked up and around, like he wasn’t quite sure where we were. Then his eyes cleared. “Sure. Wouldn’t want you to tackle Robert on your own.”

  “I don’t plan to tackle him.” In fact, I didn’t plan to have anything to do with him at all. I might not even approach him. My own life was creepy enough just now, thank you very much; I didn’t need any help from ghosts or haunted dolls.

  “I’ll keep you safe,” Ty said, taking my hand.

  He did. As we walked through cavernous rooms filled with things like Talbott Jehosephat Windsor’s bone cart and a life-size wax replica of Karl Tanzler working on Elena’s corpse, I was very glad for the warmth of his hand and the solidness of his body next to me. It was chilly in the old stone rooms, and the creepy displays added their own sort of psychological chill to the physical one.

  Robert the Doll resided in a glass case in front of a wall full of letters from all over the world apologizing for being rude to him.

  He was big, much bigger than I’d realized. The size of a small child. He was dressed in a sailor suit with some sort of plush animal on his lap, a dog or a lion, and his face was at the same time vacant and strangely expressive, with brown button eyes.

  “Want his picture?” Ty asked in my ear.

  I shook my head.

  “He might be offended if you don’t at least ask.”

  He’s a doll!

  But I didn’t say it out loud. Wouldn’t want Robert to hear.

  “Fine.” I took a breath. “Robert? You look very nice. Would it be OK if we took your picture?”

  We waited. Nothing happened.

  “No thunderbolts,” I told Ty under my breath.

  “Wait. Look.” He nodded to the doll.

  I peered into the glass case again. It was probably my imagination, but it looked like Robert was leaning just a fraction of an inch farther left.

  “Better hurry, before he changes his mind,” Ty said and lifted his phone.

  He snapped a picture. “Tell him thanks.”

  I dredged up a smile. “Thank you, Robert.”

  I can’t swear to it, but it looked like Robert smiled too.

  He’s a doll. He’s just a doll.

  I admit it. I walked backward away from the glass box. Like you would with royalty, or with a growling Rottweiler you didn’t want to turn your back on. I wasn’t exactly sure which category applied to this situation, but in either case, it seemed like a good idea.

  “Looks like Robert likes leggy blondes, too,” Ty said when we were outside.

  I shot him a look. “A shame we can’t pin the assaults on him.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that,” Ty said. “That’s what started this whole mess, you know. Whenever Eugene Otto got in trouble, he’d blame Robert. No wonder Robert got tired of it.”

  Whatever. “Were you texting Detective Fuentes?”

  He nodded. “He thinks we may be onto something. It would explain a lot.”

  Yes, it would.

  “And he’s not very happy.”

  “Because if we’re right, it means this would have to be someone who knows who you are. Right?”

  He nodded, his mouth set on grim. “That’s right.”

  “So someone local.” Which naturally wouldn’t make Fuentes happy, when he’d kept his fingers crossed for a visitor.

  “Not just a local,” Ty said, “but one of a fairly small group of locals. The ones who were notified I was here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  He sighed. “Let’s walk. We have fifteen minutes until the trolley leaves. You wanna climb to the top of the tower?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The top of the tower sounds good.”

  “The view’s nice.” He took my hand again and pulled me across the grass. The blades tickled my bare legs.

  Once we were on top of the lookout tower—where the view was nice; all blue ocean and blue sky and fluffy, white clouds—he continued. “Fuentes was the one who wanted to call in the FBI. He talked the brass into it. When I got here, they had me stand up in front of the entire police force and give a profile of the guy. The behavioral unit at Quantico put it together for me. They said he’s young, 20-30, probably white—since all the victims have been young and white—keeps to himself, a loner, socially backward, and a local... although I didn’t mention that last part when I presented the profile.”

  “But the behavioral unit said he was local?”

  “They said he most likely was,” Ty said, leaning his arms on the parapet and gazing out to sea. “I thought it would be better if I didn’t say anything about it.”

  Probably so. I leaned my arms on the warm stone next to him. “So the entire police force knows who you are. Who else?”

  “The cops had to know, so they could help me if I needed it. The mayor knows, of course. The rest of the city government. And after that, they called a meeting of every bar and restaurant owner in Key West. Everyone who owns a place where they serve drinks. That includes most of the hotel people, too.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  He nodded. “But compared to the population as a whole—not to mention the students on spring break—it’s a pretty small group. Less than two hundred people altogether.”

  “That isn’t small.” Not when we were looking for a single guy.

  Ty shrugged. “If we’re right and someone targeted you because of me, it’s one of that group. Someone Fuentes knows. Someone he trusted with the truth. So obviously he’s upset.”

  I bit my lip. “We could be wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Ty said, “but I don’t think we are.”

  Below us, the rest of the trolley passengers began straggling out of the museum. Jeff crossed the parking lot in the direction of the bus. The sun shone on the balding top of his head.

  “What about him?” I asked. “Would he know who you are?”

  “Depends on who he’s been talking to,” Ty said. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” He turned toward the stairs. “Let’s go. We don’t wanna be left behind.” He headed across the top of the tower. I took a last look at the view and followed.

  “YOU DO realize,” I told him after the tour was over, as we were walking up Duval Street from the trolley, “that with what we know, there’s a very easy way you can catch this guy.”

  He looked at me. Not like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but like he didn’t want to think about it. Or hear about it. Or talk about it.

  I ignored it. “If he wants me, you can give him me. And then catch him in the act.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” Ty said.

  “No, I haven’t. It makes perfect sense. You said it yourself. He might have gone underground. He didn’t grab anothe
r girl last night. He might not grab one tonight. He can obviously control himself, if he only does this during spring break.”

  “There’s probably something about spring break that sets him off. Something happened to him during spring break, something traumatic. Or maybe he just doesn’t like all the strangers invading his town.”

  I shrugged. As far as I could see, it didn’t matter what the creep’s reasoning was. “If he wants me, but he can’t have me, he may lay low until next year. And then you’ll have to start all over again. But if we lure him out tonight—”

  He shot me a blistering look. “No fucking way!”

  “It makes sense.”

  “I don’t care if it makes sense,” Ty snarled, “I’m not letting you go out tonight to try to lure a rapist. No. And that’s final.”

  I pulled my hand out of his and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk with my hands on my hips. “You do realize you can’t tell me what to do, right?”

  He stopped too, to stare at me. “I damn well can.”

  “Only if I let you,” I said. “If I want to go out tonight and get drunk and get myself in trouble, you can’t stop me.”

  “Watch me!”

  This really wasn’t going well. I took my hands off my hips and lifted them to his cheeks. “Ty.”

  His jaw was clenched. And when he lifted his own hands and wrapped them around my wrists, I could feel the effort it took for him to stay calm. “Yeah.”

  “I know you want me to be safe. And I appreciate it. But I want you to catch this guy. I don’t want anyone else getting raped, especially not on my account.”

  He opened his mouth, and I added, before he had a chance to speak. “I’ll wear a wire. Or whatever it is they do on TV.”

  His lips twitched. “It’s an earbud now. No wires.”

  “Earbud, then. I’ll wear an earbud. And keep my phone on. And be very, very careful.”

  “This isn’t TV, Cassie.”

  “I know that. But if I do this, and he takes the bait, you can close this case tonight.” And be off duty tomorrow. In time for the last day of my spring break.

  “Maybe Carmen...” Ty began, and I shook my head.

  “It has to be me. Carmen is Detective Fuentes’s sister, and if this guy is local, he knows that. For you to suddenly start focusing your attention on Carmen would be a dead giveaway that you’re onto him. And if he wants blondes, he’s not going to go for Carmen, anyway.”