by J. R. Ward
Her feet froze in midswing, her shoulders tensing.
"It was after years of him..." Say it. Say it. Fucking say it. "He was a violent man, and he drank. There were...things that happened that shouldn't have and I..."
The light in her eyes gradually shifted back, compassion coming to the front once again.
But when it looked like she might hit her feet and try to hug him, he put both hands up. "No, I can't--I'm not going to get through this if you touch me."
"Okay," she said slowly.
"I don't even know why I'm telling you this."
"There doesn't have to be a reason."
"It feels like there should be."
"You know you can trust me, right? I may be a reporter, but I meant what I said--that's my job, not who I am."
"Yeah." He rubbed at his hair and then took off the sunglasses. "I'm sorry, but I need to see you clearly."
She frowned. "There's no need to apologize."
He turned her Ray-Bans over in his hand. "I thought you preferred these on me. You know, back at the diner--so you didn't have to see my face."
"That wasn't why I told you to keep them. You're not ugly to me, Matthias--not by any stretch. And you don't have to hide yourself."
Somehow, he knew that wasn't going to last. He had a feeling the more that came to him, the worse the picture of who he was was going to get--like a paint-by-numbers where you thought you were making a pretty portrait, but it turned out the subject was Michael Myers.
"I boxed him in," Matthias heard himself say. "I went to my homeroom teacher, and then the school nurse, and I told them everything, explained the absences, and the bruises, and the...other stuff. I was fifteen. I'd kept it all in up until that point--"
"Oh, God, Matthias--"
"--but then I let the cat out of the bag, and the system took over. He had a heart attack in front of me when I told him the secret was everywhere."
"And that's why you think you killed him? Matthias, you didn't do anything wrong."
"Yeah, I did. I watched him die. I didn't call nine-one-one, I didn't run for help, I stood there and watched him as he went down to the floor in front of me."
"You were a victim of abuse and in shock. It's not your fault--"
"I did it on purpose."
Now she frowned again. "I don't understand."
"I didn't care what he did to me. That shit was more of an annoyance than anything." He shrugged. "The whole thing about coming forward was just a mental exercise to me. See, I knew him." He tapped his temple. "I knew the way he thought, the things that made him tick. He liked being mean and having power over me. He was a not-so-bright guy who worked with dumb animals and corn stalks all day long--it wasn't until he had to deal with adults who were on his level that his inferiority complex came out. He used to threaten to kill me if I told anyone, and that was his tell. The secrecy was so important to him, and not just because it's illegal to fuck with your kid. I knew it was going to get him, and more than stop the abuse...I just wanted to see what would happen."
"Wait, let me ask you something. How long had you been with him?"
"My mother died in childbirth."
"So your whole life."
"I was somewhere else for a while, but then I came back to him."
"When you were little."
"Yeah."
"And it doesn't occur to you that you were just a young kid saving yourself?"
"That was the end result, but not my motivation. And that's what's rattled me so badly."
Mels shook her head. "I think you need to be a little more forgiving of yourself."
Ah, hell, she wasn't going to get it. He could see it in her eyes--she had made up her mind about him, and nothing was going to change her opinion.
"Matthias isn't my real name."
"What is?"
It had come back to him. Over breakfast.
He stared at her for the longest time, lingering on her face and her neck and on her lean body...and then going back to her smart eyes.
He wasn't going to give her that information. He couldn't.
In the silence that followed, he felt an overriding need to be alone with her again, and not in public. In his room. In that hotel bed with the sheets that smelled like lemon. He wanted a little of her before he left, as if she were some kind of medicine that might keep him alive just awhile longer.
Because he was going to die soon, he realized.
It wasn't paranoia. It was...as inevitable as his past was written in stone.
"I'm running out of time," he said softly. "And I want to be with you before I leave."
"Where are you going?"
"Away," he answered after a moment.
Mels stopped breathing as the conviction that Matthias was a missing person hit her hard, without regard to the fact that he had a driver's license and, supposedly, a house: Standing in front of her, looking her in the eye, it was as if he weren't even in the room.
Here for a split second, gone forever.
"Why are you leaving?" When he just shook his head, she asked, "Is that why you won't tell me your name?"
"No, it's because it doesn't matter. It's just syllables. I haven't been that person for so many years, it simply isn't relevant."
"I'm not so sure about that." As he shrugged, she had to push. "And you don't need to go anywhere."
For one thing, she didn't believe people could see into the future, and that meant if he took off, it was of his own free will--and that decision could be unmade at any time. By him.
Except...the problem with that argument was that she felt it, too, the sense that they didn't have an ever-after waiting for them. They'd met because of an accident, their lives colliding, and just as that impact hadn't lasted long, neither would they.
The injury was what was going to be forever.
She had this awful feeling she was never going to get over meeting this man.
"How much longer?" she demanded.
"I don't know."
Getting off the table, she went over and wrapped her arms around him, laying her cheek against the beating heart behind his ribs. As he held her back, she wondered why he was the one she felt such a connection with. Those others, the conventional ones, hadn't gotten through to her.
This man, though...
Matthias eased back and touched her face. "Can I kiss you here?"
"You mean on my cheek or in this conference room?"
"Well, you do work here, and--"
She pressed her lips to his, silencing him. Who gave a shit where they were. There were plenty of interoffice relationships, and people who had brought husbands and wives and partners into the building.
Besides, if her boss could sexually harass her, she should be able to kiss the man she actually wanted under this roof.
Closing her eyes, she tilted her head and brushed his mouth again, letting her lips cling to his. And as he kissed her back, she wished she could capture the moment and make it physical somehow, turn it into something that she could hold in her hands, or put somewhere safe like she would a book or a vase.
But life wasn't like that. You didn't get to hold on to the moments that defined you or touch the things that touched you--not in the palm of your hand or with the tips of your fingers, at least. Destiny's machinations were as elusive as a sculptor's tool, swooping in, changing your contours, and then moving on to the next piece of clay.
With a steady shift, Matthias's palm slid up to the nape of her neck, taking control. And as his tongue licked between her lips, she opened for him, wishing that this was somewhere private as heat magnified inside of her, the walls of her body sending it endlessly ricocheting around, faster, hotter, faster, hotter--
Mels frowned as she realized her hand was touching something hard at the small of his back.
Not a brace.
There was nothing medical about it.
Ducking under the flap of his windbreaker, she found...the grip of a gun.
She pulled the we
apon out of his waistband as she stepped back.
It was a forty, and she quickly checked the chamber. Empty. Same with the clip.
"You're not the only one with a permit," he said remotely.
She gave the autoloader back to him. "Guess not. Can I ask you where you got it?"
"I bought it."
"And forgot the ammunition?"
"It wasn't a package deal."
"You know what? The victim who died at your hotel just last night was shot at by this caliber of gun."
"And you think I did it because I'm out of ammo."
Mels shrugged. "You told me not to get involved with you because it could kill me. You show up with a gun after someone is shot at the Marriott. Call me Einstein."
"I didn't kill that man."
"How do you know it was a male?"
"It's all over the news."
Mels crossed her arms over her chest and stared at the floor, thinking nothing good was going to come out of where this conversation was going.
"I think I'd better take off."
"Yeah," she said.
Talk about whiplash. From kissing to this in less than five seconds.
"I'm sorry," he murmured at the door.
"Why are you apologizing?"
"I don't like leaving you like this."
Well, that made two of them.
As the door clicked shut behind him, she wondered if she would ever see Matthias again--and gave herself a steady lecture about keeping her head tight and not letting her libido get her into dangerous situations.
Not something her father would have approved of. Not something smart women did.
Damn it....
After fifteen minutes of kicking her own butt, she went up to the newsroom, got herself a mug of strong-and-black, and returned to her desk.
"Tell me you haven't wrecked my car, too."
She jumped and glanced over at Tony. "Wha-- Oh, no. Here are the keys."
"Guess you just look like you've been in another accident."
Go. Fig.
Easing back in her chair, she stared at her computer screen.
"You okay?" Tony asked. "You need a Twinkie?"
Mels laughed. "I think I'll try Maxwell House first, but thanks."
"What's up with the puss?"
"I'm just wondering how it's physiologically possible for scars to remove themselves from a dead body."
Okay, not the question she'd actually been thinking about, but a fine, socially acceptable substitute. She'd also have asked it eventually. Tony was a walking encyclopedia.
Now it was his turn to ease back and stare at nothing. "Not possible. Scars are scars."
"So how could you explain two sets of photographs, one that showed a pattern on the skin and one that didn't?"
"Easy. Someone got busy with Photoshop."
"That's what I'm thinking."
What she didn't get was the "why." Although she had her suspicions as to the "who."
Mels let her head fall to the side. Any tampering wouldn't have been done by the official photographer--while the woman had been snapping away, there'd been half a dozen men in that room with her, and if she'd changed anything in the images later, they would have hollered about the discrepancy the second they saw the pictures.
So that left Monty, a man who masturbated his ego by talking to the press when he shouldn't and trying to create drama where there was none. What were the chances that he'd tinkered just for kicks and giggles?
Mels snapped into action, going into the CCJ's database.
"Either that," Tony tacked on, "or it was a case of divine intervention."
"I got the tattoo."
At five o'clock, Mels looked up from the final version of her story on the prostitute. Eric was standing in front of her, a folder in his hand, a shit-eater on his face.
"From the Marriott victim who disappeared from the morgue?"
"The very one."
"Lemme see?" she said, holding out her hand.
"It's, ah...yeah." He passed the pictures over. "Not my style. I'm more of a tribal guy."
As she popped the top fold, Mels's brows lifted. The photograph was in color, but that wasn't necessary--at least not where the ink was concerned. The tattoo's depiction of the Grim Reaper was done in black and white, and with eerie detail...to the point where even in the photograph, the glowing eyes under the ragged hood and the bony hand pointing out to the viewer seemed to call upon her specifically.
"Pretty gruesome, huh," Eric remarked. "And nice cemetery, too, don't you think."
True enough on the background: The horrible figure was standing in a field of graves, the headstones stretching far into the landscape beyond, the decaying robes sweeping out and obscuring that which seemed to go on forever.
"What are these hash marks at the bottom?" she wondered.
"It's got to be a count of something--and not loaves of bread, I'm willing to bet."
"Could be gang related."
"That's what I was thinking, especially given that there was a body recently in the morgue with something similar on it--according to my source."
"What does the CPD think?"
"I'm looking for the answer to that right now."
Mels glanced up. "So you've done an Internet search on the image?"
"There are a thousand representations of the Grim Reaper on the Web--and some of them are in people's skin. From what I could find, none look exactly like that, but all of them sort of look like that, if it makes any sense."
"How did your source get these? I heard that everything was wiped cleaned from the intake file."
St. Francis was in an uproar over the incident; it was as if the man had never been through their system at all.
Clean. Very clean.
"My buddy happens to be a tattoo buff. He took the pics on his own phone as the body came in."
"Handy dandy," she murmured as she returned the folder. "So, if we assume the ink is gang related--what the hell was the guy doing wearing a state-of-the-art bulletproof vest? And what about the disappear? Gangs aren't that sophisticated, financed or dogged about their dead--breaking into a hospital to get a body back? And then pulling an IT scrub? Not going to happen. Mob's the same."
Eric chewed on that mangled Bic of his. "It's got to be government of some sort. I mean, who else could pull it off?"
She thought of Matthias's empty autoloader. "I hear the bullets were from a forty?"
"The gun that was used against the guy? Yeah--and the good news is that the police took the vest along with the clothes and boots into evidence so they're still around." Her colleague's eyes narrowed. "So, are you going to tell me why you're so interested now?"
"My dead girl got slit in the throat as well." Although, really, what were the chances the two killings were related?
"Ah, so you're collecting neck injuries."
"Just being thorough."
"And how's your story coming on that prostitute? Anything new?"
"I'm working on some things."
"Let me know if you need any help."
"Back at you."
As Eric walked off, she realized that the newsroom was largely vacant. And she was nearly out of time when it came to her deadline.
Rereading her article, she was dissatisfied. No new information other than the victim's identity, and when she'd called the family, she'd gotten a rather shockingly uninterested no comment.
How could you not be upset at your daughter's death?
Mels didn't like sending her piece in as it was. The writing was fine, and spell-check had done its job, but the real story was with Monty and his photographs and she couldn't put any of that in yet.
With a curse, she hit send, and vowed that she was going to get to the bottom of it all. Even if it didn't go into print.
Switching her screens, she reassessed the side-by-side of two images that she'd put together an hour before: they were both of similar markings carved into abdominal skin. One was from that Cecilia Ba
rten girl who'd been found at the quarry on the outskirts of town just days before...and the other was what Monty contended had been on the prostitute's belly.
The pattern of scratches looked like some kind of language: There were identical characters in both photographs, although they were not in the same sequence--which in her mind didn't rule out in the slightest the Monty-as-Photoshopper theory. If anything, it was perfect, tying the death at the motel to that of the Barten girl without making the manipulation a one-for-one obvious.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she decided the tampering fit with Monty's routine. If he was the "source" for a new serial killer, how much fun would that be for him....
Except she had to wonder. When no one else was killed like those girls, what was he going to do? And his job was at risk. He was already walking a line by giving info like he did. Raising the stakes by lying about it was just too foolish.
Maybe he was simply getting sloppy.
Then again, what about the hair color? The prostitute had colored hers right before she'd died, to a shade of blond that matched the Barten girl's. That wasn't something that had changed between photographs; that had actually occurred.
What if Monty was a copycat killer?
"How's your car situation?" As Mels jumped, Tony halted in the process of packing up his stuff. "You okay over there?"
"Yeah, sorry. Just thinking."
Her buddy slung his bag over his shoulder. "You need to borrow my vintage wheels again?"
Mels hesitated. "Oh, I couldn't bother you with--"
"Not to worry. Just drive me home and she's all yours as long as you bring me breakfast again tomorrow morning." Holding up the keys, he swung them back and forth from their KISS logo tag. "I really don't need the damn thing."
"One more night," she hedged.
"Two more sausage biscuits with coffee, you mean."
The pair of them laughed as she shut down her computer. Getting up, she took the photographs Monty had given her, stuffed them into her bag, and linked an arm through Tony's.
"You're a prince among men, you know that?"
He smiled. "Yeah, I do. But it's nice to hear it once in a while."
"Listen, do we know anyone who's good with photographs?"
"You looking for a portrait of yourself?"
"I'm talking about analyzing."
"Ah." He held the back door open for her. "As a matter of fact, I know just who you can talk to...and we probably can meet him on the way home."
Jim had not expected to pay another visit to the St. Francis Hospital morgue anytime soon. Once through the park with the slabs and the stiffs had been more than enough for him.
