by LJ Ross
Not that there was anything wrong with that, he amended quickly, or indeed with eighties power ballads, he thought with a slight wince as the music changed.
There was no answer after a couple of raps on the door and fear clutched at his throat like an iron fist. He tried the handle but it was locked.
“Christ,” he muttered, shoving at it again with his shoulder.
He didn’t stop to worry or wonder about his actions. He kicked the door in without a second thought and burst into the hallway.
Although she hadn’t been able to hear him knocking, Anna certainly heard the sound of a door splintering and she felt her own share of fear as she stepped out of the shower room. Grabbing the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a large porcelain figurine from the mantelpiece in her bedroom, she padded onto the landing.
“I’ve called the police!” she shouted down the stairs.
At the sound of her voice, Ryan let out a distinctly shaky breath. He tried to tell himself he was just pleased there wasn’t another fatality, but he knew this went deeper. Deliberately, he gave himself a moment to collect his thoughts.
“No need,” he called out dryly. “They’re already here.”
Her head peeped out over the top of the landing and he looked up into big brown eyes which were wide with alarm.
“Oh, it’s only you,” she let out a shaky breath, her face softening. Then she looked at the door and flew down the stairs. “What have you done?”
He looked back at the damage and felt like a prize moron.
“I knocked, there was no answer,” he said defensively.
“Didn’t you hear the music?” she asked.
“I did hear the music,” he said sarcastically, as Bonnie Tyler bellowed that she was planning to hold out for a hero.
His lips twitched as Anna practically flew across the hall to turn the music off.
“Yes, well,” she said when she turned back.
“Well,” he agreed and then moved to pick up the broken door and stand it against the gaping hole in the wall.
“Cup of tea?” she asked as he turned back to her. She tried to gauge his mood, wondered if he wanted to talk about what had happened at the press conference.
He shook his head, to both offers, and looked at her properly then. She was lovely, he thought, with her face unadorned and flushed from the shower and her skin wrapped in an emerald green towel.
It made him want to unwrap her, he realised, and felt his body respond. He told himself to think of other things but how could he?
Her hair was damp from the shower and curled slightly at her temples. Then, he noticed that she still clutched the figurine of a couple dancing and he grinned.
“Were you planning on bludgeoning me with that?” he asked.
She looked down at the figure in her hand. “I…well, it was either that or my hairbrush. I thought this would do more damage.”
He wanted to laugh but her instincts had been good.
“It’s a good idea to keep on your guard, Anna,” he said quietly. “I would feel better knowing you were staying somewhere in town, at one of the inns.”
“They’re all full,” she said without thinking. She had already checked. “I prefer my privacy, anyway.”
The matter wasn’t over, he thought, not by a long shot.
Looking at her, he forgot the reasons he had come, the distress and carnage he had left behind and reached for her instead. Her eyes widened for a moment as his hands framed her face and then her fingers speared into his thick hair, tugging him towards her.
“I can’t seem to stop,” he muttered into her neck.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she replied and felt his arms tighten around her, lifting her.
Grey eyes met brown for a long moment.
“Which way?” he asked.
“Top of the stairs, on the left,” she answered.
He wanted to take and take but he found himself giving instead. Her skin was so soft, her body slender and surprisingly strong. He trailed his fingertips over the dips and curves and watched her head fall back. He dipped his head and found the fast heartbeat thundering at her neck.
He sucked in a breath when her hands lifted to peel the thick winter shirt from his shoulders, slowly popping each button while her eyes held his. They got as far as the shirt and the zip of his jeans before he caught her against him.
“Tease,” he said softly before ravaging her mouth.
Her eyes flew open when he pushed her back onto the bed with a bounce. She barely had time to push the hair from her face before he was beside her again and she was looking into eyes which were the colour of dark skies.
Everything about this man was intense, Anna thought deliriously as his mouth roamed her skin. His long body was hardened by a layer of muscle and pinned her to the soft cotton sheets. His hands fanned her hips as his teeth nipped at the skin of her navel and her body arched, begging him to go on. Her fingers clutched at his arms and she felt a long scar there running from shoulder to elbow. His hands roamed her skin and he watched her eyelids flicker as a shaft of sunlight fell on her hair which lay in wild tangles on the pillow around her face.
When her eyes finally opened again, he smiled.
* * *
He lay face down on the bed, one heavy arm draped across her stomach and one long leg tangled with hers.
“I need water,” she croaked happily, eyes closed.
He grunted.
“I think I may be dying,” she added for good measure.
He grunted again but managed to turn his head to look at her through the black hair which fell across his eyes.
She was beautiful. All long, slender curves and smooth skin. Her face was a curious mix of angles which worked together harmoniously but it was the eyes which grabbed him and held him.
He levered up and kissed her. When he eventually released her mouth, he brushed the hair back from her temple and saw mild confusion on her face.
“You ok?” she asked quietly, bringing one hand to his cheek.
“Never better,” he said with complete honesty. He couldn’t remember feeling so happy in his life, which was completely at odds with the reality that awaited him outside her bedroom.
Thinking of it, remembering it, he rolled off the bed and away from her to start pulling on his clothes. As she watched him, gloriously naked in the afternoon sunlight, she thought again that he was an excellent male specimen.
She blushed furiously and was glad he wasn’t facing her.
“We need to talk,” he said and she knew his thoughts had turned back to the investigation.
“Give me ten minutes,” she agreed. “Oh, Maxwell?”
She beamed a smile when he spun around.
“Where did you hear that?”
She chuckled. “Should I call you ‘Maxwell’? Or, how about ‘Max’?”
He looked at her, sitting in the middle of the wide bed, her long legs drawn up to her chest and smiled wolfishly. He padded towards her again and watched her eyes widen fractionally when his face hovered a few inches above her own.
“Ryan,” he growled. “Ryan will do.”
* * *
Downstairs at the little bistro table overlooking the sea, they faced one another again. There was a new knowledge, a new understanding between them, but the wariness remained. For her, she supposed it came from never trusting men, or from never finding a man whom she could trust.
For him, it was more complicated.
“Do you want to..?” she began.
“Not now, Anna,” he answered her unspoken question. He couldn’t think of Natalie now.
“OK,” she said softly. There it was again, he thought. That quiet understanding. The automatic comprehension of his feelings, without him having to explain them to her. Was that one of her many skills?
“I need to find the pattern,” he said baldly, looking her in the eye. “There were pentagrams on Megan’s body and Rob had been tied down to a few big bits of driftw
ood in the rough shape of a pentagram. Why didn’t we find one on Lucy? The girls’ bodies had been washed, taken care of in some way, whereas Rob’s had been burned.”
Ryan let out a hissing breath between his teeth which she knew was all frustration.
“I’ve got the CSI’s going over the scenes again, which is a big ask. I’ve got the pathologist going over his own findings and re-assessing the bodies for anything he missed the first time. I’ve drafted in another police pathologist from Teesside,” he referred to a county further south, “to provide his own views. The reports are due this evening. I don’t think I’ll be at the top of anyone’s Christmas card list, but it has to be done.”
Anna let him talk because he needed to.
“I’m sorry,” he added belatedly. “The delay will mean that you won’t be able to hold the funeral for another few days.”
She nodded her acceptance. Better to lay her sister to rest peacefully knowing that her killer had been found.
“About Megan,” he began, reading her mood and finding her sturdy enough to question.
“What about her?” Anna felt her brief post-coital euphoria drain away completely.
“Do you know if she was seeing anyone in particular?” He thought back to what Alex Walker had told him and added, “Anyone who might have wanted to keep their relationship secret?”
Anna let out a breath and pulled a face. “Ryan, it’s hard to have to speak ill of the dead, especially my own sister.” She rubbed at cold arms and compressed her lips. “You have to understand that Megan needed love and admiration, almost desperately.”
Ryan understood that it would be hard for her. The guilt, the grief, all weighed heavily. But he needed to know.
“I’m not here to judge her, Anna. It may help to find her killer, if we can put together a list of people who she knew. Especially intimately,” he added. “People who she would have let into her apartment without a second thought.”
Anna nodded.
“You already know about Alex,” she said evenly. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Anna kneaded her temples where a brutal tension headache was starting. “There was always the odd fling with a passing tourist. Young lads on holiday with their parents, sometimes the fathers too,” Anna’s voice lowered sadly as she listed the tally. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same applied to people already on the island. She used to keep a diary of her conquests.”
“Do you know if she still has it?”
“Ryan,” she turned to him in apology, “I hadn’t spoken to my sister in eight years. I haven’t got a clue whether she kept that old diary. I can only tell you that it was green with a gold wraparound thread. She saved up and got it from the gift shop when she was sixteen.”
“OK,” he said, thinking that nothing matching her description had been found or listed on the inventory of Megan’s belongings.
“I knew that she had been with older men,” Anna said, picking up the conversation. “It was a source of pride for her, another way to make me feel gauche and inexperienced.”
“It was nothing more than a cheap way to bolster her self-esteem,” he said succinctly, annoyed at the remembered hurt he saw reflected in her eyes once more.
“I know that,” she nodded. “As a grown woman, I understand what she did and why she did it. I didn’t envy her then and I don’t envy her now. The point is, she bragged about knowing what made a man tick and she liked to show off the little trinkets they bought her, but she never told me who these men were. I always assumed they were married or figments of her imagination.”
“Where did she keep her trinkets?” he asked.
Anna shrugged. “She had all kinds of hidey-holes. Our father used to enjoy smashing up the things we valued, so we both learned never to put our keepsakes on display.” She thought back. “When we lived at home, she hollowed out a chunk of the mattress and used to keep her bits and bobs in there, between the springs.”
Ryan knew the first place he would check.
“Other than that, I couldn’t tell you,” Anna finished with regret.
“You’ve been very helpful,” Ryan took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Really.”
Her face brightened slightly and her fingers curved into his.
“The problem is, there’s hardly any DNA evidence,” he said unexpectedly and let go of her hand. “He’s done a professional job on them and he’s laughing at us.”
He’s laughing at me.
Ryan wasn’t used to losing, he had been fortunate in his life in many ways and a combination of skill and luck had ensured that things mostly went in his direction. Recent times had put paid to that assumption of endless good fortune. He had lost too many people, too quickly. He had to ask himself whether it was because he had lost his edge.
He looked up into Anna’s patient eyes and felt twin emotions of passion and peace. He wanted to tell her then, to pour out the demons which haunted him at night, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“I want to know what I’m missing,” he said instead. “I’ve got a profiler drumming up a report on this whacko’s psychology, but I can tell you that it’s going to say we’re looking for a white male between the ages of eighteen and forty, megalomaniacal tendencies, poor relationships with women. It’s always the same.”
“It’s not all about women, though, is it? What about Rob?” Anna asked quietly, thinking of the boy she had grown up with. It was awful to realise that the more people who died, the more numbed she became.
“Exactly,” Ryan jabbed a hand out to capture her thought. “This guy isn’t particular. He does two young women in a similar way, so we start to think he has issues with the opposite sex. Then, he throws a curve with Rob Fowler.”
Ryan tapped his fingers on the table.
“Does it have to be only one person?” Anna thought aloud.
Ryan turned to look into her quiet, intelligent face.
“No, it doesn’t.”
They both fell silent, considering the implications of that.
“You think definitely male?” she asked.
He nodded. “The physicality alone suggests a male killer. The first two women were moved from the place where they died, although we’re still searching for the site where Lucy was murdered. As for Rob, we have to work on the presumption that he went to the beach of his own accord and was overpowered once he was there. The manner in which all three victims were killed would suggest a male killer; statistically, women are more likely to use different methods.”
“Oh?” she asked, intrigued.
“Yep, poison, for example, requires less physical strength.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said with a smile and he flashed a quick smile in return. Another shared moment.
“These murders,” he said thoughtfully, “they follow similar threads, but they’re different in so many ways.”
“Was Rob strangled or did he have his throat cut?” Anna forced herself to ask the question and blanked her mind of thoughts of Megan for the moment.
Ryan saw her as one of his team. As such, he had no hesitation telling her what had happened, but he did regret causing her pain.
“He was burned, not quite at a stake, but in a similar fashion. He was strapped to a wooden pentagram and placed on top of a pyre.”
Anna closed her eyes for a moment against the image in her mind.
“The fire would have burned all his skin off,” she said.
“Yes,” he nodded, frowning slightly.
“The manner of Rob’s death could have been inspired by a number of different historical practices,” she began, switching smoothly to business mode. “Celtic Druids used to build wicker figures which they filled with people and then burned alive.”
“Like in the Wicker Man,” Ryan commented.
“Yes, like in the film,” she nodded. “It was a form of capital punishment for all manner of sinners, from those seen as sexual deviants to traitors and rebels, although archeologically-sp
eaking, the Roman sources have largely been discredited.”
He had to smile. She was nothing if not a stickler when it came to her work, but then he supposed the same could be said of him. His ears pricked up at the idea of the fire as a form of punishment. What had been Rob Fowler’s crime? His sexuality?
“Then, there were the Carthaginians,” Anna continued.
“The Carthaginians?” he raised a brow.
“Carthage is a city in modern-day Tunisia,” she supplied. “In antiquity, the people who came from there are said to have practised child sacrifice. Obviously, we’re not dealing with children here, but it’s said that the children were sacrificed at Tophet, which means ‘roasting place’.”
“A fire?” He asked.
“Yes, simply put.”
The removal of skin could also be significant,” she added quietly, resting her head on her hand. “Aztec ritual sacrifices were made to Xipe Totec, otherwise known as ‘the Flayed One’, a sort of life, death and rebirth deity who commanded the seasons and the harvest.”
“Victims had their skin flayed?”
“Yes,” she said. “The skin was flayed and then the priest in charge of the ritual would use the skin for his own ends.”
Ryan studied the skin on his hands and thought of how Rob Fowler’s body had looked lying there on the beach.
“What’s the point of it all?”
“Depends what you’re asking, Ryan,” Anna lifted one shoulder. “I’ll leave the motivations of the killer or killers to you. As for the point of ritual sacrifice, it’s an ancient practice, dating all the way back to Neolithic times. It was believed to bring good fortune, or to pacify the gods.”
“Good fortune?”
“In harvests or hunting, mostly. In those times, people were often nomadic. They followed the migration of large herds of animals. It could be that you have someone making his – or her – sacrifices in the name of good fortune.” She paused, thinking of the Priory. “Sometimes, sacrifices were made to dedicate a temple which had just been built. It’s rumoured that there are thousands of people entombed in the Great Wall of China,” she mused. “Could be that you have a religious fanatic who believes in making sacrifices to dedicate to his temples.”
