Killer Heat

by Brenda Novak

  “How did you know to come?” she asked the cop who sat behind the wheel, writing a report.

  He put aside his clipboard. “Professional courtesy. Gentleman by the name of Jonah Young called in, said you were being harassed and asked if we could drive by every once in a while. I’ve been by twice already. Why? Somethin’ wrong?” He glanced around.

  Heedless of the tears streaking down her cheeks, she sank onto the blacktop. It was over. For tonight.

  But what about the next time? Butch would be back. His brazen behavior made it a certainty.

  So? Are you going to answer? Will you do it?

  Jonah rubbed his tired eyes, then reread Lori’s text message for probably the fifteenth time in three days. He needed to respond to her at some point. Ex-wife or no, he should be civil. But he wasn’t ready to address the issues her request dredged up. The clock on the wall showed three in the morning. He’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours and was in no frame of mind to formulate an answer that sounded halfway polite. Considering how things had gone down when they were briefly married, which seemed like another life since it was before he’d ever become a cop, he didn’t feel he owed her any special consideration.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t see a lot of reason to deny her what she was asking for. It wasn’t that big a sacrifice. And he’d made his own share of mistakes in life. Francesca was proof. Besides, he was over Lori. He believed she’d be a good mother. So why not write the letter? Why not support her attempt to adopt a baby?

  Resentment had to be the answer. It’d been more than a decade since he’d learned the truth, yet he still cringed whenever he pictured her sleeping with the partner she’d left him for. All those days and nights when Lori had said she needed some “girl time” he’d thought she and Miranda were seeing a movie or shopping. He’d never dreamed they might be romantically intimate—because he’d been operating under the mistaken belief that he and Lori were, on the whole, happily married. That they had a normal sex life and would someday start a family. Lori had always seemed eager enough to make love. There’d even been times, plenty of them, when she’d initiated it.

  But that was before she decided he never had and never would be able to fulfill her needs. It wasn’t until she asked him to move out that she claimed she’d never been turned on by him, that all the moaning and writhing had been for his benefit.

  Just the memory of those words made him wince. During that final argument he’d realized she’d been involved with Miranda before she ever met him. If she’d been confused about her sexuality it would’ve been so much easier to forgive her. But, according to her, she’d known since she was a girl. Which meant their whole relationship had been a front, a lie. She hadn’t told him the truth because her family was absolutely opposed to same-sex relationships. She knew they’d never accept her lifestyle or respect her choice, and she was afraid she’d lose her position in the family business as well as her inheritance if they found out. She’d also wanted to have her own children and knew only a man could give her that.

  Apparently, she’d seen him as some kind of sperm donor. But that was before she’d learned she couldn’t have children. Jonah was sure that news had made it a whole lot easier to toss him aside.

  “Hey, what are you doing here? I thought you were going to your motel.”

  Startled, he glanced up to see Dr. Leslie Price, the forensic anthropologist he’d been working with since he’d signed on to help with the Dead Mule Canyon murders. Diminutive and soft-spoken, the doctor was in her early sixties. Her white hair reminded him of his mother. So did her confidence and dedication to her craft. But the similarities ended there. As a successful corporate attorney, Rita Young dressed in bold colors with designer labels and took no time to nurture anyone or anything. She could be combative, even with him, and threw her support behind one worthy cause after another. Dr. Price, on the other hand, settled for plain white lab coats and nurses’ shoes and refused to argue with anyone. She also limited her devotion to one cause—making the dead speak through the evidence left in their bones.

  “I could ask the same of you,” he said. “You told me you were going to lie down in the back.”

  She offered him a sheepish grin. “I did. For a while. That couch isn’t the most comfortable.”

  Lack of comfort wasn’t the real problem. Jonah was willing to bet she was so exhausted she could sleep in a closet standing up. The fine lines age had etched around her eyes and mouth were growing more prominent as the week wore on. She couldn’t rest because she knew they had work to do. The bones lying on the tables that’d been set up for her in this makeshift lab weren’t just bones to her—or to him. They represented victims, victims who deserved justice for what they’d suffered.

  Jonah had spent a lot of hours here, trying to help. Without the information only she could provide, he didn’t even have a good place to start the investigation. But that should be changing very soon. Now that they’d arrived at an approximate victim count, which hadn’t been easy due to the number of bones that’d been scattered or broken in two or more pieces, they were busy establishing the biological characteristics, the time since death and the cause and manner of death for each set of remains. The more quickly they learned what these bones could tell them, the more information he’d have with which to direct the investigation.

  “I hope you’re letting your girlfriend know that the woman you’ve been spending your nights with is old enough to be your mother.” She nodded toward the phone in his hand. “Handsome guy like you…she’s got to be wondering.”

  He grinned. “Fortunately, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Fortunately?” She settled at the next table, where she’d been piecing together pelvic bones most of the evening.

  “My job can be tough on close personal relationships. The travel. The hours. You know.” He shoved his phone into his pocket and went back to measuring those femurs and tibias that weren’t broken. Dr. Price would use his allometry measurements to determine the general height of each victim. She’d also examine the thickness of the bones to suggest a body type.

  There was a great deal of work to be done yet, and soon she’d be doing it exclusively with the help of the trained assistants who came in during the day. His strength lay on the investigative end, using the information she provided. That information just hadn’t been coming quickly enough, so she’d trained him to do some of the simpler measuring.

  “Close personal relationships are what will keep you sane in all this.” She ran her finger over the sciatic notch of a pelvic bone. A broader notch indicated a woman; a narrower notch indicated a man. But some didn’t seem particularly wide or narrow. She’d told him these final few were the tricky ones. That was why she’d taken a short nap. She’d hoped to come back refreshed.

  Going by her frown, he wasn’t sure the nap had improved her ability to decide.

  “That depends on the relationship,” he said. “The people closest to you can also drive you crazy.”

  “My best guess is female.”

  “If you’re talking about the person driving me crazy, you’d be right,” he teased, purposely misunderstanding.

  She laughed. “I was talking about this victim.” After making a notation, she set the pelvic bone aside. “Anyway, it’s not like that for me. My family is the reason I do what I do. I want to make the world a better place…for them.”

  He wondered how eager she’d be to fall into another man’s arms if her husband unexpectedly announced that he’d been in love with his golfing buddy all along. Jonah’s experience with Lori had altered his outlook on relationships, made it difficult for him to trust. Not long after the divorce, he became good at spotting at least one fatal flaw in every woman he dated. That flaw insured his emotional safety, kept him from making any commitments.

  He felt his lips twist into a humorless smile as he recalled the argument he’d once had with his mother. She’d told him he needed to stop trying to prove his desirability to ev
ery available woman he met, that he should quit thinking with his cock. Offended by her blunt assessment of his behavior and her language—she was his mother, after all—he’d snapped at her to stay out of his business, told her she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  But now he could see that she’d been right all along. She usually was. Unfortunately, that didn’t make her any easier to put up with. No one could get on his nerves faster than she could, probably because they were too much alike. Although he wasn’t nearly as high-strung or brutally frank, he was stubborn to a fault and determined to live life on his own terms. That meant he was going to take a few hits, and he had.

  “Do you think you’ll ever get married?” Dr. Price asked.

  “Maybe someday.” He didn’t mention that he’d already been married. He never told anyone, hadn’t even told Francesca. Tying the knot when he was so young, and for such a short period of time, to a woman who claimed she’d never been attracted to him seemed better forgotten. Only his mother and sister knew he’d been married, and the friends who’d attended the wedding, of course. But even they had no idea of the real reason for the divorce. Terrified that word would leak back to her family, Lori had begged him to keep silent about her homosexuality. How her parents could continue to believe Miranda was her “roommate” he’d never understand. Except…he hadn’t seen it, either, had he? Lori just didn’t fit the stereotype.

  “Marriage isn’t easy,” she said. “But if both people go into it with the proper attitude, with real dedication and loyalty, it can work.”

  It hadn’t worked for his parents, but as dynamic and talented as his mother was, Jonah didn’t blame his father for bailing. He couldn’t imagine how Wesley had remained in the relationship as long as he had. He’d stayed until Connie, Jonah’s older sister, was in college and Jonah had nearly graduated from high school. That was admirable, considering it was difficult to put up with his mother for a weekend, let alone twenty years. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She’d started to say something else when his phone rang. Covering a yawn, he muttered, “Just a sec,” and dug it out of his pocket. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Young?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sergeant Lowe here, from the Chandler Police Department.”

  Immediately conjuring up the image of Francesca sitting in Investigator Finch’s cubicle, scratched and bruised from her confrontation with Vaughn, he stiffened. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, Ms. Moretti is fine, but…I thought you should know…someone cut her phone line tonight.”

  Shoving his stool away from the table, Jonah got to his feet. “Someone?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t say who. Ms. Moretti definitely has her suspicions, but we canvassed the yard and there wasn’t anyone lurking around. The good news is that we didn’t see any evidence that whoever cut the line tried to enter the house.”

  There wouldn’t be evidence. Butch Vaughn had a key. “How’d you find out about the phone line?”

  “Officer Burcell was sitting in front of the house when Ms. Moretti came running into the street, clearly upset. He checked out her claims and she was right.”

  Jonah felt Dr. Price’s attention but ignored it. “Can I talk to her?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to go by the house. It’ll take some time for the telephone company to fix the line, and I’m calling from the station.”

  “What about the officer who’s out there—Officer Burcell? He’s got to have a phone.”

  “Burcell is currently responding to another call.”

  Jonah curled his free hand into an agitated fist. “You’re telling me she’s all by herself?”

  Taking exception to his tone, the sergeant grew brisk. “We’ll continue to drive by periodically, but we can’t camp out there all night. There was no apparent threat—”

  “No threat? Her phone line was cut!”

  “That could’ve been a prank by some teenage boy. We have a whole community to protect, Mr. Young, not just this one woman,” he said, and hung up.

  As Jonah put away his phone, he gazed at all the cracked skulls and jawbones around him. Because teeth followed predictable maturation patterns, they were a fairly reliable indicator of certain biological characteristics, such as age. They could also help in identifying an unknown victim via dental records. Jonah couldn’t wait for these bones to be connected with names, which could then turn into leads pointing to Vaughn—or someone else. He wanted to keep pushing forward here with Dr. Price so he’d have something to run with. He hated to pull out until the job was done.

  But he wasn’t about to leave Francesca vulnerable while he measured femurs. He’d seen the glitter in Vaughn’s eyes when he’d been questioned about April Bonner. Maybe Francesca had screwed up and called a mannequin a body, but she claimed Vaughn was the last man to see April alive. It was entirely possible that he’d killed her.

  Picking up the tibia he’d recently measured, Jonah turned it over in his hands, noting a fine-line fracture. Maybe Butch was responsible for the death of this poor woman, too.

  Purposely avoiding Dr. Price’s curious stare, he raised his eyes to take in the entire room full of bones. Maybe Butch was responsible for all of them. And now that Francesca had drawn his attention, she might be next on his list.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, and jogged out to the car he’d rented when he arrived in Arizona.

  6

  Jonah found Francesca sitting on her front porch with a butcher knife in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Judging by the weariness that hung on her like an oversize coat and her general dishevelment, she hadn’t slept—or showered. But it was early, only five-thirty. The sun was just creeping over the horizon. None of her neighbors were up, so the windows around them remained dark, the street quiet. The one other person Jonah had spotted so far was the newspaper man.

  “You look like hell,” he said while he carried her paper across the lawn. That was a bit harsh as greetings went. But he had to compensate for the sudden jolt the sight of her, so skimpily dressed, gave his system. She wasn’t wearing a bra beneath that baggy T-shirt. He’d clued into that at first glance. Then there were the short cutoffs that made her legs look like they went on forever….

  Her eyes narrowed as he reached her. He half expected her to use that knife to chase him off her property. Lord knew he deserved nothing less. But Finch and Hunsacker were so pissed off about the way everything had gone down yesterday, he was her only ally when it came to Vaughn, and she must’ve realized it because she dropped the knife on the round table beside her and took a sip of coffee.

  “Rough night, huh?”

  She swallowed before answering. “He thinks he can get away with terrorizing me.”

  Sitting in the chair across from her, he examined the pepper spray on the table between them. “You’re sure it was Butch?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  The faint purple of a bruise blossomed on her right knee, and her lip was still swollen, but even at her worst Francesca was classically beautiful. That hadn’t changed. “Are you saying you did or didn’t get a glimpse of him?”

  “It was dark and he wasn’t that close to the window. But I saw someone the same size and shape as Butch, no question. After he cut the phone line so I couldn’t call for help, he sat at the pool throwing rocks at my window.”

  Stretching out his legs, Jonah crossed them at the ankle. “Not exactly the stealthy approach one might expect from a serial killer.”

  “It wasn’t stealthy, but it was effective.” She ran a hand through her hair, combing it with her fingers. “He scared the shit out of me.”

  “Ah, just the reaction he was looking for.” Picking up the knife, Jonah pressed his thumb to the blade, which wasn’t that sharp. “Is this your defense? What you use to chop tomatoes?”

  “For your information, that’s a carving knife. And it’s the best weapon I’ve got, since I don’t own a gun.”

  He knew why
she was reluctant to own a firearm. Her father had gotten caught in the cross fire during a drug bust. Jonah might’ve urged her to buy one in spite of all that; he had no confidence that she’d be able to fight Butch off with a kitchen knife. But he didn’t want her to fight; he wanted her to run. “You could’ve stayed someplace else, like I told you to.”

  She raised a hand. “Don’t start. I can’t hide out and hope this problem will take care of itself. If I do that, Butch will just be waiting for me when I return—if he doesn’t catch up with me sooner.”

  “So how do you solve the problem?” He wanted to add without getting killed, but figured she was traumatized enough.

  “By bringing him down, of course.”

  He turned over the knife in his hands. “That might be better left to others, Fran.”

  She blanched. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Isn’t that your name?”

  “That’s what my friends call me. It’s Francesca to you.”

  “Not Ms. Moretti?”

  “I’m feeling generous,” she said with a shrug.

  Setting the knife aside, he considered his options and decided to tackle the past. It was the only way she might let him help her. “Look. I know I’m not your favorite person. I don’t blame you for hating me. If you want another apology, I’ll—”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” she broke in. “I don’t even want to see you.”

  Although he’d expected a harsh response, the vehemence behind her words lacerated some part of him he hadn’t realized was still vulnerable. “I get that, too,” he said. “But let’s not allow the mistakes of the past to make what’s going on now that much worse. If we’re both mixed up in this thing, we might as well pull together, get through it the best we can.”

  “And how do you suggest we ‘pull together’?” She hugged her legs to her chest. “By pretending you didn’t do what you did?”

  “You could forget about it.”

  “What?”

  He folded his arms. “Unless there’s some reason you can’t.”