Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3)

by Blake Pierce

  “Text Morley that we’ll go over and talk to him. Get his address, then give me directions and I’ll drive us there.”

  As she drove, Riley found herself haunted by the memory of Hovis’s silent gaze. She’d encountered a strange and disturbing variety of people lately. Some of them were simply exploiters and abusers, like Ishtar Haynes, Calvin Rabbe, and the man who called himself Jaybird. Others were simply victims, like Justine, Trinda, Jilly, and Chrissy.

  But others were harder to pigeonhole. There had been Rex the truck driver—a man who liked his whores but was horrified when they turned out to be children. And now there was Hovis, a man who meant no harm to anyone, but nevertheless destroyed lives with the drugs he sold.

  It was weird moral territory, and Riley wasn’t comfortable in it.

  But now she had to put such thoughts out of her mind. They were going to have to pay a visit to Gretchen Lovick’s husband and tell him the terrible news. Since the body hadn’t previously been identified, he might not even know that there had been a murder. As far as she was concerned, this sort of thing was the worst part of her job. And this time would be worse than usual.

  How were Riley and Bill going to begin explaining the whole sickening thing to the murdered woman’s husband?

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Riley couldn’t imagine how she was going to explain Gretchen Lovick’s unnatural death to her family. The neighborhood where she had lived was made up of pristine rows of modern ranch houses with small but immaculate lawns and manicured shrubbery. Occasional tall, skinny palm trees stuck up along the street like giant feather dusters.

  She said to Bill, “I thought this was a desert. But look at all the grass. And there are palms of all kinds all over Phoenix.”

  “People are willing to spend for whatever they think is important,” Bill replied. “Looks like the folks around here can all afford some extras. I bet there’s a pool in back of every one of these places.”

  Riley pulled up at the address they’d been given. The house and yard were scrupulously neat and well cared for.

  Why? Riley wondered.

  Why did a woman who lived here choose such a deviant path? How could she even go to a seedy place like the Kinetic Custom Gym? How could she tolerate a pimp like Jaybird?

  As they walked up to the front door, she had to wonder if she and Bill were bringing this awful news to the wrong man. But Cyrus Lovick was expecting them and he opened the door as soon as she pressed the bell. He was wearing a polo shirt and casual slacks that could be golfing attire, but he looked somewhat rumpled and anxious.

  “Are you from the FBI?” he asked. “They said someone was coming.”

  Riley and Bill showed their badges and introduced themselves. They stepped into the air-conditioned interior.

  “What has happened?” Lovick cried.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Riley said, “but your wife, Gretchen, has been found dead.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” Bill added.

  “Oh, God,” Lovick said. He sat down abruptly in an armchair. For a moment he looked around the room, as if expecting to see something that wasn’t there. When he spoke again, his voice sounded numb. “I was afraid that something … she … yesterday when the kids came home, she wasn’t here. Lexie—my oldest—she called me, worried. I came home from work right away. After a while I called the police and reported her missing. Then this afternoon the FBI called. I knew there must be something awful.”

  He looked back and forth from Riley to Bill, “But how did she …?”

  Riley said as gently as she could put it, “I’m afraid she was murdered. Her body was found this morning in Lake Gaffney.”

  Lovick seemed stunned. After a few moments he asked, “Gretchen drowned?”

  Riley glanced at Bill and he took over the explanations. Riley watched Lovick’s expressions as he learned that his wife had been suffocated, and that her body had been stuffed into a weighted body bag. She thought that the bereaved husband’s reactions looked real, but that he wasn’t as shocked as she might have expected him to be.

  After a while Lovick asked, “Do you know who did it? Do you know why?”

  Bill explained that the FBI was at work on those questions. That’s why he and Riley were here. The man’s expressions grew more and more despondent.

  Riley said, “Mr. Lovick, we have to ask. Can you account for your whereabouts for the rest of last night?”

  Lovick didn’t look as if he understood why she was asking the question.

  “I was here. All night.”

  Bill asked, “Can anybody confirm your whereabouts?”

  “My kids, I guess,” Lovick said.

  To Riley, it appeared that he didn’t grasp that they were trying to eliminate him as a suspect. The truth was, they hadn’t done that yet. They’d have to talk to his children. And even then, there might be some question as to whether he’d coached them with his alibi.

  At the moment, though, he seemed like nothing other than a grief-stricken husband. And for the time being, Riley knew that she and Bill had to proceed on the assumption that he was exactly that.

  Riley tried to think about how to ease him into the rest of what she and Bill needed to tell him.

  “Where do you work, Mr. Lovick?” she asked.

  “I’m a computer systems analyst. I’ve got my own business. I stayed home today.”

  He fell silent again. Then he managed to murmur a question.

  “How could this happen?”

  Those four words hit Riley like a punch in the gut. Things were about to get extremely difficult.

  But before either she or Bill could speak, they heard the chattering of young voices just outside the front door. The door swung open, and in walked three children—a girl in her tweens, maybe twelve years old, and two younger brothers. One looked about ten years old, the other about eight. Judging from the time, Riley knew that they must be just getting home from school.

  The kids’ chatter stopped as soon as they saw their father sitting with two visitors. A smile vanished from the girl’s face.

  “Did Mom come back?” she asked.

  Lovick couldn’t bring himself to reply for a moment.

  Finally he said, “Lexie, take your brothers out back. Go play by the pool.”

  With a deeply worried look, the girl herded her brothers away through the house.

  Riley studied Lovick’s face. He had the slender, small-jawed face of a guy who might have been a geek and a misfit in as a kid, but had since become thoroughly socialized and successful and doubtless well liked.

  Speaking slowly and gently, Riley asked, “Mr. Lovick, were you aware that your wife was living a double life?”

  Lovick looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  Riley glanced at Bill uneasily.

  Bill said, “It appears that your wife worked as a prostitute during the day. Out of a brothel called the Kinetic Custom Gym. Were you aware of this at all?”

  Riley studied the change in Lovick’s expression. She saw less shock in his face than she’d expected. Instead, it looked as if something was starting to make sense to him.

  “I knew there was—something,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was.”

  As far as Riley was concerned, the whole thing was still completely baffling. But a possibility occurred to her.

  She said, “Mr. Lovick, did your wife happen to suffer from some sort of dissociative disorder?

  Lovick looked up at her and Riley went on, “I mean something like dissociative identity disorder? Did she ever exhibit multiple personalities?”

  “No, not that,” Lovick said. But he didn’t sound surprised at the question.

  Then he said, “She had … extreme mood swings that scared me sometimes. Like, a couple of years ago, we took the kids to the Grand Canyon. I was driving us along the South Rim, and out of the blue she told me to stop. I did, and she jumped out of the car. She ran straight toward the canyon. I was scared to
death, and the kids were too. It looked like she was going to throw herself off the cliff. But she stopped right at the edge, like stopping on a dime. She threw her arms open and looked out over the canyon and laughed.”

  “She was bipolar, wasn’t she?” Riley said.

  Lovick nodded. “Meds helped a little—when she was taking them. But she didn’t like them. And when she went off them, her behavior got erratic, or worse. When she was depressed, she couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. When she was manic, she took crazy risks, drank too much, drove too fast, that kind of thing. Things had been worse lately. I didn’t know how bad it really was. Obviously.”

  He shook his head.

  “I just wanted her to be happy,” he said. “I always wanted her to be happy. We met when we were in college, and she had all kinds of talent, could have been a great programmer if she’d wanted to. But she said she didn’t want to. She said she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, at least for now. There’d be time for a brilliant career later on, she said.”

  He stopped talking, but it wasn’t hard for Riley to fill in the rest of his story. They’d started having children when they were both way too young. Gretchen found out that being a housekeeper and a mother wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Her husband had been building a business while she was stuck at home, bored literally out of her mind.

  And this was how it had ended. With her murder.

  Suddenly, Riley realized that her face was hot, her palms were sweating, and her hands were shaking. She knew what these symptoms meant.

  She was angry. She was as angry as hell.

  The emotion took her completely by surprise. Earlier that day, she had interviewed a drug dealer, a vile man whose only life’s work was to deal in death and despair. Gretchen herself had surely partaken of his terrible merchandise.

  But Riley hadn’t been mad at Clay Hovis. Instead, she’d almost felt some strange kind of sympathy for him.

  But now she was angry. She was angry with this man, Cyrus Lovick. Gretchen’s husband.

  Why? she wondered. Did she think he was guilty?

  The answer to that question tore through her mind like the blade of a knife.

  Yes.

  But it didn’t make sense. She knew that she was being crazy. She knew that she was being irrational. And she had to stick to the task at hand.

  “Mr. Lovick,” she said, “did you really have no idea what was going on? That your wife was living this other life?”

  He looked shocked by her tone. She, too, felt shocked by her tone.

  He said, “It’s like I told you, I knew there was something.”

  “But how could you not know?” she said, her voice shaking now. “Didn’t you ever just ask her?”

  He stared at her.

  “You have no idea how much I asked,” he said.

  He looked hurt and angry now. Riley didn’t care. Her temper was rising by the moment. But why? She felt herself spinning out of control.

  She sputtered at him, “You said you thought she wanted to be a housewife. But there must have come a time when you saw that it wasn’t working out for her. Surely you knew she felt empty and lost and bored. Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you help her?”

  She felt Bill’s strong hand on her shoulder.

  Bill said to Lovick, “I’d like to confer with my partner privately for a moment.”

  Lovick nodded, looking horrified by Riley’s ranting. Bill hastily escorted Riley to the kitchen and shut the door behind them.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing in there?” Bill snapped. “You’re treating him like a suspect.”

  “He is a suspect, for all we know,” Riley said.

  Bill looked like he could hardly believe his ears.

  “Riley, for Chrissake, think just a minute. Use your brain. Do you really think this man killed his own wife? And those two other women? One of them three years ago? Were those just warm-ups or decoys or what? This isn’t some stupid TV cop show. It doesn’t make sense and you know it.”

  Riley didn’t know whether she knew it or not. She did know that she wasn’t making sense—or at least she didn’t seem to be making sense.

  “We’ve got to talk to the kids,” she insisted. “Check out his alibi.”

  “Like hell we will,” Bill growled.

  “It’s procedure.”

  Bill seemed to be struggling to keep from shouting.

  “To hell with procedure. Riley, are you seriously going to break the news to those kids that their mother was murdered, then grill them about what their daddy was doing when she was killed? Their whole world’s just been wrecked. Do you want to make it worse? What’s going on with you?”

  “I’m trying to do my job.”

  “No. You’re not. A couple of days ago you almost beat up a suspect. Are you going to beat up this guy too?”

  Riley could hardly believe the insinuation.

  “This is different,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “It’s worse.”

  The words stopped Riley short. It was starting to dawn on her that Bill was exactly right.

  “I’m getting us out of here,” Bill said.

  Riley followed him back into the living room. Bill managed to address Lovick in a steady, soothing voice.

  “Mr. Lovick, we’re terribly sorry for your loss. We don’t have any more questions.”

  Lovick looked at him dumbly. Bill handed him a card.

  “Here’s the number for a victim assistance hotline. I don’t think you should wait to call them.”

  Riley realized that Bill had come here prepared with this information. By contrast, she hadn’t been prepared at all.

  They left the house and walked to the car. Bill stopped Riley as she headed around to the driver side.

  “You’re not driving,” he said. “Not in your state of mind.”

  She couldn’t disagree, although Bill was awfully agitated himself. She walked around to the passenger side and got in.

  “Where are we going next?” she asked.

  “Back to HQ, I guess.”

  Bill started to drive in stony silence.

  Riley mentally replayed her words and actions of the last few minutes. What had she been thinking? What had triggered her anger?

  She began to understand now. She and her own daughter had been locked in cages, Jaybird’s girls passed their days in a prison cell of an extinct sauna, girls like Trinda got tossed from the back of one truck cab to the next, and God only knew what kinds of torments Justine had endured at the hands of countless men.

  But Gretchen Lovick had been tormented in her own respectable, upper-middle-class home. She’d lived in a hell that she hated so much that she took refuge in another kind of hell.

  It seemed small wonder that the situation had pushed Riley’s buttons. But since when did she let this kind of thing get the best of her?

  I’ve got to get myself under control, she thought.

  Her phone buzzed. She saw that the call was from Morley.

  “What have you got for me, Agent Paige?” the field office chief said when she answered.

  Riley didn’t reply. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word “nothing.”

  There was a note of barely subdued anger in Morley’s voice. “We brought you and Jeffreys all the way from Quantico. We expected results.”

  Riley’s anger started to rise again. She and Bill had just gotten here on Saturday, and they hadn’t even known for sure that they were dealing with a serial killer until this morning. What kind of results did Morley expect just yet?

  But Riley swallowed her anger.

  “We’ll get you results,” Riley said. “We’re on our way to headquarters.”

  “Damn straight you are,” Morley said. “I’m holding a meeting here in twenty minutes. We’re going to regroup. We’ve got to crack this thing before more women wind up dead.”

  “We’ll be there, sir,” Riley said.

  She ended the call.


  “Morley?” Bill said.

  “Yeah. He’s holding a meeting. We’ll get back just in time.”

  “He’s not happy, I take it,” Bill said.

  “No. He’s not.”

  Bill kept driving, and a chilly silence settled between them. Riley couldn’t blame Bill for being upset with her. She felt herself drowning in a sea of self-doubt. She didn’t know what to make of this case. And it was starting to look like she didn’t know what to make of herself.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Riley could feel a sense of urgency in the FBI conference room when she and Bill got there. They sat down at one end of the big table and looked over the group of people shuffling chairs about and finding places to sit. Special Agent in Charge Elgin Morley obviously wanted to make sure not to leave anybody out of the loop.

  Chief pathologist Dr. Rachel Fowler was here. So was Igraine, in all her colorful technopagan regalia. Riley even recognized the faces of the two agents who had stopped her from demolishing Calvin Rabbe. There were several others that she hadn’t met, and Riley wondered what they all expected to find out here today.

  She spotted Agent Garrett Holbrook placing his chair back from the table a bit and close to the door. She wondered if he was trying to be inconspicuous or was planning an early exit. Perhaps both, she thought.

  At the far end of the room a gigantic map was projected, showing where the three bodies had been found. The sheer size of the visual struck Riley as overkill. After all, the map wasn’t particularly informative. Still, it made the statement that Morley obviously wanted it to make—that they were deadly serious about bringing a murderer to justice.

  Once everybody had settled down, Morley stood up to get things underway. He wasn’t a large man, but he had an intense presence that commanded everyone’s attention. Riley could see why he was in charge here.

  “I’m glad you’re all here,” he said. “We now know for sure that we’re dealing with a serial killer. It’s going to be a tough case, and we don’t have a moment to lose. Even now, our subject might be targeting his next victim—or maybe he’s killed her already. We’ve got to stop him now, if not sooner.”