Angels & Assassins: BWWM Romance

by K. Alex Walker

“That’s the other reason we’re here,” Joel added. “To take you back.”

  “And I’ll put today’s date on your headstone,” Gage snapped.

  “Sir?” The agent that had pulled out the phone reappeared. “Another victim’s been discovered in North Carolina.”

  Tayler felt her stomach completely descend from her body. “Do they know who it is? Is it Katia? Please, tell me that it’s not Katia. Please…”

  He held up a finger, paused as he listened to more details, and then shook his head. “They haven’t been able to identify her yet but it’s a teen girl.”

  “Was there another message?” Joel asked.

  “Yeah. This one said that he’ll kill one person for each day Tayler doesn’t show up.” The man’s eyes went from Joel to Tayler. “Even if he slips up, we can’t risk that many lives.”

  She looked up at Gage. “You can choose to stay here if you want to, but I’m going back.”

  Then she hurried off. She was going whether or not Gage approved, but there was no way he would allow her to fly all the way back to the other side of the country without him.

  He walked into the bedroom and tossed an empty bag onto the bed. He was seething—she could feel his anger from across the room. But she could also feel his matched resignation. They had to go back. They’d run out of options.

  -13-

  The flight back to North Carolina was markedly different from when Tayler had initially left. The only sound that permeated the cabin space was the background chatter from the federal agents. Between the snippets, she could make out that the medical examiner’s office was working as swiftly as possible on Anya and the teenage girl’s cases, and that the FBI was sending out additional help to keep up with the unusual demand. The entire thing had sent her running to the bathroom to throw up several times already.

  They offered her food, but she’d refused. Gage had brought her a bottle of cold water, and it was the only thing she could even think to bring to her lips. He’d held her despite Joel’s curious stares, and his muscles had felt like knotted cords wrapped around her body.

  She was moved swiftly from the plane to the car waiting on the tarmac, everything eerily familiar from her flight to California, but in reverse.

  The sight of the lake house sitting on the hill as they approached didn’t offer any sense of relief. It was surrounded by law enforcement patrol cars, federal cruisers, and black sport utility vehicles. Men stood in the grass and on the porch dressed in all black. Some had the word “police” stretched across their shirts while others wore flak jackets. Flashing lights in red and blue casted purple rays over the yard.

  “We’ve set up a command center in the house,” Joel announced. “Needless to say, we’ve made our presence known, but it hasn’t scared this man away.”

  “How will he know that I’m back?” Tayler asked.

  “Probably the same way he figured out you left. He’s watching you.” He looked around. “We just don’t know from where.”

  They pulled to a stop in front of the house, reluctance creeping into her calf muscles like a Charlie horse. She stepped from the car with Gage right behind her, still silent.

  The mass of officials walking around and the equipment set up all over the kitchen, living room, and dining area made the house feel foreign. It was a hard thing for her to admit after all of the time and money that had been put into the renovation, but Gage’s home now felt more like the place where she wanted to end up after a long day. This place felt like she was lying naked on a block of ice.

  “Did you guys get in touch with Katia?” she asked. “Can you bring her, Jason, and the kids over here? They need to say with us. And did you find out who the girl was? The teen girl?”

  Gage gently grabbed her shoulder and maneuvered her over to an empty spot on the sofa. He didn’t take the space next to her, choosing instead to stand in the corner. The vein in his neck was still thundering and though she knew that he wasn’t upset with her directly, his silence left her feeling isolated.

  “There hasn’t been a positive ID, but according to the sheriff, Aja Robinson is missing,” Joel answered. “Did you know her?”

  Tayler began rocking back and forth as though possessed. She’d known Aja very well. Aja had been one of her patients.

  Aja had recently gone into remission after being treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma for several months. Tayler clearly recalled the weeks she’d spent speaking with Aja’s parents at different points over the course of her treatment, reassuring them that their daughter’s chances for a full recovery were very good due to the fact they’d caught the cancer in its first stage. She couldn’t believe that she’d spent so much time working with them just for Aja to arrive at an end like this. Anya and Aja were now dead because of her foolish selfishness.

  She sprang up and her eyes landed on every last official in the room. “I don’t care if you have to send up a flare. Find a way to let that motherfucker know I’m here.”

  Then she hurried upstairs to the bathroom. There was an empty tub there that she desperately needed to break down in.

  *****

  “Did you hear that Tayler’s back?”

  He whipped his head around. An overweight woman with hair the color of tomato paste was addressing him. The light blue uniform barely contained her breasts as she leaned forward to refill his coffee cup.

  “No, I hadn’t heard,” he replied.

  It was the truth. He hadn’t yet heard that she’d returned, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before the news had filtered to him. Although Tayler had been the most difficult of all of his women, the thought of letting her go hadn’t crossed his mind even when she’d left the small town. Never did he leave a stone unturned.

  “Want more whipped cream on those pancakes, baby?” the woman asked, waving a can of cream in his daughter’s direction.

  “No more,” he replied with a laugh. “If she has any more sugar, it’ll be hell getting her to sleep tonight. It’s bad enough I caved and we’re having breakfast this late.”

  His daughter signed a quick “thank you” before returning to her stack, and he watched her while she happily ate, one half of his mind remaining on Tayler. He’d already known that she would come back. Compassion was her middle name—well, in reality she had two middle names: Dede Roselyn. But, if her parents could have given her a third, it probably would have had something to do with her affinity for helping people in need. It was a trait he was sure she never thought would have become a weakness.

  She’d been his longest project. Usually, whenever he relocated to an area for the sake of choosing a subject, he would stay there anytime between six months to a little over a year. Tayler had taken an entire two years, mostly because his daughter had loved the school and he’d appreciated how the classrooms and curriculum had adapted to her disability. Moving her from place to place had been the most difficult aspect of the process, and he’d tried to quell his desires as much as possible to allow her to remain in one place for a while. But that night Tayler had worked late, he’d had enough. He’d been ready for her. Fortunately for her, that man had stumbled into her path.

  While he’d been upset at the interruption, knowing that he’d been so close but unsuccessful had given him an unexpected surge of adrenaline. There was something titillating about having Tayler know that he was watching her. It had been even more exciting confronting her in the woods. It was why he’d baited her with the dog, even though the bite the animal had taken out of his calf was difficult to explain at work the next day.

  The fear in Tayler’s eyes drove him. He’d hung that fear on his mental mantle, going back to it when his nights were plagued by thoughts of how he’d feel once she was finally taken.

  His daughter banged on her plate with a fork to grab his attention. She flailed her arms as she signed about what she’d done in school that day and asked him what they had planned for the rest of the night.

  “Bedtime,” he said, enunciating the word to
further help her learn to lip read.

  She pouted.

  “Do not look at me that way. It is late. You have to go to bed.”

  “But what about in the morning?” she signed.

  “School.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday, Daddy.” Then, her eyes lit up. “Can we play hide and seek with the babies?”

  He shrugged and brought the coffee mug to his lips. He hadn’t even decided what yet to do with their new friends.

  “We will see,” he answered.

  She silently cheered as history told her that his “we’ll see” always caved into a yes.

  He watched her wiggle in the leather booth and realized that eventually, she would develop more awareness about what was happening around them. Soon, she would start to wonder why Daddy’s friends always seemed so comatose, and why they’d moved from place to place so frequently, especially once it was revealed that he’d been AWOL for some time. With the last subject, she’d gotten so upset when he’d taken the woman away that she’d ignored him for weeks. It had made him think even harder about how long he’d planned to keep Tayler around, and what exactly he’d do with her. He’d read stories about men who’d kept women locked up in sheds and basements for years, but those men had reached certain levels of depravity that he just didn’t possess. Plus, he wasn’t sure that one woman could hold his attention for so long.

  His daughter was banging her fork again.

  “Can we go? I’m getting tired.”

  He looked down at her half empty plate. It was always the same thing; she would ask for mountainous portions but then eat only pebbles, and he hoped that it wasn’t a trait that continued into adolescence. The last thing he needed in his life was a teenage daughter with a hearing disability and an eating disorder.

  He nodded and waved the female server down. She smiled and walked over to the table.

  “Some of us might be getting together to go welcome Tayler back and bring her food and things like that,” she said. “You comin’?”

  “No.” He took the slip that she handed him, tossed a few dollars on the table, and motioned to his daughter. “She’s sleepy. We’re going home.”

  “Well, you stay safe out there.”

  He smiled. “I think I’ll be okay.”

  “You never know. This sicko might start turning on men.”

  “I highly doubt that, LouAnn.” He grabbed his daughter’s jacket and held it open while she slipped her arms through the sleeves. “This man seems to be doing this for sport. Men don’t abduct men for sport.”

  She shrugged in resignation, and he walked to the front, paid his bill, and left the diner. The parking lot was virtually empty with everyone remaining indoors until this supposed psycho was finally captured, and it was a very odd feeling being the safest person in town.

  That poor teenage girl, Aja. If she’d lived to tell the tale, she would have finally understood why parents often tell their children never to sneak out at night. But now that Tayler was back in town, he wouldn’t have to go prowling for his next victim. He had the bait. All he needed to do now was reel in his catch.

  *****

  Tayler woke up to darkness. She didn’t remember leaving the tub, but she’d somehow ended up in the middle of her mattress in the bedroom. The blinds were clamped tight, and a bit of soft, yellow light filtered under the door from downstairs. In the corner of the room, she could make out Ares’ frame and the sound of his snoring. When she stretched and hit something solid, she realized that Gage was in bed next to her.

  His voice cut through the dark. “I’m not asleep.”

  “How long was I out?” she asked.

  “Maybe four hours. You fell asleep in the tub, so I brought you in here. Why do you sit in the tub?”

  One weary shoulder lifted. “It’s something I’ve done since I was a kid. When I was going through stuff with my Dad, I’d lock the bathroom door and cry in the tub.”

  “You were afraid of him?”

  “Sometimes. When he’d drink and get into one of his moods, he’d take his frustration out on me. He’s never hit me, but he’d throw things and yell. Every time he got like that, life became very difficult.”

  With her father’s aim and accuracy, she knew that if he’d really been trying to hit her, he would have succeeded. She just could never understand why he hadn’t been strong enough not to take everything out on her, turn to religion, therapy, or whatever it was he thought was necessary to be a better father for a daughter that had also been struggling with loss.

  “Why did he move back to Cuba?” Gage asked.

  “Getting back to his roots helped him.” She looked up. “Wait. I didn’t tell you that.”

  “You mentioned it.”

  She continued to stare at him, blinking rapidly.

  “Okay, I had Mo look some things up.”

  “Knew it.”

  “You mad at me?”

  She settled closer into his side and he turned his head to press a kiss against her forehead. It was amazing how he could be simultaneously cold toward others and warm when it came to her.

  “No. What else did you find out?”

  “We didn’t look for much. Just for anything in your background that might have linked you to your stalker. The majority of women are stalked by men they know. Unfortunately, with the string of murders, you don’t seem to fit into that demographic.”

  “Tell me what else you know about the victims,” she urged. “I don’t understand how this has been going on this long and no one’s heard about it.”

  “From what I understand, it became widespread news from a social media post.”

  “Do they have any ideas as to what changed? Why he started leaving notes?”

  “Theories, mostly,” Gage answered. “In the end, it doesn’t matter. I promised you that I would kill him and I will.”

  She settled even further against him. “The way I see it, if you can get to him before they can,” she pointed in the direction of the FBI hub, “then justice wasn’t meant to be served in the first place.”

  Light blasted into their faces as the door pushed open. Joel stood in the doorway, his tie and suit jacket gone. “Tayler? Are you up?”

  “You always push open closed bedroom doors, Lattimore?” Gage asked.

  “I’m up,” Tayler replied.

  “We might have a few suspects,” Joel said. “Come take a look at them and see if anyone looks familiar.”

  Tayler hopped from the bed and followed him downstairs to a crowd of laptops set up on the dining room table. An agent moved away from his laptop, and she took his seat.

  Gage stood near the edge of the table. “Where did these suspects come from?”

  “We’ve been combing through these women’s lives,” Joel answered. “One of our profilers believes that our suspect watches them for an extended period of time, maybe even finding a way to insert himself into their routines. So we’ve been checking out coworkers, hairdressers, mechanics… everybody we could think of. Then we created a matrix and checked the backgrounds of the selections for any sort of criminal past.”

  “But didn’t they say the man’s DNA wasn’t in the system?” Tayler asked.

  “The national DNA index systems, CODIS and NDIS, are mainly databases for violent crime, but it’s common knowledge that criminality begets criminality and very often escalates. A simple breaking and entering could turn into stalking, and stalking has been shown to escalate to murder.”

  Six photos popped up on the screen. Tayler’s pulse quickened. Quite possibly, she could be looking into the face of the man who’d attacked her in the woods. Not recognizing anyone on the screen could thwart the entire investigation.

  Unfortunately, none of the faces looked familiar.

  “Take your time,” Joel instructed. “Do any of these faces look familiar to you at all?”

  She took an extra few seconds to scrutinize the images although her brain had rendered a decision almost immediately.

  “N
o,” she finally said.

  Joel’s face visibly fell. “Shit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you don’t have to apologize.” He released a haggard breath. “This has just been frustrating as hell. I was hoping that we’d finally get some headway.”

  “Why don’t you tell her what you can about the case?” Gage suggested. “It might be the way we’re looking at it. Most of us in here were bred to be law enforcement or military. We eventually dehumanize. She’s a physician. Her job is to be analytical and put people first. Plus, has a way of surprising the hell out of you with what she knows.”

  She looked over at him, and he merely shrugged as though everything he’d just said was commonplace. Meanwhile, a ruckus was building in her chest and stomach.

  “We’ve turned this thing upside down and sideways, but if you think it’ll help.” Joel walked back to the living room and motioned for them to follow him to a large, US map pinned against an empty back wall with a colorful array of thumbtacks piercing the paper. “One of the most consistent things about this man is where and who he’s attacking.”

  Tayler studied the thumbtacks. “Are these where the bodies were found?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her throat tightened at the two golden thumbtacks pinned to the state of North Carolina. She still couldn’t process the fact that, when all of this was over, she wouldn’t go back to sitting across from Anya in the cafeteria while she and Katia argued over reality TV shows and celebrity relationships, before delving into innovative treatments in oncology.

  “And the only deviation is North Carolina?” she asked.

  “Because those two women weren’t his true victims,” Joel replied.

  “How’d you eventually tie the women together?”

  “The pattern of the ligature marks around their necks. Even our most advanced ME’s can’t figure what he’s strangling them with.”

  She continued to study the map. “What do the marks looks like?”

  Joel sighed. “What I can tell you is that it’s nothing that we’ve been able to identify. All we’ve been able to tell is that he keeps the women alive for a period of time, and their bodies are usually found within forty-eight hours of death. The first victim was the outlier. She had post-mortem stab wounds. She’d also been exsanguinated. With her, he was like a kid with a new toy that he had no idea how to operate.”