“Why a woman’s name?” Vincent asked no one in particular. “Why would a man use a woman’s name? I mean, we’re assuming the killer is a man, right? But what if it’s a woman?”
“I’ve considered that idea,” Hayden informed everyone, his eyes moving to Waverly’s face. “It seemed to me from the beginning that it had to be someone connected to the men who killed my parents. But the only family either of them have are Waverly, her sister, and her mother.”
Vincent looked sharply at Waverly. He hadn’t been informed of this little tidbit.
“You think Waverly’s family—”
“He thinks my sister might have had something to do with it.” Waverly snorted softly. “My sister who had three children under the age of five, one of whom is only a few months old.”
“She has a nanny who helps care for the children,” Hayden inserted.
“She does. And she travels. But she was nearly nine months pregnant when the second murder took place in Louisiana. In August. In the hottest, most humid month of the year.”
I grimaced, too aware of what Waverly was getting at. Any woman that pregnant would have been absolutely miserable in that kind of weather.
“People have put up with worse to commit crimes,” Hayden said. “It’s not exactly a balmy seventy in Afghanistan or Iraq.”
Waverly shot him a dark look, but he didn’t seem fazed by it. He sat back, crossed his legs, and rested his arm over the back of the bench, just a few inches from my shoulders. Waverly’s eyes narrowed slightly before dropping back down to the tabletop and her splayed fingers.
“What have you found on Rosalie Matthias?”
I shook my head. “Not a lot. She grew up here in Houston. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was treated by a local doctor who encouraged group therapy and she thrived for a while before returning home and beginning to struggle with the combination of drugs they put her on.”
“Austin?”
Hayden sat up again, his eyes moving over Waverly. She was already defensive, fire snapping in her eyes.
“It’s a coincidence,” she announced.
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“This time you should.”
“What?” Vincent demanded.
“Her sister attended UT Austin. And she had depression issues that were treated by a doctor who sent her to a summer camp with other kids who had the same problems.”
“It’s a coincidence,” she repeated.
But I wasn’t so sure. Neither was Vincent.
Vincent got up and pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, moving to the bar as whoever he was calling answered. He was double checking our information, I was sure.
“My sister couldn’t have done this,” Waverly insisted again. “She can’t even get her kid to put his shoes on without holding him down and doing it herself!”
“But if there’s a connection …”
Hayden leaned across the table and tried to take Waverly’s hand, but she pulled away. A shadow crossed his face as he sat back again, moving back into that casual position as though he didn’t care about her rebuke. But I knew him better than that.
I was beginning to wonder if this thing between the two of them wasn’t much bigger than the killer who was out there trying to destroy Hayden.
Vincent came back to the table.
“The doctor’s name was Franklin Abitta. Is that familiar?”
Waverly didn’t respond at first. Then she mumbled, “It’s a coincidence.”
Vincent was gone again, ordering operatives to follow this new line of inquiry. Hayden watched him before his eyes fell on Waverly, his eyes gentle as he regarded the new tension in her shoulders even as she continued to stare at her hands. I’d never seen her quite so lacking in confidence or known her to look so defeated. I guess the idea of someone you love being a part of something like this could be quite defeating.
“We should go,” Vincent said, pausing beside the table. “Dominic and Cole are following up on this information. We should have some news in a couple of hours.”
I nodded, nudging Hayden. “You have any other information for us?”
He glanced at Waverly, then shrugged. “Not really. Kind of hard to generate leads when we’re stuck hiding from some maniac.”
“We’ll figure this out, Hayden,” I said, rubbing my hand against his shoulder. “I promise you.”
“We have everyone working on it,” Vincent added.
Hayden climbed out of the booth and held out his hand to help me up. He hugged me again and I whispered near his ear, “Be good to her.”
“I’m trying,” he answered.
“Megan,” Waverly said softly. “Could you … would you come with me to the ladies’ room?”
There was a hint of the confidence Waverly normally exuded in the question. I followed her through the crowded restaurant and into the surprisingly empty restroom.
“I need to ask … could you tell me about Sam?” she asked the moment we were alone.
“I don’t know if now—”
“I need to know about her computer skills.”
I frowned as I leaned back against the sink counter and studied her. “She was talented,” I said, remembering how Sam had changed our grades in the high school computer once to save me from being grounded from attending the prom with Luke. “She could manipulate almost any system she wanted.”
“She was self-taught?”
“Mostly. She took a couple of classes in high school, but she just seemed to have a natural affinity for it. She could get around almost any firewall and she was a whiz at doing searches of just about any kind. And she broke down this virus that was preventing us from viewing a file once.”
“A virus?”
“Yeah, it was uploaded onto a file we needed to identify a suspect. She was able to work through it and fix it so that we could read the separate pages.”
Waverly grew a little introspective. “Do you know if she was ever involved in any hacking groups? If she ever communicated with underground groups?”
“Sure. She told me a couple of times that if she hadn’t gotten in with a couple of those groups, she never would have learned some of the techniques she used to do our background checks and some of the snooping she was able to do.”
Waverly nodded, a light coming on in her eyes. “Did anyone else know? Hayden seemed to be in the dark about it.”
“Hayden prefers to think that Sam was just this side of a saint.” I shrugged, trying to think who Sam might have talked to about it. “I’m sure Peter knew. He was a computer whiz for a long time, too. He taught her a lot of what she knew. And Cole might have known, along with some of the operatives at Dragon back when Sam was around.”
I tilted my head, watching her, wondering what she was up to with these questions. “Computers are something of a slippery slope. And Sam was one of the best, so she had to indulge in things that might have gone against her moral code. But she never did anything overtly illegal, I don’t think.”
Waverly waved that thought away. “I’m not concerned with that. I just wanted to establish that she had a connection to the hacker underground.”
“Why?”
“Because someone suggested that her handle had been used recently. I wanted to verify that it was really hers.”
“Her handle?”
Waverly reached up and dragged her fingers through her hair, smoothing the already smooth hair against her head.
“It’s like a user name. It’s the name she used when dealing with the underground. Someone flagged it and said the user was suspicious.”
I frowned. “You’re sure it was Sam’s handle?”
“Pretty sure.” Waverly glanced toward the door, a wistful look coming over her. “Only someone close to her would probably realize it was hers, someone who knew her well. Or who knew Hayden well.”
It seemed like she was talking in circles until I realized what
she meant. I’d watched Sam work on her computer more than once, looking over her shoulder at her home—the home Hayden now lived in—watching her log into one website after another. I never truly understood what all she was doing, but I remembered the user name she often used.
HRDB511.
Hayden Robert Dubois. And his birthdate: May 11.
I stepped close to Waverly and took her wrists, staring into her eyes.
“Who told you this? What do you think it means?”
“I think whoever’s behind these murders is doing it because of Sam.”
And that’s when it hit me. The Bibles.
Fuck! Why didn’t I—
I turned and rushed out of there, feeling like an idiot that this possibility had never crossed my mind. What the hell was I thinking? Why didn’t my mind go directly to this person? Why didn’t I see the signs so much sooner? Of course that was who it was. Who else would want to hurt Hayden and make his life a living hell? Who else would believe that mutilating a man and making him watch his woman being raped, was a righteous thing?
I just hoped I wasn’t too late.
Chapter 17
The Watcher
The watcher knew that observing Megan Bradford-Murphy would pay off eventually, knew that she would eventually lead the way to Hayden Dubois because she could never stay away or keep her nose out of anything. Megan was a precocious teenagers who had grown up into a nosy adult, unable to keep her opinions to herself, no matter the consequences. Megan would eventually pay for her nosiness without the help of the watcher. There was no reason to interfere in God’s plan for her life. God would see that she paid.
Hayden Dubois, on the other hand, needed to suffer. And the time was coming close.
The watcher sat at the back of the restaurant and watched the two women go into the restroom. When she saw Megan come out alone, she knew it was her time.
Waverly Cooper had the blood of the devil running through her veins. Pure evil. She would suffer before she was sent back to where she belonged. She would feel pain she could never have imagined before now. She would pay for the terrible crimes her father had committed, and then Hayden Dubois would pay for her death.
It was a brilliant plan. Only God could have formulated something better.
Chapter 18
Hayden
I saw Megan come out of the bathroom, her face flushed. She seemed bothered by something, but she didn’t take the time to stop and explain. She grabbed Vincent’s arm, offered me a half-hearted wave, and exploded out of the crowded restaurant.
Something was up.
Concerned that Waverly might have said something, or Megan had said something to Waverly—what, I couldn’t imagine—I made my way to the narrow hall where the bathrooms were nestled. I glanced over my shoulder as I stepped up to the women’s bathroom door, listening for a second for … I didn’t know what. The sound of crying?
I pushed inside and heard a stall door slam closed as I moved up behind Waverly. She was at the counter, slapping cold water on her face.
“You okay?” I asked as I slipped my hand over her hip.
She straightened and met my eyes in the mirror. “This is the ladies’ room.”
“I’m aware.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“Megan rushed out of here like the devil was on her heels. I thought you might need me.” In that moment, for the first time, I realized that I wanted her to need me. Because I desperately needed her and it was a terrifying limb to be out on alone.
“Nope.”
She focused on her reflection in the mirror, patting at her wet face with a paper towel. Her eyes were dark, tension pulling at the corners of her mouth. Something was worrying her.
“Did Megan say something to you?”
“Like what? Something about you?”
“It is one thing you have in common.”
“We have other things in common. Not everything is about you, Mr. Egomaniac.”
“Fair enough.” I stepped back and held my hands up in the air. I deserved plenty more where that came from.
She looked at me in the mirror and sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I just … it’s been a long day. Could we possibly get the hell out of here?”
“Of course.” I reached for her again, slipping my arm around her waist. “There’s another safe house we can go to, one with a fancy bathtub with hot jets along the sides. We could have us a little sauna night complete with a good meal. How about that?”
She nodded, leaning back into me for a minute.
I took her hand and pulled her out of the bathroom, glancing behind me when I thought I heard a loud thud against the wall of one of the stalls. It sounded like someone slamming their fist in anger.
We made our way back to the parking garage, both of us alert to the echoes that jumped around the concrete structure as we sought out our car. There were a couple of guys loitering not far from the car, one of them leaning against the front of another dark sedan, the other bouncing a ball off of the wall in front of it. There was something about the way they looked up when we rounded the corner that set off warning bells in my head.
I didn’t think we’d been spotted by anyone inside the mall, but I couldn’t be sure. What if someone had followed Megan to us?
I tugged at Waverly’s hand and turned on my heel, leading the way down the other side of the lot.
“I think we’re over here,” I said loud enough for those men to hear.
“Maybe even down a level,” Waverly agreed.
God, I was glad she was so quick at catching up with my thought processes.
I waited until we were out of sight, then moved into a little job.
“What now?” Waverly asked when we were inside an elevator, going up to street level.
“We get another ride.”
I pulled her out onto the sidewalk. There were people everywhere enjoying the warm afternoon. We walked quickly, moving with the crowd toward the tall buildings of downtown. Waverly wrapped her free hand around my upper arm, moving as close to me as she could comfortably get. A dozen blocks away from the mall, we stepped into a busy bar, making our way to a table at the back where we could sit and watch the wide windows for any unwanted company.
“Do you think those guys—”
“I don’t want to take any chances.”
I tugged her chair close to mine so that we were sitting practically side by side, slipping my arm around her so that we looked like a horny couple biding our time until we could escape the crowd. She nuzzled against my chest, a shiver moving through her entire body that spoke more of fear and adrenaline than sexual arousal. I kissed her forehead lightly, wishing this was over and that she didn’t have to be afraid.
“I won’t let them hurt you.”
She looked up at me and I saw things I really wished I hadn’t in her eyes.
“I know,” was all she said.
A waitress came over and I ordered a scotch on rocks just so that we didn’t look odd sitting there without a drink in front of us. The moment she turned and walked away though, I saw the two men from the parking garage pass by the front windows.
“Hell,” I muttered under my breath. I’d really been hoping they were just a couple of guys who liked to hang out in the mall’s parking garage.
I stood and tugged at Waverly’s hand, pulling her to her feet. We made our way back through the crowd and slipped out the front door, turning to go the opposite direction from the two men. I pulled Waverly down a narrow alley, a part of me recognizing it as the same alley where I’d found that man roughing up Sam the night we were play-acting as man and wife. The hotel where we made love for the first time should be just around the corner.
Dragon had a tab there for emergencies just like this one.
I’d gone out of my way not to do things with Waverly that emulated the things I’d done with Sam. We didn’t date. We didn’t go to restaurants or bars together. We didn’t travel to Aspen for the hol
idays.
Before this, Waverly and I had never gone anywhere together except down the hall to her bedroom. Before this crazy copycat had turned our lives upside down.
We had no choice now.
I changed direction again, pulling Waverly back up through the alley and down the sidewalk to the hotel. We stepped into the lobby and she hesitated, tugging at my hand. I turned just in time to see the man Amelia had shot, the man who’d broken into Waverly’s house and attacked, walk quickly past the hotel to the businesses on the other side of the street.
We needed to get out of sight before someone spotted us.
I walked up to the counter and pulled a card out of my wallet.
“I’m with Dragon Security,” I told the clerk. “I believe you have a room for me.”
“Yes, sir,” the young woman said, tapping on her computer keyboard. “Would you like a suite?”
Less than ten minutes later, I was pushing Waverly through the door of a top floor, executive suite. Why the hell not? If we were going to have to be on the run, we might as well do it in a little luxury. Megan would understand.
“How did they find us?”
“They must have followed Megan from the Dragon offices.”
Waverly crossed the room and pulled the drapes tight across the high windows that looked down over the city despite the fact that we were fifteen floors over the streets. She was shaking when I moved up behind her and pulled her tight against my chest.
“It’s okay, babe. You’re going to be okay.”
“No, I’m not. We’re not. Not as long as these people are after us.”
I kissed her neck. “Megan will figure this out. She’ll get us out of this.”
“And if she doesn’t? Are we going to run for the rest of our lives?”
“Would it be so bad? A new bed every night?” I asked, nuzzling her neck. “Would you mind being stuck with me for the rest of your life?”
“Now is not the time for teasing, Hayden,” she said, pulling away from me. She crossed the room, peeked inside the bedroom and then stepped inside, opening and closing the bathroom and closet doors before coming back out. “I know you’ve been doing this a long time, but I haven’t.”
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