“I’m sorry.”
I watched her pace, working the nervousness out of her system.
“We are safe here,” I reminded her. “This hotel has some of the best security in the country. Dragon wouldn’t use it as a safe house if that weren’t true.”
“Is this the same hotel where Karma Myers was attacked?”
I frowned, a little surprised that she remembered that. “Yeah, but that was—”
“Don’t tell me it was a different situation. That man managed to get into her room. What makes you think someone won’t manage to get into this one? The maids have keys, and so do the doormen and the management. Anyone could get a spare key.”
“That’s true. But Karma opened the door to her attacker.”
“So?”
I pulled Waverly into my arms. “It’s going to be okay, babe. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“That’ll be cold comfort when they break in here and shoot you. Or worse.”
I groaned. “You are a morbid woman.”
“I’m a smart woman. I’ve watched these things happen to other operatives. I know the evil that exists out there in the world.”
“I know you do.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
I tugged her closer and held her as close as I could. After a while, the tension slowly left her body. And then I held her longer, a part of me not willing to let her go. I needed to feel the heat of her body and the movement of her breaths telling me that she was real and whole and alive.
If something happened to her … I wouldn’t survive it a third time.
Chapter 19
Megan
“Where are we?” I demanded as I walked into the conference room.
“Rosalie Matthias and Wanda Cooper were both patients of Dr. Abitta,” Dominic informed me. “However, Rosalie was his patient nearly ten years after Ms. Cooper.”
“They never met?”
“No.”
I nodded, my eyes sweeping the other faces in the room. “What about the computer stuff? Has anyone been able to figure out where the virus came from, how it was created, or who created it?”
“We have a lead on an underground hacking group,” one of the new IT people said, “but they’re not being terribly cooperative.”
“What about the differences in the murders? Have we found any more discrepancies? Anything else that might lead to the identity of the killers? Semen samples? Fingerprints? Anything?”
“We can’t pull evidence out that isn’t there,” Cole said.
“But it’s got to be there!”
“The rapist or rapists wore condoms,” Vincent informed the room at large. “They also appear to have worn gloves. They left very little evidence behind on the victims except for the random hair that investigators need to find a suspect before they can test the DNA.”
I shook my head, frustration burning in my chest.
I knew who was behind this. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I needed proof before I went forward.
Luke stepped into the room and hope blossomed in my chest.
“All right, back to work!”
I turned and Vincent was right there in my path.
“I think that Hayden checked into that hotel downtown. A charge came across our system about an hour ago.”
“Why? There are better safe houses in that area.”
“I don’t know.”
“That hotel is the same one that was compromised during the Rosalie Matthias investigation, isn’t it? Is it really a good idea for him to go there?”
“It was probably the best he could do at the moment.” Vincent was clearly trying to avoid pointing out that Hayden and Waverly must have been discovered in the mall after our visit. It was my fault if that was what had happened. “I’ll send Rhett and Amelia over to check it out.”
I nodded, my eyes moving to Luke. I couldn’t read his expression, and that worried me a little. The truth was, I wasn’t sure what I wanted his news to be. Either way, it clearly wasn’t good.
I touched Vincent’s arm as I moved around him. Luke stepped forward, but I gestured for him to follow me before stepping out of the room and heading for the elevator. He touched my hip as he boarded the elevator behind me, his lips close enough to me that I could feel his hot breath brush my cheek.
“What did you find?” I asked, turning to face him as the elevator began its ascent up to my office.
“She’s still living in that little house, still working at the church.”
I nodded. “Did you see her?”
“She wasn’t home.” He stepped back a little and rested his hands on his hips as he regarded me. “I peeked through the windows. She’s redecorated a little.”
“Redecorated how?”
A disgusted look floated over his handsome features. “She’s turned her living room walls into a sort of shrine to Sam. There are pictures from the time she was an infant until her high school graduation. Hundreds of photos, some duplicates. She has candles in front of them, teddy bears and flowers and all kinds of weird shit. And she’s got a computer system hooked up under one of the walls, a nice array like the one Sam had in her house.”
I closed my eyes, cursing softly under my breath.
“What’s her first name?”
Luke’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t remember. We always just called her Mrs. Wagner.”
“Regina,” I said softly. “Her name was Regina.”
Luke frowned. “What’s going on here, Megan?”
It was all coming together and I so wished it wasn’t. Mrs. Wagner was a difficult woman. She’d been raped as a young woman and became pregnant with Sam as a result. She turned to the church, taking the pastor’s preaching far more seriously than even he probably intended. She raised Sam strictly, dictating everything from the way she dressed to the people she spent time with to the things she was allowed to study in her public school classrooms.
She was bitter, and she made Sam miserable. But, somehow, Sam loved her anyway. She continued to nourish their relationship long after she’d grown and moved out of the house, continued to following her mother’s rules, especially when it came to her style of dress. But, to Mrs. Wagner, Sam could do nothing right.
Hayden told me about the confrontation he and Mrs. Wagner had had when Sam once took him home for dinner. It was not good. Mrs. Wagner hated me, hated the influence I had over Sam, hated that Sam worked with me. And she hated the people who worked for me, seeing them as warriors who’d turned their backs on God, clearly unaware that a lot of soldiers are deeply religious.
I had always labored under the opinion that Mrs. Wagner hated Sam because of the violence of her conception. When Sam died, Mrs. Wagner surprised me with her grief. But she didn’t surprise me with the vitriol she showed Hayden at the funeral:
Mrs. Wagner arrived, making her first appearance since Sam’s death. Everyone watched as she walked up to the casket, hidden in an oversized black dress and a large hat that sported a thin black veil. She stood at the side of the casket for a long second, her hands resting on pink silk. Then she turned and stared at me.
“Was this you? Are you the one who dressed my daughter like a harlot?”
I stepped close to Mrs. Wagner and whispered to her that Sam was dressed the way she wanted to be dressed.
“This is not what my daughter would have wanted. Not before she met you, anyway!”
Cole made a beeline for me, but Hayden was closer. He grabbed Mrs. Wagner by the arm and dragged her out of the room, much to the shock of most of the people present.
“Sam may have allowed you to speak that way to Megan before, but I won’t. You will not talk that way about her.”
“Look at you,” she scoffed. “My daughter’s lover, the man who used her as though she were some cheap whore living on the street!”
“For your information, I loved your daughter,” Hayden bellowed, his voice cracking. “We were to be married. And I would have
given her a much better life than the one you gave her.”
Mrs. Wagner stared at him. “Over my dead body.”
“That’s the way it should have been.”
Her eyes widened with shock. Dominic came over, laying his hand on Hayden’s arm.
“I think that’s enough,” he said softly.
But then Mrs. Wagner dissolved. She just melted right there in front of us. Sobs wracked her body as her knees went weak. She fell into Hayden and he had no choice but to scoop her up and carry her over to a couch set in the long hallway where we were standing.
“My baby’s dead,” she moaned. “My baby … she was all I had and she’s gone. I don’t understand …”
Hayden glanced at Dominic. He didn’t know what to do. Hayden clearly didn’t. Neither did I, for whatever it was worth.
No one wanted to help this woman. But what choice did we have?
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wagner,” Hayden said softly.
I moved up beside them and laid my hand on her shoulder, echoing his sentiment.
“I don’t understand why God would do this. She was a good girl. She was so much better than I was.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell her that?”
She shook her head. “I should have.”
“Yeah, you should have.”
That was Mrs. Wagner in a nutshell. Angry and bitter, but human underneath it all. At least, that’s what I’d always believed.
“She’s just broken,” Sam told me once. “We’re all broken in some way. We all deserve understanding and patience.”
That was who Sam was. But not even Sam could have seen this coming.
Regina Wagner was Gina Collins.
“It’s Sam’s mom. She’s getting revenge for what happened to Sam.”
Chapter 20
Waverly
We showered together, Hayden’s hands moving in a comforting way over my bare skin. He kissed the back of my neck a few times, but he never let his hands wander to inappropriate places. And I touched him, running my soapy hands over his chest and his hips, loving the way he looked when he was wet. I reached up on my tiptoes and stole a kiss or two, but they weren’t passionate. More affectionate.
Something had changed for him. Maybe he was finally feeling the fear the same way I was. Maybe my words had finally gotten through his thick head that we truly were in danger. Or maybe it was something else, something less dramatic. I didn’t know, but I could feel the change and the restraint that seemed to have no obvious purpose.
I stole one of his T-shirts when our shower was done, crawling between the cool sheets of the bed and settling against the down pillows. It was almost like being home, minus the silk sheets that Hayden pretended he didn’t like, but secretly loved. He followed, his skin warm with the rich scents of the hotel soap.
“Megan and the others should know where we are by now, right?”
“I’m sure they do. The system will show the charge almost immediately.”
“The fact that they haven’t sent anyone over is a good thing.”
“Yeah.” He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against his chest. “Everything’s okay, babe.”
He kissed the top of my head and then settled back against the pillows. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut off my thoughts. What if this was my sister? What if she really was trying to get some sort of warped revenge for our biological father? What if my mom was helping her, watching as men raped innocent women in a warped attempt to turn my biological father into some sort of martyr?
I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. But there was that trickle of doubt that I couldn’t deny.
I had to get up. I had to think. Hayden had slipped into a deep sleep, his breathing slow and steady. I lifted his arm off of me and snatched a pair of jeans off the floor before slipping out and closing the door silently behind me.
I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. I had to know who was doing this. I had to make this end.
I could worry about the rest later.
I found the card key, slipped it into my pocket, and left the room. There was a sign in the lobby that listed the hotel’s amenities. One of them was business workspaces that had computers hooked up to Wi-Fi. I headed down to the second floor, hoping the place wasn’t too busy this early in the evening.
I snagged a computer in the back corner and began my research with the name of the doctor Vincent had mentioned. Dr. Franklin Abitta. I knew that he had been Wanda’s doctor, but that didn’t mean that she had known Rosalie. He had begun his practice in the mid-eighties and still practiced, though he saw fewer patients these days. He still advocated group therapy. He still believed that peers were the best medicine for depression.
That was something of a dead end.
I plugged in Rosalie’s name and came up instantly with a half-dozen obituaries and stories about her murder in Smyer. What I found truly interesting was her age. Rosalie was thirty when she died. That meant she was seven, almost eight, years younger than Wanda. That meant they were unlikely to have been in therapy with Abitta at the same time. In fact, Wanda was already married and planning her family when Rosalie was accepted to UT Austin.
Did that mean that Wanda hadn’t done this? Possibly. Or it just meant that the connection between Rosalie and Hayden was more obscure than we’d thought.
I continued to work through the articles, searching for anything that might tell me something about Rosalie I hadn’t already known. I’d worked on this for weeks after Hayden came back from California, but it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Why would I think it would now?
But Rosalie’s connection to all of this had to be the one thing that would tell us who her killer was.
And then … it was just a small mention at the end of a long article.
“ … Ms. Matthias was an avid paranormal researcher before her death, but in her teens she was a devout Catholic, attending St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in West Houston from the time she was a small child until she left home for college.”
The name of the church … I’d seen it somewhere else in all my research. Where had I seen it?
It felt like it was right there on the tip of my brain, just waiting to be discovered. But it was out of reach. Something I’d read, but not recently.
Shit!
I hated when I struggled to remember something.
I moved on, reading more about Rosalie. I was beginning to know this woman better than I knew myself. She was single, living in a small apartment on her own. She worked as a librarian when she was on her medication. She traveled all over the country when she was doing her paranormal research. But there was nothing about her history that suggested she and Hayden had ever crossed paths. He wasn’t into the paranormal. He didn’t travel all that much, and he wasn’t a churchgoer.
What was the connection?
I pushed the keyboard away, causing it to clatter and fall off my lap. I could feel the stares of the few others in the room as I bent to pick it up.
“Really shouldn’t lose your temper like that, Ms. Cooper,” a female voice said just to my left. I looked up and found myself staring into the face of an older woman who I was pretty sure I’d never seen a day in my life.
“Can I help you?”
“My friend would appreciate it if you’d come quietly with me,” she said, rolling her shoulder to indicate the doorway of the large room. I twisted around, my heart shuddering to a stop when I recognized my attacker standing in the doorway, a crooked grin on his ugly face.
“Cooperate,” the woman said, her lips not far from my ear, “and you might not suffer as much as we originally intended.”
What was I supposed to do? I tried to imagine what Hayden would do, but I’d never seen him in a situation quite like this. My only options were to get up and go with her and hope for an opportunity to escape later.
I stood and the woman moved behind me, her hand against the small of my back. I expected to feel a weapon, but didn’t. I expected some sort of dom
inant move, but there wasn’t one. She respectfully guided me out of the room, gesturing to the man to step back as we passed him. We rode the elevator up to the ninth floor, to room 954. A part of me was surprised that they would bring me to a room in this hotel, but I had to admit it made sense.
“Have you stayed in this hotel before?” the woman asked me pleasantly enough.
“No.”
“This room has special meaning. I asked for it specifically when I realized he’d brought you here. I’m surprised he didn’t remember it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, stepping over to the windows, wanting to keep them in front of me so that I could see what they were doing.
“I’m talking about Hayden Dubois,” the woman said. “I’m talking about the night he brought my daughter here and defiled her.”
My heart sank a little as her words slowly filtered through the fear and the adrenaline rushing through my veins. I couldn’t take my eyes from the man with the hungry look in his eyes. I knew what he had planned for me. I would be their final victim. I knew that this was what the end game was always supposed to be.
I’d been so stupid, blinded by my feelings for Hayden. But this woman was standing in front of me, her eyes the same as the pictures of Sam I’d seen in Hayden’s office. It had never been about my biological father or about the murders of Hayden’s parents. It had always been about the premature death of a woman dying of lupus.
It was all about Sam.
I crossed my arms over my chest and glanced at the bed. “This is where they fell in love.”
The woman scoffed. “Love? Is that what you call it?”
“He wanted to marry her. You know that, right? He still has pictures of her in his desk that he pulls out and stares out while he drinks alone in his office when he thinks no one else notices.”
“He’s a sinner. A drunk who ruined my beautiful daughter!”
“He still grieves for her.”
The woman’s face reddened. She crossed to me and slapped me hard across the face, my skin stinging even as I pressed my cool palm against it.
DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series Page 90
