Blood Indulgence: a serial killer thriller (Phineas and Liam Book 3)

by V. J. Chambers

  Later, in the restaurant, she perused the wine list, and he snatched it away from her.

  “What is your problem?” she said.

  “You said you were keeping it, like that was decided,” he said.

  “One glass of wine is allowed,” she said. “Geez, there was this whole period of time in human history when there was nothing to drink except alcoholic beverages because the water wasn’t safe to drink, and people didn’t all have fetal alcohol syndrome.”

  “It was an uncivilized time of war and injustice and prejudice and sexism,” he said. “Who knows why everyone thought that was a good idea, but maybe their brains were mutated.”

  She glared at him.

  He glared at her.

  “If I am pregnant, you do not get to act like you own me,” she said.

  “I’m not acting like anything.” He was sulky, though. He could hear it in his voice.

  “But I’d like to remind you that I’m very probably not pregnant.”

  The waitress came by and Dawson said she wasn’t ready to order yet, that she needed more time with the menu, but she ordered a Coke, and he stifled the urge to tell her that pregnant women were also supposed to steer clear of caffeine, because he wasn’t totally sure about that. He thought that was true, but he couldn’t remember.

  Besides, she probably wasn’t pregnant.

  She buried her face in the menu until the waitress returned with their drinks. Then she ordered baked ziti. He ordered fettuccine alfredo. The waitress took their menus and left.

  “Fine,” said Dawson, and now she sounded sulky. “We can talk.”

  He felt a knot that had begun to tighten behind his neck start to unravel a little. “We can?” Man, he sounded really eager and idiotic.

  “What do you want to talk about?” She was adversarial about this.

  Great, this was not going to go well. He took a deep breath. “I just feel like we should talk about what might happen if the future and how we would deal with that is all.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I don’t think it’s that easy to get pregnant, but if it happened, then I guess we could do what I was talking about with Carter, which was to sort of split the time, so that he got the baby—”

  “Carter?” he interrupted. “Your ex? When were you talking about this with him?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you that.”

  “No, we haven’t been talking about any of this.”

  She rolled her eyes. She took a drink of Coke. “Okay, so he called me on the phone and he had this proposition for me, which was that he and I could have a baby and that the baby could be with me half of the time and him the rest of the time. It’s a better option for him and his fiance than a surrogate. It’s a lot cheaper. And adoption is really difficult for a straight couple, let alone a gay couple, so I can see why he would have been interested.”

  Liam gaped at her. He hated this idea. What the hell? Did he feel like he owned her now? Well, not own. Obviously, she was her own person, and he had no claim on her, but there was a possessive undercurrent to the way he looked at her. He didn’t think it was anything other than the beginning of some kind of romantic bond, but… well, it was there.

  “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. His mouth felt dry. He had a soda, too, and he busied himself sucking on his straw.

  “You wanted to talk.”

  “Can I be honest with you, and you won’t get angry?”

  “Oh, well, sure, I can guarantee my reaction without hearing what you have to say, Liam.” She was sarcastic.

  “Come on, Haysle.”

  “I guess you’re going to have to risk it. Be honest. See what happens.”

  He toyed with the straw in his glass. “I just feel… I think about you being pregnant with another man’s child, and it’s like… bad. To me.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He looked at her.

  She was gazing across the table at him with a look on her face that wasn’t angry. It was the way she looked at him when he was inside her, when she was gasping as he moved against her.

  His heart lurched. The emotion welling up in him was huge suddenly, engulfing him, and it was frightening. He had the urge to get up from the table and walk away. He was frightened this feeling was going to crush him.

  “Damn it, Liam,” she whispered. “It’s always like this with you.”

  “Like what?” He was whispering too.

  “Like I feel things about you, and what I feel doesn’t match up with what I know.” She tapped her temple. “You and me, intellectually, it’s… stupid.”

  He let out a laugh. “Ouch?”

  “Not just because of you.” She reached across the table and seized his hand.

  He flashed on holding hands with Finn in the prison days ago, and then he squeezed her fingers tight to chase away the memory.

  She squeezed back. “You’ve been through so much. And I have been through a lot too. So, I just feel like combining our issues is a recipe for disaster.” She sighed. “But… I like you. I’ve always just liked you. It’s stupid, and I’ve tried to warn myself off of you, but then you say crap like that to me, and…”

  “Why didn’t it make you mad? You just got done telling me that I don’t own you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  And then they were quiet.

  The waitress came with their meals.

  They ate.

  Time passed.

  “Okay, look,” he said, finally. “You want to have a baby, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. But ideally, I would want to wait until the case was over, I guess. Because there’s no way I’m going to interrogate Slater with my belly out to here.” She gestured and then went back to her ziti. “He would destroy me.”

  “Do you want to do that with Carter?”

  “Well, not really,” she said. “Knowing that I would spend basically the rest of my life seeing him at every one of my kid’s milestones, along with his new partner… I’m sure I’d get over it, but it kind of sounds painful and weird. I want to have my own life now. I broke up with him for a reason. You know he tried to get back with me after I detransitioned, and I realized that it would never work with him.”

  “Okay, good,” he said.

  “Good?”

  “Just have a baby with me, then.”

  She scoffed lightly. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Well, what you were thinking about doing with Carter, it wasn’t a relationship, so it doesn’t have to be that with us, either.”

  She set down her fork. “If it’s just about knocking me up, we don’t have to have to actually have intercourse.”

  “But it’s more fun if we do.” He shrugged.

  She gave him an annoyed look.

  He smirked at her.

  “What you’re proposing does not solve anything.”

  “I haven’t really explained it yet,” he said. “What I’m proposing is that we leave some aspects of the future murky, things to be determined, and we only nail down one aspect, which is that we’re going to have a kid together.”

  “Do you even want a child?”

  “Very much,” he said, a lot of force behind it.

  “Really? Because you’ve never said anything to me—”

  “I don’t know if I was really aware of how much I wanted it until you… until this possibility,” he said. “But I do want it. Really want it.”

  She chewed on her bottom lip, regarding him.

  He pushed on. “So, we don’t know what might happen. Maybe we end up in a relationship, living together, raising a baby together.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “But maybe we don’t,” he said. “We could figure that part out later. And we can wait. So, we don’t have to start trying until you’re ready.”

  She eyed him, and there was that look in her eyes again. Her eyes were shiny. She ducked her face down to gaze
into her half-eaten pasta dish, and when she spoke, her voice was a little shaky. “That actually is really reassuring to me, the idea that I know that part is settled.”

  “Because you’re positive that you want to have a child, but you don’t know how it’s going to happen.”

  “Yeah,” she whispered.

  “So… just say you agree.” He drank more soda. “And it’s not a formal arrangement. It’s not binding. If you decide against it later, you can back out.”

  “Or if you decide against it.”

  “I’m not going to decide against it.”

  She looked up at him again. “You sound so sure.”

  He shrugged. “My part of the agreement doesn’t sound unpleasant.”

  She snorted. “Well, you might change your mind when you’re changing diapers.”

  “No way, are you kidding?”

  “I meant that you might find it unpleasant, not that you would not want your child,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It’s a big commitment.”

  “I know.”

  “And you… I mean… it seems almost sillier to trust you with the father part of the equation than with the romantic part of it.”

  “Because I’m a fuck-up.”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Look, I… when I was in my early twenties, I thought that I murdered a woman on accident, and I spent the rest of my life dealing really badly with that and trying to drown out the truth of it. And then I was captured by a serial killer and locked up in a dog crate for six weeks, and then he escaped from prison and psychologically tormented me for months. And, yeah, I… there are…” He squared his shoulders. “What I’m saying is that all of that is over. I’m finally—for the first time in my life—able to heal. It’s only been six months, but if you see where I was six months ago and where I am now, it’s worlds apart. So, I think… what I’m saying is you can trust me.”

  She just looked at him.

  Moments passed.

  And then she stabbed her ziti with her fork. “Okay. I’m in. You can be my baby daddy, Liam. I trust you.”

  He grinned. “Seriously? You can think about it if you want.”

  “I’ll let you know if I change my mind.” She popped the pasta into her mouth and chewed. She was grinning too.

  LIAM didn’t expect her to lead him back to her room after dinner.

  He figured the talk had made it clear that she didn’t want to be pregnant yet, and that she was really confused about him.

  Even so, he didn’t say no.

  They kissed just inside the door of the hotel room. They kissed in the easy chair in the corner, him sitting in it and her on his lap. They kissed on her bed. They kissed for a long time, and he was prepared for it to just be that—kissing.

  But then she started taking off her clothes.

  So, this was happening again, and he did have condoms, but not here—they were in his room. He thought about bringing that up, trying to inject some kind of rational thought into the situation.

  But he didn’t.

  And she didn’t say anything.

  Maybe it was just easier not to talk about it.

  When he woke up in the morning, she was climbing over him in the bed.

  She hovered over him, propped up on her hands and knees, her bare breasts dangling as she bent down to kiss him.

  He put his hands on her and she squealed, breathless.

  “You should go back to your room and shower so that we can get back on the road,” she mumbled against his mouth.

  “Oh, is that what I should do?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Stop distracting us.”

  “I think you’re being plenty distracting.” He gently squeezed her breasts for emphasis.

  She moaned. “Sorry. I will go into the bathroom and remedy that situation.” She pulled away.

  He reached out for her. “You don’t have to.”

  “Definitely do,” she threw over her shoulder. And then she was gone.

  He lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling as though—for all the talking the night before—nothing had really been settled.

  He pulled on his clothes and went back to his room. He showered and got ready and they drove back to Cape Christopher.

  But they didn’t talk on the way home. He didn’t feel like he could bring the subject up again. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to her, anyway.

  Be my girlfriend, Haysle?

  Maybe it was better to play it by ear.

  So, that was what he did.

  He went home, and two days passed, and nothing from Dawson, not a thing.

  He thought about her.

  He was annoyed by how much he thought about her, and how much of the thinking that he did about her was incredibly filthy thinking.

  When she finally called him, he hoped it was because she wanted to come over or she wanted him to come to her place or because she wanted to say filthy things to him over the phone.

  But instead, she said, “It’s Slater’s.”

  That was when he remembered all about Cora Manning.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  Well, who would want to think of that?

  “That’s good,” he said. And it was, because he didn’t want to think that Destiny had killed his unborn child, or that Finn had done it, or anything like that at all.

  Even so, there was a strange lump forming in his throat about the entire situation, which seemed so tragic and so disgusting. He was ashamed of himself for so many things, but this was horrible.

  “I’m thinking we have to use this,” she said.

  “How do we use this?”

  “I know that Slater is lacking in empathy, and it won’t necessarily bother him on the same level as any other person that this tragedy happened,” she said. “But he might feel ownership. A lot of psychopaths see their children as extensions of themselves, as possessions. If Worth killed his child, that might make him very angry.”

  “We don’t know that she did,” said Liam.

  “Even if she gave him Cora to kill,” said Dawson, “it’s still Worth’s doing. I imagine he would not have killed her if he knew she was pregnant with his child. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Will you come with me while I try it?” she said. “Will you talk to him about it?”

  “What if he did know?”

  “Then we’re no better off,” she said. “But it’s worth a try.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LIAM’S reticence was more about the fact that he didn’t want to go to see Finn again than about any kind of evaluation of Dawson’s plan. He had been to see Finn once, and he’d seemed to get out relatively unscathed. Would he be all right if he tried it again?

  He wasn’t so sure.

  He tried to tell himself that it would be fine. Finn had done his worst before, saying all kinds of intimate things, including that ridiculous line about being inside him, and none of it had really fazed him. Whatever hold that Finn had on him had lessened. It was almost completely gone.

  He’d be fine.

  But he was nervous.

  Even so, it seemed even more likely that he’d knocked Dawson up at this point, considering he’d had three tries to get it done. And he didn’t want her to have to talk to Finn alone. So, he volunteered to take point on it.

  When they arrived, they both sat down across from Finn in the interrogation room, but he was the one who spoke.

  “You’re probably expecting us to be angry because you sent us on an wild goose chase to Baltimore,” said Liam, setting down a file folder on the table next to him. “But some time has passed, and we’ve gotten over it. Besides we don’t expect better from you.”

  Finn had his hands out, reaching for Liam.

  But Liam didn’t touch him this time. He waited for Finn to speak.

  Finn eyed him. “You know, maybe I might have remembered that no one was in that Baltimore ho
use, but you refused to do anything for me, Liam. After everything we’ve shared, I’d think you’d want to get me help. I’d think you’d want to help me get into a mental health facility instead of being locked up here like a common criminal.”

  “You are a common criminal,” said Liam.

  “I’m a victim,” said Finn.

  Liam sighed. “We’re not going to have this discussion. We have other things to talk about.”

  Finn lifted a shackled hand and jammed a finger into the table. “I’m not doing anything for you until you do something for me. Get me into a hospital, get me out of here, and then we can talk about Destiny.”

  “I don’t know why you think I could help you when Dawson couldn’t,” said Liam, gesturing to her. She was sitting next to him at the table. “She’s the one who actually works with law enforcement. I’m only here because of my connection with you.”

  Finn turned on Dawson. “Yes, the man-stealing Detective Haysle Dawson. How are you doing?”

  Dawson smirked. “Are you jealous, Slater?”

  “When I came to your house, I said that I didn’t like what you were doing to him,” said Finn. “You assured me that there was no one who could shake my hold on him, especially not you. And then he walks away from me last time.” His voice had gotten steadily louder as he spoke. Now, he was shouting.

  Dawson jerked back. “Calm down.”

  Finn leaned forward, straining against his chains. “Maybe I am jealous, but I’m comforted by the fact that it won’t last. You’ve known him for what? Less than a year? He and I are forever.”

  Liam wasn’t even sure what to make of this. It wasn’t anything like Finn, losing control like this. Maybe this was some sort of planned manipulation. Or maybe prison was getting to him. Maybe he really was crazy.

  Of course he’s crazy, he thought to himself. He kills people for fun.

  Finn turned back to Liam. “I won’t talk if she’s in here.”

  “She stays,” said Liam. Ah, perhaps that was the game. Separate them? Get Liam alone?

  “I need to talk to you without her here,” said Finn.

  “Not this time,” said Liam. “You do know where Destiny is, don’t you?”

  “You think I’m going to talk about this? I just got done explaining—”