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

by V. J. Chambers

  “Have you ever watched the videos he took of himself killing those women?”

  “No. How would I have seen that?” He gave her a look.

  “I guess you wouldn’t have,” she admitted. “You wouldn’t have access to them. If you want, I could arrange it, though. It helped me see how lethal he was, I guess. I feel less sorry for him than I did.”

  “Trust me, I have no reason to feel sorry for him,” said Liam. “It’s just… I’m a person with empathy, something he lacks, and I can feel sorry for anyone who’s in pain.”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “That’s true.”

  “It’s not that I want him to get out, because I don’t. Ever.”

  “I understand that,” she said.

  “Anyway, he’s not going to go for it,” said Liam. “I could tell. Couldn’t you? He completely closed down.”

  “Well, you were pretty firm with him.”

  “Yeah, I felt like I had to be. Like, he’s living in a fantasy world. He needed to understand the truth.”

  “Or we needed to lie to him to get him to cooperate and to save Hernandez.”

  “Oh,” said Liam in a different voice. “Well, I didn’t think of that.”

  “It’s devious,” said Dawson, “and we’re above that. Besides, I don’t really mean lie. We can’t tell him that he’s going to get out of jail, but we didn’t have to burst his bubble so hard either.”

  “Shit,” said Liam, setting down his fork with a clatter. “I fucked everything up.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” said Dawson. “I think we can try to go back and massage it a little, you know?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  The sound of Dawson’s cell phone ringing cut into the air. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and answered it. “Hello?” She furrowed her brow, squirming off the stool where she sat. “Who is this?” A long pause. “Quentin Worth?… Okay, okay, repeat that….” She nodded, listening. “Yeah, we’ll be there as soon as we can…. Maybe I should stay on the phone with you…. Who’s Persephone?… Quentin?…. Hello?”

  Liam got off his stool too. “What’s going on?”

  Dawson shook her head at him. “I think the line just went dead. I, um, I need paper and a pencil. Now.”

  “Got it.” Liam spun around, because he knew that Dawson had a pad of paper with an attached pen on the refrigerator. There was a magnet attached to the back. He seized it and handed it to her.

  She began scribbling down a long string of numbers.

  “What is that?” said Liam.

  She held up a finger, continuing to scribble.

  “Haysle, what are those numbers?”

  “I hope I have them right. He only went through them twice, but I have a good memory for numbers, usually. I have this way of seeing them. They have a color, and I can memorize the pattern really easily.”

  “You have synesthesia?” said Liam.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when numbers have colors,” said Liam. “Or music. Or when you see them in a certain, specific visual— What are they?”

  “Latitude and longitude. He didn’t know where he was, and so he got them from his phone, I think.”

  “Quentin Worth did?”

  “He sounded in a bad way. He was coughing. I could barely understand him. He said his sister wants him dead, and that he needs help.”

  “So, we go to these coordinates?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I need to call it in first. We need backup.”

  “But we can’t wait,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No, we can’t.”

  IT was dark, and Dawson was looking from the screen on her car with the map and then back out into the darkness as her car crept along the desolate, country road. “I don’t see anything. I must have the coordinates wrong.”

  They were probably a hour away from Cape Christopher, northwest, somewhere in the middle of nowhere up here. She hadn’t even seen a house in probably twenty minutes. There was nothing but woods, and she didn’t even know where this road led to.

  “There,” said Liam.

  “Where?” she said.

  He nudged her, and then she saw the back of the car reflecting her headlights. It was off the road, deep in a ditch, and all of the doors were open.

  Dawson pulled her car over to the shoulder and threw open her door. Yanking out her gun, she ran for the car, disengaging the safety at the same time. “Quentin Worth? Hello?”

  There was no response.

  She had left her car running, the headlights burning into the night. She ran in the spotlight that they illuminated until she reached the car.

  Now, she slowed.

  “Quentin?” Her voice was quieter.

  The interior lights in the car were off. Why was that? Almost every car would have interior lights on when the doors were open. Were the batteries dead? Had someone turned them off?

  The fact of the matter remained that the car was dark, and she couldn’t see inside.

  She began to think that this might have been a trap.

  Quentin Worth could be working with his sister, and she and Liam could have been lured out here to be killed. She should have waited for backup. She needed to be very, very careful.

  She took one step forward, and then another.

  Slowly, inches of the interior of the car came into view.

  The backseat, more of the back of the driver’s seat, a discarded empty water bottle on the floor.

  And then a foot.

  She jerked forward.

  Quentin Worth was sprawled out in the back seat, his head slumped against his chest. His shirt was stained with dark liquid. It was too dark to see the color, but she could smell it now, the coppery tang of blood.

  Damn it.

  “Quentin,” she said again.

  Quentin didn’t move a muscle. She climbed into the car and put her hand to his neck. There was no pulse, and his body was already too cool. He might have died moments after the call with her. He may have been lying here, dead, for an entire hour.

  She checked both his wrists for a pulse anyway.

  She shook him.

  Nothing.

  She crawled out of the car.

  Liam was there, standing in the pool of light created by the headlights.

  “He’s dead,” she said to him.

  “Haysle, there’s someone else.”

  “What?”

  Liam pointed.

  She peered over the top of the car, and now she saw a woman with long dark hair. She was sitting on the ground maybe twenty feet away, holding her knees to her chest, rocking. “Who’s that?” she said.

  And now, the sound of sirens approaching rent the air.

  Their backup was arriving.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE girl—she was a woman, probably in her early twenties—but she seemed like a girl, and she was wide eyed when they got to her. She continued to rock as they talked to her, and she wrinkled her nose up and released it in a sort of pattern. She ticked at the side of her mouth, too.

  “What’s your name?” said Dawson.

  “Persephone,” said the girl. “Yeah, Persephone. I’m Persephone. Pretty Persephone. Pretty girl.” The girl then performed several more ticks using her cheeks and lips and nose. She kept rocking.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” said Dawson.

  “Uncle Quentin sleepy. He can’t drive,” said Persephone. “Uncle Quentin took a nap, but he won’t wake up.”

  Uncle Quentin? Was this girl related to Quentin?

  Oh, God, was this girl Destiny Worth’s daughter?

  Dawson gaped at her. She looked like a Worth. She could definitely be a member of the Worth family. What the hell?

  “I want to go home,” said Persephone. “Take Persephone home.”

  “Where’s home, Persephone?” said Dawson.

  Persephone rocked harder. “I want my hug blanket. I want my Jeanie. Uncle Quentin hurt J
eanie.” The girl let out a wail, then, anguished. “He hurt her and she won’t get up either.”

  “Okay,” said Dawson, reaching out for the girl. “Okay, it’s okay. We don’t have to talk about that.” She tried to touch the girl, but Persephone jerked away from her outstretched fingers, and Dawson retracted her hand. Dawson straightened.

  Liam was standing there, staring at Persephone with a horrified expression on his face.

  “She’s too old,” Dawson snapped. “Don’t think that. She’s not yours. She’d be a teenager if you knocked Worth up. Stop that. This isn’t that.”

  Liam let out a shaky breath. “Fuck.”

  She put her hand on his chest. “Calm down,” she whispered to him. She raised her voice. “I need a blanket? Who’s got a blanket?”

  “Copy that,” came a distant voice.

  Dawson slid her hand up to Liam’s shoulder and gripped it. “Now that I think about it, she’s too old to be Destiny Worth’s daughter. This girl is maybe twenty-four? Twenty-five? That would make Destiny fifteen or sixteen when she was born.”

  “That’s not impossible,” said Liam, leaning around her to look at the rocking girl.

  “Maybe she calls Quentin ‘uncle’ because she calls all adults aunt and uncle,” said Dawson. “Maybe—”

  “She looks like Destiny,” said Liam.

  A uniformed police officer rushed forward with a blanket in her arms.

  “Thank you,” said Dawson, hurrying forward to take it. She took the blanket and went back to Persephone. She knelt down and draped the blanket around the girl’s shoulders.

  Persephone stopped rocking for a second, turning to look at Dawson, tears in her eyes.

  “Here’s a blanket,” Dawson said quietly.

  “Not my hug blanket,” said Persephone. “Need my hug blanket.” Persephone started to cry in earnest now.

  Dawson’s heart broke for her. What kind of trauma had this girl been through tonight? Or, hell, if she was Destiny Worth’s daughter, then her entire life? “I’m sorry we don’t have your hug blanket. I’m so very, very sorry.”

  Persephone, openly sobbing, launched herself at Dawson, throwing herself at the other woman.

  Stunned, Dawson caught her, wrapping her arms around the girl. She patted her back, making soothing noises.

  IT was midnight, and Persephone was sleeping. Once the girl had attached herself to Dawson, she had not wanted to let go. Any thoughts that Dawson’d had about working the scene were immediately abandoned, because Persephone would break down the minute that Dawson went out of sight. It was obvious that the girl needed special care, and they’d ended up bringing her to the same facility where the two of Worth’s followers were being kept.

  Dawson hadn’t been able to get much from Persephone.

  She lived somewhere with a woman she called Jeanie, but Uncle Quentin had come and hurt Jeanie and taken Persephone away. Dawson had asked Persephone about having a mother; Persephone had denied this. Persephone had Jeanie, no mother. She had asked about an Aunt Destiny. Persephone had stiffened at the name Destiny and burst into tears and refused to speak about that.

  Finally, one of the staff had brought in a weighted blanket, which was something they used in therapy there, and Persephone had been delighted, calling it a hug blanket like hers, only blue. She had wrapped up in the weighted blanket and gone immediately to sleep.

  Now Dawson knew that she should be getting some sleep herself, but she was in her cubicle at the station, looking into birth records. She couldn’t find a Persephone Worth born in any of the surrounding states.

  She’d managed to get some hair from a brush, and she was going to have Persephone’s DNA tested. They could confirm that way whether she was related to Destiny Worth.

  Quentin Worth had been shot in the stomach. He’d bled out in that back seat waiting for her to come and rescue him. Any information he might have had for them had died with him.

  Dawson didn’t know what had happened. She couldn’t see Quentin calling her if he’d wished Persephone harm. She thought that Quentin had been trying to protect the girl, but what she couldn’t puzzle out was who this Jeanie was and how that fit in.

  It seemed obvious that Quentin had killed Jeanie.

  Jeanie must have been Persephone’s caregiver, and perhaps also her jailer. Quentin must have felt he had to kill her to get Persephone free.

  Other than that, she couldn’t really piece anything together, despite talking through it with Liam, who had been with her all through this, who was currently sitting in another chair in her cubicle, looking as though he might nod off.

  “I take it back,” he said.

  “Hmm?” she said.

  “If you were pregnant, I think you’d be tired.”

  “It wouldn’t have even implanted quite yet,” she said. “That means no hormones yet.”

  “Implanted, huh?”

  “Yeah, I did some research,” she said. “You can leave if you want. I know I drove you here but call a Lyft or something, if you want.”

  He yawned. “I’ll wait for you.” He paused. “You should test my DNA with Persephone too.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s too old,” said Dawson. She was adamant about this, but she wondered if she was just trying to convince herself, because she knew that Liam would hate himself if he had some daughter somewhere that had been mistreated her whole life, and Liam hadn’t been there for the girl. “She doesn’t look a thing like you.”

  “No, she’s like a carbon copy of Destiny, though,” said Liam in a defeated voice.

  “She had a daughter when she met you,” said Dawson. “If I’m right, then when Worth came to college as a freshman, Persephone was already two or three years old, a toddler. Worth left a toddler daughter somewhere, in someone else’s care. But who? And where? And why? We know her mother was dead by then, and her father had already gone into his reclusivity, by which I assume he was also dead. It could have been Quentin, but we know that he was in college on the west coast, and he started only a year after his sister did.”

  “I don’t know,” said Liam. “I saw her naked, you know? Like a lot. And… just… her stomach… when a woman’s had a baby—”

  “Not when you’re sixteen,” said Dawson. “There’s a lot of elasticity at that age.”

  “But Belinda—”

  “Was in her thirties when you met her, right?”

  Liam nodded. “True.” He yawned again. “She went off a lot.”

  “Who did? Belinda?”

  “Destiny,” he said. “Sometimes I didn’t see her for months at a time.” He shrugged. “Still, if she went off and had a baby, surely I would noticed when she came back that there was something different about her.”

  “Destiny Worth did not have your child,” said Dawson.

  “I was pretty good about condoms,” he muttered. “But not, um, not the night that I thought we killed her.”

  “That was seventeen years ago,” said Dawson. “We can agree that Persephone is older than seventeen.”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  Dawson got up. “Let’s go home.”

  He blinked up at her. “You sure? I don’t think you’re done here.”

  “I am,” said Dawson. “Come on. Your place or mine?”

  “Oh, we’re going to sleep together, huh?”

  “Well, maybe just sleep?” said Dawson. “You look wiped out. But I don’t want to be alone tonight, and I don’t think you do either.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “I’m not that tired.” Then he yawned. “Your place is closer, but we have to climb a ladder to your bedroom. I don’t know if I’m awake enough to manage that.”

  “Your place, then.” She pressed her body into his, grinning up at him. “Let me take you home, Liam.”

  He kissed her. “Yes, please.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  LIAM woke up to find that Dawson had stolen all the covers and he set about trying to extricate them from her sleeping form wi
thout waking her up.

  In this endeavor, he was unsuccessful, and she turned on him with a sleepy, “Whatdyawant?”

  “Covers,” he informed her.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, relinquishing them.

  He covered them both up, distributing covers equally over their bodies, and she wriggled her way into his arms, her head pillowed on his shoulder, one arm flung across his body. Now, with her so close, he was far too warm for the covers he’d just put over them, so he pushed them down to their waists.

  He drifted.

  He hadn’t slept well the night before, plagued by awful dreams about Destiny. In one of them, he’d been pregnant himself and Destiny had been taking him around a bonfire, telling everyone that when he gave birth, she was going to sacrifice the child to the Lola-Gods.

  Even the thought of it now made him feel shivery and disgusted.

  This time, his half-dreams were safe, mostly of Dawson and her body and half-formed images of soft things like clouds and stuffed animals.

  He drifted deeper, plunging into a deep, soft, fluffy cloud face first. It was like a cotton ball, like something from a cartoon or a toilet paper commercial. He was dreaming, but surrounded only by warmth and comfort.

  And then the dream turned on him suddenly, as Finn plucked him away from the cloud and slid a knife into the back of his skull.

  He jerked awake suddenly, gasping for breath. He panted, twisting under the covers, feeling trapped and frightened.

  Dawson looked up at him with half-slitted eyes. “Morning,” she whispered.

  He twisted again, trying to settle.

  She moved against him, pressing her thigh against him. “Hello, there, what’s this?”

  Belatedly, he realized he had an erection.

  She lifted her head. “I have to pee. Hold that thought.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just…”

  She was scampering out of bed and heading for his bathroom. “Okay, fine, if you’re not interested, that’s also cool.”