by Mia Sheridan
And then Liza turned and walked away, leaving that scorched place behind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Freya Gagnon raised her hand, rapping twice on the hotel suite door. She shifted on her feet, wiping a finger under her lip to make sure her gloss was perfectly in place. The escort company she worked for had made it clear this client had paid well for her company, and she was to make sure all his needs were met.
As she stood there waiting, she felt . . . watched. She shifted again, clutching the small purse she’d brought in both hands. Her eyes moved to the tiny peephole in the door and she got this feeling that the man who’d hired her was standing there now, studying her, maybe deciding whether she was up to par.
The chain inside fell with a small clink, and then the door began to open. Freya let out a breath of relief. She’d obviously been judged worthy. She pulled her shoulders back, adjusting her face into a wide smile.
A man stood there, older, but . . . wow. Her mouth almost fell open. This man did not represent her usual clientele. Her usual clientele had a soft middle and a receding hairline.
“Come in.” He smiled, sending a small jolt to her belly, standing back to let her enter. Freya did, giving him a coy smile as she passed, tossing her purse on the foyer table and stepping into the large open area, a stunning view of Toronto laid out before her.
She turned, laughing when she found that he was much closer than she’d thought he’d be. She held out her hand. “Freya.”
He smiled that dazzling smile again. “John.”
John. Unlikely.
“What brings you to Canada, John?”
“I’ve always wanted to see Niagara Falls.”
“It’s amazing. You’ll love it,” she said, smiling.
“So I hear.”
She glanced down at his hand for the telltale tan line on his ring finger and was surprised not to find one. When she met his eyes again, he was looking at her knowingly. “I don’t like cheaters, Freya.”
Okay. She gave him an uncomfortable smile and walked deeper into the room, turning toward him again and leaning back against the desk. She decided to cut straight to the chase. “What’s on your palate tonight, John?”
He walked to where she was standing, keeping eye contact as he leaned toward her. Her breath came short, nipples hardening as he brushed his body against hers, opening the drawer next to where she stood and removing something. He leaned back and her eyes went to the object dangling from his index finger. Handcuffs.
Ah.
One of those.
“Am I the one being handcuffed, or am I the one doing the handcuffing?” she purred.
“Oh, I’m definitely the one doing the handcuffing,” he said, moving a finger over her cheek, reaching down and cupping her between her legs. Wow, okay, this guy didn’t waste any time.
Freya moaned, leaning her head back and giving him access to her neck. He leaned in, licking up her throat, taking her wrist in his hand and sliding the cold metal handcuff around it, clicking it into place.
“Ow,” she whispered. He leaned back, his eyes dark as he smiled at her. A strange tremble moved up her spine.
“Ready for some fun?” he asked, his voice velvety. Smooth. Hypnotic.
Freya shivered as she nodded slowly. “Yes.”
**********
Freya slipped out of bed, glancing back at John, his shirt still on and a small piece of sheet covering his groin. It was too bad he’d never gotten fully undressed. She could see his body was honed under the thin material of his T-shirt. His arms were bent back over his head, the handcuffs looped around his wrists and attached to the heavy, ornate wooden bed.
She’d woken first and taken the opportunity to use his toy on him while he continued to sleep. Apparently she’d done a good job wearing him out the night before. He hadn’t even stirred.
Freya allowed herself a moment to admire him. In his sleep he looked almost boyish. Sweet. Not the aloof man with the closed-off eyes she’d spent the night with. She wondered who he was and why he’d ordered her, when he could have brought home any number of women for free. Then again, men liked no-string nights like the one she’d provided him, and lucky for her they did, because she made a damn good living doing just that.
Freya used the bathroom, smiling to see that John was still in the same position he’d been in when she’d left the bed, and then walked to the desk where the room service menu was. She stood perusing it for a few minutes, her stomach growling. He’d given her quite the workout the night before, he owed her some sustenance now along with her payment.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said smoothly, causing her to jump and drop the room service menu, a small scream escaping her lips.
She turned to find him directly behind her. She laughed, putting a hand over her rapidly beating heart. She glanced over his shoulder at the bed where he’d just been, the silver cuffs hanging open on the bedpost. “What are you, Houdini?”
He smiled slowly, moving a piece of hair away from her face. “Something like that. I don’t like being restrained, Freya.”
She suddenly felt nervous, scared, an unseen tension expanding in the air around them. “Sorry.” She gave him her most contrite expression, the one meant to soothe men with control issues. “I was just playing around.”
“I know you were.” He looked down at the room service menu and then back at her. There was something in his eyes, something that looked . . . barely controlled. Something that stirred up her fight or flight response. Stay still, don’t move. As quickly as it’d appeared, the tension dissipated. John flicked the menu, startling her. “Order yourself some breakfast and charge it to the room. I’ll pay on my way out. I have to get going.” He glanced out the window. Freya swallowed. He’d be on his way then . . . to Niagara Falls had he said?
She’d always liked Niagara Falls, liked that you could look right over those wondrous falls and see the United States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Reed smeared a drop of peppermint oil beneath his nose, handing the bottle to Ransom as they walked toward the medical examiner’s lab.
“Thanks for coming,” Dr. Westbrook said, looking up from his work as they walked through the door. He put the instruments he was using on a small rolling table behind him and brought the sheet up over the cadaver. Reed kept his eyes on the doctor, preferring not to glance at the prone body on the table in front of him.
“Of course,” Reed said. Dr. Westbrook had called them at the office just a half hour before, telling them he might have some information, but needed to show them first. “You said it might be pertaining to the recent murders?”
“It might. Hold on.” Dr. Westbrook took off the gloves he was wearing and walked to the back of the lab, stopping at the large stainless steel sink to wash his hands. As he was drying them, he walked to a door that Reed knew led to a tiny office that held a desk and a few filing cabinets. When the doctor emerged a few seconds later, he was holding a file folder. He placed it on the empty gurney Reed and Ransom were standing in front of and flipped it open. Inside was the photograph of an obviously dead man, his head caved in on one side, his facial skin mostly missing on the other.
“Meet Mr. Doe,” Dr. Westbrook said.
“Ouch. How’d that happen?” Ransom asked.
“He jumped to his death a few months ago,” Dr. Westbrook said. “Or fell, though I’m not sure how someone would accidentally fall from the edge of an overpass. He landed on the highway below and got run over by a couple of vehicles before traffic came to a halt and it was called in. I ruled it a suicide.”
“What makes you think this might be connected to the other murders?”
Dr. Westbrook picked up the close-up photograph of the man’s face, laying it aside. Underneath that was another photo and Reed and Ransom both leaned forward to determine what it was. To Reed, it looked like a blob of meaty flesh with some hair growing from it. “Is that . . . the back of his neck?” Reed asked, looking up at the doc
tor.
“Yes. Look closer.”
Reed did, his eyes lighting on a small portion of smooth skin amidst the carnage. “A brand,” he breathed.
“I thought something about the leaf brand looked familiar,” Dr. Westbrook said. “I couldn’t place it last week when you were here and I showed you the brand on the other victim’s neck, but it finally hit me this morning, so I looked up the pictures from this case. What do you think?” He pulled another picture from beneath the folder and handed it to Reed. It was the picture of the leaf brand on Steven Sadowski’s neck.
Reed held both photos up next to each other and they took a moment to look back and forth between the two. There was only an edge that could be seen clearly on the neck of the jumper, but the longer Reed compared the two, the more certain he became.
“I think they’re the same,” he said, glancing at Ransom for his take.
“Agreed. Shame we can’t identify him.”
Dr. Westbrook shook his head. “Unfortunately, his hands were so mutilated, I couldn’t even get prints. And no one reported him missing. At the time I figured he was most likely homeless. But it was hard to tell from his clothing after what happened to him. His clothes didn’t fare much better than his body did on that highway.”
“The brand had to be premortem,” Reed mused aloud. “An officer would have been on scene in minutes for a call like that.”
“The only thing I can say for sure is that it was new,” Dr. Westbrook said. “His skin hadn’t begun healing when he died.”
Reed studied the photo for another moment, but nothing else struck him. “Can we get a copy of this?” he asked, holding up the photograph of John Doe’s neck area.
Dr. Westbrook pulled an identical photo out of the file. “I figured you’d want one.” He handed the copy to Reed. “Let me know if you come up with any questions.”
**********
“All right,” Ransom said, pinning the picture of the unnamed jumper up on the board next to the photograph of Margo Whiting. “For now, we’re separating these three victims”—he pointed to the board holding the photographs of the eyeless men—“with these two.” He tapped the board holding John Doe and Margo Whiting’s photos. “However, all five of them share the same leaf brand.”
Reed tapped his pen to his pad. Out of the team members currently working the case, they were the only ones in the office. They’d have to update the others about their visit to Dr. Westbrook later. “So, they’re two distinct groups, under some sort of umbrella,” he said, his eyes focused on the board and all the information they’d collected so far.
“They have to be, right?” Ransom asked.
“Maybe,” Reed answered. “Unless the two victims who died from a fall were mistakes. Maybe they ran from the suspect and fell, or maybe they ran from him and jumped before he had a chance to kill them and remove their eyes in the same manner as the others. We have to save that as a possibility. But it now seems more likely to me that their deaths were purposeful.”
“Why?” Ransom asked.
Reed looked at him. “Because there are two of them now. Two victims, same manner of death, same brand. Speaking of the brand, it had to be done beforehand. Dr. Westbrook could only say that it was new. But there’s no possibility the suspect had a chance to do it after John Doe’s fall.”
“True,” Ransom said. “So he brands these people when they’re alive, and then kills them in one of two ways afterward, either by pushing them to their death, or strangling them with a wire. And then the ones he strangles, he removes their eyes, sprays black paint into the sockets, and positions them.”
“Yes,” Reed answered. “The other question is, why brand these people when they’re alive?” When his partner furrowed his brow, he went on. “I mean, I see why with the victims who fell. There wasn’t opportunity to brand their body after death. But with these three”—he pointed to the three men with empty eye sockets—“it would have been easier to brand them at the same time he performed the enucleations. As it was, he’d have to have abducted them somehow—possibly at gunpoint—and then held them somewhere where he then branded them, and eventually strangled them to death.”
“So the strangulation wasn’t a surprise.”
“It might have been. But they were already being held somewhere. He branded them before they were killed.”
“Which means what?” Ransom asked.
Reed put his hands in his pockets, jangling the loose change he’d dropped in there after buying lunch, as he considered Ransom’s question. “That he wanted them to know they were being marked. He wanted them to know what it meant before they died. And why.”
“If only the dead could talk,” Ransom muttered.
“If only,” Reed agreed.
**********
“Hey, Zach,” Reed said, poking his head into his office.
Zach tossed the file he was looking through aside and smiled as Reed entered. “This is a surprise. What brings you to District Five?”
Reed sat down in the chair in front of Zach’s desk. “You’re not in the middle of something, are you?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.”
“I’m following up some leads in the area and thought I’d stop in and give you an update on the case.”
“Ah. Great, yeah. I’d love to hear what you have so far.”
Reed updated Zach on the new information, their theories so far, and what the team was working on at the moment. Normally, he wouldn’t update a lieutenant in another district, but as he’d made Zach aware of the details of the case and asked him to do a profile, if there was anything that might allow him to update that original picture, or perhaps expand upon it, he wanted to make sure that happened.
They discussed the particulars for a little while, but mostly went around the same circles he and Ransom had. They needed more, plain and simple.
And that tore Reed up, because he knew very well that “more” might be the discovery of another corpse.
At the thought, Reed pictured Liza as she’d looked in the video after making her way up the stairs in the dark and laid eyes on her boss’s eyeless body.
Zach cleared his throat, bringing Reed from his wandering thoughts. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize, I know how distracted I am when I’m working a case.” He gave Reed a long look, leaning back in his chair. “I get the feeling the case isn’t the only reason you’re here.” He raised one dark brow.
Reed smiled. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I know you and because you’re Josie’s son. You both do this thing when there’s something you’re not saying . . .” He waved his hand around the general eye area, indicating what, Reed wasn’t sure. “Must be genetic.”
Reed chuckled. “Shit. I have a tell?”
“Probably only to a handful of people.”
They shared a smile. Reed tilted his head, conceding. “Okay, yeah.”
The older man remained quiet, giving Reed room to compose his thoughts. After a minute, he looked up at Zach and asked, “When you first met Josie, she was still suffering from the trauma of what happened to her.” What my biological father did.
Zach studied Reed. “She was. It had been almost ten years though. She had a handle on it.”
Reed nodded, pressing his lips together. This was hard. They’d never discussed this before. “I assume though, that you had reservations? About getting involved with someone with her . . . issues.” A victim of untold abuse and pain.
Zach ran a finger over his bottom lip for a moment, considering Reed. “At first, yes. I was honest with myself about what I was getting into. But once I got to know her, once I had firsthand knowledge of her strength, I knew I’d be damn lucky if I got a front-row seat to experiencing it—experiencing her—every day for the rest of my life. I knew she’d bring that same fight to everything she did. Her marriage, her children, life. And she has. Your mother’s a born fighter, Reed. It just took a little while for her to see that in herself.”<
br />
Wow. Okay. He nodded, overcome, because he knew he’d been part of that fight too. She’d fought for him, and then she’d continued fighting for him . . . even if it had been from afar.
Zach looked out the small window, appearing thoughtful. “Throughout the most horrific moments of her life, she followed the instinct to love. To protect. To save.” He looked at Reed. “It kept her human. It anchored her heart, maybe even her mind, though I don’t pretend to understand how a mind is lost.”
Reed’s throat felt clogged, and he didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Some people are warriors,” Zach went on. “Soul warriors. There’s something stronger, less . . . breakable about them than others. You can knock them over, but they’ll just keep getting up. Again and again.” He looked back at Reed, his gaze intense. “I don’t know what that ingredient is exactly or why some have it and others do not. But I know I’ve seen it. And I’m sure you have too.”
Reed nodded. Yeah. Yeah, he had. He knew exactly what Zach was talking about. He knew victims. He worked with them every day. He saw the ones who were irreparably broken, and he saw the ones who were badly bent but still had fight in their eyes, dim though it may be.
He saw that same fight in Liza whether she recognized it about herself or not. Reed let out a sound that was half laugh, but mostly groan. “God, this woman, one look and she . . . flattens me.”
Zach grimaced, though there was amusement in his eyes. “Shit,” he said, the grimace fading. “Yeah.” He said that as though he knew exactly what Reed was talking about, and Reed supposed he did. He shook his head, a look of understanding taking over his expression. “Basically, kid, you’re done for. I wish I had better news.”
Reed let out another pained chuckle that faded quickly. “What if I’m not . . .” Reed expelled a breath, looking down as he ran a hand through his hair. He looked back up at Zach. “What if I’m not up to the challenge?” What if I’m not the right person for her? The man she needs?
