Beg for Mercy (14 page)

It was all Cole could do not to close his eyes and inhale a deep, lusty breath.

“You can hang your jacket in the closet. I’ll make some coffee.” Cole shrugged off his coat as Megan moved past him into the front room and flipped on a table lamp, flooding the room with golden light.

As she rattled around in the postage-stamp-sized kitchen, Cole did a quick survey of the place, confirming his initial impression that nothing had changed. Same pillows. Same oversize armchair parked in front of the television.

Same couch.

His core temperature spiked as he was suddenly hit with the memories of the last time he’d been in Megan’s apartment. The last time he’d been on Megan’s couch.

Smooth, hot skin under his hands. His lips sucking the bullet-hard tip of her breast. The feel of her hands stroking the skin of his back and arms, her mouth sucking at his like she couldn’t get enough. Never get enough. The hot, sweet squeeze of her sex around his fingers. Tight, slippery wet, aching for him to slide inside…

The sharp trill of the phone jerked him out of his flashback.

Megan picked up the phone, checked the caller ID and grimaced, but she didn’t answer. Avoiding the couch, Cole settled himself at Megan’s small kitchen table and set the folder down on it with a thud.

The answering machine clicked on as she spooned coffee into the filter.

Cole smiled when he heard Megan’s cheerful outgoing greeting. That hadn’t changed either. “Here in the twenty-first century,” he said, unable to resist a dig, “we have something called voice mail.”

She rolled her eyes at him and hit the coffeemaker’s power button.

Any trace of humor fled her face as a man’s voice filled the apartment. “Hey, Megan, it’s me, Jimmy. I really wish you’d call me back. I just want to talk to you. You know how to reach me.”

Cole settled back in his chair and tried to ignore the twist in his gut. But it was obvious from Megan’s pale, strained face that this Jimmy was important to her, whoever he was. “Boyfriend?”

Megan’s sharp, “Hah!” cracked across the kitchen. She filled two mugs with coffee, put cream and sugar in one and left one black for him. “That,” she said, inclining her head toward the answering machine, “was Jimmy Caparulo.”

Cole had a flash of recognition. “That was the bouncer from Club One, right? The guy who testified at Sean’s trial.”

Megan nodded, her mouth pulling tight. “It was more than that. He was Sean’s best friend growing up. They joined the army together after they graduated from high school. They were even in the same class in Ranger school. That’s where they met Nate.” Megan gave him a sad little smile and set a mug in front of him, and then settled into the empty kitchen chair. “They were as close as brothers until…”

“Let me guess—until Sean got arrested.”

“Nope. They were on the outs weeks before Sean got arrested, but Jimmy finally convinced Sean to come by Club One so they could talk. Don’t you remember? That’s how Sean met Evangeline in the first place.”

Cole didn’t have Sean’s file memorized like Megan did, but now the little details were falling into place.

“What was their falling-out over? I don’t remember it ever coming out in his testimony.”

Megan flashed him a bitter smile. “It was because of me. Remember how Sean had a barbecue a couple weeks after he got back? I invited you but you couldn’t come because you were too deep into the Pachevsky case?”

Cole nodded. In the end, he’d had to miss it to fly to Portland, where a money-laundering investigation had revealed a link to the murder of Sergei Pachevsky, a restaurant owner with ties to the Russian mob. Cole’s investigation had consumed the better part of the month. The first time he met Sean Flynn in person, he was cuffing and stuffing him into the back of a squad car.

“Anyway, Sean had told me Jimmy was having trouble adjusting to civilian life. He was discharged a few months before Sean after an IED almost took him out. Even though he mostly recovered, he never really got over it, you know? I saw him some before Sean came home, and I knew he was drinking too much, and I’m pretty sure he was going pretty heavy on the painkillers.He was barely holding on to his job at Club One—he was a mess. Anyway, that night at Sean’s, things got kind of out of hand.”

The muscles in Cole’s back tightened. “What do you mean, out of hand?”

“When I went inside to get the stuff to throw on the grill, Jimmy cornered me in the kitchen. Told me some BS about how he’d always had a thing for me, and he was so glad to be home where there were nice girls. He went in to kiss me, and when I pushed him away, he got a little rough.”

Cole’s hands fisted against the tabletop. “How rough?”

Megan shook her head and put up a hand as though to stay him. “Nothing major—he shoved me against the refrigerator and knocked my arm against the door.”

“You told me you got that bruise when you hit it against a door frame.”

She shrugged. “And that was the truth. I really don’t think Jimmy wanted to hurt me—”

“No, he just assaulted you.”

“He didn’t assault me! I honestly think he was so messed up he didn’t realize what he was doing.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you had better things to do, and Jimmy was having enough problems without me siccing my cop boyfriend on him! Sean came in right then, saw what was happening, and yanked him off of me and told him to stay the hell away from me or he’d kill him.”

“Has he been bugging you this whole time?”

She shook her head. “No. He called a couple times after the trial to apologize.” Her breath caught and she sniffed hard. “Like that would help. I mean, I know he had to testify, but…” She squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her arms around her waist. Cole’s own arms twitched to pull her close and give her the comfort she needed. “He called me last week when he heard about Sean.”

“Promise me you won’t go see him alone.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be an issue since I’m not even taking his calls. Even so, I don’t think he wants to hurt me or anything—”

“He shoved you up against a wall!” The thought made Cole want to plant his fist in the other man’s face.

“He was drunk. From what I’ve heard, he’s been in rehab and is keeping it together. I think he’s just sorry for how everything went down.”

“We all are,” Cole said. He made a mental note to run a check on Jimmy Caparulo when he got back to the sta
tion. Megan amazed him with her ability to see the best in people. It was a kind of faith he’d always admired, when it didn’t drive him crazy. But regardless of what she thought about Jimmy, Cole would find out everything there was to know about him and make sure he kept the hell away from Megan.

“Can we get started already?” Megan asked, indicating the thick accordion file taking up nearly the entire surface of her minuscule table. Not only was she eager to dive into the reports, she needed to distract herself from her nearly overwhelming awareness of Cole, from the memories of what had happened the last time they were alone in her apartment.

Stupid, irrational, and inappropriate,
she scolded herself. There was something wrong with her, some sick twist in her DNA. That was the only explanation for how, after everything that had happened, she still felt that same electric buzz along every nerve when she got close to him. How his scent—man plus a hint of cedarwood—could make her want to bury her face in the crook of his neck and breathe him in as if he were oxygen. How her fingers could ache to comb through his thick, dark hair.

It was a chemical quirk. Totally meaningless. She had more important matters to deal with than her libido, which for some unknown reason roused only around big, dark, roughly handsome police detectives who didn’t let anything as silly as feelings get in the way of doing their jobs.

With that in mind, Megan pulled her focus back to the
folder. Despite Cole’s certainty that there would be nothing in the reports to help Sean’s case, Megan was buzzing with anticipation to see what was inside.

Cole was wrong. He had to be. There had to be something, something everyone had missed because they didn’t know what they were looking for. But Megan knew, and if there was any information, no matter how small, linking the murders of five prostitutes to the death of Evangeline Gordon, she would find it.

“Some of this is going to be pretty rough,” Cole said. “The photos are very grisly—”

“I’m a big girl, Cole. I’ve been over Sean’s case file literally thousands of times. Not a lot bothers me.” That wasn’t entirely true, and she hoped he wouldn’t call her bluff. Sure, the pictures of Evangeline, naked, her throat slashed open like an obscene smile, her torso nearly black with a curtain of blood, had stopped making her gag after the first dozen viewings. But Megan would never be immune to them, nor to the cold, clinical descriptions of how she had been raped and sodomized, how deep slashes had been cut into her breasts, buttocks, and thighs before her throat had been cut.

She braced herself as Cole slipped the elastic from around the folder and extracted the manila folders for each case.

Megan picked up the first one, marked
Jane Doe.
The Slasher’s first victim. “So thin.” They all were.

Cole ran a hand through his short, dark hair and let out a frustrated sigh. “It’s everything we have. Crime scene report and printouts of digital photos, the ME’s report, the autopsy, and toxicology reports. Blood-spatter analysis. But, yeah, it’s not much. We know nothing about her, how
she ended up in that house. And nothing about the sick fuck who did that to her.” He flipped open the folder and indicated a photo with a blunt finger.

Megan suppressed a shudder and swallowed hard at the gruesome image before her. A woman lay naked on a bed, on her stomach, her knees still bent as ough she’d been on all fours and fallen forward. Her arms were trapped beneath her chest. Her long, blond hair obscured her face, the ends matted with the blood that had pooled under her, saturating the sheets.

Her pale skin was marred with angry red slashes. Megan flipped through the rest of the photos. A shot of the blood spray that had arced from the foot of the bed onto the floor in front of it. A close-up of three slashes the killer had cut into the smooth skin of the woman’s back.

As Megan turned to the next picture, her vision started to tunnel and she heard a loud buzzing in her head. This one was from the ME’s report, after they had moved the body in preparation for the autopsy. The victim lay on a gurney, positioned on her back. With her fine features, closed eyes, and blue lips, she looked like a wax doll.

Like Evangeline, she had a gaping wound across her throat. Circular marks covered her breasts and stomach. “Cigarette burns?” she asked, fighting back the wave of dizziness.

Cole nodded and reached out to flip through some of the pictures. “He also burned her inner thighs.”

A cold sweat bloomed on Megan’s skin as she looked at the mutilated swath of pale skin. “And of course the other knife wounds.” In addition to the cuts on her back and legs that Megan had already seen, the killer had sliced at her breasts.

The last photo was a close-up of one of those wounds, cut into the underside of the woman’s left breast. There was a latex-gloved hand in the picture, lifting the breast up to show the severity of the wound.

Megan couldn’t stifle her gasp of horror. The killer had slashed the woman so deeply, he’d nearly cut off her breast. “And he did all of that before he killed her, right?” She picked up the autopsy report, as much to distract herself as to verify the information. The typed words and diagrams swam in front of her.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Though he got a little more conservative with subsequent victims.”

“Conservative?” Megan whispered, nausea burning at the back of her throat.

“The cuts on this first victim are much deeper than with his later victims. Like he was still getting the feel for it. You’ll see with his later victims, the wounds are much shallower, the cuts much more controlled, only cutting through to the fat layer, not into the muscle. Like he’s toying with them, not wanting them to bleed out until the very end.”

That was it. One second Megan was trying to focus on the ME’s written description of the wounds, struggling to process the image of the victim bound, helpless, awash in blood. The next, she was sliding out of her chair, the hardwood floor of her kitchen rushing up to greet her.