Falling Hard and Fast (24 page)

Puzzled by his attitude, she watched as he poured himself some orange juice. “My agent. He left a message for me on my machine last night. He had the greatest news.” Wonder entered her voice. “He's got offers from three publishing houses for the book I'm writing. We haven't settled on one yet, but they're all talking book tours, astronomical advances— What's wrong?”

He leaned against the counter and drank the juice. It wasn't a good choice for a throat that already felt tight and raw. “Sounds big. How soon do you leave?”

Comprehension coursed through her, and she chose her words carefully. “The book isn't even done yet, Cage. I haven't really thought that far ahead.”

The smile he aimed was devoid of humor. “That's kind of the problem, isn't it? You're not thinking about much of anything. Not concerning us, anyway.”

“That's not true.” Her hands slipped into the pockets of her robe, hugged her body defensively. “I was awake most of the night, thinking.”

“You were awake most of the night, sugar, but not thinking. Unless you do your best planning while you're naked and moaning.”

Her lips thinned. “Don't be crude.”

He gave a polite nod that was at odds with the heat in his eyes. “All right, I'm listening. Why don't you tell me what you came up with?” At her silence, he coaxed, “Well, come on, sweetheart, let's have it. Just tell me about the parts that involve us.”

She turned away, reached out a finger and traced a shape on the table. “I haven't had a lot of luck planning futures with men. My ex-fiancé is serving time for robbing me blind while I was making the wedding arrangements.” She steeled herself against his reaction to the disappointment she knew she was dealing. Again. Defensiveness edged her words. “I'm not like you. Trust doesn't come easily for me. I don't have an endless supply of it.”

Her words tore through him with jagged, gnashing teeth. After the incredible gift of her support last night, her failure to offer her trust to him as easily couldn't possibly wound more deeply.

“That's bull.” He made no attempt to disguise his anger. “I'm willing to bet you never let your ex get close to you, either. Your brother and sister, sure, but no one else. It doesn't matter to me, because I don't want what he had,
anyway. I want it all. Everything you have to give. I won't be satisfied with less.”

Her heart jammed like a fist in her throat. He couldn't have said anything more guaranteed to terrify. She sorted through the false denials, the explanations; then, in a desolate tone, she uttered a slice of the truth: “You want too much.”

The simple words struck hammer blows at his heart. “So how long am I going to have to pay for what that creep did to you?” He took care to make sure none of the desperate emotion churning inside him made it to his voice. “Another week? A month? A year?” He slammed the glass down on the counter and went across the room to her, taking her arms in his hands. “Give me a clue, Zoey.”

“I don't know!” she shouted at him. She pulled away from his touch, her body suddenly trembling. “It isn't about him, anyway, it's about you!” She paused when she saw the hurt wash over his face, and her heart wept. Hurting Cage was the last thing she wanted to do.

She dropped her gaze to the floor. “I was ready to marry Alan. His betrayal shook my structured little world. But it didn't shatter it.”

Her last sentence arrested his attention. “And what if it was me, Zoey? What if I betrayed you?”

It was as if he'd reached deep inside her and ripped out the last desperate question that had been torturing her relentlessly. “I couldn't get over that,” she whispered achingly. “I don't even want to think about having to try.”

He opened and closed his hands helplessly, feeling as if he had one chance left, but it was dancing just out of his reach. “I don't suppose I can promise that I'll never hurt you.” He watched her flinch at his words. “But I can promise to try my best not to.” He waited, but she made no response.

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did he reveal how deeply her silence stabbed him. “I reckon we both
know what the other wants. It'll be all or nothing for me, Zoey. Guess you know where to find me when you decide.”

 

Burying himself in his work was as good an escape as any. Cage called the remaining detectives on the list, each conversation adding to the feeling of foreboding inside him. When he'd finished with the phone calls he returned his attention to the stack of printouts in front of him. He removed only the ones in which the detective had relayed details about superficial wounds to the victim's knees and shins. When he was finished, he had a stack of seven unsolved cases that involved rape/homicides.

Each of the women had knelt or crawled in something that lacerated the skin. Gravel, glass, wood chips—the material had varied. Two victims had died of gunshot wounds, one had been poisoned, three stabbed, and two strangled. No wonder he hadn't caught a pattern before. Looking at MOs had been a futile task. The shooting victims had been killed with different makes and models of guns. The stab wounds indicated different murder weapons, as well. And one woman had been strangled with a pair of panty hose; while regular clothesline had been used on Janice Reilly.

Eight women in ten years, if Janice Reilly was included. All victims were in their early to mid-twenties, all attractive. All had been brutally murdered, some of them tortured first. He felt bile rising in his throat. He didn't like the suspicions that were growing more certain by the hour; didn't enjoy envisioning a killer at work in the state, with eight homicides behind him, possibly more. A serial killer, who, to Cage's knowledge, wasn't being hunted as such.

He got up, went to a drawer and took out a map of the state. Unfolding it, he tacked it up on the bulletin board. Then he went through each of the files again, wrote dates on slips of paper and carefully pinned them up on the map, designating the locations of the bodies and the sequence of the deaths. The resulting pattern made the hair rise on the back of his neck.

The first had happened a little less than a decade ago, the second three years later. Two murders had taken place in the next four years, spaced an equal distance apart. Then it had been only eighteen months until the next. The cycle had accelerated with the last two victims—Cage checked again—killed within a space of five months.

He was no expert in the area but he knew what that escalating cycle could mean. He scrubbed his hands over his face once, hard, then reached for the phone.

It was time to call in the Louisiana attorney general's office.

 

Many states finance a government agency that law-enforcement officers can turn to for help in complex crimes. In Louisiana, the investigative offices of the attorney general were at the disposal of law-enforcement officials.

After driving the fifty miles to Baton Rouge, then cooling his heels in a waiting room for over an hour, Cage was ushered in to an assistant attorney general by the name of Tom Lane. He'd feared he'd be handed off to one of the several political types rushing to and from through the waiting room. But the man seated behind the desk before him had to have experienced at least fifty years, most of them hard ones. His dark hair was liberally streaked with gray, and his craggy features could have been hewn from stone.

“Sheriff Gauthier.” The man rose, shook Cage's hand firmly. “What brings you all the way to Baton Rouge on such a miserable day? Way I hear it, another storm is brewing.”

Reseating himself, Cage crossed one leg over his knee. “Hope that doesn't prove to be the case, sir. We still haven't completely dried out from the last one.” Pleasantries over, he eased into business. “You might have heard about the murder victim discovered in St. Augustine parish a while back.”

The man nodded. “Do you have any leads?”

“Not many, until yesterday. Now…well, now I'm not
sure exactly what I have.” Quickly he updated the man on the research he'd been doing.

By the time he'd finished, Lane was already shaking his head. “That's impossible, Sheriff. No serial is operating in the state, thank God. So far, we've managed to avoid that plague.”

“I sincerely hope that's true.” Cage handed the man a sheet on which he'd typed the pertinent information and sat back while the man scanned it.

“These injuries to the victims' legs—that checks out for all of them?”

“I called the investigating officers on each of those crimes in the last twenty-four hours. I asked about it particularly, and eliminated the victims who didn't fit. I know the MOs are all over the place. Can't figure a guy changing the way he operates from one crime to the next. That part doesn't figure.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” the other man muttered, glancing up. “It wouldn't be unusual for a serial to change the way he commits the crime. It's the signature that would remain static.”

“You think these injuries to the victims' knees and shins indicate what the killer does to fulfill himself?”

“Could be.” Lane's voice was reluctant. “Let's say, purely for the sake of speculation, that there was some nut out there who feels compelled to punish women. What does he do before he kills her? Does he make her beg, plead for her life?”

“Or pray.” All would require the victim to take a position of supplication on some sort of painful surface. That might elicit the rush of power that was so important to a demented mind.

“Do you have anything else?” It was clear from the man's tone that he was hoping Cage would respond in the negative. Silently Cage handed him the file he'd brought along. Lane took his time reading through the cases. He
stared for a long time at the map Cage had drawn indicating the sites of the bodies and the dates of the deaths.

When Lane finally looked up, concern had etched a few more lines in his face. He considered Cage for a long moment. “I told you when you came in here, Sheriff, that we have no knowledge of a serial killer working in Louisiana. I still believe that.” His gaze dropped to the open file folder before him. “However…you've presented some compelling information, which I feel requires further examination.”

“What exactly will you be looking at?”

Lane raked his hand through his hair. “I'll be interested in seeing if there's a similarity in how each of the bodies was disposed of. What were the crime scenes like in the homicides where the crime scene was discovered? Some of these freaks like to take trophies from the kills. Was anything missing from each of the victims?” He shot Cage a grim smile. “The more I think about it, the more questions I've got.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” Cage was silent for a moment. “We're still speculating, right?” He didn't wait for the other man's nod before going on. “What kind of guy would do this?”

“Hell, I'm not a profiler…”

“Me either.” His soft words effectively stemmed the rest of Lane's protest. “But you've had some training; so have I. What are we looking for here? I figure white male; the victims are all Caucasian, and these kind of crimes rarely cross racial boundaries.”

“We don't know what kind of crimes these are, yet,” interjected Lane, but his words were perfunctory. “
If
these crimes are related, this guy is the toughest kind to catch. He's smart and highly organized. He's careful with details, hence the lack of evidence at each crime. And if your theory is correct, he's had plenty of time to perfect his technique.”

Cage stared at the other man, but he wasn't seeing the assistant attorney general. His mind was racing. “This has to be someone who wouldn't attract attention. No witnesses were ever found in any of the cases who noticed anyone
unusual nearby. The killer didn't have to use force to kidnap any of these women; there was no evidence of blitz-style attacks or blunt trauma to the head. So the women trusted him, at least initially.”

“Maybe this guy is as smooth as Bundy.” Lane was getting into the brainstorming now, leaning back in his chair and fiercely contemplating the ceiling. “Or maybe he dresses like an authority figure who would normally command respect.”

“Or else he seems so damn harmless no one would ever suspect him.”

The two men fell silent, exchanging a long, grim glance. Finally Lane got to his feet. “I'll see that this information gets passed on, Sheriff, and keep you updated. I've got to tell you, I'm hoping like hell that you're way off base about this.”

Cage rose, feeling as if he'd aged a dozen years. “So do I, sir. So do I.”

 

It was almost ten o'clock before Cage left his office for home. The promised storm hadn't broken out of the suffocating cocoon of humidity, and he was glad to find that Ila had left the air conditioning on. He slipped off his shoes and wandered to the kitchen, intent on finding whatever the housekeeper might have left for him to warm up. The tuna casserole didn't look particularly appealing, but he figured if he didn't eat it, Ila would quit cooking for him altogether. After heating it in the microwave, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator to wash it down.

He stabbed at the unappetizing stuff on his plate, and shoveled in the food, more intent on fuel than taste. Lucky thing, too. He grimaced, reaching for the beer. He'd never much cared for tuna, and he had a sneaky suspicion Ila knew it, too. She made a point to remember things like that. No doubt she was paying him back for not eating the last few meals she'd fixed for him. As a tactic, it was pretty effective. He made a mental note to pick up some of that toilet water
at Neesom's Ila was so crazy about. He wasn't above a bit of bribery to do a little fence-mending with the woman. It shouldn't have been necessary, but it was hard to maintain a proper employer-employee relationship with a woman who'd diapered his bottom, and tanned it more than a few times over the years, as well. Besides, Cage had always found it more efficient to get around obstacles with a wink and a smile, than with out-and-out confrontation.