Lover Arisen, page 5
Then again, when your boyfriend killed your parents, your brother, and very nearly yourself, and then slashed his own wrists and shot himself in the head to die in a pool of his own blood, people were kind of curious about the whole thing. Especially when there was no obvious “why” behind it all.
Here was the thing. On the whole, other people’s demons were better hidden than hers. Secret vices, shameful pasts, actions that made somebody ache with regret in the dark? Most of that crap was on the down low for the folks you stood in line with at Starbucks, got stuck in traffic behind, worked around, walked past. Maybe if they drank too much you guessed something was up for them. Or if they banged too many people, did drugs hard-core, or gambled their way to bankruptcy, there was a tip-off for the peanut gallery at large—although even with those obvious markers, rarely did third parties get details. Her worst life events, on the other hand, were public knowledge, just an Internet search away if anyone needed a refresher on the fact pattern. Hell, not only was there a Wikipedia page that had recently been updated with all those “decade later” reports, but there were a good dozen or so amateur podcasts and YouTube videos about that night.
At this point, she was just praying no one made a Netflix documentary about it all. The last thing she wanted when she was busy not sleeping was to find herself and her family on the “Trending Now” lineup. And the reality that so many strangers had seen the dead bodies and mortal wounds of her mother and her father and her brother made her nauseated all over again every time she thought about it—
Erika pushed her chair back and yanked the wastepaper basket out from under her desk. As she tucked her ponytail into her suit collar and leaned over, she remembered doing the same thing at the Primrose house.
When she’d gotten overwhelmed in the doorway of that pink bedroom, she’d tried to make it downstairs and outside for some fresh air before she threw up. Halfway to the first floor, it had been clear that she wouldn’t make it, so she’d rerouted herself into the powder room off the kitchen. As she’d fallen onto her knees in front of the bowl, she’d discovered that the family had one of those floor mats that went around the base of the toilet. It had been pale blue to coordinate with the wallpaper, and part of a matched set that included a little rug in front of the pedestal sink.
While she’d wondered why anybody would insulate the soles of their shoes, given that it was unlikely there would be bare feet in that particular loo, her knees had been grateful as she’d vomited up bile.
“Shit…” she groaned aloud.
Trying to get out of her past, she straightened, kicked the wastebasket back into place, and decided that at least she knew she wasn’t pregnant. You had to have sex for that—you know, sometime in the last year, year and a half.
Or had it been more like two for her?
Whatever, like she had time or the inclination to worry about her nonexistent love life.
Focusing on the glowing computer screen in front of her, she was a little surprised to find an open email window front and center. Nobody was in the To: part and the Subject: was likewise vacant. She sure could have used a clue as to what she’d been on the verge of composing. Putting her fingertips on her keyboard, like that would jump-start her brain, she waited for it all to come back to her.
Blink. Blink. Blink…
Well, this was getting her nowhere except maybe an early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and no, that wasn’t a facetious hypothetical.
In her experience, people who had had near-death experiences or lived through violent tragedy went one of two ways. They either became fearless, and coasted on a Death Pass card that made them feel as if the biggest worry of mortals no longer applied to them… or they became hypochondriacal shut-ins who were paranoid that every hangnail was an amputation in disguise, each cold was viral pneumonia, and all the normal aches, pains, and forgetfulnesses of daily existence were cancer, cancer, more cancer, and/or dementia.
She was the latter.
“But I’m fine,” she said as she looked around numbly.
Throughout homicide’s open floor plan, the cubicles of her fellow detectives as well as those of the shared administrative support staff were unoccupied, all kinds of office chairs pushed out from under after her colleagues had stood up hours ago to go home for the night. Here and there, a blazer or a coat was draped over the short-stack walls of the workstations, and there were plenty of travel mugs, notepads, files, and pens scattered around any flat surface that presented a set-down opportunity. Although most of the monitors had been turned off, there were a couple that had been left on, CPD badge icons floating as screensavers over the CPD-branded network sign-in page.
As her nose tickled and she sneezed, she brought up the crook of her elbow to cover her mouth and nose.
“Excuse me,” she said to all the absolutely nobody.
Putting her hand to the side, she palmed up her coffee cup—and the good news was that the java was so cold, so bitter, so nasty, that the taste of it re-grounded her.
Grimacing, she put the mug back down.
Trey was right. She shouldn’t have gone into that scene. She’d known from the dispatch call that the victims were an older couple, their teenage daughter, as well as an unrelated teenage male—and that there were no signs of a home invasion. She’d known what all that meant. But she’d refused to get real with herself because she’d been pushing through fear and sadness and anger for so long, she didn’t know how to turn the perseverance off. Didn’t even know when she was doing it.
Frustrated and edgy, she checked her cell phone to make sure that it was still working, had the ringer on, and was getting adequate service.
As she set the unit faceup, she refused to wish for another new case to come in tonight. It was hard to believe in karma after what had happened to her and her own family, but on the outside chance that the what-goes-around-comes-around stuff was real, she was not going to hope for somebody else to get murdered tonight in Caldwell. She was, however, willing to pray that if anyone did because that was their destiny, she hoped like hell dispatch would call her again. And hey, she was the backup detective on duty—which was why she’d been pulled into that scene at the Primrose house even though Trey had been put in charge.
She just wanted to prove that she could do her job right, after undermining her reputation as a hard-ass cold fish in front of so many colleagues by bolting off in her unmarked like she had. After she’d thrown up in the victims’ downstairs bathroom.
“Damn it,” she said as she put her hand on her mouse.
Signing in to the case board, which listed the active investigations and provided status updates as well as links to filed reports, she checked all twelve ongoings. She and Trey were leading several of them, including the one on Primrose that involved the Landreys, Peter, 48, and Michelle, 43, and their daughter, Stacie, 16, and their murderer, Thomas Klein, a.k.a. T. J., 15, a state-ranked wrestler for Lincoln High School.
So he was a jock, just as she’d assumed. And she was going to be right about everything else, too.
Struggling to stay inside her own skin, she would have taken a cigarette break, if she’d smoked, or had a glass of wine, if she’d been off the clock. Instead, after considering all her options, she gave in to a secret vice she’d recently been indulging, one that was every bit as unprofessional as her cracking open a bottle of Chablis right on her desk.
Within seconds, as if her mouse knew the way to the file, a video was up on her screen. Before she hit play, she had a thought that she shouldn’t go down this rabbit hole again—
Yeah, that hesitation didn’t last longer than a heartbeat. And this was going to be better than sitting here doing nothing but wondering why she couldn’t remember what email she’d been thinking of sending. Plus it was related to work… right?
Hitting the play button on the footage, she leaned closer and settled in at the same time… and there it was, an interior shot of a filthy trailer, the furniture ratty and stained, all kinds of clothes and drug paraphernalia everywhere, a bar-sized sink full of crusty dishes by an equally cluttered counter.
Directly across the way from the camera, a door was loose in its hinges and she stroked her throat as she re-memorized every detail about it, from the scratches around the knob to the bend in the metal panel itself.
God, she’d watched the file so many times, she could count down the cue for the mouse to scamper across the cloudy windowsill over the sink.
“Three… two… one—”
There it was. And there it went.
Just before that door opened, Erika felt her breath get tight, but it wasn’t because she was back standing over the body of a sixteen-year-old girl who had killed herself. No, this constriction was more like Storytown-rollercoaster-excitement, that special, tingling sense of awakening you got when a thrill was about to hit you in the right spot—
And there he was.
The man who pulled open the trailer’s busted door was not what belonged in a drug dealer’s crack den. He was powerfully built, rather than wasted by narcotics use, and his black clothes were clean and well-fitting. He was also the complete opposite of strung out and half crazed. His affect was one of total control, like he owned the place—or at the very least was utterly unconcerned with whatever was going to go down or whoever might ride up on him.
The latent dominance was sexy as hell.
“Yeah, and he’s a criminal,” she muttered.
Tilting even farther forward, she focused on his face—and not because she was trying to ID him from some previous case. In fact, they had nothing on him at all. The department’s facial recognition software hadn’t yielded anything out of any database, and nobody had made him, either. So no, she stared at him not to place him… but because he was just way too handsome to be a felon, his features sharp, his eyes deeply set and very intelligent, his lips…
She stopped that line of thinking, right there. And refused to look into why she would ever assess a suspect’s mouth like it was something that might go on naked skin.
Her naked skin.
Yeah, no-go on that. She was not living a Jackie Collins novel, for godsakes.
“I’ve lost my mind.”
Shoving herself back in her chair, she let the video continue and absently reached for the mug again, but she caught herself before she took another try of the crankcase oil in there.
Boy, the way that man moved. His body was so fluid, it made her think of a predator.
Oh, wait, he was about to look into the camera—yup.
“There you are,” she murmured as the suspect stared right where the camera had been hidden.
He knew he was being recorded, and he didn’t give a shit. And the other thing that didn’t seem to bother him? The dead guy on the couch. Although the lens angle cut off any visuals for the footage’s viewer, Erika had both been to the scene and gone through all the photographs from it: The body of the drug dealer who owned the trailer was sitting upright on the sofa, the back of his skull blown out all over the wall behind him.
And yet this man in black didn’t seem affected in the slightest by what all that looked like, smelled like. He might as well have been checking out a parked car as he glanced at the sofa.
So actually, in spite of how in shape and attractive he was, he did in fact belong exactly where he was. A civilian, unrelated to the drug trade in Caldwell and all the brutality that went along with it, would have illustrated some kind of shock, dismay—flat-out horror, given how gruesome the scene had been.
Not this guy. Just another day at the office for him.
As Erika shook her head, she got ready for what was coming next. After he glanced around at the squalor, and murmured to himself as if he disapproved of the mess, his left hand moved forward ahead of his body—and that was the first time the sizable black box he was holding showed. With a lean forward, he put the thing down among the bongs, crack pipes, and measuring scales on the coffee table, and then he picked a supermarket plastic bag off the carpet. After a quick inspection of the contents, he took some money out of it and spoke to the dead body.
Then he left in no particular hurry.
That was it. That was the footage.
Erika hit replay. And as she did, she heard a woman’s voice in her head: That’s him. The man from my dreams.
As she rewatched the footage, the soundtrack of those two sentences was as familiar as the movie’s visuals were, and the simple declarative statements—made by the widow of a murder victim whose watches were in the black box the man had left in exchange for something in a Hannaford bag—was as close to an ID as they had.
Which was to say, they had no leads at all on him.
Mrs. Herbert Cambourg, of the vivid dreams, couldn’t go any further than that. She had no recollection of ever meeting the man in person, and yet she was completely certain that she had dreamed about him.
She even seemed a little obsessed with the guy.
Not that Erika could relate.
At all.
And there was something else that was weird. As Erika considered when she’d shown this trailer footage to Mrs. Cambourg, and taken that specific and yet ambiguous statement from the woman, she could remember everything about arriving at the top floor of the triplex penthouse at the Commodore and watching this file with the young and beautiful widow. She could picture the sitting area they’d gone over to, and Keri Cambourg’s long blond-streaked hair and black turtleneck with leggings. She could also recall with perfect detail the sparkly diamond necklace Mrs. Cambourg had been wearing, even though the woman had been casually dressed and it was hardly a glamour gig for a homicide detective to show up and want to talk to you about your murdered husband.
Then again, Herbert Cambourg had somehow been torn in two like something out of Game of Thrones. So it had seemed like common decency to cut the woman a little slack when it came to anything making any sense.
It was right as they’d been talking about the mysterious man from the trailer footage that things got strange. Just as Keri Cambourg had let fly with the man-in-her-dreams statement, a security alarm had gone off down below on the triplex’s first floor, where the collections of odd objects and eerie books were… where the murder had happened.
As a shiver went through her, Erika closed her eyes and pictured the next sequence of interactions with precision, slowing it all down: In her mind’s eye, she saw herself stand up, and watched, sure as if she were viewing footage from a security camera, as she told the woman to lock herself in the panic room. Then, to reassure Keri Cambourg, she explained that it was probably just someone from the CPD who had failed to call in their on-scene.
After that, Erika had descended the curving staircase alone, passing by all the modern art on the walls, arriving at the first floor and…
She was back upstairs with the widow, telling Mrs. Cambourg everything was fine, that it was a false alarm, that no one was down there.
After which Erika had left.
Rubbing her eyes, she reviewed it all again: Watching the footage from the trailer with the widow. The alarm and the stay-here-I’ll-go-check. Then the descent—
Back up with the widow. Then leaving.
The sequence of events was just like the footage playing again on her computer screen, something she knew each second of, something that, no matter how hard she mentally probed, did not change. And her conclusion at this moment was as rock solid as it had been the first time she’d come to the realization.
There was a black hole in her memory.
Sure as if her recollections were a tape that had had part of its recording spliced out… no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t remember actually walking around the first floor and checking that nobody was—
As a sharp pain pegged her over the left eye, she groaned, but she was not surprised. For reasons that made no sense, the sudden spiking headache happened every time she tried to break through the amnesia. And yet she couldn’t resist trying to pull something, anything, out of the void. But wasn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result?
On that note, she fired up the video for a third time, sat back, and watched the mouse run across the windowsill, and the man enter the trailer, and…
Even though she was getting nowhere, she reminded herself it was better than going home alone.
Too many demons waiting for her there.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Black Dagger Brotherhood Mansion
As Vishous, son of the Bloodletter, stood with his shitkickers planted on the mosaic depiction of an apple tree in full bloom, the Bastard who was in front of him in the mansion’s grand foyer looked like shit on a Triscuit. Which was not only an hors d’oeuvre even Rhage wouldn’t amuse his bouche with, but a very real commentary on what under better circumstances was a male with a lot going for him in the Cary Grant department. Syphon, son of some other guy-who-had-been-good-with-a-rifle, had dark circles under his baby blues, and lids that were half-mast and sinking, and hollows in his cheeks.
And the streaked-back hair thing he’d been rocking on and off for the past month was just reinforcing the facial wreckage, making him look like the “before” in a skin-care ad.
“Anyway, that’s it,” the male was saying. “Oh, and he’s out of your smokes, assuming my cousin wasn’t patting around all his pockets looking for change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have got to get a kombucha tea and some kale chips—”
V caught the Bastard’s arm. “Hold up, what was that? I didn’t follow.”
Syphon looked confused. Then clearly assumed he’d mumbled his report.
“My cousin, Balthazar,” he said on slow-repeat, “the one who’s been missing? I just found him at Mae’s burned-up house lot. He still believes the demon and the Book have not been destroyed—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got all that shit. And the hand-rolleds request. But kombucha? Why are you drinking that shit without an axe over your head. Have you never heard of Grey Goose—fuck it, Budweiser? Hell, tap water? Jesus.”
