Envy

those damn bags.

“Uh . . . backseat,” he muttered, “yeah . . .”

“They were having a sale,” she said as he shut the trunk.

He was getting hard again. Right now. Shit.

After the groceries were in the car, the pair of them got in their respective seats and she started the engine. The seat belt cut into his erection, but he figured the damn thing deserved the pinch. He had no business fantasizing about a fashion show.

The fine Officer Reilly was into that stuff?

Man, he needed a smoke—

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“We have to go to your place to do it.” With a curse, he amended, “Dinner, I mean. Do dinner at your place—I don’t have any pans.”

As they stopped at the light that led out of the parking lot, she glanced over . . . and started to laugh. Before he knew it, he was smiling.

“You don’t know how to cook anything, do you,” she said.

“I’ll be lucky if I can get the box of tacos open.” He put up his forefinger. “But I’d still like to make you dinner, if you’re game.”

Shaking her head, she smiled. “Okay, but can you do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Can you forget what you saw in my trunk?”

His eyes drifted to her mouth and then went farther down to the pale column of her throat and . . . “I’m sorry,” he said darkly. “That I can’t do.”

She inhaled on a sharp suck, as if everything he was thinking was showing in his face.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “I mean, yeah, of course. Consider it done. Totally forgotten.”

A loud honk sounded behind them, and she jumped before hitting the gas.

Well, this was going smoothly. Maybe he’d top off the night by burning her frickin’ house down.

CHAPTER 10

During his years as a black ops solider, Jim had learned that good intel was mission critical in any assignment. Of course, back when he’d been working for Matthias the Fucker, his job had been killing people, and that was not the situation with his new boss or his current targets. But a lot of the principles were the same, however.

And the stakes were even higher.

Sitting on his bed in the Marriott, with his Dell propped on his thighs, the Caldwell Courier Journal’s Web site was front and center on the screen, and the headache he had was not from the glare.

His work was cut out for him. Assuming Devina hadn’t lied about the soul.

Last night Thomas DelVecchio Jr. had been in the woods with a guy who he’d been investigating—business as usual for a homicide detective, right? Wrong. The wrench in the works was the fact that David Kroner, believed to be a serial killer, had been driven back to town in the business end of an ambulance. Where he’d been all but tomato sauce.

And that was just the start of the fun and games. After spending nearly two hours combing the Net, Jim knew enough to fill a book about DelVecchio . . . and the guy’s dad.

None of it was good news.

“Damn, Dog,” he muttered.

Dog let out a little chuff and put his paw on Jim’s forearm, as if offering support.

The question was, where was the crossroads with DelVecchio? Had it been in those woods last night?

No, because then Jim would have lost before they’d gotten started, and he had to imagine that was outside the scope of the rules. Didn’t mean Devina couldn’t have given that a shot, though.

And on that note. “Where are you, bitch . . .”

The demon was somewhere in all this, working behind the scenes, trying to pull strings so that DelVecchio the younger would get in deep with her.

The route could be through the father. Retyping the guy’s name into Google, Jim went on another surf of the Web, and what he found made him question whether humanity was worth saving: Web site after Web site of hero worship, blogs on the bastard—oh, look, role-playing based on his killings. Artwork for sale on eBay. Autographs.

The guy was his own cottage industry—but it wasn’t going to last, apparently. He was due a lights-out in Connecticut very, very soon.

Then again, maybe he’d live forever in infamy: There were round-the-clock vigils going on outside the prison. No doubt that collection of protesters wouldn’t stop the execution, but they were an indication that the bastard might be even more of a celebrity once he was in the ground.

According to the CCJ archives, the elder DelVecchio had done most of his killings in New York and Massachusetts, and the first of the AP reports on the victims dated all the way back to the mid- nineties, when an initial body had been found in . . . Caldwell, New York. It had taken about three years of seemingly random butchering for the authorities to kick in that they had a serial killer on their hands. Part of the lag was the fact that he had left bodies in multiple states and the disparate investigations had been carried out with varying degrees of competency by local police. But the other thing was, at least in the beginning, DelVecchio had made it his business to hide the remains well—and creatively.

The dots had been connected, however, and then it had become a race to catch whoever the killer was. The ass slapper was that DelVecchio had been in the public eye the whole time, a dealer of antiquities—and not just trinkets or fakes. He’d been at the top of the heap with that one, importing statuary and artifacts and tablets from Egypt and the Middle East.

Handsome motherfucker. Even had an article in Vanity Fair on him—which went into some detail. Apparently in between the trips overseas, and the parties at the Met, DelVecchio Sr. had managed to get some woman pregnant. The son had been born on the father’s birthday twenty-nine years ago, but there had been no family life to speak of. No other children.

Although there had been contact of a sort: Turned out the murder of that woman had been the key to DelVecchio’s eventual capture, the first link that had brought the chain he’d been making together. The rest was history, so to speak.

“I-inn-r?”

Jim looked up over the laptop. Standing in the open connector, Adrian had a pizza box between his mitts and half of a six-pack of beer hanging from his teeth.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks, man.”

Eddie came in behind the guy with a second box. “He got his with everything—and the damn bait.”

Ad parked it on the bed and put the beers down. “They’re called anchovies, fool.”

The “whatever” went unsaid between the pair of them. Jim fed Dog first, giving the little guy some crust of the non-Adrian pie. Going by his stubby tail, the grub was more than good enough.

“So how do we know Devina didn’t lie to you?” Adrian said, before he bent a slice in half and put the pointy part in his mouth.

“This hot mess is right up our alley.” He switched over to the article about the execution and turned the laptop around. “Meet the guy’s dad. And wait, there’s more.”

As they ate, he showed them some of the sites and capped it off with the write-up online about Junior’s little trip into the woods with the serial killer. While his wingmen read, there was the appropriate amount of fuckin’ hells, which was satisfying.

He finished his third slice. “We need to find out what happened in those woods last night.”