from above, reducing Devina’s fighter to a mud puddle.
The squeal was so fucking satisfying.
Disengaging again, widened his stance and angled himself so that the pair of minions that were trying to split his attention got what they were asking for: Keeping his head straight forward, he measured them in the peripheral vision of both eyes.
He was banking on a third coming from behind.
It was just too cocksucking obvi.
Flexing his knees, he threw himself into the air, backflipping over the one he’d guessed right about—and then stabbing it in the back and twisting hard. As the impact registered, the minion went into a full-body spasm, acidic blood going flying to the point where he had to disengage and get gone. Diving around the side of the thing, he ducked into himself and hit the ground on a roll.
When he sprang up onto his feet, he was prepared to take on the other two.
Instead, he faced an army.
Minions had boiled up from every shadow in the yard and they surrounded him, their numbers so deep, they were in and among the trees on the edges of the garage’s lot.
There must have been thirty. Forty. Fifty.
Facing the overwhelming force, a resonant calm flooded through him, kind of like he was bleeding out. Eddie was going to be okay; Colin was going to make sure of that. And Ad was going to give that archangel enough time and space to get the pair of them out of here.
As for him? He wasn’t getting out of this in one piece, and he was just fine with the way he was going to go.
This was the way to die: defending your territory and taking out a fuckload of the enemy on the way to your grave.
This was honorable.
As Adrian got ready to go into the thick of it, he thought, for what was going to be the last time, that he wished his friend was with still him. At least they wouldn’t be separated for much longer, however.
Downtown at HQ, Reilly found herself on the verge of leaving and going home. For about an hour and a half.
There was nothing for her to do. She hadn’t been assigned a new case yet; she’d finished up her work on her other ones; and God knew she was off Veck’s. And yet she was sitting at her desk as though someone had superglued her butt to her chair, her colleagues having filed out a while ago.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t just staring into space. She was back on Veck’s father’s Facebook page like some nut-job addict.
Going into the links section, she clicked through to a few sites, but none of them gave her what she was looking for. Then again, nothing with www. was going to help her out: Her answers as to why Veck had seduced her, and why she’d fallen for it, and why he had to be just like his father, were not on the Web.
She went to the videos section. God, these things were positively repulsive, most taken at fan rallies—
She frowned and leaned in toward her screen. One of the newest had been shot within the last couple days or so from in front of the prison where the elder DelVecchio was housed. In the bright sun, the signs were plainly visible and the slogans were ridiculous.
Some even rhymed.
Execution. Persecution. How original.
She watched the video again. And again. And again. Until she’d memorized the two-minute clip’s pans and close-ups, as well as the part where that flashbulb went off from the back—
Wait.
Not a flashbulb.
She backed the file up and let it resume. In the back row, standing off to the side, was a man . . . with a pair of mirrored sunglasses on.
There was no way of zooming in, so she just replayed.
“Oh . . . God . . .”
Again with the replay.
“Oh . . . my . . .
It was . . . Bails?
It had to be him . . . standing in and among the deranged devotees. As the camera panned, he was speaking to the guy next to him—until he saw that he was on the video and turned away.
She went back to the wall on the page. Searching the membership was useless: Not only was there no way to screen the data, more to the point, she didn’t know what she was looking for in terms of a name. In fact, if she typed in “John Bails” in the Facebook directory, it brought up a guy in Arizona who was sixty, and someone in New Mexico who was seventeen, and three other people who weren’t a match.
On a burst of paranoia, she paused and checked over her shoulder. No one was behind her . . . or even in the department.
Back to the video.
As she watched over and over again, she wasn’t absolutely sure it was him. After all, there were a million pairs of mirrored sunglasses out in the world. But the hair . . . the build . . . the coloring . . . all of that was dead- on.
Abruptly, she thought of those “boxes” he’d talked about . . . as well as the fact that Veck had passed his lie detector test. Yes, it was possible to dupe the machine, and given how cool Veck could get, he seemed like a perfect candidate for that rarified class of fibbers. But why, then, would he have admitted intent when it came to hurting Kroner? It didn’t make sense.
Unless, of course . . . he’d simply told the truth.
Reilly went through every video there was . . . and found two other sightings of the man who appeared to be Bails. He always wore sunglasses, even at night, but not exclusively those mirrored jobs.
She sat back in her chair. Kicked her foot and sent herself on a leisurely spin.
Was it possible that Bails had a relationship with Veck’s father?
Then again, if Bails was one of the legions of fans that madman had, he didn’t have to actually know the guy. But why frame Veck?
As the momentum of her chair slowed, she found herself looking at the page again, and thought, Well, duh . . .
If the father was executed, how did they keep the love going? Simple—someone created the illusion that the family tradition was carrying on. Maybe even got Veck jailed. Maybe even drove him to kill.
She thought of that polygraph, and considered the idea that Veck actually had a murderous impulse. If pushed hard enough, if put under enough stress, it was possible that someone could snap and act in ways they wouldn’t normally. Hello, that was why police departments had homicide divisions.
As for what happened in the woods? Veck might have gone there with the thought of killing Kroner on his mind, but given the way he’d behaved with the paparazzo he’d hit, it was eivable he’d approached it as retaliation for what the man had done—which was still illegal, immoral, and inexcusable if he acted on it, but different from singling out an innocent woman and defiling her. Make that twenty-five innocent women.
Besides, Veck had not, in fact, harmed Kroner.
He had, in fact, called 911.
She thought of how Veck had been around her, the way he’d talked and acted and touched her.
Then she recalled Bails by her car, looking forlorn and betrayed by his “best friend.”
Psychopaths could be very convincing. That was at the core of how they caused the damage they did.
The question was, Between those two men, who was the liar?
As she thought more about Bails’s great reveal in her unmarked in front of the hospital, she had to wonder . . . how had he known about the earring’s discrepancy? There were hundreds of pieces of evidence in the preliminary report. Hundreds. As a detective on the case, he would have looked that list over once, maybe twice. Kind of hard to believe he’d remember a single entry.
What had prompted him to compare the two lists around that particular object? The fact that Veck had
