ago, back at Darius’s in-town mansion. Two twin beds side by side upstairs. Butch had asked about the tats. V had told him to mind his own biz.
And here they were in the dark again. Given all that had happened since then, it was almost unfathomable that they’d ever been those two males who had bonded over the Sox.
“Don’t ask me to do that again anytime soon,” the cop said.
“Deal.”
“Still. If you need it . . . come to me.”
It was on the tip of V’s tongue to say something like
So he just repeated the vow he’d made to himself back with Jane. From now on, he was letting shit out. Even if it made him uncomfortable to the point of screaming, it was better than the bottle-up strategy. Healthier, too.
“I’m hoping it won’t be necessary,” he murmured. “But thanks, my man.”
“One other thing.”
“What.”
“I think we’re dating now.” As V barked out a laugh, the cop shrugged. “Come on . . . I got you naked. You wore a damn corset. And don’t get me started about the sponge bath afterward.”
“Fucker.”
“To the end.”
As their laughter faded, V closed his eyes and briefly shut his brain down. With his best friend’s big barrel chest up against his own, and the knowledge that he and Jane were tight again, his world was complete.
Now, if he could just keep his sister off the streets and out of the alleys at night . . . life would be frickin’ perfect.
FORTY-SIX
When José pulled up to the Monroe Motel & Suites, it was pretty clear that the only thing new around the place was the crime scene tape that had just been wrapped around the far end. Everything else was wilted and sagging, including the cars that were parked by the office.
Heading past the lineup of beaters, he went all the way down to the last room on the row and pulled his unmarked in diagonally to the other CPD units.
As he put the sedan in park, he looked across the seat. “You good to go?”
Veck was already reaching for the door handle. “You’d better believe it.”
When the two of them got out, the other officers came over, and Veck got surrounded by a whole lot of backslapping. In the department, people thought the guy was a hero for The Paparazzi Incident—and that approval roll wasn’t slowed in the slightest by the fact that the guy always brushed off any attaboys.
Staying tight and cool, he just jacked up his slacks and took out a cigarette. After lighting it and inhaling, he talked through the exhale. “How we doing here.”
José left the kid to get up to speed and ducked under the tape. The broken door to the crime scene had been shut loosely, and he nudged it open with his shoulder.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.
The air was choked with the smell of fresh blood . . . and formaldehyde.
At that moment, the photographer’s flash went off and the body of the victim was spotlighted on the bed—as were the specimen jars on the bedside table. And the knives.
He closed his eyes briefly.
“Detective?”
José glanced over his shoulder at Veck. “Yeah?”
“We have the registration on the truck. Illinois. Owned by a David Kroner. It has not been reported stolen, and guess what—Kroner is a white male, thirty-three years old . . . unmarried . . . on disabili—fucking hell.” Veck’s convo stopped altogether as he came to stand by the bed. “Jesus.”
The flashbulb went off again, and there was an electronic wheeze as the camera recovered from the effort.
José looked at the coroner. “How long’s she been dead?”
“Not long. She’s still warm. I’ll give you a better idea when I’m done here.”
“Thanks.” José walked over to the crappy bureau and used a pen to push around a thin gold ring, a pair of sparkly earrings, and a bracelet that was pink and black.
The tattoo that had been cut out of the victim’s skin and relocated to the specimen jar next to her was pink and black, too. Probably favorite colors of hers.
Or had been.
He continued to wander around, looking for things that were out of place, checking the wastepaper baskets, peeking into the bathroom.
Someone had clearly disturbed the killer’s fun. Somebody had heard or seen something and busted the door open, causing a fast departure out this back window above the toilet.
The 911 call that had come in had been made by a male who refused to identify himself. He’d said only that there was a dead body in the room at the end and that was it. Wasn’t their killer. Bastards like him didn’t stop unless they had to, and they didn’t willingly leave behind the kinds of trophies that were on the nightstand and the bureau.
“Where did you go after this?” José said to himself. “Where did you run to . . .”
There were K-9 units searching the woods out back, but José had a hunch that was going to come to nothing. A mere tenth of a mile from the motel was a river shallow enough to wade through—he and Veck had gone over the little bridge that spanned the damn thing on the way here.
“He’s changing his MO,” Veck said. When José turned, the guy planted his hands on his hips and shook his head. “This is the first time he’s done it in this public a place. His work is really messy—and potentially noisy. We’d have found more scenes like this after he was done.”
“Agreed.”
“David Kroner is the answer.”
José shrugged. “Maybe. Or he could be another body we’re about to find.”
“No one’s reported him missing.”
“Like you said, unmarried, right? Maybe he lives alone. Who’d know he was gone?”
Except even as José poked holes in the theory, he did the math and came up with a similar conclusion. It was rare that a person could disappear without somebody missing them—family, friends, coworkers, apartment manager. . . . It wasn’t impossible, but very unlikely.
The question was, where was the killer going to go next? If the bastard followed conventional wisdom, he was probably entering a gorging stage with his pathology. In the past, victims had shown up months apart, but now they’d found two in a week?
So if he worked off that assumption, he knew the careful actions that had masked the killer previously were going out the window, whatever patterns he’d fallen into dissipating in the face of a frenetic drive. The good news was that sloppy was going to make him easier to catch. The bad news was that this might well get worse before it got better.
Veck came up to him. “I’m going to get into that truck. You want to be there?”
“Yeah.”
Outside, the air didn’t smell like copper and chemicals, and José took some deep breaths as Veck snapped on gloves and went to work. Naturally the vehicle was locked, but that didn’t stop the guy. He got a slider and popped open the driver’s-side door like he was an old hand with the B&E.
“Whoa,” he muttered as he reared back.
It didn’t take long for the stench to hit José, and he coughed into his hand. More formaldehyde, but
