Kiss Me, Kill Me

But Kirsten was safe, and Sean took heart in that.

He left the hospital and drove to Whitney Morrissey’s Brooklyn apartment, where the police were serving their warrant. Lucy had sent him a message thirty minutes ago that Whitney was gone, but that there was ample evidence of her guilt.

He pulled up behind an NYPD police car and parked. He was stopped by a patrolman as he tried to walk down the sidewalk, and waved to Suzanne, who was standing in front of Morrissey’s building. She pretended to ignore him.

Sean knew she was furious with him for talking to Wade Barnett, but they’d saved time in getting the information, and he hadn’t screwed up her investigation. However, he decided not to mention that to her because it would probably irritate her even more.

He didn’t see Lucy. “Officer, I’m expected,” he said.

The cop didn’t budge. “Sure.”

“Agent Madeaux and Detective Panetta.”

The officer looked over his shoulder. “They’re in conference. You can wait.”

Fortunately, it had stopped raining, but it was cold and everything was wet.

He walked a few feet away and called Suzanne with his cell. He watched her look at her phone, then across the street at him, then pocket it.

He hung up and dialed again. On the third try, she answered, her eyes on him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No you’re not.”

“Okay, I’m not sorry. But let me through anyway.”

“I don’t know how Lucy puts up with you. You’re really annoying.”

“And handsome and charming and I drive a cool car.”

He saw her smile, but she quickly hid it. “You owe me big-time for not slapping you with a misdemeanor.”

“The paperwork wouldn’t be worth it.”

She hung up on him. For a moment he thought she really wasn’t going to let him through, but then a detective approached and said, “Mad Dog said you can go upstairs if you wear gloves, don’t touch anything, and stay out of her way.”

“Mad Dog?” Sean took the latex gloves the cop handed him.

The detective grinned. “She’s something else. Google her when you get home.”

Sean walked up the stairs to the third-floor apartment. He found Lucy in the bedroom with Andie Swann, the head ERT. They were cataloguing drawings.

Lucy had emailed him a heads-up about the shrine to Wade Barnett in Whitney’s bedroom, but he wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer volume of drawings, or the painting on the ceiling.

“A psychotic Michelangelo?” he said.

Lucy glanced over her shoulder. She was in her cool, professional mode. Her face was blank and serious, her eyes dark, intelligent, and observant. He’d seen her like this before. She closed off her emotions so completely she was almost like an android. He didn’t like it, even though he knew it was for self-preservation. He much preferred the Lucy who’d made love to him with heart and passion last night.

It was a sudden revelation, striking him as if God himself had put the knowledge in his head with the force of lightning. Lucy needed him to save her from herself. She wanted this life fighting the bad guys and saving the innocent, and she was so good at it, Sean would never expect her to walk away. But the violence, the intensity of the work, the inhumanity of the psychopaths she understood in ways even Hans Vigo couldn’t, would kill her spirit until she wasn’t able to shed the robotic shell she erected when she was working. He’d seen her shields go up in a fraction of a second, and it took hours-sometimes days-to bring them down.

In some ways, Lucy was a lot like his oldest brother. Sean barely knew Kane. A lifelong soldier, he’d been a mercenary in South America for at least the last fifteen years. He was hard as a rock, cold, and calculating. Sean never remembered him smiling or relaxing. He was always on alert, always at attention. He’d taken it upon himself and his team of dedicated men to rescue Americans kidnapped for ransom out of the country; he fought human trafficking in the trenches, sometimes as brutally as those who bought and sold human beings. If Kane had any humanity left, Sean hadn’t seen it, except in the cause he was fighting.

Lucy had that same capacity: to close herself off so completely, to shut down her own emotions, in order to do a job few people wanted and few people did well. Like Kane, she was a mercenary, but instead of doing it for money or a political cause, she did it for justice. She didn’t have to be in this killer’s obscene bedroom helping the FBI gather evidence that they hoped would lead to Whitney Morrissey’s capture. But Lucy was here because she could help. She wanted justice for the victims as much as she wanted Morrissey stopped simply because it was the right thing to do, and she had the skills to do it. And maybe deep down, she had to do it to give her past, and her future, purpose.

Sean had to provide her a wall of protection so she could let down her shields and be truly happy, truly free, when she wasn’t working. She needed to feel safe and loved every day, every night, so she could work these hard cases and not lose her empathy, or her humanity.

He walked behind her, touched her lightly on her back, kissed her hair. He looked at the sketchbook Andie and Lucy were going through. On the page was Wade Barnett, naked, being pulled by ugly witches with warts on their faces and boils on their backs.

“Well, and here I thought Whitney loved him in a sicko kind of way.”

Lucy shot him a glance. “Look at the faces.”

He did, repulsed by the realism; then he saw what Lucy meant. “That’s Jessica. And Kirsten. And Alanna-who are the others? There are nine.”

“When we show this to Wade Barnett, he’ll confirm that he slept with or had an online sexual relationship with all these women through the Party Girl site.”

“How long has she been stalking him?” Sean asked.

Andie said, “The first entry in her journal is dated two and a half years ago.”

“Whitney transferred from a small college in Connecticut to NYU,” Lucy said. “Her first day on campus she bumped into Wade coming out of her advisor’s office. She dropped her purse and he helped her pick everything up. She fixated on him.”

“Because he acted like a gentleman?”

“I need to go through her journal in more depth,” Lucy said, “but from what I read, she learned everything she could about him and his family. I don’t know when they actually started dating, but it was months, maybe a year, after that initial meeting. I doubt Wade even remembers it.”

“Why start killing these women now?”

“Before Alanna, Whitney didn’t personally know any of Wade’s girlfriends,” Lucy said, slipping into her psychoanalytic role so smoothly that it disturbed Sean. “Before Wade started sleeping with Whitney, she considered other women her competition. She would be prettier, more talented, kinder, not as clingy, more attentive-whatever it was she thought Wade wanted. Wade played around; he wasn’t serious about any of the women he slept with.”

Sean was distinctly uncomfortable, but he didn’t think Lucy noticed. He hoped she didn’t. Before he’d met her, he was a lot like Wade. Not the wild parties or drugs or cybersex, but Sean had a different girlfriend every couple of months. He broke the relationships off smoothly; in fact he was the master of easy splits. He didn’t want to look at that fact too closely; Lucy’s brother Patrick was right about his lack of commitment.

Lucy went on. “But after Wade became involved with Whitney, everything changed. Now it was her responsibility to make him happy. I’m sure Wade would agree with my assessment-Whitney was the perfect girlfriend at first. Too perfect. She would do anything he wanted, but because she is at her core insecure, she would need constant reassurance that he wanted to be with her. She wouldn’t trust him, so she would follow him. She would have caused at least one scene between Wade and another woman, and that’s likely when he realized she was obsessed. He wouldn’t have called her obsessed. He would have said she was clingy or demanding, but there would have been some public scene that had him breaking it off.”

“And she still followed him?”