Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Read online

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It started sometime before that,” he muttered. “I don’t know when. Whenever it was, you were too young.”

  “Hawk…” She let out a long, noisy breath. “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t know if it is. I don’t know what I am, how much of me is broken.”

  “Look, I’m okay,” she said. “You didn’t do anything to me—”

  “Are you okay? Are you really?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Because I’m not okay,” he said. “I’m… there’s something wrong with me.”

  “Don’t say that,” she whispered.

  He turned to look at her. “If I was a good man, I’d leave you alone. You and I both know that you deserve something better than me. But I’m not a good man, and I don’t want to let you go.”

  “Stop talking like this,” she said. “It’s the dream. It’s the nightmare. You’re just saying these things—”

  “So, you’re not ashamed to be with me?”

  “No.” She said it too fast.

  “Just a little bit?”

  She kissed him. “Stop talking, Hawk.” She thrust her hands between his legs.

  He groaned. His lips met hers and his mouth was hot and wet against her. Gently, he pushed her back into the bed, so that she was beneath him. “You’re just trying to shut me up.”

  “Is it working?” she gasped.

  He lowered his mouth to her neck, to the hollow behind her ear.

  She scrabbled in the bedside table, feeling around for the box of condoms she kept there. But then she remembered it was empty, that she’d meant to buy more when she got groceries, but she’d never gone to get groceries.

  “What are you looking for?” Hawk’s voice was thick.

  “Nothing,” she breathed. “Shut up. Wasn’t this supposed to make you shut up?”

  He chuckled darkly into her skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Oh, whoa, you’re here,” said Reilly as he stepped into the Daily Bean. Wren was at the counter, a coffee in each hand. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be up for anything today. You’ve been through—”

  “I’m fine,” said Wren, handing him one of the coffees. “I was surprised I beat you in here, though. Good thing I did. You wouldn’t have bought me a coffee.”

  “Thank you,” said Reilly, raising his cup in a salute. “But seriously, you don’t need to feel like you need to get back to work. Actually, you should spend the day at the Cardinal Falls Department, pressing charges against Oliver Campbell.”

  “Don’t say that so loud.” She ducked her head down and looked furtively around, as if the walls had ears.

  “You really think the police won’t take you seriously? Because I will be happy to go with you and crack skulls if necessary.”

  “No,” she muttered. “No.”

  “Wren, you can’t simply pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “Watch me,” she said, pushing past him and out of the door of the coffee shop.

  He went after her. “Hey, seriously.”

  She stopped at the bottom of the steps outside and whirled on him. “I think I solved the case.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s Agatha Christie,” she said. “I’ll tell you at headquarters, okay?”

  “What?” he said.

  She sashayed over to her car, winking at him over her shoulder.

  He shook his head. Okay. So, it was going to be like that, was it?

  She peeled her car out of the parking lot before he even got the chance to get into his, so she beat him there. Of course she did.

  Once at headquarters, he climbed out of his car and went inside.

  Maliah was there. “Good morning,” she said. “Thanks for telling me that Colt Baldwin was dead. That meant I didn’t have to inconvenience Yolanda and freak her out that some asshole was coming into her house to shoot us all an extra night. It was incredibly thoughtful of you.”

  He winced. “Sorry, Maliah.” He had been wrecked yesterday, after not getting enough sleep. Janessa had called him, and he’d relayed the information to her. He’d meant to call Maliah, but he’d forgotten. It had slipped out of his head at some point between showering and getting into bed. He’d slept all day yesterday.

  “Yeah, well, as we both know, I’m incredibly important to you.”

  “Hey,” he said. “Please don’t read anything into that. You know, you and me, we should talk. Soon. Can we do that?”

  Maliah rolled her eyes and stalked down the hallway into her office.

  Wren’s head poked out of Reilly’s office. “Ooh, someone done gone and fucked up, Caius.”

  “Shut up, and don’t call me that,” he said, joining her in his office.

  She was sitting on a chair in front of his desk, spinning around on it and grinning. “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is, but I prefer Reilly.” He sat down behind his desk. “So come on, what do you mean, it’s Agatha Christie?”

  Wren laughed.

  “Delacroix.” He glared at her.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “So, my dad’s new husband, he’s into murder mysteries. He has this huge library of stuff. He can’t get enough of the stuff.”

  “And this relates how?”

  “Well, he has this big collection of Agatha Christie,” said Wren. “You ever read The ABC Murders?”

  Reilly looked at her blankly.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of a staple plot in mystery fiction. Like, the pilot of Castle did it. It’s been on Monk and CSI and Days of Our Lives.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fake serial killers,” said Wren. “It happens constantly in fiction. I don’t know what kind of sicko you have to be to do it real life, but I mean, it explains everything.”

  “Fake?” Reilly furrowed his brow. “Wait a second, you’re saying that the person we’re hunting isn’t a serial killer? But he’s killed three people.”

  “Yes,” said Wren. “I mean, technically, I guess he is a serial killer, by the strictest definition. But profiling wasn’t working on him, because it was all wrong. He was basing everything he knew about faking serial killing on movies and TV shows. He never took a profiling course in his life. He didn’t know the difference between disorganized and organized serial killers.”

  “But why would someone go to the trouble of killing three people if he wasn’t really getting something out of it?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to figure out, like, a motive or something. That’ll be your job. You’re the one who used to work homicide. You can tell us why regular people kill.”

  Reilly suddenly got it. “Oh, wait. I do know this. I have seen this. It is an Agatha Christie thing. He killed the other people to cover up his murder.”

  “Exactly,” said Wren. “One of the murders is significant. The others are just there to camouflage that one.”

  “Right,” Reilly murmured. “I mean, that’s why he used an object to rape the corpses.”

  “Yeah, because he was grossed out,” said Wren. “He knew that serial killers would do sexual things to their victims, but he wasn’t going to actually touch the dead body.”

  “So, Megan Wallace,” said Reilly. “That’s got to be the significant murder, right?”

  “Absolutely, because it’s the first murder committed.”

  “And because he didn’t actually molest the corpse until after rigor set in, probably because he didn’t know what he was going to do with the body.”

  “Then he came up with the serial killer idea, and he molested her body.”

  “Why do you think we found her second, then?” said Reilly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he dumped her somewhere out of the way, and no one found her, so he moved her. Maybe he really thought that if we found her second, we would think she’d been killed after Bristol Cannon. Maybe he came up with the idea of having the videos and then
made one for Bristol and decided that Megan needed one too.”

  “You think he devolved to killing prostitutes because it was harder than he thought to kill high school girls?”

  “Could be,” said Wren, nodding.

  “Yeah,” said Reilly. “He kills Megan, and maybe it’s a heat-of-the-moment thing. Crime of passion. Then she’s dead, and he’s upset. He decides to kill Bristol, but it’s horrible. He hates it. He can’t bear the thought of killing again, but he knows he has to, so he kills someone less objectionable.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Boom,” said Reilly. “You solved the case.”

  “Well, not really,” said Wren. “I mean, we don’t know who did it.”

  * * *

  Reilly was erasing everything that had been written on the marker board in the bullpen. “None of this matters. We don’t need a profile. We need to start from scratch.”

  The uniforms in the bullpen had all cleared out to the sides of the room, where they were standing, watching this go down.

  Reilly scrawled on the board, Megan Wallace. He put a cap on the marker and looked out at them. “Okay, who has a motive to kill Megan Wallace?”

  “Did we talk to the dad?” said Wren. “You start with male figures in the victim’s life, right?”

  “The dad wasn’t in her life,” spoke up Marjorie Jaid.

  “That’s right,” said Wren. “She was an emancipated minor.”

  “But who was in her life?” said Reilly. “The boyfriend.” He turned around, uncapping his marker and writing THE BOYFRIEND underneath in all caps.

  “I thought the boyfriend’s dad’s gun was stolen,” spoke up one of the uniforms.

  “Yeah, stolen by the boyfriend.” Reilly tapped the board. “Genius, right? He stole it from his own dad, and his dad filed a report. Looks great for him.”

  Wren rubbed her hands together. “I guess that’s possible. He was the one who was all, ‘Anything you need,’ right? He was real cooperative.”

  “I thought he was the sullen one who wanted his mother there for the interrogation.”

  “No, that was Bristol’s boyfriend,” said Wren.

  “You sure?” said Reilly.

  “Pretty sure,” said Wren.

  “Hold on,” said Jaid, who had gone over to fire up one of the laptops in the bullpen. “Let me pull up the reports you guys filed.”

  Wren and Reilly waited.

  Jaid nodded. “Bristol’s boyfriend, Peter Baker, asked for his mother to be there. Noah Adams claimed to have been looking for Megan while the murders were taking place. We had to call to check on his alibi.”

  “Oh, right.” Reilly pointed at Jaid. “And it didn’t check out, did it?”

  “No,” said Jaid.

  “He’s our guy,” said Reilly. “He’s got to be our guy.”

  “But, what’s his motive?” said Wren.

  “Oh, come on, there’s always some reason to kill your girlfriend,” said Reilly. “Besides, we’re working under the crime-of-passion theory here. Maybe they were fighting and—”

  “And he shot her in the back of the head?” said Wren.

  Reilly considered. “Well, we still need to look into him. He’s our best suspect. It’s him.”

  “What about the principal or the teacher or the janitor?” said Jaid.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.” Reilly turned around and wrote all that on the board underneath THE BOYFRIEND.

  “Reilly,” said Wren.

  “Yeah?”

  “If he stole the gun, that’s not a crime of passion.”

  Reilly raised his eyebrows. “You’re right. That’s premedi-fucking-tation. The plot thickens.”

  * * *

  “You know, I was wondering when you were going to come and talk to me,” said Alyssa Jennings. “On TV, the cops always come and talk to the friends of the people who died and ask if they had any enemies, that sort of thing. But you guys never did.”

  They were out at Lingandale High. It was late afternoon. School had just gotten out.

  “Right,” said Wren, “well, we thought we were dealing with a serial killer, and serial killers don’t kill for the same sorts of reasons as other people, so we didn’t do the typical kind of questioning.”

  “Which may have been a mistake,” said Reilly. “But the important thing is that we’re here now.”

  Alyssa surveyed them both. “Well, she had broken up with him. Like two weeks before she went missing.”

  “Broken up with Noah?”

  “Yeah, it was ugly,” said Alyssa. “He was, like, in a bad way over it, and he would call her at all hours of the night and come by her apartment and bang on the door and beg her to let him in. One night, she said she made the mistake of answering the phone and he told her that he was going to commit suicide if she didn’t take him back. She told him to cut the shit or she was going to call his mom, and that seemed to shut him up. But if you had talked to me, I would have told you that I never trusted that guy.”

  “Well,” said Reilly, “you could have called the police yourself, you know. Taken initiative.”

  Alyssa wrinkled up her nose. “I mean, I could have, sure. But it’s your job to go out and interview people, you know?”

  “It’s not important,” said Wren. “So, what you’re saying is that he might have killed her because she broke up with him.”

  “She didn’t have anyone, you know?” said Alyssa. “She was an emancipated minor and she lived on her own. There was no one for her to call.”

  “You know, in the future, if something like this happens, you can tell a teacher or the school counselor,” said Reilly. “Or you can call the police. We do take this kind of thing seriously.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Alyssa. “That’s why you’re just now talking to me.”

  * * *

  “He’s not talking to you,” said Pamela Adams, standing in the doorway to her house. Behind her, Noah was trying to get her attention.

  “Mom,” said Noah. “Mom, come on.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” said Pamela. “Apparently, you already talked to him at school, and I wasn’t even notified, and he’s my son, and that makes me angry.”

  “Mom,” said Noah. “I think we should cooperate with them. If we don’t, it’s only going to raise their suspicions. I didn’t do anything wrong, so if we cooperate—”

  “You be quiet, young man,” said Pamela. “Out of the room.” She pointed.

  Noah didn’t go anywhere.

  Reilly smiled at Pamela. “Mrs. Adams, your son is right. If he is really is innocent—”

  “Now, that’s just not true,” said Pamela. “I know that sometimes, you police just get an idea in your head, and you make the evidence fit. Noah told me you eliminated him.”

  “We couldn’t,” said Wren. “He didn’t have an alibi.”

  “He was sleeping,” said Pamela. “We were all under this roof.”

  “If you were sleeping too,” said Wren, “then you can’t really verify that, can you?”

  “Oh, everyone was sleeping at that time of the morning.”

  “Except Bristol Cannon,” said Reilly. “Except the murderer.”

  “Who is not my son,” said Pamela. “Noah would never do such a thing. He’s a gentle soul. You’re completely barking up the wrong tree here. If you want to talk to him, you’re going to have to place him in custody. I’m not allowing you into our house.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Oh, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,” said Wren to Hawk.

  “It’s fine,” said Hawk. “I promise it won’t go any further. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I just… I mean, I couldn’t help but feel as if his mother had a point. Reilly honed right in on Noah Adams. He was like, ‘It’s the boyfriend.’ I mean, I know a lot of times it is the boyfriend, and there’s evidence there, but…”

  “What do you think about it?” said Hawk.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said. “That’
s not my area of expertise. I make profiles and try to match people to profiles. I’m not good at this motive stuff. And I get that people get angry after breakups, but it’s a lot of trouble to go through just because someone dumped you, you know?”

  “So, you don’t think it’s him?”

  “Well, we need to be sure,” said Wren. “We need a piece of evidence. If we could find the gun he used, that would be something. That would nail it. If we could link him to one of the phones used to make the videos. Hell, if he’d confess, that would be perfect.”

  Hawk laughed. “I bet it would.”

  She sighed. “I’m going to tell Reilly that we need to go and talk to some of the other suspects. And that maybe we need to widen the pool of suspects. Like, this is a whole new ballgame here. I think we felt like we had a breakthrough, but we’re not really that much closer to finding the murderer.”

  “You said the kid, he, uh, he threatened to kill himself?”

  “Oh, that’s what Megan’s friend said,” said Wren.

  “So, maybe this kid, maybe he got the gun to, uh, to make himself look serious. And maybe while he was trying to show his girlfriend that he was actually going to kill himself, maybe that’s when she somehow got shot,” said Hawk.

  “Wait, you think he did it?” she said.

  Hawk shrugged. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. That was Reilly’s theory, though, right, and he’s good at his job. I mean, if he says it’s the guy, maybe you should believe him.”

  She shook her head. “It’s bizarre how you two are, like, bros now.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Hawk. “He thinks I’m creepy.”

  “Creepy? He said that?”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Did you do something creepy?”

  Hawk looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “You okay?”

  He turned back to her. “One thing I know, little bird, is that it’s sometimes so much easier to snuff out a life than it should be. Like, this Noah boy you’re talking about. He maybe had no idea how quick the lights could go off.”

  “Hawk, you’re being creepy now.” She waggled her eyebrows at him.

  “I’ve seen it,” said Hawk. “One minute, a person is alive, moving around, breathing, talking, loving, thinking. And the next…”