A Caress of Bones: a serial killer thriller (Wren Delacroix Book 9) Page 6

  “You stopped me.”

  “You wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Wren…” He rubbed her back. “Why are we bringing this up right now? You know that you’re only emotional because of hormones. Don’t think too much on it.”

  “I want to go and kill Hawk,” she said.

  He pulled away, then, taking her by the shoulders.

  She swallowed. “You’ll have to lie and say you didn’t know I was going to do it if I get caught.”

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Cai, I should tell you some things,” she said. “The first man I killed. Kyler Morris. I did it for you? To save you. It made me… I got worked up afterwards. Like I got… excited. Like, that kind of excited.”

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “What is the point of this? You think I care about this? You think you’re going to convince me—”

  “I went to find Hawk, and—”

  “Stop.” His voice was sharp. “Definitely don’t tell me that.”

  She licked her lips, pulling away from him.

  “Hey.” He tucked one of his thick knuckles under her chin, tilting her head back to look her in the eye. “It was traumatic. Sex is a response people have to trauma. It doesn’t mean you’re… getting off on—”

  “When I shot Doug Sanders, I never felt so powerful. I just wanted to stay there with his body, and I wanted—”

  “Wren.” He shook his head. “I know you. I know you better than anyone else knows you.”

  “You don’t know me better than I know myself,” she said.

  “Maybe in this, I do,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re back here again, having this discussion again.”

  “I’m not trying to have this discussion,” she said.

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “I’m just saying, I could do it, that’s all.” She twisted her hands together. “I don’t think it would really bother me if I did. I’ve never lost sleep about any of the people I’ve killed. Not Kyler Morris, not Louis Bitner, not Doug Sanders. The only thing that ever bothered me was… well, how much I liked doing it.”

  He drew in a noisy breath through his nose. “You didn’t like it.”

  “Cai, I am telling you—”

  “If you think you could say anything that would talk me out of being head-over-heels in love with you right now, Wren, you are insane. You are my everything. You are carrying my child. I would die for you.”

  She drew back, speechless. Now, she wanted to kiss him.

  “Just, let’s leave this discussion behind,” he muttered.

  “He should be dead, though,” said Wren.

  “That’s not even a question,” said Reilly.

  “And the justice system is incredibly inept.”

  He raised his gaze to hers, but he didn’t speak.

  “So, in a situation like that, from a moral perspective, I don’t really see anything wrong with him being dead.” Her voice was steady, firm. “And it wouldn’t… damage me to kill him, because I’m kind of good at that, so if I can do that, if I can kill without remorse, I should put it to good use.”

  “No,” he said.

  “But—”

  “No, because you could get caught,” he said.

  “I won’t,” she said. “But if I do, you have to pretend we never talked about it, and you can’t help me, because I’ll need you to be there for the baby.”

  He let out a long, slow groan, and then he stood up from the couch. He walked out of the room.

  She waited, peering after him, confused.

  A moment passed, and she stood up to follow him out of the room.

  He came back in. He stood in the middle of the doorway, glaring at her. “If we were going to kill him, Wren, you’d have to let me do it.”

  “No,” she said. “I just got finished explaining that I—”

  “You are pregnant.”

  “Barely,” she said.

  “It would be my job,” he said. “To protect you. Both of you.”

  “No, it would upset you worse than it would upset me.”

  “It wouldn’t upset me at all to end that bastard.” He growled it. “And ask me how long I think it’s going to take before he makes some move once he finds out that you’re pregnant?”

  She drew in a breath. “Oh, I didn’t think of that. That’s going to piss him off.”

  “A preemptive strike,” said Reilly. “Before he comes for us, I’ll just fix that problem.”

  “It has to be me.”

  “You loved him, Wren,” he said.

  “No, I—”

  “I’m not saying you love him now, but you did once. He was important to you. And you’re lying to yourself if you think it wouldn’t bother you to do it.”

  “I hate him,” said Wren, and now tears were starting to stream down her face again. “Goddamn these stupid hormones.” She snatched up a tissue and began furiously wiping them away.

  “Oh, I loathe him,” said Reilly. “So, I’ll do it.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Some night, after you go to sleep, I’ll just load up a gun and drive out there, and I’ll—”

  “Stop it, you won’t,” she said, sinking down on the couch.

  He gazed at her. He shook his head. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off.

  She bowed her head and buried her face in her hands.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MALIAH poked her head into Trevon’s lab. “Hey,” she said. “You want to grab lunch today?”

  “I got Hawk Marner’s vic,” said Trevon from the other side of the room. He didn’t look up from the body on the slab. “And he raped her.”

  Maliah came into the lab. “I didn’t think it was definitely Hawk. You don’t have DNA or something, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t see anything that looks like blood or semen or anything,” said Trevon. “Definitely signs of penetration, though. We’ll have to wait to see if they find trace DNA when I send samples off to be tested.”

  “So, no lunch for you.”

  He gave her a little grin. “I do love my work.”

  “I could bring you something back?” she said. She was disappointed, she realized. They didn’t eat lunch together every day, but it was pretty frequent unless he was so busy that he didn’t feel like taking a break to eat.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you don’t mind waiting an hour, and you want to drive out to Harper’s Ferry with me, I did plan to check in on Mischa today.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “You want me to come along?” Mischa was Trevon’s ex-roommate, who’d moved out to Harper’s Ferry along with her abusive boyfriend. Trevon felt protective towards her, and he went out to the place where she worked to check in and make sure she seemed to be doing okay every so often.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think she gets a little weirded out that I’m there, so if I bring another girl, maybe that will reassure her that I’m not actually, like, stalking her, just concerned about her well-being.”

  “Makes sense,” said Maliah. “Sure, I can wait an hour.”

  “I’ll come to you,” he said.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said, because Trevon got engrossed in his lab work and would probably not even realize an hour had passed.

  “I swear,” he said, grinning at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “We’ll see.”

  “You want to put money on it?” he said.

  She snickered. “How about lunch? If you don’t come find me, it’s your treat.”

  “You’re on,” he said.

  She went back to her office and continued looking into Sunrise Ventures, LLC for Wren. She nearly didn’t realize when an hour had passed, but her growling stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten.

  She checked the clock to realize that time was up, and no Trevon.

  Triumphant, she swept into his lab.

  He grinned at
her. “Maybe I just wanted to buy you lunch.”

  That made her feel unsettled. Yeah, maybe Wren was right. Maybe Trevon was being flirty. Well, maybe she liked it. She tilted her head back. “All you had to do was ask.”

  “You want to go to lunch with me, Maliah?” He offered her his arm.

  “Take off those bloody gloves first,” she said, shaking her head.

  He looked down. “Oh, I forgot I was wearing these.” He stripped them off and tossed them in the trash and made his way over to her, shedding his lab coat on the way. Then, he offered her his arm again, with flourish.

  She wrapped her hand around his arm, looking up at him.

  He looked back.

  They might have looked at each other for a little bit longer than friends and co-workers should look at each other.

  Then they were off, laughing together as they made their way out to the parking lot.

  They took Trevon’s car, since he knew where the restaurant was in Harper’s Ferry. It was a ten-minute drive there, and they talked about the radio station on the way over, about why they always did their ads at the same time every day. And then they realized that it was an hour later than usual, so the radio must run ads on the same hourly schedule.

  Maliah had to admit that she was curious to see Mischa, who was partly the reason why Trevon had even come to work out here. If she hadn’t moved to the area, he might not have been so insistent on getting the job. He had felt as if her boyfriend, whose name was Kayden Rush, was trying to get her away from any support system she might have, which Maliah knew was a common tactic of abusers.

  She also knew, frustratingly, that it was difficult to intervene if a friend seemed to want to stay with her abuser. Unless Mischa wanted help, she would likely stay under Kayden’s influence. And often times, the women didn’t think they needed help. Abusers made their victims blame themselves, and they often thought they deserved the bad treatment.

  Trevon pointed her out when they found their seats at the restaurant. It was crowded, so they had to sit outside at a table in the overflow seating. It was hot, but at least there was an umbrella to keep them out of the direct sunlight.

  Mischa was not waiting on them, so they only saw glimpses of her as they ordered food and waited for their meal. She was pretty. She had freckles on her nose and she wore her sandy-colored hair in a ponytail. When she saw Trevon, her expression froze.

  “She doesn’t have to talk to me,” said Trevon. “It reassures me just to know that she’s here, and that she doesn’t have any visible bruises or anything, you know? She’s up and walking. She’s all right.”

  “Yeah, but Trevon, there are so many things that he could be doing to her that wouldn’t leave marks. The worst of what abusers do is the emotional and mental abuse, anyway,” said Maliah.

  “I know, but I can’t push,” said Trevon.

  “You pressed charges against Kayden when he came to the lab, right?”

  “I dropped it,” said Trevon.

  “Why?”

  “Well, he didn’t do anything,” said Trevon. “He came in and talked a bunch. That’s it.”

  “But he hit you before.”

  Trevon hunched up his shoulders.

  “Is this some weird male thing where you don’t want to publicly admit you were beaten up?” She glared at him. “I thought you were more evolved than that, Trevon.”

  He sighed.

  “If you have a paper trail against him, it helps,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I guess…” He stared down at the table. “He kind of scares the fuck out of me.”

  It was her turn to sigh. “Trevon, it’s normal to be scared of a bully like that.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “But it’s not exactly an attractive trait, being a frightened, scrawny weakling of a man.”

  “I thought you didn’t do relationships,” she said. “Besides, you’re not scrawny.”

  He snorted. “But a frightened weakling, that’s accurate?”

  She shrugged, grinning at him.

  He licked his lips, holding her gaze. “You know, the relationship thing…”

  “Yeah?” she said. Damn it, why did her voice sound so breathy?

  “I just maybe have never actually tried it,” he said.

  She laughed a little. “Well, I have. And you’re not missing much.”

  “Sometimes, I wonder,” he said. “If I am missing something? It seems like everybody else is really into having one. Mischa’s letting a guy treat her like trash rather than be alone. There’s got to be something I’m missing about it all.”

  “Mischa’s being manipulated,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

  Suddenly, Trevon sat up straight. “Mischa’s coming,” he said in a low, urgent voice.

  Maliah started to turn around to see.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Just look at me.”

  “Okay,” said Maliah. “But I think if we’re acting weird—”

  Mischa put both of her hands down on the table, leaning down so that she was eye-level with Trevon. “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

  “Do what?” said Trevon.

  “Come here,” she said.

  “It’s a public place,” said Trevon. “Um, this is my, um, my co-worker, Maliah Wright.”

  Maliah offered her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Mischa ignored Maliah. “You need to leave me alone,” she said to Trevon.

  “Listen,” said Maliah in a quiet voice, “You should know that you don’t have to stay with him. You can leave. And if you need help, there are people who can help you. You’re not alone.”

  Mischa shook her head, glaring at Trevon. “I can’t believe you lie to everyone about Kayden.” She pushed off the table and backed away. Then she turned her back on them and hurried off.

  Maliah turned to watch her go.

  Trevon was fuming. “You think she really thinks that?”

  “Thinks what?”

  “That I’m lying,” said Trevon. “That whatever Kayden is doing to her is fucking normal.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maliah. “But maybe, yeah. Maybe she’s lying to herself, because she’s afraid to leave him.”

  Trevon opened his wallet and tossed some money on the table. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Maliah.

  “SO, what do we have?” Wren said.

  They were all in the lab—her, Reilly, Trevon, and Maliah. She knew she should be concerned with the bodies for the Poppy Morgan case, but all Wren could think about was Hawk. She couldn’t seem to stop thinking about him.

  She’d woken last night to find herself alone in bed, and she’d been horrified that Reilly was serious, but then she’d heard him in the bathroom, and she’d known he hadn’t gone to kill Hawk, after all.

  They had not returned to the subject, and she knew that was because neither of them had any good arguments for leaving him alive, and that they both somehow knew that killing Hawk was a line they couldn’t cross. Neither of them were sure why, though. That was the real problem.

  “Well,” said Trevon, “this woman, who is still a Jane Doe, as far as I am aware, no matches in the DNA database, was drugged and then raped and then killed. I think the raping happened before she was killed, but it’s hard to say definitively. She doesn’t seem to have been conscious, however, when it happened, and there’s no sign of a struggle. The substance used to drug her is the same substance that Hawk Marner used, and she was also suffocated, like his victims were killed.”

  Wren tapped her chin. “And no DNA?”

  “Nothing,” said Trevon. “Seems like he used a condom from the trace lubricant I found. She was scrubbed clean afterwards with bleach.”

  “We never get DNA,” muttered Reilly.

  “Do you guys think it was Hawk Marner?” said Trevon. “I mean, just from looking at the body, could you tell?”

  “How would we be able to do that?” said Wren, ann
oyed.

  “I don’t know,” said Trevon, shrugging. “Seems like maybe it would be in your skill set, though, because you’re amazing.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said dryly.

  “I just think it would be really cool if she was actually Hawk’s victim,” said Trevon. “That would be, like, a moment for my career.”

  Wren gave him a look.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was another thing I should have not said out loud. It’s just that, you know, I read about your cases, and then I come here, and I’m part of them. It’s a big deal. I’m pretty excited about it.”

  “Well, we need to identify this girl,” said Wren. “I guess if she was found in the same place as Everly Green, we might go and start looking at the college.”

  “Out for the summer, right?” said Reilly.

  “I don’t know,” said Wren. “It’s August. They might be back.”

  “Yeah, they are,” said Trevon. “First week of classes.”

  “So, let’s go flash her picture around, see if we can get an ID,” said Wren.

  “Flash pictures of a corpse?” Reilly made a face.

  “I can make her look alive,” said Trevon. “Give me, like, ten minutes and I will make you a very, very lifelike photograph.”

  THERE was something almost comforting about doing the canvassing, going from group to group on the college campus, introducing themselves, flashing the photo around. It was tedious, frustrating work, and it was rife with failure, but there was something about the pattern of it that made Wren feel reassured.

  She liked having something to do, something that occupied her.

  And after about four hours, they were rewarded with someone recognizing the girl. Two more conversations and they had found the girl’s roommate.

  “That’s Asha, all right,” said the girl, whose name was Miranda. “I can’t believe no one told me this when I tried to call the police.”

  “Which police?” said Reilly.

  “The Shepherdstown police,” she said.

  “Well, Asha was found in Cardinal Falls,” said Wren.

  “And she’s really… she’s dead?” Miranda’s face twisted. “I knew something bad had happened to her. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ but I knew it was weird.”