Fallen Angels 03 - Envy (3 page)

He didn’t say anything. No “I didn’t do it” or “Let me explain . . .”

His eyes just locked on her and . . . that was it.

Ditching the pleasantries, she said, “The sergeant cal ed me in.”

“I figured.”

“Are you injured?”

“No.”

“Mind if I ask you some questions?”

“G’head.”

God, he was in such control of himself. “What brought you out here tonight?”

“I knew Kroner was going to come back. He had to. With his col ection impounded, he had nothing left of his work, so this is a holy site to him.”

“And what happened after you got here?”

“I waited. He came . . . and then . . .” Veck hesitated, his brows going tight as a knot before one hand came up and rubbed his temple. “Shit . . .”

“Detective?”

“I can’t remember.” He looked her square in the eye again. “I can’t remember anything after he showed up, and that’s the God’s honest. One minute he was coming through the woods, and the next? There was blood everywhere.”

“May I see your hands, Detective?” When he held them out, they were rock steady . . . and unmarked with cuts or abrasions. No blood on the palms, the fingertips, the nails. “Did you assess the victim or intervene with him in some way prior to or after cal ing nine-one-one?”

“I took my leather jacket off and put it to his neck. It wasn’t going to help, but I did it anyway.”

“Are you carrying any weapons other than your gun?”

“My knife. It’s on my—”

She put her hand on his arm to stop his reaching around. “Let me take a look.”

Nodding, he pivoted on his boot heel. In the light from the ambulance, the nasty-looking blade holstered at the smal of his back was a laceration waiting to happen.

“May I remove this weapon, Detective?”

“Have at it.”

Taking a set of vinyl gloves out of her backpack, she snapped them on and went for the dagger. As she tugged to loosen the snap, his body didn’t shift at al . She might as wel have been disarming a statue.

The knife was clean and dry as a whistle.

Lifting it up to her nose, she inhaled. No scent of astringent as if he’d scrubbed it in a hurry.

As he looked over his shoulder, the torsion in his body made his shoulders seem huge, and for no good reason, she realized she was eye-to-eye with his pecs. At five-foot-six, she was of average height, but next to him she felt like she’d shrunk to miniature.

“I’m going to confiscate this, if you don’t mind?” She was going to take his gun as wel , but given the injuries . . . the blade was what she real y wanted from him.

“Not at al .”

As she took a plastic bag out of her sack, she said, “What do you
think
happened here.”

“Someone ripped him apart, and I think it was me.”

That stopped her, but not because she thought it was an admission of any kind—she just didn’t expect anyone under these circumstances to be so honest.

At that moment, an unmarked pul ed into the parking lot along with two squad cars. “Your partner’s arrived,” she said. “But the sergeant wants me to lead the investigation to avoid any possible conflicts of interest.”

“Not a problem.”

“Wil you consent to my taking samples from under your nails?”

font size="3">“Yes.”

She shifted the pack in front again and took out a Swiss army knife, along with some smal er plastic bags.

“You’re very organized, Officer,” Veck said.

“I don’t like not being prepared. Please hold out your right hand.”

She made fast work, starting with the pinkie. His nails were cut short, but not manicured, and there was very little under any of them.

“Do you have a background in detective work?” Veck asked.

“Yes.”

“Shows.”

When she was finished, she glanced up . . . and immediately had to downshift from his midnight blue eyes to somewhere in his chin vicinity. “Would you like another coat, Detective? It’s cold out here.”

“I’m fine.”

If you were bleeding from a chest wound, would you take a damn Band-Aid? she wondered. Or would you tough-guy it until there was no plasma left in your veins?

He’d tough-guy it, she thought. Definitely.

“I want the medics to look you over—”

“I’m fine—”

“That would be an order, Detective. You look like your head hurts.”

At that moment, de la Cruz emerged from his car, and as he came over, he looked grim faced and weary. Word had it he’d already lost a partner a couple of years ago; he obviously wasn’t psyched at the retread, even if it was for a different reason.

“Excuse me,” she said to them both. “I’m going to snag one of the medics.”

Except when she got over to the two men, they were in the process of transferring Kroner onto the gurney, and it was clear they couldn’t spare even a minute. “What are his chances?”

“Bad,” the one who was bagging him said. “But we’l do our best, Officer.”

“I know you wil .”

The gurney’s supports were extended so that the thing was at waist height, and just before they wheeled away, she took a mental snapshot. Kroner looked like he’d been pul ed from the steaming wreck of a car, his face mangled as if he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and had gone through the window.

Reil y glanced back at Veck.

Lot of holes in this scene, she thought. Especial y given that he believed he’d been the attacker. But there was no way to do that much damage and get cleaned up this fast in the woods. Besides, he didn’t look like he’d been in any altercation at al —there was no way you could soap-and-water away bruises and scratches.

The question was . . . who had done it?

As if he could feel her eyes on him, Veck’s head cranked around, and when their stares met, everything disappeared: she might as wel have been al alone with him . . . and standing not fifteen yards away, but fifteen inches.

From out of nowhere, a wel ing heat boiled up in her body, the kind of thing that, if she’d been indoors, she’d have told herself was the result of standing under a heat duct. As it was, she justified the flush as being an adrenal response to stress.

Stress
, damn it.
Not
sexual attraction.

Reil y broke the connection by cal ing out to the newly arrived uniforms, “Would you tape us up?”

“Roger that, Officer.”

Right, time to get back to work: That brief spike of whol y inappropriate attraction was not going to get in the way of her doing her job. She was far too levelheaded, for one thing, and for another, her professional integrity demanded nothing less. She also had no intention of being on the man’s very long list of adoring fans. She was going to take care of business, and leave the Moon Pie eyes to al the others.

Besides, guys like Veck didn’t go for women like her, and that was just fine. She was far more interested in work than in showing her legs, puffing her hair, and competing in the date Olympics. Brittany—spel ed Britnae, a.k.a. the office hottie—could have him and keep him if she wanted.

In the meantime, Reil y was going to see whether or not the son had lived up to the father’s horrors.

U
nder normal circumstances, Jim Heron considered himself a sore loser.

And that was with your average, everyday shit like World of Warcraft or frickin’ tennis or poker.

Not that he wasted time playing any of those, but if he did, he would have been the type who didn’t leave the control er, court, or table until he was on top.

And again, that was just about unimportant crap.

When it came to the war with the demon Devina, he was on fire, he was so pissed off: He had lost the last round.

Lost as in no win. As in out of the seven souls they were battling over, he and that bitch were now tied 1–1. Granted, there were stil five more at-bats, but this was not the direction he or anyone else needed to go in.

He got defeated? That demon had dominion over not only the earth but the heavens above . . . which meant his mother and al those good souls up there, as wel as him and his fal en angel soldiers, were looking at an eternity of damnation.

And that was not, he’d recently discovered, just a hypothetical used to motivate the religious. Hel was an actual place and the suffering there was very real. Matter of fact, so much of what he’d previously written off as sil y rhetoric from the holier-than-thou crowd had turned out to be dead on.

So yeah, the stakes were high and he
hated
losing. Especial y when it didn’t need to go down like it had.

He was flat-out rip-shit at the game. At his boss, Nigel. At the “rules.”

It was common fucking sense: When you told a guy he was supposed to influence some jackass at a crossroads in his or her life, it kind of helped if you frickin’ told him who was on deck. After al , it wasn’t a big goddamn secret: Nigel knew. The enemy, Devina, knew. Jim? Not so much, people. And courtesy of that informational black hole, he’d focused on the wrong man in the last round and blown it.

So here he was, tied with the bitch and pissed off in a hotel room in Caldwel , New York.

And he wasn’t the only one with a case of the grumpies.

Next door, on the far side of a connector, two deep male voices were doing the back-and-forth, in the key of frustrated-to-shit.

Not a news flash. His wingmen, Adrian Vogel and Eddie Blackhawk, were not happy with him, and clearly the two of them were chewing him out in absentia.

This goin’-back-to-Caldie-Caldie-Caldie wasn’t so much the issue. It was the reason Jim had dragged them al here.

His eyes shifted across the duvet. Dog was curled up in a tight bal beside him, his scruffy fur giving the impression that he’d been heavily moussed and put into a stiff wind, even though he hadn’t. Next to the little guy, there was a computer printout of a three-week-old newspaper article from the
Caldwell
Courier Journal
. The title was “Local Girl Missing,” and off to the side of the text, there was a picture of a group of smiling friends, heads close together, arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders. The caption beneath the pic identified the one in the middle as Cecilia Barten.

His Sissy.

Wel , not real y “his,” but he’d come to think of her as his responsibility.

The thing was, unlike her parents and family and friends and community, he knew where she was and what had happened to her. She was not part of the countless roster of runaways; nor had she been murdered by a boyfriend or a stranger; and she hadn’t been cut up by that serial kil er who, according to the
CCJ
’s Web site this morning, was at large.

She had been defiled, however. By Devina.

Sissy was a virgin sacrificed to protect the demon’s mirror, that most sacred possession. Jim had found her body hanging upside down in front of the thing in the demon’s temporary lair and been forced to leave her behind. It had been bad enough to know that she’d lost her life to his enemy, but then later, he’d seen her in Devina’s wal of souls . . . trapped, suffering, lost forever among the damned who deserved that fate.

Cecilia didn’t belong in hel . She was an innocent taken and used by evil—and Jim was going to get her free, if it was the last thing he did.

Which, yeah, was why they’d come back to Caldwel . And the reason Adrian and Eddie were pissed.

But no offense . . . fuck them.

With care, Jim picked up the article and brushed his cal oused thumb over the grainy image of Sissy’s long, blond hair. When he blinked, he saw the stuff covered in her blood and hanging down close to the drain of a white porcelain tub. Then he blinked again and saw her as he had the other night, in Devina’s viscous prison, terrified, confused, worried about her parents.

He was going to do right by al of the Bartens. But Adrian’s and Eddie’s yammering was just aerobics for their pieholes: He wasn’t taking his eye off the war, because he couldn’t afford to lose to Devina before he got Sissy out of the wel of souls. Duh.

The connecting door broke wide and Adrian, a.k.a. the Tone-deaf Wonder, walked in without knocking. Which was exactly his style.

The angel was dressed in black, as usual, and the various piercings on his face weren’t half of what he supposedly had al over his body.

“You two finished bitching about me?” Jim turned the article facedown and crossed his arms over his chest. “Or are you just having a little break.”

“How about you take this seriously.”

Jim got up off the bed and went nose-to-nose with his soldier. “Am I giving any indication I’m fucking around?”

“You didn’t drag us back here for the war.”

“The hel I didn’t.”

As they faced off, Adrian was undaunted, even though as a former black ops assassin, Jim knew how to drop a heavyweight like the other angel twelve different ways to Sunday. “That girl is not your target,” Ad said, “and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re down one. Distractions are not our friend.”

Jim gave the Sissy reference a pass: he made a point never to talk about her. His boys had been witness to him finding her body, and they’d seen what that had done to him—so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know enough. And there was no reason to vocalize what seeing her in that wal had been like. Or mention the fact that while he’d been used and abused by Devina and her minions during the last round, he feared the young girl might have seen everything that had been done to him.

Shit . . . the stuff on that “work” table was nothing you wanted even a battle-hardened man to witness. An innocent? Who was petrified already?

Besides, in actuality, the violations hadn’t bothered him one way or the other. Torture, in whatever form it took, was nothing more than an overload of physical sensation—but again, no one needed to eyebal that, much less his girl.

Not that she was his.

“I’m on my way to go talk to Nigel,” Jim bit out. “So if you’re finished jerking me off? Or do you want to waste my time some more.”

“Why aren’t you already over there, then?”

Wel , because he’d been sitting on that bed, staring into space, wondering where in the hel Devina had taken Sissy’s body.

Except Jim was just that flavor of asshole not to concede the point in the slightest.