One Secret Night (23 page)

Chapter 20

A
utumn reclined on an outdoor lounge chair, staring up at the blue sky, listening to birds and her dad’s movement in the pool. He was swimming laps. Mom had gone to answer a phone call.

Savanna lay on the chair beside her. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her. They were an entertaining pair.

“I can’t believe he was seeing her the whole time we were together.”

The fancy attorney’s ex-wife wouldn’t be his ex-wife for much longer. They were getting remarried.

“Let’s keep the TV off for a few days,” Autumn said.

“Okay.”

Autumn looked over at her sister. Savanna had opened her heart to a man for the first time since the first one she’d loved broke her heart and now she was heartbroken yet again.

“Do you want to go to Milan?” Autumn asked.

“No. I want to stay here.”

Autumn looked up at the sky again. “I don’t, either.”

“Go to Milan? That’s new for you. Why not?”

“This is my first heartbreak, Savanna. I’m too depressed to go shopping.”

“Shopping normally cheers you up.”

“Not this time.”

“You’re going to see him again, aren’t you? The pictures of you made it seem like he wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Unfortunately.” She patted her tummy.

“He’d really abandon his own child?”

“Not entirely. He’ll
support
us. Which means that for the rest of my life I’ll be tortured with seeing him on a scheduled basis.”

After a long contemplative silence, Savanna said, “Men are weird.”

“Well, it looks like your schedule starts today.”

Autumn turned her head to see her mother standing beside her chair.

“What?”

“Raith is here. He brought his armored vehicle and a platoon of men, but he’s here.”

“How did he know I was here?”

“I told him.”

“Mother!” Autumn sat up on the lounge chair.

“He called yesterday. I said I’d keep it a secret. He didn’t want you jumping on a plane for Milan.”

“No fair. You get your man and I don’t get mine.”

Savanna kept levity in her tone, but Autumn wasn’t fooled. She was hurting. Bad.

But Autumn would have to tend to her later. Raith was here. He’d come for her!

No attempt to tame her rapidly beating heart worked. She slipped into her sheer swimsuit cover-up and walked through the mansion to the front entry. Outside, three big black SUVs were parked and running in the circular driveway.

She opened the heavy door and stepped outside. A maid deposited her suitcase beside her on the stone porch. Autumn looked back at her as she timidly retreated into the house.

“Just following orders, ma’am,” she said.

Her mother had told her to do that. The door shut before she could say anything. Not that she would.

She faced the SUVs as Raith climbed out. He wore a suit and tie and his dark hair was smoother than it had been lately.

Walking toward her, he stole what little breath she had left in her. He was so handsome.

He stepped up the stone stairs and removed his sunglasses as he came to a stop before her, his eyes mesmerizing her as they lowered down and back up, touching her body through the sheer cover.

“Did everything go okay with India and Garvin?” she asked while her heart pounded a hole through her chest.

“As far as I know.”

“What happened with Nash?”

“His assistant turned over evidence of the illegal exports to the Department of State. There will be an investigation.”

Maybe not entirely what Nash deserved, but something he should and did expect.

They continued to stare at each other.

“What brings you here?” she asked.

“I have two questions for you,” he said.

She smiled. “The first?”

“Can you ever forgive me?” he asked.

“If that’s the first question, the second one must be a whopper.”

“Can you?”

Forgive him. She’d forgiven him the instant her mother had told her he was here. “For what?”

“For being such an idiot.”

“
Idiot
might be too strong a word.
Insensitive
might be better.”

“Okay, insensitive. Can you forgive me?”

“That depends on what your second question is.”

He grinned, sending sparks showering all over her core and not improving her breathing.

From his suit pocket, he took out a ring box and opened it to reveal a giant round diamond with two smaller diamonds on either side of it.

Autumn gasped and covered her mouth.

“Will you marry me?”

When she recovered, she lowered her hand. “Are you serious?”

“Never been more serious in my life. I’m not traveling anymore. I’m going to take a sabbatical for a while and figure out what I want to do next. But I need a wife first, and a baby. I can’t do it without them.”

“Raith...” Was he sure? “If you’re doing this because—”

“I’m not doing this because of the baby. The timing is because of that, but I know you’re the one I want, Autumn. I’ve been falling in love with you ever since I saw you in Iceland.”

“Raith...” Her thoughts raced with possibilities, the pros and cons, the utter thrill of him coming here and asking her to marry him.

Taking her hand, he took the ring out of the box and slipped it onto her finger. “Marry me, Autumn. Will you?”

Autumn looked from the stunning ring up to his face. There was no doubt in her mind. “Yes! I’ll marry you!” She flung her arms around his shoulders and he lifted her as he kissed her.

Over his shoulder, she saw the SUVs again. “I see you brought something to protect us from the media.”

“Plenty of it.”

“They’ll never get by that.”

“I don’t care if they do. I only did it to be funny.” He extended his hand while one of the men took her suitcase to the middle SUV. “And to make a point.”

“That you should have never played the media card?”

“Nothing’s going to keep me away from you.”

She gave him her hand. “My dreams couldn’t beat this. You’ve made me the happiest woman alive, Raith.”

“Then let me take you home where I can continue to do that.”

She walked with him toward the SUV, where the driver opened the back for them.

“No Milan, huh?” Raith asked in a teasing tone.

“Nope. For some reason I didn’t feel like running.”

He grinned at her as the reason became clear to him. She didn’t run because she loved him.

* * * * *

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Chapter 1

T
en months after Lena Perez vanished, a woman's body was found along the banks of the Charles River. The call woke Lieutenant Gray Bartlett an hour before his alarm was scheduled to go off.

“I don't want to speak too soon, but it looks like it could be the work of Valentine,” the sergeant said. Gray didn't need to hear anything more. Valentine meant his case, his killer. Another dead body bringing down his stats.

He rolled out of bed and staggered to his feet, sweeping his palm forehead to chin and back again before stumbling to the kitchen. One of these days he would feel as though he lived here, in this bare-walled shell of an apartment. He stood in his boxer shorts in the center of his kitchen, gulping the thick remains of yesterday's coffee and passing his gaze across the empty countertops and the sparse table-and-chair set. He tossed his mug into the sink.

The first forty-eight hours were crucial. After that the likelihood of solving this crime went down precipitously. Gray had set the mental timer already, wondering how many hours he was behind. Had the crime occurred two days ago? Five hours ago? He was out the door, showered and shaved, in less than ten minutes. Not quite the timing he'd been able to keep when he was in the military, but Boston P.D. wasn't the Marines.

Traffic into the city was light. The entire city felt emptier now that colleges had cleared out for the summer. He made the drive in record time and pulled his vehicle into line behind a string of squad cars parked against a hill overlooking the Charles. At the top of the embankment stood a crowd of people craning their necks like geese to glimpse the carnage. The responding officers had strung yellow police tape widely, blocking off the cement stairs that led down the embankment to the river, and closer to the scene, joggers were being redirected. They were looking backwards, too.

It's the stuff of nightmares, folks. Keep jogging.

A young officer stood in front of the steps leading to the scene, blocking his entry. “Sir, this is a crime scene. You're going to have to keep moving along.”

There was a time when Gray might have taken such a statement as an affront to his authority, but somewhere along the years, he'd become accustomed to it, and then he'd stopped caring altogether. It was a perk of the job that he was able to dress in plain clothes—today, jeans and a black polo shirt. No need for a uniform when you spent your workday sifting through crime scenes and interviewing junkie witnesses, but the plain-clothes policy backfired when the endless stream of new kids didn't know who the hell he was. He reached into his back pocket and flashed his credentials. The officer immediately stepped to the side.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he mumbled, lifting the crime scene tape to allow Gray entry to the stairs.

The young officer's face was fat with youth, but lots of seasoned officers still looked fresh out of the academy. What identified this kid as a rookie were his blue eyes: wide and restless with unfamiliar fear. Gray had seen eyes like that at almost every crime scene he'd ever encountered. They were the eyes of disillusionment.

“Officer Hodges,” Gray read from his name tag. “You're one of the responding officers?”

“Me and Officer Neill,” he replied. His cheeks were flushed and sweaty, and he glanced uneasily toward the bottom of the stairs as if he didn't quite believe this was happening.

“First on the scene.” Gray pulled his shoulders back as he eyed the young officer. “You lose your breakfast?”

“Sir?” The kid's wide eyes snapped back to meet his. “No. No, sir.”

“Then you did better than me when I saw my first body.”

“Lieutenant!”

The shout came from the bottom of the embankment, where Gray observed Officer Jude Langley waving to him. Gray brushed past the young officer without offering a condescending pat on the arm, dipping below the crime scene tape to walk the steps to the scene below. “Officer Langley,” he said as he reached the bottom stair.

“Sir. Sorry it's so early.”

Sometimes Gray had to remind himself that Langley was a Worcester native. He acted more like some transplant from a region of the country where people still said
please, thank you
and
sorry.
He liked Langley. The kid pulled long hours and didn't give him lip. But if he had one criticism, it was that he was too nice. Someone would take advantage of that.

“Unless you put the vic there, you have nothing to apologize for.” Gray accepted the pair of latex gloves the officer held out to him. “What's the story?”

“A jogger found her. ME's on the scene, but nothing's been moved.”

Gray nodded, slipped the gloves on his hands and approached the small crowd gathered ten yards away. The medical examiner was crouched beside the body, but he rose when he saw the lieutenant. Gray had worked Homicide long enough to know all of the MEs, their strengths and shortcomings, which ones played well in front of a jury, and which ones came across as deader than the bodies they carved. Dr. Jonah McCarthy was one of the doctors whose blood still ran warm. In Gray's opinion, he was one of the best.

“Doc.” Gray nodded to him in solemn greeting. He never made pleasantries at a death scene.

“Good to see you, Lieutenant.” He sighed and crouched down beside the body again. “Young female, probably early to mid-twenties.” Right down to business.

Around them the crime scene unit continued its work. Outdoor crime scenes were exposed to animals, insects and weather. The dead might have all the time in the world, but the living had to move quickly to avoid losing evidence.

Gray squinted at the body from behind his sunglasses. The early summer morning was already promising to be scorching, and the sun rippled across the water like flashes of silverfish. She was lying in the grass, her toes pointed toward the shore as if sunbathing. It didn't take a medical degree to see that the woman had met a violent end delivered by the edge of a knife. It didn't take a law degree to know that he was looking at a murder, not a homicide.

“I thought she was pulled from the river?” The vic's hair and clothing were dry, and her features didn't carry the characteristic bloat of floaters.

“No, although the body is slightly damp, probably from condensation,” McCarthy said. “She hasn't been here long, either.” He gently pried open an exposed wound on the vic's arm. “Temperature's been above ninety degrees for three days now, and no blowfly larvae. They're just starting to find her.” As if on cue, a fly landed on her cheek.

Gray crouched next to the doctor, trying not to reel at the stench of death and grateful he'd received the call before breakfast. The victim's face was frozen in a grimace, and her limbs appeared stiff. “The body's in full rigor?”

“Yes. She was most likely killed sometime overnight.”

“Dumped here early this morning,” Officer Langley said, pointing to the earth. “No blood on the ground.”

Gray frowned and surveyed the surrounding area. “Have you been able to locate the site where she was killed?”

“Not yet,” said Langley.

“Keep looking.” He nodded at the ME. “What about cause of death?”

“I'll perform a full autopsy, but it looks like what you'd expect.” He gestured with a gloved finger as he reviewed the evidence. “She was stabbed by a serrated knife before she died, and she saw it coming.” He pointed to the cuts on her forearms and hands—evidence she'd tried to block the attack. “There are a lot of wounds. Someone was angry about something.”

Gray turned away to stare out at the Charles, where life continued as usual. White sails already billowed against the wind, pulling boats across the water. Not far away from this death scene, people were enjoying a pleasant Saturday morning.

An unfamiliar voice cut through his thoughts. “Langley, you'll want to look for gravel and clay.”

Gray whipped around to see a woman coming from the stairs he'd just walked down. Her slender figure was clothed casually in jeans and a blue tank. Her hair was pulled away from her face and secured at the back of her neck in a messy knot, but auburn tendrils grazed her cheeks. With one hand she clutched a small stainless-steel travel mug, and with the other she shielded her eyes from the sun, leaving untouched the pair of sunglasses that dangled from the center of her tank.

She pointed to the victim. “Her knees are torn, and there's gravel and dirt in the cuts.” She pointed the same hand at the path along the Charles. “This path is asphalt. The injuries would be different if she'd been killed here.”

“Excuse me.” Gray stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the body. No one was allowed on his scene unless authorized, and he'd never met this woman. “This is an active crime scene. What's your role in this investigation?”

She faced him, still shielding her eyes, and then lifted the pair of sunglasses and slid them on her face. “There, that's better.” She reached into her back pocket and removed a business card. “I'm Dr. Mia Perez. I'm an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern.”

An associate professor? She looked as if she was only in her twenties. He glanced to the top of the embankment. “Who the hell let you in here?”

She set her jaw firmly but spared a tight smile. “The officers know me. I've done some work for the Boston P.D. It's nice to meet you, too.”

“What kind of work?”

“Criminal profiling. I've provided some insight on cold cases that has led to convictions.”

Gray squinted at the simple business card with disinterest before handing it back to her. “With all due respect, none of that answers my original question. What's your role in this investigation?”

Her mouth twitched. “In my experience, when someone says ‘with all due respect,' they actually mean the opposite.” She nodded curtly at the business card. “Keep it. I have plenty of them. And as to your question, I was asked to be here.”

Gray's eyes narrowed. “By whom?”

“Me, sir.” Officer Langley stepped forward, bobbing his head nervously. “She was working with Lieutenant Mathieson last summer on the Valentine case, and I heard this was a young woman, so...” He stood dumbly in place.

“So what, Officer?” Gray knew he didn't have to do much to appear physically imposing, and now he just pulled up to his full height, rested his hands at his sides and waited for the explanation. “You thought this woman might be one of Valentine's victims? He hasn't killed in nearly a year.”

“About ten months,” said Mia. “Serial killers often take breaks in between killings. Officer Langley called me to the scene because this vic fit the profile, and because I might be helpful if this was Valentine's scene.”

Valentine.
Blame the media for the stupid moniker. A little over a year ago, bodies began to pile up in Boston. Three bodies and one missing person later, a reporter started calling the perp Valentine because an anonymous source let slip that a single killer was suspected, and that this killer left flowers at the scenes. What the reporter couldn't know was how apt the name truly was, because the police hadn't disclosed that Valentine had removed the heart from each of his victims. A vile souvenir, no doubt.

Officially, Valentine was a bogeyman, a figment of that reporter's imagination. “Do we think this is the work of a single killer? It's too soon to tell,” said the chief at a press conference when the Valentine article came out. No one at the Boston P.D. was prepared to utter the words
serial killer,
and a year later, no one had. Serial killers didn't just generate hysteria in the public—they attracted the FBI, and Gray needed federal involvement in his cases like he needed another homicide file on his desk. When his predecessor retired, Gray inherited the Valentine file and the sleepless nights that came with it. All of his worrying amounted to squat, because once the chief denied Valentine's existence, Valentine stopped killing.

“Like that fairy in
Peter Pan,
” an officer quipped one day. “He dies if you don't believe in him.”

Someone should have named him Tinker Bell.

“Valentine doesn't exist. Not officially.” Gray kept his side to her and spoke to Officer Langley instead. “And we bring profilers on board only after CSU has had the chance to process the scene.”

“That's not always the best idea, Lieutenant.”

He spun to face her, and Mia continued. “I've pointed out evidence that CSU has missed on more than one occasion. Once CSU leaves the scene, this evidence can't be used in court because the chain of custody has been broken.” She shrugged. “That's why it's better if I see the scene while it's being processed rather than later.”

Gray bristled. No one told him what best practices were. “Now, wait a damn—”

“I made a mistake,” said Officer Langley. “I shouldn't have invited her without your knowledge. Lieutenant Mathieson would have...” He shook his head. “But I should have run it by you first.”

“Lieutenant Mathieson is retired. Valentine is my case now.” He glanced at Mia, who was watching him intently. “We'll talk about this privately, Langley. Later.”

“Yes, sir.”

Her mouth was pulled into a tight straight line. “I haven't caught your name, Lieutenant.”

“Gray Bartlett.” It came out as more of a growl. He pointed to her travel mug. “What's that? Coffee? It's not allowed at the scene.”

“Sorry, I got the call while I was out and I came right away,” she said, setting the mug on the lowest step. “It's monkey-picked oolong. Do you drink tea, Lieutenant?”

Gray rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. This all had to be some kind of bad dream. That, or someone was pranking him. “No, I don't drink tea.”

“I drink it for the antioxidants, though I load it with sugar.” She smiled. “That probably defeats the purpose, wouldn't you think?”