Pravus, in his fury, brought down a nightmare on Melody Fredericks.
He didn’t play out the ritual like he’d planned, but the satisfaction was surprisingly intense.
Terror such as he’d never known followed him home. He could feel the eyes on him. Surely someone had seen what happened.
Pravus prepared quickly for his artwork. He’d listen and be ready to run, but he couldn’t move yet. The beast was like a starving wolf licking its jaws. He had to paint. He had to create.
Because she’d fallen into his hands, he had no time to prepare, so that would come now. There was an address in her purse, so he could find her house. The reverend wouldn’t even feel pain over this. So why involve him?
Pravus quickly carved the sign for this plague. It wasn’t his best work, but Melody Fredericks wasn’t worthy, so it hardly mattered.
Finishing the plaque in quick time, he slipped up to her home. A pretty house in a nice neighborhood, not the isolated, dreary apartment he was used to. He quietly hung the plaque in place and went back to his creation.
Only to find she wouldn’t supply him with paint. Dead women don’t bleed. He looked from his latest creation to the empty white gown and fumed.
There was no help for it. The only one available to bleed was himself. Pravus raised the chisel to his own arm. The pain was pleasure and the beast was content.
Paul spent the night between Keren’s cubicle—where she seemed determined to make every doctor and nurse who came in contact with her reconsider their occupation—and the waiting area nearest LaToya’s operating room. When O’Shea came barreling into the hospital, Paul turned the tiny frogs over to him.
O’Shea, befuddled, stuck them in a plastic evidence bag as if they might contain fingerprints. They stared, wriggling pathetically, through the bag. O’Shea muttered, “Airholes.” He poked a few before he gently lowered the bag into the pocket of his brown suit.
Then Agent Higgins came.
Paul felt like a criminal under interrogation.
Keren heard them talking and demanded loudly, from behind the curtain, to be included.
“It’ll probably kill her,” the doctor said sarcastically. “But the nurses are pooling their money to hire a hit man anyway, so what the heck. Go on in.”
She was sitting up, so Paul didn’t take the doctor’s dark warnings of death very seriously. The hit man? Maybe.
Paul had to go through it again, with Keren adding details.
“You got the make and model of his car at night, on a dimly lit street, after you’d been run down?” Paul asked incredulously.
Keren rolled her eyes. “Some of us do this for a living, Rev.”
O’Shea said, “I’ll put an ATL on a dark-green Malibu with a broken taillight and bullet holes.”
“An Attempt to Locate for possible connection to a homicide.” Keren nodded. “It’s got to be the same car we saw those men driving outside the mission.”
“But when he was questioned, Murray had already reported it stolen.” Paul shook his head. “The cops remember him because he was so upset. He’d just bought the car. The first car he’d owned in his life. That’s why he was giving everybody a ride. It was stolen before he’d owned it two days. I can’t believe it’s him.”
He saw Keren and O’Shea exchange a glance of pity and didn’t even have the gumption to snarl at them.
“A stolen car is really convenient,” Keren said. “If he’s got a place to hide it, he can use it once in a while and it’ll all be blamed on someone else as long as he’s not caught.”
Paul ducked away while they grilled Keren. No one else was there for LaToya but him. The paramedics had already “slipped” and told a reporter she was dead. The police were in full agreement that it was best she be declared dead for now. It made Paul sick when he overheard a spokesman for the hospital say the words. It was far too close to the truth.
There was a nurse in the operating room who spoke to him every time she came out. “They’re bringing in a plastic surgeon to try to fix the cuts in her arms with the least scarring possible. We’ve taken pictures from every angle, as the police requested. We’ve already handed the white dress over to the detective.”
The next time the nurse came out, she said, “She’s sedated, but the EEG shows she’s in a deep coma. The final stab wound was the only potentially fatal wound, but the cumulative effect of all that trauma and blood loss is extensive. It’s the doctor’s feeling that she’s probably been in a coma for the last twenty-four hours.”
Paul ran his hands through his dark hair and felt it standing on end. “I saw her move just an hour ago. I saw the man who did the cutting on her strike the last blow. She rolled away from him. She saved herself.”
The nurse shook her head. “That’s not possible. The doctor is estimating how long she’s been out, so it could be less than twenty-four hours, but it’s definitely longer than one. There’s no way she could have made any defensive movements so recently.”
“But I saw her,” Paul insisted.
“Maybe she rolled because the hillside was steep and the man leaned against her wrong. Whatever caused her to move saved her life.”
Paul quit protesting. He didn’t need to find out more. Whether LaToya had done the impossible and awakened or Pravus had shifted his weight and knocked her aside or God had simply sent her rolling away from that chisel, the end result was the same.
Paul had witnessed a miracle.
His heart filled with the blessing of it. LaToya would live. God had directly intervened to save her. It wasn’t yet her time. In that dimly lit, lonely waiting room, he shook off the cop and found the pastor and praised God to the highest reaches of heaven.
It was only after he’d spent time in praise and regained a modicum of his peace that he remembered the moment he’d demanded Keren hand over her gun.
“Give me your gun!”
If he could have wrestled it away from her, he’d have gone after Pravus and…
God, forgive me. Paul sat with his legs spread, hands clasped between his knees. His head hung in shame. I’d have killed him.
Paul began again, his earlier closeness to God lost. He prayed for forgiveness, and as he prayed, he knew that it wasn’t God who was going to be the problem. God was there pouring love and forgiveness down on him in abundance. It was himself. This side of himself—the violent, cynical side that had been such a neat fit for the way he’d acted when he was a cop. Now, with Pravus to fight and the police at hand constantly, he was being pulled back into that life.
God, please, I don’t want that to be me. Give me a peaceful and contrite heart. Give me humility. Paul buried his face in his hands as he prayed. Make the longings of my heart be love and joy and sacrifice. Take away this willingness I have to fight and hate. Please, Lord, forgive me for wanting to kill that man.
Paul wasn’t fighting for his soul. His belief in his own salvation was rock solid. It was his own nature that he fought. In the end, he didn’t find the satisfaction he hoped for. Even as he prayed, he felt the hunger to close his hand over that gun and hunt down Pravus personally. Paul felt like he’d lost five years of spiritual growth in a single week.
Keren was part of the problem. She’d pulled that gun with lightning speed. She went running headlong toward danger. She did what a cop was supposed to do. Paul was afraid that if he became involved with Keren—which he wanted to do very badly—the life she led, or more exactly, the lure of it, would swallow him whole.
The nurse appeared again with another update and the news that it would be hours before LaToya was out of surgery. The chisel had pierced a lung and severed muscles. And she had deep cuts that needed sutures. Paul remembered the police questioning Keren and went back to the room where she was corralled.
He went behind her curtains, expecting to find her in a hospital gown. She was almost dressed, just tucking in her shirt.
“Hey!” She glared at him. “Knock next time.”
“It’s a curtain. How do I knock on a curtain? What are you doing with your clothes on?”
“Not a question a reverend should be asking,” she replied smartly. She sat in a chair and reached for her socks.
Paul said, “Get back in that bed! I heard the doctor say he wanted to observe you overnight because you have a concussion.”
Keren began pulling on her socks. “Says the man who checked himself out of the hospital without his doctor’s approval.”
She flinched when she leaned over to grab her shoe. He pushed her hands aside and knelt in front of her and lifted her foot to rest on his knee. “They needed the room because of the explosion. That was an emergency. They’ve got plenty of room for you.”
Keren didn’t wrestle him for her shoe. She straightened gingerly in the hard chair and Paul heard her squelch a sigh of relief. That tiny show of weakness must have made her mad. “Didn’t you take that cervical collar off a week before the doctor said you could? And quit wearing your sling the minute his back was turned?”
Paul lifted her other foot and slid the black Nike on gently, thinking of all her bumps and bruises. “I was fine. Doctors have to be overcautious, because they’ll get sued otherwise.”
“Amen.” Keren stood. “I’m out of here. I promise not to sue.”
Paul steadied her when she wobbled. “You’re not supposed to sleep for twelve hours because of the concussion.” Paul knew he was right, but he didn’t kid himself he’d ever convince Keren.
“No problem. I’m going back to work, so I’ll be up.”
O’Shea called from outside the room, “Her head’s a hard one, Pastor P. She’ll probably be all right.”
Higgins was out there, too, and he laughed.
Paul pulled the curtain aside and let Keren step out ahead of him. “I can’t leave. I’ve got to stay and see how LaToya does.”
“I’ll stay with you.” Keren seemed to forget her plans to begin tracking down Pravus.
“If you’re staying in the hospital anyway,” Paul growled at her,
“why don’t you just lay back down there?”
Keren narrowed her light-colored eyes at him. The blue had turned to a gunmetal gray that looked like she wanted war. “How about this for a compromise? I’ll do exactly as I want, and you shut up.”
“That’s the deal she always gives me.” O’Shea laughed and slapped Paul on the shoulder. “Take it, kid. It’s all you’re going to get.”
It had been so long since someone had called him “kid,” Paul almost liked it. “At least when you keel over and I have to call 911 for the third time tonight, it won’t take the paramedics long to get here.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Keren turned to the FBI agent, still in his black suit even in the middle of the night. “Are you done grilling me, Higgins?”
Higgins said, “For now.”
He and O’Shea turned to leave. Keren and Paul headed for the surgical floor.
“I’ll be right back, Higgins.” O’Shea’s voice turned Paul and Keren back.
O’Shea came up close and spoke in a whisper to Keren. “There are going to be questions about tonight, so get ready for them.”
“What questions?” Keren asked.
“You discharged your weapon.”
“At a fleeing felon.”
Paul noticed Higgins reach the exit door then stop and look back, one brow arched on his movie-star handsome face.
“Anytime you fire your weapon, you answer for it—that’s routine. You’ll need to file an incident report.”
“I know that.” Keren sounded cranky, but Paul suspected she was just in pain and taking it out on the world.
“You fired at a moving vehicle, in the dark.”
“He ran me down.” Keren ran one hand into her hair and fiddled with her weird barrette. She took a quick look at Higgins.
Higgins started back toward their secretive little group.
“You ran out of an alley into his path. You could have run into the path of any oncoming car. You didn’t know who was driving it.”
“I did. It was him and you know it.” Keren scowled.
“I do know it. But you made a real fast judgment call, and I’ve yet to hear you say you saw the guy’s face, saw him get into that car, kept your eye on him the whole time. You need to get your story straight. I understand how you could be sure it was him, but IA isn’t going to trust you like I do.”
Paul felt his blood chill as he thought of the headaches of an internal affairs investigation. Keren could end up suspended, even fired. And he needed her on this case.
“I appreciate you mentioning it. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Good.” O’Shea turned just as Higgins came up.
“Why do I feel like I’m not invited to this party?” Higgins’s hazel eyes looked at all of them like they were a herd of gazelles and he was the king of the jungle. And speaking of animals, Paul thought of that weird gathering of critters in the park tonight. He’d meant to ask about that.
“Just cop stuff. We’re done here.” O’Shea turned and left.
“Being suspicious is how I make my living.” Higgins smiled then turned to follow O’Shea.
Paul thought the smile was a little too warm and aimed very particularly at Keren. But then Paul was so tired he was sucking fumes, and he might be making stuff up.
Keren started down the hall toward the OR. “Now, tell me how LaToya is holding up.”
Paul caught up with her and repeated everything the nurse had said to him.
“You felt that guy, didn’t you?”
Keren sat in one of the chairs in the waiting room, with her forearms resting on her knees, her hands clasped between her legs, her head drooping. Paul sank down in a chair next to her, so tired he could barely see straight, and he hadn’t been run down by a Malibu.
Of course he’d had a building fall on him recently.
“Yeah.” Keren turned to look at him. “I never even thought of it until Mick said that. I knew he was in that car. There’s no doubt it was him.”
“But you didn’t really see him, did you? And if you hadn’t had that sense of him, you’d have hesitated before you fired. You’d have considered it might have been an accident when he hit you.”
Keren’s eyes seemed to look into the past, as if she were reliving that race she’d run, chasing a serial killer.
“I’ve almost never talked about this gift I have and now I can’t shut up about it.”
“I’m honored.” And he was, deeply.
She spoke carefully, as if putting words to a story that unfolded in her memory. “I heard him running. I was following the sound of his footsteps, but the presence of him guided me.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a Spidey sense or something.”
Keren slugged him in the leg and managed a smile. “Great image. Maybe I oughta get a red ski mask to wear for work. It’d at least control my hair.”
Paul reached over and pulled her hair tie loose.
“Hey, stop that.”
“It was hanging by about ten hairs. Just relax.”
Keren did, probably because she was so beat up. “I’m not going to lie, I refuse to. But no one will understand the concept of a spiritual gift leading me anywhere. After the guy hit me…” She ran both hands deep into her coiled explosion hair and sat silently. At last she said, “I heard the car door slam. I heard the engine. The driver gunned it. Took off. Aimed straight for me. I think I can honestly say it was an unbroken trail that I followed from the crime scene. I heard it all.”
“And if they hammer on it long enough and don’t accept that?” Paul reached over and caught her right wrist. It couldn’t be too badly hurt; she’d fired her gun real efficiently with it.
“I’ll give them my story and they can do with it what they want. I’m a good cop with a good record. All but—” Her blue-gray eyes came up and nearly burned a hole in his hide.
“All but the bad mark you’ve got because of me.” He held on to her hand, and she let him, so that was a good sign.
“Let’s just drop it for now. I need some time to think it through, get it straight in my head.”
“I need some time to pray for LaToya.” Paul let her go before she made him.
“That, too.” Keren managed a smile. The two of them sat quietly in the waiting room and prayed.
The window in the lobby began to lighten, and they received word that LaToya was through the surgery and out of recovery. Her coma had deepened. She was now in a room where Paul was allowed in to see her for a few minutes.
She lay motionless, hooked up to every monitor imaginable. But she was alive. Paul’s most heartfelt prayers had been answered.
Higgins impatiently appeared, hoping to question LaToya.
It woke up the prowling cop inside Paul, the one he’d spent the night lulling to sleep. Higgins was just doing his job. Paul still wanted to slug the guy.
When the sunlight began to give them hope that they had a better day ahead, O’Shea came into the waiting room. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. And the bad news is so bad that we’ll never get to the good news if I tell you the bad first.”
With a jerked move of his hand that accentuated his distress, he tossed a copy of the Monday morning Chicago Tribune on the coffee table in front of Paul. A picture of LaToya appeared at the top right corner. The headline read, “Second Murder in South Side Park.”
“That’s great,” Keren said, pleased. “Did the paper agree to cooperate?”
“No,” O’Shea said with disgust. “They just got the red herring we tossed out and ran with it.”
“They’re going to be mad when we tell them the truth,” Keren predicted. “I can hear them now, ‘Police Lying to the Press,’ ‘Citywide Cover-up,’ ‘What Did the Mayor Know and When Did He Know It?’“
O’Shea said, “So what else is new? They got enough of the sensational details about LaToya to make a front-page story, but they haven’t found out about the carving or the frogs, and they also don’t know LaToya is connected to Juanita. Once the serial killer connection comes out, we won’t be able to take a step without a reporter’s camera flashing in our faces.”
“So what’s the bad news?” Paul looked at the picture of LaToya. It was one of the pictures that hung by her front door. She smiled so beautifully.
“We have another missing person. A woman. And there’s a carving.”
“Who?” Paul’s stomach skidded. He thought of several women he’d helped over the years. Which one was it? Then he thought of Rosita. Had she gone out last night to meet Manny? He should have double-checked. He should have talked to Manny himself and made sure the young man understood the seriousness of the situation.
O’Shea cut into his panic. “Her name is Melody Fredericks.”
Paul thought for a long minute. “That name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“She’s from outside your neighborhood,” O’Shea said. “The preliminary report on her doesn’t fit the profile of the other vics. She’s the co-owner of an upscale Hyde Park restaurant who never got home from work Sunday night. Her husband called the police to check for accident information when she was only two hours late. Outwardly at least, he seems frantic. She’s the mother of two. A couple of unpaid parking tickets are her only brushes with the law.”
“Is it possible it’s a copycat?” Keren asked. “Maybe her husband saw a way to save some money on a divorce settlement.”
“I don’t know yet. My report says the husband is frantic and has an alibi that, at first glance, looks fairly solid, home with the kids. Ten and six, old enough to know what time Daddy tucked them in at night. But they were asleep at the time the wife went missing, so he could have slipped out. But there’s definitely a carving, and it looks like Pravus’s work.”
“What does it say?” Paul was sure he already knew.
“Pestis ex Culex.”
“Plague of gnats. “Paul shuddered. “The other two were taken from apartments.”
“Like I said, it doesn’t fit. She’s a well-known, successful businesswoman, with no ties to the mission we can find. She certainly isn’t someone who used to live on the streets and got her life back through the mission.”
“The press isn’t talking serial killer yet. Maybe Pravus picked a higher-profile victim because he wants people to notice.” Keren noticed her barrette lying on a coffee table and picked it up. She groaned in pain when she bent over but went about corralling her hair.
“I’m heading over to her place now. I’d like you to come along, Paul. Maybe you’ll recognize her. We need your help to figure out why she was taken.”
Paul looked at the door to LaToya’s room. “I don’t think I should leave. What if LaToya wakes up? I don’t want her to be alone.”
“Can you give us a minute?” Keren asked O’Shea.
“Sure.” O’Shea walked out of the waiting room.
Keren stood and reached for him. Paul hesitated then took her hand. When she tried to pull him up, he cooperated. Keren’s body was battered, and since she seemed inclined to manhandle him, he made it easy.
When he stood, she went into his arms so simply and beautifully Paul didn’t give a second thought to his concern about being too involved with the police in general or her in particular. He just held her.
They stood that way for a long time, comforting each other, sharing their badly taxed strength. She’d done the same for him in that basement, after she’d defused a bomb and he’d enraged a murderer.
Paul liked her style.
Finally, she pulled back. He bent to kiss her.
Before he could, she said, “Call the mission. Have someone bring Rosita over here.”
“Who? The regulars at the mission are all suspects.”
“How about I go get Rosita and bring her back here then catch up with you. She can call you if there’s any change. We can be back here in a few minutes if she wakes up.” She added, “You know we’ve got to go.”
“This is what I remember about being a cop.” Paul stepped out of Keren’s arms when he thought about the life he had left behind. “All the times I had to go. All the important things I missed because I was needed somewhere.”
“Yeah, that’s the way it is,” Keren said with calm acceptance.
“And I was so self-centered. I always thought what I needed to do was more important than anything else… more important than my wife… more important than my daughter….”
“You were needed, Paul. That’s the life of a cop.” Solemnly Keren added, “That’s why you got out. That’s a big part of why I’ve stayed single. For far too many of us it’s not a family kind of life.”
They stared at each other for a long minute. Paul still wanted to close that distance. But he couldn’t do it. Their kisses had always been spontaneous, but now, somehow, it was as if Keren was asking him to stay away, because only hurt lay in pretending it could be different. He had to wonder if it wasn’t at least in part because she was using him, using her connection to the mission to search for a killer. Being a cop first and a woman second.
With a wrench that felt as if it broke something inside him, Paul turned away from her. “You get Rosie. I’ll go with O’Shea to see what nightmare I’ve brought down on poor Melody Fredericks.”