BITCH (A Romantic Suspense Novel) (15 page)

Thirty

Erin let herself slump back against the bed and felt the tugging in her chest that told her to go back and apologize. She couldn't just leave things the way they were. She shouldn't have said it. She should have opened the door.

That was exactly why she didn't do it, though. Because every part of her wanted to, and that part was going to hurt now or it was going to hurt when he had to leave her behind when he left. But the hurting, that part was built in.

And if she was going to hurt, then she wasn't going to let someone else hurt her. She'd been a bitch for twenty-five years, and looking back it had hurt her as much as it had hurt anyone else.

Then she crawled back into bed and got ready for the time that was going to come. Things wouldn't stay this way. Craig had told her he was going out of town, and he'd done it for a reason, though she couldn't begin to guess what that reason was.

That meant that she needed to be ready for just about anything. Someone was going to get killed, and it was going to be soon. Neither of the two men she'd met so far had been accidents.

Nor had they been caught by accident. The one who broke into her house, 'Ryan,' had been sent there. No chance in hell was he there of his own volition. He wouldn't even know where she lived.

Craig could have been the man pulling the strings, but why? Why would he want her dead? Because she knew too much? That directly contradicted what he'd told the others in that little grove. She was 'on the hook,' he'd told them. Then, not four hours later, he sends someone to kill her? It didn't make any sense. Not one lick of sense.

There was always the chance that he expected her to get the better of her attacker. Maybe Craig had told the guy that the owner of the apartment was out of town. Just an easy break-in. But then why bring the gun?

She'd seen evidence plants before. This wasn't that. The weapon was holstered and buttoned in. So it wasn't the uniforms trying to protect her.

If it wasn't Craig, who was it?

The thought ran through her head that whenever things seemed impossible, there was probably a wrong assumption somewhere. Too many detective novels as a girl, maybe, but she'd learned a long time ago that it didn't always work that way. Sometimes the only wrong assumption you had was that their reasons would make sense.

But just in case, she ran through a few of them. First was that Roy wasn't involved. More than a few television shows had given rise to the notion that there might be dozens or hundreds of killers who took over investigating their own murdering, and then have to pin it on someone else. If Roy were involved he would have certainly wanted her dead. And he'd left with about enough time to kill Becca. The pieces fit together, sort of, but only in the broadest strokes.

She didn't get the gut feeling that he could have done it. It wasn't a hell of a lot to go on, but as she thought it through, the circumstances got pretty ugly. Why sleep with her damn near right up until the moment her sister died?

Well it was to taunt her. The questions were easy to answer. But if he was trying to taunt her, he could have done a better job of it. He could have asked about her family, asked about her sister. How things are going with them, the works.

He had a phone, if it was just an ordered killing then he could have stayed at the resort until after Erin got the call. That would have protected him from any suspicion. That he didn't know not to have circumstances make him look suspicious was evidence by itself that he didn't know about the murder in advance.

She assume that Craig was involved. But it was impossible that he didn't know anything. He'd been slowly handing her the killers one-by-one, in order. As if he had them all in his back pocket and every day or two he decided that she should have another one. Just barely slow enough that it might be inconspicuous.

By now he'd know that the cops had picked up the blue-and-white truck. No doubt he'd known it before he told her he was leaving town, probably got a text about it during their brunch together. Very possibly they'd reached out to him as soon as the guy was picked up.

The questionable assumption lit up like a Christmas tree. She assumed that there was someone else in the shadows, someone who was manipulating these guys into killing the women they'd killed. Or, at least, someone manipulating them after the fact. Now that they were here, and the women were dead, someone was passing them orders.

That one hadn't been because of a feeling or a hunch or anything like that. She just had trouble believing that Craig would make such erratic decisions, so much relying on chance.

But maybe he wasn't as smart as she had him pegged for, or maybe he was much smarter than she had figured. Maybe—

Erin heard the sound of footsteps coming to a stop in front of the door. She saw the shadow of the figure outside, saw it widen just a bit, and then an envelope slipped under the door. She reached for it and grabbed, but she could already tell that whoever had dropped it was in the wind. They'd taken their sweet time coming up, but the minute that the envelope was all the way through they'd started booking it down the hall, towards the fire escape. It was closer than the elevator.

Right on cue as she opened the door, the fire alarm hit. Someone had gone through the fire door. The heavy door sent a loud slam echoing through the hall. Erin winced as it sounded, and looked down at the envelope in her hands.

Russo, it said. The handwriting was nice, neat, even. She tore the envelope open neatly and tossed the torn-away bit in the trash can by the door. The paper was neatly folded. She unfolded it and started to read.

The handwriting here was atrocious. She knew right away that someone else must have written the letter, than the person who folded it up and addressed it to her.

She could barely decipher it in some parts, but the parts she could told her that what she was looking at was a diary. A diary for the writer and the writer only, or they might have tried to fix the numerous misspellings and mistakes in writing. Then again, maybe they didn't know about them. Maybe this was how the person always wrote, but nobody wrote anything like this.

Nobody wrote anything like this, that is, except for a confession. Erin took a breath and sat down at the little table by the window, flattened the paper out, and pulled out her own pad. If she was going to make a serious attempt at reading this, then she was going to need a copy that was at least halfway legible. And that meant transcribing, which meant a lot of work, considering how poorly written the original was.

She took a breath and a pen and craned her neck forward in the chair. Either way, she had work to do.

Thirty-One

Erin took a long last look at her copy. This was a confession, more than anything. The problem was that she had no idea who she was supposed to pin it on. She didn't recognize the handwriting on the paper, nor did she recognize the handwriting on the envelope. But they spoke of two completely different individuals. People who were so completely separate on the scale that someone might wonder if they were, strictly speaking, the same species.

Erin knew better. Or at least, she certainly thought she did. There were bad people out there, and there were uneducated people out there, and there were people out there who had unsteady minds. This guy was all of those things.

She took a deep breath. There was one question that had been in the back of her mind, and now it came forward again. Why all the specifics? There was something fetishistic to the murders. Seven, exactly seven. Why exactly seven? Nobody knew.

Well, this was a confession. Stabbed seven times. It felt good. Blood on my hands. Most of all, a young woman. Erin had trouble believing that there was anything that would make the guy who she'd shot describe her or her sister as 'young' women.

They were the same age. If anything, Ryan looked a year or two younger than them. They weren't young to him. This person had described her as a 'young' woman, sometimes even as a 'girl.'

Which raised more difficult questions about who had written this diary. This journal. This confession. Confession to a murder.

Without knowing more, she couldn't begin to look into the murders. Not effectively, anyways. She took a deep breath. That meant taking this in to the station, and that meant having to see Roy. Schafer was head on this investigation. Taking it somewhere else would have been an insult, and as much as she wanted a clean break, she respected him as a cop.

She wanted to stop feeling anything for him—not to insult him in front of his coworkers. So she was going back into the lion's den again, after all. It took her a minute before she felt ready, then she dressed in professional clothing, slipped her wallet into her trousers pocket, and started off.

It took her exactly ten minutes and twenty-eight seconds to get there, though she wasn't timing it and didn't know. But for those six-hundred twenty-eight seconds, she was feeling exactly how long the trip was. Every one of those seconds, she thought about how much she didn't want to go inside that station.

She ignored that tugging, the same way that she was ignoring the niggling feeling that she should apologize and beg for Roy's forgiveness. The feeling that he was all she had left. Maybe he was all she had left, or maybe he wasn't, but that didn't define her. He was a colleague, and he was a man she'd spent some good times with, but he wasn't the end of the line for her, and it wasn't going to underscore her whole career.

Erin made it through the door moving fast enough that she could ignore her doubts. As long as she kept up her forward momentum, it didn't matter that she wasn't one damn bit certain if what she was doing was going to help or if she was being played like a damn fiddle.

The elevator opened with a ding and Detective Green turned. His desk was right by the elevator and he had a bad habit of looking to see every time someone came up. It was a distraction.

"I thought you were out of here for a while."

"I am," she answered, already moving towards Schafer's office.

"If you're looking for Agent Schafer, he's gone."

"Gone?"

"Out."

"Out where?"

"Out of here."

Oh. Erin swallowed hard and tried to think. He needed to see this, and if he was gone…

She turned and headed for the door. If she hurried, she could make L.A.X. before they departed, she hoped. It burned her ass, but she pulled out her phone as she slipped back into the Jeep and dialed Roy's number.

It rang twice before going to voicemail. She called again. No rings this time. He'd turned the phone off.

She might have done the same thing in his position, but now it was God damned important that she got in touch with him before he left the ground. Why did he have to pick right now to be a hurt child? Why had she picked that exact moment to piss him off?

She put her foot down harder. How long had he been gone for? An hour? Two?

A question hit her. Why would they leave? Had there been something new? Had they been pulled out?

At some point, sure. They'd go back to Quantico. But there had been a murder here less than twenty-four hours ago. They'd just arrested a suspect in the murder, but that left at least one more. Likely two.

Without being able to reach Schafer, she couldn't begin to guess what the hell had happened, and nobody in the station would want to tell her about it, even if they knew. After all, she was on leave. She wasn't involved in the case in any official way, and that was how it had always been. Why would it be any different now that Schafer and his suits had left?

She took a breath. She needed information, and she needed to cooperate with the F.B.I. to get it. How was she supposed to do that?

The thought occurred to her a minute after it came through. The field office might at least be able to hand information like the page in her hand. If it looked useful, they could at least get in touch with Schafer or one of his boys. Maybe before they took off, or maybe they would be able to head back.

She turned the Jeep around and got back on the gas. She didn't know where the F.B.I. field office was in California, but it couldn't be too far. She jabbed it into the G.P.S. while she drove, and started following the directions. It took five minutes to get there, another minute to find parking, and a seventh to get inside.

"I need to speak to someone."

"May I ask you what this is regarding?" The man behind the counter looked like a kindergarten teacher more than a law-enforcement agent. Thin and bookish and retreating.

"I've been given evidence in an ongoing murder investigation."

The man nodded to himself, clicked his mouse a few times and tapped a few keys. "Can I have the details?"

"I need to get in touch with Special Agent Roy Schafer. It's with regards to a series of murders committed across the country."

"What's your evidence?"

"A confession. Someone slipped it under the door of my hotel room."

"May I have your name?"

"Erin. E-R-I-N. Russo. R-U-S-S-O."

"Can you give me the paper?"

"What? Uh." She'd been building up the moment that they were forced to see each other again. The moment she handed him the paper. It was one last chance to make her apology in the end. It should have occurred to her that the office would want to take custody of any evidence involved in an ongoing investigation. "Sure."

She handed it across. The man smiled and set it aside, got on an intercom and asked someone to come take it into evidence, along with her transcription. Then he tapped another few keys, looked up at her as if he was surprised to see her standing there.

"Thank you very much." She let out a breath. "We'll be in touch if we need to reach you."

Thank you very much, indeed.