Deep Dark Secret (14 page)

“And…is there someone?”

“There might be.” His hand gripped the back of my headrest so hard the leather cried out. “But it’s hard to deal with. He’s a good man, but he’s human. It’s bad enough, the lies you have to tell your loved ones when you’re gay. It’s harder still when I have to keep all the werewolf stuff from him.” He closed his eyes and pursed his lips together in a tight line.

“Can we meet him? Me and Desmond, I mean.”

Dominick opened one eye and stared at me, probably trying to judge if I was pulling his leg. “And tell him what? ‘Hey, Cas, this is my werewolf brother and his girlfriend, Queen of the Damned.’”

I slapped his arm. “I’m not queen of anything. And just tell him the truth. That we’re family and we love you.”

He opened both eyes, and a fine haze of tears shone in them. “You know something, Secret?”

“What’s that?”

“For someone who isn’t human, you’re a hell of a woman.”

Desmond shook me lightly, ignoring my muffled protests and threats of violence until I relented and opened my eyes. When he shoved my cell phone in my face, I wished I’d pretended to still be sleeping.

“Too early,” I whined, batting the phone away and covering my head with a pillow.

Most people would say six in the evening was a perfectly normal time to call a friend, but for me it was barely thirty minutes after sunset, and I was in no mood to chat with anyone.

“It’s Mercedes,” he said, pushing the phone under the pillow. “She’s been calling here all damned day, and I can’t keep ignoring it. Your ringtone is driving me crazy.”

After he’d changed my ringer at Christmas to the annoyingly festive “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, I’d gotten my revenge by making my post-holiday call alert Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”, which was potentially one of the most irritating and catchy earworms of all time.

In the middle of the chorus I hit talk and mumbled my greeting into the phone. “Fuckingwhat?”

“Nice to talk to you too, morning glory. Did you forget to have some fucking coffee? A cup or twelve might cure your attitude problem.”

I grunted.

“I will give you ten thousand dollars if you can guess what I’m going to say next.”

“‘Secret McQueen, your best friend is a psychopath who thinks you like guessing games. As a reward she is offering to never call you again.’”

“Close, but sorry, I guess I get to keep my retirement fund.”

“Point. Get to it.”

Desmond stood in the doorway wearing jeans and a gray cashmere sweater. There was a cup of hot coffee in his hand. Love is a beautiful man bearing caffeine. I sat up, letting the pillow fall to the floor, and held my hand out in the universal gesture for
gimme
. Desmond laughed and handed me the cup. Piping-hot and bitter-black as Satan’s soul. Just how I liked it.

“I’ve got bad news.”

“Cedes, the day you call me with good news I will die.”

“It’s about your boy.”

Gee, that narrowed things down. “Huh?” I took a big swig of coffee and made a face. A shot of whiskey had less potency.

“We found two more bodies. Columbia coeds. Same MO as Trish Keller.”

“Oh.” I finished the rest of the coffee and handed the mug back to Desmond. “But if you found them since he’s been in lockdown, wouldn’t that clear Gabriel?” My voice sounded a little too hopeful, and it made me feel stupid and guilty.

“It would if the corpses weren’t a week old.”

“Fuuuuuck.”

“A very concise summation, yes.”

“You need me to come down?”

“Tyler wants to see if Holbrook will talk to you, give something up. I know he was important to you, Secret, but we need to see if we can crack him.” The fact that she was calling him Holbrook instead of Gabe told me she’d already distanced herself from this case on a personal level. Cedes knew Gabriel. We’d spent time together when he and I had been a couple. They’d butted heads, but she’d only actively disliked him after he dumped me.

That made two of us.

“There’s still a chance he might be innocent.”

“I know how it works. Innocent until proven guilty. Remember which one of us is an officer of the law.”

“Then why are you so sure he did it?”

“Why are you so unwilling to admit he might be guilty?”

I sighed and wished I had more coffee. I scuttled out from under the covers and went to my closet in search of something suitable to wear to a lynching. “I don’t want to think someone I slept next to for months and months is capable of being a serial killer.”

“You should watch more
Dexter
.”

If I started to spend any more time at the police station, I was going to have to ask for a desk, a badge and a paycheck. This was, however, the first time in at least a year someone other than Barbie was perched behind the front desk. Instead of explaining myself and getting the frustrating runaround of “I’m sorry, did you say your name was Secret? I’m going to have to call someone…” I decided to try the path of least resistance.

I jerked my chin up in an abrupt greeting and marched past the front desk without a second glance or another word. Apparently the key to success was simply pretending you belonged somewhere.

Detective Tyler spotted me before I was halfway across the room, and instead of any kind of glaring or snide remarks, he gave me an amiable nod and waved me over to his desk.

Okay, this was just weird. Had I stumbled into some alternate reality where I was a normal woman and got to play cops and robbers for a living instead of eating blood and running a vampire government? If so, I was already loving it.

“McQueen,” Tyler greeted me as he sat down in his desk chair.

I took the seat opposite him and leaned back, balancing the wooden chair on its two rear legs. This was a move my
grandmere
lovingly referred to as Death Bait.

“So, Detective Tyler, how can I be of assistance? Or did you call me in because you missed seeing my face?” I gave him my most dazzling smile. He looked unamused.

“While it fulfills my deepest unrealized fantasies to sit here and trade quips with you all day, Secret, I’m afraid it will have to wait until I don’t have a triple-homicide case to solve.”

My chair dropped down, and a loud smack echoed through the relative quiet of the room. Tyler pretended to ignore it and handed me three folders, then took his opportunity to lean back. He loosened his tie, a blue-and-gold-striped number that brought out flecks of gold in his brown eyes I’d never noticed before. The blue also made the dark circles under his lashes take on the appearance of deep purple bruises.

He looked exhausted.

The first folder was all familiar information. Trish Keller’s photos, her class schedule, some statements from her roommate and a few family members, and the unfortunate crime-scene photos. Say what you will about the naked female form, but there’s nothing pretty about it when it’s gray-blue and stuffed in a Dumpster.

The next two folders were carbon copies, with minute variations to keep things interesting. Misty Fitzpatrick and Angie Ferris. Both in their early twenties, both matriculated at Columbia, and both looked like boozy, floozy party girls based on their personal photos. What was it with the young women of today thinking the more eyeliner you wore and the oranger your tan the better it made you look?

Sometimes I was thankful sunlight would kill me. I’d rather be pale than look like a walking pumpkin. In the back of my head I heard
Grandmere
scolding me to not speak ill of the dead. Even thinking ill of the dead would be poor form in her opinion.

I scanned the crime-scene photos of the two new girls, but they didn’t tell me anything. Both girls were found nude, their skin frozen by the bitter cold of winter, their lips blue and fingertips black. As I thumbed through them I felt the weight of Tyler’s gaze looming over me. My gaze darted up and caught him staring at me with a singular focus.

“What?” I asked as I closed the folders and placed them on his desk.

“I wonder about you sometimes.”

This wasn’t exactly akin to having a handsome man confess
I think about you sometimes.
To be frank, the less Detective Tyler thought about me, the better. Once upon a time I would have relished attention from him, because he was a good-looking, smart, funny man. He was also deliciously human, and much like being with Dominick, the time I spent with Tyler early in our acquaintance had made me feel grounded to the real world.

Then the illusion had been masterfully shattered when I was forced to dice up three vampires in the Bryant Park subway station and Tyler had gone home without his memory.

That was the real reason I didn’t need him thinking about me. It was a rare feat, but sometimes people who’d been enthralled by a vampire were able to regain their original memories. It often took years, sometimes hypnotherapy, but once in awhile they just had a series of lucid dreams until the real memory came back to them.

I did
not
need Tyler Nowakowski to remember what he’d seen. He’d lock me up next to Gabriel and throw away the key.

“What do you wonder?”

“How is it a pretty girl like you can look at pictures like that and not be moved by them?”

“Would you prefer I turn into a trembling, weepy mess and launch into a fit of hysterics? It’s not really my style, but if it would help you rationalize me better, I can do it.” For effect, I stuck out my lower lip a bit and gave it a good pre-sob tremble.

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Why do you insist on making a joke of everything?”

“Because if I took everything I see on a daily basis seriously, Detective, the weight of my life would destroy me.” Wow, that was a hell of an honest answer. Where had that come from?

Even Tyler looked a little stunned by my candor. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

I waved off his apology. “We all have our coping mechanisms, right?”

“I suppose so.”

Before he could try probing the layers of my subconscious any further, I rose to my feet and inclined my head towards the door at the back of the room. The employee-only basement stairs. It was time to get this show on the road. “Let’s go see that ex-boyfriend of mine, shall we?”

“We won’t need to go downstairs for that.”

My question came in the form of an arched brow and a puzzled expression.

Tyler answered me with a simple direction. “Interrogation room four.”

There are a lot of women who would love to square off against an ex-boyfriend across an interrogation-room table, under the unforgiving fluorescent lights and with a one-way mirror bearing mute witness.

I was not one of those women.

The tiny room made me feel ill at ease and put me on the defensive before I’d even taken my seat. I didn’t like locked boxes with only one method of escape. I also didn’t like knowing I was being watched by people I couldn’t see. In spite of knowing better, the whole setup reeked of a trap. The two things keeping me from fighting against my instincts were the knowledge I was here to do a job and that the police weren’t interested in killing me.

The metal chair squealed against the tile floor, and for a long while the echo of its protestation was the only sound in the room. Gabriel smiled at me pleasantly, his cuffed hands folded in a look-how-innocent-I-am manner on the scarred wooden table. There was a lingering aroma of sweat and the stink of cigarette smoke in the room. In spite of a smoking ban in municipal facilities, I would stake money the cops here still garnered witness favor by offering them a smoke.

I’d seen enough police procedurals to know that a seasoned cop would play this two ways. Either the straight-up investigator who just wanted answers, or the good-cop, bad-cop routine. I’d played the bad cop in my own life, and the idea of it was more than a little appealing given who I was dealing with, but I decided to try a different approach to see what Gabriel knew.

“How are they treating you?”

Gabriel shrugged. “My lawyer asked me the same thing. Fine, I guess. It’s not the Ritz or anything. Remember that ghastly little motel we stayed at one summer when Keats made you go to Albany?”

My poker face needed some work because I flinched. It was the same trip that first introduced me to Marcus Sullivan, the former Alpha of Albany, and the man who had turned my whole goddamn life into a shitstorm last year. I was
still
dealing with the fallout of killing him. How Gabriel had picked that memory out of all the others available to him was enough to make me want to reach out and deck him.

Instead I focused on the other tidbit of information his sentence gave me.

“You have a lawyer, and yet you’re here talking to me alone.”

“Do I need a lawyer present to talk to an old lover?” The familiarity of his tone made my stomach churn. This conversation would do nothing to convince the detectives on the other side of the glass that Gabriel was innocent. If anything, it made him look more like a creepy, leering sociopath.

“I want to help you, but you need to give me more to go on.”

“Like what?” He held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged. “I didn’t kill the girl, Secret. If anyone should believe me, I would hope it would be you.”

“Why? Why should I believe you? You bailed on our life together with no notice. Why should I think you’re somehow exempt from being a murderer?”

“I didn’t leave without my reasons. After everything…after what happened… I wanted to believe you and I could have a life together, but I couldn’t pretend, not after that.” He didn’t need to elaborate. The allusion to what had gone on between us was enough to make me feel as though guilt and loss and emptiness were stabbing me in the heart. I’d tried hard to forget what I lost at nineteen, and so had he if he still wasn’t able to talk about it.

“I’m not here to talk about us.”

“Okay.” He nodded, looking somewhat relieved.

“I’m here to talk about Misty Fitzpatrick.”

That got his attention. “What did Misty tell you?”

I sat back in the chair and said nothing.

“Look, that whole thing was a mess. She didn’t start talking about grades until
after
I slept with her, and I told her in no uncertain terms I wasn’t an express ticket to an A.”