Fallen Angels 03 - Envy (13 page)

He pul ed their cart into a U-serve and began swiping stuff as Reil y handed him things. “But like I said, you aren’t in any of those categories,” he finished.

“Definitely not.” She passed over the bag of tomatoes. “I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

“There are worse things to get saddled with.” Like his blood tie to that maniac father of his, for instance. Hel , the groupies who wanted to fuck him just because of his name were bad, but the fact that he had that kil er in his very marrow was the true nightmare.

“Are you going. . . in the middle of next week?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“To the execution,” she said gently.

Veck froze with the yel ow Old El Paso box in his hand. “It’s going forward?”

“If the governor doesn’t issue a stay. There was an article in the paper today.”

Ah, yes, the three columns he’d skipped at the diner. “Wel , I hope they fry the bastard. And no, I’m not going. I have to see that son of a bitch every time I look into a mirror. Enough is enough.”

He took his wal et out and snagged his ATM card.

“Here, let me give you some—”

Veck shot a stare over his shoulder. “The man should pay. I’m traditional like that.”

“And the woman can damn wel make a contribution. I’m a realist like that.”

As she shoved a twenty-dol ar bil into his palm and leveled her eyes at him, he knew he wanted to kiss her—and not just in his fantasies: He wanted to know what it was like to pul her in close and take a taste of that no-nonsense mouth of hers.

Not going to happen.

Refocusing on things that weren’t going to get him written up or rightful y slapped, he swiped his card, punched in his PIN, and waited for the transaction to go through. After he snagged the receipt and threw it out, they headed for the exit, where he left the cart with the others and grabbed the bags.

As they walked back over to her car, he murmured, “You’re quiet. Did I say too much.”

She glanced up at him as she hit her remote and unlocked everything. “About your father? God, no . . . anytime you want to talk about him, or anything else, I’m happy to listen.”

Veck believed her. Which was a miracle of its own.

Just as he reached for the trunk release, she went for the rear passenger door and said, “Wait, here, put the groceries—”

“I’l just throw them in—”

As the top rose on its own, he got a gander at three big Victoria’s Secret bags.

He couldn’t help it: His eyes shot over to her and scanned up her body . . . al the way to her bril iant red cheeks.

Which told him that chances were good there weren’t a whole lot of fuzzy pajamas and fluffy bathrobes in those damn bags.

“Uh . . . backseat,” he muttered, “yeah . . .”

“They were having a sale,” she said as he shut the trunk.

He was getting hard again. Right now. Shit.

After the groceries were in the car, the pair of them got in their respective seats and she started the engine. The seat belt cut into his erection, but he figured the damn thing deserved the pinch. He had no business fantasizing about a fashion show.

The fine Officer Reil y was into
that
stuff?

Man, he needed a smoke—

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“We have to go to your place to do it.” With a curse, he amended, “Dinner, I mean. Do
dinner
at your place—I don’t have any pans.”

As they stopped at the light that led out of the parking lot, she glanced over . . . and started to laugh. Before he knew it, he was smiling.

“You don’t know how to cook anything, do you,” she said.

“I’l be lucky if I can get the box of tacos open.” He put up his forefinger. “But I’d stil like to make you dinner, if you’re game.”

Shaking her head, she smiled. “Okay, but can you do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Can you forget what you saw in my trunk?”

His eyes drifted to her mouth and then went farther down to the pale column of her throat and . . . “I’m sorry,” he said darkly. “That I can’t do.”

She inhaled on a sharp suck, as if everything he was thinking was showing in his face.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “I mean, yeah, of course. Consider it done. Total y forgotten.”

A loud honk sounded behind them, and she jumped before hitting the gas.

Wel , this was going smoothly. Maybe he’d top off the night by burning her frickin’ house down.

D
uring his years as a black ops solider, Jim had learned that good intel was mission critical in any assignment. Of course, back when he’d been working for Matthias the Fucker, his job had been kil ing people, and that was not the situation with his new boss or his current targets. But a lot of the principles were the same, however.

And the stakes were even higher.

Sitting on his bed in the Marriott, with his Del propped on his thighs, the
CaldwellCourier Journal’s
Web site was front and center on the screen, and the headache he had was not from the glare.

His work was cut out for him. Assuming Devina hadn’t lied about the soul.

Last night Thomas DelVecchio Jr. had been in the woods with a guy who he’d been investigating—business as usual for a homicide detective, right?

Wrong. The wrench in the works was the fact that David Kroner, believed to be a serial kil er, had been driven back to town in the business end of an ambulance. Where he’d been al but tomato sauce.

And that was just the start of the fun and games. After spending nearly two hours combing the Net, Jim knew enough to fil a book about DelVecchio . . .

and the guy’s dad.

None of it was good news.

“Damn, Dog,” he muttered.

Dog let out a little chuff and put his paw on Jim’s forearm, as if offering support.

The question was, where was the crossroads with DelVecchio? Had it been in those woods last night?

No, because then Jim would have lost before they’d gotten started, and he had to imagine that was outside the scope of the rules. Didn’t mean Devina couldn’t have given that a shot, though.

And on that note. “Where are you, bitch . . .”

The demon was somewhere in al this, working behind the scenes, trying to pul strings so that DelVecchio the younger would get in deep with her.

The route could be through the father. Retyping the guy’s name into Google, Jim went on another surf of the Web, and what he found made him question whether humanity was worth saving: Web site after Web site of hero worship, blogs on the bastard—oh, look, role-playing based on his kil ings. Artwork for sale on eBay. Autographs.

The guy was his own cottage industry—but it wasn’t going to last, apparently. He was due a lights-out in Connecticut very, very soon.

Then again, maybe he’d live forever in infamy: There were round-the-clock vigils going on outside the prison. No doubt that col ection of protesters wouldn’t stop the execution, but they were an indication that the bastard might be even more of a celebrity once he was in the ground.

According to the
CCJ
archives, the elder DelVecchio had done most of his kil ings in New York and Massachusetts, and the first of the AP reports on the victims dated al the way back to the mid-nineties, when an initial body had been found in . . . Caldwel , New York. It had taken about three years of seemingly random butchering for the authorities to kick in that they had a serial kil er on their hands. Part of the lag was the fact that he had left bodies in multiple states and the disparate investigations had been carried out with varying degrees of competency by local police. But the other thing was, at least in the beginning, DelVecchio had made it his business to hide the remains wel —and creatively.

The dots had been connected, however, and then it had become a race to catch whoever the kil er was. The ass slapper was that DelVecchio had been in the public eye the whole time, a dealer of antiquities—and not just trinkets or fakes. He’d been at the top of the heap with that one, importing statuary and artifacts and tablets from Egypt and the Middle East.

Handsome motherfucker. Even had an article in
Vanity Fair
on him—which went into some detail. Apparently in between the trips overseas, and the parties at the Met, DlVecchio Sr. had managed to get some woman pregnant. The son had been born on the father’s birthday twenty-nine years ago, but there had been no family life to speak of. No other children.

Although there had been contact of a sort: Turned out the murder of that woman had been the key to DelVecchio’s eventual capture, the first link that had brought the chain he’d been making together. The rest was history, so to speak.

“I-inn-r?”

Jim looked up over the laptop. Standing in the open connector, Adrian had a pizza box between his mitts and half of a six-pack of beer hanging from his teeth.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks, man.”

Eddie came in behind the guy with a second box. “He got his with everything—and the damn bait.”

Ad parked it on the bed and put the beers down. “They’re cal ed anchovies, fool.”

The “whatever” went unsaid between the pair of them. Jim fed Dog first, giving the little guy some crust of the non-Adrian pie. Going by his stubby tail, the grub was more than good enough.

“So how do we know Devina didn’t lie to you?” Adrian said, before he bent a slice in half and put the pointy part in his mouth.

“This hot mess is right up our al ey.” He switched over to the article about the execution and turned the laptop around. “Meet the guy’s dad. And wait, there’s more.”

As they ate, he showed them some of the sites and capped it off with the write-up online about Junior’s little trip into the woods with the serial kil er.

While his wingmen read, there was the appropriate amount of
fuckin’ hells
, which was satisfying.

He finished his third slice. “We need to find out what happened in those woods last night.”

“Article says DelVecchio has no memory.”

Jim glanced over at Eddie, a.k.a. teacher of tricks. “That’s where you come in. I want into that guy’s mind, and you need to tel me how to do it.”

Ad shrugged. “Personal y, I’d just use a hacksaw, but—”

“There are potential consequences and side effects,” Eddie said careful y.

“Like what?”

“Wel , worst case . . . he could end up like Adrian.”

“Hey—”

Jim cut the angel in question off. “Tone-deaf. Needle freak.”

“Sex fiend,” Eddie added.

“That would be ‘
god
.’ ” Ad cracked open a Bud. “And I keep tel ing you people, I’m not tone-deaf.”

“We’ve been through this before.” Eddie wiped his mouth. “If you can’t hear how off-key you are, how would you know?”

“I’m not off-key.”

“Yeah, you are,” Jim and Eddie said together.

Before this argument got out of hand, Jim got serious with Eddie. “So tel me what I need to know.”

“You’re going to have to explain what you’re looking for first.”

Jim took a long pul from his can of beer. “I want to know where Devina is in al this. What her angle’s been and which way she’s likely to take shit. Thats what I’m after.”

And given what was doing with the father? He had his suspicions already.

Natural y, Veck had to see what was in the trunk, Reil y thought as she pul ed into her driveway.

The universe just couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that to get her a good one.

While her garage door went up, she glanced over at her partner. “Let me guess . . . you like to carry the groceries, as wel as pay for them.”

“Yeah, I do.” He looked across the seats. “Like I said, I’m old-fashioned. But if you want to do the duty, I’l step back.”

And that was why she didn’t have a problem with him.

Besides, he could handle the food while she grabbed the VS in the trunk: However embarrassed she was, she wasn’t going to leave that stuff behind.

There was no pretending the disclosure hadn’t been made, but more important, there was no reason to hide. She was a grown-ass woman and she could buy herself—

As the voice in her head grew more strident and defensive, she wondered who exactly she was talking to.

Probably her father.

Cutting off the ridiculous rant, she parked the car. While Veck got out and grabbed the Hannaford bags, she headed around the butt of the sedan, popping the trunk and keeping her chin up as she fisted al of her lacy-and-lovely and led the way into her kitchen.

“Wow,” he said looking at the wal s. And the drapes. And the counters.

“I should have warned you.”

The good news about the rooster-themed nightmare of a kitchen was that it usual y made people stop and look around, so she had the chance to tuck her bags around the corner, out of sight.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen . . .”

With a nod, she was grateful he didn’t finish that one, although it wasn’t like he had to. “. . . so many cocks in one place” had been let fly with reliable, if cringing, frequency.

“The little old lady who lived here before liked them.” Oh, God, that sounded awful. “Ever since I moved in here two years ago, I’ve been meaning to get out a razor blade and start picking at the corners. But there’s always some kind of work that keeps me preoccupied.”

Although seeing it from his eyes made her wish she’d focused a little more. The wal paper’s pattern had three alarmingly exaggerated roosters in different poses, like they were bodybuilders competing for a trophy. Color scheme was brown, red, and cream, with green tufts of grass beneath their tripart feet. And somehow, even though the stuff had been on the wal s for a good twenty years, it had retained an eye-popping vividness.

“Is it me or do their eyes fol ow you?” Veck asked as he put the bags on the counter.

“No, they’re watching you, al right. Done wonders for my diet—I feel like I’m eating with an audience, and I haven’t had chicken in here since last May.”

“This is like
The Birds
.”

“Except farm-themed. I know.” As she went over and opened the cupboard under the stovetop, she said, “The fact that I’m getting a little used to it scares me—like maybe they’ve hypnotized me? By the way, pans are down here. Bowls under there and knives in thodrawers by the dishwasher.”