Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (15 page)

“Did you know this
girl?” she asked Chrissy.

Chrissy knitted her
eyebrows as she tried to remember.

“Oh, yeah,” she
said. “It was a long time ago. She called herself Ginger. I never knew her real
name. I figured she’d died. I mean, maybe she didn’t have long to live. She—”

Jaybird cut her off
with a grunt. But Riley bent close to her and said gently, “She was what,
Chrissy?”

“She was awful sick,”
Chrissy said.

Riley could see that
Chrissy was frightened of Jaybird now. She’d better not push the issue. Besides,
Chrissy’s meaning was obvious. Marsha “Ginger” Kramer had been HIV positive,
possibly with fully developed AIDS.

Then Bill asked
Chrissy, “Do you know a girl named Snowflake?”

“Yeah, she used to
work here, she—”

But Jaybird cleared
his throat and she stopped in mid-sentence.

“Snowflake doesn’t
work here anymore,” Jaybird said.

Again, Riley saw no
need to push the issue. It was all pretty clear to her. Snowflake had fled this
horrible place because of Jaybird’s brutality. It was only because she was free
of Jaybird that she’d dared to call in her tip.

“Hey, wait a minute,”
Jaybird said. “Wait just a minute. I know who you should check out.”

“Who is it?” Riley
asked.

“Now hold on, not so
fast,” Jaybird said. “I’ll tell you only if you agree to not hassle me. I’m
just doing an honest business.”

Riley’s stomach
turned at making any kind of deal with this man.

“OK,” she said, “but
only if your tip is good.”

“It’s a guy named
Clay Hovis. Yeah, I remember how Ginger was scared of him. All our girls were
scared of him. Chiffon especially. In fact, I finally barred him from the place
because he’d been too rough on Chiffon. Isn’t that right, Chrissy?”

Chrissy nodded
mutely.

Jaybird said, “Yeah,
it’s definitely Clay. He’s really bad news. Give me something so I can write
down his name and address.”

Chrissy handed
Jaybird a pad and pencil, and Jaybird jotted something down. While Bill asked
him for a few details about Hovis, Riley turned to look at Chrissy.

Riley’s heart sank.
Still silent, Chrissy was staring at her with an imploring expression. After
all the unspoken signals Chrissy and Jaybird had passed back and forth, it
struck Riley likely that Jaybird would beat her badly as soon as she and Bill
left. The poor woman desperately wanted someone to rescue her from this
horrible life. But Riley knew that any rescue would be temporary. This woman
would have to get to a point where she was willing to rescue herself. And all
the others too.

As the men talked,
Riley leaned over and whispered to Chrissy, “You can leave with me right now if
you want to.”

Chrissy just looked
at her blankly.

“I can get you
someplace to stay. There are people who can help you.”

Chrissy shook her
head no. Riley felt a little sick now.

She’s too scared
to even think about leaving,
Riley realized.

She handed Chrissy
her card and whispered, “Call me if you change your mind.”

Chrissy took the
card, but she looked away.

Now Riley knew why
the sick, tired, despairing women in the sauna reminded her of Peterson’s cage.
Her own torment had lasted only a few days. Chrissy and the rest of women here
were living under a life sentence.

In a way, it didn’t
much matter whether Jaybird was the killer they sought, or Hovis, or some other
man.

They’re all
monsters,
Riley
thought.

And there was no way
to stop them all.

Riley turned away
from Chrissy and stepped menacingly toward Jaybird.

“Your tip had better
be good,” Riley said. “Just give me an excuse. Give me any reason at all. I’ll
put you down like a dog.”

Jaybird stared at
her with dark angry eyes.

“Come on,” Bill said
to Riley. “Let’s go check out Clay Hovis.”

It wasn’t a long
drive to Clay Hovis’s apartment. It was in the same rough neighborhood as the
Kinetic Custom Gym. Riley wasn’t looking forward to interviewing the man. After
a career of dealing with horror, she’d had no idea that she could still be so
horrified. Right now this case seemed to be getting uglier by the hour.

“Are you OK?” Bill
asked Riley as she drove.

Riley didn’t answer.
She simply didn’t know what to say.

Then Bill asked her,
“What do you think of Jaybird? Do you think he’s our guy?”

Riley thought for a
moment.

“No,” she said. “He’s
just a businessman. Oh, he’s a businessman who hates women. And he’s OK with
beating up and abusing women. That’s all in his line of work. But murder is bad
for business. He doesn’t like murder.”

She thought for
another moment, then added, “And he’s not impotent.”

“And our killer is?”
Bill said.

“Intermittently, at
least,” Riley said. “Although I’m sure he doesn’t like to admit it, even to
himself. And maybe not when he first started killing. But now performance is an
issue for him. He gets his enjoyment out of the murders themselves, not sex or
sexual violence.”

She thought about it
for another moment. “And Jaybird’s not like that,” she said. “His bluster and
bravado is genuine, not a way of compensating for a lack of virility.”

“So his tip about
this Clay Hovis guy might be legit?” Bill said.

“Could be,” Riley
said.

It made more and
more sense to her. Jaybird had sounded truly angry with Hovis. The man must
have caused some real trouble for Jaybird to have banned him from the place.
And Jaybird was undoubtedly worried what would happen if or when word of these
murders got out. That would really hurt his business. If Hovis was the killer,
Jaybird had plenty of reason to want to put him away.

“You’d better call
headquarters,” Riley told Bill as she turned a corner into an especially seedy
part of the neighborhood. “We need info about Gretchen Lovick. We’ll need to
find out about her next of kin. Chrissy said her husband does some kind of work
having to do with computers. It shouldn’t be hard to track him down.”

Bill got on the
phone. As he talked with Morley, Riley realized that she and Bill just might
have to inform Lovick that his wife was dead. That thought only made the sick
feeling in her stomach worse. Since the body had not been identified until now,
the woman’s husband probably wouldn’t know that she’d been murdered. Unless, of
course, he had killed her himself, but that wasn’t at all likely in a case that
included three dead prostitutes over a span of years. The man they were going
to see now was a much more likely suspect.

Riley pulled the car
up in front of a big, ratty-looking apartment building where Clay Hovis lived.
They got out of the car and walked up three flights of stairs. As they
continued down the hall toward Hovis’s apartment, a cacophony of blaring music
and loud voices surrounded them. It was hard for Riley to imagine living here.
How could anybody ever sleep or even think?

As they approached
the door to Hovis’s apartment, they heard a dog barking inside. Before they
could even knock on the door, they heard more hostile snarling and the
scratching of claws against the door. The animal sounded big and extremely
dangerous.

After a moment of
animal fury, they heard a man’s voice call out from inside.

“Who is it?”

Riley realized that
the apartment’s occupant was looking out through a peephole. Riley stepped back
so that she’d be fully in view. She took out her badge.

“Agents Paige and
Jeffreys, FBI,” she called out. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The dog started
barking again.

“Do you have a
warrant?” the man yelled through the door.

“No,” Bill said
loudly. “We just want to talk.”

The animal noise
continued.

“No,” the man’s
voice said.

Riley called out, “Mr.
Hovis—I believe we’re talking to Mr. Hovis—things will go better for all of us
if you cooperate.”

Once again, the man
answered, “No.”

Riley looked at
Bill, uncertain of what to do. Things would be different if they had a warrant
for his arrest, or to search his premises. But as things stood, Clay Hovis was
well within his rights not to answer the door, even to law enforcement. And he
apparently knew it.

Bill yelled over the
barking, “That’s OK, Mr. Hovis. We understand. You don’t have to talk to us if
you don’t want to.”

Riley looked at Bill
with surprise. Bill gave her a half-smile that assured her that he knew exactly
what he was doing.

As the dog’s fury
grew, Riley quickly understood Bill’s tactic. Although Hovis had the right not
to talk to them, she and Bill had every right to stay right where they were.
And as long as they stood in front of the door, the dog’s uproar would get
worse. Hovis couldn’t calm the creature down, and the situation inside the
apartment must be becoming intolerable.

Soon the door opened
a little, stopped by a chain. Riley could now see the black face of a Doberman pinscher.
Its nose pushed through the opening as far as it would go. It flashed enormous
teeth at the strangers, and its eyes were angry. The creature barked furiously.

An African-American
man also peered through the opening.

“What do you want?”
he said over the sound of barking.

“Like I said, we
just want to talk,” Bill said.

The man cursed and
unlocked the chain. He opened the door, holding the dog tightly by its collar.

“It’s OK, Genghis,”
the man said to the dog. Then he said to Riley and Bill, “Come on in.”

Riley and Bill
cautiously stepped into the apartment. The dog was growling, but he was calmer
now that his master had invited them in. The man attached a leash to the dog’s
collar, walked the surly creature over to an armchair, and sat down.

“Genghis, down,” he
said.

The dog obeyed,
lying down beside the chair with a whimper. It stopped growling but watched
them alertly. Then Hovis glared at Riley and Bill.

Bill began, “We
understand that you’re familiar with the Kinetic Custom Gym.”

“Yeah,” the man
said.

Riley added, “What
do you know about two of its female employees—Chiffon and Ginger? Ginger worked
there a long time ago. But Chiffon’s very recent.”

“I’ve never heard of
them,” Hovis said.

The man’s face and
voice were so lacking in expression that Riley couldn’t tell if he was lying or
not.

“Both women are
dead,” Bill said. “Chiffon died last night. Ginger died about three years ago.”

Hovis said nothing.

Riley said, “Can you
tell us where you were and what you were doing last night, between dusk and
dawn?”

“I was right here,”
Hovis said.

“Do you have any
witnesses to back you up?” Bill asked.

“No.”

Then he fell silent
again. The air was still full of ambient noise from the nearby apartments, and
the dog kept whining a little. Hovis was obviously not going to be forthcoming.
Riley couldn’t yet tell whether he was concealing something or was reticent by
nature.

But as a team, both
she and Bill knew from experience better than to try to rush a situation like
this. It was best to let Hovis think that they were in no hurry.

Riley looked the man
over carefully. He was black, tall, and rather gangly. His gaze was direct and
very intense. She noticed that he was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and
full-length jeans, despite the fact that the room’s air conditioning was
audibly sputtering and the room was uncomfortably warm.

After a moment,
Riley said, “We talked to Jaybird. It sounds as if you and he had a bit of a
falling out.”

Hovis’s registered
an ever-so-slight smirk.

“You could say that.”

Bill said, “Care to
tell us what it was all about?”

“Business,” Hovis
said.

Riley said, “Jaybird
told us you were getting too rough on his girls. He said that both Ginger and
Chiffon were scared of you.”

Riley thought the
man looked vaguely offended.

“I never touched his
girls,” he snapped.

Riley looked around
the apartment. It was shabby and cheap, and all the furniture looked old and
used. Still, the place was remarkably neat. Clay Hovis was anything but a slob.

Nearby was a chess
set on a ’50s-style kitchen table. It looked like a game was in progress. Was a
partner coming in to play chess with Hovis from time to time, or was he playing
the game alone? Either way, Riley had a hunch that Hovis was an excellent
player.

And judging from the
books on a nearby bookshelf, Riley gleaned that Hovis was intelligent and
self-educated. All this was consistent with the profile of their killer. But
she wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.

Riley returned the
suspect’s gaze. He kept unflinching eye contact with her. She was starting to
read something in that face. She wasn’t sure just what. She reminded herself
again not to hurry, not to push. This man demanded patience.

Then Hovis asked, “How
did the girls die?”

Riley saw something
in his expression. Was it a flash of concern? No, Riley sensed that it went
deeper than that.

Guilt, maybe,
Riley thought.

“They were murdered,”
Bill said.

Riley kept studying
his face, trying to gauge his reaction.

“You don’t think
Jaybird killed them?” Hovis said.

“We haven’t ruled
out anybody,” Riley said. She wondered if he knew that she was lying about
Jaybird.

Hovis didn’t try to
evade Riley’s gaze. To the contrary, he kept his eyes locked directly on hers.

“What do you do for
a living, Mr. Hovis?” she said.

“Freelance
construction work,” he said.

Riley detected in
both his voice and his look that this was a lie. She also sensed that he didn’t
much care if she knew it. He might very well want her to know it. He actually
seemed to want to tell her something. But it was something that he couldn’t
tell her openly.

He wants me to
parse it out somehow,
she thought.

“Mr. Hovis,” she
said quietly, “I’m going to say a few things. Statements, not questions. You
don’t have to say anything in response to them. You don’t have to do anything
at all. Just listen.”

Just a hint of a
smile formed on his lips. Yes, this was what he wanted.

She looked around
the sparsely furnished apartment. She didn’t see a single object of real value.
So why did Hovis keep such a big, fierce guard dog? What was he guarding?

Riley looked Hovis
over again. She noticed that his face and hands were oddly pasty for a black
person. And again she observed those long sleeves and full-length pants. He was
in his stocking feet. He wasn’t wearing a belt, and his fly was unfastened. He’d
put these clothes on in a hurry when she and Bill had gotten here. He wanted to
cover up something.

In a flash, Riley
realized …

Needle marks. All
over his body.

“You’re a drug user,”
she said.

He stared back at
her. Nothing in his gaze contradicted her.

Then she said, “You’re
an addict—but you’re an extremely high-functioning addict.”

That hint of a smile
showed through again.

“You don’t work in
construction,” Riley said.

His head tilted
forward slightly, almost a nod.

Things were starting
to come together in Riley’s mind, without Hovis saying a word. He was a drug
dealer—but not a sociopathic drug dealer. He was compelled to sell drugs to
maintain his habit.

Then she remembered
the question he’d asked earlier

“How did the
girls die?”

She thought back to
the women at the Kinetic Custom Gym—how wan and tired and strung out they
looked. Chrissy too. Hovis had been afraid that he’d been responsible for their
deaths.

“You didn’t kill
them,” Riley said.

Riley saw something
new in Hovis’s expression. It almost looked like gratitude. She knew that her
own little chess game with Hovis was over. It had ended in a draw, which suited
both of their purposes perfectly.

“We’ll go now, Mr.
Hovis,” she said. “Thank you for your time.”

Bill seemed only
mildly surprised that Riley was cutting the interview short. She knew that he
was used to her coming to unspoken conclusions like this.

As she and Bill made
their way out of the building, Riley said, “He’s not our man. But he’d been
dealing heroin to Jaybird. Jaybird likes to keep his women dependent and
helpless. Hovis didn’t like it. He prefers to do business with users like
himself, people who’ve got some control over their lives. So he cut off Jaybird’s
supply.”