She showered, dressed in one of her black pantsuits, chose a striped red and black tie because the colors shrieked power, then stepped into her three-inch spike-heeled pumps.
“How did he know?” she whispered to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. How did Bud know her crime?
“Maybe you’re two halves of the same coin,” Cameron answered.
She shivered with the thought of it. “Soulmates.” As Bud had claimed. “Soulmates in hell.”
“Think how similar the acts.”
The tremors began at her shoulders, shuddered down her arms, then dissipated through her fingers. The gold of her wedding ring glittered in the vanity lights. She stroked on eye shadow, mascara, blusher, and lipstick.
“Think.” Cameron gave her but a moment before he continued the torture. “You made a human sacrifice to survive.” She chewed the color from her lips. “Bud sacrificed his humanity.”
Her heart cried out, wanted to deny that she could be anything like that man. But truth was truth. Cameron’s words dripped in imagined blood across the bathroom mirror in front of her. As a child, she’d taken to hiding in the closet hoping the devil would never find her. He always did. The devil in her life had now become the truth. She couldn’t hide from it any more than she’d hidden from her uncle. She wouldn’t hide from Bud.
From the toilet lid, Buzzard watched with unblinking eyes.
“Don’t give me that look,” she told the cat. “I know I promised Witt I wouldn’t see that man, but Bud threatened me.” She repaired the destroyed lipstick on her mouth. “I have to play this drama out.” She had no idea what her lines were.
At seven-thirty, Max double-locked her studio despite the fact that she’d left the upstairs window open for the cat to come and go as he pleased. Her high heels sunk into the gravel as she traversed the drive. The morning, cold but bright, bore no hint of the usual seasonal rain. Wind whistled through the elm outside her window while Buzzard cried plaintively amongst its branches. The shush of car tires rushed in from the nearby freeway. A mother called her youngsters to heel. Down the block, children laughed, a morning like any other morning. For them, at least.
She saw him as she reached the end of her driveway. Her mystery man from the airport, in other circumstances, someone else’s Greek god. Somehow, in four days, certainly in the past four hours, she’d forgotten all about him, forgotten the urgency she’d felt to find out who he was.
His black hair, overlong, reached past the collar of his khaki shirt. His jaw line stubbled, his lids drooping, his skin pasty and pouches beneath his eyes from lack of sleep, he slumped in the seat of his vintage blue Camero. Despite the lazy facade, he watched her with dark, alert eyes, beautiful like a strong, young wolf in falling snow and equally as dangerous.
She crossed the street, heels tapping. For the moment, she had the height advantage. “Why are you following me?”
He opened his car door, forcing her to take a step back. She stopped with enough room for him to get out. The slam of the door broke the silence of the neighborhood. She hadn’t realized all other sound had fallen away. He towered despite her three extra inches of heel. One corner of his mouth lifted. Many would have thought it was a smile. Max knew it to be a predatory growl.
He’d been after her for almost three weeks, dogging her footsteps, showing up in her rearview mirror without even the guise of unobtrusiveness. Like a wolf, he’d stayed beyond her reach, turning as she turned, disappearing into the shadows when she would have followed him. “What do you want?”
He reached inside his black leather jacket. Max’s heart pounded with a fear-threat reaction, but she yielded not another inch of ground, not even when a car passed from the left, air currents washing through the material of her suit, through her pantyhose, ruffling the back of her hair.
The wolf didn’t have a gun in his hand. He held four fanned photographs. Turning with a flourish, he laid them out one by one on the roof of his car.
“Beginning of September.” His voice dripped warm honey. Frostbite numbed her fingers. “Wendy Gregory.” He turned, brown eyes sharp and trained on her. “You found her killer.”
Max swallowed, said nothing, but prepared to site the fifth amendment, sure this guy was a cop out to get her.
Next photo, a finger tap. “Late September.” She knew well the date. “Tiffany Lloyd.” Murdered after sex in a public restroom. “You”—pause for visceral contact, eyes backlit with gold, age indeterminate beneath a zealot’s eagerness—“found her killer.”
She closed her eyes to the next picture with its soft puft of air against the roof of the car as he tapped. Two small girls minus protective mothers skipped down the sidewalk, laughing, quieting for a moment when they saw the two adults, rushing past in fear, then laughing again once they’d reached what they thought was safe territory. Didn’t they know safety was a figment of imagination?
The wolf’s voice went on. “Early October. Bethany Spring.”