“Her killer found me.”
He smiled with two pointed eyeteeth, kept that predatory gaze on her as he patted down the last photo, the one that had appeared in the paper, as the others had. “Lance La Russa.”
“Three weeks ago.” Give or take. She tipped her head, waiting for his answering line.
“Another killer unmasked.” He blinked. “By you.”
Unmasked, yes, but Max had not discovered a perpetrator as harsh as the word killer described. And Lance, though murdered, was not the true victim in it all.
“Who are you?” How had he connected the four deaths?
“I’m asking the questions.”
“And I’m not giving any answers.” A cop. He had to be. Four different jurisdictions, four sets of investigators, not one had looked to her. Not until this guy. She thought of Witt, itched to reach for the cell phone he’d given her, the one hidden in the voluminous pockets of her purse. But she didn’t need a savior. Keeping her hands at her sides, she refused to fidget.
A bus rumbled by the end of the road, the heavy scent of diesel in the air despite the distance. Minivans packed with moms and kids invaded the quiet, tree-lined street. An old lady, sensible shoes slapping the pavement, plastic poop bag in hand, walked her bouncing poodle. The next door neighbor kid, and future hoodlum, streamed by on his skateboard, a sneer distorting his face.
Max and the man waited the activity out in silence, like gunslingers at high noon. She moved her hand to her hip. Mystery Man—to her mind, he wasn’t anything like a Greek God now—reached once more to his pocket. He kept a rumpled, folded bit of paper to himself but put the photograph in her hands.
A Polaroid. Max gasped, for the first time unable to hide her reaction.
“Recognize him?” There should have been a taunt in the wolf’s voice. Instead a trace of sympathy laced his tone.
Max closed her eyes, fighting the urge to drop the thing like a hot coal. The stiff paper burned her fingertips. She’d seen enough lifeless bodies both in vision and in reality to know this one was dead. Obviously a morgue shot, it focused on the head, shoulders and half a torso, but it was the scar that held her attention, the scar running from cheekbone to mouth, puckering his lips with a grimace that didn’t relax even in death. She’d seen it in her nightmares, memorized it like the feel of tissue beneath her fingers.
Scarface was dead. Retribution had been earned, the god of vengeance appeased for the moment. She kept her eyes closed, waiting for an adrenaline rush that never came.
The creak of leather, the rustle of paper, the honk of a distant horn, and Max opened her lids. Mystery Man spread out his secret paper atop the roof of his metallic blue car.
A sketch artist’s rendition of the dead man as Max had seen him two years ago, the features blended, hazed, indistinct, only the scar stood out in the composite drawing. The scar had stood out in her mind the night Cameron died, the night this now dead man had held her down and forced himself inside her, the night he’d threatened to slice her cheeks open with his death’s head ring, to give her a scar rivaling his own.
At the bottom right of the composite, in a square box, the artist had drawn a likeness of his ring. Max wondered if he’d been wearing the piece of jewelry—if a death’s head could be called that—after all this time or if he’d pawned it for his next score.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“Gunshot to the back of the head.”
“Where’d you find him?”
His eyes widened, at what she couldn’t be sure. “San Francisco. Parking garage near Pier 39.” A tourist attraction.
Odd place for a druggie/rapist/killer. Why had he been there?
Her hand with the photo rose to chest level, high enough to look once more at the spent features. Strange that violent death didn’t appear on that peaceful face. He might have been asleep but for the lack of muscle control, the mouth slack on the unmarred side, cheeks flattened. Lightheaded, she swayed. Mystery Man caught her arm, popping her out of the fog.
“Why are you showing this to me?” How did he know the picture’s importance?
“Do you have any comment to make?” He folded the paper lest it blow away in the slight morning breeze.
“You live by the gun, you die by the gun.” She stared at the face, now smooth and unlined. Scarface had been nothing more than a boy, late teens, early twenties. Somehow, that night, never realizing, she’d seen him as an ageless monster.
“That sounds like vigilantism.” The wolf devoured her with greedy eyes, hung on her every word, hung her on every word.
She gave him what he wanted. “It sounds like justice to me.”
The growl dropped a pitch. “Why did it take you so long to find him?”
She didn’t deny his implication. “I never looked.”