His heart banged against the cage of his ribs, trying to bust out and make a break for it. A bead of sweat slid in agonizing slowness down the center of his spine.
“You don’t look so good.” MacNeil Anderson stepped into Cain’s line of sight, diverting his attention from the blood. The furrows around Mac’s eyes cut deeper than normal, and three days’ worth of old-man stubble fuzzed his cheeks, giving him a haggard and homeless appearance. Not exactly the look the FBI was going for when they promoted Mac to senior special agent.
Cain almost smiled at his own thoughts, but laughter no longer existed in this place. Only horror could thrive here now.
“Do I ever look good when I’m about to…?” Yeah. There wasn’t a name for what he did. To the bureaucrats with their thumbs jammed up their asses, Mac called it profiling—had to call it something. But it wasn’t profiling. Not at all. What Cain had to do with the blood was something worse than profiling. So much worse.
“This is different.” Mac reached up and put his dry palm on Cain’s forehead. “You sick? Have a fever?”
Cain might be thirty years old and had lived on his own since he was eighteen, but Mac had never outgrown the role of his adopted dad.
“You can always walk away.” Mac made this offer at every kill scene.
And every time, Cain’s legs twitched with the urge to run. Only determination, masochism, and the promise of sick satisfaction kept him locked in place. “I’m staying. I always stay.”
“I’d stop calling you out for these cases, but I know you’d just find someone else who would.” Mac’s words were slow and glossed with sadness.
“No one else has the history I have. No one else can do what I do. No one else can give you the information I can.” Yeah. His profiles were more accurate, more detailed than anything a traditional profiler could come up with. In the majority of cases, his work guided law enforcement directly to their perpetrator. “It’d be stupid not to call me.” Not to mention he needed to be around that dynamic duo—blood and death. They stripped away his mask of normalcy, leaving him naked to the one truth about himself he could never forget.
He was Killer Killion’s Kid—Triple K, the media called him. The spawn of a killer with the genetic predisposition to be a murdering machine. One of the only ways Cain had found to curb the ugly urges was to force himself to attend these murder scenes. Force himself to witness the destruction.
His deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret—the thing he would never utter out loud because it terrified him: Sometimes he enjoyed himself.
“Son, you don’t have anything to prove. Not to me.” Mac used a caring tone, but that word—son—threatened to transport Cain back to his childhood. Back to his biological father using that word like a curse.
Not going there.
Cain stepped around Mac and moved to look out the window. The Victorian home sat on a miniature peninsula of land that jutted out into a large pond. Such an odd place for a house. A beautiful place—breathtaking and yet eerie in its loneliness and total isolation. Just the kind of place Cain loved.
Had location been a consideration for the killer? Had he finished with his bloody work, then stood in this very spot staring out the window at the water?
Cain sucked in a breath, held it for as long as his lungs would allow, then blew it out slowly. “I know I don’t have anything to prove to you. I do this for me.” He tried to make his tone firm, but it came out a little shaky. Mac the-FBI-guy would hear it, but Mac his-adopted-dad wouldn’t press. Time for a change of subject. “You notice anything odd about this place?”
“It’s not the typical.” Mac’s words were spoken on a sigh. “Not that there is a typical. This just isn’t like any other location I’ve been called to investigate.”
“Yeah. Victorian house. In the woods. On a pond. I get why our guy would like the isolation of this place. But there’s something more. It has to do with…” He had trouble finding to words to describe the gut-level truth inside him. “…all of it. The house. The woods. The pond. The family. It’s like this guy wanted the complete package.”
Mac nodded, his expression serious as a gravedigger. “You get that from the blood?”
“Just a feeling I have.” It was the kind of place he’d choose if he were going to plan a murder. Kind of like how salt and sweet tasted so good together, this was violence and peace in one location.
Enough stalling. Cain turned away from the window and faced the room.
Three walls were covered in Victorian-era wallpaper—rich gold background, red blossoms on a vine, and fancy peacocks. Ostentatious was the word that came to mind. One wall—the longest, largest wall—had been painted the same color as the paper’s background. Yeah. Four walls of peacocks and posies might’ve caused bleeding eyeballs.
Finally, Cain forced himself to look at the blood on the wall. Rosettes of red seeped into the wallpaper, the fat watercolor splotches almost blending in with the flowers.
Mac cleared his throat as if gearing up for a formal speech. “The techs released the scene this morning. They worked ’round the clock to get everything cataloged and bagged so we could get you on this ASAP. The blood is, of course, clean. I wouldn’t have called you in otherwise.” He pointed to the three distinct blood pools. “The family—Dad, Mom, girl—was found here. Killed here too. Forensics places their time of death at—”
“Mac.” Cain spoke the name loud enough to smother whatever the guy had been about to say. “Quiet.” He needed the absence of sound to see what happened. And he needed to do it now before he pussied out.
Mac clamped his lips closed, nodded, and moved across the room—out of the way.