I’m judging her harshly, I know, and I need to make sure I don’t go near the book until I’ve had some time to cool down and think it through. But it’s hard to do that when I’m sitting here looking at a picture in a family photo album of the man that so badly damaged the woman I l—
The second the thought runs through my head, I shut that shit down deep. I shove it into a dark, shadowy corner of my mind where I can either deal with it much, much later or simply ignore it completely. I’ve known Veronica four days, I remind myself. Four days. We’ve had passionate fights and even more passionate sex, but that’s it. That’s all there is to it. All there will ever be to it. Because the idea that I would be so stupid as to fall in love with a woman this damaged when I have absolutely nothing to give her, nothing to help her, is ludicrous. Veronica has been hurt enough. The last thing she needs is to deal with all the baggage that comes with me, too.
“Who is this?” I ask, pointing at the picture of Brogan as I interrupt Melanie’s soliloquy.
“That’s Veronica, silly. She—oh.” She stares at the picture hard for several seconds, a strange look on her face. “I didn’t realize he was in that photo.”
“Who?” I push.
“No one.” She takes the album from me, starts to pull the picture out from between the plastic. But she catches me watching her and at the last minute just straightens it up. “Just an old bodyguard of Veronica’s.”
Picture time is obviously over, though, because she closes the book and then stacks it on the coffee table underneath the other two.
“We should probably get back to the party,” she tells me as she pushes to her feet. For the first time since I got here tonight, she looks closer to her own age than her daughter’s. “The birthday girl can’t go missing too long.”
“Of course not.” This time I’m the one to push open the suite door that leads to the hallway. “I’m sorry for monopolizing your time.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Anything I can do to help the man writing about my baby girl for Vanity Fair. Did you find any photos you like in the albums? I’m happy to have copies made for the magazine.”
“There are a few, actually. But let me talk to Vanity Fair and see what they say first, before you go to the trouble.”
“Honestly, it’s no trouble. I think the one of her and me in the polka dot bikinis would be cute. And maybe the one of us on the red carpet when Salvatore won his first Oscar. And the one of us at the Acropolis. Her hair was adorable that day.”
And Melanie had been at the height of her beauty, in a skimpy little dress that showed her legs to their best advantage. Big surprise. Is it any wonder Veronica has trouble opening up? Melanie herself has so many agendas I’m not sure how she keeps them all straight.
The second we enter the ballroom, I feel Veronica’s eyes on me. I turn to find her and we lock gazes for several long, loaded seconds. I start to cross to her but I’m still shaken from seeing that photo of her with Liam Brogan, still burning with rage at the knowledge that he was ever that close to her, and the suspicion—no, the knowledge—that before he left here he’d been even closer.
The sick son of a bitch.
Back when I was a profiler working this case, there were a few things about Brogan’s murders that always bothered me.
The escalating age of the victims that I was certain was modeled after a child who was growing into a young woman while the agents in the case were certain the girl was long grown.
The voyeuristic staging of the body that the others always thought signified a fantasy that he was playing out but that had always seemed nearly performance-like in nature to me.
And perhaps, most important, the way the crime seemed so much more about the rape than it did the actual murder, as if death was an afterthought instead of the goal.
We had caught him, despite our differing opinions regarding motive, but the whole thing had left such a sick taste in my mouth that I’d left NCAVC not long after. But the case had haunted me, the questions I’d never gotten answered poking at me even through the success of Belladonna and my subsequent books. At the time, I hadn’t had a clue where those answers would take me, any more than I’d realized just who stood to get hurt by them.
Now I do, but I’m in too deep to stop. For myself, for the book, and—most important—for Veronica.
Which is why I stand my ground, eyes locked with hers across the crowded ballroom but unsure of what I should say to her—or even, what I want to say.
Finally, I say to hell with it and head toward her. After seeing that picture, after all the crap that’s been chasing itself around in my head, I want to touch her. To hold her. To make sure that, after everything I fear she’s gone through, she really is okay.