Beg for Mercy (33 page)
She shoved herself up from the couch, afraid if she stayed a second longer she’d spend the next twenty-four hours back in bed with him instead of doing whatever she could to help Sean. “I’m going to take a shower—”
He caught her by the arm before she’d taken two steps. “Have some breakfast first.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said, and tried to pull her arm from his grasp. At that moment, her stomach rumbled, foiling her attempt to get away.
He gently steered her to the table. “Fighting crime burns calories, and you haven’t been taking care of yourself.” He guided her to the chair and pushed a plate of eggs and toast dripping with butter in front of her. “Come on, I scrambled them with cheese, just how you like them.”
Megan froze with her fork in her hand, afraid she was going to burst into tears. Why was it so easy for him to work past her defenses even when she was telling herself to be careful? To not fall for the lure of depending on him again, for anything, because he’d shown her how easy it was for him to turn his back on her.
But right now all she could think about was that they could have had a thousand mornings like this, sitting
across the table from each other, if things hadn’t gone so horribly wrong.
“Did you ever wonder what might have happened if—” It was only Cole’s stare, freezing her midsentence, that made her realize she’d asked the question out loud.
“If I hadn’t arrested Sean?” he finished.
Heat seared her cheeks and she fixed her eyes on her half-eaten eggs. “Never mind—it’s a stupid question and this isn’t the time.”
“No,” he said.
Megan’s stomach bottomed out and she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. She closed her eyes, wishing he would disappear instead of sliding his hand across the table to cover hers.
“I never let myself think about it because it hurts too much,” he continued in a rough voice. “I knew it was over, and the only way I knew how to deal with it was to shove what I felt for you away and pretend it didn’t matter.”
Shock washed through her, and she opened her eyes to meet his fierce stare. His fingers curled tighter over hers.
“You’re a really good actor, because I genuinely thought you couldn’t care less about me.”
Cole squeezed his eyes shut as though in pain. “It kills me that I made you feel that way.” His phone rang, and he cursed softly under his breath. “It’s Petersen. I need to take it.”
Megan nodded, still reeling, trying to figure out what it meant. Trying to convince herself that whether or not he had actually cared about her didn’t matter. It didn’t change how he’d treated her after Sean’s arrest.
And it didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of doing it again.
Yet as she thought of the weight of his hand on hers, the
look of dark regret in his eyes, everything he’d risked for her in the past week, it was becoming harder and harder to hold his past mistakes against him.
“Really? Within the next forty-eight hours? No shit.” A pause. “No, I understand you can’t. I appreciate you giving me this much.”
The snippet of conversation dragged Megan back to reality. There was a murderer to catch. Now wasn’t the time to navel gaze and reevaluate her twisted knot of a relationship with Cole.
Another pause and then he chuckled softly. “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do my best. Thanks for the update.”
“What did she say? Did they find Jack?”
“Brooks’s alibi checks out,” Cole said as he wandered back into the kitchen.
“Let me guess, he was at the club when it happened, and Talia Vega is the one covering for him.” There was something about that woman, a coating of dishonesty that clung to her like a bad smell. Many had cast off Megan’s assessment of Talia as the by-product of bitterness against the woman who’d been a key witness for the prosecution in Sean’s trial. But Megan knew there was more to it; she had always felt Talia knew something more than the story she’d told on the stand. Megan wouldn’t put it past Talia to cover for the man who had murdered Stephanie and attacked her and Cole.
Cole gave a soft chuckle and set his phone on the table. “Nope, turns out when Jack’s not working security at Club One, he teaches martial arts down at the Southwest Community Center. While we were at the Hillside Motel fighting off the bad guy, Jack was teaching Tae Kwon Do to a bunch of five-year-olds.”
Megan shook her head. “Are the parents trying to scare their kids to death?”
Cole shrugged. “From what Petersen told me, aside from a scrape with the Portland PD a couple years ago—he beat the crap out of some guy but was never charged—Brooks has been clean since he left the military two years ago.”
So despite the hostile vibe Megan picked up whenever she was around the former Green Beret, it looked like her suspect pool for the Slasher had just shrunk by one.
Megan was still processing that when Cole threw out another stunner. “They’re also working a solid lead on the guy from the hotel room and expect to make an arrest in the next couple of days.”
“Who?”
Cole looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “You really think she’s going to tell
me
that?”
Megan’s face heated, her stomach churning at the memory of Petersen’s accusations. “They think they’ve found the Slasher?” Megan’s heart skipped a beat at the thought.
“We’ll see,” Cole said as he got up and crossed to the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. “The MO is nothing like his recent kills. None of the degree of ritual or preparation. Of course, if he knew you were coming, he knew he didn’t have time for all that.”
Megan shivered, the small hairs at the back of her neck standing on end at the memory of the killer’s voice. He
had
been watching. He
had
known.
“But based on the preliminary examination,” Cole continued, “the knife he sliced me with is similar to, if not the same as, the one used on the Slasher victims.”
“I hope they get him,” Megan said, but she could tell by Cole’s raised eyebrow that he’d picked up on her lack of conviction.
Of course she wanted the killer caught. Whoever had brutalized those women was a monster, not to mention Megan would live in constant fear until he was caught, constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for a stalking killer to emerge from the shadows.
But with no information linking the Slasher murders to Sean’s case, Megan and her brother would be stuck exactly where they were right now. And if Megan couldn’t find anything, the police and the prosecution weren’t going to go digging around looking for a connection to a case they considered not just closed, but also nailed shut.
She began pacing across the living room, wracking her brain as to where to start. “The other victims,” Megan said abruptly, “did you find out if there were any more cases where they found evidence of a video recording?”
Cole shook his head. “If there was, it didn’t make it into the report. Devany’s eye witness account is the first we’ve heard that he might be filming himself.”
Megan grabbed her laptop from her bag, set it on Cole’s coffee table, and powered it on. “He might have posted it,” Megan said, almost to herself. “Do you know if they’re looking at anything like snuff film sites?”
Cole nodded. “Tasso had a team of people combing the Web, looking to see if videos of the victims showed up. As of two days ago, they hadn’t found anything.”
Megan typed the phrase
snuff film
into her search engine, her stomach falling as hundreds of thousands of results popped up. She felt the couch cushions shift
as Cole moved from the armchair to sit next to her. She clicked on a link for
seeherscream.com
.
“You don’t want to see this,” Cole said, reaching out and flipping her laptop closed before the page could load. “The FBI has an entire team of people looking at this and tracking down whoever is behind the Web site. What makes you think you’ll find anything they can’t
“They’re only looking for videos of the Slasher’s known victims,” she protested. “What if there’s a video of Evangeline’s murder too? No one else even knows to look for it.”
Cole rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Megan, you’re going to drive yourself crazy—”
“Too late for that,” she snapped. “Sean’s going to walk into the execution chamber in four days if I don’t do anything. Without something tangible, he won’t file another appeal. I know it looks like I’m grasping at straws—believe me, I know how hopeless this probably is, but what else can I do, Cole?”
Cole sat back against the cushions, wincing a little as his knife wound pulled. “Hell, you could come on my boat, let me take you out to the San Juans for the next month or so, pretend nothing else exists.”
Though his tone was almost joking, the look in his eyes stopped her heart in her chest. She knew what was shining in those night-dark eyes, knew it because she felt it, too, growing harder to resist every second she spent in his presence.
I never let myself think about it because it hurt too much.
He felt it, too, the need, the yearning for something, anything to grant him the power to go back and change everything, to go back to the time before they fell apart and make sure it never happened at all.
Tearing her gaze away from his was like ripping a scab off a fresh wound.
For a brief second, she let herself entertain the fantasy of disappearing with him and shutting out everything but the two of them.
It was so tempting.
In the next instant, the fact that she’d so much as entertained the thought made guilt burn through the fantasy like acid. “Cole, you know that could never happen.”
“Of course not. But is it so crazy for me to want to take you away, keep you from getting hurt any more than you already have been?” He reached out and threaded his fingers through hers, and Megan resisted the urge to lean into his strong, bare shoulder.
But she couldn’t keep herself from squeezing his hand. “Then help me. You’re a detective. Assume there is a connection between the murders. Tell me how you would start.”
Megan was killing him. Cole tried to steel himself against the pleading in her big green eyes, the clutch of her much smaller hand in his. He wanted to order her to forget about it, then fling her over his shoulder and carry her off somewhere he knew she would stay safe.
But he was as helpless against that look as he’d been when she’d stormed into his office, asking for something,
anything, to help exonerate her brother. The only time he’d resisted that plea was the night of Sean’s arrest, and it had haunted him ever since.
He didn’t doubt Sean’s guilt this morning any more than he did that night; he was still convinced beyond a doubt that Megan was doing nothing but torturing herself. And yet he finally realized this was the only way for her to get through this tragedy.
He’d spent the last three years wishing she could accept the truth and move on, make peace with what had happened so she could get on with her life. But he finally understood that there would be no peace, no moving on, until she exhausted all options, until she did everything within her reach to prove Sean’s innocence. If she was ever going to get over this—and frankly Cole had serious doubts that she ever would—it would only be if she knew in her soul that she’d tried absolutely everything, left no stone unturned in her quest to save her brother.
Cole didn’t have much—hell, any—faith that he could save Sean from the needle, and despite Megan’s belief in her brother’s innocence, he wasn’t sure Sean deserved to be rescued. Yet he couldn’t deny the feeling gnawing at him, the hunch that, although all the facts about Sean’s case appeared to be right in front of them, in black and white, he couldn’t completely rule out Megan’s notion that maybe they didn’t have all of the answers.
“I’d start with the basics,” Cole said. “Throw out everything you think you know from Sean’s case, and find out everything that was going on in Evangeline Gordon’s life at the time of her murder, see if there’s anything that connects her to the other victims.”
“I’ve tried that,” Megan said impatiently. “I’ve asked everyone involved in the case, repeatedly.”
Cole shook his head and pulled the laptop from her onto his lap. “You’ve been making a pest of yourself playing amateur sleuth,” he said as he brought up a Web browser. “Now, if it were me, and I weren’t suspended”—he couldn’t quite keep the trace of acid from the word—“I’d run all of the names through our system to see if anything comes up. But without that”—he typed
Evangeline Gordon
into the search engine—“you’d be surprised how much information ends up on the regular old Internet.”
“I’ve already run searches on Evangeline and anything related to the other cases, and there’s never anything new.”
Cole clicked on a link to a popular social networking site. Megan peered over his shoulder and shook her head. “That’s been up since before Sean’s trial. It’s a memorial page on FacePlace, set up by Evangeline Gordon’s college boyfriend.” Megan’s mouth pulled tight when she saw a post that read,
Finally the monster will die,
and another,
My sweet Evangeline will finally be at peace.
“Looks like he’s been posting a lot more since Sean’s execution date was set,” she said, snatching her laptop from Cole.
She scrolled through pages of comments vilifying her brother and grew visibly more upset with every post.
Cole reached to take the laptop back. “You don’t need to read this. Why don’t you let me—”
“No,” Megan said firmly. “I want to see what he’s saying.” She finished reading the written comments and went on the’s bee photo album, swallowing convulsively as photo after photo showed a beautiful, vivacious young woman
wrapped in the arms of her ex-boyfriend, who obviously adored her. “These are all old.” Her brows knit into a frown. “But these weren’t posted the last time I visited.” The new album was already several weeks old. Megan clicked through the first few, then froze. She leaned forward, squinting at the screen. “Holy shit,” she breathed, pointing at the screen, “that’s Bianca.”
Cole leaned over her shoulder to look, his coffee cup nearly slipping from his grip as recognition hit him full force.
Sure enough, there was a picture of Evangeline Gordon, arms flung high above her head as she danced. And there, a few inches away, only half illuminated by the glow of the flash, was the Slasher’s last confirmed victim.