Violence of the Father (A Trinity of Death Romantic Suspense Series Book 2) (9 page)

“Okay,” I say. “Do you have my cell phone? I left it at your apartment.”

“I put it in your top desk drawer,” she says.

I open my mouth, wanting to continue this conversation until we can find some middle ground—a place where the past few days can be erased—but no words come to me. Maybe this is how relationships end: when even the idle words fail you.

I don’t know how to save our relationship and after our last fight, and I don’t know if I really want to.

W
hen Julia opens her door
, she’s wearing a light pink silk nightgown with a cardigan draped over her shoulders.

“It’s almost eleven in the afternoon,” I say.

“And I get one day off a week,” she says. “Today is that day, so I was trying to relax as long as possible. Did you need something, detective?”

“I just wanted to ask you some more questions,” I say.

“Is this going to take a long time?”

“It could,” I say.

“Then, come in,” she says, indicating the inside of her house.

“Thank you,” I murmur, stepping into the dark interior. Her feet shuffle against the wood as she walks down the hall. I follow her as she turns into a small living room, filled with furniture with flower designs all over it. She sits down in the armchair, so I sit across from her on the couch.

“Do you have company often?” I ask, gazing around the room. Though there’s a large window, it’s covered by dark gray shades. Still, she has a couch and two armchairs, so it would seem like she expects company at least occasionally.

“Are you asking whether Philip ever came to my house?”

“You asked the question,” I say. “You might as well answer it.”

“He did,” she confesses. “I suppose that’s why I keep the shades drawn all of the time. I was ashamed when he would come here and I’m still ashamed now.”

“Is there a reason you’re ashamed?”

“I slept with a man who was married to someone else,” she states. “It’s not hard to understand why I’m ashamed.”

“Were you with Philip the few days before he was found?” I ask.

“A couple weeks ago?” she asks. “Yeah. I saw him the night before he disappeared. I remember because I spent the next few days trying to figure out why he stopped contacting me. I had begun to assume he was avoiding me until I saw in the news that the police had found him near Lake Erie.”

“That day was the fifth of April and he died about a week before that, so he was put there around the thirtieth of March,” I say. “Can you tell me where you were that day?”

“Well, if it was the same day he stopped contacting me, I was working most of the day and then moping around my house for the rest of it,” she says. “I was very…I was upset. Can’t you see that?”

She cradles her face in her hands and her shoulders begin to shake. This is where Lauren would be the better detective, but I walk over to Julia and place my hand on her back.

“It’s okay,” I reassure her. “I understand. It’s difficult when someone close to you is murdered, but I’m sure it’s harder when you can’t tell anyone what your relationship with them was.”

She raises her head and stands to reach up to me. Her fingers brush against my cheek.

“You’re a kind man,” she murmurs. “You do understand what it’s like to lose someone close to you, don’t you?”

“I do,” I tell her. Her hands move down from my face to my shoulders. They trace down my arms and move inward to my waist. She hooks her fingers around the loops on my jeans. I start to take a step back, but she holds me in place.

“I’ve heard rumors that this killer has left extra messages on the backs of the crosses,” she says. “Do you know anything about it?”

“I know some things,” I tell her. “But I can’t tell you about it.”

She pulls off her light pink cardigan, revealing her small shoulders, which are sprinkled with freckles. Standing this close to her, I have a great view of her cleavage.

“Come on,” she says. “It’s not going to hurt your case at all if you tell me a secret or two.”

“I don’t think I should,” I say.

She slips her hand up my shirt, touching each muscle in my abdomen. With Lauren’s cold shoulder, it would be so easy to fall into this. Infidelity is certainly a sin, but it has to be the most enjoyable one.

“If you tell me something, I’ll tell you a secret,” she says. She lifts up on of her legs propping her foot on the loveseat. It makes her nightgown hike up her thighs. Her legs are pale, but nicely shaped. As I gaze at her thighs, she grasps both sides of my face, looking up at me. “You are the most intriguing creature.”

“You’re an enigma yourself,” I say.

She takes my hand and presses it against her stomach. She slides it down until my palm is covering her white underwear.

“I bet with your detective skills you could figure me out,” she says.

I’ve gotten tired of this game. I lean in close to her, my mouth lingering near her ear.

“I can figure out some things,” I say. “Like the fact that you crucified Glenn Erwin, which means you killed Philip too.”

I take a step back from her. Her eyes are wide and her whole body has gone rigid.

“What?” she blurts. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t even know Glenn Erwin except for the fact that he adopted his son through our agency.”

“Yes, that is how you knew him,” I say. “So, tell me: were you having an affair with him? Is that why you skipped over the adultery commandment? Because your victims were all cheating assholes?”

“Victims?” she asks, pulling her skirt back on. “What are you talking about? You think that I killed either of them?”

“I think you killed both of them, actually,” I say. “And I have a witness that places you at the baseball field. You just told me that you knew both of them. I think I’m a few minutes away from a full-blown confession.”

“No! I didn’t kill either of them,” she insists, pulling her cardigan back on. “I would never kill anybody.”

“Miss Simpson, you just tried to seduce me. You were having an affair with a married man,” I say. “I’m going under the assumption that your moral compass is broken. You can’t expect me to believe that you were having an affair with Philip when there’s no record of you calling or texting him, there’s no mysterious charges on his credit cards or mysterious withdrawals from his bank account, and even though you live alone, there is zero evidence that a man has ever set foot in this house. You were not having an affair with him.”

She plops back into her armchair. “You’re a pretty damn good detective. Detroit should be proud.”

“Are you confessing?”

Her lips curl up. “Please. I was lying about the fact that Philip and I were having an affair, but I didn’t kill him or Glenn Erwin. Philip and I had flirted quite a bit and I was on the brink of convincing him to have an affair with me, but we hadn’t quite reached that point. I work part-time for a newspaper company—it’s called
The Rising Truth
, you can check my employment with the owner—and they wanted me to get close to Philip in order to figure out if he was stealing money from his boss by creating fake charges. My boss wanted me to ruin Philip over an old grudge and I went along with it because he paid me extra to do it.”

“You’ve lied to me repeatedly,” I say. “Why would I believe you now?”

“Because my boss will back me up.”

“Your boss at the New Hearts adoption agency also thought you were a saint, but clearly, you’re not.”

She snorts. “Patrick White is a kind, sweet man, and those are the easiest kind to fool.”

I unhook my cuffs from my duty belt.

“Come on,” I say. “Turn around, put your hands behind your back.”

“Are you supposed to tell me to put them on my head?” she asks.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back before I have to use force in order to get you to comply,” I snarl.

She turns around. I cuff her wrists.

“I usually wait until the second date before the handcuffs are brought in,” she says.

“Well, your second date is going to be at a women’s jail,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll have a very romantic dinner with somebody who’s having their first night without heroin.”

“That’s nothing,” she says. “You should try being around journalists with a looming deadline.”

“You have the right to remain silent. You might want to use that right.”

“No thanks,” she says. “This will be a great story when it’s found out that you arrested the wrong person.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“
T
here are
rumors that this killer is now being called the Commandment Killer for choosing his victims by those who have broken one of the Ten Commandments,” radio host Cameron Cassidy says.

I turn up the radio. Charlie Cassidy is an asshole shock jock, but he has enough sway over the general population that it can help me figure out what the rest of the city thinks about the police’s actions.

“Mary Fitzgerald allegedly crucified—that’s right, nailed the poor bastards to a cross—the first two victims, but now two more have popped up while Mary Fitzgerald is in prison. Some are questioning whether Mary was even guilty of the first two murders. The Detroit police are insisting that she confessed to the two murders, but there’s zero evidence that she actually did. You guys know me, I don’t like this holier-than-thou teen, but it does raise some questions—the biggest one being: are the Detroit police inadequate idiots? We have some calls coming in. Let’s answer a few.”

“He is right about one thing,” Julia says, handcuffed to the grab handle above the passenger window. “You guys are inadequate idiots. What reason would I have to kill those people?”

I turn down the radio.

“Well, you’re a religious nut who sleeps around with married men,” I say. “Maybe it’s shame and guilt that drives you to think you’re saving people by crucifying them.”

“I’m not a religious nut. I’m just religious,” she says.

I raise an eyebrow. “Really? So, you have all this religious stuff on your desk while you were trying to sleep with a married man for your job and you also just tried to seduce a detective. There’s something wrong with that picture. Either you’re not really religious or your idea of Christianity is so warped that you think you can get away with those things and murder people too.”

“I am a true Christian,” she insists. “God will forgive me for my sins and God would have forgiven me for premarital sex if it were to protect myself from blowing my cover for my job. God loves all his children, even the ones who mess up all of the time.”

I grip the steering wheel. “Did you ever want kids?”

“Excuse me?” she asks, more surprised than when I accused her of being a sociopathic serial killer. “Kids?”

“Yeah. Did you ever want any?”

“No,” she says. “I didn’t want any when I was a little girl and I don’t want any now.”

“Would you ever date someone who wants kids?”

“Detective, even when I’m not doing an undercover job, I still tend to gravitate toward married men. There’s a reason for that,” she says. “They don’t want anything too serious and neither do I.”

I nod. “That makes sense.”

“So, this doesn’t take a genius to figure out. You’re in a relationship with someone who wants kids, but you don’t want kids yourself,” she says. “Do you want my opinion on that?”

“Not really.”

“I’m going to give it to you anyway,” she says. “It’s good that you’re asking these questions and not assuming everything you think is right. It means that you care about your significant other. It’s a good step. The question always comes back to your motives though—why don’t you want kids? Because if it’s truly that you hate the idea of kids, that you hate the idea of raising kids, that you’re satisfied with your life without children, then you shouldn’t have them. There’s no point in bringing a child into a possibly hostile environment where you might resent them for existing. But if it’s because you’re afraid that you’ll mess them up or you think the world in general is terrible, you should at least think twice about it. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and realize that you could have brought new life into the world and simply didn’t do it because you were scared.”

“Well, thank you for your advice,” I say. “But we should remember that you’re the one in handcuffs in my car. I don’t think you’re the best person for me to take life advice from.”

“And you’re the inadequate idiot,” she says. “It’s better to be the immoral whore than the moron.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” I say. “Only the immoral think it’s better to be immoral.”

“And only the idiot is the one left with the short end of the stick,” she says. “I’m not the one having a mid-life crisis.”

“I’m thirty-three!”

She shrugs. I turn the radio volume back up.

“I mean, this killer is kidnapping people, keeping them hostage for at least a couple days in order for their crucifixion to be completed, and this has happened four times now,” Charlie Cassidy chuckles. “How do they not catch these guys? How hard could it possibly be?”

Everyone’s a critic.

A
s I pull
Julia into the interrogation room, Lauren gestures for me to come talk to her. I close the door, locking Julia inside, and walk over to Lauren.

“What did you find?” I ask.

“Nothing on Julia,” she says. “She has no connection to Mary.”

“And that’s why you wanted to talk to me?” I ask. “To tell me that you have nothing?”

“No,” she snaps. “I also found out that the flesh from your room is a DNA match to Philip’s…that means that the killer cut off some of his flesh before the animals got to him, like we suspected. This killer is merciless.”

“Should we stick together for now on then?” I ask. “The killer’s message in my apartment was clearly aimed at both of us and we can protect each other better together.”

“Or the killer will only try to kill us if we’re together,” she says. “If it’s infidelity he’s mad about and he enjoys making a scene of everything, he’d want to kill us together. It’s probably best if we just have a police officer park outside our apartments.”

Her logic is nearly flawless, but there’s a tone in her voice that tells me that this is about more than the killer. She’s avoiding me.