A Righteous Kill (8 page)

She loved her parents dearly, but after six weeks of recovering with them, she’d had enough of their hovering.

It was time to take back her life.

Hero felt a sudden surge of unfamiliar anger. How had this bastard turned her cozy sanctuary into a sinister place? Her breath sped and her throat constricted as she turned and took a few hesitant steps toward the swinging kitchen door. Her heart beating in her ears muffled the silence, and her muscles went painfully rigid as adrenaline spiked.

Wait. Wasn’t this how the pretty girl died in all the movies? Was her hypothetical audience yelling at the screen?

Don’t go in there! If you do, you’re too stupid to live!

Run out the door and don’t look back!

Where’s your fucking weapon?!

Oh—a weapon. Good idea. She looked around her clean, bohemian-style living room for something she could use to defend herself.

Hmm, she sure had a lot of useless pillows.

Hero hurried back to the door and grabbed her umbrella from the coat/hat/umbrella stand, and brandished it in front of her. It had a metal pointy end, and she would face whatever was dead or alive in her kitchen. Her parents forced her to take martial arts with Knox and Demetri as a young teenager. It had been years and years, but probably she could kill someone with an umbrella.

Probably.

She wanted Agent Ramirez here. Luca. He would keep her safe.

Quickly pushing that thought away, she inched closer to the kitchen door on wobbly legs.

Pressing her back against it, Hero took a bracing breath before exploding into the kitchen, the point of the umbrella preceding her, ready to skewer any assailant.

Her war cry cut short when she faced an empty, albeit stinky room. Feeling foolish, she leaned the umbrella against the counter and reached for her stainless steel fridge. Yup, this was the culprit. She hadn’t stepped foot in her home for six weeks, of course every vegetable, fruit, organic cheese, marinated olive, and leftover would be rotten by now. She closed her eyes and groaned. Her last meal of wok fried tofu Pad Thai was only covered with plastic wrap and not in a container.

Dear sweet Jesus, all the rotten fish sauce.

Before she could stomach cracking the fridge, Hero opened the small window above the sink and hurried to open the living room windows to create a cross-draft. What had she been afraid of? Whoever may have been hiding behind her kitchen wall would have asphyxiated at the stench.

Throwing back her fringed, beaded blue and purple drapes, she was captivated for a brief moment by the blue of the Willamette River. Hero loved her view. In the unseasonable warm December weather, a few hardy souls still took their boats out on the choppy river, bobbing like rubber toys in a rowdy child’s bath. As much as she loved to watch, Hero doubted she’d ever dare go in the river again.

Averting her eyes and the direction of her thoughts, she lifted her gaze to the fluffy clouds drifting overhead. The weather channel called it partly cloudy. She preferred to think of it as partly sunny.

Renting a top floor, one bedroom, mother-in-law apartment off Riverside Drive had been the biggest stroke of luck. Situating it above a posh mansion over-looking the country club dock and the sparkling waters of the Willamette, well, that had been just brilliant.

It took all her body weight to open the stuck latch on the window. She loved to listen to the sounds of afternoon lake traffic. But there would be time to enjoy the view later. First, she had to get rid of whatever was making her apartment smell like a landfill.

Snatching the essential oil air freshener in the bathroom, she sprayed a liberal path into her bedroom and opened the window in there, as well. Clove and mulberry tinged the air but failed to dissipate the awful stench.

Puffing out her cheeks on a beleaguered sigh, she tried to steel herself for what she must do. No getting around the fact it was time to tackle the fridge. Hero groaned as she remembered the Kim Chi experiment waiting for her. It would be a dismal failure now, ruined by the extra five weeks it spent marinating.

Stef will have a good laugh at this,
she mused.

Stef and her sister, Andra, had her undying gratitude for taking her on that Mexican Rivera Cruise. It had been just what she needed to clear her head, escape the smothering sympathy of her family, and finish healing.

Hero remembered how angry Agent Ramirez had been at her for going to Mexico without his permission. She could remember the pure, hot fury in his silky voice when she’d called him from the airport to tell him she was boarding the plane.

“
Like hell you are
,” he’d growled.

“
Oops, can’t hear you, air traffic radio interference
!” She’d hung up on a string of curses that would have impressed a prison inmate.

She couldn’t depend on his incredible strength for everything. She needed to face her own fears. John the Baptist had been quiet since her attack. He’d never threatened her or acknowledged his failure. Even after the media furor. And he hadn’t killed anyone else.

That they knew of.

The FBI pulled their official protection from her a month after her attack. No more drive-bys, no more check-ins. The Bureau’s Senior Special Agent could no longer excuse the allocation of resources anymore.

Agent Ramirez had been angry about that, too.

Stalling, Hero leaned her hip against the sink and looked around her kitchen. It looked like a coffee commercial had frag-bombed in here.

Luca would look good in this room. It matched the mocha color of his smooth, perfect skin.

Hero shook her head to scrub away unruly thoughts. She had to be careful about this line of thinking. The many times they’d been together since her attack had been so perfunctory. They focused on the statements she needed to sign. They went over her story. And over. And over. Studied pictures to see if anything jogged more memories. Visited the crime scene once she’d been well enough to leave the house and drew diagrams. The whole time, she should have been focused on the despicable reality of what had recently happened to her.

Instead, her mind seemed to wander to the veins in Luca’s muscled forearms that rolled and flexed when he took hand-written notes on his yellow legal pad. She’d never seen him without that memo pad, actualizing his thoughts in strong, decisive scrawls. The greatest distraction was the way he smelled invariably of coffee and fresh linen. It was like a damn aphrodisiac.

Okay,
this
smell wasn’t going to dissipate without some help, and mentally conjuring any other scent with the cloud of rank organic death floating about was impossible. She hoped her landlord wouldn’t be stopping by to welcome her home and offer well-wishes. That would be so embarra—

Hero opened the stainless steel door and gagged. So much blood. Another death. Strange, yellow, lifeless eyes fixed in the stare of the dead.

Her lungs emptied and refused to inflate again. Purges of cold and hot alternated over her skin and her extremities lost all feeling as they began to shake uncontrollably as she stared at the gore. Her throat clogged on a scream and a sob.

Dear God. She’d thought she was safe. That the nightmare was over.

But it was just beginning.

Chapter Six

“In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead.”

~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Hero!” Luca called as he burst into her apartment. His semi-automatic did a quick sweep of the space. He gave an involuntary flinch at the scene. More from the odor than the sight of the dead goat head in the open fridge. He’d known what to expect, more or less, from Hero’s borderline incoherent phone call.

“Ms. Conner?” Vincent Di Petro called from behind him. She was no longer in the kitchen and the living room and bedroom were also empty.

Luca’s heart rate spiked. Were they too late? He’d raced over here as though demons from the seventh-level of hell gave him chase. He’d never forgive himself if she—

A flush from the adjoining room and a beleaguered feminine groan gave away her position. Luca sprang for the door.

She knelt with her forehead resting on the pristine porcelain of the bowl. The faint bitter smell in the room suggested she’d just tossed her breakfast. Her hair was secured in a loose bun skewered by a thin paintbrush. A few long tendrils tangled with her extravagant earrings.

“Are you all right?” he asked lamely.

She took a few deep breaths through her nose and hissed them out her throat before answering. “I’m okay.” Her voice echoed in the toilet bowl.

“We’re clear,” Vince’s Boston accent, tinged with some east coast Italian descent sounded more like ‘
Weah cleah
.’ “I’m calling forensics and securing the scene.”

“Copy that,” Luca called over his shoulder, unable to take his eyes off of Hero. He moved deeper into the bathroom to stand beside Hero on the shaggy, lime-green bath mat.

Bent over like she was, her short, flowing green sundress shared a hemline with her jacket, barely covering her round ass. That sure meant a lot of leg showing, and anything below the knee was covered with sexy brown leather boots. Hmm, the Mexican sun had dusted her skin with gold.

Goddammit
. He averted his eyes.

“Let me help you up.”

She lifted her head and regarded him for a second before accepting his outstretched hand. Luca had braced himself for the inevitable electric contact of her skin. He’d experienced chemistry with women before, but nothing like this. It was like he could feel every swirl in the pad of her fingers, every line in her palm, because they were all alive with kinetic energy. That same energy flowing from her fingertips jolted through him like a taser burst, not leaving any muscle, sinew, or piece of connective tissue unfazed. He’d been fighting this feeling for almost two months now, and he was damn tired of it.

Luca helped her stand, catching a flash of teal lace panty in the process. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think of the dead animal head in her fridge.

Boner killer.

“Agent Ramirez?”

He opened his eyes and cleared his throat. She looked pale beneath her tan. Her eyes had sunken back into her skull a little too much for his taste and her cheek bones stood out more prominently than they should. She was still the most temptingly beautiful woman he’d ever seen up close, but damn, she needed a cheeseburger and some sleep.

“Tell me what happened,” he demanded more tersely than he’d meant to.

Her eyes didn’t tear up. In fact, they narrowed on his face. “He
found
me.”

“There’s a note in here,” Vince called from the kitchen.

“Did you read it?” Luca asked Hero.

She nodded and stepped around him, heading for her living room. “It was some kind of bible verse,” she said as Luca followed her. “He still wants me dead.”

“Maybe you should sit in your bedroom,” Luca suggested, trying to prevent her from seeing the gruesome scene again.

“I want to look out the window,” Hero insisted, plopping onto the ridiculous, overstuffed sage green couch and refusing to look in the direction of the kitchen.

Jesus, how many funky pillows did one couch need?

“He was in my
house.
” She began to itch at the raised scars on the back of her hands. They were still pink, but had healed very well, considering.

“We can’t say that for sure.” Luca tried to sound reasonable. “It could be a copy-cat, or any sick fu—, er, weirdo who’d seen you on T.V. We need to verify it was him. That’s why we’re getting the Crime Scene Unit down here.”

She nodded, looking hopeful and frightened at the same time.

Luca couldn’t stand it, so he turned and stalked to the kitchen to examine the typed note Vince was studying.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body,

that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.

But yield yourselves unto God.

For he that is dead is freed from sin.

I will set you free.

“So free equals dead. Easy enough,” Vince whispered.

Luca cursed. “This is from the bible?” No wonder he didn’t read the thing.

“Been too long since I cracked open one of those,” Vince snorted. “We’ll have the nerd herd back at headquarters look it over.”

The shrill wail of sirens sounded in the distance and quickly drew closer.

“Sure.” Luca glanced up at Hero. She was staring out at the beautiful river, stubbornly avoiding her kitchen. Her hand idly rubbed at the side of her slim waist, where he knew a deep scar still healed.

Had that only been less than two months ago?

Luca told himself the tightness in his chest was just pity. He’d been eating, drinking, and sleeping John the Baptist for the better part of a year. More so these last two months. Living every moment trying to beat some invisible countdown to another dead body was taking its toll on his sanity. He’d chosen this, though. He could walk away from it anytime. Dump the file in another poor sucker’s lap and wash his hands of this job.

As a victim, Hero didn’t have that luxury. On top of it all, her home had been invaded.

Luca never had to grapple with the fear of impotence, but this shit was every bit as emasculating as a limp dick. He couldn’t very well hand-cuff her delicate, bangled wrists to his. No matter how badly he wanted to. And short of doing that, he couldn’t be sure of her safety. Since the night he’d spent with her in the hospital, she’d been part of his every unfettered thought. If he wasn’t pouring over case files, notes, photographs, profiles, and forensic evidence, he was wondering if she slept okay. If nightmares plagued her. If her body recovered properly.