Crossing the office, I round the desk and locate the pizza box where it now sits on the chest under the window. Where I know I didn’t put it. Kane was here. That is the only explanation. Thinking back to last night, I recall pulling the note from the pizza box and setting it on my desk. Planning to sit down, I pull out my chair to find my briefcase on top—my briefcase, where I’d stuffed the rest of Junior’s love notes. I grab it and sit down. Of course, the note that was on the desk is gone. On the laughable chance that Kane didn’t look in my briefcase, I unzip it, but as expected, those notes are gone, too.
Kane has every note Junior has left for me up to this point, unless he missed the one I balled up and threw on the floorboard of my rental, which I doubt. I glance up at my board on the wall. I’ve listed out names and pinned note cards there, all of which entail details about my thought process in this investigation that I would not willingly share with anyone. I punch my keyboard, and my computer comes to life with the open e-mail that included Woods’s suicide video. “Stupid,” I hiss. “Stupid, Lilah.” I stand up, pressing my hand to my forehead. “I shouldn’t have gone there last night, and yet I was about to go back there now. I can’t. Not after last night, and not with my history with Kane. And now I’m talking to myself.”
My hands flatten on the desk, a storm brewing inside me, and I let it. I embrace it. Being alone with Kane gets me fucked one way or the other, any way and every which way. The man drugged me. He then invaded my private space, stole those notes, inspected my evidence, and worst of all, left me with Cujo, as if I could really use him while sedated. If anyone should know what that means to me, it’s Kane. Which is exactly why I never even considered him a risk last night. Because that night binds us together and forces trust. At least, that’s my excuse for trusting him. But not again.
I consider looking at the security feed, but watching Kane carry me to bed and then search my house isn’t good for him or me right now. Instead, I shut my MacBook, stick it inside my field bag, and zip it up. It’s on my shoulder next, and when I would head for the door, I pause to look at the boards to my left, the words MURDER GIRL written in big, bold letters. Kane doesn’t know about that nickname, but he’ll know that’s me. He knows Murder Girl. She existed long before the night I stabbed a man twelve times. She’s the one who is too comfortable with dead bodies. She’s the one who understands him. But what he doesn’t understand is what the badge is to me or what I’ll do for that badge. And how can he? He believes that night and the secret it created removed it from our equation. I have to find a way to add it back in.
I start walking and I don’t stop until I’m at the door to the garage in the kitchen, standing at the security panel, and with a quick scan, I find Kane left it armed. “Aren’t you a gentleman?” I murmur, considering he left me here, drugged.
Exiting the house, I’m inside the basic white rental that I’m quite certain will offend half the population of this town, but I like it simply because it reminds me of two things: I don’t belong here anymore, and I’m not staying. It also stands out among the Mercedes and BMWs and tells people I’m coming, which isn’t exactly a good thing. But then, today at least, Kane is expecting me, and I’ve decided I don’t want to disappoint him. And his office is the exact right location for an official visit from Agent Lilah Love.
The moment I pull onto the road, I can feel the tug of another flashback: The beach, salt on my lips. Sand at my back. I turn on the radio, blasting the volume. A song I don’t know comes on, but as soon as the lyrics “I hate you, I love you, Don’t want to but I can’t put nobody else above you” lift into the air, I turn the damn thing off again. I don’t do music when I work cases. Lyrics tell stories that distract me from the story every dead body I study has to tell about how they died and who killed them. The one I stabbed over and over certainly told a story about me. I would call it an act of rage and passion. I’d suggest the person who planted that knife in a man’s chest a dozen times would feel remorse, when I did not and do not. I’d suggest they wouldn’t kill again, but I will.
And if all goes as planned, it will be called my job rather than murder, but nothing goes as planned in my world.
I pull into the parking lot of Kane’s offices, and I don’t bother to look for his fancy, sleek, sporty Mercedes because I know that it will be in the private garage underneath the castle that is the building. Lucky for once in this town, though, I snag a spot near the front of the building and open the door. I’m out of the car in an instant, and I grab my field bag with my MacBook inside and pop the trunk, sticking it inside before I lose it, too. My purse goes with it, but not before I attach my badge to my waistband.
Once I’ve shut the trunk, I face the building, and I start walking toward the main castle, ignoring the two side buildings, because Kane Mendez is always at the core of Mendez Enterprises. And per his near confession last night: the Mendez cartel. I cross the wooden bridge that is the path over a man-made moat. I enter the building and ignore the pretty brunette behind the triangle-shaped stone desk and head to the stairs.
“Excuse me,” she calls out, but I ignore her. Kane knows I’m coming. He has people watching me and this building. He knows I’m in the building by now. I don’t need “sweet thing” down there to announce me in yet another way. I’m at the top of the stairs before she finishes her fourth excuse me, which is now a bit louder, as if I just haven’t heard her the other three times. I turn down the hallway and walk toward the desk outside Kane’s office where Tabitha sits, minus any more originality today than the last time I was here. She’s still bleached blonde, with her fake, giant-ass boobs hanging out of a silk blouse with numerous buttons undone that turn it into a slut show that could have been professional.
I pass her without a word, approaching Kane’s double doors, when she says, “Drama follows you, Lilah Love.”
“No,” I say without looking at her. “Dead bodies follow me.” I glance over my shoulder at her. “You should remember that.”
And with that statement, which really had no purpose other than it felt really damn good, I open Kane’s door.
CHAPTER FIVE
I step inside Kane’s office and find him sitting behind his desk, just in time to hear him say, “She’s here,” into his intercom and then release the button.
With exaggerated drama that I reserve for moments when I want to be a smart-ass or simply announce my fucking presence, I use my body to shut the door, but I don’t hang out and wait for it to grow roots. I rotate and charge toward Kane and that King Mendez desk of his that he doesn’t get to use as shelter. By the time I round the wooden atrocity, he’s standing, towering over me in a charcoal suit and a purple shirt with black stripes and some sort of black-and-gray tie. It’s flashy, expensive, and works on him when it would not on nine out of ten other people. But then, while I keep a low profile—aside from the door drama, of course—and favor my black nondescript looks, his entire persona says “look at me” with the intended message of “I have nothing to hide.” A lie he tells the world and, after he drugged me to keep me from knowing what happened last night, apparently me.
We stand there for a beat or ten without words before he says, “Lilah,” and the very fact that he says it like sex is all it takes for me to snap.
I slap him in the face, because my bare fist is too small to hurt him the way his jaw would hurt me. It’s also a disgrace to a man to be slapped, which is why one UFC fighter I’ve watched here and there does it to his opponents. And Kane is my opponent. He turns his head with the force of the blow, my palm stinging in the aftermath.
“Well now, beautiful,” he says, fixing me with a brown-eyed stare. “I know you like it rough, but is now the time? We both have questions we want answered.”
I slap him again, and this time he catches my wrist before I pull back. I try to slap him with my free hand, and he catches it as well, this time before contact. “You get two, not three.”
My gaze flicks to the handprint on his right che
ek that matches the one on the left before I meet his stare and say, “Two was pretty damn satisfying.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about your stalker?” he demands, his question low, lethal, his anger banked just beneath the surface, while mine is the cherry on top of every lie he’s told me. “Because we both know that’s what we’re dealing with here,” he adds.
“Let go of me, Kane,” I bite out, my voice taut with impatience. No. Make that a desire to smack him again.
“After you tell me about your stalker and the notes.”
“Let go of me, Kane,” I repeat slowly, “or my next move will be a knee to your family jewels. And I promise you, it will be hard enough that neither of us will have to worry about our urge to fuck ever again.” My jaw sets hard, but he doesn’t release me. “You drugged me,” I remind him, “and then searched my house before leaving me with a gun that I was too drugged to use. So if you think I won’t do it—”
He releases me but doesn’t step back. “I didn’t leave you with a gun you couldn’t use. I kept you at my house until sunrise, and I left a team guarding your place, front and back.”
I don’t analyze why that makes me angrier. That’s for later. For now, there is this: “I’d pull my gun on you and back you off, Kane, but I swore the next time I did that, I’d shoot you. And I need information from you.”
“I’m all yours, beautiful,” he says, holding his hands out. “I always am.” He motions to the sitting area to his left and behind him. “Let’s sit and make this peaceful.”
“Peaceful, my ass,” I say. “You drugged me. Is the old man dead?”
“He is not.”
“Is he in your garage?”
“He’s been set free.” And with that simple, unexpected answer, he sits down on the desk, hands on either side on him.
“Just like that?” I demand, claiming a new position in front of him with the window behind me, and not because that’s what he wants: Me boxed in. Me closer to him. Because I don’t want to shout across the room as I talk about his crimes that I haven’t reported.
“We came to an agreement,” he says without hesitation—not that Kane Mendez ever hesitates.
“What agreement?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” he replies.
“But it does, doesn’t it?”
“Nothing you need to know,” he amends.
“Deniability, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you filming me now?”
“Yes.”
“Ammunition, right?”
“That’s not what last night was about, and you know it.”
“It was a threat to expose me if I arrested you,” I say.
“It was me giving you a reason to walk out of the door.”
“And when I didn’t, you drugged me.”
A muscle in his jaw flexes. “It was necessary.”
“Necessary? Really? That’s your rebuttal? Even for you, that’s lame, Kane.”
“If you were ever questioned about Romano, you needed an out. You can now say that I drugged you. You woke up in bed. And I’ll back that story.”
“Taping me tells me that you’d bribe me.”
“That isn’t who I am with you, and you know it.”
“But it’s you with everyone else?”
“This is you demonizing me to avoid guilt and make yourself feel good about you. Everything I did, I did to protect you.”
“That’s how you justify searching my house and looking at all my research notes?”
“I saw someone hide their face and put a note on your car. I asked you about it. And like it or not, I know you. And I knew by your reaction that you were in trouble.”
“I can handle my own trouble.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m ten feet under in this, right along with you.”
“I’m crystal clear on how ten feet under you are in this, Kane.”
“Are you? Because the tone of those notes says that your note writer is trying to turn you against me. And that’s damn convenient, considering a woman was killed in one of my rentals and two of Romano’s people had their heads chopped off. Obviously meant to turn attention on me.”
“I never for a minute believed you killed that woman, and for the most part, I didn’t believe you chopped off the heads.”
He arches a brow. “For the most part?”
“Just being honest, the way you say you’re honest with me.”
“You know—”
“That you wouldn’t leave a trail that leads to you?” I ask, and I don’t wait for an answer. “Yes. I do, but I also know you’re capable of killing. Because like it or not, I know you, too. More than either of us likes to admit.”
“And yet at some point you convinced yourself that I’d act with stupidity and kill Romano’s men.” He doesn’t give me time to reject that statement, continuing with, “And you didn’t come to me about those notes. In other words, your note-writing stalker has succeeded in dividing us.”
“For a Yale-educated attorney, you might not be stupid, but you’re choosing to play dumb. Those notes didn’t scare me and they didn’t divide us. My badge did.”
“You always had a badge.”
“You didn’t always run the cartel. Your father did.”
“I don’t run it now.”
“You inferred otherwise last night,” I say.
“Stop deflecting. Tell me about the notes, Lilah.”
“Says the king of deflection. They started the night I arrived. I was on the beach, and when I got back to the house, someone had thrown a bloodlike substance on the sliding glass door and left a note. It spiraled from there.”
“They read amateurish with an almost adolescent effort.”
“Which could mean that this person wants me to underestimate them, or they’re just plain crazy.”
“Or they really are amateurish and adolescent.”
“Maybe. I doubt it. Have you ever seen the notes Son of Sam left at his murder scenes? They were in childlike script, and one of them read along the lines of, ‘I say goodbye and good night. Police: Let me haunt you with these words. I’ll be back! I’ll be back! To be interpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!’” I pause to clarify. “He actually wrote ugh. And it was signed with, ‘Yours in Murder, Mr. Monster.’ His victims,” I continue, “inclusive of those who lived and died, neared twenty.”
“You’re telling me you think this person is violent.”
“I’m telling you that no two killers are alike. Just because he, or she, is not the kind of killer you understand does not make them not a killer. And furthermore, adolescentlike behaviors do not necessarily preclude or exclude a propensity for violence. Bottom line here, Kane: this person knows our secret. And if that person knows, so, most likely, does someone else.”
“Which means we need to know two things: Who knows and what do they plan to do to use it against us? Because they wouldn’t be taunting you unless that’s what they intended.”
“For two years there has been silence,” I say. “And then I returned and the silence ended. This was never about you, was it?”
“No. In my world, people claim their sins. No one came forward. In fact, the more I dug for answers, the deeper they seemed to get buried.”
“So whoever ordered my attack—because we both know it wasn’t random—wanted me gone then. And they still want me gone.”
“And yet someone was killed in your city with the exact same tattoo as the man who attacked you here.”
“What are you saying?”
“Someone sent you a calling card to come home.”
CHAPTER SIX
There’s no such thing as a coincidence.
I live those words during my investigations, but somehow, I’ve missed the importance they play in these murders. “The murders in LA were to get my attention. The murder of your employee, at your rental, when I arrived, was to get our attention. Both assumptions worthy of a debate about where th
at might lead us.”
“Agreed,” Kane says. “Assuming those things are correct.”
“Can we now also assume that Romano is behind all this?”
“He’d be dead if I believed that.”
“But he approached me at the tattoo parlor,” I counter.
“I’d refused his meeting and told him he had to meet with my uncle, who, contrary to your belief, runs the cartel.”
“He approached me at the tattoo parlor. That’s not a coincidence or just because he couldn’t reach you.”
“I said that to him, but he had a prepared answer. He’d been sitting on the anonymous tip for years. When you got back in town, he called me. That’s proven true. His first attempt at contact was the day after you arrived. And when you showed up on his turf, and at the particular parlor that is known for that tattoo, he didn’t want you to end up dead and have me look to him.”
“But he knows about the tattoo. He told me that the tattoo was a blood tattoo.”
“He shared that information with me as well.”
“What does that mean? Blood tattoo?”
“There are whispers of a group called Blood Assassins who are supposedly inked in blood tattoos, but no one believes they really exist.”
“The bleeding Virgin Mary? Is that the blood tattoo?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know this from the beginning?”
“No. I knew they had ink but not what kind of ink. People clam up on this topic.”
“Then they’re afraid, which means they must have a reason. And I find that where there is fear there is fire.”
“Perhaps not the fire you’re assuming. These assassins could well be a story created to cover up a crime, and that snowballed into a bigger piece of fiction.”