The Inquisitor

His gaze having followed the line of the long navy coat down to the low-heeled boots she wore, Sean raised his eyes once more to the psychologist’s face. Her features were striking but not classically beautiful.

She wouldn’t draw every masculine eye, he acknowledged, but she’d find her share of admirers. The bone structure underlying that clear olive skin was too anatomically perfect not to attract attention. The discriminating would recognize it would be just that perfect when she was eighty.

And you’ve always considered yourself discriminating.

The image he’d been studying was suddenly replaced by an advertisement for a local car dealer. Sean punched the button, shutting off the television, before tossing the remote down on the bed.

He walked across his motel room toward its wall of glass, where he pushed aside the draperies to look out onto the interstate that paralleled the wide right-of-way just across the parking lot. The scene he encountered was depressingly winter-dreary, although the climate was generally mild.

The weather would make the killer’s hunting easier. More people outdoors than in the northern cities. Not that the bastard ever seemed to have a problem finding victims.

Maybe what Dr. Kincaid said was right. Maybe he was so charming the women made it easy for him.

He would have had to be something special to charm Makaela. His sister had been nobody’s fool. And unfortunately she’d had a lot of experience with phonies.

Apparently not enough to see through whatever ploy her murderer had used to persuade her to go with him.

Sean put his palm against the glass, using its coldness to fight the fury that flooded his brain whenever he thought of the things that had been done to his sister. They could still bring him wide awake, sweat pouring off his body, as he struggled against the nightmare images of what she’d suffered.

The press in Detroit were the ones who’d christened her murderer “the Inquisitor,” a name horrifyingly appropriate. Too soon the people in this town would learn what the others had about the maniac in their midst.

Unless the bodies were too decomposed to make them obvious, as the first two here had been, most law enforcement agencies now recognized those signature mutilations. The special agent on the FBI’s task force, the one who’d put Sean onto the Birmingham murders, had recognized them as soon as he’d read the description of the last victim.

Now that the locals had connected the three, they would be forced to take the next step and admit that these killings were part of a series, which, through the efforts of the Bureau, had been linked and credited to one man.

An unimaginably cruel and sadistic madman.

The cops here would add whatever information they had managed to uncover to the profile that was slowly, but relentlessly, being built. And when it was complete…

Sean’s hand closed into a fist that he slammed into the glass. The window shuddered in its frame, although the blow had not been particularly hard. It hadn’t been done in anger. It had been measured. Like a gavel pounded against a judge’s bench. Or a hammer driving a nail.

The last one in your coffin, you bastard. And as God is my witness, I’ll be the one who’ll put it there.

Long after the television screen had gone dark, he couldn’t get the psychologist out of his mind. After a while, he stopped trying, allowing her image to fill his head.

She’d been so perfect he had wondered—briefly—if the cops had put her up to that interview. After mentally reviewing the clip, something he was able to do with almost complete fidelity, as if he were watching a replay, he decided that what he’d seen hadn’t been a performance.

Her slight hesitancy and the care with which she’d worded her opinions made him believe she had really been speaking off the cuff. The expression on her face, although quickly controlled, had made it obvious that the reporter’s question about the murders had caught her off guard.

That’s what you get for trusting the media, my dear.

He smiled as he raised the wine he’d bought on his way home in a semitoast before he brought the glass to his lips. He grimaced slightly at the taste before setting it back on the coffee table.

He had thought the merlot would make the evening more enjoyable, easing his disappointment about how quickly the locals had tied these three victims together. Now that they had, he knew it would be only a matter of hours before they made the connection to the others.

His intent was always to break the pattern so that wouldn’t happen. But if he were able to succeed in that, then what would be the point of the entire exercise? Old habits die hard, he admitted with a smile.

As some of them had, fighting the sweet release of death until the very end.

At that thought, somewhere deep inside his body was a wave of sexual pleasure, so sharp, so pure, it literally stole his breath. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to relish both the feeling and the memories that had provoked it.

Instead of the faces of the women whose suffering at his hands had induced that remembrance, the image of Jenna Kincaid clutching her coat against the cruel invasion of the cold as she wept for the child he had been again formed behind his lids.

They’re helpless to prevent what is being done to them, often by the very people who should be their protectors.

It was rare that someone was able to articulate so clearly, so precisely, the nature of the injustice he’d suffered. That she had done so without knowing anything about him.

She was obviously someone of value. Someone he should get to know. Someone he should allow to know him.

Not like the others, of course. She was above all that. Just as he would be when he was with her.

She, unlike the rest, understood what drove him. Interacting with someone who could comprehend that on an intellectual level was a luxury he hadn’t allowed himself in a very long time.

Simply another kind of indulgence, perhaps, but one whose time had definitely come.

Two

The sound of her door being flung open brought Jenna’s eyes up. The secretary she shared with three other therapists was aware that she used the last ten minutes of the hour to make notes on the session that had just ended. Why she would interrupt—

Except it wasn’t Sheila. Not just Sheila, she amended. Her secretary was looking at her over the broad shoulders of the man who seemed to fill the opening.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Kincaid,” she said. “I tried to tell him—”

“We need to talk.”

The intruder offered no apology for the interruption. The curt sentence had been more of a command than a request. Whatever his problem—and Jenna wasn’t using that terminology in the sense of something that needed treatment—she didn’t have the time or the inclination to deal with it today.

“I’m sorry. You’ll need to make an appointment—”

“How much?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“How much is it going to cost to talk to you? What I have to say won’t take an hour, but I’m willing to pay for one if that’s what it will take to get you to listen.”

As if to prove his point, he took his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. Behind him, Sheila pantomimed dialing and then bringing a phone to her ear, brows raised in inquiry.

Jenna shook her head, the movement slight enough that she hoped it wouldn’t be noticed by the man now in the process of opening his billfold. She was unwilling to call the police until she knew more about what was going on.

The guy didn’t look deranged. Actually…

Actually he looked pretty normal, if you thought normal was six-foot-something of solid muscle enclosed in black chamois and denim. He was carrying nothing in his hands, and the worn jeans hugged his narrow hips too tightly to conceal a weapon. He was also clean-shaven, although there was a hint of a five o’clock shadow on the lean cheeks.

The black hair was so closely cropped it couldn’t possibly become disarranged, which might have given her some indication of his mental state. The fact that it had so recently been trimmed seemed a point in his favor. People who had really “lost it” weren’t usually concerned with personal grooming.

His eyes, however, were the most compelling argument that there was nothing seriously out of whack in his psyche. They were a clear, piercing blue, the color startling against his tanned skin and ebony hair.

And right now they were focused on her face as he calmly waited for her answer, wallet open, long, dark fingers poised to pluck from it whatever amount she named. Still evaluating him, as she would any patient, Jenna noticed that his nails were neatly trimmed, the hands themselves completely masculine, fingers square despite their length.