Forbidden Temptation

Poor Frank. Tina had always been their mother’s favorite, more so after her death. Emotionally, Mary Frances had left her teenage son to his own devices, too wrapped up in grief for the child she’d lost to deal with the child left behind.

A glass-encased photo of Tina hung over the inscription on her tombstone, her pretty smile captured for eternity on a face that would never grow old. Her eyes glowed with life.

Daniel pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and polished the glass. Twenty-one and beautiful forever, he thought.

Only, she hadn’t been beautiful at the end. Her killer had marred that porcelain skin with slashes and gouges with his rage. He’d slit her throat, silencing her soft voice.

Daniel rose, gazing down at the tombstone. Did Orion kill you, too, Tina? Am I finally going to find him this time?

Tina’s grave lay silent, offering no answers.

Daniel turned and walked back toward the funeral home barely visible at the far end of the cemetery grounds. Today, another woman would be laid to rest, her life silenced by the slashes and strokes of a killer’s rage.

And, if Daniel was lucky, Orion would show up to see what sorrow his handiwork had created.

ROSE SMOOTHED the lapel of her dark brown suit and studied her reflection in the Impala’s driver’s side window. She looked sober and nondescript, she noted with satisfaction, her dark hair tucked into a simple knot at the base of her neck and her makeup at a minimum.

She’d come to Alice’s funeral to see, not be seen.

She spotted Melissa Bannerman and her fiancé, Mark Phagan, just inside the foyer of the Serenity Ridge Funeral Home. Melissa was simply incapable of blending into her surroundings, despite the conservative lines of her navy suit. Pulling her blond hair into a straight ponytail only emphasized her fashion-model cheekbones and cornflower-blue eyes. She was as tall as Mark, towering over most of the women and half the men in the foyer, drawing the eyes of every red-blooded male in the place regardless of the somber occasion.

Melissa’s gaze connected with Rose’s. She waved Rose over. “You remember Mark, don’t you?”

Mark managed a pained smile, obviously wishing he were anywhere else.

Rose followed Melissa into the small chapel, where Alice’s coffin took up the front. They found a pew in the middle, Mark entering first, leaving Rose on the aisle. Melissa inclined her head toward a sandy-haired man sitting by himself a couple of rows up. “That’s Richard Hughes, Alice’s ex.”

The man Alice had been drinking and dancing to forget, Rose thought. She watched him, wondering if he could have been the figure in the shadows. The police had probably questioned him already—significant others were always the first suspects in any murder investigation. Was he still on their list?

Melissa and Mark seemed to know most of the mourners in the chapel. Understandable; funerals were often like reunions, bringing together people who hadn’t seen each other in years. Melissa, Alice and Mark had all attended Alabama together, and many of the people in the tiny chapel shared that common past.

Just not Rose.

For most of her life, that wouldn’t have mattered. “Never met a stranger and never will,” her sister Lily used to tease.

But Rose wasn’t that person anymore.

She gritted her teeth against the creeping sense of self-consciousness and glanced at the growing crowd filling the pews behind her, letting her gaze move smoothly from face to face without settling long enough to attract unwanted attention. The man standing in the back of the chapel looked familiar; it took a moment to place him as Detective Carter, the policeman who’d taken her statement on Monday after Alice’s murder. If he recognized her, he gave no indication.

Rose started to turn back around when her gaze settled on a tall, lean man in a charcoal suit entering the back door of the chapel. Her heart seized.

It was the man who’d accosted her outside her house the day after Alice’s murder. The one named Daniel.

He met her gaze, his eyes narrowing briefly. He inclined his head in silent greeting as he slid into one of the back pews.

Rose faced forward, her heart racing. Who was he? Why was he here? The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Was he looking at her, even now?

She leaned toward Melissa. “Do you see the man at the back of the chapel, wearing a dark gray suit with a blue-and-gray striped tie?”

Melissa glanced over her shoulder. Her eyebrows arched. “You mean, Daniel Hartman? Weird. Wonder why he’s here.”

“You know him?”

“Yes. He’s a famous profiler. Used to be with the FBI. He’s a professor or something now. Haven’t you ever heard of him? He’s always on the true-crime programs on TV, talking about this case or that.” She lowered her voice. “I’m considering publishing a new book of his.”

As the funeral director took the podium and began the service, Rose slumped in the pew, mulling the new information. She barely heard any of the eulogy, her earlier tension fading into annoyance as she realized just how many hours over the past couple of days she’d spent in fear of her mystery man, when he could have eased her worries with a simple introduction.

After the service, Melissa turned to her. “I need to talk to her parents for a minute. Are you going to the graveside for the rest of the service?”

Rose shook her head. She’d had enough of death for today. “I’ll call you tomorrow and we can get back to planning your wedding. Happier things, right?”

Melissa gave her a quick hug. “Thanks for coming.”

Rose stood, stealing the opportunity to glance at the pew where she’d last seen Daniel. He was no longer there.

She looked around the chapel, trying to spot him in the milling crowd heading for the exit, but she couldn’t find him. She did spot Detective Carter again and, for a moment, she considered flagging him down to tell him about Daniel. The police might want to know they had a rogue profiler sniffing around their case.

But telling Detective Carter about Daniel meant admitting she’d been at Alice’s apartment the morning she’d turned up dead, a piece of information Rose had withheld from the detective during their brief interview a couple of days earlier.

He’d want to know why she’d run away when the police showed up. And the only answer that made sense was the one she had no intention of giving. Detective Carter had seemed the open-minded, reasonable sort, but she wasn’t about to tell a cop that she had foreseen the deaths of three of the slasher’s victims.

She joined the mourners heading for the exit, peeling off when she reached the foyer to find a restroom. Spotting the signs at the other end of the foyer, she started weaving her way through the crowd.

Halfway there, the sound of Mark Phagan’s smooth baritone caught her ear. “It’s no big deal—I just had other stuff to do—but Melissa thinks I was with y’all at the game. So if it comes up, that’s where I was, okay?”

Rose followed his voice and found Mark standing a few feet away, addressing a couple of men who looked to be around his age. Both men nodded, one shooting a wry half-grin at the other as if sharing a private joke.

Rose’s heart sank. Mark had already cheated at least once during the engagement. Was he doing it again?

She gave herself a mental shake and pushed on toward the restrooms. Whether Mark was cheating or not, that was for Melissa to figure out by herself. The last time Rose had tried to interfere with the course of true love, her efforts had ended in tragedy in the middle of Bridey Woods.

The restroom was full, women waiting in single file along the wall for their turn inside. Rose fell in behind the last woman, letting her gaze wander to the opposite wall where a bulletin board hung next to the door of the business office. Amid a sea of white sheets of paper full of tiny black type, a sunny yellow flyer gleamed like a beacon, catching her eye.

Special Neighborhood Meeting, read the bold headline across the top of the page. Below, an announcement of free CPR lessons listed a date and time. Too bad it wasn’t self-defense lessons instead, Rose thought.

She cocked her head. Why couldn’t it be? Why couldn’t the Southside neighborhood association set up a special meeting, bring in the police or a self-defense expert to tell women how to avoid being the killer’s next victim? The women in the neighborhood weren’t receiving any warning at all. The police weren’t putting suspect sketches on the evening news or even admitting that the killings were connected—didn’t want to “panic” people.

But if the neighborhood association got involved, the police wouldn’t have much choice, would they? Get enough voices clamoring for answers, and the police might have to admit what Rose already knew: There was a killer stalking Southside and, if he wasn’t stopped, more women would die.

She had the association president’s contact information filed somewhere at home. She’d call as soon as she got there.

DANIEL WAS WAITING in the funeral-home foyer when Frank Carter emerged from the chapel. His old friend met his gaze with a wry half-smile. “Imagine meeting you here.”

“Just thinking of you a little while ago,” Daniel said. “Stopped by Tina’s grave on the way in.”

Frank’s expression darkened. “See any ghosts?”

Not quite the response Daniel expected. “Only the ones in my mind. Still avoiding the place?”