The Man from Gossamer Ridge

Gabe’s hair already looked as if he’d spent the last few hours running his hands through it. Another pass didn’t do anything to improve its disheveled state. “Yeah. They had a lot of questions.”

She hadn’t even considered they might think him a suspect. “They didn’t arrest you or anything, did they?”

“No. They called my brother Aaron, who’s a deputy sheriff back home. He vouched for me. That seemed to be good enough for the locals.”

“This is so weird. Your just dropping by that particular convenience store at that particular time—”

“Yeah, I think the cops were pretty struck by that, too. But it’s less than a mile up the road from my motel, and I hadn’t eaten much dinner, so I went to stock up on some snacks.” Gabe grimaced. “Not really that hungry anymore.”

Her chest ached with sympathy. He looked so tired. “You know, maybe what you really need is sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow—”

Gabe shook his head. “It’s fresh in my head now. Best time to discuss it.”

“Okay. How do you want to start? Just tell me what happened, start to finish? Or skip to the details?”

“Nothing really happened—I went to the store, shopped for the food, and by the time I got to the counter, nobody had responded to the bell over the door that rang when I arrived.” Gabe’s blue eyes met hers suddenly. “Can I have some water?”

“Of course.” Alicia kicked herself mentally for not offering something when he first arrived. She found a large glass and filled it with water, adding extra ice because she’d seen the way he’d eyed the glass earlier that evening with a mixture of amusement and mild disappointment. Southerners seemed to like an inordinate amount of ice in their beverages.

He took the glass from her. “Extra ice,” he murmured, a small smile curving the edges of his mouth.

She smiled back. “I guess you earned it.”

He cradled the glass between his large hands. “It was so quiet. I called out, thinking maybe the clerk was in the back and hadn’t heard the bell, but there was no answer.”

“So you went into the back?”

He nodded. “The back room was dark, but I could feel her. When I turned on the light, I knew exactly what I’d see.”

The haggard look in his eyes when he lifted his gaze to meet hers made her breath catch. She reached across and covered his hand with her own.

He looked down at her hand, slowly turning his own until his palm touched hers. “I know you told me the signatures were similar, but when I saw her lying there—” He broke off, seeming unable to find the words.

She waited in silence, realizing Gabe Cooper was dealing with a lot more than just finding a dead body this evening. He’d found Brenda Cooper’s body, too. He’d been younger than Alicia was now, no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. It might well have been the first time he’d ever seen a dead body outside a funeral home. And now, it had happened again.

Gabe cleared his throat, finally, and finished his thought. “It was like finding Brenda’s body all over again. The pose, the wounds, the woman’s shape and overall looks.” His gaze slanted toward her. “You fit the profile, Alicia. You have to know that.”

She nodded.

“You have to be really careful, do you understand?”

“I know,” she agreed. She’d thought of little else since she’d first realized just how much she looked like the previous two victims and, if Gabe’s reaction were anything to go by, the third victim as well. “Did you get a name for the victim?”

“Melanie Phelps.”

Alicia gave a small start. Melanie Phelps was in one of her psych classes. “I know her. About twenty-seven, shoulder-length dark brown hair, brown eyes—”

Gabe nodded. “This guy is a lot more specific than I ever really gave him credit for being.”

“How would you have known?” she asked sensibly. “You knew about Brenda, and after the fact, you learned about the other women in Mississippi and Alabama, but with the scrapbook practically destroyed, you couldn’t have tracked those people down and made the connections.”

“How did you do it?” Gabe asked, waving his hand at the folder still lying on her coffee table. “You’ve already connected these murders to previous murders, including Brenda’s. How’d you even know where to look?”

She listened for any hint of suspicion or skepticism in Gabe’s voice, but all she heard was curiosity. “It started with a favor I was doing for a friend. He’s a police officer, and he’d been the first officer on the scene at Meredith Linden’s murder—the one at the TV repair shop in Blicksville. Anyway, he went to college in Livingston, and there was a case there that had been a big deal in town, and Tony—my friend—thought Meredith Linden’s case sounded suspiciously similar.”

“So he asked you to work your profiling mojo?”

She bit back a smile. “Something like that. I went with the premise that there had to be other similar murders, unsolved, since the guy was still killing. I started gathering information on unsolved murders in Alabama and Mississippi. Anyway, sometime last month, Cissy came to me—she’d heard about my side project, since by then I was thinking seriously about making it the topic of my dissertation, and I wasn’t exactly being secretive about it. She told me about Victor Logan and his scrapbook.”

“And Brenda’s murder?”

She nodded. “The M.O. was so similar—curvy, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her mid-to late twenties, working alone late at night in a secluded area. Raped, then stabbed to death.” She held back a shudder. “I started searching through cold cases for that victim profile, making a list of possible victims based on characteristics the killer might find appealing—body shape, hair color, eye color, type of job—that sort of thing.”

“The convenience store was in the middle of nowhere,” Gabe said quietly. “Melanie Phelps could have gone her whole shift without seeing anyone. Just like Brenda.”

Alicia nodded, not missing the bleak tone of his voice. He’d clearly taken his sister-in-law’s murder hard. She wondered if there was more to it than his being the person who found her. “Did the police get anything from the security tape at the convenience store?” she asked aloud.

Gabe released a soft huff of grim laughter. “All the tapes were missing. The guy apparently knew what to look for and covered his tracks.”

Alicia grimaced. “He’s been at it a long time. He’s probably only getting better at it as he goes.”

“You know what? I shouldn’t have come here. I gave the police a statement. It’s probably going to be more accurate than anything that I can come up with right now.” Rubbing his temples, Gabe stood. “I should just go back to the motel and let you get some sleep. I can ask to see my statement tomorrow and refresh my memory then.”

Alicia caught him as he started toward the door. “Wait. Don’t go.”

He stopped and looked down, towering over her. The room around them seemed to close in on all sides, heat roiling the air between them. Alicia dropped her hand away from his arm, but her fingers still tingled from the feel of his sinewy muscles beneath her fingertips.

“What?” he asked, his voice little more than a murmur.

“You can take my bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

His eyes narrowed slightly at her blurted offer, and her cheeks grew hot with embarrassment. Had she really just invited a stranger to stay the night?

“I think the killer’s probably through for the night. You should be safe,” Gabe said.

She was tempted to latch onto the easy out he’d just given her, but that wasn’t really why she’d asked him to stay. Sure, having him around would make her feel exponentially less vulnerable, but so would a German shepherd.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, stepping away from him to try to regain her focus. “I just—you came here because of me, and you’ve had a rough night because of me. The least I can do is give you somewhere homey and nice to stay instead of some Route 7 motel room.”

“The motel’s not so bad,” he said. But she could tell the words were perfunctory.

She turned back to look at him. “I make a mean omelet.”

His lips curved. “Now you’re playing dirty.”

“And, okay,” she admitted, “I would feel a little safer if someone else was here tonight.”

He laid one large hand on her shoulder, the touch gentle and undemanding. Still, the flesh beneath her robe tingled and burned as if he’d caressed her. “I’ll take the sofa.”