“Bob, get a detective over to Lillian Doyle’s apartment now,” Derek instructed. “The landlord will let him in, since the apartment’s now officially vacant. You don’t need a search warrant; Dr. Doyle broke her lease. According to the landlord, she and her son dropped off her key and enough cash to cover the remaining months of the lease. They then promptly left, for good. ERT’s heading over there now to sweep the place and to get a DNA sample from Luke’s comb or his toothbrush, and helicopter it down to Quantico.
“And one more thing. Luke Doyle didn’t take a leave of absence from Bellevue. He quit. Said he was taking his mother and relocating—permanently. Coincidentally and on the same day, a shitload of morphine and Nembutal disappeared. But this time there were prints. I guess when you’re planning to disappear, you get careless about using gloves. His loss, our gain. I had the M.E.’s office compare those prints to the ones on Luke Doyle’s coffee mug and stethoscope. Game, set, match. We’ve got more than enough to arrest him.” Derek gritted his teeth. “Now we just have to find him.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY
Consciousness returned in painful waves as she averted her face from the repugnant smell of the mattress she was lying on.
Where was she?
Memory filtered back, first in broken flashes, then in chunks, until it was all there.
Luke. All this time it had been Luke. A serial sexual killer. A stalker. A madman.
Her first reaction was overwhelming rage.
Luke Doyle had killed Elliot. And maybe Penny. And Lydia. And Cynthia. And the list went on and on. Including helpless Asian women who’d been sold into prostitution and then brutally butchered by her dear friend Luke.
Rage transformed into guilt. How could she not have seen it? How could she not have known? If only she had, all those people might be alive today.
Usually, she was an excellent judge of character. But not this time. Then again, Luke had never acted abnormally around her. They’d had lunch together, taken walks together, faced a world tragedy together.
But when she got right down to it, how much time had they really spent together? Talked?
Not a hell of a lot. Not alone and not in any depth.
He was a medical assistant. He healed people. She’d watched him do so with her own eyes. He’d been caring, compassionate, gentle.
And that same man whose gentle hands had healed the wounded had slashed people’s throats and carved up their bodies. How was that possible?
Even now he was a walking contradiction. He had put his entire world on hold to care for his mother during her final days. He’d even moved in with her to be the best caretaker possible. He’d literally given up everything in his life to ease her passing.
What life?
The thought suddenly struck Sloane like a ton of bricks. Whenever she and Luke had talked, it had been about work, about 9/11, about her recovery from her hand injury. Never a word about his friends, never a mention of a date, never a funny story from his past.
And, lately, never a word about anything but Lillian.
Because Lillian was his life.
Mentally, Sloane reviewed the detailed profile Larry had developed of their serial sexual killer.
An abnormal bond with his mother. A screwed-up view of other women—the “good girls” and the “bad girls.” A built-up rage that needed only a trigger to set him off.
That trigger was Lillian’s cancer.
It made perfect sense. When Lillian was first diagnosed, Luke had freaked out. The result had been Penny’s abduction. Others had followed. Then Lillian had gone into remission, so the kidnappings had stopped. That was the classic “cooling off” period ascribed to serial killers when their stressor ebbed. And now, when he knew his mother’s cancer was terminal, when he was about to lose her forever, he’d gone completely over the edge.
That explained the why. The rest of what was going on here was up to her to decipher.
Sloane shifted, trying—and failing—to change position, so she could get a glimpse of her surroundings. Abruptly, she realized why she couldn’t move. Her arms and legs were in shackles. Evidently, Luke didn’t trust her.
Smart man.
He knew how advanced her Krav Maga skills were. He wasn’t taking any chances, especially not after the ass kicking he’d taken from Tina.
With an iron will, Sloane fought the last vestiges of medication, forcing her head to clear. She couldn’t see much, but she could see that she was alone. That was a temporary luxury she couldn’t afford to waste. She had to assess her surroundings, her resources, and her limitations, plus work out her strategy, all before Luke came back.