“Who are you?”
After hanging up from Detective Montoya, Alvarez coordinated the information he’d given her with what was known about the crimes in Montana. Zoller had e-mailed some information on Anne-Marie Calderone and was checking to see if there had been any similar killings in the last year in other parts of the country. So far, the department hadn’t heard of women who had been murdered, the ring fingers of their left hands severed, nor had they found any other crimes where the Calderone woman’s fingerprints had shown up.
But, she told herself, it is still early.
The Pinewood Sheriff’s Department might be on the track of one of the most deadly female serial killers in history.
I’m getting ahead of myself, she thought, leaning back in her desk chair and taking a sip of her tea that she’d gotten from the break room. It was stone-cold, the tea bag still steeping in it, the orange-spice so strong she nearly gagged. Setting her cup aside, she concentrated on her computer screen, reminding herself that most likely there were no other identical crimes anywhere close by or she would have already found mention of it. Because of computers and communication systems, like crimes were more quickly identified.
She glanced at her e-mail, searching for more reports and heard a text come into her cell phone. One look and she smiled.
The short missive was from Gabriel, her biological son with whom she’d recently reconnected. No school!!! Along with the two words he’d attached a winking smiley face.
She quickly texted back, Have fun. See you soon.
Her heart swelled at the thought of him, the teenager who’d been raised by Aggie and Dave Reeve. Aggie was Dylan O’Keefe’s cousin and not all that happy that her son had discovered his birth mother, but the two women were working things out. Alvarez kept her distance as she didn’t want to intimidate the woman who had spent all of Gabe’s life caring for him, raising him, teaching him right from wrong.
She added a smiley face to her text despite the fact that she loathed all the emoticons. But when in teenaged Rome . . . She hit SEND.
She turned her attention back to the matter at hand—running Anne-Marie Calderone to the ground. Whether the woman who’d left her fingerprint on the belongings recovered from the victims was the actual killer or an accessory, or something else, she had some explaining to do. Some serious explaining.
Taking a swing at him wouldn’t help, so Anne-Marie let loose of the poker, stood, and dusted her hands.
“Who am I?” Ryder repeated. “I’m not the one with myriad disguises, a series of fake IDs, and multiple aliases.”
“But you wer
e spying on me. I don’t remember you being some kind of techno geek who could bug rooms. Where the hell are they?” she demanded and turned around in a tight circle, searching in the dark corners, the lamps, wherever.
“You never bothered to find out that I was in the Special Forces and specialized in communications, did you?” When she looked at him as if he were mad, he admitted, “Afghanistan. Nothing I really want to dwell on.”
“Was this pre- or post-cowboy?”
“Between,” he admitted, snapping the switchblade closed and putting it, along with her gun, into a pocket.
Now that it was light, she could see that pocket was already bulging. “Wait a minute. You have your own damn gun?”
He smiled then. That reckless, roguish smile she’d found so irresistible. “You didn’t think I’d come in here unarmed.”
“But you stole my gun.”
“Didn’t feel like having you use it on me.”
“I wouldn’t have . . . well, if I’d known it was you, anyway.”
Apparently satisfied that she wasn’t going to flee or attack him, he started stripping small microphones and cameras from the tiniest of places around the room—a crack in the fireplace, a dark corner of the bookcase, even the damn wood box.
“Really?” she said, watching in disbelief and suddenly
feeling bare and vulnerable, all of her worst fears coming to the fore. He’d been observing her every move, whether she’d been awake or asleep. He’d seen her break down or flop in despair or rail at the heavens. “I can’t believe you would do all this—”
“Believe,” he said without emotion.
She was trying to make sense of it all but couldn’t. She’d thought, once they’d broken up, she would never see him again. He’d been so furious with her that she’d thought he might strangle her. He’d said as much. “Go to hell, Anne-Marie,” he’d said, “and don’t look over your shoulder.”
So, why would he be there now, dissecting her life . . . no, injecting himself back into it . . . trying to force her to retrace her steps and return to a city she’d sworn she’d never set foot in again?
“I don’t understand why you want me to go back to New Orleans,” she said.