"You want my clothes now?" he said as he held up a trash bag.
"Yes, thank you." She accepted the load through her window and put the things down on the floor. "Boots, too?"
As he nodded, he said, "Can I bring you some coffee? I don't have much in my kitchen, but I think I can find a clean mug and I got instant."
"Thanks. I'm okay."
There was a pause. "There a reason you're not looking me in the eye, Officer?"
I just saw you buck naked, Detective. "Not at all." She pegged him right in the peepers. "You should get inside. It's chilly."
"The cold doesn't bother me. You going to be here all night?"
"Depends."
"On whether I am, right."
"Yup."
He nodded, and then glanced around casually like they were nothing but neighbors chatting about the weather. So calm. So confident. Just like his father.
"Can I be honest with you?" he said abruptly.
"You'd better be, Detective."
"I'm still surprised you let me go."
She ran her hands around the steering wheel. "May I be honest with you?"
"Yeah."
"I let you go because I really don't think you did it."
"I was at the scene and I had blood on me."
"You called nine-one-one, you didn't leave, and that kind of death is very messy to perpetrate."
"Maybe I cleaned up."
"There wasn't a shower in those woods as far as I saw."
Do. Not. Think. Of. Him. Naked.
When he started to shake his head like he was going to argue, Reilly cut him off. "Why are you trying to convince me I'm wrong?"
That shut him up. At least for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, "Are you going to feel safe tailing me."
"Why wouldn't I?"
For the first time, emotion bled through his cool expression, and her heart stopped: There was fear in his eyes, as if he didn't trust himself.
"Veck," he said softly, "is there anything I don't know."
He crossed his arms over that big chest of his and his weight went back and forth on his hips as if he were thinking. Then he hissed, and started rubbing his temple.
"I've got nothing," he muttered. "Listen, just do us both a favor, Officer. Keep that gun close by."
He didn't look back as he turned and walked across the street.
He wasn't wearing any shoes, she realized.
Putting up the window, she watched him go into the house and shut the door. Then the lights in the house went out, except for the hallway on the second floor.
Settling in, she eased down in her seat and stared at all those windows. Shortly thereafter, a massive shadow walked into the living room - or rather, appeared to be dragging something? Like a couch?
Then Veck sat down and his head disappeared as if he were stretching out on something.
It was almost like they were sleeping side by side. Well, except for the walls of the house, the stretch of scruffy spring lawn, the sidewalk, the asphalt, and the steel cage of her Crown Victoria.
Reilly's lids drifted down, but that was a function of the angle of her head. She wasn't tired and she wasn't worried about falling asleep. She was wide-awake in the dark interior of the car.
And yet she reached over and hit the door-lock button.
Just in case.
Chapter 4
As the demon Devina wandered up and back across cold concrete, her path was not straight, but full of curves. Winding in and out of rows of bureaus, the discordant tick-tocking of hundreds of clocks drowned out the clip-clip of her Louboutins.
Everything had been given a place here, her collection safely moved into the basement of this two-story office building. The location was perfect, just outside of Caldwell's downtown, and to appear legitimate and uncontroversial, she projected an illusion that a human resources firm took up the space above where she was pacing: As far as people were aware, a hustling, bustling business had rented the place to accommodate its expansion.
Stupid humans. As if in this economy anyone was hiring or could afford hand-holding when it came to filling jobs.
Pausing by a Hepplewhite bow front that had been made in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1801, she ran her hand over the mahogany top. The original finish was still on the piece, but then again, she'd kept the thing safe from sun and water damage since she'd bought it over two hundred years before. In its drawers were baskets full of buttons and rows of spectacles and jumbles of rings in boxes. The other bureaus had similar objects, all personal items fashioned out of various metals.
Aside from her mirror, this collection of hers was the most precious thing she had. It was the tie to her souls down below, the tethering security she needed when she felt insecure or stressed-out here on earth.
As she did now.
The problem tonight, however, was that for the first time since she'd started hoarding aeons ago, she was not calmed, nor reassured, nor eased. Walking around this repository of objects, she was summarily unaided by the addiction that had long proved to e so useful.
And what seemed even worse? This evening should have been "a seminal moment," as her therapist called them, a time to center herself and savor her accomplishments: She had won the last round against Jim Heron, and even though he and Adrian and Eddie had infiltrated her previous lair, she had safely gotten her things installed in this new, secure facility.
She should have been f**king ecstatic.
But shit-on-a-shingle, even the scent of fresh death drifting over from the bathroom gave her no pleasure: To protect her mirror, she needed so much more than what ADT or Brinks monitoring had to offer, and the new sacrificial virgin she'd strung up over her tub was bleeding out nicely - getting ready to be useful, not just decorative.
Everything was going her way, at least on the surface, and yet she felt so ...
Ennui, she believed it was called ... and what a lovely name for such a crappy, unmotivated state.
Maybe she was just exhausted from setting everything up after the move. She had about forty bureaus full of acquisitions from all eras of humanity, and whenever she was forced to reestablish herself in another place, she was compelled to touch every single object one by one, reconnecting with the essence of the victim that lingered in the metal. She had yet to start on the contact ritual, however, and was a little surprised at herself. Usually, she could focus on nothing else until she fractured time, stepped into the space between minutes, and completed the lengthy process.
She supposed her therapist would have seen this as progress, considering the compulsion was typically prompt and undeniable: These precious items, from ancient Egypt to Gothic France to the Civil War and the present here in the States, were what tied her to home when she was so far away.
Still, there was no panicky rush to snuggle up with what was hers for eternity. All she seemed to want to do was mope around and pace.
It was all Jim Heron's fault.
He was just too defiant. Dominant. Extraordinary.
He had been chosen by her and that supercilious sonofabitch Nigel because Heron was equal parts good and evil - and as she had learned through the ages, when it came to mankind, evil always won. In fact, she'd assumed that drawing him over to her side would be nothing but a tedious bore, the kind of thing she had done to men and women since time had cast its first hour so very long ago.
Instead ... it was she who had been sucked in and seduced.
Heron was just so ... unownable. Even when he had turned himself over to her and she had been playing with him, her minions swarming him, her true nature revealed ... he had been unbowed, unbending, unyielding.
And that strength made him unattainable.
She had never known that before. From anyone.
The thing was, it was in her very nature to take over: She was a perfect parasite, niggling her way in and replicating her essence until what she had entered became hers forever.
Heron's challenge to her was intoxicating, a slap in the face, a breath of fresh air. But it also seemed to deflate the importance of everything else.
Pulling open a drawer, she took out a thin gold bracelet that had a little dove charm dangling off of it. The inscription on the inside was in cursive and just precious. Fromparents to a daughter. With a date from the year before. Blah, blah, blah.
She hated the name Cecilia. She really did.
That irrelevant virgin ... what a thorn in her side. The purpose of that Barten girl had been to protect the mirror. Now the little shit had some kind of connection with Jim -
Just as she was going to crush the fragile memento, a waft of warmth went through her, as if a lover's touch had passed not just over her flesh, but through to her very bones.