Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

“‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.’” He sputtered the verse from the Bible and then promptly, as if with the grace of his fucked-up God, he passed out.

Seconds later, I was tackled to the ground and arrested for the second time, for something I had no part in.

Bea

It was Margaret Huxley.

The body laid to rest carefully at the base of my back porch had her hands over her chest, eyes closed, and mouth painted a harlot red. She could have almost been sleeping there, but for the tent peg stabbed through her right temple.

It was a tent spike from my own set, the one I kept in the shed in my backyard. Which, of course, meant that the killer had been in my yard before, perhaps watching me while he concocted his mad plans of murder.

She had been killed the way Jael had murdered the turncoat General Sisera in the Bible. The message couldn’t have been clearer. In insulting me, she had insulted the killer, who felt we were somehow linked.

“As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him,” from Titus 3:10 was typed out on the note she clutched in one hand.

I told the police who littered my house that entire Monday morning that the murderer might have killed her as a gift to me, but he would’ve had to know we’d had an altercation just the night before.

It made sense, maybe, that the man Priest had hunted down on Main Street was Owen Burns, the same young man I’d seen Brett give drugs to what seemed like years ago on Halloween at the college party.

Apparently, Owen Burns was the estranged son of Opal Burns, one of my mother’s old friends who had distanced herself after our fall from grace. She didn’t even attend church with my Grandpa anymore, though she’d always been a devout Christian. Though she was very good friends with Tabitha Linley, who was known to be a bit of a friendly gossip.

But I didn’t even know Owen Burns. Why would he kill Margaret for me like the misguided courtship ritual of a madman?

There was this weaving, this overlap of the Walsh family and the serial killer, as if they were linked intrinsically in a way I felt I should understand more clearly.

I didn’t understand any of it.

Neither, it seemed, did Lion or the club.

After the interviews with the cops, after I threw up at the sight of the dead body in my yard thinking about poor Billy Huxley without a mother and soon to be without a father, Loulou had insisted I go with them to the clubhouse to set up for the barbecue.

Only The Fallen would have a party when a serial killer was on the loose and a dead body had shown up on a doorstep. Truthfully, I loved that about them. They lived every single day as if it was their last. Taking nothing for granted, they sucked the marrow out of each moment.

The prospects, hang-arounds, and some of the old ladies were already well into setting up when we arrived, and Loulou immediately ushered us into the clubhouse where the entire rest of the Garro clan was set up, waiting for me.

Mr. White was at the precinct representing Priest again as he was questioned. I’d wanted to go to him, but Zeus claimed Priest had expressly forbidden it. Normally, I wouldn’t have heeded his protest, but Zeus assured me Priest would be freed shortly and brought immediately to the clubhouse.

To me.

Until then, I was happy to lounge between my sister and Cressida with Prince’s gorgeous little face smiling at me from her arms. Sitting there with them, knowing they’d come together to support me yet again, made me feel seen and appreciated in a way I’d never known before meeting The Fallen.

Lion scrubbed his hands over his stubbled jaw, looking like a handsome cowboy even tired as he was. “The RCMP aren’t getting anywhere. Seems they want to think this Owen Burns is the ‘Prophet’. Makes it easier, that’s for damn sure.”

“There’s no way,” I insisted. “He doesn’t fit any of the profiling. I think he’s just some poor kid who made some bad decisions and got dragged into this.”

Harleigh Rose stared to rub the tension out of Lion’s back, making him groan and reach behind his chair to squeeze her thigh. “You and me both, Bea. I got no say with them anymore. I hung up my badge, and for the men in blue, that’s a certain kinda betrayal they don’t get over.”

“Your dad was a corrupt cop who tried to force you to be corrupt too,” Harleigh Rose grumbled. “Fuckin’ idiots.”