As soon as he’d lifted the lid an inch or two, Sean made a sound. One Jenna couldn’t begin to identify. One she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Despite the sense of horror that had grown the closer he’d come to revealing the contents of the box, she had instinctively taken a step forward. And then another. Moving closer until she was standing so near she could hear him breathing.
Air ratcheted in and out of his lungs, the inhalations ragged. Ugly.
Gathering what courage she had left, she peered around his shoulder. Compared to what her imagination had suggested might lie on the square of cotton wool, what she saw there was anticlimactic. A gold ring, its styling antique and its dark red, heart-shaped stone clouded with age or dirt, was centered on the pristine white liner of the box.
For a few seconds she thought it might really have been intended as a present. Of course, there was no one in her life right now who would give her something like this. Not as a token of a romantic relationship, which was what it looked like.
Since she’d never seen the ring before, she knew it didn’t belong to anyone in her family, which seemed to indicate…
“Why would he put that in my refrigerator?”
She didn’t want to accept the obvious answer to her question. That he had taken the ring off Carol Cummings’s hand and sent it to her as a warning that she was next.
Sean dropped the lid down over the box, hiding what it contained. As he straightened, his shoulder brushed her cheek.
She immediately stepped back, increasing the distance between them. Despite her response, she admitted that she wouldn’t have minded remaining that close to him.
He exuded strength. He had from the first day, despite his obvious anger.
Her sense that he was in command, both of himself and the situation, was something she needed as her own world spiraled out of control. That was the same reaction that had sent her scrambling into her parents’ bed when, as a child, she’d been unsettled by a nightmare.
What was happening right now was a nightmare. One Sean wanted to bring to an end as much as she did. The difference between them was that he possessed the skills to make that happen.
She didn’t. And she knew it.
“He needed to make sure you were the one who found it,” Sean said. “Putting it there was the surest way to guarantee that.”
The cops, who had finished their cursory examination of the apartment only minutes before, wouldn’t have opened the refrigerator door. And if the maid had, she would have assumed it was a gift.
Jenna had to wonder if the killer had also chosen the refrigerator because he wanted her to think exactly what she had thought. That whatever was in the box required preservation. A stupid assumption, perhaps, but one she’d made all the same. And it had both terrified and horrified her.
“What’s the ring supposed to mean?”
For a long time there no answer from the man still standing in front of her. He took another breath, but he still didn’t say a word.
“Sean?” Jenna realized this was the first time she’d called him by his given name.
The fact that she’d asked him to come when she found the box instead of the police would make a mockery of calling him anything else. For whatever it was worth, they were in this together, inextricably bound until it was resolved.
He turned so that, for the first time since he’d lifted the lid, she saw his face. It had gone gray beneath the tan.
Only then did she realize what she should have known immediately. She wasn’t the one who was supposed to recognize that ring. He was.
She was simply the conduit through which it had been conveyed. As the killer intended her to be. He had known all along that when she found it, she would call Sean rather than Bingham.
The nausea that had eased with her identification of the object in the box, something far less grisly than she had prepared herself to see, churned through her stomach again. How could he have been sure what she would do when even she hadn’t known? Not until her hand had closed around the phone.
“It’s Makaela’s,” she said. Not a question, but a conclusion. The only one that made sense.
“It belonged to my grandmother. Makaela always wanted it, even as a child. My mother finally gave it to her on her twentieth birthday.”
“And the killer took it when…” She hesitated, unable to say the words.
They would make what had happened to Sean’s sister too real. Too close.
Makaela’s murderer had slipped this ring off her finger, obviously as one of his trophies. An object he would touch and feel and look at over and over again in order to re-create the pleasure her suffering and death had given him.
“I looked for it when I cleared out the house. I thought maybe she’d lost it. Pawned it. She would have done that if she’d had to. It would have been for a good reason—to feed the kids or pay the rent—but she would have done it. And she would have gotten it back as soon as she could. I even looked for a ticket. Checked with a couple of nearby shops.” He shook his head, the movement small. Almost regretful. “I guess I could have asked the kids if she’d been wearing it, but they were still babies. I didn’t want them to ever think about what might have happened to it. Somewhere inside, I think I always knew.”
Other than the tirade in her office, what he’d just said represented the largest number of words she’d heard him string together at one time. That he was willing to share this much of his anguish over his sister’s death was undoubtedly the result of shock.
That would be natural, considering what he’d just discovered. And that meant, as much as she wanted to deny her own admission, it was up to her to think clearly right now.
“We need to call Bingham,” she said. “There may be trace evidence—”
“There won’t be. There never has been. Not on any of the bodies. No fibers. No hair. No prints.”
“He’s human. He makes mistakes. Or…he will eventually,” she hedged, knowing Sean was right, at least about the ring.
This wasn’t something that had been left behind, overlooked at a crime scene. The killer had given it to them. And he was smart enough, and careful enough, to make sure there was nothing on it or the box that could lead the police back to him.
“It doesn’t matter,” she argued. “We still have to let the police know.”
“This isn’t about them.”
“What?”
“This is between me and him. That’s the way he wants it.”
“I don’t care what he wants. I don’t even care what you want. I’m calling Bingham.”
She turned to put her intent into action. Before she had taken a step, Sean’s hand shot out, long hard fingers closing around her wrist.
Shocked, she looked up into his face again. His features were drawn, his skin still almost devoid of color.
“It’s a challenge.”
It’s a challenge… From the killer? He was challenging Sean? To what? Some kind of duel? A duel of wits? With more victims as the stake?
“I don’t care what he’s doing,” she said again, twisting her arm in a vain attempt to free her wrist. “We have to call the police. We have to tell them about that.” She glanced back at the box sitting innocently on her counter, its red ribbon gleaming beneath it.
“That ring belongs to my family.”
“I’m sure they’ll give it back when all this is over.”
“It won’t be over. Not if they’re allowed to stop me. And if you’re determined to do that—”
Had he finally crossed the line between desire and obsession? Enough had happened that she couldn’t blame him if he had. Burying his sister. Seeing to the disposal of her house and her possessions. And dear God, seeing to her children as well.
It would be impossible for Sean to distance himself from the trauma of his sister’s death and its painfully intimate connection to this ring. Someone else needed to objectively examine the evidence the killer had provided. Not as something personal, but as something that might be valuable in building a case against him. Only the detectives would be able to do that.
“You’re hurting me,” she said, holding his gaze.
He blinked, the blaze of anger she’d seen in his eyes suddenly clearing. He freed her wrist, stepping back as he did.
“I’m sorry.”
“We have to call Bingham, Sean. We don’t have a choice. We have to tell the police about this.”
“What do you think they’re going to do?”
“Examine it, for one thing.”
“You read the papers. Has there ever been any evidence?”
“You can’t just assume—”
“He put this here. Do you think he would take any kind of risk, even the most minute one, that would lead them back to him? Think, damn it.”
She had. And she’d already reached that same conclusion. So why was she arguing the point?
“What do you want to do with it?”
“I want to find out what comes next.”
“What comes next?”
“Everything he does has a purpose. He put Makaela’s ring here for a reason. What do you think that was?”
“To frighten me. To prove he can get into my apartment. To taunt you.”
She had added the last defiantly. She knew that’s what Sean thought. Obviously, he was right. The ring would have been meaningless to her. Only to Makaela’s brother would it have any significance.
When he didn’t respond, she added the other conclusion she’d come to. “And to show me he can anticipate what I’ll do.”
“Anticipate?”
“When I found the box, I didn’t call the cops. I called you. He knew that’s what I’d do.”
“He hoped that’s what you’d do.”
“What’s the difference? He was right.”
“He isn’t omniscient. Don’t give him more credit than he deserves.”
Omniscient. All-knowing. She realized she was surprised at his use of the word. Surprised Sean would know it, much less use it correctly.
Because he isn’t an “officer and a gentleman”? Or because he doesn’t have the same education you do?
It was the kind of snobbery she had always professed to hate. Yet in Sean’s case she’d bought into it.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been saying?” she challenged. “That there’s no need to call the police because he won’t have left any evidence on the ring or on the box?”
“Acknowledging that he’s careful is a hell of a long way from believing he can read minds.”
“I don’t, but you can’t deny he seems to be very good at reading people.”
Something about her comment had resonated. She could see its impact in his eyes, although he didn’t respond directly. And what he said instead—
“You wanted something from me.”
“What?”
“Tonight. At the precinct. You asked me for something. I’m asking for something in exchange. Quid pro quo.”
She had asked him to protect her. Not just to watch her in hopes of catching his sister’s murderer, but to guard her from him. Apparently he was prepared to do what she’d asked, but on the condition that she not call the police about the ring.
“Why?”
“I told you. This is personal.”
He had said before that it was a challenge. Issued by the killer. And directed at him.
“Then why didn’t he leave the ring in your refrigerator?”
“He wants to prove he can do both.”
“I don’t understand.”
It was if she were in the middle of a game whose rules she didn’t understand. Or a game where there were no rules.
“He wants to prove he can take you, like he took Makaela. And that it won’t make any difference whether I’m watching you or not.”
Her first inclination was to think what she’d thought before. He’d lost all perspective about his sister’s murderer. Grief, anger, the need for revenge had combined to unhinge him.
Still, there was something about the explanation he’d just given that had a kind of perverted logic. Especially when she remembered the phone call he’d received.
If the killer wanted someone to know about the Cummings girl, why not make that call to the cops? Better yet, to a local reporter, any one of whom would have given the story the widest possible coverage?
He hadn’t. He’d placed the call instead to the brother of a woman he’d killed almost three years ago. Someone who wasn’t a cop. Someone who couldn’t give him the publicity he craved.
There had to be a reason for his choice. A twisted one. Or maybe the word she’d used before. Perverted. But there would be a reason.
She knew enough about organized killers—the FBI classification into which the Inquisitor fell—to know that very little they did was by chance. As she had told the interviewer, the man Sean sought wasn’t insane. He was cruel and cunning and ruthless, but he wasn’t mad, no matter how bizarre the scenario of the ring appeared.
Was it possible Sean was right? That this had been a challenge to him? And if so, what did that mean for her?
“So…now you’re offering to protect me?” she asked.
“Every second of every day. And every night.”
She opened her mouth to argue there was no need for that. She closed it again with the realization that the same man who had tortured and killed at least fourteen women had been inside her apartment. Inside this very room.
“And what do you get in exchange?”
“You say nothing to Bingham or anyone else about that.” He inclined his head toward the box.
He had offered to give her what she’d asked for. And she should have jumped at it. But something else was going on. He was playing her. There was something…
“The ring would make them take the threat against me seriously. If he saw it, Bingham would have to admit I’m in danger.”
The detective had downplayed that idea this afternoon, and because she had wanted desperately to believe he was right, Jenna had let him get away with it. Now she had the proof she hadn’t had then.
“Maybe,” Sean agreed. “I guess that would depend on your definition of ‘seriously.’”
An overextended police department, currently engaged in a life-and-death hunt for a missing girl. Or a battle-hardened soldier with a thirst for revenge.
Her intellect screamed that there wasn’t a choice. Call the cops. They were the professionals. Let them put guards around her apartment. Or, better yet, out at her parents’ house, with its state-of-the-art security system.
That was the kind of protection anyone with half a brain would opt for. The thing that made the most sense.
It wasn’t the option her gut was telling her to go with. Not as she looked into the ice-blue eyes of a man who wanted nothing more than to catch the killer who had taken his sister’s life. Given an opportunity, Jenna knew that nothing would prevent Sean Murphy from attaining that goal.
“I swear to you he won’t get by me,” he said, his voice low and intense. “He won’t do to you what I listened to him doing to Carol Cummings. What I saw he did to Makaela. I promise I won’t let him, Jenna. I won’t let him take you. I swear that to you on my sister’s soul.”
She had always been someone who followed her head rather than her heart, refusing to let her emotions overrule her common sense. There was nothing logical about letting Sean’s fervor and determination outweigh every other consideration.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I really wish I could help you, but…This is my life we’re talking about.”
“They can’t keep you safe.”
“Please don’t say that. It isn’t true, and it isn’t fair.”
He held her eyes, evaluating. For the first time she let him see in them her fear and desperation. Surely, since he’d seen his sister’s body, he could understand the risk he was asking her to take. She expected him to argue against her decision. To point out its flaws. To make more promises.
What he said instead threw her.
“Without me, the ring means nothing.”
“What?”
“I never reported that it was missing. I wasn’t sure it was. Even after I’d finished cleaning out the house, I couldn’t be sure Makaela hadn’t let the ring go long before her death.”
She knew, of course, but she couldn’t believe he would do this. Despite her refusal to go along with what he wanted, she had trusted him. She had almost come to think of him as a friend. Someone who was on her side. And now…
“The ring isn’t in any police report. There is nothing but my word to connect it to my sister.”
“You just told me—”
“But I won’t tell them. You call Bingham, and I’ll swear I’ve never seen it before. That I was never here. That I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“That’s insane.”
“Maybe. And maybe it isn’t ‘fair.’” He mocked the word she’d used. “Neither was having to tell a four-year-old that her mother isn’t ever coming home again. Any belief I ever had that anything in life is fair ended three years ago. I’ll do whatever it takes to get my chance at this guy. Even if that means walking out that door and taking my sister’s ring with me.
“If that’s your choice, Dr. Kincaid, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll change his mind. For your sake, I hope he does. But for my sake—and for Makaela’s—I’m going to assume that he won’t.”