CHAPTER FIVE #3
Heading across the living area, I’m irritated to find my mind conjuring an image of him leaning against his car tonight: tall, dark, and damnably good-looking, a glint of heat simmering in his eyes.
Why the hell couldn’t that man have just gotten fat and unattractive?
Translation: easier to dismiss. Sure, I know that makes me a vain, horrible bitch, but if I suddenly didn’t find him attractive, I’d be an unaffected vain, horrible bitch.
And unaffected by Kane would be a welcome calm in the middle of one hell of a storm, I think, entering the kitchen and making my way to the garage door again, where logic forces me to a dead stop.
I can’t get to my suitcase without taking off the security system. Damn it.
I hit the button on the panel by the door, and a deep male voice immediately asks, “Can I help you, Ms. Love?”
“Can you disable the garage door and leave the rest of the system armed?”
“No, ma’am. I’m afraid if you want to open the door without setting the alarm off, you’ll need to disarm fully.”
“Right. Of course not. Thank you.”
“Is there a problem?” the man asks.
“No problem I can’t solve,” I say. “Thank you.”
He replies, but it’s just muffled words to me right now.
I’ve tuned him out, repeating my own words to him in my mind: no problem I can’t solve.
Except one, I amend. The one I left for Kane to solve.
And that reality turns my thoughts to the alphabet row across the top of that letter left for me tonight.
A is for Apple, it had said. And F, I decide, is for the fool I was for leaving myself exposed, a golden rule in law enforcement I’d learned in the police academy and later with the FBI.
And yet, I’d done just that. I’d left myself so damn exposed I might as well be as naked as I was on that beach.
Memories assail me and I squeeze my eyes shut, mentally blocking out the images that want to be seen, but they persist, screaming in my mind like magpies.
The impact is a punch in the gut that rivals the fat man in a clown suit who’d tackled me on Santa Monica Boulevard during my first week in LA.
I’d tripped and cuffed that bastard, arresting him and then spending the night watching Stephen King’s It over a large cheese pizza.
Because I’m Lilah-fucking-Love, and I’d owned the damn clown.
My lips tighten. That’s the way I need to own my memories, and whoever wrote that note is trying to own me right now.
I can’t let that happen. I have to think.
I have to figure out what the hell just happened.
I shove off the door and walk to the counter, grabbing my briefcase and charging toward the office, my mind working as I do.
Either Kane and I weren’t the only ones here that night, or he broke our vow of silence and told someone about it, someone who is now betraying us both, which I don’t believe.
Not because I’m assessing his loyalty to me as rock solid, but he’s not stupid enough to give someone ammunition to use against him.
I return to option A: we weren’t alone that night.
And whoever was there kept silent until now.
The night I came home. Why? What’s the motivation to taunt me now and not anytime in the past two years?
Reaching the office, I charge up the steps, and the minute I’m at the top, I cross to the desk, sit down, and pull my case file from my bag before tossing it onto the desk.
Inhaling, I flatten my hands on the desk on either side of the file, but I’m not quite ready to open it again.
Twisting my chair to the left, I face a wall decorated with nothing but three white boards on the left and a massive floor-to-ceiling bulletin board on the right.
These were not my father’s. They were—are—mine, and as I stare at them, a piece of my mind sees all the many cases I once analyzed here.
In fact, by the time I worked from this office, I’d already been labeled the “Murder Girl,” a joke made by a drunk coworker at someone’s retirement party that had stuck.
The truth is that almost every single one of the cases I solved in this house started with a dead body.
And I solved many of those cases because I wouldn’t give up.
I locked myself in this room that I’ve come to know as Purgatory until I found a clue to follow.
I reach for my badge, slip the picture out that I’ve hidden there, and stare down at a photo of me with Kane Mendez.
I flip it over and stare at the pen marks that count down the perps I profiled, who my efforts helped convict: thirty-one.
Thirty-one times that I’ve proven that the sins of my past, which include Kane Mendez, don’t define me.
I stick the photo back inside my badge and then stand up, walking to one of the whiteboards, grabbing a marker from the silver ledge beneath it, and stepping onto the wooden stool in front of it.
Ripping off the cap, I start writing the names of the murders I’ve helped bring to trial.
I stop ten names in and stare at them, picturing their victims, noting how bloody my life has become.
And why is that? I write my answer in huge letters: BECAUSE I AM MURDER GIRL.