CHAPTER FOUR
“So we’re done, right?”
Kate bit her lip as she considered the photographs. She wanted to say they were done. She wanted that very badly. She wanted to tell Marcus that there was no possible way these scenes had anything to do with Elijah Cox and that they must belong to another killer.
But she couldn’t. Instead of wanting to see Cox where he wasn’t, she wanted to ignore him where he was. Or might be.
Oh, the irony.
“Kate?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why? No ciphers, no message from Cox, nothing that points to you or to Cox or any of his disciples.”
She gnawed on her lip some more. “Something’s not right.”
“Wonderful. And whoever takes this case is going to do an outstanding job of solving it. But you and I are finished. I have the Cox manhunt, and…” His voice trailed off. “And I’m being an idiot, aren’t I?”
Kate gave him a sour smile. “Well, siccing me on a case unrelated to Cox would be a nice way to keep me from pursuing him, wouldn’t it? It would also give you some breathing room in this office.”
"That's not what I… Well, the first part, yes, but not the second part. I still want to be your partner, Kate."
“Could have fooled me these past two months.”
“Kate I… it’s… been difficult.”
“Remember when we came back from Miami and promised each other that we could still be partners and friends? That even if we never got a chance to be more than that, we could at least be partners and friends?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I really am.”
She looked at him. He really did look sorry.
He was staring at his feet, shuffling them like a kid apologizing for copying homework.
At another time, his adorable face would be enough for her to forgive him, but the crap he’d just pulled in Winters’ office warranted a bit more of an explanation. “What’s been difficult?”
“Everything.”
“Such as?”
He took a breath, clearly reluctant to share details. “The divorce, the tension between us, the manhunt for Cox, the constant terror that you’re going to die, and I won’t find out about it until your mother identifies the body.”
“Lovely image. Thanks for that.”
“Well, it’s the image in my head. You won’t accept protection, you won’t let me protect you, you're still living alone at the same apartment you've always lived in, and now Winters is putting you back in a position where you could end up on his trail.
After he's almost killed you twice, this is ludicrous. You should be nowhere near this."
“I’m the one who brought him into custody both times,” Kate reminded him. “I’m the one… Okay, strike that. We are the ones who have solved each Commandment Killing. Not me but also not you. We. The Bureau needs me on this case. Winters recognizes that. Why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t want you to die! Why… What is difficult about that?”
Frustration clawed its way up Kate’s spine, but she took a breath to slow its progress. They needed to have this talk, which meant she needed to get through it without losing her cool. “There’s always a risk with this job.”
Marcus scoffed. “Oh, don’t give me that crap. The risk is different when it’s coming from a guy who literally said that God’s plan for him was to kill you.”
“Cox’s plans won’t change just because I’m not hunting him,” Kate said softly.
“Yeah, but if you stayed off his trail and accepted protective custody, then his plans won’t matter.”
A stab of guilt ran through Kate’s midsection. Marcus held her eyes, which of course only made the guilt worse. “I…”
Her voice trailed off, and Marcus said, “No, you need to finish that sentence. If it’s so important that you’re willing to put your life at risk, then you need to talk to me about it.”
Kate’s lips thinned, but Marcus was right. She’d made him spill. She had to follow through.
Have I mentioned how much I freaking hate Tuesdays? “I… got rid of him.”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“I got rid of him,” Kate repeated. “When I saved Emily Warren from hanging herself off the courthouse in Chicago, I got rid of Cox. I… I visualized the rope as his tether to me and my severing of the rope as my choice not to allow him to influence me. I got rid of him. Then a few months later, he blew up our relationship by having Christina Bennett send pictures of us to Cheryl. Cheryl blew up in your face, and as usual, you wilted.”
Marcus recoiled, and Kate sighed. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t…”
But she did mean it, and there was no point in lying.
Marcus nodded. “Yeah, um… And now you’re upset because Cox is back, and he might personally be a threat again.”
“Right. And if I accept protective custody, I will be off the case forever. And… if I live with you, then it’s an admission that I’m vulnerable. I just… I don’t want to feel vulnerable. I don’t want to feel like he’s got me wrapped up in his bullshit little plan again.”
She fell quiet. In a rom-com, this was where Marcus would have wrapped her up in his big, strong arms and held her. In a police drama, this was where he would have lectured her about making decisions based on logic instead of emotion.
Instead, he said, “All right. I get it.”
She was once again too surprised to react.
“I get it, but I disagree, and I’m going to fight a lot harder about it once we’re done looking at this case.”
She grinned. “If I hug you right now, will it make everything worse?”
He laughed.
Then he wrapped her up in his big strong arms and held her.
She held onto him, and when she searched for the spark that had made her ask him to dinner five months ago as they made their escape from the swarm of reporters wanting to talk to the FBI agent who had saved the suicidal murder suspect’s life, she found only the warmth she had missed ever since trying to push for more than just friendship.
She liked that warmth. She was glad to have it back.
When they separated, he looked a lot less angry too. There was still tension in his eyes, but it wasn’t at the forefront anymore. They could deal with the tension later. That was a good start.
“Okay,” he said. “Talk to me about the photographs.”
Kate rifled through the photos for the ones she wanted and laid them out in front of Marcus. “I think there is a cipher at these scenes. Or rather, I think each scene is a piece of a single cipher. I’m just not sure what it means yet. Look at this one, from the Schulz home.”
Marcus looked over the scene. It showed Schulz—who really was a big and imposing man—lying on his back, face mottled, eyes and tongue bulging, deep bruising around his throat where strong hands had throttled the life from him.
It showed his living room, a typical middle-class bachelor’s living room with a comfortable easy chair set across from a too-large-for-the-room television with a couch off to the side and no decorative objects save one.
It was that one decorative object that caught Kate’s attention. “See the bird?” She pointed at the six-inch painted ceramic cardinal on the coffee table.
“Yeah, I see it. What about it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said, “but look at this one.”
She pointed at a photograph taken from the home of Karen De Luca.
Karen was only partially visible in the photograph, but it was the music box on the living room windowsill that caught Kate’s attention.
It was a small copper box with a dancing ballerina performing a pirouette.
Her toes pointed up and to the right, nearly but not quite parallel with the window.
It sat in front of the drawn curtain, the only object within the house that was visible since all the other windows were shuttered too.
“What should I be seeing here?” Marcus asked. The killer’s leaving mementos?”
“Maybe,” Kate said, “but I don’t think so. I think he’s using objects that were already in the home to send a message.”
“What message?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the cipher.”
Marcus took a deep breath. Kate steeled herself for another argument, but he only said, “Okay. I have no idea how you’re getting that from a bird and a music box, but I’ll trust you.”
She smirked. “You mean you know better than to try to stop me, so you’re going to go along.”
“You want to fight again?”
“Definitely not.”
She looked at the photos from Gloria Prentiss’s crime scene. It took some time for Kate to decide which object was out of place, but her eyes kept coming back to a brass sewing thimble positioned carefully on the sill of Gloria’s bathroom window. “It’s that,” she told Marcus. “It’s gotta be that.”
Marcus glanced at the thimble, then at her. “The thimble?”
“Yes. It’s out of place. And like the other objects, it looks to be positioned carefully to draw the eye.”
“To draw the eye where?”
Kate shook her head. “I still don’t know.”
She examined the final photo. The suspicious item in question was a pocket watch placed on the kitchen counter of Jordan Prescott's house.
The watch was set to six-thirty, meaning both the second and minute hands pointed directly through the bottom of the watch, which was angled about thirty degrees off perpendicular to the counter in the rough direction of the kitchen window.
“The watch?” Marcus asked.
Kate crossed her arms and tapped her bicep.
Then she grabbed her phone and looked up the number for Louisville police.
After a couple minutes of navigating through automated menus and reluctant desk sergeants, she finally reached Detective Orrin Lacey.
After working her way through polite greetings, Kate asked, “What can you tell me about the pocket watch found on the kitchen counter of Jordan Prescott’s home? ”
"That's a good question," Lacey replied.
"It looks like Prescott collected pocket watches.
There were three more in his nightstand.
Funny thing is, they were all over the place in terms of value.
One of 'em was an 1886 Hamilton that could probably fetch five figures.
Another was an Omega that might have been a few grand new, but isn't really anything special.
The third—that's the one on the counter—was a replica of an old Elgin watch.
Worth maybe a hundred bucks. The fourth—the third one in the nightstand—was a Casio.
Twenty bucks on , and it runs on batteries. "
Marcus frowned. “That’s an interesting collection.”
“We thought so too. That’s why we looked into it. Not sure what it has to do with anything, though. Do you have an idea?”
“We’re working on it,” Kate replied. “Thank you.”
She hung up and looked at Marcus. Marcus looked uncertain.
“I don’t want to start an argument, but I’m still not seeing Cox in this.
Just a serial killer. There’s definitely a message there, and I guess you could call it a cipher since it’s not a clear message, but I don’t see commandment killing.
What commandment would they even have broken? ”
“Well, the next one on the list is Thou Shalt Not Steal.”
“So these are stolen items?”
“Maybe.”
Marcus pressed his lips together. “I don’t like maybe, Kate. Especially not a maybe that could pull you back into the field.”
“Well, like I said. If this isn’t Cox, then being in the field working closely with armed law enforcement might be the safest place for me. And if it is Cox, then he’s killing again. And finding him solves your manhunt as well as these murders.”
Marcus nodded slowly. “All right. Let’s go talk to Winters.”
Another smile spread across Kate’s face at the thought of her and Marcus working together again.
It died by the time she stepped through the door. If this was Cox, then he had increased his body count by half in the past seven weeks. And there was no doubt he was leaving a message.
And no doubt he left that message for Kate and Kate alone.