CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
St. Louis was the kind of city Kate would call a “proper” city. As compared to Portland, which she rightfully thought of as a large town more than an actual city.
To Marcus, St. Louis was more like a sort of city. Too big to call a town but lacking the life a real city provides. It all came down to background.
Kate had spent her childhood in suburban Chicago.
Chicago was a real city, but Kate had spent most of her time in the quiet, forested neighborhoods removed from the urban sprawl.
As an adult, she’d lived most of her life in Portland, and it was clear that was where she belonged.
Her emotions seethed inside her, and since she fought hard to never let them reach the surface, the quiet peace of Portland was a perfect place for her to vent them without needing to let others witness her vulnerability.
These thoughts passed through Marcus without judgment.
He wasn’t walking through downtown St. Louis to access his sensitive side, after all.
He was far from the most level-headed guy himself, only he looked for the hustling bustling frenzy of a metropolis to soothe his nerves.
New York was a place you could hide from everyone and never be alone.
St. Louis was… Well, it wasn’t empty. That was the best he could say for it.
“Hey, baby,” a voice called from the shadows. “You looking for a good time?”
Without turning toward the voice, Marcus replied, “Not tonight, sweetheart, thank you.”
The voice didn’t reply. The fish had swum on. Time to cast the bait elsewhere.
More voices reached him, a gaggle of twenty-somethings stumbling out of a bar and heading down the street, presumably to the next bar. He walked around them, and some punk with swollen arms balanced precariously atop toothpick legs called, “Yeah, you better get out of our way!”
This outburst earned him a scolding from a fragile-looking blond girl walking with him. The punk asked “What?” in an injured voice that told Marcus he’d expected his girl to be impressed with his aggression.
Got to put a stop to that soon, kid, he thought to himself. That road leads to a dead end.
Cox's face swam into his vision. His piercing eyes and smug smile never concealed the sickness and rage that boiled underneath.
He imagined his fingers wrapping around Cox's neck, feeling them sink deep.
He pictured that smug look vanishing, replaced by fear, then terror, then helplessness as he realized he'd finally pushed too hard and gone too far, and now he was going to die.
A sting in his left palm jolted his mind back to reality. He looked down and saw his hands balled tightly into fists. He uncurled his fingers and saw blood welling in a quartet of half-moons he’d dug into his palm. The right hand hadn’t split, but it was close.
He sighed and walked into the nearest bar. He headed for the bathroom, and a female voice called, “Hey, buddy! Restroom’s for customers only!”
“Pour me a beer then,” he called back.
“What kind?”
“A cold one.”
He entered the restroom and started to wash his hands. He stopped when he heard moaning coming from one of the stalls. He frowned and reached into his jacket, closing his hand around the handle of his service weapon.
“Oh yeah. God, sweetheart. Just like that.”
Marcus rolled his eyes and took his hand off the weapon. He finished washing his hands, then returned to the bar to see a woman in her late twenties, strikingly pretty with pale skin, jet-black hair, and even darker lipstick, gesturing at a can of Coors Light. "It's cold," she said snarkily.
He plucked a twenty from his wallet and tossed it on the counter. “Keep the change.”
She chuckled behind his back as he walked out without the beer. “Whatever you want, buddy.”
The cold hit him like an icy blast. His few minutes inside the bar had allowed him to warm up, and the return to below freezing weather shocked his system.
He welcomed it. It calmed down some of the frustration he felt, allowed him to give it a name.
Failure. He was a failure. He’d failed as a SEAL, failed to make his marriage to Cheryl work, failed to make his relationship with Kate work, and failed to find Elijah Cox, a failure he was still compounding.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and headed back for the hotel, eyes drawn moodily together. What was he missing? He considered himself a smart guy. Not a genius like Kate and not shrewd like Winters but a smart guy. He understood people well as long as they weren’t people he loved.
That earned a chuckle, but it was a bitter one and the snowflake that fell on his tongue was just as bitter.
He looked up and saw more of the bitter snow falling from the sky. He decided he didn’t want to think about what could have made it bitter.
What was he missing? He could solve puzzles with the best of them. He’d come up with breakthroughs on his cases with Kate. He’d held his own.
So why was Cox beating him so easily? It made little sense that he was giving Kate a hard time.
Kate has the sharpest mind in the Bureau, but her father's death and her own near-death experience with Robert Denton were easy vulnerabilities to exploit.
Cox was very good at exploiting them, had studied very hard to make sure he could exploit them.
Marcus didn’t think Cox perceived a special connection with Kate, though he might have deluded himself into believing he did.
Marcus was pretty sure Cox had just figured out early that Kate was the greatest threat to his safety and taken steps to protect himself by exploiting the chinks in Kate’s armor.
That was where Marcus was supposed to come in. He was supposed to be the tough guy, invulnerable to Cox’s mind games, using hard work and relentless dedication to overwhelm Cox’s deception and cowardice.
Instead, he was being led around by the nose.
They both were. Cox was out there killing with impunity despite the fact that the entire damned Bureau had put out multiple APBs and PSAs on him.
The man’s face was at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list, but he’d killed six people and no one had thought to wonder why this priest sort of looked like the serial murderer terrorizing the entire country.
It wasn’t fair. It was goddamned embarrassing, in fact. It didn’t ease his embarrassment knowing that he was far from the only individual who couldn’t figure out how to keep Cox chained.
“Hey.”
He frowned and looked up. He was in the parking lot of the hotel, having covered the distance without realizing it.
Kate leaned against the wall just outside the entrance.
She was wearing a running outfit: joggers and a hoodie.
Her hair was matted with sweat, her cheeks flushed red with the cold that sweat caused evaporating off her skin.
She looked small and vulnerable, and if Marcus wasn’t afraid of getting blood on her sweater, he would have pulled her into an embrace.
Instead, he replied, “Hey. Go for a run?”
“No, I’m looking for a date. I thought the hoodie made me look sexy.”
“It does, actually.”
She smiled, but it faded as quickly as an ember landing on the fallen snow. “I guess you didn’t find what you were looking for either.”
“No,” he agreed. “Just some fresh air to suck in while I scream into the void.”
That brought a somewhat longer-lasting smile and an almost genuine laugh. “Yeah. Sure feels like that, doesn’t it? How’s Cheryl?”
The last question caught Marcus off guard. He stared at her, and she shrugged but didn’t turn her gaze away and didn’t say anything else.
“Uh, she’s good,” he replied. “I guess. She’s not coming after alimony anymore. She’s going to sign the divorce papers. Which are just waiting on my signature now, which my attorney will receive as soon as we’re finished with this.”
“That’s good,” Kate said.
“Yeah.”
They fell silent again. Kate didn't take her eyes off Marcus. He shuffled his feet after a moment and said, "Kate, I want to be more than your friend."
Kate sighed. "Marcus, now's not."
“I get it,” he interrupted. “Just let me finish what I have to say. I want to be more than your friend. I have failed badly at making that happen.”
Compassion came to Kate’s eyes. “You didn’t fail, Marcus. It just didn’t work out.”
“It didn’t work out because I was dragging my feet with Cheryl. I was dragging my feet because… Because I hated that I’d failed at that too.”
Her eyes hardened a little. “So you want to be more than my friend, but you don’t want your marriage to fail.”
“My marriage failed before I started dating you. I didn’t have the courage to accept that I could try hard at something and not succeed.”
“But you didn’t really try hard to make us work, did you?”
She delivered that without anger, or without much anger, but it cut Marcus to the bone anyway. Mostly because it was true.
“No, I didn’t. And I will always regret that. But I’m not going to dance around this anymore. I like you. Hell, I…” He hesitated but only for a moment. “I could fall in love with you as easily as I could put on an old boot.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Thank you, I think?”
Marcus chuckled. “My point is that… I understand that the best I can hope for right now is to get along with my partner. Maybe soon, we can be friends again. And maybe, somewhere in the distant future, we can be more than friends. That’s what I want. That distant future. Hopefully not too distant.”
He paused a moment, allowing the thought to percolate in both of their minds. Kate regarded him, her expression waffling between frustration, exhaustion, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of hope.
When she finally spoke, she kept that hope well-hidden, but she didn’t slam the door in his face either.
“I would love to be you friend again. I miss that. I miss that we could talk and not worry about what we said or what the other person was going to say. As for the rest? I think we should just focus on being friends right now. Let the future take care of itself.”
Marcus nodded. “Okay. I can do that.”
Kate smiled. A real smile. It looked good on her. “If I hug you, do you promise not to try to kiss me?”
Marcus laughed. “Sure. This one time. I can’t make any promises about tomorrow, though.”
“We’ll let tomorrow figure itself out.”
She pulled him into an embrace, and the cold in Marcus’s veins retreated. He held her for a long while, and when he separated, some color remained in Kate’s cheeks. That looked good too.
“Why don’t we take another look at the evidence?” he suggested. “I’m not getting any sleep tonight, and you don’t look in a sleep mood either. I’ll brew us some coffee while you get everything set up, and we’ll have an old-fashioned brainstorming session.”
Kate nodded. “All right.”
She was smiling, but now that their focus was back on the case, anxiety had crept into her expression too. “We’ll get him, Kate. We’ll put an end to this, all of it. I promise.”
Kate took a deep breath. "I wonder how much longer we'll keep believing that."
She pushed off from the wall and headed inside. Marcus remained where he was for a moment longer. A snowflake singed the back of his neck as it melted. The water rolled down to his collar and soaked into the cotton.
Now they were a team again. Cox could beat them when they were apart. Could he beat them now that they were together again?
He wished he could confidently say no, but all he could really do was pray for a miracle and hope that whoever was listening answered their prayer and not Cox’s.