Chapter 7
Haven had cleaned the apartment. Not because she was expecting company …
exactly. More because she'd woken up that morning and looked at the kitchen table.
She saw the files, the notepads, and the three coffee mugs she'd been using as paperweights.
And if someone from Guardian was coming to her home to interview her, she was not going to look like a person who'd been losing her mind in a two-bedroom apartment for the last week.
She was going to look like a detective who'd been working a case.
The distinction mattered. Well, it mattered to her.
Whether it mattered to the officer from Guardian, who knew.
Del had said he was professional and quiet.
That information helped like zero percent.
She'd stacked the files. Consolidated the mugs. Made a fresh pot of coffee. She hadn’t changed out of her sweatpants because that felt like too much. She’d changed t-shirts, though. The coffee stain on her favorite Tim McGraw t-shirt needed pre-treating anyway.
Marcus King was tall and broad, requiring her to instantly recalibrate.
You knew six-four intellectually, and then you were standing in front of it.
Wow. He was handsome to the point of almost being pretty.
He had dark hair. Blue eyes that were doing the thing she recognized.
The same thing her own eyes did, which was to take in everything in the first three seconds.
He was wearing a jacket that looked like he’d slept in it on a plane and didn't care.
He held a coffee carrier with two cups from the place on Charlotte Avenue.
He'd talked to someone. Well, duh … Del had told her that he and her sergeant had filled him in on what they knew.
“Detective Stone,” he said.
“It’s Haven. You’re Detective King.” She stepped back. “Come in.”
“Marcus,” he said as he passed into her apartment.
Dang, his voice was deep and sexy. She blinked several times and filed that bit of information.
Filed in the “No, don’t touch the sexy Guardian cop” file.
She had a feeling the file would hold more by the time she finished this conversation because … damn …
He glanced at her one more time when he stopped in her kitchen.
She knew what he saw when he saw her. Brown hair in a thick braid, brown eyes, no makeup, sharp cheekbones, athletic build.
She was five feet seven in her socks, which was currently what she was wearing on her feet. Pink fuzzy ones, to be exact.
He handed her one of the coffees without making a thing of it. She took it the same way. What did you know, they were already communicating efficiently, and they'd known each other for eleven seconds.
He sat at the kitchen table because she gestured at it, and then he looked at the stacked notes without commenting on them as she sat across from him. They assessed each other directly and without pretending not to, which was the modus operandi for people in their line of work.
“You've read my incident report,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She knew he had.
“Several times.”
“And you're not here because you think it was a robbery.”
“No,” he said. “I'm here because I have nine homicides in eight states and one Canadian province with identical blunt force trauma, ligature, staging, identical trophy behavior, and the same missing fingernail on every victim. Angela Porter was the tenth victim, and the ninth murder. You were supposed to be the ninth murder, but you survived,” he said plainly, without softening it, and she appreciated that more than she could have explained.
“I need everything you remember. Not just what's in the report.”
Haven wrapped both hands around the coffee cup. His words were blunt, but she was glad he had a direct, no-nonsense approach. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Start wherever makes sense,” he said.
So, she did.
* * *
The woman across from him was striking. She didn’t wear makeup and didn’t need it.
Her eyes were big, brown, and framed with long, dark brown lashes.
She was beautiful in an unassuming way. He blinked and tried to redirect his thoughts.
Tried being the operative word. As they talked, the woman checked off a list of the things he’d want in a partner, including some he didn’t realize he wanted.
And no, he wasn’t thinking about a work partner.
She was smart, quick-witted, and didn’t know she was damn attractive.
If she did, she didn’t act like it. And that …
approachability was so fucking attractive to him.
He was hard-pressed to keep on topic. But he did.
Because he wasn’t here to find the woman of his dreams, he was here to catch a killer, and she was a good source of information.
As he'd suspected she would be. The incident report had that quality.
It had the precision of someone trained to observe and record, but watching her reconstruct the attack in real time was something else.
She didn't perform it. She didn't dramatize.
She worked through it the way he assumed she'd work a case.
She moved through her narrative sequentially, flagging her confidence level on each detail without being asked.
This I'm certain of. This is an estimate. This I'm less sure about.
The physical description was limited, and she knew it and even apologized for it.
Her attacker was of average height, lean, with brown hair, and he maintained controlled movement.
The face, she only got a glimpse, about a second, in low light.
She gave him pale eyes, gray or blue, and average features.
He was absolutely forgettable. She said that word herself.
Forgettable. Like he was built that way on purpose.
“The approach,” Marcus said. “Walk me through the timing.”
“He was already in position. He didn't follow me in from the lot. I would’ve seen him. He was on the trail before I started. Which means he knew my route, and he knew when I ran. He had to be on that trail waiting before I got there.”
“How many mornings do you think he watched you before the attempt?”
She looked at him and frowned. “More than once. The way he moved, there was zero hesitation. He attacked me at the darkest section of the trail. That wasn’t a coincidence.
You don't get that from one morning. Plus, he avoided the cameras in the parking area. According to my sergeant, there was a sweep of headlights before my helper ran to the parking lot.”
“Ted,” Marcus said.
“Yes, and Maggie.” She looked at him.
His brow furrowed for a moment. “Ah, the Golden.”
She smiled. “Score one for the detective from Virginia.”
“Are you testing my recall?” He lifted an eyebrow.
“Consider it active observation of your abilities.”
“Noted,” Marcus smiled and shook his head. This woman was something else. He sobered a bit before continuing, “The approach sounds you mentioned … You said gravel under a foot, placed carefully.”
“Controlled is a better word. The effort to be quiet was deliberate.
And when I turned and found nothing, he'd already gone still.
He knew I'd turn.” She paused. “That tells me he'd done that before. The subject knew what the response to his victim checking behind them should be. He knew the window to attack and when it opened.”
Subject. She'd used that word. She hadn't taken it from his reports. She'd arrived at it herself.
He kept his voice neutral. “Tell me about his hands.”
Something shifted in her expression, and she frowned. “Gloved. Black. The kind—” She stopped. Started again. “Fitted. Not work gloves. Something thinner. More precise.”
“Did you notice anything about the gloves themselves? Material, construction?”
She was quiet for a moment. Her eyes went to the middle distance between him and the wall.
He'd seen this before, the specific focus of memory retrieval, the way the brain went somewhere else to look for something.
“Smooth,” she said. “No texture grip. The kind of material that doesn't snag.” She paused and then looked at him in realization.
“He wasn't worried about grip. He was worried about transfer.”
Marcus wrote that down.
“And the smell,” he asked.
She looked at him directly. “I put it in the report as disinfectant. It was more than that. There was something underneath it.” She frowned.
“I've been trying to identify it since it happened.
It's not a cleaning product. It's something else.
Something I've smelled somewhere, but I can't—” She shook her head.
“It's there. I just can't get to it yet.”
“It'll come,” Marcus said. “Don't push it.”
Her eyes popped wide, and she looked at him like she wasn't used to being given the grace of time. In her work, timely answers mattered. It was a one-eighty she wasn’t expecting.
“He looked at my hand,” she said. “Before the second strike. He grabbed my wrist and turned my hand over. Just for a second. Like he was checking something.”
Marcus went still, and she noticed it.
She frowned and pointed to the copy of her statement. “It's in the report,” she said.
“I know. Tell me about it.”
“I went down after the first strike. If I hadn’t gotten my arm up, I’d have been dead now.
Anyway, I got back up. We made contact. I got a partial hip throw, he adjusted, and we went into the tree line.
He grabbed my wrist.” She looked at her own hand flat on the table.
The nails had a fresh manicure. “He turned it over. Looked at my nails. Then I kicked him in the knee, tried to get to my weapon, but he plowed me over. I scrambled to the path. I screamed for someone to call 911. Then the second branch hit me.”