Chapter 20
I took her again in my bed, slowly this time, and I savored every second. Her skin was warm and inviting. Her body tucked in against mine was soothing and full of life, and my feelings of gloom and doom lifted, if only a little.
I kept my eyes wide open as she slept. Her head lay on my chest, her dark hair tickled my chin, and her fingers lightly pressed against my abdomen.
Her tangy floral perfume filled the room as her even breaths fanned my skin.
She was the first woman at my place since Sarah died, and she livened it, even in her sleep.
My phone vibrated with long and purposeful hums. I canceled the call, needing to extend these fleeting feelings of peace and hope as long as possible.
I shouldn’t have slept with her, but I didn’t have it in me to regret this break from monotony.
In the morning, she’d leave, and this ended.
Until then, my inner darkness hovered beyond reach.
Again, the phone buzzed with a new call, and I silenced it.
I stared at the ceiling and let myself relax. My thoughts blanked. Slowly, the cold void seeped into the cracks in my mental armor and flooded me from head to toe. Everything turned bleak and trivial.
Until she stirred and sighed against me, her smooth skin rubbing mine. It broke the pull of suffocating numbness…for now.
The phone rang a third time. I growled under my breath. Something had better be on fire.
“Finally,” Liam barked in my ear as I slipped out of bed.
I didn’t take my eyes off her. What was it about her that kept me so captivated?
“Killy, you there?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me why you’re calling at three a.m,” I grumbled.
“They found another body. It’s another one of LK’s.”
“Fuck.” I pulled on my pants and slipped on a shirt. “Yours or Brody’s?”
“The fact you never think it’s yours means you really need to get laid more.”
I glanced down at the woman in my bed. Alice. Another potential casualty, but not yet. This only counted as one time together. It was the one caveat we found in LK’s rules. During the same continuous date, we could fuck all night, and the tally stayed at one.
“No grunt? No ‘no’? You still there?”
“I am.”
“Well, Cranwell wants us at the scene.” He listed an address. “You coming?”
“You know I am. Meet you in thirty.”
“That’s a little slow.”
“Not in the mood for your teasing.”
“When are you ever?”
I grunted and hung up. I had been in the mood five minutes ago, before he reminded me exactly why tonight was a one-and-done. I couldn’t give her any more than I already had, and it filled me with regret, something I rarely felt.
I kissed her forehead, then finished dressing and left behind the first person to thrill me in almost a decade.
“Been a while, Cranwell.” I shook the FBI investigator’s hand as he led us into a small four-story apartment complex on a street in Southie.
“Not long enough, O’Leary. If you boys could just keep it in your pants—”
“And if you could just do your job and catch the damn woman—” Liam cut in from behind us with Brody.
Special Agent Joey Cranwell whirled around, finger up like a schoolteacher about to scold a kindergartener.
He was old enough for it, having followed the case for close to thirty years.
I remembered when he still had a full head of hair.
Now he was bald, eyebrows scragglier than ever, and the skin on his hands was growing more translucent with each year.
“Listen to me, you lil’ punk. I don’t take shit from an asswipe the likes of you.”
I tsked. I doubted the sexagenarian could move my brother an inch even if the older gent put his full weight into it, but we needed to keep the peace.
“Simmer down, fellas. Cranwell, lead the way.”
Cranwell’s tactical boots clopped against the linoleum tile in the stairwell, up two flights of stairs to a corner apartment.
“You know the drill. Put these on before we go in.”
He handed us each a pair of disposable booties, gloves, and coveralls before entering the apartment.
Cranwell stopped taking my family into the FBI field office for questioning over two decades ago when rumors arose that the killings were the O’Leary family’s doing, and we became the target of numerous attacks.
Since then, we supplemented his income and now met him at bars to discuss the cases or at the victim’s place of death.
“The victim is Mitsy James. Twenty-four. She was found early this morning by her roommate when she came home from work. The coroner puts time of death between eleven and midnight last night. Normally, she works at a strip club until two, but she switched schedules with another dancer and took last night off.”
“One of ours?” I asked.
Liam scratched the back of his head. “Aye, the one on Lagrange Street.”
I rolled my eyes at my youngest brother, mouthing “Really?”, to which Liam shrugged.
Cranwell pointed between my brothers. “I guess that means I don’t have to ask which one of you two fuckers she was sleeping with.”
“Oh, come on.” Liam tossed his arms up. “I followed the rules. Only slept with her once. Once. That’s supposed to be allowed.”
“Tell me I’m wrong, but you boys aren’t too big on following the rules. Why are you expecting a killer to?”
“Wait. How many times did you fuck her?” I pressed my brother.
“Like I told you, once.”
“Ah, Jaysus.” I grabbed him by the arms and gave him a shake. “Tell me you’re not sure of that.”
“I am. Once. I’m dead certain. What’s the deal with you?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” I dragged a hand down my face. If this change in MO wasn’t a one-off, I’d made an even worse mistake last night than I thought. I sent a quick message to Alice, checking if she’d left my apartment or not. I needed to get men on her.
“This is out of the norm for the Love Knot Killer,” Brody chimed in.
“Bingo. Now tell us something we don’t all know.” Cranwell held up a USB key, then set it on the kitchen counter. “Crime photos. Pretty much exactly what we’d expect.” He clapped his hands. “So I see two possibilities. Either this means our killer is escalating, or this one was personal.”
“You’re expecting to find a clue here?”
“Yes and no,” Cranwell said. “The roommate is too much in shock to give us much of anything right now, but you…you’ve been here before.”
Liam held up one finger. “Like I said, once. And I was half drunk, hyped on sex. I remember more of what was between her legs than her bedroom.”
“Too crass.” Brody smacked Liam upside the head.
“Oi, I can’t fucking remember. What’d you expect? It meant nothing. I left before daybreak.”
“Tell me everything you know.” Cranwell clicked a pen and opened a notepad. “Everything you remember from that night, and any other night you saw her at the strip club. Any particulars. Any people who hovered around her.”
While Cranwell took Liam’s statement, Brody and I toured the apartment.
It was a tiny place with two bedrooms that barely had enough room for a mattress and a dresser in each.
However, the furnishings were decent, nothing too old or falling apart.
Kitchen was clean, with only a few dishes in the sink.
There was nothing lying around to indicate a struggle—there rarely was with LK—except for the obvious bloodstain and vomit residue in the middle of the living room.
“Did the toxicologist find the same toxins?” I asked Cranwell.
“Yes, all as usual. Elevated levels of digoxin, saponins, and helleborin, consistent with foxglove and hellebore poisoning, with suspected ingestion in a cocktail for this one.”
“Exact amounts?” Brody asked. “Any deviations?”
“I’ll get you the information.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Cake. It appears the victim was forcefully fed cake before her death. Coroner found residue in the mouth, throat, and stomach.”
Frosting coated the inside of the trash, with leftover cake piled inside.
“That’s new,” Liam said.
“The Love Knot Killer has never deviated from her pattern before,” Brody added, typing away on his laptop on the kitchen counter.
“A celebration of some sort?” Liam peeked in at the cake.
“A birthday?” I asked.
“If so, why this year?” Cranwell sighed. “Another piece to this killer’s puzzling profile.”
“What about those candles?” Brody pointed at the plain white, thick, waxy candles at the edge of the kitchen island. “They’re set on the counter with nothing underneath. People don’t usually do that.”
“Right. That’s—that might actually be a good catch.” Cranwell snapped on a glove and unfolded an evidence bag. “I’ll see if there are any prints on this, but I doubt it.”
“These candles aren’t the type for celebrations.”
“Cake and lighting candles,” Brody noted. “That’s more in line with a wake.”
“Question is, who died? I mean”—Liam scratched his head—“besides the stripper.”
“A close death might cause a change in pattern.”
“Or it’s to celebrate a death anniversary,” I countered.
“Again, why this year?”
“Perhaps something upset her annual routine at home,” Liam guessed.
“Any chance someone you know died on this day? Any ideas?”
I rotated my karambit knife around my thumb, racking my brain. Liam shrugged, looking stumped.
“Hold on. I just need to pull up my rosters.” Brody lost himself in his computer files.
My middle brother was organized to a fault, keeping a record of everything he’d ever seen or learned.
File by file: rivals (sub-listed by group type, name, and threat level), partners and associates (a folder per business and revenue level), employees, acquaintances, friends, family (clan-affiliated and kin).
“Found it.” We clustered around his screen. “We have two employee birthdays today, the death of one Russian rival out of Miami three years ago, the birthday of the sister of a friend, and the death of Da’s second wife twenty-nine years ago.”
“That one. I bet that’s our link.” Cranwell jotted down notes. “Name?”
“Fiona O’Leary, born Maguire.”
“Relationship to your family?”