Avalon Read online

  Lancelot had chopped off Gloria’s trademark braid of long, silky blonde hair and used it to strangle her. After being viciously raped and sodomized, the death had probably come as a blessing.

  Gloria’s rape had been the most brutal, but she had fought, long and hard. The tenacity that had landed her the cop beat in Avalon had also helped secured the cops something priceless.

  The psychologist had a little stunned.

  “Interesting. I wonder why he made this fatal slip. He never has before. It would appear he is losing control.”

  Oh, he had lost more than his control during that last battle with Gloria.

  Under her nails were skin fragments, blood, and tissue, signs of the vicious battle she had waged for her life. Evidence that would put the bastard away for life.

  If we can ever find him, Seth thought, expelling a harsh breath through his nostrils and opening his eyes. On the wall in front of him were the pictures of five lovely women. Below each picture was a name and life story. Below that, the death story and gruesome photos of the crimes scenes. Two hotels, one abandoned house, and three private residences. Three of the women, including Gloria, had been raped, tortured and killed in their damned homes.

  “Not exactly the most cheerful thing to be contemplating when you have a wedding scheduled, huh?”

  The cool voice still sent shivers down his spine, still made him ache. Cocking his head, he studied the woman who stood in the doorway, her eyes full of pity and veiled anger. “No, but I don’t think they give a shit about whether or not this cheers me up. They just want me to find the motherfucking, sick-assed, butchering son of a bitch.”

  “It isn’t his mother he’s fucking,” Erin commented, a slim brow rising slightly at his tirade. Though she made no other comment on his language, Seth felt it all the same. That look of hers was worse than a slap on the hand or verbal chastisement any time. Too bad Eva—

  Watch it, Porter, he cautioned himself, dragging his eyes away from her, wondering if there would ever be a time when he didn’t look at her and yearn. “Is there something I can do for you, Erin?” he drawled, reaching for the lukewarm Coke and draining it, even though he didn’t want it.

  She had been gone on vacation for nearly two weeks. He eyed her pale skin. No tan. She hadn’t been sunning herself on a beach somewhere. And she actually looked rather stressed, more than she had when she left. Erin generally didn’t look stressed. That was too human for her.

  “I had something on my desk this morning that you and Eddie need to see,” she said, reaching in her jacket and pulling out a disc. “Where is he?”

  “Running late. What is it, Kate Winslet’s latest DVD?” he asked. “Eddie’s got a thing for her, but she’s not my type.”

  “No. Paris Hilton is more your style, I know,” Erin replied evenly, her eyes staring coolly into his.

  Lifting his shoulders in a shrug, Seth replied, “I prefer actually doing it to watching it. But then again, you should know that.” Was that a shadow that passed through her eyes, he wondered?

  He couldn’t begin to guess because Erin turned away, sighing.

  Reaching up, she pressed her fingers against her temple, waited for the pressure to ease. As the headache retreated a bit, she wished she could ease the ache in her heart that easily.

  The headaches had gotten worse, steadily worse over the past few months. A week after her twenty-ninth birthday. Because she was practical, she had gone to see her doctor and was told it was stress-related. The CT scans had shown nothing but a normal, healthy brain. She was given painkillers and a daily pill for migraines that she didn’t take.

  No point to it, really. Eleven months later, the headaches were nearly enough to lay her flat.

  It wouldn’t be a headache that killed her. It wouldn’t be a tumor, or a hyped-up druggie looking to kill the cop bitch who had taken his stash.

  It would be someone she knew.

  With a forced effort, she shoved those thoughts from her brain.

  This is not going to be one of my better days, she thought morosely. Her nerves were still raw from viewing the DVD that had been left on her desk. How it had gotten there was anybody’s guess. Erin really couldn’t begin to guess which was more painful, seeing Seth or watching that disc on her computer, the disc of a young woman being brutally raped and murdered.

  He’d torn her apart; first with his own fists and the tools of the trade career rapists tended to carry in their rape kits. Erin had no doubt that the internal injuries would have killed the woman in time.

  She hadn’t been given the time.

  Was she going to have to suffer through that? Did she have Gloria’s courage?

  “Erin?”

  Turning back to Seth, she asked, softly, sadly, “Do we have to be enemies, Seth?”

  Raising one thick, black brow, Seth asked, “Is that what we are? Enemies?” One corner of that clever, elegant mouth lifted in a sarcastic little smile. “I think we have a little too much history for us to be friends, Erin.”

  “Old history,” she added quietly, folding her hands in front of her. “You’re engaged to be married. I seriously doubt our…history is causing you much distress.”

  “I never said it caused me distress, sugar,” Seth drawled, propping his booted feet on the desk. Studying her from beneath the fringe of his lashes, he watched as she walked across the office and laid the DVD down on his desk. One hand rested on it, until he looked away from it and into her eyes. “You’re looking kinda ragged there, darlin’. You coming down with something?”

  Ragged, hell. She looked…fragile. Erin had never, in all the time Seth had known her, looked fragile. He hated that worry, and the tenderness, that was building inside him.

  “Watch it,” she said, nodding to the disc, sliding it across his desk with one finger.

  Curiosity flickered and he took the DVD, sliding it into his computer. “What is it?”

  “Find out,” she suggested coolly, moving across the room to stare out the window.

  Seconds later, Gloria’s face bloomed on the screen. It went on close-up and the camera trailed down the length of her body. She hadn’t been beaten. Not yet.

  Her eyelashes were still closed and she appeared to be sleeping. The picture faded out and reappeared on a close-up of a man straddling her naked body. No audio, but the absence of sound didn’t make it any less horrifying.

  “Fuck me.”

  Erin closed her eyes, resting her forehead on the cool glass of the windowpane. Every vicious second had been imprinted on her memory. And she knew it would never leave her. Her only release was in knowing that the waiting was almost over, that it would be her turn to face the evil.

  And when she died, she would take him with her.

  That was the one thing that kept her from screaming in the night as the visions came with increasing frequency, increasing clarity. Never in time. Never in time to stop the one who was preying on the young, cool-looking blondes of Avalon’s upper crust.

  And never clear enough to see his face, to see any marks that would betray his identity.

  Behind her, she heard Seth’s breath whistle out between his teeth, then speed up in impotent rage.

  Several times, Seth tried to fight down the bile that rose in his throat. The disc ended after thirty-five minutes. Spinning in his chair, he rose and moved across the small office, catching hold of Erin’s arm and turning her to face him. “Where did you get this?” he asked just as the door opened.

  Eddie tensed, recognizing the tension in the air. He closed the door behind him and came in, his hands sliding into the pockets of his blazer while he studied his partner and Erin Sinclair with curious, cautious eyes.

  “It was on my desk this morning when I came in,” she said. “No note. Just the disc.” Dispassionately, Erin said, “She marked him. His right forearm had three gouges, pretty deep. He may even scar from them.”

  Yeah. Seth had seen the gouges.

  And he had watched as her long blonde brai
d was sawed away, watched as the obscure figure in black viciously tightened it around her throat, cutting off her air until her eyes bulged, then releasing her.

  Another rape.

  Another beating.

  By the time he finally grew tired of his new toy, Seth figured the bastard had kept her alive nearly two days, judging by the shadows that fell across the bed.

  “He has a job,” Erin said from across the room. “A few screens show a clock. There’s a ten hour period on both days when he left her strapped down.”

  “How many times did you watch it?” he demanded. “This should have been brought to me immediately.”

  She turned away from him, staring back out the window, her eyes dry and burning. “I grew up with Gloria,” she said quietly.

  And then she brushed past him into the bullpen.

  “Aww, shit,” he muttered, pressing his thumbs to his eyes.

  Eddie closed the door quietly behind her and turned to face his partner. “What’s up?”

  Eddie’s ruddy face was pale by the time they had finished viewing the CD together. A cop for more than twenty years, he had hoped to do his time without ever encountering this kind of depravity. “Why did he leave it with Erin? And how did he get it there?”

  “She was out of the office on personal time, gone for two weeks. God knows when he put it there,” Seth said. As to why, he didn’t want to consider that.

  “She said she grew up with Gloria?” Eddie asked.

  “Yep,” Seth said, kicking back on the rear legs of the chair.

  “We’ll have to question her.”

  “Well, I think we can safely say, after viewing the flick of the day, that the perp is definitely male,” Seth drawled.

  “Cute,” Eddie muttered, digging in his pocket for a role of antacids. “I don’t like this.”

  Me neither, Seth thought.

  “I mean, why in the hell leave it on Erin’s desk? She isn’t connected to the case, her history with Gloria was a long while back, and she’s not with homicide.” Tugging at his lip, Eddie turned his eyes to the pictures that lined the walls. The resemblance between the dead women and Erin hadn’t gone unnoticed by Eddie. Studying his partner out of the corner of his eye, he decided it hadn’t gone unnoticed by Seth either. “She fits the profile.”

  “We need to put a uniform on her,” he said, a muscle twitching in his cheek. If he knew anything about Erin, it was that she wouldn’t like that at all.

  “Not likely.” The cool voice that came from the doorway was much more calm, much more collected.

  He should also have remembered how damn quiet she was, he thought irritably, studying the tall, cool-eyed blonde in the doorway. “You may not have much choice in the matter,” he said.

  One slim blonde brow rose. “Do you really think I’d have a hard time losing a rookie? Please. I seriously doubt you could keep up with me, unless I wanted you to.” She strolled into the room, moving slowly, lazily, as if she hadn’t just received a very nasty gift from Lancelot.

  “Has it occurred to you that you fit the profile?” Seth asked, rising from his chair and glaring at her from across the desk.

  Settling down in a chair, she crossed one long, silk-covered leg over the other. “When we were in school together, before we drifted apart, Gloria and I used to be mistaken for sisters,” Erin said quietly, her eyes sad and distant. When her eyes returned to Seth’s face, he saw a simmering anger brewing there. “Whatever the reason may be, he had a reason for sending that disc to me. And if he’s set his sights on me, I’ll be ready.”

  Not if, she thought, with certainty.

  When.

  “No.”

  Cocking her head, a slight smile curving her mouth upward, Erin said, “Seth, I really don’t see how you have a choice in the matter.” A sick feeling had settled in her belly after seeing the case file on the first victim. It had worsened with each additional one, until culminating just two weeks earlier when she had found out Gloria was the most recent victim. “I’ve already spoken with the captain, and the chief. If necessary, he’s fully ready to use me as bait.”

  “Like hell.” Seth was reaching for the phone when her voice reached him again.

  Softly, Erin said, “He’s done this before.”

  Looking up, he stared across his desk at her, his eyes dropping to the file she held out. “Take it,” she said. “Seventeen years ago. I have a friend in Evanston on the force. He accessed these files for me. I used to spend summers there as a child. My parents have close friends there. I read up on the case files after our third victim. It rang a bell.”

  Lies. She hadn’t needed to read up on the case files. She had accessed them, illegally, years before. Shortly after she turned eighteen and knew it was pointless to fight her future, to fight her…destiny. So she had taken them, memorized them, prepared herself.

  Sick at heart, Seth opened the file and handed the enclosed duplicate to Eddie. Same profile, same method-of-operation. Death by asphyxiation, brutal rape and beating.

  “Some kind of copycat?” Eddie asked.

  “No.” Lowering herself into a chair, Erin said, “The fact that the woman was strangled with a rope made of her own hair was a detail never released to the public. I don’t see these as being copycat.”

  “You’ve been reading the case files,” Seth said grimly, turning a page to reveal crime scene photos. Grisly echoes of those currently in his desk.

  “Yes. We’re talking about a man who has killed eleven women,” Erin said. “Over a span of fifteen years. And…they’re being killed in the same order.”

  “Order?”

  “The first one, back in 1985, was Alice Jones, a bank teller in Evanston, single, blonde, found in a hotel two days after she was reported missing.”

  Seth’s looked at the board across the room. Allison Monroe, bank teller at Avalon First Bank, found dead in a motel.

  “The second one was a kindergarten teacher, Meredith Baxter, married. Found in a vacant house three blocks from where she lived.”

  The second photo on the board was of Mrs. Marilyn Beard, kindergarten teacher, found in a vacant house just a few blocks away from the school where she taught.

  “God have mercy,” Eddie whispered as Erin went on, ticking off the details, the similarities. Right up to number six.

  She said nothing, waited as Eddie and Seth thumbed through the file until they came to Erica Morrisey, a narcotics detective with the Evanston Police Department.

  Jaw clenched, Seth stared at her lovely face as he rose. Hoarsely, he rasped out, “You’re the target. The psychologist contacted a friend at the FBI, a profiler. We’ve been warned he already has his agenda, and he will stick to it. We haven’t had any idea what it was and unless something major happened, we wouldn’t be able to stop him in time.”

  Seth’s hand clenched and he felt the rage building inside him but he managed to keep his voice level. “You’re the fucking target.”

  With a tiny smile, Erin said, “I’m the something major, it would appear.”

  “No,” Seth said, his voice almost soundless. That maniac getting his hands on Erin? He felt the insane scream building low in his gut and shook his head vehemently. “No way in hell.”

  Her face sobered and Erin moved across the room, around his desk, until she stood only inches away. So close, he could smell the scent of peaches and vanilla on her, a smell he hadn’t had fill his lungs in more than three years, not since he had walked away from her.

  “We can’t stop him. He will find me, no matter what we do. I am his target, and that’s fact, not hunch, not instinct,” she told him.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Eventually, I’ll tell you everything you want to hear,” she said, unconsciously promising him. Someday, before it was all said and she was done, she would tell him what he had meant—what he still meant, what he would always mean—to her.

  “But for now, you need to use me. Let me in on the task force, plant a tracki
ng device in my fillings, whatever. Even try putting some poor rookie on my tail, Seth, if you honestly think it would serve some purpose. But use me. Help me stop him so he doesn’t start this again in another seventeen years.”

  What choice do I have? Seth wondered later that night as he lay in bed next to his fiancée. Eva curled her petite frame around him, one hand lying over his heart, her leg thrown over his.

  But his mind wasn’t on her.

  His mind wasn’t on the woman lying next to him, the woman he was supposed to marry later that fall.

  It was on the sad-eyed blonde who had left his office after he had reluctantly admitted, even to himself, that this was a chance they couldn’t pass on.

  Hell, how many cops were given the chance to save the victim before she became the victim?

  And he would save her.

  Failing wasn’t an option. Because if he failed, the next body he would be called in to see would be hers.

  He didn’t doubt that.

  After damn near going blind over the files, he had come to the inevitable conclusion that the killers were one and the same. And nothing Gloria had done in the news, or hadn’t done, had pointed the finger her way. She had been on his list from the beginning. Side by side with Angela Neally, the reporter who had been found raped and murdered in her home, only a month before the final, and most brutal, murder.

  Rolling from the bed, he gave up on the idea of rest. No time any way. He wouldn’t take the time to piss for the next month if it would save Erin.

  Padding down the stairs of the large cedar wood house he and Eva had moved into the past spring, he went to the telephone and punched in a number he had known for years.

  When her sleepy voice sounded in his ear, the knots in his belly loosened. Would he have to keep her next to him until this whole thing was resolved? Damn right, part of him whispered.

  And he would, if that kept her safe. God knows, that was what he wanted anyway. Erin. He had just wanted Erin, always, forever.

  “Seth,” she mumbled sleepily, “if you have something to say, say it. Otherwise, I’m going to go back to sleep.”