Kill Me Once Read online

  Dana fought back more tears. Poor Crawford. What would she do without him in her life? He’d single-handedly turned her into the woman she was today, taking a nervous young agent who hadn’t known her ass from her elbow and selflessly shaping her into one of the top agents in the Bureau, at least according to Dana’s file folder back at FBI Headquarters.

  There was always hope, of course. Dana had read about cases where supposedly terminal cancers had gone into sudden and mysterious remission. She only prayed her former partner was lucky enough to be one of them. Hell, he deserved that much after everything he’d been through. Losing his wife and daughter to murder hadn’t turned him into a helpless mess like it would have done to so many lesser men. Instead, he’d focused his energies on making the world a better place, which was a lot more than most people could have said in his situation.

  When the elevator doors opened, Dana stepped out and walked down the hall to apartment D13, accidentally scratching the delicate glass face of her mother’s watch against the concrete wall in the process.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ she hissed under her breath.

  She came to the outside of the apartment door and took a deep breath. This was not her apartment – hers was D12, directly across the hall – but it was time for a little good old-fashioned TLC. God knew she needed it right now. She could pick up her notebooks later.

  Dana rested her head against the cold surface of the apartment door and knocked. A deep mellifluous voice sounded from inside almost at once.

  ‘Come on in! It’s unlocked!’

  Dana turned the knob and stepped inside. There, in an expensively upholstered wing-backed chair, sat Eric Carlton, an unlit briarwood pipe on the end table by his side and a dog-eared copy of Memoirs of a Geisha in his hands. Oreo was curled up in a furry ball in his lap, purring contentedly.

  ‘Well, now, if this ain’t the picture of domestic bliss, I don’t know what is,’ Dana said, almost overcome by the normality of the tableau before her. ‘Reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting. Either that or Norman Bates. To tell you the truth, I haven’t quite made my up mind yet when it comes to you two characters.’

  Eric laughed and rose to his feet as Dana entered the stylishly decorated apartment. Art deco furniture was tastefully arranged around the room, with original oil paintings of Cleveland’s skyline spaced evenly on the walls.

  ‘Dana!’ he said happily. He placed Oreo down on the floor and took a step in her direction to give her a hug. ‘It’s about time you got home. We’ve missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you guys, too,’ Dana said, a catch in her voice. She hugged him back before leaning down to scratch Oreo behind his pointy ears, tears threatening again. In return, the cat rubbed his fat body against her legs and purred like a generator.

  Eric picked up on the emotion in her voice at once. ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ he asked softly. ‘Here, sit down. I’ll get us some coffee and then you can tell me all about it.’

  He took her firmly by the shoulders and led her to the dining-room table before disappearing into the kitchen and returning a moment later with two steaming mugs. ‘Now, tell me what’s going on.’

  So Dana took a deep breath and filled him in on all the latest developments, leaving out the part about Crawford’s diagnosis and her planned upcoming trip to the house of her childhood. That would only make Eric worry more than he already did.

  He frowned. ‘So you’ve got to go out to Chicago now?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Dana – do you really have to? When is this shit ever going to end?’

  ‘It’s going to end when we finally catch this guy.’

  Eric pressed his lips together. He’d always respected what she did, even when things got tough – but that didn’t stop him from caring. ‘Well, that makes sense, I suppose. Still, I’m worried about you. You don’t seem yourself.’

  Dana smiled at him. ‘I’m just frustrated, is all. I’ve got a million great questions but not a single goddamn answer to any of them.’

  Eric shifted in his chair. ‘And you really think Crawford Bell’s going to help out all that much answering those questions, Dana? I don’t know.’ Eric had never liked Crawford. He’d only met him once, at a party, and they’d gotten into a bullheaded argument about healthcare, of all things. ‘Seems to me he’s coming into this pretty late in the day,’ Eric continued. ‘You’ve already told me he still hasn’t given you a profile, and something about him rubs me the wrong way.’

  Dana waved his concern away with a sweep of her hand. ‘And here I was thinking another man couldn’t possibly rub you the wrong way. Guess I was wrong, huh?’

  Eric didn’t laugh at her feeble attempt at a joke. ‘Just watch your ass around him, would you?’

  Dana laughed. ‘If you weren’t so goddamn gay maybe I’d leave that job up to you, Rock Hudson.’

  Eric finally cracked a smile. ‘In another lifetime, Dana. In another lifetime.’

  ‘Just my luck. All the good ones are either taken or gay.’

  Eric leaned back in his chair and looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. A devious smile played across his full lips. ‘Or taken and gay, dear. Don’t forget about that possibility.’

  Dana widened her eyes in surprise. ‘Find yourself a boyfriend now, did you? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You’ve been away, remember?’ he said. ‘Anyway, up to this point it’s only been over the computer but it’s looking pretty promising so far.’

  Dana rose to her feet and tousled his hair. Seeing Eric had done her a little bit of good at least, as she knew it would. Shame she couldn’t just stay here for ever. ‘Good for you, you old dog, you. But that guy better treat you right or he’ll have to answer to me.’

  She leaned down and wrapped her arms around his neck from behind. ‘Sweetie, could you please watch Oreo while I’m in Chicago? I promise I’ll make it up to you when I get back.’

  Eric reached up and pulled her arms closer around his body. ‘You know I could never say no to the mother of my only son. Now get the hell out of here and go do whatever the hell it is you’ve got to do, Special Agent Whitestone. But just be careful out there, for Christ’s sake, would you? Oreo and I worry about you, you know. We’ll be waiting for you here with bated breath until you get back home.’

  Dana kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thanks, buddy. You’re a prince. I’ll stop by and say goodbye before I leave for the airport tonight, OK?’

  Eric rose to his feet and shooed her out of the apartment with both hands. ‘Sounds great, but I’m no prince and we both know it. Now scoot.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  When the light went on in their bedroom Nathan saw red everywhere.

  Kelly was naked, legs spread, her throat slashed. She’d probably been raped. Little Jennifer was cradled in her mother’s arms, her sweet face blue; the pillow that had been used to smother her to death had been tossed carelessly to one side.

  In an instant, Nathan’s entire world collapsed. He looked numbly around the room and saw the bloody handprints covering the walls. The Kermit the Frog piggy bank in which they’d been carefully squirrelling money away for Jennifer’s college education was smashed open and empty. There had been about a thousand dollars inside.

  Five hundred dollars apiece for the lives of his wife and daughter.

  Looking down at their destroyed bodies in horror, the silly little lullaby that Nathan had composed for Jennifer started playing in his mind. He sang it to her every night and it had always made her smile up at him and laugh. He’d loved those moments.

  Jenny-Benny, you are the love of my life. Jenny-Benny, you are so pretty, you are so nice.

  The song in his head stopped playing as abruptly as the needle scratching off a record at a junior high-school dance when the familiar ringing sounded in his ears. But Nathan passed out cold before the connection could be made.

  When his world finally swam back into focus an hour and a half later he felt strangely calm, knowing exactly what he had to do.


  First he stripped completely naked and went into the kitchen. Returning a moment later with a packet of sponges and a bucket filled with steaming-hot water, he gently washed the blood off his dead wife and daughter. He carefully placed their bodies side by side on the floor and stripped the bloody sheets off the bed before shoving them into a large black garbage bag.

  Next he remade the bed with fresh sheets and reclothed his beloved girls in clean attire. Placing them back in the bed, he fluffed the pillows up beneath their heads and pulled the comforter over their bodies to keep them warm. Jennifer went back in Kelly’s arms, her sweet blue face snugly cradled up against her mother’s soft breast.

  In a trance, Nathan methodically scrubbed the bloody handprints off the wall. Then he vacuumed. Then he dusted. Retrieving the calla lilies from the kitchen table, he placed them in a vase on the bedside table and arranged them as carefully as a master florist before taking a long hot shower and finally crawling into bed with Kelly and Jennifer.

  Exhausted, he wrapped his arms around his dead wife and daughter and quietly cried himself to sleep.

  When the police arrived several hours later, Nathan was arrested on the spot and roughly tossed into a downtown cell for an overnight stay. But even with all the compulsive acts that had destroyed so much of the evidence, the real killer had left more than enough clues behind for the cops to catch up with him less than a week later.

  As the story slowly unfolded in the media, Nathan was stunned to discover that the murders of his wife and daughter had been nothing more than thrill kills, inexpertly pulled off by the son of a wealthy Cleveland real-estate developer just for kicks.

  He sat there in court every day just watching the man who’d so brutally butchered his young family. He would have gladly killed the bastard with his own bare hands had he been given half the chance, of course, but even through his overwhelming grief and despair at the loss of his beloved girls he couldn’t help feeling dismayed at the ham-handed manner in which the idiot had committed the murders. Kelly and Jennifer had deserved more.

  At the very least they had deserved professional deaths.

  The criminal trial resulted in the expected death sentence for young Prentice McIntyre when a jury of his peers took less than a week to decide unanimously that he wasn’t fit to walk the Earth with them any more. The civil trial that followed two years later made Nathan five million dollars richer, but he’d continued showing up for work every day for the next year anyway. From that terrible and bloody night forward, however, every waking moment of his life was consumed with his desire to extract revenge from the world that had fucked him up so badly in so many different ways since the very day he’d been born.

  And now he had the money to pull it off.

  The money and the perfect plan.

  Nathan finally quit his job at the Plain Dealer thirteen months later and used his media connections to audit a profiling class at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He took to the course like a duck to water, of course. If anything was right up his alley, it was this.

  He was so good, in fact, that it wasn’t very long before he decided he could probably teach the class himself.

  Hell, Nathan knew so much on the subject that he could probably write a goddamn book.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Dana crossed the hall and let herself into her own apartment. She’d put on a brave face for Eric but more than twenty-four hours had passed since she’d last slept, not counting the short nap on the plane, and it was really starting to catch up with her. Exhausted as she was, though, sleep really wasn’t an option right now. Not when she had a long-overdue date with the demons of her past.

  She shuddered and glanced down at her watch. Almost two o’clock already, and Crawford had agreed to meet her over at the house in West Park at three-thirty after stopping off to pick up a search warrant from a judge downtown. If she left now that would give her just enough time to make sure that she got all the crying out first. With any luck she could fix her make-up and pull herself together before Crawford arrived and had the chance to realise she’d been there before. That was if he didn’t remember before then why the address rang a bell and had something to say about it. She was slightly surprised he hadn’t phoned to bawl her out already. Probably, understandably, because he had other, more important things on his mind.

  Dana shook her head and went into the bathroom to freshen up. Her career was on the line here if anybody got wind of the fact that she was suppressing information her superiors had every right to know. All her hard work over the years and the sterling reputation she’d built up as a person who always played by the rules would go right down the toilet. But what choice did she have? If she told them about the connection to her past they’d yank her ass off the case so fast her head would spin, and that really wasn’t an option. Not at this point. If that meant the end of her career, so be it. She’d worked at K-Mart throughout her high school and college days, and she could probably catch on back there if she really needed to. Hell, it might not be the most glamorous job in the world, but innocent people didn’t usually die at K-Mart so there was something to be said for that.

  Dana locked her apartment’s front door behind her and made her way down the hall to the elevator. Down in the parking lot of the apartment complex two minutes later, she hopped inside the Protégé and began the short drive over to West Park.

  Her pulse quickened when she pulled onto Eastlawn Street fifteen minutes later. Most of the houses on the street looked exactly the same, with the odd different paint job here and there. The exact same maple trees lined the exact same perfectly manicured tree lawns, blowing gently in what appeared to be exactly the same breeze.

  Dana got out of the car before she could change her mind and stood in front of the house of her childhood. The single-storey ranch-style home was still painted white, with black shutters adorning the windows. A metal sign in the front yard declared that Chem-Lawn had been there recently. Even though it was November now, the chemicals made sure the grass stayed a deep, lush green – unlike the lawn next door, where the grass had slowly withered and died before fading away into a limp lifeless brown.

  Dana marshalled her courage and marched up to the front door before looking down at her watch again. Fuck the search warrant. She was going in without it. She’d clean up the mess with Crawford later on if it came to that. That was the least of her worries.

  She jimmied the lock on the door and pushed it open. Stale, unmoving air filled her nostrils. The living room was empty save for a small desk with an old rotary phone sitting on top. Exact same model as the one from her childhood.

  Dana sucked in a sharp breath and looked around. Her mind immediately slammed back to 1976. She could almost hear the sound of her mother’s laughter as she chuckled at another one of her father’s silly jokes. She walked into the kitchen and remembered the faint pencil lines that had been drawn on the wall next to the refrigerator marking her slow growth in height over the years. They’d been long ago painted over now.

  Hot tears filled her eyes as she went back into the living room. Down the hall to the right was her bedroom. She started in that direction, but the sudden sound of a telephone ringing almost made her jump right out of her skin.

  Dana’s heart slammed in her chest as she stared at the old rotary phone on the desk. Several seconds passed before she realised that the ringing was coming from her own cellphone. She dug it out of her pocket with shaking hands and flipped it open. Crawford’s voice filled her ear.

  ‘Slight change of plan, Dana,’ he told her without a preamble. ‘I’m in Cleveland now but I won’t be coming out to West Park. I managed to get an appointment with Dr Anthony Justice over at the Cleveland Clinic. He’s the best brain-cancer specialist in the country and I had to pull a lot of strings to get the appointment so I really don’t want to miss it. Could you manage without me for another day or two?’

  Dana shook her head hard to clear the cobwebs away while the ghosts of
her past gleefully danced in the living room all around her. Her beautiful mother. Her handsome father. The sadistic killer who’d murdered them both. ‘Of course,’ she told Crawford, desperately trying to keep her voice even. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m headed out to Chicago in a couple of hours, though. You can meet up with me there when you’re done in Ohio.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ he asked.

  ‘At the house in West Park. I couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Find anything interesting?’

  Dana looked over at the rotary phone and tried to ignore the apparition of her parents’ killer laughing at her. ‘Not really.’ Crawford obviously hadn’t made the connection yet and perhaps it was just as well that he wasn’t coming over. She found herself torn between relief that he wasn’t about to walk into her past and surprise that he would miss out on something potentially key to their case. But of course he’d want to see the specialist. She couldn’t possibly understand how he was feeling right now – and so she couldn’t possibly judge him. She just wondered why he hadn’t told her before that he was trying to get an appointment.

  Crawford coughed and said, ‘Well, soon as I get this damn appointment over with I’ll be at your full disposal.’

  Dana brought the conversation to a speedy conclusion and switched off the phone. Her skin crawled, being in this place, and she needed to get out. Now.

  She practically ran through the living room to escape, the ghost of her parents’ killer hot on her heels.

  Finally reaching her car ten seconds later, she let out a deep breath. Coming here by herself had definitely been a very bad idea, to say the least.

  She slammed the Protégé into drive and peeled out. She didn’t bother looking back, fearing the house of her childhood would be laughing at her, too. She’d walked straight into the emotional trap the killer had set for her.

  Twenty minutes later she was back inside her apartment in Lakewood. She went into the kitchen and grabbed a quarter-bottle of Jack Daniel’s by the neck off the counter and unscrewed the cap. She lifted the bottle to her mouth and winced as she drained the remainder of the contents in four quick swallows. Then she headed straight for her bedroom and fell into bed. Exhaustion flooded over her. A moment later, her eyelids drooped.