Val flipped the hood of her sweatshirt over her head as she walked into the police station, praying no one got a good look at her. Most people there, if not everyone, would recognize her. Hell, some of them had personally arrested and interrogated her after the Pacific Science Center shootout six years ago, and then the showdown with Lucien in the Westford warehouse nine months later. The whole goddamn police department was intimately familiar with both her and Max, thanks to the death and mayhem that constantly dogged them.
I’m here, she texted Sten, then headed toward the interrogation rooms in the back of the station. She moved with confidence, pretending she belonged there so she wouldn’t look suspicious—until she got to the locked Interrogation Area door and had to stand awkwardly in front of it, waiting for Sten to let her in.
“Hey,” someone’s gruff voice said behind her.
She turned enough to get a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye—a big man with close-cropped blond hair and a detective’s cheap suit, walking toward her.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked.
Head down, she mumbled, “I’m waiting for someone.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be in here. Go wait in the lobby.”
When she didn’t move, he gripped her arm and yanked her toward the exit. Just as Val was about to punch his grabby ass, the interrogation room door swung open and Sten stepped out.
“Where’re you goin’ with my crack whore, Kirby?” Sten said to the detective dragging Val away.
Kirby stopped and looked down at Val. She turned her head away, pretending to cower so he couldn’t see her face. From beneath the sweatshirt’s hood her gaze met Sten’s, his dark, sharp eyes a stark contrast to his bored facial expression. He really was an amazing actor.
“She your informant or something?” Kirby said, still keeping an iron grip on her arm.
“No, I use the phrase ‘my crack whore’ as a term of endearment for all the ladies.”
After a couple seconds, she heard Kirby give her a dismissive sniff before shoving her toward Sten. “Keep your informants on shorter leashes next time.”
“She’s on crack, Kirby. My instructions go in one ear and smoked out the other.”
Gritting her teeth, Val stomped past Sten into the Interrogation Area. He followed, closing the door behind him.
Throwing back her hood, she slapped him in the face.
He flinched in surprise. “Hello to you, too.”
“Did you send pictures of us to Max?”
Raising an eyebrow, he asked, “Pictures of us doing what?” After correctly interpreting Val’s seething silence, he said, “Oh. Huh. We should’ve figured. I told you what would happen if you took your anger out on me.”
With a grunt of rage, she slapped him again. She might as well have tapped him on the shoulder for all the pain she’d seemed to cause him. Instead, he took her aback when he looked at her with eyes smoldering with desire.
“You’d better stop that. I thought you didn’t want to have sex again.”
She felt her cheeks heat up. He was right; her unbridled rage and the need to take it out on somebody had been the genesis of those stupid pictures to begin with. Not that they’d ever fall into bed again, but—well, best not to tempt fate.
Confident by his response that Sten hadn’t sent the photos, and reminding herself why she came there to begin with, she snapped, “Where’s Eleanor?”
“Your second biggest fan is in Room Two. But we need to establish some rules of engagement first.”
“Rules of engagement?” Val had one rule—that crazy bitch was finally going to get what was coming to her. She scoffed and turned away from Sten, ready to march into Room Two and start wailing on Eleanor’s smug face. He grabbed her arm before she got more than one step away, twisted her around, and pulled her flush to him with a grip that made Kirby’s seem childlike. With their chests pressed together, in a flash she remembered what his naked body felt like against her own. She swallowed hard and set her face to stone as he leaned down, his mouth a couple inches from hers.
“These are the rules of engagement,” he said, his words cold but his breath hot against her lips. “She turned herself in for questioning in the disappearance of one Aaron Zephyr, because of her connection to him through Jones’s bar. However, we’ve had her detained for three hours now and I’m all out of excuses to keep her here. I sent the other detective on the case away to do some bullshit errand, but he’ll be back soon and he’ll probably cut her loose. You have ten minutes alone with her, tops. I turned off the cameras, but if she walks out of here with a bloody lip, they’ll blame me, and I am not dealing with that shit. Do you understand what I just said?”
Aaron had disappeared? Did Max know? Her husband hadn’t mentioned it, though they hadn’t talked for more than a few minutes since the toy store disaster, so she wouldn’t know for sure.
Sten’s hand tightened around her arm when she didn’t immediately answer him. “I need an affirmative, Shepherd.”
“Yes, Jesus.” She yanked her arm away when his grip finally loosened, rubbing the spot where she’d soon have bruises in the shape of his fingers. “Why didn’t you arrest her for the bombing, or the toy store collapse, or the ferry crash?”
“Because you need things like evidence and probable cause for that. Fuck visions and paranoid conspiracy theories aren’t admissible in court. I thought we’d gone over how all this law and order stuff works before.”
The police hadn’t found any evidence of Eleanor’s involvement in those tragedies? Bullshit. Mother was helping her cover her tracks, Val knew it. All the cops could do was hold her for questioning in her lover/client’s disappearance, until she lawyered up or asked to leave. Shit.
“Fine,” she said through a clenched jaw. “Just take me to Eleanor.”
He walked past her in the direction she’d tried to storm down, and stopped at the end of the hallway in front of Interrogation Room Two.
Looking at his watch, he said, “Eight minutes,” then opened the door for her.
In the plain white room with a one-way mirror on the far wall, Eleanor sat calmly at a stainless steel table. Her gray jacket slung across the back of her simple metal chair, she fingered a Styrofoam cup of water and eyed the new arrival as if she’d been waiting for Val the whole time. When Val took a step inside, Sten shut the door behind her, taking position on the other side of the mirror to watch the fireworks, she guessed. The corners of Eleanor’s hideous red lips turned up.
“Welcome, Valentine,” Eleanor said. “You took your time getting here. But I guess I shouldn’t expect punctuality from an agent of chaos.”
Val stared her down, imagining all the ways she could break every bone in Eleanor’s body. Her fingers twitched with the need to exact justice right then and there for Lydia, Michael, Dani, and all the other innocent people Eleanor had killed or hurt. She had to ball her hands into fists to steady them. Never breaking eye contact, she walked to the chair opposite Eleanor and slowly sat down.
“Who are you?” Val asked with as much calm as she could muster.
Eleanor cocked her head and smiled. “I’m the opposite of you.”
“Meaning?”
“I preserve God’s plan and protect it from your perversity.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. God has a path we must all walk down, a grand plan you are disrupting. He sent me to stop you.”
“So you think you’re receiving messages from Father—from God?”
Eleanor lifted her hands up as if she were attending a revival church meeting. “When my body feels the rapture, He speaks to me, and I obey.”
Val glanced at the mirror, relieved that only Sten was witnessing their conversation. So Eleanor thought her visions were messages from God that she had to make come true? As far as Val knew, every seer’s visions were unique to them—Max saw numbers, Lucien had seen medical technology, Val saw murder and mayhem, and Eleanor saw—or heard—the “voice of God.” Her reign of terror could be a murderous chicken and egg scenario—she acted out what she saw in a vision, but the only reason she saw it in a vision to begin with was because she’d already committed to fulfilling the vision in the past. Thinking about it made Val furious—and her head hurt.
“God is not talking to you,” Val said. “You have a…condition. It’s a physical response to an unknown phenomenon that hasn’t been discovered yet.” Those were Max’s words. It was all the explanation he could come up with.
Eleanor laughed. “When faced with the divine, you can’t accept it.”
The truth was, Val had considered her curse might be some kind of divine punishment. But it definitely wasn’t a force for good. At best, it was like a gun—its utility, for good or for evil, depended entirely upon the person who wielded it.
“If Father is telling you to do bad things,” Val said, “what is Mother telling you to do?”
Eleanor cocked her head a hair, as if slightly surprised Val knew of the mysterious other woman, but not fazed. “Bad things? No. Mother tells me to listen to Father. She guides me in fulfilling his divine plan.”
Val slammed her fist on the steel table. “Who is she?”
Eleanor’s smile fell away, though she didn’t flinch. She wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s what absolute certainty in your own righteousness did to a person. “You know.”
“No, I don’t actually. Why don’t you enlighten me.”
Staring at something past Val, Eleanor’s eyes misted over. “Mother is also God’s agent on this earth. She showed me the way when I was lost, and loved and cared for me when no one else would.”
“Is she telling you to terrorize my family?”
“Terrorize? That’s ridiculous. She told me about you, your husband, and your children, what you all were.”
“Why? What does she want? Who is she, goddammit? Answer me!”
“She guides me in fulfilling his divine plan—”
“You said that already, and it’s fucking stupid. You don’t have to do what the visions tell you to. You didn’t have to get on the ferry, you didn’t have to bomb the Thornton Building, you didn’t have to sabotage the toy store platform. You could have stayed home.”
Eleanor glanced at the mirror where she knew Sten watched them. “I didn’t do any of those things.” She wasn’t about to confess in front of an audience. “But those sad things, I’m sure, happened for a reason. It’s His plan—”
“You are not going to convince me that murdering children is His plan!”
Eleanor’s lips tightened, and the faintest hint of sorrow touched her eyes. “It’s His plan.”
Like Max, maybe she’d tried to change the future before and failed—because only Val could change what she saw. That must be what Eleanor meant by calling Val an agent of chaos. Now Eleanor rationalized her visions as something she had no choice but to do, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and Mother. Given her rough past, and the strong possibility she’d been abused or threatened by some of her previous Johns, Val guessed somewhere along the line, her visions had morphed into murder and snowballed from there.
“You don’t have to be this way,” Val said, a tiny iota of pity tempering her anger. “Fight for the future you want, Eleanor.”
Eleanor flinched, a flicker of doubt in her eyes for the first time.
“Fight!” Val slapped the table as if she could break loose some sanity in the woman who’d clearly been driven mad by the things she saw but couldn’t change.
Instead, the doubt vanished and that horrible grin returned. “Mother and I are doing His will, enforcing the future as He intended it to be. You’re the one defying Him and changing his plan. You’re the aberration—you and your children.”
Val jumped up from her seat, knocking her chair over, the sliver of pity gone in a flash of rage. “The only reason I haven’t killed you yet is because we’re in a police station, you crazy, evil bitch.”
Eleanor chuckled. “Are you threateining me?” She looked at the glass again. “Mister Police Man, please note that she’s threatening me. You know what else I’ve seen? You and I at a Christmas festival, the one along the Seattle waterfront tomorrow night. Both of us go, but only one of us leaves.”
Val leaned across the table toward Eleanor, planting her palms on the smooth surface as she drilled into the woman’s cool green eyes. “You think you can scare me? That you can break me? Many have tried. All have failed. So good luck.”
Eleanor sneered in response. “I think, after the Christmas festival, I’ll take your husband. He’s a fine man, and I could tell at Jones’s that he wanted me. Mother told me my connection to God would increase when we felt the rapture together. He’d be quite useful. Where is he right now, by the way? Have you seen what will happen to him yet?”
Val would have laughed at Eleanor’s ridiculous attempt to egg her on, but she felt too sick to her stomach to try. “If you think he’d ever touch you, then you’re even more delusional than I thought.”
Eleanor chuckled. “What is it rich people like to tell anyone who will listen? ‘I am the master of all I survey and I take what I want?’ I’ll take what I want this time. Maxwell’s trip to Him, very soon, has already been foretold. Doesn’t feel so nice being on the other end, does it?”
Val was only vaguely aware the interrogation room door had burst open when she lunged for Eleanor. To hell with the police station venue or Sten’s warning. Eleanor would die right here, right now, by Val’s hand. An inch from reaching the murderer, she felt herself jerked backward by Sten’s iron grip on both her forearms.
“Stop it, Shepherd!” Sten said. “Time’s up.”
“I’ll kill you!” Val bellowed. “I’ll kill you—”
“Jesus H. Christ!” another man’s voice said from the doorway. “What in the holy hell is going on here, Ander?”
Oh shit, Sten’s expression said for half a second, before he masked it with his usual bored confidence. “What does it look like, Cody? A girl fight, obviously, over who’s hotter—Fabio or Kevin Sorbo.”
Cody squinted at Val. “Is that Valentine Shepherd?”
“No. I think you might be projecting your fantasies on other people—”
“Goddammit, Ander! I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to pull here, but Miss Fatou is free to leave.”
Smiling, Eleanor stood and slipped on her jacket. “I certainly hope you find Aaron, Officer Cody. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.”
Val strained against Sten’s grip as he held her tightly in one spot. “No,” Val growled as Eleanor walked past Cody, then out of sight. “No!”
Cody blocked the doorway with his body, folded his arms, and glared at Val. “And what is your connection to this case again, or do you show up places to cause trouble for fun?”
Finally shrugging out of Sten’s grasp, she said, “That woman probably killed Aaron!”
Cody raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
“Because she was having an affair with him.”
“Yes, we know.”
“His wife hired me to take pictures of them together that she could use to take him to the cleaners in a divorce.”
“Do you have these pictures?”
“I don’t have any of them together yet. But she could have killed Aaron because she didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
She knew that wasn’t true; by the skeptical look on Cody’s face, he knew it, too. But she couldn’t explain everything she knew about Eleanor without sounding crazy.
Ah, to hell with it. “And she’s responsible for the Thornton Building bombing, and the toy store collapse, and the ferry crash. She’s trying to hurt my family through acts of terrorism, and she’s not going to stop until she kills us!”
Cody blinked at her for a moment, dumbstruck. Then he chuckled. “Did Miss Fatou kidnap the Lindbergh baby as well?”
Of course he’d say that. Every second she wasted talking to the clueless police was one more second Eleanor used to get away.
“Can I just go, please? Can I go right now?”
Cody turned his glare on Sten. “Why did you let her in here?”
“Well, the thing is…Okay, you got me. We’re having an affair, and I was doing her a favor. Don’t tell anyone.”
“What? That is not—” With a howl of frustration, Val lunged past Cody and ran down the hallway before he could stop her. She burst into the main police station and did a frantic scan of everything she could see—no Eleanor. Barreling past people in her way, no longer caring if anyone recognized her, she flew through the exit and into the cold street swarming with people in heavy coats and holiday sweaters. She spun in a circle, searching for the gray coat, yellow hair, and red lips. Round and round she turned, gripped by an impotent fury that had no outlet, until tears welled in her eyes and all the Christmas lights blurred together.
Eleanor had escaped. Again.