Denver, Colorado

 

Wren was disappointed not to have the chance to speak to Mike Bruno with Cormac. The murder was over twenty-eight years old. They didn’t have a whole lot of leads. They’d spoken to a woman who witnessed the aftermath of the murder all those years ago, but she didn’t give them much more than what they already knew. She’d seen what might have been Devin Wilde with her mother in the park that night, but they already knew that Devin and her mother had been acquaintances. Devin had given that much up. But it put Devin with her mother on the night of her murder, suggesting as the Santa Monica police had always maintained that Devin was her killer. But Devin himself implied that someone else had committed the crime.

Who that was, of course, he refused to admit.

Wren had hoped that if they looked more closely at Devin’s past, they might find the connection between him and her mother, that they might be better able to understand what role he’d played that night. Wren knew painfully little about her mother’s background because she’d been something of a drifter when she met Wren’s bohemian artist of a father. He never bothered to ask her much about her past, and when she decided to go home to Texas, he just let her walk away. He claimed to know nothing about what had happened the night of her death. As far as he’d known, she was back in Texas and had been for weeks. When Wren tried to ask him about her, he shut down, refusing to answer her questions.

Devin suggested her father was hiding something from her. That he knew more about the events leading up to her mother’s murder than he’d previously shared.

Wren wasn’t sure that was true.

Devin Wilde was playing games. He had twice given her information on her operatives that was correct, an attempt to win her good graces. But all his suggestions that he’d had a close relationship with her mother and that her father was the liar, the perpetrator of falsehoods in all this, felt wrong. Maybe he’d known her mother, but he couldn’t have known her that well, could he have? Why would her mother be friends with a serial killer?

Maybe Mike Bruno could shed some light on all that.

Wren walked off the elevator at the hotel and sauntered down the corridor to her room. She pressed the key card against the reader, jerking the door handle to let herself in. She’d given her key to Cormac because she realized she didn’t have pockets in her neat suit as they were leaving this morning, and he gave it back when he pushed her away from Bruno’s house. But it wasn’t working.

The damn light kept flashing red.

She turned away from the door, wondering how complicated it would be to get a new key, seeing as how Cormac had paid for everything. Would they even do it for her? And then her eyes fell on Cormac’s door just across the hall.

He’d been so proud of himself when he held out the room key he’d gotten for her. “Two rooms,” he said. “I promised no funny business on this trip.”

She wondered if he was aware of just how disappointed his little show of chivalry had made her.

What if the key was for his room?

She crossed the hall and tried it, smiling when the light flashed green. She let herself into the room, not surprised to find it was exactly like her own, just covered in Cormac’s things. He was not a neat guy, apparently. He’d taken a bunch of clothes out of his overnight bag, and they were scattered all around the room.

She hadn’t gotten that impression from his house. But some people acted differently at a hotel than at home.

She walked around, gathering the items. She was nearly finished cleaning the place up when she saw the edge of a bag sticking out from under the bed. Curious, she pulled it out. It was just an athletic bag, one she remembered seeing among Cormac’s things when they arrived at the airport. But why was it under the bed?

She set it on the edge of the mattress and unzipped it. Inside was a mass of papers and files and pictures, case files jumbled up together like someone had gathered them in a hurry. She began lifting them out, recognizing pictures of the crime scene after her mother’s murder. There was too much there to be only about her mother, however. She began digging through it all, pulling out files from some of Devin Wilde’s cases, files from other murders that were just as old, and some that were more recent. A couple were fewer than ten years old.

What was this? Was this Cormac’s cold case collection? Were these some of the other cases she’d been told he was exploring?

She began to organize them, the cop inside of her growing more and more suspicious as she studied the pieces of paper and photos that were floating among the files untethered. All of them were of murders that were darkly violent, murders that went beyond what might be considered a simple act of passion. No simple shootings or stabbings. Each of the victims was mutilated in some way and appeared to be posed. Each victim was a woman of a specific age range, mostly in their mid to late twenties.

Like her mother.

There were notes. Someone—Cormac, she supposed—had written notes in each file, making comparisons, noting similarities in witness statements, discussing the use of certain weapons. He was trying to find a pattern.

Why? What was the connection between these cases? What was he looking for?

She was so engrossed in putting the cases back together again, in trying to read Cormac’s mind, that she didn’t hear him come up behind her. She saw his shadow, and she started to turn, but he must have had a Taser in his hand. She felt the shock of electricity course through her body and fell, the room quickly darkening as she lost consciousness.