Deep Dark Secret

Then the illusion had been masterfully shattered when I was forced to dice up three vampires in the Bryant Park subway station and Tyler had gone home without his memory.

That was the real reason I didn’t need him thinking about me. It was a rare feat, but sometimes people who’d been enthralled by a vampire were able to regain their original memories. It often took years, sometimes hypnotherapy, but once in awhile they just had a series of lucid dreams until the real memory came back to them.

I did not need Tyler Nowakowski to remember what he’d seen. He’d lock me up next to Gabriel and throw away the key.

“What do you wonder?”

“How is it a pretty girl like you can look at pictures like that and not be moved by them?”

“Would you prefer I turn into a trembling, weepy mess and launch into a fit of hysterics? It’s not really my style, but if it would help you rationalize me better, I can do it.” For effect, I stuck out my lower lip a bit and gave it a good pre-sob tremble.

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Why do you insist on making a joke of everything?”

“Because if I took everything I see on a daily basis seriously, Detective, the weight of my life would destroy me.” Wow, that was a hell of an honest answer. Where had that come from?

Even Tyler looked a little stunned by my candor. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

I waved off his apology. “We all have our coping mechanisms, right?”

“I suppose so.”

Before he could try probing the layers of my subconscious any further, I rose to my feet and inclined my head towards the door at the back of the room. The employee-only basement stairs. It was time to get this show on the road. “Let’s go see that ex-boyfriend of mine, shall we?”

“We won’t need to go downstairs for that.”

My question came in the form of an arched brow and a puzzled expression.

Tyler answered me with a simple direction. “Interrogation room four.”

There are a lot of women who would love to square off against an ex-boyfriend across an interrogation-room table, under the unforgiving fluorescent lights and with a one-way mirror bearing mute witness.

I was not one of those women.

The tiny room made me feel ill at ease and put me on the defensive before I’d even taken my seat. I didn’t like locked boxes with only one method of escape. I also didn’t like knowing I was being watched by people I couldn’t see. In spite of knowing better, the whole setup reeked of a trap. The two things keeping me from fighting against my instincts were the knowledge I was here to do a job and that the police weren’t interested in killing me.

The metal chair squealed against the tile floor, and for a long while the echo of its protestation was the only sound in the room. Gabriel smiled at me pleasantly, his cuffed hands folded in a look-how-innocent-I-am manner on the scarred wooden table. There was a lingering aroma of sweat and the stink of cigarette smoke in the room. In spite of a smoking ban in municipal facilities, I would stake money the cops here still garnered witness favor by offering them a smoke.

I’d seen enough police procedurals to know that a seasoned cop would play this two ways. Either the straight-up investigator who just wanted answers, or the good-cop, bad-cop routine. I’d played the bad cop in my own life, and the idea of it was more than a little appealing given who I was dealing with, but I decided to try a different approach to see what Gabriel knew.

“How are they treating you?”

Gabriel shrugged. “My lawyer asked me the same thing. Fine, I guess. It’s not the Ritz or anything. Remember that ghastly little motel we stayed at one summer when Keats made you go to Albany?”

My poker face needed some work because I flinched. It was the same trip that first introduced me to Marcus Sullivan, the former Alpha of Albany, and the man who had turned my whole goddamn life into a shitstorm last year. I was still dealing with the fallout of killing him. How Gabriel had picked that memory out of all the others available to him was enough to make me want to reach out and deck him.

Instead I focused on the other tidbit of information his sentence gave me.

“You have a lawyer, and yet you’re here talking to me alone.”

“Do I need a lawyer present to talk to an old lover?” The familiarity of his tone made my stomach churn. This conversation would do nothing to convince the detectives on the other side of the glass that Gabriel was innocent. If anything, it made him look more like a creepy, leering sociopath.

“I want to help you, but you need to give me more to go on.”

“Like what?” He held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged. “I didn’t kill the girl, Secret. If anyone should believe me, I would hope it would be you.”

“Why? Why should I believe you? You bailed on our life together with no notice. Why should I think you’re somehow exempt from being a murderer?”

“I didn’t leave without my reasons. After everything…after what happened… I wanted to believe you and I could have a life together, but I couldn’t pretend, not after that.” He didn’t need to elaborate. The allusion to what had gone on between us was enough to make me feel as though guilt and loss and emptiness were stabbing me in the heart. I’d tried hard to forget what I lost at nineteen, and so had he if he still wasn’t able to talk about it.

“I’m not here to talk about us.”

“Okay.” He nodded, looking somewhat relieved.

“I’m here to talk about Misty Fitzpatrick.”

That got his attention. “What did Misty tell you?”

I sat back in the chair and said nothing.

“Look, that whole thing was a mess. She didn’t start talking about grades until after I slept with her, and I told her in no uncertain terms I wasn’t an express ticket to an A.”

“Oh, Jesus, Gabriel. Is there anyone in Mayhew’s class you haven’t fucked? What about Angie Ferris?”

“Once.”

“Gabriel.”

“Okay, two or three times, but she was a lousy lay and started introducing me as her boyfriend, and that’s not how I do things.”

“Yeah, monogamy really fucked up your social life, didn’t it?”

“That’s not what I meant. You know I was never unfaithful to you.”

“Do I?”

“I’m telling you I wasn’t.”

“Just like you’re telling me you didn’t kill Trish Keller or Misty Fitzpatrick or Angie Ferris.”

“Oh Christ. They’re dead?”

Wrapping my arms tight across my chest, I fixed him with a humorless glare. He’d broken out into a sweat, and the sickly sweet aroma of fear was filling the room. Either he was afraid of what the implications of the new murders meant for him, or he was worried he was about to finally be caught. I could smell a lot of things, but the truth wasn’t really one of them. A skilled liar can smell like a lot of things. A bad liar smells like anxiety and guilt. I was having a hard time making sense of Gabriel’s particular fragrance.

“If I were to give you Mayhew’s class list and ask you to circle the names of every girl you’d slept with, how many circles would be on that list?”

“A lot,” he admitted.

“What does the name Lucy Renard mean to you?”

There was a commotion behind the one-way mirror. Gabriel wouldn’t be able to hear it, but I could get the gist of it. Someone was freaking out because the name meant nothing to their investigation. Tyler’s even voice, muffled through the glass, was saying, “Let’s see where she’s going with this.”

“Lucy? What about Lucy? No. Not Lucy too.” He looked like he was going to be sick.

“Would her name have a circle around it?”

“What? No. Look, Lucy was a gifted student, a really smart girl, that’s why she was a freshman in a third-year class. Mayhew has a lot to deal with in class, and I think sometimes the top-notch students get overlooked because he has to deal with all the groupies.”

“So you had no physical relationship with Lucy.”

“No, I was mentoring her. I wanted to help her stand out more. She has a real future in medieval studies, with the right guidance. A good grade in Mayhew’s class would go a long way. I even set up a few meetings between them privately so she could get to know him and maybe he’d give her a grad school recommendation or something. I wanted to help her.”

“How noble.”

“Is she dead?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “But she’s missing.”

More uproar behind the glass. There was a full-on argument going on in there. My back was to the mirror, but I couldn’t help myself. I looked over my shoulder and gave my reflection a hard, unforgiving stare. I shouldn’t be able to hear them, but they might think they were being louder than they realized. It wasn’t a top-of-the-line mirror, after all. The fighting got quieter almost instantly.

Gabriel raked his fingers through his unwashed hair, leaving the dirty blond strands standing on end. His cuffs jingled with the trembling in his hands. For the life of me, I didn’t think he was guilty. Guilty of being a world-class prick, yes. A serial killer, though? It didn’t fit.

“Did you do it?”

“No.”

We’d already had this discussion, but I needed to have it again. I needed to hear it in his voice that he was innocent and I wasn’t wasting my time helping him.

“Can you think of anyone, anyone at all, who might have set you up for this?”

He cradled his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side. “Who would want to do something like this to another person? I think Misty had a boyfriend, but murdering three girls seems like overkill for getting back at the other man, doesn’t it?” He was talking to the table, no longer able to look me in the eyes.

“Gabriel, give me your hand.”

He complied without question, holding out his palm as if he was going to take my hand in his and we’d go strolling off into the sunset. I grabbed his wrist, pressing two of my fingers into his pulse point, and I stared him in the eyes.