Chapter 3
Cyrene Patterson stretched languidly on
the beach towel, her bikini-clad, five-eight body soaking in the
morning sunshine by their pool directly outside the bedroom’s
French doors. The deluxe honeymoon package at the Grand Resort
there in the Bahamas included not only a luxury villa suite, but
butler service. She and Errol had enjoyed breakfast in bed, and
then made love as if they hadn’t already spent half the night
screwing like crazy. She had left him asleep, slipped into her
bathing suit and taken a dip in the pool. Life was good. Just
couldn’t get much better. She had waited a lifetime for Mr.
Right—thirty years. But he had been well worth the
wait.
Neither she nor Errol had been naïve
youngsters, with stars in their eyes, when they said their I-dos.
Both had been married before when they were too young and too
stupid to know what they were doing. She had married the first time
to get away from home, an alcoholic mother, a father who showed up
once in a blue moon, and younger siblings who were more than her
grandmother could handle. Her two-year marriage to Polo had proven
the old adage about jumping out of the frying pan and into the
fire. Thank God she’d been smart enough to leave the abusive son of
a bitch before she got pregnant. Errol, on the other hand, had
married at nineteen the first time because his girlfriend told him
she was pregnant. She had lied to him, but by the time he had found
out the truth, she actually was pregnant. He had lived in hell for
three years. But before little Tasha’s second birthday, Errol had
known he needed to end the marriage and had sued his wife for full
custody. Two weeks before their divorce was finalized, Errol’s
wife, who had been granted visitation privileges, had taken their
child for a joy ride and both had been killed in a head-on
collision with an eighteen wheeler. Witnesses had said that it
appeared she had deliberately caused the “accident.”
Cyrene lathered SPF 15 sunblock on her
arms and legs to protect her golden skin from UV damage. The
popular belief that darker skin didn’t need protection from the
harmful rays was false. Even the darkest skin could
burn.
She intended to do everything possible
to take care of her skin and her overall health. That’s why she’d
never taken drugs. Sometimes, Errol accused her of being a health
nut. If following an exercise routine, being a vegetarian, not
smoking, doing drugs or drinking to excess made her a health nut,
she would gladly don the label and wear it proudly.
“Any place you can’t reach?” Errol
asked her, his voice husky with innuendo.
The moment Cyrene heard his voice, she
smiled, but she didn’t look at him. Instead, she held the sunblock
bottle up over her head. Once he grasped the bottle in his hand,
she untied her bikini top and dropped it to the patio floor. With
her breasts bare, she tilted her head and gave him an enticing
come-here-big-boy glance.
“Start wherever you’d like.” She loved
to tease him. “But don’t miss a spot.”
He came around the back of the lounge
chair, knelt beside her, upended the open sunblock bottle and
squirted a large dollop of the scented cream into the center of his
open palm. After setting aside the bottle, he started at the base
of her neck, lathering the lotion onto her skin. He moved steadily
from shoulder to shoulder in downward swipes until his big hands
hovered over her naked breasts. Her nipples tightened in
anticipation. The moment his fingers caressed the hard tips, she
moaned with pleasure.
Errol slid his hands beneath her,
lifted her into his arms and carried her off the patio and through
the open French doors. She laughed with pure delight as he tossed
her into the center of the unmade bed, stripped off his bathing
suit and came down over her.
Cyrene reached for him, her arms and
her heart open wide for the man she loved.
Maleah and Derek arrived at Griffin’s
Rest that evening well before sunset. They would have arrived
sooner, but they had backtracked to Dunmore to pick up Maleah’s
vehicle, a new Chevy Equinox. Although they had lost sight of each
other during the trip from Alabama to northeastern Tennessee, he
caught a glimpse of her in his rearview mirror just before the I-40
Bridge crossing Douglas Lake. The moment he saw her, he couldn’t
help wondering if she was pissed because he was ahead of her in the
home stretch. Not that he had consciously been trying to arrive at
Griffin’s Rest before she did or that he saw everything in life as
a competition. But during their working partnership on the Midnight
Killer case, he had come to realize several things about Maleah.
She hated to come in second to anyone, but especially to any man.
The fact he had reached the gates outside the Powells’ Douglas Lake
retreat moments before she had seemed completely insignificant to
him, but probably not to Maleah. Sometimes her competitive spirit
drove him nuts.
“You’ve never had to struggle for
anything in your entire spoiled rotten rich life,” she had once
accused him. “You’re an arrogant son of a bitch because you have an
inflated ego. You overestimate your self-worth.”
“And I believe you underestimate
yours,” he’d told her.
His comment had ended that conversation
once and for all. Didn’t she realize that he could see past all the
pseudo-confidence she tried so hard to project? He suspected that
deep inside Maleah Perdue a small, helpless, vulnerable child
warned her not to give up a single ounce of the hard-won control
she had over her life.
Derek stopped his silver Corvette at
the enormous iron gates flanked by two massive stone arches
decorated with large bronze griffins. After he used the
voiceactivated entry code, the gates opened and he drove onto the
long, tree-lined lane leading to the house overlooking the lake.
Maleah followed at least twenty feet behind him. He parked in front
of the house, got out, and waited for her as she pulled in behind
him.
The Powell home was large,
approximately ten thousand square feet, but actually rather modest
for a man worth billions. Despite the mansion’s size, there was
nothing ostentatious about either the house itself or the décor. It
had been built and decorated to accommodate the man who owned the
property. Since his marriage to Nicole Baxter a few years ago,
Griff had allowed his wife to make any changes she wanted. But
almost as if she didn’t quite think of Griffin’s Rest as her home,
Nic had made few alterations.
Derek snorted. Good God, why did he
always do that? Why did his brain instantly delve into other
people’s psyche and try to figure out what made them tick?
Instinct, pure and simple. His instinct dictated that he profile
everyone.
Maleah emerged from her white SUV,
slung the straps of her small leather bag over her shoulder and
approached him. If she took more time with her appearance, she
could be strikingly beautiful. She had all the ingredients, from
pretty face to shapely body. Shapely? Get real,
Lawrence. The woman is built like a brick shithouse and you know
it.
“Waiting on me?” she
asked.
“Yeah. What took you so
long?”
She glared at him, giving him an
eat-dirt-and-die look. “I’m tired, I’m hungry and I’m totally
pissed at you.”
“What did I do now?”
“You drove like a bat out of hell,
that’s what you did.”
He stared at her, totally puzzled by
her comment. “You lost me somewhere there, Blondie. I have no
idea—”
“I got a speeding ticket, thanks to
you.”
He grinned. “How is it my fault that
you got a ticket?”
Glowering angrily at him, she clenched
her jaw and huffed. “Never mind. Forget I mentioned it. Let’s go
inside and—”
Before she could finish her sentence,
the front door opened. Sanders glanced from Maleah to Derek.
“Please, come in. Griffin and Nicole are waiting for
you.”
Sanders had been Griffin Powell’s
right-hand man for as long as Derek had known either of them. Griff
and Sanders’s association went back a good twenty years. Rumor had
it that they had met during the ten missing years of Griff’s life,
when he had disappeared off the face of the earth shortly after
graduating from the University of Tennessee nearly two decades
ago.
A couple of inches short of six feet,
the bald, dark-eyed, brown-skinned Sanders possessed the bearing of
a much larger man. His stance, his attitude, and his appearance
practically screamed military background. His slightly accented
English suggested a foreign birth and upbringing.
Ever the gentleman his mother had
raised him to be, Derek waited for Maleah to enter first. Sanders
led them past the large living room with the floor-to-ceiling rock
fireplace and down the hall to Griffin Powell’s private study. The
door stood open and inside Griff sat behind his antique desk placed
in the corner by the windows overlooking the lake. The moment he
saw them, he lifted his two hundred and forty pound muscular body
from his desk and stood at his impressive six-four height. Griff
was a big man, his mere physical presence intimidating. Include his
wealth and power and that added up to a man only a fool would ever
cross.
But out there somewhere was a fool who
was killing people connected to the Powell Agency.
Nicole Powell stood with her back to
them in front of the massive rock fireplace, one of several in the
house. When Griff rose from his desk, she instantly turned to face
them, her soft tan eyes focusing on her friend Maleah. Physically,
the two women were opposites. Nic was a tall brunette; Maleah a
petite blond. Whenever he saw Nic, the first thought that came to
mind was Amazon Warrior. Standing five-ten in her bare feet, with
an hourglass figure reminiscent of Hollywood sex symbols of the
1950s, the lady’s size was every bit as impressive as her
husband’s. Derek genuinely liked both Mr. and Mrs. Powell, but it
had been easier to like Nic immediately because of her outgoing
personality. Griff was more reserved, a man who made others earn
his approval.
“Please, come in,” Griff said, then he
looked at Sanders and told him, “Close the door.”
Once the five of them were closeted in
Griff’s private study, everyone except Sanders seated, Griff spread
his big hands out over the folders lying atop his
desk.
“These contain all the information we
have on the four murders. The info on Winston Corbett came in
mid-afternoon, so we’ve had a chance to go over it.”
“As you already know, Ben’s dad’s
murder fit the same pattern as the previous three,” Nic said. “We
don’t need to wait on the autopsy report to know
that.”
“Our killer, for whatever reason, has
targeted Powell employees and members of their families.” Griff
reiterated an undisputable fact.
Studying the big man’s somber
expression, Derek noted suppressed anger combined with grief and
frustration.
Sanders said, “Protecting the Powell
Agency employees and their families is of paramount importance.” He
stood, as he so often did, at Griff’s side, his body stationed
slightly behind his boss.
“Everyone is vulnerable because there
is no way to predict who will be chosen as the next to
die.”
“I’ve given orders for the security
here at Griffin’s Rest to be expanded. As of tomorrow morning,
we’re doubling the guards and bringing in more agents to the
estate,” Griff explained. “There will be guards here at our home,
twenty-four/seven, as well as at Yvette’s retreat.”
Most people would not have noticed the
slight tensing in Nic’s body, but being an observer of human
nature, Derek noticed. Whenever Griff mentioned Dr. Yvette Meng,
Nic reacted in a subtle, barely discernable way. He suspected Nic’s
friendship with Yvette hinged precariously on Nic believing that
her husband had never shared a sexual relationship with the exotic
Eurasian beauty. Derek also suspected that there was far more to
Griff’s apparent symbiotic relationship with both Sanders and Dr.
Meng than anyone, including Nic, knew.
“Obviously, the problem is that we have
no idea who the killer has chosen as his next victim,” Nic said.
“We’ve read and re-read the reports.” She glanced at Griff’s
desktop. “The only thing the four victims had in common was their
link to the Powell Agency. They were different ages, different
sexes, were murdered in different states. One was a Powell
secretary, one an agent, one a lawyer who was the brother of an
agent. And now, Ben’s father, a retired businessman, has been
killed.”
“If we could figure out how he chooses
his victims—” Nic said.
Derek cut her off. “To date, he’s
chosen two women and then two men. If he follows this pattern then
the next two victims will be female.”
Griffin grunted, the growling sound
coming from deep in his chest. “If that’s the case, then every
female Powell agent as well as every agent’s wife, mother, sister,
daughter, and niece could be at risk. How the hell can we narrow
down the choices when we have no idea what criteria he’s using to
make his decisions?”
“We can’t,” Derek said. “My educated
guess is that he is following a specific plan and that he probably
won’t deviate from it. He’s too methodical, too precise, as if he
has a blueprint that leads him step by step.”
“The way a copycat killer would mimic
the original killer’s MO,” Griff said.
Derek’s gaze met Griff’s and he
understood that Griff and the others knew something that he and
Maleah did not.
“Are you saying you think we’re dealing
with a copycat killer?” Maleah asked.
“I believe it is a good possibility.”
Griff picked up two file folders and handed them to Sanders.
“Later, I want you both to read over this information.” He motioned
to Sanders to distribute the folders, which he quickly
did.
Derek glanced at the typed heading on
the folder. Jerome Browning.
The name sounded vaguely
familiar.
“Who’s Jerome Browning?” Maleah
asked.
“He is a convicted serial killer
serving half a dozen consecutive life terms at the Georgia State
Prison.” Griff made direct eye contact with Maleah before he
continued. “Browning became known as the Carver when he viciously
murdered nine people by slitting their throats and carving
triangular pieces of flesh from their upper arms and thighs. His
first kill was twelve years ago and his killing spree lasted less
than three years before he was caught, tried and
convicted.”
The way everyone else in the room
seemed focused on Maleah piqued Derek’s curiosity. He sensed that
Griff was on the verge of revealing information that would in some
way personally affect her. His protective instincts kicked in
automatically, urging him to place himself between Maleah and
whatever might harm her.
“I’m getting the distinct impression
that I’m not going to like whatever else you have to say.” Maleah
glanced around the room, taking note of how everyone was staring
directly at her.
“Maleah, I’m so sorry . . .” Nic’s
voice trailed off.
“Jerome Browning’s third victim was a
young man living and working in the Atlanta area,” Griff said. “His
name was Noah Laborde.”
Maleah gasped, the sound sharp and
highly exaggerated in the hushed stillness. “He killed Noah?” She
spoke the man’s name softly . . . sadly.
“Who was Noah Laborde?” Derek
asked.
Nic walked over to Maleah and draped a
comforting arm around her shoulders. Maleah looked at Derek. “Noah
was my college boyfriend. We . . . we were almost engaged. We broke
up right after graduation. His sister called me a year later to
tell me that Noah had been killed, but I . . . Oh, God, I never
knew the details. I never asked.”
Of all the killers this person could
have chosen to imitate, why had he picked the man who had murdered
Maleah’s former boyfriend?
The answer was obvious, of
course—because of the Powell Agency connection.
“So what do you think, Derek?” Griff
asked.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
Derek knew exactly what Griff was asking. “Our killer chose this
man Browning because he had killed Noah Laborde, Maleah’s former
boyfriend. Maleah is a Powell agent and therefore connected to the
agency. He handpicked the Carver as the killer he would imitate for
the same reason he has chosen his victims.”
“Because they are all, in one way or
another, connected to the Powell Agency.” Griff pummeled the
desktop with his huge fist. “God damn son of a bitch.”
“I can only surmise that his real
target is the Powell Agency.” When Derek’s gaze met Griff’s, he saw
the pain in his employer’s eyes. “I would assume that means his
target is either you, Griff, or you, Nicole.” He glanced at Nic.
“Or possibly both of you.”
“It’s not Nic. I’m his real target,”
Griff said. “He’s striking out at me through my
people.”
“That’s one possible scenario,” Derek
agreed.
“I could be his target,” Nic said. “He
could be someone from my past, someone connected to one of my cases
when I was a federal agent. After all, he has chosen to copy a
killer who has a direct connection to my best friend.”
“We can debate this all day and still
won’t know for sure,” Maleah told them. “Once we find out who the
killer is, we’ll have the answers to all the whys, won’t we? That
has to be our first order of business—identifying our
killer.”
“Maleah’s right,” Derek said. “Since it
seems obvious that the new Carver murders are copycat killings,
that means we need to start with some basic questions. Is our guy
someone who has been in contact with Jerome Browning, maybe visited
him in prison? Is he an admirer? A student of the Carver’s methods?
Is he perhaps even a protégé of Browning’s?”
“There is one person, other than the
killer himself, who may be able to answer those questions,” Maleah
said.
“Jerome Browning.” Derek’s voice filled
the quiet room. All eyes turned to him.
“Browning is the reason y’all decided
to pair me with Derek on this case.” Maleah stared right at
Nic.
Nic simply stared back at
Maleah.
“I think it’s obvious that our killer
wants you involved,” Griff said.
Maleah gave Griff her undivided
attention. “You think because of my connection to Noah, Browning’s
third victim, the copycat is sending me an invitation to become
personally involved.”
Griff nodded. “Don’t you agree,
Derek?”
Reluctantly, Derek replied, “Yes, I
agree. And it could be that by singling out Maleah this way, it’s
the copycat killer’s way of getting as close to Nic as he possibly
can without actually involving her. At least not yet.”
“See, I told you that this could be all
about me and not you.” Nic glared at her husband.
Griff frowned, but didn’t verbally
acknowledge Nic’s comment. Instead he spoke directly to Maleah.
“Someone will have to interview Browning. Since the killer chose a
specific connection between you and the killer he is imitating, it
would seem logical that you should be the agent I send to Georgia
to talk to Browning.”
“I’ll accompany her, of course.” No way
in hell was Derek going to let Maleah confront Browning alone. She
might project a tough as nails image, but he knew just how
vulnerable she really was.
“Of course,” Griff agreed. “We’ll want
you to study Browning while Maleah interviews him.”
“She needs to know the rest.” Nic
glared at her husband. “No secrets. If Maleah is going into this,
she needs to go into it armed with all the facts.”
Derek’s gut tightened.
Griff nodded. He stood, reached down
behind his desk and lifted a small thermal cooler from the
floor.
“We received a package sent via FedEx
this morning,” Griff said. “There was a small plastic case inside
an Arctic foil insulated package, the type used to ship perishables
such as food and medical supplies.”
Griff flipped back the lid on the
cooler, reached down inside and lifted out the plastic case. “The
package was addressed to you, Maleah, in care of the Powell Agency.
The sender was, supposedly, Winston Corbett.”
Derek sensed that Maleah was holding
her breath as Griff removed the top from the plastic case. He
inched in closer, placing himself directly behind her. Looking over
her shoulder, he had a perfect view of the sectioned interior of
the case and the first layer of its contents.
“Are those . . . ?” Maleah swallowed
hard. “Are those what I think they are?”
“We’ve had our lab verify that those
small triangular objects are human flesh,” Griff said. “I think we
can be relatively certain that the pieces in the top section were
cut from Winston Corbett’s body and those in the other three
sections belong to the other victims.”
“And he sent them to me.” Maleah balled
her hands into fists and pressed her fists against her upper
thighs.
Derek reached out and clamped his hand
over Maleah’s tense shoulder, conveying his support. “We’re in this
together, Blondie. You and me. From here to the bitter
end.”