Chapter 8
Cyrene woke with the worst headache of
her life. She came to slowly, painfully, her eyelids flicking.
Moaning as she stretched her neck, she tried to focus on the
mundane task of keeping her eyes open. When she parted her lips,
she realized that her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth and
her throat felt parched. She remembered drinking a glass of wine
with Errol last night after they had made love and showered
together. Surely, she hadn’t gotten drunk on a single glass. Had
she drunk more than she thought she had?
“Errol . . .” She forced her eyes wide
open, stared up at the unmoving ceiling fan and spread her arm
across the bed, searching for her husband.
Dim early morning sunlight reflecting
off the patio pool danced in waving patterns on the
ceiling.
Ah, another day in
paradise.
She ran her fingertips across the sheet
and found that she was alone in the bed. Apparently Errol was
already awake and had gotten up. He was probably in the bathroom.
She could hear running water, but it didn’t sound like the shower.
Flipping over toward the side of the bed, she stretched her arms
over her head, extended her legs and curved her feet backwards.
When she rose from the bed, her bare feet encountered the cool tile
floor.
Where are my house
slippers?
Cyrene rounded the foot of the bed,
intending to surprise Errol in the bathroom, but as she passed by
his side of the bed, she caught a glimpse of something red on the
sheets.
What in the
world?
They hadn’t spilled any wine in the
bed, had they?
She moved closer, getting a better look
at the dark red stains on the snowy white sheets.
How odd. It looks like
blood.
Instinct kicked in, a primeval sixth
sense that warned of danger.
“Errol?” She backed away from the bed.
“Errol . . . Errol . . .”
Flooded with a barrage of frightening
thoughts, Cyrene shook her head in denial, refusing to believe,
trying to convince herself that nothing was wrong.
“Errol, where are you?” Silence.
“Please, honey, answer me.”
Silence.
As if her limbs were activated by some
sort of remote control, her legs and feet moved, carrying her
toward the bathroom. Gazing down as she walked, she noticed a smear
of dried red liquid stretching from the bed to the
bathroom.
Suddenly she went numb, unable to feel
her hands and feet. The thunderous roar of her heartbeat threatened
to deafen her. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t happening.
Standing in the bathroom door, she
stared at the body lying on the floor beside the bathtub
overflowing with water.
Errol? Oh my God,
Errol.
His eyes were closed.
A thin red line marred the perfection
of his smooth, clean-shaven neck and rivulets of dried blood
descended from that red line like trinkets on a charm
bracelet.
Cyrene stood perfectly still, her mind
unable to process what she saw.
And then, in the quiet stillness of her
honeymoon suite, Mrs. Errol Patterson screamed. And screamed. And
screamed.
Maleah squared her shoulders and took a
deep breath before entering the prison’s visitation area. She
didn’t look back at Derek nor did she glance at the guard escorting
her. After showering and dressing—khaki slacks and dark green
tailored blouse—she had met Derek downstairs for breakfast. She had
managed to down a cup of coffee and eat a few bites of blueberry
muffin, hoping to quiet the tempest in her belly. Although she had
done her best to assure her partner that she was not nervous and
was ready for today’s meeting with Jerome Browning, she sensed that
he knew she was simply putting up a good front. And that she was
doing it as much for herself as for him.
If you can act as if
you are self-assured and confident, then you’ve already won half
the battle.
She remained standing as she waited for
the guards to bring Browning from his cell. Thinking about what she
was going to say and wondering how he would respond, she heard
rather than saw Browning enter the visitation area. When she looked
directly at him, he stared back at her, that weirdly pleasant and
completely unnerving smile growing wider and wider as he drew
closer.
The guards instructed him to sit. He
sat.
“Good morning, Maleah. I hope you had a
pleasant night. I certainly did.” He licked his lips. “I dreamed
about you and woke this morning eager to see you
again.”
Is that the best you’ve
got? she wanted to say. A little sexual
innuendo isn’t going to unnerve me in the least. Not when you’re in
shackles and there are three armed guards in the room with
us.
“I slept quite well, thank you,” she
lied to him. “A restful, dreamless sleep.”
“I assume Mr. Lawrence also slept well.
Any man sharing your bed would sleep well after . . .” He didn’t
finish the sentence, but the implication was obvious.
Was he fishing to find out if she and
Derek were lovers? Or was he merely hoping the comment would insult
her? Either way, she had no intention of responding.
“We have an hour,” Maleah said as she
sat across from Browning. “I think we’ve wasted enough time on
meaningless, uninteresting chit-chat.”
“Is your love life meaningless and
uninteresting?” His smile never wavered.
“Do you know why I’m here, Jerome? Why
I’m wasting my valuable time even talking to someone like
you?”
“Someone like me?” He laughed. “Someone
handsome and brilliant and gifted. And if I may be so immodest,
someone who has been told that he is a superlative
lover.”
Egotistical, maniacal, psychopathic
monster! “You are someone who has murdered fifteen people.” She
paused before adding, “That we know of. You are someone who will
spend the rest of his life slowly rotting away in
prison.”
He lifted his bound hands, gesturing
toward his heart. “You wound me with such harsh words.” His smile
turned quickly to a frown, his expression one of mock
sadness.
“Do you know why I’m here?” She
repeated her initial question.
“All work and no play makes Maleah a
dull girl.”
“You know why I’m here and what I
want.”
He stretched as languidly as his
restrained body could and glanced from the guard on his right to
the guard on his left, both men standing several feet behind him.
“What am I going to do with such a dull, dull visitor, gentlemen?
All she wants to do is talk business.”
Maleah eased back from the edge of the
seat and crossed her arms. “The warden has granted us an hour
today, Jerome. But if you’re not in the mood to talk about what I
want to talk about . . .” She uncrossed her arms, glanced at her
wristwatch, tapped the glass face and said, “Five minutes. That’s
as long as I’ll wait for you to tell me something that interests
me.”
Browning remained silent for four
minutes. The silence in the large, nearly empty room echoed with
the sound of their quiet breathing. One guard cleared his throat.
Another coughed a couple of times.
“You’re here because you think I might
know who has mimicked my unique modus operandi almost perfectly and
has recently killed four people.”
Finally.
“And do you know who he is?” she
asked.
As if believing he now had the upper
hand for the time being, he smiled and shrugged.
“All right,” she said. “You tell me
what you want in exchange for answering my question.”
“Ah, Maleah, my sweet beauty, you’re
very bright. You catch on quickly. Games are so much fun, don’t you
think?”
“You’re wasting time,” she told
him.
“All right. I’ll cut straight to the
chase.” He chuckled. “I want to know what color panties you’re
wearing.”
Good God!
Without blinking an eye, she said, “Beige. With lace
trim.”
He closed his eyes, licked his lips as
if savoring a delicious morsel and sighed with a sickening sound of
satisfaction.
“I assume the copycat killer is an
admirer,” Jerome said. “I assume he has studied my work. Perhaps,
he’s even communicated with me.”
“Has he?”
“That’s another question that requires
payment.”
Damn you,
Browning.
“You haven’t answered the first
question yet. Not to my satisfaction.” She looked him in the
eye.
“I don’t know who the copycat killer
is,” he said, and then hurriedly added, “Not exactly, but . .
.”
“But what?”
“There are things I do know. Things
that can help you find him.”
“Why should I believe
you?”
He grinned.
“Even if you answer every question I
ask, how would I know whether or not you were lying to me?” she
asked.
“You’d have to take me on faith. But if
you do that, I can promise you that in time, you’ll discover
everything I tell you is true.”
“Okay, let’s say I take you on faith.
But first, you’ll have to give me something right now, something to
prove to me that I can believe you.”
“He’s going to kill again soon, if he
hasn’t already.”
She snorted. “That’s it? Sorry, Jerome,
but you’re going to have to do better than that.”
“I’ll tell you something about the next
person he’s going to kill, if you’ll tell me something I’d love to
know.”
“My bra matches my panties,” she said
glibly.
“That information paints such an erotic
picture in my mind,” he told her. “But that wasn’t my
question.”
“Then what is it?”
As nonchalantly as if he were asking
her about her favorite flavor of ice cream, he asked, “Was he your
first?”
She stared at him, puzzled by his
question.
“Noah Laborde,” Browning said. “Was he
your first lover?”
She should have been prepared for this,
but she wasn’t. Damn it. She wasn’t.
“You do remember Noah, don’t you?
Good-looking young man, fresh out of college. Quite an up-andcomer
in the Atlanta business world about twelve years ago.”
Get hold of yourself,
Maleah. He’s trying to rattle you. Don’t let him get away with it.
Show him what you’re made of.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I remember Noah Laborde. And yes,
he was my first lover.”
Browning smiled as if he thought he had
won a great victory. He hadn’t. But she had. He just didn’t know it
yet.
“He’s going to begin varying the sex of
his victims. You won’t know from one kill to the next if he will
choose a man or a woman.”
“We learned that from your files, so we
assumed if he followed your lead, he wouldn’t stick with two female
kills followed by two males.”
“Looks like you’re a step ahead of
me.”
“Tell me something else, something I
don’t already know.”
“Why should I? It’s not my fault that I
told you something you already knew.”
“Ah, come on, Jerome. Fair’s
fair.”
“You surprise me.”
“Do I?”
“I believe I may have underestimated
you, sweet Maleah.”
“If you have, you wouldn’t be the
first.” She stood up and glared down at him. “Pay your debt. Give
me some information that I can use. If not, when I walk out of here
today, I won’t be back.”
“You could be bluffing.”
“Only one way to find out—call my
bluff.”
She turned around and walked toward the
exit door, her escort following. Just as he unlocked the door and
opened it, Browning called out to her.
“You’ll be back. You won’t be able to
stay away.”
She paused for half a second and then
started through the door.
“The next victim won’t be brown-eyed,”
he told her.
She kept walking without responding in
any way. Keeping in step with her guard escort, she followed him
back to the warden’s office where Derek was waiting.
Derek took one look at her and knew the
session with Browning had rattled her. But he also knew that she
was okay. He could see the steely determination in her eyes and the
stiffness in her spine. Whatever had transpired between her and
Jerome, she had come through the battle with nothing more than a
minor flesh wound.
She acknowledged his presence with a
glance, then marched straight to the warden. “I won’t be back
tomorrow.”
“Then you’re finished with—?” the
warden said.
“No, I’m not finished with Mr.
Browning. Not by a long shot. But he needs to think that I
am.”
Warden Holland nodded. “I will need
twenty-four hours’ notice before your next visit.”
She shook his hand, said thanks, and
motioned to Derek that she was ready to leave. He tried to talk to
her, but she told him flat out that she was in no mood for
conversation.
“Not now. We can talk on the way back
to Vidalia.”
And so he waited, giving her the time
she needed to decompress after game playing with a cunning
madman.
When they reached the designated
parking area, she said, “You drive.” And then she tossed him her
keys. He grabbed the keys mid-air, remotely unlocked the SUV and,
gentleman that he was, opened the passenger door for
her.
And then he waited until they were
several miles from the penitentiary before he said, “The warden is
going to have a list of all of Browning’s visitors for the past
year, along with the names and addresses of the people who have
written to him and the names and phone numbers of the people he’s
called compiled and sent to me and to Powell headquarters as an
e-mail attachment. He’s promised we’ll have the information by the
end of the day.”
“Great. We’ve finally got something to
work with, don’t we?”
“Yep.” When she didn’t continue their
conversation, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”
“We’ll have to talk about your
interview with Browning. I’ll need to know what he said, everything
you can remember.”
Maleah adjusted her seat so that she
could lean further back. She rested her head on the cushioned
leather and folded her hands together in her lap.
“He asked what color my panties were
and I told him beige with lace trim and that I was wearing a
matching bra.”
“Son of a bitch.” Derek growled the
comment under his breath.
“He still didn’t give me the copycat
killer’s name or a description of him. But he did say that he knew
things about this guy that could help us find him.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I didn’t disbelieve him.”
“He’s playing you. He may not know a
damn thing.”
“He said if the copycat follows the
Carver’s MO, he’ll alter the sex of his victims pretty much
willy-nilly.”
“Something we already
knew.”
“We didn’t know that his next victim
wouldn’t have brown eyes.”
“What?”
“He called out to me just as I was
leaving. He said the next victim wouldn’t be
brown-eyed.”
“How could he possibly know that?”
Derek suspected that Browning wouldn’t say something like that off
the top of his head. If he wanted Maleah to come back to see him,
he would try to impress her with his knowledge.
“I have no idea, but maybe we should
check and see what color the first four victims’ eyes were. Maybe
there’s a pattern.”
“We’ll contact the
agency—”
Derek’s phone rang. No music. Just a
strong, routine ring tone.
With one hand on the wheel and his eyes
fixed on the road ahead, he pulled the phone from his pocket, hit
the On button and said, “Derek Lawrence speaking,” without checking
caller ID.
“I want you and Maleah at the Vidalia
Municipal Airport as soon as you can get there,” Griff Powell said.
“There’s a charter plane waiting to fly y’all to Atlanta. Nic and I
will be taking off in the Powell jet within the next thirty
minutes. We’ll pick y’all up in Atlanta. We’re flying from there
straight to Nassau. The copycat struck again last night. He killed
Errol Patterson. Errol’s wife found his body in the bathroom of
their hotel suite. She’s under a doctor’s care at the moment and
heavily sedated. She’s going to need all the help we can give
her.”
“We’ll pick up our bags at the hotel
and drive straight to the airport.”
Succinct and to the point. Conversation
ended.
“What’s happened?” Maleah
asked.
“The copycat killed Errol Patterson
last night and his wife . . . his new bride . . . found his body
this morning.”