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“Some.” She’d be honest about that. “But what we had is over.”
He flashed his sharp teeth. “Good.”
His mouth crashed onto hers.
Her hands flattened against his chest. Not normal—she wasn’t, he wasn’t. But she was still pretending, dammit. Jude would have to learn the truth about her sooner or later.
Maybe later...much later.
His breath panted when he raised his head. “Now let’s go see what we can find out about the bastard.”
* * *
Jude realized right away that the cops liked her. Respected her. It was in their eyes. On their faces. They opened their offices to her. Broke rules that they shouldn’t have, and they did it for her.
Jude and Erin poured over files. Searched databases. They looked for clues in the crimes that might have been overlooked. Links that weren’t noticed.
They found jackshit.
At six o’clock that night, Jude leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes and stretching his back. As far as they could tell, the attacks by Erin’s stalker had ended as soon as she left town.
The precinct had been a dead end for them.
Time to tryhisway.
“Here you go.” A slim female cop with a long braid of red hair tossed a file onto the already overflowing desk. “Last info on the Trent case. Shame about the wife...”
“What?” Erin’s brows snapped together. “What are you talking about, Wendy? What happened to the wife?”
“Ah...” Wendy shifted from her right foot to the left. “Thought you’d heard. Sylvia was the vic in a hit and run. The kids were with the grandmother at the time. Sylvia had just gone out for some groceries. She was walking across the street, headed back to her car when she got hit. Such a shame.”
Erin grabbed the file and began flipping through the notes. “Yes, it sure as hell is.”
Jude waited until the cop shut the door, then asked, “Did you know her well?” She’d paled at the news of the woman’s death. Her breath had caught.
She glanced up at him. “Donald Trent spent five years beating his wife whenever he wanted.Iwanted to put the bastard away, but Sylvia recanted on the stand.” A hard exhalation of air. “She had twins, two little boys, real cute kids.” She licked her lips. “But the boys would jump anytime a door slammed or a voice was raised.”
His hands clenched. Through Night Watch, he’d seen kids, human andOther, with shadows in their eyes—and it always pissed him off to know where those shadows came from. Whenever he could, he tried to make that fear go away.
Permanently.
“She didn’t want him back.” Erin was definite on that. “She had a new life going. She’d moved in with her mother. Filed for divorce. But he got to her. I know he did. Threatened her or the kids, and she changed her story so that he could walk.” Her gaze fell to the folder. “Now she’s dead.”
And the kids would grow up without a mother and with a piss-poor excuse for a father.
Her brow furrowed. “She’s dead, and the kids are living with her mother because…” Erin glanced back up at him. “Because Donald Trent has been missing for the last two months.”
Well, well. The trip to the PD might be paying off, after all. They’d already figured the stalking began with the Trent case.
Maybe because the stalking had come from the prick Trent? “You ever get a sense this guy was more than human?”
“I got a sense the jerk waslessthan human.”
He reached for the file. Scanned the details available about Donald Trent. Age: forty-five. Height: Six-foot-three. Weight: one ninety. An ex-football player who’d busted his knee the first year in college. He’d bounced around after that, gotten into bar fights, and racked up a few restraining orders from former girlfriends.
The man liked to play rough. And he liked to hurt his ladies.
“You ever see any sign of this guy in Baton Rouge?” Jude asked.
