Page 77

Exhaustion clouded Josie’s mind. What if they put in all those hours and still couldn’t come up with a suspect? What if they found him on video and were able to trace his movements but couldn’t identify him?

What if he got away again?

She shuddered as she remembered the lipstick heavy on her mouth, garishly smeared onto her face. Spinning in her chair, she looked at each of her colleagues and then Noah. By their haggard faces, she knew they were having similar thoughts.

Even if they tracked down both the patient with the blanket over his head and the linen cart guy, there was no proving either of them had done it. There was no proving anything.

The Last Kiss Killer had snuck into her exam bay and left his signature, and he’d done so without being caught on camera.

Forty-Five

Hot water cascaded over Josie’s body, washing away the past twelve hours, the mark of the Last Kiss Killer. She’d scrubbed her mouth more thoroughly within minutes of arriving home. Dull pain pulsed through her left shoulder as she squeezed bodywash into a washcloth. Dr. Flowers had told her that if she needed to remove the sling, to keep her arm passive at her side but Josie needed to bathe like she needed her next breath. Soap suds swirled down the drain as she slowly and carefully washed as much of her body as she could comfortably reach. With every swipe of the washcloth, she felt better, more herself. A moan of pleasure slipped past her lips.

“Should I leave you alone?”

Noah’s voice, low and amused, sent her heart into her throat. She hadn’t even heard him come in. He pulled the shower curtain back a fraction. He was grinning, a playful spark in his hazel eyes.

“Is there something I should know?” he said. “All this time, I thought I was satisfying you but if that washcloth is doing a better job⁠—”

She balled up the cloth and tossed it at him. He barely moved, dipping his shoulder slightly so it sailed right past him. It made a loud splat on the tile.

“You scared the shit out of me,” she told him.

“You could have waited for me,” he said. “You should have, actually.”

Noah had been on the phone with Gretchen when Josie climbed the stairs to their bedroom. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

He started stripping his clothes off, and despite the harrowing events she’d just endured and the exhaustion that clung to her like a second skin, a frisson of excitement ran up her spine. Wordlessly, he stepped into the shower with her. When he gathered her into his arms, careful not to jostle her left arm, she sighed and rested her cheek against his chest. The water rained down on them both, but Noah’s bicep shielded it from her face. Josie reveled in the feel of his arms around her, the warmth of his body, the way his quiet strength always soothed her ragged psyche. They stayed locked in the embrace for a few minutes.

Noah’s hands slid down to her ass. “Hmmm, this is nice.”

“The shower or my ass?” Josie mumbled into his chest. “Choose your answer wisely.”

She felt the rumble of his laughter against her cheek. “Your ass. The answer is always your ass.”

“Will you wash my hair?”

“Of course.”

Gently, he turned her around. As he massaged shampoo into her scalp, Josie sagged against him.

Her mind drifted back to the video they had watched in the security office. The Chief had requested copies of all the footage from the entire emergency department. He, Turner, and Gretchen were going to spend the day going over it all yet again. They were going to question both Dr. Holmes and Louis Fisher again. Fisher’s cubicle had been in the same hall as hers.

Last she’d heard from Turner, no one they interviewed remembered anything strange or out of the ordinary. None of the patients who’d been on gurneys in the hall had been keeping track of which people were coming in and out of which cubicles. Then again, most patients had been sleeping or in such pain or so out of it that they hadn’t noticed much at all about what was happening around them. Their loved ones were also leaving the hall and returning several times to use the restroom or seek out the overworked nurses.

Total chaos made it easy for the killer to move freely and go unnoticed.

Which was exactly the point of the fire at Sylvia West’s home. As unhinged as the killer had become, he was still cunning. He was also bold. Why hadn’t he killed Josie? In her state, he could easily have overpowered her. She had no doubt that had he tried to garrote her or strangle her with his hands, she would have awakened and made some attempt to fight him off but there were ways to ensure that she didn’t make a lot of noise. It would have been his riskiest move to date, as anyone could have walked in. Anyone could have walked in when he was applying the lipstick but that had likely only taken seconds whereas killing someone took minutes, at the very least.

“I can hear you thinking,” Noah said, turning her and tipping her head back so the spray rinsed the shampoo from her hair.

“What was he doing?” she asked. He was directly in front of her now so she motioned toward her lips to indicate the lipstick. “Did he intend to kill me but lost his nerve, given the risk? Or was this meant as a taunt?”

Noah considered the questions as his hands glided through her hair. “It’s a taunt. If he wanted to kill you, or just kill again, he wouldn’t do it in a crowded ER. The question is what kind of taunt? What was he trying to do? Warn you off the case? Scare you?”

There may have been an element of that but Josie didn’t think that was his MO. Not after he’d stopped killing for thirteen years. The botched attack on Sylvia West hadn’t brought police any closer to finding him. He could have continued. Maybe Sylvia getting away had spooked him too much for him to keep killing, but surely after a year or more went by without the police closing in, he would have realized that he was in the clear. If he had gone to such great lengths to stay off law enforcement’s radar, there was no way he would suddenly start trying to intimidate the police in the most brazen way possible.

“He likes it.” Josie thought about the lipsticks he had left for Sylvia each year near the anniversary of her attack. “He enjoys taunting people. I don’t even think it’s about intimidation. It’s about power. The power he has to fool people, to get away with things right under everyone’s noses. He puts things in motion and then watches them play out.”