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PROLOGUE
Katherine hummed as she looked at herself in the mirror. Gary had always told her she was beautiful, but he sort of had to. He couldn’t exactly say, “Geez, honey, you’re old and fat now.”
She actually felt good about her appearance. She recalled a time when she always felt good about the way she looked, but after turning forty, her confidence had dwindled considerably.
Of course, since she had started exercising and eating healthy, she had trimmed away all of that fat and now was the same svelte weight she was in college. Gary’s perfunctory compliments weren’t so perfunctory anymore, and on the rare occasions she allowed him to do something about his renewed attraction, he was almost as energetic as he was twenty years ago.
Not that it mattered much to her how energetic he was. Nothing he did even came close to Antonio.
She shivered with excitement as she imagined Antonio’s hands sliding over her, admiring the lacy, silk bra and panties, deep red to match her lipstick. Gary was out of town again and wouldn’t be back for a few days. Antonio had a meeting in town tonight, but he promised to see her first thing in the morning.
She couldn’t wait. She supposed she didn’t love Antonio, but she wasn’t really sure she loved Gary anymore either. They had both been so young when they married, and he had been so handsome in college with his full head of hair and athletic physique.
Of course, even at his best, he could never hold a candle to Antonio.
Katherine giggled and headed to the closet to try on the strapless dress she had bought. It was the perfect cut to reveal just enough of the lace of her bra to let Antonio know there was something special waiting underneath. She bit her lip as she thought of his hands traveling over her again and finding all of the spots she loved. God, she felt like a schoolgirl again!
She threw open the closet and froze. For an instant, she was certain she was seeing things. There was no way the strange man crouching there and grinning at her could have gotten inside in only a few minutes.
But when he looked up and she saw that his grin wasn’t mischievous, but predatory, she realized that what she was seeing wasn’t her imagination but was terribly real. She took a breath and released a shriek.
The man lifted his left hand. Stuck just before the first knuckle of his third finger was her wedding ring.
“I can’t get it to fit,” he said, his voice soft and lilting. “I’ll have to fix that.”
His smile disappeared, and with a snarl, he threw himself at Katherine. She released a second shriek, but this one cut off abruptly, and the only sound left in the house was the soft hum of the TV.
CHAPTER ONE
Faith shut the car’s lights off and dimmed the dash console. She didn’t care much for electric vehicles. Personally, she preferred the steady thrum of a good old-fashioned internal combustion engine. She had to admit, though, silent operation had its perks, especially in law enforcement.
The car she was tailing was electric as well, but unlike Faith, the driver kept his lights on, unaware that he was being followed. He drove smoothly through the residential street, his headlights occasionally illuminating the street signs that exhorted drivers to yield to pedestrians and politely informed them to slow when children were present.
It had taken Faith nearly a week to locate Jared Greenwood. The copycat killer file had his name but not his address. Apparently, his name showed up in one of the victim’s phone contacts, but the Bureau ruled him out before even bothering to investigate him.
That was just laziness. It would have cost them an hour or two of work to look up his address and send an agent to talk with him, but that was too much work for Clark and Desrouleaux, apparently. It was just another sign that she should have been the agent assigned to the case.
She would have thought that once his father, Horace Greenwood, was revealed to be the Weed Killer, the FBI would have considered it worth their time to follow up with Jared, but once more, that seemed to be beyond their ability to understand. So, whether the Boss liked it or not, it fell to Faith.
It would have been much easier for her to locate him if the Boss would just let her work on the case, but he had made it clear that he didn’t want Faith anywhere near the case. Her suffering at the hands of Jethro Trammell, the original Donkey Killer, had convinced the Boss that she was not able to work on the copycat killer case, and the fact that she had solved not one but two high-profile cases in the past year hadn’t swayed him.
So, instead of running his name through the FBI database or that of another law enforcement agency, she had had to dig through decades of whatever public record she could find on him. That proved to be unhelpful, so she finally visited his father on death row and asked him where he was. Unfortunately for Faith, the Weed Killer had been utterly unhelpful, expressing neither knowledge nor interest in his son’s whereabouts.
In the end, Faith had found Jared’s address in a record of a home sale from six years ago. All real estate sales were matters of public record, and Faith had eventually found one with Jared Greenwood’s name.
She had sent a quick text to David postponing their dinner date until the following Saturday, claiming that a minor family emergency had come up. Nothing serious, no, he didn’t need to come over, just a bit of drama she had to deal with as the only responsible member of her crazy family.
Jared lived in a fairly nice, middle-class neighborhood, far less snooty than the Cedar Hills community where his father made a living out of murdering neighbors he found morally lacking, but nice enough that Faith decided his career as an HVAC technician was paying well. It was a solid two and a half hours from the nearest farming community, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine he wanted to keep his hobby separate from his home life.
Jared’s car pulled wide to turn into his driveway. Too wide. Faith slammed on her car’s brakes but not quickly enough. Jared compensated for his turn by nearly completing a U-turn. When he did, his headlights shone directly into Faith’s unlit car.
Their eyes met for an instant, but an instant was all Jared needed to realize something was up. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and before Faith could gun her motor and put her car in between Jared’s and escape, he shot past her like a rocket.
“Shit!” Faith spat, spinning her wheels as she struggled to turn her protesting vehicle around. By the time she managed to complete the U-turn, Jared’s taillights were already some three hundred yards distant. She mashed the accelerator pedal to the floor, but this rental was the kind of electric car designed for short, comfortable city routes and thirty-five mile per hour speed limits, not blinding acceleration, so she kept it up for only a moment before she accepted that she had no chance of catching Jared.
“Shit!” she cried again, bringing her hand down hard on the steering wheel.
Well, he was definitely into something shady. He was a big, well-built man, as muscular as his father but much taller, and the NRA sticker on his rear windshield suggested he was well-prepared in case he encountered a situation where his physical strength couldn’t save him. He had no reason to run from Faith unless he suspected she was an investigator, which—considering she was tailing him with her headlights turned off—was almost certainly his first thought.
