Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(14)

And there he was.

The man who pulled open the trailer’s busted door was not what belonged in a drug dealer’s crack den. He was powerfully built, rather than wasted by narcotics use, and his black clothes were clean and well-fitting. He was also the complete opposite of strung out and half crazed. His affect was one of total control, like he owned the place—or at the very least was utterly unconcerned with whatever was going to go down or whoever might ride up on him.

The latent dominance was sexy as hell.

“Yeah, and he’s a criminal,” she muttered.

Tilting even farther forward, she focused on his face—and not because she was trying to ID him from some previous case. In fact, they had nothing on him at all. The department’s facial recognition software hadn’t yielded anything out of any database, and nobody had made him, either. So no, she stared at him not to place him… but because he was just way too handsome to be a felon, his features sharp, his eyes deeply set and very intelligent, his lips…

She stopped that line of thinking, right there. And refused to look into why she would ever assess a suspect’s mouth like it was something that might go on naked skin.

Her naked skin.

Yeah, no-go on that. She was not living a Jackie Collins novel, for godsakes.

“I’ve lost my mind.”

Shoving herself back in her chair, she let the video continue and absently reached for the mug again, but she caught herself before she took another try of the crankcase oil in there.

Boy, the way that man moved. His body was so fluid, it made her think of a predator.

Oh, wait, he was about to look into the camera—yup.

“There you are,” she murmured as the suspect stared right where the camera had been hidden.

He knew he was being recorded, and he didn’t give a shit. And the other thing that didn’t seem to bother him? The dead guy on the couch. Although the lens angle cut off any visuals for the footage’s viewer, Erika had both been to the scene and gone through all the photographs from it: The body of the drug dealer who owned the trailer was sitting upright on the sofa, the back of his skull blown out all over the wall behind him.

And yet this man in black didn’t seem affected in the slightest by what all that looked like, smelled like. He might as well have been checking out a parked car as he glanced at the sofa.

So actually, in spite of how in shape and attractive he was, he did in fact belong exactly where he was. A civilian, unrelated to the drug trade in Caldwell and all the brutality that went along with it, would have illustrated some kind of shock, dismay—flat-out horror, given how gruesome the scene had been.

Not this guy. Just another day at the office for him.

As Erika shook her head, she got ready for what was coming next. After he glanced around at the squalor, and murmured to himself as if he disapproved of the mess, his left hand moved forward ahead of his body—and that was the first time the sizable black box he was holding showed. With a lean forward, he put the thing down among the bongs, crack pipes, and measuring scales on the coffee table, and then he picked a supermarket plastic bag off the carpet. After a quick inspection of the contents, he took some money out of it and spoke to the dead body.

Then he left in no particular hurry.

That was it. That was the footage.

Erika hit replay. And as she did, she heard a woman’s voice in her head: That’s him. The man from my dreams.

As she rewatched the footage, the soundtrack of those two sentences was as familiar as the movie’s visuals were, and the simple declarative statements—made by the widow of a murder victim whose watches were in the black box the man had left in exchange for something in a Hannaford bag—was as close to an ID as they had.

Which was to say, they had no leads at all on him.

Mrs. Herbert Cambourg, of the vivid dreams, couldn’t go any further than that. She had no recollection of ever meeting the man in person, and yet she was completely certain that she had dreamed about him.

She even seemed a little obsessed with the guy.

Not that Erika could relate.

At all.

And there was something else that was weird. As Erika considered when she’d shown this trailer footage to Mrs. Cambourg, and taken that specific and yet ambiguous statement from the woman, she could remember everything about arriving at the top floor of the triplex penthouse at the Commodore and watching this file with the young and beautiful widow. She could picture the sitting area they’d gone over to, and Keri Cambourg’s long blond-streaked hair and black turtleneck with leggings. She could also recall with perfect detail the sparkly diamond necklace Mrs. Cambourg had been wearing, even though the woman had been casually dressed and it was hardly a glamour gig for a homicide detective to show up and want to talk to you about your murdered husband.

Then again, Herbert Cambourg had somehow been torn in two like something out of Game of Thrones. So it had seemed like common decency to cut the woman a little slack when it came to anything making any sense.

It was right as they’d been talking about the mysterious man from the trailer footage that things got strange. Just as Keri Cambourg had let fly with the man-in-her-dreams statement, a security alarm had gone off down below on the triplex’s first floor, where the collections of odd objects and eerie books were… where the murder had happened.

As a shiver went through her, Erika closed her eyes and pictured the next sequence of interactions with precision, slowing it all down: In her mind’s eye, she saw herself stand up, and watched, sure as if she were viewing footage from a security camera, as she told the woman to lock herself in the panic room. Then, to reassure Keri Cambourg, she explained that it was probably just someone from the CPD who had failed to call in their on-scene.