Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(27)



Or stalked her, was more like it.





CHAPTER EIGHT




I know him.”

As Erika made the ID down by the bridge, she was kneeling beside the cooling body of a man who appeared to have shot himself in the head. The entrance wound was on the right temple, and the gun was still gripped in his hand.

Twice in one night, she thought as she noted the bomber jacket, the hoodie, the dark clothes and the bright white sneakers. But no pink nail polish this time.

“Who is he?” Detective Kip Creason asked.

She glanced up at her colleague. Kip was a lean man who always wore skinny cut slacks and bow ties. He and his husband were just back from their honeymoon, and she had a passing envy at his tan and the natural sun-streaks in his dark-blond hair. Kip was born and bred in California, and coming to Caldie hadn’t changed the fact that he always looked better, more rested, and happier than everybody else did. Even down here by the river, after two a.m., he was fresh as a daisy. And didn’t that make her feel older. More tired. More crazy.

“Christopher Ernest Olyn.” Erika refocused on the body. “He’s got a long rap sheet for drugs and assault, and he brushed up with homicide for the first time about six months ago. Remember the case? He almost beat his girlfriend to death—we were sure she was going to die as soon as she was taken off life support. She survived, but refused to testify, and there were no witnesses. The DA had to drop the case, but Olyn was ready if it went forward. He lawyered up with some big-time, mob-connected criminal attorney from Manhattan.”

“I remember, yes. You really were good with the victim. She trusted you.”

Erika stood back up. “I’m worried he finally killed her tonight—and then came down here, unable to live with himself. They had a really toxic, codependent relationship. We need to do a welfare check on her.”

“You should go over and do that. If anyone else in uniform or with a badge shows up at her place, I’ll bet she won’t answer her door. I can handle things here.”

Looking around, Erika took some quick mental pictures of the scene. The body was at the far edge of what was considered “under the bridge,” lying at the base of an old brick wall that encircled one of the original Caldwell warehouses.

“We’re not going to have any witnesses,” she murmured.

“No,” Kip agreed as he pulled his fitted peacoat closer across his chest. “Nobody will have seen a thing.”

No one was around to even be interviewed. The population who lived in and among the forest of concrete pylons had emptied out, the burning drums of trash casting flickering orange light over the littered, vacant acreage.

“Erika? Are you all right?”

She shook herself back to attention and smiled at her sun-streaked colleague. “Fine, thanks. And absolutely I’ll do the welfare check. They were living over on Market, assuming they haven’t moved. I can confirm with the probation database.”

Getting out her cell phone, she signed in to the CPD system and ran a search under the name of Constance Ritcher. Street name had been Candy. She’d had some prostitution convictions on her record, but no drugs, nothing violent.

Erika could still remember what the emaciated woman had looked like hooked up to a ventilator in the ICU over at St. Francis.

“Yup, she’s still on Market.” She put her phone away, and took note of the uniforms who were bringing over a privacy screen. “It won’t take me long.”

“As I said, I’ll take care of things here.”

She nodded and murmured a few more things to Kip, not that she was tracking—and then she was walking to her car, stepping over brown-paper-bag-wrapped bottles and twisted-up cloth wads that could have been towels, shirts, sweaters. As she came up to her unmarked and unlocked it with her remote, the sense that she was being watched brought her head around.

Reaching up to the nape of her neck, she rubbed at the tingling sensation and then she looked back at the scene, which was only about fifty feet away. In the lee of the brick wall, the uniformed officers were unfolding the screen and Kip was kneeling where she had just been, talking into his phone, recording notes.

As a breeze came off the river, she smelled shore funk and dirt and the greasy smoke of trash burning in those steel drums.

Everything was right about this… just like back at headquarters. And yet her instincts were telling her—

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something red, and she pivoted quick. Then she frowned and wondered if she was seeing right. The flash of one-of-these-things-does-not-belong was actually a woman, and she was leaning against one of the bridge supports, looking as out of place as a cultivated rose in the middle of a landfill. With long, wavy brunette hair and a breathtakingly beautiful face, she was wearing nothing but Christmas-red skintight leggings and a matching bustier, seemingly impervious to the cold.

The scent of a grapey perfume drifted into Erika’s nose.

Poison by Dior, she thought. God, she hadn’t thought of that oldie-but-goodie since college, when she and her friends had bought designer perfumes on the cheap from CVS’s locked case of rejects, resales, and fakes.

“Erika? You forget something?”

Erika jumped and glanced back at the scene. Kip had risen to his feet and was staring over as if he were thinking about doing a welfare check of his own. While he fiddled with the navy-blue-and-gold bow tie that peeked out under his peacoat’s lapels, she realized he was wearing the same expression Trey had had back at Primrose—after she’d emerged from the Landreys’ bathroom.

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