Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(30)

The steps creaked as she went up, and every time they did, she looked behind herself. Shadows. So many shadows.

“Get a grip,” she said under her breath.

Up on the third floor, she paused—and then broke away from the staircase to go to the sole door on the little hallway. The thing had hunks out of its boards, like somebody had gone after it with a hammer, and most of its paint—red, it seemed—had flaked off, the wood underneath stained with dirt and filth from decades of no cleaning and lots of hard living.

“Connie?” she said as she went to knock. “It’s me, Erika…”

The door opened a crack as her knuckles made contact, and unlike everything else in the building, the hinges were silent, having been oiled. The smell that was released was bad… but it didn’t carry with it that telltale death stench. There was garbage, yes, but no rotting human remains.

Fresh kills didn’t smell like that, though.

“Connie?” Adding some more volume, she called out, “Connie, it’s me, Erika.”

Out of habit, she did some quick math on whether she had probable cause to enter the premises, but then again, if anything had happened to the woman, Olyn was by far the most likely aggressor and it wasn’t like they could prosecute Olyn from the grave.

“I’m just here to check on you, Connie…” she said.

The living area was cluttered with weeks-old pizza boxes, empty two-liter Mountain Dew bottles, and dirty clothes. A faded sofa was off-kilter, its front right foot busted, and a chipped coffee table was splintered down the middle, yet pushed together. Like whoever had broken it had tried to put it to rights.

Most likely, Olyn had slammed something into it, and Connie had been the fixer. Which was the bandwidth of their relationship, as far as Erika had seen.

“Connie?”

A filthy kitchen was next in the lineup of the long and narrow apartment, and it was clear things had degenerated in the three months since Erika had paid her last visit. Underfoot, plastic food containers crackled and crunched, and the smell was like a restaurant dumpster on a hot August night: With the windows all boarded up and the radiators pumping out heat, the flat was an incubator for spoiled meat, milk, cheese, and whatever else.

The far side of the kitchen put her by the bathroom, and as she leaned into the cramped space, she checked the tub, which was stained but not with blood, as well the shower stall, which was the same.

It was as she went farther down the hall toward the bedroom that she caught the undercurrent in the air.

Beneath the garbage stink… there was blood.

For the second time in one evening, she had to brace herself before entering a stranger’s sleeping space, and as she pushed open the half-closed door, she—

Erika froze. Caught her breath. Then threw a hand out for something, anything, to keep her on her feet.

“It’s… you,” she breathed.



* * *



At the sound of the female voice, Balz looked up from his kneeling position by a dead woman on a bare floor mattress. When he saw who was standing in between the jambs of the victim’s room, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Then again, that made two of them. His homicide detective—not that she was his—seemed equally poleaxed at his presence, the pair of them locking eyes and sharing a common astonishment.

She recovered first, shaking her head like she was trying to rattle loose some rationality in the middle of something that made no sense to her. “What are you doing here?”

And then she was groaning and putting a hand to her temple. The obvious pain she felt made him wince in sympathy, and God, he hated that he had stolen anything from her.

Kind of ironic for a thief, he thought.

“Hi,” he said softly. “It’s good to see you again—and no, I didn’t kill her. I came to see if I could help.”

As Erika Saunders looked down and opened her mouth, he didn’t really want to hear how there was no way she’d believe a piece of shit like him. But that wasn’t what came out at him.

“Oh, Connie,” she whispered in a sad way. “Shit.”

The woman he had watched at her desk earlier in the night entered the squalid bedroom on feet that were silent and careful. When she got to the mattress, she, too, kneeled down, one hand coming up to hold her chin, the other resting on her knee.

Her hazel eyes roamed around the bloody remains, seeing everything he had—and maybe more because this was her profession.

“I don’t think she suffered much,” he said dully. “That puncture through the heart… it happened fast.”

“Actually, she suffered mostly by being alive. Oh… Connie.”

The hand that was on her chin moved down to below her collarbone and she seemed to massage an ache there.

He wanted to tell her that the knife was in the kitchen, in the sink, where that piece of shit down by the bridge had gone to wash the blood off his hands. Balz also wanted to tell her that he was sorry the woman had died, even though he hadn’t known her. And that he was sorry this was obviously so hard to see.

Then again, it was a dead human, and Erika clearly had a heart. How could it not be hard?

As a period of quiet stillness seemed to permeate the whole building, he had to look away because he felt as though he were intruding on a private moment. Unfortunately, the body was the only other thing to really look at, and he saw what he had walked in on with fresh eyes: The victim was lying faceup, in the position that Balz had found her in. She was wearing blue jeans that had rips in both knees, a t-shirt that seemed way too thin for the season, and nothing on her feet. Her blond hair, which had a brassy tone to the frizzy ends and two inches of dark regrowth, was matted with blood that had darkened from bright crimson to black. The face was so bruised and swollen, the features were unclear, and the mortal wound, that penetration in the center of the chest, had bled so extensively that half of the mattress underneath was showing the stain.