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  Now that boil on the ass of society was going to walk free unless she could come up with another witness to put him at the scene when the Salvatores were killed.

  And her own father had shown up to rub her nose in it. She supposed she should be grateful her father had recused himself from the case and let his partner handle it. No doubt he was still working behind the scenes in an anonymous advisory role, pitting himself against her.

  Trying to demonstrate, yet again, that Krista’s quest for justice was not just misguided, but ultimately futile. Waiting for the day when she finally tucked in her tail and admitted Daddy was right, that she was wasting her life in a thankless government job when she could be making millions as the daughter and protégé of one of the top defense attorneys in the Pacific Northwest.

  The mere thought made her skin crawl. It was one thing to take money from wealthy businessmen like Maxwell to protect them from lawsuits. It was another to help a scumbag like Karev get away with murder, and God knew what else.

  She ordered a latte and forced herself to stop brooding over today’s failure and instead focus on how she was going to salvage the case.

  Jimmy was late, so she pulled out Karev’s case files to review while she waited. Her irritation escalated as eight turned into eight-thirty, eight forty-five, and finally nine o’clock passed, and still no sign of Jimmy Caparulo.

  Two phone calls at the number he’d given her dumped straight into voice mail, and her texts went unanswered.

  She swore under her breath as she looked up Jimmy’s address from the report Stew had given her. Jimmy was not the most stable person in the world, with documented PTSD and a history of alcohol and drug abuse. Most likely he had gone on a bender and either forgot about their meeting or passed out before he could meet her.

  Which also made whatever information he provided less than reliable, she reminded herself as she walked the short distance to the house where Jimmy lived with his aunt.

  Still, it was a start, and maybe if it wasn’t all bona fide he’d give her something—

  Her inner monologue stopped short as she registered the flashing blue and red lights in the driveway halfway down the block. She bit back a swear when she saw it was Jimmy’s house.

  As she got closer, she could hear the voices popping over the radios and the murmurs of the small crowd gathered on the front lawn.

  A woman was sobbing inconsolably against the shoulder of another woman. “It was awful, so awful. Thank God Angie wasn’t here to see it.”

  Krista recognized one of the uniforms controlling the perimeter. “Roberts! What happened in there?”

  Roberts looked at her in confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was supposed to meet with Jimmy Caparulo about an hour ago,” Krista admitted. So much for keeping their meeting secret until she’d built up her case, but with her number popping up all over his cell phone in the last hour, there was no way to keep a lid on it. “When he didn’t show I decided to come by.”

  Roberts let out a mirthless laugh. “Guess he was too busy blowing his brains out to keep your date.”

  Krista’s stomach bottomed out at the news. “He killed himself?”

  “They’re not gonna call it right now, but from where I’m standing, there isn’t much question he ate the business end of his Glock.”

  She swallowed back a surge of bile. “Who found him?”

  “Neighbor,” Roberts said, indicating with his head the direction of the sobbing woman. “She found him about fifteen minutes ago and called it in.”

  “How’d she get in the house?”

  “She has a key. She was a friend of Jimmy’s aunt, and since she died a couple weeks ago, they’ve been taking turns bringing him dinner. Came over to deliver a plate of enchiladas and got one hell of a surprise.”

  “Neighbors didn’t hear anything?” The houses on the Caparulos’ street were close together. “Seems like someone would hear a gunshot.”

  “It’s an older neighborhood,” Roberts said, and as Krista took a closer look at the crowd milling on the lawn she saw a lot of white hair and hunched backs. “The lady next door says she might have heard it but at the time she thought it was the TV.”

  “She say what time?”

  “About seven-thirty.”

  Krista pulled her wool coat tighter around herself. All that time she was waiting for Jimmy at the coffee shop, and he was already dead.

  And he just happened to kill himself on the day he was supposed to meet you.

  A shiver that had nothing to do with the damp spring night slithered down her spine. “Okay if I go inside?”

  Roberts frowned. “The M.E.’s still in there and they haven’t even moved him yet—”

  Krista cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’ve seen worse.”

  Yet Krista could see a thousand bloody crime scenes and nothing would ever prepare her for the smell. She was brutally reminded of that the second she stepped into the small one-story house. She flashed her ID at a uniform and didn’t bother to ask where Jimmy was.

  It was all too easy to follow the odor of violent death. Sickly sweet, metallic blood and excrement mixed with an indescribable stink, like she could smell the body already rotting though he’d been dead for less than two hours.

  She followed the smell and sounds of activity down a short hallway, past a bathroom on the left, and through the second door on the right. Like a homing beacon, her gaze skipped right to the headboard of the double bed and the wall above. A wall that was painted white now displayed a splatter pattern of blood punctuated with the occasional pieces of gray brain.

  Despite the cavalier attitude she’d shown Roberts, Krista’s knees went a little wobbly and her vision started to tunnel. She leaned carefully against the doorjamb and took a deep, quiet breath as she kept an iron-clawed grip on her composure. She’d worked for the prosecuting attorney’s office for seven years, dealt with some of the bloodiest crime scenes imaginable, and had never shown even a hint of weakness. She wasn’t about to start now.

  She forced herself to look at the scene analytically. She knew the crime scene guys would do a thorough investigation, but she wanted to take her own look around and see if there was anything going on here that would indicate it was anything other than a gory suicide scene.

  Jimmy was flopped back on the bed, his booted feet resting on the floor, knees bent over the edge of the mattress. His right hand was flung out to the side, and there was a chalk mark on the bed to indicate where the gun had fallen.

  Flashbulbs popped as the techs took pictures of the scene and she recognized Medina from the coroner’s office leaning over Jimmy’s body. She greeted him, and immediately regretted it when he straightened up, giving her a good look at Jimmy’s face. What was left of it anyway. Her stomach lurched and she pinned her stare to a blank spot on the wall until she was sure she wasn’t going to hurl up the coffee she’d drunk.

  “This guy wasn’t screwing around,” Medina said as he snapped off his gloves and dropped them into a biowaste container. “We’ll need ballistics to confirm it, but judging from the way it took off half of his skullcap, Mr. Caparulo used a hollow point, which expanded on impact.”

  “Roberts said the Glock was registered to him.”

  Medina nodded. “I guess so—that’s for these guys to figure out.” He gestured at the crime scene techs.

  “You’re sure he did it himself?”

  Medina frowned like the question confused him. “I need to do a full postmortem, and the forensics will have to confirm it, but he has powder residue on his hands.”

  A cold breeze wafted through the room, providing momentary relief to the suffocating stench. The shade flapped against the window frame. “The window is open.” Krista lifted the shade and saw the screen was still in place. She turned to one of the techs, an Asian woman wearing wire-frame glasses who was dusting Jimmy’s desk for fingerprints. “Was it like that when you got here?”

  “I’m not sure. You
’ll have to ask whoever was first on the scene.”

  Krista started to ask who that was when her gaze snagged on a silver-framed photo on Jimmy’s desk. She recognized Jimmy Caparulo, dressed in army fatigues. He looked younger, smiling into the camera with his arms slung over the shoulders of the two other men in the photo. Her breath caught as she recognized the other two.

  Flanking Jimmy on the left, looking like a fallen angel with his dark hair and piercing eyes, was Sean Flynn, the man whose face had haunted her, waking and sleeping, from the day she’d watched him walk out of the courtroom a free man.

  But the man in the picture wasn’t the Sean Flynn she knew. Gone were the deep, grim lines in his cheeks, the tight mouth, the eyes dark with anger.

  In the picture was a Sean that Krista had never seen. Eyes sparkling with humor, mouth wide open and laughing, his teeth bright white in contrast to his sun-baked skin. So happy and gorgeous it was hard to believe she’d ever thought he was a murderer.

  And on Jimmy’s right, Nate Brewster, the epitome of an American hero, his flawless blond, blue-eyed perfection hiding the well of evil at the root of his soul. Evil that had ruined the lives of the men who considered him a friend.

  Now Jimmy was dead, just as he was about to reveal the secrets Brewster had killed to keep.

  Despite Medina’s assessment, Krista knew in her gut it was no coincidence. “Make sure you check the window outside for signs of forced entry,” she said to the tech dusting for fingerprints, who looked confused by the order but nodded in agreement.

  Who else could be hurt by the information Jimmy had? What was she missing?

  Before she could ponder the question further, her phone rang. When she recognized Stew’s number, she ducked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom across the hall, closing the door before she picked up.

  “Jimmy Caparulo’s dead,” she said.

  “I know,” Stew said. “The late local news already picked it up. They’re saying he killed himself after the trauma of being framed for the Slasher murders.”

  “Conveniently on the same night he was going to meet me,” Krista said. “I don’t care how the ruling ends up. I don’t think this was a suicide.”

  “I’ll look into it. But that’s not why I called you. I think I found something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been tracking Brewster’s financials and I think I’ve found something. Could be something big.”

  Chapter 2

  Krista went through everything one last time before she headed for Benson’s office. She wanted to make sure all of her ammo was in order.

  She hadn’t been surprised in the least when he’d left a message last night at midnight asking that she meet him first thing. By then he must have found out about Jimmy Caparulo’s alleged suicide and about how Krista showed up at the scene after her number popped up on Jimmy’s phone about half a dozen times.

  Benson was understandably curious. Curiosity that would be followed shortly by anger once she told Benson she was meeting Jimmy Caparulo as part of an independent investigation into a case that he considered emphatically closed.

  He didn’t disappoint. “What part of ‘drop it’ don’t you understand? Nate Brewster is dead, Sean Flynn is free, and we don’t have the time or the resources to waste on some theory you have that Brewster wasn’t working alone.”

  “We have every reason to believe there were others involved. There are witnesses who are willing to give statements to that effect.”

  Benson cocked a skeptical brow at her. “Witnesses? Don’t you mean witness? One that has disappeared off the face of the earth?”

  Krista forced herself not to drop her gaze like some timid teenager. “Talia Vega could have important information.” Unfortunately the prosecution’s star witness in Sean’s original trial had disappeared almost immediately after she’d been rescued, along with Megan Flynn, from Nate Brewster’s brutal clutches.

  “And you only know that secondhand, from Sean Flynn’s sister. Hardly a reliable source.”

  Krista’s eyes narrowed. “I consider Megan a reliable source, and even if I didn’t, you know as well as I do that Detective Williams is solid.”

  Benson replied with a skeptical grunt.

  “And you can’t tell me the files deleted from Brewster’s computer don’t raise a red flag,” Krista continued.

  “Yes, they do, but with nothing else to go on, our hands are tied.”

  “And yesterday Jimmy Caparulo turns up dead, right after he tells me he has information about Brewster. You don’t think that’s a little too much of a coincidence?”

  Benson’s thick gray eyebrows raised above the wire rims of his glasses. “He was a disturbed young man struggling with serious PTSD and addiction issues. I imagine you’d have to take any information he provided with a huge grain of salt.”

  Krista opened her mouth to protest but Benson silenced her with a raised hand. “We’ve been through all of this, and I keep telling you, there’s not enough to go on—”

  “What about this?” Krista had been waiting for the right moment to break out the new information Stew had discovered. She slid the paper across Benson’s desk and perched on the edge of her seat as she waited for his reaction to her bombshell.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “A bank statement, from one of Brewster’s offshore accounts. One we just found, under a dummy corporation.”

  “He had several, including the one he used as a holding company for Club One. What makes this one different?”

  “There are three ten-thousand-dollar deposits: one on May fourth, one on October sixth of last year, and one on March third this year.”

  “So?”

  Krista kept her jaw from dropping. Benson was only in his early fifties, and she had never known him to be anything but razor sharp. Was it possible that edge was starting to dull? “March third was when Bianca Delagrossa was murdered.” She’d been found in a trailer park, tortured, raped, and murdered in the Slasher’s signature style. “And at least one of the other deposits coincides with when he murdered another victim.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means it’s possible someone was paying Nate to kill those women.” She sat back and folded her arms, waiting for Benson to congratulate her on her insight.

  Instead, Benson leaned back in his chair, slipped off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “Krista, you have got to stop spinning your wheels on this. I think you’ve gotten so close to this case you’ve lost all perspective.”

  “What do you mean? What if someone was paying him to kill those women?” She knew her theory was radical, but when dealing with psychotic minds you had to allow for all possibilities.

  “Brewster was sick. He killed several women. He also ran a very successful legitimate computer consulting business. Don’t you think it’s possible that a customer might have happened to pay him on the same day one of the murders occurred?”

  This time Krista couldn’t keep her jaw from falling open. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Why won’t you even consider that he wasn’t working alone—”

  Benson slammed his palm to his desk, sending a stack of files to the floor. “Because we have a backlog of three dozen fucking cases, we’re going to lose at least three people because of budget cuts, and one of my best prosecutors is wasting her time on a case that was closed months ago!” He snapped his mouth shut and closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer, but the lines of tension around his mouth were still there. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t speak to you like that.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly and when he looked at her again, it was with a paternal smile edged with exasperation. “Krista, your thoroughness and your commitment are things I appreciate most about you, but I’m asking you, please. Let this go. For both our sakes, I need you to turn your focus to something that really matters.”

  Krista could barely see through the red fog hazing her brain. She couldn’t believe the man she’d looked to for advi
ce on everything from whom she should call on as an expert witness to whether she should buy a house or a condo was dismissing her suspicions out of hand. “Sean Flynn was sentenced to death and Jimmy Caparulo is dead along with seven other women because we went after the wrong guy. Now I come across evidence that Nate might not have been working alone and you think that doesn’t matter?”

  “There’s a difference between information and evidence, Krista. I can’t open an investigation based on what you’ve given me.” He reached down to gather the files he’d knocked to the floor. “Now, we need to find another angle in the Karev case. We need to think about…”

  Krista barely heard a word as he droned on about his strategy for the investigation. He really expected her to drop it. Just tuck her tail between her legs and ignore the fact that she was sure Brewster hadn’t been working alone. When she’d first been hired fresh out of law school, she would have shrugged aside her suspicions and trotted obediently away.

  But that was before she’d encountered Sean Flynn.

  “I have a lot of vacation days piled up,” she blurted out in the middle of Benson’s speech.

  “What?” he said, startled. “You can’t. After today’s setback we have to completely rebuild our case against Karev—”

  “Chandler can take it,” Krista said. “He’s dying to get in on Karev’s case.” Luke Chandler had been hired three years ago, and he was hungry for a big case to beef up his profile.

  “I don’t want Chandler on this case. I want you.”

  Krista shook her head. “My head isn’t in the game, not like it needs to be. You said so yourself. Just give me a couple weeks to get it straightened out. Let me see this through.”

  “You’re on the fast track here, Krista,” Mark said, not unkindly. “If you take off in the middle of a case like this, you could be risking everything you’ve worked so hard for.”

  Krista didn’t have the heart to tell the man who had taken her under his wing and fostered her from the very beginning that, after the last few months, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be on any track in this office, fast or not. “I understand,” she said. She rose from her chair and gathered her printout of the bank statements.