Zane frowned. “Yes. I’d been buried in the barrio for almost fourteen weeks. I hadn’t heard or read anything that wasn’t in Spanish in at least that long.” He moved in the seat, trying to stretch out his long legs.
Ty nodded. That was the answer he’d expected. “I lied,” he admitted.
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” Ty answered with a shrug. “It was the first thing that came out. He asked if I’d been following, and I said no before I even thought about it.”
“And after you said it?” Zane prodded.
“Didn’t look back,” Ty answered immediately. He produced a thin leather binder and handed it over to Zane.
“What’s this?” Zane asked in surprise as he took the portfolio and looked at it warily.
“It’s all the clippings I kept about the case when I was in the hospital and after,” Ty answered as he crossed his arms over his chest defensively and shifted in his seat.
Zane looked up in surprise. “You kept up with it the whole time?
Why would you do that? With all the mess in your head you were trying to straighten out?” He clearly remembered the look on Ty’s face when they’d seen that girl hanging in the window.
“I don’t like being outsmarted,” Ty answered in a soft, determined voice. “And I don’t like feeling guilty,” he admitted.
Zane raised his head and looked at him seriously. He’d taken for granted that a man like Ty would be able to shrug off the past easily. His behavior and his attitude all implied that he lived in the here and now, but Zane knew him well enough now to see that he took everything to heart, especially his failures. And Zane knew Ty considered that woman’s death his fault. The killer never would have set his sights on her if Ty hadn’t led him to her. Suddenly, whatever Ty had collected in that binder seemed very important to Zane. It would tell him about more than just the case. It would tell him about Ty, about the man he thought he could care deeply for.
“I highlighted some bits. Underlined and … scribbled. I was cooped up,” Ty muttered defensively.
Zane tipped his head, eyes warming, and he smiled slightly. “Okay,”
he said quietly, trying not to laugh. He schooled his features and looked back down at the portfolio solemnly. “Anything I should know before looking?” he asked, sliding his hand over the leather.
Ty pursed his lips and then nodded his head. “The last murders were….” He seemed to hesitate, unsure of how to continue. Zane frowned worriedly. “They found them in the morgue,” Ty told him hoarsely.
“The morgue?” Zane asked with a sudden drop in the pit of his stomach.
“The ME and her assistant,” Ty answered as he lowered his head.
Zane’s head snapped up. “Karen? What the hell?” he asked.
Ty didn’t look up, merely kept his head bowed as if it was somehow his fault. Zane looked back down at the binder with dread, then opened it and turned it to look over the first page. The articles weren’t in any sort of order.
They were merely put in as Ty had found them.
The first page, however, was about the woman. It detailed her discovery with all the gory relish of the popular press, and Ty knew it word for word. He looked away from the photograph included of Isabelle St. Claire in her airline uniform. “The way she was found,” he said in a hoarse voice,
“made me start thinking the way the bodies were found was even more important than we thought it was.”
Zane glanced up at him before going back to the article. “Go on,” he invited.
“It’s not really the victims he’s after,” Ty conjectured. “It’s the situations,” he went on with a point at the next page. “His vics have to fit the situation he’s after, but other than that he doesn’t care who they are. He went after the ME and her assistant next.”
Zane glanced up at him with a wince.
Ty nodded grimly. “But it wasn’t in the same manner as the agents he killed, or like us or the other people he was trying to merely get rid of. It wasn’t like they stumbled across him as he was doing something. It was methodical. I think they were planned victims, killed in the morgue for some reason,” he said with emphasis.
Flipping through the pages, Zane stopped on that article, seeing the picture of the dark-haired woman they’d worked with. He shook his head. Ty must have done this just in the last few days, right before he got the call from Burns. He was still keeping up, somehow. Zane’s chest hurt with the thought.
“Goddamn,” he murmured. “They were locked in the autopsy lab. But why?
You’re right; there’s something off about it. Always before, there’s some sort of odd positioning. They were just there.”
“Right. In the morgue. I started looking back at the other ones. The first with the meth guy found in his bed. The second with the hooker found in the graveyard, which happens to be one of the most elite burial grounds in the city,” he added with a point of his finger at the binder. “Then the two girls with the dyed hair who were switched in each other’s beds. I don’t think it mattered how they were killed or who they were. Just how they were found.”
“What about the guy with the bird flu? Or the twins that looked like a mutual execution? What was off about them?” Zane asked.
Ty sighed heavily and shook his head, looking out the window as the plane began to taxi down the runway. “That’s the problem with my theory,”
he admitted. “The twins were the ones that were killed across state lines. They were the reason the FBI was brought in at all. That is the importance of their location. But aside from that? There wasn’t anything special about where or how they were found, just what they were killed with.”
“The one man with a rare disease and the others with their own twin?”
“Uh huh. Nothing else stands out.”
“Other than they were different from all the others,” Zane said.
Ty muttered as he looked out the window diligently. “There’s an answer there, but I’m just not seeing the big picture,” he added in frustration.
Zane kept paging through the binder quietly, reviewing the older cases and then reading up on what had happened since.
A shiver ran through Ty and he closed his eyes and bowed his head again. “I hate knowing this fucker is smarter than I am,” he muttered.
Zane’s head snapped up. “He’s not smarter than you,” he said firmly.
“He just has inside information.”
Ty sneered at that bit of logic and snorted. “You saying he’s the kid in class with the teacher’s copy of the textbook?” he asked wryly as his knee began to bounce restlessly.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s easy to beat the other kids’ test scores when you have the answer key,” Zane pointed out.
Ty closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Still doesn’t mean the other kids have to like it,” he muttered as the engines roared and the plane lifted off.
ONCE they arrived in New York, a brief discussion established that they would contact Tim Henninger at the Bureau. It was fairly safe and probably the most expedient way of going about things. He’d risked his neck to help them before, and despite Ty’s inherent lack of respect for the kid, they both trusted him in their own ways.
When they called him, he sounded almost happy to hear from them.
Ty could practically hear him vibrating over the phone as he asked where they wanted to meet.
When Henninger arrived at the diner, Zane was eating as Ty drank a glass of juice. They sat on the same side of the table, Zane somewhat sprawled in the booth, Ty sitting up straight and slightly stiff. Henninger blinked at them, noticing the outward changes; Zane’s scruff set off by Ty’s more polished, professional look. For the first time, it was easy to see the former Marine in the FBI agent.
“Guys, it’s great to see you,” Henninger said quietly as he slid into the booth across the table from them, looking at them in mild confusion. He leaned closer, looking at them both oddly. “But why are you back?” he asked with a frown.
Ty gave Zane a glance and then looked back at Henninger seriously.
“They wanted someone who could fly under the Bureau radar, as it were. And the … the general feeling was that the killer…missed us,” he answered hesitantly.
Henninger’s dark eyes lit up with amusement, and he smiled and nodded as he laughed softly. The smile gave him an entirely different look, one that Ty probably would have found appealing in other circumstances. “It would appear that he did,” Henninger said with some amusement as the waitress sauntered over to take his order. “So, you’re here to draw him out?”
he went on after he ordered. “If you’re under the radar, how do you plan to make yourself known to him?”
Ty just frowned. That wasn’t exactly why they were here, but it made a certain kind of sense when put that way. If the killer had gone silent because they had abandoned the case, then it stood to reason that their mere presence would kick him back into doing something stupid. That also meant that their mere presence might cost someone else their life.
Zane pushed a bite of waffle around on the plate in front of him.
“That’s not exactly the plan,” he murmured half to himself.
“But you hope to catch the killer’s attention?” Henninger asked as he watched Zane’s fork distractedly.
“We don’t want his attention,” Zane answered carefully. “We want him. Tell us about the cases. We’ve both been out of the loop.”
“Have you?” Henninger responded with wide eyes, looking back and forth at them. “So you don’t know anything about the last two murders?” he asked, his brow creasing.
Ty shook his head in answer, lips pressed tightly together.
“They didn’t even tell you about the other agents?” Henninger asked them in disbelief.
Zane shook his head. “Just the basics,” he said tightly.
Henninger looked between them, clearly surprised. Ty stared back at him, not appearing at all fazed.
“The murders when he resurfaced, medical examiner Karen Bryce and her assistant, Mina Holmes,” Henninger told them regretfully. “They found the two of them in the morgue, locked inside. Looked like a nasty, bloody fight. Karen’s throat was cut, and Mina had been strangled.”
Zane cursed quietly and looked away, fighting back the desire to throw something.
Henninger frowned. “How do they expect us to make progress on finding this guy if we keep starting over? I mean, you got pulled right in the middle of things. You hadn’t been killed yet; you were ahead of the curve,”
he pointed out wryly. His eyes shifted back and forth between the two, still puzzling over the changes in them.
“That knock on my head was a bit worse than we thought at first,” Ty answered shortly. “I wasn’t making much sense there at the end.”
Henninger watched him silently for a moment, frowning and pursing his lips. Finally, he seemed to accept that and sat back.
Zane pushed his plate away, unable to eat any more after the news about Karen. “The Bureau has pretty much accepted that he’s one of us now, right? Has anyone done anything about security in the offices?”
“Aside from more locked doors in the building and lengthier pass codes? Not really,” Henninger answered with a shake of his head. “They don’t want to spook him.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Zane spit out under his breath, sitting back with a thump and crossing his arms.
Henninger boggled at them. “What’d you two do? Switch brains?”
Ty sat silently and glared at the kid, remembering why he might have disliked him. Zane’s glare matched Ty’s, and Henninger shrank back a little.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“This is what’s going to happen,” Zane bit off after a little more glaring. “You’re going to get us all the case files—the originals, not copies—
and the personnel files we were working before. I want the manifest lists from evidence, including everyone who’s touched every single piece, and everyone who’s filed a single piece of paper in this case.”
“And you have clearance from on high this time,” Ty added. “No sneaking required.”
Henninger blinked, looked vaguely worried, and opened his mouth to utter a very obvious word, but caught it just in time. “I don’t want to know, do I?”
Ty just shrugged and looked back down at his untouched food.
“Just get it. Then call us when it’s together, and we’ll meet again to pick it up. You’ve got my number.” Zane scooted out of the booth and stood up, pulling a wad of cash out of his pocket and tossing a twenty on the table.
Henninger watched him rise with a slightly stricken look and then looked back at Ty, who was still sitting and staring at him blankly. “I kind of liked him better when he was you,” Henninger grumbled to him.
Ty gave him a weak, sympathetic smile and slid out of the booth.
Zane rolled his eyes and nudged Ty to get moving. Ty nudged him back, hard, and snarled at him as they left the restaurant. Henninger turned in his seat and watched them go, frowning at them thoughtfully.
Zane pulled out a cigarette and lit up as soon as they were outside. “I still don’t like him,” he said as they started walking.
“What do you mean, still?” Ty asked.
“He’s a puppy dog. Didn’t we have this conversation?” Zane said around his cigarette. He stopped at the curb to wait for the light to change.