Zeke nodded. No one else had heard, either. Just that it was over a girl.
“I’ll head out then.” Gene opened the door, slid from the room, and closed it behind him, leaving Zeke alone to stare at the coroner’s initial report that was lying on the desk.
Joe pumped up on heroin didn’t make sense. Joe and Jaime fighting over a girl didn’t make sense. Nothing about their deaths added up or pointed him in the right direction to look for evidence. All Zeke had was the fact that it was identical to a method the exterminator used. He knew it was, because his father had told him about it repeatedly when he’d been a teenager. When he, too, had been a part of the Freedom League.
He rubbed at his jaw, sat back in his chair, and visualized the murder scene again. The TV remote and the half a bottle of beer. But the television had been turned off.
There had been no drugs in the house, though Joe and Jaime weren’t strangers to a little marijuana. There should have been some.
Jaime hadn’t fought, he hadn’t even tried to come out of his chair.
Joe had put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger within moments of killing his brother.
There were no signs of tears on his face or in his eyes. There were no defensive wounds to indicate he had been murdered. The gun was in his hand, his prints alone marking it.
He closed his eyes and let the scene form in his head. There was something off there.
Something more than the lack of evidence for anything illegal, something more than that damned television being turned off, the remote in the exact position it would have been if it had fallen from Jaime’s hand.
There had been traces of marijuana in Jaime’s system, but heroin in Joe’s. The coroner’s report showed a single track mark in the arm. Nothing more. He’d shot up only once and killed his brother while under the drug’s influence.
Zeke knew it hadn’t happened that way.
His eyes opened, his lips compressing as he rose from the desk and jerked his hat from the desk where he’d tossed it.
He wanted to see the scene again, remember the layout of the bodies, and figure this out. The mobile home may have been blown to hell, but the ashes were still there, and Zeke could remember how it had been when he’d found the bodies.
Joe had shot up only once. Just that single time. And that was bullshit. Someone had managed to shoot him up and walk into that mobile home with him. Once there, the unsub had shot Jaime, then killed Joe.
Zeke left the office and headed from the building, walking into the warm April sunshine and ignoring the sharp pang of longing he felt at the sound of a motorcycle purring past the sheriff’s department.
He looked, but it wasn’t Rogue. Wild hellion curls weren’t flowing back from the rider’s face and a fun-loving, devil may-care smile wasn’t aimed his way.
Hell, she was working, he knew. It was her afternoon at the restaurant, and if nothing else, Rogue was damned dependable in what she did.
He was the inconsistent one. He’d lusted after her for years and fought against it. He’d kissed her, then pushed her away. He ordered her not to bring another man between them, but he made damned certain he stayed as far away from her as possible. And when that hadn’t worked he’d at least tried to give her pleasure and satisfaction before walking away again. Staying away from her was killing him.
And he had to fight himself, daily now, not to go to her, not to take what he knew he could have, what she would willingly give him.
Twenty-six. She was twenty-six years old. Slender, delicate. Pixy wasn’t far off when describing her. She barely topped his chest. She was fragile. She wasn’t strong-boned; she wasn’t mountain stock. Hell, she looked like a good breeze might blow her away, but still, she wasn’t skinny. She was slender. Rounded where a woman should be rounded. Curvy and tempting. But too damned fragile, he had to remind himself as he pulled himself into the official Tahoe emblazoned with the Pulaski County sheriff’s seal.
He could fuck all night, most nights. He was so damned testosterone driven that there were times he cursed it. When men he went to school with resorted to taking Viagra, Zeke still had the stamina he had had ten years before. Hell, there were times he wondered if he hadn’t gotten worse as he’d gotten older.
It was a Mayes male trait, his father had once bragged. All Mayes men had a big dick and lots of fire, his father had been known to tell anyone who cared to listen.
It was definitely a Mayes trait, and one he wasn’t happy with at the moment. If he had to take a little something to help his flesh get happy, then it might be better for him and Rogue both. Neither of them needed the complications that would come from the relationship he feared would evolve.
Because the fire wasn’t the only Mayes trait. Zeke loved sex; he just managed to keep his lusts reined in and tried to turn them toward women he knew weren’t looking for commitment or for something more than the hard ride he could give them.
Familiarity could breed a greater hunger. His marriage to Shane’s mother had suffered beneath the desires that often tormented Zeke. Not all women had the hungers or the needs that Zeke knew; he’d realized that with his wife before her death.
He’d had to hide his needs because of her distaste of them. After her death, he’d learned there were more women like her than he’d realized. He was the odd one, the one that needed to put a handle on his unruly fantasies and needs.
He hadn’t thought he was odd when he lived in L.A., when the friends he’d made there had revealed their own darker desires. He didn’t share his women. What was his was his, but damn, he liked to push them sexually.
He liked to play, to tempt, to tease a woman’s body and watch her go crazy as she grew wet and wild. He loved seeing a lover with a black blindfold, his handcuffs circling her wrists, bare flesh between her thighs, sweet syrup glistening on feminine folds, and the heated flush of her flesh from an intimate spanking.
Or better. Ah, even better. A pretty, shapely ass raised for him, clenched rounded curves straining as he invaded a tender, sensitive little rear.
Perverted, his wife had called him. She’d rage for days if he even tried to touch her there. And God forbid he should mention blindfolding her or spanking her. The insults she’d thrown at him over that one had been nearly as bad the ones that had come when he suggested she shave or wax her pussy.
He was a hard lover. It was a part of him. It was something he’d sworn he wouldn’t deny himself after his wife’s death, only to learn that more often than not finding a woman who enjoyed the kinkier sex was easier said than done. The women he’d had affairs with liked their missionary position and their gentle loving, which could be good. But it was like having steak morning, noon, and night. Sometimes, a man craved a little variety, a little spice to his meal, or to his sex life.
And Rogue was definitely spice. All the more reason to stay the hell away from her.
Because all he could see was Rogue stretched out on his bed, her pretty violet eyes hidden by a silk blindfold, her hands cuffed, her little rear lifted to him.
She was a baby compared to him. He had no business fantasizing about her, and he had no business touching her. Despite her air of cynical sexuality, there was a glimmer of innocence in her eyes that warned him that the schoolteacher wasn’t far below the surface.
The soft-spoken, tentative, shy young woman that had come to teach and had learned the dangers of a small town far faster than she should have. She was still there, and she still looked at him the same way she had looked at him at that town hall meeting. With stars and heat in her eyes.
Rogue. She was definitely wild as the wind and bordering lawless. But that schoolteacher still lurked beneath the surface. Soft, delicate, her smile shy, her violet eyes filled with curious sensuality.
She was like a delicate, sensual little bomb waiting to explode in his hands. In his hands, beneath his body, with his cock buried inside her.
And he couldn’t allow it.
He had managed to contain himself over the years. Rumors of his desires had never leaked out because he never gave in to them. He didn’t spank his lovers, he didn’t handcuff them, and he didn’t fuck their asses. He rode them hard and heavy and left them panting and exhausted at the end of the night.
That mark on Rogue’s neck had surprised him. He hadn’t even marked his wife Elaina’s neck. He’d never left a mark on a woman’s flesh. Not beard burn and sure as hell not a bite mark. He’d lost control in those few brief seconds that he had held her. Lost control of his need and his hunger. It was time to rein them in now. It was time to forget Rogue and get back to the business of finding a killer. The same killer that had taken his wife’s and mother’s lives in L.A., and then his father’s, here in Kentucky.
The killer that would have no compunction in wiping out Rogue’s existence if he thought it would serve his purpose. And if he learned Zeke was searching for him before Zeke managed to identify him, then it would definitely serve his purpose. It would destroy Zeke.
SEVEN
There was very little to be found in the remains of Joeand Jaime’s mobile home.
Bedsprings, the springs on the couch and chair. Appliances were blackened and melted in spots; the rest was pretty much cinders. Standing at the edge of the burned remains, Zeke could remember what he had seen when he had been there the day he found the twins.
The burned, twisted metal left from the recliner became the chair Jaime had died in.
Surprise. There had been an expression of complete surprise frozen on his face. There had been something, someone he hadn’t expected with his brother.
Zeke narrowed his eyes as he imagined how it could have played. Joe arriving, possibly high, not exactly himself, with a friend. They step into the house as Jaime stares at his brother in surprise. A second later, he was dead.
Zeke stepped into position, lifted his arm, and pointed his finger as though it were a weapon, imagined it firing, saw in his mind’s eye where the bullet may have caught Jaime.
Either the killer was a quick aim, or he was taller than Zeke. Taller, Zeke thought. The killer’s arm came up and he fired, dead center between Jaime’s eyes before the other man could raise up in his chair.
Joe was high, but he would have been surprised by the shot. Turned a little, just enough.
The gun barrel against his head.Pop. Zeke imagined the shot, saw where it went, and nodded his head slowly.
“Been a long time since I’ve seen you do that.”
Zeke froze at the sound of Gene’s voice behind him. Turning slowly, he found Gene’s cruiser parked farther down the graveled road.
Zeke shrugged in answer to Gene’s comment. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to do it.”
Gene shoved his hands into his uniform pockets and frowned as he stared around the small valley. “Guess you were right about something not being right about those boys’
deaths,” he stated. “Someone made damned sure that fire was hot enough to wipe that trailer out.” He turned and looked at Zeke in confusion. “Why the hell would someone want to kill those two boys?”
Zeke breathed in heavily before turning away and staring out over the valley.
“I figure it had something to do with the girl,” he finally answered, and it struck him that he was having to tell too many damned lies lately in an attempt to protect the information he was looking for.
Gene didn’t say anything. When Zeke turned back to him the other man was watching him closely.
“You don’t tell me stuff anymore, Zeke.” He sighed. “We used to share cases like this.”
Yeah, they had, until information had begun leaking from the office, until he had lost DHS’s support and cooperation. It bit his ass that the Mackays had been involved in investigations that Zeke should have been a part of. He wouldn’t have even known why he had been pushed out of it if his contact in Washington hadn’t suggested that was the cause last year.