“Johnny and I weren’t friends,” Burke said of the inmate he’d used. “I didn’t even like him.”
“Did he know that?” David asked.
Burke ignored the question. “The San Francisco police needed my help. They were grateful for it.”
“Help that coincided nicely with your parole hearing, I might add. Congratulations on timing it so perfectly.”
David expected a small smile or some other sign of acknowledgment. But Burke simply persisted in creating the image he was hoping to sell. “They know I’m not like the others in here.”
Irritated, David couldn’t resist pressing him a little harder. “Do you think the families of the women you murdered believe you’re any different?”
Silence. Then Burke chuckled in what David interpreted as mock sadness. “I’ll never be able to convince you, will I?”
“You expect me to believe that bullshit you told the jury?”
“It’s true.”
“No, it’s not.” But Burke was such a skilled liar that some members of the jury had viewed rock-solid evidence with skepticism. As far as David was concerned, even the San Francisco police had been conned by this crafty man or they wouldn’t have recommended him for parole no matter how many inmates he ratted out.
“Believe what you want.” Burke waved his free hand. “It’s over. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters to me.” Withdrawing the pictures he’d brought, pictures of Meredith Connelly, Amber Farello and Patty Poindexter—the three girls murdered near the American River—David used his shoulder to support the phone and held them to the glass. “This is why.”
As Burke’s eyes moved from one photograph to the next, they flickered with recognition but not remorse. “I’ve told you already. I’ve never seen those girls before in my life. It’s not as if they were my patients or anything.”
Because he was too intelligent for that. He’d chosen random victims, victims in an area other than the one in which he lived, victims with no apparent tie to him. He thought he was smarter than the police, and it galled David no end that so far that seemed to be true.
“I won’t give up, you know,” David said. “Ever.”
Burke held the phone casually, toying with the hem of his prison-issue jeans. “Then you’ll be wasting your time.”
David put the pictures back in his shirt pocket. “What will you do for a living when you get out?” The dental board had revoked Burke’s license when he was convicted, so he couldn’t establish a new practice in California. And if he tried to go elsewhere, a background check would reveal his criminal record.
For a moment, the congenial facade slipped and David glimpsed what he saw as the real Oliver Burke. Sullen. Full of self-pity. “Thanks to you, I’ve lost a vocation that required six years of schooling and several more years to develop into the success it was. My wife had to sell my practice for pennies on the dollar just to survive.”
“Thanks to me?” David echoed. “I’m not the one who attacked a woman with a knife.”
Their eyes locked. “She attacked me.”
“You cut her.”
“In self-defense.”
David had the fleeting desire to feel his hands around Burke’s neck, to choke the truth out of him if there was no other way. But he knew it was the anger and frustration that goaded him. He had to watch those negative emotions, remain in control. “The evidence doesn’t support your story.”
“It doesn’t support hers, either. If I put a knife to her throat, where is it?”
At the challenge in Burke’s voice, David tightened his grip on the phone. He’d get this little son of a bitch if it was the last thing he did. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“There was never any knife.” Burke stared at the fingers of his left hand as he drummed them on the table. “We were making out, feeling each other up, when she suddenly freaked out and stabbed me with her sewing scissors. Then we started fighting over them.”
More lies. Skye’s injuries weren’t consistent with the kind of puncture wounds she would’ve obtained had he used her scissors against her. There’d been a knife.
“All I did wrong was go home with her,” he said. “And I’ve been through more than enough to pay for that. What man has never been tempted to stray?”
“Why’d you pick her?” David asked.
“She wanted me to pick her.”
“You’re dreaming again.”
Burke shrugged. “You weren’t there that night. You didn’t see the way she smiled at me, the way she went for my zipper.”
David arranged his features in a calm mask. Burke was on a fishing trip, trying to provoke him and, as much as David’s heart pounded at the images Burke created, he refused to give him the upper hand. “You’re quite a ladies’ man, Oliver.”
“A guy knows when a woman’s coming on to him, especially when she wants him that bad.”
“Didn’t you ever think about your wife, your daughter, when you were planning your attacks on innocent women?”
“I didn’t attack anyone. But if I was the type, I can’t imagine I’d be thinking of my wife. What do you imagine when you look at a nude woman in Playboy?” He’d asked as if he sincerely wanted to know, but it was a rhetorical question he answered himself. “You dream of getting it on with someone like that, don’t you? And let’s be honest, Skye’s as hot as any centerfold.”
When David didn’t respond, Oliver finally seemed to grow self-conscious. “Don’t you agree?”
“Quit trying to play me.”
Burke leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “I saw how you looked at her in that courtroom.”
David twisted his mouth into a cocky smirk. He could act as well as this ass**le. “That’s the best you can do?”
With a sniff, Burke lost the smile and moved the phone to his other ear. “I know you want her. Any man would want to ride her.”
“Like you wanted to?”
“Sure,” he said flippantly. “Why else would I have gone home with her?”
“She doesn’t remember ever seeing you before you broke in.”
“She remembers.”
“No, she doesn’t. If anything, she tossed you a polite, vacant smile and continued on her way.” That type of interaction happened between total strangers all the time. It had no meaning. Except to Oliver.