The Night Serpent
Anna Leonard

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

About The Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Copyright

Anna Leonard is the nom de paranormal for fantasy/horror writer Laura Anne Gilman, who grew up wondering why none of the characters in her favourite gothic novels ever seemed to know a damn thing about ghosts, vampires or how to run in high heels. She is delighted that the newest generation of heroines has a much better grasp on things. “Anna” lives in New York City, where either nothing or everything is paranormal…

She can be reached via http://www.sff.net/people/lauraanne.gilman/ or http://cosanostradamus.blogspot. com/.

For KRAD and TO

May your life together be filled with love,

joy, satisfaction and success.

Eight times before she had traveled this dream-road; traveled, and been lost. Eight times before, the same sensations haunted her sleep. The feel of the sun’s intense heat between her shoulder blades, the heavy slip of linen across her shoulders, the sweat of fear down her neck. The sound of scorn in his voice as he cast her aside. Most of all, the low vibrating purr, the gentle rumble that chilled her, made her eyes scrunch closed and pray to a vengeful goddess that mercy would at last be granted her….

And the Voice, echoing forever in dream-memory. “As you destroyed, so must you repair. Until then, child-of-mine-no-longer, walk these sands as one forgotten, never to be judged worthy, never to rest—”

“Mother, please…” She wasn’t sure what she was asking for. Forgiveness? Absolution? A chance to explain, to make an excuse?

No matter. It did not matter. It never mattered.

Eight times she bowed her head to the inevitable, knowing there was no excuse she could make, and no explanation she might offer that would wash the blood from her hands. Her birth and position would save her from public humiliation and shame, but inside, in her ka, she would always know. Always remember.

“Mother, I am sorry. My children, I am so very sorry….”

A soft touch against her skin, fur stroking skin. She flinched from the comfort, welcoming the pain that followed. Agony, the sharp downward stroke of betrayal, over and over and over again. Then…darkness.

When she woke, she would remember none of it. She would forget.

Eight times, she always forgot.

This was nine.

Chapter 1

Lily Malkin undid the barrette holding her hair out of her face. The thick black curls slid past her shoulders, and she reached up to run her fingers against her scalp, feeling herself relax. The headache that had haunted her all morning, residue from her usual insomnia, eased a little more.

“Mrrrup?” A tiny paw batted against her knee, demanding attention, and the chance to claw those curls.

“Hello, Rai.” Lily scooped the tiny silver tabby up in one hand, easily keeping the needle-tiny claws away from her hair. The kitten complained, and she soothed it by stroking the soft head until the outraged expression was replaced by heavy lids and a gentle purr.

Lily could almost feel her own eyelids lowering in response. Kitty nap-vibes, the other shelter volunteers called it: the sincere conviction that everything in the world could be made better by stopping to nap in the sun. Oh, if only that were true. She raised the kitten higher and touched her nose to the little pink one. “There you go. Life’s not so bad. And it will only get better for you now, I promise.”

The kitten, secure in her grip, kneaded its claws sleepily against her skin, but didn’t otherwise respond. Lily only wished that her problems were that easily solved. Never a particularly good sleeper, she had been averaging less than four hours a night for the past month, and it was taking its toll.

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change ready. The old joke was even less funny now than it had been in college, she thought. At least then, she had exams and a social life to blame for her exhaustion. Now…Now there were only dreams that she couldn’t remember, and a sense hanging over her that there was something, somewhere, she needed to do. Something important.

The sad truth of the matter was that there wasn’t anything really important in her life. Not in the way that niggling dream was telling her.

Maybe it was time to go back to therapy. Or visit a psychic. Or start taking sleeping pills. Something.

Rai dug tiny needle-claws into her hand, informing her that the petting had stopped, and why had the petting stopped? An obedient human, Lily stroked the downy head again, until the claws relaxed.

A deep voice above her, filled with laughter, broke her concentration on the tiny animal. “You, Lily Malkin, are a miracle.”

“Me?” Surprise made her voice rise, making the word even more of a question, but she kept her attention focused on the kitten, afraid to startle it and ruin the progress they had made. She felt like many things right now, but none of them were miraculous.

“You, yeah. Three years ago, just looking at a cat made you break into a cold sweat. Now?” Ronnie, the director of the Felidae No-Kill shelter, sat down on the floor next to Lily, where a pair of inquisitive kittens immediately pounced on her. The two women were in the middle of the “socialization” room, a space filled with climbing trees, catnip mice and rope nets—and almost a dozen cats and kittens in various stages of sociability. “And now? Now you’re our very own ‘cat whisperer.’”

Lily made a face. She hated that nickname, and “cat talker” and “cat lady” and all the other terms the other volunteers and media people had stuck on her. But there didn’t seem to be any way to get rid of it, now.

It was ironic, really. Despite her last name having a traditional, if unfortunate connection to cats, from the time she was a child being around cats had made her uneasy both physically and emotionally. Physically, she got dizzy, sweaty palmed and nauseated. Emotionally…she had nightmares triggered by something as simple as hearing a cat meow.

Despite that, cats still seemed drawn to her, climbing in her lap and weaving in and out of her legs at the slightest chance.

“It’s because you’re scared and sit so still,” people had told her, as though that made it all right. And, in truth, she had always—from a distance—admired cats, with their easy strides and poised gracefulness, and the way they could curl up, nose, toes and tail, and be instantly comfortable anywhere. But the unease kept growing, to the point where she could not visit homes of friends with cats, or even watch a cat-food commercial on television without changing the channel.

Over the years, that unease had transferred to people, too. She watched them the same way she watched cats, wondering what they wanted from her, what they expected, and when their demands would overwhelm and consume her.

It wasn’t rational, but nothing Lily had read about phobias over the years indicated that rational thought was involved.

When she had moved to Newfield three years before, it had been with the plan to make a new start after the collapse of yet another relationship, her fourth since graduating college. This time, she had told herself, she would not make the same mistakes. New town. New start. Except that she didn’t know how to begin.

Her problems had started with cats—she thought maybe she could start there, and work her way up to people. A helpful therapist and a lot of pep talks had gotten her to the door of the Felidae No-Kill shelter, meaning simply to volunteer in the front office, maybe greet people when they came in, help maintain their Web site, or…

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. The fact that she was where she was, the ranking volunteer with the most responsibility…

Maybe Ronnie was right. Some days even she could barely remember the person she had been the first time she set foot in the doorway two and a half years ago; shaky, sweaty and ready to pass out at the sight of the first inquiring whisker. It had been that much of a change.

With cats, anyway. Lily still had trouble with really connecting to people beyond casual friendships and working relationships.

But she didn’t speak cat, or have any kind of supernatural connection with them, the way some people seemed to think. Cats were just easy to understand. The things they wanted were simple: scratching, and feeding, and a warm place to sleep and to be left alone when they were enjoying all those things.

People? People always wanted more, and they never seemed able to just come right out and ask.

“I think this guy’s going to be ready to adopt soon,” was all she said, lifting the tabby and putting him next to a large orange tom named Willikers, who promptly started grooming the kitten. “And he’d be fine in a house with older cats. Maybe even a dog, if he was used to cats.” Talking about cats—and their adoption chances—was easier than talking about herself.

“I’ll note that on his chart,” Ronnie said, accepting the change of subject. “In the meanwhile, you should try to scrape off some of that cat hair. There’s someone here to see you.”

“Me?” Again, her voice rose, this time almost to a squeak. Maybe that was what she needed to work on next, not sounding so anxious when people noticed her.

Her boss nodded, absently petting the calico she had chosen. “Your faithful mechanical Mountie just stomped in, looking for you.”

Oh, Lily thought. Then, uh-oh. She knew what that meant.

Resigned, Lily stood up and brushed without much hope at the denim of her jeans. She had quickly learned not to wear wool or corduroy at the shelter, but cat hair could stick to anything, and with the multicolored cats they were currently housing, there wasn’t a color you could wear that wouldn’t show the inevitably shed fur. Giving up, she gave her cotton sweater a tug, ran her fingers through her hair to get the overlong curls off her face and went out of the glass-enclosed socialization room and into the lobby.

Two men were waiting for her. One was an older man, craggy-faced, wearing casual slacks, a button-down shirt and a gray blazer that had seen better years.

“Detective Petrosian.” Formal in the presence of a stranger, for all that they had known each other for two years now.

Aggie—Augustus—Petrosian looked up, and Lily knew for certain that she wasn’t going to want to hear what he had to say. It was going to be worse than her usual calls, which were more along the lines of removing a litter of kittens from the inner walls of a building that was being torn down, or getting someone’s illegal pet—last month it had been a half-grown ocelot—out of an apartment without anyone getting bitten. When he showed up with those sorts of problems, Aggie never looked as grim as he did right now.

“Lily. Thank you.”

She smiled at him. He always said that, as though she was going to hide in the backroom and pretend he wasn’t there.

“Lily Malkin, this—” and he indicated the man next to him “—is Special Agent Jon T. Patrick. He’s with the feds. Visiting us here in the burbs to help out on a case.”

“Patrick” as a surname sounded as Irish as it got. This guy, Lily thought immediately, wasn’t even remotely Irish; not unless they had packed up and colonized somewhere more exotic when history wasn’t looking. Intense black eyes looked out from deep-set sockets. Those rather amazing eyes, emphasized by a thick, short cap of black-and-gray curls above and the high brace of cheekbones below, were all you saw at first. Lips were thin, ears ordinary and skin a soft golden tan that gave her the urge—briefly—to lean forward and find out what he smelled like. Sandalwood, she thought, without knowing what sandalwood actually smelled like.

Oh. Also, oh. If she were a shallow woman, her mouth would be watering right about now.

All right, so she was a shallow woman on occasion. It wasn’t a crime.

He looked her up and down and then directly in the eyes, and the intensity of that gaze felt as though he was undressing her almost casually, as though he had the right to do so. That kind of arrogance pissed her off, so she stared back at him, daring him to continue. At least she had been discreet in her observation.

You’re not that hot, pal, she thought, now annoyed by how quickly she had responded to him. It hadn’t been that long since she’d…All right, maybe it had. That was still no reason to react like a tabby in heat.

Detective Petrosian finished the introductions quickly, as though he sensed the undercurrents. “Agent Patrick, this is Lily Malkin. Lily’s our local cat expert.”

Her lips quirked at Aggie’s words, despite her irritation. Between him and Ronnie…She wasn’t any kind of expert, really, just cheaper and easier to get hold of than any specialist they could afford to hire, even if one were available. Newfield was a small city, as cities went, and they had an equally small budget to cover a lot of far more urgent needs.

Agent Patrick didn’t seem too impressed, by either her or her credentials or his surroundings. His gaze was still on her, but it had become a polite, indifferent look, and his mouth—too thin, she decided, and not to her taste—was held flat, as though he was biting back a comment.

So much for her federal rating, she thought. He probably preferred athletic blondes. Not that he was her type either—she preferred her dates to be a little less obviously high-maintenance.

Agent Patrick did dress well, though. Or maybe that was in contrast to Aggie’s familiarly rumpled self—the gray suit and white shirt was probably issued in bulk at FBI headquarters, but it fit Agent Patrick’s tall but solid form, and his tie was not the usual power red, but a dark gray-on-gray pattern that was both stylish and surprisingly soothing.

The agent hadn’t looked away from her yet, despite his disapproval, and Lily felt the back of her neck prickle under that steady regard. He needed to blink, at least. If she had been one of her four-legged charges, she might have hissed and arched her back to look more fearsome and drive him away.

“Lil.” Petrosian was speaking again. “Lily, I’m sorry, but I gotta ask you to do something ugly.”

Her attention left the fed and narrowed to the expression on Aggie’s face: regretful, but determined. She had been right. Whatever it was, it was going to be bad, especially if a federal agent was along. Lily had no idea what she might be able to help with, at that level, but she trusted Aggie Petrosian as much as she trusted anyone. He was, maybe, the only person she truly did trust. He asked of her only what he asked, and nothing more. No hidden agendas waiting in the shadows. He had always been up front with her. Like a cat. And because of that, if he needed her to do something, she would do it. It was that simple.

Even if it meant being in the company of this Agent Rude-stare Patrick.

“All right.”

Special Agent Jon T. Patrick wasn’t usually so obvious when he checked someone out; contrary to popular opinion, the bureau did install some couth and control in their people. And his mother would have slapped him over the sofa if he was rude to a woman. But from the way this woman—Ms. Lily Malkin—was shying away from him, he’d been both obvious and obnoxious about it.

Nice move, smooth guy, he thought in disgust. But she had taken him totally by surprise.

When the detective had collected him at the airport, Patrick had expected that they would go directly to the site, since it was still relatively fresh. Instead, as he loaded his bags into the back of the unmarked sedan, Petrosian had informed him that they were going to make a stop along the way, to pick up another consultant.

Patrick bristled at being called a consultant—if he wanted to, he could have used his credentials to argue for the lead in this investigation, and the detective knew it—but instead he merely nodded and let his gaze rest on the scenery. Newfield wasn’t much to look at; the airport was just outside city limits, and they were passing the usual patch of warehouses, followed by bluecollar neighborhoods of two- and three-family houses, then into the city itself. He thought they might stop at the university, or maybe the police department.

The last thing he had expected was to find himself in the lobby of a run-down animal shelter, being introduced to a black-haired, peach-skinned pocket Venus wearing faded blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater that made you want to run a finger down the crevice…

He jerked his attention back to the woman’s face as Petrosian asked her to accompany them. Her skin was smooth, with wide-set hazel eyes, a sweetly rounded face and a chin that was just blunt enough to keep her from being cute. Malkin. An old, useless bit of information filtered through his magpie memory and into recall; an old slang term, meaning a slatternly woman, or a scarecrow. It also, ironically, had been used to mean both rabbit and cat. She had the nervous posture of a rabbit, but the sleek lines of a cat.

And Lily? Lilies had long necks, like…

Patrick shut that line of thought down, aware that his brain could sometimes go off on totally random tangents. Work related: that was good. Libido related? Less so. Keep it official. Keep it on business.

The detective didn’t explain to Ms. Malkin what was up when he made his request, and she didn’t ask for details, indicating that they had done things like this before.

Patrick was reassured by that, the familiarity and the trust, both. Consultants, in his experience, usually asked too many questions up front. That prejudiced their read of the site before they even got there, making their evaluations useless. So she was not only sexy, but smart. And, apparently, from the coolness in her hazel eyes while she looked at him, wanting nothing to do with one special agent.

Blew that before you even knew you were doing anything, didn’t you, Jon T.? He could hear his mother scolding him, across seven states and two time zones. How will you ever meet a nice girl if you scare them all off?

Yeah, yeah, Mom, I know, he told the voice. Very smooth. I’m a moron.

Not that it mattered. He was here on business. The case—ordinary enough on the surface—might be nothing more than a garden-variety cat killer howling at the moon, which he could leave for the locals. Or this guy might in fact be an embryonic serial killer just starting his progression: if so, finding what triggered him would support his own personal theory, and stopping the guy would help cement his standing in the bureau. A federal officer’s career was all about reputation: making it, and keeping it.

It was never good to alienate a local expert, however dubious her standing, this early on, though. Petrosian thought enough of her insight to make a special trip to ask for her assistance, and the cop had come across as a pragmatic, by-the-book guy.

Patrick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Well, if he suddenly needed to borrow the brain inside that lovely casing, then he’d pull out the professional charm and make her forget that she’d ever thought badly of him. The fact that she rang his bell would just make that job pleasant, rather than a chore.

“Let me get my coat, I’ll be right back.”

“Patrick.” The cop got his attention with a thick, stubby finger waved under the agent’s nose. “Don’t underestimate her,” Petrosian warned. “She may look like a little girl, but she’s smart. And tough.”

Patrick raised his eyebrows at Petrosian’s wording. The last thing he would ever describe that woman as was “little girl.”

“Aggie. You driving?” She was back, a denim jacket pulled over her sweater. Clearly, the chill air outside didn’t bother her at all. Spring in New England, ha. He was already homesick for D.C.’s milder weather.

“Yeah. I’ll bring you back after, okay?” Petrosian was already herding them out the door. That was fine by Patrick—the crime scene wasn’t getting any fresher while they stood here. The sooner he got to it, the sooner he could determine if he had any business being here at all.

The dark green sedan slid through traffic, heading away from the downtown area into more residential blocks. Petrosian left the radio muted to a quiet squalk and their cat lady didn’t seem inclined to talk, so Patrick took advantage of the time, sitting in the backseat, to go over his notes and compare them to the official file on this incident. There wasn’t much in the update Petrosian had given him at the airport, and he closed it without having made any more progress than he had since getting the original material via the local bureau office the night before. The information was too slim: he needed to see the site himself, form his own impressions. That was why he was here: his skill was in transforming direct observation into a working and workable theory. Someone else’s observations, with their inevitable biases, were useless to him.

“Please, don’t let anyone have fubar’d the scene.”

“What?” Petrosian raised his eyes to the rearview mirror to look back at him.

“Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the files in explanation. Thankfully, Petrosian just nodded and went back to his driving. Bad form to tell your host that you expect his men to be incompetent. No, Patrick thought ruefully, he was not getting off on the right foot with anyone here so far.

Ten minutes later, they parked outside a small storefront, a single-story corner convenience store in a neighborhood of small, neatly maintained houses with neatly, if unimaginatively, tended lawns and a grade school down the block. There were two squad cars out front, but no yellow tape to be seen anywhere. Ms. Malkin got out of the car and waited for Petrosian, who gestured her toward the front door. She nodded once, her body language changing from uncertain to aggressive, and moved up the walkway. Another thing to like, Patrick noted: she took possession of her scene like a pro. It took them a year to hammer that into cadets at the academy, and some of them never learned how to do it.

Lily had been aware, the entire ride, of Agent Patrick’s presence directly behind her. Oh, he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t said anything, but she could practically feel him looming behind her.

All right, “looming” was overstating it. He was sitting normally, going through an official-looking file of papers and photos, barely even glancing up as Petrosian took corners too quickly, only once muttering something she didn’t quite catch. But when he did look up, she felt his gaze like a physical touch, as soft as a cat’s tail flick and just as unmistakable. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly…but it made her uncomfortable.

He made her uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just because he was good looking. Or even because he was arrogant. Lily had seen better and worse examples before, both on her job and in dealing with the cops and the press. But there was something about this guy that was putting her on edge.

Or maybe it was this…whatever it was that Aggie had called her out for, and Agent Patrick was just catching the fallout. She wished that she had asked for more detail before agreeing, but…

It didn’t matter, not with regard to Agent Attitude. Either way, it wasn’t as though she was going to have to deal with him for long; she could put up with the arrogance and just enjoy the eye candy while it lasted.

When they arrived, she got out of the car before Aggie had even finished parking, looking around curiously. She had lived in Newfield for three years, but she didn’t know this neighborhood. It seemed a little rundown, but reasonably safe. Although, she admitted, that might have had something to do with the noticeable police presence on the street.

“Up here,” the detective said, waving her toward the storefront. She swallowed hard and went inside, passing a uniformed officer in the doorway.

There was no warning: one moment she was moving forward, and the next she was knocked back on her heels, a full-body slap.

Aggie had said it was ugly. Ugly wasn’t the word for it. Lily stopped just inside the doorway and blanched, the back of her hand pressing against her mouth while she swallowed, hard, and tried not to breathe.

“Oh God.”

The inside of the front room was splattered in red; walls, counters and empty glass-fronted display cases. In a photograph it might have looked like paint; the smell told the real story. Some atavistic sense in the back of her brain told her what the tinge in the air was, and what the spray, by default, had to be: blood, with the undercurrent of meat starting to go bad.

But the floor was what caught her attention: a cleared space in the middle of the room, the pale green linoleum tiles covered with a black cloth about four feet square. On the cloth, seven still, limp forms were arranged in an odd-shaped circle, nose to tail.

Cats.

And, without warning, she was back in the echoes of a dream. Cats, sprawled as though basking in the sun. Only there was no sun, and their heads turned wrongly, their tails stilled, their voices silent…. A shadow rose behind her; despair and terror flooded her throat….

“Oh, the poor moggies,” she heard Agent Patrick say behind her, and the faint flash of not-quite-a-dream shattered. Her mouth was dry, her skin clammy. Where had it come from, that flash, that overwhelming, painful visual? It wasn’t a memory, nothing she had ever seen. She would remember something that horrible. But where had it come from, then? Television, maybe, or something she had read?

It didn’t matter, she decided, trying to shove it away. The here and now was disturbing enough.

“Who did this to you, little ones?” she heard the agent ask, obviously speaking to the cats, and the discomfort she had felt in the agent’s presence earlier was diluted by an instant and unexpected kinship with him. Arrogant as he might be, there was real sympathy in his voice. They weren’t just animals to him—they were victims.

“I’m going to need photos from every angle,” he barked to Aggie, taking command of the scene as if it had been deeded to him. Clearly, no matter how much he might have felt for them, he was all business now.

The arrogance that had annoyed her earlier was reassuring now. Attitude was much more appealing when matched with clear competence.

Lily took a shallow breath, and regretted it. The bodies weren’t fresh. More than a day, from the smell, but not much longer, or it would be worse. She thought it would, anyway. Actually, she had no idea, and wasn’t able—or willing—to turn around and ask Aggie for an answer.

“You were the one who found the bodies?” Patrick was now asking the young cop nearest him, who nodded. The man—a boy, really—looked as ill as she felt.

Intellectually, Lily knew that people did things like this. The first year she worked at the shelter, around Halloween, she’d been asked to help with two black cats that had been tortured by a couple of wannabe Satanists, to see if the cats could be used to identify and hopefully convict their abusers. It had been a slow news week, and the media had gotten hold of the story. The shot of her leaving the scene with one of the cats clinging to her, his triangular head hidden in her hair, had run every time they touched on the story. That had been what started the “cat talker” nickname. The press had hounded her for a week afterward, even though she refused to give any interviews or sound bytes. Petrosian had sworn to run interference with the press from then on.

Lily didn’t like being in the spotlight. It made her nervous, the same way the unblinking scrutiny of cats once had, as though someone was judging her, finding her lacking, unworthy. Not the way Agent Patrick had, but deeper down, where it mattered. Where you couldn’t avoid it. Connection, a therapist had told her once. She wasn’t good at maintaining connections. The responsibility made her nervous, made her wonder how she had failed, even when she knew that she hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have.

But nobody was watching her now. Even Aggie had turned away, joining Agent Patrick in talking to the cops on the scene, giving her a moment to regain selfcontrol.

“Your people have already been through?” Agent Patrick, his voice still and intense again, as though the lapse into emotion had been a—well, a lapse.

“Last night, yeah, when we made the discovery of this new source.” Aggie’s gravelly rumble was soothing by comparison. “Everything’s been documented and swabbed, but since no humans were involved, we left the scene itself intact, as per your request. As soon as you’re done here, we’ll bag and tag it.”

Lily stood over the circle, wondering what she was doing there. Normally, at a scene, there was a live cat present, of some breed or another, that she could observe and interact with. Normally there was something she could do. Now, all she could do was to take in the details, look at the still, unmoving, cold bodies, and wonder who could have done such a thing.

God have mercy on them, the poor innocent beasts, she thought. She wasn’t much for religion—going to church had always left her feeling more empty than fulfilled, and her brief foray into Buddhism during college wasn’t much better, but there had to be someone who looked after those so ill used….

She swallowed hard against the surge of emotion, willing herself into professional behavior. Thankfully, some coolly analytical portion of her brain came forward, sorting the scene into dry facts, something she could process, the way she handled numbers at her day job at the bank. All right then. Aggie wanted her here for some reason. She knew cats. So she would study the cats.

Seven bodies, all spotted tabbies, their silver, gray and white coats covered with black thumbprint-size spots, tails striped with wide black marks. Young, male. Not at their full growth yet, they weren’t, with tails too long for their bodies and ears too large for their heads. There was a slice across each throat, a puddle of red underneath where each one had bled out. Where had the blood on the walls come from, then? How much blood was in a single cat, multiplied by seven?

No, don’t go there. Keep the thoughts all clinical, detached, distanced, and unreal. Safe. Like counting out money, entering numbers. Important but not emotional. Not anything that could make her chest hurt for the horror of it. Lily was good at being practical, at making the world make sense, especially when it didn’t. She only wished she’d had more sleep last night.

The headache was back, sneaking up like a bully with bad intent, and Lily wished she had taken her own car, which had painkillers stashed in the glove compartment. She reached up to rub the ache between her eyes, allowing her concentration to slip.

That was a mistake: the separate details clicked into a whole picture, the smell and texture and reality of it slamming into her. Wrongwrongwrongwrong! A sheen of red to match the blood on the floor and walls rose over her vision, and her hands shook until she clenched them together. Someone had done this to cats—to kittens.

The headache was swamped, disappearing under the onrush of rage. Anyone—anything—that could do that needed to be stopped. Punished.

She felt someone coming up behind her, the heavy tread and swish of wool uniform slacks telling her who it was even before the smell of stale cigarette smoke that hung around him reached her, mingling with the smell of blood and meat and, oddly, settling her stomach before she even realized that it was upset.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked Petrosian, not taking her eyes off the scene. If he heard the rage in her voice, either he had been counting on it, or he didn’t want to call attention to it, because he didn’t flinch or make any movement to try to soothe her.

“I don’t know,” he said instead. “I’m hoping you can tell me. Tell us what’s going on. What happened here.”

She looked over her shoulder, then looked back at the cats, and then up at the ceiling, which, she noted now, had been painted black. The paint looked oddly flat, under the fluorescent lights, as though it had been meant to reflect softer, kinder lights. None of the blood had reached that high, she noted. “Other than animal abuse?”

“That much we got. But that’s Patrick’s problem, what he’s here to study. What I want you to take a look at is back here.” Petrosian’s thick-fingered hand came down on her shoulder, steering her past the grisly tableau, the only apology for putting her through this that he could give her, the only one she would accept.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Agent Patrick kneeling by the bodies, pulling on a pair of latex gloves before reaching out to touch one of the kittens gently.

He looked up and met her gaze. A spark seemed to jump between them, invisible electricity that she felt through the palms of her hands, running like a ribbon of warmth all the way to her feet.

He looked away first, and in another place, another time, she might have felt a flush of feminine triumph. But not here.

There was another room behind the first one, and that was where the smell was coming from. Ten mesh cages, each one with a water dish—most dry—and spilled dry kibble. A small plastic box in each, half filled with uncleaned litter.

“Nobody touched anything once we found it. How many cats, Lily? How many cats were here? Tell me what this guy was doing with them.”

Usually she had to listen to the cat’s vocalizations, watch its body language, before she got a read on the situation, on how it had been treated. Not this time. This time it came out of the empty space, swarming her, almost knocking her over.

Crowded. Anticipation. Fear. Hunger. Lust.

Even without the cats, she could feel the emotion still in the room, could almost hear them meowing, scratching at the wires of their cages, scratching at the metal floors, the rasping of their tongues as they tried to keep fur clean and claws sharp…Not a bad dream. Not something she could block, ignore or forget.

She gagged at the strength of the knowledge, forcing the words out carefully. “More than ten. More than…there were kittens here. Litters.”

That was the smell she had picked up, even over the blood and shit. Pheromones. The scent of a female cat in heat. The thought made her ill, where the killings had only made her angry.

“He was breeding them. This wasn’t just storage, it was a cattery.”

“Go, do your thing,” Petrosian had said to him when they got out of the car. The cop hadn’t said it rudely, or mockingly, the way some did; more along the lines of “you do your thing and I’ll do my more productive thing.” Profiling was still looked at sideways and suspiciously by a lot of folk, especially outside the agency. Hell, Patrick knew that he occupied a strange sort of niche within the FBI hierarchy itself: he had a master’s in psychology, but he had never been interested in profiling, preferring to play a more active role in chasing down criminals. He might have had a very traditional career; fieldwork landing him in a desk job leading him all the way to retirement and possibly a teaching job after that, except that during his second year in the field he had discovered in himself an odd fascination for—and affinity for solving—a particular kind of crime, specifically animal mutilations, and the criminals who perpetrated them. Those acts, along with a few others, often heralded the beginning career of a serial killer.

A profiler got into the head of an unsub—bureauspeak for an unknown subject of an investigation. He tried to feel where they were going, mentally and emotionally, and sense how close they were to breaking out to human victims. Patrick was less interested in what went on in their heads than in the end result; the instinctive reaction response to that internal stimulus. His skill might have ended up simply as a side talent, except that he was very very good at finding those patterns, even where none seemed to exist. And so, whenever a case with certain elements—domestic animals, ritualistic injury—came up in the reports, the agency tapped him to immediately take a look. Catch an unsub when he was still targeting animals, and save human lives later.

That was the theory, anyway. There was no quantitative proof either way. It could all be hand-waving and luck.

Patrick had, in self-defense, come up with his own theories about sociopaths and the making thereof. Forget the psychology, the biochemistry, the sociology. Jon Patrick was a believer in intent. Not that someone chose to be a stone-cold killer, but that they always had a trigger, something to make all the parts come together from where they lay latent in every single human being.

He focused on the ritual aspect rather than the actual violence—violence was universal in the end, while the steps chosen to get there were individual. Identify a strain of ritual, and determine where that particular mind might go, criminally. Find the pattern break the pattern and prevent a killer from being born.

The problem was that, without enough distinct data points to prove or disprove his ideas, he couldn’t get anyone to take them seriously. And being taken seriously was what Agent Jon T. Patrick was all about. Being taken seriously, and getting serious results.

He was damn good at his job, though, and even if his ideas were unsubstantiated, his results were getting him some notice at higher levels; the bureau cared less about theory than they did about getting results they could use. The suits back in D.C. were marking him as a player of note, and Patrick had goals above and beyond being a field agent with nightmare memories and a passable retirement package at the end. Ambition, to him, wasn’t a dirty word.

His career, if he didn’t screw up, was looking good. It was all good.

This, though…this wasn’t good. He made a circuit of the scene, aware of the technician taking additional photographs and jotting down measurements, observations and verified facts. Good—he would need the daylight shots, too. He knelt beside the small, still bodies, careful not to disturb the black cloth or the blood splatter around it, and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket, sliding them onto his hands His last girlfriend had referred to them as fingercondoms. He had been amused by that: a pity that had been the extent of her sense of humor.

“Poor moggies,” he said again, reaching out to touch one of the bodies. The flesh was firm even in death, meat and muscle over the ribs. The cats hadn’t been abused before being killed. Small mercies. But that put a different spin on the scene, and his unsub. Usually animals were tortured before they were killed. It was all about power in most cases. Power, control, authority. To kill animals that, although helpless, were undamaged, especially in such a methodical, almost ritualistic manner? All it lacked was an athame—a ritual knife—and some candles, and the press would be screaming black magic.

He didn’t believe in magic, black, white, pink or polka-dot. He did believe in the power of belief, though. Believe something, and you could take power from it. Believe in it strongly enough, and it took power over you.

Normal people with normal emotions didn’t kill small cute cuddly animals. This killer was bent at best, and possibly a textbook sociopath, working his way up to more of a challenge.

Despite the violence inherent in the act, though, Patrick got the feeling that this guy wasn’t acting out of unformed rage or irrational fear. He wasn’t striking out in any desperate attempt to be heard, or regain control or any of the usual textbook profiles. There was a cooler, more rational mind behind this. A mind with a list, maybe, or a plan.

Intent. What was his intent? What triggered him to take cats, care for them, kill them, arrange them this way and then just leave them here?

“Is this guy just your everyday boring psychonutter,” he said, sitting back on his heels and looking at the bodies. “Or is there something else going on? And if so, what? Where is he coming from, that this is a logical progression?”

What he wouldn’t give to be able to talk to this guy, to unpack his brain and see where the wires went and which ones were crossed….

A noise behind him made him look away, up and toward the door to the backroom. Petrosian and the woman—Malkin—were coming back. The cop looked a little grim around the mouth, issuing soft-voiced directions to the painfully young uniform who had been first on the scene. Ms. Malkin—he tried to read her expression, and failed utterly. It was as though a stone wall had come up, leaving him no opening to see through. Even his charm might not be enough to win her back, if he needed her help with this case.

Then she looked up, and he almost recoiled. Even under the fluorescent lights overhead, there was no mistaking the fury in those wide-set eyes. He had never bought into that whole cliché of flashing or sparkling eyes—eyes were just bits of meat and veins, and they did not shoot anything except glares.

But he would have sworn an oath that Ms. Lily Malkin’s hazel eyes filled with dangerous green sparks as she stared at the dead cats under his hand.

It was scary. It was also, he admitted to himself, pretty damn hot.

Chapter 2

Lily had gone outside to get some fresh air. She was waiting there, watching the cops canvassing the neighborhood, when Patrick and Petrosian finally came out. It was close to 4:00 p.m., and dusk was falling. She loved winter, but getting to it…Autumn just depressed her. She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest, less from the evening chill than the inner one. The spark of attraction that had warmed her earlier was long gone.

She tilted her head, looking for the first evening star. It was an old habit from her childhood, stargazing. But no matter how many times she looked, however much she read about constellations, the sky never seemed quite right to her, the ancient drawings in the sky never familiar. She kept looking, hoping that one night the patterns would suddenly make sense to her. They never did. They didn’t tonight.

“Sorry, took longer than I expected,” Petrosian said, breaking her concentration. “I just need you to give a report, and then you’re done. Okay?”

Normally she did whatever they needed her to do, and went home, or took the cats involved to the shelter for processing. This was different. Everything about this was different. Knowing that there were people who were cruel, who could do things like that; it was different actually seeing it. Experiencing it.

It made her ingrained distrust of the world suddenly seem like a good idea, not a handicap.

“Lily?” Petrosian was watching her, his careworn face filled with regret. “I’m sorry. I needed you to go in without any knowledge beforehand….” He had apologized more to her tonight than in all the time they had known each other.

Aggie and his daughter, Jenny, had adopted three cats from the shelter, two since she had worked there. Max, a red tabby, and Wilma, a calico shorthair. He had been the one to suggest her name when the department first needed a cat expert and had been her contact person ever since then. He knew more about her, simply through observation, than even members of her own family. He knew what he had asked her to do.

“Yeah. Me, too. Sorry, I mean.” Only she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. But without knowing where to direct that anger, it weighed her down and simply made her tired. And cold. The crisp night air seemed to cut into her bones. “It’s okay, Aggie.” No, it wasn’t. It was very much not okay. But it wasn’t Augustus Petrosian’s fault. “Let’s go.”

There were two police stations in Newfield, one uptown and one down. There was a substation, Lily knew, that was closer, but Petrosian took them to the uptown station instead. Agent Patrick excused himself the moment they arrived to make a phone call, and the detective handed her over to a sketch artist, a tall, rounded woman with a ready smile and ink stains on her fingers and a smudge on her freckled snub nose that made her look too young to be working in the police department. She introduced herself as Julia, and brought Lily to a square table in a small room off the main hallway, out of the flow of traffic. There wasn’t a door to the room, but the chatter, slams and creaks of station activity flowed around them, turning into a babble of white noise.

“All right. Detective Petrosian says you’ve got a scene for me?”

“I thought sketch artists did faces?” Lily didn’t really care, she felt too exhausted by what she had seen to worry about anything else, but it made for conversation. Conversation was easier than thinking. Kinder than thinking.

“Mostly, yeah. But we do whatever it takes to close a case, same as everyone else here. So. What’ve you got for me?”

So much for not thinking. Worse, they wanted her to remember.

Lily sat down at the table, in the chair Julia indicated, and closed her eyes. She had thought—had hoped—that once away from the site, the visual would fade. But the moment she shut out the distractions around her, it came back, and she began to describe it, slowly, trying to hit as many details as possible. Something stuck in her throat as she talked, and hurt, like it was hard-edged and heavy, and the more she talked, the worse it became.

“All right. I think I’ve got it.”

Julia’s voice seemed to come from far away, down a long tunnel. Lily opened her eyes, resurfacing into the noise and bustle of the police station. Julia was putting down her pencils and Agent Patrick was standing behind her, looking down at the sketch with a fascinated expression.

“This is what you saw?”

Lily frowned, confused by his question. He had been there, why was he so surprised? Julia turned the pad around and slid it across the table so that she could see. It was the cattery, but not abandoned now. Each cage was filled with four or five shadowy bodies: adult cats in some and kittens in others, almost all of them with dappled coats. Dishes overflowed with dried kibble, and water was slopped carelessly onto the counters. There was a figure in the middle of the room, but so roughly drawn that it was impossible to determine if it was male or female. Tall and lean: hunched over slightly as though expecting a blow.

“You saw this?” Agent Patrick asked again, his voice intent on the question. She responded almost unwillingly to the urgency in his voice.

“No. Not really. The room was empty.” He knew that. He had been there, too.

“But you described it. Every detail.” His voice wasn’t exactly doubting, but it was skeptical that she could have managed it without prior knowledge, something she wasn’t telling them.

Lily was too shocked to take offense. She looked at Julia, who nodded. “I don’t add anything the witness doesn’t tell me, not until we go to the next stage. Everything there’s what you told me to put down.”

Lily looked at the sheet again, and a sense of familiarity moved through her. Yes. This was what the room looked like. The cats, restless and calling each other. The figure moving among them, taking them away and—sometimes—bringing them back. The smells of food and urine against the stainless steel of the cages, the hint of antiseptic…

There was no way she could know any of that. But she did. As much as she knew anything that happened today. She could even pick out the shadowed forms of the cats that had been selected for death, there, in the far cage, segregated from the others.

“You psychic?” Agent Patrick’s voice had evened out, not making judgments in a way they had to teach in the academy. “Humor the crazy person, and then disarm them” would have been the motto of that class, no doubt. He probably got an A. It should have rankled, but looking at the sketches, Lily just felt tired. He was only doing his job, and part of that job was to doubt everything.

“No.” She looked at him, then down at the drawing again. “It was just how everything was laid out. This is the only way it could have been.”

That didn’t satisfy him, she could feel it in his gaze, in the way he looked at her, and then at the sketch, and then at her again. He didn’t accuse her of lying, but he didn’t quite believe her, either.

She couldn’t explain it. She couldn’t prove it was true, what she described. But it was.

“All spotted cats,” Julia noted.

“Yes.” She was certain of that, too.

“Tabbies, mostly. The slaughtered animals here had white paws. How common is that?” Patrick was staring intently at the drawing, clearly trying to work something out in his mind. He had put aside the question of her accuracy, and was working with the available evidence, no matter how dubious.

“What, mitting?” Lily said. “It’s pretty common, no matter what the coat’s color. Especially if he’d been breeding them—there weren’t that many queens in the room, so the gene pool was small.”

“Queens?” Julia asked.

“Breeding females,” Patrick said, surprising Lily with his knowledge. “A queen can breed every four months, anywhere from three to seven kittens in a litter.”

For a moment, Lily felt that spark running between the two of them again, a spark that had nothing to do with his dark eyes or undeniably masculine appeal—or his interest in her. A cat person. Or at least, one who had done his homework. That tied in to the feeling she had gotten from him at the scene: that he saw more than statistics and splatter.

Aggie had said the agent focused on animal abuse cases, something about him psychoanalyzing killers the way they did on TV shows. But that made her wonder—why was an FBI agent, a profiler, investigating something like this? What made cats important enough to interest a federal agency?

Suddenly Lily felt herself deflate. Of course he was interested in her, a cat person. It was part of his job. Well, that was what she was here for; to help him, however she could, to catch this guy.

“He—whoever was doing this—didn’t have more than three queens in the room, from the size of the cages. But a lot of kittens. You think he was trying to breed for a particular color?” Lily had never really thought about the genetic side of cats before; all she knew about different colors was what was more popular among adopters.

He shrugged. “I’m not ruling out any theories at this point.”

“And what is that point, exactly?” Why are you here? she meant.

Julia touched the sheet, the motion drawing their attention. “I’m sorry. I need to run this over to the detective. Lily, if you want to wait, I can make sure an officer—”

“I’ll make sure Ms. Malkin gets home safely,” Patrick said, cutting Julia off, and then smiling at her to soften his rudeness. “I’d like to ask her a few more questions first, if we can use this desk?”

“Yeah, sure.” Julia seemed flustered at being the focus of his attention, which Lily thought was odd, but then the artist gathered herself back into professional mode. “Will you want a copy of the sketch?”

“That would be wonderful, thank you.”

Lily watched Julia’s slender white hands gather up her pencils and the sketch, then disappear into the swirl of noise around them. Somehow, it seemed distant from her, even now. She had known about the queens, the female cats. How? How could she have known anything she had told Julia to draw? Extrapolation from a few cages and a smell could only go so far, but—

But, stop, she told herself, feeling the old, familiar, unwanted distress crawling back. Stop. Breathe, Lily. Breathe in through the mouth, out through the nose. Breathe, and be still. A lifetime of dealing with panic attacks—she might not need the technique on a daily basis anymore, but it still did the job. Her anxiety level dropped until she felt as if she could manage again.

“Why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked, once her breathing was under control.

“We have varied interests,” Patrick said, sliding into Julia’s seat with a grace that belonged to a more slender man. If he noticed her momentary distress, he didn’t mention it. “Why do they call you the cat talker?”

She shook her head, too worn-out to be either angry or amused at his evasion or the appearance of her hated nickname. “Who told you that?”

“One of the uniforms. Said you could talk to anything feline, get it to do what you wanted.”

“Anyone who said that knows nothing about cats.” Lily looked up finally, and in doing so was caught again by Agent Patrick’s gaze. Dark, yes, and intense, yes, and totally focused entirely on her, in a scary-nice sort of way. Oh. So that was what he’d done to the sketch artist. You could get lost in those eyes, just watching them watch you. It made her nervous. Something, hell everything about him was making her nervous. Like he thought she was one of his suspects, someone to be interrogated, bullied and pushed around.

“Oh?” His tone was smooth, inviting; much smoother than the look in his eyes. That voice was another thing the FBI probably issued its agents on their first day on the job, to go with the suits. And the guns, although she hadn’t seen Patrick’s yet. She didn’t doubt he carried one. There was something about him. That intensity, it had a purpose beyond getting answers. Or undressing women visually. She had seen it before; he was a man with a long-term goal, and Lord help the person who got in the way.

All right, maybe that was unfair. But she could practically smell the ambition in him, and it made her wary. Lily didn’t understand ambition. She had needs, desires, of course. Everyone did. But ambitious people carried a tension around inside them that made her tense up in return. She preferred the company of those who were comfortable where they were, who took days one at a time and who didn’t ask too much of life.

“There’s an old joke,” she said, shaking off her reaction and responding to his earlier question. “‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff.’ Or, ‘Dogs come when called. Cats have answering machines and might get back to you.’ All true. A cat will do something you ask of it because it chooses to do so. It won’t obey out of loyalty, or fear, or even love—merely choice.”

Cats couldn’t be used. Not that way. It was one of the reasons why she respected them.

Agent Patrick nodded, not laughing, or even smiling at her words. “And cats choose to listen to you?”

No. Cats chose to talk to her. They always had, even when she was a little girl and terrified of them. They would come to her, twine their lithe bodies around her ankles, look up at her as though she could solve great mysteries, and she would curl into a ball against the nearest wall and cry until her mother came and got her. She never got violent, the way some phobics did, and she never got angry—just sad to the point of overwhelming depression. She had wanted to like cats, in a way she never felt with people.

“My boss at the shelter claims I must smell like catnip, or something.”

The look in his eyes suddenly shifted. Lily wasn’t sure how, or why, but the interest deepened, his face changing slightly. It made her suddenly uneasy in a way even his previous intensity hadn’t, as though she had suddenly been dumped somewhere unfamiliar, without warning. The other man, the FBI agent, she knew how to avoid, and why. This man, the one with the glitter-bright stare, he was…Seductive was the only word that came to mind. Seductive, and dangerous, and appealing. Which were three words, but all meant the same thing. He was looking at her as if he wouldn’t mind taking a roll in some catnip, himself, right then. Like he wasn’t undressing her now, but was already inside her.

Lily knew herself pretty well. She was attractive, if you liked brunettes, too short, and had a reasonably curvy, if not stacked, body. Great hair, nice face. A solid B-grade on all fronts. Nice, but nothing that qualified for that kind of fascination. He was interrogating her again, only with a different question in mind.

“Look, I don’t know what Detective Petrosian thought I’d be able to tell him, or what you think I can do. I’m good with cats, yes. But—”

“Have dinner with me.”

“Excuse me?” She should have been expecting that, yet it still caught her off guard.

His thin lips curved in a smile now. The hint of white teeth showed between the pale red flesh, but the intensity of his eyes was, if anything, even more focused on her. Not undressing her, but getting inside her brain. Inside her soul.

She recoiled, and then scolded herself for recoiling.

All right, Lily, stop that, she told herself. You’re tired, stressed and overreacting. He’s just a guy. A cute guy. Why not have dinner with him?

“I’m a federal agent, miss. You can trust me.” She must have laughed at that. “Seriously,” he went on. “I have a few questions I want to ask you, but I just hit town and I’m starving. And we hijacked you out of your job—the least I can offer is dinner, as a thank-you for your help.”

Lily was oddly flattered, but shook her head. She wasn’t much for dating, and even if she were, a guy who was in town for two, three days tops? She needed more time than that to make up her mind about a guy. Even if he was as exotic as a Burmese, and friendly as a Maine coon. And on the hunt sure as any big cat she’d ever seen. “Thank you, but no. I’m just going to grab a ride back to the shelter, pick up my car and go home. It’s been a really long day and I’m not feeling particularly social. Detective Petrosian has my phone number and e-mail address, if you need to ask me anything more, but I’m sure there’s nothing I can add.”

She stood up, and then looked down at the agent, remembering that moment of sympathy she had experienced on the scene, over the bodies of the kittens. “Whoever did this, you’ll find him.”

It wasn’t a question, and Agent Patrick didn’t pretend otherwise.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Petrosian found him half an hour later still sitting at the table, a notepad flat in front of him, the unlined paper covered with circles with words scribbled inside them.

“So what’s the story?” he asked the cop, pushing the notepad away from him in disgust.

“The store was for rent. Last owner moved out four months ago, but market’s been slow, hasn’t even had anyone in to look at the space since then. It was the Realtor who found the bodies, called us in.”

“Four months.” Patrick reached for the pad and jotted that down as well. “We’ll need a list of anyone who might have known about the space, had access to the keys, that sort of thing.”

“Already have someone on it. Anything else you want us to dig into?”

Jon T. Patrick was smart. More, he was savvy. And he knew blue sarcasm when he heard it. So he dragged himself out of his thoughts and gave the detective his full attention. “You guys have it under control. I’m just working a side investigation, is all. A little project.”

“Uh-huh.” Petrosian maybe wasn’t as smart, but he was plenty savvy too, so he let Patrick’s comment go without challenge.

“Although…” Patrick knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t resist. “Tell me about your specialist, Ms. Malkin.”

Ms. Malkin. Lily. It wasn’t a name that suited her: a lily was a delicate, overscented flower. Malkin’s hazel eyes were tough, her body toned and muscled under the curves, her stride strong, and her scent…unscented. Powder and soap.

He usually liked perfume on a woman, liked placing his face against her neck and smelling the aroma rising off her skin. But perfume would be wrong on Malkin. It would be overkill.

He wanted to take her out to dinner. Nothing fancy: pasta maybe, and a bottle of decent wine. He wondered if she drank red wine. He thought maybe she did. Or maybe he was projecting. Patrick was amused at himself, despite the seriousness of the case. Profiler, profile thyself? Why was he so attracted to her? She was a hot little thing, yeah, but he’d seen better. But there was something about her that spoke to him, beyond the physical, and well beyond any use she might have to the case.

That attraction was bad. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He had a steady rule: no female distractions on a case. After, yes. But he would be on his way home by then.

Petrosian looked at him carefully, and then answered. “Lily’s good people. She works as a teller down at West Central, that’s a local bank. Volunteers at the shelter. Lived here, oh, three, four years? About that. Went to school on the West Coast, doesn’t seem to have any family that she’s mentioned. Straight up, all straight up.”

“And she talks to cats.” She also had skin the color of a sun-ripened peach. He wondered if all of her skin was that exact tone.

Petrosian snorted. “She does something, that’s for sure. Years ago, I was a rookie, we had a cougar wander into town, get panicked. The local zoo sent over one of their people to try to get it back into a cage. Took us all night, half a dozen tranqs, and earned me a couple of nasty gashes before we got the damn thing cornered and caged. Last year? Lily damn near purred a big cat into walking on its own paws into the cage. Took maybe an hour, all told.”

Patrick wasn’t sure he entirely believed that, but they’d probably both seen stranger things in their years. “How does she do it?”

The cop shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care, and she won’t thank you for poking around.”

Patrick sat back in his chair. It wasn’t a warning-off. Quite. But he wasn’t on the prowl; he wasn’t going to do anything that would hurt her. His interest in her was about the case; he really did have questions he wanted to ask her. A traditional expert would be by the book. This case didn’t feel by the book. The cats had been clean and well cared for, and killed with what could almost have been reverence. Maybe talking to the cat talker would give him the point of view he needed to understand how and why.

Petrosian looked at the schoolhouse-style clock on the wall. “I’m still on shift. I’ve got other cases to deal with before they let me out of here. A patrolman will take you to your hotel. If we catch any new info, I’ll give you a call.”

That was a clear dismissal. Slaughtered animals were a crime, but they weren’t a high-priority one, not even in a relatively sleepy New England city. FBI man could do whatever he wanted, but the cops weren’t going to hold his hand while he did it. That suited him fine, actually.

Still, Petrosian lingered. “You going to need anything else for your ‘little project’ before I sign off on the paperwork?”

“No, I think I have everything I need for now.” Clearly, he was supposed to skedaddle, as his mother used to say. Patrick closed his notebook and stood, feeling the joints in his knees and hips creak distressingly. He wasn’t getting old, just road-worn. He’d been on another assignment when the call came about this find. He’d barely had time to hand over his notes to another agent and throw some clean clothing into a case before catching his flight to Newfield. “I think I’ll grab some dinner and do some more research.”

“You do that.”

Petrosian watched him walk out; Patrick could feel the man’s gaze between his shoulder blades, like an infrared targeting mechanism. But he had been in cities where the cops were actively hostile, not just cautious, and he had learned not to take offense where none was intended.

The hotel he’d been booked into was pretty standard: a decent enough bed, small bathroom, inexpensive toiletries. But it had hot water, a desk he could work at and a twenty-four-hour restaurant next door. All the comforts of home. But somehow, showered and dressed, his notes spread out in front of him and covered with his scribbles and yellow Post-its, he wasn’t in the mood to work, or to go downstairs and eat alone.

You’re on the job, he told himself. Don’t be an idiot. The lady said no, and you shouldn’t have asked in the first place anyway.

Not letting himself think about it, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed the phone number he had jotted on the edge of his notebook before handing back the original file to the police clerk.

“Lily Malkin? It’s J.T. Patrick. Agent Pa—yes, that’s right. Hi. Look, I know you said that you weren’t interested in dinner, but I really want to bounce some ideas off you, and…well, I hate eating alone. Especially when I’m away from home. In a new town. Save me?”

Chapter 3

Lily stared at the phone, not quite believing what she had just heard. Did he know how obvious that line of bullshit was? He had to; she could practically hear it in his voice: “Laugh at me, but laugh with me.”

“Agent Patrick…”

She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. He was far too appealing, and her thoughts had been far too depressing. Against her better judgment, she said yes.

“Great. Nothing fancy—maybe there’s a local Italian around here, a mom-and-pop place you could recommend? I’m craving ziti.”

She knew exactly the place, and on a Tuesday night, it shouldn’t be too crowded. “I’ll pick you up in—” she looked at the clock on her desk “—twenty minutes?”

“Great. I’m at the Veis Hotel, over on—”

“I know where it is. Budget central—nice to know our tax dollars aren’t going to Jacuzzis and wet bars.”

He snorted into the phone. “Hardly. I’ll see you in twenty.”

She hung up the phone and stared down at the pile of bills she had been paying. Or trying to pay, as her thoughts had been more on this afternoon’s scene than what she owed Visa and the electric company. “You. Are insane. And this is a terrible idea.”

Ten minutes later she had gone through three different outfits, finally settling on a pair of black slacks and a dark red sweater, with her favorite boots with the heels that made her feel not quite so short. Jeans were fine for shelter work, but even a casual dinner with a good-looking guy seemed to call for something a little more. Or at least something not covered in cat hair.

She stared in the mirror, giving herself a once-over. A rub of blush over her cheekbones, and eyeliner and that was it. The look was casual, not too much effort, but looking good. Grabbing her keys off the hook by the door, she was in her car and on her way before she could second-guess herself.

Lily Malkin wasn’t much for impulsive actions. She felt more comfortable on her own, when she could control the situation, and not have to do anything other than what she wanted. Her father called her selfish, but among all the men she had dated—and the few she had loved—Lily had never met anyone that she honestly felt that she could relax with; that she felt could accept her for who she was.

Probably because she was never quite sure who that was. An insomniac, not-quite-cat-phobic, detail-oriented female with trust and responsibility issues, to start. In short, a mess. On her own, Lily could deal with it. Bring someone else into the equation, and there were too many variables. Too many ways things could go wrong. So control was important.

After graduating from college, she had gone into banking because she wanted a job that would allow her to interact with people, but from a safe distance, and would allow her to leave the job at the office. Being a bank teller was perfect. She had moved to Newfield after a lot of thought, choosing it for low cost-of-living and a pretty environment.

Even working at the shelter had been part of a longterm planned goal. Tired of having responses to stimuli she could not control, she had finally gone to a therapist who helped her gain the courage to stop avoiding cats, and face the discomfort. It had worked, but the process had been slow, steady, and under her control every step of the way.

She was having dinner with this man because…

Lily knew the reason. Because she couldn’t get the image of those kittens out of her mind, and he was the only way to get answers about who would do that sort of thing. And why.

If she could help him find this guy, then maybe this feeling of depression, of helplessness and failure, might go away.

It had nothing to do with the way his eyes were so dark, or intense. Really. It was all part of the long-term plan.

“And if he suggests dinner in his hotel room, you are out of there, federal agent or not,” she told her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her reflection looked dubious, and she laughed at herself. Right now, she was so tired she’d probably fall asleep in the middle of anything, anyway.

To her relief, he was waiting outside the hotel’s lobby when she pulled up, talking on his cell phone. He saw her and waved, then closed the phone and slipped it into his pocket. He had a slim leather briefcase with him, she noted, and when he slipped into her Toyota she noted there were a number of color-coded files sticking out of it. This really was going to be a working dinner, then. Lily almost laughed again at the wash of disappointment she felt.

They were seated quickly; as expected, the little Italian restaurant wasn’t busy, and they had the corner to themselves. Patrick put the file on the table next to him and quickly buttered a bread stick. “Sorry. I’m a carb addict, if there’s one thing I can’t resist it’s fresh bread.”

“It is so unfair. Guys can eat anything and not gain a pound.” Casual, almost stupid chitchat. They were doing it to keep from thinking about what they had seen that afternoon. Or at least, she was. If she could not think about it, she could keep it from being so real. If it wasn’t real, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.

I’m sorry, kittens, she thought again, feeling the wave of helplessness move through her. There was nothing she could have done, and yet she felt overwhelmed by the feeling that she was supposed to have done something, somehow prevented this.

He protested the implied slur in her words. “Pound, shmounds. This particular guy has to keep up with the FBI regs for fitness. They don’t let us relax until after we have seniority behind a desk. That’s why we’re all so anxious to get promoted.”

She laughed, almost more than what the joke was worth. He glanced at her quickly, looked at the menu, then looked at her again, those dark eyes toned down for once. “Lily. Before we talk about anything else…I’m not a practicing psychologist, but it’s okay to be upset. What you saw…most people never run into that kind of violence, and that’s good. Nobody ever should, whether it’s directed at them or someone or something else. And when you do see it, you shouldn’t be unaffected. It’s not healthy, or human, to be unaffected. Even us tough federal-lawman types.”

She toyed with the corner of the menu, rubbing it between two fingers. “I know. It’s just…how do you sleep? After things like that?”

He gave the faintest shrug, barely a jerk of his shoulder. “I catch the people responsible. Or I do my damnedest to try, anyway. That is why I need to pick your brains. I think you can help me.”

She pursed her lips, weighing his words. “All right.”

Something she hadn’t even known was knotted inside her eased with those words. She only meant to agree to having her brain picked in exchange for dinner, but somehow it felt as though it was more.

Is this it? she wondered. Is this the thing I’ve been feeling I need to do? That easy? She doubted it. But it was something.

They placed their orders, and Lily ordered a glass of wine—“None for me,” Patrick said regretfully. “I’m technically on duty. On the plus side, that means I can expense this, so eat up!”

There was something about him, despite his practiced charm, despite his intensity, that almost made Lily forget her original discomfort. Almost. He cared about what he was doing. That made him likable. The fact that he was likable made her even more cautious. Charming men were men with agendas and ambition. Men with agendas and ambition were not to be trusted. It wasn’t any one bad experience that had drummed that into her, although it was proved, more often than not. No, that knowledge, that wariness, was born in her, it sometimes seemed.

This wasn’t a date, she reminded herself, wondering at his pleased smile at her choices. It was, as he said, a business meeting. Over food. So what if he had an agenda?

Everyone wanted something. Everyone had a secret. Even her.

“So why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked again, taking a bread stick for herself.

This time, unlike earlier that day, he answered her.

“The FBI normally gets called in for certain things. Kidnappings, bank robberies, crimes that cross state lines or involve national issues…This…isn’t really one of them.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Except it falls in that gray area of ‘might be of interest.’Courtesy of the twenty-first century and modern paranoia, just about every investigated crime gets entered into a national database. Mostly they just sit there, unless there’s something in them that triggers an alert somewhere else. In my case, I look for tags that indicate animal-abuse cases.”

He waved the remains of his bread stick at her, as though lecturing. It should have been annoying, but wasn’t, mainly because his intensity was so real, and focused on a thing, not her. Whatever it was that he did, it meant a great deal to him. She admired that.

“Animal abuse is—it’s one of the things we’re taught to look for in the background of suspects. I’m working on a particular theory that, if I can prove it, could lead us to a way to identify and stop potential killers. So, if a police department reports a notable case of animal abuse it pings on my radar. If there are certain elements to the case, I follow up.”

“Certain elements?” The waiter came with her glass of wine and his soda. Lily nodded her thanks, but kept her attention on Patrick.

“A level of ferocity, or indications of repetition. Something that suggests escalation.”

“That whoever it is, is getting ready to move on to something bigger,” she guessed. “Like humans.”

“Exactly. Abuse, especially of cats, is considered one of the ‘terrible triad,’of indicators that’s often found in the background of a serial killer. That, and arson, are historically two of the major warning signs of serial killers before they turn to human targets. It’s almost as though they’re trying to vent themselves on weaker beings, or—by some theories—are working up their nerve to go to the next level. Nobody really knows for certain. It’s an inexact science.”

Lily was horrified, but fascinated. Everyone knew about serial killers, of course—even if you never watched the nightly news, you had to have heard of Silence of the Lambs. But she had never realized that there was a pattern, or a science, to it. Or that cats were so very much a target.

“And you try to find them before then. But how do you know that they’re going to go to people next?”

“I don’t. Most of the time they don’t, either. But if I can stop them before that line is crossed, that’s all that matters. Law enforcement isn’t all about punishment. It’s about being a deterrent, too.”

She nodded. It made sense. “So this one incident brought you out here?”

He hesitated, taking a sip of his soda before responding. “No. Not the one. This goes no further than this table, Lily.” He paused until she nodded her agreement. “Three years ago in the next town, there was a couple of scattered cases—cats being cut open and left, like some kind of sacrifice. By itself, that’s nothing, unfortunately. Wannabe Satanists, or just one kid with a cruel streak, or even a budding coroner who wanted to start small. They wouldn’t even have been entered in the system, except there was a small media fuss.

“And that was nothing, until now. The reason they called me is that here have been two incidents prior to this in the past two months. All involving cats. All young males. None of them quite so…formalized as today’s offering. Whoever this guy is, assuming it’s the same guy from three years ago—he’s working out a pattern that satisfied him. If it was him three years ago…he’s on an evolving scale, an escalating one. And that’s a major danger sign.”

“So you think…” She shuddered involuntarily. “You think we have a baby serial killer right here in Newfield?”

She’d had nightmares about that; not often, maybe three or four times, but unlike most of her dreams they tended to stay with her even after she woke: of women dying, one after another, in terribly bloody ways. She hated those dreams, all the more so for never being able to figure out what caused them or how to prevent them.

“No.” He shook his head, almost as though he regretted that lack of serial killerage. “The indicators I’ve seen so far suggest that he hasn’t crossed that line. I’m not sure that’s the direction he’s going in, either. His pattern is…Different. Odd. Intriguing.”

Lily cocked her head and studied him. “You find strange things intriguing, Agent Patrick.”

He accepted the jab with self-aware good humor. “Nature of the job, Ms. Malkin.”

The conversation was interrupted by the delivery of their meals, and the resulting pause to sort things out.

“No,” he said again once they started eating. “I don’t think he’s a serial killer. The specifics line up—cats, violence, repetition. That’s what pinged on my radar. But seeing it—the feel of it is all wrong.”

“Intriguing?”

“To a person with my background, yes. Serial killers have a variety of reasons for acting the way they do, by their standards. The files—” and he made a gesture with his fork to the file at his side “—the first two cases, and now this one, they don’t show the kind of…passion normal to a serial killer’s buildup. This was…”

“Restrained.”

He looked at her with surprised respect. “Yeah.”

Lily didn’t know why she had said that, but when she thought about it, it was true. The violence had been contained, the cats carefully tended, the scene almost designed, like a stage set…

Going back there made her insides queasy again, so she changed the subject. “So what’s the third thing? You said there was a—terrible triad? You said two, so what’s the third?”

“Bed-wetting.”

Lily stared at him. “Bed-wetting.”

“It shows up often enough in established serial killers that it’s considered an indicator, yes.”

She wasn’t going to laugh. It wasn’t funny. “But not a crime.”

“No, not a crime. We don’t investigate anyone on the basis of soiled linens.”

“I’m not laughing,” she told him.

“Nobody ever does,” he assured her, his dark eyes creased around the edges with humor. “Joking is frowned on in the FBI.”

Lily ate a few bites of her veal, letting the moment pass intentionally, and then looked up at her companion. “All right. You said you wanted to ask me something about the case. About the cats?”

He took a bite of his own ziti, chewed and swallowed before responding. Good table manners, she noted. Another point in his favor, were she keeping any sort of list. Which she wasn’t.

“Yeah. About the cattery that you said he had. You work in a shelter—it looks like you have a full house there?”

“Always. Females, unless they’re fixed, breed regularly even when they have kittens already. Even if you could stop every stray from breeding tomorrow, there would be more cats in shelters than we could ever find homes for.”

Lily felt guilt once again for not adopting one or two of her own. She had the room, and Lord knew she had gotten over her fear…but something held her back from bringing them into her own home. She still needed that distance, the place to retreat to, in case things went wrong.

“So why was he breeding them, if there are so many out there to adopt?”

“For color.” No hesitation in her mind now, not after what Patrick had told her. “He—we’re assuming a he?”

“For now.”

“All right. He used spotted tabbies with white paws, all seven of them. The cats before, they were spotted as well?”

Patrick nodded. “According to the files the cops gave me, yes. Not all of them had the white paws, though. That was new.”

“The spotted markings are common enough, but not so much so that you could find seven of them, all about the same age—not kittens, but less than two years old, I’d guess. And to find three…three batches of seven? The combination of color and age, there’s no way he could assume he was going to find them all at the same time. So it makes sense he’d try to breed them himself.”

“That was my thought, too. This guy, whoever he is, wasn’t flying off the cuff. He has an agenda. There was planning here, at least a year’s worth to be breeding his own litters. More, since the first incident was two months ago, and the cats were about the same age.”

“But why?” Why would someone do something like this? Why use cats? Why cats of that specific type? “And God, how could he breed cats, raise them and then kill them?”

Patrick poked his fork at the mound of ziti on his plate, and then looked up at her, his dark eyes now shadowed by more than exhaustion. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

Then he leaned back and smiled at her, clearly changing mental tracks. “But enough. You’ve confirmed what I suspected, and may yet be useful to the investigation, so this meal is hereby considered a justified expense. Therefore I’m not going to do anything right now except enjoy the lovely company, the excellent food and the fact that I’m not cooped up in a hotel room watching reruns of Fox shows I didn’t like when I first saw them. And I insist that you do the same, just to keep me company.”

Lily flushed, but smiled at him, and went back to her veal piccata, hyperaware of the fact that he was watching her every move, observing her the same way he had observed the crime scene. Charming, but ambitious, she reminded herself. Be careful.

“So. You volunteer with cats and work in a bank. And, occasionally, help out the local cops and wandering feds. What else does Ms. Lily Malkin do?”

Lily didn’t play games, was what she didn’t do. “I bake. I work out to burn off the calories I put on from baking. I sleep as much as humanly possible. I like modern art and Delta blues, an occasional glass of wine and really scary movies with buttered popcorn. I have no siblings, my father lives in Seattle where I grew up and my last relationship ended amicably. Anything else?”

He blinked, visibly thinking over her words. “No, I think that about covers everything, and then some. Your turn.”

She didn’t have to think about that at all. “What does the T stand for?”

“The letter T,” he said easily, and she smiled reluctantly in return. Oh, charming. Very, very charming. But she still wasn’t going to play.

Lily turned off the beeping alarm even before she turned on the light as she came in through the garage. Once the condo was plunged back into silence, she slipped her shoes off at the door, dropped her bag on the dining-room table and shuffled to the narrow spiral staircase that led to the bedroom. She had lived in a studio apartment when she first came to town, but on her morning run one day she had passed the row of town houses under construction and, on a whim, stopped in at the builder’s office. Three months and most of her savings later, she had closed on her town house, and two months after that she had moved in.

It was the first place she had ever owned, the first real home she’d had since leaving her father’s home for college sixteen years before. Her dad had choked up when she called to tell him the news. Her dad was a little weird: “not married? No problem, honey, you’ll find someone some day. But this endless string of living in apartments? That can’t be healthy!”

The condo wasn’t large—a kitchen, living room and dining room downstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs—but it was all hers. Her refuge.

She stripped as she went into the bathroom, tossing her clothing into the hamper and turning on the shower. The two glasses of wine at dinner, plus a hot shower, might be enough to let her get to sleep—and stay asleep until the alarm went off. If she was lucky, and fate was kind, she might not even dream.

Or if she did, maybe they would be the hot and sexy kind. Lord knows, she had enough material to work with tonight.

“Don’t get so caught up in secret-agent-man fantasies that you forget to finish paying those bills,” she told herself, pulling her hair into a scrunchie and knotting it. She was on shift at the bank from ten to four, and if she didn’t get everything into the mail in the morning, it would bother her all day.

The mirror was starting to fog, and she rubbed a spot clear to check her skin.

“Holy shit!” she shrieked, spinning around.

There was nothing there, of course. She had known there wasn’t going to be anything there. It wasn’t possible that there was anything there—the alarm had been on, no windows had been open. There was no way a cat could have gotten in.

There was no way she could have seen, reflected in that tiny corner of the mirror, a cat sitting on the shower ledge behind her, watching her with wide, rounded green eyes.

Mrrrrrai?

And there was no way she could hear the plaintive query of a cat, echoing off the tile of the shower, over the sound of the water and the rasp of her own breath.

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