Confessions of the Heart Read online

  Anna’s gaze went reluctantly back to Ben. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing as she, that maybe such a meeting, no matter how brief, was the reason they had this strange connection.

  “The killer was never caught,” Gwen said. “Isn’t that right, Ben?”

  He started toward the doorway, as if he’d had enough of the conversation. “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Gwen watched him leave, then turned back to Anna with a frown. “You’ll have to forgive Ben’s manners. He’s a little…abrupt at times.”

  He’d left the room, but Anna could still feel his presence. It was so odd. She’d never felt this way before. She’d never experienced such an intense attraction, and she knew he’d felt it, too. Why else had he tried to kiss her?

  She strove to keep her tone even as she said, “Is he working on a new book?”

  Gwen grimaced. “No. He’s working on an old case.”

  “He’s still a cop, then?” Anna asked in surprise.

  Gwen shook her head. “He’s not a cop. Ben will never be a cop again. Scorpio took care of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gwen hesitated. “I don’t know how much you remember about that summer, but the police had no real suspects. They were very frustrated. Ben was one of the lead detectives on the case, and he…did something stupid. He used himself as bait to draw out the killer, and he very nearly became Scorpio’s thirteenth victim.”

  Icy fingers played up and down Anna’s spine as Gwen leaned toward her, lowering her voice. “The scars on his hand and face…Scorpio did that to him. And the scars on the inside are even worse. I don’t think Ben ever recovered from that summer. He’s still convinced Scorpio will jump out of the bushes one day and finish him off.”

  Anna suppressed a deep shudder. Whatever Ben was afraid of, she doubted it had anything to do with his personal safety. He didn’t seem the type of man to dwell on a close call, even one with a brutal killer. It had to be something else he feared. “I don’t remember hearing about any more victims after that summer,” she said reluctantly. “The killings stopped, didn’t they? The police thought Scorpio might be in prison for some other crime or else he was dead.”

  Gwen shrugged. “No one knows what happened to Scorpio, or why the killings stopped so suddenly. But all those unanswered questions still feed Ben’s obsession.”

  “Is that why he wrote the book?”

  “Partly, I suppose. And partly because he was offered a great deal of money to do so. But enough of all this.” She gave Anna an enigmatic smile. “You didn’t come here to talk about serial killers, did you? You came here to talk about my sister.”

  “Actually, I just wanted to stop by for a few minutes to pay my respects and now I really should be going.” Anna stood, suddenly anxious to get out of that house, away from Gwen Draven and her dark story, away from Ben Porter and his devastating effect on her. She needed space to breathe because for a moment while listening to Gwen, Anna had the disturbing notion that she was being sucked into Katherine’s life and it just might be a place she didn’t want to go.

  To her relief, Gwen didn’t protest her leaving. She got up to walk her to the door. “Are you going back to Houston tonight?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s a long drive, and I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll find a place to spend the night, and then head back first thing in the morning.”

  Gwen’s gaze rested on Anna. “Look, this is none of my business, but you mentioned on the phone this morning that you’d been ill recently. That’s why you hadn’t heard about Katherine.” She paused. “Are you okay now? You seem so…fragile.”

  “I sometimes tire easily, but I’m fine,” Anna evaded. “Thanks for asking. And thank you for agreeing to see me today. It meant a lot.”

  “I could tell that it did when you called.”

  “Katherine changed my life,” Anna said. “I wanted her family to know that.”

  Gwen smiled. “Someday you’ll have to tell me more about your relationship with my sister, but right now, I won’t keep you. There’s an inn on Old River Road called Casa del Gatos. It’s sort of a cross between a bed and breakfast and a small hotel. It’s actually quite charming if you don’t mind rustic. When you leave here, just follow the street to the bottom of the hill and turn left. The hotel is all the way at the end. Some of the rooms have a nice view of the river.”

  Anna nodded. “Thanks. I’ll look for it.”

  The two women said their goodbyes, and Anna headed down the steps of the veranda, then crossed the lush grounds to the street. She paused at her car, glancing back at the house and wondering if she’d accomplished what she’d set out to.

  Neither Gwen nor Ben had spoken about Katherine’s suicide, but Anna supposed that was to be expected. She was a stranger after all. No reason they would open up to her.

  But at least she’d been able to see for herself where Katherine had lived. She’d met her sister and husband, and had seen evidence of the very rich and full life Katherine had led.

  So why had she committed suicide?

  And why had Anna come away from Katherine’s home deeply disturbed? It was as if there’d been something simmering just beneath the surface she hadn’t quite been able to see.

  As Anna stared up at the house, a movement from a third-story balcony drew her attention. Someone stood just beyond the railing, staring down at her. At first, she thought it was Gwen, but Anna wasn’t sure even Gwen, for all her obvious physical fitness, would have had time to rush up two flights of stairs to the third story.

  It suddenly occurred to Anna that the watcher might be Katherine’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Gabriella, the one who had been playing the piano earlier. Anna couldn’t distinguish her features, but for some reason she had the impression the girl was scowling at her with displeasure.

  As their gazes met from a distance, a chill lifted the hair at the back of Anna’s neck, and rather than waving a greeting, she opened the car door and climbed inside.

  Chapter Four

  Ben stood at the window of his second-floor office and stared down at the heavily landscaped grounds that were already deep in shadow even though the sun still lingered just above the horizon. Soon it would be twilight, and every bush and tree would become a potential hiding place for evil.

  He grimaced, thinking that he might be starting to sound a little too much like Margarete Cortina, a local woman whose rants about demons and spirits, along with her devotion to a rather bizarre religion, had made her something of a laughingstock in San Miguel.

  But Ben wasn’t laughing, nor was he so quick to dismiss her beliefs as the ramblings of a mad woman. And for one simple reason. Like Margarete, he knew evil existed. He’d seen it. He’d almost been destroyed by it. And he would be a fool to dismiss the clues, no matter how subtle, that warned him now the evil was back. In a different form, maybe, but still deadly, nonetheless.

  He flexed his right hand as he kept his uneasy vigil at the window. In the nearly three years since he’d been wounded, he still couldn’t get used to the stiffness in his fingers, the loss of agility that made it impossible for him to fire a weapon with any accuracy. He still couldn’t get used to the feeling of vulnerability that came with having hung up his .38 after fourteen years on the police force.

  If Scorpio was back, in any form, Ben would now be easy prey.

  But then, he always had been. He just hadn’t realized it until it was too late.

  A mistake he wouldn’t make again.

  His gaze fell on Anna Sebastian as she stood beside her car, gazing up at the house, and a dark foreboding stole over him. He’d never put much stock in premonitions or visions, but he still had a cop’s instinct. Anna Sebastian was hiding something, and given her relationship to Katherine, Ben didn’t think much good could come of her visit today.

  Why had she come? What did she want?

  Merely to pay her respects, as she claimed? Then why wait so long? Katherine had been
dead for nearly a year.

  He remembered Gwen mentioning something about Anna having been sick, and Ben could believe that. She was a pale, fragile-looking woman who seemed incapable of sustaining her own meager weight, much less holding up under the brutal South Texas heat. And yet in the short time he’d been in her company, Ben had sensed an inner strength. He’d glimpsed a steely determination in her eyes that her illness hadn’t completely extinguished.

  She was an interesting woman. Intriguing. And that brought him back to his original question. Why was she here?

  Maybe the better question was why had he reacted so strongly to her? For a moment in the bathroom, he’d forgotten they were strangers, and he’d completely lost himself in her sensuality, in those beautiful, soulful eyes that were so striking against her fair complexion. He’d almost kissed her, and not gently, either, but with a deep, driving need that had burned as hot as it was quick. He hadn’t felt an instant attraction that fierce since…

  He frowned, not wanting to judge her against his late wife, and yet knowing the comparison was inevitable. They were both beautiful women. Both secretive and coy. Both possessing that unique feminine power that could destroy a man’s soul, if he wasn’t careful.

  Abruptly, Ben turned away from the window as Anna got into her car and drove off. Hopefully, that was the last he would ever see of her. He had enough to worry about without having to battle his own libido.

  And yet even now he found himself wondering when she was leaving town. If he could arrange an accidental meeting…

  Idiot, he scoffed. He’d never known when to leave well enough alone. That was why he was no longer a cop, and why he spent half his nights tossing and turning and the other half searching the darkness for ghosts.

  Returning to his desk, he sat down and began to methodically go through his files. Since he’d left the police force, Ben had taken up the rather macabre hobby of keeping a body count of violent crime victims in and around Houston. He scoured newspaper accounts, badgered his contacts in the department, even kept in touch with some of the former detectives he’d worked with on Operation Exterminate, a task force assembled by the Violent Crimes Division to track Scorpio before the killer had suddenly gone dormant at the end of that summer.

  This latest killing was the first one in nearly three years that had triggered Ben’s deepest fears. Dr. Michael English’s murderer had shot him in the head and then attempted to cut out his heart with a knife. A grisly little tidbit the police had withheld from the public.

  Ben had been in Houston when he’d gotten word of the murder. His contact in H.P.D. hadn’t known at the time if any of Scorpio’s other signatures had been found at the crime scene, but at least he’d been able to warn Ben about the mutilation.

  Most serial killers had their own unique calling cards that they left on the body or at the crime scene. In addition to removing the victims’ hearts, Scorpio had stuffed dead scorpions in the victims’ mouths. The absence of the latter in the English case didn’t ease Ben’s fear because he now knew—had known for almost three years—that Scorpio wasn’t one killer but two.

  The early consensus among the nearly three dozen detectives assigned to Operation Exterminate, as well as the FBI profiler who’d been called in to assist on the case, was that Scorpio, like most serial killers, was a male Caucasian. Ben’s had been the lone voice of dissent, but even he hadn’t realized until much later how truly unique Scorpio was.

  As the media point man, Ben not only became the face associated with the investigation that summer, but also the cop Scorpio loved to taunt in the letters sent to the police station and to the newspapers, much as David Berkowitz had done in New York and the Zodiac had done in the San Francisco Bay area.

  The writing appeared to be long, psychotic ramblings at first, but as the killings escalated, Scorpio’s letters, especially the ones addressed to Ben, took on a more personal note, almost bordering on flirtatious at times. The killer began making references to the way Ben had looked on the news the previous evening, the color of his eyes, whether or not he’d just gotten a haircut.

  The profiler picked up on the subtle coquetry, too, and suggested Ben use it to try and draw out the killer. He still wasn’t as convinced as Ben, however, that Scorpio was a woman. Female serial killers were an anomaly and usually fell into two major categories: black widows and angels of death. Scorpio was neither. Scorpio seemed to be a true thrill killer, for which the act of taking a life was part of a desire for new and exciting kicks.

  By the end of the summer, the game of cat and mouse had turned into a dangerous one of seduction. Whenever Ben was interviewed on TV, he made sure he gazed directly into the camera, as if he were speaking only to the killer, and he always wore a red tie, Scorpio’s favorite color. The letters started to come with more frequency, containing subtle hints that soon it would be time for Ben and Scorpio to meet.

  The profiler warned that the investigation had entered a new and even more deranged phase, and it might be time for Ben to pull back and assume a low profile.

  But by then it was too late. By then Ben had fallen victim to the same fatal flaw that had been the downfall throughout the ages of better cops than he. He’d let the thrill of the hunt cloud his judgment, make him careless, and when he’d awakened one night in his darkened apartment to find himself staring up into the eyes of the killer, he’d realized then what Scorpio had known all along.

  He’d never been in control. He’d always been one step behind, and when he’d joined the killer’s deadly game, it had been because Scorpio had lured him in—not the other way around.

  It was later determined that a drug had been slipped in Ben’s drink when he’d stopped by a local bar with some of the other detectives working the case before going home that night. That was how brazen and confident Scorpio had become. The killer walked into a cop bar, slipped a Mickey to the highest profile detective in the city, and then calmly exited, with no one being the wiser.

  The dosage was expertly administered, too. Ben felt nothing more than a faint drowsiness until he got home where he collapsed on top of the bed, fully dressed, as he often did after putting in fifteen-hour days.

  When he finally awakened, his hands and legs were bound with cord and his mouth taped shut to prevent the screams that surely would have been heard throughout the apartment complex once Scorpio set to work.

  The killer started with Ben’s face. One slash of the knife and no more TV appearances.

  His right hand came next. The killer sliced deep, severing tendons, making sure Ben would never again qualify at the shooting range.

  Even in his agony, Ben tried to remain alert for as long as he could, tried to commit certain things to memory. The killer’s height, weight. The color of the eyes behind the ski mask. The size of the gloved hands that didn’t tremble, that didn’t show a moment’s hesitation or a hint of mercy.

  Woman or man? Ben couldn’t honestly say. The disguise was thorough, the killer’s movements carefully devoid of gender-related qualities. If the killer was a man, he had a slight build. If a woman, she appeared to be agile and athletic.

  It was odd, Ben remembered thinking, that after months of tracking Scorpio, trying to get inside this monster’s head, he’d always assumed when the moment of confrontation came, he’d feel some sort of connection, some sort of obscene bond with the killer, but there was nothing. Nothing but pain and rage…

  And then, just before he lost consciousness, he saw her. The real Scorpio. She was standing in the shadows, watching. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew instinctively the voyeur was female.

  He tried to lift a beseeching hand, but she melted even deeper into the shadows. And mercifully darkness soon claimed Ben.

  The profiler, and later the police psychologist who came to interview him in the hospital didn’t put much stock in his claim that Scorpio was not one killer, but two. Serial killer partnerships were rare, and even rarer still would be a female in the dominant position. The woma
n usually assumed the “slave” role, staging the torture and murder under the direction of her male “master.”

  Ben began to have his own doubts about what he’d seen. His pain and fear might well have made him imagine a third person in the room that night.

  But then two days into his hospital stay, he’d awakened one night, sensing her presence. She’d been there. In his room.

  It was impossible, of course. A guard was posted at his door. No one could get in without being seen. He must have had a nightmare.

  But deep down, he knew it was no nightmare. Scorpio had somehow gotten past the nurses and the guard without detection. That was how clever, how resourceful, how utterly fearless she was.

  She never came back. It was as if the sole reason for her visit was to prove to Ben how easily she could get to him.

  The killings stopped, too. The game was over. Scorpio had won.

  But little had Ben known then that in the dark, seductive game he’d set in motion that summer, Scorpio had one final move….

  CASA DEL GATOS was a charming, turn of the century, Spanish-style inn with gleaming stucco walls and a red tile roof baked to a soft terra cotta by the relentless Texas sun. The long, curving driveway was lined with a neatly clipped hibiscus hedge in full scarlet bloom, and at one end of a wide veranda, a Mexican flame vine scaled a trellis to the low-hanging roof.

  A gardener pushing a wheelbarrow came around the corner of the hotel and paused to watch Anna get out of her car and head up the steps to the entrance. He was a small, wiry man with a thick mustache and a dark, glossy ponytail that hung almost to his waist. A red bandana protected his neck from the sun, and Anna could see what appeared to be a tiny silver cross dangling from one ear lobe.

  “Buenas tardes,” she murmured, a little disconcerted by his unwavering stare.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything as he rolled the wheelbarrow toward the drive. Anna stared after him for a moment, then turned and entered the hotel.