Before he’d had a chance to kiss her and test the strength of the passion she’d drawn from his soul.
“A fan?” She shook her head, as if she doubted his claim or doubted that anyone would actually enjoy the novels he’d written.
Sometimes he wondered about that himself. He didn’t enjoy writing them; they exhausted him as much as experiencing the emotions of others.
“This murder didn’t happen before you were born,” she pointed out, her teeth nibbling at her full bottom lip. “Did you get sick of just writing about murder and decide to reenact one that you wrote about?”
“No.” He wasn’t a killer … in this life. But if he had the soul of a killer …
“No?” she repeated as if disappointed by his short response. “That’s it? You’re not going to eloquently profess your innocence?”
While he shrugged, he was anything but unconcerned. “It doesn’t matter how eloquent I am. You’ve already made up your mind about me, Alaina.”
“You’re involved,” she insisted. “Somehow, someway, you’re involved.”
He wished like hell that he wasn’t. But he couldn’t deny her allegations.
As if she dismissed him, she began to inspect the crime scene, ignoring his presence. He couldn’t ignore her; he could do nothing but stare at her.
Then she uttered a sudden gasp.
He followed her gaze to discover what had elicited the reaction from her. The blood, the gore? He would have expected that she was used to those things in crime scenes. Then he saw it, too: his book, lying atop the day-bed where the victim had been raped and mutilated. The book lay facedown, the hand lifted over Trent’s face in the publicity shot spattered with blood.
As if he hadn’t already been blaming himself for this woman’s death.
Her blood was on his hand. It had only been a book, Alaina kept reminding herself. But still she couldn’t get the image out of her head. She couldn’t get Trent out, either. She worried that he was in deeper than her mind, that he owned a part of her reincarnated soul.
“Why are you so hung up on Baines?”
She jerked away from her intense scrutiny of the bright lights of the cityscape outside her office window. Vonner’s startling question brought forth a rage of denial and resentment. “Why the hell would you say something so—”
He held up a palm to interrupt her tirade and clarified, “As the killer. Why are you so hung up on him being the killer? Yeah, I get that the helicopter access makes him a suspect in this case, but he wasn’t even alive when the other murders occurred.”
She turned back to the window, leaving Vonner sitting in front of her desk piled high with cold-case files. She only needed to glance at one of the folders to know exactly what was inside; she’d read them all so many times. But how did Trent know so many of the details it had taken her years to learn? “He knows too much.”
“So you think he knows who the killer is?” Vonner asked with a heavy sigh. “That he interviewed him when he started writing those horror books of his?”
He should have been excited by the lead he’d been chasing for months—Alaina for years—but they’d spent hours on the road after very little sleep. She understood his weariness.
But Alaina doubted she would sleep anytime soon. The killing had started again. She knew this murder would not be a onetime thing; she knew it with as much certainty as she knew the contents of every one of those cold-case files. This new victim’s case would never get onto that pile on her desk; Alaina would not rest until Penelope Otten’s murderer was found.
“Yes, I think he knows who the killer is.” Or he had been the killer in another life and his evil soul had called him to kill again …?
She sucked in a breath at the horrific thought. She didn’t want him to be the killer. She just wanted—
Vonner said, “We’ll have to talk to him again.”
That was what she was afraid of—talking to him, touching him, kissing him, giving in to the passion that had burned so hotly between them that it was forever a part of her soul. But she would do whatever was necessary to find the killer. “Yes, we’ll need to interview him.”
“That’s if the bosses will let us.” Vonner pushed a hand through his disheveled hair. “I still can’t believe he was granted access to a crime scene.”
“A crime he could have committed,” she reminded her partner and herself. He could be a killer in this life, too.
“Think the Bureau will let us use the helicopter to get back to the U.P.?” he asked. “I hate to think of doing that drive again.”
“He’s here now,” she murmured, her skin tingling as she sensed him close.
“What?”
“He’s somewhere in the building,” she said.
“What? Did Security notify you when he came in?” Vonner asked.
“Something like that …” Her phone rang, saving her from offering a more specific explanation. Her partner would not understand her special connection with the horror author; she didn’t understand it herself.
Vonner grabbed the receiver. “Agent Paulsen’s desk.”
She held out her hand for the phone, but instead of passing it to her, he hung it up. “Who was that?” she asked.
“The morgue.”
Trent gripped the edge of the metal table on which the victim’s body lay. His vision blurred, a red haze blinding him as pain overwhelmed him. He felt every emotion she had experienced in those final moments before her death. Panic shortened his breath and quickened his pulse. Then the fear intensified to a terror so acute that his lungs burned with a scream he couldn’t utter. His throat ached as if strong hands wrapped tight around his neck, choking the life from his body. But before the threatening blackness claimed him, the pressure eased. He gasped for breath, trying to fill his aching lungs. Then pain shot through his heart, so sharp and intense he clutched a hand to his chest and dropped to his knees.
“What’s he doing?” a male voice whispered. “Having a heart attack?”
Trent turned toward where Alaina stood in the doorway to Autopsy. He hadn’t felt her this time. He’d been too connected to the dead woman, to the emotions echoing from her soul within the empty shell of her mutilated body.
Those emotions clung to him no matter that he tried to shake them off. Exhaustion weighing heavy on his limbs, he lurched to his feet and staggered into the metal table. The woman’s stiff arm dropped off the edge, her hand open as if reaching out to him.
Alaina stared at him, her eyes narrowed and her brow slightly creased beneath the fall of blond hair. The man, her partner, stood almost in front of her, as if protecting her from Trent or trying to come between them.
A memory tugged at him, a memory of frustration and jealousy. Someone else had tried to come between them. In another life?
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Agent Vonner asked. “Are you drunk?”
He ignored the man as if he was invisible. To Trent he was; he could see only her now.
“What are you doing?” she asked him finally.
“I was given access—”
“To the Bureau’s morgue?” Vonner asked, his voice cracking with shock and indignation. “Who the hell gave you access?”
Because she lifted a dark blond brow in question, Trent answered, “Phillip Graves.”
A breath