Bonds of Justice

CHAPTER 25

Nikita wasn’t pleased at the interruption in her investigation, but she didn’t attempt to stand in their way after Max made it clear that not only would they continue to work her case while in Wyoming, but that Bonner’s victims had a prior claim on his loyalty.

“How long will this trip take?” she asked.

“If Bonner gives up the bodies”—a grim hope—“I’ll have to inform the parents.” They knew him, trusted him . . . would know why he’d come after so long. “After that, forensics will take over. Since Bonner is already in prison for the length of his natural life, it’s not imperative I be there at every moment.” Though before, he would’ve been, would have wanted to see it through to the bitter, destructive end.

Now, he had other priorities. “I can delegate the supervision to one of the other detectives”—good cops, cops who’d sacrificed weekends, given up vacations, to help Max in the hunt for the Butcher of Park Avenue—“and keep an eye on things from a distance.” Of course, he’d never be free of the Bonner case, not truly. And perhaps he didn’t want to be. A man carried scars on his heart. They made him who he was.

Sophie would leave the biggest scar of all.

No. He refused to lose her, this J with her hunger for touch and her gifted mind.

“Very well, Detective.” Picking up a cell phone call, she turned to the plate-glass window. “I expect you to keep me informed.”

Max found himself momentarily caught by the image of Nikita standing silhouetted against the glass, her gaze somewhere far in the distance. Powerful. Lethal. Alone.

Sascha stretched out her legs on the ottoman in Tammy’s living room and leaned back against the softness of the couch. Like everyone else in DarkRiver, she’d headed to their healer the instant she’d needed comfort of a feminine kind. Lucas had dropped her off after lunch with a kiss—though she knew it was only because Tammy’s mate, Nathan, was home. Likely, there was another sentinel prowling around outside anyway—DarkRiver took the protection of its healer dead seriously.

Suspicious scrabbles sounded from behind her. Feeling her lips tug upward, she remained in place, her eyes closed. Little click-clacks on the wooden floor, silenced as they hit the rugs. Then a few whispering scratches and she felt a warm, playful presence walk along the top of the sofa back to lie down a few inches from her ear. Another presence, just as playful, a little more mischievous, settled beside her thigh.

She’d half expected a baby roar to make her jump up in surprise, but when she opened her eyes, Julian and Roman, Tammy’s twins—both in leopard form—were looking at her with expressions so innocent, her heart melted. “How am I supposed to resist?” she murmured, stroking Jules while she glanced up at Rome.

Getting up, he padded over to nuzzle at her ear. She tried to catch him in one arm to bring him down, but he jumped onto the couch beside her so she could pet him, too.

“Are my little demons bothering you?” Tammy asked, walking into the living room with a tray piled high with Sascha’s favorite chocolate-chip cookies hot from the oven.

“They’re being sweethearts,” Sascha said, as Rome settled down with his paws on her thigh, his eyes closing in bliss as she petted his gorgeous little head with firm, sure strokes. “They’re not as rambunctious with me anymore.”

“What do you expect?” Tammy rolled her eyes. “They’re growing up around Nate and the others. They’ve figured out you’re to be ‘looked after.’ ”

Sascha laughed as Tammy took a seat opposite her. Ferocious, the twins’ pet kitten, immediately made himself at home in the healer’s lap. “Shouldn’t they both be in kindergarten?”

“They’re doing half days at the moment—just got home a few minutes back,” Tamsyn said with a fond smile. “They both got a good-behavior report from the teacher.”

Kissing the pad of her index finger, Sascha touched it to the tip of Julian’s nose. Lifting a paw, he nipped playfully at her finger. “Why do you sound so surprised?”

“Tell me you’re not.”

Sascha couldn’t help it, she laughed again, even as Jules and Rome both gave little growls. “They’ll grow up into wonderful young men, you know.”

Tammy’s eyes softened. “I know.” Petting a purring Ferocious, she leaned back in her seat. “So, you saw your mother today.”

“Yes.” Roman butted against her hand when she stopped stroking him, and she continued at once, scratching him behind the ears in that way he liked before moving up and down through the beautiful gold and black fur of his back. “I don’t know if I’m fooling myself, but I think . . . there’s something different about her.”

Tamsyn didn’t say anything, just let Sascha talk. And she did. She talked about her hopes, her worries, her fears. “Do you think,” she said at last, “it’s just the emotions of pregnancy? I mean, I love our baby so much. I can’t imagine any mother not feeling this way.” Under her now unmoving hands, Jules and Rome lay curled up, fast asleep, two exquisitely precious lives.

“Psy are different,” Tammy said at last, “you know that far better than I ever could. But you’re also an empath, and if your heart tells you there’s some hope of a healthy relationship with Nikita . . .”

“I don’t know,” Sascha said. “I just know I’m not ready to give up on her yet.”

Tammy’s smile was slow, strong as her healer’s heart. “Then I guess Councilor Nikita Duncan had better watch out.”

Having dropped a dubious-looking Morpheus off at DarkRiver HQ—to be taken home by Clay—Max and Sophia arrived at the closest airport to the D2 penitentiary less than three hours after Max’s meeting with Nikita. A twenty-minute drive later and they were at the facility.

“Bonner still refusing to talk?” Max asked Bart after Sophia returned to the room, having undergone a quick preliminary checkup at the M-Psy’s hands. Max met her gaze, caught the very slight shake of her head. Relief twisted around his heart—she was hanging on, refusing to surrender to the death that had been stalking her her whole life.

“Bastard hasn’t said a word since he asked for Ms. Russo,” Bart said, glancing at Sophia. “Be careful, Ms. Russo. I have a feeling he’s enraged after we sent in a male J to do a follow-up on his comm-conference with you.”

Sophia’s expression didn’t change. “I expected that, Mr. Reuben. Bonner isn’t used to being denied.”

Max folded his arms across his chest. “That’s an understatement.” Bonner had been born into wealth, gone to the most exclusive private schools, summered on a vineyard in Champagne, wintered at a ski resort in Switzerland. He’d had simply to ask and his parents had given it to him, their only son—a hundred-thousand-dollar car at sixteen, a trip around the world at seventeen, a private residence on their extensive property at eighteen.

“He’ll try to play you,” Bart said, tapping a pen on the old-fashioned legal pad he insisted on using. “He’s had a few days to do some underground research, maybe find out things about you—”

Sophia shook her head. “I’ve survived worse monsters.” Her eyes met Max’s. “It’s time for me to go in.”

Every single muscle in his body went rock hard in rejection of the idea, but he nodded. “I’ll be right here—one small signal and I come get you.”

Sophia walked into the same room she’d entered only a few days prior, but this time, she was viscerally aware of Max’s gaze on her no matter that he stood hidden behind the wall that separated the room from the observation chamber. And though a prison guard stood with his back to the wall behind Bonner, it was the knowledge of Max watching over her that kept her calm, focused.

Her cop would never let the monster touch her.

With that knowledge in her heart, she said, “Mr. Bonner,” as she reached the table.

Gerard Bonner’s smile presumed an intimacy that made her skin crawl. “Sophia. I’d rise to welcome you, but alas . . .” He gestured to the clamps that kept him immobilized, his hands jerking to a halt.

“It’s for my protection that you can’t move,” she said, taking a seat across from him. “You have very strong hands.” After torturing Carissa White in a multitude of horrific ways, he’d finally killed her with the intimacy of his hands.

“Are you attempting to shock me?” A warm chuckle from the outwardly handsome man in front of her. “I enjoyed it, you know. Poor Carissa. She begged me to do it in the end.”

So clever, she thought, always couching his words in a way that it was never quite a confession. Not that they needed it, not for Carissa White. “I was told you were ready to cooperate.”

“Did I put you to too much inconvenience with my request?” he asked, his expression filling with what many would’ve mistaken for the sincerest of apologies. “I find that I like you the best. You’re so much . . . gentler than the other Js.”

“Did you know, Mr. Bonner,” she said conversationally, “that in the early part of this century, they still incarcerated males together in the same cell? Tell me”—she held his gaze, let him see that she’d looked into the abyss, that nothing he said could touch her—“do you think you would have . . . enjoyed”—a deliberate echo of his word, his tone—“being in a cell with another inmate who might not have shared your more sophisticated tastes?”

Bonner didn’t like that, his eyes showing the sadistic bite of malignant rage before he got it under control. “I’m sure I would have survived, Sophia. Hmm, does anyone call you Sophie?”

She hated that he’d used Max’s pet name for her, hated it so much that for an instant, she wondered if she’d betrayed herself, because Bonner’s blue eyes glinted with pleasure.

“You may call me anything you wish.” A facsimile of calm, good enough that it had fooled the medics all these years. “All I care about are your memories.”

Another crack in the facade, the ugliness inside him rising to the surface for a fleeting instant. “Then take them, Sophie.” Vicious words laced with charm. “Take what you came to find . . . then maybe you can tell me how you got such a pretty, pretty face.”

She did nothing, felt nothing. His words didn’t matter—not when Max saw her, knew her, accepted her. “I’m not going on some kind of a scavenger hunt in your brain, Mr. Bonner. If you want to cooperate, then cooperate. If not, I’ll make a final recommendation that your offers to share information have been nothing but a waste of time and that all further approaches from you be ignored.”

“Bitch.” It was said in that same charming voice, his smile never slipping. “Is the rest of your skin marked? Or are you a blank canvas just waiting for the right artist?”

“One last time, Mr. Bonner—are you ready to cooperate?”

“Of course.”

She held the eye contact, sweeping out with her unique telepathic gift. Some Js needed physical contact with those they scanned, but she never had. And now, with her Sensitivity, touch would take her too deep, lock her into another’s mind. And if there was one consciousness she did not want to be trapped within, it was that of the sociopath on the other side of the table.

Moving effortlessly through the easily permeable barrier that was the weakness of a human shield, she stepped into his mind. It was as calm, as orderly . . . but the pieces had shifted. Bonner was rearranging his memories of the past, perhaps to better fit his own personal view of the world.

A woman’s screaming face, her back contorted in agony, her eyes bleeding at the corners. Sophia recoiled inside, but years of training kept her from betraying her abhorrence on her face. “We already know what you did to Carissa White,” she said. “If that’s all you’ve got—”

A small wooden glade, peaceful almost.

She felt the handle of the shovel vibrate under her hands as he/they drove it into the earth, heard the eerie quiet, felt the cool crackle of the plastic under his/their hands as he/ they rolled the body into the shallowest of graves. Bonner didn’t waste any time covering his victim up again, his/their actions as impersonal as if he/they were raising a garden. The body had ceased to have any meaning once it stopped screaming. Not long afterward, the earth covered the plastic, and then they were walking through the forest, exiting less than five minutes later onto a rugged track swathed in fog.

Firs—deep green, thick with foliage—their tips disappearing into the fine white mist, surrounded them on all sides, but there was a lot of undergrowth, a few spindly trees of other species. So not a tree farm, but something more natural. She got into the vehicle, started the engine after stripping off heavy gardening gloves. The four-wheel drive took the rickety road with ease, until half an hour later, she appeared out of the fog and found herself at a T-junction, a sealed road in front of her. Her heart was calm, her body relaxed. It was—

Sophia realized she was losing herself in Bonner, fought to bring herself back. “I need a location.” She could see nothing but the infrequent car zipping by fast—a lonely highway.

“Patience, my sweet Sophia.” Bonner was breathing hard, excited by the memory . . . by making her relive it with him.

That was when she saw it, the board on the left that marked the entrance to “Fog Valley Track.”

She took note of the kinds of flowers she’d seen, the angle of the sun, the weather, everything she could.

Then Bonner’s memories shifted sideways, a twisting kaleidoscope.

She’d expected something of the kind, pulled back before it could affect her. “That doesn’t give us much.”

“You’ll find her.” He drew a long, deep breath. “You’ll find my lovely Gwyn.”

Gwyneth Hayley had disappeared six months after Carissa White and was widely considered to be Bonner’s second victim. Sophia tried to pry further details out of the Butcher, but he just smiled that intimate, satisfied little smile and told her she’d have to do some of the work herself.

Exiting, she let the medic scan her. “You need nutrients,” was the response.

She drank the energy drinks he gave her, then let Bartholomew Reuben lead them up out of the bowels of the building and to a conference room on the upper floor. “If everyone could drop their shields,” Sophia said, “I can project the scan into your minds.” This was part of what made her a J, rather than a simple telepath—the ability to literally project entire memories. She could only do five people at a time, but other than Max, there was only Reuben, the warden, and Reuben’s assistant. “I’m sorry, Detective Shannon, I can’t project through your natural shield.”

Max shrugged. “Projecting is tough on a J, right?” He continued without waiting for an answer, “Why don’t you give us a recap instead?” His eyes were piercing. “If Bonner really is in a cooperative mood, we don’t know how soon you might have to scan him again.”

He was protecting her. The knowledge made her heart expand until it threatened to consume her. Taking a deep breath, holding that powerful emotion like the treasure it was, Sophia described what she’d seen.

“Fog Valley Track,” Max said, already on the phone to the computer techs at Enforcement. “Yeah, how many hits?” A pause. “Narrow it down to a location with a lot of firs, relatively isolated—or it would’ve been five years ago; maybe off a highway.”

Sophia raised her hand to catch his attention. “The temperature was cool, though the position of the sun suggested it was close to midday.” Her mind filtered out the distractions of the other cars, Bonner’s thoughts, and saw through to the other side of the road. “There was a billboard advertising a harvest festival as he turned out of the track.”

Max repeated her words to the computer tech, waited a few moments. “I owe you a drink. Send everything through to D2, comm station three. And encrypt it, just in case someone’s scanning the prison line.” Hanging up, he said, “We’ve got three mentions of a Fog Valley Track that might match,” he said.

“The track was very rough,” Sophia pointed out. “Could be it’s not on the maps at all.”

“Yeah.” A grim look. “But we’ll worry about that after we check out these images.”

Those images were transmitted moments later. Sophia said, “That one,” almost before she was aware of opening her mouth.

Gwyneth Hayley’s last resting place lay deep within a snow-capped mountain range.