Forbidden Temptation

Chapter Three

“I’d like to see Ms. Bannerman,” Daniel said.

The receptionist, a motherly-looking woman in her midforties, arched one eyebrow as she read the business card he’d handed her. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I was in the area when I had the idea I’d like to discuss with her, so I thought I’d drop in to see if she had a moment to speak with me.” Daniel smiled at the woman, hoping a little charm might nudge her toward buzzing her boss.

“I’ll see if she’s available.” The receptionist looked pointedly toward the brown-leather wing-backed chairs in the waiting area. Daniel retreated to one of them, taking a look around the office of Bannerman and Bannerman Publishing.

It was a converted loft on Morris Avenue; unlikely digs for a publishing company that had been in business for more than a hundred years. The Bannermans were old money and lots of it, but apparently the new generation was dragging the company kicking and screaming into the new millennium.

A few minutes with the distraught-and talkative-employees at Five Points Floral Creations Monday morning had led Daniel to Alice Donovan’s college friend, Melissa. Alice and Melissa had gone clubbing Friday night. Melissa might well have been the last person to see Alice alive besides her killer.

Luckily, with a couple of bestsellers under his belt, Daniel had a good excuse to call on Alice’s grieving friend.

He didn’t enjoy taking advantage of her vulnerability, but it was a necessary evil. She might have information about the man who’d killed Alice and a lot of other women. So when the receptionist informed him Ms. Bannerman could spare him a couple of moments, he buried his guilt and headed for her office.

Melissa Bannerman was a pretty blonde in her late twenties, dressed in an expensive gray suit with a pale green blouse, which flattered her tall, lithe build. Recent attempts to repair her makeup couldn’t hide her tear-reddened eyes or the shell-shocked expression beneath the practiced smile. When she shook his hand, her grip was firm, but he felt the faintest underlying tremor. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Hartman. I’ve read all your books and enjoyed them immensely.”

“Glad to hear it.” Daniel sat in the chair she indicated. “I’m here in town doing some research on a cold case, and that’s when I had the idea for a new book. I’m between publishers, and the idea I have is ideally suited to a boutique publishing house like this one, so I thought I’d give you my pitch to see what you think.”

Melissa’s blue eyes narrowed slightly. “I can’t imagine a larger publisher wouldn’t jump at the chance to publish any book you chose to write.”

“Maybe, but I’ve heard good things about Bannerman.”

Her smile almost made it to her eyes. “What’s your idea?”

“Cases in the South that have never been solved.”

A flicker of pain darted across her face. “Intriguing.”

Daniel leaned forward. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I came at a bad time.”

Her expression started to crumble. Tears glistened in her eyes. She caught herself before she broke into tears, but her lower lip quivered as she replied, “No, of course not.”

“I can tell you’re upset. Can I get you a glass of water?”

His kindness seemed to do her in. The tears spilled over, streaking her cheeks. “I lost a friend on Friday and I just got off the phone with her parents.”

“Sorry to hear it. Was it sudden?”

Grief lined her pretty face. “She was murdered.”

As Daniel gently led her to tell him more details about the night of Alice’s murder, the story spilled from her in a rush of sadness and rage.

“Alice left the club around ten or so. She said she had an early morning. I’d have gone with her, but Rose was still there.”

“Rose?”

“Rose Browning, my wedding planner.” Melissa fluttered her left hand, showing off a large diamond solitaire. “We ran into her at Sizzle. She was still there when Alice left, so I stayed. Only, then Rose left about a minute after Alice.”

“So Rose might have seen Alice outside?”

Melissa’s brow wrinkled. “You sound like a cop.”

“Occupational hazard. Have you talked to the police yet?”

“Yes. I don’t know much, but maybe it’ll help track her movements that night, right?”

“Has your friend Rose talked to the police?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask her tomorrow at the funeral.”

“Obviously, this isn’t a good time to discuss my idea.” He rose and handed her his card. “In a week or so, give me a call.” Though he’d used the book idea to get in the door, he’d been contemplating it for a while. He’d give Melissa a fair chance to make a good offer. Meanwhile, he needed to talk to Rose Browning, preferably before she talked to the police.

As Melissa walked him to the door, he asked, “Your wedding planner-you don’t happen to have her card, do you?”

“Somewhere around here. Are you in the market?”

“Maybe.” He smiled at her.

“She’s easy to find-she lives in a big brick Colonial Georgian on Mountain Avenue. It’s 601 Mountain Avenue-right on the corner. You can’t miss it.”

He didn’t react outwardly, but his heartbeat quickened. He knew the house she was talking about. And now he knew the name of his mystery woman. All that was left was to figure out what to do with the information.

SERENITY RIDGE CEMETERY stretched across rolling green hills just outside the Birmingham city limits. Granite and marble gravestones lined the hills like soldiers in formation, waiting for their marching orders.

Tina Carter’s grave lay in the far eastern corner of the cemetery, close to the access road. Fall leaves covered the fading grass and the base of the marble headstone. By the gravestone, a small urn of faded silk roses lay overturned.

Daniel set the urn upright, adding the arrangement he’d picked up at Alice Donovan’s flower shop that morning. If Tina’s mother was still alive, the grave would be immaculately tended, he knew. Fresh flowers left daily, the leaves swept from the headstone and the grass cut above Tina’s silent resting place.

But Mary Frances Carter had died earlier that year of a heart attack and, apparently, Frank still couldn’t bring himself to visit his sister’s grave after all these years.

Daniel brushed the leaves away from the grave, something Frank had said thirteen years earlier still vivid in his memory. It had been the day of Tina’s funeral, moments after the final prayer. Frank had been standing next to Daniel, tears trembling in his reddened eyes. “I can’t stand to even walk by her room anymore,” he’d confessed as cemetery workers had lowered the casket into the ground. “Mama’s made it into a shrine.”

Poor Frank. Tina had always been their mother’s favorite, more so after her death. Emotionally, Mary Frances had left her teenage son to his own devices, too wrapped up in grief for the child she’d lost to deal with the child left behind.

A glass-encased photo of Tina hung over the inscription on her tombstone, her pretty smile captured for eternity on a face that would never grow old. Her eyes glowed with life.

Daniel pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and polished the glass. Twenty-one and beautiful forever, he thought.

Only, she hadn’t been beautiful at the end. Her killer had marred that porcelain skin with slashes and gouges with his rage. He’d slit her throat, silencing her soft voice.

Daniel rose, gazing down at the tombstone. Did Orion kill you, too, Tina? Am I finally going to find him this time?

Tina’s grave lay silent, offering no answers.

Daniel turned and walked back toward the funeral home barely visible at the far end of the cemetery grounds. Today, another woman would be laid to rest, her life silenced by the slashes and strokes of a killer’s rage.

And, if Daniel was lucky, Orion would show up to see what sorrow his handiwork had created.

ROSE SMOOTHED the lapel of her dark brown suit and studied her reflection in the Impala’s driver’s side window. She looked sober and nondescript, she noted with satisfaction, her dark hair tucked into a simple knot at the base of her neck and her makeup at a minimum.

She’d come to Alice’s funeral to see, not be seen.

She spotted Melissa Bannerman and her fiancé, Mark Phagan, just inside the foyer of the Serenity Ridge Funeral Home. Melissa was simply incapable of blending into her surroundings, despite the conservative lines of her navy suit. Pulling her blond hair into a straight ponytail only emphasized her fashion-model cheekbones and cornflower-blue eyes. She was as tall as Mark, towering over most of the women and half the men in the foyer, drawing the eyes of every red-blooded male in the place regardless of the somber occasion.

Melissa’s gaze connected with Rose’s. She waved Rose over. “You remember Mark, don’t you?”

Mark managed a pained smile, obviously wishing he were anywhere else.

Rose followed Melissa into the small chapel, where Alice’s coffin took up the front. They found a pew in the middle, Mark entering first, leaving Rose on the aisle. Melissa inclined her head toward a sandy-haired man sitting by himself a couple of rows up. “That’s Richard Hughes, Alice’s ex.”

The man Alice had been drinking and dancing to forget, Rose thought. She watched him, wondering if he could have been the figure in the shadows. The police had probably questioned him already-significant others were always the first suspects in any murder investigation. Was he still on their list?

Melissa and Mark seemed to know most of the mourners in the chapel. Understandable; funerals were often like reunions, bringing together people who hadn’t seen each other in years. Melissa, Alice and Mark had all attended Alabama together, and many of the people in the tiny chapel shared that common past.

Just not Rose.

For most of her life, that wouldn’t have mattered. “Never met a stranger and never will,” her sister Lily used to tease.

But Rose wasn’t that person anymore.

She gritted her teeth against the creeping sense of self-consciousness and glanced at the growing crowd filling the pews behind her, letting her gaze move smoothly from face to face without settling long enough to attract unwanted attention. The man standing in the back of the chapel looked familiar; it took a moment to place him as Detective Carter, the policeman who’d taken her statement on Monday after Alice’s murder. If he recognized her, he gave no indication.

Rose started to turn back around when her gaze settled on a tall, lean man in a charcoal suit entering the back door of the chapel. Her heart seized.

It was the man who’d accosted her outside her house the day after Alice’s murder. The one named Daniel.

He met her gaze, his eyes narrowing briefly. He inclined his head in silent greeting as he slid into one of the back pews.

Rose faced forward, her heart racing. Who was he? Why was he here? The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Was he looking at her, even now?

She leaned toward Melissa. “Do you see the man at the back of the chapel, wearing a dark gray suit with a blue-and-gray striped tie?”

Melissa glanced over her shoulder. Her eyebrows arched. “You mean, Daniel Hartman? Weird. Wonder why he’s here.”

“You know him?”

“Yes. He’s a famous profiler. Used to be with the FBI. He’s a professor or something now. Haven’t you ever heard of him? He’s always on the true-crime programs on TV, talking about this case or that.” She lowered her voice. “I’m considering publishing a new book of his.”

As the funeral director took the podium and began the service, Rose slumped in the pew, mulling the new information. She barely heard any of the eulogy, her earlier tension fading into annoyance as she realized just how many hours over the past couple of days she’d spent in fear of her mystery man, when he could have eased her worries with a simple introduction.

After the service, Melissa turned to her. “I need to talk to her parents for a minute. Are you going to the graveside for the rest of the service?”

Rose shook her head. She’d had enough of death for today. “I’ll call you tomorrow and we can get back to planning your wedding. Happier things, right?”

Melissa gave her a quick hug. “Thanks for coming.”

Rose stood, stealing the opportunity to glance at the pew where she’d last seen Daniel. He was no longer there.

She looked around the chapel, trying to spot him in the milling crowd heading for the exit, but she couldn’t find him. She did spot Detective Carter again and, for a moment, she considered flagging him down to tell him about Daniel. The police might want to know they had a rogue profiler sniffing around their case.

But telling Detective Carter about Daniel meant admitting she’d been at Alice’s apartment the morning she’d turned up dead, a piece of information Rose had withheld from the detective during their brief interview a couple of days earlier.

He’d want to know why she’d run away when the police showed up. And the only answer that made sense was the one she had no intention of giving. Detective Carter had seemed the open-minded, reasonable sort, but she wasn’t about to tell a cop that she had foreseen the deaths of three of the slasher’s victims.

She joined the mourners heading for the exit, peeling off when she reached the foyer to find a restroom. Spotting the signs at the other end of the foyer, she started weaving her way through the crowd.

Halfway there, the sound of Mark Phagan’s smooth baritone caught her ear. “It’s no big deal-I just had other stuff to do-but Melissa thinks I was with y’all at the game. So if it comes up, that’s where I was, okay?”

Rose followed his voice and found Mark standing a few feet away, addressing a couple of men who looked to be around his age. Both men nodded, one shooting a wry half-grin at the other as if sharing a private joke.

Rose’s heart sank. Mark had already cheated at least once during the engagement. Was he doing it again?

She gave herself a mental shake and pushed on toward the restrooms. Whether Mark was cheating or not, that was for Melissa to figure out by herself. The last time Rose had tried to interfere with the course of true love, her efforts had ended in tragedy in the middle of Bridey Woods.

The restroom was full, women waiting in single file along the wall for their turn inside. Rose fell in behind the last woman, letting her gaze wander to the opposite wall where a bulletin board hung next to the door of the business office. Amid a sea of white sheets of paper full of tiny black type, a sunny yellow flyer gleamed like a beacon, catching her eye.

Special Neighborhood Meeting, read the bold headline across the top of the page. Below, an announcement of free CPR lessons listed a date and time. Too bad it wasn’t self-defense lessons instead, Rose thought.

She cocked her head. Why couldn’t it be? Why couldn’t the Southside neighborhood association set up a special meeting, bring in the police or a self-defense expert to tell women how to avoid being the killer’s next victim? The women in the neighborhood weren’t receiving any warning at all. The police weren’t putting suspect sketches on the evening news or even admitting that the killings were connected-didn’t want to “panic” people.

But if the neighborhood association got involved, the police wouldn’t have much choice, would they? Get enough voices clamoring for answers, and the police might have to admit what Rose already knew: There was a killer stalking Southside and, if he wasn’t stopped, more women would die.

She had the association president’s contact information filed somewhere at home. She’d call as soon as she got there.

DANIEL WAS WAITING in the funeral-home foyer when Frank Carter emerged from the chapel. His old friend met his gaze with a wry half-smile. “Imagine meeting you here.”

“Just thinking of you a little while ago,” Daniel said. “Stopped by Tina’s grave on the way in.”

Frank’s expression darkened. “See any ghosts?”

Not quite the response Daniel expected. “Only the ones in my mind. Still avoiding the place?”

Frank didn’t answer.

“Meant to tell you, I was sorry to hear about your mother,” Daniel added. “Mom wrote to tell me about it.”

“It was strange. She was in good health all the way up to the massive coronary. I don’t know, maybe if I’d been here, I might have seen the signs.” He shrugged. “Ten years away, and the first time I come back home, it’s to bury my mother.”

“And decided to stay?”

“Something like that.”

“Where are you living these days?”

“Home sweet home,” Frank said with a grimace. “The place needs a lot of work before it’s ready to sell and I don’t see the point of spending rent money on an apartment when the house is there and paid for.”

“Shrine still there?” Daniel asked.

Frank’s scowl answered the question. “I still can’t go in there. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like she’s still there. I just…can’t.”

“Going to make it hard to sell the house.”

Frank slanted a look at Daniel. “I’m working up to it.” He moved ahead, toward the exit to join the mourners lining up for the slow drive out to the newly turned grave at the far side of the cemetery.

Daniel lingered behind, looking for Rose Browning. He’d kept an eye out for her since spotting her heading toward the restrooms. He hadn’t seen her come out, so she had to still be back there somewhere.

Unless there was a rear exit.

As he started toward the corridor, the object of his search emerged, stopping short as her startled gaze met his.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said quietly.

She narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t think you were.”

“I need to talk to you.”

One dark eyebrow arched. “About what?”

“Alice Donovan’s murder.”

The other eyebrow lifted. “Why would I want to talk to you about Alice’s murder? You’re not a policeman.”

He debated telling her who he was and why he was interested, but he didn’t want to lay out all his cards yet. He compromised. “Actually, I’m something of a true-crime buff. I’m thinking about writing a book on unsolved murders in the southeast.”

“You want to write about people murdering other people?”

Not the question he’d expected. “Maybe what I write will help solve the crimes.”

Her pale brown eyes glittered with skepticism. “Right.”

He couldn’t blame her for her doubt. It wasn’t a great cover story but it had the advantage of being the truth. Sort of. “Whoever killed Alice has killed before.”

She didn’t look surprised. Interesting.

“There was another woman about a month ago. Sherry Nicholson. Seen leaving the Anchor on Magnolia Avenue around midnight. Next morning her body turned up in the woods near Vulcan Park.” When Rose didn’t respond, he continued. “Victim number two was a med student at U.A.B.”

“Elisa Biondi,” Rose blurted softly.

He narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

“They’re connected, aren’t they?”

“I think so.”

Her gaze lifted to meet his. “Interesting hobby you have.”

He didn’t like her cool tone. What he did wasn’t a hobby; it was his job. He was damned good at it. Sometimes he got a big rush out of it. A lot of women found him fascinating because of what he chose to do with his life. Just not Rose Browning, apparently.

“He didn’t start here in Birmingham,” he said.

Her brow creased. “You think he’s killed before?”

Daniel hesitated, not sure why he’d opened up to her as much as he had already. He needed to control the conversation, not get sucked into spilling his guts to a big-eyed brunette beauty with her own secrets. “Why were you at Alice Donovan’s the other morning?”

She hesitated before answering. “I called her business that morning, and her employees were worried because she was very late. I’d offered to check on her. What were you doing there?”

“Following the police from the crime scene.”

She gave a soft huff of surprised laughter.

“I talked to your client, Melissa Bannerman. She told me you were at a club with her and Alice the night she died. Said you left a minute or so after Alice.”

Rose cocked her head. “Melissa told you that?”

“Yes.”

She stepped back, putting more distance between them. “Or maybe you were stalking Alice.”

He ignored the accusation. “Did you see Alice leave?”

“Yes. I saw her drive away, and she was alone and fine.” Rose started to walk briskly toward the exit.

Daniel caught up with her outside the funeral home. “That’s all you saw?”

“You think I saw someone grab her and just forgot to call the police?” She pinned him with a fierce glare.

“You may have seen something you don’t realize you saw.”

“I didn’t,” she said. But unease flickered over her face.

“Maybe someone at the bar paying too much attention to her. Or a car that left the parking lot right after hers-”

“I didn’t see anything like that.” She moved away, heading toward the parking lot. He let her go, walking to his Jeep at a more leisurely pace. She was already pulling out onto the highway by the time he slid behind the steering wheel.

No matter. He knew where she lived.

“IS IT A GO?” Rose tightened her grip on her cell phone, waiting for the neighborhood association president’s response.

“Tuesday at seven, regular room,” John Fielding answered.

Rose sighed with relief. “Perfect. Do you need me to help pass out the fliers?”

“We’ll have some printed up by one o’clock this afternoon. You can pick up a batch then.” He gave her the address of his law firm.

“I’ll be there.” Rose hung up and looked across the desk at Melissa Bannerman. “It’s on-next Tuesday at seven.”

Melissa smiled, though sadness lingered in her eyes. “I can’t believe you got it put together so quickly.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Mr. Fielding. He even managed to get the police to cooperate.”

Melissa looked surprised. “Did you think they wouldn’t?”

“The guy’s killed three women, and the cops haven’t got a clue. That’s not something they like to talk about.”

“Well, I definitely plan to be there.” Melissa stood, picking up the suit jacket draped over her desk chair. “After what happened to Alice, I’ve decided there’s no such thing as being too careful. I have a technician coming first thing in the morning to put in a new alarm system.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Rose agreed. She should consider it herself, although money was tight at the moment.

Melissa shrugged on her jacket and motioned toward the door. “Let’s go see what the Elegant Eatery has to offer.”

Rose let Melissa take the lead at the caterer’s, knowing her strong-willed client would make her own decision regardless of what Rose might suggest. She was too keyed up to sample the goods, anyway.

She couldn’t stop thinking about what Daniel Hartman had told her at Alice’s funeral.

It had been bad enough knowing that the killer had murdered three women. But if Daniel was right, he’d killed dozens of women across several states without being caught.

How could she possibly stop him before he killed again?