“Morgan Fletcher was a criminal defense attorney. He took the biggest cases, the most sensational ones. His clients—they were some of the worst killers out there. The first time we met, I was sure I wouldn’t like him at all. How could I? He defended the people I wanted to put away.” Her hair had slid over her face. “But when we talked, he understood me. No, he understood them.”
Yeah. The jealousy is back. I know the guy is a straight-up bastard, and I’m still jealous. How rational was that? Not at all. But who cared? With Chloe, Joel was far past the point of being rational.
“We could talk about killers for hours. About what drove people to commit horrible crimes. About the demons inside of us all. He could figure out what was happening at a crime scene as quickly as I could. He didn’t mind when I got lost in my own head. He didn’t mind when I spent days hunting a murderer. He liked to hear every detail about what I was doing. And I didn’t realize, until too late, that he liked it all too much.”
“The sonofabitch pulled a gun on me tonight, Chloe.”
Her head whipped up.
“And I broke his hand. A few fingers. Maybe his wrist. I also gave him a few other mementos to remember me by.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Marie said he had probably already called them. That he’d arranged the whole scene so it would look as if I’d assaulted him—and, yeah, guilty, but only because he made the first move and I was defending myself.”
“I’ve never seen anyone as good at manipulation as Morgan. He could have a jury believing a mass murderer was a choir boy. He could have me believing that the devil was prince charming.”
Joel wished he’d given the dick a few more mementos. “When did you realize the truth?”
“The night before I was supposed to go out on that yacht with him. Everything he said and did was perfect—when he was with me. Like each response was designed to please me. To match me. But no one is perfect, and it was that very perfection that made me so nervous. I started digging into his past. At first, everything was fine. So I had to look deeper and deeper. I had to go back more and more. It was only when I went back to his time in high school that I found my answer.”
“And you found it the night before the yacht trip?”
“His high school girlfriend vanished. Just disappeared one day. No trace of her was ever found.”
“How do you know he was involved? How’d you get proof?” A rough bark of laughter escaped him. “Another cadaver-sniffing dog—”
“I didn’t get proof. I had no proof. I had nothing but every instinct I possessed telling me that I had been wrong about him.” She was still hugging herself. “I don’t like to be wrong.”
“I have noticed that, sweetheart.”
She flinched. “She looked like me.”
“What?”
“Dark hair, blue eyes, similar build. She looked like me.”
He shoved away from the door. He wanted to pull her into his arms—
“I had no proof. No option. Just…fine, for the first time, I guessed. I called him. I told Morgan—I lied to him and said I knew what he’d done. One of my tests. Always testing people, yes? That’s me.” Chloe rocked back onto the balls of her feet. “I said I had proof. I said her name. I wanted his reaction.” Her breath had turned ragged.
“And what was his reaction?”
“Morgan said that the moment he met me, he knew I’d be the one.”
“The one fucking what?”
“The one who would understand him. The one who would see every part of him and understand what he was.”
I should have never let him get away. “So he admitted—”
“No, he never came out and admitted anything. But the next day, his yacht sank, and he was supposedly dead. I went to the police. Told them what I suspected, but his family was well connected in the area. He was well respected. Money and power can turn the tide on most stories.” A bitter laugh. “I’ve certainly seen that happen more than once in my life.”
“Wait.” His mind was spinning. “You said you got a card from him tonight—when I first came in, that’s what you said.”
“Yes.” She reached into the loose pocket of her shorts. Pulled out a tarot card.
The Magician.
“He wrote my name on the envelope that contained the card. I recognized his handwriting. I’d suspected