and then walked to the desk where the room service menu was. She stood perusing it for a few minutes, her stomach growling. He’d given her quite the workout the night before, he owed her some sustenance now along with her payment.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said smoothly, causing her to jump and drop the room service menu, a small scream escaping her lips.
She turned to find him directly behind her. She laughed, putting a hand over her rapidly beating heart. She glanced over his shoulder at the bed where he’d just been, the silver cuffs hanging open on the bedpost. “What are you, Houdini?”
He smiled slowly, moving a piece of hair away from her face. “Something like that. I don’t like being restrained, Freya.”
She suddenly felt nervous, scared, an unseen tension expanding in the air around them. “Sorry.” She gave him her most contrite expression, the one meant to soothe men with control issues. “I was just playing around.”
“I know you were.” He looked down at the room service menu and then back at her. There was something in his eyes, something that looked . . . barely controlled. Something that stirred up her fight or flight response. Stay still, don’t move. As quickly as it’d appeared, the tension dissipated. John flicked the menu, startling her. “Order yourself some breakfast and charge it to the room. I’ll pay on my way out. I have to get going.” He glanced out the window. Freya swallowed. He’d be on his way then . . . to Niagara Falls had he said?
She’d always liked Niagara Falls, liked that you could look right over those wondrous falls and see the United States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Reed smeared a drop of peppermint oil beneath his nose, handing the bottle to Ransom as they walked toward the medical examiner’s lab.
“Thanks for coming,” Dr. Westbrook said, looking up from his work as they walked through the door. He put the instruments he was using on a small rolling table behind him and brought the sheet up over the cadaver. Reed kept his eyes on the doctor, preferring not to glance at the prone body on the table in front of him.
“Of course,” Reed said. Dr. Westbrook had called them at the office just a half hour before, telling them he might have some information, but needed to show them first. “You said it might be pertaining to the recent murders?”
“It might. Hold on.” Dr. Westbrook took off the gloves he was wearing and walked to the back of the lab, stopping at the large stainless steel sink to wash his hands. As he was drying them, he walked to a door that Reed knew led to a tiny office that held a desk and a few filing cabinets. When the doctor emerged a few seconds later, he was holding a file folder. He placed it on the empty gurney Reed and Ransom were standing in front of and flipped it open. Inside was the photograph of an obviously dead man, his head caved in on one side, his facial skin mostly missing on the other.
“Meet Mr. Doe,” Dr. Westbrook said.
“Ouch. How’d that happen?” Ransom asked.
“He jumped to his death a few months ago,” Dr. Westbrook said. “Or fell, though I’m not sure how someone would accidentally fall from the edge of an overpass. He landed on the highway below and got run over by a couple of vehicles before traffic came to a halt and it was called in. I ruled it a suicide.”
“What makes you think this might be connected to the other murders?”
Dr. Westbrook picked up the close-up photograph of the man’s face, laying it aside. Underneath that was another photo and Reed and Ransom both leaned forward to determine what it was. To Reed, it looked like a blob of meaty flesh with some hair growing from it. “Is that . . . the back of his neck?” Reed asked, looking up at the doctor.
“Yes. Look closer.”
Reed did, his eyes lighting on a small portion of smooth skin amidst the carnage. “A brand,” he breathed.
“I thought something about the leaf brand looked familiar,” Dr. Westbrook said. “I couldn’t place it last week when you were here and I showed you the brand on the other victim’s neck, but it finally hit me this morning, so I looked up the pictures from this case. What do you think?” He pulled another picture from beneath the folder and handed it to Reed. It was the picture of