raised her eyebrows, clearly surprised by the question. “Yes. She changed back to her natural color.”
“When?”
“After her wedding. About three weeks ago.”
Wiley ceased tapping his pen for the first time since Rees had entered the room. “So she’s a brunette now?”
“Her hair is about the same shade as mine.”
Trent nodded. Also the same shade as Farrentina Hamilton’s. “Did she say why she dyed it?”
“Oh yes. It was a big deal to her. A big compliment. She said Kane wanted her to be her natural self. He loved her just the way she was.”
His stomach turned at the thought of Kane whispering those words to Dixie, his voice thick with false charm. And judging from the revulsion on Rees’s face, she was fighting the same touch of nausea.
Wiley leaned forward across the scarred tabletop. “So he asked her to dye her hair brunette?”
“That’s what Dixie told me.” She glanced from Wiley to Rook to Trent.
Trent stared down at the tabletop. An icy point of foreboding pricked between his shoulder blades.
“Why do you want to know about Dixie’s hair color?”
Trent raised his gaze to meet hers. “It seems Kane has changed his hair color preference from blond to brunette in the past few weeks.”
She gave him a confused look.
“He asked Farrentina Hamilton to dye her hair brunette too.”
“The woman in the red lingerie,” she said, putting two and two together.
“Yes.”
“And the women he killed before were all blond, right? That was part of his signature.”
“Yes.”
“So what does this mean?”
Trent blew a frustrated breath through tight lips. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. A killer doesn’t just up and change his signature. It doesn’t make sense. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless hair color was never really part of Kane’s signature.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at Rees’s long brunette hair, shining under the fluorescent lights. Hair that smelled of lavender. Hair that had once flowed through his fingers and puddled on his pillow like warm silk.
The knife of dread broke skin and delved into muscle. “Have you ever done anything to Kane that he could have misconstrued? Anything that made him angry?”
The jolt that ran through Rees’s body was unmistakable.
He grasped her arm and willed her to face him. “What happened, Rees?”
She drew in a slow, deep breath. “About four months ago I published an article in an academic journal. An article about Kane, though I didn’t use his name. I don’t know how he got a hold of an academic publication in prison, but he did. And he figured the article was about him. He was very angry with me. He didn’t like some of the things I wrote.”
“What did he do?”
“I had one more meeting with him for the book I’m working on. He agreed to see me, but whenever I asked a question, he wouldn’t say a word. He’d just stare.” She closed her eyes and covered her mouth with trembling fingers. Her face grew more pale than death.
“What else, Rees?” he prompted.
She swallowed hard and opened her eyes, latching on to his gaze as if grasping for a lifeline. “That was when he started returning Dixie’s letters. He started courting her.”
A picture formed in his mind. A horrifying picture. Dread plunged to the hilt.
Kane acted out his violent fantasies on women to serve his twisted sense of revenge. He chose victims with the same hair color as the woman he believed had wronged him. Then he played out his game—letting his victim loose in an isolated forest, hunting her down, slitting her from neck to pelvic bone. With each woman he killed, he fantasized he was asserting his power and dominance over the woman who’d humiliated him—the true target of his hatred.
And this time, he feared Kane’s true target was Rees.
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