the candles, considering the rest of the room.
There were no pillows on the double bed, no top sheet, either. Just the fitted bottom sheet. The center of the bed was strewn with a path of red rose petals, as if flung there by a flower girl following a bride down the aisle. The remaining roses—at least two dozen—filled a vase on the dresser.
A seduction scene. If you could ignore the surgical tubing tied to the headboard. And the looped ends that could be quickly slipped around wrists and ankles, and which would only become tighter as the victim struggled. Since there was no footboard, the tubing had been attached to the legs of the Hollywood bed frame. Square knots, again, tied by a right-hander.
Three of the red rose petals had missed the bed entirely and resembled a blood trail.
Alec’s gut twisted. Everything inside him wanted to deny what he was seeing. No one could look at the room and not be shaken by it. Not think about the woman who was to have been lashed down and terrorized. Murdered. It was what nightmares were made of. For Alec it was even more personal than that. It was the nightmare he couldn’t escape. It represented not only the degradation that one human being could inflict upon another, it also represented Alec’s own failure.
He stepped carefully into the room. One narrow path in and the same path out. He’d been working crime scenes for enough years that it had become second nature.
Without even counting, he knew there would be twenty-seven candles—the cheap variety, which accounted for the heavy scent of wax. Just as he knew the brand of box cutter on the nightstand—Swain. Just as he knew the picture over the bed had been removed to make room for a different kind of artwork.
The kind that required blood.
Eleven months ago, his flight into Philadelphia International had been delayed because of a snowstorm. When he’d landed, he’d thought about calling Jill, but she would have been sleeping. She was a teacher and got up early. The roads were a mess, and it had taken him seventy minutes to go twenty-eight miles. The house had been dark. He’d come in through the garage, stopped in the kitchen long enough to drink a glass of milk—his dinner—and to add kibble to the cat’s dish.
He’d left his suitcase there, figuring he could undress in the dark and climb into bed without waking Jill. He’d thought the house cold, so had dialed up the thermostat as he passed.
He remembered that he’d hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, looked up into the familiar darkness above. He’d sensed something wasn’t right, but had quickly written it off. He was just beat.
He’d taken only the first two steps when he’d smelled it…the heavy scent of blood. His grip on the railing tightening, he’d tried to convince himself he was wrong. That the smell of death had been with him for so many days he was no longer capable of breathing air that wasn’t tainted with its stink.
And then he’d seen the bloody paw prints left by the cat.
Alec had taken the remaining steps two and three at a time, his weapon drawn.
But he was too late.
The attack had taken place midafternoon—the medical examiner had never been able to put an exact time on it because of the cool temperature in the house and the ceiling fan. Blood had soaked all the way through the mattress, forming a puddle on the wood floor beneath the bed.
“Alec.” Jack had followed him into the room, and now interrupted the too-vivid memory. “Talk to me.”
Talk to him? Alec realized he would give anything to talk to his brother. Not about police work and crime scenes, but about coming home, finding his wife murdered. To know deep down inside that he was the reason she was dead. That her death hadn’t been the work of a sexual sadist, but of someone out to destroy Alec. Someone seeking revenge for some perceived wrong.
But he couldn’t talk to Jack. Not because Jack wouldn’t listen, but because Alec couldn’t make himself say any of those words aloud.
“Alec?” This time Jack squeezed his brother’s shoulder.
Alec stepped out from under what was meant to be a comforting gesture. The pink cotton rug deadened the sound of his hard soles. He looked down at the bed. At the blank wall above. In his mind, he saw the bloody message the killer had left him eleven months ago.
REMEMBER.
And he did remember. Every second of every day, he remembered.
Alec looked back at his brother, at the young crime scene tech Martinez. “He’s grown tired of postcards. There’s nothing visceral in paper and ink.”
Stunned silence followed those words.
“But why now?” Jack remained unmoving.
It was as if the question threw some kind of switch inside Alec. He was no longer the grieving husband…desperate to right an unrightable wrong. He was the man who had spent years in the FBI facing the unimaginable. One of Quantico’s best. In reality, he was beginning to believe that he wasn’t all that much different from the men he’d hunted. Of late, he’d started to realize that he was more comfortable staring at photos of the dead than looking into the eyes of the living. He’d told his brother that tonight’s date was just pizza and conversation, but it hadn’t been. It had been a test. To see if he could sit across from an attractive woman and pretend that he was okay.
“Why now? Maybe he sees my leaving Philadelphia as a sign I’m moving on. He can’t let that happen.” Alec continued to examine the room, seeking subtle changes in the scene—a new twist—that might suggest that the killer was evolving.
Alec placed his hands in his pockets. For the first time in his career, they were shaking, not just with anger, but with fear, too. For the woman in the other room. He immediately closed out that line of thought, wouldn’t allow himself to go there quite yet.
“He needs to maintain control. Control is very important to him. You can see it in the precision of everything he does.” Alec checked out the top of the dresser, the room’s small bookshelf. “He tidied up in here. Dusted. Rearranged her books. Probably went through them. He’d want to know everything he could about her.” Not because he was interested in her, but because he wanted to know what had drawn Alec to her.
“How can you know that?” Martinez asked, his voice filled with skepticism.
Alec swung his gaze to the man briefly. “Because the mantel in the living room hasn’t been dusted recently. The end table showed signs that someone attempted to swipe away the worst of it with a hand, but didn’t shift the lamp aside to be thorough—probably Katie when she got home tonight. Books are piled on the end of the sofa. The ones that fell onto the floor have been left there.”
Alec closed his eyes in an attempt to stave off the headache building behind his right eye. “Living rooms are usually kept ready for company, but our bedrooms, that’s where we can be ourselves. We can toss the magazine we’ve been reading in bed onto the floor, get up in the morning and step over it and never concern ourselves with the possibility that we’re slobs.” Several magazines were neatly stacked on the corner of the nightstand.
“And Katie?” Jack asked. “A waitress in a restaurant where you have breakfast? Why choose her?”
Alec thought back. “It’s been suggested that I observe Katie more than other people. A few, including you, Jack,
