“This is you demonizing me to avoid guilt and make yourself feel good about you. Everything I did, I did to protect you.”
“That’s how you justify searching my house and looking at all my research notes?”
“I saw someone hide their face and put a note on your car. I asked you about it. And like it or not, I know you. And I knew by your reaction that you were in trouble.”
“I can handle my own trouble.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m ten feet under in this, right along with you.”
“I’m crystal clear on how ten feet under you are in this, Kane.”
“Are you? Because the tone of those notes says that your note writer is trying to turn you against me. And that’s damn convenient, considering a woman was killed in one of my rentals and two of Romano’s people had their heads chopped off. Obviously meant to turn attention on me.”
“I never for a minute believed you killed that woman, and for the most part, I didn’t believe you chopped off the heads.”
He arches a brow. “For the most part?”
“Just being honest, the way you say you’re honest with me.”
“You know—”
“That you wouldn’t leave a trail that leads to you?” I ask, and I don’t wait for an answer. “Yes. I do, but I also know you’re capable of killing. Because like it or not, I know you, too. More than either of us likes to admit.”
“And yet at some point you convinced yourself that I’d act with stupidity and kill Romano’s men.” He doesn’t give me time to reject that statement, continuing with, “And you didn’t come to me about those notes. In other words, your note-writing stalker has succeeded in dividing us.”
“For a Yale-educated attorney, you might not be stupid, but you’re choosing to play dumb. Those notes didn’t scare me and they didn’t divide us. My badge did.”
“You always had a badge.”
“You didn’t always run the cartel. Your father did.”
“I don’t run it now.”
“You inferred otherwise last night,” I say.
“Stop deflecting. Tell me about the notes, Lilah.”
“Says the king of deflection. They started the night I arrived. I was on the beach, and when I got back to the house, someone had thrown a bloodlike substance on the sliding glass door and left a note. It spiraled from there.”
“They read amateurish with an almost adolescent effort.”
“Which could mean that this person wants me to underestimate them, or they’re just plain crazy.”
“Or they really are amateurish and adolescent.”
“Maybe. I doubt it. Have you ever seen the notes Son of Sam left at his murder scenes? They were in childlike script, and one of them read along the lines of, ‘I say goodbye and good night. Police: Let me haunt you with these words. I’ll be back! I’ll be back! To be interpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!’” I pause to clarify. “He actually wrote ugh. And it was signed with, ‘Yours in Murder, Mr. Monster.’ His victims,” I continue, “inclusive of those who lived and died, neared twenty.”
“You’re telling me you think this person is violent.”
“I’m telling you that no two killers are alike. Just because he, or she, is not the kind of killer you understand does not make them not a killer. And furthermore, adolescentlike behaviors do not necessarily preclude or exclude a propensity for violence. Bottom line here, Kane: this person knows our secret. And if that person knows, so, most likely, does someone else.”
“Which means we need to know two things: Who knows and what do they plan to do to use it against us? Because they wouldn’t be taunting you unless that’s what they intended.”
“For two years there has been silence,” I say. “And then I returned and the silence ended. This was never about you, was it?”
“No. In my world, people claim their sins. No one came forward. In fact, the more I dug for answers, the deeper they seemed to get buried.”
“So whoever ordered my attack—because we both know it wasn’t random—wanted me gone then. And they still want me gone.”
“And yet someone was killed in your city with the exact same tattoo as the man who attacked you here.”
“What are you saying?”
“Someone sent you a calling card to come home.”
CHAPTER SIX
There’s no such thing as a coincidence.
I live those words during my investigations, but somehow, I’ve missed the importance they play in these murders. “The murders in LA were to get my attention. The murder of your employee, at your rental, when I arrived, was to get our attention. Both assumptions worthy of a debate about where th
at might lead us.”
“Agreed,” Kane says. “Assuming those things are correct.”
“Can we now also assume that Romano is behind all this?”
“He’d be dead if I believed that.”
“But he approached me at the tattoo parlor,” I counter.
“I’d refused his meeting and told him he had to meet with my uncle, who, contrary to your belief, runs the cartel.”
“He approached me at the tattoo parlor. That’s not a coincidence or just because he couldn’t reach you.”
“I said that to him, but he had a prepared answer. He’d been sitting on the anonymous tip for years. When you got back in town, he called me. That’s proven true. His first attempt at contact was the day after you arrived. And when you showed up on his turf, and at the particular parlor that is known for that tattoo, he didn’t want you to end up dead and have me look to him.”
“But he knows about the tattoo. He told me that the tattoo was a blood tattoo.”
“He shared that information with me as well.”
“What does that mean? Blood tattoo?”
“There are whispers of a group called Blood Assassins who are supposedly inked in blood tattoos, but no one believes they really exist.”
“The bleeding Virgin Mary? Is that the blood tattoo?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know this from the beginning?”
“No. I knew they had ink but not what kind of ink. People clam up on this topic.”
“Then they’re afraid, which means they must have a reason. And I find that where there is fear there is fire.”
“Perhaps not the fire you’re assuming. These assassins could well be a story created to cover up a crime, and that snowballed into a bigger piece of fiction.”