County, only a few yards from the trucking company where Brenda had worked, staring down at the bloodstained body of his sister-in-law.
He forced himself to touch the store clerk’s throat to check for a pulse, knowing what he’d find as surely as he knew his own name.
This killer wasn’t going to leave behind a live victim. He never had before.
Gabe pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911.
Then he pulled out the card still resting in his back pocket. The one Alicia Solano had handed him before she let him out of her apartment.
Alicia answered on the third ring, her voice raspy and alarmed.
“It’s Gabe Cooper,” he said tersely, not bothering with small talk, since he knew she wouldn’t want it. “There’s been another murder.”
“What?” She sounded more awake now, and over the phone, he heard the rustle of fabric, as if she were throwing on a robe. Gabe was tempted to let himself dwell on the picture that rose to mind at that thought, if only to drive out the sight of the dead woman lying at his feet.
He’d give almost anything to get that image out of his head.
“I stopped at a convenience store on Route 7—Stiller’s Food and Fuel,” he said aloud. “Nobody came to ring me up, so I looked for the cashier. I found her in a back room. Dead. It’s the same guy, Alicia.”
“As the other two coed murders?” she asked carefully.
“As all of them,” he answered, his gaze drawn back to the murderer’s handiwork. “All of Victor Logan’s murders. Or the ones he helped facilitate,” he added, giving in to the probability that Alicia’s theory was right. “Alicia, this guy’s still killing. And you’re right. We have to stop him.”
Chapter Four
It was almost two o’clock in the morning before Gabe Cooper knocked on Alicia’s door. She’d spent the hours since his call on her sofa, certain she’d be unable to sleep. But the long day at work and her stressful evening had taken a toll on her stamina. Gabe’s knock woke her from a dead sleep.
She pushed to a sitting position on the sofa where she’d nodded off, taking a second to gain control over her jangling nerves. Tightening her robe over the shorts and tank top she wore as pajamas, she pushed to her feet. After a quick check of the peephole, she unlocked the door and let Gabe inside.
He looked haggard and apologetic. “I should have just gone back to the motel instead. It’s so late—”
She took his arm and led him to the sofa. “No, I want to hear everything you want to tell me. I guess you’ve been with the cops?”
Gabe’s hair already looked as if he’d spent the last few hours running his hands through it. Another pass didn’t do anything to improve its disheveled state. “Yeah. They had a lot of questions.”
She hadn’t even considered they might think him a suspect. “They didn’t arrest you or anything, did they?”
“No. They called my brother Aaron, who’s a deputy sheriff back home. He vouched for me. That seemed to be good enough for the locals.”
“This is so weird. Your just dropping by that particular convenience store at that particular time—”
“Yeah, I think the cops were pretty struck by that, too. But it’s less than a mile up the road from my motel, and I hadn’t eaten much dinner, so I went to stock up on some snacks.” Gabe grimaced. “Not really that hungry anymore.”
Her chest ached with sympathy. He looked so tired. “You know, maybe what you really need is sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow—”
Gabe shook his head. “It’s fresh in my head now. Best time to discuss it.”
“Okay. How do you want to start? Just tell me what happened, start to finish? Or skip to the details?”
“Nothing really happened—I went to the store, shopped for the food, and by the time I got to the counter, nobody had responded to the bell over the door that rang when I arrived.” Gabe’s blue eyes met hers suddenly. “Can I have some water?”
“Of course.” Alicia kicked herself mentally for not offering something when he first arrived. She found a large glass and filled it with water, adding extra ice because she’d seen the way he’d eyed the glass earlier that evening with a mixture of amusement and mild disappointment. Southerners seemed to like an inordinate amount of ice in their beverages.
He took the glass from her. “Extra ice,” he murmured, a small smile curving the edges of his mouth.
She smiled back. “I guess you earned it.”
He cradled the glass between his large hands. “It was so quiet. I called out, thinking maybe the clerk was in the back and hadn’t heard the bell, but there was no answer.”
“So you went into the back?”
He nodded. “The back room was dark, but I could feel her. When I turned on the light, I knew exactly what I’d see.”
The haggard look in his eyes when he lifted his gaze to meet hers made her breath catch. She reached across and covered his hand with her own.
He looked down at her hand, slowly turning his own until his palm touched hers. “I know you told me the signatures were similar, but when I saw her lying there—” He broke off, seeming unable to find the words.
She waited in silence, realizing Gabe Cooper was dealing with a lot more than just finding a dead body this evening. He’d found Brenda Cooper’s body, too. He’d been younger than Alicia was now, no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. It might well have been the first time he’d ever seen a dead body outside a funeral home. And now, it had happened again.
Gabe cleared his throat, finally, and finished his thought. “It was like finding Brenda’s body all over again. The pose, the wounds, the woman’s shape and overall looks.” His gaze slanted toward her. “You fit the profile, Alicia. You have to know that.”
She nodded.
“You have to be really careful, do you understand?”
“I know,” she agreed. She’d thought of little else since she’d first realized just how much she looked like the previous two victims and, if Gabe’s reaction were anything to go by, the third victim as well. “Did you get a name for the victim?”
“Melanie Phelps.”
Alicia gave a small start. Melanie Phelps was in one of her psych classes. “I know her. About twenty-seven, shoulder-length dark brown hair, brown eyes—”
Gabe nodded. “This guy is a lot more specific than I ever really gave him credit for being.”
“How would you have known?” she asked sensibly. “You knew about Brenda, and after the fact, you learned about the other women in Mississippi and Alabama, but with the scrapbook practically destroyed, you couldn’t have tracked those people down and made the connections.”
“How did you do it?” Gabe asked, waving his hand at the folder still lying on her coffee table. “You’ve already connected these murders to previous murders, including Brenda’s. How’d you even know where to look?”
She listened for any hint of suspicion or skepticism in Gabe’s voice, but all she heard was curiosity. “It started with a favor I was doing for a friend. He’s a police officer, and he’d been the first officer on the scene at Meredith Linden’s murder—the one at the TV repair shop in Blicksville. Anyway, he went to college in Livingston, and there was a case there that had been a big deal in town, and Tony—my friend—thought Meredith Linden’s case sounded suspiciously similar.”
“So he asked you to work your profiling mojo?”
She bit back a smile. “Something