"What's your hourly rate?" Dan asked.
She gave him a number.
"I'll pay that plus twenty percent."
Alarm bells went off in Serena's head. "Why would you want to do that?"
Dan eased back into the leather folds of the sofa and cradled his coffee mug in both hands. "Because there may be some risk involved."
"Oh?"
"That's another reason why your background as a cop is important to me. You're used to dealing with risky situations."
"Let me hear what you have to say first," Serena told him.
Dan nodded. "I'm being blackmailed."
"Then you should call the police."
"No way," he said, shaking his head. "I can't risk this information coming to light."
"Someone blackmailing the county attorney raises all sorts of issues. You know that. You ought to be talking to Stride."
"Maybe so, but that's not an option in this case."
"What does this person have on you?" she asked.
"You don't need to know that."
"That's going to make it hard to help you," Serena said. "I don't like flying blind."
"Let's just say that it's sexual in nature. Okay?"
Serena's mind flitted to Maggie's question. Have you two ever done anything… strange?
"An affair?" she asked.
"You're not a detective anymore. Forget the interrogation. It makes no difference what I did. It's enough that I was stupid and shouldn't have done it."
"Does Lauren know?"
Dan snorted. "No, and you don't tell her a thing, okay?"
"What did you tell her about hiring me?"
"I said it was a political deal. Dirty tricks. She bought it."
"I take it you want me to find out who's blackmailing you." She wondered if he had fantasies of her conducting a hit for him.
"No, I don't care. I don't want to know. I just want to make this go away, and I need you to be my intermediary. This man has already given me a price, and I've got the money right here in cash."
Dan extracted a thick envelope from his suit pocket and deposited it on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
"He's going to call me in the next couple days about a drop," Dan continued. "I want you to make the payoff for me."
"Why not do it yourself?" Serena asked.
"And risk having the media there with cameras? No thanks. I want this all done at arm's length. Just you. No one else."
"This is a blackmailer. He won't be satisfied with one payoff. He'll be back for more."
"I'll take that risk."
Serena sighed. "Do you really need me to tell you this is a very bad idea?"
"Bad idea or not, I'm willing to pay a lot of money to have you handle this for me."
"You know there's no such thing as private investigator's privilege. If this were to wind up with the police, I'd have to tell them what I know."
"That's why I don't want it to wind up with the police."
Serena didn't like this. It smelled bad. "Do you have any idea who the blackmailer is?"
"No. He's just a voice on the phone."
"How did he get the information he has on you?"
"I don't know that either. I have some suspicions, but it doesn't matter now."
"You're sure he's not bluffing?" Serena asked.
"He told me things on the phone. It's no bluff."
Serena hesitated. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Dan to forget it, but she couldn't resist the adrenaline rush. This was the kind of hands-on street work she wanted as a PI. Something that made her feel like a cop again. The money was good, too. "Hourly rate plus thirty percent," she said.
"Now who's the blackmailer?" Dan asked. He smiled, put a hand on Serena's knee, and squeezed with his fingertips.
"Is it a deal?" she asked.
"Yes, fine."
"Good." Serena took his hand off her knee and twisted his wrist until his smile evaporated. "One other thing," she told him pleasantly. "Touch me again, and I'll snap off your fingers like the icicles on my roof."
She let go.
"Stride must have his hands full with you," Dan said, massaging away the pain.
"Call me when you know about the drop," Serena said. She picked up the envelope of cash, slid it into her pocket, and left the office.
Downstairs, she stopped again in the park near the statue of the centurion. Something about his empty granite eyes troubled her, and she felt the oppressive weight of the gray clouds overhead. She told herself again that it was nothing, but as she stood there, the feeling came back.
The same feeling that had followed her for weeks.
She was being watched.
6
He knew she could feel him staring at her, the way an antelope senses a tiger stalking from the camouflage of the bush. Invisible and deadly.
When he lifted the binoculars, her body leaped into focus, and it was as if he were standing next to her, breathing on her neck. As he watched her, she shivered. Her head wheeled in his direction, and through the binoculars, he got a chill of pleasure to have their eyes meet. His penis twitched inside his jeans, nudging its way down his leg, growing swollen and stiff.
"Ah, fuck," he murmured, relishing the sensation. It was especially sweet since he had spent ten years watching his manhood wither away. The guards taunted him that prison would make him shrivel up like a salted slug, and they were right. The more years he spent behind bars, the more his penis shrank. Nothing aroused him. He would beat off in his cell at night, but after a while, he could barely coax a hard-on out of his cock. He'd spit on it or rub it with soap, but it would just lay there, so tiny that his giant hand couldn't even pull it out from his groin.
But his organ had risen again that night in the abandoned house in Alabama during the hurricane. As he watched the cop drown in the basement, blood had surged between his legs, making him rigid. A spontaneous erection, ripe with power.
Four months had passed since a National Guard helicopter rescued him from the roof of the farmhouse. He wore clothes he had found in an upstairs bedroom, and he had shredded his inmate's fatigues and let them float away with all the other debris in the water. By the time the storm died away, the land around the house was a lake. The squad car was gone, and so was Deet's body. He was just a trapped homeowner who hadn't evacuated soon enough.
They took him to a shelter in Birmingham along with hundreds of other refugees, but he ran away that night, stole a car, and headed north. He didn't want to take any chance that he would be found out, or that the authorities at Holman would figure out he was on the loose. As it turned out, he needn't have worried. He jacked a laptop and kept an eye on the Internet by hacking into wireless connections as he made his way out of the South. Several days later, he found an article in the Montgomery newspaper that reported the story. The squad car had been found wrapped around a tree ten miles from the farmhouse, and Deet's headless body had turned up another five miles away in a different direction. All three people in the car were presumed dead, victims of the storm.
He was a nonperson. No identity. No past.
He could have gone anywhere, but he first had to deal with the fist of rage that beat its way through his chest. Payback for ten lost years.
"You feel me, don't you?" he whispered. "You know I'm here."
He had been laying his plans for Serena ever since he arrived in Duluth. Watching her. Stalking her. He could have taken her anytime, but he wanted the experience to linger. Every hunter knew-you don't break the neck of the captured animal right away. Once it's yours, you play with it for a while.
In the meantime, he had other prey. People like Dan. Mitch. Tanjy. And the alpha girls. People with dirty secrets they were desperate to conceal.
He remembered what the little queer in Holman had told him about the art of blackmail. If you know what someone is hiding, you can do anything you want to them, and they'll never breathe a word. The danger in poking a hive, though, was getting stung. He could have let the games go on even longer, but something unexpected had popped up like a fish out of the water and made him speed up his plans.