Breath of Malice(2)

His eyes widened slightly, lifting skin that had sagged at the corners. His smile grew, showing an overbite and uneven teeth. She could see in his expression that he would kill her now and saw that he would enjoy it. Paige inhaled her last breath.

“Federal agents! Drop your weapon and put your hands behind your back now!”

Paige recognized the voice of her squad leader. Agents swarmed from the tree line, taking up positions all around her and the man holding the gun to her head.

Paige continued to stare into the man’s eyes. His smile didn’t waver. Nor did he break eye contact. For an instant, Paige thought he was going to ignore her squad leader’s command and kill her anyway, but then he dropped his gun at her feet. And winked at her.





CHAPTER TWO

One Year Later



He’d winked at her. Agents had run to him, forcing him to his knees, then hauled him away. Paige’s next view of him, the man she’d since come to know as Todd Thames, had been at his murder trial. Now here she was, back in this Manhattan courtroom seated across from Thames again as she gave her accounting of the events that had transpired on that mountain one year ago.

Thames sat at the defendant’s table, and though she kept her gaze on the attorney directing her questioning, she could feel Thames’s eyes on her. Even a year later, those eyes still chilled her.

Every seat in the courtroom was filled. It was standing room only as members of the media, officers of the court and of the law, and the families of the women Thames had murdered took up every available space. All were gathered for this hearing, which had been called in response to a motion made by Thames’s attorney to have Thames’s conviction overturned, a conviction that had entailed the maximum sentence. New York was a death penalty state, and Thames had been sentenced to die.

The state maintained that motion was not valid, and the state’s attorney had pulled out all the stops to resurrect even the tiniest shred of evidence and testimony against Thames, including Paige’s testimony.

There’d been no doubt that Thames was the right man, but there’d been insufficient evidence to gain a lawful conviction. Someone had jumped the gun, or maybe made a mistake, or deliberately decided to enter into evidence an item found in Thames’s cabin that hadn’t been named in the search warrant and had not been openly visible for the prosecution to argue to include it under the plain view doctrine. The item was an earring belonging to one of the women. The unlawful introduction of this evidence had been overlooked during the first trial. But no longer.

Outside, April rain pelted the ground and had soaked the hair and suit jackets of the men and women in the courtroom. Paige took a breath in an effort to steady her vibrating nerves and inhaled the odor of damp clothing.

But that wasn’t all she smelled. Though Thames was several feet from her, she could smell his cologne. It was the same one he’d worn on the mountain. Paige had not forgotten that scent and now fought to keep from gagging.

“Agent Carson?”

Paige blinked at the trim female state attorney who’d addressed her. Paige realized that she had stopped speaking. The lawyer’s eyes looked like they were about to bulge out of her head, silently prodding Paige to get on with it.

Paige took a sip from the glass of water at her elbow and summoned all of her internal resources to keep her hand from shaking. She cleared her throat. “And then my squad arrived. Mr. Thames was taken into custody. I had no more dealings with him after that point.”

The Bureau had recovered three bodies. All three had been women in their mid-to-late twenties. In order for the murders to be classified as serial killings, there needed to be at least three victims, found at different times. The way the bodies had turned up had appeared calculated to Paige, not random. Though Paige was not a profiler, she had studied criminal behavior. She believed Thames was a narcissist who craved validation and who had lost patience with law enforcement running in circles and failing to identify him and bring him the recognition he wanted. The bodies had turned up at different public locations within hours of one another, and all the victims had been murdered in the same way. Paige believed Thames had given up the location of the bodies and just enough information to point the Bureau to him—but he hadn’t given them enough information to convict him.

Thames was a medieval history professor, and all three women had been his students at one time. An image of the brutalized women flashed in Paige’s mind. Bodies broken into unnatural angles. Shredded flesh where female body parts had been. Jaws locked in a silent scream. Paige felt the blood leave her face and bowed her head to force a blood rush.