Chapter Six

Ben

I slept for shit. No surprise, really, given everything that weighed on my mind. It meant I was more groggy than usual when the insistent ringing of my phone had me rolling over and groping for it on my nightstand. My alarm? No, wrong sound. It was someone calling me. Which, given the darkness of my bedroom, could mean only one thing. This part of the job never got any easier.

"DCI Weaver," I said, my voice reflecting my lack of cognizance perfectly, as I struggled to fight my way through the layers of sleep still hanging over me like the world's heaviest shroud.

If Baros noticed, he didn't comment, choosing to cut to the chase instead. "There's been another one." Fuck! I levered my legs over the side of the bed, my bare toes sinking into the carpet as he reeled off an address and I memorized it. There'd been no pattern in terms of area, the murders spread over four different boroughs of London. And now it was five, the address taking me to Whitechapel. Hunting ground of Jack the Ripper. How apt.

"Take your necromancer."

My necromancer. He had been once. Until grief and guilt had ripped him away from me and left me reeling, my behavior in retrospect, the complete opposite to what it had needed to be, which had left us both at fault for throwing away the perfect relationship. If you could screw up fate, then maybe you didn't deserve to be happy. We had a chance, though, to do something good. Something that would put an end to the murders once and for all.

I pulled clothes on awkwardly with one hand while I called Griffin with the other. Only a few hours had passed since our last interaction had ended badly, so I doubted he'd take kindly to me calling him again. Hopefully, given the hour, he'd realize the implications. If I was lucky, tonight would be the beginning and end of our partnership. We'd get the information we needed and Griffin would exit stage left. Again. And I could get back to normality. Assuming you could call the fated mate bond that still existed between us normal. When we'd split, I'd expected it to fade with time. It hadn't. On a bad day, it was just as strong as ever.

The phone went to voicemail as I sat on the side of the bed and tied my shoes. There was no point in leaving a message, so I hung up and tried again. "Answer, you piece of—"

"What?"

Not the friendliest of greetings, but then I hadn't expected it to be. "I just got the call."

"What call?"

Griffin sounded even less with it than I'd been when I'd spoken to the DCS. "The call about another murder. "

"Shit!"

"Yeah. My thoughts exactly. It's in Whitechapel. I'll pick you up on the way. Do you still live in the same place?"

A slight hesitation and then, "I do."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Meet me out front. I'll be in a silver Toyota Corolla." I didn't wait for Griffin's agreement before I ended the call. If he was going to back out, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't kidnap him and force him there against his will. It was one thing to agree to something in the bright sunshine of the day—it'd been cloudy today, but my point still stood—and another to go through with it in the cold and dark of early morning. An ex had once told me that only someone twisted would leave the warmth of their bed to attend a crime scene, and tonight, I found myself inclined to agree with him.

I pulled up in front of Griffin's building in less time than I'd stated, tamping down on the waves of nostalgia threatening to engulf me. Once upon a time, it hadn't just been Griffin's building; it had been mine as well, the two of us moving in together less than three weeks after meeting. We'd done everything quickly, like we'd been determined to live our lives in fast forward. Everything had been perfect. Until it wasn't.

I was so busy trying not to remember how Griffin just hadn't come home one day and had stayed away for weeks until I'd finally given into the inevitable and left, that when the passenger door opened, I startled. "Bit jumpy, aren't you?" Griffin said with a smirk as he climbed in. I spared the large backpack he'd pulled onto his lap a glance, but didn't question it.

Having left the engine idling, I wasted no time in pulling away from the curb. "I didn't know if you'd come. "

"I said I would, didn't I? When do I ever say things and not go through with them?"

When you asked me to marry you. You didn't go through with that, did you? My fingers tightened around the steering wheel as I struggled not to verbalize my thoughts. "Right. You normally just say no."

"There you go then. I said yes, so here I am. And given it's almost three in the morning, I feel I should be congratulated for that."

"Congratulations. Welcome to the real world."

Griffin turned his head to stare out of the window, denying me a glimpse of his expression. "Oh, my world's real enough. We just conduct it at more reasonable hours, like after breakfast."

Leaning forward slightly, I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a chunky Kit Kat, flicking it onto Griffin's lap. "There you go, breakfast."

He picked it up and stared at it, but didn't unwrap it. "Too kind."

We'd barely gone a couple of miles before my nose wrinkled, the whiskey fumes filling the car too strong to ignore. "Jesus! It smells like a distillery in here." Griffin turned his head my way, the power of his glare undisputable. "Well, it does." I opened the window, the breeze that rushed in cold but infinitely fresher. "Couldn't you have taken a shower or something?"

"You gave me fifteen minutes."

"You could have brushed your teeth or used some mouthwash."

"I could have done. I didn't." A brief pause, and then, "Is this what you're going to be like? If I'd wanted non-stop nagging, I would have gone ahead and married you. "

A knife in my gut would have hurt less. I tried to think of something equally cutting to retort with and came up short, settling for silence instead. Eventually, Griffin sighed. "I'm sorry. That was a low blow and I shouldn't have said it."

"It was," I agreed. "We'd be better off pretending we're strangers."

Griffin gave a humorless laugh. "I'm not sure that's an option."

Neither was I. Strangers didn't feel each other's emotions. They couldn't tell what the other one had eaten for dinner that night, and they certainly didn't suffer second-hand orgasms.

I didn't have to check the numbers of the houses as we turned onto the road in Whitechapel. The uniformed officers crawling across the small yard like ants, and the police cordon to keep people at a distance, made our destination obvious. I parked the car just outside the cordon and climbed out. Griffin was slower to join me, his expression reminding me that this was my world, not his.

"It's a lot," he said as he took it all in.

"It is," I agreed as I engaged the car's central locking and flashed my badge at the officer tasked with enforcing the cordon. "He's with me," I stated, as the young police constable's gaze turned Griffin's way. "A specialist assigned to this case."

He nodded and waved us through, both of us maneuvering ourselves beneath the tape. The front door of the house was wide open, forensic officers in full gear coming and going. I was required to show my ID a couple more times before we reached the bedroom where most of the action was taking place. It didn't bother me. I would have been more upset by people not doing their jobs. Stringent security meant less chance of a crime scene being contaminated .

With Lou confined to desk duty to make way for Griffin, Sergeant Michael Brownlow took on the responsibility of briefing me, our paths having crossed previously. "What have we got?" I asked him, keen to know as much as I could before I surveyed the scene itself. It helped to have a more rounded picture.

He raked his gaze over Griffin, but didn't question who he was. "Neighbors reported a disturbance at just gone midnight."

"What sort of disturbance?"

"An argument. Banging. It seems like this one put up more of a fight than the others. They saw someone leave, but said it was too dark to get much of an idea of anything beyond it being a male of above average height."

"No description at all?" I tamped down on the buzz of excitement at someone having seen the perpetrator. It might be more than we'd gotten for any of the other murders, but that didn't amount to much if it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

Brownlow shook his head. "No idea of age. No idea whether his hair was dark or blond. Said he kept to the shadows." He checked his notepad. "They said he was carrying a bag. Described it as a fairly standard backpack. No markings on it as far as they could see. Probably black or dark green, but again, they weren't sure."

"Probably to carry his fingers," I said. "I guess a pocket just doesn't cut it. Too much chance of them falling out."

Nobody balked at what I'd said, everyone carrying on with what they were doing. A dark sense of humor was a must if you wanted to survive in this game for longer than two minutes, and unless they were fresh out of police training, they knew that. Sometimes it was the only thing that kept you sane. "What about our victim?" I asked. "Do we know anything about him yet?"

"Neighbors said he was quiet and mostly kept to himself. They know he was a lawyer but couldn't say what type. Apart from work, he went out a couple of nights a week. Usually Wednesday and Saturday. They seemed embarrassed to admit they knew that. I guess they don't want to come across as peeping toms. They didn't know where he went, or whether it was alone or with friends or work colleagues." Brownlow held up a driving license, letting it fall open so that a photograph stared back at me. "We found this in his office. Rupert Shaw. Age twenty-five."

I took the driving license from him, holding it where Griffin could see it as I studied it. Apart from the date of birth and the photograph, there was nothing else of note, the address on it the one where we stood. He was a handsome man, and I made an effort to remember what he'd looked like, knowing that the sight awaiting me inside the bedroom would be a far less palatable one, and wanting to remember him as the man he once was before he'd made a fatal mistake. "Did the neighbors say anything else?"

Brownlow shook his head. "Nothing of use. Lots of guilt and recrimination, but that's nothing new."

"Guilt about what?" Griffin asked.

"That they didn't come round and find out what was going on when they heard the disturbance, that if they had, they might have stopped it from happening," Brownlow said.

"What made them call it in?" I asked.

Brownlow gave a wry smile. "The bedroom light staying on, would you believe? They found it suspicious. Said he never slept with it on. It was enough for the husband to come knocking. At which point, he found the back door open."

"Why does he leave doors open?" I mused aloud. "That's three times out of the five that we discovered the body more quickly because he left the door open."

"In a hurry to leave?" Griffin theorized.

I shook my head. "It just seems sloppy compared to everything else. He's not leaving fingerprints. He's not leaving any evidence behind except for the symbols and the body. It just seems unnecessary."

Griffin rubbed his chin, stubble rasping beneath his fingertips. "You think he wants them to be discovered more quickly? Why? What would that achieve?"

"No idea." It was worth thinking about, though. I might not have investigated a serial killer before, but like any other police officer, I'd done my fair share of reading up on them, both in terms of cases and psychological profiling. Sometimes they wanted to be stopped. Was that what was going on here? Did we have a killer who couldn't control himself and wanted someone else to do it for him? It would fit with why there had been so many murders in such a short time. That fact alone screamed a lack of control.

Brownlow cleared his throat. "We'll interview the neighbors again once things have calmed down a bit and they're not operating on adrenaline. See if they can think of anything else useful."

I nodded, various theories running through my head at lightning speed. Uniformed police would also canvas the neighborhood, just to put together a more complete picture of Rupert Shaw. Neighbors always noticed stuff, even if they pretended not to. Once Brownlow drifted away, the only thing left to do was take the few steps down the hallway to the bedroom. I wished I could say that this part got easier, but it never did, even when you could predict exactly what was waiting for you.