Beautiful Sacrifice

widened. “And I’m a man with a real big hunger. Let’s do this gallery so I can get on home and…eat.”

C HAPTER T EN
     
    P URPLE DUSK WAS SLIDING OVER THE LAST ORANGE LIGHT of day, but the parking structure still felt like a three-story oven as Hunter parked his Jeep. Jase’s white minivan idled by, looking for an empty space in the gloom.
    Hunter and Lina got out and stood near the Jeep, waiting for Jase. Even after he went by, she kept looking around, checking out the cars coming in. Hunter was doing the same thing, but it was a survival habit he had picked up on the job. Like most animals, he had a sixth sense that told him when he was being watched. Every time he was around Lina, the prickly warnings would go off, a constant stretch of nerves that had nothing to do with sexual attraction.
    “Do you have an ex who is a stalker?” Hunter asked Lina.
    She blinked. “What?”
    “You act like someone who’s afraid she’s being followed.”
    “No ex-anything, including stalker.” She went back to staring at the entrance.
    Hunter waited, watching her.
    “Okay, I know this sounds crazy,” she said after a minute, “but sometimes I feel like I’m being followed.”
    “How long has it been going on?”
    She kept watching the garage entrance. “A month, maybe more. It didn’t happen all of a sudden. Just a sort of gradual awareness until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
    “You ever see anyone?”
    “No. Unless a shadow here and there counts. Nothing I can put a face to. Just a…feeling. An almost-itch on the back of my neck. Maybe Philip’s paranoia is catching.”
    “Or his caution,” Hunter said easily. “Sounds like your father made a few enemies along the way. What about you?”
    “Oh, I’m sure I’m not everyone’s best friend forever, but enemies? Not that I know of.”
    “Think about it.”
    “I have,” she said, narrowing her eyes as another car came in.
    Like a lot of the vehicles in the lot, it was a dark SUV with tinted windows. It turned down a different aisle and vanished.
    Jase found a parking spot a few rows over. He got out, locked up, and threaded himself between parked cars until he reached Hunter and Lina.
    “Let’s go get a dose of education,” Jase said, walking toward the garage exit.
    Lina shook her head at his tone of voice. “Such enthusiasm.”
    “You’ve only been on this case for two days,” Jase said. “I’vespent enough time that I’m getting really cheesed about tiny steps forward, big steps backward, and most of the steps running round in circles until I feel hungover.”
    Hunter looked at his friend. He knew that underneath the easy tone of voice, Jase was tight, exhausted, feeling time dripping away like blood.
    “Anything new turn up from the basement?” Hunter asked.
    “We’re up to ten bodies now. Is that new?”
    “I meant from processing the gangbangers that were arrested.”
    Jase smiled grimly. “Oh, we learned boatloads, but nothing that applies to this case. Snakeman has never been in our system, or in any of the law enforcement databases we’ve accessed. He’s clean except for a lack of immigration papers. Given that his lawyer is slick as snot, he’ll get off with deportation.”
    “That’s fu—ah, crazy,” Hunter said, looking sideways at Lina.
    Jase made a sound that could have been a laugh. “It’s scary, is what it is.”
    “That, too,” Hunter agreed.
    “All but the last body—LeRoy—died without mutilation,” Jase continued in a casual voice. “Well, they were beheaded, but still intact otherwise. From the tracks the gangbangers left in the legal system, we should be giving them medals for skimming scum off the cesspool. Except for LeRoy—who had only minor stuff in his record—I’d have done them myself for free.”
    “I so don’t want to meet your ‘clients,’” Lina said.
    Jase’s smile was all teeth. “Every day is a new lesson in dickheads.”
    After the gloomy heat and conversation in the garage, the street looked like heaven. The gallery was located on Houston’s answer to Rodeo Drive, where money, fashion, money, jewelry, money, cars, and money were on display inside and outside of the shops. The gallery itself went for an ambience of exceptionally classy artifacts for exceptionally discriminating multimillionaires. Pools of white-gold light haloed objects that would be sullied by the very thought of a price being attached to them.
    But there’s always a pric e, Hunter thought