Murder Deja Vu

it happened. But it did.
    “They said I’d be their bitch for as long as they wanted me.” He felt Dana’s hand on his arm.
    “Stop. Please, stop. I don’t want you to go through this. I know enough.”
    He saw the tears rolling down her cheeks, but he couldn’t stop. “You’ll know as much as I can tell you and then we’ll never speak of it again.” He was glad he was driving, glad he couldn’t break down the way he had so many times when he thought of that day. When he learned the evil in the world would always be there like some predatory animal skulking in wait, if not for him, then for some other innocent whose life would forever be changed.
    “They took turns.” His voice cracked. He swallowed. “When the one standing guard came to change places with the man who’d just sodomized me, I heard a scuffle. I didn’t know what was happening, but the hands holding me fell away. I couldn’t catch my breath, as if all the air in the room had been sucked out. I found the strength to crawl into the corner of the shower and curl into a fetal ball.”
    “Stop, Reece. Please.”
    He shrugged off Dana’s hand without looking at her. “Then I saw him. This big hulking man with a shaved head and tattoos and muscles rippling all over like one of those toy action figures. He looked like something out of a horror movie, sneering and grunting. He threw those guys around, big as they were, like they were midgets. One of them lay bleeding on the tile floor, the other three scrambled away like roaches.”
    Reece pulled the truck off the road. He couldn’t see, blinded by the rage that filled him, his heart pumping like an engine piston.
    Dana moved across the bench seat, wrapped her arm around his neck, and placed her other hand over his mouth. “Enough,” she whispered. “I know enough.”
    He moved her hand away. “That was my introduction to Frank Vance, the man we’re going to see. He’s sick now, but he’s the best friend I ever had. He saved my life, and later, a long time later, I saved his.”

Chapter Twenty
Collusion

    R obert couldn’t believe it when he heard Lurena Howe was dead. His witness. Damn Klugh. Robert didn’t trust him worth a damn, and the feelings were mutual. But too many knots over the years tied them together, inextricably binding them into unlikely partners. They met at a different out-of-the-way diner.
    Klugh exuded his usual air of superiority, looking like he’d wandered off the golf course at a high-class country club. Pressed slacks, expensive shirt, tanned and fit. That pissed off Robert even more. Sweat soaked the collar of his expensive Egyptian cotton shirt. Sweat stains didn’t come out, even when professionally laundered.
    “When I told you to incriminate Daughtry in Rayanne Johnson’s murder, I didn’t mean like the time in Charlotte, with a dead body. Which, by the way, I never ordered.”
    “Of course you didn’t. You never do. You imply. But somehow I always find money transferred into my account for whatever you didn’t order. Besides, no one ever found that body.”
    “What the hell were you thinking?”
    “You wanted to nail him, didn’t you, Robert? Well, I nailed him for you. Everything played out perfectly. Lurena Howe needed money—who doesn’t these days?—and she didn’t bat an eye lying to get it, because she believed Daughtry was guilty. Now, with her dead, they’ll know he committed both murders.”
    This was the problem doing business with idiots. “It’s too perfect. Daughtry’s not stupid. Don’t you think he’d know what the reaction would be if he killed the witness?”
    “How smart was it to kill a second woman the same way he killed the first? Killers have patterns. That’s a fact. He followed the pattern.”
    “But this didn’t fit the pattern. Not even close. And what if my ex-wife was with him, which is entirely possible, the whore?”
    “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. So we might not get him for this one. But he’ll panic. Bet he runs. That’s what guilty men do.”
    Robert considered that. “Hmm, he might. I’ve heard he sleeps outside sometimes, not to feel like he’s in prison.” He chewed on a fingernail. “I don’t have a choice now, do I? You’ve seen to that.”
    “I’m telling you, he’ll run.”
    “Are you sure no one saw you with Howe?”
    “Naw. We got it on at her place. I did her, then cleaned up.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “You think I’d leave prints? You don’t