The study was as nice as the entryway, with antique furniture and shelves loaded with leather bound books. While she waited for her boss to take care of that thing he’d been in the middle of, Samantha looked around. Taking in the books, paintings, and the glass case filled with more edged weapons and a handful of extremely modern handguns and rifles, she was pretty sure this one room was worth more than her whole apartment.
One particular painting on the back wall behind the desk caught her attention. It was extremely well done, depicting Louis with a teenage boy and a pretty, dark-haired woman. The boy was obviously the son she’d heard about that had died years ago. The woman in the painting must have been his wife, but Samantha had heard rumors they’d gotten divorced a little while after that.
“Jamison was killed in a car accident several years ago,” Louis said from behind her and Samantha turned to see him standing in the arched doorway, gazing up at the painting she’d been studying. “I’m sure you knew that already, though. But the fact that my wife divorced me less than a year later is probably something not as widely known. Not that I blame her for leaving. I was an inconsolable prick after my son’s death and gave her no reason to stay.”
Samantha couldn’t help but feel badly for Louis. He’d gone through a lot of tragedy. “I know saying this doesn’t mean much, but I’m sorry for your loss.”
Louis nodded, continuing to gaze up at the painting for some time. Then he seemed to come back to himself, walking across the room to move behind the desk and take a seat there. “Thank you for that. And thank you for waiting so patiently while I took care of that other issue. But I’m sure that you didn’t drive all the way out here at this time to night to talk about my family. You mentioned discovering something about the Butcher case?”
Samantha took a seat in one of the two fancy armchairs in front of the desk. “I have good reason to believe that Hugh is the Butcher. Or at the very minimum, is working directly with the killer.”
Louis lifted a brow. “I think you’d better tell me everything—and I do mean everything.”
Taking a deep breath, Samantha laid it all out for him—the body parts she’d identified from Hugh’s staff briefing, the paperwork trail the assistant ME had left showing that Aiden Bridges and the John Doe had been cremated, her theory that Hugh was helping to make sure the Butcher case was never solved and that he was conducting some kind of macabre experiments using cadaver parts, trying to reattach them to other bodies. She told Louis everything she knew or suspected, no matter how insignificant she thought it might be.
Louis sat there speechless for what felt like five minutes after she finished, and Samantha wondered if she’d screwed up and thrown in too much conjecture when all her boss wanted was the facts.
“To say this is bad is the understatement of the century,” he finally said, and Samantha could almost see the wheels in his mind turning as he considered the various ways this could play out. “But I think you’ve found the Butcher.”
Before she could say anything, Louis reached for the fancy French phone on the corner of his desk. “Have you told anyone else about this yet? You might have put them at risk if Hugh figures out you’ve told them. At this point, I doubt there’s anything left the man wouldn’t do to cover up his crimes.”
That was probably true. She shook her head as Louis asked to be connected to the lead detective for the task force. How bad was it that her boss knew the full name of the task force lead when she didn’t?
“I called Trey…Officer Duncan, but got his voicemail, so I left a message for him to call me back,” she said. “I didn’t think this was the kind of thing you leave on someone’s voicemail.”
Louis nodded, waving his hand when Samantha was about to ask if she should call Trey back. “The head of the task force just picked up.”
Samantha leaned back in the chair, listening as her boss explained everything she’d discovered. He covered it in detail, answering what seemed like an endless list of questions. She couldn’t help but notice he kept using her name over and over, making sure the detective knew she was the one to get credit for this discovery. It was difficult to put into words how much she appreciated this.
After another minute or so of conversation, Louis hung up, a smile on his face.
“The police are heading to Hugh’s place to pick him up.” Louis leaned back in his leather office chair. “They’re also sending someone over to take your statement.”
She nodded. She would rather have headed over to Trey’s place, but it made sense the cops would want to take her statement. She was a little surprised they hadn’t asked him to go to the station to do it, though.
Getting to his feet, Louis moved around the desk to sit on the edge, gazing down at her with kind eyes.
“I’m glad you came here and told me all of that,” he said quietly. “It completely destroys my established timeline, but it could have been so much worse.”
Samantha frowned, trying to understand what Louis was talking about. Apparently seeing the confusion on her face, her boss picked up the rest of his thought.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to force me to do some things earlier than I would have preferred, but it would have been much worse if you’d told anyone what you’d discovered. That would have ruined everything.”
Samantha straightened in her chair, alarm bells going off.
Hugh wasn’t the Butcher.
Louis was.
Crap.
Suddenly, a hand came around in front of her face and slapped a wet cloth across her nose and mouth. She struggled immediately, trying to stand up, then clawing at the hand over her face when that didn’t work.
But whoever was behind her was incredibly strong and held her down like she was a little kid. Louis stepped in then, grabbing her flailing hands and shoving them down to the arms of the chair. Her heart felt like it was about to explode in her chest even as her mind recognized the ether-like odor of chloroform.
Everything started to get fuzzy then, her last thoughts of Trey and wishing she’d told him she loved him on that phone message she’d left.
***
“Are we seriously about to Skype with someone from STAT on the top level of an uptown parking garage?” Trey asked as he watched Connor boot up his laptop. “Isn’t this some kind of security violation? Couldn’t our conversation be hacked and show up on TMZ or something?”
“STAT loaded an encryption program on my laptop,” Connor said with a snort, not bothering to look up from the screen of his computer. “Yours, too, by the way. Something tells me even the NSA would have a hard time eavesdropping on this call.”
Before Trey could say anything, the echoing squawk of tires on concrete caught Trey’s attention, and he turned to see Trevor’s blue Ford Thunderbird coming up the ramp to the top level of the parking garage. Hale was sitting in the passenger seat of the beautifully restored classic, looking as confused about the last-minute meeting as Trey was.