Gavin walked until he found a bus stop with a bus to take him downtown. From there, a taxi ride and he was home, pleased at the extraordinary measures he had taken to cover his tracks. He’d been surgical. A single strand of hair or a few skin cells was all a lab needed to put Sadie Vauk in his house, but if the police ever crossed his threshold, they would find nothing—not a hair, not a cell, not a speck to corroborate their theory.

There was a part of Gavin that yearned for them to show up at his house with a search warrant. He would encourage them to look. Hell, tear the place down board by board. The mere thought of an army of detectives and crime scene techs rooting around his house in vain, impotent at every turn, aroused Gavin in a way he hadn’t expected, and he understood why other killers might send taunting letters to the newspapers. But Gavin would send no letter.

And if it ever came to the point where he found himself in court over Sadie Vauk, it would be her testimony against his—and Gavin had a plan for that contingency as well.

Chapter 17

Lila Nash was pretty certain that Donald Gray’s bail hearing had been unremarkable for most observers, but for her it held the rush of a tsunami exploding against a rocky coastline. Gray had twice gotten away with attacking his wife, but not this time. And the best part was that Gray’s wife wouldn’t be the target of his anger; she hadn’t asked for him to be held to account. Lila had done that. It had been Lila’s work that had put him in his box, and as Andi had explained, there was only one way out. Men who harmed women should never get to walk away free—as her attackers had.

Judge Anderson, a kind woman with more years as a judge than Lila had as a human being, ordered Gray to have no contact with the victim—his wife—and specified that any such contact would constitute an additional criminal offense. He would have to move out of his house until the case resolved. This time there would be no retaliation, no arm twisting.

A very pissed-off Donald Gray glared at Lila as he left the courtroom, his expression stripped clean of the false humility he had so carefully presented to the judge. There was a part of Lila that thought she should be intimidated, but somehow it exhilarated her. The thrill of that moment, standing up to an abuser at her first real hearing, was something she would never forget. It fed a yearning that begged to be satiated.

As she often did, Lila met with Ryan and Patrick for lunch in the cafeteria of the Government Center, and as they waited for Patrick, Ryan asked Lila how she was getting along with Andi Fitch. The truth was that Lila found Andi to be the most amazing woman she’d ever met. Strong and brilliant, Andi was everything Lila wished she could be. However, telling all that to Ryan might rub him the wrong way, so Lila simply said, “Well, she hasn’t thrown any books at me yet.” Ryan seemed satisfied with that answer.