“Fuck.” He couldn’t take them to the lab without admitting he’d picked up the pair out of protocol, not collecting them as evidence. And they were tainted with his own damned DNA. Even if they could be tied to the crime, if the blood was maybe Megan’s, which seemed highly unlikely, a defense attorney would turn him inside out on how he’d procured the gloves. There was no explaining it away. Furious with himself, he tossed the gloves onto the counter, walked around a post to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and pulled out another bottle of beer. He was sweating and breathing hard, as if he’d picked up that damned axe in his first vision and swung it, over and over again.

“Dumb ass,” he muttered before opening the bottle and taking a long, cold swallow. Closing his eyes, he counted to fifty. Then a hundred. His heart rate slowed, but he still felt beads of sweat around his hairline.

Shaking off the images, he carried his beer to the living room window and past the small yard to the street beyond. Snow was falling, thick and heavy, dancing in the blue glow from the streetlamp. One of his neighbors on the far side of the cul-de-sac was backing out, garage door rolling down, crimson brake lights flashing as the back tires of the old Cadillac reached the sidewalk. He snapped his blinds shut and rubbed the back of his neck, then finished his beer.

Rivers knew he was missing something, something he couldn’t feel in the personal items. Something just out of reach.

Oh, hell.

Maybe Astrid had been right.

Maybe he was sick. Or perverted. Or bat-shit crazy.

Stealing personal things, trying to get a sense of the owners from them, nosing around in their most private thoughts, attempting to learn more about an ongoing case, risking his reputation and his job . . . that wasn’t the definition of sanity.

Not by anyone’s standards.

Astrid’s warning floated back to him.

Some secrets are better kept locked away.

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 35

What had James said?

“No, Sophia, don’t come.”

The horrid words rang in her ears as she started her car and backed out of her parking slot at the apartment building.

Don’t come? He was rejecting her?

“Ridiculous,” she muttered, her breath fogging in the frigid interior. As she turned the heat on full blast, she caught a movement in the unit that sat catty-corner from her own, the larger apartment that jutted out to form an L around the edge of the parking lot: the owner’s unit. The curtains were open, lights on, yapping, piece-of-shit dog standing at attention, flashing his teeth on the back of Phoebe Matrix’s couch.

As ever.