Now he wanted to know why.
“We played those last few minutes.” Stokes snickered, the vile, grating noise irreverent. “She kept crying,Mommy,but ... Mommy was already dead.”
“That’s enough!” Wainwright cautioned.
Carson lifted a hand to quiet the objection even as murder burgeoned in his heart. “I want to hear what he has to say.”
“Don’t allow this, Carson,” Wainwright urged. “It won’t give you the closure you’re looking for.”
“What’s the matter?” Stokes cocked his head, clearly excited about the tension he generated, even shackled as he was. “You got a problem with hearing therealstory, Mr. DA?” The bastard snorted. “Well, you shouldda thought of that before. I sorta like seeing you bastards sweat.”
Moore started to object but his client cut him off. “Besides, you don’t gotta listen. What I have to say is personal. Between me and Carson Tanner.” A sadistic grin spread across his loathsome face. “We should be alone for that.”
Carson didn’t flinch. “That’s a reasonable request.”
“Absolutely not going to—”
“Five minutes,” Carson argued, interrupting Wainwright, his mentor, the man he admired and respected above all others.
The district attorney’s gaze held Carson’s for a beat, then two. He exhaled a heavy breath. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.” Wainwright picked up his briefcase and stood. “You watch yourself, Stokes, this isn’t over untilIsay it’s over,” he warned. “Five minutes. Not a second longer.”
Moore rose from his chair, wordlessly announcing his concurrence. He’d done his job. Represented a killer to the best of his ability as required by law.
Wainwright nodded to the deputy standing by, and the three exited the room.
That suffocating heaviness crowded in once more.
Stokes settled his attention on Carson. After an endless moment of probing silence, he spoke. “Well, well, the lone survivor. Looks like you did pretty good for yourself, a deputy district attorney and all.” Stokes leaned forward. “A regular hotshot, ain’t you, boy? Newspapers call you the Avenger or some such shit. A chip off the old block.” He made a disparaging sound. “’Course your daddy wasn’t so big and powerful when he was on his knees begging for mercy.”
Fury burned low and deep, but Carson wasn’t going to waste this opportunity being baited by the son of a bitch. “I have one question.”
Stokes eased forward a little more, putting his face only inches from Carson’s. “I touched her,” he whispered. “That little sister of yours. Could’ve been all up in that tight little pussy, but time was short and I still had your daddy to gut.”
Carson’s fingers curled into fists of restraint. “My sister wasn’t raped. My mother, either.”Stay cool just a few minutes more.“None of your victims were sexually assaulted.” Stokes wanted Carson angry. Wanted him to react. Not today. He needed that one answer. “Your file says you’re impotent so don’t try your perverted strategy with me.”
The bastard had the unmitigated gall to snigger. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t touch ’em.” He growled with sick pleasure. “Feltgood.Their skin was so smooth and soft. Their blood so hot, it scorched my hands. Made that old cock of mine stand at attention.”
Carson swallowed back the rising bile of disgust. This one question had burned in his brain, twisted in his gut all those years. He had to know. “Whymyfamily?”
Menace danced in the madman’s eyes. “I watched them for days,” he murmured, his voice thick with something like longing. “Waited for just the right moment.”
“You didn’t answer the question.” Carson refused to let him see for a damned second that he was hanging on to control by a single unraveling thread. “Why?”
Stokes sprang to his feet, testing his margin of freedom. His shackles rattled. “Because I could,” he snarled.
Carson took a moment, let those words permeate him, igniting the sheer determination necessary to see this through without yielding to his baser instincts. He pushed back his chair and stood slowly to put himself at eye level with the bastard once more.
“And there wasn’t a damned thing you or anybody else could do to stop me,” Stokes taunted.
The faintest glimmer of what had earned Carson the nicknameAvengerawakened. Adrenalized him. “There wasn’t a single link discovered between you and any member of my family.”
Therein lay the rub, the part of this that gave Carson pause no matter that the scumbag had confessed. He hadn’t been able to get past that discrepancy when considered with the other glaring deviation from Stokes’s usual MO: the missing personal effects. Stokes never took so much as a lock of hair from his victims. Only their dignities and their lives—in that order. And why take items from two of the victims and not the third? Nothing of Katie’s had been missing. Something was wrong with that scenario.
“With every other case linked to you,” Carson continued, “that connection to the victims was present.”
Stokes didn’t answer, merely stared at Carson with demented amusement.
“I’ll ask you again,” Carson reiterated far more patiently than he had any obligation to given the blitz of emotions whipping inside him. “Why?”
