“I really don’t.” He needs to give that argument a rest.
“Where are they?”
No fucking idea. I don’t carry them on me. If it were up to me, they wouldn’t exist. I don’t need help toread,for fuck’s sake.
“Spence.”
Why does he have to say my name like that? “Ken,” I mimic. If he’s so obsessed with the glasses, he can wear them himself. Not a terrible idea; he’d look hot. We can get some that don’t have lenses in them.
Kendrick leans around me, bracketing me in. He stops for a second to kiss my shoulder and then opens the drawer on my side of the desk. He comes out with a dark-blue case that looks a bit like—Kendrick flicks them open to reveal a sleek pair of half-frame black metal glasses.
“Those aren’t mine.” I’ve never seen them before in my life.
“They are. I got two spares when you got the first pair that you keep trying to run over with your car.”
An exaggeration: I’ve never tried to run them over. It has merit, though. “Wait.Two?”What the fuck? Where’d he find my prescription? I thought I’d hidden the papers in a great spot. “Where’s the other pair?”
“I’ll never tell you.”
“What do you thinkabout the pictures,” I repeat, dragging us back to our original conversation. This case is more important than how I accessorise.
Kendrick holds out the glasses, patiently waiting. If I don’t give in, we’re going to be locked in this stalemate for a while.
I shove them on my face and give him a look. “Well?”
He softens, and he traces the edge of the frame softly before nudging them further up my nose. “Perfect.”
The way he’s looking at me is intoxicating. “You like them?”
The pads of his fingers trail down my cheek, over my lips, and then back up to rest on the tip of my nose. “Yeah, Spence. I like them.”
I clear my throat, thickness clogging it. Well. Maybe they aren’t so bad, after all.
Kendrick drops his hand and moves back. “There’s a distinct difference.”
“In my face?” I don’t think glasses can alter a look that much. It’s still the same shape. Stillmy face.This isn’t like Superman, where I can slip on a pair, and suddenly, no one recognises me.Pretty sure there was some reason why in the comics, but I can’t remember, haven’t read them since I was a kid.
“No, in the pictures,” Kendrick explains.
I look back at them. One, a crime scene from a year and a half ago, and another from a day ago. Eerily similar in so many ways. The candles, the bath, a naked body suspended in water, their eyes closed as if merely sleeping.
The candles aren’t in precisely the same spot. There’s more water in the bath at the first crime scene—whether that’s relevant or not, I’m not sure—and the second victim has bruises around her throat and on her face that aren’t present on the first. One peaceful, one violent.
“Different killer, then?”
Kendrick shakes his head. “No. It’s too imperfect?”
“You might have to explain that one to me.” The desk rattles when I kick my legs up onto it, crossing my ankles and leaning sideways against Kendrick. He takes my weight, my head leaning back against his shoulder.
“If it were a copycat,” Kendrick says, stroking my hair, “then they’d take pains to make it perfect. They’d want it the same, to pay homage to the original killer. We can’t rule it out, but my gut says that it’s not what it seems.”
“Because it’s not exactly the same?”
“Anything that we do in life, it’s never the same twice, right? You can make a coffee every single day your entire life, and not one cup will be the same as another. There are subtle differences. Sometimes it’s about the weather, or the time, but sometimes it’s just about how much you put in, the coffee-to-milk ratio. A number of things. Even a serial killer who’s obsessed with killing a certain way, every kill, isn’t perfectly the same.”
“If it’s the same killer, then—”
“The guy in prison isn’t the original killer,” Kendrick finishes. “Only a theory, though.”
