Free Mann 01 - Where Angels Rest by Kate Brady Page A

Calloway. Let’s see… His wife is drop-dead gorgeous without makeup so he can’t bear to have it on his lovers?”
    “A little cliché, don’t you think?”
    “His mother used to scrub his face with paint thinner and lye, until he bled.”
    “Better,” she said. “It’s always about the mother, after all, isn’t it?”
    Fucking shrinks. They were the reason Bertrand Yost wasn’t in a real jail serving real time. The reason Nick’scareer had gone to hell. “No,” he said. “It’s usually about money or sex or vengeance, and hardly ever about psychological mumbo jumbo. Jails need bars, not couches.”
    “Look, I’ll be the first to say I don’t know why Lauren’s murderer cleaned off her face with paint thinner, but I do know there’s a reason. Something that would explain his actions.” She squared her shoulders. “Why don’t you ask Calloway what it is?”
    Nick suppressed a scowl. He tried to paint Jack Calloway with the brush of a psycho-murderer—someone with some weird compulsion to shoot a woman and leave her fresh-faced, then dump her for gators. It wouldn’t work. Aside from the simple weirdness of it, Jack was a good man, successful, and devoutly religious. He was married to one of the most attractive women Nick had ever laid eyes on; even now, at nearly fifty, Margaret’s features were put together in a way that made men of all ages catch themselves staring, and she wore them naturally and without arrogance, with a slim figure and thick dark hair attractively threaded with silver. She never wore a speck of makeup yet—
    Christ.
    Nick cursed beneath his breath. This was the problem with shrinks: They could take a man apart and put the pieces back together in a way that created a different man altogether, something that wasn’t real.
    Detective Mann, isn’t it a fact that you went there with the
intention
of killing Bertrand Yost? Isn’t it a fact that you
enjoyed
beating the hell out of him?
    Nick bit back a curse. Focus. This is about Lauren McAllister. Not Allison, not Yost.
    He slid a finger beneath the portrait of Lauren provided by her family and held it beside the ME’s headshot of herdeath: a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, complete with the mole above the left corner of her lip, heavy makeup, and a come-fuck-me look in her eyes. Typical nineteen-year-old these days, Nick thought, feeling his age, then remembered that this shot was actually twelve years old.
    It was an old case. A closed case. A case in which the murderer had already been identified, tried, and convicted. Justin Sims.
    He pulled out another folder: Sims. Justin and Erin were the children of Marla Gordon and Chuck Sims. Sims died in a boating accident when Justin was a baby and Erin was six, and her mother re-married Jeffrey Collins, a successful realtor in South Florida. By all accounts, the family was respected and privileged, and though the marriage ended in divorce several years before the murder, there were no indications that teenage Justin was on any sort of bad track at the time. His mother attended his trial but was noticeably absent from her daughter’s efforts to defend him afterward; Jeffrey Collins disappeared after the divorce. Similarly, there was a husband in there for at least a little while. David Cox was a law student Erin Sims married a year before the murder. He testified for the defense, claiming Justin’s gun had been stolen, but after that, he too stopped showing up in reports.
    Nick looked across the room at Sims, at the empty left ring finger. She
was
alone. Even the rest of her family seemed to have accepted Justin’s fate and, one by one, had abandoned the cause. Jensen had a whole stack of pages here that showed ten years of visits to police departments, the FBI, journalists, and a string of private investigators—none of them mentioning anyone but Dr. Sims.
    A twinge of admiration threatened and Nick bullied it back. No matter how much she believed in her brother’sinnocence, her