The Night Serpent

“No,” he said again once they started eating. “I don’t think he’s a serial killer. The specifics line up—cats, violence, repetition. That’s what pinged on my radar. But seeing it—the feel of it is all wrong.”

“Intriguing?”

“To a person with my background, yes. Serial killers have a variety of reasons for acting the way they do, by their standards. The files—” and he made a gesture with his fork to the file at his side “—the first two cases, and now this one, they don’t show the kind of…passion normal to a serial killer’s buildup. This was…”

“Restrained.”

He looked at her with surprised respect. “Yeah.”

Lily didn’t know why she had said that, but when she thought about it, it was true. The violence had been contained, the cats carefully tended, the scene almost designed, like a stage set…

Going back there made her insides queasy again, so she changed the subject. “So what’s the third thing? You said there was a—terrible triad? You said two, so what’s the third?”

“Bed-wetting.”

Lily stared at him. “Bed-wetting.”

“It shows up often enough in established serial killers that it’s considered an indicator, yes.”

She wasn’t going to laugh. It wasn’t funny. “But not a crime.”

“No, not a crime. We don’t investigate anyone on the basis of soiled linens.”

“I’m not laughing,” she told him.

“Nobody ever does,” he assured her, his dark eyes creased around the edges with humor. “Joking is frowned on in the FBI.”

Lily ate a few bites of her veal, letting the moment pass intentionally, and then looked up at her companion. “All right. You said you wanted to ask me something about the case. About the cats?”

He took a bite of his own ziti, chewed and swallowed before responding. Good table manners, she noted. Another point in his favor, were she keeping any sort of list. Which she wasn’t.

“Yeah. About the cattery that you said he had. You work in a shelter—it looks like you have a full house there?”

“Always. Females, unless they’re fixed, breed regularly even when they have kittens already. Even if you could stop every stray from breeding tomorrow, there would be more cats in shelters than we could ever find homes for.”

Lily felt guilt once again for not adopting one or two of her own. She had the room, and Lord knew she had gotten over her fear…but something held her back from bringing them into her own home. She still needed that distance, the place to retreat to, in case things went wrong.

“So why was he breeding them, if there are so many out there to adopt?”

“For color.” No hesitation in her mind now, not after what Patrick had told her. “He—we’re assuming a he?”

“For now.”

“All right. He used spotted tabbies with white paws, all seven of them. The cats before, they were spotted as well?”

Patrick nodded. “According to the files the cops gave me, yes. Not all of them had the white paws, though. That was new.”

“The spotted markings are common enough, but not so much so that you could find seven of them, all about the same age—not kittens, but less than two years old, I’d guess. And to find three…three batches of seven? The combination of color and age, there’s no way he could assume he was going to find them all at the same time. So it makes sense he’d try to breed them himself.”

“That was my thought, too. This guy, whoever he is, wasn’t flying off the cuff. He has an agenda. There was planning here, at least a year’s worth to be breeding his own litters. More, since the first incident was two months ago, and the cats were about the same age.”

“But why?” Why would someone do something like this? Why use cats? Why cats of that specific type? “And God, how could he breed cats, raise them and then kill them?”

Patrick poked his fork at the mound of ziti on his plate, and then looked up at her, his dark eyes now shadowed by more than exhaustion. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

Then he leaned back and smiled at her, clearly changing mental tracks. “But enough. You’ve confirmed what I suspected, and may yet be useful to the investigation, so this meal is hereby considered a justified expense. Therefore I’m not going to do anything right now except enjoy the lovely company, the excellent food and the fact that I’m not cooped up in a hotel room watching reruns of Fox shows I didn’t like when I first saw them. And I insist that you do the same, just to keep me company.”

Lily flushed, but smiled at him, and went back to her veal piccata, hyperaware of the fact that he was watching her every move, observing her the same way he had observed the crime scene. Charming, but ambitious, she reminded herself. Be careful.

“So. You volunteer with cats and work in a bank. And, occasionally, help out the local cops and wandering feds. What else does Ms. Lily Malkin do?”

Lily didn’t play games, was what she didn’t do. “I bake. I work out to burn off the calories I put on from baking. I sleep as much as humanly possible. I like modern art and Delta blues, an occasional glass of wine and really scary movies with buttered popcorn. I have no siblings, my father lives in Seattle where I grew up and my last relationship ended amicably. Anything else?”

He blinked, visibly thinking over her words. “No, I think that about covers everything, and then some. Your turn.”

She didn’t have to think about that at all. “What does the T stand for?”

“The letter T,” he said easily, and she smiled reluctantly in return. Oh, charming. Very, very charming. But she still wasn’t going to play.

Lily turned off the beeping alarm even before she turned on the light as she came in through the garage. Once the condo was plunged back into silence, she slipped her shoes off at the door, dropped her bag on the dining-room table and shuffled to the narrow spiral staircase that led to the bedroom. She had lived in a studio apartment when she first came to town, but on her morning run one day she had passed the row of town houses under construction and, on a whim, stopped in at the builder’s office. Three months and most of her savings later, she had closed on her town house, and two months after that she had moved in.

It was the first place she had ever owned, the first real home she’d had since leaving her father’s home for college sixteen years before. Her dad had choked up when she called to tell him the news. Her dad was a little weird: “not married? No problem, honey, you’ll find someone some day. But this endless string of living in apartments? That can’t be healthy!”

The condo wasn’t large—a kitchen, living room and dining room downstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs—but it was all hers. Her refuge.

She stripped as she went into the bathroom, tossing her clothing into the hamper and turning on the shower. The two glasses of wine at dinner, plus a hot shower, might be enough to let her get to sleep—and stay asleep until the alarm went off. If she was lucky, and fate was kind, she might not even dream.

Or if she did, maybe they would be the hot and sexy kind. Lord knows, she had enough material to work with tonight.

“Don’t get so caught up in secret-agent-man fantasies that you forget to finish paying those bills,” she told herself, pulling her hair into a scrunchie and knotting it. She was on shift at the bank from ten to four, and if she didn’t get everything into the mail in the morning, it would bother her all day.

The mirror was starting to fog, and she rubbed a spot clear to check her skin.

“Holy shit!” she shrieked, spinning around.

There was nothing there, of course. She had known there wasn’t going to be anything there. It wasn’t possible that there was anything there—the alarm had been on, no windows had been open. There was no way a cat could have gotten in.

There was no way she could have seen, reflected in that tiny corner of the mirror, a cat sitting on the shower ledge behind her, watching her with wide, rounded green eyes.

Mrrrrrai?

And there was no way she could hear the plaintive query of a cat, echoing off the tile of the shower, over the sound of the water and the rasp of her own breath.