Page 4 of Go Under

She made it inside and set the thermostat to seventy-five degrees. She didn’t feel cold, but she knew she was.

She washed her arms in the kitchen sink. Thankfully, since she’d been living off of food delivered to her doorstep, the sink wasn’t full of dishes. The only occupants were the forks and butter knives she’d just liberated from her living room floor.

She would wash them later. She was exhausted, physically chipper but mentally drained and emotionally on the verge of tearing her apartment to pieces and running out the door cackling like a hyena.

She trudged to the couch, flopped down and grabbed the remote. Oh yeah, she needed to order food.

She reached for her phone, and it buzzed just as she grabbed it. Marcus.

She took a deep breath, plastered a smile on her face, and answered. “Hey! What’s up?”

“I’m on my way back,” he told her.

He sounded listless, forlorn, and she realized he was on his way back from finalizing his divorce. There was no need for her to pretend to be cheerful. In fact, it was pretty shitty of her to be bubbly at a time like this.

She dropped the smile. “How are you feeling?”

He sighed. “We have another case. Winters called me just now. She said she tried to call you a while ago, but you didn’t answer, and you haven’t replied to her voicemail.”

Kate blinked and looked at her phone. Sure enough, there was a missed call from Assistant Director Victoria Winters. Also, a voicemail and a text message, all of which arrived while she was showering.

“Yeah, I was in the shower,” she said.

“For an hour?”

Her cheeks heated. “Well, I didn’t hear my phone. I started cleaning and… You know what? Never mind. I’ll head to the office.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll pick you up. She sent everything to me.” He hesitated for a moment. “It’s a Commandment Killing, Kate.”

She frowned. Of course it was. Wasn’t that obvious? Winters wanted her out for eight weeks, and she was pulling her back in after four. There was only one reason she’d do something like that. “Okay.”

“I’ll see you soon. I’m about an hour out of Portland.”

“See you soon.”

He hung up, and Kate sighed. She shut the TV off and headed upstairs to change. At least she’d had time to clean before her life was turned upside down again.

Cox the Cockroach had come back. What revelations awaited her now as she dug through the mess of lives he left in his wake?

CHAPTER TWO

Marcus Reid, newly single, just couldn’t catch a goddamned break. He felt like shit feeling that way, but feeling like shit about how he felt didn’t make him stop feeling it.

He was on his way back from fourteen hours of meetings over two days with a stranger who had once straddled his thighs and whispered in his ear, “Hey. I’m your wife now.”

It would have been easier if she had screamed at him, or treated him coldly, or made some snide, underhanded remark. Instead, she greeted him with a polite half hug and a kiss on the cheek, asked how he was, and even suggested they grab coffee together before they attended the meetings that would end with Mr. and Mrs. Marcus and Cheryl Reid no longer existing.

She was fine. Which was good and should have felt good. Instead, it felt like the final proof that he was a shit husband and a shit human being.

Speaking of that, he was on his way back to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. Ex-girlfriend was a huge stretch. They’d made out once in his car and held hands a few times. Then Cox’s disciple had sent pictures of Kate and Marcus together to Cheryl, who had freaked out because apparently saying she needed time to figure out if she still wanted to be married to him wasn’t the same as saying she didn’t want to be married to him. That had revealed to Kate that he had dragged his feet over the divorce, and now they were back to being friends and partners. They lived in the same apartment, had for a month, and the closest Marcus had gotten to her was holding the door open so she could carry groceries inside.

Not that it was about sex. It was just that he couldn’t figure out how to be in love with someone without completely blowing it up.

And the cream on the cannoli was that the two of them were now going to investigate the latest in a string of serial murders perpetrated both directly and indirectly by a human worm named Elijah Cox, a former priest who couldn’t handle his vows and took his frustration out by executing people who broke the ten commandments. On the side, Cox had a little obsession with Kate. He liked messing with her mind, and poor Kate fell for it every time.

Every. Damned. Time.

She was right now trying to figure out what connection Cox had with her fourteen-years-dead father because Cox mentioned something about a stupid photograph. It didn’t seem to register with her that the bastard could be lying, even when it was obvious to literally everyone else that he was.