“Who told you that? Dr. Easton?”

Even as she squared off with him, her mind was scrambling to think of a way to get around him, to go through him, to overpower and disable him until help arrived. Surely help would arrive! “Where is Mike?”

He laughed. “The tub of lard?”

“What have you done to him?”

“I’ve put him out of his misery. He was huffing and puffing like a steam engine before I choked the life out of him.”

She couldn’t withhold a mewl of anguish, but she held herself upright by sheer force of will. If she cracked in the slightest, she would shatter completely. If she did that, she was doomed. She probably was anyway, but she wasn’t going to give Jasper the satisfaction of watching her fracture.

“Drex knows that I’m here.”

“Unsurprising. You two have become nauseatingly attached. But he’s at the courthouse, waiting for me to show up.” He tapped his cheek as though in contemplation. “I must say, there was a brief period of time today when I actually entertained the notion of going there to witness his fall from grace.”

“Dressed as a woman and wearing a wig?” Talia scoffed. “Drex picked you out of a surveillance camera video, Jasper, and he wasn’t even challenged by its poor quality. You gave yourself away. You’re not nearly as clever as you perceive yourself to be.”

“Yet he’s there while you’re here, eager to get your hands on this.” He fingered the button on the blazer.

“What was in the envelope?”

“A pebble,” he said, grinning. “Evidence of nothing. I confess to having experienced a brief panic attack earlier today when I thought I’d lost this beauty.” He rubbed the button again. “But then I remembered that it was the one button I didn’t switch out. I wanted to have one to wear until the others could be incorporated into my new wardrobe, whatever it might be.

“I came out of the panic when I realized that this blazer, button intact, was in my suitcase the whole time. But the episode gave me an idea about how lure you back here. I really hated to leave with unfinished business between us.”

No doubt the unfinished business meant the finish of her if she couldn’t think of a way to escape him. “Drex knows about your silly button collection. He knows how you think. He’ll figure out that the call from Mr. Singh was a trick. He’ll come after me.”

His lips formed a rueful moue. “Meaning no slight to you at all, dearest, but I think it’s me he’s after. He’s been on the chase for a long time, hasn’t he?”

“Since he was nineteen. That’s when he learned that you had killed his mother.”

He reacted with a start. “His mother?”

“Lyndsay Cummings.”

“Well, well, what do you know?” He laughed. “He’s the child? Lyndsay thought her ex-husband and son were a well-concealed secret, but I knew about them, of course. Just like I know about your little eggs stored in an ice tray.”

She couldn’t hide her shock, and it made him smirk. “I wonder what they do with the ova if they aren’t used before the mother dies. Hmm.” He waved off the thought. “Anyway, after I disposed of Lyndsay, I spent several months trying to pick up the trail of her ex-husband and the boy. I didn’t want to live looking over my shoulder for the vengeful Cummings men.”

“Drex’s father legally changed their names so you couldn’t find them.”

“Did he? Well, no wonder Drex’s name didn’t ring a bell. In any case, I bored of tracking them.”

“You didn’t get bored, Jasper. You failed. Drex, on the other hand, was tenacious. He kept at it until he found you.”

“Which only underscores what a sad, wasted existence his has been. To fritter away one’s life in pursuit of vengeance for a mother who abandoned him?” He shook his head and tsked. “And the really pathetic thing? He’s only begun.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Talia, that he’ll have a real bloodlust for me after I kill you.”

With no more warning than that, he rushed her.

Acting on instinct, she turned and tried to make it into the bathroom, where she could put a locked door between them. But she soon realized that turning her back to him was the worst thing she could have done. From behind, he enwrapped her in a hug that pinned her arms to her sides and made her neck susceptible to the arm he crooked beneath her chin.

“Let her go, or I will kill you.”

Drex’s voice!

Jasper swiveled around, hauling her with him.

Drex hadn’t shouted. He’d made a controlled and imperative statement of fact. He certainly looked deadly enough. His tiger eyes were fixed on Jasper. In his outstretched hands, he cradled a handgun. It was aimed at a spot slightly above and behind her: Jasper’s forehead.

Jasper said, “I’ll snap her neck.”

“The bullet will get there first.”

“You’re not going to kill me.”

“You don’t think?”

“You’re restricted by code. FBI rules. Law and order.”

“If you don’t let her go, there’s no code, no rule, no law, nothing that would stop me from blowing your brains out.”

“You do that, you’ll never know where your mother is buried.”

Drex grimaced.

Jasper laughed. “Ah, I’ve presented you with a dilemma. You want to save Talia, which is romantic to the nth degree. But, if you kill me, you’ll never know your mother’s final resting place.”

“You’re right,” Drex said, lowering the pistol. “I’ll just shoot you in the leg instead.”

He pulled the trigger. Jasper’s body jerked. He cried out. When his leg buckled, he dragged Talia down with him. She used that nanosecond of weakness to lunge away from him.

He caught her by the hair and tried to jerk her backward.

Rapid gunfire erupted.

His grip on her hair was released so abruptly, she fell forward, landing hard on her knees, gasping for breath, deafened by the barrage.

Then Drex was there, kneeling beside her. He took her by the shoulders and gently pulled her into a sitting position. Her hearing was still muffled, but his lips were moving, asking repeatedly if she was all right.

Dumbly, she nodded.

He kissed her forehead, then eased her toward Menundez, who was at her other side, down on one knee. A number of uniformed officers had crowded into the open doorway. Locke was motioning them back, keeping them from entering the room.

She took all this in, but her gaze followed Drex as he walked over to where Jasper had collapsed. He had crumpled against his closet door, listing at a severe angle. He was bleeding from numerous wounds in his chest and abdomen.

Drex crouched in front of him.

With cold objectivity, Drex regarded the wounds he’d inflicted. The one in Jasper’s thigh was the only one that had required some shooting skill. He’d had to make it count without hitting Talia.

The others, he’d gone for center of mass. They hadn’t required careful aim to do fatal damage.

Had he felt any remorse for that, he only had to look into the black, fathomless eyes, from which not a single glimmer of a human soul had ever shone. He had only to think of the women who had suffered and died and been abandoned in ignominious graves.