“You sure you want to do this now?” Walt asked as he led Becca into an interview room. He’d taken her to the hospital, despite her protests, she’d had x-rays, which thankfully showed her arm was just bruised and not broken, and then she had insisted on coming down here to find out about her brother’s case.
“Of course I want to do it now,” she said with an eye roll.
“Can I get you something to drink? Eat?” he asked the stubborn woman who’s soft lips he couldn’t get out of his mind.
Kissing her had been stupid.
A mistake.
Clearly an abuse of his position as a homicide detective over a woman he’d cuffed and very nearly arrested.
Didn’t mean he regretted it though.
“Water, I guess,” she said. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was pale, but there was a fire in her eyes that said she was stronger than he had originally given her credit for.
Leaving her in the room, Walt went to get her water. His partner was waiting outside the door, three bottles of water in his hands.
“Well that was unexpected,” Cooper said.
“What was?” Walt asked, frowning at his friend.
“Everything, the sister being there, Brody being gone, a mention of this cousin, Becca coming here to help us, you kissing her,” Cooper finished with a waggle of his eyebrows.
Throwing a glare at Coop, he snatched a bottle of water from his hand and barrelled back into the interview room to find Becca rubbing her temples.
“You got a headache, Bec?” Cooper asked, breezing in behind him.
“Yeah, I do,” she said, offering Cooper a smile. The two of them had been chattering and laughing the whole time at the hospital and the drive back here while Walt had sat there and seethed. Cooper was the fun one, the personable one, the charming one, he on the other hand wouldn’t recognise charm if it came up and bit him on the backside.
“I’ll grab you some painkillers,” Cooper offered.
“Thanks, Coop.” The smile Becca gave Cooper was warm and genuine and Walt couldn’t help but wish she would smile at him like that.
At least she’d kissed him back.
A kiss he wouldn’t mind repeating.
Over and over again.
“We should get started,” he said briskly, sitting down at the table. “Last chance, you sure you’re ready to know exactly what we thought your brother did or you want to back out. And I warn you once you learn this you can’t unlearn it.”
Becca swallowed audibly but nodded. “I know my brother, Brody would never kill anyone, I want to help you prove that.”
She was brave, he’d give her that, she’d fought to defend herself against what she thought was intruders, and she was sitting here now even though she was clearly scared, ready to do whatever she could to help her brother. He sure hoped Brody deserved that kind of loyalty.
“So far we have six bodies, all women in their early to mid twenties, all intelligent with good jobs, all beautiful, all cut into pieces and left at various locations around the city.”
“Cut into pieces?” Becca gasped, her eyes going wide. Then she pressed a hand to her mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You can’t just be blurting stuff like that out, dude,” Cooper said as he entered the room and set a bottle of painkillers on the table in front of Becca.
“She wanted to know,” he protested, this wasn’t his idea it was Becca’s.
“Tact, man,” Cooper said, rolling his eyes. “Here you go, sweetheart, take these pills for your headache, you should have taken what the doctor at the hospital offered.” Cooper placed a hand on Becca’s shoulder and Walt found himself wanting to rip his partner’s hand clear off.
“Yeah, I should have, thought I could tough it out,” Becca said as she swallowed the pills along with the water. “Can I ask a couple of questions?”
“Of course,” he said, that was why she was here after all, to convince them it was her cousin and not her brother they were looking for.
“The women were they blonde?”
“They were,” Walt replied.
“Blue eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Tall?”
“The … uh … body parts … were they found at … at schools or universities?”
His eyes narrowed, how had she figured that out. His gut said this woman had nothing to do with the murders, but for someone uninvolved she certainly had a lot of the details. Details that hadn’t been released to the public.
“How did you know that, Bec?” Cooper asked, much more gently than he would have asked the same question.
Huge eyes stared up at them. “Benjy once said to me that a, to quote him, red-headed midget, he’d teach my stuck-up self a lesson. Said I thought I was so smart, that I was better than him, he told me I needed taking down a peg or two. I just thought since he liked tall blondes they would be the kind of women he would ask out, and if the thought they were smarter than him that he might … you know … do what he threatened to do to me,” she finished with a gulp.
The idea of anyone laying a hand on Becca Sharp was so abhorrent to him that Walt actually felt his heart rate accelerate.
“Three of our six victims were last seen with a man matching Brody’s description, the last was with a man who called himself Brody,” Walt informed her.
“It was Benjy, he and Brody used to switch places all the time when they were little, before Benjy changed.”
“What happened to make him change?” Walt asked.
“He was in a car accident, received a traumatic brain injury, he was never the same after that. I told them, my parents, his parents, our grandparents, that something wasn’t right with him but they didn’t believe me. They only saw what they wanted to see but I knew the truth. I saw the real Benjy.”
Something in the way she said that had the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. “Becca, did your cousin ever hurt you.”
Her yellowy brown eyes met his directly as she said the word that made his stomach drop. “Yes.”
“Why?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I was in the car too. I walked away from the accident without a scratch, he nearly died, said it wasn’t fair. He hates me.”
If that was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, then this beautiful, brave woman sitting before him could be their killer’s real target.