No Hero by Mallory Kane Page B

revulsion as the camera moved into extreme close-up on the lunatic’s eerie, pale eyes. What a disgusting piece of inhumanity.
    “Here.” Connor’s whisper cut across Fontenot’s words, raspy with anticipation. “Listen.”
    “I will reach out, Ms. Conner.” Fontenot’s voice rose to the pitch and cadence of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. “I am the father, the child, and the spirit. No one can equal me. Your Detective Gautier will suffer much more at my hand than I ever did at his. He will know the hell of watching that which he values most, destroyed.”
    “Son-of-a-bitch,” Dev muttered, shocked. He jumped up and grabbed the remote control from Connor’s fingers and hit reverse. Fontenot’s words were almost exactly what he himself had lamented to Penn last night—make that early this morning. Impotent fury warred with grief as he listened to the bastard’s words a second time. Then he slammed the remote down on the desk. “When did you tape this?” he demanded.
    She picked up the DVD case and handed it to him. It read, Fontenot, February 24 . Just after Dev had left for Seattle.
    “If I’d known—” he started, his voice gravelly with emotion.
    On the other side of the desk, Connor seemed to shrink before his eyes. Her face was pale, her nostrils pinched, her eyes shimmering. “I didn’t make the connection at first,” she whispered hoarsely. “I wasn’t sure. I am so sorry.”
    Her apology registered in his brain on some level, but his entire consciousness was focused on what Fontenot had said. He picked up the remote, rewound, and played it one more time, noting every facial expression, every slight change in tone, every nuance. He straightened and paced, pushing his fingers through his hair, arguing with himself about whether he was reading too much into the old man’s words. It was a fairly generic statement, maybe even a diabolical maniac’s version of the childhood warning “You’ll be sorry.”
    “This is the date you recorded the interview?”
    Connor had eyes only for him. She nodded.
    “When did it air?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “It hasn’t. We’re not going to show it. My producer and I felt that it was too disturbing. Airing it would only be sensationalizing Fontenot again.”
    “Why now?”
    She frowned at him. “Why what?”
    “Why’d you decide to do an interview with him now, after all this time?”
    “I didn’t request the interview—Fontenot did. He called my producer.”
    Right. Fontenot had said that on the recording. Dev stopped pacing. “Then I guess the question is, why did he wait so long?”
    “I asked him that,” she said on a nervous laugh. “I asked him a lot of things. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. He barely responded to anything I said. I’m sure he got me up there just to tell me this—” she waved toward the TV. “I didn’t have enough sense to understand what it meant.” Her voice broke on the last word. “And now three teenagers are dead and I—I could have stopped it.”
    For a second he was taken aback. She blamed herself? “If he is somehow engineering these murders from prison, we’ll get him,” he assured her. “I’ll request the prison records of every visitor he’s had, every phone call he’s made or received. We will get him.” He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted her to understand that he didn’t blame her.
    She swallowed. “It really bothered me, the way he talked about making you suffer. I thought it was all bluster. But now I can’t stop thinking it’s my fault they’re dead.”
    He searched her face. “Don’t. We don’t even know for sure that Fontenot’s involved.”
    “Just wait,” she said dully. “You haven’t heard it all. There’s more. A lot more.” She nodded toward the remote he still held.
    He started to press play, but before he could, a phone chimed.
    “That’s mine,” she muttered, pulling it out. “This is Reghan Connor,” she said, then listened.