“You had no proof that I’d ever slept with another woman.”

“And I told her that,” I said. My words slurred together, and I realized my jaw wasn’t working right. It hurt like the dickens. And my shoulder. Holy cow. “I said we had no real proof of you cheating.”

“Oh, I’m sure you fought for me.”

I tried to roll off my side and onto my back. My left shoulder felt dislocated. Though the world flip-flopped with the movement and my stomach lurched, I did manage to ease the pain a little. A warmth ran down my temple and cheek, and I realized I was bleeding. Ha! I was getting blood all over Marv’s SUV. No getting that stuff out. At least there would be forensic evidence.

“So I figured if I couldn’t kill her, I’d kill you. No one would make that connection.”

They would when they brought out the luminol. And he was clearly forgetting the part where he attacked my assistant in a room full of off-duty cops. Why did no one remember that?

I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the spinning and concentrated, but Angel didn’t pop in. He always popped in when I needed him. I just couldn’t focus, couldn’t assemble my thoughts. They were coming at me too fast and they were fractured, broken and in pieces.

“Why were you at this bridge?” he asked. “How did you know about it?”

He looked back at me, but he was shrouded in darkness. I was seeing his aura. I’d caught glimpses of people’s auras before, but this was different. Marv’s was cloudy. Evil. Plain and simple, his aura was evil. It surrounded him, consumed him. He felt no remorse for anything he did to get what he wanted.

If nothing else came of this, at least I had saved a woman’s life. He had every intention of killing his wife for the insurance money. It took a special kind of ass**le to do something like that. To be able to convince a woman that he loved her, to convince her family that he loved her, that he was a loving and devoted husband, and the entire time he plotted her death in the back of his mind. If only he could have kept it in his pants, Valerie Tidwell would never have called me.

“A dead girl told me,” I said, answering his question at last, “only she wasn’t dead.”

“You’re about to be. That’s all that matters.”

I couldn’t take the spinning anymore. The pain shooting through my shoulder, ribs, and hip, and I had a horrible feeling my leg was broken. If it wasn’t, it had a lot of explaining to do. Pulverizing me with that much pain for nothing was not acceptable. But the spinning was the worst.

Marv pulled onto a rough patch and threw his SUV into park, giving my dislocated shoulder a nice little jerk.

“What did you give me?” I asked him.

“A GMC sandwich.” He turned back and glared at me. “How dare you interfere with something that is none of your business.”

“That’s kind of my job,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He got out, opened my door, and yanked my legs until I fell onto the dirt. My head hit the frame on the way down, and Barbara screamed in protest. I was right there with her.

I tried to concentrate on the surroundings, but it was difficult when those surroundings were part of a merry-go-round carnival ride. The one thing that did catch my eye was the bridge. The old, dilapidated bridge for a railroad track that was no longer used.

“You are about to have a nasty fall,” he said, trying hard to sound clever. “But cause of death will probably be strangulation.”

He clasped my arm – the non-dislocated one, thank god – and dragged me up the side of the incline. Then he shoved me over one track and across the wood slats of the bridge until we stood above the highway. It wasn’t that high. The fall probably wouldn’t kill me. It would just hurt really bad. He was such an idiot. I lost all respect for him.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you won’t be my first.”

He’d killed before. That was so not comforting.

“My best friend died on this bridge. Everyone thought it was an accident. It’s amazing what people will believe. He just happened to fall when a truck was approaching? Idiots.”

His best friend. He had a strange idea of friendship.

He pushed me onto my stomach and straddled me. The next thing I heard was a rip. He tore the back of my shirt open, and the crisp night air swept across my skin. Then he reached around my front and unbuttoned my jeans. Unzipped them. Yanked them and my underwear down to my ankles.

When I heard his belt coming off, I slammed my eyes shut and tried to concentrate again. Tried to summon Angel. But before I thought too hard, a crack split the air as leather and metal whipped across my back. I gasped at the sting. Gasped again when the belt lashed across my bu**ocks and thighs. He was whipping me with the buckle, the sharp metal slicing into my skin. Over and over. I couldn’t help it. I cried out, but that only seemed to increase his fervor. His zest for cruelty. My one saving grace was that every point of contact left forensic evidence. But that didn’t help when the metal ripped through my skin. My body seized with every lash. A spasm bolted through me every time the metal struck. I ground my teeth together, tried to breathe through the pain.

The world spun.

The pain crippled.

And the thrashing continued.

Just when I thought I would lose consciousness, it stopped. He pulled me from the fetal position I’d curled into and straddled my back again, his mouth at my neck, his groin on my ass.

“You think you’re so much better than me. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”