Page 13 of Blood and Sand

“You’re very welcome, baby.” She beamed at the compliment. “I know you came to get baby girl’s help on something, so I wanted y’all to be able to work on full stomachs.”

“Thanks, Grandma. We’re going to take over the den if that’s all right with you?”

“Sure, baby. And Rey, you take the spare bedroom when you’re done. I don’t want you traveling late at night when y’all get finished,” she said, continuing to clear the dishes off the table. “Since y’all ain’t married no more, ya can’t be doing no shacking up in this house.”

“Grandma!”

“What, girl? Don’t Grandma me. Y’all must think I’m a fool or something,” Mama Wright mumbled. “I know what I see. When y’all start acting right again and get remarried, then y’all can share a room.”

“Grandma, Rey and I are just working on a case, that’s all. We are not getting back together.”

“Whatever you want to think, DeeDee,” Pops interjected, chuckling and pointing at me. “That boy has that same look he had the very first time I met him.”

I leaned back in my chair and listened. Both her grandparents were right. My intentions were to get my wife back, and there was no need to hide it from the most important people in her life and mine.

“Tell them, Rey.”

“Tell them what exactly, DeeDee?” I looked directly at my ex-wife and winked. “I messed up. I’m gonna fix it.”

She stood and glared. “What is the matter with you?”

She threw her hands up in the air and stomped out of the room. She was furious, but I needed to let her grandparents know I was going to fight for her.

Her grandfather chuckled.

“Make it right, Rey,” her grandmother said.

“I’m gonna try my best, Mama.” I kissed her on the cheek, then followed Dana into the den.

“Did you have to say that, Rey?” she asked as soon as I walked into the room.

“Say what, Dana?” I shrugged like it was no big deal because, to me, it wasn’t. I knew I’d fucked up. I’d known it was a mistake as soon as I signed my name on the divorce papers. “That I’m gonna fix what I messed up?”

“Yes, that!” She tossed her hands into the air, then started pacing. “You know how they feel about you, about us being together. You can’t go filling their heads with the hope that we’ll get back together when that’s not going to happen.”

“I do know how they feel, and that’s why I told them the truth.” I sat on the couch, pulled the files I’d handed her earlier from her messenger bag, and placed them on the table. “I told you, DeeDee, what my plans were. Did you think I was lying? You know me better than that.”

“Rey, you can’t be serious.” She stopped pacing and glared at me with her hands on her hips. “We haven’t been together for three years. I haven’t heard from you in three fucking years!”

“That doesn’t mean shit to me, DeeDee. None of it! I still love you, and I will love you until I take my last fucking breath. And you still love me, too. I know you do. You don’t have to say it now, but I know you.” I ignored her shocked look. We’d come back to this topic later. Right now, this case needed to be solved before he killed someone else. “Now, could you please sit your beautiful ass down and help me catch this son of a bitch?”

She remained standing for a few more minutes before she sighed and sat down beside me. “This conversation is not over,” she mumbled.

“I know. So, did you get a chance to look at any of this?” I asked, glad she was ready to get started.

She nodded and picked up a sheet of paper from the file. “I did.”

“Okay, so what did you get?”

“Without having time to dig deep into this, I could only come up with a preliminary workup.”

“That’s fine.” And just like that, it was like old times. We were a team again. I flipped through the papers and photographs. “Something is better than nothing because we ain’t got shit on this psycho.”

“Okay, with your victims being college-educated women with high-paying jobs averaging anywhere from two-hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand a year, more than likely, so does your unsub. These women all have white-collar jobs and make an incredibly good living. They also lived in affluent neighborhoods. I would say your killer is of a similar background. He’s highly educated, probably a White male who went through a recent life-changing event such as a divorce or loss of a job. That’s more than likely when the killings started.”

“Why do you think he’s highly educated?”

“Women usually tend to have something in common with the men they date. For example, we both have an interest in criminology, me the behavioral and psychological side, and you the enforcement side. Women who are executives, such as these women, tend to gravitate to men of similar education, of similar backgrounds—wealth, friends of the same social circle, expensive cars. These women aren’t picking up random men from bars.”

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