by Lolli Powell
“Oh, yeah.” Will smiled. “Sorry. I guess I was just thinking it would be nicer taking orders from you.”
Jen blushed and turned to get out of the car. Will stopped her with a hand on her arm. The physical contact sent a surge of heat through her body that left her weak.
“Wait, Jen.” The flirtatiousness was gone from his voice. “I’m sorry I’m making you nervous.”
“Don’t be silly.” She automatically started to deny the truth of what he’d said, but he shook his head.
“You know it’s true. And I haven’t meant to do it. But you interest me a lot, and I can’t seem to help myself.”
Looking at him carefully, she could see little trace of the macho predator who had been circling her since that morning. Suddenly he grinned, his blue eyes sparkling, and she thought that he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
“I guess you just bring out the animal in me.”
He let go of her arm and moved his hand to her hair, gently brushing it back from her face. The touch sent a shiver through her, and her lips parted involuntarily. They stared into one another’s eyes, and for a second, Jen was sure he was going to kiss her. In the police garage! Then the moment passed, and he pulled his hand back on his side of the car.
“How about letting me buy you a sandwich and a beer this evening after we’re through?”
“I don’t know.” She tried to think of a good reason to deny herself the pleasure of being with this man.
“Don’t answer now.” He held up a hand. “Think about it. I promise to keep the animal under control.”
“Are you sure you can?” The words popped out before she could stop herself.
His eyes filled with such desire that she felt her breath leaving her body. This man could be the death of me, she thought, as she felt her own body mirroring his desire.
“If that’s what it takes to get to know you better, I can. It won’t be easy, but I’ll do it.” He smiled. “If I get out of hand, I expect you to put me in my place. I’ve got a feeling you can handle the likes of me, Detective Dillon.”
She laughed, but as she got out of the car, she admitted to herself that she wasn’t as strong as he seemed to think she was. In fact, she suspected that he could turn her into putty in his hands. It was a shocking realization since she had never before known a man capable of doing that.
CHAPTER 9
Brandon was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the coffee table, focused on his latest video game, an Xbox thing that had something to do with motorsports. Jen’s father had bought it for Brandon a couple of weeks before. He had assured her that it was age appropriate, and that was good enough for her. She had no desire to immerse herself in video games, but fortunately for her, her dad had the time and the interest. He also had the money and desire to spoil her son.
“Hi, Mom,” Brandon said, without looking away from the screen, his thumbs moving rapidly as he negotiated the game’s challenges.
“Hi, hon. How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Fine” seemed to be Brandon’s standard answer any time she asked him about something he didn’t think she’d understand. She had no doubt that if his grandfather had asked him the same question, he would have received a detailed answer about whatever Brandon had accomplished to that point.
“That’s good,” she said. “How’s pizza for dinner?”
“Pizza sounds great!”
“Now how come I knew you were going to say that? I’m going to shower and change and go back down to the building for a while. I’ll ask Ada to look in on you.”
Ada Levinson lived across the hall. She was sixty-two and widowed. With no children of her own, she had more or less adopted Jen and Brandon. Jen knew her parents were willing to watch Brandon any time, but Brandon was old enough to stay home by himself most of the time. Rather than drag him out or ask her parents to drive across town, it was much more convenient to ask Ada to check on him from time to time.
Brandon paused the game and turned to her.
“Why do you have to go back to work?”
“Another lady was murdered. Like the one two weeks ago.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Was she a school teacher, too?”
“No, this woman was a beautician.”
“Did the same guy do it?”
“We think so.”
Brandon looked troubled. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, hurried to Jen, and threw his arms around her.
“Be careful, Mom,” he mumbled into her shoulder. “Be real careful.”
Jen hugged him tightly, surprised at his “mushiness,” as he would have called it. He seldom expressed any concern about the danger inherent in her job. In fact, she knew he was proud of what she did, often bragging to his friends when he didn’t know she could hear. Now, for the first time, she suspected that underneath all that pride ran fear.
She kissed the top of his curly blond head, put her finger under his chin and tilted his face up to look into his concerned blue eyes.
“Sweetheart, I’ve got the best reason in the world to be careful, and it’s looking me right in the face.” She kissed him again. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
“Now, what’ll it be? Sausage or pepperoni?”
“How about both?”
“You got it.”
The shower felt good. Jen shampooed her thick shoulder-length hair and soaped her body, then just stood under the water, enjoying the feel of the hot spray on her skin.
Brandon’s reaction disturbed her. She tried to keep the local news off when he was around. Considering the depravity and violence in the world today, she thought the news should carry ratings like the movies. Still, he could have seen something while at Ada’s or his grandparents. They all knew she didn’t want him watching TV shows or movies that were too violent or sexual, but she had stopped at asking them to forego the nightly news. Maybe she should have once these murders started.
It wasn’t like she had tried to keep him completely in the dark. She’d told him about the earlier murders, but only that two women had been killed and that she was tasked with finding the killer of one. The trouble was, the TV stations vied to see which one could out-gross the other. They seemed to think prefacing explicit scenes or descriptions with “Caution: Some viewers might find the following scenes or descriptions disturbing” absolved them of any responsibility for the reactions the scenes or descriptions might elicit. In her more cynical moments, she thought the warning was simply their way of ramping up the anticipation, since the lag time between the warning and the scene or description was never more than a few seconds. Unless the remote was in the parent’s hand, there wasn’t time to turn the TV off, much less get a child out of the room.
Well, it was too late now. Brandon seemed to know more about the first two murders than she wanted him to, but she made a mental note to herself to ask Ada and her parents to not watch the news when he was around. He didn’t need to hear any more about the third one than what she told him. He was growing up, and she knew it might only be another year—maybe even a month—before she could no longer shelter him from the ugliness of the world, but for now, that’s exactly what she was going to do. Try to do, she amended. Thanks to the Internet, she wasn’t sure she would succeed.
The murders. The computer checks on the people they knew who were connected to Victoria Kaufmann hadn’t turned up anything of value. The mailman, a fellow by the name of Carter Holiday, had been in and given his statement, and the hospital had verified that Sandy Norton was under sedation and couldn’t be questioned till morning.
Don and Al had witnessed the autopsy. As the coroner had suspected, there had been no sexual assault. He had found several brown hairs on the body that didn’t match Vicki’s. Although he hadn’t yet matched them to the hairs found at the other crime scenes, she had little doubt they came from the same man. Arthur Kelty had had brown hair. Had he left a few strands behind as a ca
lling card?
The last thing she’d done before heading home had been to call BodyFit Athletic Club. She’d learned the club opened at five in the morning and closed at ten.
She shut off the water and stepped out of the shower. What a day it had been! An encounter with a man who made her turn to mush with only a glance, another woman killed by a madman, and the realization that her son was no longer an innocent babe. She hoped there were no more surprises in store before sundown.
She had just finished dressing and running a pick through her curls when she heard a knock at the door. Brandon knew not to answer the door when she was gone or otherwise indisposed unless he knew it was Ada or his grandparents, so she slipped her feet into sensible flats and hurried to the living room.
“Talk about timing,” she said. “That’s bound to be the pizza man.”
It was. For the next twenty minutes, she and Brandon gorged themselves on pizza and Pepsi and talked about the events of his day. They carefully avoided any mention of the events of hers.
CHAPTER 10
It was five till six when Jen arrived at the Municipal Building. It had been built four years before, and the police department was housed in the basement level. Lonnie said that the sight of a police officer, especially a uniformed one, was offensive to the average citizen, so the city had put them in the basement to get them out of sight. On her bad days, Jen tended to agree with him.
The department consisted of one hundred and two sworn officers, divided among the patrol officers, detectives, and supervisors. In addition, the department employed dispatchers, clerical personnel, and corrections officers who worked the city jail.
The detective section included juvenile and narcotics officers. Its twenty-eight men and four women, plus two clerical assistants, were housed in a large, brightly lit room off the main lobby. The room was quiet, most of the detectives having gone home at four. She stopped to say hello to Leslie Drake, who was still at her desk in the small office assigned to Juvenile.
“It sounds like things are getting hairy.” Leslie’s brown eyes were thoughtful. “Any ideas?”
“Next to none,” Jen admitted. “I suppose you’ve heard our killer might be the son of a man who committed serial murders across the country over fifteen years ago.”
“The whole department’s talking about it.” Leslie absentmindedly played with a strand of hair the color of an Irish Setter’s. “I wonder how long it will be before the media gets the word.”
“I’m sure they already have. Who knows? It might help if they print Kelty’s name and his father’s story. Sometimes these killers like publicity. Maybe it will prompt him to contact us or some lucky reporter.”
“It will also have the public on our backs wanting to know why we haven’t found him if we know who he is.”
“There is that.”
“If he wasn’t murdering women, I could almost feel sorry for the guy,” Leslie said. “Can you imagine what it must have been like having a serial killer for a father? Makes a girl glad she was born into a family that’s just got the normal screw-ups.”
She leaned back in her chair, her eyes twinkling.
“By the way, what’s this I hear about a certain FBI guy having the hots for you?”
Jen groaned. “You’ve been talking to Jamie.”
“And Lonnie.” Leslie laughed at Jen’s muttered curse. “From what they say, the man is smitten. And they say it looked to them like maybe you had a little touch of the bug yourself.”
“They’re liable to say just about anything. What bothers me is that they’ll say it to anybody who’ll listen.”
“Oh, I’m sure they haven’t talked to more than three or four people. Each.” Jen groaned again, and Leslie laughed. “And, of course, you can trust those three or four people to keep their mouths shut.”
“Right. Just like I can trust the sun to come up in the west tomorrow.” Jen shook her head. “I’ve got work to do. I can’t stand around gossiping all night.”
“By all means, go ahead.”
Jen saw with astonishment that Leslie was actually smirking.
“By the way, if you’re looking for your partner from the FBI, I just saw him go into the conference room.” She paused for a single beat, then added, “Nice butt.”
Jen burst out laughing in spite of herself. Waving a hand in disgust at Leslie, she headed toward the detectives’ conference room.
Lonnie, Al, and Don were at the table, reading reports. Will stood with Mike Hardesty at one end of the room. He had changed into slacks and a light sweater and was pouring a cup from the Mr. Coffee on the credenza. When he saw her, he smiled, the corners crinkling up in that maddening way of his that made her heart skip a beat.
Lonnie’s thinning gray hair was standing at angles on his head, evidence that he’d been running his fingers through it in frustration. He motioned for her to sit down.
“I’ve just been going over the Edwards file. Again. I don’t see anything I didn’t see before.”
“These are always the hardest murders to solve,” Hawkins said. “No motive that makes the slightest bit of sense to anybody but the killer.”
“And if we have the same luck we had last time,” Al added, “the fingerprints we found will belong there.”
“Well, we do have a few hairs and the black ribbon.” Jen tried to sound more positive than she felt. “Once we get a suspect, the hairs can be either matched up or not.”
“Sounds easy.” Lonnie snorted. “But first we’ve got to get a suspect.”
“We will. Eventually the guy’ll screw up, and we’ll get him.”
“The only problem with that,” Hardesty said, “is that in order for him to screw up, he’ll have to make another attempt on some poor girl’s life.”
She looked at Will.
“Yeah. And if our guy is Arthur Kelty—like you think—he might leave town before he has the chance to screw up. Just like his father.”
She pulled a chair out from the table and flopped down in it.
“Regardless of his identity,” Hardesty said, “there’s got to be a common denominator. Maybe the victims used the same gas station or supermarket or patronized the same bar. There must be some connection between them and the killer.”
“It does seem unlikely that the killer would pick a home at random,” Jen agreed. “He’d have to be watching that night to know she was alone then, and he would probably have to have her under surveillance for some time in order to be sure she lived alone.”
Will had stood quietly at the end of the table as the others voiced their conjectures. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since she’d entered the room. His gaze was at once thoughtful and tender. She suspected that his thoughts were running in two tracks, one devoted to catching a killer and the other devoted to getting her into his bed.
“Maybe the Bureau will have some luck tracing Arthur Kelty,” she said.
The federal machinery had creaked into gear to search for the missing man. Jen knew all avenues would be explored, from Social Security records to income tax returns to military records. Sometimes it was helpful that Big Brother watched, but if Arthur Kelty really wanted to disappear and reemerge as someone else, she knew it wouldn’t be that difficult. False identification had always been available for the right price, but in the digital age, even a technologically savvy teenager could manage it. Not to mention that anything and everything could be had on the Dark Web. She’d seen news stories where journalists had bought fake passports on the Dark Web, then used them to cross borders with no one being the wiser.
“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Jen said. “Besides picking each other’s brains for ideas, I mean?”
“The pickings are slim,” Al muttered.
“I thought we’d look over the reports again,” Lonnie said. “In light of this new case, something might stand out like the connection to BodyFit.”
“By the way,” Hardesty cut in, “I checked with Judy Sams’s friends and relatives. None
of them know of her ever going to BodyFit, but they admitted it was possible. They said she’d been complaining that she needed to start exercising more, so she may have stopped in to look the place over.”
“Al, I’d like you and Don to canvass Kaufmann’s neighborhood tonight,” Lonnie said. “A lot of the neighbors were at work earlier today.”
“I’d like to check BodyFit,” Jen said, “unless you have something else you want me to do.”
“No, that’s top on our list. I’d planned to have you and your new partner check it out.”
Lonnie smiled mischievously, and Jen glared at him.
“We could split up, you know,” she said. “Cover more ground that way.”
“We don’t have that much ground to cover. Besides, you know I prefer having two people conduct interviews. One often picks up on something the other one misses.”
“I think it’s a good idea.” Will and Lonnie exchanged a look.
“I thought you would,” Lonnie said.
Jen gave up. Her sergeant was obviously committed to playing Cupid. She knew that until these cases were closed, she was going to be thrown into constant and close contact with Will Anderson. She couldn’t decide if she was pleased, angry, or frightened at the prospect.
“After we get finished with BodyFit,” Will said, “we could check out The Factory.”
The Factory was a favorite singles spot in the Forest Plaza Mall near the interstate. She’d been there a couple of times with dates. It was a nice enough place, but it catered to a younger crowd than she preferred.
“I gather that’s where Vicki and Sandy Norton went last night?”
“Yeah.” Al looked up from the report he’d been reading. “Norton’s mother called. I got the impression she wasn’t too keen about her daughter going to places like that, so, of course, she’s convinced the killer followed them from there.”
“Maybe he did.”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
Jen picked up a copy of the Edwards file and tried to ignore Will. She settled back with the thick sheaf of papers and grisly photographs. She practically knew the file word for word, but one more look wouldn’t hurt.