by Jami Alden
To finally feel the sweet grip of her body as she came with him buried deep inside her. Maybe if he finally had that, she would stop haunting his dreams.
He paused for a moment, transfixed by the sight of her laid out on the couch in front of him, wearing nothing but a couple of scraps of cream-colored silk. She stared up at him with hot green eyes, a delicate flush spreading across the curves swelling over the top of her bra. Slender curves and pale silky skin. More beautiful than his fevered memories, sexier than any fantasy he ever could have conjured.
He came down over her and captured one nipple through the flimsy silk of her bra. It nudged eagerly against his tongue. He shoved the bra out of the way and sucked her in, groaning at the taste of her, salty sweet. Megan moaned and dug her fingers into his hair, urging him on.
He sucked her hard as his other hand slid down to cup between her legs. Hot, damp, pulsing against his hand. Something that sounded like, “Oh please” escaped her throat.
She wanted this, wanted him as much as he wanted her.
The thought almost made him come, right then and there.
He reared up off of her and fumbled with his belt. He wanted to spend hours, days, exploring every secret spot, licking and sucking every inch of skin from the top of her head to the soles of her feet until he knew her body as well as he knew his own.
But he was so primed he knew he’d be lucky if he lasted more than a few thrusts.
Just this once. This is all I’m going to get and I promise I’ll never ask for more.
He was dragging his zipper down when his phone rang in his pocket, the vibration against his aching dick almost knocking him off the couch.
Déjà fucking vu.
He considered ignoring it, but even if he did, it was too late.
The cell phone’s sharp ring had snapped Megan out of her haze. She scrambled up to sitting and looked down at herself in horrified disbelief, as though shocked to find herself nearly naked and about to have sex with him.
Again.
Cole zipped his pants and yanked the phone from his pocket. He didn’t try to stop her when she scrambled off the couch, grabbed her clothes, and made for the bathroom, slamming the door so hard the was shook.
He looked at the caller ID. “What’s happening, Petersen?” he asked, hoping nothing in his voice would tip Olivia to the fact that he was nursing a massive case of blue balls.
“Why are you breathing hard?”
Shit. “I was walking fast.”
“Where are you anyway?”
My own personal hell. He considered lying, then quickly dismissed it. Petersen was too sharp for that. And he didn’t want to lie any more than he had to. “I’m at Megan Flynn’s place,” he said. A cover story always worked better when it included some truth.
Dead silence echoed across the phone line.
“I wanted to ask the girl, Devany, more about the night of the murder. But I wanted to check with Megan on her emotional state first.” That sounded reasonable.
“You couldn’t do that over the phone?”
“Petersen, do you have something to tell me or not?”
Megan emerged from the bathroom then, carefully averting her gaze, once again covered from neck to toe by her heavy wool sweater and tight-fitting jeans. Her wavy brown hair was again pulled back in a tight braid. Prim, proper, and buttoned up like nothing had happened. But one look at her flushed cheeks and red, kiss-swollen mouth and it was all he could do not to throw his phone against the wall, toss her back down on the couch, and pick up right where they’d left off.
“Is she what’s making you pant like that?”
You have no idea.
“Wait, don’t answer that. Just get back to the station. We just got an ID on the latest victim.”
Anticipation pricked the hairs at the back of his neck as he buckled his belt. Don’t get your hopes up. “Two of the other victims were ID’d, too, and that led nowhere.”
Megan, who was sitting back at the kitchen table, pretending he didn’t exist as she put the case files back in order, snapped to attention.
“It’s different this time,” Olivia said, excitement evident in her voice.
“This must be good. I haven’t heard you this excited since you heard Heidi Klum was going to be on the cover of Playboy.”
“Come on, with Karen’s pregnancy hormones kicking in, I have to get my thrills where I can. Anyway, one of the FBI’s computer jockey’s ran the vic’s picture through the facial-recognition system and linked her up with a cold case in San Diego. We need to verify, but it looks like our victim was really Bianca Delagrossa, who disappeared at age sixteen on her way home from a party.”
“We have a real name. A real person this time.” It was flimsy, but it was something. Every victim had a story. Maybe this one would fally be able to tell them something. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“A real name? What does that mean?” Megan snapped as soon as he hung up.
He paused, weighing how much to tell her. On the one hand, the information wasn’t public yet. On the other, it was likely Tasso would release the victim’s name and alias to the press in a call for any information on the victim. “We have an ID on the latest victim.”
“Who is she?” The pale, pinched look was back on Megan’s face. That tight look of despair that had disappeared for a few minutes in the heat of passion.
He reached out to her but she jumped back. “Don’t. Don’t touch me.” It was then he saw something else in her eyes. Shame. Guilt. Like she’d done something dirty by letting Cole touch her.
Or worse yet, betrayed someone she loved.
Fuck it. He couldn’t wipe away the grief or the guilt. But he could throw her a bone. Knowing the victim’s name before it was released to the press wouldn’t help her, but it wouldn’t hurt the investigation either. “Until Tasso makes a statement to the press, what I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential.”
Megan looked at Cole as he walked out the door. Her body hummed with a combination of unfulfilled sexual need and nauseating guilt.
She sank into a kitchen chair and buried her face in her hands. What was wrong with her? Not only did she let him touch her, kiss her, she’d kissed him right back, given as good as she’d gotten. She could make up all the excuses she wanted about her fragile emotional state, but bottom line, she knew if Cole hadn’t gotten that phone call, she would be under him on her couch right now with him buried deep inside.
The thought was enough to send a jolt of desire straight to her core, so keen it nearly hurt. Her skin felt too tight for her body, so sensitive that the silk of her bra felt like sandpaper across her nipples. She shoved away from the table and retrieved her laptop from her bag, determined to take her mind off Cole and what had almost happened.
She pulled up a search engine and typed in the name of the Slasher’s latest victim, Bianca Delagrossa. Cole had surprised her by telling her the victim’s name, but she figured he was trying to make up for refusing to pursue the connection to Sean’s case.
And maybe for some of the other stuff that had happened.
Not that there was much information to be found, she realized as she quickly scanned through the results of her search. The articles were all old, dated over six years ago when Bianca had first disappeared. An apparent runaway, then sixteen-year-old Bianca had gone missing from her home in San Diego sometime in the middle of the night and hadn’t been seen since.
Megan clicked over to a Web site that kept a database of missing children and pulled up a photo and description. She swallowed hard, trying to reconcile the beautiful, smiling girl in the picture with the images of her mutilated body from the crime scene. Megan had known too many girls like Bianca, girls who ran away from a bad situation only to find that what waited for them on the streets was a thousand times worse.
She got more depressed as she scanned through what little was written about her disappearance. Because she was a runaway from a working-class family that didn’t
have the resources to launch a massive media campaign, Bianca’s disappearance had received minimal attention beyond the first week. And it didn’t help that Bianca’s family and close friends depicted her as a troublemaker who’d already been in trouble with the police after she was caught trying to sell Percocet she’d stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet. The most recent article had been published a little over two years ago, when Bianca had turned eighteen, when a reporter revisited cold cases from his neighborhood. By that time, even her parents had given up. “If she wanted to come home,” her mother said, “she would have done it by now.”
Megan’s stomach hurt reading it. They had no idea how lost a girl could get, how even if no one was forcing her, it would seem impossible to go home.
Her cell phone blared and she recognized Devany’s ringtone. Megan snatched it up, grateful for the distraction. “How are you doing?” she asked when she answered. Devany was still pretty shaken up from the other night. “Did you manage to sleep?”
“Yeah,” Dev replied. “I kinda need to talk to you about that. I’ve been having these dreams.”
She could relate. “The nightmares are normal, Dev, and they’ll pass. But you should definitely bring them up in your counseling session tomorrow.”
“It’s not that…. It’s—” She broke off. “Do you think the killer saw me?”
Megan bit her lip. She didn’t want to lie, but she didn’t want to ratchet up Dev’s anxiety. “The important thing is you didn’t see him,” Megan replied.
“That’s the thing. I’ve been having these dreams, and I think I did see something after all.”
Megan sat up straighter. “You think you saw the killer? You have to call the police—”
“Not the killer—the dead girl. I think I know her.”
“From where?”
The other line was silent for several seconds. “A couple years ago, before my mom got busted the last time, I took off for a while.”
Megan knew all of this from Dev’s file. She’d run away from the house her mom shared with the boyfriend who turned out to be a registered sex offender and had spent nearly two months on the streets. The thought of twelve-year-old Dev out there on her own still made her queasy, but somehow the girl had made it through without being sexually assaulted or seriously injured. “You met her then?” Megan’s skin broke out in goose bumps. If she could find information about where Bianca had worked, who her pimp was…“You’re sure?”
“I didn’t recognize her at first when I saw her….” Dev’s vo
A crescent moon surrounded by three smaller stars, to be exact. Megan had seen it in the autopsy photos Cole had shown her. But Megan couldn’t let Devany know that without outing Cole for feeding her information.
“Do you remember her name?”
“She said her name was Bibi, and I met her a couple times when I was crashing at the mission down on Thirty-ninth.”
Megan knew Mission St. Jude—and its director, Sister Mary Theresa Goczeski—well. “So Bibi was homeless too?”
“No… at least, I don’t think so. She never said, but she was too clean and dressed too nice, and when I saw her, she was mostly helping out with meals and stuff. But I remembered the scar because she would wear these tank tops and the nun who ran the mission was always telling her to cover up.”
“If she wasn’t homeless, do you know where she lived, where she worked?”
“No,” Dev said. “She didn’t talk much about herself. She just always told me I should go home before I got into real trouble.”
“We need to tell the police.”
“No!”
Megan could hear real fear in her voice. “If you’re worried about getting in trouble for not telling them sooner, don’t worry. This kind of thing happens all the time. I’ll go with you if you want—”
“You don’t get it. If I tell them, they’re going to start snooping around, asking questions, and if it gets out that I’m the one who sent the cops around, I could end up worse than Bibi.”
Megan sighed, knowing Dev’s fear wasn’t completely unjustified. “Fine, I’ll tell them and I’ll be sure to keep your name out of it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Thirty minutes later, Cole ducked into the conference room and slid into a seat next to Petersen.
The rest of the task force was already in attendance, and Special Agent Tasso stood at the front of the room. Behind him was a whiteboard with pictures of the victims, as well as a map of the West Coast. “Now that Detective Williams is here, we can get started. As you all know, we’ve identified the Slasher’s latest victim as Bianca Delagrossa, who was reported missing on August twelfth, 2004.” Tasso indicated a photo that stood out from the rest because it wasn’t taken at a morgue. In it, a pretty teenage girl gave a flirty smile to the camera through thick, dark lashes. Glossy black hair spilled over her shoulders.
“The San Diego police treated it as a runaway case based on information given to them byr mother. They could find no trace of her, until now.” He pointed to another photo. There was no smile in this photo. Bianca lay silent and still, her dark hair dull, her pretty features looking as if they were carved in gray marble.
“As of now, we don’t know anything about her other than her name. Not how she got up here, where she lived, who her pimp was. But if we can find that out, maybe we can figure out what links her to the other victims.”
Tasso started to toss out orders. “Blake, I want you to run the other victims through the facial-recognition program again, see if we get another hit on a cold case. And be sure to cross-reference internationally. No reason to think some of these girls weren’t trafficked in.”
Agent Blake, who sported a goatee and heavy-framed glasses, nodded.
“I plan to release a statement in the next forty-eight hours, but for now, the victim’s identity is strictly confidential. We haven’t even notified her parents yet.”
Cole’s collar went a little tight around his neck, and he told himself to relax, reminding himself that Megan had promised to keep it quiet.
But she’s leaked stuff to the press before. When it comes to her brother, do you really think you can trust her?
He shoved aside the doubts. Leaking the victim’s identity wouldn’t serve any purpose, and Megan wouldn’t do it out of pure malice.
“Detective Williams, Detective Petersen, I want you to find out everything you can about our victim, where she lived, who her friends were.”
“Yes, sir.” Cole stood, followed by Petersen. “We thought we’d start by running down people in the city who do these scar tattoos,” Petersen said, indicating the close-up of Bianca’s moon and stars. “We’re hoping that will get us an address, maybe a neighborhood she was working.”
Cole nodded. “It’s a place to start.” Not that Cole thought it would get them anywhere. Even if they could nail down where she lived, it had been clear from the first victim, and was more so now, that if the victims were prostitutes, they weren’t part of the ordinary downtown crew. These girls were high-end, well maintained, free of disease or any indication of drug abuse.
And well protected from the police. Any prostitute who worked the same territory ended up in the system eventually, whether through a roundup by vice, a drug bust, or an assault that landed her in the hospital.
Whoever worked these girls had resources to keep them off the streets, out of the system; they had the ability to erase their lives and give them entirely new identities.
And whoever was killing them worked on the inside.
Now tell us something we didn’t know, Sherlock.
“Who knows, maybe there’s something about Bianca that will pull this whole mess together,” Cole said as he and Petersen exited the conference room.
“Detective Williams,” Tasso called after him. “A word, please?”
“I’ll catch up with you,” he told Olivia. “Yes, sir?”
Though Cole topped him by about three inches and thirty pounds, Tasso still
cut an imposing figure. With his military bearing and piercing stare, he wore his authority like an invisible cloak. “I noticed you requested copies of the victims’ files.”
Shit. Should have known Tasso would keep close tabs on everyone. “I wanted to go over them on my own. See if anything new jumped out at me.”
Tasso cocked a thick eyebrow. “And? Anything of interest?”
Nothing to do with this case. He didn’t know Tasso well, but he knew his work and respected him. Having always prided himself on being up front and honest, Cole didn’t like having to go behind his back. “Nothing we weren’t already aware of.”
“Keep me updated on any new information you discover.”
He didn’t even consider bringing up the perceived similarities with Sean’s case. Megan had already gone to Tasso herself and had been dismissed out of hand as a delusional woman who was desperate to grasp at anything that might exonerate her brother.
Tasso’s assessment was pretty dead-on.
Still, some of Megan’s delusion must have rubbed off on him, because as he headed back to the bull pen, he couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that maybe they were missing something. First the TV left on, then the cuts…
An ambidextrous killer and a calculated frame job. It was like something out of a movie, nothing that could happen in real life.
As much as he wanted to help Megan, it would be career suicide to push to reopen Sean’s case on such flimsy evidence.
Yet he couldn’t get Megan’s haunted face out of his head.
“Ready to go?” Olivia said as he passed her desk.
Whatever follow-up he was going to do on Sean’s case would have to wait for later. “Let’s hit it.”
Chapter 9
Mission St. Jude was located just within walking distance of the famous Pike Place Market. During the day, the downtown area was spit shined for the tourists. Few visitors ever realized that only a few blocks away was the dark world of Seattle’s homelessness, drug trade, and prostitution.