by Karen Rose
He shifted, trying to find a comfortable place on the concrete of the roof. He’d had to find a new rooftop. Who would have thought the police would use Skinner’s car to guide them to the old rooftop? He had to give them credit. Mitchell and Reagan were no fools. Especially that Reagan. He frowned a little, thinking of how Reagan arrived to rescue Kristen from those thugs that ran her car off the road. Kristen had walked into his arms like she’d known him all her life instead of only a few days.
He sincerely hoped that Reagan wasn’t the kind of man to push his advantage. If Reagan was foolish enough to try, he’d find Kristen had powerful allies in hidden places.
Aah, finally. He’d thought his target would never come. After his little detour with Conti, he’d gone back to the fishbowl and resumed his quest. Tonight’s mark had been easy enough to lure. He’d found Arthur Monroe in a bar, quickly made friends by buying the man a beer. Then he’d made Monroe practically drool by bragging about a stash of pure cocaine and offering him some if Monroe met him here tonight. The lure had worked well in the past, bringing him every mark except for Skinner who’d required a slightly different candy. Skinner’s lure had been the promise of discrediting information about a victim who was accusing one of Skinner’s clients with sexual harassment. His lips curled in distaste. Killing Skinner had been one of his greater contributions to humanity.
But tonight was about Arthur Monroe, a man who’d justified his gross sexual imposition of the young daughter of his girlfriend by saying the five-year-old had “led him on,” that he “hadn’t been able to help himself,” that it had been a “one time thing.” Kristen pushed for a trial, but the mother refused to allow her child to testify. He gritted his teeth as he brought the mark into his sight. Most of the time parents refused to allow their children to testify to protect them from media exposure and further trauma. This little girl’s mother didn’t want her boyfriend to go to jail. To Kristen’s shock, the judge in this case had sided with the boyfriend.
He’d known her by then and remembered that day well. She’d been devastated. She’d worked out a plea that she’d found repugnant enough, but the judge had unbelievably decided society in general had failed the pedophilic boyfriend and had rejected the plea, sentencing Monroe to probation and counseling.
Probation. For molesting a five-year-old. He smiled grimly as he tracked the man crossing the road. This time he’d get the boyfriend. Maybe next time he’d pull a judge’s name out of the fishbowl. Because there were judges in there, waiting with all the others.
He inched the sight down, bringing the man’s knees into view. He really wanted Monroe to pay, and with more than an easy death. But the vision of his own bloody hands after he’d killed Conti entered his mind, front and center. His bloody, gloveless hands. What a stupid mistake to make. He couldn’t risk losing control again. The police already knew the florist sign on the van was a sham, and they’d recovered a bullet. That the bullet was too damaged to identify was a short-term boon. Sooner or later they’d figure it out and find him. He needed to hurry. There were many more names in the fishbowl.
He brought the sight up to Monroe’s forehead and gently squeezed the trigger.
Nine down and still a million to go.
Chapter Fifteen
Monday, February 23, 5:00 A.M.
“Wake up.”
Kristen heard the fly buzzing and swatted it away.
“Kristen, wake up.”
No, not a buzzing fly. A rumbling voice. Abe. She rolled to her back, her eyes flying open. Abe sat on the edge of her bed, looking worried. And incredibly handsome. His shirt hung open partway, giving her a glimpse of his chest. It was hard, she knew. She’d felt his solid strength each time he’d held her against him. Now she wondered how it would feel to touch him there, to slide her fingers through the thick dark hair that covered his chest. Would it be coarse or soft? Would he like it? Would she feel his groan rumble beneath her hands?
As she contemplated, his hand lifted to smooth the hair away from her face so tenderly she wanted to sigh. He had such gentle hands. Such very nice hands. She shifted her body, feeling a warm throbbing between her legs that she now knew could become more than just a frustrating distraction. Much more. So that’s why everyone is so hooked on orgasms, she thought. The feeling had been simply… indescribable. Exhilarating. Powerful. I did it. I finally, really did it. And she wanted to do it again.
How exactly did one go about making such a request? And if she did, when would he expect more? Eventually, he’d want… well, more. And despite his arguments to the contrary, he would be disappointed. Abruptly the warmth chilled. So much for that.
He bent his head a fraction closer. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He narrowed those blue eyes. “You don’t look fine. You shouldn’t go into work.”
“I have to. I’ve got motion hour at nine.” She struggled up onto her elbows and groaned at the resulting pain in her back. “It feels like I got hit with a truck.”
“You did. A big truck with a gun.”
Her stomach quivered and she glanced over at her bedroom window. She’d nearly forgotten about the attack. It should have been her first thought, waking up. But it hadn’t been. Her first thought was of Reagan and his hands.
“You’re safe now,” Reagan said soothingly. “You don’t have to be afraid.” But she wasn’t afraid. No man had ever made her feel truly safe. Not until this man.
She looked him straight in the eye. “I know. Thank you.”
His eyes changed in a flash, going from worried to heated and the warm throbbing in her own body returned, intensifying almost to the point of pain. She watched his throat work. His jaw clenched. But he made no move to touch her. And she wanted him to.
She was in bed. With a man. And she wasn’t afraid. Not taking her eyes from his, her lips curved. “Good morning.”
His nostrils flared and she heard the quick intake of his breath. “Good morning.”
He needed to shave, she thought. The beginning of a dark beard covered his cheeks, his chin. That space between his nose and his upper lip. Tentatively she reached up and trailed her fingertips along that space, then across his lips. And he swallowed hard.
“What?” she whispered, her fingertips resting on his lips. They were soft, but she knew they could be hard when they crushed against hers.
His eyes smoldered. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered back.
She had to remember to breathe. “No, I’m not.”
He pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist and she wondered if he could feel her pulse quicken. He leaned closer until their eyes were just inches apart. This close she could see the blue was rimmed in black. “Yes, you are.” Then he tilted his head and his lips were on hers and it started all over again. The rushing, the pounding, the throbbing. The wanting. She heard herself hum in pleasure and he apparently heard it too because he took the kiss deeper, pressing her back, back into the pillows. Her hands reached, found his shoulders and held on. There was a tension in his shoulders. He was holding back, she realized dimly. He touched her only with his mouth, the rest of his body carefully held apart from hers. No pushing, no forcing. Strong, but gentle. The disparity was arousing.
He ended the kiss without really ending it at all, teasing the corners of her mouth with the tip of his tongue, brushing kisses across her cheeks, her chin, her forehead. “You’re a beautiful woman, Kristen,” he murmured into her ear and she shuddered hard, her hips arching upward, meeting nothing but blanket and air. Tensing, he pulled back until he was sitting in his original position. She opened her eyes to find him staring down at her, his powerful chest rising and falling as he worked to catch his breath.
So this is what they mean by sexual tension, she thought. I like this. “How do you do that?” she asked, her voice rough and husky.
His brows lifted. “Did you like it?”
She felt her cheeks heat and knew she’d bypassed peony pink and gone straight
to ruby red. And by the look in his eyes, he didn’t care that her face clashed with her hair. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said with such satisfaction that she had to smile.
She closed her eyes and screwed up her courage. “You make me want more.”
A full beat passed. Then another. “Good,” he finally said and this time it was his voice that was rough and husky. His fingertips skimmed her lips. The mattress shifted as he stood up. She opened her eyes and her mouth went dry at the sight of his body in profile. His chest isn’t the only thing that’s hard, she thought. And the thought didn’t make her cringe. A mixture of pride and relief rushed through her as he chuckled wryly.
“Thank you,” he said and she wished she could hide under the bed.
“I said that out loud?” she asked.
“Afraid so.” He aimed an amused smile in her direction. “You have to get up now. I have to go by my apartment and change clothes, shower and shave before I take you to work.”
She opened her mouth to say she could drive herself, then glanced at the window. There was pride and there was stupidity and Kristen was not a stupid woman. “Okay.”
Monday, February 23, 8:00 A.M.
Spinnelli looked worried. He had a right to be, Abe thought. They didn’t have shit.
Spinnelli leaned one hip against the conference room table, his bushy mustache bent in a painful frown. “So if I might summarize …” He lifted his hand and started counting with his fingers. “One, we have two more bodies. Two, one of the lead prosecutors in the city has been attacked twice, once in her own home. Three, it’s open season on defense attorneys.”
“That’s not such a bad thing,” Mia muttered and Spinnelli cut her off with a glare.
“Four, the captain’s taken calls from Jacob Conti every other hour all weekend because the ME’s office is, in Conti’s words, carving up his son a second time, and five”—he held all five fingers extended—“we don’t have a single goddamn suspect.”
Mia shifted uneasily in her chair. “That’s about the size of it.”
“Kristen scratched her attacker last night,” Abe said. “What about the scrapings from under her nails?”
From his seat beside Mia, Jack shrugged. “I can get DNA for you, but until you have a suspect, I don’t have anything to compare it to.”
Spinnelli stared at the whiteboard in frustration. “Julia found nothing on Skinner’s body? No hairs, no fibers, no nothing?”
Jack shook his head. “Nothing. I did find some debris ground into Skinner’s clothes, mud and some chemical residue from the factory in the dirt. I matched it to the site where we found the bullet, so we can confirm Skinner was there. The vise he used to keep Skinner’s head immobilized was so tight it left an imprint of the model number. Julia was able to stain the skin so I could get a good photograph. It was a Craftsman.”
“Solid as Sears,” Mia muttered. “On every daddy’s Christmas wish list.”
“I have one,” Spinnelli grumbled. “Wife gave it to me for my workshop three years ago.”
“I bet half the workshops in Chicago have one,” Jack said.
“What about the bullet?” Spinnelli asked.
“We’ve shown it to all the major gun stores in town,” Mia said. “Nobody recognizes that maker’s mark. It’s too damaged. They also said nobody’s been practicing at their range with homemade bullets. But I was thinking—”
“No,” Spinnelli drawled and Mia shot him a look that was half annoyed and half hurt.
“Yes. I do that occasionally, Marc,” she said quietly.
Spinnelli sighed. “I’m sorry, Mia. I know you guys worked most of the weekend on this one. I got a call from the captain’s office this morning. He’d just hung up with the mayor, who’d been getting around the clock calls from Conti demanding we put more men on this case. The mayor wasn’t pleased, so the captain wasn’t pleased. Plus it seems like every defense attorney in town’s called to complain. They say we’d put more cops on the case if the prosecutors were targets.” Spinnelli clenched his jaw. “That’s just bull-shit.”
“So you’re in a shitty mood,” Mia said. “Fine, just don’t take it out on me.”
“Fine.” Spinnelli raised both brows. “So what were you thinking, Mia?”
Mia didn’t look placated. “Just that if the guy has gone to all the trouble to make his own bullets, and he’s a sharpshooter who’s not practicing at a public range, he’s probably rigged his own target range. He’d need some land to do that so that no neighbors would see him and call the cops. Ever since 9/11, people have been a little skittish about their next-door neighbors playing Rambo.”
“That’s good, Mia,” Abe said. “If he does own land, his name will appear in deed records. We can cross-reference the list you got from the sandblasting company.”
“But not the florist companies,” Jack said.
“I’m still mad about that,” Mia complained. “I looked at florists for hours. All wasted.”
“Are we sure about that?” Spinnelli pressed. “We’ve got testimony from two kids saying they saw different signs on a white van. Are we sure they’re telling the truth?”
“McIntyre saw it, too,” Abe said and Spinnelli shrugged with regretful acceptance.
“And anyway, why would those kids lie?” Jack asked. “What’s in it for them?”
“Especially since one of them walked right by a police cruiser to deliver the Conti package,” Mia added. “McIntyre was sitting right outside Kristen’s house when Tyrone Yates dropped off his box. If they were in cahoots with our guy, they wouldn’t be so bold.”
Abe had a sudden, terrible thought. “They might not be so bold. He might.”
Mia turned around to look at him, her brows furrowed. “What?”
Abe sat down at the computer and brought up the depart-ment’s criminal database. “How did our killer pick those two kids? They came from different neighborhoods, different schools. Did he pick them at random? By chance?”
Spinnelli’s expression was grim. “He doesn’t do anything by chance. He’s too organized. Everything’s connected, every loop closed. Abe, tell me those two boys were God-fearing angels that never gave the law a day’s trouble. Please.”
Abe typed in Tyrone Yates’s name and waited for the computer to respond. And when it did, he sighed. “This boy’s got a yellow sheet as long as my arm. Assault, plead down. Possession, plead down. Et cetera, et cetera.”
Mia went very still. “And what about Aaron Jenkins?”
The only sound in the room was the clacking of the keyboard. “Same. Throw in a few misdemeanor petty thefts.” He scrolled down. “He turned eighteen four months ago. He’s got a sealed juvie record.” Abe looked up, saw every eye looking at him. “He set these kids up.”
Jack frowned. “I’m not following you.”
Abe leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “He didn’t just choose these kids at random. I’m sure of it. What if he has some personal beef with these kids? Maybe they did something to him, or to someone else who he wants to avenge. If he hires them, pays them, people will assume they know who he is. They’re bad kids, they have reputations in the neighborhood. Word gets out, and suddenly they are the link to the killer. If somebody wants the killer, they go through the kids.”
Jack shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense, Abe. Not only do you have one hell of a lot of ‘ifs,’ but if he has a beef with these kids, why not kill them himself?”
Abe shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a vigilante code of ethics or something. Maybe whatever they did wasn’t bad enough to warrant his kind of justice, but hey, if someone else does the honors, it’s okay with him. I don’t know. All I do know is right now, this is all we have.”
Mia closed her eyes. “We showed everybody in that neighborhood Aaron Jenkins’s picture. The whole freakin’ neighborhood.”
Jack massaged his temples. “And everybody who has a TV knows you guys are working this case, thanks
to Zoe Richardson.”
“She put Tyrone Yates’s picture across the news last night,” Spinnelli said grimly.
Abe clenched his jaw. He’d missed the news last night. He’d been too busy with Kristen’s attacker. “How did Richardson get pictures of Tyrone Yates?”
Spinnelli ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “She must have been skulking around Kristen’s neighborhood yesterday. She had really grainy video of Yates waiting in the back of McIntyre’s cruiser. Then they ran the footage of Conti manhandling Julia. ‘A father’s grief,’ Richardson called it,” he said sardonically. “My wife videotaped it for me, since we were all a little busy at Kristen’s house last night. I saw it when I got home.”
Mia got up to pace. “So between us and Richardson, the identities of those two delivery boys are common knowledge.”
“The kids won’t be able to ID the vigilante,” Jack said. “Unless they lied to you about what they’d seen.”
“Maybe they did lie,” Abe said. “Maybe they didn’t. If they did, I want them in here to get the truth. If not, if somebody wants to know who our humble servant is badly enough, they won’t believe those kids and their lives are in serious danger. We know the Blades want to know, badly enough to risk attacking Kristen on a public street. Let’s bring those two boys in for their own protection. In the meantime, I want to know what links these boys to our guy. Kristen wasn’t involved in either of their cases.”
Monday, February 23, 11:30 A.M.
Silence hung over the conference room in the State’s Attorney’s office. Kristen drew a deep breath. “That’s about it.” She scanned the twenty-odd faces in the room and found most registered shock or dismay. Greg and Lois were concerned.
At the head of the table, John looked tired. It had been John’s request that she tell them about the Friday night attack in her car, the discovery of the Skinner box, the Conti box, the two delivery boys, and her attack last night. She omitted the more personal points, primarily the way Abe Reagan had come to her aid, in more ways than one.