The flashbacks came. Brutal and relentless. Knifing through her mind. She saw the other dead woman and felt the life being choked out of her.
Leah gulped in some air and fought to keep ahold of herself. She couldn’t fall apart. Not now. Not in front of Alex.
She watched as he knelt down and touched his fingertips to the woman’s wrist. “Dead,” he verified.
Leah kept fighting to maintain her composure. She inched closer, but stayed in the doorway so she could see anyone who might approach. The short guy with the box turned and ran. She didn’t go after him. It was too big a risk to leave Alex alone at the crime scene. She’d already learned that particular lesson the hard way, but she would ask the lodge manager about the man when he got there. She would have to ask him about a lot of things.
Soon, the chaos would come. And the questions. But for now, Leah had one specific question that had to be answered.
Just one.
She waited for Alex to move away from the woman, and that’s when she got a look at the deceased’s neck. Leah nearly lost her breath again, because she had her answer. She saw the telltale signs of manual strangulation.
Ligature marks.
Like the ones on her own neck.
That wasn’t the only similarity. No. The woman had short blond hair, like Leah’s. Similar build, too. And then there was the fact that this room was directly across from her own.
Alex looked back at her, and in his eyes she saw the order he was about to give. He could see she was on the verge of losing it big time, and he was about to send her to her room—literally.
“We know who did this,” Leah whispered.
The logical thing would have been to tell her to wait for all the facts, but he didn’t bother. They both knew who’d killed the woman. But Alex didn’t acknowledge it. He kept his attention on the crime scene.
“There isn’t much disturbed in the room. The bed’s made, nothing’s toppled over.” Alex’s gaze fanned the area before going back to the woman’s neck. “There are two small puncture marks just below her right ear. He could have used a stun gun to subdue her.”
That would explain why the woman hadn’t managed to put up much of a struggle. No time to scream or fight back before his hands were on her throat.
“If she was expecting towels, she would have opened the door readily when the strangler knocked,” Alex continued. “If he had the stun gun ready, she wouldn’t have seen it coming.”
Leah certainly hadn’t seen her own attacker before he pounced, and she hadn’t been incapacitated, as this woman likely was.
“Maybe he thought she was me,” Leah mumbled. “After all, he attacked me in a dark room. He might not have gotten a good look at my face.”
The idea sickened Leah. Another woman possibly dead because of her.
“No,” Alex quickly disagreed. “He knows you’re injured. Even though they didn’t put your picture in the newspapers, they reported that you’d suffered a broken wrist. This woman doesn’t have a cast or any visible previous injuries.” He hesitated. His gaze met Leah’s. “Plus, he’s probably been watching you, or maybe even saw pictures of you in your apartment. There’s no way this is a case of mistaken identity.”
Yes. The strangler had watched her, and Leah could feel his eyes on her just as she’d felt his brutal hands.
She heard voices and a commotion in the hall, and looked out. A wide-shouldered bald man was running toward them. Behind him was the maid who’d been there earlier. As Leah had done with the other worker and the box guy, she made mental descriptions that she would need for the report.
“Keep them out,” Alex instructed. He, too, backed out of the room and blocked the entry by standing in the doorway.
“I’m Winston Cooper, the lodge manager,” the man explained. He was gulping in his breath as if on the verge of hyperventilation. “Rosa said you needed a doctor, that a woman had been hurt. We don’t have a doctor. Just a medic, and he’s out helping a crew right now.”
“We don’t need the medic—the woman’s dead,” Alex explained. “I’m Special Agent McCade.” He looked past the manager at the petite maid with the salt-and-pepper hair. “You found the body?”
The woman nodded and crossed herself. She was trembling all over, especially her hands. “I was bringing up towels.” Her gaze dropped to the ones on the floor. “She didn’t answer when I knocked, so I let myself in with the master key.”
“Did you touch anything?” Leah asked.
“No.” Rosa shook her head. “When I saw her, I ran out.” A hoarse sob tore from her throat, and tears spilled down both cheeks. “Is she really dead?”
Alex made a sound of confirmation and glanced around the ceiling. “No security cameras?”
“Not in this part of the resort, only at the front desk and lobby,” the manager answered. “There’d been no need for them. Not until now.” He put his hands on his hips, lowered his head, sucked in more air. “I need to tell the sheriff about this. The storm’s already taken out the phone lines, but I have a portable CB radio I can bring down for you to use. That way you could talk to the sheriff yourself.”
“Do that,” Alex instructed. “And keep everyone away from this end of the hall. I’ll also need to speak to your other employee, the man who was with Rosa when she found the body.”
“David Fowler,” the manager supplied. “He’s pretty shook up, but I’ll let him know you need to see him.”
Leah understood that “shook up” reaction. Especially since Fowler wasn’t law enforcement. She’d had years of experience and training, and it still ripped her apart to see this woman murdered. If only she’d been able to stop the strangler—
“Focus on this case,” Alex whispered to her.
That worked. Well, as much as words could. It wouldn’t do the dead woman any good if Leah didn’t give this her full attention. That was the way to find the person responsible.
And that person was clearly here at the lodge.
Leah had no doubts about that now. The written threat had been real, and that meant the strangler would come after her next.
Alex gave her one last hold-it-together look before he walked closer to the maid and started a string of necessary questions. Did she know the dead woman’s name? Had she seen anyone in the hall? Anyone else in the room? Had she heard anything suspicious?
Rosa answered no to each one before Alex dismissed her.
“Go ahead and bring down that CB radio from my office,” Winston called out to her. She nodded and hurried away.
Leah tipped her head toward the far end of the hall. “A few minutes earlier there was a man here holding a box,” she said to the manager. “Blond hair. Glasses. Wiry build. Did you see him?”
Winston glanced at the spot she’d indicated. “Oh, you must mean Lou. He’s a seasonal hire.” His eyes widened. “You think he had something to do with this?”
“Right now, I’m just getting information.” Though she did already have some doubts about this Lou. He didn’t appear the size to be the strangler. Of course, the use of the stun gun could have made up for that. “What’s his last name?”
The manager shook his head. “I’ll have to find out, and I won’t find out from him. Lou went running from the lodge like a man on fire. I just hope he can get to a safe place what with this storm breathing down on us.”
That gave her more doubts about the guy’s guilt. The strangler wouldn’t have just left. No. He wouldn’t leave until he had what he wanted, and what he wanted was her.
“I’ll check on the maid and make sure you get that CB right away,” Winston assured them, and he headed out, running back up the hall.
God knew how shaky Leah must have appeared, because the moment that Winston was out of sight, Alex latched on to her arm and moved her to the other side of the hall. “You look ready to keel over.”
“I’m fine,” she lied.
Alex stared at her.
“Almost fine,” she corrected. “Besides, we don�
�t have to be fine to do our jobs.”
Alex gave a grunt of agreement. “But sometimes the job is best left to others. Once the sheriff arrives to take over, we’ll get out of here.”
That helped rid her of some of the nervousness. Still, Leah shook her head. “But it’s our case.”
“We’re not doing this,” Alex snapped.
He stared at her for several seconds, then his face softened. Well, as much as it could. In the five years she’d known him, she couldn’t say she’d ever seen Alex look soft. Even during sex, he was in the alpha warrior mode.
“We can’t do this,” he corrected.
She wanted to argue, but since her wrist and hand were throbbing like a bad toothache, Leah knew it wasn’t an argument she could win.
Not that she ever won one with Alex.
“I just don’t want to be scared of him,” she admitted. She didn’t have to clarify the him. They both knew it was the strangler. “Leaving feels a little like being scared.”
Alex touched her good arm. “Nothing wrong with being scared. But being reckless is a whole different story. I can’t allow him to come after you again.”
Leah waited, because it seemed as if he wanted to say more. Her suddenly fertile mind filled in the blanks for him. Did he want to say he couldn’t allow it because he still had feelings for her?
No.
It couldn’t be that. The lust was all that was left. Maybe all that there’d ever been. Except her fertile mind rejected that, too.
She’d cared for Alex once. Okay, even now she cared for him. Some days it was easy to push that completely out of her brain.
But today wasn’t one of those days.
“I’ll finish packing,” she told him, and had turned to do just that when she saw Winston hurrying back toward them. He was shaking his head and wheezing again, and he had both the CB and a piece of folded paper.
“I got Sheriff Quick on the CB,” he said. He repeated the news, the anxiety in his voice going up a notch with each word. “He can’t get here anytime soon. There was an avalanche, and it buried a couple in their car. It’s touch-and-go right now.”
Leah understood the lawman’s priorities. The couple could be saved, perhaps. There was nothing to be done for this woman, but the sheriff would need to secure the lodge and make sure someone else didn’t get killed.
Like her, for instance.
She glanced out the window at the steady sheet of falling snow. Soon the roads would be impassable.
Alex took the portable CB from Winston. “Sheriff Quick?”
“Agent McCade,” the lawman answered. “Winston just told me about the dead woman. Do you have the resources there to secure the scene?”
Alex opened his mouth to answer, but there was a flurry of static. “Sheriff Quick?”
Nothing.
Alex tried again. And again. But got the same result.
“This happens during bad storms,” Winston explained. He took the CB back from Alex. “But I’ll keep trying to get through to him.”
“Oh, and someone put this on my desk,” the manager added through the wheezes. He volleyed wide-eyed glances at both of them before handing Alex the folded piece of paper. “It has your name on it, so I figured it might be important.”
Leah’s stomach tightened into a cold hard knot. She recognized that paper. It was from the lodge’s notepad.
“I didn’t see who left it,” the lodge manager explained, “and it wasn’t there when I came running down here the first time.”
Alex examined it, no doubt to see if there were any visible prints. There weren’t any. He used his thumb to brush open the folded sheet.
There was a single handwritten sentence. One that twisted Leah’s stomach even tighter when Alex read it aloud.
“‘If you leave with her, I’ll kill another woman in her place.’”
CHAPTER FOUR
“ALISHA MONROE,” Alex mumbled. Age thirty-one. Single. According to the info that Winston had provided Alex, she was from Billings and had come to Ice Lake for a ski vacation.
Her vacation was over. She was dead.
Maybe her murder had been a message. Some sick cat-and-mouse game meant to torture Leah. Or maybe Alisha had learned the hard way who the strangler was. Whatever the case, Alex didn’t think it was a coincidence that the woman had been choked to death or that she so closely resembled Leah.
“You’re scowling,” Leah mumbled.
She was in a chair that she’d pulled up next to him—her shoulder to his—staring down at the items scattered on the desk in her room. Items they’d both been studying for the past hour and a half while they waited for the sheriff.
Included in their stash were the two threatening notes, bagged and tagged using the evidence materials he’d had in the field kit in his car. Alex hadn’t wanted to leave Leah in order to retrieve it, so Winston had gotten it for him.
The manager had also given them the hotel guest list and personnel files. They were on the desk next to Alex’s phone, which he’d used to take photos of the crime screen across the hall. His own personal notes were there, too. The beginnings of the reports on the murder of one Alisha Monroe and the continued threats aimed at Leah.
“Sixteen men are still registered guests at the lodge,” Leah said, dropping her copy of the guest log in front of him. “Seven fit the age range for the profile. That means seven possible suspects.”
“Eleven,” Alex corrected. He tipped his head to the personnel files he’d been scouring. “There are four male workers who also fit. One is Lou Sullivan, the seasonal hire you saw with the box.”
“Yes, the short blond guy. Winston said he ran out. Did he come back?”
Alex shook his head. “No. But Winston verified that Lou went back to his regular post. He was just here to drop off that box of supplies.” So they could rule Lou out for now, since the strangler was no doubt still close by. And that narrowed it down to ten suspects—still way too many. “We have to trim this list.”
“Well, we can’t trim David Fowler,” Leah insisted.
Alex knew where she was going with this. Fowler had also been in the hall when the body was discovered. His file was incomplete, because he’d only recently been hired. Recently as in the past week—or less. The assistant manager who’d hired him wasn’t at the lodge and so far couldn’t be reached to provide them with specific employment details, and Fowler was nowhere to be found. Maybe his absence was something as benign as the man finishing his shift and leaving. Or running out after seeing a dead body.
But Fowler could also be a serial killer.
Unlike Lou Sullivan, Fowler was unaccounted for, and that wouldn’t do anything to get him off their suspect list.
“I didn’t get any bad vibes from Fowler,” Leah said. She drew in a hard, weary breath before she continued. “But I think we both know not to trust my instincts. After all, I walked in on an ambush.”
Alex heard the unspoken garbage in that comment, and he nipped it in the bud. “Your instincts are just fine.” It didn’t come out exactly as he’d planned, because it was more of a snarl, so he made sure he softened his expression a bit when he looked at her.
Since she dodged his gaze, Alex put his fingers beneath her chin and lifted it to force eye contact. He’d had some good ideas in his life, but that wasn’t one of them. Her vulnerability hit him hard, and before he could talk some sense into himself, he slipped his arms around her and pulled her to him again. Apparently, he hadn’t learned his lesson about close contact with Leah.
“We can’t leave,” she whispered, her voice heavy with emotion.
“No,” he agreed. Not that they could, anyway, at this point. The road leading to the main highway would soon be closed, if it wasn’t already.
Plus Alex didn’t want another dead body.
“He’ll kill again,” Leah added. Her voice cracked.
Alex stared at her, waited for her eyes to meet his. Their gazes collided. He didn’t draw her any closer, but
it didn’t matter. The intimacy was there, and he could feel her deep in his arms, anyway.
Oh, man.
Would this ever end? Ever? He had a dozen things that should be occupying his thoughts. And they were critical. But Leah had a way of cutting through everything. A way of occupying his body below the belt.
Okay.
Maybe not just below. Other parts of him were in on this, too. But that didn’t make this close-quarters situation any easier.
Little by little her expression changed as she moved out of his embrace. She fought first a smile and then a scowl. “You dumped me, remember?”
He considered his answer. Considered ditching the conversation entirely, but when her scowl continued, he knew he had to set things straight—again. “Dumped isn’t the right word. I ended things because the Bureau promoted me and made me your supervisor.” He shrugged. “Besides, you said it was just sex between us.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, but then shook her head. “It was.”
He froze, because he saw the slight dilation of her pupils. Heard the shift in her breathing.
Leah was lying.
Well, hell.
Had he missed those signs before? Or had he wanted to miss them, because a breakup was less complicated than having to work out a supervisor-subordinate relationship? Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. Not now, anyway. Not with a killer bearing down on them.
Because he was so caught up in thoughts that he shouldn’t be having, the knock at the door nearly caused him to jump out of his skin.
Alex cursed. Great. Just great.
Losing focus was the best way to get them both killed.
He stepped in front of Leah, looked through the peephole and opened the door to the manager. Good. Winston was one of the few males there who didn’t fit the profile. Plus, he’d been manager at the lodge for nearly fifteen years, and the serial strangler murders had happened miles away.
Well, except for Alisha Monroe.
“It took some doing, but I managed to get the sheriff on the CB,” Winston said. He wasn’t wheezing as much as he had earlier, but his breathing was still unsteady. “He can’t get here because the avalanche closed the road between Graniteville and Ice Lake.”
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