by Lori Ryan
He wanted to bury himself in her, knowing he would find such ecstasy there. Nothing but pleasure, intense and aching and sweet as hell. Christ, he wanted inside her.
“Shouldn’t you get that?” The laughter in her voice said she knew damned well what he was thinking.
He growled a response as he leaned over her and lifted the cell, swiping it to answer before he placed it to his ear. As soon as he had it situated between his ear and shoulder, he ran a hand up Ava’s body, from the gentle curve of her thigh to her waist. He let his hand settle there, working his thumb in a circle, drawing a wriggle from her.
“Sevier,” he said, knowing full well he was likely going to have to leave any minute. A phone call in the middle of the night meant he was being called to a scene.
He listened for a few seconds before rolling off the bed with a curse. He couldn’t delay on this one no matter how tempting Ava was. Their jewelry store robberies had started up again. And this time, there were no survivors.
Chapter Sixteen
John studied the body on the floor. It was the kind of scene that would turn the stomach of new officers on the force, and he could see the uniform who had secured it was struggling.
He couldn’t blame him. Blood spatter made a stark frame to the flesh and teeth dotting the floor around the man’s head.
“Let me ask you something—” Eric shifted his position, turning to face the victim’s feet which were splayed out on the floor like a rag doll tossed aside by an angry child. “—why didn’t his buddies hold him back this time?” Eric asked.
John had been thinking the same thing. The older man had been beaten to death, likely with the perp’s bare hands. He lay, battered beyond recognition, in the back hallway of the jewelry store.
They’d been told another body had been found, that of a younger woman, shot to death in the store’s office. She got off easy.
“And why do I feel like we’re going to need a psych eval on this guy when we find him?” Eric mused.
John was silent. He didn’t mind that Eric liked to fill the silence, but John wasn’t up for it right now. He was picturing Ava or her sister on the floor instead of the victim.
Still, Eric’s initial point was valid. “You’re right. They either didn’t or couldn’t stop him.”
“I don’t think his buddies were with him this time.”
John turned toward the voice to find a smaller black man with scarring on the left side of his face coming from further inside the store. As one of five death investigators in the city’s department, Demetrius Johnson came to the scene when there was a dead body. The death investigators took photographs, documented the scene, and would let the medical examiner know if they recommended an autopsy on a particular case.
It was well known around the department that Demetrius was working his way through night school to get a degree. John had a feeling the guy would end up as a medical examiner one day. Maybe even Chief Medical Examiner. He was hungry and dedicated, the kind of guy they wanted on cases.
Demetrius had come from the direction of the office.
“What makes you say that?” John asked.
Demetrius pointed to the floor around the victim. “Shoes. Only one set of shoe prints in the blood. Same in the office.” He gestured with a pen at the heel of one of the cleaner imprints. “Distinct mark here tells me they're the same shoe. But the marks are your jurisdiction, not mine. Get your techs on that. We'll match it if you bring us a shoe."
Eric grunted. Sure. Get the shoe.
The death investigators didn’t normally analyze crime scene evidence like that, but Demetrius was good, and Eric and John didn’t mind input. Demetrius knew which detectives he could offer his two cents to and which to keep quiet around.
“That,” he grinned as he stood, “and Rhys already got an emergency phone warrant from a judge and dumped the security video. This was one guy.”
Rhys walked in as he was speaking and nodded his agreement. “One guy. Dressed exactly the same as the other robberies, so he’s either a really good copycat who’s spot-on in his imitation, or our guy’s on his own now.”
John looked down at the corpse, still seeing Ava instead of the man who truly lay there. Fear and anger warred. “On his own, with nothing and no one to hold him back now.”
Chapter Seventeen
John slowed his steps as he and Eric walked through the parking lot of the police precinct. It only took Eric a minute to see what John had spotted. Lucia was getting out of her car and waving at John.
Shit. If she’d come here, she really needed to talk to him. And he was a first-class asshole for not calling her back.
“Meet you inside,” John said, giving Eric a nod in response to his partner’s questioning look. No, he didn’t need backup to talk to his ex-wife.
John changed direction, heading for Lucia. She stood behind her car door, half in and half out of the car.
He gave a small wave and a smile, starting to prepare his “I’m a dick” speech, when he saw it.
John froze. He might need backup after all.
He stood stock still, staring at his ex-wife’s stomach. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel the sting of tears behind his eyes.
“I’ve been trying to reach you. I didn’t want you to find out at the wedding.” Lucia laid a hand on her stomach. She had to be six or seven months along. Well into the safety zone for most pregnancies.
Probably safe, even for her. All of their miscarriages had happened before the twenty-week mark.
John didn’t have words.
The silence hung between them for a long time before he broke it and walked forward, pulling her into a hug.
“Jesus, Lucia. God, this is amazing. It’s great.” He meant it. He wanted this for her, even as the ache of what this meant hit him.
When they weren’t able to conceive, the doctor had said there was no reason for it. Unspecified infertility they called it.
But if she was standing here pregnant before him …
She took his hands. “Can we talk?”
She tilted her head toward the car.
John nodded. “Yeah, sorry. Uh, sure.”
When they were settled in the car, she looked over at him, taking his hand again. The ache of the failure of their marriage hit him again. He was past the heartache of lost love, but somehow that sense of failing her loomed.
She rubbed his hand with her thumb, a gesture he’d grown accustomed to during their marriage. It was how she soothed. She wanted to soothe the hurt now.
“I need to tell you something, John.” She seemed to rush the words. “Carlos and I saw a new doctor, and this one took the time to explain some things to me.”
He didn’t know why she was telling him this. He knew Carlos had the kind of money that meant he could take her to as many fertility doctors as they needed. John, on the other hand, had had to scrimp and save for the in vitro rounds they’d done. And for the last of them, he’d had to borrow the money from his dad.
“John, you need to listen to me.”
He focused on her again. He owed her that much, no matter how much he didn’t want to hear this.
“This doctor explained some things our other doctor never did. Did you know that a diagnosis of unexplained infertility is a good thing?”
John reared back like he’d been kicked in the gut. How could she possibly be saying what they’d gone through was a good thing?
She put her hand up. “I don’t mean it like that. But what that means is that they never found anything wrong with either of us. None of the doctors we saw ever really explained it that way. They always said they couldn’t pinpoint a cause.”
John let out a slow breath as she kept talking.
“The doctor Carlos and I are seeing said she would have kept working with us, kept trying things to support fertility. She was so angry when I said the clinic you and I were working with told us they couldn’t help us anymore.”
John put the heels of his hand
s over his eyes and pressed, holding the steady pressure on them as he tried to process what she was saying.
“John,” Lucia pulled one hand away from his face. “She’s saying it’s very possible there isn’t anything wrong with either you or me. It’s possible you could have kids someday, just like Carlos and I.”
John didn’t know how he felt about that. He felt like he’d been hit square in the chest with a sledgehammer. He was happy for Lucia and Carlos. Lucia would make a wonderful mother.
His thoughts strayed to Ava, and he felt a small flare of hope that he could give her a future. That he could share a future with her. He doused it quickly. It didn’t matter what Lucia’s doctor said. He had failed Lucia. He had failed them both. When she’d wanted to keep trying to have a baby, he had begged her to stop. He hadn’t been able to go through it anymore.
When that didn’t work, he’d ordered her to stop. Said he wouldn’t be a part of trying anymore. He’d actually stopped sleeping in their bed. He wouldn’t make love to her. He’d turned her away, even when he heard her crying in their bedroom as he slept on the couch. A husband like that doesn’t need to be trying over with another woman anytime soon. Bad enough he’d put one woman through that hell.
John reached for the door handle, afraid if he sat there any longer, he’d break. He’d never been very good at talking about his feelings, and he sure as hell didn’t know how to put what he was feeling into words.
“I have to run, Luce.” He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, ignoring the worried look on her face as she watched him.
“I’ll see you at the wedding?”
John grinned, putting the small bit of acting ability he had in him into the gesture. “Absolutely. I’ll be there.”
“You can bring her,” she said, as he stepped from the car.
“What?” John asked, leaning back in.
“The woman. Whoever it was that you thought of when I mentioned a baby. Bring her with you. I want to meet her.”
John started to argue, but she waved him off.
“Women know these things, John. I saw the look in your eye. Your head went to someone important. I hope things work for you and her. If anyone deserves to be happy, John, you do.”
His head was still wrestling with those words as she drove away.
Chapter Eighteen
“All good?” Eric said under his breath as John slid into a seat in the conference room next to him.
John gave a jerk of his head, but he was anything but. He’d stood for a solid two minutes in the parking lot after Lucia drove away. He’d only moved when one of the uniforms had honked at him for standing in the middle of a parking spot.
“Where are we with the evidence?” he asked.
They were all planning to sit down with the evidence collected at the scene of what now had to be termed a murder more than a jewelry robbery. They were waiting on an inventory from the store owner’s wife, but John would be willing to bet there wouldn’t be much jewelry missing. He had a feeling their lone guy was now in this for the thrill more than the money.
The others had probably been chased off when Officer Hall was shot. They were likely smart enough to know the whole department was gunning for them after shooting a cop.
Eric tipped his head to the table where a sheaf of papers waited. “Not much back yet. The uniforms canvassing the area for witnesses turned in their reports. Most of the employees at neighboring shops had gone home. The guy who runs the liquor store halfway up the row in the shopping center said he didn’t see or hear anything.”
Mason leaned toward them and spoke to John. “Erica is looking over the footage from the store to see if she can post anything, but so far, the guy is wearing the same mask and wig we’ve seen in the past. Clothing looks the same, too. She did say the prints they lifted show a distinctive wear pattern in the left heel, so she can match them to any boots we pull in for a sample.”
“Cool,” John said. “Let’s just go start collecting boots off the street.”
No one bothered to answer him.
The phone on the wall rang, and Rhys leaned over to lift the receiver. He gave the rest of them a brows-up look at something he was hearing on the other line.
When he hung up, he turned to them. “We’ve got a guy just walked in off the streets confessing to the robberies and to being the one who pulled the trigger on Officer Hall.”
The room went still.
John was the one who broke it. “KMI?”
He didn’t have to explain to anyone—even Connie—what he meant. You learned that one early on the streets as a uniform. KMI meant Known Mentally Ill, a term they used for someone who was known to the police department to be suffering from any of a variety of mental illnesses.
“Not as far as they know.” Rhys pulled one of the laptops they kept in this room over and punched the keys.
He read the screen for a few minutes before turning it their way.
A man in his forties looked back at them. He had jet black hair and eyes to match. His skin was pale, and he had a scar over one eye.
Rhys summarized the information on the rap sheet. “Guy’s name is Trenton Doyle. A few arrests for shoplifting when he was a kid, then a third-degree assault that got him eighteen months.”
John frowned. “Why eighteen months?” A third-degree assault charge could land a person in jail for six to eighteen months.
Connie had been reading the laptop and was the one to answer. “He assaulted a police officer. Argument at a bar, cops arrived, and the guy ended up assaulting one of them instead of the guy he had a beef with.”
“How long ago was that?” Eric asked.
“Ten years. Clean since then,” Connie answered.
“Or not caught,” Gerald said.
They all knew that was possible. Of course, he also could have been clean that whole time. The shoplifting arrests as a minor weren’t unheard of. The guy really only had that one arrest as an adult. Though, assaulting an officer wasn’t a minor thing. And it showed he was willing to harm an officer. It wasn’t a far leap to shooting one.
“Rhys, you and Mason take the interview?” John asked. He and Eric could jump in if they needed to change tactics. They often did that during an interrogation. It didn’t matter that the guy was confessing.
They would need him to lay out all of the details of the shooting. Just because someone was willing to confess didn’t mean they wouldn’t play games during the interview. There were three other people out there responsible for these crimes. Yes, they wanted the guy who pulled the trigger, but they also wanted to get those others, if they could.
Rhys and Mason nodded and left the room. The interrogation rooms were down the hall. They had observation rooms next to them, but on a case like this where they had so many detectives on it, they would watch from the video feed in the conference room. Rhys and Mason would have a uniformed officer outside the interrogation room and one in the observation room as backup if they needed it.
They all watched the screen as Rhys and Mason entered the small room where Trenton Doyle had been placed. The thin man sat with shoulders hunched, seeming to close in on himself as the detectives entered.
“Hi Trenton,” Rhys started, as though he was the guy’s best friend. The uniformed officer followed them into the room, but that was all part of the setup.
Rhys turned to the officer. “You can hang outside, man. We aren’t going to need you.” He turned to Trenton. “We don’t need him in here, do we? We aren’t going to have any trouble with you, are we? I mean you came in here on your own, right?”
Rhys was purposefully trying to get Trenton to say yes to him.
Trenton’s eyes went big and round. “No, of course not, I mean … no.”
Rhys gave the uniformed officer a pat on the shoulder. “Sorry, buddy. You’re sitting this one out.”
He’d just established that he was on Trenton’s side.
When the officer left the room and shut the door, Rhys and Maso
n sat across from Trenton.
“I’m Detective Evans and this is my partner, Detective England.”
Trenton nodded, but remained mute. He’d gone even paler, if that was possible, like he was beginning to regret walking into the precinct to confess.
John studied him as they all watched Rhys continue to explain to Trenton that they would be recording their conversation. They didn’t need to Mirandize him because they hadn’t placed him in custody. He’d walked in of his own accord and could walk out anytime. Of course, if he did that, they’d get someone watching him and start to dig so damned deep into his life, they’d know if he had smear stains on his tightie whities by the time they were done with him.
“Something’s wrong,” John said, leaning forward.
“You’re right,” Gerald agreed, arms crossed over his chest.
“What do you mean?” Connie asked.
Gerald explained what John was thinking as John stood and went closer to the monitor.
“There’s no way this is our shooter,” Gerald said. “Our witness said the shooter was confident, cocky. He was clearly running the show with his buddies. When they stood up to him after he shot Hall, he fought back. He shot at Hall a second time and the only reason he missed was because his buddy shoved him.”
Gerald stabbed a finger toward the screen. “This guy isn’t leader material. There’s nothing cocky about him.”
John turned and looked over his shoulder at them, adding to what Gerald was saying. “If this guy’s friends fought him on something, he’d back right down.”
“Could it be one of the other guys in the group coming in to confess for the leader? Maybe the real shooter forced him to confess, somehow?” Connie suggested.
Gerald nodded, pointing at Connie. “You’re thinking. That’s good. Rhys will see how much this guy knows about this.”
The phone on the wall rang again, and John reached for it.