River Road

by JoAnn Ross

  To Jay—

  who never complains about living in a house populated by imaginary people, taught himself to cook so I don't have to live on cereal while I'm deep in a book, and is always there to point out the rainbow whenever I begin fussing about storm clouds.

  I love you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 1

  Washington, D.C.

  Finn Callahan hated bad guys, criminal lawyers, bureaucrats and cockroaches. At least the bad guys had provided him with a livelihood as an FBI Special Agent for the past thirteen years. Why the Good Lord had created the other three remained one of those universal mysteries, like how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or why it always rained right after you washed your truck.

  "It's not like I killed the guy," he muttered. The way Finn saw it, a broken nose, some bruises and a few broken ribs didn't begin to equal the crimes that scumbag serial killer had committed.

  "Only because two agents, a Maryland state trooper and a court-appointed shrink managed to pull you off him before you could," the woman behind the wide desk said. There was enough ice in her tone to coat Jupiter. Her black suit was unadorned; her champagne blond hair, cut nearly as short as his, barely reached the collar, and her jaw thrust toward him like a spear. Put her in dress blues and she could have appeared on a U.S. Marine recruiting poster.

  "I've spent the past hour on the phone with Lawson's lead attorney. Unsurprisingly, he wants to file assault and battery charges. And that's just for starters. I'm attempting to convince him to allow us to handle the matter internally."

  Unpolished fingernails, trimmed short as a nun's, tapped an irritated tattoo on the gleaming desktop.

  Finn had no problem with women in the Bureau; he'd worked with several and would have trusted his life to them any day. Hell, even James Bond had gotten a woman boss when Judi Dench took over as M. Finn didn't even have any problem with ice queens like Special Agent in Charge Lillian Jansen.

  He did, however, have a Herculean problem with any SAC who wasn't a stand-up guy. From the day she'd arrived from the New York field office, Jansen had proven herself to be far more interested in the politics of the job than in locking up criminals.

  "It's a helluva thing when an SAC takes the side of a sicko killer over one of her own men," he muttered.

  "Christ, Callahan," the other man in the office warned. James Burke's, ruddy cheeks were the hue of ripe cherries, suggesting that Finn's recent behavior hadn't been good for his blood pressure problem. A faint white ring around his mouth was evidence he'd been chugging Maalox directly from the bottle again.

  "You're out of line, Special Agent," Jansen snapped. "Again."

  Leaning back in the leather swivel chair, she dropped the sword that had been hanging over his head for the past forty-eight hours— ever since the killer it had taken Finn nearly three years to track through eight states had made the mistake of trying to escape from the hospital, just as Finn dropped by to see how the court-appointed psychiatric evaluation was going.

  "I will, of course, have no choice but to turn this incident over to OPR."

  The Office of Professional Responsibility was the equivalent of a police force's internal affairs bureau. Since many of its investigators possessed a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude, a lot of agents tended to distrust the OPR right back.

  The idea of being thrown to the wolves made Finn's gut churn, but unwilling to allow Jansen to know she'd gotten beneath his skin, he forced his shoulders to relax, schooled his expression to a mask, and although it wasn't easy, kept his mouth shut.

  "You're scheduled to be questioned tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock. You are, of course, entitled to be represented by legal counsel."

  "Now there's an idea. Maybe I can get one of those worms making up Lawson's legal dream team to represent me. Of course, the only problem with that idea is since Lawson's a gazillionaire sicko with bucks out the kazoo, I doubt any of those scumbags would want to take on the case of a middle income cop who got pissed off at their client for raping and killing coeds."

  Ronald Lawson had murdered eight college women scattered across the country from California to Maryland. Finn's recurring nightmare was that there were still more missing women he hadn't yet discovered who could be linked to the guy.

  "We would have had eleven victims if Callahan hadn't gotten to Lawson's house when he did and found those girls locked up in his basement." A chain-smoker, Burke's voice was as rough as a bad gravel road.

  "That's part of my problem." Frustration sharpened the SAC 's brisk voice. "The Georgetown girl's parents are close personal friends of the Attorney General. In fact, the AG and his wife are her godparents. They heard about Lawson's attempted escape on the nightly news and are pressuring the AG to allow Callahan's outrageous cowboy tactics to slide."

  Finn shot a sideways look at Burke, whose expression told him they were thinking the same thing. That perhaps he just should have put his gun barrel into the guy's mouth and pulled the trigger in those midnight hours when they'd descended on Lawson's Pontiac mansion. Every cop in the place would have sworn on a stack of bibles that deadly force had been absolutely justified.

  He'd always been a by-the-book kind of guy, the type of FBI agent Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. had played on TV, but sometimes the laws protecting the bad guys really sucked.

  "How about we come up with a compromise?" Burke suggested.

  "What type of compromise do you have in mind?" Jansen asked.

  "Callahan takes a leave of absence until this blows over. Say, two weeks."

  "That's not enough time for damage control. Four weeks suspension," she countered. "Without pay."

  Finn had been staring up at the ceiling, pretending disinterest in the negotiation. When he realized Burke wasn't countering Jansen's proposal, he shot the SAC a savage look.

  "Fuck that." He rubbed knuckles which had been bruised when they'd connected so satisfyingly with Lawson's jaw. You are not, he instructed his itchy fist, going to screw this up worse by punching a hole through that damn trophy wall. A wall covered with photographs of SAC Lillian Jansen with seemingly every politician in town. "I'll take my chances with OPR."

  "Dammit, Finn, it's not that bad an offer." Burke plowed a hand through thinning hair the color of a rusty Brillo pad. "You haven't taken a real vacation in years. Go home, do some fishing, unwind, and when you come back all this shit will have blown over."

  They both knew it'd probably take another Hurricane Andrew to blow this particular shit pile away.

  "If I were you, I'd take your squad supervisor's advice." Jansen folded her arms across the front of a jacket as black as her heart.

  Finn suspected that not only was she enjoying this; she was just waiting for him to squirm. Not in this lifetime, his expression said.

  Want to bet? hers said right back. "If this goes any further, my recommendation will be to terminate you." />
  And she'd do it if it'd help her career. Hell, she'd probably run over her own dog if it'd get her a promotion to ADIC. Of course she didn't actually have a dog; that would take some kind of personal commitment—and from what he'd seen, the woman was only committed to her swift climb up the Bureau's political ladder.

  "Two weeks." Forget Hurricane Andrew. Finn needed a tornado to come sweeping out of Kansas, swoop down over K Street, and drop a damn house on Lillian Jansen.

  "Four." Her lips actually quirked a bit at the corners, hinting at the closest thing to a smile he'd witnessed since her heralded arrival from New York. She held out her hand, palm up. "And I'll take your weapon and shield."

  Feeling Burke's gaze on him, the silent plea to make nice radiating off his squad commander like a physical presence, Finn swallowed the frustration that rose like bile in his mouth, took his .40mm Glock from his shoulder holster and resisted, just barely, the urge to throw it onto her desk.

  When he failed to manage the same restraint with his shield, all three pairs of eyes watched the leather case slide off the highly polished surface onto the carpet. Finn hoped Jansen would ask him to pick it up, so he could suggest where she could plant those thin, pale lips.

  "Do you know the trouble with you, Callahan?"

  "No. But I have a feeling you're going to tell me."

  "You’ve begun to believe your own press. There are those in the Bureau, including your former SAC, who may be impressed by your appearances on Nightline and your dinners at the White House. But as far as I'm concerned, you have a very bad attitude toward authority. You also take your work personally."

  "And your point is?"

  She glared at him with nearly as much contempt as he felt for her, then pressed a button on her intercom. "Please send in security to escort Special Agent Callahan out of the building."

  "I'll do that," Burke offered quickly. It was obvious he wanted to get Finn out of the office before things got worse.

  "It's not your job," Jansen said.

  "A superior stands by his men." His tone clearly implied the SAC did not. If Jansen's eyes were frost, Burke's were flame.

  Finn was willing to take the heat himself, but didn't want to cause a longtime friend any more problems. Especially since he knew Burke had put a second mortgage on his Arlington house to pay for his three kids' college tuition and couldn't afford a disciplinary suspension.

  "Jim, it's okay."

  "The hell it is," the older man shot back. "This whole mess stinks to high heaven." He pinned the SAC with a hard look.

  Clearly unwounded, she merely shrugged in return. "You have ten minutes," she told Finn.

  Finn turned on his heel with military precision, and had just opened the office door when she called his name. Glancing back over his shoulder, he imagined a black widow spider sitting in the center of her web.

  "If I were you Callahan, I'd spend the next month sending out resumes. Because if and when you return, you'll be transferred to another field office, where—if I have anything to say about it, and believe me, I do—you'll be reassigned to desk duty."

  Oh, she was good. Coldly efficient, deadly accurate, hitting right on target. She knew he'd rather be gut shot than spend the rest of his career stuck in some dreary outpost, shuffling papers. Finn would bet his last grade increase that, instead of playing Barbie dolls and having pretend tea parties like other little girls, SAC Jansen had spent her childhood drowning kittens.

  He heard Burke clear his throat, another less-than-subtle warning. But Finn refused to justify her threat with a response.

  Since his work had always been his life, he didn’t have any hobbies, nor had he bothered to accumulate any superfluous stuff that might clutter up either his desk or his life. He cleaned a few personal effects from his desk and was out of the building in just under eight minutes.

  Chapter 2

  Los Angeles, California

  The bedroom was bathed in a shimmering silver light. A sultry sax crooned from the stereo speakers hidden in the walls, a bottle of champagne nested in a sterling ice bucket beside the bed, and the warm glow of candles cast dancing shadows of a man and a woman against the walls.

  "I dreamed about you," the woman said. She went up on her toes, her arms twining around his neck. "Hot, deliciously wicked dreams."

  His hand fisted in her long auburn hair, pulling her head back to give his roving mouth access to her throat. "You're not alone there, darlin'," he drawled with the cadence of the Louisiana South. "I've been walking around with a hard-on since the moment you sashayed into that Vegas wedding chapel looking like a Hell's Angel's wet dream."

  Her low, breathless laugh vibrated with sexual excitement, Amanda had known the black micro-skirt and studded, shaped jacket worn with nothing but perfumed and powdered flesh underneath had been an outrageous thing to wear to a wedding. Especially when you were the maid of honor. But it had been Las Vegas, and the minister marrying this man to her half sister was a decidedly untalented Elvis impersonator.

  Two hours later, after a surfeit of champagne cocktails blended with a little Valium, the bride had passed out in the honeymoon suite while the maid of honor and groom were two floors below, screwing each other's brains out.

  Three weeks later, back in the mansion on River Road, they were still at it. "What is it about black leather that makes men so horny?" Amanda asked.

  "It wasn't the leather. It was you. Christ, I've never seen a woman who looked more ready to be laid. You were wet and hot and in heat. I've never wanted a woman the way I wanted you. Hell, after banging you every chance we get, I still want you even more than I did that day."

  "Then take me," she purred. "Now."

  "Now," he agreed. Buttons scattered across the floor as he ripped open the scarlet-as-sin dress that fit as if it'd been sprayed onto her gleaming flesh, and dragged her down onto the bed.

  Wrapping her legs around his hips, Amanda encouraged him with ragged gasps, breathless cries and earthy sexual suggestions. He peeled the dress off her slick body, revealing an ivory teddy that was a surprisingly innocent contrast to the dress lying in a crimson puddle on the carpet.

  He left the bed only long enough to strip off his trousers, then chuckled as Amanda's eyes widened at the huge bulge beneath his silk leopard printed bikini briefs. "See something you like, sweetheart?"

  "There's definitely a great deal to like," she murmured.

  He laughed appreciatively as he rolled her stockings down her legs, then used them to tie her wrists to the ebony bedposts.

  Having recovered from her surprise, she gazed up at him, her green eyes limpid pools of desire. "There's nothing I won't do, Jared," she said, her voice throaty with sex and sin. "Nothing I'll say no to."

  His hand stroked her, exploring, arousing. Kneeling over her, he followed the hot path with his lips. Engrossed in the moment, in each other, neither heard the French doors opening.

  "Well, I'd hoped my husband and sister would get along." The icy British voice was like a splash of cold water on a blazing fire. "But don't you two think you're overdoing it a bit?"

  "Vanessa!" The man leaped from the bed. "You weren't due back from Cornwall until next week."

  "I found the country boring." The heat in the woman's eyes was a direct contrast to the chill in her voice. "Everyone tromping around in Wellies and shooting poor, defenseless birds out of the sky."

  Amanda sighed. Obviously the fun was over for tonight. "Well, I suppose I should be leaving." Scenes with betrayed wives were so utterly boring. "Unless," she suggested wickedly, "you'd care to join us, Van."

  A flush rose like a fever in the betrayed woman's peaches-and-cream complexion. "You're an amoral slut. Just like your mother. It's no wonder Father divorced her and deserted you."

  "Sticks and stones," Amanda drawled. "And for the record, our dear papa married your mother for the same reason your husband here married you. For your money."

  Both sisters ignored Jared's stuttered attempt at a protest. Am
anda's accusation was true and all three people in the bedroom knew it.

  "Since it appears you're not going to take me up on my invitation, if one of you could just untie me—"

  Jared Lee moved quickly to do just that, as if he couldn't wait to get her out of his house, out of his life. But before he could untie the stubborn knot in the first stocking, his wife pulled a small but potentially deadly pistol from her Coach bag.

  "Vanessa, what in God's name do you think you're doing?" he gasped.

  "Isn't it obvious, darling?" She pointed the gun at the most vulnerable part of his anatomy. "I'm going to ensure you never betray me with this cheap piece of trash again."

  He flinched and went ghost white. His hands instinctively dropped to his crotch. "You wouldn't."

  "Jesus, Van," Amanda complained. "I can't believe you're being so middle-class uptight about a little infidelity."

  Vanessa's chin lifted. "Perhaps if you were to actually marry that man whose ring you're wearing on your finger, sister dear, you'd understand my feelings better." She shot a scathing glance at her husband. "Quit trembling, Jared."

  The injured wife was gone, replaced by the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Comfort Cottage Tea. "I believe, since I have use of them myself on occasion, I'll let you keep your testicles. For now. So long as you keep them at home. Where they belong."

  "I promise, darling. This was just a small slip. I never planned to be unfaithful, but I was missing you so—"

  "Don't embarrass yourself further by lying," she cut off his weak excuse.

  He looked so desperate, Amanda was starting to feel sorrier for him than she did for herself. She, at least, was capable of standing on her own two feet. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been afraid of anyone or anything. Least of all this British bitch who'd bought herself an alcoholic Southern philanderer.

  Finding the domestic drama increasingly tedious, she had just freed one wrist when the sound of a gunshot shattered the night and the smell of cordite overpowered the vanilla scent of the candle.

  Pressing her hand against the lacy bodice of the bloodstained teddy, Amanda slumped back against the pillow.