Latent Danger

by Lori Ryan

  “I know, I know,” her mother said. “That’s putting it mildly. But don’t let Pat control you this way. If you let him keep you from finding real love, you let him win in the end, no matter that we succeeded in chasing him off.”

  Even the mention of Pat Donovan made Shauna want to cringe. How she’d ever fallen for the man, she would never know. But her mother was right. She had been hiding from a relationship because she didn’t trust herself.

  “He’s not Irish,” she said now to her mother. She didn’t really plan to debate the merits of dating Zach Reynolds with her mother, but hoped to get her ma off on a different track.

  Her father came back into the room carrying a large box that she would guess contained food for her to bring back to the station with her. He grunted a dismissal of what she’d just said. “After what you went through with that Donovan fellow, we’ll make allowances.”

  Shauna grinned. She knew just how to get to her dad. “His last name is Reynolds, pop. I’m pretty sure his family traces back to England.”

  Her dad put a hand over his heart. “Don’t say it, girl, I can’t handle that much.”

  Her mother laughed. “There were Reynolds families in Ireland. Maybe he’s got a bit of Irish blood in him.”

  Shauna rolled her eyes and stood. She’d managed to eat her burger and most of the fries. “I have to get back.”

  Her father pushed the box down the bar toward her. “Sandwiches and chips. I’d have made them burgers and fries, but they wouldn’t last the drive. These’ll keep.”

  Shauna hugged her parents goodbye with promises to touch base by phone when she could throughout the investigation. She just prayed this investigation would be over soon. She didn’t know if she could stand to see the body of another slain girl.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Zach looked up from where he was currently devouring the best sandwich he’d ever tasted and groaned at Shauna. “Tell me you can bring more of these.”

  “Every day.” Ronan said. “Please say you’ll bring them every day.”

  Zach and Ronan and a few of the other detectives in the squad had descended on Shauna the minute she’d come into the room with a box that smelled like heaven. There was no doubt it had contained food and he kind of liked that she didn’t bat an eye when they all started fighting for the wax-paper wrapped bundles.

  “Please?” Zach pled around a mouthful of food. Okay, so he wasn’t the most gracious guy in the world and his manners sort of sucked. He was a cop. “I think it’s the seasoning that makes it so good. It’s like some magic combination of happy...” he struggled for the words... “happy goodness.”

  Detective Jepsen walked up, peering in the box. “No one saved me one?”

  There was a collective snort from the detectives. No one would save Jepsen anything. The man was an asshole of epic proportions. On the street, they’d have his back when he was in danger if for no other reason than he was a fellow cop. In a fight for sandwiches? Hell no.

  Shauna shook her head, but her expression showed pleased pride. “It’s the bread. My brother makes it every morning.” She scrunched her face. “And the seasoning mix doesn’t hurt—that goes onto the turkey my other brother roasts several times a week—but there’s also the tapenade. I’m pretty sure it’s the tapenade that counts the most.”

  “What’s tapenade?” Zach and Ronan asked in near unison.

  “Olive spread.”

  “I’m in love,” Zach said.

  Shauna looked a little mortified and he grinned and winked at her before reaching for the bag of chips Jepsen had just tried to steal. Zach didn’t bother to assure her he’d been talking about being in love with the sandwich. He liked the way her cheeks heated at the mention of love.

  He liked a hell of a lot of things about her. And he wasn’t too stupid to recognize that this time his feelings went past what he’d liked about her last time. It wasn’t just the way her eyes heated when she was passionate about something or the way her body filled out even the drabbest detective pants and blouse. It wasn’t the way his body hardened anytime he got within reach of her.

  He was drawn to her mind, the way she worked the puzzles of a case. The way she genuinely cared about the people they were trying to protect, and those they could only hope to get justice for now. He was drawn to the way she could help them laugh when things got to be too heavy, and he would swear she seemed to calm him when he wanted to put his fist through a wall at some of the shit they were hearing and seeing on this case.

  He liked everything he saw in her. Everything about being around her.

  “I was thinking,” she said as she leaned back in his desk chair. He liked the way she looked sitting there.

  Zach forced the other images from his mind. Ones of her sitting in his bed. Leaning back on the pillow, hair tousled and cheeks flushed. It was the last thing he needed to be thinking about at the moment.

  Shauna continued, and he hoped that meant she couldn’t tell where his thoughts had been. “I know my team has been looking at the cold cases, but I think we need to take a look at them, too. There has to be a connection between the victims of thirty years ago and the ones we’re seeing now. I think we’ve been too focused on the crimes that are happening now.”

  She seemed almost apologetic, as though she understood there were girls being murdered in the here and now and didn’t want to take the focus off them.

  Ronan looked like he might argue, but Zach jumped in. “What did you guys find was the victimology in your cases?”

  “It was very consistent in some ways. Not so in others. The girls were all between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. All were petite and blonde. That never varied. Nancy Cheever and Jill Porter were from working class families but in very different areas of town. They didn’t share the same school, friends, or any activities that we found. The third girl, Wendy Bridgeton, was from a wealthy family visiting the area. Her family lived in New York, but were visiting family. The last was Michelle Hankey and she was from a middle-class family. She lived a few minutes from where the Bridgeton girl was visiting family, but their areas were night and day. Moderate homes, compared to almost mansions in the area Wendy’s family lived in. The girls didn’t seem to have met at all, despite the proximity.”

  Ronan frowned. “Our girls are two wealthy, one not; all seventeen; only one was blonde.”

  “It really bothers me that the setting of the bodies is so different and he’s moved from blondes to a real mixed bag.” Shauna looked at the men and received nods. Candice Jordan had been the furthest from their victimology so far with darker skin and black hair.

  “Maybe we need to head up to the cold case division and get our eyes on what they’re working on. See what they’re seeing,” Zach suggested. “It’s possible we need to pull the two investigations back together again to see what it is we’ve been missing here.”

  It was clear from the looks on the faces of his partner and Shauna, they both agreed they were missing something. He just hoped like hell whatever that piece was, that they somehow managed to find it soon.

  Zach’s cell buzzed with a text and he lifted it from his pocket to check the screen. He bit down on a curse and stood. Kate Sorino hadn’t come home after school and none of her friends had any idea where she was.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Zach was glad he’d drawn the short straw on making the thirty-minute drive to the cold case division in Rocky Hill. There was nothing short about that straw to him, because the drive included Shauna. Of course, he was happy to let Ronan think he’d taken one for the team. Never hurt to have your partner owe you, especially with the amount of paperwork and reports they were having to file on this case.

  They’d spent the afternoon questioning everyone at Elmhurst Academy who could have any knowledge of Kate’s whereabouts. They’d talked to her parents, her driver, and her friends. They’d dragged Jonathan Sawyer back in for questioning, despite the fact he’d been under a police tail. The officers w
atching him weren’t trailing his every movement on campus. They watched him go down the drive each day, then waited out on the street for him to come back out at the end of the day.

  Now, they had officers combing the campus and the woods surrounding it. Ronan was overseeing the deployment of the search and rescue team and would work on coordinating with their lead, while Shauna and Zach went to see what they could piece together by looking at the cold cases again. The cold case team had been sending reports daily, but for the most part, their work consisted of checking hundreds of possible suspects off lists of people who’d been incarcerated or hospitalized during the period between the killings.

  They were quiet for the first part of the drive, but Zach didn’t want to lose the time to talk to her. They wouldn’t have much time alone, and when this case was over, he had a feeling she’d be gone.

  “What happened with your ex?” He didn’t know why he opened with a question she was unlikely to answer. He was an idiot.

  Rather than take back the question, he waited as she looked him over, forcing himself not to squirm.

  “Answer one of my questions, first.”

  He glanced over at her, before looking at the road. “I’m an open book. Ask away.”

  “Why did you become a cop? When we were together, you were trying to figure out what to do after the military. You never mentioned the police academy as an option.”

  Well, shit, did he say open book? He cleared his throat. “Well, it was, uh, a good living. And something I knew I could do. I mean, I thought I could do it.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, letting her tone tell him she knew damned well there was more to it.

  “And it fit my need for doing something with an adrenaline rush. Of course, that doesn’t come every day. There are a lot of boring days, too, but it keeps me needing to stay sharp, stay fit, hone my training. I like that.” He was stupidly telling her shit she knew all too well.

  “Um hmm.” This time, her tone said she thought he was getting close, but hadn’t gone all the way yet.

  He shook his head and gave it up. “I liked seeing the way you were passionate about your job. The way you cared whether you were able to make a difference. I wanted to feel that, okay?”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  She snorted. “Feel like you make a difference?”

  “Most of the time.” He focused on the road for a minute, then, “Most of the time, yeah.” He thought about the times he’d lost his head in the interrogation room as a rookie detective and blown cases.

  He hadn’t gotten his temper under control completely as a patrol officer. He’d quickly learned he wasn’t going to do well as a detective if he didn’t master his emotions.

  “But not right now?” she prompted, drawing him back to the conversation.

  “No, not enough, anyway. My gut tells me Kate Sorino doesn’t have a whole lot of time for us to find her and I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Before they’d gotten in the car, they’d gotten the news that alibis for Carville and the other teachers and employees who were new to the school had all checked out.

  They drove another few minutes in silence, now more than half of the way there, before Shauna spoke, answering his question about her husband.

  “I thought I loved him. It wasn’t the kind of crazy, passionate, needing-to-drown-in-a-person kind of love, but it was steady and I thought it was enough.”

  Zach clenched the wheel. He’d heard the guy moved away, taking a job in another part of the state a month after they split up, but the rumor mill had been surprisingly quiet where they were concerned.

  “He was a cop, too, right?”

  She nodded. “Patrol cop.”

  “So, you didn’t love him as much as you thought you did?” Zach wondered if that was all it had been.

  “No. I think I would have grown to, but he hit me.”

  Zach swerved, then corrected.

  “I came home one night and he was in a mood. We argued. I actually remember thinking, ‘hey, we’re having our first fight,’ and thinking it had been bound to happen. Then he hit me. Threw me against the wall. I fought back, but he was strong.”

  More silence filled the car as Zach felt a hurricane build in his head. He wanted to reach out and tear this guy to pieces, spread the viscera and bone that should have made up the man all over the country. He wanted it to be painful and final. Most of all, final.

  “What happened?” He managed to croak out.

  “I went utterly still. Didn’t fight him and he stopped. He took off, went out to cool off, I guess. I left. I wasn’t going to stick around and tell myself it wouldn’t happen again.”

  Good for her, he thought. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak just then.

  “I filed for divorce right away. I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. I was embarrassed.”

  Zach looked over and saw her staring straight ahead out the windshield like she needed to focus on something far away from where the two of them sat to tell the story.

  “He wrote notes, sent flowers, begged me to come back. Then one night, he attacked me in the parking lot of the friend’s apartment I’d been staying in late at night after work. I saw him coming. I wasn’t an idiot.”

  No, Zach knew she was well-trained. He’d seen her head swivel when they were walking or entering a building. She was aware of her surroundings. No one would take her by surprise easily.

  “He had a stun gun. I didn’t see it until it was too late. He dragged me off into the bushes, pinned me and told me I’d never leave him. That he was taking me home and I would stay there if I knew what was good for me.”

  Zach had the wherewithal to pull the car over to the side of the road before he got them both killed. She didn’t seem to notice they’d stopped and he wondered if she’d told this story to anyone else besides family. She seemed so far away, like she could protect herself from the memory if she rattled it off but kept her distance.

  “A car of loud teenagers pulled into the lot, distracting him. I kneed him in the groin and took off. That’s when I went to my family. I knew I wouldn’t get rid of him on my own.”

  She took a few deep breaths, and he found himself taking them with her, matching his breath with hers. “With my parents’ support, I went to his boss. He helped me talk to the district attorney. It was messy. It was also his word against mine and he claimed I had hit him, that I had a temper and I’d been abusive. I’m ashamed of it now, especially working on cases like the one we’re on right now, but I was too embarrassed for people to know what happened to me. I didn’t want it getting out. Between my father and brothers and a few of the cops I’d grown up with hanging around the pub, they convinced him it would be better for his health and career to give me up. The district attorney and his captain worked with him. Got him moved to a new precinct and he was put on probation there. Had to go to therapy and anger management classes.”

  “And he did?” Zach held his breath, all the while the winds of the hurricane churned in his head.

  She nodded. “He completed the anger management and his captain told me recently he’s been toeing the line and still in therapy four years later, just as a sort of maintenance thing.”

  She shook her head. “In some ways, I guess it was weak of me not to try to prosecute. I shouldn’t want him to do this to anyone else, but honestly, the chances he would serve much time were slim and I’d be left to face the stigma of being that woman, that cop.”

  Zach took a deep breath and blew it out slowly before turning to find her looking at him. There seemed to be a horrible vulnerability in her eyes, like she was waiting for judgment from him. He slowly reached his hand out, gently touching his fingers to the soft skin of her cheek before threading his fingers into her hair.

  He looked her in the eyes for a long moment before saying, “you didn’t deserve that.”

  Then he silently pulled the car back out onto the road and drove them the rest of the w
ay to the state offices in silence.

  She had not deserved that at all.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The sheer number of names these guys were working through was astounding. Zach picked up a list of people who’d been hospitalized at the time the killings ended thirty years prior.

  There were notations next to each name that was crossed off, as well as notations next to some that weren’t crossed off yet.

  Paul Schwartz deceased 1995

  Jack Hudson released 1982, incarcerated 1999

  Amanda Cunningham moved to Seattle, no crimes matching, confirmed still in Seattle

  Meredith Crawley transferred to another facility, unsure where she is now

  Marcus Jones

  Herschel Kenworth deceased

  Joseph Harris

  Peter Ohrt

  “Do we have any updates from forensics?” The question came from Detective Manigault, or Manny, as he seemed to be called. He was the one with the dark hair and eyes.

  Zach shook his head. “No usable skin cells on the rope or lipstick. There were a few fibers on the body, but nothing useful. Came from a blanket that could have been bought in any big brand box store. The DNA in the semen was a match to Jonathan Sawyer, but we expected that.” They’d gotten the news that morning that Carrie had semen matching Jonathan Sawyer in her mouth and vaginal cavity, as well as evidence of GHB in her system.

  Hutch leaned back in his chair and studied Zach and Shauna. “What do you think about the Sawyer boy? Do you still feel he’s our present-day killer?”

  Shauna was the first to answer. “In my gut, I know he’s involved. At the very least, he raped Adrienne and Carrie. I just don’t feel so strongly anymore that he’s our killer. Or if he is, he’s not the only one.”

  “He was under surveillance when Candice was killed,” Zach said.

  “If they didn’t have eyes directly on him, he could have snuck out,” Manny offered.

  Zach stiffened but conceded it was possible. Possible, but unlikely. There was someone off their radar they hadn’t found yet.