Tactical Advantage

by Julie Miller

  But there was one more flash of a camera. She recognized Gabriel Knight’s black hair and blue eyes from a task force briefing. The man had been particularly critical of the task force’s lack of progress on the case in the column he wrote for one of the local papers. He stood outside the open doors, tipping his head toward the injury on her forehead. “Somebody got to you, didn’t they, Ms. Hermann? Are you certain it wasn’t him?”

  Nick punched the door close button. “No comment.”

  The doors shut on the nightmarish episode. Maybe she should stop clinging to the idea that anything about her life would ever be normal again.

  She jumped at the touch of Nick’s hand folding over hers where she squeezed the back railing. “Easy. You okay?”

  Annie stared straight ahead at the doors, desperately trying to organize the thoughts and emotions that had jumbled inside her. “I am a well-trained scientist with multiple university degrees. I’ve worked at the lab for three years now. I find facts. I solve crimes. I’m good at what I do.”

  “I know.”

  She was vaguely aware of the elevator rising beneath her feet. “All those people wanted something from me. I hate being in the spotlight like that. I get tongue-tied. I can’t think straight. This is exactly why I’m a lab geek. I don’t want to be on the front page of anything. I just want to do my job.” An instinct she barely recognized and scarcely trusted prompted her to release the railing and turn her palm into Nick’s. As unsettling and ill-timed her attraction to him might be, he was solid and strong, and he’d been there for her these past twenty-four hours in ways no one had been there for her in ten long years. She held on tight and tilted her eyes to his. “How do they know it was me at that crime scene? How does anyone know?”

  He didn’t stop at holding hands this time. Before she got her questions out, he was pulling her up to his chest and wrapping his arms around her. “I don’t know. Other than my partner and your boss, no one should know you pulled that assignment. I haven’t even filed my report yet.”

  “I worked with Raj Kapoor at the lab yesterday. He knows.”

  “Would he talk?”

  Annie shook her head. “He’s a friend. We started together at the lab at the same time. He wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Maybe not intentionally. Is he a chatty guy?”

  Annie shrugged. “To be honest, I guess I don’t know him that well outside of work. He is on his phone a lot, but I’ve never seen him talking with reporters.”

  “There are also our fake cops, Gobel and Ramirez.”

  “Either of them could have talked to Vanessa Owen.” Inhaling the leathery scent that was uniquely Nick’s, Annie burrowed her head beneath his chin and circled her arms around his waist. “I thought I heard him again, Nick. The man on the phone. That voice from the alley. He called me Annabelle.”

  “Just now? You heard it here?”

  “Maybe I imagined it. Maybe my fear is getting the better of my common sense.” She turned her ear to the strong beat of his heart, loving the way his shoulders curved around her. “Do you think that voice on the phone is someone working with the rapist? Was he driving that car that nearly hit us? Do you think he killed Rachel? Do you think one of those reporters knows who attacked me? Or, even worse, knows who the Rose Red Rapist is?”

  “Always with the questions, eh, slugger?” Nick pulled the stocking cap from her hair and tunneled his fingers into the curls at her nape, gently massaging her there.

  “That’s because I need answers. I feel like I’m in limbo until I know something for sure.”

  “We’ll get them.” His heat warmed her. His strength gave her strength. His teasing diverted her attention from her futile speculation and she realized she’d been shaking. Hard. But Nick was holding her, comforting her, letting her know she wasn’t alone. “Give that brain of yours a rest for a couple of minutes. You’re safe now, Annie. Nobody gets to bug you but me.”

  She hiccuped a laugh against his chest, relaxing into his embrace. The clever words sounded a lot like the old Nick, the adversary she was used to battling. But this Nick was still different. This Nick was serious. He was protective. He was tender. He wasn’t the enemy.

  This was the Nick she was falling in love with. Maybe the same Nick she’d had a thing for, for a long time now, only it had never made any sense for her to be attracted to a man so different from anyone or anything she knew. It would be too crazy, too dangerous to admit her awakening feelings for someone who claimed that guilt was the reason he’d suddenly become a part of her life.

  But Nick made her feel safe.

  That was one honest, irrefutable fact.

  Another was their shared determination to find the truth. “I want those answers, Nick.”

  “Me, too.” His hold on her didn’t loosen until the elevator slowed its ascent. He released her entirely before the doors opened and they had to face coworkers, departmental protocol and a task force meeting. “I don’t know how that information leaked to the press. But I intend to find out. I’m done chasing shadows.”

  Chapter Nine

  Nick flipped his ink pen back and forth between his fingers, over and over, fighting that edgy need to do something that had fired through his blood for the past thirty-six hours. He was as restless and ready to work as the muscular German shepherd lying beside his handler’s feet at the end of the conference room table. At least the dog got to pant and gnaw on his knotted rope to disperse some of that energy. Sitting through long meetings had never been Nick’s favorite thing on the best of days, but everything about this morning’s task force meeting reminded him of all the should-have-dones he’d mishandled since getting Spencer’s phone call New Year’s Eve.

  He should have known Nell was sneaking out to see her bad-boy boyfriend.

  He should have been in that alley with Annie to keep her from getting hurt and to protect the crucial evidence they’d lost.

  He should have kept his hands to himself and never touched her, never kissed her, never got it into his head that sweet, soulful Annie Hermann was a lot more than the nerdy lab rat he had to work with on the task force.

  Even now, he was having a hard time keeping his gaze from sliding across the table to watch her lift her coffee mug to those softly bowed lips that said a lot of smart stuff and tasted even better. His skin tingled with a remembered anticipation, watching her play with those natural, sable dark curls that had cupped and clung to his hands like silken fingers.

  Annie pushed the tendrils off her face, frowning as she focused on the drawing set on the table in front of her. The subtle action exposed the bandage on her forehead, and the bruising that marred her porcelain skin. Nick could still feel her digging her fingers into his chest in that alley, feeling safer with him than without him. He could feel her wrapping her arms around his waist and holding on tight because a bunch of nosy reporters had caught her off guard and rattled her sense of security. He could feel her deep inside, getting into his head, getting close to his heart.

  He supposed an attraction must have been there all along, from that first task force meeting, when she’d spilled the contents of that loud paisley bag across the table and then clumsily gathered up the mess with an apology that made him think she was all innocence and way out of her league. Yet, ten minutes later, she’d been thumping the table, challenging him head-to-head about her science beating his street smarts. It was hard not to notice someone like that.

  Her petite height made her a perfect fit for his vertically challenged frame. But with those eyes and that hair, she could have been six-feet tall and his hormones would still be firing on all cylinders. How could a woman look so barely thrown together and yet exude such an earthy sexuality? How could she be so intellectual and stubborn and emotionally guarded, and still be soft and witty and so easy to kiss?

  Maybe that was why they’d been butting heads for so long. He liked her. More than he should. And just what exactly did they have in common besides working together and loving baseball?
It made no damn sense.

  “Would you agree, Nick?”

  He nearly snapped the pen in half as Spencer Montgomery’s voice cut through the rising tide of Nick’s emotions. He carefully placed the instrument on the table top instead, buying himself a second to shuffle his thoughts to catch up with the conversation in the third-floor conference room. They were looking at a drawing of the alleged accomplice to the man who’d attacked Annie.

  “This is the sketch Officers Galbreath and Foster gave us of the fake cop who relieved them of duty at the Shamrock Bar. They never saw the second impostor.” Spencer, the task force leader, sat at the head of the table. As his partner, Nick always sat at the corner beside him. “Based on his height and the pot belly Galbreath described, Annie thinks it has to be the other guy who stole and destroyed our evidence.”

  Nick zeroed in on the computer-generated image sitting in front of him and the details the two KCPD officers had described. Receding blond hair. Five-nine. Nick pushed the paper away. “He has to be the getaway driver. The man I chased was six-two, six-three.”

  Add in the bulk of his parka, and the man had been nearly twice the size of Annie. She was lucky to have survived the attack.

  But when Nick looked across the table to tell her so, he saw her turning the page of a lab report, poring over the information, as oblivious to the conversation now as he’d been a moment ago. Unlike him, however, from the way she worked her lips into a frown, and skipped back and forth from one data-filled printout to the next, he doubted she was contemplating the relationship—or whatever this was—growing between them.

  Spencer, fortunately, was as focused on the case as ever. He nodded to the red-haired officer in her navy blue uniform sitting beside Nick as she typed notes on her laptop. “Maggie, add that to the BOLO we’ve got out on those two guys.”

  “Yes, sir.” After typing in the updates, Sergeant Maggie Wheeler repeated the details to the group. “Balding blond man. Blue or green eyes. Five-nine to five-ten. Heavyset. Second unsub is six-two to six-three. Large frame. Both in fake KCPD uniforms—which I’m sure neither one will still be wearing,” she added as an aside before going back to the details of her report. “Big man wore black parka with dark stocking mask over face.”

  “Brown eyes.” The image suddenly gelled in Nick’s memory as he replayed the chase through the alley. “I couldn’t see much else about the guy with the mask he wore. But when I took a bead on him, brown eyes were looking back at me.”

  “Would you concur, Annie?”

  “What?” Annie’s head shot up and her eyes blinked several times at Sergeant Wheeler while she processed the question the redhead had asked. “Yes. His eyes were dark.” Just as quickly as she’d looked up from her printouts, though, she turned her attention to them again. But her fingers scratched at her throat and she kept talking. “He had a funny voice, too—like he had laryngitis. Maybe he was short of breath or disguising his voice, but there was no tone to it.”

  And then she was completely immersed in the files again.

  Maggie grinned at the offhand, yet precise, detail, and typed. “Raspy voice. I’ll add that to the suspect description and get copies sent out to all the precincts.”

  The protective adrenaline inside Nick pumped up a notch. Annie thought her attacker and the crank caller were the same man—and that he had spoken to her down in the lobby during that mob of a press conference. She’d dismissed it as fear and imagination. But he wasn’t so sure there was anything imaginary about it. Annie didn’t trust her own instincts that way.

  But Nick did.

  Brown eyes. He’d gotten no more than a fleeting glance in a shadowed alley before the perp had grabbed his loot and run out of sight around the corner. And it was possible he was transposing Jordan Garza’s brown eyes in his memory, because the teen was equally high on his list of threats he wanted to get off the streets.

  But his gut was telling him that that detail was something important. Now if he could just get his gut to clarify the relevance of that memory—put the eyes to a face, pin that voice to a particular man—then they might actually make some progress on this investigation.

  Although Nick couldn’t pinpoint where yet, he’d looked into those eyes more than once. Only in passing—not enough for their shape and color to register at the time. But he’d seen them someplace besides that alley. He’d seen Annie’s attacker.

  If he could just place the bastard. Nick would have that guy in handcuffs so fast, he’d be in lockup before he even knew he’d been arrested. Annie would be safe. Nick could get off this damn guilt trip. And then maybe they could go back to square one, and see if something between them really could work without the threats and the job and the task force affecting everything they said or did.

  Nick sensed his partner’s cool gray eyes glancing his way, and he realized he was flipping that stupid pen between his fingers again. Wisely tucking it away inside the neckline of the layered thermal shirts he wore, Nick turned his attention back to the table.

  “Moving on,” Spencer continued. “Fortunately, Nick and Annie were able to recover photographs of the scene as well as some blood evidence.” He nodded to the CSI who’d now lined up three reports side by side to peruse them. “Annie?”

  “This can’t be right,” she muttered, scanning from one report to the other.

  “Annie?”

  She lifted her chin and looked around as though surprised to see her colleagues at the table with her.

  Spencer leaned back in his chair and needlessly smoothed the knot on his tie. “You said you had a serology report?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” Earth to Sherlock. The taunt was poised on the tip of Nick’s tongue, but he couldn’t say it. Forty-eight hours ago, he’d have called her a space cadet for being so distracted. But now all he could see were the wheels turning inside her head, piecing together information with a precision his gut envied.

  “Did you come up with something?” he asked instead.

  Annie’s golden-brown eyes found his across the table. The cautious excitement he read there lit an answering current of energy inside him. “If I hadn’t completed these tests myself, I’d tell the techs to rerun them. But I think we just caught a break. A big one.”

  “Explain,” Spencer ordered.

  The electricity she was giving off blazed up another notch as she turned to include every task force member around the table. “I haven’t had a chance to make copies yet, so I’ll pass these around. The photograph shows two handprints on the alley wall—one man-sized, and a smaller one which matches Rachel Dunbar’s hand.” She passed the files to Kate Kilpatrick beside her. “The blood samples Nick and I saved were too degraded to get a DNA profile, but I can confirm the blood in those handprints came from two separate donors.”

  “A man and a woman.” Kate scanned the files before handing them off to the big-shouldered K-9 officer, Pike Taylor, sitting at the end of the table. “I’m assuming one of them belongs to the victim?” she asked.

  “Most likely. The M.E.’s report types Rachel Dunbar’s blood as O positive. One of my samples was also O positive.”

  Pike glanced at the files before passing them on to Maggie. “This says ‘Unknown Donor.’ So who does the other blood belong to?”

  Annie looked to Officer Taylor and shrugged. “Like I said, the samples were too degraded to get an exact match to anyone in the system. But that second sample is O negative.”

  “Does that mean what I think it does?” Maggie asked, pushing the reports on to Nick.

  Nick understood. “Our unsub has O negative blood.”

  Believing in absolute proof, Spencer raised a cautious hand, tempering the sidebar conversations and beginnings of a celebration around the table. “Are you sure it’s the rapist’s blood, and not the accomplice’s who came to clean up the place after him?”

  Annie stood and leaned over the table to slide the files in front of the task force leader. Then she pointed to a paragraph in the top report. “Look
at the time line. The blood spatter and handprints I found behind the Dumpster had been there longer—by three or four hours—than the blood farther back in the alley where the victim died. Rachel Dunbar fought back when she was abducted—maybe she even saw her attacker’s face. But she got a piece of him—scratched him, knocked him into the wall, hit him with something, who knows? The rapist may have washed her clothes and sterilized her body, removing any trace of himself off the victim. But he was bleeding in that alley, and he left a part of himself on that wall.” Once Spencer nodded his agreement, she sat back in her chair. “The Rose Red Rapist has O negative blood.”

  Spencer jotted the information in his notebook, making it a fact he believed, moving their case forward. “That fits Kate’s profile about two unsubs—the man responsible for the rapes and the ‘cleaner’ who comes in after him to mop up any mistakes.”

  Nick could feel that they were finally on the right track. “If the rapist was injured in his blitz attack, that also explains why his sidekick upped his involvement to murder. Either Rachel Dunbar saw his face and had to be silenced, or he wanted some kind of retribution for hurting his...idol, for want of a better word.”

  “So we’re looking for an unsub with O negative blood,” Annie concluded. “And one or more people who clean up after him.”

  Spencer took the suspect analysis one step further. “Our unsub either has a lot of money to pay this cleanup crew for their help and silence—”

  “—or there’s a relationship of some kind between them.” Nick was feeling more like his old self, more like the detective he’d been before the turn of the New Year. “One that ensures loyalty—through blackmail, bribery, family ties, whatever.”

  “Our unsub profiles are taking shape. We’ve got some specifics to look for that we haven’t had before,” Spencer agreed. He pulled a sheet of paper from his notebook before closing it, indicating the meeting was almost at an end—meaning they could all get back to tracking down these lowlife scumbags who preyed on women in the city. “Good work, Hermann.”