Tactical Advantage

by Julie Miller

  “Money’s always tight at the beginning of the year. Actually, though, I’m looking for reasons to justify increasing your budget. The Rose Red Rapist is a top-priority case for KCPD. Terrible PR for the department until we arrest someone. Naturally, the commissioner wants the case solved sooner rather than later, so we’re looking for ways to help your team do that.” George draped his long coat through the crook of his arm and perched on the corner of his desk. “Any new information? Any breaks in the case you can give me without waiting for it to go through channels to my office?”

  Nick relaxed his stance. “We just had a breakthrough, thanks to Annie. We got a blood type on our perp. The task force is certain we’re looking for two unsubs now. We don’t believe the rapist has escalated to killing his victims.”

  “That is good news.”

  “We’re looking at an accomplice—someone the rapist knows or even a sicko fan who thinks he’s doing him a favor—as the actual murderer. We’ve nicknamed the second unsub The Cleaner.”

  “Just the kind of sound bite the press will have a field day with.” George groaned at the idea, but kept the conversation focused on business. “So you’re expanding the investigation to look for two unsubs?”

  “At least. We’ve got two perps we want to track down for impersonating police officers. One could be the killer—one could be the rapist. Or they could be hired help.”

  George’s gray eyes narrowed. “Instead of zeroing in on a suspect, it sounds like the task force is expanding the scope of its investigation.”

  Nick nodded. “Any connection we can bust gets us one step closer to finding the bastard.”

  “So cutting funding for your investigation couldn’t come at a worse time.”

  “Duh.” The deputy commissioner had asked the question, but Nick pleaded with his mom’s brother. “Pull some strings, George. Help us. Don’t let the brass and budget cuts hinder our investigation.”

  George stood and shook open his coat. “Let me know as soon as you make one of those connections that gives us a break on this case, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure your task force has what it needs—manpower, equipment, you name it.”

  “Thanks. You’ll know something when I do.”

  As effortlessly as he buttoned his coat and pulled his scarf and gloves from his pockets, George switched to a new topic. “How’s the girl?”

  “Annie?”

  “Yes.” His uncle winked. “The CSI you spent the night with last night.”

  “On her couch, George. I slept on her couch.” Not that every cell in his body hadn’t wanted to climb into that bed where she’d been playing possum and hold her so that they both could sleep. “She looks a little worse for wear, but she’s fine. Annie’s a small package, but she’s tough.”

  “Good to hear.” George draped his navy blue scarf around his neck. “I suppose I should give you a heads-up that your mother is planning on paying the two of you a visit tonight. Trudy says she and the girls are on a knitting kick today, and Connie’s making another pot of minestrone. Apparently she was quite a hit at breakfast.”

  His gut warned him that Annie needed to take his family in small doses if he didn’t want to scare her off a relationship before it ever got started. But his brain latched on to a more important detail. “So Nell is hanging out at home today?”

  “I don’t know if it’s by choice, but at least that Garza boy hasn’t been back to the house. Your father filled me in.”

  “Yeah. Apparently, Nell opened up to Annie and talked about Garza grilling her about me, and losing his temper.” Nick shook his head in frustration. “Maybe Annie’s patience and ability to reason are the way to get Nell to see sense and dump the guy. Lord knows my efforts haven’t done any good.”

  George slapped his leather gloves into his palm and made a fist. “I know I’m not a front-line cop anymore, but I looked up the current roster on suspected associates of the 7th Street Snakes. Gang Squad says Garza was brought in for questioning a couple of times this past year—for jacking car parts and assault. But he was never charged with anything.”

  “So Nell’s right? If he’s not in the gang anymore, though, why ask about me?” But he didn’t feel any relief when he saw the grim expression lining his uncle’s face. “What?”

  “Jordan Garza is still a member, according to their sources. Even more than that, they suspect he’s being groomed to become one of Ramon Sanchez’s lieutenants. He may be using Nell to get Gang Squad information he thinks you have.”

  Nick swore, shoving his fingers through his hair in lieu of punching his fist through the side of his desk. “And he put his hands on my sister? I don’t suppose you could pull some strings and park a black-and-white by the house to make sure Garza and his Impala don’t show up in the neighborhood again?”

  “Already done.” George reached out and squeezed Nick’s shoulder before checking his watch and pulling away. “I’d better grab some lunch and get back to the office. I’m interviewing potential new assistants this afternoon. An administrator’s work is never done.” He sighed and pulled on his gloves. “Keep me in the loop on the task force’s progress, all right?”

  “Will do. Keep me in the loop if anything else happens at home I need to know about.”

  “I will.” He’d taken only a couple of steps toward the elevator when he stopped and smiled. “CSI Hermann. Or may I call you Annie?”

  Nick had already identified Annie’s arrival by her unique lavender-and-soap scent when he turned to run interference if needed.

  “Hello, sir.”

  His uncle shook his head. “Still need to work on that sir stuff.”

  “Right.” She twisted her fingers around the thick strap of her purse. “Good to see you...George.”

  “See? That didn’t hurt, did it?”

  A wry smile crept across her lips. “Not as much as the last time.”

  With a laugh that relaxed Nick’s concern, George walked away. “Bye, Annie.”

  Nick was still marveling at this woman’s resilience when she tilted her face up to his. “Are you ready?”

  “Everything go okay with Dr. Kilpatrick?”

  “I’m no more eccentric than usual. She gave me her

  number—told me to call anytime. She advised me to surround myself with people I trust...” Oh, man. That must have echoed around that empty hole of grief she carried with her. Before Nick could come up with the right words to reassure her she wasn’t alone, she unwound her fingers from her purse and reached up to brush some rumpled spikes of his hair off his forehead. An intimate heat sparked through him at the shy caress. “Everything okay with your family?”

  One little touch and he was a changed man. Oh, yeah, Spencer was right. As usual. Nick’s objectivity regarding Annie Hermann was sorely compromised.

  He nodded. “For now.”

  Energized, humbled, eager to spend time with this woman and ready to work, Nick grabbed his stuff off his desk. Resisting the urge to grab her hand amid the public hubbub of cops and criminals and staff moving around the room, he turned her toward the elevator. “Let’s go find some evidence.”

  Chapter Ten

  Regina Hollister could go a little easy on the perfume, Annie thought, as she and Nick rode the elevator up to the fourth floor of the old St. James Brothers Textiles warehouse building. Or maybe that was her boss’s cologne that made Annie’s eyes water in the enclosed space.

  Brian Elliott, the owner of the building, had insisted on meeting the police here himself to inspect the damage done to his latest investment. The two executives could have been twins, with their charcoal-gray suits and wool dress coats. They both towered over Annie, both had dark hair, and both probably made more money in a week than she and Nick combined earned in a year as public servants. At least, that’s what the tailored clothes, Rolex and expensive scents seemed to indicate.

  As the elevator car slowed to a stop, Annie heard a banging sound from the floor above her, giving her an uneasy
feeling. And as they stopped and the doors opened, she was hit with a new barrage of scents—sawdust, mold, hot metal, chemicals. At the screech of a power saw blade hitting wood, Annie pushed her way off the elevator first and surveyed the ten or twelve construction workers.

  She had to raise her voice to be heard over the pounding of hammers and conversations among the men. “Please tell me this isn’t our crime scene.” This was as bad a situation for contamination as the winter storm had been. “With all this traffic and dust, there’s no way we’ll find any usable evidence. Where are the officers who are supposed to cordon off the scene?”

  “Watch out.” Nick pulled her back a step as a man dressed in tan coveralls strode by with a stack of treated lumber balanced on his shoulder. Nick glanced up at the building’s owner for an explanation. “Mr. Elliott?”

  “This is what progress looks like.” The wealthy man seemed almost entranced by the bustle of activity around them. “Men are working. I’m saving something old and beautiful. We’re creating a useful space here.”

  The last person to exit the elevator, Regina Hollister, touched her boss’s sleeve and turned him toward the west wall. Thankfully, her response was more practical. “This is as high as the public elevator goes. The break-in happened one floor above us. We’ll have to take the stairs.” She walked around the power tools and workmen, expecting the rest of them to follow. “This way.”

  They met two uniformed cops standing at the base of a concrete stairwell. The openings going both up and down had been wrapped in plastic, although Annie noted that neither entry had been completely sealed, allowing easy enough access to the floors above and below them.

  Nick was more interested in the two uniforms, a man and a woman. “Let me see your IDs and badges.” He made sure badge numbers and pictures checked out before dismissing them. “Wait downstairs. I’ll call if we need anything.”

  The crinkling of plastic being pushed aside and the high-pitched whistle of the winter wind blowing through a broken window were the only sounds on the fifth floor. The layers of plastic and thick floor muffled the sounds of the workmen beneath their feet. Nick lifted the yellow crime scene tape at the top of the stairs and the group stepped into a cavernous space of concrete and history.

  “This entire floor is the crime scene?” Annie frowned. Processing this much space was almost as daunting as working through the chaos downstairs.

  Regina Hollister pointed to the opposite wall. “The break-in happened over there, but because the workmen aren’t finished with this level yet, the officers didn’t want anyone coming up here.”

  “These stairs are the only access point?” Nick asked, pulling out his notebook to jot down information.

  “They were,” Regina answered. She pointed to the only relatively solid wall, where broken boards and caution tape revealed glimpses of the iron work behind them. “There’s the old freight elevator, but it’s been boarded up for decades behind that wall. The building inspector says it’s not structurally safe.”

  “But we intend to bring it back up to code,” Brian Elliott added, still focused more on the renovation than the crime that had happened here. “Once we refinish the wrought-iron and brass trims, we think it will be a real selling point—a truly unique entrance to the two-story penthouse my people are designing for this floor and the one above us.”

  Setting her purse down beside her kit, Annie pulled a pair of sterile gloves from the CSI vest she wore, and readied to go to work. She opened her kit to retrieve her camera and loop it around her neck, and then pulled out her flashlight. Although there was enough natural light coming through the windows to see the general layout of the place, she shined her light from one corner to the next for a closer inspection.

  It did look as though Brian Elliott’s crew was in the midst of gutting the old textile factory. New windows had been installed in the exterior walls, which had been taken down to the original red brick. Crisscrossing through the middle were exposed two-by-fours, some wrapped in plastic to protect the old wiring inside, others framing heating and exhaust ducts that ran from the concrete floor to the ceiling and through the rafters overhead. Fluorescent paint marked holes where toilets and plumbing had been removed, and a path had been sprayed from the stairs to a Dumpster chute where a window used to be. In front of that lay a scattered mess of debris, from vintage wooden spools that had once held miles of thread and skeins of material to a broken-down mattress and discarded rolls of plastic.

  “Did these used to be apartments?” Annie asked, lowering her light to take a few wide-angle shots.

  Brian Elliott came up beside her to answer. “Over the years the warehouse storage spaces were sectioned off into tiny apartments. We’re opening it up and converting it into loft condominiums, reserving the bottom floor for office or business space.”

  “So you’re working from the top floor down,” Nick clarified. With his father’s expertise as a contractor, he probably knew a lot about the work going on here. “Replacing windows, taking out non-load-bearing walls, bringing wiring up to code.”

  Annie expanded her search, taking more photos while Brian Elliott talked about his grand plan for renovating the historic building.

  “We’re also adding central heating and air. But that won’t come in until the second phase.” He pointed to a space heater next to a framed-up wall. “In the meantime we’re using space heaters to keep the temperature tolerable for the workers and clients who come to see their potential future investment.”

  After a nod of permission from Annie, Nick followed the line to the broken window and peered out. “The fire escape is right here. I’m guessing a homeless person. After that storm, they’d be drawn to the heat and a place out of the wind. Annie?” He called her over to inspect the mattress tossed in front of one of the space heaters. “Whoever broke in probably pulled it out of the trash to sleep on.”

  Pulling out the ultraviolet attachment and goggles for her flashlight, she took note of the stains, both human and otherwise, that decorated the old mattress. “The last surviving witness said she came to on a mattress at a building under construction. That the rape took place there before he returned her to the abduction site.”

  “But our guy’s a neat freak.” Some of the construction plastic has been cut off the walls and folded over the end of the mattress like a blanket. Annie snapped a picture before Nick moved aside the plastic and shook the dust off it. “Even if he covered it with plastic, do you think he’d want to mess with this trash heap?”

  “I don’t know.” Annie ran through witness accounts from previous attacks and tried to make them match what she was seeing here. Close, but not quite counted when playing horseshoes, but not in a forensic investigation. “This is weird,” she confessed, drawing on the instincts that served Nick so well. “I feel like this has been staged. It has elements of the attacks, but it isn’t quite right.”

  “It’s another one of those damn coincidences I don’t like.” Maybe she was rubbing off on him, too. “I’d rather see some cold, hard facts.”

  “Maybe this is just a break-in.”

  “You’re just getting started,” he reminded her, going back to the window. “Let’s not make any decisions yet. Footprints in the snow out there. Your intruder came up from the outside. Probably climbed up until he found a window where he could force his way in.”

  Annie tipped up one of the giant spools and climbed up on it to inspect the window inside and out. “So where did our intruder go after spending the night? All I see are tracks leading in—nothing going back down the fire escape.”

  “Maybe he sneaked down the stairs and out the front door after the construction crew opened up the place this morning.”

  “Looks like he tried to pry the window open first, lost patience and then broke through the pane with a—” she followed the trail of broken glass across the floor with her flashlight and recoiled with a gasp “—a brick.”

  She caught Nick’s worried gaze looking up at her and
shook off his concern. It was another ugly coincidence, nothing more. “The brick used to kill Rachel Dunbar was stained with her blood,” she reminded him. “There’s nothing but a lot of dust on that one. No way is it the same murder weapon The Cleaner stole from me.”

  Still, it left her with the shivery feeling that there might be something more going on here than an innocent quest to get out of the cold. But Nick was right. She had to see everything first. Piece the clues together. Figure it out. And she needed to get rid of the audience across the room to do that.

  “Annie? I’m here.” An accented voice called to Annie from the stairs.

  She glanced up to see Raj Kapoor push through the plastic barricade alongside another man in a suit and coat that matched Brian Elliott’s. Surprise robbed her of breath and anchored her feet to the crate.

  “What are you doing here?” She accepted Nick’s outstretched hand to help her down, then held on to it a split second longer than was necessary to keep herself grounded in the moment at this surreal turn of events. But Annie was looking at the blond-haired man in the suit, not her coworker from the lab.

  Nick’s voice was an urgent whisper in her ear. “What’s wrong? Doesn’t the lab usually send backup when the crime scene’s this big?”

  “Adam?”

  “Oh, my God. I saw you at the press conference on the noon news. Are you all right?” The tall blond in the suit walked straight across the marked path to Annie and scooped her up, camera and all, in a hug that lifted her right off her feet. “I didn’t realize how badly you’d been hurt. It looks worse in person than it did—”

  “Back it up, pal. You’re interfering with a police investigation.”

  Annie saw Nick moving to block the embrace. He grasped the other man’s arm and pried her free. Not a problem. She was already pushing against the unwanted, albeit familiar hug.

  “And you are?” Adam lorded his six-foot-two status over Nick.