Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel

by Mari Carr

  The brick wall.

  Walt and Jakob moved at the same time, both lunging for the fleet admiral. Walt hooked a hand around Eric’s elbow, though since he was still sitting, stretched out across Eric’s chair, it wouldn’t have done much good.

  Jakob, however, was both fast and effective. He grabbed the fleet admiral in a Full Nelson, arms hooked under Eric’s armpits, his clenched hands braced against the back of Eric’s neck, forcing his head down and hobbling the movement of his shoulders.

  Eric snarled and started to turn. Jakob’s shoes skidded across the floor as he was dragged. Walt and Jakob shared a glance, and there was a moment of understanding as well as a fair amount of oh fuck.

  Even as Walt was scrambling out of his chair, bracing his body against Jakob’s—which was rock hard with muscle—Annalise got up too.

  “Fleet Admiral. Eric.” She put a hand on his chest, her voice commanding. “This behavior is not productive. You are distracting us rather than helping us catch Josephine’s killer.”

  That stopped Eric cold, and after a moment, Jakob eased his hold. Walt backed off so Jakob could let him go.

  Annalise went to reassure the scared-looking waiter who was hesitantly approaching.

  Annalise returned to the table, then cleared her throat when they remained standing. Walt sat down, and Annalise smiled at him. More slowly, Jakob resumed his seat. Finally Eric did too, but his jaw was clenched so tight that Walt was worried about his teeth.

  “Dr. Hayden—” Annalise began.

  “Walt.”

  “Walt, what can you tell us based on the photos?” Annalise gestured at the tablet.

  “I hate to put a damper on your theory, Professor, but I don’t think they were killed by the same person.”

  Annalise and Jakob shared a look.

  “Maybe it is the same person, and they got better, but…” Walt shook his head. “I’m not a forensic pathologist, this is not my specialty at all. But on some of these, it’s hard to see details.”

  “I have additional printed copies of the photos not in the folder.”

  “Well damn, you’re organized. I like it.” Walt shot her a smile, and when she glanced back and gave him a genuine, unguarded grin, he was surprised by his response to it. Annalise Fischer was—in a word—beautiful. Her chestnut-colored hair was currently pinned up, but enough tendrils had escaped that he could see it was long and wavy. Her light brown eyes captured his and, though it was a silly, romantic sentiment, Walt felt as if he could get lost in them. He forced himself to look away first, feeling the weight of Jakob’s gaze on him.

  Walt put down the tablet and quickly sorted through the paper copies. It took him a few minutes, during which everyone watched him make four piles.

  “Why are there four?” Eric demanded. “I thought we were talking about two people and Josephine?”

  Walt considered making a comment about Eric needing to be patient, then decided to choose life rather than having his face punched in.

  “Okay, this pile is all Alicja.” He stumbled a little over the pronunciation. “I matched up the closeups with the overall photo.” He spread out the detailed shots. Up close, it was actually easier to deal with, because it didn’t look like a person—just pinkish muscle, white bone, and cartilage. “If I was going to dismember a body, this is probably how I’d do it. Cut the legs off at the knees, and don’t try and mess around with the hips. The joint there would be a pain in the ass to deal with, unless you used a bone saw, and the femur is a big bone.

  “At the ankles, they cut off right between the bottom of the leg bones—tibia, fibula—and the top bone of the foot, the talus. That’s hard to do because it’s not straight across. They had to sort of go around the bottom of the tibia. And if you look at the legs, and the one foot, there’s only one cut in the flesh. They knew exactly where to start. If they’d been an amateur, they might have started too high or too low and had to adjust, start over. The same thing at the shoulder. They knew just where to go to get in between the humerus and the clavicle and scapula.”

  He touched his arm and then collarbone and shoulder blade as he mentioned them. Probably unnecessary with this audience, but it was a practice he’d developed over the years he’d spent working abroad, using physical gestures in tandem with words to help explain for those with limited knowledge of their own anatomy or medicine.

  He went on to the next stack.

  “This body, though there’s not much of it—”

  “That’s the victim from Belgium,” Annalise said.

  Walt nodded. “Again, the cuts are in just the right spot. Most people would try to cut straight across to sever a head, but they came in at a slight angle. See it?” Everyone leaned in to look at the line he drew across the profile shot of the head. “It’s angled up from the back. The spinous process, the skinny fin part of your vertebrae that sticks out at the back, is angled slightly down in your neck. Whoever did this knew that and adjusted their angle so they’d go cleanly between the vertebrae.”

  Walt didn’t look at Eric as he tapped the picture of Josephine’s neck. “The same here.”

  “What’s the fourth pile?” Eric asked.

  Walt glanced at Annalise and Jakob, a little suspicious that they hadn’t said anything or reacted.

  “I guess this is the rest of the person from Belgium, but here, these incisions were made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.” He spread out the photos of a knee, ankle, and right hand. “Compare these to these.” He pointed to Alicja’s photos. “See how there’s a deep cut at the wrist, but they were too high? They hit bone, so then they started again, farther down, and managed to get it off. But see how the muscle looks sort of chewed? I’m guessing that’s from either a dull knife or maybe hacking at it.”

  “Josephine and Alicja had the same killer, but the Belgium girl is only half this killer?” Eric sounded calm once again. Coldly analytical, even. “Maybe two killers.”

  “No,” Annalise said. “They were all killed by the same unsub.” Annalise picked up the fourth pile of pictures. “These are from another body. Not part of the victim from Belgium. One I ruled out, but I wanted to be sure.”

  “A test?” Walt tried not to be irritated.

  “A test of my skill, not yours. The victim was a possible one, whom I ruled out based on the dismemberment, but I am far less an expert on human anatomy than you.”

  Walt relaxed and nodded. “A second opinion.”

  While he and Annalise had been talking, Jakob had twisted in his chair, scanning the restaurant. Eric, too, was looking around. Walt winced and checked to make sure no one was close enough to have heard them. The fact that they were speaking English wasn’t a guarantee that no one would understand. Hopefully their poor server hadn’t heard any of this.

  “Now we come to the issue of the partnership,” Annalise said. “Killer partnerships are not unheard of. I haven’t had a chance to do an in-depth read of the reports from Rome about Ciril Novak, the man who killed a trinity, then kidnapped and tortured two other members. I want to do that before I make too many statements about how the partnership between Petro, who would most likely have been the dominant partner, and this unsub may be similar, or differentiate from the known—”

  “Get the papers,” Jakob said.

  Annalise’s brow furrowed at the same time Eric stood up, his chair teetering, almost ready to topple over.

  Walt and Annalise shared a look, and then in tandem swept the papers off the table, shoving them into her bag.

  “What’s going on, Eric?” Walt asked in a low voice.

  “Go out the back,” was Eric’s unhelpful reply.

  “I will stay, Fleet Admiral.” Jakob was on his feet, and he’d turned to the main dining room.

  Now Walt could see them—a few people who had hats pulled low or newspapers open, but all of whom seemed to be looking their way.

  They were being watched.

  Why, and by whom, seemed unimportant as his body dumpe
d adrenaline into his system. Walt pushed to his feet.

  “Dr. Hayden…” Jakob didn’t look at him, didn’t take his attention away from those watching them, but Walt immediately knew what he was asking.

  Walt looked at Annalise, who had her arms wrapped around her bag, holding it to her chest. Her eyes were wide, and she was trembling slightly. He remembered what they’d said in her office the other day. Something about Jakob guarding her due to a stalker. Something bad had happened to Annalise, and now Jakob wanted Walt to look after her. He was pretty damn sure that request didn’t come easily to the other man, which only ratcheted up the tension.

  “Come on, Professor.” Walt hooked a hand under her arm and pulled her to her feet. “Time to go.”

  “Jakob, follow us out.” Eric grabbed Annalise’s and Walt’s shoulders and started dragging them to the door into the café kitchen. Walt hauled Annalise against his side so Eric wasn’t dragging her.

  Jakob’s attention was focused on the room, on the potential danger, as he took calm, measured strides backward. Walt lost sight of him when they burst into the kitchen. Ignoring questions from the staff, he, Annalise, and Eric picked up speed, nearly running when they hit the back door. It opened onto an alley, and there were two large trash cans beside the door, reeking of old food.

  Eric glanced left and right. The narrow alley was, luckily, not a dead end, with exits to the streets on both sides.

  “You go left. Get someplace safe and stay there.” Eric shot Walt a hard glance, and then turned away, toward the right.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Walt called out.

  Jakob emerged from the kitchen door. He glanced around, picked up a short broom, and held it like a bat, positioning himself so the first thing anyone who opened the door saw would be him.

  “Knew three days here was too long.” There was a wealth of feeling in Eric’s words. “I’m the one they’re after.”

  “Who?” Jakob asked, at the same time Walt said, “You’re just telling me this now?”

  “I pissed off a few people. If they find my body, start with the Albanian mafia or the guys running the port of Antwerp. They were smuggling cocaine. I kept running into assholes when all I wanted was a damn serial killer.”

  Walt thought about Eric casually taking down an extremist cell and teaching children how to fight and appropriately use words like “co-conspirator”. Yeah, he could see that Eric might have made a few other enemies if he’d been rampaging all over Europe like that.

  “Fleet Admiral,” Jakob barked. “If you are in danger, the Spartan Guard—”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.” Eric smiled grimly at Walt. “Sorry about this. We’ll meet up later.”

  “When? How?” Walt was both baffled and terrified—the feeling reminded him a bit of being in med school.

  “Jakob, get them out of here,” Eric called back. He was almost to the street. “And keep them safe.”

  Then the fleet admiral disappeared around the corner.

  Jakob dropped the broom and, without a word, went to the other side of Annalise, taking her hand while Walt still had an arm around her shoulder. She was pale and breathing too fast.

  They heard a commotion in the kitchen.

  Jakob looked at them. “Run.”

  Chapter Six

  It was a testament to exactly how worried he was about Annalise that Jakob didn’t object to how Walt’s hand had rested on her shoulder during the car ride. He slid out of the armored, chauffeured car he’d called to pick them up after they’d taken basic evasive maneuvers, walking in a corkscrewing circle around Frankfurt. There’d been no sign of the people from the restaurant following them, but he’d opted to have a security service pick them up just in case and take them to his home, which he considered to be one of the most secure residences in Frankfurt.

  A home he’d bought and remodeled for Annalise.

  Because he was a stupid fucking fucker who was in love with a woman too good for him. Over his ears in love.

  Years in intelligence work and then as a Masters’ Admiralty Ritter hadn’t beaten the stupid out of him.

  His grandmother, if she were still alive, would have smacked him on the back of the head and called him an Arsch mit Ohren. Oma had never minced words, never hesitated to tell him when he was acting like a complete idiot. And God knew an arsch mit ohren was what he felt like. He was a butt with ears.

  Walt guided Annalise up the steps to the front door. Jakob keyed in the code on the lock with one hand and subtly pressed his palm to the hidden scanner in the doorframe. It clicked open and he swept in, quickly checking and then disarming the security system before turning and motioning for Walt to guide Annalise inside.

  She looked pale, even paler than her typical light complexion, with a gray undertone to her skin, set off by the darkness of her hair. It was pulled back today, the way she wore it when she was in her office at the university or teaching. But he’d seen her with her hair down, watched her scrub her fingers through it after releasing it from a tight bun. For a moment, she’d have glorious just-fucked hair, and then she’d smooth it down, tuck it behind her ears.

  More than once, after she’d fallen asleep on the couch while he kept watch, he would crouch down and brush back any pieces that fell over her face.

  Verdammt! He was no better than her stalker.

  He was completely aware of exactly how ridiculously stupid he was, how creepy as fuck it was that he loved to watch her sleep, but that didn’t stop him. He knew she felt safer when he was there.

  And Annalise’s feelings had become the single-most important thing in his life.

  It was why his very precious free time was almost all spent with her or trying to ensure her safety in some way. Any moment he had where the vice admiral, who was in charge of the Ritter, didn’t need him to be doing something else, Jakob was playing bodyguard for Annalise.

  Sometimes, when he sat near her, either working on his own computer or watching TV while she graded papers, he could pretend they were a couple, relaxing together. And when they were done, they’d go to bed together. Their bed.

  The bed in this house, in the bedroom he’d remodeled with her in mind.

  He’d bought and redone an entire fucking house for a woman who would never live in it.

  Verdammter Mist!

  Arrrrgh.

  “Okay, what do we do now?” Walt was looking around the foyer. Jakob had sanded down the exposed beams and varnished them himself, nearly breaking his fool neck when he leaned too far back and fell off the damn ladder.

  “Come inside.” Jakob motioned them through the door on the right.

  The house was old but large, though by modern standards, the rooms were small. It sat in the middle of a large plot of land with trees that hid it from view on all sides.

  Most of the trees had cameras, infrared sensors, and motion detection tech mounted to the trunks and disguised to look like bark. He’d toyed with the idea of adding automatic ground-level flamethrowers that would ignite when the motion or infrared sensors were tripped, but his beta test had resulted in several flaming bunnies that still haunted his nightmares.

  The room he led them into was a small living space with two narrow windows on either side of a stone fireplace. There were three leather and wood armchairs, each with matching footstools, in a semicircle facing the fire.

  In his deranged fantasy life, when he and Annalise were married and living here, there was always a shadowy third person—their third—so he’d made sure there were three chairs in this cozy little room. A cozy room with bulletproof glass windows and access to one of the seven safe rooms.

  A second closed door led to the dining room, and beyond that, the kitchen, which he’d enlarged considerably, since he knew she liked to sometimes work at the kitchen counter for a change of scenery. The inset marble block in one section of the counter was for baking, since she’d told him marble worked best for pastry making because it stayed cold.

  The urge
to say all these things, to give her—well, them, since Walt was here—a tour was so strong, he had to bite the inside of his cheek. He wanted to tell them that the chairs were custom made by a local furniture company. That he’d repaired the chimney for this fireplace himself and re-mortared the stone. Tell her, them, about the security system and his Oma’s homemade quilt that covered the trinity-sized bed in the master suite.

  Instead, he pointed at the chairs. “Sit.”

  Yeah, that was better.

  Walt raised one eyebrow but guided Annalise over to the center chair. Then he crouched beside her. “Hi there, Annalise. Can you talk to me for a second?”

  Oh, wait. Walt was a doctor.

  And Annalise was either in shock or had done a mental retreat. Dissociated. He’d spent enough time with her that he had picked up his fair share of terms. He was pretty sure he’d attended more of her lectures than some of the actual students.

  Either way, if it had been just him and Annalise, he would have been preparing to call someone to come out and check her physical health.

  Her mental health?

  Well, he had a pretty good idea of what was going on in that beautiful brain of hers, and he would have to find a way to break her out of her downward spiral.

  “Annalise, is it okay if I touch you? I want to touch your wrist with two fingers.” Walt held up two fingers on his left hand.

  She didn’t respond. No comment.

  Walt turned to Jakob. “Can you repeat what I just said, in German?”

  Jakob shifted so he could see Annalise’s face and both doors, then quietly repeated exactly what Walt had said.

  Annalise blinked and her eyes focused. She looked at Jakob and spoke in German. “You want to touch me?”

  There was panicked, excited screaming in Jakob’s head because he thought, hoped—verdammter Mist—there was longing in her voice. He held very still, replying in the same language. “I was repeating what Dr. Hayden said.”

  Annalise hugged her bag tighter against her chest, turning her face away from him.

  The screaming in his head was now accompanied by a voice asking him why he hadn’t just said yes. He could have confessed his undying love and devotion and…and…