“What? That thing’s too long for me.”
“Hey, whatever you want.” He led her down the row to an empty cage with a pitching machine that was already loaded with balls. “Ladies first.”
“I knew you were going to say that.” She downed a sip of coffee and nestled the cup on the ground beside the gate. Brian was already up at the pitching machine making adjustments.
“We’ll start slow,” he said.
“Gee, thanks.”
She did some quick arm stretches and prayed she wouldn’t pull a muscle or something equally embarrassing. She really could not remember the last time she’d hit anything with a bat. It had probably been college, and Brian clearly did this on a regular basis. She braced for humiliation.
Maddie positioned herself beside the plate and lifted the bat. Her pulse picked up, and she took a deep breath. “Ready.”
He made a final adjustment to the machine and came to stand behind her.
“Out of the way,” she warned.
“I’m okay.”
The ball sailed out. She swung and, to her astonishment, connected. The ball hit the netting above her head and bounced down to the ground beside her foot.
“Not bad.” He scooped up the ball. “Try widening your stance.”
She ignored him and focused on the next pitch. Which she completely whiffed.
“Spread your feet apart.” He walked up behind her and adjusted her hips, which was a complete distraction. She missed the next pitch, too, and turned to glare at him.
“Do you mind?”
He backed away, smiling. “Not at all.”
She turned just as another pitch came at her. She let it go and calmly got into position. She bent her knees, took a deep breath, steadied her nerves. Concentrate.
It felt good to hold a bat in her hands. Natural, even. The ball flew out, and she reacted on pure instinct.
Thwack.
He whistled. “Nice one.”
She turned to him with a grin. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“You play in high school?”
She scoffed.
“I’m serious. Heads-up.”
Another ball came out, and she hit a grounder. “Middle school,” she said. “The Plano Pythons.”
“Thought you grew up in Dallas.”
“It’s a suburb.” She swung again and missed. “Oops. Too early.”
She waited for her pitch, heard another satisfying thunk.
“Okay, your turn.” She turned and smiled at him.
“You’ve got four more pitches.” He reached out and caught the ball bare-handed. “Damn.” He shook out his fingers and jogged over to switch off the machine.
“You’re up,” she insisted. “I need a coffee break.”
He made some adjustments and reloaded balls.
“How fast does it go?”
“About sixty,” he said. “That’s what it says, anyway. I think it’s more like fifty.”
He picked up his bat from where it was leaning against the gate, and Maddie watched him get into position. The muscles of his shoulders strained against his T-shirt as he choked up on the bat. He looked calm but intent as he waited for the pitch.
Thwack.
It was beautiful. He was beautiful. She smiled as she removed her sunglasses and tucked them into the neck of her T-shirt.
“Okay, why are you so good at this?” she asked.
He smacked another ball without missing a beat. “Our office fields a team every spring. We play against other LEAs in the area.”
LEAs—that would be cop-speak for law-enforcement agencies.
“And you practice here because . . . ?”
“The place near my house holds clinics on the weekends,” he said. “It’s usually packed.”
Another pitch. Another perfect swing. He was poetry, and she couldn’t help but admire him. Just watching him gave her a warm giddiness she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“What?” He slid her a suspicious look.
He knew damn well what, but she didn’t stop smiling. “Nothing.”
She reached down for her coffee and took a sip as he continued hitting. This was so not a good idea, but she was doing it anyway. She was enjoying a carefree Saturday morning with—what had Brooke called him?—a delectable-looking lawman. And as an added bonus, he also happened to be a natural athlete. Of course he was. She doubted his talents were limited to the field—he probably excelled at all physical activities. She sighed contentedly and leaned against the gate.
For a moment, she let herself entertain the fantasy of going to bed with Brian Beckman. She imagined those muscular arms wrapped around her. She imagined clutching his body against her. She imagined his low voice whispering in her ear as he urged her on. And then she wondered what he’d say to her afterward. Would he look serious, or would he give her one of his sexy half grins? Her heart started to thud as she thought of all the things she could do to put a satisfied smile on his face.
She watched him hit a few more balls, savoring the breeze in her hair and the sun on her cheeks. It was a beautiful morning, and although she knew she looked terrible, she felt good, better than she should on a mere three hours of sleep.
As often happened, guilt intruded on her sunny mood. As little sleep as she’d had last night, she imagined Jolene Murphy’s parents had had even less.
“So,” she said, as he sent yet another ball soaring into the netting. “I’ve been thinking about Gillian Dawson.”
He glanced back at her, his eyes serious. “You really want to talk about the case right now?” He turned and smacked another ball. Even distracted, he was spot-on.
“Isn’t that why you brought me here?”
“No.” He didn’t look at her, and she didn’t know what to say. Obviously, this wasn’t a business meeting, but it wasn’t a date, either. There was nothing date-like about hitting baseballs at nine in the morning.
He swung and missed, then darted a look in her direction.
“Did I break your concentration?” she asked sweetly.
He turned toward the machine. “What about Gillian Dawson?”
“I’ve been thinking about the case,” she said as he hit a ball. “You want to hear my ideas?”
He sighed.
“What? I’m not allowed to have ideas?”
He hit a grounder.
“We’ve got an interagency task force devoted to this thing,” he told her. “No offense, but they’re not exactly looking for more input.”
“The alphabet soup.”
“What’s your beef with law enforcement, anyway?” He glanced over his shoulder at her.
“I don’t have a beef.”
“Right.”
“I don’t. I just know that law-enforcement agencies are made up of humans. And as such, they’re prone to human error. Even when people have good intentions, sometimes things get missed.”
He hit a fly ball, and she ducked for cover.
“Sorry.”
She scooted farther away. “Don’t you think it’s possible a civilian might have an idea every now and then?”
“Okay, what’s your idea?”
“I’ve been thinking about the connection between Gillian and Katya.”
He turned to look at her. “What connection?”
“Look out.”
“That’s it.” He glanced at the machine, which was empty now, then back at her. “What connection?”
“That’s the thing. I think there has to be a connection, even if we don’t know what it is yet.”
He watched her, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. She could tell he didn’t like her involvement in the case, and she wasn’t surprised. Most of the cops she knew were territorial.
“Don’t you think?”
“We looked for a connection, but we’ve found zip,” he said. “Gillian lived and died in California. Katya and her friends had never even been to that state, except for Jolene, who went to Disneyland when she was a kid. Gillian never went
to Texas, as far as we can tell.”
“What about cause of death?”
“Still no connection. Gillian was bludgeoned in her home. Heidi was kidnapped, tortured, and strangled.”
“Okay, but what about Katya? You said she OD’d.”
“Yeah?” He pulled his hat off and wiped his forehead on his shoulder.
“Do you know what she OD’d on?”
“Oxycodone. It was prescribed by her dad, something her mom was taking for back pain.”
Maddie cringed. She couldn’t imagine Katya’s mother knowing that her own pills had been the cause of her daughter’s death.
“And like I said, Gillian was bludgeoned. I don’t see the connection.”
“Except that DNA found at the scene of her murder happens to belong to one of Mladovic’s henchmen.”
“Right, but that doesn’t connect Gillian to Katya or the other girls.”
Maddie sighed, frustrated. “Did you check the ME’s report to see if Gillian had drugs in her system?”
“She didn’t.”
“Any chance she had painkillers in her possession when she died?”
Brian watched her, all playfulness gone. She was on to something, she could read it in his eyes. But he seemed intent on keeping her out of the loop on this.
“Well?”
“Well, nothing. She didn’t have any prescriptions—not according to her medicine cabinet and not according to her parents.”
“Girls’ parents aren’t always the most well informed about what drugs their daughters are taking.”
“What’s your hang-up with this drug angle?”
She shrugged. “You brought it up.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You said Mladovic was being investigated for drug trafficking, among other things. He’s a doctor. His daughter died of a drug overdose. Seems pretty obvious drugs are an element in these cases.”
Brian muttered something and looked away.
“What?”
“You’re not even supposed to know all that. I don’t like you involved in this. Mladovic’s dangerous.”
“Well, too late.”
He flashed a look at her.
“And you didn’t make me involved. I was involved the moment one of his goons tried to choke the life out of me in that parking garage.”
He repositioned the cap on his head. “It ever occur to you to let the police handle anything? Most women would hang back and wait for a detective to call them. Or maybe try to forget about it.”
“I’m not most women. And like I said, people miss things. Even seasoned investigators.” Which you are not. But she didn’t say that, because she didn’t think he’d appreciate the criticism.
He watched her for a long moment. She bent down and retrieved a couple of baseballs from the dirt.
“You’re up again.” She walked over to the pitching machine and started reloading balls. When she turned around, he had his phone pressed to his ear. Maddie hadn’t heard a ring tone, so she guessed it had been set to vibrate.
His expression looked serious as he ended the call. She joined him beside the gate.
“You have to go, don’t you?”
“That was Sam,” he said, tucking his phone into his pocket. “And yeah, I need to go in.” He rested his hands on his hips and gazed down at her, and she resisted the urge to reach up and brush her fingertips over his stubble. She should feel relieved that he had to go, but instead, she felt disappointed.
She enjoyed being with him. It had been so long since she’d really enjoyed a man, she’d forgotten how it felt. His gaze held hers, and she knew she was on slippery ground here.
“Sorry you didn’t get much of a turn.” He sounded genuinely sorry.
“Hey, I understand. Duty calls.”
“We’ll do a rain check on breakfast.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She forced a smile. “I’m not much of a breakfast person.”
Brian made a quick detour by the vending machine before joining Sam in a meeting room. He was on the phone and glanced up as Brian sank into a chair and twisted the top off a Gatorade.
“Okay, keep us posted.” Sam hung up the conference-room phone and looked at him. “How’s Maddie?”
“What makes you think I was with Maddie?”
“Because you look frustrated.” Sam smiled and leaned back in his chair. “What, she shut you down again?”
Brian swigged his drink. One of the disadvantages to working with Sam was that he didn’t miss much—meaning he was fully aware that Brian had developed a fixation on a certain Delphi Center CSI. He plunked down his bottle. Maybe fixation wasn’t the right word, but it was definitely bothering him that she seemed dead set on ignoring his attempts to get to know her outside of work.
“She’s fine,” he said now, because dodging the question would only pique Sam’s curiosity. He scooted his chair in. “So tell me what we got. You come up with a link?”
“Elizabeth’s still working on it,” Sam said. “She was here half the night looking for anything to connect this girl in California to Jolene Murphy. So far, nothing.” Sam thumbed through the file in front of him. “But we did get some lab results back.”
“That was fast.”
“They put a rush on it. The blood in Volansky’s bathroom comes back to Jolene.”
Brian didn’t say anything. He would have been surprised if it hadn’t.
“And we sent a tool marks expert over to look at those marks on the side of the tub,” Sam said. “He agreed they’re from a hammer.”
Brian felt sick thinking about it. “So they cuffed her under the sink so they could torture her in there.”
“That’s what it looks like. Thing I don’t get is why.”
“Because Mladovic is a sadistic shithead?”
“It’s got to be more than that.” Sam tapped his pen on the table. “I think he was trying to get information out of her.”
“Or maybe punish her for sharing information with us,” Brian said, feeling guiltier than ever. Why hadn’t he fought for surveillance of this witness?
“Maybe,” Sam said. “But she hadn’t shared much of anything. Not yet.”
“But what was she planning to tell us? It had to have been something important for him to risk a murder rap in order to shut her up.”
They stared at each other.
“I keep coming back to the daughter,” Sam said. “Maybe it had to do with Katya.”
“Katya’s dead.”
“Maybe Jolene knew something about that. Take a look at what else we got.” Sam fished a paper from the file and slid it across the table.
“What’s this?” Brian studied the page. It was a copy of a color photograph showing a brown prescription bottle on what looked like a bedside table.
“Investigator who handled Katya’s case e-mailed that over. That’s the bottle of pills she supposedly OD’d on.”
“Supposedly?”
“Her prints are on it. ME’s still saying suicide. Says there were no marks on the body or any indication someone forced her to take the pills.”
“Lot of ways to force someone to do something,” Brian said.
“And listen to this. The pharmacy listed on that bottle? They claim they have no record of this prescription.”
Brian studied the picture more closely, trying to read the address, but the photo only showed the name of the pharmacy and the first few digits of a phone number.
He looked at Sam. “Where is this place?”
“It’s right by Mladovic’s house, but apparently, his wife used a pharmacy in her grocery store. The obvious question is, where’d this bottle come from that has her name on it?”
“And why didn’t the police notice this a year ago?” Brian shook his head with disgust. “Where’s this bottle?”
“Who the hell knows? Nobody kept it. When the ME ruled the death a suicide, the cops basically washed their hands of it. Their file on this thing is a joke. We’re lucky to have the photo
s, but that’s about it in terms of physical evidence. ’Less someone plans to exhume the body and take another look.”
Brian stared down at the photo as questions flooded into his head. “We’re talking about a phony prescription with Mladovic’s name on it.” He looked at Sam.
“Could be.”
“Which makes me think either he orchestrated his daughter’s death or someone else did. Or maybe it really was a suicide, and the bottle was Katya’s idea, to get her dad in trouble. He’d already been in all kinds of shit for his prescription-writing practices. She had to know that. Maybe she set this up as a dying ‘fuck you’ to her father.”
“Maybe.” Sam was being evasive, and Brian knew he had another theory of what happened.
“At the very least, Mladovic had to know something was wrong. He knows he didn’t write that script,” Brian said. “And his wife’s bound to know she didn’t fill it at that pharmacy. Any normal parent would raise a big red flag and demand a murder investigation.”
“This guy’s not your normal parent,” Sam said. “Not by a long stretch.”
Brian stared at the picture and wondered for the thousandth time how the hell Katya and her friends had become tangled up in Mladovic’s mess.
“So there’s a very real possibility he murdered his daughter and staged it as a suicide.”
Sam nodded. “Either that—or he knows who did.”
Goran watched his wife step out of the shower as he zipped his pants. Maybe it was the excitement left over from last night, but he actually found himself taking a second look.
Sylvia was tall and blond and had had the requisite plastic surgery for a woman in her late forties. She had a degree in political science and had begun their marriage on what she perceived to be equal footing. He liked that about her. Sylvia had opinions, and she fought back—which was also to his liking—but she knew the limits, and in twenty-four years of marriage, she’d never crossed them.
Except once.
After Katya’s death, she’d become hysterical and threatened to go to the police with everything. Goran had promised that if she did, he would kill her.
And he didn’t break his promises.
Sylvia wrapped herself in a towel. Goran scooped his Mercedes keys from the dresser and headed for the garage. His wife could wait until tonight—one of the few benefits of marriage. Goran checked his trunk to make sure his clubs had been loaded properly and slid behind the wheel. He raised the garage door and backed out of the drive, taking note of the gray Taurus parked conspicuously in front of his neighbor’s house.
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