by Kylie Brant
He’d start over and fill the place with stuff a guy could feel comfortable in. The first thing he’d done after she’d walked out was smash the collection of antique teapots displayed on a unit in the family room where a TV should have gone.
The second thing he’d done was go out and buy the biggestscreen TV he could find.
He toed off his shoes and padded stocking footed to the kitchen. Opened the fridge to grab a beer. Twisting off the cap, he tossed it to the counter and kept the refrigerator door open, peering inside as he drank, hoping the contents would change.
They didn’t. The one thing he still missed about having Cheryl around was that she’d taken care of the grocery shopping. It looked like it’d be peanut butter again tonight.
He let the fridge swing shut with the intent of trying the cupboard when he heard a small sound. Instinct had him going for his weapon as he turned. He stopped in midmotion when he found a Sig P220 equipped with silencer shoved in his face.
“Jesus.” In a split second, he evaluated his chances of completing the draw. Found them dismal.
“You think you’re that fast? Want to see?”
The whispered voice was vaguely familiar. But the oversized hooded sweatshirt the guy was wearing shadowed his face. “What the fuck do you want?” But, God, he knew what the cocksucker wanted. His body knew anyway. His knees felt like Jell-O and his heart was pounding hard enough to tear through his chest. Sweat slicked his brow.
“Turn around.”
Slowly, mind racing, he did as he was told.
“Hands behind your head.”
His arms rose slowly. He wasn’t going like the others. Knowing what was in store for him made the decision easy. He’d take his chances with the gun. Hell, he might take a bullet but he could still get a shot off.
And he’d rather go down in gunfire than be torched like the rest of the guys.
He felt the Sig pressed against his spine. Half expected a bullet to shatter it as he went for his weapon, turning at the same time. He hadn’t completed the turn when something was shoved in his face. A nauseatingly sweet, pungent smell filled his nostrils. As he dropped to his knees, his weapon clattered out of his hand.
The first thought that made it through his groggy brain was that he had a helluva headache for not stopping at the bar tonight.
Then comprehension rushed in. His bowels went to ice water. He was in a cellar. At least the stone all around him seemed like one. But there was a mess of stars overhead. A slivered moon. It was probably no more than a crumbling foundation somewhere. Outside the city maybe.
Far from help.
Fear unlike any he’d ever known had Randolph lunging forward. Chains jangled. His hands were fastened above his head and secured to a spot in the stone behind him. And the smell that filled the air was terrifying.
Gasoline.
Panic did a fast sprint up his spine. “What do you want? I’ll give you anything you want.”
Except the words came out muffled. He shook his head, trying to dislodge whatever was surrounding his face.
“That’s a smoke mask, Jack.” The tone was conversational. “Hate to go to all this trouble and have you succumb to smoke inhalation too quickly. Seems rude not to stay alive long enough to appreciate all I’ve done here. How tough are you? Let’s find out, shall we?”
A match scratched and flared in the darkness. Illuminated the face of the last man he expected to see here. Shocked disbelief filled him. “You? But why?”
“That’s right.” The match was tossed in a slow descent toward his feet. “It’s me. And we’ll have a lot of time to talk about why.”
Frantically Randolph stomped out the match that landed near his foot. And the next one. Then the one after it. Soft laughter sounded. The entire matchbook was lit and made a slow arc toward his feet. He tried to stomp it, too, but the hem of his pants flared. “No!”
He tried to rub his other leg over the flame, only to watch aghast as the other pant leg caught fire, too. The first scorch seared his flesh. “Oh, God, please!”
“I didn’t realize you were a praying man, Jack. I guess there’s lots we don’t know about each other. When the fire really gets going, I’m going to have to crawl up and out of here and watch from above. So first let me fill you in on a few of those details about me.”
“Next time, I’m picking the movie.” Risa yawned and watched without enthusiasm as Nate got up to put in yet another security tape they’d collected. “Yours don’t seem to have a plot.”
It was past one. They’d moved to the conference room where the briefings were held because the TV, VCR, and DVD player were already set up there. Both of them had long since gotten comfortable. They’d shed their jackets and Nate was minus his tie. Her feet were propped on another chair, and until a few moments ago, he’d been in a similar pose.
And, as promised, there was popcorn. Microwave, but she hadn’t had enough to eat today to be especially choosy.
“Eleven and a half minutes passed from the time Christiansen pulled in to that convenience store lot and the security camera caught the back door of his car opening. In that time, the offender had to find a place to park, run to the convenience store lot, and break into the car.”
“We’ve already watched the videos from the areas closest to the lot,” she said around a yawn. He had to have left the car in a spot that he could access quickly without scouting beforehand. “He may have lucked into a parking place near no cameras.”
Nate dropped the tape he was extracting and, muttering a curse, bent to pick it up. Because she wasn’t dead, Risa tilted her head for a better view. The man was built. Broad shoulders tapered to a narrow waist and a tight behind. Topped off by his smoldering dark good looks and he was three for three in the tall, dark, and handsome category. She was only surprised she hadn’t tripped over some of his admirers yet.
Her mouth quirked. Of course, there had been the older woman calling to offer borscht. Which may have been wrapped up in an ethnic culinary bow, but there was little doubt what she’d really been suggesting. Risa was certain most women were far more obvious in their interest.
He turned then to say something, caught her gaze on him. A purely masculine smirk settled on his face. “Made you look, huh. See anything you like?”
Oh, yeah. Nate McGuire was definitely used to female attention. “You’ve got a hole in the seam of your pants.”
The smirk faded in dramatic fashion as he rose and twisted around, one hand going to his butt. Then he glanced at her. “I do not.”
It was her turn to smirk. “Made you look.”
“That’s what I like about you, Chandler. Your maturity.”
“That’s only because you don’t know me well enough to be familiar with my myriad other charms.” Punchy with weariness, she slouched farther down in her chair. “I’m a kick-ass chess player.”
Looking unimpressed, he slid a different tape into the slot and picked up the remote before heading back to the table. “I’m more of a checkers guy, myself. Although I’ve been known to get beaten by my five-year-old nephew, most of the time it’s because I let him win. Almost always,” he corrected himself.
Unwillingly charmed, she considered him. It was late. She was low on caffeine, sleep, and food, in that order. But there was something appealing in the open affection with which he spoke of his nephew. Coupled with the dangerously desirable sleepy-eyed and stubbled look he was sporting now, and she was skating perilously close to attraction.
She wouldn’t let it bother her. Tomorrow, when she was well rested and proactive enough to buy her own jug of coffee before heading in to work, she’d be back at the top of her game. Professionalism firmly in place. But right now, she let herself consider how long it’d been since she’d simply enjoyed the company of a good-looking man with whom she shared a common interest. Found the answer dismally difficult to summon.
There had been men since her divorce, but none that couldn’t be forgotten the moment Raiker sent her to
whatever location a case demanded. Las Vegas, Chicago, Tampa, New Orleans. Few males of her acquaintance were content to put up with the weeks-at-a-time absences demanded by her work. Fewer still had elicited any real regret when they’d moved on.
She had a feeling that leaving Nate McGuire behind could lead to a boatload of remorse. Which was only one of the many reasons there was no way she’d allow anything to start between them.
Risa was carrying all of the regrets she could handle already.
To distract herself from the familiar gloom just threatening to settle, she picked up the original thread of the conversation. “Took my police basketball team to the city championship three years running.”
“Yeah?” That disclosure was met with more interest than the first. He resettled himself in his chair and started the tape. “Why do I have the feeling you think you’re hot shit on the court?” His look was appraising. “You play college level?”
“Penn State.”
“Bunch of pussies.” He coupled the trash talk with a smile. “I quarterbacked for the Fighting Irish. We regularly kicked the Nittany Lions’ ass.”
“That’s because the women’s basketball team wasn’t on the field.”
That drew a laugh from him. Their attention to the black-and-white action—or lack thereof—on the screen was desultory. “I seem to recall them being good a while back. It was a couple years after I’d graduated. Was that . . .” His voice trailed off abruptly. Both of them straightened, their feet hitting the floor in unison as they leaned forward.
“That’s the same guy, isn’t it?” Risa asked, weariness banished by a flare of adrenaline. “Where’s his girlfriend?”
The man on the screen looked a lot like the one that had been filmed in front of the convenience store that had been Patrick Christiansen’s last stop. Same dark-colored hoodie, pulled up over his head, shielding his features from the camera. Except he was minus the girl he’d been having an argument with when he was filmed in front of the store. “Back it up.”
Ignoring the remote, Nate made his way to the TV. He reran the tape. Paused it and started again. Risa got up to join him to get a closer look at the unfolding scene. The car pulled into the lot in front of the pawnshop and jolted to a stop, as if the driver was in a hurry. The guy in the hoodie got out, took something out of the backseat, and jammed it under his oversized sweatshirt before straightening to slam the door behind him and head across the lot toward the east.
“That pawn shop is a block east of the convenience store,” Nate murmured, his gaze fixed on the screen. “He must have been tailing Christiansen from a ways back. Saw his stop and picked the first the place he could leave the car.”
The figure had moved well beyond the sight of the camera. He reached out to rewind the tape again.
“If this is our guy, he wasn’t arguing with his girlfriend,” she theorized. “But it makes a great cover. He sees a lone female, grabs her, and pretends to shower her with some unwanted attention. She tells him to get lost, we pick up that argument on the convenience store’s external security tapes, but it looks like something else. He probably keeps up the guise just past the camera’s range, drops it to run around the building, and comes back on all fours.” He’d stayed well out of range of the convenience store’s cameras, she recalled. Even with enhancement, all they’d gotten from that tape was the shadow initially shown slipping into the backseat of Christiansen’s car. “Maybe later in the tape we’ll see him come back for the vehicle.”
If he heard her, he gave no indication. He rewound the tape several more times, seemed to focus on the car rather than the figure. Then she sat in silence as he ran it forward, pausing it occasionally. Eventually nearby bars and restaurants closed, leaving it the only car in the lot. The passing of time on the tape was evidenced by the gradual lightening of the sky. By the time the tape had run out, the time stamp on the screen said nine A.M. A clerk had pulled into the lot, given the car a glance, and headed into the store. At eleven A.M. the car still sat there.
At eleven thirty A.M. a tow truck backed into the lot and hooked up the vehicle. Hauled it away.
“Son of a bitch,” Nate breathed, sounding as stunned as Risa felt. “Is it possible the offender’s car ended up in the impound lot?”
“Maybe as the truck loads it, we’ll get an angle that shows the vehicle’s license plate number,” she said hopefully. They were standing shoulder to shoulder now, inches from the screen. Nothing short of a natural catastrophe could have had her tearing her gaze away. As the scene unwound, she scarcely dared to breath.
When the plate came into view only the first half of the number was displayed. Nate was diving for his jacket, scrambling for the notebook he always carried in the pocket. She reached out to pause the tape until he was ready, then started it again so he could write the number down. It was impossible to tell the color of the car on the black-and-white tape. “It’s a Ford, isn’t it?” Car models weren’t her forte.
He looked up. Stared at the screen again. “Ford Five Hundred. Two thousand seven or two thousand eight is my guess.”
The information rang a bell. “Isn’t that the same model . . .”
He finished her sentence for her. “The same model that Sherman Tull was driving when he disappeared.” They stared at each other, disbelief warring with excitement. “Son of a bitch,” Nate said again, his tone slightly awed. He slipped an arm around her waist for a hard hug. “We’ve been wondering what the offender did with the victims’ cars. Could he really be that ballsy?”
The warmth his touch elicited sent an answering shower of sparks through her veins. It suited Risa to blame that on the excitement generated by a possible break in the case. “Does the partial plate match Tull’s vehicle?”
Nate strode quickly back to the table, where he’d left the bulging case file he’d brought downstairs with him. It took several minutes for him to look for the necessary information. She remained where she was. It seemed safer that way.
Finally he looked up, his excitement visibly dimmed. “No. But if we go back to my office, I can access the database to determine who the vehicle belongs to.”
She extracted the tape and helped him pile it along with the others into the large cardboard box he’d carried them in. Then they headed back to Nate’s office. The initial adrenaline from the discovery had subsided, leaving Risa with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. She needed sleep. And more than that, she needed distance. Spending long hours penned up with Nate McGuire was playing havoc with her normal good sense.
And good sense dictated never, ever getting personally involved while on a case.
While he accessed the information, she sat down, uncertain how much longer she could remain upright.
Finally Nate looked up from the computer screen, his expression pensive. “The state of Pennsylvania issued fifty-seven plates beginning with those three digits to owners of 2007 or 2008 Ford Five Hundreds. Half of them list Philadelphia or the immediate surrounding area as their address.”
There was more. Something in his voice alerted her. “And?”
“There was a local report of stolen plates with the same three digits made just last week. The owner is seventy-two and rarely uses her vehicle. Keeps it in the parking garage for the apartment complex she lives in. She hasn’t driven the car in over a month.”
They looked at each other in mutual understanding. “Which would have given the UNSUB ample opportunity to switch the stolen plates to Sherman Tull’s vehicle.”
The fire was licking up a stone wall, engulfing the figure chained to it. The body gilded by the flames was almost silent as it writhed in inhuman agony, only muffled sounds that had to be screams escaping it. The watcher stood over the scene, elevated as if levitating, cavorting nude in a joyous dance as the figure burned.
The watcher bent and spun, releasing something into the air. Once and then again. Each article spun in a speeding arc to land in opposite directions in the tall weeds. Then the watcher resumed his
dance, celebrating the death that was taking place below. A picture of triumph and sheer madness.
The moan that wakened her didn’t belong to the victim. It was her own.
Risa sat up, sweating and shaking, her heart racing in her chest like a runner’s after a record-setting sprint. It took long moments to regulate her breathing. To focus on the simple act of hauling oxygen in and out of deprived lungs.
It took far longer to calm her pulse.
She rubbed the perspiration from her face with a hand that that trembled as if with palsy. And made herself, through sheer force of will, consider the details revealed by the newest vision.
There was no rhyme or reason in the way the dreams played out. In one she might be a spectator, in yet another it would be as if she were in the victim’s place suffering their pain.
It was those dreams that took the worst toll on her.
After all of them, she was left to decipher what they meant. How the events unfolded. When they might have happened. Who was involved.
It was the “who” that made it especially difficult to return her breathing to normal.
Because the man engulfed in flames was Detective Mark Randolph.
Sneaky little needles of doubt pierced her then, detracting from her conclusions. The dreams were rarely specific. Her interpretation of them could be erroneous. That had been all too evident in Minneapolis.
Drawing her knees up, she enfolded them with her arms, rocked a little. She’d been to all three scenes. This one was different, she was certain of it. Outside, but not the park where Christiansen had been found. Not the woods that had been torched with Parker.
Was the dream a depiction of the past or the future? If the past, it would have to be fairly recent. They’d just spoken to the man a couple of days ago. She and Nate had been at the station house until after midnight. No call had come in.