The shadowy figure moved, disappearing into the swirling snow. A moment later, an engine rumbled, then slowly faded away. He barely heard it as the car eased closer, sliding across the snow-slicked ice. Adding weight, so much weight.
Crack.
How deep is the water? How thick could the ice be?
Will we freeze or will we drown?
“Jase?”
“Ryan, I’m sorry I got you into this,” he sobbed.
Ryan’s head moved, until his frozen hair touched Jason’s face. “S’okay. Sidekick’s always got the hero’s back.”
“Sorry!” Jason cried, trying not to move yet desperate to break away. But before he could do a thing, even say good-bye to his best friend, another crack came and the ice gave way beneath them. Freezing liquid rushed over his feet and ankles, bringing them back to life to experience the agony.
They plunged down until blackness covered their heads and ice seared his lungs. And as the water turned the world above him into an icy grave, Jason could think only of his parents.
God, how he wished he’d gone with them to Florida.
Wyatt Blackstone, the enigmatic leader of the Black CATs has been on the trail of an elusive killer who is targeting pedophiles, leaving behind a single lily as his calling card. Unsure if the case could possibly have anything to do with his own former agent, Lily Fletcher, he knows he’ll do just about anything to find out…and to stop the killer before he strikes again.
Chapter 1
AS FAR AS MURDER VICTIMS WENT, Dr. Todd Fuller didn’t, on the surface, seem a likely candidate to be sliced to ribbons in a no-tell motel in the middle of nowhere. A respected dentist from Scranton, he had a wife, a pricey house, a nice car, a thriving practice, no criminal record. A charmed life, in fact.
There was nothing charming about him now.
Wyatt surveyed the scene from the doorway, wondering why he still had any capacity to be surprised by what man was capable of doing to his fellow man. After everything he had witnessed throughout his life, including some of his very earliest memories, he should be able to muster no dismay that such things were possible.
Yet he found himself having to close his eyes, take a moment to prepare, before entering the room. Because scenes like this one were usually reserved for twisted movies that delivered terror to the masses. Not the real world.
Steady now, calm and emotionless, he stepped inside. His shoes covered with plastic, he skirted the wall with a nod to the crime scene investigators in acknowledgment of their work area. He didn’t bend to examine any evidence, didn’t focus on anything except the overall feeling that lingered in the room long after the crime had been committed.
He could only imagine the rage that had inspired it. In his years with the FBI, he had seen multiple homicides with less blood, inner-city gang-war battlefields without as much gore.
Todd Fuller had suffered greatly in his final hours.
Some murders were passionate and some impersonal. He had met killers who claimed to have merely lashed out in a moment they regretted one second too late and others who truly believed they had simply taken care of something that needed to be done. A few were remorseful, some soulless and happy with what they had achieved. Others calculated their crimes, meticulously planned them, with death the goal and the act of killing merely the means to achieving it.
This had been like all of those, and yet, like none of them.
Wielding a knife on a helpless victim, feeling the gush of warm blood spill from his veins, could never be an impersonal act. Yet the planning involved, and the time it had taken, would have required a level of removal, a dispassion. This killer hadn’t lashed out; he had reined in. Inhaled his rage and his emotion. Controlled himself completely while also savoring every minute of it.
In this room, the killer had calmly and patiently accomplished the objective—a man’s death—in the most vicious way possible.
Wyatt knew all that. Because it wasn’t the first time he’d seen this unsub’s handiwork.
Like the two that had preceded it, this murder had been carefully orchestrated by someone whose goal was not just death. Something deeper was at work here.
Pleasure? Insanity?
Revenge? Are you wreaking vengeance on all of them because you can’t get to the one you want?
He thrust that thought away, not wanting to let any preconceptions color what he was about to learn regarding the murder of the dentist.
“You Blackstone?” a voice asked.
Nodding, he watched as a plainclothes officer stepped into the doorway. “Detective Schaefer?”
“Yeah. You made good time. Didn’t think you’d show up until midmorning.”
Considering how little he slept these days, it had been no great feat to leave his Alexandria home within thirty minutes of the detective’s four a.m. phone call. And the desire to arrive before the body could be removed had prompted him to drive a little faster than normal. He’d pulled up outside the western Maryland hotel just as the automatic streetlights had clicked off, hazy, gray morning chasing away the last remnants of dark night.
Wyatt extended his hand to the detective. “Thank you for contacting me about the case.”
Schaefer, a middle-aged man with a strong grip and intelligent eyes that belied the crumpled suit and rumpled hair, nodded as they shook hands. “Not a problem.”
“Have you learned anything more?”
The detective shook his head. “Just the basics I told you about on the phone. Guy went missing two evenings ago. Pennsylvania police were investigating. A local cruiser spotted his car in the parking lot late last night and ran the tag. When he noticed the smell coming from inside, he got the manager up and they found the vic like …” He waved a hand. “Well, like you see.”
Steeling himself against the smell of death, Wyatt stepped farther inside and scanned the room. “What do you know about him?”
“Not a lot. Missing persons report gave us the basics, but I’m sure we’ll learn more about him as the day goes on.” He shook his head and snapped his chewing gum. “One thing I do know, his funeral ain’t gonna have an open casket.”
“Indeed.”
Wyatt already knew more about the victim than this detective did, including the fact that Fuller’s wife was a thin, slight blonde with a pixie haircut, freckles, and a childlike figure. He had a picture of her on his BlackBerry, as well as one of the pre-sliced-up dentist.
Handsome couple, although they’d looked more like father and daughter than man and wife. Which came as no great surprise.
As soon as he’d heard about the murder, he’d contacted the one person he could trust with this particular situation, IT Specialist Brandon Cole, and asked him to find out everything he could on the victim. The always-energetic young man had not wasted a second, working from home in the predawn hours. And he’d called him back forty minutes later, following up with an e-mail detailing what he’d found.
Brandon knew the stakes here. He knew what Wyatt was thinking about this case, about who could be killing these men and why. He didn’t believe it. But he knew.
Actually, Wyatt didn’t truly believe it, either. And yet here he was.
You know you have to consider the possibility.
Was it possible? Of course. Anything was.
But probable that someone he knew, someone he liked, someone he’d protected, could be responsible for this? It seemed beyond belief. The evidence, however, could not be ignored.
“Sounded like you weren’t too surprised by what we found here,” said Schaefer.
Again surveying the room, the massacred victim, the dried blood, the lingering aura of violence, he shook his head. “No. Not surprised.”
Then his gaze focused on one spot. On the item that had most drawn his attention when he’d learned of this particular murder. “A tiger lily,” he murmured.
“That what it is?” Schaefer followed his stare. “I don’t know shit about flowers.”
“I’m fairly
certain.” Wyatt’s even tone betrayed none of the intensity coursing through him all because of that one vivid tropical flower.
“Well, like I said on the phone, I saw the bulletin last week about brutal murders of men in small, out-of-the-way hotels. The flower thing sounded nutty. But once I saw this one, I figured this was exactly the kind of case you were watching for.”
“It is. And I appreciate getting the call so quickly.”
Drawn to that single blossom, Wyatt stepped to the bedside table, still cautious to avoid the remains and evidence markers littering the floor. Fortunately, the particular type of flower had no scent, unlike the one at the Virginia crime scene. Last time, it had been an Easter lily, the scent of which always made him think of funeral homes, caskets, and grief. The room had already reeked of death, just as this one did. The flower had just made it worse.
This one, though, did not. It was beautiful, its pale orange petals, though brownish and wilted around the edges, still curled closely together. It had obviously been cut just as it began to open and blossom, before it reached its full potential.
The roar of the tiger cut off with a sharp snick of the blade. A symbol for what had gone on in this room? For why it had gone on?
There was much to learn about Todd Fuller. Wyatt wanted to know if there were any hush-hush rumors about him swirling in his community. Rumors that persisted despite his upstanding reputation as a good dentist, a family man, a generous contributor to children’s charities. He wanted to understand the man’s relationship with his little-girlish wife. And he most wanted to know exactly what he had been doing here, so far from home, in this dingy hotel.
If this case proved to be like the last two, he suspected the answer to all those questions would be found in the man’s computer hard drive. His browsing history would show visits to secret, twisted Web sites that appealed to a certain type of sadistic individual. His e-mail file would contain communications between murder victim and killer. And they would invariably involve a child.
Yes, if Fuller was like the others, he had come to this hotel thinking he was meeting a father with a young son or daughter he was willing to exploit.
“So what’s the deal? Some florist get mad about the prices of roses around Valentine’s Day and tumble off his rocker?”
Wyatt forced a faint smile. “Not exactly,” he said, barely paying the detective any attention. He had questions for the man, but for now, his focus was on that lily. And on the single drop of blood that lay beside it, congealed and dark on the cheap Formica tabletop. Had it accidentally fallen from the killer’s gloved fingertip as he lovingly left the fragrant calling card?
More imagery. The soft flower resting beside the ultimate symbol of violence—spilled blood—in a blatantly symbolic display of innocence shattered.
Don’t miss PITCH BLACK and BLACK AT HEART available in ebookstores now!
And watch for BLACK-OUT coming in early 2014!
Have you read Leslie’s dark-and-edgy Veronica Sloan series?
In 2017, the United States suffered the worst terrorist attack in history. Now, five years later, the country is at peace and prosperous…but they’ve paid a heavy price, giving up freedom and privacy in the name of security.
Veronica—Ronnie—Sloan is a D.C. police detective. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s dangerous. She’s also part of an experimental program in which microscopic cameras are imprinted into the brains of willing test subjects. Now she needs to find out if the implant can do what it was designed to do: help catch a killer! And her very first case starts in the basement of the White House…where a woman’s dismembered corpse has just been located.
Read an excerpt from DON’T LOOK AWAY
Chapter One
“THIS IS GONNA TAKE FOREVER.”
Detective Veronica Sloan glared out the windshield of her car, mentally cursing the heat, and the crowd. Though traffic in the nation’s capital was always a bitch, the lines to get through the Pennsylvania Avenue checkpoints were longer than usual on this wickedly hot summer morning.
A queue of pedestrians wound from each of the heavily-guarded entrances, through Lafayette Park, all the way to H Street. Throngs of other people milled around them, selling cold drinks, packaged food or souvenirs. Some held protest signs, some formed prayer circles.
A bunch of them blocked the damn road.
On any day there would be discontent. On this particularly sweltering July one, tempers were flaring. Hers not the least of them.
In the time it had taken to crawl two blocks in the unmarked sedan, she’d seen one woman faint, two fights break out, and a group of children sprawl on the sidewalk in exhaustion. Flag-draped rednecks glared at Japanese tourists—the slanty-eyed foreigners just as unwelcome as the burqa-wearing ones in their minds. Everyone sweated and cursed and bitched and shouted.
But they didn’t leave. Morbid curiosity always ensured they wouldn’t leave once they’d made it this far.
She could have roared in on full emergency response, dispersing the crowd spilling into the street with her siren and her horn. She didn’t. Because if the people heard about the murder, they might get a little itchy. Might start stampeding, in fact. Washington was quick to panic these days. And she didn’t particularly want to add any boot-crushed grandmas from the Midwest to her already backbreaking caseload.
“Christ, I think there are as many people in line now as there were yesterday for the rededication.”
Ronnie glanced over at her partner, Mark Daniels, who looked as impatient as she felt. The cynic in her couldn’t help saying, “Yeah, but this is nothing compared to the crowds who lined up to gawk at the rubble that first year.”
No, it definitely wasn’t. As soon as the military had begun to allow visitors to view the destruction wrought in October of 2017, D.C. had become the hottest tourist destination in the world. People had clamored for the chance to say they had seen the site of the worst terrorist attack in history.
Goddamn ghouls.
“I guess you’re right.” He leaned back in the seat, crossing his arms over his brawny chest and closing his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”
She laughed softly. “Who was she?”
Her partner didn’t bother looking up. “A stripper from the Shake And Bake. I always thought it would be fun to be the pole for a walking pair of jugs, but I think I’m gettin’ too old for that stuff.”
He wasn’t even forty. Nowhere near old, in brain or brawn, though his weary tone hinted at his recent late nights. Daniels had been edgy lately, pushing limits, taking risks. She couldn’t say why. Nor could she say she wasn’t worried about him.
“Hard living. You’d better slow down.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Hey, my ass isn’t hanging off a bar stool seven nights a week. And the only poles I see are the ones holding up the lights in the park where I run.”
Mark’s lips twitched a little, though his position never changed. “I keep telling you Ron, a body’s only got so much runnin’ in it. You better save it for our visits to the East Side. One of these days when you’re chasing some banger, you’re gonna run out of run.”
Ahh, Daniels wisdom. What would she do without her daily dose of it?
Ronnie didn’t have time to wonder, because they’d finally reached the turn-off for heavily barricaded 17th Street. Ignoring the glares of the pedestrians who grudgingly got out of the way, she turned and drove past a picket line of armed soldiers dressed in urban fatigues.
This was the only vehicular route into or out of the north quadrant of the area once called the National Mall. An area that had, just yesterday, in a ceremony full of as much pomp and ceremony as could be accomplished behind a wall of bulletproof glass, been rededicated by the president as Patriot Square.
The place had another name on the street. Just as most New Yorkers still called the 9/11 site Ground Zero, most people around here called this The Trainyard.
“Stop the car,” a stern voice or
dered as she slowly cruised toward the iron-and-barbed-wire fence. The voice had come out of one of the dozen body-armor wearing troops fronting the gate, every one of whom had a weapon aimed directly at her face. Talk about a welcoming committee.
Eight years ago, when she’d been just a rookie cop and the U.S.—more than a decade after 9/11—had seemed relatively safe, a flashed badge would have gotten her past any roadblock. Times were different now. Much different. So without a word, she threw the car into park, killed the engine, and put her hands up.
“Let’s go,” she told her partner.
Daniels put his hands up, too, and opened his eyes. The bags under them spotlighted his weariness, not to mention his hangover. Ronnie was seriously going kick his butt later for showing up on the job in such a pathetic state, especially on a day like today, which was shaping up to be a really shitty one. Bad enough on any normal day when they were rounding up the latest gang-enforcer or Pure V dealer, Pure V being the hottest new street drug, a cheap variation of Vicodin. But it was much worse now, when they had to come to this side of town and undergo a thorough inspection.
After they had been given the nod by the sergeant in charge, they stepped out into the bright sunshine, and were each immediately approached by different security teams.
“Sloan, D.C. Police,” she said as soon as one of the men reached her, his weapon still trained on her head. Another soldier stood directly behind his left shoulder, and a third was holding the leash of a thick-chested, sharp-toothed K-9.
Never lowering his semi-automatic, the first soldier held out his other hand. She passed over her badge and photo I.D., then moved away from the car for a thorough search. Both of the vehicle, and of her.
He examined her badge. The gun came down. But he didn’t holster it.
His mouth barely moving, and his face expressionless, he asked, “Weapon?”
She nodded. “Glock. Rear holster.” Ronnie knew better than to reach back and offer it up herself, which was why she hadn’t made any proactive move toward it before exiting the car. Her head would have been a slushy pile of brain and bone on the sidewalk the second these hard-nosed troops had seen a weapon in her hand.
FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series Page 33