“Are you going to give me the clue or not?”
“So eager.” He laughed. “Very well. Listen carefully. Your clue is”—he paused for dramatic effect—“Hush … hush, Thomas Wolsey.” He ended the call.
What? Another name? But this one sounded familiar for some reason. Something historical maybe.
As soon as she laid aside her phone, she looked at Griff. “My clue is another name. And it’s one I should know.”
“What is it?”
“He said, ‘Hush, hush, Thomas Wolsey.’”
“Thomas Wolsey?”
“Yeah. Why should I know that name?”
“The Thomas Wolsey was a powerful English statesman during the time of Henry VIII,” Griffin said. “He was also a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.”
“Oh, well, knowing that should make it easy for us to put our clues together and figure out who his next victim will be and where she lives.” Nic groaned, knowing that once again the killer’s clues would have to be deciphered.
“He’s playing with us, giving us clues that even if we figure them out will only indirectly lead us to the victim. And he knows that by the time we make a really good guess and act on it, even if we turn out to be right, the way we were with Amber Kirby, it’ll be too late to save her.”
“But we can’t not try,” Nic told him. “We have to give it our best shot.”
“Yeah, and he knows that.”
Chapter 11
While Griff had phoned Sanders to give him the latest clues from the Scalper so that their team could get to work on deciphering them, Nic had called Doug Trotter to fill him in.
“Looks like I just might get my wish,” she’d said after hanging up. “As early as midweek, I may be heading up an official investigation into the murders.”
Griff knew that was what she had desperately wanted, and he had no doubt that she could handle the job. She was a smart woman. And as determined as a dog with a bone. But he was concerned about her. She was already borderline obsessed with finding the killer. He’d never thought he would ever care one way or the other about Special Agent Nicole Baxter.
The woman had been a pain in his backside for years, all through the BQK investigation. From the moment they met, she had disliked him and done everything possible, short of spitting in his eye, to make sure he knew it. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that the lady had a massive chip on her shoulder about men in general and him in particular. While her former boss, Curtis Jackson, had been in charge, she’d been forced to downplay her animosity. Griff had liked Curtis, an old-fashioned man’s man. But once he retired and Nic was put in charge of the BQK cases, things had gone downhill in no time. The cordial relationship Griff had cultivated with Curtis hadn’t extended to Nic, who had let him know immediately that his involvement in the BQK investigation was unwanted and bordered on illegal.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Nic said.
“Hmm … Just thinking,” Griff replied as he lifted his arms and stretched.
“Come up with anything?”
“No.” He checked his wristwatch. “It’s after one. We’ve been batting ideas around for the past few hours. Maybe we should call it a night and start fresh in the morning.”
“Sure, if that’s what you want. You can head out for your hotel anytime you’d like.” Nic got up off the sofa, rubbed the back of her neck with both hands and moaned. “I think I’ll put on a pot of coffee and—”
Griff reached out, grasped her arms, and lowered them. She shivered at his unexpected touch. He took her hands in his. She glared at him.
Always on the defensive, even when she didn’t need to be.
“What?” she demanded, then jerked her hands free.
“You’re dead on your feet and should get some sleep. The last thing you need is coffee. Why don’t you sit down, relax, and we’ll go over everything again?”
“I thought you were leaving.”
“I’ll leave when you go to bed.”
“Then you may be here until breakfast.” She sat back down, crossed her arms over her chest, and gave him a so-there look.
Griff picked up the notepad where he’d been doodling while they had discussed the case after her call to Doug Trotter. “Okay, let’s go over what we think we know. We’ve decided that ‘fit as a fiddle’ might mean the victim is into physical fitness professionally. She could be a gym teacher, an aerobics instructor, a physical fitness instructor, someone who makes her living helping others get in shape.”
“And that would be how many hundreds of thousands of women nationwide? Even if we could narrow it down to a state, even a city, what are the odds we can get to her before he does?”
Nic lifted her bare feet off the floor, turned sideways, and bent her knees to create a slanted table with her thighs. She picked up her laptop. “I’m going to try the words again.”
“You’ve done that three times already,” he told her. “You’ve got all the info we need. It’s just a matter of figuring out what makes sense and what doesn’t.”
“Four words,” she said. “Well, actually only three, with the first two repeated. ‘Hush, hush, Thomas Wolsey.’”
“We’ve agreed that the most logical assumption is that Thomas Wolsey was a cardinal.”
“Yeah. Ball teams came to mind first. St. Louis, Arizona, Louisville.”
“Was he telling us that his next victim will be from one of those areas? If so, we’ve agreed that since all the other victims have been taken from Southern states, Louisville would be our top pick from those three.”
“But what if it’s not a ball team?” Nic pecked on the keyboard but glanced at Griff. “There’s cardinal rule, cardinal number and, of course, there’s the cardinal bird.”
“Let’s not forget the small towns throughout the country that are called Cardinal.”
Nic groaned. “Damn! Why didn’t I think of this before?”
“What?” Griff sat down on the sofa beside her and turned her laptop sideways so he could see what she’d brought up on the screen.
“I should have typed in the words ‘hush, hush’ earlier. Do you see what I see?”
“I see that there are restaurants and clubs and—”
“There. That one.” Nic pointed directly to the title of a DVD.
“The movie title? Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the old Bette Davis film?”
“What if the ‘hush, hush’ part of the clue is Charlotte?” She typed furiously. “Of course, the first city that comes to mind is Charlotte, North Carolina, but that might be too easy.”
“At this point, I’m ready for easy,” Griff told her.
“Hmm … There’s a Charlottesville, Virginia, a Charlotte County, Florida, a Charlotte, Tennessee, and—”
“What’s the state bird of North Carolina?” Griff asked.
“Huh?”
“What’s the state bird? Want to bet me that it’s the cardinal?”
Nic kept typing and the info on the screen kept changing. “Holy shit! You’re right, the state bird of North Carolina is the cardinal.”
“ ‘Hush, hush, Thomas Wolsey’ translates to Charlotte, North Carolina.”
“His next victim is a professional in the fitness business and she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.” Nic shoved the laptop off her thighs and onto the coffee table, then she grabbed her cell phone. “I’m calling Doug. He needs to contact every law enforcement agency in Charlotte, including our field office there.”
“Every woman the Scalper has abducted came up missing between six and ten in the morning, five of them while they were on morning runs or walks. If he goes after her in the morning—”
“Do you think he’ll go after her so soon? Hasn’t he been putting some downtime between killing one woman and kidnapping another?”
“Check the data,” Griff said. “Unless I’m mistaken, the time between one body being discovered and another woman being abducted has varied between two and four days. He’s not consistent about that.
Probably because the distance between his home base and the victim’s location varies, as does his means of transporting them.”
“Are you trying to tell me that even knowing the city and the woman’s profession, more or less, there’s no way to get to her before he does?”
“He’s not giving us enough info to narrow it down to one woman. If he did, he’d be a fool and the Scalper is no fool. A psychopathic killer—yes. But a fool—no. He’s smart, but probably not as smart as he thinks he is.”
“If we could get out some kind of announcement to the women in the Charlotte area, those who are physically fit … God, would you listen to me? That was a brilliant idea, wasn’t it? Can you say panic in the streets?” Nic twisted her neck in a clockwise motion.
“Call Doug Trotter,” Griff told her. “I’ll wait until morning to contact Sanders. There’s not much the Powell Agency can do at this point.”
Nic nodded, hit the programmed number and waited. He could tell by her end of the conversation that she had awakened her boss from a sound sleep and he was none too happy about it. But once she had soothed his ill temper, she relayed the information calmly and precisely.
She flipped her phone closed, laid it on the coffee table, and rubbed her neck. “He’s making the necessary calls and he’ll get back to me later. He needs to check with the SAC in Charlotte before he okays my going there in any official capacity.”
“Sit back down.” Griff patted the sofa cushion beside him.
She eyed the cushion, then frowned; but she sat down.
Griff clutched her shoulders, turned her around so that her back was to him, and then he massaged her neck, using his thumbs to administer deep pressure. Nic yelped, then moaned.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but you’re so tight that the knots in your muscles have knots.” He continued massaging, alternating between soothing and pain-inducing pressure.
“Ooh … That feels so good.”
Suddenly, as if just realizing that she was intimately close to a man she didn’t like and didn’t trust, Nic pulled away and turned around so that her back was against the sofa.
“Thanks,” she told him. “You’re pretty good at that.”
Smiling, Griff wiggled his fingers. “I’ve been told I have the magic touch.”
Nic snorted. “I’ll bet.”
“Practice makes perfect. Just think, if I hadn’t tried my skills on a host of other ladies and learned what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been able to make you feel so good.”
“I don’t know if you’re joking or if you’re serious.”
“A little of both.”
“You know that I’ve spent quite a few years adamantly detesting you, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“I disapprove of you on so many levels. As a private detective, you’ve stuck your nose into criminal cases without any legal right to do it. And you’ve delighted in showing me—the bureau—up whenever possible. And don’t even get me started on what I find reprehensible about your private life.”
“Hey, I draw the line there.” Here we go again, Griff thought. She’s off on another tangent, citing all the reasons she shouldn’t like me. “You have every right to complain about our business differences, but you don’t know the first thing about my personal life, except what you read in the newspapers.”
“Believe me, that’s enough. Actually, it’s more than I really want to know.”
“How would you like it if people judged your personal life without any firsthand knowledge of the subject?” Griff asked. “What if I judged you on hearsay, on rumors, on—?”
“Are you saying that you’re not a filthy rich, bed-hopping playboy who thinks of himself as a cross between James Bond and—?”
“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and I must admit that I prefer being rich. Who wouldn’t? Agreed?”
“I suppose so.”
“As for the bed-hopping.” He shook his head. “I’m a single man with a normal libido. I enjoy sex and I like to indulge frequently. But I don’t go through women as if they were throwaway tissues and I don’t make promises that I don’t keep.”
“So, you don’t break any hearts along the way?”
“Not intentionally.”
“You want me to think that I’ve been misjudging you all these years, don’t you?”
Did he? Was what Nic thought of him really important? Apparently it was or he wouldn’t be defending himself. As a general rule, he didn’t explain himself to anyone. One of the perks of being Griffin Powell.
“Just to show you what a good guy I really am, what do you say I call Jonathan and have him get the jet ready to fly to Charlotte as soon as you can pack a bag?”
He could tell by the light in her eyes that she loved the idea, but she said, “I’m not authorized to go to Charlotte. I need to wait until I hear from Doug and—”
“Did I say anything about your going to Charlotte in any official capacity? We can fly down, get there in time for breakfast, and by then my guess is Doug will have okayed it with the SAC in Charlotte for you to take part in the investigation.”
“Oh, Mr. Powell, you do know how to tempt a girl, don’t you?”
He grinned. “So, what do you say?”
She jumped up. “I say give me fifteen minutes.”
“Take your time, honey.”
As she hurried out of the living room, she paused, looked back over her shoulder, and said, “You realize, don’t you, that I’m actually doing you a favor by allowing you to accompany me to Charlotte?”
She winked at him, then rushed off down the hall.
Griff chuckled. There was much more to Nic Baxter than met the eye; and he was beginning to realize just how much he would like to peel back the outer layers, one by one, and get to know the real lady buried deep inside.
Dru started to hit the snooze button on her alarm one more time, but when she glanced at the lighted digital clock, she gasped. It was five forty. That gave her twenty minutes to get up, shower, dress, grab a protein bar in the kitchen, and make the fifteen-minute drive to Great Bods. There was no way she could accomplish the impossible and arrive on time.
She opened Great Bods every weekday morning at six o’clock and her mom was responsible for the weekend mornings. Mondays were always the most difficult for Dru because she stayed up too late on Sunday nights and felt horribly sleep-deprived the next day. She had found that going in early on Mondays so that she could work out before any of the customers starting showing up helped energize her. That certainly wasn’t an option today.
Careful not to disturb Brian, she eased back the covers and slipped out of bed, then tiptoed to the bathroom. Good thing she was a creature of habit. Last night, as she did every night before a workday, she had laid out her shorts, tank top, clean bra, and bikini panties, as well as her socks and athletic shoes. With no time for a shower, she took a quick sponge bath and put on her working clothes, then ran a comb through her hair, pulled it into a ponytail and rinsed her mouth out with mint-flavored mouthwash.
Usually she took time to peek in on Brianna before going downstairs, but she had to forgo that pleasure this morning. If she drove like a bat out of hell, she should just make it there in time to unlock the doors by six. Most people didn’t start showing up until between six fifteen and six forty-five, but occasionally someone would show up early.
Please don’t let this be one of those mornings.
She didn’t bother grabbing a protein bar. She kept a few in her desk at work, so after she opened Great Bods, put on a pot of coffee in the lounge, and ran a couple of miles on one of the treadmills, she’d grab a quick bite. She wasn’t one of those crazy women who skipped meals or used laxatives or made herself throw up to stay slim. She ate three healthy meals a day, stayed away from processed foods like white sugar and white flour and limited her red meat intake. Managing a fitness center was a real plus, as was having inherited her mother’s sleek figure and great metabolism. Of course, she did have o
ne sinful weakness. Coffee. She could do without candy and cookies, without potato chips and nachos, but she’d rather die than live without coffee.
Dru went through the kitchen and out into the garage. Her black Mustang had been a present from Brian this year on her thirtieth birthday. She slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and backed out into the driveway.
Mondays seemed like the longest day of the week. Maybe that was because she put in twelve hours on Mondays, from six to six. Although Great Bods stayed open until nine, she had arranged for her assistant manager, Kim Worsham, to come in at one and stay until closing. Nothing was more important to Dru than being home to have dinner with Brian and Brianna every evening. She and Brian took turns giving their daughter her nightly bath and reading her a bedtime story. She loved that she and her husband shared all the parenting and household duties.
Dru made it five blocks without getting caught by a red light, but the one up ahead was already on caution. She pressed her foot on the accelerator and raced through the light that changed from yellow to red just as her Mustang zoomed beneath it. If her luck held out, there wouldn’t be any police officers on the prowl looking for speeders.
At precisely five after six, she pulled into her designated parking slot, came to a screeching halt, shut off the engine, and got out. Taking a deep breath, she marched toward the back door. She’d been in such a hurry that she hadn’t noticed the other car in the back lot or the man standing by the door under the burgundy canopy. She paused a few feet away and looked him over. Customers used the front door, so she didn’t think he was a customer. At least, she didn’t recognize him. He was of average height and had a stocky build, with a mop of curly black hair. He wore loose-fitting tan slacks and a light blue cotton pullover shirt.
He wasn’t a customer and he certainly wasn’t a delivery person. So who was he and what did he want?
A tingle of unease vibrated through Dru, nothing major or sinister, just an inkling that something wasn’t quite as it should be.
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