Together Again (Never Too Late Book 5)

by Aiden Bates

  "I'll see you tomorrow," he muttered, and fled to his car.

  He knew that he should get this feeling out of his system. He should go to a bar or a club, find some attractive guy and stay up all night screwing each other's brains out. As he directed his car back in toward Jamaica Plain, though, he knew that he wasn't going to do that. He was going to head home and lock himself into his apartment. He was going to take a long, cold shower. And then he was going to bed, alone, where he was not going to think for even a moment about what had just happened.

  He made a good effort. He got home. He locked himself into the apartment. His shower started out cold, but he found himself increasing the heat once his teeth chattered without chasing away his longing.

  Why had he pushed Elias away? Okay, Elias had only kissed him to keep him from running off. Would it have been the end of the world to let that go on a little longer? He knew the truth. He wouldn't let himself get in too far, but he could always pretend for a little while, right? He wouldn't be an interchangeable part for a little while. He'd be part of someone's life.

  Sure, it would come to an end as soon as the case was over. That would still be longer than he'd been with anyone since he and Elias had split up. He could make someone feel good, in his heart, instead of just giving him a few orgasms and moving on. He could pretend that he had something to offer someone again.

  Except that would all be a lie, just like it had been the first time. Elias didn't want him. Elias had only kissed him to make him stay and "clear the air," not that anything felt any clearer. He'd kissed Pat because the best way to control an alpha was through sex, not through constructive dialogue or reason. He'd kissed Pat to shock him, not out of affection or love or even lust.

  Maybe he could have shown him, though. Maybe Pat could have shown Elias that Pat was more than just some alpha who could give him babies. Maybe Pat could have convinced Elias that they could rebuild some kind of life together.

  Maybe the Charles could produce edible fish. Maybe the Revolution could fill Gillette Stadium. Maybe Pat's mom would change her mind and call him.

  Elias didn't want any of that. He hadn't wanted it back then, and he didn't want it now. Pat wasn't a long-term partner. He wasn't a mate. He was a one-night stand. No self-induced illusion could change the truth, and he knew that there would only be pain to come if he let himself forget.

  He got out of the shower, all traces of desire gone from his body, and dried himself off. Once he was done with that, he tossed the towel toward the laundry and hopped into bed. He flipped the television on for background noise, so it could drown out the little part of his brain that tried to convince him that he was wrong about Elias and what they could have been, and focused on the case.

  He still thought that they needed to focus on Western Mass, just because the sheer amount of agricultural land out there told him that was the right track to follow. There were some similarly desolate places up on the North Shore, but they were all too close to popular tourist areas to offer the kind of privacy that their suspect would want. Unfortunately, Devlin and the people who operated the helicopters wanted more proof than: "Look, it has to be there, because reasons." Bastards.

  He grabbed his phone and sent a quick message to Oliver, cc'ing Ryan and Elias, asking for any trace evidence from Scott Gilbert's shroud. Then he headed back into his living room to grab his briefcase.

  The great thing about living alone was that he could review case files in bed and no one could complain at him. Ryan and Robles had agreed not to look at cases in the bedroom, due to potential arguments. Morris had told Pat that his mate, Pete, flat out forbade police work in the bed. "You bring that into bed, I bring my work," he promised, and Morris hadn't been all that keen to involve cameras. Langer and his mate, Doug, couldn't even do work in the same room in case of a conflict of interest. And Nenci and Oliver agreed not to bring work home with them, simply because they worked in the same place and didn't want to let work eat their lives.

  Pat was free. He could do what he wanted. He didn't even have to put on pants. He spread the case file out over the bedspread and read it over again, trying to figure out what he was missing. The living kids wouldn't be in school, so there wouldn't be some sudden outbreak of diphtheria cases to spark interest. There might be petty thefts, though. He snapped his fingers and fired off messages to police in a few target towns from his earlier explorations.

  The kidnapper would probably be farming, and that might not arouse any attention. A skilled and careful survivalist could grow their own crops without reference to the local authorities. Keeping the children clothed, however, would be more difficult. Even making their own clothes would be a challenge, unless the kidnapper kept a large enough flock, and possessed enough skill to spin and weave their own cloth. Both of those things would eat into their farming time.

  He asked his contacts out there about thefts of common supplies—farming and gardening tools, clothing, fabric, shoes. Then he sat back and looked at maps of the areas under consideration. Which of them would be best for the kind of farming he was thinking of? He wanted territory that wasn't too badly polluted from prior use to grow useful crops. They'd need a water supply. They'd need to be relatively remote, but if the kidnapper was bringing kids in and corpses out they'd need a road relatively nearby.

  He found a few areas that he thought could work, and then he grinned. Okay, so he still hadn't solved the Elias problem. He hadn't solved the case, either. He had untangled a target area, though. He could feel better about himself and his position. He'd done something, he'd contributed. There was a reason he was there.

  He closed up the file and focused his attention on the television. Awesome. He'd hit on a documentary about the eruption at Thera. He'd always wanted to go to Santorini to study that one. Oh well. In another life, maybe. He drifted off to sleep, listening to the narrator talk about the long-term effects of the ash cloud on the planet.

  Chapter Five

  Elias wasn't sure what to expect from the day after his confrontation with Pat. He wasn't sure what he wanted, either. His own heart had broken all over again when he'd heard Pat refer to himself as an interchangeable part, and Pat's insistence that he had realized that love was a fairy tale when he and Elias had broken up had just about done Elias in.

  He'd done that. He hadn't meant to. He had been done with their relationship, been done with trying to help a guy who wouldn't accept it, but he hadn't meant to break Pat's heart and spirit. He'd known that Pat had no one else, that he had a hard time trusting, but he hadn't expected to destroy Pat's faith.

  Then again, it wasn't fair to put it all on Elias. Pat should have talked to him before the end. Maybe they could have resolved things before Elias had given up. Instead, it had all ended in disaster.

  Until Elias smashed his lips onto Pat's. It had been just like coming home. He'd missed Pat. In that moment, he'd wanted Pat to take him home and make him his. He didn't care about class issues. He didn't care about the past. They would make it work.

  And then Elias had screwed everything up. He hadn't kissed Pat because he wanted to express his love, it was true, but what he hadn't told Pat was that he'd wanted nothing more than him by the time that their lips had sealed together. Great job, Elias.

  He'd been heartened, at least a little bit, when he'd gotten Pat's emails looking for forensic details and information from local law enforcement. Maybe Elias' pep talk had accomplished something. Maybe he'd have done that anyway. Either way, Pat wasn't just sitting off by himself somewhere, pouting or whatever he did when he was upset.

  Elias still couldn't help the trepidation that followed him into the team room the next morning. He forced himself to sit in his usual spot and wait.

  Ryan joined him a few minutes later, greeting him with a pleasant smile. Pat showed up maybe ten minutes later, carrying his briefcase and holding his head up. Ryan looked at him with narrowed eyes. "Can I help you?"

  Elias swallowed. He'd hoped that this wouldn't be qu
ite so confrontational.

  Pat sat down in a seat further down the table, where his scent would be less overwhelming. That was kind of him, Elias reflected, as Pat smirked. "You can start by telling me your progress, since you seem to have left me out of the loop, Sergeant."

  Ryan clenched his jaw. "I don't think it's necessarily in the team's best interests for you to work in this office, Tessaro. You don't need to be read into every activity, and that's okay."

  "Actually, it's not, and if I could get that statement in writing I'd be happy to walk it down to HR, Sarge." Pat stretched out and put his hands behind his head. "Seems to me that you're either retaliating for the way you were treated when you were stuck working with Cold Case, or else you have an axe to grind with me personally. If it's the latter, take it up with Devlin and have me actually pulled off the case. If it's the former, well now not only is it illegal, but it's kind of grossly misplaced since I stuck up for you.

  "But until you successfully have me pulled off of this case, Tran, you're going to have to accept the fact that I am working on this case, as a full partner, and you're going to have to treat me equally to the outside consultant working on the case. Now. Are you going to share what you've been working on, so we don't embarrass the entire State Police by duplicating one another's work, or are we going to make a joke out of dead kids and an outbreak of a serious infectious disease?"

  Ryan pursed his lips together. "Look, Tessaro, it's nothing against you—"

  "Then you'll have no problem treating me like an equal." Pat gave him a thin, deadly, and entirely too sexy smile.

  "Damn it, Tessaro, I'm trying to keep the peace here!" Ryan pounded his fist on the table.

  "Leave the peace between the people involved. There are actual children involved, and a disease with the potential for a lot of fatalities, so how about if we get to work on solving that?" Pat never raised his voice, but his tone took on an underlying growl that left Elias squirming, just a little bit. He wanted, in ways he hadn't since the miscarriage. "I'd like to think that those kids are a higher priority for you than anything else. Or am I wrong?"

  Elias had seen Ryan stand up to any number of alphas that came into their office, most often Nenci. Now Ryan looked away and ducked his head, just a little. "For the kids," he muttered. "But don't think that Devlin won't hear about this."

  "Believe me, he will." Pat's smile turned close-mouthed. "Now. Where do you stand, and what've you come up with?"

  Elias cleared his throat and tried not to think about dragging Pat off to a supply closet somewhere. "Well, I saw your notes and your requests for information. Those are good. One thing we've been doing is looking at the kids who fit the pattern, and who've been taken and returned in the same way. We're trying to find patterns, other than something that the kidnapper is attributing to abuse."

  Ryan cleared his throat. "In some cases, her beliefs are accurate, although not always in ways that she understands. The girl who drowned had been abused—but not by the mother from whom she'd been taken. There's another case where the child was put into a foster home based on false accusations, and wound up being harmed by the foster mother. Two cases were cases that had already been reported to us, but that hadn't involved removing the child from the home yet."

  Pat nodded slowly. "And how many cases are we talking now?"

  Elias blew out a long, slow breath. He toyed with one of the curls of his hair as he looked down. "Counting the ones who've been returned? Twenty-six." He didn't know why he should be ashamed or embarrassed. It wasn't his fault. He hadn't been behind the kidnappings, and he hadn't been behind whatever failures had allowed the cases to go unnoticed.

  Ryan bit his lip. "There's nothing to connect the victims, though, other than the possibility that this… disturbed person could have perceived a case of abuse. They come from all over the state. They're from rich backgrounds, poor backgrounds, everything in between. They're white, brown, black, whatever." He paled. "One is actually a second cousin of mine, apparently. Who knew?" His mouth twisted bitterly, and Elias grabbed his hand.

  "We'll bring them back, Ryan." Pat's voice softened. "We will."

  Ryan looked down and nodded, squeezing Elias' hand. "Anyway," he said, once he'd gotten himself together again, "We've been trying to find the pattern, but we haven't been able to pick up on it."

  Pat stroked his chin for a moment, eyes far away. "Maybe there isn't one."

  Elias frowned. "What do you mean?"

  "We're dealing with a savior, remember?" Pat managed a little smile. "She seems to think that she's saving these kids from abuse. She may be at these venues for other purposes and fixate on a child in her age range—unplanned. Then she sees something that, to her, justifies the crime. Once she does, she commits the crime. It's not premeditated. Maybe if we look and see the venues where the crimes took place, we'll see more of a pattern that way."

  Elias chuckled and cast his eyes toward Pat. "I thought I was the one who double-majored in psych."

  "And who proofread all of your papers?" Pat raised an eyebrow. His skin paled, but he didn't otherwise react to that reminder of the past. Elias had to count it as progress. "You think I didn't learn from them?" He huffed out a little laugh.

  Elias took a chance and stuck out his tongue at Pat. Then he bit down on the inside of his cheek. "So, if that's the kind of suspect we're dealing with, we should probably use the same methodology we'd use for certain kinds of predators. We look in a radius away from their lair. It's not perfect, because the victims come from all over the state, but we know that this woman isn't going to be taking victims from her hometown."

  Ryan nodded. "She wouldn't be stealing in her hometown. It's too risky. She might get the older kids involved with the thefts, though, as a way of pitching in." He ran his hand over his face. "We might have a record of this woman, some place in her history, too."

  "Could be." Pat chewed on the end of his pen for a minute. "If she does," he said, very carefully, "it wouldn't be one of the success stories. It would be a case with a bunch of problems."

  Elias jumped in, drumming his fingertips on the tabletop. "Exactly," he said. "She's grabbing these kids because she thinks she's the only one who can save them. That doesn't speak to a lot of faith in the social services system."

  Ryan made a face. "You know, every time we get a case like this, it's exponentially harder to save kids the right way. I was a foster kid. It wasn't what you see on TV." His shoulders slumped. "That doesn't mean that the worst doesn't sometimes happen. That does give me some places to look, though. I'll look for girls with either negative experiences, or girls who were returned to their families who shouldn't have been, before our timeframe starts."

  "Good distinction." Elias shook his head. "Can't pretend that doesn't happen either. In the meantime, I'll start calling around to different jurisdictions and see what we can't do about making a map. If I'm right, we'll see a nice little circle of dull right around our suspect's area."

  "You want to split that up? We can make it go a lot faster that way." Pat looked directly at Elias.

  "Sure. I'll take Barnstable, Berkshire, Bristol, Dukes, Essex, Franklin, and Hampden Counties. You take the other seven." Elias nodded. "We should be able to get that done before quitting time today, right?"

  Pat nodded. "You bet. Last one done has to buy tomorrow's coffee and doughnuts."

  "Oh, you're on." Elias grabbed his assigned landline phone and started dialing.

  Ryan watched them both with raised eyebrows for a long moment. Then he just shook his head and turned to his own task, muttering quietly to himself.

  Pat finished first. Elias had been half afraid that he would, but he'd also known better than to get involved with challenging an alpha's sense of competition. Of course, when Pat finished he took half of the towns that Elias still had to call and called them, much to Elias' gratitude. They were finished by quitting time, and Pat took off after bidding them both a good night.

  Ryan packed up his things, but
he turned to Elias before he left. "You want to tell me what all of that was about, or nah?"

  "All of what?" Elias kept his face straight, but he blushed.

  "You two had some kind of 'talk' last night, and then he comes in here, and, all of a sudden, he's not willing to take a back seat anymore." Ryan crossed his arms over his chest. "You know, it's easy to forget that Tessaro's an alpha. I mean he's got an alpha scent, but he doesn't act like one. At least he doesn't act like one most of the time. This morning, though, and that one time when we met with the Gilberts—I mean there was no getting away from it. He wasn't just an alpha, he was The Alpha. There was no getting away from it."

  "Right?" Elias sighed. "He doesn't like it. Never did, honestly."

  Ryan looked at him for a long time. "You miss him."