“Exactly like in a homicide,” Josh confirmed for King.
Dark brown eyes went from one to the other like marbles pushed to and fro by the wind. King still appeared dazed, but anger began to etch its way into his features.
“Who did it?” he asked. “Do you know who did it?” This time, it was a demand.
“Not yet, but that’s what we’re trying to figure out by piecing things together,” Bridget told him, doing her best to sound sympathetic even as she was still trying to make up her mind about King. “Do you know if Karen had any enemies, any old boyfriends who didn’t take kindly to being dumped by her?”
“We’ve been together for three years. There are no boyfriends,” King said vehemently. “And she didn’t have any enemies. Karen could be a pain in the butt sometimes, but then she’d turn around and be this sweet, amazingly thoughtful woman who made you feel glad just to be alive and around her. Everyone liked Karen,” he insisted. King suddenly looked stricken, as if what he’d been told was finally sinking in. His voice became audibly quieter as he asked, “She’s not coming home?”
Bridget shook her head as sympathy flooded through her. “I’m afraid not.”
His knees giving way, King sank down on the cream-colored sofa. He dragged his hands through his hair, distraught. “Last thing I said to her was I didn’t want her coming back,” he confessed brokenly.
“We can’t ever know that the last thing we say to someone is going to be the last thing we ever say to that person,” Josh told him. Maybe if people had the ability to have that sort of insight, they’d be a whole lot nicer to one another, he thought.
“Is there anyone you want us to call for you?” Bridget asked him.
King shook his head, struggling to pull himself together and save face. “No, I can call.” And then his voice broke again as he asked, “Did she suffer?”
“ME said it was quick,” Bridget was fast to assure him. “Can you tell us where Karen worked? We’d like to ask her coworkers some questions.”
He gave them the name and address of a firm that handled event planning for the rich and famous called The Times of Your Life. Thanking him, Bridget gave him one of her business cards and asked him to call if he could think of anything else.
“The ME hasn’t seen her yet, remember?” Josh said as they left the apartment and walked back to the car. “You said so yourself.”
“Yeah, I know,” she responded with a dismissive sigh. “But I didn’t see the point in burning the image of the killer carving out her heart while she was still alive into his head. Knowing the bloodthirsty media, King’ll find out about that soon enough.”
Josh looked at her just before he got into the vehicle. “So you believe him?”
She hedged for a moment, wanting to get his take on it first. “Don’t you?”
“Actually, yeah, I do. But you’re usually the overly suspicious one,” Josh reminded her. He found that unusual. In his experience, the softer sex tended to be more trusting. But then, he’d come to learn that there were a lot of amazing, unique things about his partner. She was a woman of substance. “You should have been the one named Thomas in your family, not your brother. As in Doubting Thomas.”
Bridget rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m familiar with that term, thank you,” she said briskly. “King looked genuinely broken up when I told him that his girlfriend was dead,” she explained as she got in on the passenger side.
Josh didn’t know how King had actually felt about the victim in the long run, but he could see why the man had been initially overwhelmed. “It’s always harder when the last words you’ve had with someone were angry or deliberately hurtful.”
“You sound like you speak from experience.”
“Me?” Her comment caught him off guard. “No,” he said with feeling. “That’s why I believe in amiable breakups.” He started up the car. “Always leaving ’em smiling is my motto.”
Leaving being the key word there. The man had trouble written all over him, she thought, not for the first time.
Bridget noted the wide grin on his face as he told her his “motto.” Knowing Youngblood, there was only one way to read that. She tried not to dwell on the image of him that raised in her mind. “That’s a little bit too much information, Youngblood.”
He laughed heartily. “Why, Detective, you have a dirty mind.”
“Three years partnered with you will do that to a person,” she assured him.
“Can’t plant a seed and have it grow where there is no dirt,” Josh countered glibly.
“Dirt being the operative word here,” Bridget said pointedly.
Josh glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was getting close to noon. “You want to pass through a drive-through and grab some lunch on the way to this events-planning place?” he asked.
Looking at the dashboard clock herself, Bridget sighed. It was now or who knew when? “What I’d like is to stop someplace and eat lunch slowly at a table like a normal person, but, since that’s impossible and in the interest of time, your way’s probably better.”
“My way’s always better,” Josh cracked. He gave Bridget a choice of several places that were close by and she picked one. Nodding amiably, he began to drive in that direction. “Why do you think he does it?” he asked as he merged into the left-hand lane. He needed to make a left turn at the next light.
When he plucked conversations out of the air like that, he managed to completely lose her. She could feel her temper growing short.
“Who?” she asked
“The Lady Killer,” Josh elaborated. “What do you think his driving force is? Why February? Is he making some kind of a macabre statement about Valentine’s Day, or does the guy just hate a really short month?” he ended wryly.
“You mean is he killing women to make some kind of a protest against commercialism?” she asked incredulously.
“I think if that were the case, he could have found a more subtle way to get his point across,” she told Josh. “My guess is that someone jilted him, and I mean royally, and unlike a lot of people, he couldn’t handle the embarrassment of it.” Her mind raced as she fleshed out her theory, trying to find the pieces that fit. “Maybe he’s this invisible guy and he got tired of no one really seeing him. This is his way of getting even with the woman.”
“And every woman who reminds him of her,” Josh speculated.
Bridget nodded, agreeing. But there was a slight problem with that theory. “But why just in February?” she asked Josh. “Why isn’t he killing women all year round, every time he sees someone who looks like the woman who broke his heart?”
Josh laughed shortly. The caseload would be absolutely impossible if that were the case. “Whose side are you on?”
“Ours,” she told him with feeling. “I’m just trying to get into the guy’s head and figure out what motivates him. That way, we can finally get him.” She couldn’t think of anything she wanted more for Valentine’s Day than to get this psycho off the streets of her city.
As he drove to their destination, Josh reviewed what she’d just said when she started using him as a sounding board. Something she’d just thrown out had stuck. “My guess would be that he’s doing it in February because that was when she rejected him, during all the hype and commercialism leading up to the ‘big day.’ Department stores, restaurants, greeting card companies, they’re making a big deal of Valentine’s Day these days. Subtly or blatantly they make a person feel like there’s something wrong with them if they don’t have someone special by their side on that day.”
He seemed to have a pretty good lock on all the hoopla surrounding the day, Bridget thought. That had her entertaining other questions about her partner. She told herself that she was only being curious about a friend, but even she knew that there was more to it than that. But exactly what she was not about to go into or explore. That would be asking for trouble.
“Speaking of which,” she began on a much lighter note, “who’s going to be by your side on
Valentine’s Day? Since your cell phone hasn’t rung in, oh, the last two hours, I’m assuming that you and—Linda, was it?—are now officially history.” That was the way he operated. Hot and heavy for a few days and then he’d start craving the sweet taste of freedom. She felt truly sorry for any woman who really fell in love with Josh. Luckily that wouldn’t be her.
“Don’t worry about who I’m going to be with,” he told her, flashing his thousand watt-smile. “And you know damn well her name was Linda.”
Was. I was right, Bridget thought with a quick flare of satisfaction.
“I’m not worried,” she informed him, “just curious. And as for my reaching for a name to your last current squeeze, there’ve been so many women in and out of your life these last three years that it’s hard for me to keep track of their names.”
He looked at her pointedly, “No one asked you to keep track.”
“You’re my partner,” she answered matter-of-factly. “If someone finds you strangled and naked in your bed bright and early one morning, I want to know who to go looking for.”
Stopping at a light, he took the opportunity to turn toward her and study her for a moment. “You think of me that way a lot?”
“What, strangled?”
He grinned. He knew that she knew he wasn’t referring to that. “No, naked and in bed.”
“No, but I do I think of you strangled a lot.” Changing the subject quickly before the color of her complexion changed and gave him something else to tease her about, Bridget nodded toward the drive-through he was approaching. Because it was still the early part of the lunch hour, there were five cars already queued up ahead of them.
“Why don’t we just go in and order?” she suggested. She didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in a line, idling. “It’ll probably be a lot faster and it’ll waste less gas.”
“Sensible,” he agreed. He’d never admit it to her, but it was one of the things he admired about his partner. She didn’t just go with the easy answers; she liked to think things through. “How is it that no one’s snapped you up yet, Bridget?” he teased.
“Just lucky I guess,” she countered dryly as he pulled into an empty parking spot. He put the car into “park” and then turned off the ignition.
“No sense in the two of us going in.” Josh opened the door on his side. “I’ll go,” he volunteered, then paused before getting out. “What do you want?”
“For the Lady Killer to come down with a quick, terminal disease and die before Valentine’s Day. But I’ll settle for a beef burrito and a diet cola,” she concluded philosophically.
“Amen to the first part,” Josh responded glibly. “I’ll be right back with lunch.” With that he got out and shut the door behind him.
Bridget tried to relax for a moment. She leaned the back of her head against the headrest, willing the tension out of her body.
Without realizing it, she watched her partner as he walked toward the restaurant’s entrance and mused—not for the first time—that Josh had a really cute butt for someone who could, at times, be a real pain in the exact same area.
One of life’s mysteries, she supposed.
* * *
Their long afternoon, spent talking to Karen’s coworkers at The Times of Your Life, turned out to be as fruitless as their morning had been before it. They returned to the squad room with nothing more to go on than they already had when they first left. The victim, everyone had sworn, was someone who no one would have wanted to hurt.
Until someone had.
Bridget sat back and stared at her handiwork. The bulletin board was filled with the photographs and names of all of the Lady Killer’s previous unfortunate victims. And now Karen Anderson had unwillingly joined their ranks.
What were they missing?
Ten red-haired young women in their twenties all stared back at her, their smiles frozen in time, all silently begging to be avenged and to have their killer stopped and brought to justice.
Who the hell is he and how can he possibly sleep at night? she asked herself.
In the next breath, she silently mocked herself for even asking the question. The Lady Killer undoubtedly slept just fine because he did not operate by the same set of rules that the rest of them did.
As normal people did.
Because he wasn’t normal.
That was the big thing she had to remember. The Lady Killer thought and reacted on a far different plane from that of either she or Josh.
“He got started early this time,” Bridget realized, thinking out loud. She could feel Josh watching her, so she elaborated for his benefit. “This is February second. Most likely he killed Karen last night, which was the first day of the month. Last year we didn’t find a body until the eighth.”
He remembered. The maimed body behind the gas station store. The girl had just turned twenty the week before.
“Didn’t mean that there wasn’t one,” he pointed out grimly.
She didn’t agree. “No, this guy likes to show off his handiwork. It’s like he’s bragging, telling us we can’t catch him. That he’s smarter than we are.” She turned away from the bulletin board and looked at Josh. “Maybe it’s someone who washed out from the academy?”
Josh tried to follow her line of thinking. “So he’s showing us that he can get away with murder to make us pay for not hiring him?” Saying it out loud made it seem really far-fetched.
She didn’t want to let go of the new angle just yet, but it belonged in a different light.
“No, he’s reliving getting even with the woman who turned him down—that’s his primary driving force. But every which way he turns, he gets rejected. His feelings toward the police department might be no different from what he feels for the woman who turned him down. Thumbing his nose at the efforts of the police to find him might just be a big bonus feature for him.”
Josh turned it over in his head. “Worth a shot, I guess,” he agreed. “But if we’re going to go through old files,” which was what he assumed she was getting at, “we’re going to need some extra people and the budget’s tight.”
He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. Lieutenant Howard had made a point of letting them all know that there was no more money for overtime but if extra hours needed to be put in, he expected that to be done—with no extra compensation.
“Don’t worry. If Howard says no to putting at least a couple of extra people on this, I know who to ask,” she promised. “Someone who can see beyond a dollar sign and fostering his own ‘legend.’”
Josh grinned. He didn’t have to ask what she was thinking. “That’s my girl.”
A quick, warm salvo shot through her in response to his words and the way he looked at her as he said it before she had a chance to shut it down.
What the hell was that all about? she upbraided herself impatiently.
She didn’t have time for this.
Chapter 5
“You think I’m going to endanger my career by going out on a limb and authorizing overtime for you and your little playmate here just so that you can find some dirt to tarnish the police department’s good name in the community?” Lieutenant Howard demanded. His voice rose in direct correlation to the pulsating blue vein that snaked its way along his forehead.
It amazed Bridget just how obstinate her new acting supervisor could be. Determined to cross her t’s and dot her i’s, she had gritted her teeth and deliberately gone through the proper channels—in this case, that would be Howard—to make her request for more manpower. They needed help to plow through the mountain of files she was anticipating—once she and Josh began going over all the academy’s rejects from three to five years ago.
The request had momentarily stunned the preening lieutenant into complete silence. He’d come out of his office to ask for a status report on the investigation, apparently expecting to hear that they were closing in on a suspect. Instead, he’d been hit with a request for exactly what he’d already told his squad he had no
intentions of allowing.
The vein across his forehead pulsed harder.
The second he’d opened his mouth, the very faint hope that he might actually be reasonable and consider her request went down in flames. Bridget had to admit that it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
Well, at least no one could accuse her of going over the man’s head without first giving him a chance to work with her.
Still, she felt she had to straighten out Howard’s misconception. “No, not overtime. I’m asking for extra people. And it’s not to make the department look bad, it’s to find out who the department was intuitive enough not to hire in the first place.”
Bridget searched the lieutenant’s face for some indication that she’d gotten through. There was none. Apparently her words weren’t penetrating the force field around his brain.
“The answer’s no. You and Youngblood put in whatever time you have to get this guy behind bars, and you do it because you’re supposedly good cops, not because you think you’re going to line your pockets and your buddies’ pockets with extra cash.” Drawing himself up to his full five feet ten inches, Howard glared down at her. “Now, did I make myself clear?”
She met his glare without flinching or looking away. Bridget was not easily intimidated, thanks to growing up with four brothers.
“Perfectly,” she bit off.
“Good. Now get this damn case solved and off my desk, and I mean like yesterday, you hear me?” Howard ordered. Then, fuming, he turned to go back to his office.
Bridget squared her shoulders, hating the fact that she’d gotten a dressing-down in front of all the other detectives, as well as Josh. The latter was standing beside her and she could literally feel his anger. Despite his easygoing manner, she knew that Josh had even less regard for Howard than she did. And, whatever else his faults were, the man was protective of her, as she was of him. It was one of the reasons they worked so well together.
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