by Jami Alden
Talia shrugged as she released his hand. “Thanks for not making me come to you.”
Jack, who must have had ESP because there was no way he could have heard Detective Nolan come in, strode through the archway in the wall that divided the bar and the main dining room.
“You’re the cop?” Jack said as he gave Detective Nolan an assessing stare.
“Detective Nolan,” he replied, giving Jack an equally hard look. “You’re a friend of Miss Vega’s?”
“More like a human guard dog,” Talia muttered, earning her another half smile from the detective.
“Jack Brooks.” His eyes narrowed on the detective’s smile as he strode forward and offered his hand. She could see the muscles shift and bunch as he gripped the detective’s hand. “I take Talia’s safety very seriously.” So don’t fuck anything up. He didn’t have to say it out loud. The look in those ice-blue eyes said it all.
Detective Nolan didn’t flinch. “Right. So let’s get down to business.” He slipped his hand from Jack’s grip and did a quick scan of the bar and adjoining dining room. Though the restaurant wasn’t opening for another hour, several employees were moving around doing prep work for dinner service. Nolan turned to Talia. “Is there someplace private we can talk?”
Talia nodded and led him back to Susie’s office, not surprised when Jack followed.
Susie, whose blue eyes widened at first sight of the handsome cop, was more than willing to give up her office for the meeting. “And feel free to stay for dinner on me, uh, on the house,” she said with a blush. Despite the macabre circumstances, Talia couldn’t stifle a grin. In the months she’d worked here, she’d seen her friend flirt with dozens of men, but she’d never seen her so flustered.
Nolan, for his part, looked like he’d been hit on the head with a bat as he said, “Sure. That would be nice.” His infatuated gaze followed Susie as she rose from her desk.
As she rounded the desk, Susie knocked into the corner because she was watching Nolan instead of where she was going. She flushed and a giggle more suited to a thirteen-year-old burst from her mouth. “So, I’ll just leave you to it.”
She left, closing the door behind her. Nolan stared at it for several beats before shaking his head as though to clear it. He turned back to Talia, his dark eyes still looking a little dazed. Talia wasn’t surprised. Susie had that effect on people. What did surprise her, though, was her friend’s equally intense response.
“So you said you think the DVD I received could be related to a case you’re working on?” Talia prodded.
The last of the haze cleared from Nolan’s expression. His face grave, he darted a quick look at Jack.
“He stays,” Talia said before Jack could even respond. “He knows about everything that’s happened. He was there when…” She cleared her throat around the tightness that choked off her words. “He pulled me out of that hole. He saved my life.”
She didn’t see Jack move closer, but she felt him come up behind her. Not close enough to touch, but close enough for her to feel his warmth, his solid presence at her back. The feel of him was enough to ease her tension a degree. Though it rankled her to feel so dependent on him, she knew that no matter what Nolan was about to tell her, with Jack at her side she’d somehow get through it.
“Recently there have been attacks on several women. So far they’ve all occurred in Redwood City and Menlo Park,” he said, referring to the two towns immediately north of Palo Alto. “The victims are kidnapped, held in an unknown location for several days, and then they are repeatedly sexually assaulted. He then drugs them and dumps them, unconscious.”
Acid burned in Talia’s stomach. “I’ve been following the story on the news. I have a younger sister at Stanford. I told her to be careful.”
“What does this have to do with Talia?” Jack asked, his voice tight.
Nolan’s mouth pulled tight. “Do you have any idea who would have sent you that DVD?”
Talia shook her head. “Our best guess is that it’s someone from Seattle, someone connected to David Maxwell or perhaps his wife, but that leaves dozens of possibilities. But I don’t understand how there could be any connection to the attacks here.”
Nolan folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against the door. He lowered his eyes to the floor as though he were mulling something over. Finally he gave a heavy sigh and looked at them from under arched brows. “Look, what I’m about to tell you is highly confidential, details we’re purposely keeping out of the media. If it gets out that I gave this information to anyone outside the investigation, my ass will be in a sling. Got it?”
“We’ll keep it strictly confidential,” Jack said.
Talia nodded vigorously in agreement, though she had a sick feeling in her stomach that the details Nolan was going to reveal weren’t going to make her feel any better.
“Our perp doesn’t just rape the girls. He mutilates them too.”
“Mutilates how?” Talia choked out through lips gone bone-dry.
He slipped the folder he was carrying out from under his arm and moved to place it on the desk. But he didn’t open it. “Burns them with cigarettes, cuts them. Mostly on the back, but sometimes on the stomach and breasts too.”
Talia swallowed back the bile rising in her throat.
“We found the latest victim two days ago. She’d been dumped in a clearing in Foothills Park. Like the first three victims, she was heavily drugged. Unfortunately, unlike the other victims, she hasn’t regained consciousness yet. Doctors are afraid the overdose may have caused permanent brain damage.
“One of the first officers on the scene was Martinez, who you may remember?”
Talia nodded. “He came the night I found the DVD. He’s the one who brought it in.”
“When he found the victim, he noticed the cigarette burns and said the placement of the cuts looked very familiar.”
Talia could feel Jack tense behind her, and she instinctively took a step back, needing his warmth to counteract the chill that coursed through her, making her skin prickle with goose bumps and her fingers tremble.
Nolan reached for the folder, then hesitated. “These are pretty graphic.”
Talia nodded. “Is it worse than what I experienced myself?”
Nolan flipped open the folder, revealing the first photo. It was a close-up of the victim’s back. Two diagonal slashes that went from the top of the shoulder to the opposite hip, meeting in the middle in a perfect X.
The matching scars on Talia’s back burned under her shirt.
Nolan flipped the picture over, revealing the one underneath. The victim was on her back now, her face invisible, as the picture was from the neck down. Her breasts were bare, the pale skin mottled with bruises. And on the right one, a few inches below the nipple, was a circular mark, angry and red, surrounded by black.
“Is that a cigarette burn?”
Jack’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a barrel. Talia’s vision tunneled, focused on another mark. This one was in the center of her torso, right underneath her breastbone.
The exact same spot where Nate’s knife had plunged into Talia’s body. Her hand went to the spot on her own body, and as she stood in Susie’s tiny office, it was like she could feel the cold sting of the blade as it penetrated skin and muscle.
Her knees turned to water and she would have crumpled had it not been for the strong forearm that caught her around the waist.
“That’s enough.” She heard Jack’s voice over the roar in her head as he guided her carefully to the chair behind the desk.
Talia hung her head between her knees until the buzzing faded. She sat up and looked at Jack, who had gone as pale as she felt. “It’s like he’s using it as a blueprint,” she whispered.
Nolan nodded. “At first, we didn’t realize it was a pattern. In each of the previous victims there was only one long, clean cut, and the one that drew from the right shoulder was shorter, more ragged. And this fourth victim was the only on
e to be cut under the sternum.”
“But he didn’t stab her,” Jack said. “He just marked her. I wonder what that’s about.”
“We have no idea,” Nolan said grimly. “So far, we can’t get much information from the victims. All they remember is a stick in the neck—he injects them with something, GHB or Rohypnol—and then he keeps them, blindfolded and gagged. Usually for two to three days, but this latest victim was missing just shy of a week.”
“Why?” Talia asked, futilely she knew. “Why would he try to imitate what Nate did to me?”
Nolan didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.
He left, with a promise to keep them apprised of any leads, and she and Jack promised to let him know directly about any other incidents or harassment she experienced. She heard the door close behind him and looked up, catching Jack’s stare.
His blue eyes were dark and troubled under his wrinkled brow, staring at her without really seeing.
Anger, helpless and bitter, rose in her chest. She knew exactly what he was thinking and she hated it. Hated that whoever was doing this had the power to rip her world out from under her at his whim. Hated that she had once been weak and stupid enough to put herself in a position where she’d end up in that hole.
Hated that no matter what happened between them, part of Jack would never stop seeing her as she’d been in that moment when he pulled her bleeding and naked from Nate’s torture chamber.
“Stop looking at me like that!” she snarled, heaving herself out of the chair.
Jack’s head snapped back. “Like what?”
“Like I’m some victim. Like I’m pitiful!”
“I don’t think you’re pitiful—”
“You think I’m weak, and stupid, and that I need you to take care of me.” All of which was true, but she hated having him see it. Angry tears burned her eyes.
His jaw clenched tight; his face was as hard as granite. “I feel a lot of things for you, Talia, but pity isn’t one of them.”
She stormed past him, out to the bar. The restaurant still hadn’t opened for dinner service yet, but Detective Nolan was huddled with Susie at the end of the bar, sipping a bottle of microbrew while she cradled a glass of chardonnay. Like he didn’t have a goddamn care in the world. Like he hadn’t just come in with a wrecking ball and dealt the deathblow to her already crumbling sense of safety and security.
Somehow she made it through the rest of the night. Jack urged her to take the night off, but she snapped that since she was already giving up her most lucrative shift of the week for his stupid party, she couldn’t let a little thing like a serial rapist keep her from working tonight.
With the bar rapidly filling up, it was easy to distract herself from Jack’s grim stare and the thought that her tormenter could be at Suzette’s and she would have no idea.
Or he could be somewhere with another faceless victim, keeping her blindfolded, helpless, as he tortured her.
She cast a nervous glance around the bar. Given the two choices, she prayed the monster was here.
Chapter 11
The smell of blood was everywhere. Dark and meaty, metallic, noticeable even here, through the closed front door of the little bungalow he’d helped Gina rent. He didn’t want to go in, but his hand reached out, twisting the doorknob against his will.
The late afternoon sun poured through the open shades, casting long shadows across the worn carpet of the living room. A breeze blew through the screen door, carrying the scent of apple blossoms from the tree out front.
A large form was slumped in the corner. A man, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, half of his face blown away.
His heart pounded in his chest as he walked down the hall to the bedrooms. He pushed open the door on the right. There was another body here on the floor. But smaller, so much smaller than the one in the front room. The boy was on his stomach, his sturdy legs sticking out from the legs of his shorts, bare feet tipped with round little toes.
He looked like he’d collapsed into a nap where he was playing, as he’d done so many times over a puzzle or a pile of LEGOs.
Except the crimson stain on his shirt and the matching one under him on the rug made it clear Toby wasn’t taking a nap.
“Nooooooo!!!” But his cry was muffled and strange, his lips rubbery like they couldn’t form the denial. Why? Why this sweet boy who loved to run in the grass and ride his bike?
He moved down the hallway, the sense of dread growing until it threatened to consume him. He knew what he would find, but he had to see for himself. See the horror he hadn’t been able to prevent no matter how hard he tried.
It felt like he was walking in quicksand, but finally he made it to the end of the hall. Last door on the left. He knew where the master bedroom was even though he’d never been inside, no matter what Troy had thought.
The door was open, and Gina was there. Lying on her back, her blond hair spread out like a halo. Her sprawled legs were bare, their long lines revealed by the shorts at midthigh. Her eyes were open, as was her mouth, her face frozen forever in a look of pain and shock, as though even at the end she couldn’t believe Troy had come back and pumped four shots straight into her chest.
One he’d saved for Toby. The last for himself.
“Oh, God.” He crumpled to his knees at the foot of the bed, laid his hand on her cold foot as though he could somehow bring her comfort.
He’d failed. Goddamn it, he’d failed again.
“Jack.”
He looked up, shock pouring through him. “Gina?”
But it wasn’t Gina. It was Talia. She was wearing a white shirt and the blood was gone. She was sitting up, her dark eyes open. Accusing.
“You can’t save me, Jack. You can’t save any of us.”
As he watched, a tiny pinprick of red formed on the front of her shirt. She shuddered and gasped as though in pain, and the stain grew until it was soaking her hands. Desperate, he grabbed at sheets, pillows, anything to stop the flow of red gushing from her body, soaking his hands and arms.
“You can’t, Jack. You can’t save me.”
“NO!” he shouted. “I won’t let him hurt you. I won’t let him hurt you this time.”
“Jack! Jack! JACK!”
He jolted awake, shaking and sweating like a racehorse. He was on his knees, hovered over the bed. He heard a rustling sound.
“Jack! Wake the hell up.” He winced and jerked back as a small fist connected with the side of his face.
He reached up and snapped on the lamp and realized he had Talia pinned to the bed and he had a pillow pressed against her stomach.
The first screams had jerked Talia from sleep. She’d lain in bed for several seconds, frozen with fear. Was Jack being attacked? She grabbed her Taser from the nightstand and crept down the hall. If there was an intruder, Jack would want her to get the hell out, but she couldn’t just hide like a coward if there was something she could do to help.
The incoherent cries got louder as she went down the stairs, and she quickly realized they weren’t noises made in the heat of combat but those of someone in the throes of a nightmare. She flicked on the hall light, and when she opened Jack’s door, she saw that he was thrashing around, groaning.
“Jack?” she called. He turned toward her but didn’t wake up. She came closer, put her hand on his shoulder, and gave him a little shake. “Jack, wake up.”
Without warning, he reached out and grabbed her, and the next thing she knew, she was pinned under two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle clad only in a pair of boxer shorts. She knew Jack, awake, would cut off his own hand before he hurt her, but in the state he was in now she wasn’t taking any chances.
She struggled, yelling his name as she landed whatever blows she could on his arms and back and tried to buck him off of her. But he was too big, too strong.
She watched as he grabbed a pillow. Oh, God, was he going to kill her in his sleep? Was he having some god-awful PTSD flashback like Owen on Grey’s Anatomy?
> But instead of covering her face with the pillow, he shoved it against her abdomen, groaning and muttering something that sounded like her name and “no, won’t let you.”
She yelled his name, louder this time, and his eyes flickered. “Wake up!” she yelled, emphasizing her point with a punch.
His body jerked, and he froze for a second, trying to get his bearings. Still not letting her up, he reached out and flicked on the bedside lamp. His eyes were open, but they still looked foggy, confused, as though he wasn’t quite sure where he was.
“Jack? Are you all right? Can you let me up?”
He didn’t answer but threw the pillow across the room and without so much as a word yanked her tank top up her stomach. He would have ripped it off her if she hadn’t grabbed the hem with both hands.
Panic surged through her. God, please not this, not Jack.
It took her a moment to realize Jack wasn’t trying rip her clothes off. Instead, he had his hand on her stomach, his index finger tracing the scar under her sternum as he whispered, “No blood. You’re okay. There’s no blood.”
Talia stopped struggling and covered Jack’s big hand with her own. “Of course there’s no blood,” she said softly. “I’m okay now.”
His gaze snapped to her face, and she recognized the moment he became fully aware of what was happening. His eyes widened and he scrambled back. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t hurt you? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He was awake but strung tight as a wire, his muscles twitching under tawny skin that glistened with a layer of sweat. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and rested his head in his hands.
Talia pushed herself up to sit next to him and laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I’m okay. You didn’t hurt me.”
“Bet I fucking scared the shit out of you, though. Jesus, I’m sorry—”
“You startled me, that’s for sure.” Her hand moved unconsciously up and down his back, trying to soothe him. “But I know how it is. I know how bad the dreams can get. I don’t think I got a peaceful night’s sleep for the first year after I was attacked.”