Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Carol Ericson

  Who, of their current suspect pool, had the meticulous determination to hunt down and slaughter every single officer tied to the original case?

  Jonah Watson had discarded the notion an original investigator had taken the law into their own hands. So far, the marshal had been right. They were all dead. A family member then? A partner they’d never known about ordered to finish what the New Castle Killer started? Hard to believe all these deaths were the work of one killer, but it was possible. The planning and locating of targets alone would take months, if not years. He wrote the date of the detective’s death beside her pushpin on the map he’d taped to the wall and stepped back. “I can’t make out a pattern here, Sheriff. This guy is all over the place. As far as I can tell he’d locate a victim then head straight there to add another notch to his murder post.”

  Remi set her chin into her palm and studied the map as he faced her. “You might be right, or he purposefully switched up which targets to hit and when in order to confuse law enforcement. If he’d killed his victims from the east coast to west coast, there was a chance someone would notice. Maybe the randomness is the pattern, same as the MOs he used to kill his victims. He didn’t want any of them connecting back to him. No pattern, no way to determine his next step.”

  “Except we made the connection when we looked into the case.” He folded his arms across his chest and pressed the edge of the pushpin into his finger. They’d narrowed down everyone who’d worked the investigation three years ago and compared the names to the files, but were there more? A dispatcher, a witness, an EMT they hadn’t thought of?

  “You made the connection.” She pushed to her feet, and a yawn contorted her features as she headed into the kitchen for another cup of black coffee. “I ran as fast as I could as far as I could to leave this case behind.”

  Dylan rolled his lips between his teeth and bit down. “How is the killer getting the names of his targets?”

  “What do you mean?” Remi refilled her mug and pulled one from the shelves, presumably for him. No end in sight for her—not tonight—but it was only a matter of time before the long hours caught up with her and she’d pass out wherever she landed. He’d watched it happen too many times before. Hell, the only reason she’d been able to give Gresham PD an alibi had been because cameras had caught her asleep at her desk around the time Del Howe had been murdered.

  “I mean we didn’t know some of these victims were connected until Watson pulled their files and sent them to you, and we were working the damn case. Our theory is that the killer is murdering anyone involved in the New Castle investigation, but how did the killer know who was involved in the first place?” He crossed to the table as tendrils of adrenaline released into his veins. This was why he’d become a private investigator. This was what he’d been trained for. To take the smallest amount of evidence and suspicion and connect the dots.

  He scrolled back through the open cases on Remi’s laptop. Straightening, he pointed to the screen. “A family member wouldn’t have been told the name of the dispatcher who’d taken the first 9-1-1 call or the name of the EMT who’d first arrived on scene. Those names are included in the initial incident report written by the officers on scene, and then detectives question them and submit their statements after the interviews.”

  The small lines between her eyebrows were back as Remi moved along the length of the kitchen island toward him. Her eyes widened. “You’re right. Family members aren’t briefed on who arrived on the scene, who collected evidence from the crime scene, who ran the samples in the forensics lab, yet every single one of them has been killed. So how is the killer getting this information, and how does he know their whereabouts?”

  “I can think of one way.” Occam’s razor. The simplest answer was usually the right answer, and Dylan didn’t see any other way around it. “He’s got to be law enforcement.”

  “We’ve already concluded it couldn’t be one of the officers who worked the original case. According to Watson, they’ve all been accounted for, apart from you and me.” Remi shook her head. She rounded the table, one arm crossed over her chest as she bit down on her thumbnail and bent at the waist to scroll through the files on her screen again.

  His gut clenched. Watson’s research had been thorough. The former FBI bomb technician was trained to spot the most minute details and uncover a suspect’s motive, means and opportunity. Dylan trusted the marshal had tracked down anyone involved in the New Castle Killer case, including him and Remi. That meant the killer wasn’t finished. If whoever killed Del Howe this morning truly had access to the files from the initial investigation, sooner or later the bastard would come for Remi, come for him.

  And hell, having that information didn’t only put the killer ahead of them, it strengthened Gresham PD’s case against Remi. Only a law enforcement officer would’ve been able to access those files. The fact Del Howe had been following her, combined with the history between her and the New Castle Killer case, would give them enough probable cause to seek a warrant from a judge.

  But Dylan wasn’t going to let her take the fall. This was what he’d been trained for, what all those years of off-the-books investigations had sculpted him into. No matter how hard Captain Elijah Paulson and his sergeant pushed to make her a suspect, Dylan knew without a doubt Remi hadn’t done this. “We need to go through the background checks you originally ran for the first three victims’ family members again. It’s possible we missed something, maybe a law enforcement connection that didn’t seem relevant at the time.”

  “I remember something like that coming back when we initially notified the next of kin for one of the victims. A distant relative maybe, but I can’t...” Her eyes slipped closed—almost involuntarily—but she cleared her throat and set her expression. “I can remember. Just give me a minute.”

  Dylan trailed his hand up her spine and pried her away from the screen. She’d made it clear she’d rather forget what’d happened between them all those years ago, but he couldn’t. He never wanted to forget. Never wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. For the first time in years, he’d found someone he could trust, who was as authentic on the inside as they claimed to be on the outside. He’d spent most of his life being lied to in one form or another, but with Remi, he’d never had to wonder if the words coming from that flawless mouth of hers were the truth, and it’d cleansed him in a way. Given him clarity. Helped him realize the culmination of keen observation skills and a lifetime of working on his own didn’t have to hold him back. When she’d hired him, she’d made him part of a team, and he wanted more of that. He wanted her. “You really can’t handle your coffee. Come on, Sheriff. You know how embarrassed you get when you fall asleep on your keyboard.”

  Her voice softened as her words slurred together in an indistinguishable one-sided conversation.

  Hell, she was about to collapse. Dylan maneuvered her down a hallway branching off from the kitchen, where the bedrooms had been laid out. Shouldering most of her weight, he passed the first door—a large bathroom—and headed for the second on his right. She wasn’t going to make it to the end of the hallway. He kicked the door into the stopper behind it and flipped on the light.

  A bare queen-size mattress had been centered in the room. Remi had told him the house had been acquired by the marshals service within the last two weeks. The case was still in the courts, which explained the lack of bedding, but it’d have to do. He swung her from his side to his front and braced his legs on either side of hers to keep himself from dropping her. Setting her on the mattress, he leveraged both hands against his knees. She was still wearing her shoulder holster and her weapon. Damn it. He was going to have to figure out how to get her out of it without pissing her off. Or maybe sleeping with the thing was common practice for her nowadays. He had no idea. They hadn’t shared a bed in three years. “Okay, Sheriff. I’m going to get you out of your holster. No biting, no kicking, no punching.”

&nbs
p; She mumbled something as her eyes slipped closed, and he couldn’t help but smile. The woman didn’t drink alcohol, but she certainly passed out cold as hard as any addict.

  Dylan intertwined his fingers in hers and moved to thread her elbow back through the shoulder strap.

  A strong grip shot up and locked around his wrist, those piercing blue eyes suddenly wide and aware. Remi wrenched her upper body off the mattress and dug her nails into his skin. “He’s connected. Sergeant Nguyen...is...connected.”

  Her grip relaxed from his wrist, and she fell back, instantly unconscious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sharp architectural angles came into focus as Remi cracked open her eyes.

  Grogginess and the unrelenting ache of passing out when her body had given up weighed her down, something she’d become more used to over the years. Sleep hadn’t been the same since she’d left Delaware. In sleep, the nightmares waited, and she battled every waking hour to push it off more and more. Until she couldn’t. It was the perfect solution. Passing out ensured utter numbness. She’d burned the midnight oil a few too many times while she’d been sheriff back east. In those moments, she’d realized when her body simply gave out, there hadn’t been any nightmares. No shame. No humiliation for what she hadn’t been able to change. Over the past three years, that darkness had developed into a safe space, an emptiness she couldn’t wait to hide inside. Sometimes it’d take a day, sometimes two, for the blackness to find her. This time had been on the shorter side, and her stay even shorter.

  She turned her head to one side, her hair catching on the divots in the bare mattress’s structure, and the grogginess drained. Except the past had caught up with her. She bolted upright and instantly patted at her side. Her shoulder holster and weapon were gone...with her boots. Studying the room, she recognized the color of the bare wood trim around the closet, and brief memories of the night before surfaced. Watson had sent everything he’d had on the murders of her former coworkers and investigators involved in the New Castle Killer case. And Cove... She and Dylan had gone through them...together.

  Remi wiped sleep from her eyes before attempting to roll off the mattress with some kind of grace. Instead, she rolled straight onto her shoulder holster, her weapon and her boots neatly waiting for her beside the makeshift bed. Her overnight bag packed with a few changes of clothes, toiletries, extra ammunition and a first-aid kit had been brought into the room, too. She stared at the strap coiling over the edge of the bag, feeling as though she’d made an important connection with the case, with who might’ve had something to do with Del Howe’s murder, but she couldn’t remember. One of the downsides of pushing herself into exhaustion instead of listening to her body when it needed to rest—damaged short-term memory.

  She reached for her bag, unpacked a change of clothes and collected her holster and weapon from the floor. Slowly, she opened the bedroom door. Movement registered from down the hall, and she caught a glimpse of brown hair, bare muscular shoulders and a mountain of rock-solid deputy marshal. Dylan. He’d followed her to the safe house last night, brought her dinner, worked through the files Watson had uncovered.

  Her mouth dried as he dropped to his hands and feet and counted off a series of pushups. Muscles she’d never known existed rippled across his back in a hypnotizing dance of strength, and she found she couldn’t look away. He’d changed over the past few years. His dry sense of humor hadn’t, but physically, he’d become rougher around the edges, less approachable to anyone who didn’t know him well, more aggressive and...bigger. Tempting.

  “Didn’t anyone teach you it’s not polite to stare?” Dylan hopped to his feet and turned to face her, sweat glistening down his chest and abdominals. Shadows carved defined ridges across his midsection as he reached for a nearby towel. A smile broke out across his handsome face as he wiped droplets from his hairline, and her gut twisted. From the smile she hadn’t been able to forget or the fact she’d been caught watching him, she didn’t know.

  Remi tightened the grip on her holster to counter the heat flaring up her neck and into her face. “I figured it was fair game considering you removed my boots and holster after I passed out last night.”

  His laugh intensified the heat simmering under her skin. He brushed the hair hanging over his forehead back and collected his discarded T-shirt from the floor. He’d changed into sweats while she was asleep, leaving no doubt he’d stayed the night. “To be fair, you weren’t unconscious yet. You were still talking, and I told you exactly what I was doing.”

  “Did I...” She cleared her throat while trying to sound casual. There’d been times—nights—when she’d screamed herself awake. Times she’d rather not reveal to a man who used to share her bed. “Did I say anything?”

  “You said a lot of things. At one point, you recited the alphabet backward, and while I was unlacing your boots, you said you were going to kick me in my perfect face.” Dylan tossed the towel then threaded both arms into the sleeves and stretched the T-shirt over his head. “Then you accused Sergeant Nguyen of having a connection to the New Castle Killer investigation.”

  “Sergeant—” The fog lifted, and a soft gasp escaped her control. “The background checks we ran during the initial investigation. I remember that same spelling coming up when we were trying to contact next of kin on one of the victims.” She closed her eyes, trying to sort through the hundreds of facts she’d archived at the back of her mind, to those first few days of the case. “Tony Rasmussen. He was half Vietnamese. Most of his mother’s side of the family had adopted Americanized last names when immigrated to the states, which made them harder to track down during the initial stages of the investigation, but there were a few who’d kept tradition. Sergeant Nguyen was one of Tony’s uncles.”

  Could he be the killer? Had he discovered the identity of the man responsible for his nephew’s death and killed him? Had he used his access as a Gresham PD officer to hunt and take his revenge on anyone involved in the case then used that same power to accuse her of Del Howe’s murder? Was the sergeant she’d come to know these past few years the reason this was happening?

  “I ran a background check on Daniel Nguyen while you were asleep.” Dylan pointed to the kitchen table, out of sight, and headed that direction.

  The corner of the hallway blocked her sightline of him, and Remi used those few seconds of isolation to take a deep breath. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel much of anything after relocating to Oregon, but in those short moments Dylan had been unaware of her presence, she’d remembered what it’d been like to feel those muscles under her touch. Remembered how...safe she’d felt the times they were together, and a piece of her had craved that sensation again. Wouldn’t happen. Not now. Never again. Not only because she was his superior, and a relationship with a subordinate would reflect poorly on her career, but because he was the link to a past better left forgotten.

  Remi forced one foot in front of the other until she rounded the corner, and their makeshift murder board came into sight. Surprise filtered through the drugging haze of sleep as she took in the progress he’d made in the few short hours she’d been asleep. A complete set of pins had been set in the map that indicated the locations of each murder with dates written clearly in black marker. The butt of her weapon brushed against her calf as she closed the distance between her and the map. Distinct blue lines connected the locations, a trail of where the killer had been and where he’d gone next, dating all the way back to the first murder and ending with Del Howe’s death in Gresham yesterday. “You did all this while I was asleep?”

  “You were right about the randomness being a pattern in and of itself. Six of the twenty-five original investigators in the case were still in New Castle County when the murders started two years ago.” The sound of his heavy footsteps filled her ears as he stepped up beside her, his arm brushing against hers. Dylan motioned to the entirety of the board. “He might’ve started there, but I think
the killer was trying to keep law enforcement from catching on to him too quickly. He couldn’t kill all six of them around the same time. Too much attention. So he spread it out. He killed Teresa Hild at her home in Greenville, then he headed to Georgia for the next.” Dylan used his hand to indicate the blue line from Delaware to Georgia, the veins accentuated in the back of his hand. “Sometimes he’d alternate between New Castle County and his next location. Sometimes he killed two or three victims before returning, which makes me believe—”

  “Delaware is his home base.” Even now, there was a chance whoever’d killed Del Howe had fled the state, but her instincts said the game of cat and mouse wasn’t finished. There were still two investigators here in Oregon who’d been involved in the original case. Her and Dylan.

  Remi visually traced the patterns he’d created across the board, noting a red line had been added sometime during the process. A line that interconnected a few of the murder locations and dates, and ended in what looked like Gresham, Oregon. “And this red line? What’s that one for?”

  “After you suggested Sergeant Nguyen was involved with these twenty-five deaths—twenty-six, if you count Del Howe from yesterday morning—I started looking into him a bit more. We theorized our killer might be law enforcement, which would explain how he was able to get his hands on the original New Castle Killer case files. I think you were right.” His chest pressed against her arm as he indicated the length of the red line, and warm, nervous energy skittered down her spine. Her breath caught as he continued. “I was able to verify Sergeant Daniel Nguyen was in these six cities when these murders occurred.”

  That couldn’t be a coincidence. She’d been completely out of it when she’d claimed Daniel Nguyen was linked with the murders, but something at the back of her mind had made the connection. Now it was more than a theory. “Harrisonburg, Las Vegas, Hanover, Kansas City, Baltimore and San Antonio. All of these cities host law enforcement conferences. He could have used them as a cover to travel to these locations then slipped away long enough to kill his victims.”