Jax settled on the big leather chair beside the couch, not surprised when Patches pushed past him to sit beside Keara. His dog always knew who needed her most.
“That’s profiler territory,” Jax said. “I used to be a psychologist, so yeah, I definitely have insight into some of these criminals. But this symbol doesn’t represent anything I can decode.”
“It’s the only thing connecting the crimes,” Keara said, the frustration in her voice edged with grief. “Nothing else is similar. Fitz sent me the file from Celia Harris’s murder. And I know everything about Juan’s murder. The only possible link is the timing and the fact that Juan questioned a possible witness shortly before he was killed—and shortly before that witness disappeared. But the bombing? Nothing about it seems remotely connected. Except this damn symbol.”
Jax leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on his thighs. “What if that’s because the murder—or possibly murders, if your husband’s case is also connected—were the anomaly? What if he was always a bomber?”
Keara twisted slightly to face him, her eyebrows twitching inward. At her interest, Patches pivoted, too. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe the kill was personal. Maybe the bomber knew Celia Harris. Maybe bombs are his thing and this was the exception.” He could hear the excitement in his voice as he turned it over in his mind. “It could make him easier to track if he’s really a bomber. Maybe there have been others.”
Keara’s shoulders dropped, her excitement obviously waning. “I don’t think so. Juan thought Rodney was suspicious mainly because he so vehemently denied being near the crime scene when it happened. But he couldn’t find any personal connection between Rodney and Celia. If this was a serial killer, that wouldn’t matter so much. But a personal kill?” She shook her head. “After Juan died and Rodney disappeared, Fitz dug deep, looking for a connection. He never found one, either.”
“You said Rodney was flighty, right? That he didn’t tend to stay in one place for long, that even his family wasn’t all that concerned when he cleared out?”
“Sure, but it’s pretty coincidental timing,” Keara insisted.
“Exactly,” Jax agreed. “What if Rodney leaving is just a coincidence? Maybe Celia’s murder and this bombing are connected. And it’s possible your husband’s death is, too. Maybe. But what if it’s not Rodney? What if we’re looking for someone else?”
* * *
“WHAT IF IT’S not Rodney?”
Jax’s words from last night had run through Keara’s mind during a restless night of sleep and again duringher drive into work this morning—when she wasn’t distracted by memories of kissing him. She’d been attracted to him from the start, so she’d expected to enjoy those kisses. What she hadn’t expected was the intensity.
The man kissed with a singular focus, until she’d felt consumed by the feel of him, by the taste of him. He might not have been law enforcement, but after plastering herself against him, she suspected he worked out with his agent colleagues, because his chest was rock-solid.
It was better that he’d stopped it before things went too far.
He was a colleague. He was also her best chance at connecting the Luna bombing to her husband’s murder—if in fact they were connected.
He was also dangerous. A fling was one thing. A fling was temporary, a distraction from the fact that she’d chosen a profession that sucked away a lot of her personal time. A distraction from the fact that even if she had more personal time, she had no one to spend it with. But a single kiss from Jax and she’d felt herself wanting. Physical wanting, of course. But emotional wanting, too. And that was territory she didn’t want to revisit.
“Everything okay, Chief?”
Keara looked up from her desk.
Tate Emory was standing in her doorway, too-perceptive concern in his dark eyes. He was the closest thing she had to a friend on the force. Not that she didn’t like just about everyone on her team, but Tate was different. She knew his secret, had given him a job in a tricky situation, so it was easier to share things with him in return. She’d kept his confidence, so he’d keep hers.
But not this. Not the guilt that filled her like nausea when she thought about kissing Jax when she should have been focused on getting justice for Juan.
She forced a smile. “It’s been a tough week. We’re four days out from that bomb and neither the FBI nor the Luna police have much more to go on than they did when it went off.”
By Wednesday morning—a full ninety-six hours after the bomb had detonated—she’d expected a solid suspect, maybe even an arrest, but at the very least, a manhunt. Instead, the FBI’s semiregular news conferences beside Luna’s police chief focused more on reassuring a scared public that they were working on it, and asking them to come forward if they had information that could help.
What the public didn’t know—what Keara had learned from talking to her colleagues in the Luna Police Department—was that the FBI still had a long way to go. They still had no idea who or what the intended target was, or what goal the bomber was trying to accomplish. Was there a message? If so, no one knew what it was. They still weren’t even sure if the bomber had been going for a bigger death toll by waiting until the impromptu soccer game happened or if that was unintentional and he’d expected few—or maybe even no—dead.
“Hey, at least it’s finally May,” Tate said, his tone more enthusiastic than the forty-five-degree weather warranted.
It would be a while before they hit temperatures that didn’t require a coat. But at least it was sunny.
She gave him a halfhearted smile, acknowledging his attempt to cheer her up.
“I’m going to take a trek up the mountain today,” Tate said, apparently giving up on that.
“Take Lorenzo and Nate with you. I doubt we’re going to magically run across someone who knows something, but let’s be honest. If Desparre is a good place to hide out, the mountain takes it to the next level.”
The mountain that separated Desparre from Luna was a great place to get lost, even more lost than the relative isolation offered by the rest of Desparre. Five years ago they’d discovered kidnappers had hidden five kids on that mountain for many years. They’d also found a murderer, running from a decades-old charge in Kansas. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine a bomber hiding there, too.
All of her officers were using their extra time between calls to chat with citizens, both to reassure them that the bombing investigation would be solved and also to see if anyone had useful information. So far it hadn’t borne any fruit, but there had to be a reason the bomber had targeted such a tiny park. Luna and Desparre weren’t that far apart, at least not in Alaskan terms. So there was a good chance someone around here knew something, even if they didn’t realize it.
Lorenzo Riera was one of her veterans, a steady officer who’d once faced down a grizzly bear who’d gotten a taste for people food and wandered downtown four years ago. He’d just as readily had her back at a more standard bar fight breakup last month. His partner, Nate Dreymond, had barely passed a year on the force. Since Tate’s partner, Peter, had left a few months ago, Nate was the force’s rookie.
Having Lorenzo at his side would be good backup for Tate if he ran into trouble, and having Nate tag along would give the rookie a chance to watch two great officers at work.
“Got it,” Tate agreed. “But you know, maybe you should reconsider the K-9 unit. If I had a K-9 partner, you wouldn’t have to keep putting out those failed job postings for another officer.”
It was a request Tate had been making almost from his first day on the force. Usually, Keara cited their lack of funds. But after seeing Jax work with Patches, she wondered if the cost might be worth it. “I’ll think about it.”
Tate’s mouth opened and closed, as if her response had totally thrown him.
“Let me know if anything pops,” she said.
> He nodded and took the cue to leave.
She should do the same. Being chief meant a certain amount of politics and paperwork, but in a town as small as Desparre, it still required her to be out on the streets, too. Or maybe that was just the kind of chief she’d chosen to be.
She’d been out in her town every day since the bomb had gone off, reassuring citizens and doing the same kind of low-key investigative work as her officers. But right now the question of Rodney Brown’s involvement was still messing with her focus.
Jax’s claim that Rodney’s leaving was just coincidence could be right. Twelve years in law enforcement had taught her that stranger coincidences happened. The problem was, it had also taught her to always be suspicious of them, because too much of a coincidence usually meant it wasn’t actually a coincidence.
Then again, maybe something bad had happened to Rodney, too. But what? And why?
Rodney Brown killing Celia Harris and then killing Juan was a real possibility she couldn’t drop. But the bombing connection felt more tenuous.
What if they were two different people? The idea made Keara jerk straighter in her chair, making it roll slightly backward and bump the credenza behind her.
Two different people didn’t mean they weren’t connected.
The theory made her heart rate pick up, sent a familiar rush through her body. The thrill of the chase, when her gut was screaming she’d hit on something. She’d felt it regularly as a detective. As a chief, she had less opportunity to be in the center of a case in the same way.
Grabbing her cell phone, she hit redial on a number that had started to appear constantly on her list of recent calls.
“Jax Diallo.”
The deep, relaxing tone of his voice sent a little thrill through her that Keara tried to ignore. “Jax, it’s Keara.”
“Keara.”
The way he said her name, the way she could practically see his slight smile, made her stomach clench. Pushing forward, she told him her new theory. “What if you’re right about Celia Harris’s murder being personal? What if the person who killed her is still out there, but it’s not Rodney Brown?”
“I don’t—”
She kept talking, adrenaline pumping, her words spilling out faster as the idea continued to take shape. “What if the killer knew Rodney, knew the symbol he liked to use, and spray-painted it above Celia’s body to lead police in the wrong direction? Or maybe they’d had a falling out and it was a ‘screw you’ kind of move?”
“So you’re suggesting Rodney is the bomber?” Jax asked, not sounding anywhere near as excited by the theory as she felt.
“Yes! When Juan came to talk to him about the murder, he was pissed because his symbol was used. He killed Juan to keep him from connecting it to his own crimes. Then he left town.”
“So you think Juan is the one who let it slip about the symbol? But what about Rodney’s car being near the murder scene?” Jax asked, still sounding confused.
“We know Rodney was near there at the time of the killing. Maybe it really was coincidence. Or maybe he knew what was going to happen and drove by, but he wasn’t the killer.”
“Then, the real killer told Rodney he was going to murder this woman? Why would he do that?”
“Maybe they had a sick friendship. You can’t tell me you haven’t seen criminals connect before, give each other ideas, trade stories about what they’ve done, even cooperate with each other. Maybe give each other alibis. Maybe play a one-upmanship game.”
“Well, sure,” Jax said, his tone still skeptical.
“Maybe that’s what happened here,” Keara said, holding in her frustration. “And whether or not Juan mentioned the symbol, Rodney knew about it. So maybe that was his real worry. He wouldn’t know that Houston PD isn’t like the FBI. We don’t have bomb databases. We wouldn’t know if he’d used that symbol before, not if it was outside our jurisdiction.”
She blew out a heavy breath, tried to slow her adrenaline along with the speed of her words. “What I’m saying, Jax, is that maybe the killer and the bomber aren’t the same person. But maybe they know each other, even schemed together at one point. And Rodney killed my husband because he was onto something bigger than a single murder.”
Jax sighed. “It’s a good theory, Keara, but there’s a problem.”
“What?”
“The FBI ran the bombing details through our database, specifically that symbol. They finished reviewing everything today and confirmed it. We’ve never seen a bomb with this symbol before. Not in Houston, not anywhere.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
With every large-scale crime scene, Jax found at least one person whose resilience awed him. From the Luna bombing, that person was Gabi Sinclair.
The young woman was a fighter. She’d lost a leg, lost a fiancé. She was definitely angry, grieving and in pain, but she was also strong. She had a lot still to get through, but he knew she’d come out the other side of it.
He went to see Gabi at her mom’s house in Desparre, where she was staying while she healed. He was hoping she might remember something more, since she’d been at the edge of the park, maybe at a good vantage point to see the bomber leave the scene. But she had nothing new to offer him, just like he had nothing new to share about the investigation. The most he was able to do was return her fiancé’s watch, which had been processed by the FBI.
“They told me in a month, I’ll get a preparatory prosthetic,” Gabi said, fighting through the pain as she settled herself on her mom’s couch, with Patches beside her good leg. “After a few months I’ll be able to get fitted for something permanent. Then I’m going to learn to run again.”
She said it all with her chin tipped high, with her mom clutching her hand and fighting tears. Gabi only broke down once, when he handed her the watch and she told him about her fiancé’s funeral, which had been put on hold long enough for Gabi to be released from the hospital.
As Jax and Patches climbed into his rental SUV, Gabi’s broken words echoed in his head. “I thought Carter and I had so much time. We had so many plans. Now all our dreams for our future together are just gone.”
Instead of seeing Gabi’s tearful gaze, he pictured Keara, stoic and frustrated as she tried to get closure, seven long years after her husband had been murdered.
It wasn’t his job. Not to investigate the bombing outside his role with the victims. Definitely not to try and connect it to an old murder case. But he’d seen what a good investigation could do for those left behind. Knowing who was to blame, being able to see justice done for those they loved. It made a difference. It was why he’d left private practice to join the FBI. Maybe he could help Keara find her own closure.
“Call Keara Hernandez,” he told his phone as he started up his SUV, heading toward downtown Desparre instead of back to Luna. Even before she picked up, his pulse increased at the thought of seeing her.
“Hello?”
Her tone was cautious, as if she wasn’t sure what to expect, and he wondered if it was because of their kiss last night or his less-than-enthusiastic response to her theory this morning.
“I’m in Desparre and I was hoping we could grab a coffee before I make the drive back to Luna,” he told her, surprised at the nerves in his belly, like he was asking for a date instead of a chance to talk about the case.
He could have just swung by the police station, but he didn’t want word getting around that he was spending too much time talking to the Desparre police chief. Ben and Anderson were already suspicious. As much as he respected them, he wasn’t in the mood for their only-partially joking jabs at him “playing agent.” Especially since he didn’t plan to stop. Not for this case, and not when it might help Keara.
When the pause on the other end of the phone went on too long, Patches chimed in. Woof! Woof!
Keara laughed. “Okay, Patches. I can do that.” Then her
voice got more businesslike. “This isn’t Anchorage. We don’t have a dedicated coffee shop in Desparre. But there’s a spot we can go outside downtown with good coffee. You have a new idea about the case?”
“I wish I did. I just thought we could talk it over again, see if we can come up with something new.” He didn’t say the rest of it: he wanted to see her.
There was another pause, like Keara was reconsidering, but then she said, “Okay,” and gave him an address.
It was actually closer to Gabi’s mom’s place than driving all the way into downtown, and Jax pulled into a gas station and did a quick U-turn to get onto a different street. According to his GPS, it was a quicker route to The Lodge, the spot where Keara had recommended they meet.
“You ready to see Keara?” he asked Patches, glancing at her in his rearview mirror.
As she barked an affirmative, Jax frowned, squinting at the huge dark blue truck behind him. It looked like the same vehicle that had been behind him on the road from Gabi’s. But why would it now be going this way? Had it also turned around at the gas station?
Was someone following him? And why did that vehicle seem slightly familiar, like he’d seen it before today?
He eased up on the gas, slowing to ten miles below the limit, hoping the truck would pass him on the otherwise deserted road. But it slowed, too, staying just far enough behind him that Jax couldn’t get a good look at the driver.
His heart rate picked up, even as he told himself he was being paranoid. Why would anyone follow him?
It was probably just a coincidence. Still, when a street appeared to his right, Jax yanked the wheel that way.
Patches barked and he could hear her sliding across the seat at his sudden turn.
“Sorry, Patches,” Jax said, his gaze darting back and forth between the road ahead and the rearview mirror.
After a minute passed and the truck didn’t appear again, Jax let out a heavy breath and eased his foot slightly off the gas.
Despite telling himself he’d been overreacting, he didn’t fully relax until he reached the restaurant Keara had chosen. Apparently, it had once been a lodge and even the outside looked more like a log cabin than a small-town restaurant.
Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Page 43