“Like I said, you don’t have to thank me.” She dropped that mesmerizing gaze to the counter, sweeping the spread of flour into the sink set into the island with one hand, and swiped beneath her nose with the other. Touching her face had always been a nervous habit. “All part of the job.”
“Is that what this is for you, Ana? Just another job? Because this case is definitely a lot more personal to me.” Benning maneuvered around the counter, his bare chest nearly pressed against the exposed skin of her arm. He set his hand over hers on the granite, her quick gasp searing through him. Her warmth penetrated past skin and muscle, deep into his bones. “After what you told me about the Samantha Perry case, I realize now how hard it must’ve been for you to come back here, and you’re standing there as if none of it affects you. But is that how you really feel?”
He wanted—no, needed—to know. Was this going to play out exactly as it had between them the last time? Had he made a mistake requesting her to work this case?
Her mouth parted. “I...”
Skimming his fingers along the back of her hand, he trailed a path up her arm to her jaw, and all of his thoughts burned away. There was only the two of them. The softness of her flawless skin and hardness in her invisible guard. After everything that’d happened, after everything they’d already been through in the short span of time she’d walked back into his life, he’d struggled to keep the uncertainty, the rage, the fear, at bay so he could stay strong for Olivia. To prove that he could protect her from any threat, be the father she and her brother deserved. But Ana...stripped him of all of that. With her, Benning felt raw, exposed, bare. She was real. She was here. Not a memory—a fantasy—anymore, and it took everything inside him to pull himself away from her. “You had some cookie dough on your chin.”
She’d left because she believed her emotions clouded her judgment on the Samantha Perry case, and he wasn’t about to complicate anything else between them. Not when it was his son’s life at risk this time. Ana turned her gaze up to his, a small tremor crossing her shoulders, and an invisible anchor settled inside his chest in the dark, watery landscape of this case. No matter what happened, Ana would bring his son home alive. He had to believe that. He had to believe in her. Otherwise, he’d have nothing left. “Thanks.”
A soft trill broke the silence spreading between them, but she didn’t move.
“I think your phone is ringing.” He cleared his throat, trying to drown the surge of awareness burning through him, and stepped away. It was for the best. Because anything that happened between them would only take away from their focus on finding his son, and that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.
Ana pulled her phone from her back pocket, running one hand through her hair, but only ended up streaking more flour into the soft strands. Tapping her cell’s screen, she answered the call and pressed Speaker. “What do you have for me, JC?”
The agent she’d called from the car. The muscles down Benning’s spine contracted as every sense he owned homed in on the voice on the other end of the line. Had the team dispatched to the crime scene at his house found something that could tell them where Owen was being held? He hiked his T-shirt over his head and shoved his arms through.
“Sevierville PD is still working the scene, but I can tell you right now, it’s not looking good,” JC said. Tension replaced the rush of sudden desire throughout Benning’s body. What the hell did that mean? Static cut through the line, but given the cabin’s proximity to the Smokeys, it was a miracle they’d received the call at all. They were two hours out of town, with nothing and no one around but trees, the mountains and wildlife.
Three distinct lines deepened between Ana’s dark eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”
“We searched the property and found the old outdoor fireplace a few hundred feet from the house you’d told us about. Kinda hard to miss seeing as how the entire thing was on fire. Bad news is, that skull you sent the photo of with the gunshot wound wasn’t inside,” JC said.
“How is that possible?” Benning didn’t understand. “No one knew that’s where I hid it.”
“That’s not all,” JC said. “We might not have the skull you wanted, but the coroner did pull an entire set of bones from the fireplace once we got the fire under control, and, Ana, the remains... It’s going to be nearly impossible to identify them now.”
* * *
THE BASTARD HAD used an accelerant.
The odor of gasoline burned Agent JC Cantrell’s nostrils, even with his nose and mouth buried in the crease of his elbow. Crime scene techs and the coroner carefully removed the charred remains one by one from the brick fireplace hidden back on Benning Reeves’s property as he disconnected his call with Ramirez.
Hell, the only reason they’d found the fireplace had been because the whole damn thing had been on fire, which meant their UNSUB—unidentified suspect—hadn’t just taken Benning Reeves’s kids last night, he’d also come back to clean up his own mess. Assuming it was the same perp behind both crimes. Black smoke still lingered in the air and irritated his eyes. It was a miracle the flames hadn’t started a wildfire, but whoever’d lit the match most likely hadn’t even thought about the possibility. They’d been too busy trying to cover up a crime by destroying evidence. Which, from the looks of the blackened bones currently being sealed into evidence bags, had done a damn fine job.
He followed the pattern of scorch marks scarred into the dim red bricks. Gasoline burned upward of five hundred degrees, but add in the fact those bricks held on to that heat and the metal inside the fireplace, there was a good chance dental records, fingerprints and DNA had all been burned away. Without an ID on the body, the chances of that six-year-old boy coming home only got smaller. “Damn it.”
Sevierville PD had taped off the target scene with a wide perimeter through the trees at JC’s instruction, the entire property in controlled chaos. Local PD had already searched and processed the house, but out here it’d take days—weeks—to filter through what qualified as evidence. Small towns like this saw a few instances of violent crime, but this case was about to blow Sevierville’s crime stats through the roof. Someone had used the fireplace out of convenience, knowing the remains would be found, but they hadn’t wanted the victim to be identified. That was where the accelerant came in. With any luck and depending on how long the fire had been going, the forensic lab might still be able to put a rush on pulling DNA from the bone marrow of the victim and nail this killer to the wall. JC would be there when they did.
He noted the shortened bones of the hand the coroner was in the process of securing. He faced Evan Duran, hostage negotiator extraordinaire, crouched a few feet away, and dropped his arm away from his mouth and nose. “Looks like our UNSUB went out of his way to ensure pulling fingerprints were out of the question. Cut the tips of the victim’s fingers clean off before lighting the match.”
“The guy knows what he’s doing, that’s for sure. That’s why we couldn’t trace the bug he planted in Olivia Reeves’s hospital room and couldn’t get any surveillance of the getaway vehicle the night of the kidnapping. I’d say our suspect has at least some knowledge of crime scenes or forensics given he chose to toss in the gasoline.” Duran straightened, gaze to the ground as he moved farther from the epicenter of the crime scene. This case had the entire Tactical Crime Division team on edge. Hell, JC couldn’t even imagine what was going through Ramirez’s head right now having to partner with a former lover to find the guy’s son, but for Duran, this investigation hit a little too close to home. The hostage negotiator’s little sister had been taken from right in front of their apartment building when he was only ten years old, too small to do anything but watch, but it was that moment that drove Duran’s attention to this case now. He would do whatever it took to bring Owen Reeves home. They all would. Shadows darkened Duran’s Latino features as he nodded to the trail carved through the mud. “But he wasn’t careful enough.�
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“What do you got?” JC arced his path out from his teammate’s to avoid contaminating whatever Duran had found. Slowing, he caught sight of the deep grooves carved into the snow and mud—most likely drag marks from his victim’s heels—coming from the house and snapped a pair of latex gloves over his hands. Cold worked past the thick layer of his coat the longer they searched the scene, but the sight of a silver or white gold piece of jewelry partially uncovered in the dirt froze him straight through. A charm in the shape of the scales of justice with the eyelet spread wide as though it’d been torn from a necklace or bracelet. He swiped up on his phone’s screen and took a photo before digging for an evidence bag from his jacket. He pinched the metal between his index finger and thumb and dropped it inside.
“Might help us identify the victim,” Duran said.
“The coroner would’ve mentioned if there’d been evidence of jewelry melted to the bones. Gasoline burns hot, but not hot enough to evaporate silver or white gold.” JC pushed to his feet, studying the charm still in his hand. Sunlight pierced through the trees, reflected off the tarnished metal. His lungs still burned with the smell of gasoline and dropping temperatures. They were losing daylight. In another hour Sevierville PD would have to pull out the spotlights, making it that much harder to search the scene. “Which means it came from somewhere else.”
From someone else. Another victim? Were they about to find more bodies out here? JC messaged the photo he’d taken directly to Ramirez. Scanning the trees around them, he couldn’t shake the feeling every piece of evidence they recovered, every move they’d made out here, was being carefully curated and watched. The vibration of his phone snapped him back into reality, and he answered Ramirez’s call. “You get the picture I sent?”
“Where did you get that charm?” A combination of tension and panic tinted her words, and everything around JC slowed. Ramirez wasn’t the kind of agent to wear her emotions on her sleeve, but something about this charm had obviously rattled her.
“You recognize it.” Not a question. He leveled his gaze with Duran’s, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.
One second. Two.
“Ramirez?” JC checked the screen. The call hadn’t been dropped.
“Yes. I recognize it. It belonged to a fifteen-year-old girl whose body was found a few months after she went missing from Sevierville. Her name was Samantha Perry,” Ramirez said. “I was one of the agents assigned to find her.”
Chapter Five
It wasn’t possible. Samantha Perry’s charm shouldn’t have been at that crime scene. Not unless... The edge of her phone cut into her hand, her gaze rising to meet Benning’s. “Search the rest of the property. I need you to find that skull and get me an ID on the victim. Now,” she ordered JC.
She disconnected the call, the entire floor shaking beneath her as though a high-magnitude earthquake had rolled through Sevierville. Or maybe the possibility of a familiar killer had her senses on the edge of an unknown precipice. She didn’t know. Didn’t care. The FBI had been hunting Samantha’s murderer for seven years with no leads, no evidence, no crime scene left behind. Nothing. Until now. Couldn’t be a coincidence. She fought to control her breathing, an acidic bite on her tongue, but gravity had drained the blood from her upper body too fast.
“Ana?” Her name on his lips, that seductive combination of a growl and concern, pushed at the barriers she’d set between her and the rest of the world. “Tell me what happened.”
“Have you seen this charm before? Could it be Olivia’s or one of her friends’?” Swiping her tongue across her dry lips, she angled her phone toward him, the screen bright with the photo JC had sent.
“No. The only piece of jewelry Olivia has is a beaded necklace she made herself.” He shook his head. “I don’t let her or the kids’ friends go that deep into the woods. Not after Owen cut open his head on that fireplace.”
“Agents Cantrell and Duran found this bracelet charm near the crime scene on your property after the coroner pulled an entire set of remains from that same fireplace. The girl who went missing when we were... Samantha Perry.” No. Now wasn’t the time to fall back into the past, no matter how much she wanted to sink into the familiar cage of his body around hers. There were too many similarities between then and now, but she couldn’t afford to let the past dictate the present. “She had one exactly like it. She and her best friend had a matching set. Only Samantha’s wasn’t recovered with her body. They found her bracelet, but the charm had been torn off.”
He took the phone from her, his calluses catching on the side of her hand, but where her body had instantly warmed at their brief contact mere minutes ago, the hollowness inside only tore through her now. “Justice scales?”
“It’s the zodiac sign for Libras. Both girls shared the same birthday. They were friendship charms.” What were the chances another charm like that would surface now, right when Ana had come back to Sevierville? “My partner and I theorized Samantha’s killer kept it as a trophy, but we couldn’t prove it. Harold Wood disappeared off the FBI’s radar. He quit his job at the school, wasn’t seen by any of his neighbors or his family in the area. No one has been able to find him for seven years.”
“But now the charm’s surfaced, and someone burned a body on my property.” He handed her back the phone, but the numbness spreading through her was all consuming as he stumbled backward. Color drained from his face, his wet hair leaving pools of dampness across his shoulders. “You think the man who killed Samantha Perry has something to do with Owen’s kidnapping?” He ran his hands through his hair, fisting the dark strands. “What about the victim they found? Was it... Could it be—”
“No.” She rushed toward him, her hands gripped around his muscled arms to keep him upright. Infierno. His skin was hot. She battled against the possibility of his six-year-old boy being held by a vicious killer, but she couldn’t discount anything at this point. That charm had been discovered on Benning’s property, mere feet from a fireplace that contained human remains. The chances that specific piece of jewelry had turned up in not one but two of her investigations were slim, but the idea Owen Reeves had been taken by the same monster who’d killed Samantha Perry... Nausea churned in her gut. She sought his gaze and put every ounce of confidence she had left into her voice. “It wasn’t your son, Benning. Agent Cantrell said the remains belong to an adult. Owen is still out there. He still needs our help.”
“Someone took the skull and stuffed another body in there?” Mountainous shoulders rose and fell in rapid succession as he leveled bright blue eyes with hers. “You said you needed an ID on the victim they found right away. You already have an idea of who the victim is.”
She nodded. After all these years, how could he still read her so easily? How could one look from him make her forget why she’d left in the first place? She swallowed hard against the urge to lean a bit closer, to confirm the unsettling pressure inside was nothing more than biology in a stress-induced situation and had nothing to do with the man standing in front of her. Ana forced her fingers to unwrap from around his arms, the heat sliding past her defenses too familiar, too comforting. Too tempting. “You said your nanny should’ve been there with the kids when you got back home. The killer might’ve gotten to her first and taken advantage of the fireplace to get rid of her body. Or... Samantha’s best friend owned the same charm bracelet. She would be an adult now, but if it doesn’t belong to Samantha, then, given the fact her best friend is the one who led us to him as a suspect, there’s a possibility he resurfaced here in Sevierville for another victim. For Claire. Either way, there’s a chance whoever took your son has the skull, too.”
The rush of his exhale swept across her neck and collarbones. “You make it sound like this guy is a serial killer.”
“Somebody drywalled that skull into one of Britland’s construction projects, used your kids as leverage because you found it, and is now tr
ying to tie up loose ends by destroying the evidence.” In her experience, that didn’t sound like the plan of a serial killer. Not with the seven-year cooling-off period and differences in MO between the victims. But Ana couldn’t ignore the number of victims missing in this investigation or the charm found on Benning’s property. No. The random—almost chaotic—moves this killer had made spoke of something much more dangerous. “I think whoever we’re dealing with is desperate to hide what they’ve done. No matter who gets in their way.”
“Just tell me what I need to do to get my son back,” Benning said.
“We start where this all began. Finding the skull. If we can pinpoint how and why the victim ended up in that wall, we’ll find who put them there.” Her phone vibrated from another incoming message from JC. Crime scene photos. She scanned through the shots her teammate had taken of the remains as the coroner sealed each bone into individual evidence bags. How the rest of the bones had gotten there, she didn’t know. She had to assume whoever’d started the fire had tried to destroy the evidence all at once. She wanted to be there, wanted a firsthand look at the scene, wanted to do something that would help the investigation and not make it so she didn’t feel so...helpless, but as long as Benning and his daughter were in danger, Ana would stay. She’d do for them what she hadn’t been able to for Samantha Perry. She’d protect them.
She studied the photos. The fire had most likely burned away any chance of comparing DNA from the remains, so it’d be almost impossible to identify the victim, but the slight discoloration on a few of the skull’s fragments—different than the rest—held her attention. Evidence of blunt-force trauma. The photo Benning had taken of the skull he’d recovered flashed across her mind. The owner of the skull from the construction site had been shot in the head. Not hit from behind. Another difference in MO. “The skull you found. What did it look like when you pulled it out of the wall?”
Midnight Abduction Page 6
