by Dana Nussio
Her jaw tightened. “I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, I’m not saying I know anything. But we can’t just sit on our hands and wait in case he strikes again, can we?”
Touché. Her heavily lashed eyelids lifted, and she glared up at him.
Deidre chuckled as she headed to her own desk, closest to the door. “It’s good that we’re all getting to know each other better.”
Eric gestured toward Tony with his thumb. “Don’t worry about him. He’s all grumble with no fangs. He’s always tough on the new guy, and lucky for me, you’re it.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“All of us bring something new to the task force,” Eric said. “The special agent here also happens to be a veritable computer genius.”
“It’s my job.”
Eric brushed away Tony’s comment with a wave. “And I might look mild, but I’m seasoned in pursuing human traffickers. So, what’s your superpower?”
Tony was careful not to look interested, but he wanted to know the answer, too. The details they’d been given about her were sparse.
“Besides being first on the scene when the victims’ bodies were discovered along the Brighton Mountain Bike Trail, I guess it’s my voice.”
Tony’s back teeth clenched before he could stop them, but at least the others weren’t looking his way.
“Oh, that’s right,” Eric said. “That was Special Agent Dawson’s idea. Something to sweeten the deal while we’re trolling for online predators. Special Agent Lazzaro wasn’t a fan of the plan.”
Her gaze shifted to Tony, and she seemed to dare him to look away first.
“Most suspects prefer the anonymity of text-only chats.”
“You do kind of sound like a kid, though,” Eric said.
“Thanks, I think. I’ve never been hired for my voice before.”
She laughed then, a sound like the smoothest whiskey pouring on ice, and the sensation that sluiced over Tony and headed south couldn’t have been more different from the jab he’d felt earlier. With a laugh like that she could have worked as a phone-sex operator. He was tempted to tell her so, but the door opening again cut them off. Good thing for that.
Special Agent Dawson entered the way he always did, coffee in one hand, a plate with a Danish in the other and a collapsible umbrella handle strap looped over his wrist.
“I see you’ve already met,” he said as he introduced himself.
“We’re old friends now,” Eric answered for all of them.
“Well, let’s get this done.” Dawson dropped his Danish off in his own cubicle and continued toward them. “The sooner we close this case, the sooner my wife and girls can sleep again. The trail’s already going cold.”
“You’re sure we’re headed in the right direction?” Tony asked.
“I’m not sure of anything. But we already know that one of the young women was computer savvy and was hanging out in chat rooms. I don’t think this was the adventure she was looking for.”
Two other team members had followed him into the office, and Dawson asked them to introduce themselves.
“Robert Golden, Homeland Security,” the graying one with the paunch told her.
The guy with a crew cut and a gym body lifted his hand in a wave. “Don Strickland, Detroit Police.”
“Trooper, tell the team a little bit about yourself,” Dawson said.
Kelly shifted her feet. “I’ve worked with the state police for three years, assigned to the Brighton Post. I’m usually alone in my own patrol car, so you’ll need to give me a few days to get used to working in an office.”
She might have said something else after that, but Tony couldn’t get past the thought that she’d been a police officer that long. She wasn’t a rookie, though nothing could prepare someone to work on this task force.
“One more thing. I’ll do whatever it takes to get this guy. It’s personal for me. I mean, I live in Brighton.”
Dawson’s gaze narrowed. “Are you sure you’re not too close to this?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Tony wasn’t certain of many things. He definitely wasn’t sure this officer’s voice would help them locate the suspect who’d murdered these victims or even if they’d met online before the attack. But he was convinced of two things at that moment. The first was that he wanted to get this guy—and in statistical likelihood the suspect was male—as much as the trooper did.
His second certainty concerned him more, though. With that gut sense law-enforcement officers hone over time, he knew that the state trooper who’d just marched in there to mess up the task force’s equilibrium had also just lied to the team. What he didn’t know was why.
Chapter 2
Kelly slid her chair closer to the edge of her cubicle, so she could see the office door. She could shoot out and be back on Interstate 96 on her way to the Spencer Road exit and the Brighton Post in ten minutes flat.
At least she was wanted there.
A report lay open on her desk, but the words and the grisly crime scene photographs swam on the pages in front of her. This was a mistake. She shouldn’t be there, and it went beyond the special agent who clearly agreed with her on at least that.
She’d believed she could do this. That eighteen years was enough time. Enough distance from those bicycles. That creepy smile. She’d been wrong. Shame filled her, heavy and familiar. The uniform that she wasn’t supposed to be wearing seemed to be the only thing preventing her from splintering into thousands of pieces.
But she had to keep it together, for Emily’s sake. She took several deep breaths and focused on a pushpin on her bare bulletin board instead of the file. Finally, her rapid heartbeat slowed.
She’d hoped for an opportunity to make up for the mistakes she’d made following her friend’s abduction, and now she was balking. Yes, it would require her to work with someone who clearly didn’t want her there, but atonement wasn’t supposed to be easy.
What was Special Agent Lazzaro’s problem with her, anyway? He must have thought that those Italian good looks of his—the kind that a sculptor’s knife would have loved and a sonnet or two had already mentioned—gave him an excuse to be a jerk. Not that she’d noticed the olive skin, that strong jaw, the dimple in his chin or those blue-gray eyes, anyway, but none of those things made the way he’d spoken to her okay. What had she ever done to him?
Eric had said the agent was always hard on new team members, but she couldn’t help thinking it might be something more. That she was a woman? Well, tough crap. She’d proven herself to her fellow troopers by working harder than any of them. If he thought rudeness from one curmudgeonly FBI agent would be enough to scare her off, then he was about to find out how wrong he was.
“You about ready?”
She nearly jumped out of her seat as Tony leaned in to speak to her. The cubicle’s walls had prevented her from seeing his approach, but he’d caught her thinking about him. She didn’t have time to worry about him or anyone else when they had a double murder to investigate.
“Uh. Ready?” Could she have sounded any less like she was about to prove something to him? And why did his eyes have to smile like that, before his lips even moved?
“I just wanted to know if you’re finally up to speed on the case so we can get started. You know, on the voice recordings.”
“For the record, I was already well informed about this case. I was first on the scene, remember?” She took a breath so she wouldn’t tell him where he could shove all his assumptions. “Now what did you say about recordings?”
“You didn’t think you were going to do all of this live, did you?”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a way that was beginning to annoy her. As a matter of fact, she had believed she would always be speaking live, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of having her confirm it.
“I figured at leas
t some of it.”
“Then you were right. Here, let’s go back to my computer to make the recordings.”
He strode to his desk without looking back at her. She grabbed the binder of case overviews that Dawson had given her and fell into step behind him. Inside his cubicle, Lazzaro had already turned his straight-back visitor chair so that it was right next to his. Too close for Kelly’s comfort, but the microphone cord wasn’t long enough to reach across the room.
Nothing about the special agent’s cubicle surprised her, from the obsessively straight collection of pencils in his top desk drawer to the line of photographs—some children, some adults—in the bottom corner of his bulletin board. All about a half inch apart. Just like the crisp creases in his slacks and dress shirt and his perfectly knotted tie that weren’t supposed to be parts of a uniform, Tony Lazzaro was all about preciseness and control. Her arrival must have thrown off his perfect balance.
She rested the binder on the corner of his desk, pulled the seat back and sat. A masculine amber scent filled her nostrils. She’d never been a fan of cologne, but this one was almost pleasant. Distracting.
But she didn’t get distracted. By anyone. If she’d never allowed male-female nonsense to disrupt work with her fellow troopers, even the hotties, she should have no trouble ignoring a surly law enforcement officer. Especially one who had a sprinkling of gray in his black-brown hair that made him look at least a decade older than her twenty-seven.
Tony obviously had no trouble tuning her out as he focused on his laptop and clicked through several screens. Then he moved the standing microphone closer to her. She didn’t miss his frown when he noticed the binder, out of place on his orderly desk.
“Now we just need to record the early stuff. The greetings,” he said. “That way you can practice the flirtation.”
Her breath rushed out in a choked sound. “Are you saying that some victims flirt with their eventual offenders?”
The thought of it made her stomach roll. Emily’s attacker had required no enticement. No encouragement at all.
“I guess some potential victims think they’re supposed to talk more like grown-ups would when they’re in online chat rooms,” he explained. “Seventy-six percent of underage victims first encounter their offenders in chats.”
Kelly blinked away images from her past to focus on details of the current case. On offenders they might have a chance to stop.
“But don’t victims in chat rooms believe they’re talking to someone their own age and not some guy in his sixties with a double chin and a second mortgage?”
“Maybe potential offenders aren’t that specific, but most tell their victims they’re older when they initiate contact.”
As he spoke, he scrolled through a website with a series of conversations rolling down the screen.
She leaned forward to get a better look. “That’s where you’ll have me hanging out? In chat rooms like that one?”
He closed the browser, whether to keep her from seeing what he was looking at or to move on, she wasn’t sure.
“Not you, really. Just an online identity to which you’ll be lending your voice. You won’t always be the one at the keyboard, either. It can be any of us. The screen name will be INVISIBLE ME.”
“Because victims are often looking for someone to pay attention to them and actually listen to them?”
“That’s right. Some of them get more than they bargain for.”
“Especially kids like Sienna and Madison.”
She expected him to say something about her referring to the recent murder victims by their first names instead of calling them “Miss Cottingham” and “Miss Blackwell,” but he nodded at his screen.
“What does all this have to do with the Dark Web?” She hated asking so many questions, but he seemed knowledgeable, and she needed to catch up quickly. “I don’t know as much about that as I should. I spend most of my work time investigating traffic accidents and issuing citations.”
He slid a glance her way and then launched another browser, one she didn’t recognize.
“Most people don’t know a lot about it. The Dark Web is just a small part of the Deep Web, that part of the Internet that includes email accounts and bank records. Only the Dark Web is different. You access it using a software that makes you anonymous by disguising your computer’s IP address. Then visitors can participate in illegal activities without being tracked. Drugs, weapons, assassins...”
“Porn?”
This time, he turned to face her. “That and human trafficking. Those two things are almost always linked.”
“Do you think our victims visited sites on the Dark Web?”
“Probably not. It requires too much computer know-how since the sites aren’t indexed. It’s more difficult to do a search there.” He closed the screen and held his hands wide. “But the suspect might hang out on the Dark Web as well as chat rooms in the Surface Web.”
“Then it makes sense to look both places.”
“Particularly now that he’s had a taste of murder. His cooling-off period between the two girls and his next victim might be decreased. If this is even his first time.”
Was he watching her because he was discussing the possibility that they were dealing with a serial killer when he’d criticized her earlier for jumping to that same conclusion? Or did he expect her to race out the door after the details he’d shared with her? He put his headset around his neck, handed her a second one and pointed to the microphone.
“Ready?”
She straightened in the chair. “We’re going to record stuff right here?”
“Why? Can’t turn on your charm with an audience present? Hate to tell you this, Trooper, but we can’t provide you with a private sound booth.”
The patronizing way he said trooper made pinpricks form on the back of her neck. He might as well have said sweetheart, and she was not okay with that.
“Hello,” she said into the microphone.
“Don’t say it like you’re about to try to sell him a houseful of vinyl windows.”
“Give me a minute. I haven’t done this before.”
“No kidding. And you thought you were going to do all of this live.”
Her glare wasn’t as effective as it would have been if he’d looked at her.
“By the time you have a voice conversation with a suspect, you won’t be strangers, at least in that world. You’ll even tell him your real name is Mackenzie. But if you don’t think you can do it, I’ll be happy to approach Special Agent Dawson and tell him his idea is a bust.”
“Not necessary,” she ground out.
It didn’t matter that Kelly was so far out of her comfort zone. This jerk had underestimated her, and he should know it. She wouldn’t allow him to make her forget why she was there, either. She’d come to track a killer, and there was nothing he could do to stop her. She gripped the microphone and pushed the button to speak.
“Hi there.” That voice didn’t even sound like her. So smooth. A sexy laugh formed with words. “I’m so glad we finally get to speak to each other. I’ve wondered what your voice would sound like.”
She released the button and, as she pulled her hand away, she peeked over to catch him watching her. He quickly turned back to his computer screen.
“How was that?”
He cleared his throat but didn’t look her way. “Fine.”
“Good. What else do you need me to say?”
“How about I just ask you some questions, and you answer them the way you would’ve at about thirteen?”
“You mean with a giggle and maybe a snort?”
“You snort?”
“Not anymore. Well, not much.”
He gave her a few more phrases to record.
“Hey, gotta go. My mom’s coming upstairs,” Kelly said, recording the last. In her own headset,
the words sounded exactly like teenage Kelly would have spoken them.
“Okay, we’re done.” Tony cleared his throat again. “Good job on those.”
“You don’t need anything else?”
He shook his head.
She stood and pushed the chair to the open spot in the corner of the cubicle and grabbed her binder. She opened the book to the page she’d been reading before he’d interrupted her: an open case involving a missing teenage boy.
“Just staring at those photos isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
“You don’t think familiarizing myself with these other cases can help? I have fresh eyes. Maybe I’ll see something that others have missed.” She gestured toward his laptop. “Anyway, how are you so sure that whatever you do on that computer will help more?”
She braced herself for his hot retort. He hadn’t disappointed her all morning. When he didn’t answer, she lifted her gaze to find him staring, not at her but at that straight line of photos on his bulletin board.
“Looks like you have some pictures of your own. Are those some of the people you’ve helped? Do you look at them when you need a pick-me-up?”
“No.”
At the low tone of his voice, she regretted asking. Something told her that Special Agent Lazzaro was the type of guy who recorded his defeats. Not his victories.
“You don’t have to answer,” she rushed to say.
But he appeared lost in the photos and the stories that must have clung to them. When he finally turned back to her, his eyes were suspiciously shiny. He quickly lowered his gaze to his desk.
“Those are the ones we didn’t help. They’re there to remind me just what is at stake.”
Chapter 3
Cory Fox gripped the video game controller with both hands as he navigated the danger-filled path on his computer screen to save Princess Amelia from the evil dragon. Usually, he would have scaled those walls and leaped the obstacles with ease in his new favorite game, Rescuing the Royals. Not so much this morning. He’d already fallen through the earth twice, and he hadn’t even made it close enough to the dragon to try out his superpower lightning flashes.
