A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  He watched her, weighing the pros and cons of bringing her in. Pro, she was a fed, meaning resources and connections. Con, she was a fed, meaning red tape and other bullshit he didn’t want to deal with. Plus, she was a she, which wasn’t going to win her any brownie points around here. If he aligned himself with her, he’d be signing up for a crapload of trash talk from now until he finished this project, possibly beyond.

  Elaina slumped in her chair and gazed out at the water, as if he weren’t even there.

  “Breck isn’t the lead.”

  She turned her head. Blinked. “What?”

  “It’s not Breck you have to watch out for. He’s the lead, yes, technically, because these last two bodies turned up on the island, which is his jurisdiction. But that ranger you met yesterday, he’ll be the one calling the shots now, all the way from Austin. He’s got the governor’s ear, and if this turns out to be a serial killer at one of the state’s most popular beach resorts, you can bet the governor’ll get involved, even if only behind the scenes.”

  “The Texas Ranger. I don’t even know his name.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Troy said. “It’s his connections you need to remember. Other thing is your boss, Scarborough. He and Breck go way back.”

  She looked skeptical. “Scarborough and Breck?”

  “They were frat brothers at Texas State. I’m surprised he didn’t mention that when he sent you up here. And if your boss sent you here, knowing full well how Breck would react, there has to be a reason.”

  She looked out over the water, those blue eyes hot. He liked the thrust of her chin. She resented being manipulated, but she wasn’t about to give up.

  “You know, you still haven’t told me what your interest is in this case,” she said.

  He’d known she’d get back to that. “I write crime. And these murders are happening in my backyard.”

  “Is that all? Proximity?”

  He looked into her eyes, and he could see she believed there was more to his motive. She was right.

  Troy leaned forward. “If your theory holds water—”

  “It does.”

  “Okay, assume you’re right. Then Mary Beth Cooper was one of this guy’s first victims. That would mean the man who confessed to killing her was lying, and my book is wrong.”

  “So you’re here to set the record straight?”

  “I don’t like to be wrong, Agent McCord.” He’d bet she didn’t, either.

  She held his gaze for a long moment, and he saw the first flicker of trust. Then she looked away.

  “You seem to know the local politics,” she said.

  “I grew up around here.”

  “You seem to be trying to help me.”

  “Maybe.”

  She turned to face him. “I won’t be a source for you. I’ve got enough career problems without my boss seeing me quoted in some pulp fiction novel.”

  “I write nonfiction. It’s called true crime.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m off limits to you as a source.”

  Troy suppressed a smile. Off limits had never been part of his vocabulary. “Whatever you say.”

  “Why did you stop by, anyway?”

  He watched her, liking her attitude and knowing he would regret what he was about to do. “Thought you might want a tour.”

  She eyed him warily. “A tour of what?”

  “The crime scene.”

  • • •

  Troy Stockton’s boat was flat and narrow, and looked different from all the other flat, narrow fishing boats living at the Lito Island Marina.

  “It’s black,” Elaina said, gazing down at it from the dock.

  “So?” He undid the bowline and whipped it into a neat coil, which he tossed on the boat’s floor.

  “All the other boats are white.” She stepped aboard. Everything shifted, and he caught her arm to steady her.

  “No law against black.” His hand dropped away, and he turned to flip some switches at the helm. Soon the engine grunted.

  “Looks like it can go in pretty shallow water.”

  “Eight inches,” he said with a touch of pride.

  She looked around for a good place to stand. There weren’t many choices, so she rested a hand on the captain’s chair as they eased back out of the slip.

  “Hold on.” He shifted gears, and then they were gliding in the other direction, moving out of the sheltering cove the marina shared with the police dock. Elaina glanced over her shoulder and watched the pier recede. She was going out on a boat with a man she barely knew, without letting her boss or anyone else know what she was doing. Not terribly smart.

  She patted her BlackBerry in her back pocket. Her Glock was stashed in the Bianchi holster at her ankle, and if Troy tried anything funny, he was going in the bay.

  Elaina shifted, putting some distance between them. She couldn’t explain why he made her uneasy. It made no sense, because she spent every day surrounded by macho types—guys trained in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, and mind games. Since her first day in Brownsville, many of the Bureau, DEA, and Homeland Security guys had attempted to intimidate her either physically or by getting in her head, and she’d learned to blow them off.

  But Troy was harder to ignore.

  He stood between the helm and the captain’s chair, and she stood beside him, trying not to cling too tightly and reveal her fear of toppling out of the boat. She glanced over and noticed his ropey forearms and powerful calves. He was some sort of athlete, obviously, and she tried to guess the sport.

  “You get seasick?” Troy asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “You look uncomfortable.” But he wasn’t even looking at her. Those eyes—which were the exact green color of the bay—were trained on the southern horizon. He wore cargo shorts and Teva sandals today. His white T-shirt contrasted with his sun-browned skin, and she envisioned him on a surfboard.

  Why was she even thinking about this? She needed to focus on the case, not on Troy Stockton. This man had a reputation. It was coming back to her in bits and pieces. She didn’t usually read celebrity mags, but she had a vague recollection of flipping through People at her dentist’s office. Troy had been photographed with some gorgeous starlet. That girl from Corpus Christi. What the hell was her name?

  “That was some profile you came up with.”

  She cut a glance at Troy and saw the smile playing at the corner of his mouth. She bristled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “White male. Likes hunting and fishing. Owns a boat. Sounds like half the men on this island, including me.” He stared down at her, serious now. “Except for the getting-it-up part.”

  Elaina felt a blush creep up her neck. “Look, Troy—”

  “Here we are.” The boat slowed abruptly as he pushed the throttle up, and she stumbled into him. “She was found just over there,” he said.

  Elaina looked in the direction he was pointing, but saw nothing unusual. Just more grass and water.

  “How do you know?”

  He tapped his control panel, and she noticed the GPS. “I got the coordinates.”

  He got the coordinates. From the police, no doubt, who clearly were sharing information with members of the public, but leaving her completely in the dark.

  “They got a good set of prints from the victim last night.” Troy veered close to the shoreline, and the water was so shallow, Elaina could see grass on the bottom. “They’ll run the thumbs through DMV, hopefully get an ID soon.”

  Elaina thought of Valerie Monroe, who’d graduated third in her class at Baylor Med and had been accepted as an intern at Texas Children’s Hospital. She wondered what Valerie’s parents were doing at this moment. Most likely they were either en route to Lito Island or already camped out at the police station, waiting for news.

  Troy veered left into a narrow inlet.

  “We’re going in?”

  “You want to see it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but…” She watched him
deftly steer the boat through the tight opening. The water wasn’t even a foot deep, and she saw ripples in the sand as they skimmed along the surface. “What if we run aground?”

  He smiled. “You get out and push.”

  But they didn’t run aground. He tipped up the engine and slowed down, using just enough speed to maintain control over the steering as they maneuvered this way and that through all the channels. She began to doubt that he really knew where he was going.

  She spotted something yellow tangled in the reeds. “Look there.” She pointed.

  “Well, shit.” He let the motor stall and then jumped out of the boat and waded over to take a look. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?”

  The boat drifted into the grass and bumped against the bottom.

  Troy gazed down at the thin yellow twine but didn’t touch it. “They must not have seen this,” he muttered. “Or maybe they came in from the south.”

  “Who came in?”

  He looked up. “The crime-scene guys. Breck, Maynard, Chavez. They should have collected all this. It’s evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  He trudged back to the boat and shoved it into the center of the narrow channel.

  “Of your unsub.” He climbed aboard and got them moving again. “This marsh, it’s like a maze. I grew up all over this bay, and I get lost half the time. Looks like the killer used twine to mark the route so he could find his way out after dumping the body.”

  Elaina stared at the twine, struck by the idea.

  “And how do we know it came from him?” she asked. “Maybe Breck left it.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because.” Troy gave her a hard look. “They found it in Gina’s case, too. He leaves it every time.”

  Elaina continued to look queasy, so Troy hugged the coast as he headed back in. He felt her behind him as she silently gripped the chair.

  She hadn’t liked him poking holes in her profile, but that was too damn bad. Sure, the profile sounded good in theory, but given the demographics around here, it didn’t narrow things down a whole lot. Troy had never cared much for mind hunters. Most of them stayed holed up in their basement offices, rattling off psychobabble while the real cops rolled up their sleeves and worked the cases. If criminal profiling was Elaina’s thing, she was going to have an uphill battle getting anyone around here to buy into it. Next best thing to fortune-telling, as far as Breck was concerned.

  Troy glanced back at Elaina and saw that she still had that uneasy look. Her nose was pink, too, and she’d forgotten sunscreen. She wasn’t from around here, evidently, but he didn’t know her background. He needed to do some digging and find out just how green a greenhorn she was.

  She squinted at something up ahead, and he followed her gaze.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Dunno,” he said. But as they neared the marina, it became clear something had gone down during their little sight-seeing cruise. Cars and news vans filled the LIPD parking lot.

  “Breck’s holding a press conference,” Troy guessed, turning into the cove. They glided past the police station, and Elaina turned to stare at the crowd.

  Troy pulled into his slip without touching the dock. He hopped out and tied the bowline to a cleat, then held out a hand for Elaina.

  She barely glanced at it as she stepped onto the pier without help.

  “I hope your police chief knows what he’s doing,” she said. “If he releases too much detail, he’ll compromise the investigation.”

  “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. The man hates reporters.”

  “But he talks to you?”

  Troy walked across the pier and surveyed the situation. Breck was talking to the media—or more likely, deflecting their questions—from the station house steps. Cinco stood on the sidelines. Troy caught his eye, and he joined them on the lawn beside the marina.

  “What’s up, Cinc?”

  He glanced at Elaina. Then he eyed Troy’s muddy sandals and seemed to put together where they’d been.

  “Good news and bad news,” Cinco said. “We got an ID. Girl’s name is Whitney Bensen.”

  Troy felt Elaina go rigid beside him.

  “What about Valerie?” she asked.

  “That’s the bad news,” Cinco told her. “Valerie Monroe is still missing.”

  • • •

  Jamie’s stomach clenched as she watched the television. “Are you seeing this?”

  She glanced across her apartment to where Noah sat camped out on a beanbag chair beside a pack of Oreos.

  “Noah? Are you watching?”

  But he was intent on his Nintendo DS. “Shit!” He glanced up finally. “What the hell, Jamie? I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “They identified that victim from the park. And now they’ve got another girl missing. Maybe she’s the one we saw on the mainland. I’m calling the cops!”

  Jamie lunged for her phone, and Noah shot up from the floor.

  “What are you, crazy?” He jerked the phone from her hand. “What are you gonna say, huh? How you were walking along and stumbled into some dead girl and how you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “That was your idea! I wanted to call nine-one-one!”

  “Great plan, James. Call the cops out there when you got dope in your car and Ecstasy stashed in your backpack. I’m on fucking probation.”

  She bit her lip and glanced past him at the television.

  “Just chill out, okay? Let the cops handle it.”

  She looked up into those blue eyes. Which were bloodshot, of course. Why did she get mixed up with these guys? All her life, she’d been a magnet for beautiful, do-nothing men with zero ambition.

  “Come on.” He kissed her forehead and wrapped those muscular arms around her. “The cops’ll figure it out. There’s nothing we coulda done, anyway. She was dead, remember?”

  Jamie tensed. Yeah, she remembered. The image of that mutilated girl had been haunting her for days. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. She was turning into a mental case.

  She wrapped her arms around Noah and held on. She felt better somehow.

  “What about an anonymous tip?” she said. “I could just stop by a pay phone. Call the sheriff’s office.”

  “Shit, don’t you watch TV? They’ve got surveillance cams, like, everywhere. And they can trace your cell. You call anyone, they’ll be at your door in no time. Trust me, okay? Just let it go.”

  Jamie closed her eyes and listened to the broadcaster drone on. “. . . two vicious deaths in just three months at this sunny coastal paradise…”

  Make that three deaths. Or four, if this other missing girl wasn’t the same one they’d seen. Jamie thought of the corpse, and her stomach turned again.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  But she wouldn’t look at him. She knew what she had to do.

  CHAPTER 4

  Coconuts had been Troy’s favorite fishing hole once upon a time. But blender drinks and half-wasted twenty-year-olds had lost their appeal, and it had been years since he’d set foot in the place. He spotted Cinco bellied up to the outdoor bar underneath a thatched roof. In board shorts and a T-shirt, his friend looked off-duty. But looks could be deceiving.

  Troy took the stool beside him and flagged the bartender.

  “Anything interesting?”

  Cinco shrugged. “Not yet. Place is just getting going, though.”

  Lito’s bikini girls spent their mornings sleeping off hangovers. They hit the beach all afternoon. About an hour after sundown, they’d start working their way down the two-mile stretch of shoreline known as the Strip. Coconuts was the most popular destination by far, dominating the scene with loud music, cheap drinks, and waitresses who wore tops made of actual coconuts.

  Troy surveyed the crowd. “How many hits you get on Whitney Bensen’s credit card?”

  “Two,” Cinco said.

&
nbsp; “And Gina Calvert was here, too?”

  “Spring break,” Cinco said. “She spent money here four nights in a row.”

  Troy nodded. Could be a coincidence. But it was one worth pursuing, which was why Cinco was here on his night off, poking around. Of all Breck’s men, Cinco looked the youngest and was the least likely to stand out.

  The bartender slid a Dos Equis across the counter. Troy took a swig and pivoted his stool so he could look at the crowd. Half of them were in the pool, where the long swim-up bar gave everyone a chance to check out the goods before making a play.

  “You think he’s here?” Cinco asked.

  “Could be.” Troy scanned the faces. Everyone was in pickup mode, but most seemed to be in groups. Fraternity boys, probably down from Austin. Their guy would be solo. Troy was no profiler, but he knew that much.

  “So.” Cinco tipped back his beer. “Elaina McCord. Not your usual type.”

  Troy glanced at him.

  “Kind of uptight,” Cinco said. “Pretty, though. And smart. She’s already figured out she needs to make herself useful, quick, or she’ll be back to serving warrants and running background checks in Brownsville.”

  “How do you know what she does in Brownsville?”

  “Spent the afternoon with her at the station house, tracking down records. She’s putting together a suspect list.”

  “And you’re helping her.” Troy shook his head. Not a great strategy on Cinco’s part. Breck wouldn’t like it. But Cinco was a sucker for a pretty woman, always had been.

  “They’re combing the bay tonight,” Cinco said.

  “Who, Breck?”

  “And the sheriff. And the Coast Guard. So far, nothing.”

  Troy doubted they’d find anything tonight—Whitney Bensen was all over the news. But then, maybe this guy wanted to make a splash. Elaina had said he was “ego driven,” so maybe he’d like the challenge of dumping another body right under the authorities’ noses.

  “Breck still hung up on the copycat theory?” Troy asked.

  “Not with this other woman missing. Even without the Mary Beth Cooper murder, he’s pretty sure we’re looking at a serial killer.”