A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  The hair on the back of her neck stood up. She darted her gaze around. Something moved in her peripheral vision. She glanced at the pickup parked closest to the mailboxes.

  Inside the truck, an arm reached up and adjusted the mirror.

  She halted.

  The door swung open, and the light inside the cab came on. Mia’s heart lurched as a man climbed out. He slammed the door and moved straight toward her in the darkness.

  She hurried for the stairs.

  “Mia?”

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  His strides lengthened. “Hey, wait up!”

  She lifted the Mace. He lunged out of the shadows and ripped the tube from her hand.

  She shrieked to wake the dead.

  And realized it was Ric Santos standing in front of her. He smiled. She swung back her bags and knocked him in the ribs with a week’s worth of Coke Zero.

  “You jerk!”

  He laughed.

  She hit him again, harder, eliciting a curse in Spanish this time.

  “What are you doing skulking around out here? I nearly Maced you!”

  “I know.” Another lady-killer smile like the one she remembered from the bar.

  She stalked off toward the stairs. She’d stomped up half of them when she heard his footsteps echoing on the metal below.

  He caught up to her and took the plastic bags from her hand. Now she was totally disarmed, so she shot him a venomous look.

  “It’s nearly midnight. You should know better than to creep up on women in parking lots.” She stopped in front of her unit, and he propped a shoulder against her door frame as she fumbled with her keys.

  “In my defense, I didn’t creep,” he said.

  She glanced into his laughing eyes and felt her cheeks warm. He was right—he hadn’t really been creeping. And she’d left a message for him earlier, so she shouldn’t have been that surprised to see him. But then, she hadn’t expected him to show up at her home.

  She opened her door. He followed her inside, and she flipped on the light switch in the foyer.

  “Some people use the phone to communicate. You should try it.”

  But he was too busy glancing around her apartment. She remembered the mess she’d left it in this morning and decided not to turn on any more lights. She also decided not to be embarrassed that she’d spent her evening working and grocery shopping.

  He walked into the kitchen and flipped on a light switch, then set her groceries on the counter. He plunked her tube of Mace on the bar dividing the kitchen and living room.

  “You’re worried about security,” he said.

  She tossed her purse on the sofa and walked over. “So?”

  “So that’s good. You ever thought about getting a handgun?”

  “How do you know I don’t have one?” She slid a six-pack of soft drinks into the fridge and looked up at him. He was in her kitchen. She’d never expected to be standing in her kitchen talking to this man tonight.

  “Do you have one?” he asked.

  “God, no.”

  “Why not?”

  She snatched a grocery bag off the counter and put some Lean Cuisines in the freezer. “Same reason I don’t have an iron.”

  His eyebrows lifted.

  “If I had an iron, I might actually iron something.”

  He leaned back against her sink and watched her. She tossed the empty bag on the counter, and his gaze dropped, and in that brief instant, she discovered two things: Ric Santos was a breast man—not that she’d met many men who weren’t, but she definitely noticed his look of male appreciation at the sight of her snug-fitting T-shirt. She also discovered he had either manners or self-control, because he refrained from staring. An amazing number of men didn’t, which was why she wore a lab coat practically every second she was at the Delphi Center.

  She got a cup down from the cabinet and filled it with ice. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “I’ve got some wine somewhere.”

  “No. Thanks, but I can’t stay long,” he said. “I just stopped by to find out what’s up. You called me twice, so I’m guessing you finished the tests.”

  She filled her glass with water. “Not yet. I was calling about the victims’ clothes.”

  She’d thought he looked intense the last time she’d talked to him, but that was nothing compared to the way he was looking at her now.

  She cleared her throat. “I examined all of the items under a stereomicroscope and I had several interesting findings.”

  “Such as?”

  “Were you aware that each shirt has a puncture hole on the upper-right shoulder?”

  His brow furrowed. “What, you mean like a stab wound?”

  “I mean something much smaller. The kind of hole that would be consistent with a twenty-five-gauge needle. The sort someone might use to inject someone with a drug.”

  “Both victims’ clothes?”

  “Yes.” She took a sip of water. “In each case, there was a very small amount of blood left on the inside of the garment at the site of the hole. I’m testing both blood samples, but my guess is it’ll come back as belonging to the victims. You said both women are already in the database?”

  He nodded. “Their families submitted DNA samples to the missing-persons index years ago, hoping for a match someday. So far, we’ve had nothing.”

  “Well, it gives me something to compare the blood to. If the blood isn’t theirs, you’ll be the first to hear about it.”

  “Puncture holes.” Ric rubbed his jaw. He badly needed a shave, and Mia wondered if he hadn’t been home since yesterday, or if he was one of those men whose beards grew quickly.

  “I read in the paper about the Paradise Killer,” Mia ventured. “Investigators say they believe he’s drugging his victims. Women at bars are being cautioned about leaving drinks unattended, stuff like that.”

  “Ketamine,” Ric muttered, staring at the floor now. He was thinking about his case. Mia had seen this before with many of the homicide detectives she knew. They had this remarkable ability to focus. Mia could relate. She tended to block out everything when she peered into one of her microscopes.

  “I had one of our toxicologists examine the clothing,” she said, and Ric looked up. “That is what he found—trace amounts of ketamine hydrochloride in both cases.”

  Ric crossed his arms and watched her without speaking. She wasn’t sure what she read in his expression, but it seemed a lot like respect. To her dismay, she felt a flush of pride.

  “So,” she said nervously, and she knew she was in trouble here. Allowing herself to care what this man thought of her was an extremely dumb idea. But she also knew it was too late—she cared not only about his opinion of her, she cared about his case.

  “Anyway, I thought you’d want to know,” she said. “Your two missing hikers are definitely connected, and there’s a strong chance they’re linked to the Paradise Killer, too.” Actually, she had more to tell him, but she wasn’t prepared to do it yet. She didn’t want to share the rest of the test results until she got confirmation from one of her colleagues at the Delphi Center.

  Ric was watching her now with a gleam in his eyes, and her stupid heart fluttered.

  “You realize what this means?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “You just resurrected a dead investigation.”

  CHAPTER 15

  She heard screaming.

  The noise pierced through the fog and penetrated her brain.

  Elaina opened her eyes. Then squeezed them shut again to block out a thousand tiny daggers. Too much light. Too much noise. The high-pitched screams were coming from outside. She squinted at the window as the sound continued.

  Seagulls.

  She sat up. She was in Troy’s bed. He was sprawled out beside her, completely naked and completely conked out. She glanced around. Tangled sheets. Discarded blue jeans. A scrap of yellow peeking out from under the bed.

  The pain intensified as her brain began to pro
cess. How late was it? She looked around for a clock, but her gaze got hung up on Troy. He lay on his stomach, his muscular back rising and falling with his rhythmic breathing. Slowly, she pulled the sheet away from herself and eased out of the bed. The floor creaked under her foot. She froze. She glanced at him, but he was dead to the world. She took a tentative step, then another. She scooped her yellow bikini bottoms from the floor, grabbed her dress, and slipped out of the room.

  The hallway was dim. No outside windows. She crept past the bathroom where Dr. Lopez had stitched her up last night and avoided even a glimpse at the mirror. She crept into the living room, where she stepped into her bathing suit bottoms and pulled the dress over her head. It fell to the floor, and she stood there, blinking down at it. A vision of the dark, stinky alleyway slammed into her.

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think at all.

  She hastily pulled the dress up and tied the torn straps. She spotted her travel pouch on the coffee table and grabbed it, then remembered she had no shoes. It didn’t matter; she’d walk back on the beach. She crossed the living room and slid open the door.

  The sky was a painful, brilliant blue, and the mid-morning sun shimmered off the water. She clamped her hand over her eyes and stood there a moment, waiting for the nausea to pass. Seagulls screeched at one another, and she steeled herself against the noise as she padded across the deck to retrieve the other half of her swimsuit. As she walked toward the wooden stairs, her gaze landed on an empty bottle and two bar glasses sitting beside the hot tub that was built into the deck.

  She stopped and stared at it. She remembered Troy, his hair slicked back from his face, his gaze, dark and sensuous, as he’d lifted her out of the bubbling water and set her down on the deck. He’d pushed her knees apart and—

  Oh. My. God. Her legs went weak. Her skin tingled. She bit her lip and pictured him just a few rooms away, stretched out across his bed. She could go back there right now and crawl in with him. She could do it. But she shouldn’t. She should leave. That was the definition of a one-night stand—no morning after.

  Wasn’t it? She thought of him, bracing himself above her, gazing down at her in the shadows.

  The door slid open, and she jumped at the sound.

  He stood there in only a pair of shorts. Their gazes locked.

  She didn’t breathe, didn’t move, except for the brief instant when her attention veered to the staircase beside him. It was just a millisecond, but he caught it anyway, and his expression hardened.

  “It’s for you,” he said, and thrust out his hand.

  She stared blankly down at his phone. “It’s… what?”

  “Weaver. For you.”

  He took a step forward and handed her the phone, then turned and went back inside.

  She looked down at the cell phone. Her heart was thudding now. Her hands shook slightly, and she didn’t know if it was the aftereffects of alcohol or Troy or the realization that one of her colleagues had called her on his phone.

  She put it to her ear. “Special Agent McCord.”

  A slight pause, no doubt as Weaver absorbed this strangely formal greeting. Why had she said that?

  “Thought I’d catch you before you came into the office,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly formal, too. “I’m with a Detective Ricardo Santos from the San Marcos Police Department. He’s been trying to reach you. Any chance you could meet us on the island after your meeting with Chief Breck?”

  Her meeting with Chief Breck? It took her a full two seconds to realize the detective must be standing right there and Weaver was covering for her.

  “No problem,” she said, and glanced down at her clothes. “I’ll… um, just be another half hour or so.”

  “Good. Why don’t we meet up at that coffee place across from the hotel?”

  “Fine. Thank you.”

  They disconnected, and she took a wistful look at the stairs. So much for her attempt at a coolly casual exit. She should have known she’d be bad at this.

  She opened the door and went back inside to return Troy’s phone. Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and then he was crossing the living room, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and Teva sandals.

  She held his phone out to him. “That was Weaver.” She said, and instantly realized he knew this already.

  His eyebrows tipped up as he shoved the phone in his pocket.

  “I’m late for something. I have to go.”

  He walked into the kitchen and grabbed a set of keys off the counter.

  “I can walk,” she said. “It’s just down the beach.”

  Instead of answering, he strode past her and into the bedroom part of the house. He came back with a pair of pink flip-flops dangling from his fingers. He held them out to her.

  She clenched her teeth with annoyance as she took the shoes from him and slipped them on her feet. He was already out the door.

  He chose the pickup, thank goodness, and had the engine started when she climbed in.

  “Thank you for the ride,” she said.

  He slipped on a pair of sunglasses and said nothing as he backed out of the driveway and took the road back to the main highway. The silence hung there in the air, and she glanced uncomfortably around the cab. Her gaze landed on the clock.

  Nine-twenty? She’d missed half the morning. Her stomach clenched with anxiety as she tried to remember what she’d intended to do this morning. A call to Loomis to arrange surveillance for that suspect. Another call to Dr. Lawson. And Santos, although she could scratch that off the list now because he’d obviously come here to see her. He must have something important to share. And here she was, late and exhausted and hungover beyond belief.

  She glanced at Troy, silent and hostile behind his mirrored sunglasses. She’d known last night was a bad idea. She’d known it from the first shot of tequila, and she’d done it, anyway.

  He pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through, and she listened, astonished, as he ordered two Egg McMuffins and two large coffees. He paid for the food and shoved the cups in the console, then handed her one of the sacks.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Breakfast.”

  Her gaze narrowed on him. She dropped the bag on the floor and looked out the window. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He pulled back onto the main highway and drove the rest of the short distance to her hotel. He pulled up to the front door and braked, but didn’t even bother to put the truck in Park.

  A bitter lump lodged in her throat. She knew what he was doing, and she wanted to hit him.

  Instead, she gathered her things and climbed out.

  “Thank you,” she said as she closed the door.

  She turned and walked into her hotel, carrying a cup of McDonald’s coffee and wearing another woman’s shoes.

  The thousand daggers had morphed into a pair of hammers at her temples by the time Elaina walked into Dot’s Diner. With much reluctance, she removed her sunglasses and scanned the room for Weaver. She spotted the familiar back of his head on the other side of the restaurant. The dark-haired detective seated across from him looked up as she neared the table.

  “Detective Santos? Elaina McCord.” She held out her hand. The detective gave her a firm handshake while checking out her face.

  “Holy crap, what happened to you?” Weaver asked.

  She slid into the booth beside him. “It’s nothing,” she told him.

  “Nothing?”

  “Just a few stitches.”

  “Did Troy have something to do with that?” Weaver demanded. “I swear to God, I’ll kick his redneck ass right back to the trailer park.”

  Elaina shot him a “drop it” look as she took a menu from behind the napkin dispenser. Her stomach did a flip-flop the instant she opened it.

  “Who’s Troy?”

  She glanced across the table. Detective Santos was watching her.

  “No one,” she told him. And then to Weaver: “I got into a li
ttle scuffle in Matamoros yesterday. It’s really no big deal.”

  “I thought you were checking out veterinary clinics,” he said. “Don’t tell me you went down there alone.”

  “Troy was with me. We ran into some thugs but squeaked out okay.” The waitress showed up, and Elaina quickly changed the subject. “Water, please. And a cup of coffee. Black.”

  She felt both men watching her as she tucked the menu away and pulled a notepad from her purse. She knew Weaver was busy noticing every detail of her appearance, from her still-damp hair to her slightly rumpled shirt and slacks, which she’d planned to iron in her hotel room the night before, but as of twenty minutes ago had still been draped over an armchair.

  She glanced across the table at the detective, who—despite a long drive from San Marcos—managed to look much more professional than she did in his button-down shirt and slacks.

  “So,” she said crisply. “Detective Santos. Your department sent you down here? Does that mean you have something relevant to our case?”

  He watched her for a moment, and she felt herself being sized up. “It’s Ric,” he said. “And I’ve got two linked cases. Two women who went missing up in Hays County.”

  “Two linked cases? That’s a huge break.” Elaina turned to Weaver. “What did Loomis say?”

  The waitress reappeared with coffee and water. Elaina lifted the glass and downed half the water in one sip.

  “He was noncommittal,” Weaver told her. “He’s not convinced, but at least he’s not dismissing it out of hand.”

  She turned her attention back to Ric. “Tell me about your cases.”

  “Both college students,” he said. “They disappeared from separate nature trails where they’d gone hiking alone. Their bodies were never recovered, but we found their clothes. According to a tracer at the Delphi Center, it looks like they were injected with a shot of ketamine hydrochloride, upper right arm.”

  Elaina leaned forward. “When were the abductions?”

  “February five years ago. Both victims had told their roommates they planned to spend the day hiking at Devil’s Gorge.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “About ten miles west of town. It’s a state park. There’s some endangered bird that nests there, I think.”