by Alexa Grace
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Gabe paced back and forth in front of his office window. He couldn't get to Anthony's identity. Gabe tried to trace the killer through his IP address, but found that Anthony was either using a firewall to deny traffic, or he was using multiple proxies around the world that masked his original IP address. He called his contact at Teen Chat and was given a name and address for @Anthony16 that he researched, and discovered neither existed.
At the end of his rope, he thought about what Brody told him about going outside the box. His brother was adamant about doing everything by the book. But then, Gabe thought, Brody was referring to instances where he had a search warrant for the subject's computer and the computer was in his possession. This was a different scenario, he reasoned, because he didn't have a warrant or the subject's computer in his reach. He wasn't searching for evidence. Gabe needed Anthony's identity.
Stumped, he called Frankie Douglas-Hansen, a fellow private investigator he'd met at conferences, with whom he'd become good friends. They talked for about twenty minutes, as Frankie filled him in on her pregnancy, and gave him some advice for hacking Anthony's computer.
Gabe went back into Teen Chat and waited thirty minutes before @Anthony16 joined the chat room. Well, hello serial killer. He initiated a chat acting as an interested preteen. After a short conversation with @Anthony16, he asked for a photograph. Gabe was more than happy to oblige. Using Carly's sex sting photo, he attached a backdoor Trojan Horse virus that would report directly to him @Anthony16's real IP address, which would enable him to get Anthony's real name and address.
Before long Gabe tracked @Anthony16 to his correct IP address, thanks to his Trojan-infected bait photo, just as Frankie had advised. He now had the killer's real name. Jim Ryder? The deputy? Thinking there must be more than one Jim Ryder, he looked up employment history. The only Jim Ryder in Shawnee County was a deputy on his brother's team. He was the same guy who'd ridden with the others in the back of the van he drove to Ron Tyler's house.
He had to get to Brody right away with this information. Calling both Brody's office and cell phone, he got no answer. Finally, he dialed Cameron's number.
"Cam, I know who @Anthony16 is. It's your deputy, Jim Ryder. He's the killer."
"We just figured it out, too. I'm getting a search warrant for his place signed by Judge Carlson right now. Brody and Carly are driving to his house to pick him up for questioning."
"They went without backup?" Gabe asked.
"I'm heading that way as soon as I get Alison to the safe house and Gail has the search warrant signed," said Cameron.
"I'm going now!"
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Brody slowly drove up to Ryder's house. Cameron made Ryder turn in his county patrol car, but Brody knew he had an old Ford truck. There was no vehicle in the driveway, but it could be parked in the closed garage. Pulling into the driveway, he stopped a short distance from the side door of the house. He and Carly jumped out of the vehicle.
"Are you armed?" asked Brody.
"Aren't I always armed?" replied Carly, pulling her jacket back to reveal her Glock in its holster.
"Okay, you check the garage, while I knock on the door."
Brody knocked several times, and then peered in through a window. It seemed no one was home. Carly appeared at the front of the garage and signaled it was empty.
"I'm checking the barn," she said.
"I'll walk the perimeter and check more windows."
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The barn was dark, so Carly pulled a small flashlight from her jacket pocket and flipped it on. The air was thick with dust, and smells of straw, manure, and something yet-to-be-identified filled her lungs. There was an eerie quality about the shadowy barn that made her skin crawl. She had a bad feeling about the barn, and her intuition was usually right. Spotting a couple of rough wooden stalls at the back of the barn, she checked out each one and found nothing.
Carly was heading back to the barn's entrance when her foot became entangled in something metallic and she slammed onto the dirt floor, knocking the wind out of her. Collecting herself, she crawled on all fours to identify what had tripped her. The area where she'd stumbled was covered with a thick layer of hay. Brushing it aside, she discovered a metal latch. Getting to her feet, she cleared away the layer of hay until a trapdoor revealed itself. Judging from the sawdust in its cracks, the door had been built recently.
Grabbing the latch, she pulled until the door opened, and saw an old wooden ladder leading into a pitch-black room below. That's odd, she thought. If one was going to all the trouble to make a new door, why is this ladder so old? Pulling out her flashlight, Carly swept the light back and forth and realized the room was larger than it first appeared. She backed onto the ladder, and rung by rung descended into the dark room. The ladder's fourth rung gave way when she put her weight on it, and she fell to the floor below, landing with a thud.
Suddenly, the trapdoor above her slammed shut, leaving her in total darkness. Where was her flashlight? She'd dropped it when she fell. Getting on her hands and knees, she swept her hands around the dirt floor, until she located the flashlight. She got to her feet and turned it on. It didn't work. She shook it. Had it broken in the fall?
An overwhelming odor in the room assailed her nostrils and she knew exactly what it was. Carly would never forget the dense, sweet and putrid stench of human decomposition. Covering her mouth and nose with her hand, she felt nauseated, and stepped backward in an effort to escape the odor. She tripped, falling through sticky spider webbing that covered her face and hair. Blindly, she did a wild dance, clawing at the webbing and swiping at the creatures skittering through her hair. Fearing spiders since she was a kid, Carly remembered Brody telling her that poisonous Brown Recluse spiders could be found all over Indiana. Just what she needed, a fatal spider bite.
Stepping down on her flashlight, it flickered on, creating a beam of light that illuminated the face of Jasmine Norris, her body in the early stages of decay. Carly shrieked in shock, and backed into something soft. Picking up her flashlight, she focused its beam on yet another body. It was Erin Ryder, with a gaping hole in her forehead.
Accidentally, Carly had discovered one of Jim Ryder's body dump sites, and the up-close-and-personal nature of the discovery was a little hard to take. Feeling sick to her stomach, she didn't want to spend another minute in the foul-smelling, dark hole. She aimed the flashlight toward the wooden ladder, from which she'd fallen.
Before she had a chance to approach it, she heard loud voices above her. Stepping on each rung slowly, testing it to see if it would hold her weight, Carly inched her way to the top.
"Drop your gun, Ryder!" She heard Brody demand.
"Go to hell," growled Jim Ryder. "If you don't have a search warrant in your hand, you're trespassing."
"It's over, Ryder. We know everything."
"I doubt that very much, Sheriff."
"What you did to Alison Brown and how she witnessed you killing Jasmine Norris is no longer a secret. We also know about all the other girls you lured to Shawnee County, tortured, and murdered. It's over. Put down your gun."
"You don't have anything solid and you know it. Alison Brown? It's the word of a trusted law enforcement officer against a teenaged twit. Any good defense attorney will take her down. Got any forensic evidence? Didn't think so."
"Put down your gun, Ryder!" Brody roared.
Pushing on the trapdoor, Carly created an opening about six inches high that enabled her to see Jim Ryder, just as he fired his gun. Holding the trapdoor in place with one hand, she used the other to whip out her Glock and screamed at Ryder to "freeze". Instead, he fired a shot at her that glanced off the trapdoor. Carly returned fire, hitting Ryder in the chest. Blood blossomed and spread across the front of his shirt as he sank to the ground. Throwing the trapdoor open, Carly rushed to him and kicked his weapon far from his reach.
Checking his pulse, she found it was weak, but his heart was still beating. Hearing moveme
nt behind her, she whirled in place with her gun extended.
"Don't shoot, Carly. It's me!" shouted Gabe, his hand grabbing her wrist with surprising force. Putting his hand gently on her shoulder, he said, "It's over. It's okay, Carly."
"Where's Brody? I heard his voice."
A moan at the back of the barn answered her question. Brody lay on the other side of the trapdoor, bleeding profusely from his arm. Carly rushed to him and Gabe called for help on his cell phone.
Carly ripped off her jacket, folded it, and tied it around Brody's arm to make a tourniquet.
"Brody's been shot. Tell them to send an ambulance, Gabe. Tell them to hurry!"
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Once they reached the hospital, Brody was whisked off to surgery and Dr. Ford promised Carly he'd take good care of him. With Cameron and Gabe, Carly stayed in the waiting room until someone notified them about the outcome of Brody's surgery. Cameron and Gabe took turns teasing Carly about the stench emanating from her filthy clothing. Carly ignored them. She was too worried about Brody to have much of a sense of humor.
When watching television and pacing back and forth didn't help, Carly searched for the cafeteria to get coffee for the three of them.
Upon her return, she saw Dr. Ford at the nurse's station and rushed to him.
"Is Brody okay? What happened in surgery?"
"I was just about to find you, Carly. The surgery went well and Brody is in the recovery room two doors down. You can see him, but just for a minute."
Placing the three coffees down on the counter, Carly hurried to Brody's recovery room. When she reached the doorway, she froze and her jaw dropped open in surprise. Mollie Adams sat on Brody's bed, holding him in her arms, stroking his face and kissing him as she wept. Had she imagined an attraction between Mollie and Cameron? Was it Brody all along for Mollie?
She felt like such an idiot. This was just as devastating as finding her ex-lover Sam Isley screwing his trainee on his desk. How many times would she find men she loved in the arms of other women? Was she really that naive and stupid in her personal life that she couldn't see the signs?
Carly thought of Mollie's daughter, Hailey. Usually blunt and direct, why hadn't she asked Brody if the girl was his daughter?
Her eyes filled with tears, Carly backed out of the room, raced past the waiting room, out of the hospital into the parking lot.
Carly got into Brody's SUV, started the engine, then headed toward the cottage. As much as she loved Brody, she could not commit to a forever kind of relationship with him. She would not be the one to stand in the way of his happiness with Mollie and Hailey. Carly loved Brody and needed him to be happy, even if it wasn't with her.
At the cottage, she ran upstairs, packed her things, then threw her bags in the trunk of the SUV. She left a message inside the cottage that it would be parked at the airport. On her way to Indianapolis, she booked a flight to Orlando. She was going back home.
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During her first two weeks in Florida, Carly threw herself into a consulting job with the Bureau. One of their witnesses in a sex trafficking case Carly had worked refused to talk to anyone but her. So Carly stayed with the witness in protective custody and supported her through a difficult two-week trial.
After the trial ended, Carly moved back home. The loneliness for Brody hit her like a ton of bricks. There were a dozen messages from him on her answering machine, but she deleted each one.
Insomnia took the name of Brody Chase and stole her sleep. Even her steady supply of caffeine wasn't working to alleviate her exhaustion during the day.
Her mother showed up in the middle of the third week to whisk Carly off to a spa. They had facials, massages, pedicures, and sipped iced mint tea, and Carly felt a little better — until she walked into her empty house that evening, loaded down with shopping bags, and had time to think.
Why had she fallen so hard for Brody Chase? Maybe because he wasn't a bad boy as all her past lovers had been. He liked her intelligence, and wasn't threatened by it. He hadn't cheated on her like Sam Isley. At least she didn't think he had.
What is it about first loves that make them so hard to forget? She had no chance of competing with Mollie Adams. Their history spanned years. If Brody had really been in love with her, Carly wouldn't have had to vie with anyone for his affection.
Pulling on her new red bikini, Carly grabbed a fluffy, white towel as she went outside to the pool. She loved to swim at night under the stars. If anything could make her feel better, swimming would. Carly did a breast-stroke for the first lap, and for the second lap she flipped to her back and gazed at the million glittering stars in the night sky. After a while, she did another couple of laps, and then swam toward the pool ladder to get her towel.
Pulling herself up onto the ladder, she'd climbed a rung when she realized, her white towel was being handed to her by a tall and very handsome sheriff named Brody Chase. Her breath caught on a surge of yearning so abrupt and intense it felt like pain.
Once she was out of the water, he wrapped the towel around her and hugged her against his hard body so tightly, she could barely breathe. He crushed his mouth to hers and she felt the surge of sexual electricity all the way to her toes. The kiss went on and on until finally, she pulled out of his arms and said, "Brody, what are you doing here?"
"I figured if you didn't want to live in Indiana, then I'd move here."
"What are you talking about?"
"Just what I said. I tried living three weeks without you, and I can't do it, Carly. I can't. So I asked for a leave of absence to talk to you about my moving in with you."
"Have you lost your mind? What about Mollie? You two have a lengthy history. What about your daughter, Hailey? You and Molly should be together."
"That's the thing, Carly, Mollie is not the woman for me and I'm not the man for her. There's another Chase brother that should be with Mollie. And if Cam has a brain in his head, he'll make it happen. Another thing, what gave you the idea Hailey is my daughter? She's not. Her father was killed in an accident years ago. I love you, Carly. I should be wherever you are. So here I am."
"But at the hospital that night, I saw..."
"What you saw were two old friends embracing each other, after one of them just got out of surgery."
"If that's true, why did it take you three weeks to contact me?"
"Didn't you listen to any of my messages? I was miserable without you, but I couldn't leave until Jim Ryder's case was wrapped up so tight our prosecutor can get a guilty verdict. He's seeking the death penalty. I met with him this morning before my flight. After that, I met with the commission and asked for a leave of absence, which they gave me. Cam is in charge while I'm gone."
"So you're here to..."
"I'm here to find out what you want. If you love me, like I hope you do, then I want to make things permanent."
"You would give up your job for me, Brody?" she asked. "You love your job."
"I love you more."
Carly backed up a step. "Well, there are a couple of things I'll need before we talk permanent."
"Negotiating again?"
She nodded. "I need to hear the words."
"Will you marry me, Carly?"
She shook her head. "Not those words."
"What about these words? I've never loved or wanted anyone like I do you, Carly Stone. It's one of those forever kinds of things, like the love I think my parents had. I love you, Baby."
Her fingers gripping his shirt, she pulled him to her and kissed him the way she'd kissed him in her dreams. "I'm thinking a pre-wedding honeymoon, lasting approximately six months to a year in the Honeymoon Cottage, with a 'do not disturb' sign on the front door at night might work for me."
"Does that mean you'll marry me?"
"Eventually, big guy, but for the next six months to a year, I'll be in your bed every night so I imagine that's enough time for you to do some impressive persuading."
Brody's face broke into the widest smile as he
said, "Let's go inside, sweetheart. I don't procrastinate when it comes to showing off my impressive persuasion abilities."
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Dear Reader:
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Alexa Grace
P.S. If you should find a mistake, please notify me. I always strive to write the best book possible and use a team of beta readers as well as an editor prior to publication. But goofs slip through. If something slipped past us, please let me know by writing to me at [email protected]. Thank you.
The Profile Series by Alexa Grace
Spring 2013 Profile of Evil
Carly Stone is a brilliant FBI agent who's seen more than her share of evil. Leaving the agency, she becomes a consultant for Indiana County Sheriff Brody Chase, who needs her profiling skills to catch an online sex predator who is luring preteen girls to their death in his community.
A life hangs in the balance, and the two rush stop the most terrifying killer of their careers — and time is running out.
Summer 2013 Profile of Terror
Social media sites are the playground for twin sexual predators and are the last stops for three young women. When an ex-girlfriend goes missing, Private Investigator Gabe Chase is obsessed with finding her. Once her lifeless body is discovered, her gorgeous and accusing older sister is the distraction Gabe doesn't need as the body count increases and he hunts down the killers.
