by Cynthia Eden
Hyde must know some serious dirt on the higher-ups in order to have swung a plane—just for the SSD. But the ride had been pretty close to torture. Trapped in the plane with her, he’d been able to do little more than drink in her scent and drink in… her.
Even after all these years, the woman was still too beautiful. Smooth, pale skin. Nose perfectly straight. Full, red lips. And those legs…
He could still feel them around him, digging into his back, clenching tight as he drove into her, as hard and as deep as he could go. Those legs…
On the plane ride from hell, she’d crossed them, then begun to kick one foot slowly while she made her notes. Watching that foot, then letting his gaze rise to follow the smooth lines of her legs up to the edge of her skirt…
Once, he’d licked his way up her body. Tasted the flavor of her skin. But that was the past.
In the present, the woman had frozen him out. She’d looked at him with those blank eyes and pretty much told him to go screw himself.
Hands off or your ass heads back to Atlanta.
So much for picking up where they’d left off.
Business only. He could do that.
Luke jerked his gaze off the sway of Monica’s ass and caught sight of the two uniformed sheriff’s deputies waiting for them.
Stick to the case. Forget the girl.
Her high heels clicked across the pavement. The two cops shot up from their slouching positions and hurried toward her. Smart men.
“Agent Davenport?” The first guy to reach her asked, shoving out his hand. A fresh-faced kid, he looked like he’d just skated past twenty-one. He had black eyes, olive skin, and twitchy fingers.
Monica gave a firm nod. The wind on the runway caught her hair, tossing the dark locks and wrecking her smooth style. She ignored the wind and caught his hand, shaking once.
“I’m Deputy Lee Pope, and this here is Deputy Vance Monroe.”
She nodded to the other deputy, then offered her hand.
He caught the slight widening of Vance’s brown eyes. The second deputy was older than the other guy—tall, with ruddy cheeks, dark red hair, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Vance seemed to hold Monica’s hand a little bit longer than was really necessary.
“This is my associate.” Her voice rose easily above the wind. “Special Agent Luke Dante.”
He flashed a smile, and when the deputies blinked, he figured maybe he’d used too much teeth.
Reflex. He’d been trying to bite back a pissed-off snarl.
“Sheriff wants us to take you to see the bodies, ma’am.” From Lee. He shifted from his right foot to the left. “You don’t—you don’t really think we got us a serial killer down here in Jasper?”
Luke positioned himself next to Monica. He caught a glimpse of the faint tightness around her mouth.
“I don’t know what you’ve got, deputy.” Monica stared down the guy. “I just know my boss told me to get on a plane.” A little shrug. “So here I am.”
Senior agent.
Hyde had given him a quiet warning before he’d left the office. “Don’t screw up, hotshot. When in doubt, do whatever Davenport tells you.”
They’d trained together. Studied together. Graduated together.
But from the beginning, he’d known Monica was being fast-tracked. Everyone had figured that out pretty much from day one.
The profiler who knew the killers. Whispers about her had floated through every area of Quantico. There wasn’t a test the woman didn’t ace. Wasn’t a drill she didn’t nail.
She’d graduated at the top of her class. Then been swooped up by Special Projects the next day.
He’d worked his cases over the years, busted ass and proven that he knew the victims better than pretty much any-damn-body. Yeah, he’d shown he could crack the cases, and he’d gotten the coveted interview with Hyde.
“True serial killers can be very rare,” Monica said, voice cool and easy, with just a hint of her own southern drawl creeping through the words. “Your Sheriff Davis simply wanted us to come down and give our opinion on these cases.”
“We got a twisted fuck out there.” Deputy Vance shook his head and spat on the ground. “Ma’am, I saw what he done to that Moffett girl.”
He’d seen, too. Thirty knife wounds. All on the face and chest. Pretty girl, at least in the before pictures. After…
Deputy Vance was right. Twisted fuck.
Though Luke doubted Monica would consider that a professional term.
“Her body’s still at the morgue?” Luke asked. From the report he’d been given, he knew the victim had been found two days before, dumped like garbage in an abandoned house.
If the deputies hadn’t raided that place, looking for a drug dealer…
“Yeah, she’s still there.” Lee stepped back. The sun glinted off his badge. “You folks need to get settled at the motel or you wanna—”
“Take us to the body,” Monica ordered just as Luke said—
“The body.”
The deputy yanked out his keys. “Sorry… but you two are gonna have to ride in the back…”
In the back of the squad car. Nice.
Monica climbed in first. Luke sucked in a breath, smelling her, warm woman and a hint of that light perfume she’d always worn, and he tried his level best not to touch the woman as he crowded in beside her.
His thigh brushed hers. Focus. He cleared his throat and managed to say, “The second body—I didn’t see much about that victim in my files.” He leaned toward the gray cage that separated him from the uniforms. The better to get away from Monica’s soft flesh.
The engine kicked to life, and the car shot forward.
Vance, buckled in the passenger seat and with the radio at his mouth, glanced back at him. “That’s cause there wasn’t much left of Sally to see.”
• • •
Morgues sucked. Luke hated ’em, always had.
And the dead—they were everywhere. Hell, he’d joined the Bureau to save lives. Not to sit with the dead.
But Monica, she sauntered around the room, those heels tapping, staring at the dead woman from every angle, her bright eyes narrowed and intense—and not the least bit hesitant as she fired question after question at the ME.
“Time of death?”
“What was the killing wound?”
“Any drugs in her system?”
“These marks on her face… that look like a pattern to you?”
Her white-gloved fingers pointed right above the woman’s left cheek.
The ME, Doctor Charles Cotton, was a balding man with some of the palest skin Luke had ever seen. Cotton eyed her with a worried stare as she circled the table like a vulture coming to pick apart her prey. The two deputies were there, huddled at the back of the room. Lee kept glancing at the floor, and not the body, and old Vance had his lips pressed so tightly together Luke thought the guy might draw blood soon.
Not morgue guys. He didn’t blame ’em, not one bit.
Luke swallowed and tried to ignore the scent of death that shoved up his nostrils.
“So our killer took his time and did all of this…” Monica motioned to the criss-cross of wounds on Patricia “Patty” Moffett’s face and chest, “before he decided to kill her.”
A prick who liked to play.
“That’s what my report says.” Cotton crossed his thick arms over his chest. The guy’s half-eaten pizza sat on a table behind him.
The guy ate in here with the bodies? Jesus.
Monica glanced over at Luke.
Ah, his cue. Luke took a step toward the body. The stiffs really weren’t his specialty, and he hadn’t thought they were Monica’s either.
The killers—those guys were all hers.
But if one thing had been drilled into him in those profile classes at the Academy, it was that even dead victims could talk. You just had to know how to hear them.
He glanced at Patty’s wrists. Saw the purple circles.
Restraints.
Luke stalked to the end of the table and lifted the sheet. The same circles mottled her ankles.
“No drugs.” At least not when the slicing started. You didn’t restrain someone who was out cold. “She was awake and aware while the asshole carved her up,” he said, fury boiling through him. The woman had been small, petite, and she’d just turned twenty-nine.
Hell of a way to die.
“The wounds on her face are so precise,” Monica whispered.
He heard the shuffle of feet behind him. A look over his shoulder showed the deputies craning their necks and inching closer.
“No hesitation.” Monica inhaled sharply. “Pleasure cuts.”
The ME’s jaw dropped and so did both of his chins. “What?”
Luke nodded because he knew exactly what she meant. Cuts to make the vic suffer and to give the perp his sick thrill.
The door of the morgue shoved open.
“Pope, Monroe—get your asses back out on the street!” Luke turned at the snarl and saw the sheriff, his uniform perfectly pressed, his hands balled into fists on his hips. “Billy Joe is drunk down at Taylor’s again, and Ron needs backup.”
The two deputies shot to attention. “Sir!”
“Now!”
They flew past him.
When the door slammed behind them, the sheriff marched forward and faced Luke. “You here to tell me what the hell is goin’ on in my county?”
They were there to try.
“Guessing you’re Dante,” the sheriff muttered. The sun had tanned his skin a dark brown. Lines cracked the planes of his face and gray dotted the black hair near his temples. “And you…” His gray eyes drifted to Monica. “You must be Davenport.”
Her head inclined toward him. “Sheriff.” Monica’s cool-as-you-please voice. A brief pause, then, “We’re going to need to see the other body.”
But the sheriff, Luke remembered his name was Hank Davis, shook his head. “Not gonna happen. Sally Jenkins was buried yesterday.”
Luke clenched his back teeth. Exhuming bodies was a bitch. Especially in these small-ass southern towns. Folks didn’t like it when their dead were jerked back out of the earth.
Not that he blamed them.
Monica’s eyes narrowed, and she stepped away from the slab. “She’s been buried? You knew the FBI was coming; you’re the one who called us! The body shouldn’t have been released—”
“Wasn’t a body to release.” His jaw flexed. “Just pieces of little Sally…”
Emotion there, lurking in the eyes and in the voice.
The guy had known the victim.
“You didn’t send a lot of information about Sally’s death to our office,” Luke said, trying to choose his words carefully now that he knew the connection was there for the sheriff. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m confused as hell. Why would you figure a woman who’d been stabbed to death…” Pleasure cuts. “And a woman who was killed in a car accident were linked?”
The sheriff and the ME shared a hard glance. Then Davis looked back over his shoulder, as if checking to make sure neither of the deputies had snuck back in to eavesdrop. “Didn’t send the info, but I told Hyde.” Davis’s jaw flexed. “Told him, and he understood. He sent you because he understood.”
Cotton shuffled over to a filing cabinet. The drawer groaned when he pulled it open. “I think you two should see these.”
Luke grabbed the file from him and tried to keep his face blank as he flipped through the pictures.
Shit.
Wreckage. Twisted metal.
Pieces. Not of the car. Of… her. The wreck had torn her apart.
Monica eased beside him. Luke heard the hard breath she sucked in when she glimpsed Sally.
He studied the photos, examining and—“What the hell?”
Monica’s fingers lifted and clamped around his shoulder.
“Guess you see why I was worried about Sally’s death.” A hard, biting blast from the sheriff. “Not every day you see an accident victim who was tied to the steering wheel.”
No, not every day.
Christ. One hand and wrist were still attached to the wheel, hanging by the thick, knotted ropes.
“We found marks on the bumper—someone pushed Sally, hard and fast. That somebody drove her right into that ravine.”
And Sally had been helpless.
But…
But the crimes were too different. With Sally, maybe someone had wanted to off her and claim insurance money that would have come from her “accident.” Maybe the killer had thought the car would blow up on impact, and the bindings on her wrists would have been destroyed. Maybe.
The stabbing, well, stabbings were personal. Intimate.
“Does Sally have a husband, a lover—someone we can talk to?” Monica asked.
Silence.
They looked up at the Sheriff. He licked his lips. “Sally’s husband Jake was killed in a car accident last year. A year to the day of Sally’s death.” He swallowed. “She was in the car with him, barely survived.”
This time, she hadn’t.
Someone had made absolutely certain of that.
“What makes you think these two crimes are related?” Luke asked. Bizarre, yeah, but to say the same perp was out there—
“In the last ten years, we’ve only had two murders here in Jasper.” A heavy pause. “They both happened within the last two weeks.” The sheriff held his stare. “You think we got two murdering SOBs all of a sudden in the area? Or just one fucked up asshole?” His right hand moved to rest on the slab, right near Patty. “I’m betting my money on one asshole.”
CHAPTER Three
Walking through a dead woman’s house, poking through her possessions and rifling through what was left of her life was not really Monica’s favorite thing to do. It was a part of her job, though, a necessary one. Just one that she hated.
Every profiler knew, the first step was assimilation. She’d seen the body, seen the photos, read the autopsy reports, now she needed to work on victim profiles.
Luke flipped on the light as he stepped into Patty’s bedroom. Monica hesitated, just for a moment, then followed him inside the small room.
“Just what do you think we’re gonna find here?” he asked.
Hell if she knew. The locals had already been over the place. The sheriff had good instincts and good training, so she doubted the guy missed much.
But she always went to the victims’ houses on her cases. The houses and then the crime scenes. That was her pattern.
She rubbed the back of her right shoulder. “We need to do a thorough scan of the house, just in case the deputies overlooked something.” What that something was, well, she didn’t know. Yet.
Her gaze darted to the nightstand. A framed picture. A smiling, beautiful Patty, hugging a man, a good-looking guy with glasses.
“Guess that’s the boyfriend,” Luke murmured.
“Kaziah Lone.” He was on her list. Rule number one in these cases: Always talk to the lovers.
Especially on knife kills. An intimate crime, an intimate kill.
Luke yanked open Patty’s dresser drawers, searching through the clothes. “What’s your take on the case?”
Don’t know. “Hyde sent us here, that means he thinks we’ve got a serial.” Or a potential serial. Because sometimes, weeding through the cases and finding the real serials—that was another job he liked to give his team.
More photos lined the walls. Pictures just of Patty, always smiling. Posing with her dark hair framing her perfect face.
Hyde’s report said the woman had done some modeling for an agency in New Orleans. She sure had the look for it.
He shoved the top dresser drawer closed. “But what’s your take?”
His gaze held hers. God, Samantha had been right about his eyes. She’d never seen eyes like his before.
Never been able to forget those eyes.
Or him.
The one man who’d come too close.
The one man who’d made her burn, made her desperate.
And he could do it again. One look, and the need had quickened in her. It would be so easy to go back, to let the lust ignite between them. So easy…
When they’d been on that plane and he’d been so close, his scent had surrounded her. She’d remembered the strength of his touch and she’d wanted him. She’d talked tough, but, dammit, she wanted him.
Luke Dante had always made her feel alive. In those precious hours with him, she’d felt wild and reckless.
No ice maiden. There’d been too much pleasure for that. Too much passion.
Temptation. He was still as dangerous as before. Monica licked her lips. The crimes. The kills. Focus. Now wasn’t the time for any weakness.
Even if he was the one man who could make her weak. She exhaled on a long, hard breath. “The kill methods are off. They don’t make sense to me.” She turned away from him, worried those eyes would see too much.
Even when they’d been together, she’d always made him turn off the lights. So he wouldn’t see…
Patty had a small desk in the corner of her bedroom. Monica pulled open the long, top drawer. Pens, paper clips, a worn romance novel.
She pushed the drawer closed—
But it stuck.
She froze.
“Monica? You got something?”
Dropping to her knees, she carefully pulled the drawer back and eased it out of the grooves that held it in place.
An envelope. It waited, smashed at the back of the desk, like it had gotten pushed up in the drawer and then caught.
Maybe when the police were searching?
Her gloved fingers reached for the envelope.
No return address. Just Patty’s name, scribbled across the front.
Monica rose, turned—
And found Luke standing right in front of her.
Too close.
She didn’t make the mistake of looking into his eyes. Not this time.
Monica straightened her shoulders and opened the envelope. The top had already been ripped apart, the ends tattered and loose.
A slip of paper hid inside. Carefully, she eased it out and read the same distinctive scrawl.
Pretty lady, what scares you?
An image of Patty’s face flashed before her eyes. There had been so many brutal cuts and slashes on her face. Not her body, where the knife would have done more damage. But on her face.
