by Kylie Brant
“Except there hasn’t been a call out on her phone for three days.”
She went on as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Or she might have walked over to the neighbors and gotten a ride to the ER.”
“Her friend lives right next door and never heard from her. We’ve called the area hospitals. She hasn’t been admitted. Jenna’s checking with the Urgent Care clinics, even though most don’t open until eight and I was here at seven. Tommy’s doing a canvass, but so far no one around here has reported anything amiss.”
Maria’s gaze narrowed. “You brought Franks in on this, too?”
“I was trying to keep it quiet,” Cam snapped. He paused, struggling to tuck temper away before going on. “I didn’t want to unnecessarily alarm anyone. Kitchen door was unsecured. All the doors operate on the same security system, but they can be opened from the inside without having to disarm it.”
“It’s like she walked out of her own accord.”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Kid next door saw a truck bearing a glass repair shop logo here a couple days ago. I’ve been running down the names of those businesses in the area.”
His cell rang. Cam took it from his pocket and checked the screen. It was Connerly, the forensic anthropologist working with the ME. “Take a look in the bedroom and the bathroom and let me know if you think the scene looks like Sophie left here on her own,” he said shortly. Turning away before Gonzalez could answer, he spoke into the phone. “Prescott.”
“Hey, Cam we got a breakthrough here.”
“—not a breakthrough, it’s a possible scenario.” He could hear Benally’s correction in the background.
“It’s more than a possibility. Probability factors in the ninety per cent range. That’s good enough for this California boy.”
“Maybe you and Lucy can argue the point on your own time.” Given the circumstances, Cam’s patience was nil. “What do you have?”
“The lab got back to us a couple days ago with the chemical breakdown in the soil surrounding each of the victims. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty which of them has been in the ground the longest. Even better, I can give you a good approximation about the order in which the vics were buried. We had it pretty close timing it by the dates of the original burials, but we were off some.”
He released a breath. Yesterday he would have been ecstatic at the news. Right now it bottomed out on a list of his priorities. “That is a breakthrough. Nice work.”
“Not the overwhelming enthusiasm I was hoping for, but a bump up from Negative Nancy here.”
He heard Benally’s response. “I told you to quit calling me that.”
Cam saw Maria exit the bedroom. He knew from personal experience the woman was a helluva poker player. He also knew her tells. The flare of her nostrils gave lie to her carefully blank expression.
His stomach clenched. In that instant he realized he would rather have had her continued disagreement about what had gone down here. Even a thread of hope would have been better than the utter blackness that descended upon him the moment he recognized that the SAC was finally convinced.
The voice in his ear reminded him that he was still on his cell. “Gavin, have either you or Lucy spoken to Dr. Channing recently?”
The man was silent for a moment. “Sophia? I haven’t talked to her since you guys came to the morgue a few days ago. Can’t speak for Lucy.” Cam heard the man pose the question to the ME, and her negative response.
Gonzalez jerked her head in a signal for him to join her. “Okay, I’ll catch up with her later. Listen, great work on the burial sequence. I’m in the middle of something here, but I’ll be in touch.” Disconnecting, he swiftly strode across the room toward the SAC. Silently she stepped aside, pointing him toward the bathroom.
Seth Dietz, the tech working in there, had plastic evidence markers scattered around the floor and a few sticky notes the floors, the sides of the shower and walls. Cam knew that meant the areas had already been sprayed with Luminol and they’d glowed, indicating a presence of hemoglobin.
“Behind the toilet.” Maria’s voice was quiet.
Craning his neck, Cam could see the yellow plastic evidence marker she must be referencing, but not what it indicated. “What is it?”
Seth looked up. “Just pointed that out to Special Agent Gonzalez. I can show it to you after I finish photographing the room. It’s a syringe. Found the plastic top under one of the rugs. Haven’t been through the medicine cabinets or the refrigerator yet. Channing might be diagnosed with a condition requiring injections.”
“She’s not.” Cam heard the bleakness in his own voice. Knew Gonzalez had, too. He no longer cared what interpretation she placed on it.
She placed a hand on his arm. “I’ll issue a BOLO.”
He nodded and she moved away. The be-on-the-lookout bulletin would alert law enforcement in the vicinity to watch for sightings of Sophie. But he knew in his gut it was no use.
She could have been taken by anyone. Cam couldn’t lose sight of that fact. In her capacity of forensic profiler she consulted on any number of cases simultaneously. He had no idea what else she was working on, or for whom. She could even have been targeted because of someone she’d interviewed in the past.
But he’d learned to trust his instincts. And they were telling him she’d been taken by the maniac who’d kidnapped, raped and murdered at least six women. The one who might have abducted yet another from Edina three days earlier.
The deviant who just might be harboring a rage toward the woman who’d written the profile on him that was now splashed all over the media.
Chapter 8
Eddies of pleasure continued to shimmer through Sophia, never-ending ripples in a sensual pond. Her heart rate still bucked and sprinted like a high-spirited filly. Cam’s weight, while heavy, was too comforting to want to separate from just yet.
Sophia wasn’t inexperienced, but she had been selective over the years. None of the men she’d slept with in the past had managed to elicit an ounce of the explosive response she felt with Cam. The thought had a thread of alarm mingling with recently sated desire. Of course, not one of the men in her past had much of anything in common with Cam Prescott, short of gender. Other than where their careers crossed, the same could be said of Cam and her.
Before grad school her life had followed a predictable, if dull pattern. Her childhood had consisted of arranged play dates with children of other professors at the university. Lessons for flute, piano and French, all of which she’d excelled at. And because a well-rounded child required physical activity, there had been golf, soccer and tennis. None of which she’d excelled at.
When Cam took a long ragged breath, she delicately traced his spine with the tips of her fingers, pleased when his damp flesh quivered beneath her touch. Her teen years at the all girls’ school had been filled with science club and chorus, band and dates with carefully selected suitable young men, some the same playmates from her childhood.
And all of it so controlled and planned it was as though she’d been raised inside a glass bottle. If she’d chafed at the firmly set parameters of her life, there had at least been no outright rebellion. Sophia had been raised much too well mannered for that.
Until Louis Frein had smashed that glass chamber, introducing her to a world her parents would never have chosen for her. For the first time in her life, she’d deviated from the path her parents had selected. More, she’d found a career at once challenging and fulfilling. It was the only choice she’d ever made that was totally her own.
She’d been paying for that deviation ever since. First with the never-quite-dissipated disapproval of her parents and then the disintegration of her marriage. Hefty prices for her decision. Perhaps well worth it, but she’d certainly learned that choices came with a cost. Which was why it was easier…wiser…to remain in control. Impetuous decisions invited far-reaching consequences. She preferred a guarantee that throwing caution to the winds wouldn’t come bac
k to bite her in the end.
Which made inviting Cam Prescott into her life even more inexplicable.
With an effort she could tell cost him, Cam rolled heavily off her. “Sorry.” He positioned them both so they were on their sides, facing each other. Looping an arm possessively around her waist, he buried his face in her hair. “You should have gotten a crane. Are you still breathing?”
“I’m not quite sure how to summon a crane. If the situation had gotten dire, I am armed with the secret knowledge of your ticklish spots.”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “A wise woman doesn’t give away all the weapons in her arsenal.”
“A wise woman doesn’t get herself in situations where she requires an arsenal.” So why was she even now scrambling for her scattered defenses? She felt totally, achingly vulnerable with him. What she knew about the man, other than the obvious, would barely fill a thimble.
He was sexy, but opaque. Hard, with glimmers of compassion. Reticent, yet intuitive. And despite her respect for no-trespassing signs, both figurative and literal, suddenly that reticence disturbed her.
“Are your parents alive?” she asked suddenly.
“Why?”
“I’m assuming you do have parents.”
“I came about in the usual way.” His hand began to slide lazily up and down the curves and hollows of her waist. “I have a mom. There must have been a dad at some point, but he was gone before I knew him. And then there were men.” His voice went flat. “Some better than others, but most whose charm disappeared about the time they convinced my mom to move in with them. My mother sees the best in absolutely everybody, but I learned at a young age that some people have no ‘best.’ Just traits that make them a little less than a total son of a bitch.”
Her heart clutched a little at the thought of him as a young boy, a revolving door of strange men in and out of his life. She had clients with similar backgrounds. Knew well the dangers of exposing a child to that lifestyle. “Did she marry any of them?”
“She’s married now. Not then.” One of his feet began to stroke hers. “When I was ten I got a paper route. Then another. A guy gave me a job delivering small orders from his grocery store on my bike. When I’d saved two hundred dollars I thought it was a fortune. I took it my mom, who still had a black eye from her latest ‘fall.’ Dumped it in her lap and told her she didn’t need men to take care of her anymore. I was old enough to be the man.”
“Oh, Cam.” Her heart quite simply melted. She could imagine him as he must have looked then. Too determined and serious for his age. With those golden brown eyes that even then saw too much. And knew, without being told, how much of the boy still existed in the man.
“My mom’s a crier.” There was an indulgent note in his voice. “Happy, sad, tired, proud…she’s an equal opportunity weeper. So, she cried, of course. Then she hugged me. Then she packed. It was just the two of us after that. She worked a series of low-paying jobs, and I pitched in. We scraped by. She married Larry about six years ago, after dating him at least that long. Good guy. Not a son-of-a-bitch.”
And that easily, that simply, her alarm quieted again. It was such a small thing, this freely revealing a snippet of his past. But for this man every nugget shared was like gold.
Sophia sighed a little, slipped an arm around his neck. “Cam. What am I going to do with you?”
He cupped her jaw, leaning in to whisper a kiss against her mouth. His voice took on a hint of wicked. “I have a few suggestions.”
It took effort to open her eyes. Sophie struggled to surface from an ocean of unconsciousness. Her limbs were weighted. Her mouth felt as though it were filled with sand. There was a jackhammer at the base of her skull, drilling reverberations that were echoed by the drum roll in her temples. Her thoughts were muzzy. She must have the mother of all hangovers. But she hadn’t drunk any wine last night, had she?
Lying there another few minutes, she became aware of a dark foreboding simmering inside her. The mattress she was lying on was soft. Too soft. It wasn’t the firm mattress she’d selected when she’d moved into the condo. She must be in Cam’s bed.
The thought had her trepidation easing. Pleasure filtered through the confusion. She’d never woken with a headache in Cam’s bed. A night spent tangled up with him always left her limbs weak and her mind dazed. The man had the most amazing hands. And mouth. Her palms itched to explore his hard body again. To map every intriguing place where sinew and muscle met bone.
Something furry skittered across her foot, jolting her fully awake. Biting back a scream she sat straight up on the mattress, kicking awkwardly at whatever had disturbed her.
Her actions intensified the pounding in her head. Sophia placed one hand on the mattress next to her, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass.
“Bitching about your quarters already? Typical woman. Never happy.”
Something wasn’t right. Cam’s voice sounded unlike him. Its pitch was higher, with an edge she’d never heard there before. The foreboding returned twofold, morphing into panic. Sophia forced her eyelids open. Threw up a hand as a shield when a bright spotlight drilled into her eyes. The shadowy man next to it seemed to split into two, the images wavering before they melded again.
It wasn’t Cam, but a stranger. The realization washed over like a douse of ice water. And she wasn’t in a bedroom at all. She swung her head wildly to take in the confines of her prison, the action sending waves of nausea through her.
“Where am I? And who are you?”
“Who am I?” The stranger was huge. At least he seemed that way, shrouded in shadows. Five-ten maybe, but with the build of a dedicated weight lifter. Muscles bulged unnaturally in his chest, arms and legs. Even his neck was thick, causing his bald head to appear to sit directly upon those massive shoulders.
Comprehension was dulled. It took moments to observe that the stranger was completely naked.
And so was she.
The realization had Sophia drawing up her knees, wrapping her arms around them as if donning armor. She was seated on a blowup mattress placed on cracked and crumbling pavement. One wall of her cell was stone, the sides wooden. And the front where the stranger had stationed himself to peer in at her was fashioned of metal bars too wide to completely wrap her hands around. What was this place?
Memory quickly followed on the heels of that question. The man wasn’t a stranger at all. He’d come into her bathroom last night while she’d showered.
That recollection seemed to open the floodgates and memories rushed in on a torrent. She’d seen an intruder in the bathroom only seconds before he’d opened the shower door to drag her, kicking and swinging, from the tiled stall. With one of those muscle-bound arms holding her pinned against his chest and his free hand clapped over her mouth, their reflection from the vanity mirror had been something from a horror show. The helpless victim struggling with the masked intruder.
But sometime in their struggles his mask had worked up. She’d gotten a quick look at the features of the man now glaring at her with naked venom in his eyes.
It’d been like glimpsing hell.
“Not so high and mighty now, are you?” The smile that split his face made her shudder. “Most cunts aren’t once someone shows them their place in this world. I’m gonna be the one to put you in your place, all right. You and me got a score to settle.”
“How can that be? I don’t even know you.” Sophia was shocked by the reasonable tone she managed, even while everything inside her shrank in fear. “Maybe there’s been a mistake.”
“Oh, there has been. A big mistake. And you made it, bitch. Or should I call you Dr. Bitch?” The stranger seemed to be enjoying himself now, one foot raised to rest on the lowest metal bar, his hands wrapped around another. “Looked you up on the Internet after I saw your lies all over the news a couple days ago. Just because you got a bunch of letters after your name doesn’t make you an expert on people you don’t even know.”
“You’re an
gry with me,” she said evenly, trying to make frantic sense of what he was saying. “Why don’t you tell me what I did to disappoint you?”
“That!” The rage that bubbled out him appeared so suddenly, so violently that she reared back, even with the closed gate and space between them. He stabbed a finger at her. “You called it right there. All women are disappointments sooner or later. Goes without saying. But you…who the fuck are you to say those things about me? Inadequate? Displaced aggression? You’re going to pay for lying ’bout me getting fucked up the ass when I was a kid. You’ll be begging me to end you.” He pressed his face close to the bars, his face red, chest heaving.
Every organ inside her body froze. This had to be a nightmare. Sophia squeezed her eyes tightly closed, willing the scene away. But he was still there when she reopened them.
He’d quoted snippets from her profile of the offender in Cam’s case. But how could that have been on the news? When? She still couldn’t make sense of it.
“And you’ll die, all right. But on my say, not yours. First I’m gonna hurt you.” He said the words as if savoring them, and they seemed to calm him. “You can’t even imagine how much I’ll hurt you. And then I’ll do it all over again. Those letters after your name don’t mean shit to me. You’re just tits and ass and cunt, no better than the rest of your kind. I’ll use you like a filthy whore and when I get tired of you, you’ll be dead. Then the world will know you’re nothing. Less than nothing.”
“Did a woman make you feel that way once?” she hazarded a guess. “Is that why they have to pay?”
“You want to know what makes a man like me tick?” The temper had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He seemed almost amused. “Well, I’m going to educate you about that. I’ll educate you real good until the only question you’ll have left is when are you going to die?”
He pushed away from the gate, rattling it on its hinges. “You think about that until I come back for you.”
He strode out of her line of vision. She couldn’t seem to move, and she couldn’t blame her immobility on whatever drug he’d injected her with. Fear kept her limbs leaden. Her mind frozen. But a couple thoughts were clear enough. The man they’d been seeking so diligently had found her.
