The evening of the date, she carefully applied make-up—another rarity—and actually spent time on her hair. Usually her style consisted of gathering up the thick locks and pulling them into a ponytail after showering, but she used curlers and sprays and gels. She wanted to look her best for him. She wanted to knock him out. She wanted him enchanted, intrigued, addicted. Instead, she had the opposite effect on him. He hadn’t spoken to her again since that night and ran the opposite direction when she approached.
The fact that she made the colossal mistake of sleeping with him on their first date might have had something to do with his reaction.
All she wanted was for him to like her and apparently he had enough so that he coaxed her into bed…not that it took much effort on his part. She had fantasized about it for so long. It was the most incredible night of her life. They made love three times, each more explosive than the last. When she woke, he was gone. No note, no thanks that was great. Nothing.
She felt cheap, easy, used. She tried approaching him the next day to talk about it but he avoided her like the bubonic plague. He obviously got what he wanted from her and had moved on. He probably thought she was a slut.
Bastard.
She glanced around the room. She was the only uniformed officer and the only female. Her dream was to be a detective and being chosen for this case would be a huge coup for her resume. There wouldn’t be many opportunities to catch a serial killer in Vermont. That she had to do it on Turner’s watch was the only negative in the deal. Still, she owed him her thanks.
Turner handed out assignments, and not surprisingly, hers was a desk job. He wanted her to check for similar crimes around the country in the last fifteen to twenty years. The others would be out combing the streets looking for clues while she sat behind a desk with the computer. At least she was part of the investigation, she reminded herself.
"Officer Demaree, if you have any questions using the ViCAP program, just let me know," Kincaid told her.
Maya learned all about the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP, in the academy. The data information center collected and analyzed violent crimes around the country, specifically murder. She would enter the statistics of their case for comparison and possible matches of other unsolved crimes. It would give them an idea if there were other victims of their killer and whether he had traveled around the country before he arrived in Vermont.
"Thank you Special Agent, I mean, Mr. Kincaid, I will."
"Jake, please. We are all going to be working together long and hard to find this guy. There’s no room for formalities, Officer."
She smiled at him. "Maya".
He smiled back. "Maya it is."
Nick glared.
She smiled wider.
Vic asked a question, drawing Jake and Nick’s attention. Maya gathered her notes, anxious to tackle ViCAP. She waited until the others filed out of the room, leaving only her, Nick and Jake. She took a deep breath and pulled up her big girl panties. "Detective Turner, could I speak with you a moment?"
Nick turned at her voice, frowned and reluctantly gave a curt nod. "What it is, Officer Demaree?"
Maya flinched at his cool tone. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but standing here talking to her. And it didn’t slip her notice that he hadn’t asked her to call him Nick. She cleared her throat. "I-I just wanted to thank you for giving me this opportunity."
"You can thank Sergeant Masters. I didn’t want to include you but we needed all the hands we could get and since you are currently partner-less, he insisted."
Ouch. He might as well have bitch-slapped her across the face. She wasn’t on the team because of her skills, but because the sergeant insisted and because her partner, Burt Givens recently retired. And because she was available, like she had been to him on their one and only date. "Nevertheless," she gritted out, "I appreciate it."
He stepped away, clearly dismissing her. Her temper flared. He brought out the worst in her. She wanted to land a solid fist into his gorgeous face. "Jerk," she mumbled.
He spun around. "What was that, Officer?"
"Work," she improvised. "Gotta get to work."
He nodded briskly and left. She blew out a breath and sagged against the table. How would she ever survive this assignment?
#
Nick made it out into the hall before he broke out in a cold sweat. Being close to Maya Demaree had that effect on him.
He wiped a hand down his face, remembering how she felt in his arms, how sweet she tasted, how amazing it felt to be buried deep in her perfect body. He groaned. He knew he'd been unfairly cold to her after the most intense night of his life, but self-preservation had kicked in and he fled like a coward.
He felt guilty for jumping her on their first date but he couldn’t stop himself. She was so pretty and smart and sweet. He thought she was beautiful before, but the moment she opened the door in a dress and three inch heels, her dark hair curling around her shoulders, he knew they would end up in bed before the night was over. He'd been right.
He'd been fascinated with her from the first time he spotted her in her uniform. The only other time he had seen her was at her father’s funeral. He remembered her being beautiful but nothing like how she looked in her police uniform. She was tall, graceful and walked with an air of self-confidence. She had the most gorgeous gray-blue eyes and wore her coal-black hair pulled back in a ponytail at work but one shorter lock always broke free to drape across her forehead.
He watched her run through training drills and admired her athletic ability. At the shooting range, her dead-eye precision couldn’t be beat. She graduated from the top of her class, well on her way to making a kick-ass detective someday.
He managed to wait a good six months before he asked her out. He knew other guys had tried but she turned them down, preferring not to mix work with pleasure. There were no written rules forbidding cops from dating, but the inevitable break-up made working together uncomfortable so most tried to avoid the issue. Plus, Nick had respected and idolized her father.
In a moment of weakness, he caved, asked her out, fully prepared for her to turn him down. When she readily accepted, he’d been stunned. Then the date had been perfect. She made him feel things, want things that he was not comfortable with. He looked into her pretty gray eyes and wanted everything: family, house, kids, pets…he wanted it all. He was terribly afraid he'd fallen in love with her after just one date. That’s why he fled in the wee hours of the morning.
If Frank Demaree knew what he had done to his precious daughter, he’d reach up from the grave and pull Nick down to join him.
CHAPTER 4
January 7
Violet juggled packages in her arms and pushed the door to her house open with a booted foot. Her golden retriever Zeus, named for the supreme ruler of the Greek gods, lord of the sky, the rain god, barked happily and danced circles around her feet. The packages teetered precariously.
The phone buzzed and she managed to close the door, avoid stumbling over her enthusiastic pooch and place the bags on the counter before she grabbed the receiver. She checked caller ID, something she did each time the phone rang since that call a few weeks ago when she found out her stepfather was up for parole.
The number was familiar, one that made her stomach pitch uneasily. She eased to the sofa. Sensing her discomfort, Zeus placed himself protectively at her feet, his liquid brown eyes watching her intently. "Hello?"
"Violet? It’s Phil Wasserman."
Phil Wasserman had been a young, up-and-coming prosecuting attorney when he successfully tried and convicted her ex-stepfather, Willie Jack Kinney. Phil had always been good to Violet and her sister Daisy.
"Hello Mr. Wasserman. What…." Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and tried again. "What can I do for you?"
"I wanted to check in, see if Kinney has tried to contact you yet."
Violet swallowed hard. She hoped and prayed the man stayed far away from her. According to the prison
officials, Willie Jack had been a model prisoner, never causing any trouble after his first week when he killed another man in self-defense.
Trouble he saved for his stepdaughters.
She could've attended his parole hearing and testified that he shouldn’t be let out, but she preferred to stay away. When Willie Jack was hauled out of the courtroom after being found guilty, Violet sincerely hoped that would be the last time she ever had to lay eyes on the man. She didn’t want to face him again and have all those nightmares come rushing back.
Mr. Wasserman had been up front with her from the beginning. He admitted that there was a very good chance Willie Jack would be paroled, with or without her testimony. He suggested that she not attend and save herself the grief. She readily agreed.
"No, Mr. Wasserman, he hasn’t contacted me."
"Good. I want you to let me know immediately if he does. I don’t care if he calls to just shoot the breeze or to apologize, I’ll slap a restraining order on him so fast he won’t know what hit him."
Violet smiled sadly. Mr. Wasserman had always been her champion. "Thank you. I’ll let you know." She sat staring out the window long after she had disconnected, Mr. Wasserman’s call bringing back her painful past. She wanted to block out the memories, but they were part of who she had become. She picked up the phone and dialed.
"Hello?"
"It’s me, Mom." At the long pause, she added, "Violet. How are you?"
Closing her eyes, she silently prayed for a pleasant, civil conversation with her mother.
"Yeah, Violet, what do you want?"
Well, what did she expect? That Loretta Davis Anastasia Kinney Hooper Franklin, something or another—Violet had lost count of the surnames tacked on to the end of her mother’s name—would suddenly morph into mother-of-the-year material? "I just called to see how you are doing, Mom."
"I’m fine, Violet. I was just headed out the door to the beauty salon."
"I hope you had a nice Christmas. Did you get the card I sent?" Not that her own mother had bothered to send her one.
"Yeah, thanks. Look, I gotta get going or Betty-Lou will give my time slot away."
"One more thing," she said quickly before her mother could hang up. "Have you heard from Willie Jack?"
There was a long pause and Violet worried her mother had actually disconnected. Finally Loretta blew out a breath. "No, I ain’t heard from him and I’ve really gotta go now."
"It was good to talk to you, Mom. I’ll call—"
Click.
The tone sounded unusually loud in the silence of her living room. Violet fought the urge to weep. She would not cry. She wouldn’t. Too many tears had been shed for the little girl lost. She wouldn’t give in again. How many years had it been since her mother practically disowned her? It wasn’t hard to think how many years it had been since she loved her. The answer to that was never. Violet and Daisy had been nothing but inconveniences to Loretta. She blamed her girls for holding her back from the life of luxury she thought she deserved. She hadn’t wanted kids, only agreeing to them for her first husband’s sake.
Violet missed her dad so much. He had adored his two little girls, doted on them. His death sent Violet into a deep, dark spin, her world turned upside down. He'd been too young to die of a heart attack, not much older than she was now. At the time, she didn’t think there could be anything worse than her father’s death. She quickly found out otherwise.
Her happiness might have died with her dad, but life as she knew it ended a few years later. She inhaled deeply and forced the painful memories back into the dark recesses of her mind. She would not dwell on her past. She was a professor now with a nice job, good friends, and a promising career. She wouldn’t let the past interfere with her future.
#
Maya was the first to arrive for the late afternoon meeting, she was happy to note. She prepared a pot of coffee and poured a mug when it finished. The rest of the task force filed in and Jake Kincaid started off the meeting. He stood in front of a dry-erase board and drew a timeline. "With two murders, it is hard to tell if there is a pattern the killer follows or if the time-frame between murders is random. If he is following a set course, it is likely another woman will be abducted and murdered tomorrow night."
Maya swallowed. They needed to catch this guy and fast.
"I have a call in to one of the top profilers from the Behavioral Analysis Unit so he can work up a report on the kind of person who would commit this type of crime," Jake added. "He's putting a rush on it so we should have it soon." He turned to Maya. "Did you have any problems with ViCAP?"
Jake’s gaze was direct and respectful. Unlike the dark glower from Turner. She decided not to let him get to her anymore. She had a job to do and she would do it well. Turner could just go to hell.
"None, thank you. The only remotely similar crime I could find happened twenty years ago." She flipped open a manila folder and recited the specifics. "A twenty-six year old woman was found strangled to death in Biloxi, Mississippi. She had long dark hair and cause of death was ruled cerebral hypoxia. Then ten years ago several women were reported missing in Greenville, South Carolina, but their bodies were never found. Five years ago, eight girls were reported missing within days of each other, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, all with long dark hair, but their bodies were never recovered either."
She purposefully avoided looking at Nick, instead focusing her attention on Kincaid. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nick’s eyes narrow in annoyance and experienced a small burst of victory.
"Any note or poem with the first victim?" Turner asked.
Without looking in his direction, she shook her head. "No."
"So just because she had long dark hair and died by strangulation, you assume we are dealing with the same killer?" Turner’s tone was incredulous.
Maya slowly rotated her head and pinned him with a glare. "No, Detective, that is not how I related the cases. Give me a little more credit than that."
"Give me reason to give you credit," he retorted.
Maya bit her cheek, calming her temper. More than anything, she wanted to slap the condescending smirk off his face. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing how much he affected her. Instead, she ignored him and refocused on Jake. "I can’t relate the two missing groups of women to this case just because they had long dark hair since their bodies were never found. But the first one in Biloxi, Kim Markham, was brutally raped and dressed in lingerie when discovered." She paused for dramatic effect. "And she had ‘queer’ branded onto her belly."
With an approving nod, Kincaid said, "Great work, Maya. It definitely sounds like the same guy."
"So what happened to him in the last twenty years?" Turner asked, not bothering to apologize. "Serial killers usually crave notoriety. If he abducted those other women, wouldn’t he want to leave a calling card, so to speak?"
"My reactionary answer would be yes," Jake agreed. "Look at the taunting notes at these two murder scenes. But it’s not unusual for a serial killer to change his technique, hone his craft so to speak. The notes could be one of his tweaks." He rubbed a hand across his chin. "Maybe he killed those other girls and was left unfulfilled when they were never found."
"Who knows what goes on in the twisted mind of a serial killer," Arch Keller grumbled.
"If the South Carolina and Pennsylvania cases are related, it looks like he has been slowly working his way north," Milt Baker pointed out.
"Or maybe the cases aren’t related and our guy was locked away for years," Vic Hammond suggested.
"Like in a mental institution?" Maya asked.
Jake nodded. "Or prison."
"That would make sense in the length of time between the two similar crimes," Turner said.
"Or maybe he's been able to tamp down the urge to kill," Jake considered. "Maybe the compulsion was too much and he snapped in Greenville and then again in Harrisburg, but the rest of the time, he's been able to control it."
"Somethi
ng set him off here," Vic mused.
"Assuming Kim Markham was his first kill, and the missing women in the other two states have similar descriptions," Jake said, "maybe spotting a woman who looked like Kim was the stressor."
"That would fit," Turner agreed.
"If you’ll let me see your notes, I’ll get in touch with the field office in charge of the Biloxi area and see what information they can give me," Jake said to Maya. She handed him her folder as he whipped out his cell phone. He nodded thanks and padded to the far end of the room to place the call.
Feeling good that she had contributed to the investigation, she settled back in her seat. Nick’s voice pinned her in place.
"Nice job, Maya."
She spun back around, shocked and hopeful. One look at him quickly dashed those hopes. His gaze was direct, complimentary and very distant.
"Thanks," she muttered, disappointed at herself for thinking he would change and disappointed in him for not changing.
#
"I just spoke with Martin Pratt, the detective in charge of the Markham murder," Jake informed the group an hour later. "He's retired now but he remembered it clearly." Checking his notes, he continued. "He said it was vicious, that Ms. Markham clearly suffered before her death. She had severe trauma and tearing from the brutal rape. Her body was covered in bruises, especially on her breasts, inner thighs and neck. The brand on her belly was inflicted premortem, so she suffered. In a little change of pace from our victims, Ms. Markham's face was battered beyond recognition."
"If she were his first kill, it was personal," Turner said. "He took out his anger on the object of his rage."
Jake nodded in agreement as he scanned his notes. "Ms. Markham's parents made a living by taking in foster children. The father passed away a few years before the murder, and the mother continued fostering after his death. Pratt and his crew spoke with the children and they all painted a picture of a home with no love or happiness. They had a roof over their heads and food, though nothing special, but that was it. The foster parents weren't involved in the kids lives at all. Their only natural daughter, Kim, had just left for college when the father passed away so she moved back home to help her mother with the children."
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