Kylie Brant - What the Dead Know (The Mindhunters Book 8)

by Unknown

  He set her down and, hooking his thumbs in the sides of her pants, dragged them over her hips. And when Keira pushed them down her long slender thighs to the floor, stepping out of them revealing only a scrap of panties, he felt his mouth dry.

  She swayed toward him. Her gaze was direct, her eyes smoky with desire as she worked to release the button of his jeans. He splayed a hand over her bottom to urge her closer and smoothed his lips over the side of her throat before taking the lobe of her ear in his teeth, worrying it gently.

  His hands molded her curves, tracing the edge of the elastic where it met the tops of her thighs, before cupping her lace-covered mound. Covering her mouth with his, their tongues dueled in rhythm with the brushing movements of his fingers. He could feel the damp heat of her behind the thin fabric. Could imagine that slick wet softness opening. Surrounding him.

  Then her hands were freeing him, stroking with a firm movement that threatened to send restraint careening away. He withstood her teasing as long as he could until the breath was strangling in his chest, and his vision began to haze. Then Finn stepped back, his last functioning brain cell reminding him to retrieve the condom from his jeans pocket before kicking out of his remaining clothes and reaching for her again.

  He tumbled her onto the bed, pausing to appreciate the way the moonlight sheened her skin to alabaster. Her hands were greedy, her mouth demanding as she drew him down to her. But he wasn’t ready for this to be over. Not yet. Not until he’d tasted every inch of her. Explored all the curves and hollows where her scent lingered, her pulse throbbed.

  He moved his lips over the satiny skin of her belly, pausing to dip his tongue in the delicate whorls of her navel. Her muscles quivered as she guessed his intent. He felt the bite of her nails on his shoulders when he swept away the scrap of lace and slid his hand up her thighs to part them.

  He sensed her protest, but it remained unuttered. He explored her delicate folds with the tip of his tongue just once before parting them to feast, relishing the low moan she released. Her fingers clenched in his hair. The taste of her was liquid fire and it called to something primal in him. When he found her sensitive clitoris, her hips arched off the bed.

  The long broken cry she made had his last remnant of civility slipping its leash. This was what he’d wanted. The scent of her in his system. Intoxicating his senses. He wanted to strip away every vestige of control she might cling to. Wanted to lose his own. To shatter every defense until she was a mass of sensation, a creature driven only by need.

  He entered her with one finger, exploring her inner softness as she twisted against him. His name on her lips fulfilled one need; summoned a hundred more. Her body bucked beneath his touch, her urgency signaling her imminent release. And when it came, ripping a cry from her, need slashed through him, dark and edgy.

  Lifting his head from her sated body, he searched blindly on the rumpled covers beside him. Found the condom in the folds of the comforter and attempted to rip it open, his movements made awkward by pent-up hunger.

  Then Keira’s hands were pushing his aside to roll the latex over his straining penis. Finn closed his eyes, trying to summon a sliver of control. Any thoughts he might have had of

  finesse were beyond him now. He pressed her back on the bed, meaning to make a place for himself between her thighs, but she had other plans. Suddenly it was Keira pinning him to the mattress and straddling him. Her torso arched languorously above him. And at that moment he would have given everything he had to freeze the sensual picture of her.

  She reached between their bodies and guided him inside her. The words on his lips were desperate. The hands on her hips more so. As if sensing his unraveling restraint, sharing it, she sheathed herself fully. He surged up against her in helpless demand, focusing on her face. Her eyes were at half-mast. Color rode high in her cheekbones. He wanted to commit every change of expression to memory as they moved together in a sensual battle. But his climax was rushing in, making thought impossible. His hips hammered against hers following the pace she set, fighting to get air into his lungs.

  Their rhythm quickened, each movement driving him deeper inside her until his release rocketed through him, wiping his mind clean.

  _______

  It was the heat that awakened her, a furnace-like seal pressed against her back. Then she noticed the weight. An anchor over her waist. Another pinning her ankles to the mattress. Keira dragged open her eyes and struggled to make sense of her world.

  Her bed. Her room. Not her jeans on the floor.

  A smile settled on her lips as memory filtered in. Finn Carstens was the cause of the heat and the weight. As well as the soreness in her muscles. She couldn’t muster a single regret for any of them.

  The sky overhead had lightened. The urgency of the day was already pressing in, but she was going to allow herself the next little while to simply be.

  It was only a few minutes before a quiet alert sounded, followed by Finn’s sleepy murmur. “Is that your phone or mine?”

  With some difficulty, she turned over to face him. His eyes weren’t open yet, but his arm tightened around her, pulled her closer. She rested her head against his chest, lulled by the slow, steady beat there. “Yours.”

  “Can you hand it to me? I think I’ve gone blind.”

  “Your eyes are closed,” she observed amusedly. But levered herself up and over him to get the cell, which at some time during the night he’d retrieved from the pocket of his jeans to set on the table next to him. Unerringly one of his hands went up to cup her breast. She stifled a laugh, shoving the phone in his questing fingers instead. “Apparently you don’t need sight for some things.”

  His lips curved as he freed his other hand to rub at his eyes even as he swiped in the security code with a thumb. The calendar reminder was easy enough for her to see.

  Cady’s memorial.

  She stilled against him. “Who’s Cady?”

  The change that came over his expression was immediate. He stared at the cell for a moment and she knew that he was suddenly irrevocably awake. He shifted in bed to prop himself against the headboard. “I’ll never be certain. A little girl who died.”

  He didn’t have to tell her. She wouldn’t push. Keira had experienced enough loss to respect the space of others who’d suffered the same. “She’d be six by now. Today’s the anniversary of her death. She and her mother died three years ago.” His expression was impassive when he turned to face her, but his eyes…the haunting pain there was palpable. “Cynthia…her mother and I…we dated for a while, but it was never serious. I was preparing for my first DGA trip and we were both seeing other people. After I left, I never saw her again. Until she and her daughter showed up in my autopsy suite.”

  The awfulness of what he was telling her carved a hole through her gut. “God, Finn.”

  “It’s standard procedure to excuse ourselves if we know the victims, but I didn’t recognize Cynthia’s last name. She’d married. Some idiot with a gun started shooting up a mall and she and her daughter were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  A minute passed, stretching interminably. “I told you I was a twin. My sister’s name is Fiona.” His smile flickered, there and gone again. “There’s this dopey picture of us on my parents’ mantel wearing matching sailor outfits. And Cady…that beautiful little girl on my table…I swear to God she looked so much like my sister in that photo…I had to wonder.”

  A sigh rattled out of him. “I got someone in there to relieve me. Made an excuse.” He shook his head as if to dislodge the memory. “I never knew Cynthia was pregnant. I’ve run a hundred different scenarios through my head. I wasn’t ever unavailable, even when I was out of the country. I didn’t hear from her again. But the girl…her age was right. She could have belonged to someone else Cynthia was seeing. She just looked so damn much like that picture…” He turned his face toward hers. She could see the ghosts that lingered in his eyes. “I’ll never be certain.”

  Her chest wa
s tight with empathy. Keira’s hand reached out for his. Squeezed hard. “Not knowing must be torturous.”

  “There was something in the paper with the obituary. A suggestion for where to send memorials. That’s what the note on the phone was for. I make a donation every year. It’s important that she be remembered. No matter…”

  No matter who the girl’s father was. Keira completed the thought silently. Her heart ached for a child cut down before she’d had a chance to live. It hurt equally for the man beside her.

  “When Raiker approached me about a job I jumped at the opportunity to get out of the ME’s office.” He skated his thumb along the side of her hand where their fingers were laced together. “I still do pathology when it’s called for, but I can’t practice it on a continual basis anymore.”

  Her throat tight, she shook her head. “No one could blame you.” There was nothing more to say so they fell silent, her hand gliding rhythmically over his arm as if she could soothe away the pain. Ghosts. They all had them. Sometimes they haunted for a lifetime.

  They stayed that way long enough for a pre-dawn glow to appear at the edge of the curtains. When her cell rang, she reached for it with her free hand. She checked the screen. Six forty-two. “It’s Phil,” she said to Finn as she answered it.

  “Took a call fifteen minutes ago from Doug O’Shea.” By the noises in the background, it sounded as though the man were already in his car. “He was out checking his traplines and found a body in the Hiawatha Forest.”

  She was out of the bed in seconds, heading to her closet for a fresh uniform. “Male or female?”

  “It’s male. Haven’t made it there yet myself but Doug seemed to think it could be Bruce Yembley.”

  Chapter 11

  Tiffany was glad he kept his face covered. Not because it hid the man’s identity. She’d already recognized his voice when he and Yembley were talking. No, wearing the facemask meant that maybe he planned to let her go. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  But when he’d forced Yembley into the pickup she knew in her heart that even if she was allowed to leave this building alive, she wasn’t going to stay that way. Because the man had come back alone. And it was at that moment that she realized that whatever he’d done with Yembley, he had something even worse in store for her.

  “You do any hunting?” He seemed in a fine mood right now, his voice echoing a bit in the building as he approached her. “Trapping?”

  She shook her head and tried to keep herself from shrinking away when he stopped in front of her.

  “Too sensitive? Don’t like the mess? Or don’t like taking trophies?” When she remained silent, he reached out one gloved hand with a vicious swipe that snapped her head back. “Answer me, bitch.”

  The blow accomplished what hours of terror-filled solitary couldn’t. A hot ball of fury formed in the pit of her stomach. Tiffany welcomed it. Embraced it. This wasn’t a man who’d be swayed by tears or pleading. She needed brains to get out of here.

  Brains and the devil’s own luck. She spit the blood that pooled in her mouth at the man’s feet. “No. I don’t think I’d like it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t need you to make the delivery. Just to write the message.” He reached up to unlock the cuffs that kept her wrists secured to the pipe running over her head. Her arms dropped down numbly. She’d lost feeling in them hours ago.

  Frowning, she watched him take a piece of glossy white paper out of the bag he carried, followed by a black Sharpie.

  “Go ahead,” he said impatiently. “Get the circulation back in your hands. You’re going to need one of them to write with.”

  Awkwardly she rubbed her hands and arms until needles of sensation could be felt stabbing through them. “Okay, enough.” He shoved the marker at her. “You’re going to send a message to your bitch friend. Saxon.”

  Tiffany stilled. “Like hell I am.”

  The fist he plowed into her stomach had her doubling over, gagging and retching as she struggled for breath. “I can hurt you. Bad. I will, eventually, although women aren’t near as much fun as men.” He wrapped his hand in her hair to pull her head back painfully until his masked face with its slits for eyes and mouth filled her entire vision. “You’re nothing but bait, get that? Either you write the note, or I cut off a body part and send that along to Saxon because all I care about is letting her know I’ve got you. To find you she’ll have to come through me.” He released her and shoved the Sharpie at her again.

  She didn’t understand this. Not any of it. But she knew he was planning to hurt Keira, and he was going to use Tiffany to do it. Thinking rapidly, she said in a weak voice, “She hasn’t seen my handwriting for years. But I can write like we did when we were kids. She’ll recognize that.”

  It was a struggle to hold the Sharpie. When it slipped from her hand once he punched her again, this time with enough strength to have pain singing through her jaw. “Jesus, it’s simple enough. Just say, ‘Come and get me.’ Can you fucking do that, or should I just slice off your tit and send that along?”

  “What makes you think she’d recognize that, asshole?”

  He smiled as she bent down painfully to prop the paper he handed her on her thigh to start writing. “You always were a smartass.”

  She had no idea what he was trying to accomplish, but she knew this might be the one and only time she would have a chance to warn her friend. She wrote the words, adding flourishes as clues. He grabbed the paper away from her, stared at it. “What the hell is that supposed to be?”

  “Half hearts,” she lied, bracing herself for another blow. If her feet weren’t bound, she’d kick him square in the balls, regardless of what the action would cost her. “We were half-hearted. It’s a joke from when we were kids.”

  “Lame.” He took the paper and set it next to a cardboard box. When he stood again, he snapped the cuffs on her wrists, but this time threaded a chain through both that he looped to the overhead pipe. It would allow her to move a short distance. More importantly, she could lower her arms.

  Her gratitude was short-lived. He pulled a knife out of the back of his waistband and approached her, seeming amused by her efforts to scramble away from him. “Count yourself lucky.” He stopped her with one hand in her hair. She felt a sawing motion, pulling and snapping until she was free again. When she opened her eyes, she saw him holding a long hank of hair. “I could have removed it like Yembley’s.” He flipped open the carton with one foot, and her horrified gaze followed his. And for the first time since he’d taken her, Tiffany Andrews began to scream.

  _______

  “He was lying right next to my trap.” Doug O’Shea’s voice was shaky, and he took another gulp from the thermos he held. “Face up. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t touch anything. It was still dark. At first, I thought a large animal was feeding on my catch. Then the flashlight beam caught him. I contacted Phil right away.” He tried for a smile. Couldn’t quite pull it off. “We golf sometimes in the summer, so I had his number. Probably should have called 911. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “That’s understandable.” Keira looked over his shoulder at the body. She’d called for the ME, but the man would be coming out of Manistique. Finn was serving in that capacity at the moment, and he likely had a great deal more experience than did the general practitioner that served as ME for four counties.

  But after last night, she felt more than a little guilty about asking Finn to assume the duty.

  Turning her attention back to O’Shea, she asked, “You knew Yembley?”

  He nodded. Took another sip. “I’ve seen him checking his traps now and again. I give him a pretty wide berth usually.”

  “Have you had trouble with him in the past?”

  “Not really.” He rolled the thermos between his gloved hands. “I’m referring more to his reputation, I guess. He always has something to say when I run into him out here. I ignore him when I can, but sometimes he makes that hard.” As
if realizing how that sounded, his head jerked up. “Not that there was bad blood between us. I barely knew him.”

  “Okay. At least you don’t have to worry about going in to work today.” She patted him on the shoulder.

  “I was planning on church later. Not sure that’s such a great idea now.”

  “Why don’t you get the statement out of the way then? Mary’s right here, and she’ll walk you through it.”

  He nodded, and she left him sitting in the back seat of her cruiser, and beckoned Mary over. Phil appeared at her side. “Hank will try to get here later. They were in the hospital all last night with his son. Double ear infection or something.”

  They walked toward the approaching newcomers. She recognized Sergeant Gomez, the U.S. Forest Service’s special agent who served several local counties. Gil Stevens, the investigator for the National Park Service, flanked him. Both men had been on the scene when her dad’s body had been found. They were accompanied by Gary Paulus, a district forester and DNR Conservation Officer Beau Chandler.

  “Hell of a thing, Sheriff. Have you identified the victim?”

  She nodded at Gomez’s question. He was a short, stout man and looked rounder today in his down jacket and stocking hat. Although it wasn’t snowing at the moment, the breeze was dislodging flakes from the branches from overhead trees and a few adorned his bushy black mustache.

  “Bruce Yembley. An ex-con who lived in Deerton.”

  “Saw the BOLO on him yesterday.” The sergeant’s dark eyes were shrewd. “Guess we know why you never caught up with him.”

  Keira looked toward where Finn was crouched down beside the body. “If we had, he’d still be alive. We had just identified him as the shooter at my place the other night.”

  Stevens followed the direction of her gaze. “Was he killed here or dumped?”

  “The ME hasn’t arrived, but I have a special consultant working with the department who has the same background.” Keira had drawn her own conclusions when she’d first seen the area, but she’d wait for corroboration. “He’ll be able to give us some answers.”