As she thought of what had happened to Melinda she couldn’t help but wonder if somebody was watching her and waiting for the perfect moment to kidnap and beat her.
Chapter 5
Melinda Grayson sat on Mark’s chest, her long dark hair wild and free and her large green eyes gleaming in the light of a full moon. She was laughing as something pulled tighter and tighter around his throat, choking him...gagging him.
He could smell the dank earth of his shallow grave, was aware of two dead bodies nearby. His heart thundered in his chest, desperately needing the oxygen he was being deprived by whatever was wrapped around his neck. A male’s laughter filled the air, joining Melinda’s. She tightened her thighs against his sides.
She then leaned down, her lush lips moist and swollen and repulsive. He knew that if she tried to kiss him he’d vomit and aspirate on his own bile. “Die,” she whispered, and then threw back her head and laughed as darkness claimed Mark.
He shot up, his gun in hand and sweat pouring off his body. It took him a moment to orient himself in the dark room. From a slit in the curtains at the window he could see the yellow neon sign flashing Vacancy. The motel. He wasn’t in some makeshift graveyard. He was in his motel room in Vengeance, Texas.
He clutched the gun so tightly his fingers ached, making him wonder when he’d grabbed it and how long he’d been holding it. With a hand that trembled he placed it on the nightstand and turned on the bedside lamp. A shudder slowly worked its way up his spine.
Thank God he hadn’t fired the weapon. He could have killed somebody in the room next to his. He stumbled from the bed and into the bathroom, where he sluiced cold water on his face. When he was finished he dried his face with a towel and then stared at his reflection in the mirror.
This had never happened before. He’d always been able to easily tap into the head of the killer, but not the victim. But he’d been there as a victim, helpless and choking, feeling the life slowly squeezed out of him and knowing that he would soon join the other two dead men in a shallow grave of his own.
His heart finally slowed to a more normal rhythm and he left the bathroom, his mind twisted in confusion. Why now? Why identify with any of the victims? It was as if he’d been there when those three men had been strangled to death, as if he’d seen the way it had gone down with Melinda’s glee and her partner’s cool efficiency.
Had the dream simply been a manifestation of his need to be right? Of his desire to make Melinda the guilty party because he didn’t believe the whole kidnapping issue that his teammates had bought into so easily?
He got back into bed, his brain refusing to turn off despite the fact that it was just after two in the morning. The dream bothered him despite the fact that it was just crazy and all in his head.
He finally fell back asleep and woke up in a foul mood. As if the wild dreams about Melinda and some unknown male killing him hadn’t been enough. When he’d finally fallen back to sleep, he had dreams of Dora.
Erotic dreams of the two of them together in his motel room bed. Her smell had permeated the entire place, and her imagined warmth had been a tangible ache when he’d awakened alone in the bed. His intense physical attraction to her had been so unexpected.
He’d told himself she would be a perfect tool to use in his investigation, but he knew now he was only fooling himself. Dora Martin wasn’t about to solve these crimes for him; nor did he believe she had any relevant information that might lead to the killer or killers.
What she did have was hair that looked as soft as silk, eyes that held just enough mystery to make him want to explore and an indefinable spark that kept him wanting more from her...of her.
After rolling out of bed he’d taken a long shower, then had dressed and tried to forget Dora Martin. He attended the usual briefing, where they were all told that there was intense pressure coming from Darby College officials as well as the mayor to clean up this whole mess before homecoming week.
This mess. Mark was sure the powers that be in the small town of Vengeance would like nothing better than to somehow sweep this all under a rug, but three men were dead, one of them a state senator. Homecoming was only two weeks away and nothing new had come to the surface to shed the tiniest light on any of the murders or the kidnapping of Melinda Grayson.
They’d interviewed spouses of the dead men, neighbors and friends. Mark himself had conducted a long interview with Senator Merris’s aide, Frank Kellerman. He’d found the thirty-eight-year-old man to be angry and closemouthed despite the fact he was cooling his heels in jail for the kidnapping of Peter Burris’s baby and sister-in-law. He refused to shed any information that would help the ongoing investigation of the murder of his boss.
Dead ends, and Mark had seemed to have lost his ability to crawl inside the killer’s mind. They didn’t even have enough information to formulate a viable profile that fit both the kidnapping and the murders.
The usual murder suspect would be a Caucasian male between the ages of twenty-eight and forty. The consensus was that all three men might have known their attacker and were taken by surprise. Certainly the killer had been privy to the secrets that the men had in their lives before their untimely deaths.
It was late afternoon when Mark found himself once again in front of the video equipment, playing and replaying the images of Melinda Grayson with her captor and trying to forget the alarming nightmares he’d had about her the night before.
He watched all four of the videos that had been sent to law enforcement three times and then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his gritty, strained eyes.
Dora. This was about the time of day she’d be making her way to the bookstore. In the brief kiss they’d shared she’d tasted just like he thought she would, like warm sunshine on his lips.
What he’d like to do was walk over and hang out, talk to her and maybe buy her a cup of coffee again after she was finished for the night. But he wasn’t going to do that.
Two weeks before homecoming and in his heart he knew Dora had no information that would move the investigation forward. He could pretend all he wanted that he needed her as an informant, but the truth was it had nothing to do with his job—as a man, he wanted her.
That wasn’t fair to her. She’d told him she had no place for romance in her life and the last thing he wanted was to be a meaningless distraction from her studies. She could definitely become a distraction to him in his duties, and he couldn’t allow that to happen.
With a disheartened sigh, he leaned forward and punched the remote to watch the videos yet again. He was still there an hour later when Richard found him.
“Richard, I want you to see something.” A thrum of excitement raced through Mark’s veins, an excitement he was afraid to embrace in case he was seeing something that really wasn’t there.
Richard eased down in the chair next to him. “You’ve got to get away from these videos, Mark. You’re driving yourself crazy,” he said not unkindly. “You need some distance, to get out of this room and try to get an insight into things through another avenue.”
“Just wait.” Mark hit the rewind button and waited until he was at the beginning of the loop of the four videos. “For the first time I think I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. I just want you to focus solely on Professor Grayson. Don’t take your eyes off her while you watch,” Mark instructed.
Richard released a long-suffering but tolerant sigh. “Okay.”
Mark hit the button to play the videos. Neither of them spoke as each scene played out. When the screen went blue Richard leaned forward, a thoughtful frown on his face. “Play it again.”
When it had played once again Richard leaned back in his chair and raked a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “She flinched,” he said as he looked at Mark with a vague surprise. “Each time before her captor hit her, she flinches, as if she’s expecting the blow.�
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Mark nodded and allowed his excitement free rein. “Exactly, and yet she’s blindfolded, so she wouldn’t see the hit coming, there’s no reason for her to flinch and prepare for the blow.”
“Unless the whole thing is scripted,” Richard said thoughtfully. “I can’t believe that I’m starting to buy into what I thought was your very own personal delusion.”
Mark laughed. “All the times I’ve watched these scenes before, I’ve been focused on the surroundings, the person in charge. I’ve been trying to find something that would point to where the video was shot and something to identify the captor. I hadn’t really focused my whole concentration on the victim.”
“But, playing devil’s advocate here, she might have flinched just because she was afraid of being hit, unsure of if or when an attack might come.”
Mark shook his head. “The flinches are perfectly timed just seconds before she gets hit. She doesn’t flinch any other time. I’m telling you, somehow this whole kidnapping was staged.”
“But why? Why would a woman like Melinda Grayson do such a crazy thing? She’s an esteemed professor, an icon of success around the campus. It doesn’t make sense that she would work with somebody to stage her own kidnapping, allow herself to be beaten and then miraculously be released. There’s no motive for her to have done that.”
“I know,” Mark replied, the excitement he’d felt at his discovery quickly ebbing away. “I just can’t figure it out. I think we need to dig deeper into Melinda’s background, find out exactly what kind of woman she is.”
“And I think you need to get out of here and come with me. Some of the guys are calling it a day and doing a little unwinding at Johnnie’s Tavern. Pitchers of beer and New York–style brats with spicy onion sticks that will blow the back of your head off.” Richard stood. “Come on, Mark. Take the night off and fill your head with grease and booze. We all need a little downtime.”
“Okay,” Mark relented. He didn’t often join the team for anything but the daily briefings. Mark was a loner who allowed in few people, and he knew it was because so many people found him intimidating with his intelligence and strange because of his abilities and his social awkwardness. Richard understood this. However, at the moment, the offer appealed to Mark because not only did he need a break from thinking about the cases, he also needed something to make him stop thinking about Dora.
* * *
A half hour later he sat with Richard on his left and Donald Thompson on his right. Lori Delaney was across the table along with Agents Larry Albright and Joseph Garcia.
Within minutes three pitchers of beer adorned the center of the table and orders had been placed for everything from mozzarella sticks to hot wings and, of course, the onion sticks that were a signature dish of the dingy, typical college-town tavern.
“Hey, Mark, nice of you to climb out of your head long enough to join us,” Delaney teased when the waitress had left.
“As long as I don’t have to crawl into your head, I’m good,” he teased right back.
“Right now my head is filled with thoughts of a bubble bath in my own tub and a full night’s sleep in my own bed. I hate the motel we’re stuck in. I swear they put the noisiest guests in the room next to mine night after night.”
“I never thought I’d say it, but I’m actually starting to miss my wife’s cooking,” Larry said.
Everyone groaned. It was a well-known fact among their team that Larry’s wife was an enthusiastic but very bad cook.
As everyone at the table began to talk about what they missed most being away from home, Mark thought of Grace and the phone call and promise he’d made to her.
He’d forgotten to mention it to Dora and it had been Dora who had prompted him to make the call, to make an attempt at being the kind of father Grace needed in her life.
He gazed across the table at Lori Delaney. She was a nice-looking woman with shoulder-length brown hair like Dora’s. But Mark didn’t want to tangle his hands in Lori’s hair. He didn’t want to pull her close against him and feel how well their bodies molded together. He wanted to do that with Dora.
He wanted to feel the strands of her hair whirled around his fingers, pull her close to see if her hair smelled of wildflowers. He could easily imagine how neatly she would fit against him.
Sarah was a short, petite woman, and their embraces had always felt awkward, as if they were two pieces of separate puzzles. He knew instinctively that physically Dora’s height would make them fit together neatly, as if they were from the same puzzle.
“Earth to Mark.” Joseph’s voice pulled him back to the tavern. “You’ve got to try these onion things. They are mucho hot.”
“It’s the capsaicin,” Mark replied.
“The what?” Richard asked.
“Capsaicin, a molecule that is the main component in chile peppers. It’s actually an irritant that causes the burning on the tongue.” His cheeks flushed as he realized he’d delivered a short speech on something nobody really cared about.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t ever want to play trivia with you,” Lori replied ruefully, and Mark relaxed as everyone laughed.
He used to think that people were laughing at him, but he knew these people who surrounded him. They were colleagues who knew and appreciated his quirks, people who often came to him for minute bits of trivia when investigating one thing or another.
For the next two hours they sat at the table, eating fried and greasy food and drinking far too much beer. They got loud and laughed often as they all blew off the steam of frustration.
It was the work that brought a team together, but it was times like these that bonded a team forever. When Richard’s wife had gone through breast cancer treatment it had been the people at this table who had brought food to his house, visited her in the hospital and tried to ease some of Richard’s fears. When Sarah and Mark had divorced it had been these people at the table who had offered him comfort and support.
By the time Mark got up to use the men’s room he had a pleasant buzz going on and was grateful that the motel where they were staying was walking distance from the tavern. There was enough trouble in town without the embarrassment of one of them being picked up by a local for driving under the influence.
He’d almost made it to the restroom when a loud, strident voice caught his attention. Blearily he gazed at the table in the back corner where a thirtysomething man appeared to be holding court.
“They all were scumbags,” he said to the group of three men who were with him. His words slurred, a definite indication that the man had probably had a little too much to drink. “They deserved what they got. I hope the Feds don’t solve the damn murders. Whoever killed those men did us all a big favor.”
Mark sobered as he continued on his way, suddenly interested in the identity of the man who was so outspoken and publicly applauding a murderer.
When he left the restroom he went to the bar and waited to catch the bartender’s attention. “More pitchers for the table?” the bartender, who wore a name tag that identified him as Mike, asked.
“No, thanks, I think we’re good,” Mark replied. “I was just wondering if you could tell me who that guy is at the corner table in the back, the one wearing the blue shirt.”
“That would be Troy Young. Why, is he bothering you? He tends to be a loudmouth, especially when he’s had a few.”
“No, nothing like that,” Mark hurriedly replied. “Thanks.”
Troy Young. Mark turned the name over in his head as he walked back to the table of his colleagues.
If Melinda was somehow responsible for the murders, then she had to have a partner. There was no way she could have killed three men and buried them all by herself.
A person of interest, he thought as he rejoined the group. First thing in the morning he’d do a
little digging into Troy Young and see if there was anything there or if the loudmouth opinionated guy was just another person who hated liars, cheaters and thieves.
* * *
Amanda knocked on Melinda’s door and waited for a response. It was almost nine at night, but it wasn’t unusual for Melinda to get a sudden brainstorm and need Amanda to come take notes or sit at the computer and pull up research. Melinda didn’t adhere to usual business hours. When she needed her assistants she called, no matter the time of day.
Her stomach clenched in irritation as Ben opened Melinda’s front door. “How did you get here so fast?” she asked as she shoved past him and into the living room. It usually took Ben ten minutes longer than it did Amanda to get to Melinda’s when she beckoned.
“Actually, I’ve been here for a little over an hour.” He flung himself on the sofa, a smug smile on his face. “Melinda is in the bedroom. She should be out shortly.”
Amanda stared at him, feeling sick as she recognized the implication he was trying to give her. The idea of Ben in bed with Melinda made her throw up a little in the back of her throat.
“You’re lying,” she whispered vehemently, not wanting to believe that her idol, her role model would allow somebody like Ben to even touch her. He wasn’t good enough to wash Melinda’s feet, let alone be in bed with her.
Ben shrugged. “Believe what you want.” He grinned slyly. “I’ll just say this, I like being teacher’s pet.”
“Ben.” Melinda’s voice thundered as she entered the living room from the bedroom clad in an emerald-green dressing gown. “Stop trying to make trouble or you’ll make me angry. And you know you don’t want me angry with you.”
Her eyes were hard chips of jewels that matched her floor-length silk gown. They glowed with a displeasure that chilled Amanda to the bone. Ben’s smug smile disappeared from his face. They both had seen Melinda’s rages and Amanda knew she never wanted Melinda angry with her.
“We have work to do,” Melinda said briskly. “And we don’t have time for childish games.” She glared once again at Ben, who appeared to sink deeper and deeper into the brown sofa cushion.
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