(Moon 1) - Killing Moon

by Rebecca York

  His hand clamped around the butt of the gun, the cold metal digging into his flesh.

  He was going to find out who it was—because failure was not an option, not when failure meant the end of everything. Life. Freedom. And the sexual satisfaction he needed to exist.

  CHAPTER TWO

  « ^ »

  MEGAN SHERIDAN FOLDED her arms across her chest, rubbing briskly at the sleeves of her lab coat.

  She'd already tried to turn up the heat, but a newly installed plastic box covering the thermostat made it impossible to change the setting without a key. One more Monday morning surprise at Bio Gen Labs.

  "Is Walter trying to freeze off our fingers, then collect on the insurance?" she muttered under her breath.

  Her coworker Hank Lancaster gave a sharp laugh and handed her a hot mug of coffee. The mug was a freebie from a drug company pushing a new diuretic, and the picture emblazoned on the side of the bright yellow ceramic showed a pair of kidneys.

  "Here, maybe this will help. And don't let him hear you. He may think it's a good idea."

  Megan rolled her blue eyes as she cupped her hands around the mug's warmth. Two years ago, after her medical internship at Johns Hopkins and a year of postdoc work, she'd had her pick of job offers from the bio-genetic laboratories clustered around the Washington-Baltimore area.

  She'd gone with Bio Gen because the CEO, Walter Galveston, had sold her on the potential of his up-and-coming company. Now in his early forties, Walter had learned the ropes at several area labs, then gone out on his own. After telling her he was looking for projects that would bring in money as well as scientific prestige, he'd listened attentively to her proposal for using gene therapy to treat Myer's disease, an inherited form of macular degeneration that struck in young adulthood. Walter had given the project priority at Bio Gen until some of the well-publicized deaths caused by gene therapy had hit the news.

  Now he was holding up her clinical trials until she dotted every "i" and crossed every "t" in her proposal. Not only that, but in the past four months, she'd watched Walter shift her hours away from her project to routine paternity testing, chromosome studies, and genetic profiles—jobs that paid nice fees in the short run but contributed nothing to the basic genetic research that fired her enthusiasm.

  From where she stood, it looked like Bio Gen had a cash flow problem. Only Walter hadn't bothered to share the information with his employees. And he hadn't bothered to come in on time this morning, either, Megan thought with a snort—then suffered a pang of guilt for her mutinous attitude. Bitching behind her boss's back made her feel uncomfortable. Yet sharing her frustration with her coworker was turning into a ritual, probably because their research goals were so similar.

  She and Hank were both in their early thirties, both highly educated, both dedicated to their research projects. She'd gotten her MD, then realized it was impossible to keep her distance from her patients. She cared too much, was affected too much by their suffering and their deaths. And so she'd withdrawn to a safer venue—where she could impose the veil of lab procedures between herself and flesh-and-blood patients.

  Hank had gone a different route—earning a Ph.D. in biology before coming to Bio Gen. He was different, too, in his feelings about people. While she appreciated the unique human qualities of each individual, he was the kind of man who classified everyone he met according to IQ. The smarter they were, the more he respected them.

  She watched him walk down the hall to the front office, pause for a brief conversation with the receptionist, Betty Daniels, then return with a clipboard in his hand and a carefully bland expression on his face.

  The feigned nonchalance didn't fool her. Sweeping back a lock of dark blond hair that had fallen across her eyes, she said, "You might as well hit me with the bad news."

  He gave an upward thrust to the clipboard, managing to make it look like an obscene gesture. "We've got eighteen paternity cases this week. And almost as many clients who want genetic profiling before they consider having children."

  Megan did a rapid calculation. That was going to suck up most of the workweek. Which meant that if she were going to do anything with her own project, she would be doing it after hours. Damn, what was wrong with Walter? Didn't he know that if she succeeded in her treatment protocol, Bio Gen would have plenty of money? Not to mention credit for a major medical breakthrough?

  Hank rolled back the top sheet of paper and stabbed his long finger at a line on the second page. "There's a notation on this one—about a client who lives in Lisbon. Apparently he wants someone from the lab to go out there and get a blood sample."

  "Lisbon, Howard County? Or Lisbon, Portugal?"

  He laughed, apparently giving her points for the quick comeback. "Howard County."

  "That's an hour's ride from here."

  "Maybe he's got some nasty genetic defect that causes warts all over his body, so he doesn't go out in public."

  "Sure."

  "Or he could have a sick kid who can't be left alone."

  Megan felt her stomach clench in that old familiar way. She didn't even know the man, but she could imagine what his life might be like. If he were taking care of a critically ill youngster with a serious genetic defect, he might well have trouble getting to the lab.

  "Whatever it is, you can bet Walter is charging him through the nose for the house call." Hank let the top sheet fall back into place, set down the clipboard on the edge of her desk, and pulled a quarter out of his pocket. "I'll flip you for it."

  "Sure. Why not?" she agreed, wishing she could be as blasé as he was. She called heads. And lost, of course. Her luck hadn't been particularly good lately.

  "I'll cover the next house call," Hank offered as he took in her gloomy expression.

  "Like we're going to get another one anytime soon," Megan answered, picking up the clipboard.

  The conversation came to a halt when the outer door slammed open with enough force to shake the walls.

  "What the hell was that?" Hank muttered as they exchanged glances.

  In the reception area, a man was bellowing at Betty.

  The administrative assistant's voice was unnaturally high as she responded—and hardly anything usually disturbed her equanimity. She was a veteran office manager whom Walter had enticed away from NIH. He liked having her in the front office for the combination of motherly warmth and polished efficiency she projected. And her word processing skills were nothing to sneeze at, either.

  By unspoken mutual agreement, Megan and Hank started down the hall, bent on rescuing the poor woman.

  They both stopped dead when they saw that the person bellowing at Betty was Walter Galveston. Ordinarily their boss looked like he'd just sauntered out of a photo session for GQ. This morning, his charcoal gray suit was rumpled, his expensively cut hair was mussed, and Megan thought his face appeared to have aged five years since she'd seen him Friday afternoon.

  Her own features contorted. "Walter, what is it? What's wrong?"

  He flapped his arm in an angry gesture. "Some bastard ran me off the road on the way here. Then he sped away before I could get his license number."

  "Oh, my God. Are you all right? What about your car?"

  His jaw trembled with emotion. "I'm just shaken up. But there's a gouge on the side of the Mercedes where I sideswiped a traffic barrier."

  "Did you see what kind of car it was?" Hank asked.

  Walter shook his head. "It all happened too fast, and I was busy staying out of that ditch where they're laying sewer pipes on Montrose Road."

  Megan pictured the intersection he meant. "Were there any witnesses?"

  "Probably, but everybody just kept driving by. You know—the usual behavior these days. People don't want to get involved. And no wonder. If you stop to break up an argument between two motorists, you could get your head blown off."

  As she nodded in agreement, Hank asked, "What exactly happened?"

  "The car came up behind me, nudged me to the side, then sped
away."

  "You think it was an accident?" Hank asked. "Or road rage? Did you do something to yank his chain? Cut him off or something?"

  A guarded expression crossed Walter's sharp features. "I don't know."

  Megan wondered if he had cut the other guy off—or done something else he wasn't going to admit.

  Before they could ask any more questions, he was shoving open the front door. "Come see what the bastard did to me."

  Bio Gen was in an industrial park, near the end of a one-story building of buff-colored brick strung out along a parking lot. Separating the entrance and the paved area was a five-foot strip of crabgrass. Walter's only concession to charm was a couple of conical evergreens in fancy cement pots on either side of the front door.

  As Megan and Hank followed Walter down the short sidewalk and across the blacktop to the parking spaces, she braced against the late March wind. Betty trailed behind them, clutching a baby blue cardigan closed across her ample breasts.

  Walter's gold Mercedes was parked in a reserved spot next to the handicapped space.

  Her lab coat whipping around her legs, Megan followed Walter's gesturing hand and squinted, trying to locate the damage to the vehicle. Finally her gaze lit upon a hardly noticeable scrape in the gold metallic paint.

  Behind Walter's back, Hank raised his eyes toward the heavens. "It shouldn't take too much to fix that," he commented.

  "Yeah, well, it's not just the paint. There's a dent underneath you can feel if you run your hand along it. I'm going to start making calls to body shops right now."

  As he strode back inside the building, his bemused audience followed.

  Walter paused to grab a phone book from the drawer in Betty's desk and then stalked down the hall to his plush, private office, leaving his three employees in the reception area.

  Standing with the others, Megan felt the awkwardness of the moment. Obviously nobody knew what to say about the boss's uncharacteristic behavior. The clipboard was still in Megan's hand. To give herself something to do, she looked at the name and the phone number of the guy in Lisbon. "Ross Marshall," she murmured.

  Betty responded almost instantly. "The guy who doesn't want to come in to the lab."

  "Right. I guess you talked to him."

  "Uh-huh." She paused for a moment, taking a pencil from the holder on her desk and fiddling with it. "He's got a very… compelling voice."

  Perhaps Hank was worried that the Ross Marshall job was still up for discussion, because he turned and hurried out of the room.

  Megan stood where she was, studying the secretary's unfocused expression and the fingers she ran up and down the pencil shaft. It wasn't like Betty to react to clients in anything but a professional way.

  "Walter confirmed an appointment for this afternoon," the assistant informed her. "Mr. Marshall said he'd be home. So you or Hank just need to set the time."

  "I'm doing it."

  "I keep wondering what he looks like. Since I'm not going to see him, I expect a full report."

  Megan blinked. "Okay," she agreed, as much to end the conversation as anything else.

  Her curiosity piqued, she returned to her desk and dialed the phone number on the sheet. On the fifth ring, an answering machine picked up. Five seconds into the recorded message, she understood what Betty had been reacting to in the man's voice. It was assured, compellingly masculine. But there was something more. An inviting quality that set off a subtle vibration deep within her.

  "This is Ross Marshall. I'm out of the office right now. Please leave your name and number, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible."

  When he finished speaking, she looked again at the sheet in front of her. According to the notation, she was supposed to be calling a home number. Well, maybe the guy worked from home.

  She'd hoped to get directions to his place. So she asked if he'd call her back, then added that she planned to be at his house around four-thirty. What she didn't say was that she was going to be really pissed off if she drove all the way to western Howard County for nothing.

  A couple of miles away at the Second District police station, Detective Jack Thornton stared down at the thick file in front of him as he rubbed his thumb against his lean jaw.

  Inside the file was a name he hadn't expected to encounter: Ross Marshall. One of his most useful contacts.

  He'd met Marshall three years ago. Jack had just been promoted to detective and was working a seemingly unsolvable homicide case. A woman named Helen Dawson had disappeared from a car later found pulled into a patch of weeds along Falls Road. There were no suspects—except the estranged husband who was the beneficiary of an insurance policy that the woman had neglected to alter when they'd separated. The man had an alibi, though, that stood up to extensive investigation.

  With no police leads, the woman's distraught parents had hired Marshall to find out what happened to their daughter. A week later, the PI contacted the department, saying he had some pertinent information. Jack had been skeptical at first, but he'd agreed to a meeting with Marshall at a coffee shop on Rockville Pike.

  He remembered their first encounter with vivid clarity. The PI had been tall, athletic, intelligent looking, and reserved in a way that made it hard to get a handle on him.

  Telling himself not to make any judgments until he heard the whole story, Jack had listened to the tale Marshall had to tell: that Dawson had been abducted, raped, and killed by a man named Billy Preston, a mechanic who had done some work on her car several weeks before and who had become obsessed with her. When she'd stopped for gas on the night she'd disappeared, Preston had asked for a ride to a nearby shopping center. But they had never reached that destination.

  Jack remembered asking Marshall how he'd come up with that kind of detailed scenario. The PI had declined to reveal his methods, but the look on his face dared Jack to ignore the information. Still figuring it was a long shot, he had pursued the lead, using an outstanding traffic violation as an excuse to search Preston's car. He'd hit pay dirt when he'd found Dawson's bloodstained sweater stuffed in a gym bag.

  Marshall never had explained how he'd fingered Preston, but the Dawson case had been the start of a working relationship between the two of them. On his end of it, Jack ran license plates for Ross, checked outstanding warrants, and meted out inside information available only to the department. In exchange, Ross provided leads that could have been obtained only by illegal means—or magic.

  Jack didn't believe in methods impossible to verify. Which meant that Ross was collecting information through clandestine searches and other questionable procedures. The assumption put a barrier between him and the PI, a barrier that neither one of them had been able to breach.

  Yet Ross kept coming to him when he had something he thought the police department could use. Although Jack admitted to himself that he still had suspicions about the guy, he continued to accept his help.

  He stared across the squad room, his blue eyes unfocused. Then the phone rang on a nearby desk, and his attention snapped back to the file on his blotter—a five-year-old missing persons case, a man named Edward Crawford.

  There was more in the folder than simply information on Crawford's disappearance. The man had been a suspect in the killings of several young women from the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Then his sister had reported him missing—and the murders had stopped.

  That was the end of it—a Stone Who Done It. An unsolvable case. Until three weeks ago when torrential rains had washed a skeleton out of the ground in a rural area near Sugar Loaf Mountain. It had been identified by dental records as Crawford.

  It hadn't been Jack's problem five years ago. The dead man's folder had ended up on his desk because the primary investigator, Ken Winston, was now retired.

  Jack had started by going over everything in the file: pages from Ken's notebook, a couple of Post-it notes, an old envelope with the sister's address, a couple of business cards, and neatly typed official paperwork.

  One of the not
ebook entries had yielded a very interesting piece of information. A private detective named Ross Marshall had been hired to find out who murdered one of the missing women, Lisa Blake.

  Jack paged to the medical examiner's report. Because of the deterioration of Crawford's body, the cause of death was undetermined. If the man had been shot, the bullet hadn't shattered any bones. If he'd been strangled, the hyoid bone hadn't been crushed. And there was no skull-crushing trauma to the head.

  But a soil sample estimating the decay placed the burial at about the time of Crawford's disappearance.

  The Frederick County officers who'd been called to the scene had searched for evidence. Things like old cigarette butts, a lighter, buttons—anything that might provide clues. But there was nothing useful. Either physical evidence had been covered by falling leaves, or someone had carefully cleaned up the burial site.

  Next Jack studied the pictures of the grave, then of the skeleton, along with a few shreds of clothing that still remained. Also included was a close-up that showed the victim's neck and one shoulder. Accompanying text noted that these areas had been gnawed by a predator. And there had been some dog hairs near the body.

  As he looked at the photo, an unaccustomed sensation of cold traveled across his skin. He had certainly seen far more gruesome bodies—like jerks who went up in the attic in the middle of summer to hang themselves and weren't discovered until several days later. So he wasn't sure why he was having such a reaction to the pictures of Crawford's remains.

  Still, he had learned to pay attention to his hunches, and he had the feeling that Ross Marshall could tell him something about this case.

  He went back to the folder, spreading out several sheets of Ken Winston's cramped handwriting. One cited a meeting requested by PI Ross Marshall to talk about Lisa Blake. Marshall had pointed the finger at Crawford, but Winston hadn't followed up on the tip. Well, that fit what Jack remembered about Winston, a tight-assed type unlikely to act on information he couldn't verify for himself.