by R. J. Blain
“He was her last partner. I got the impression he was responsible for her being shot. I want him.” I was growling, and I couldn’t bring myself to care—or try to contain my wolf’s rage.
“If I find just cause and can get approval, of course. I’ll make sure you’re on the team. That said, if you happen to spot him in a dark alley, don’t get caught.”
“Don’t give the pup any ideas. We don’t condone the unjustified killing of anyone, Normal or otherwise,” my father called out in the background. “Tell him there was a case, but it was closed. The infant was found dead several years after the kidnapping.”
“Heard your father, pup?”
“I heard him,” I confirmed. “I’ll bring your car back tomorrow night.”
“Keep it for the week. Who knows? Maybe it’ll help your partner warm up to you a bit.”
I snorted. “For some reason, I doubt that. At least I have a better idea of who I’ll be working with.”
“You always liked a challenge.”
If one thing was certain, Karma Johnson would be a challenge, and I looked forward to every minute of it.
Six
Karma: Partner in Crime
Under any other circumstance, I would’ve found at least a little satisfaction in kicking the snot out of my opponent during a kickboxing tournament. My foot connected with her face, something that shouldn’t have happened if she’d had her guard up. At least she, like everyone else competing, wore headgear. The woman dropped to the mat hard, her body going limp. I landed, hopped back a step, and slid into an offensive stance, waiting to see if she got back up.
She groaned, tapped the mat in surrender, and stayed down.
Instead of jubilation at the win, I wanted to crawl into a hole, curl up, and stay there until hell froze over. My leg throbbed, a consistent reminder of my last partner’s betrayal. The FBI, true to form, had found a new partner for me, and I resented their choice of Jake fucking Thomas. The man grated my nerves like no one else.
From the moment I had met him, I had wanted to kick him in the face. His wide, chocolate brown eyes reminded me of a puppy’s, imploring and innocent. There was nothing innocent about men in the FBI, especially within the division overseeing violent crimes.
When he wasn’t hovering within arm’s reach, he kept showing up, startling me with his silence.
I hated when people snuck up on me, and no matter how observant I thought I was being, the man found my blind spot. Watching my own back had kept me alive, and every time he popped up, he unnerved me more and more.
I checked over my shoulder to make certain he wasn’t there, watching me as always. The tournament crowd was light, and I saw no sign of the FBI agent among the cheering spectators. No one in the FBI knew about my hobby, and I meant to keep it that way.
Drawing in a deep breath, I held it until my lungs burned before letting it out in a sigh.
Kickboxing was supposed to be my haven away from work, a way to calm down and work out my nerves. Instead, I found more frustration without any relief.
To maintain appearances that I wanted to be in the competition, that I was grateful and delighted to have won, and that my leg wasn’t hurting so much I wanted to cut it off, I smiled. I helped my opponent to her feet, shook hands with her, and kept an eye on her until the tournament’s volunteer EMT checked her over.
The organizers always made an effort to keep a few folks on hand in case someone got hurt.
For someone as light as me, I hit hard enough I had a reputation—and a nickname to go with it. At first, I hated when people called me Kit Kat, the nickname Pops came up with to prevent bullying when I’d been younger. It had grown on me. Vixen came along after I had let my hair grow out enough for the white tips to show.
Ma and Pops hated that part of the name despite it being an accidental acquisition.
At least I didn’t have to wait long before I could claim my belt and head home. Normally, my parents would have been at the tournament, but with my leg still healing, I’d kept my participation on the down-low, avoiding their smothering concern I’d do more damage to my leg.
I’d done a lot better than I had expected; when I had stepped into the ring, I’d been certain I faced elimination in the first round. The memory of my ex-partner’s face haunted me whenever I closed my eyes, his expression cold and lifeless when he took aim and fired, deliberately aiming for my leg. A slow, painful death was what he had wanted.
A single backhanded crack to the face had downed me long enough for blood loss to do the rest of the work. I still wasn’t sure how I’d survived or who had found me. I remembered nothing between his final strike and waking up in the hospital.
One day, therapy would help—maybe. I’d progressed enough to return to the field. After two weeks of partnering with Jake, I questioned my drive. If I had delayed a week or two, would I have gotten someone else?
Then again, they’d imported him from Las Vegas, so I doubted it. Unlike the other partners I’d had, Jake didn’t flaunt his resume. I knew very little about him at all, and neither did anyone else in the office. He was as much of a mystery as our current cases, all dead in the water waiting for more information or some sort of break that would give us the clues we needed to finally solve them.
I’d gleaned one bit of useful information out of a co-worker, a fellow field agent who typically disliked the idea of a woman on the ground out of some primitive need to protect anyone with a pair of breasts. Jake’s parents lived somewhere in the area, which likely contributed to his transfer to Baltimore.
I headed to my car, a Mustang I’d gotten on the cheap and had repaired. After some tender loving care, a paint job, and a mechanic who knew his way around a wrench, I had ended up with a dependable enough personal vehicle that got me from Point A to Point B when I wasn’t using my FBI-issued SUV.
No one in the kickboxing circuit knew what I did for a living, and as long as I had something to say about it, they never would. None of them knew where I lived either, with the exception of tournament organizers, who needed my address for their paperwork.
As long as I was careful, no one from either part of my life would ever learn about the other.
In the relative safety and comfort of my car, I shimmied into a pair of yoga pants and a t-shirt to cover my kickboxing gear before heading home. With traffic, the drive cost me an hour, and I was stifling yawns by the time I found a place to park on the street and make the hike to my apartment. It wouldn’t be long until I finished moving into my new townhouse, a quaint little place with a one-spot driveway skirting one of the worst parts of town.
My real estate agent thought I was insane but had gotten rather thoughtful when I pointed out only stupid criminals bothered a street with an FBI-marked car parked along the curb. I’d save the spot for my Mustang and use my SUV to deter the unwanted elements. All in all, I’d gotten a good deal on the property. With a little elbow grease, I’d probably make a pretty penny when I decided to sell and move elsewhere.
My renovation projects would keep me busy when I wasn’t at work or kickboxing.
Home didn’t prove a safe haven; Jake waited on my front step in a work suit, his gaze roaming over me with an arched brow. “Fit in some time at the gym?”
Kickboxing tournaments counted; the place had even been hosted in a gym complex. Since Jake was aware of my limp, I decided to take the safe route and play along with his assumption. “Sure did. Got in some cardio and worked my leg a bit. Did I miss a call?”
I slung my duffle bag strap over my shoulder and dug my phone out of the side pocket. The screen showed no new texts or calls.
“I was about to call you, but then I spotted your Mustang, so figured I’d just wait.”
“Assignment?”
“Yep. Boss wants us on it, so she sent me over to pick you up.”
“Give me five.” I left him outside, something he didn’t seem to mind, as he never asked to come up when I refused to invite him in. Cursing the stiffness in
my leg, which kickboxing hadn’t helped in the slightest, I took the steps two at a time, unlocked my door, and dumped my duffle in the entry before kicking the door closed and diving in the direction of my bedroom, shucking clothes as I went. I yanked the first suit I spotted on the rack, ending up with a black blazer, white blouse, and a knee-length pencil skirt.
Cursing but not willing to waste the time to find something with pants, I changed, wiggled my way into my pantyhose, and grabbed a pair of flats plus heels in case our assignment took us into the business sector rather than on the streets.
If I needed anything other than my badge, wallet, keys, and gun, I’d be out of luck. Spitting more curses, I jammed my feet into the heels, held my flats under my arm, and trapped my hair into a ponytail. In just over five minutes, I tapped my way down the stairs.
“You’d put most men to shame with how fast you change.” Jake held the door open and nodded in the direction of his SUV, which was parked behind mine. “Your vehicle or mine?”
“Yours.” I hated driving in heels, and I’d try to catch a few minutes of sleep on the trip. “What’s going on?”
“Bureaucrat got himself killed in the Inner Harbor. Word on the wire is he was gunned down in a drive-by while trying to hook up with a prostitute. The prostitute’s in critical, and there are two other bodies for us to deal with.”
So much for my nap; it’d take less than twenty minutes to reach the Inner Harbor from my apartment. I climbed into Jake’s SUV and tossed my flats in the back. “Lovely. A mass shooting. That’s just how I wanted to spend my night. Our victim probably has a list of enemies a mile long.”
“At least he isn’t stuck up in a tree.”
I grimaced at the reminder of how I’d met my new partner. Would Jake actually last longer than six months, or would I go down as the agent with the highest number of transfers in the entirety of the FBI? “I hate trees.”
Anything higher than two feet gave me pause, and I couldn’t even stand on a chair without anxiety shivering through me. At least Jake had been willing to deal with getting up close and personal with the corpse while I had stood on the ground and pretended I could do something other than get squished if he fell.
“Well, I’m not going to look at them quite the same after that case. Let’s just hope we get some useful hits so we’re not dealing with yet another cold case. I’m starting to think someone upstairs doesn’t like us, Karma.”
I already knew it; I was stuck with him as my partner, after all. Instead of saying so, I shrugged, dug out my notepad, and went to preparing for what I expected to be a very messy case.
Gunshot wounds bled a lot, but the vast amount of spatter and pooling blood on the roadway and sidewalk was enough to take even me by surprise. The politician, one Gregory Hamilton, a mayor of a small town halfway between Baltimore and Annapolis, hadn’t just been gunned down. He’d been riddled full of bullets from a large-caliber automatic.
Shell casings littered the ground, and I crouched beside them, my eyebrows rising. “Are these .50 caliber? What the hell did they do? Mount a machine gun in an SUV?”
While they made .50 caliber automatic handguns, the number of casings on the ground indicated something with a large capacity—or a feed—had been used. I stopped counting casings after I reached forty. I didn’t envy the forensics people marking each one, documenting its location, and photographing the site. The chalk marks on the sidewalk indicated someone had already started the work.
Jake joined me, shaking his head. “Looks like it to me. Whoever they are, they really wanted Hamilton dead, that’s for sure.”
“And they didn’t care who else they killed in the process.”
“Right.” With a huff I suspected expressed annoyance, Jake rose to his feet, looking over the crime scene. “Do you want to do the main walk around while I see where we’re at with witnesses?”
“Sounds like a plan.” I got up and headed for the cordon to ask the police what they’d already found out, preemptively pulling out my badge and identification so no one would hassle me over my youthful appearance and skirt.
Both of the cops gave me a dubious look and double checked my qualifications before walking me through what they knew, which wasn’t much. A white, gray, or silver SUV had come along the main street, the driver behaving as though looking for a spot to park, lined up alongside Mayor Hamilton, opened fire, and sped off like a bat out of hell.
No one had caught the vehicle’s license plate number, although two witnesses claimed it was a Mazda with Maryland tags, which didn’t do a whole lot to narrow the playing field. At least it hadn’t been a CR-V; the damned things were a dime a dozen in the Baltimore area, second only to Escalades, which were favored by too many government officials.
Both of our SUVs were Escalades, and some days, I seriously considered torching it and requesting something a little less ostentatious. I sighed, made a note to see if pale-colored Mazda SUVs in the state numbered in the hundreds or thousands.
My first task would be to find out what Mayor Hamilton was doing in Baltimore looking for a prostitute in the Inner Harbor and why someone had gunned him and several others down on a busy street to get rid of him. I knew nothing of the man, which meant a few things. First, he wasn’t in the center of an advertised scandal. I watched the news every morning and tracked the activities of the more nefarious politicians, as they were the most likely to become a victim. Second, he wasn’t popular, as the popular mayors tended to make the news whenever they stopped to pet a puppy and someone caught it on camera.
Taking my time, I walked down the street, snapping pictures as I went so I could review them from the perspective of the vehicle responsible for the shooting. I stopped where the casings waited to be gathered, inspected by the forensics team, and categorized for a trial should the killer—or killers—be caught.
I halted by the man’s body, in the process of being checked over and bagged so he could be taken to the morgue for an autopsy. What secrets would his corpse tell?
Leaving the forensics crew to their work, I hunted Jake down to see what he had learned so we could put our heads together and begin unraveling the mystery of Gregory Hamilton’s death.
After running on less than three hours of sleep, I considered the advantages and disadvantages of crumpling the preliminary autopsy report, shoving it down my partner’s throat, and heading home. Jake sat in my chair and watched me with his chocolate brown eyes, eyes I liked far too much on a man I trusted so very little.
Forcing my attention to the report didn’t help matters at all. The prostitute was Mayor Hamilton’s younger sister. No matter how many times I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and re-read the initial DNA test results from the crime lab, the report remained the same.
Mayor Hamilton had been murdered while meeting his sister, known to the locals as Champagne and Cinnamon Sticks. I could deal with prostitutes having weird names. I could deal with politicians visiting prostitutes with weird names. Dealing with a politician going to a prostitute with a weird name who also happened to be his sister, however, stopped me dead in my tracks.
I really hoped the pair had been getting together for a chat and a cup of coffee, picking the street corner as an easy place to meet. I read the report again just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. After an all-nighter trying to make sense of the mass shooting, I could easily believe I was seeing things.
Jake coughed, as did Dr. Banyerd, the coroner in charge of Hamilton’s autopsy.
At least the powers that be had decided Hamilton’s autopsy needed to be finished ASAP, resulting in the preliminary results reaching my desk before noon. What I wanted to know was why Dr. Banyerd had hand-delivered the report—and why he hadn’t left yet. When he ignored my silent, questioning stare, I checked the report one more time.
I inhaled long and slow to steady my nerves and prepare myself so I wouldn’t laugh at my own question. “How did you determine Champagne and Cinnamon Sticks, AKA Dorothy Hamilton, is Mayor Ham
ilton’s sister?”
Both men collapsed over my desk, choking on their laughter. I decided we all suffered from a severe case of sleep deprivation. That explained my partner’s unprofessional behavior. Cutting open bodies for a living had to be hard on a man, so I could understand Dr. Banyerd’s having a morbid sense of humor.
What I didn’t understand was what was funny enough to reduce two full-grown men to giggling.
It had to be Dorothy Hamilton’s alias. I’d heard of strippers and hookers going by Cinnamon, and I’d heard of them using the nickname Champagne, but I had no idea why anyone would mix the two together. While my partner and the coroner snorted in the futile effort to regain their composure, I flipped through the autopsy report.
Mayor Hamilton had been shot twenty-three times with a .50 caliber weapon and twelve times with a 9mm. According to the preliminary autopsy, death had been instantaneous, with the three bullets to the head being declared the primary cause of death. The toxicology report would take time, and I sighed over the necessary wait.
In addition to dead, he’d been diabetic and had lost two toes as a result. Someone had gotten a hold of his primary medical records, showing he was also at risk of losing a finger on his right hand and was in line for an organ transplant. What startled me was his weight and general body size; from all appearances, I would never have guessed he was someone suffering from diabetes.
“Should I come back after you two have finished your day at kindergarten?” I slapped the autopsy report onto my desk. “You’re in my chair, Thomas.”
“It’s a pretty comfortable chair.”
“Go back to your own desk and at least pretend you’re doing some work.”
