Trey didn’t miss the light wash of goose bumps that rose up over her dark skin. He laid a hand there, covering her forearm. “We don’t have to do this now. It’s late and this is hardly a topic that ensures a good night’s sleep.”
“We owe it to those women, Trey. And we owe it to Skye.”
“But—”
She laid a hand over his. “I’m fine. Let’s just push through.”
She was fine, of that he had no doubt. The woman understood the human psyche in ways he couldn’t fathom. A few summers back he caught her leisure-reading a biography of Jack the Ripper and when asked about it, she said the man fascinated her. That she enjoyed probing into the mind and trying to understand the mysteries there.
While he enjoyed it in his fiction, he wasn’t all that keen on having it in his real life.
Which made his next thought that much harder to say, yet somehow safe when voiced in a room with only his best friend for company. “Would you think less of me if I said I wasn’t fine?”
“No.”
“Because I’m not.” He pushed back his chair, the heavy scrape of metal legs over the linoleum tile a scratchy counterpoint to the drumming in his chest. “I want to be okay but all I can think about are those women. Worse, then I start imagining my cousin and what could have happened to her.”
Trey deliberately tamped down on that train of thought. They were all desperate to find Skye, but also determined to stay focused on the positive. She was missing but that didn’t mean she’d become the target of a serial killer. They had to believe her disappearance was the work of some other force. Something wild and crazy, just like Skye.
“I know.” Aisha nodded. “I know it’s hard.”
“I look around here and see all the beauty and wildness of Colorado. The mountains and the trees and all the wide-open spaces. I see it as a place to breathe. To find myself. And all those women found was death. Quite brutally, too, based on the forensics.”
“They did.” Aisha picked up the various photos and turned them over. “Classic serial killer behaviors of dominance and a deep desire to hurt another. To not only kill but to torture before doing so.”
“A coward who gets off on causing fear.”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“Right here. Under our noses.”
He let out a sigh, his gaze drifting once more over the box of pizza. The hunger that had carried him into the room had vanished and now he was left with a strange emptiness roiling in his gut in its place.
All of it had happened right under his nose. And if he didn’t get a handle on it, it was going to happen again. Of that he had no doubt.
Copyright © 2019 by Harlequin Books S.A.
ISBN-13: 9781488041426
First Responder on Call
Copyright © 2019 by Melinda A. Di Lorenzo
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