The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  Angie went over to grab a wad of Kleenex. “Thanks. I used some ointment that Hash left in my vehicle. Burns like hell.” She tried for a light laugh. “His last joke’s on me, as usual.”

  Shit shit shit …

  She took her place beside Mr. Big D. and noticed that on this occasion he wore a gold wedding band. As she suspected. Her stomach balled tighter. Men. Out in the dark, hunting on the quiet in various ways, driven to satisfy the most basic of urges over which some had little or no control. But then she couldn’t judge. She hunted on the quiet, too.

  The fact that he was married could actually work in her favor.

  It could give her leverage. She held on to that thought, cleared her mind, and returned her attention to the body on the table. Surprise washed afresh through her as she caught sight of the ink that covered the woman’s lower abdomen and shaved pubic area.

  “You’re just in time,” O’Hagan said. “We’re about to open her up.” She reached up and reengaged her mike.

  CHAPTER 17

  Jack Killion slotted his key into the lock and opened the door. The lights inside had been dimmed. Candles flickered next to an open bottle of wine and two glasses that had been placed on a coffee table in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the windows it was dark outside, the lights of the legislature buildings twinkling across the bay. Music, jazz, played softly.

  He hesitated, tension balling between his shoulder blades. Perhaps he should leave, stop this. But he entered, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “Hey.” She came around the corner, startling him. She took his briefcase and set it on a chair, and then she curled her hands around his wrists and drew him close, kissing him on the mouth. She tasted of wine.

  When he didn’t respond in the way he usually did, she drew back and narrowed her eyes. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s just …”

  “The swearing-in on Tuesday? The breaking news?”

  “Fine timing, huh? Whole bloody stamp-out-crime angle could backfire on me now.”

  “Come—sit. Fire is on, wine is open.” She padded on stockinged feet into the living area and seated herself on the sofa. She patted the cushion next to her. “Talk to me.”

  “Joyce, maybe we should stop for a—”

  “Sit.” Her features turned serious. “I can help, Jack.” She had the ability to switch her business mind on or off in the blink of an eye, toggle back and forth. It made him wonder sometimes who the real Joyce Norton-Wells was at any given time, what she was really thinking in that calculating brain of hers. “Chief Gunnar called me at home to apprise me of what’s happening,” she said as she reached for her glass of wine. “It looks serious.”

  “Hell yeah—”

  “No, I mean big, Jack.” She inhaled deeply and crossed her gorgeously honed legs. “We could have a serial killer on our hands.”

  He lowered himself slowly onto a chair near the window, preferring—needing—to keep a little distance between himself and her, for now. She leaned forward. “As you know, the office of the attorney general is entitled to be told in advance of potentially major or difficult prosecutions.”

  A sense of foreboding rose inside him as he measured Joyce’s dark eyes. They showed a glint of excitement. She had a taste for ugly battles. And he knew that whatever she was about to say, it was regarding a fight that was looming, something he didn’t want as he took office on a very slim mandate.

  “Go on.”

  “We ordered a rush on the medico-legal autopsy for the body found floating in the Gorge this morning. The PM is being performed as we speak—”

  “At night? On a Sunday?”

  “Extraordinary circumstances.” She hesitated. “Something came up in the preliminary external examination.”

  The sinister feeling inside him furled deeper.

  “A lock of her hair had been cut off.” She paused. “And she’d been circumcised.”

  He stared, pulse quickening.

  “Metro PD feels her case is linked to that of the young woman found in the cemetery and possibly to two earlier sexual assaults that they know of.” She watched him, as if gauging his stomach, his stamina for something like this. “A ritual lust killer, Jack, someone who has escalated from rape to murder and who might be devolving very fast, given the apparent back-to-back timing of these two very recent homicides.”

  “I don’t need this.”

  “Maybe you do. When the MVPD catch this guy, and they will, our prosecution of him is going to be sensational. It’ll garner international attention. Gunnar is looping my office in from the start so that Crown counsel will be well prepared and apprised of all facets of the investigation—we want to ensure no balls are dropped, no legal holes left. I’m working to have a team of top prosecutors ready to clear their slates for this. We cannot afford a misstep.”

  He surged to his feet, strode to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and stared out over the lights of the harbor. His city.

  “Jack?”

  “You get off on this, don’t you? You actually want this. You like it that young white girls are being sexually mutilated and killed in this city because you think it will further your career, shine the limelight on your office when it comes down to prosecuting him.”

  “Jack—”

  “Eighty-nine votes,” he said, still facing the view. “That’s my mandate. That’s my ‘victory’ over Patty Markham. It’s all I got. And polls show that it was my zero tolerance on crime policy that won me that slim margin.” He turned to face her.

  She’d kicked off her heels, curled her legs under her butt, and was watching him intently. She reminded him of a Rene Russo type in looks. Sexy as all get out in an older woman kind of way that spoke of experience and confidence in her own sexuality. And power. Assistant Deputy Attorney General Joyce Norton-Wells knew how to break men’s balls with a smile and her intellect—and sometimes a calculated display of cleavage or calf.

  Outwardly sophisticated and cool, yet inwardly ferocious, a blisteringly intelligent lawyer, leader, activist. Was it the penumbra of her power and genius that he loved to cloak around himself? Was it feeling part of a secret team, the sense that they belonged to an inner sanctum, that they both were going somewhere big in this country? Was it the sex? The titillation, the salaciousness of a clandestine relationship?

  Whatever it was, it aroused them both. He was quite simply addicted to her.

  “What makes you think they’ll get him soon?”

  “Because he’s an addict. He’s compelled to act out whatever sex-based fantasy he holds in his head. And his need is growing. If Metro is correct, his cooling-off period appears incredibly short, which means he’s devolving astoundingly fast. He’ll crash, make mistakes.” She angled her head and smiled. It shot a spark of irritation through him. “Come here.”

  “Joyce—”

  “No, listen to me. This is a good thing, Jack. It’s a powerful tool. Think about it. You get Zach and his team to spin these terrible sexual assaults as the legacy of a Markham government lax on crime, too friendly to the homeless, not tough enough on street drugs. You tell them that this is what a corrupt and inept police board and MVPD has allowed to breed. Four years—” She held up four fingers. “Four—that’s when this rapist apparently first came to the attention of the Metro sex crimes unit. Then another attack a whole year later, and still they did not apprehend anyone in those cases. And now this same repeat offender, if it is him, has been allowed to kill, maybe not once, but twice. Bad closure rates leading to further and more serious crime. You tell your constituents that this is why they elected you—to clean up the Markham-Gunnar mess—and you use this as your justification to act harshly and swiftly to sweep the police board clean, to appoint new members who are in synch with your policies. Then, when the MVPD gets close to apprehending this perpetrator, you find cause to axe Gunnar, and you put Antoni Moreno in his place, like you’ve been wanting all along.” She pushed a fall of thick hair off her brow and
smiled. “Then, an MVPD under Moreno’s stewardship arrests the serial killer.”

  He looked away, inhaled deeply.

  “It’s a game plan, Jack,” she said softly. “You have to have a game plan. It’s a way of handling this before it handles us.”

  He turned back to face her.

  Us.

  “We’re good together,” she said.

  He gave a derisive snort, but a smile pulled at his mouth nevertheless. “And then,” he said slowly, “a sensationalist sex killer is convicted under your tenure as ADAG.”

  She angled her head and gave him a sly grin.

  “You really are gunning for it,” he said. “Minister of justice. Maybe even the premiership.”

  “No, Jack, premier is yours down the line.” She came to her feet, padded over to him, lifted her skirt, and straddled him. She cupped his face, angled her head. “Supreme Court will suit me just fine.” And she pressed her warm, open mouth over his. Heat washed into his groin. “We’ve got an hour before I need to be home,” she murmured against his lips.

  He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, and his fingers met bare skin. His heart kicked. She was wearing suspender tights, no panties. He cupped her shaved pussy, and his vision blurred as she moaned and rocked her pelvis gently against his hand. With two fingers he parted her labia. Inside she was smooth and warm and wet and her little nub of a clit was erect. He slid a finger up inside her and massaged, searching for the elusive G-spot, the place that could explode her in an instant. She put her head back, arching her spine, opening her thighs wider, tilting her hips toward him, giving him deeper access as she groaned in pleasure.

  CHAPTER 18

  Maddocks stepped out into the chill night air with Leo and Pallorino, his mind racing, adrenaline still thumping through his blood. Along with something deeper—a crackling hot sexual energy that had everything to do with the woman who’d walked into the morgue and shocked the nuts off him. What were the fucking odds? Angie—a detective? The woman he’d so badly wanted to screw again, the woman he’d phoned first thing this morning, was now working a case with him that he couldn’t afford to screw up.

  It was close to eleven, and the world felt quiet, waiting, breath misting from their mouths as they walked to their cars. Despite the pristine air, death clung to the fabric of their clothes, to their hair. It was inside their nasal passages and on their skin. It was a scent nigh impossible to get rid of, Maddocks knew from experience. Downstairs, O’Hagan and her assistants were winding things up. Once the doc had peeled back what remained of their victim’s face, she’d found fine lines scored into the bone of the forehead in the shape of a cross. Additional ligature marks had presented around the neck, wrists, and ankles—marks that had been made antemortem—and there was severe anal and vaginal tearing, which appeared to have occurred both ante-and postmortem. Their decedent had been through a rough time before she died from strangulation.

  Inside the tarp cocoon O’Hagan had also found fragments of dried leaves, a few soil grains, and what looked like grass seed, plus sheep maggot evidence, which implied the victim had been dead on land and had possibly lain outdoors, likely under shelter, before going into the sea. This all might help narrow down location.

  Establishing time of death, however, would remain tricky without the context of location and given the extreme below-freezing temperatures of late, which would have delayed the decomp process. As it stood, even in deaths with the same cause and identical environmental conditions, one body could show advanced putrefaction, while another could show little change, O’Hagan had explained. Maggot larvae could even go into a period of suspended animation if conditions did not warrant further development.

  Once they’d opened up the body, things had taken a pretty standard timeline of around three hours for the rest of the autopsy. Tox, serology, entomology, odontology, and other forensic lab tests analyzing combings from head and pubic hair would obviously take longer, but they were being expedited, as per the ADAG’s direction. O’Hagan would start the Drummond postmortem at dawn and have a preliminary report for them later tomorrow.

  “Anyone up for a late beer and steak at the Pig?” Leo said, pausing to light a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and blew out a long stream of smoke. It made Maddocks wish he still smoked. It was better than the stink of death. And he was on edge tonight, as if needing some kind of fix.

  “Not me,” Pallorino said. “Been on over twenty hours straight. Need my sleep.” Her eyes met Maddocks’s in the dimly lit lot, and she glanced quickly away. She knew that he knew exactly why her sleep had been compromised and what she’d been doing last night when she’d gotten the call for Cemetery Girl—riding him at the Foxy Motel.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” he said to Leo.

  “Catch you both at the butt crack of dawn, then,” Leo said. “My wheels are this way.” He hunkered down into his wool coat and headed around the building to another parking lot.

  Pallorino made for a Crown Vic parked alone under a light standard.

  “Angie?” he called after her.

  She stilled, stood motionless for a moment, her back to him, car keys jiggling in her hand.

  “We need to talk.”

  She turned. “We do?” Her complexion was pale in the parking lot light, a black woolen hat pulled snug over her sleek, dark-red hair. The scar across the left side of her mouth was shadowed in this light, and it offset her obvious fatigue, which gave her an oddly sexy badass appeal mixed in with a vulnerability. Goddamn if he didn’t find it appealing.

  “Is this going to be a problem?” he said, coming closer.

  “This?”

  “You, me.” He paused. “That club.” Wind gusted, icy, lifting a fine spray of crystals.

  “There is no you and me, Detective,” she said quietly. “It never happened, okay? And it’s Pallorino.” She held his gaze. Unflinching.

  He swallowed. Yeah, she really did it for him on all levels. Which gave him his answer—this was going to be a problem.

  Her gaze shifted slowly, pointedly down to his left hand. He realized with a shock that he was fiddling his thumb against his wedding band.

  “Married,” she said quietly. “I suspected as much.”

  “It’s … not what you think.”

  She gave a snort and took a step toward him so that they stood almost toe to toe. “If you don’t want your spouse to find out about your extramural activities, Detective Maddocks,” she said softly, “you won’t mention ‘us’ to a single soul back at the station. Or anywhere.”

  He watched her mouth. An urge came over him to bend down, kiss her lips, explore that scar with the tip of his tongue. His groin stirred at the memory of her naked, straddling him, breasts bouncing, her head thrown back, long hair spilling over her shoulders. He inhaled slowly, deeply. “That a threat?”

  “Consider it whatever you want.”

  A slow smile crossed his lips, and he angled his head.

  “Don’t mock me,” she said. “And don’t try me—you’ll regret it.” She turned her back on him and beeped her lock. “I should’ve made you for a cop,” she said, opening her door. “I was a fool not to have seen it.” She got into her car and reached to pull the driver’s side door closed. But he clamped his hand on the door, stopping her.

  “Yet you gave me your number. Your name.”

  She glanced up, meeting his gaze. “See you in the morning, sir.” And she yanked the door out of his grip, slamming it shut. Her engine started. Exhaust fumes boiled white into the cold air.

  He stepped back as she revved her engine and took off at a clip, skidding slightly on ice as she rounded the curve out of the parking lot. His breath clouded around his face. His heart, he realized, was thumping in his throat. He dragged his hand over his hair. Yeah—this was going to be more than a problem.

  CHAPTER 19

  Angie drove home, nerves crackling like live electrical wires. First the hallucinations and those weird words in her head that seemed to com
e from the child. Now Mr. Big Dick—her superior. Her temporary partner. A fucking cop. A ferocious urge rose in her to cut a U-turn and speed for the highway out of town, hit the club, even as exhausted as she was. She wanted to fuck her brains out, blow off steam with someone other than Maddocks. Overwrite her sexual experience with him, forge fresh neural pathways in her brain. Wash him clean out of her head with something hotter, wilder. Better.

  Yet a little voice in the back of her brain said there wasn’t going to be anything better than James Maddocks.

  James—what kind of name was James, anyway?

  Hi, I’m James … James Bond. She put on music. AC/DC. Pumped up the sound, amped the bass. You … shook me … all night long … She banged her palm on her wheel in time to the beat, the sound slamming through her skull as she turned onto Wharf.

  She lived in one of those new “loft” condo developments right on the Gorge waterway at the bottom of Chinatown, “loft” being Realtor-speak for license to charge a fortune for postage-stamp footage that barely accommodated one bedroom. But it suited her—close to work, good investment, new, no-hassle appliances, easy resale. And it had rental potential should she want to travel. Or … get a life, or … something.

  As she wheeled her Crown Vic down onto Dock Street with its steep incline to the water, the memory of Vedder’s words hit her.

  Be nice. If you play nice, Maddocks might put in a word of recommendation when the time comes … Violent death is not a one-person mission …

  Great. Just great. She waited for the underground parking security gate to open.

  After all these years of trying to get into the elite unit, it came down to this? The guy she’d screwed to blow off steam, to escape from her work, now was her work? And she had no choice but to cooperate, because making homicide was her one big life goal—a holy grail toward which she’d been gunning for the last six years since she’d made sex crimes. His dark-blue eyes, his words sifted into her memory as she entered the garage.