Missing Justice (The Justice Team Book 7)

by Adrienne Giordano

  “There’s approximately a few hundred yards still to be searched once they’ve moved the pile of shit covering the ground, but if there was a baby buried with Felicity, the bones shouldn’t be on the other side of the yard. No bones. They’re still looking, but…” her voice trailed off and she shrugged.

  “What, Taylor?”

  “What do you mean, what? Where’s the baby? I have questions about this woman’s death and your client is not only being uncooperative, he’s making the FBI, including yours truly, look incompetent. I want to know what Jarvis is hiding.”

  How the hell much had she had to drink? The woman was all sorts of fired up. Matt held out his hands. “He didn’t kill her. He’s grieving. People do stupid shit when they’re grieving. Which would explain the press conference. Ever think of that?”

  “You’re awfully confident.”

  Bet your ass. “Yeah. I am. He loved her. And believe me, I looked at every angle. The marriage was strong. They respected each other. Her family confirmed it. Sure, they fought occasionally, who doesn’t? It’s not a smoking gun.”

  “I never said she was shot.”

  He gave his head a solid shake. “It was a figure of speech. What the hell’s your problem?”

  “My problem? I’m trying to figure out what the hell happened here!”

  “And I’m not?”

  For a few seconds she gave him the hard stare. The I-will-incinerate-you look his mom liked to level on them when someone suggested another rehab stint. Well, have at it, sweetheart. Over the years, Matt had become immune to that look.

  Taylor may have spent her days bullying witnesses, but he wasn’t having it. Any of it. Instead, he met her stare and the room filled with hot tension that could have sparked a fire.

  The two of them sat locked in a battle of wills until, finally, she broke eye contact. She leaned forward, slapped her hands over her face then pushed them back through her hair. “I’m sorry. This case. It has me all twisted up. And the baby. My God. Where is he? Is he still alive?”

  She was churned up all right. He could see it in the tautness of her cheeks, the stiff, iron grip she held onto her hair with. Taylor, as much as she liked to play the in-control federal agent, was at war. And it was something down deep.

  Something ugly.

  Matt knew all about that. The buried anger, the soul-evicting sorrow that bore into bones and held on. The unrelenting mental pounding.

  This woman? She had it in spades, and after some digging, he suspected why.

  “Is this about the baby?” he asked. “Or something else?”

  She looked over at him, her hands now gripping the cushion, her eyes direct and maybe…what?…moist? “Of course it’s about the baby.”

  He switched to the seat next to her and set his hand on her back, gently stroking. After a second, she met his gaze and he sensed the change. That crackle of lust sparking between them. Her pupils dilated and she lay one hand on his thigh, inched it higher, closer to his crotch.

  All while he kept his eyes on hers, watching her battle demons.

  He enjoyed sex as much as the next guy. Easy sex? Even better. Not from Taylor though. He didn’t want her this way. No chance. He’d spent months thinking about her and, for once, he wasn’t satisfied with a meaningless, easy lay.

  He set his hand on hers. “Sweetheart, we have time for that.”

  She gave him a sexy little smile, but nothing about it moved him. Nope. This Taylor, this facade, left him cold. Even when she kissed him, that wicked mouth hungry on his, soul-kissing him and stealing his air.

  Nothing.

  He backed away and pressed the tips of his fingers against her lips. “Stop. What’s got you worked up?”

  Angling back from his touch, she rolled her eyes. “I told you. Bad day.” She squeezed his thigh. “You’re here to make it go away.”

  Looking down at her hand, dangerously close to his dick, he shook his head. What kind of idiot was he? Sex on a platter. Right in front of him. And he didn’t want it.

  No. He wanted it. Just not like this. “Talk to me, Taylor, and I’ll fuck you until I split you in two. Is that what you want?”

  That got her attention. Her gaze burned into his. Whether it was anticipation or her need to rid herself of the hell churning inside, she got hot and moved closer to him, her hand sliding from his thigh, over his belly to his chest. She tangled his shirt in her fist.

  “I keep picturing that infant,” her voice shattered like glass against stone. “Buried. In wet, cold dirt. That innocent baby, alone out there, away from his mother and father. Can you imagine? All alone, crying, waiting for someone to help him.”

  “There are no bones. He didn’t die there. Don’t torture yourself about something that never happened.”

  “But he might have died somewhere else, in the exact same way, or…or…”

  “Shh.” He cupped her chin, kissed her softly. She tasted like scotch and gut-rotting grief. “You can’t do this to yourself. If the baby is alive, we’ll find him. If he’s not, we’ll still find him and bring him home, just like Felicity.”

  In a heartbeat, she was on him. Swinging her leg over his lap, straddling him and kissing him with lip locking desperation and he started to get it. Taylor needed to lose her mind for a while. Cradling her face in his hands, he pushed her back half an inch. “Honey,” he said, “this isn’t about that baby. This is about your missing sister.”

  “Oh, God. Not that. Not you too. Just…just shut up, Matt.”

  “No. Hate to tell you, sweetheart, but I understand you.”

  “Fuck you. You’ve known me all of a few days.”

  She hopped off him, grabbed the glass from the tray, and headed for the kitchen.

  “What you don’t get,” he said, “is that we have the same monster inside. Eleven years ago my sixteen-year-old sister was walking home from school and got snatched off the street. Just gone.”

  Midway to the kitchen, Taylor stopped and spun back, empty glass in hand. “Oh, my God. No.”

  He nodded. “We were lucky.”

  “You found her?”

  “We found her.”

  She stood motionless, taking in the words. We found her.

  “Please,” she said, “tell me she was alive.”

  Matt stayed quiet. He had to. For a few seconds, at least. To get his head together. Talking about this never brought anything good, only madness, rage, and all those fucking thoughts about fucking evil things that fucking evil people did. So he propped his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers against each other, concentrating on their perfect alignment. If he looked at Taylor now, he might pick up that kiss where they left off and all that would accomplish would be two people in a helluva hot mess of emotional puke. “It took six months, but we brought her home. They found her in the woods five miles from my parents’ house. Those six months made us nuts. We didn’t know where she was. When we got her back, at least we knew. She was gone, but we had her body to bury properly.”

  “That’s why you became a homicide detective?”

  “Partly. I wanted to be FBI. Just like you.” He met her gaze. “Didn’t make the cut.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It doesn’t come up much. I wanted to tell you, though.” He stood, walked over to her, got right into her space, cupped her cheeks in his hands, felt the warmth flood his suddenly freezing hands.

  “When I tell you we have the same monster inside.” He squeezed her cheeks, kissed her lips. “Believe it. I watched my mother turn into a grieving drunk and I can promise you scotch and sex won’t make that monster go away.”

  Chapter Six

  “Victimology,” Taylor said, avoiding Matt’s irritated gaze as she refilled her glass. If Matt had wanted to be an FBI agent, he knew the filters of profiling. In his past life as a detective, he’d used them too. “Let’s start with what we know about Felicity.”

  “Really, Taylor? You’re not going to talk to me about your sister
? About mine? After everything I’ve just said?”

  “Nope. Not talking about our personal shit.”

  Or his drunk of a mother because Taylor was not a drunk. She controlled herself when necessary.

  Nope. No way in hell was she going down that long, dark road tonight. Not on top of everything else. “What I will talk about is how the hell we’re going to find Baby Jarvis, which means we have to figure out who our kidnapper-slash-killer is.”

  He came up behind her, put his hands on her hips with a sigh. “Felicity Jarvis, age 28, eight months pregnant. Married to Senator Walt Jarvis. College graduate from Cornell, majored in dance. Financial donor to the Kennedy Center Ballet where she once was part of the troupe. She was loaded, thanks to her family’s sunglasses empire. Sunglasses.” His breath was warm against the back of Taylor’s head. “Who knew you could become a billionaire from eyewear? We’re in the wrong business.”

  In the midst of her pain, he was trying to make her laugh. Take the sting off. He really was better than scotch.

  And here she was, being a total bitch. What’s new?

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said softly, her mind jumping all over the place, trying to find something to land on to break the monstrous ice cube filling her chest. It was easier to talk about missing children—dead children—if she didn’t have to look Matt in the eyes. “And your mom. Life can be so brutal and unfair.”

  “Yeah.” His hands slid around her and he tucked her into his arms, resting the side of his head against hers. “That’s why we do what we do.”

  Right. Back to business. She couldn’t let emotions rule her while a baby was missing. “We have no solid motive for the kidnapping, but Felicity’s wealth would be a strong possibility. The senator’s position another. There was no ransom request, and the senator wasn’t being blackmailed. That we know of,” she added.

  The selection of the victim often offered a possible motive of the offender, making it easier to get a clear suspect list. Taylor still believed Walt might be guilty; Matt disagreed.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Sucking down another shot of scotch, she set the glass on the counter and turned to face the devil’s advocate holding her in his arms. “Initial contact site between victim and offender?”

  “Felicity told Walt she had a stalker and the sightings were always at the same baby store. No statement from her—that he could remember, at least—that the kidnapper made actual contact, but according to Walt, Felicity did mention seeing the man in his silver truck on multiple occasions watching her.”

  If Walt was to be believed. “According to your client’s statement, the stalker was outside the store, a retail place, at night, and Walt believes that’s where she was kidnapped. Why there?”

  “Felicity was a regular visitor to that store because of the baby, so the kidnapper knew her routine. He planned it ahead of time.”

  “So was he watching Felicity or the store and she just happened to catch his eye?”

  “Good question. No one else reported any man in a silver truck watching them. Let’s assume the stalker was specifically after Felicity.”

  He was good at this. Taylor reached for his belt and began undoing it as she talked. “The kidnapper probably knew the location well, though, if he’d been watching Felicity there. He might even have known someone who worked inside the store and knew the video surveillance was shit in the parking lot.”

  He didn’t stop her eager hands, his fingers going to the buttons on her shirt in a tit for tat. “Which brings up the disposal site. Was that planned too? Did he have familiarity with the scrapyard or was it only after Felicity’s death that he searched for a place to dispose of the body?”

  The belt was undone. She pulled his shirt out of the waistband of his pants. “The bones were surrounded by a pile of junked building materials. The forensic anthropologist believes Felicity’s body was most likely there for the better part of the eight years she’s been missing, but actual date of death is unknown at this point. Cause of death is still unknown as well, so we can’t confirm or rule out physical or sexual attack. There is even a slim possibility Felicity died of natural causes and was simply dumped. Highly unlikely, but we have to consider every single possibility, and at this time, we have nothing obvious from the bones. Still waiting on the tox screen, but since it’s being pulled from bones, it may not be all that reliable. If our kidnapper/killer disposed of her body there, he intentionally used the building materials to hide her. That’s planned and organized.”

  He finished the last button and drew her shirt down over her shoulders. He leaned down and kissed one naked shoulder, murmuring against her skin, “Any correlation between the store and scrapyard?”

  She ran her hands under his shirt, feeling his tight abs. This is what she needed. To feel him. To have him feel her.

  For both of them to be alive.

  A connection between the initial crime site and the disposal site could offer a lead into the killer’s personality. “None that I’ve found. One site is very public. The other is open to the public but secluded. Everyone goes to the store. Not many people go to the scrapyard. Background checks on all the employees of the baby store and scrapyard show no crossovers.”

  “The risk of being seen at the store indicates a lack of sophistication from the killer, but killing Felicity ensures there’s no witness, which is a level of sophistication. Is it possible her death was accidental?”

  “Anything is possible.” God, it turned her on that she could talk work with him. She’d never been able to do that with anyone else. “She could have died accidentally, maybe even during or after the baby’s birth.”

  He eased the shirt the rest of the way off her arms and let it fall to the floor as he stared at her breasts, heaped up like matching Mt. Everests. “Nice bra.”

  Score. The stupid underwires had been worth it from the way he was salivating.

  “Thanks.” She gripped each side of his shirt and gave a tug. Buttons flew, exposing his gorgeous chest. “Nice pecs.”

  He leaned into her, planting his hands on the counter behind her. His eyes were hard, not sexy and teasing like normal. “You sure you want to talk shop when I’m about to fuck you senseless?”

  The scotch had taken the edge off of her heartache. Matt’s attention had helped as well. “My two favorite things, sex and solving cold cases. Might be fun to see if you can work your magic well enough to make me forget this case for a few minutes.”

  “Is that a challenge?”

  Of course it was. She longed for oblivion. Most nights, she found it in the bottom of a bottle. The alcohol blotted out the horrors of the day, the horrors of her past. Tonight, Matt might be the prescription to doing that. It had certainly worked two nights ago and she hadn’t end up with a hangover the next morning.

  She lowered his zipper and slid her hand inside, cupping him. He was hard and thick and his eyes momentarily went fuzzy as she gave him a squeeze. “Looks like you’re up for it.”

  With a low growl, he caught her bottom lip between his teeth and kissed her, hard, pushing her roughly against the counter. “No more work talk,” he hissed, undoing her pants and peeling them down her legs. He kneed her thighs apart and cupped her ass cheeks in his big hands, lifting her off the floor and onto the counter. “If we’re doing this, I want your undivided attention. Forget the case.”

  He stepped out of reach and shucked his clothes. Took a condom from his pocket and put it on. Taylor stared in admiration and licked her lips. “What case?”

  The teasing light finally entered those baby blues and he grinned, yanking her jeans the rest of the way off her legs. “That’s more like it. The Mad Dog doesn’t compete with anyone—or anything else.”

  “Are you referring to yourself in third person?”

  He grasped her around the waist, lifted her slightly, and ripped her undies off. “Nice panties, but I like you better without them.”

  She laughed. She couldn
’t help it. He was…fun. Such a different energy to this fucking bad day. Plus, she had the control. A part of her liked that. “Get inside me. Now.”

  He scooted her to the edge of the counter and drove himself inside in one fast movement. Taylor gasped. It felt so good.

  No more thinking.

  No more remembering.

  Just feel.

  She spread her legs wider, giving him deeper access and moaning as he accommodated her, his driving rhythm sending her toward a climax quickly.

  Too quickly. She didn’t want it to be over this fast. “Wait…”

  He stopped, buried deep inside her. “What? Are you kidding me right now?” His breath was ragged. “Two, three more strokes, Taylor, and I’m gone. Done.”

  Her own breath was hit and miss. “I’ve been waiting for this…all day. Waiting for you. Don’t rush it.”

  Tipping his head back to look at her through half-lidded eyes, he frowned. “But you like it fast.”

  Boy, did she. Usually. The faster and harder, the easier it was to fly apart and stay gone for a while. “Will you stay with me? All night?”

  He brushed back a lock of her hair once again in her face. “Is that what you want?”

  She didn’t know what she wanted. Not really. What she did know with no uncertainty was that a part of her, the one who had listened to his confession about his sister, wanted to curl up in his arms and never leave that space.

  If only she could tell him that. Be that vulnerable. She didn’t want to use alcohol or sex to blot out the ugliness. They were simply all she had.

  Now she had him. “I want lots of sex like the other night. If you’re going to bail after dinner, then you better pony up a few orgasms between now and the time my doorbell rings, but if you stay…we can take things slower and enjoy ourselves.”

  A slow, wolfish smile curled one corner of his lips. “I can stay. No more scotch though. That’s non-negotiable.”