Waking the Dead

by Kylie Brant

  He gritted his teeth with the effort it took to hold back when all he wanted was to lunge into her. Quick, hard, and deep. Perspiration dampened his forehead. His breath was ragged. He entered her with one long stroke that had them releasing a mingled groan.

  And felt, strangely enough, at peace.

  But the instant of calm was shattered in the next moment when her legs climbed his hips to wrap around his waist. And the evidence of her urgency reignited his own. He began to move, carefully at first, but then with increasing desperation. He thrust into her, possessed by a fierce intent. To brand himself on her so completely she could never forget.

  But as his vision hazed, as the blood pounded in his ears, he recognized dimly that he was caught in his own trap. The need skyrocketed in his veins, matching the pace of his hips as they jackhammered against hers.

  And knew, even as the climax ripped through him, that it was he who would never forget.

  “It’s late.”

  “Technically, since you haven’t opened your eyes yet, you can’t possibly know that.” Zach pressed a stinging kiss to her throat that made her shudder, before tonguing the sting lightly.

  Her back was to the alarm clock. But when she cracked one eye open slightly, she could see the light edging the shades on the window. And gave a mental sigh. It was at least seven, if she didn’t miss her guess. Well past the time she needed to be up and moving about, readying for the day.

  But the man beside her obviously had other ideas. His erection nudged insistently against her belly. And the way the hand on her waist slipped to her butt wasn’t exactly innocent.

  “If you’re going in to work today wearing the same clothes from last night you’re going to have to do the walk of shame.” The thought had her lips curving before she pressed them to one of his firm pecs.

  “Women do the walk of shame.” His hand slid to her breast and lightly scraped the nipple with his nail, making her shudder. “Men strut.”

  She gave an ungentle tug to his chest hair. Was satisfied to see him wince. “Not if their ‘strutter’ is broken.”

  “That sounded suspiciously like a threat.” With a quick and sneaky move he rolled to his back, bringing her with him and settling her on top of him. His eyes gleamed up at her, filled with sleepy male satisfaction. “Since I know you have a weapon close by and I’m unarmed, I’m obviously at your mercy. Do your worst.”

  She studied him from beneath lowered lids, duty warring with desire. The battle was unfamiliar. For the last several years duty had always been foremost. First with school, then her job.

  But it had been a long time since she’d been presented with temptation the likes of Zach Sharper.

  She slid down his body slowly, anticipation thrumming in her veins. She took his shaft in her hands and flicked delicately at its tip with her tongue. “I certainly intend to.”

  It was telling that Cait spent the drive to the morgue trying to figure a way to divert Kristy’s attention once she arrived. The last thing she wanted was to have another conversation about “the sex glow” the woman claimed to be able to detect on her face. Because she was very much afraid that she looked exactly the way she felt . . . loose, satisfied, and intensely female.

  It seemed that spending a night wrapped around Zach Sharper had that effect on her.

  But as she was pulling in to the morgue parking lot, a more pressing concern arose when her cell rang. Reaching one-handed to withdraw it from her purse, she saw the LA prefix on the screen and considered allowing it to go straight to voice mail. It wasn’t Lydia’s number, but she could be calling from a different phone. She was tenacious when she wanted something and had called almost daily since their last conversation.

  All of the messages she’d left had been deleted.

  Nudging aside the prickle of guilt at the thought, she took a chance and answered it on the third ring. She couldn’t risk missing a job-related call on the off chance that her mother had found a new way to reach out and nag her. “Caitlin Fleming.” She parked the SUV and dropped the keys into her purse before getting out of the vehicle.

  “Fleming, this is Detective Richard Gomez, LAPD. You left me a message a few days ago about a missing persons case of mine. Sorry about the delay. I just closed a homicide investigation that was sucking up all my time.”

  Her steps faltered a moment before adrenaline kicked in and quickened her pace. “I did call. You were the detective listed on a case regarding Paul Livingston, three years ago.”

  “That’s right. Guy disappeared one night when he went out to pick up a few groceries for his wife. Never showed up at any store we could discover. No one ever saw him again. You got something on him?”

  “Maybe.” Quickly she filled him in on her background, the investigation she was working on, and the DNA samples she’d taken from the remains. When she’d wound down, the man on the other end of the line was silent for a moment.

  “Raiker Forensics? Why does that sound familiar?”

  Releasing a quick breath of impatience, she used her temporary ID card to open the morgue’s back entrance and hurried to the lab. “It’s headed by Adam Raiker. He was . . .”

  “The Mindhunters. Yeah, yeah, I remember now. Read about your outfit not too long ago. Saw something about your case on the news.” A new note of respect had entered the detective’s tone. “You think you got Livingston in that batch of bones you all pulled from the cave up there? Because I’ve got to admit, I always figured the guy pulled a fast one and took a hike.”

  Pushing open the door to the lab, she lifted a hand to acknowledge her assistant’s greeting and sat down to the desk in the corner. “You think he disappeared on purpose?”

  “Made it look good if he did . . . but, yeah. Thought it was possible. At least that’s what I’d have done if I’d been him. Livingston was loaded, but his wife, excuse my language, is a class-A bitch. And he had a no-good son who was bleeding him dry, bailing him out of one scrape after another. If it’d been me, I’d have run fast and far.”

  If Livingston turned out to be involved in this case, she’d have a name to go with the bones of male E. The approximate age and stature of the remains matched the physical description of the missing man. But they were a long way yet from making that determination. “You wouldn’t happen to remember whether he attended UCLA, would you?” The mascot of UCLA had been one of the images on male E’s scapula.

  “Now how in hell would you have known that from looking at some bones?”

  Excitement balled in the pit of her stomach. Gomez went on. “ ’Course my memory is shit these days, so I wouldn’t have recalled that, but I reviewed the case file before calling you back. Got it right here on my desk.”

  “Could you take a look in it and see if it includes any copies of credit card statements?”

  “I had copies made for the last two years before he disappeared. What are you looking for, exactly?”

  “Check for a billing to a resort of some kind in Oregon months before his disappearance. The only victim we’ve identified so far had stayed in the vicinity eight months before she disappeared.” She waited, barely breathing, for several minutes as he flipped through the contents of the file on the other end of the line.

  “Yeah, okay, here’s something.” The knot in her stomach tightened as the man began to read. “Payment to a place called Blue River Cabins eleven months prior. Must be some place in the mountains, huh? I remember his wife saying they took separate vacations because he was into hiking and kayaking and she liked the beach. Anyway there’s more here. Got a couple smaller payments to places in Sisters. McKenzie Bridge. Some gas receipts, and then one other charge to a place in Eugene. Called Oregon Outdoors.”

  The reference to Zach’s business gave her a jolt. But both of the identified victims had come to the area to enjoy nature. It wasn’t surprising that they’d hire a company like his.

  Although they had no DNA reference sample match yet, the rest of the details were sounding eerily similar to
the disappearance of Marissa Recinos. “How much money did you say was missing from his account?”

  “Several accounts, actually. And it was just shy of a million. His wife was plenty pissed about it, believe me. We didn’t discover it for several days, and then she was initially convinced he’d taken off, just like I said. But eventually she changed her mind. Said he’d never have been satisfied leaving her the bulk of their money and taking only that much for himself.”

  “Did you trace it?”

  “Tried.” She could hear the continuous ringing of phones in the background that reminded her of every visit she’d ever made to a police squad room. “We dead-ended. Bounced us around to one overseas account after another in a half a dozen countries before fizzling.”

  She thought hard. Cyber theft wasn’t her area of expertise. “But if Livingston didn’t show up in a bank to wire the monies, they had to be done online, right?”

  “Yeah. The banks indicated the money had been transferred with Livingston’s personal information, but there was no evidence of the transaction on his personal computer. Whoever planned the transfer was slick.”

  Cait had heard enough. “Can I get you to fax those credit card statements to me?” She gave him the fax number. “What are the chances you could also obtain a DNA reference sample match from one of Livingston’s relatives? Maybe his son?”

  “Shouldn’t be difficult to get that.” Gomez’s voice was heavy with irony. “He’s serving a ten-year stretch at Cor coran for possession with intent to deliver. His DNA is on file with the California Department of Corrections.”

  Chapter 16

  “Kristy has finished with the comparisons on the garbage bags, with the exception of the one kept by the crime lab. She’s got two possible matches. One to the brand name Sowell’s, a biodegradable bag that’s been on the market for seven years. The other to Caston’s.” Cait passed out the sheet detailing the results to Andrews and the dozen deputies collected in the conference room at the sheriff’s office. “I’ve included the list of the samples she compared and where they were collected from. I suggest more brands be picked up for testing, and this time concentrating our focus on stores in towns closer to the vicinity of Castle Rock.”

  Barnes looked at a dark-haired deputy on his left. “Hank, you and your team can continue on that.” The man nodded silently.

  “We follow every lead, but I want the highest concentration of manpower at the two resorts that showed up on credit card statements for the two victims Fleming has identified,” Andrews put in. Just an hour earlier Cait had determined the DNA profile in the database for Raymond Livingston shared five markers with that of Paul Livingston. The remains of male E now had a name. “You pull in every employee for an interview. Show the pictures. It’s been years since the victims were guests at these places, so you’re going to have to spend some time. Go over employee histories and get the owners to give you a list of any former employees who would have been working at the time the two disappeared.”

  “Kristy will have the results from the remaining paint samples finished within the hour. I don’t doubt we’ll have a match for you.” Cait had delegated the remainder of the task to her assistant after her conversation with Gomez that morning. “Wouldn’t hurt for another team to be ready to track down that lead, as well.”

  “Sutton, you can stand by and wait for those results. Your men will follow up.” It didn’t escape the notice of anyone at the table that Barnes had usurped Andrews’s role of relegating duties to the chief members of the investigation.

  “Now that we’ve determined at least two of the victims visited the area where their remains were eventually found, we have reason to focus more closely on people in that region.” Cait caught the sheriff’s gaze. Held it. “If the killer lives in the vicinity, and it’s looking increasingly like he does, that focus is going to make him very nervous.”

  “So he might make a mistake.”

  “Or feel cornered.” She shifted her gaze to encompass all the personnel in the room. “He’s killed eight times. That definitely makes him dangerous.”

  “Understood,” the sheriff said brusquely. “Every officer here will exercise the utmost caution. I’ll want progress briefings by the end of shift from team leaders.”

  There was a scraping of chairs as the detectives and deputies departed from the room. When only she, Barnes, and the sheriff remained, Cait said, “What about Lockwood? Do you still have people looking for him?” The roamer had never been found in the searches she and Zach had made. In light of the most recent developments in the case, continuing the search for him didn’t seem to hold the priority it once had. But like Kesey, he could have seen something that related to this case.

  “Yesterday evening a ranger discovered a body of a man in the forest north of Highway One twenty-six.” Andrews drummed her fingers on the file folder in front of her with Cait’s most recent report of her findings. “No ID, and the animals and insects had gotten to him, but there’s enough left of his face to be fairly certain it’s him. He also had a couple items in his lean-to with the initials B.L. on them. The ME figures heart attack or aneurism, some time in the last week.”

  In the last week. Which meant if they had happened to find him, he would have already been dead.

  “All right.” She started to rise, but something in the sheriff’s expression alerted her. “Is there something else?”

  Andrews and Barnes exchanged a gaze. Cait felt all her senses go on alert. “Crime lab contacted me today. They have a match on the thumbprint they took off the garbage bag.”

  Mystified, she sat back down. Wondered at the edge of tension in the room. “From one of the elimination prints?”

  The other woman nodded. Picked up the file folder to fan her face as it began to flush. “The print belongs to Sharper.”

  There was a viselike squeeze in Cait’s chest. It took effort to take a breath, survey the two impassively. “I suppose it’s to be expected. He said he’d looked inside one of the bags.”

  “That wasn’t in his original statement.”

  “In the statement he was asked if he touched the bones.” Like anything else she read, details of that document were imprinted on her memory. “He didn’t. But no one asked if he’d handled the bags.” It had been the sort of mistake made during questioning that Raiker would never tolerate from his employees. “He told me he had when I took his prints.”

  Again that look of shared knowledge between the two. And it was starting to irritate her. “Climbers wear gloves, don’t they?” Barnes asked.

  “Climbing gloves don’t have fingers in them. They protect the palms while still allowing dexterity for grasping finger holds.” Cait’s voice was cool. Her pulse was thudding in her ears. Trepidation pooled in her stomach. It was easy enough to see exactly where this was going. And like a train wreck, she was helpless to stop it.

  Barnes leaned forward. His mustache had filled in a little, more rusty colored than the remaining hair on his head. His brown gaze was unblinking. “How close do you think Sharper comes to fitting the profile you developed for the UNSUB?”

  All those years of donning masks for her photo shoots came in handy now. She could be certain her expression remained professional even as nerves were scampering up her spine. “Superficially, there would be some similarities. Given his time in the military, he may have acquired training in various kill techniques. There’s acidic soil on his property, although the sample I took wasn’t an exact match for the sediment found in the bottom of a couple of the bags.”

  “And both of the identified victims went missing in the time he’s been back in the area,” Andrews put in.

  Cait inclined her head. “With another six set of remains to be identified,” she reminded them. “But once you get past the superficial qualities—qualities that are probably shared with several others in the region—I don’t find him a probable match for the offender.”

  Andrews sat back, folded her arms over her chest, still g
rasping the folder. “You don’t? What about the fact that he found the bodies in the cave? And that his clients stumbled on the last one? We know he did business with Livingston when the man vacationed in the area.”

  “What would his motivation be for ‘accidentally discovering’ them?” Cait argued. “Chances are those bones could have sat in that cave for years longer if he hadn’t brought them to your attention. While it isn’t all that unusual for an UNSUB to deliberately insert himself into an ongoing investigation in some way, it’s hard to believe one would do so when it looked for all intents and purposes as though he was getting away with the crime.”

  “He may have done it to prove he’s smarter than we are.” At her look, Barnes lifted a shoulder. “We had that a few years ago. An arsonist was burning places down and leaving us notes. Finally caught him with the help of a handwriting expert.”

  Irritation was starting to take the place of her earlier panic. “With an arson, you already had evidence of the crime. In this case the killings could have remained undetected for much longer. This isn’t Hollywood. It’s actually more rare than you’d think to have serial offenders deliberately engage the police. The act is about their compulsion, whatever drives them. It’s not about us.”

  Andrews shrugged, clearly unmoved. “It should be simple enough to check out his alibi for the days the two victims disappeared.”

  Cait doubted there would be anything simple about providing alibis for dates three and five years ago, respectively. “Obviously you’ll want to talk to him. We should follow up with all the businesses in the area that showed up on the victims’ credit card statements. But I think you’re wasting your time focusing on him as the UNSUB. As a matter of fact, after speaking to Gomez this morning, I’m wondering if we’re dealing with more than one offender.”

  Cait watched the dismayed look pass between the two and wondered if she should have waited before bringing this up. She hadn’t worked through all the angles of the theory yet, although it was beginning to make a great deal of sense to her.