The Southern Comfort Series Box Set

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  Sam couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous when Josh ran his hand over the animal’s coat.

  “I can handle it,” Josh assured her, before looking pointedly at the dog. “Just stay away from my shoes,” he addressed her. “You chew up any of my Bruno Magli’s and we will not be getting along.”

  Snickers simpered, and Sam frowned, trying to remember if any of Karen’s shoes had sported teeth marks. Then some more of her brain cells kicked into place and she remembered that she needed to thank him.

  “You, uh, didn’t need to send someone to escort me to my car,” she told him, thinking about how surprised – and worried – she’d been when the uniformed officer came into the bar. He’d introduced himself as a friend of Josh’s and then followed her from the Roadhouse to the hospital, where he’d made sure she got a parking spot near the entrance and then walked her safely to the door. Sam felt awkward that Josh had gone to so much trouble.

  “Simms owed me,” Josh said with a shrug, giving another pat to the dog’s furry head. Clearly in doggy ecstasy, Snickers plopped down and promptly rolled over. “I’m doing a portrait of his daughter as a Christmas gift for his wife so we bartered. I would have come myself, but I probably wouldn’t have done you much good. I was so tired that a five year old could have gotten the jump on me.”

  And now she was keeping him up. “I’m sorry,” she said, swallowing, “about the barking.”

  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “I was sort of waiting up for you anyway. Well, not up.” His smile was adorable as he mocked the fact that he’d been out cold. “But I wanted to talk to you when you got in.” He patted the sofa, much as he had with Snickers, and asked her to have a seat.

  “I’m all smoky,” she protested, looking down at her work-soiled clothes. She didn’t want to mess up his leather, knew how that smell could soak right in.

  “Well, I neglected to take a shower after working out and now I’m all sweaty, and Snickers here really stinks, so I don’t see how that’s a problem. Come on.” He patted again. “I’m more concerned about you than a piece of furniture.”

  Which shouldn’t have made her feel as good as it did.

  “How did things go at the hospital?” he asked as she took up position on the other side of Snickers. The flirt was shamelessly sprawled, looking at Josh with adoring eyes, and Sam felt no small measure of sympathy. If she thought she stood a chance of gaining his attention in that respect she’d be sprawled on her back as well.

  Sam crossed her legs and told her hormones to keep quiet.

  “It was… the same,” she said, feeling the disappointment flow through her. It washed away the sexual urges, leaving her hollowed out and dry. “We’re still waiting for the results of a couple of tests they performed last night, but Donnie showed no more progress when I was with him. Whatever caused the seizure he was experiencing seems to have ceased doing whatever it was doing. He’s not sick, at least, there’s no fever or anything, but he’s still unresponsive. I thought, after yesterday, that maybe…”

  HER voice trailed off, and Josh ached over the desolation on her face. And he knew, after talking with Justin, that unless there was some sort of change soon that Sam’s brother would be headed for a state-run facility. He hoped to God that didn’t happen. It would kill Sam to see him there and Donnie would be in the medical equivalent of cold storage. “I’m sorry,” he told her earnestly. “In some ways brain injury has to be one of the most devastating things for friends and relatives to endure, because there’s just no way of knowing – what he’s going through, what he feels, whether or not he’ll ever wake up.”

  Sam’s shoulders slumped and her eyes filled, making Josh reach over Snickers to take her hand. Hers trembled before she pulled it away, using the back of her fingers to brush at the tears. “Wow,” she said shakily. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually get all maudlin. It’s just that you really hit the nail on the head. No pun intended.”

  One corner of Josh’s mouth quirked, and he retrieved his abandoned appendage. Sam wasn’t used to accepting comfort from others, so he tried not to feel hurt at the rejection. She was here, and she was safe, and for now that would have to be enough. And there were other pressing issues they needed to discuss, so he pushed his personal agenda aside. “About the hospital, Sam, there’s a reason I had you escorted, other than just to impress you with my authority.”

  She smiled, which he’d intended. But then sobered very quickly, tears drying on her cheeks. “Did you find out something about Karen? Or my apartment?”

  “Nothing pertinent. There’s a lot going on in the department right now so things aren’t moving as quickly as I’d like. But…” he paused and ran his fingers over his eyes, “you remember the girl you spoke to the other night?”

  “The rape survivor?”

  He nodded. “Well, I think I mentioned that there was another assault that might be connected, and unfortunately, another woman came forward today. She was abducted and raped several months ago, but was too traumatized to tell anyone what happened. She was so traumatized, in fact, that she attempted suicide. The psychiatrist who’s caring for her at the hospital talked her into reporting it.”

  “So that she could start blaming her rapist and not herself,” Sam concluded.

  “Exactly,” Josh said, thoughtfully. And if he hadn’t been so attuned to body language in general and Sam’s in particular, he probably would have missed the way she’d stiffened. Because it only lasted an instant. But he felt like he’d been sucker punched right in the gut.

  She understood these women so well that it could only be from personal experience.

  When, he wondered. Who? Had Collin the asshole been sexually abusive, or God, even her father? The thought of that nearly killed him. He wanted to ask, wanted her to trust him with the truth, but he clamped down his anger and revulsion. He could tell by her shuttered eyes that this was so not the time, so he kept his own face carefully impassive.

  But please, God. Not Sam.

  “The thing is, part of the woman’s statement led the detectives on the case to believe that it may be connected to the others. So basically, we may very well have a serial rapist on our hands.”

  Following along, Sam put the pieces together. “And you’re worried that this might have something to do with me? Or with Karen?”

  “I don’t know.” But even the possibility was untenable. “So far the guy’s MO doesn’t seem to have anything to do with breaking and entering, but you know as well as I do that a pretty high percentage of rapes go unreported, so more than likely we only know of a few links in the chain. He could have started off with B and E, maybe one time caught a woman alone, assaulted her and progressed from there. We have no way of knowing at this point. What has me concerned is the fact that the three assaults we know about happened within about a three mile radius of the hospital.”

  Sam paled, pulling Snickers closer to her leg. “Do you think Karen was abducted?”

  “Again, I don’t know that. And I don’t want to upset you unnecessarily. So far, this man has followed a pretty consistent pattern of abducting, raping and releasing. There’s been no indication that he’s kept any women for any length of time, or that he intended to hurt them beyond the rape.”

  Again, the brief reaction. Just enough to let Josh know that he hadn’t imagined it before.

  “But these guys sometimes escalate, don’t they? Get bolder, more violent? Or what if she resisted, fought back, and he used too much force to subdue her? Karen’s a tough cookie. She wouldn’t go down without a fight. Shit.” Sam squeezed her eyes shut.

  Josh risked reaching for her again and this time she didn’t resist. He took her hand in his, did his best to absorb some of her pain. “Look, Sam, I really don’t know what happened to Karen, and I don’t mean to make you worry. I’m jumping a lot of guns here because I’m privy to a variety of cases, which may or may not have anything to do with one another. And because I’m concerned about you.” He gave her hand a squeeze.
“I’m trying to sit back and be rational, let my colleagues go through the steps that need to be taken, but I’ll admit that I’m a little… overprotective where you’re concerned.” Which was a giant understatement. He wanted to scoop her up and tuck her away and keep her from hurting ever again. But he was also realistic, and he knew that wasn’t possible.

  DESPITE the chill of fear for Karen, Sam felt the warmth of that down to her toes. Josh was such a good friend, and she’d be foolish not to feel grateful. She’d pushed that aside once, because emotionally she couldn’t handle it, but she was older, more stable now and knew that what he offered her was solid and real. She may not be getting exactly what she wanted but then how many people ever did? She sent him a warm smile, interlaced their fingers.

  “One thing I did want to ask you is whether or not you can remember seeing a white van, either in the parking lot or around your apartment.”

  Sam’s brows drew together in concentration. “Not specifically. Does it have something to do with the rapes?”

  “The three women all mentioned a white van as figuring into their abductions. Two of them were assaulted there, and the other was transported in the back of a van to another location where she was then raped. So yeah, I think it’s a pretty important factor in the profile. Although if the man is smart, he’ll realize that van is a liability. But hopefully, he’ll be just arrogant enough to think it won’t matter.”

  “Well there are a million white vans in the city. Contractors, florists, cable TV installers… the list is endless.”

  “And any time you see one, I want you to pay attention.”

  “I always do.”

  “Just be extra cautious. Okay?”

  Sam smiled and jostled their interlocked fingers. “I promise.”

  “Thank you. And in the meantime, I have a couple of days, maybe three before all hell breaks loose at work. I’m going to carve out some time tomorrow or the next day to try and find out who sent you that negligee. So far we’ve got zip on prints – whoever burgled your place obviously wore gloves – but at least we know where the package came from. I’ll talk to the staff at Intimate Expressions and see how far that gets me.”

  “Do you think they’ll have a record of the purchase?”

  “Oh I’m sure they’ll have records, but they may not let me see them. Any business with even a modicum of concern for customer privacy won’t want to risk that liability. And unfortunately, without prints, there’s no way to establish a solid connection between that purchase and the breakin, so there’s no probable cause for a warrant. It’s tricky,” he admitted. “If the salesperson is chatty I might be able to finesse some information, but I don’t want to cross the line and make whatever I might find inadmissible as evidence.”

  “Do you really think there’s a connection,” Sam wondered, because it all seemed utterly inconceivable, “between that negligee and everything else?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I might be jumping the gun. But there are a lot of puzzle pieces that need to be fitted into place, and the negligee seems like a pretty good place to start.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  STUPID virus, Joey thought as he turned his Camaro onto his street. With all the idiot staff at the hospital out sick he’d been pulling double shifts for the past two days. He’d hardly had time to take a piss, let alone get over to the warehouse to poke at Karen. The dumb bitch was probably half dead by now, and wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. Still, he figured some fun was better than nothin’, so he’d go visiting after he caught some sleep. Then after he took care of business on that end, he needed to check in with the boss. Good old Donnie had been acting pretty funky lately. Joey had entertained himself for months by jabbing various “unresponsive” body parts with needles, amused to see the bed-ridden idiot flinch in some automatic reaction to pain, but the other day when he’d pricked Don-Don’s toe, Mr. Shits-His-Britches had started to seize. Nearly gave Joey a heart attack.

  The way he saw it, Baby Sammy was probably right, and the guy wasn’t quite as big a vegetable as everyone thought. Joey figured it was high time to take him out. He would have gone ahead and taken care of that little problem on his own, but the boss had been incommunicado for the past few days, out of town and not answerin’ his damn cell phone. It would serve the bastard right if Donnie woke up and spilled his guts.

  “Shit,” Joey muttered when he saw that some idiot had parked a white van in his spot. He lived in a townhouse and all the spaces had numbers on them which clearly showed who was supposed to be parking their shit where. Visitor spaces were out to the ass-end of the lot, so he’d have to circle around and walk just to get to his damn door. And it was cold as a bitch tonight. The damn south was supposed to be warm, wasn’t it? Otherwise, what was the point? He could have stayed in New York for this. Friggin’ cold front.

  Giving the van a what-for as he walked past it, Joey pulled the collar of his jacket around his neck. He’d have to make sure to slit a tire, or key the paint job on his way back out. But for now, he just wanted a warm bed and a few hours sleep so that he had the energy to teach Karen a lesson.

  Stupid bitch.

  Joey kicked the door shut behind him, simultaneously shrugging out of his jacket. His arms tangled in the sleeves when he realized something was wrong. If he hadn’t been so damn tired he would have noticed it the second he walked in – the charged air, that little current that couldn’t be mistaken. He knew without a doubt that he was not alone in the room.

  The snap of a lighter brought Joey’s head whipping that direction. With his hands caught as they were he had no way of reaching for his gun. But the flickering glow showed the familiar face, sitting casual as you please on Joey’s couch. He took a drag of his cigarette, looked at Joey through the smoke.

  “I haven’t had one of these in years.”

  Joey eyed the man uneasily. It wasn’t the usual order of business for the boss to be hangin’ out in his living room, but maybe the jackass had gotten his message and was finally ready to shit or get off the pot. Joey was sick and damn tired of workin’ at that hospital, and he was ready to get back to more… entertaining work. Far as he was concerned, this whole thing had been a waste of time – a problem that coulda been remedied by finishing Donnie off months ago. If the damn fool had just minded his business in the first place, none of this shit would have happened. Friggin’ goody-two-shoes.

  “I take it you got my message.” Joey hung up his jacket, pulled the gun from his waistband. Sat it on the table next to his recliner before sinking in, kicking back.

  “Mmm,” the boss agreed. The prick hated to be wrong, but oh well. He should have listened to Joey three months ago.

  “I’m telling you, it’s time to take Martin out. He’s a liability you just don’t need.”

  The boss laughed and flicked some ash, and Joey frowned as he watched it smolder. Ever hear of an ashtray, asshole?

  “Well now,” he said in that stupid drawl that made Joey want to choke every damn southerner. Just get to the point already. “It seems to me that that just might be a case of the pot accusing the kettle of discoloration.”

  That got Joey’s attention. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  The other man merely smiled, but Joey felt the cold finger of unease. It teased a line up his spine and had him glancing toward his pistol. No way would the boss do anything stupid – he’d be cutting his own throat if he did – but he could make things pretty uncomfortable for Joey if he really wanted to.

  “I stopped by the warehouse on my way back into town today.”

  The warehouse. Shit.

  Joey considered lying, but eased back, spread his hands. “Hey. A man’s gotta have some fun. I been stuck in that damn hospital for months.” He lit his own cigarette, feeling a lot more chipper. Boss might be pissed, but Joey was the one with connections. “Is that bitch still alive?”

  “Oh she’s alive. Unconscious, probably hypothermic, but still alive. Your coworker, down
at the hospital? I noticed the ID tag among her effects.”

  Effects. What a prissy-assed word. “Yeah.” Joey let himself grin. “Dumb bitch has been hounding me from day one, and I been feeling a little… tense lately, so I figured I’d blow off some steam. But she got sick, put a kink in my plans. Of course my plans were already pretty kinky.”

  They both laughed, and Joey linked his fingers behind his head. Hell, he’d been friggin’ paranoid for nothing. He knew the boss himself appreciated a little kink, so this was really no big deal. Like he said before, dispose of the body properly and it was almost impossible to prove foul play.

  “Do you think it was wise to target someone you work with?” the other man inquired calmly, still dragging on his cigarette. “If you’ve had an openly volatile relationship in the past, that’s bound to come out.”

  Joey shrugged, because he really didn’t see the problem. “Don’t worry yourself, man. No one saw me leave with her. I already took care of her car, and I’ll get her out of the warehouse tonight. I’ll get rid of the body where it’ll never be found and no one will be the wiser.”

  “Just like you got rid of Allie Beaumont’s body.”

  “That’s right. It’s only one of my many talents.” As much fun as he was having just shootin’ the shit, Joey was tired, and snuck a glance at his watch. “Look, not that I don’t appreciate you droppin’ by and all, by if I’m gonna take care of that piece of business, I’m going to need a little rest.”

  The boss laughed again, but something about all this damn joviality just didn’t seem right. “The police found Miz Beaumont’s body.”