Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  Red Fish, Dead Fish

  By Amy Lane

  Fish Out of Water: Book Two

  They must work together to stop a psychopath—and save each other.

  Two months ago Jackson Rivers got shot while trying to save Ellery Cramer’s life. Not only is Jackson still suffering from his wounds, the triggerman remains at large—and the body count is mounting.

  Jackson and Ellery have been trying to track down Tim Owens since Jackson got out of the hospital, but Owens’s time as a member of the department makes the DA reluctant to turn over any stones. When Owens starts going after people Jackson knows, Ellery’s instincts hit red alert. Hurt in a scuffle with drug-dealing squatters and trying damned hard not to grieve for a childhood spent in hell, Jackson is weak and vulnerable when Owens strikes.

  Jackson gets away, but the fallout from the encounter might kill him. It’s not doing Ellery any favors either. When a police detective is abducted—and Jackson and Ellery hold the key to finding her—Ellery finds out exactly what he’s made of. He’s not the corporate shark who believes in winning at all costs; he’s the frightened lover trying to keep the man he cares for from self-destructing in his own valor.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Belly Up

  Fish on the Run

  Cold Fish

  Tastes of Fish

  Radio Silence

  Fish Gone Walkabout

  In the Wrong Bowl

  Fish Caught

  Other Things with Scales

  Fish Takes a Breath

  Fish in a Waterfall

  Still Twitching

  Ninja Fish

  Fish Under the Bridge

  Red Fish

  Quiet Pond

  Old and Fishy Business

  Fish Flop

  New Currents to Explore

  Accompanying Stories

  Amy’s Dark Contemporary Romance

  Readers love Fish Out of Water by Amy Lane

  About the Author

  By Amy Lane

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Mate, Mary, kids, Kim, Amelia, and Karen—how is it you all are there when I need you?

  Acknowledgments

  KIM FIELDING and Karen Rose—thank you both so much for your knowledge and your willingness to help me refine my skills in this subgenre that I’ve long admired and have finally dared to write.

  Prologue: Belly Up

  “ELLERY, HAND me my phone,” Jackson mumbled. “It’s ringing.”

  “You’re not back at work yet,” Ellery slurred. “You have two more weeks.”

  Jackson rolled over on top of him and then yelped as he reached unwisely for the phone Ellery had strategically put on his own end table. For a moment, Ellery was covered with tense, warm man, and then he shoved Jackson off.

  “I’ll get it!” he snapped, officially awake. “Jesus, what in the—”

  “It’s Mack’s ringtone,” Jackson defended. “I told him what we were looking for.”

  Ellery tried not to roll his eyes. Mack. This was the same Mack who had helped Jackson out when Jackson had wrecked the car unofficially helping Ellery with an investigation.

  At the time, Ellery had been so happy to get Jackson back in one bruised piece—and on a plane to somewhere he could rest without incident—that he hadn’t questioned this Mack’s existence. Once he found out that Mack Flanders had been Jackson’s bedmate a few years ago, he’d been irritated but unsurprised.

  Now that Mack was calling them in the whore of dawn’s sweaty crack, Ellery wanted to kick him in the balls.

  Except….

  “Cottage Park, near the outbuilding. Yeah, I got it. There’s a way to get in there, right? I’m not climbing the fucking fence. Of course there’s cops and crime scene tape. That’s not what I’m asking.” The voice on the other end spoke patiently, and some of Jackson’s defensiveness seeped away. “Okay. Thanks, Mack. Owe you another one. No, sorry—told you. Not paying favors that way anymore, but it’s nice of you to ask.”

  “God in heaven,” Ellery muttered.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “We’ll be there.” Ellery rolled out of bed and headed for the shower. Thirty seconds to run some soap under his pits and pack a suit for court later that day. He could do it.

  “Crap,” he could hear Jackson say as he closed the shower door. “We’ll be there. Thanks.”

  Five seconds later, Jackson stepped into the shower with him and grabbed his own shower gel from the corner of the tub. They’d had some nice times in there together—particularly when Jackson was still healing from his gunshot wound and his shattered scapula and needed Ellery’s help.

  They’d had a few after that too, but not today.

  “Body?” Ellery asked, not really needing confirmation.

  “Yeah.” Jackson scrubbed his pits with care but not vigor—moving was still painful and probably would be for a little while. He’d gotten out of the hospital less than six weeks earlier. By all rights he should still be chilling in the fall sunshine, maybe swimming in the pool at the gym—but not Jackson.

  Ellery had needed to haul him to San Diego to give himself time to recover.

  It was even more infuriating that he was right today. There really was no time to rest.

  “Our kind?”

  Jackson shook the water from his dark blond hair and squinted at Ellery through eyes as green as bottle glass. “We have a kind of dead body? Most couples just go with favorite song.”

  Ellery soaped his hair efficiently. “You know what I mean.”

  Jackson grabbed the shampoo. “Yeah.”

  Jackson, the private investigator at Ellery’s defense firm, had gotten shot helping Ellery bring down a ring of corrupt cops. They’d put the ringleaders in prison—but one of the underlings had gotten away.

  Turned out he was the one the police should have been chasing all along.

  “Young,” Jackson said, ticking off items on the list. “This one’s Hispanic. Male, but slender. Recent involvement with drugs. Maybe a week of turning tricks.”

  “Dirty pretty,” Ellery confirmed grimly. They had been Scott Bridger’s words, actually, one of the men they’d brought down, to describe the kind of person who had disappeared on his partner’s watch. Gender hadn’t mattered, nor race. Just a little bit of street dirt and some physical beauty.

  Tim Owens liked to take the “dirty pretty” ones and make them not so pretty anymore.

  “Mack says there’s something new about this one,” Jackson said, stepping in front of him to rinse his hair.

  Ellery wasn’t sure why he did it, except it was not yet four in the morning and he and Jackson were naked together, and that wasn’t something he’d learned to take for granted yet.

  He wrapped his arms around Jackson’s shoulders and kissed his neck, softly, gently, with just enough tongue and teeth to make Jackson regret they weren’t making love this morning but going to work instead.

  Jackson tensed for a moment, probably caught off guard, but then he relaxed into Ellery’s arms and leaned his head back.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  Well, Ellery had been known to be an autocratic bastard—that was probably warranted.

  “Just….” Ellery couldn’t find words. Or he could find words, but neither of them had said the words yet, and you just didn’t spring those words on a guy whose entire life had been an act of insufficient self-protection.

  With a sinuous movement, Jackson turned his head and caught Ellery’s mouth, something he couldn’t have done a month ago, something that felt huge and necessary now.

  “Don’t w
orry about me, Counselor,” Jackson said cheekily, pulling away. “But the cuddle was downright friendly.”

  Well, sure. Friendly. Just two friendly lovers getting out of bed extra early to go catch a serial killer. Nothing strange about that at all.

  “Just be careful,” Ellery said, trying not to sound bitchy or officious and failing. “He’s got your cell phone. You know that, right?”

  “Well, he had it for a couple of hours before it got deactivated,” Jackson said. “And yeah—fuck me for owning an Android with the shitty security. Thank you so much for the iPhone, Ellery. Now I am safe from serial killers everywhere.”

  The snark in his voice was the only thing that kept Ellery from conking him over the head and tying him to the bed in a completely nonkinky way.

  MACK WAS still at the scene when they got there—but not for long. Ellery had just enough time to register that the state trooper was older than he’d thought—maybe in his forties—and not particularly handsome. He stood around five six, with a small face that showed signs of childhood malnourishment and acne. He sat comfortably in his skin now, his thinning blond hair cut close to his head and his smile warm and friendly as he shook hands with Jackson.

  Ellery abruptly forgave him for sleeping with Jackson in the past—he wasn’t a cover model, he was a human being, and that seemed to be the kind of person Jackson was the most attracted to.

  Which gave Ellery hope for himself, because it meant Jackson saw something in him besides the shark he’d honed for so long.

  Mack greeted Ellery pleasantly, ushered them both into the crime scene, and left unobtrusively. Jackson gave him a salute as he got into his vehicle—he’d put himself out for them. This wasn’t even his beat. Jackson would—Ellery had no doubt he would—find a way to return the favor.

  Twenty minutes later, they stood in the corner of Cottage Park under the emerging sunshine. Jackson wore faded jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, because by October, mornings were getting a little chilly.

  Ellery wore slacks and a polo shirt and was grateful.

  This little corner of the park had a stream that usually passed through. But the body had been thrown into a bottleneck of the stream, and the entire corner was a swampy, bloody, rotting mess.

  Walking into court with that ick on his pant cuffs wasn’t going to win any cases.

  Which is what Ellery kept thinking to avoid the thought of the body in the water.

  “The knife work is new,” Jackson said, voice cool. Ellery knew he wasn’t unaffected—in a moment of candor, he’d once confessed to bringing Tic Tacs to the morgue for a reason. But he managed to sound composed and ordinary in the face of….

  Oh my God.

  Ellery fisted his hands in his pockets and tried not to throw up.

  “He knew what he was doing,” Jackson said softly, standing well back from the frantic CSIs who were working the case. “He wanted to play with him.”

  Ellery actually felt Jackson’s shudder through their touching shoulders.

  “Was he raped?” Jackson asked the tech. The CSI officer wearing a white hazmat bunny suit was a familiar face these days—she’d caught a few other cases Jackson and Ellery had investigated. Now she crouched in a bloody puddle, taking samples from the clothes, from the water, from the surrounding area. She was African American, with a bold nose and a strong jaw—strikingly beautiful with just a trace of girlish flirt in her eyes when she smiled at Jackson.

  Awesome. Another conquest.

  But there was no flirting at all now when she looked up and nodded soberly.

  “He’s got DNA all over him,” she said, a soft Southern accent in her voice. “We’ve seen this pattern before, but not the knife work.”

  No, all of Owens’s other victims had been beaten and assaulted. This one had been beaten as well, his face almost unrecognizable. His pants had been cut cleanly down the back, and the blood leaking from that quarter of the body was unmistakable. So were the scores along the back, like someone had been bored and doodling with a knifepoint in flesh, probably while, oh my God, in the act.

  “Somebody got bored during sex,” Jackson said grimly. “What a douche.”

  Ellery nodded. Douchebag. It was a funny word. And so less frightening than monster.

  “I know we have other bodies like this,” Jackson said lowly to the tech—Roberta, if Ellery remembered aright. “Have you matched the DNA?”

  “We’ve matched it to itself,” she confirmed. “Since you first asked me to keep track of these, this is our third body. They’ve all got the same DNA on them—we just don’t have anyone to match it with in the computers.”

  Jackson frowned. “Did you take samples when you searched Owens’s place?”

  She gave him a classic What kind of miracle worker do you think I am? look. “We didn’t take samples from Owens’s apartment—we didn’t even know he was a suspect here.”

  Jackson let out a little growl. “He’s still not,” he admitted. “But goddammit, he should be.”

  Roberta nodded, and Ellery’s respect for her grew when her hand hovered for a moment over the back of the neck. The gesture was human and curiously tender. She saw a person here, not a piece of meat. She would do her job—but her job was, ultimately, to get justice for the human being who’d been discarded like so much garbage.

  Whether the police recognized it or not, that was Jackson and Ellery’s job as well.

  “Rivers? Jesus—can’t Ellery keep you in a crate or something?”

  Jackson growled, and Ellery rolled his eyes. “Down, boy,” he muttered. “He’s just baiting you.”

  Golden-haired, blue-eyed, with a cheerleader nose and a superhero jaw, Sean Kryzynski was aiming to be a very young detective, and—at one point—had been aiming to be in Ellery’s bed. Given that Ellery hadn’t had that many offers, he’d been flattered.

  Given that Kryzynski had propositioned Ellery when Jackson was being hauled away on a gurney, he was pretty much over Kryzynski before he even opened his mouth. But Kryzynski didn’t see it that way, and judging by Jackson’s growls, reformed tomcats didn’t like to share.

  Kryzynski popped his gum and winked. “Don’t worry, Rivers. I can’t take what’s not on the table—whoa!”

  Ellery had to stand in front of him and shove him backward.

  “There is a boy here at our feet!” Jackson snarled. “And yeah, he was a little bit dirty—but our perp takes the ones on the cusp, see? The ones who could be saved. So this was a kid, and he needs us now when we weren’t there for him when he was alive.” The fight went out of him, and he glowered over Ellery’s shoulder. “Try being an actual cop, a good guy! Not the guy looking to get out of his blues.”

  Ellery caught his breath. A vulnerable expression crossed Jackson’s face. He’d said more than he meant to, shown more than he’d planned.

  “We need to do something,” Jackson said, looking at Ellery with pleading in his eyes. “Why is nobody listening to us?”

  After Jackson had been shot—and Bridger and Chisolm, the guys behind the shooting, had been arrested—law enforcement had declared their jobs done. They conveniently overlooked the fact that Tim Owens had probably been the triggerman behind Jackson’s shooting and clapped themselves on the back.

  “Because every case he had, every person he arrested—ever—will be tainted,” Ellery said patiently. They knew this. Neither of them was naïve.

  Jackson shook his head. “I think it’s time to tell the boss,” he said after a moment.

  Ellery regarded him with surprise. “Contact an authority figure? Jackson, are you well?”

  “Ha-ha.” With an irritated one-armed shrug, Jackson broke away from him and prowled around the cops, looking for things forensics had possibly missed while staying out of their way.

  Kryzynski walked up to Ellery looking surprisingly contrite. “Look, Ellery… I hope you know we take murder seriously here. It’s just….” He shrugged in apology. “Street people. They die a lot, you know?”

&
nbsp; Ellery turned a flat-eyed gaze toward him. “Really fucking sensitive. Do they always die covered in the same guy’s ejaculate?”

  Kryzynski recoiled. “They do what?”

  “Maybe you should talk to your forensics crew. Roberta there has some shit to teach you.” Ellery took a step toward where Jackson wandered, wanting to do something—touch his hand, reassure him, something. But Jackson’s past was… complicated.

  Ellery tried his best to keep things simple. Ellery, friend. The rest of the world? Could fuck off.

  That didn’t work when Jackson felt pressured or closed in. Dogs did well in crates, but cats, not so much. If Jackson didn’t have space, Ellery firmly believed he’d scratch at the walls that confined him until he bled to death.

  Kryzynski put a hand on his arm. “I’ll talk to my lieutenant,” he said softly. “If the same person did all this, we should be investigating. He’s right—this is awful.”

  Ellery nodded. “It is. And it’s escalating. If we’re right, Owens did this once in a while under Bridger—maybe every three, every four months. Since Bridger went away, this is the third body in two months.”

  “Were they all found in Arden-Arcade?” Kryzynski asked. “Because that’s sort of hard to hide.”

  The Arden-Arcade area was actually pretty nice—lots of parks with dark corners to hide bodies, but it wasn’t exactly a hotspot for street people. A little farther north, to Watt Avenue, and the hunting grounds were richer. Follow Watt down past the freeway and it was beating up stoned fish in a broken concrete barrel.

  Reluctantly Ellery shared some information. “Ask Roberta, but we’re pretty sure this is the secondary crime scene—a body dump. He and Bridger used to work District Three—midtown. We’ve been looking over old cases. Six of them are looking like our guy, and they’ve been found on both sides of the freeway, mostly in places like this.” Weekends, after work, they’d looked through morgue records and police reports practically since Jackson had gotten out of the hospital.

  Today had been a breakthrough, because today they’d hit a forensics officer who knew Jackson and would share. And also because today, with Kryzynski, they’d managed to catch somebody’s attention.