Taking a breath, Josh stepped out on the ledge and then dove off.
“Actually, no, it wasn’t ‘just a hookup’ and I think you already know that,” he added quietly.
No, she didn’t. If she was being honest with herself, she’d have to admit that she’d hoped, but she really hadn’t known. Not when it came to Josh, who went through women the way her mother used to go through tissues while watching An Affair to Remember for the umpteenth time.
A warm sunspot opened up inside of her. She did her best not to grin like an idiot. “So, what do you want to do?” she asked Josh.
“Truthfully?” He really had only one thought in his head. “Make love to you until I literally come apart at the seams.”
It was a real struggle to keep her grin from surfacing. She knew if she came across as eager in any manner, shape or form, Josh would be gone so fast he would make the Road Runner look slow.
So, putting herself in Josh’s shoes, she said, “As enticing as that sounds, why don’t we take it one step at a time?”
In every other case, that would have worked fine for him. The suggestion would have been right up his alley. It didn’t nail down anything, didn’t promise anything. No strings, no commitments, which was just the way he liked it.
The operative word here, he realized, was liked. As in past tense.
He had never felt uncertain before, never been in this position before. The emotional uneasiness, even if he didn’t show it, was a new sensation for him and he didn’t much like it.
But to say so would be to lose face. Moreover, it would tell Bridget that when it came to this—whatever “this” that was between them was—she was in the driver’s seat and his pride wouldn’t allow that.
So instead, he said, “Works for me,” and then turned his attention back to what had called them out in the first place. The Lady Killer and his gruesome, growing body count.
“What the hell are we going to do to stop this son of a bitch?” he wondered out loud.
“Until we have a suspect in our sights, nothing,” she answered, every bit as frustrated as he was. Maybe even more so.
“And once we have a suspect?” he asked. Her tone of voice seemed to indicate that she had a plan in mind after that and he was curious to hear what she was thinking.
He wasn’t wrong. “Then we set a trap for him and bring him down.”
He couldn’t have said exactly why, but there was something about the sound of that that made him uneasy. “What kind of a trap?”
“The simple kind,” she answered. “The psychopath obviously likes redheads. If we know who he is, we give him what he likes. I can become a redhead in twenty minutes.”
Josh scowled. That was an utterly stupid plan. What the hell was she thinking? “You can become dead in less than that,” he snapped.
She looked at him, stunned. He’d never yelled at her before. Never yelled at all to her recollection. “Why, Youngblood, is that concern I hear in your voice?” she teased.
Yes, it was concern. Even if they hadn’t just shared an incredible interlude together, she would still be his partner, his friend, and there was no way he was going to let her dangle herself like live bait in front of the cold-blooded shark that was out there.
But again, to tell her that would be leaving too much of himself exposed and vulnerable. He fell back on a standard excuse. “You die, I have to fill out a mountain of paperwork, explaining to HR why I wasn’t there to save you.”
“The best way around that,” she told him cheerfully as they got closer to the scene of the crime, “is for you to be there like the cavalry, lurking in the shadows.” She gazed at his profile. “You’re good at lurking, aren’t you?”
“Never tried it,” he told her seriously. He had already dismissed her suggestion as ridiculous.
“‘Lurking’ is a little like hiding,” she told him, “except more obvious.”
Josh didn’t want to continue going down this path, or having this discussion. And he definitely did not want to contemplate the thought of Bridget risking her life by putting it into the hands of some unpredictable, homicidal maniac.
“Moot point,” he said, calling an end to the banter. “We don’t have a suspect.”
“Yet,” Bridget deliberately underscored. “We don’t have a suspect yet.”
He laughed shortly, shaking his head. “You really are a Pollyanna, aren’t you?”
As for him, he wasn’t nearly as optimistic as his partner was. Granted the police department’s record for arrests here in Aurora was better than most, but in general, a lot of killers—serial killers included—were just never caught and brought to justice. He didn’t like thinking that way, but it was the simple truth and he couldn’t help wondering if the same thing would happen here.
Ordinarily, Bridget bristled at being labeled a Pollyanna, but not this time. And not by him. “Well, after last night, as far as I’m concerned, hell has frozen over and the devils are ice-skating, so anything’s possible.”
Maybe hell had frozen over. In any case, Josh knew when to leave well enough alone and this was one of those cases.
They talked about other things.
“Another dump job?” Bridget asked the ME the moment she got out of the car and approached the body.
Like the others, this victim was a redhead, probably not even twenty-one years old. Her hands were clasped together, as if in prayer, right below the gaping hole that had been left. The hole where her heart should have been.
The medical examiner, Eliza Stone, a black-eyed, black-haired young woman who had been on the job all of three months, nodded. Because the angle was awkward when it came to conducting a conversation, she rose to her feet before speaking.
“He killed her somewhere else and dumped her body here.” Her mouth set grimly, she looked from one detective to the other. “This guy is definitely a professional.”
“Yeah, a professional nut job,” Josh said disparagingly.
“That, too,” the young woman agreed. “But I wish I had his precision. He didn’t make a single unnecessary cut or stroke on her skin.” Eliza looked back down at the killer’s handiwork. “This guy’s very skillful. This sort of thing takes training.”
“You’re obviously not talking about him attending serial killer school.” Josh’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not talking about a—”
“—surgeon, are you?” Bridget asked, finishing her partner’s sentence for him as her eyes widened in horror and disbelief. Doctors were supposed to be the good guys, the ones who stitched you up and made you whole, not the ones who stole organs and hollowed you out like some macabre Halloween pumpkin. That just didn’t make any sense.
“Actually, I guess I am,” the young woman answered in dismay.
Stunned, Bridget turned toward the ME. “Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
The reasons had sounded right in her head at the time. Now, she realized the error she’d made. An error that possibly had cost at least a couple of girls—if not more—their lives.
“Because I didn’t want to think that someone who had taken the oath to ‘first do no harm’ was doing more than just ‘harming,’ he was slaughtering,” the ME admitted. “Besides, until this last one, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he was a surgeon.”
“But now you are?” Josh asked, wanting to pin her down.
“More than before,” Eliza allowed, evasive up to the end.
Bridget stepped away from the ME and the body that was still on the ground. Away from the men from the coroner’s office who were waiting for the body to be released so that they could transport it to await an autopsy.
“So we should have been looking for a surgeon instead of a police officer wannabe?” Bridget said to Josh, disheartened.
Once the lieutenant caught wind of this, he would have her head on a platter, she thought. She’d gone over his head to secure extra hands to go through the data files, looking for an academy dropout or reject who could have done
this. Now, apparently, that very well could turn out to have been a waste of resources, man hours and money.
Head on a platter, big time, Bridget thought, trying to resign herself to that and the fact that the man might even suspend her without pay for this.
“Way I see it, we were covering all possible bases. It could very well have been someone flaunting his kills before the police department,” Brian observed, surprising both of them as he walked up behind them.
“Instead of someone who doesn’t seem to care if he’s caught,” Josh speculated.
“Or someone who is trying to get caught,” Bridget countered.
The medical examiner frowned. “Why would he want to do that?”
“Because he can’t stop himself. He needs someone to do it for him,” Bridget said. “Someone to stop him. To stop his pain.”
“His pain?” the ME echoed, dismissing the theory. She looked back at the latest victim. “Looks to me as if he’s the one who’s causing the pain.”
“There are all kinds of pain,” Bridget told the other woman. But she was looking at Josh as she said it.
Josh raised an eyebrow in a silent question, as if to get her to elaborate or explain just what she meant by that, and why she was looking at him so pointedly. But for once, Bridget pretended not to see him.
Turning away from the dead girl, Bridget felt her pocket vibrating. Someone was calling her on her cell. At this hour?
Didn’t anyone sleep anymore? she wondered, taking the phone out. “Cavanaugh.”
“Cavelli?” the uncertain voice on the other end of the line asked.
Was she going to have to make some kind of a public declaration of the name change? She had been hoping word of mouth would do that for her.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said, for a moment embracing her previous name. “Who’s this?”
“Cox,” the voice told her with a touch of surprise that he hadn’t been instantly recognized. “When did you change your name?” he asked, momentarily sidetracked.
“Recently,” Bridget bit off, then asked with a touch of impatience, “Did you call with something important or are you just updating your yearbook?”
She heard the other detective laugh. “You’re going to kiss me when you hear.”
At this point, curious, Josh joined her. Angling her hand a little so that the phone was positioned between them, Josh cocked his ear so that he could hear what the other detective was saying.
“We’ll see,” Bridget said to Cox. “I know I’ll kill you if you keep playing games like this,” she said in an unflappable voice. “Okay, spill it, Cox. Why are you calling us when we’re in the middle of the newest crime scene?”
“Because—wait for it,” he announced dramatically, then after a moment, continued, “I think I found our guy, Bridget.”
She knew better than to get excited. Disappointment almost always followed. But things were becoming so intense, she couldn’t help herself. Excitement pulsed through her veins.
She did her best to sound calm. “What makes you think so?”
The detective on the other end drew out each word. “Because I have found victim zero. The one the Lady Killer killed first, except we didn’t know it,” he clarified in case Bridget had missed that.
Bridget gripped her cell phone so hard, had it been alive it would have squealed. She exchanged looks with Josh. Almost afraid to breathe, she urged Cox to go on.
The older detective paraphrased what he’d stumbled across. “Three years ago, just before the guy’s killing spree took on a more public nature, there was this medical student who was killed leaving the campus late one night. The coroner said that she’d been savagely slashed across her chest.”
Now her palms were growing damp. “But her heart was still in her body, right?” Bridget guessed. Otherwise, it would have been flagged by the detectives who had initially worked the cases that first year.
“Yeah, right.” Cox’s voice grew more intense as he continued. “But reading the report, I got the impression that the killer ran off before he could finish what he started out doing. According to the autopsy, the student was barely dead when the campus security guard found her.”
“And he checked out? The guard?” Josh wanted to know, speaking up. “They found him to be innocent?”
“Yup. Like fresh powder on a ski slope,” Cox confirmed.
She needed to see that report. “Okay, we’re coming in. Don’t go anywhere,” Bridget instructed. “We’ll be right there.”
Cox’s laugh was hollow. “Where would I go? This has become my home now,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “My wife’s probably having an affair with the plumber. We’ve been getting a lot of bills for repairs lately,” he speculated, his voice trailing off.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” she instructed as she terminated the call.
“You two have a lead?” Brian asked, waiting for Bridget to close her phone and slip it back into her pocket.
Bridget grinned hopefully and held up two crossed fingers over her head. “With any luck, yes. Finally,” she added with momentarily enthusiasm.
“Then get going,” the chief urged. “I don’t like this creep running free in my city a minute longer.”
Coming from anyone else, the term might have sounded presumptuously possessive, but everyone on the force had come to regard the chief of detectives as a father figure. They knew that he felt that the city was his baby and that he intended to keep it as safe as he could by any means possible.
They slept easier for it.
* * *
By the time they reached the squad room, Bridget had picked up her pace and all but burst into the near-empty room.
“We’re here,” Bridget announced needlessly. Making a beeline for Gary Cox’s desk, she asked, “What do you have?” The question came out breathlessly as she all but hovered over the detective’s computer.
Cox obliged by punching several keys on his keyboard. Within moments, the case he’d called about was up on his monitor.
But as Bridget leaned in to look, the detective angled the screen away from her, asking, “What, no bribes? You’re supposed to bring bribes.” He pretended to pout. “I’ve been stuck here since the bicentennial, the least you can do is bribe me with a latte.”
“The bribes are coming. They’ve been held up,” Josh quipped, turning the screen back so that Bridget could view it. “Now what do you have?”
“Gerald Green gave a statement to the police after they found the woman’s body,” the other detective recited, summarizing what he’d read. “Said they were engaged to be married. Turns out he was a medical student, too.” Looking at the screen, he didn’t see Bridget and Josh exchange glances. He had no way of knowing about this latest point that had been raised by the ME about the serial killer. “According to this, Green said they met in one of the classes and ‘love blossomed over the cadavers.’”
Josh’s jaw all but dropped. “Wow. Is he for real?” he hooted.
Cox nodded. “Apparently.”
“We need to do a little follow-up on this Gerald Green guy,” Bridget said, doing her best not to get carried away. They’d had leads before only to have them disintegrate right before their eyes. This could be another one of those.
But something in her gut said no, not this time.
“See if he went on to graduate from medical school and just where he is now,” she continued. Looking at Josh, she couldn’t help saying, “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
The next moment, she was patting Cox’s shoulder. “Nice job, Cox,” she told the man with feeling. And then, impulsively, because he’d said that what he had to show her would make her kiss him, Bridget brushed her lips against that man’s cheek.
When he looked at her, stunned, his fingers tracing where her lips had just been, Bridget grinned at him. “Thanks.”
Recovering, Cox said, “Don’t mention it.” And then, as mischief entered his dark eyes, the older detective began to ask
, “What do I have to do to get you to—”
“Not tell your wife that you were about to make a lewd suggestion?” she finished, raising an eyebrow.
“Never mind,” Cox murmured, waving his hand. “I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”
“You do that,” she encouraged. “In the meantime, we need to get hold of Brenda and ask her to do a little digging for us.” This she said to Josh as she took out her phone for the umpteenth time.
“My thoughts exactly,” Josh agreed. “Except for one little thing. It’s Sunday morning.”
“She’s a Cavanaugh,” Bridget answered, scrolling through the list of phone numbers she’d recently input. “They have a code. She’ll come in,” she told him with confidence.
Being a Cavanaugh definitely had its perks, she thought as she heard the other line being picked up.
Chapter 14
“Thanks again for giving up your Sunday and coming in to help us with this,” Bridget said to Brenda as she and Josh came into the computer lab.
Brenda Cavanaugh was already in the lab and working by the time they came down to the precinct’s tech lab. Armed with all the information that Bridget had given her when she called, Brenda had immediately started the search for the whereabouts of Gerald Green, the first victim’s fiancé.
Brenda brushed off the thanks. “No problem. Hey, it’s in all our interest to get this guy off the street as soon as possible.” She looked up at them for a moment. “Who’s to say that this time around, the animal’s going to stop carving up women at the end of the month? According to the reports, he’s escalated his kills. Maybe he’ll just go on with his spree as well until he runs out of redheads.”
“Or gets caught,” Josh interjected with a hopeful note.
Brenda smiled at the suggestion. Her fingers seemed to move almost independently, flying across the keyboard at a speed Josh found enviable. Surrounded by technology, he was still a hunt-and-peck kind of guy.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Brenda murmured in response.
There was nothing more they could do here for the moment, Bridget thought. “Call me when you get something,” she requested, then turned on her heel and retreated.
Cavanaugh's Bodyguard Page 14
