He’d never dated anyone in law enforcement, despite working so closely with them, despite some mutual interest a few years ago when he’d been in DC. He’d never wanted the constant fear that came along with it. But Keara? His gaze darted to her once more, took in the serious determination in every line of her body. Being with Keara would be worth it.
The four hundred miles between Desparre and Anchorage wasn’t ideal, but it suddenly didn’t seem impossible.
The bigger hurdle was Keara herself. Her reaction to waking up next to him this morning had been equal parts adorable and frustrating. But even if she was willing to try and pursue something long-distance, would her heart really be in it? Or would she never be able to truly give him a chance while her past was unresolved? Her words at the police station ran through his mind:
What scares me is the idea that I’ll never be able to solve Juan’s murder. And that as long as it remains unsolved, I’ll never be able to fully move forward myself.
As he stared at her, hoping this case would be able to shed light on her husband’s murder, would be able to give her that closure, he also hoped he could find a way to breach her walls even if it didn’t.
She’d been closed off for years, running away to Alaska but never able to escape her husband’s unsolved murder. It probably made her feel like a failure in some ways, and it wouldn’t matter how often someone told her that wasn’t true. She’d always wonder if she should have done more, if she should have insisted on staying on the case. He didn’t need training in psych to guess that. At the very least, he wanted her to find some peace, and maybe it could be with him.
Patches nudged him again, harder this time, and Jax smiled down at her. “I know. Let’s do some work.”
He angled his arm toward the big tree behind the gazebo, with fresh tape around it marking it as part of the crime scene.
She tilted her head at him, as if questioning why there were no people in the direction he was telling her to go. But she walked that way anyway, periodically glancing back to make sure he was following.
This wasn’t part of his job, but he needed to see the symbol himself, needed to evaluate how similar it was to all the others he’d seen in case files yesterday.
The white spruce was charred like the gazebo, strips of wood dangling from the tree. The lower leaves were charred, too, and a few branches had snapped off. But on the side facing away from the gazebo was a familiar set of loops. It wasn’t an exact match to the other symbols, but only because they all had some small variation—mostly due to the materials used. This one was neatly carved, suggesting that the person who’d done it was skilled with a knife, and Jax couldn’t help but think of the way Keara’s husband had been murdered. With one quick slice across the neck.
A chill darted up his arms and Jax shivered, his gaze going to the surrounding forest, dense with trees and places to hide. He didn’t have a lot of experience with serial bombers, but it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that they liked to stay close, admire their work.
Woof!
Patches’s reminder that he needed to get to his own job—and hers—was overlaid by Anderson calling, “Jax!”
The agent was standing across the street from the park, beside a couple Jax remembered from yesterday. When he’d first seen them, they’d had a young girl between them. Now the woman had a hand curved protectively over her stomach, which had just enough of a swell to tell him the reason she’d climbed into an ambulance yesterday, despite looking okay. She’d been checking on her baby.
Jax jogged over, Patches at his heels.
He hadn’t had a chance to meet the family yesterday before they’d all taken off, the dad and daughter jumping into their car and following the ambulance out of Desparre. He was surprised to see them back here today.
“Jax is our Victim Specialist and Patches here is a therapy dog,” Anderson introduced them. He gestured to the petite Black woman with worried eyes. “This is Imani.” Then he motioned to the man beside her, a mountain of a guy whose thick beard and pale skin patchy with anger made him look like someone who could handle Alaska’s wild terrain. “And her husband, Wesley.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jax said. When he noticed Imani eyeing Patches, he added, “She’s technically still a puppy. If you want to pet her, she’ll love it.”
A smile peeked free and Imani reached her hand out toward Patches, who rushed over and sat on her feet.
Wesley pet her, too, keeping his other arm wrapped protectively around his wife. “We saw you at the park yesterday,” Wesley finally said.
Jax nodded, letting the couple lead the conversation, knowing that Anderson had called him over for a reason.
“You were taking to the chief after she helped the officer who was hurt.” Wesley and his wife shared a glance full of worry. “Is he okay?”
“He’s critical.” Jax told them the news Keara had gotten this morning. “But he’s a fighter.”
“It’s our fault,” Imani said, her voice tearful. “We called him over and that’s when the blast went off.”
“That’s not your fault,” Jax said. Deep down, she knew it. But it often helped victims to hear someone else say it. “But why did you call for him?”
Anderson nodded at him as Imani and Wesley both pet Patches faster, their anxiety suddenly palpable.
“We saw this guy skulking in the woods by the gazebo,” Imani said.
Jax’s pulse leaped as Anderson leaned in. Had the guy they’d seen been lurking there because he was carving a symbol into the tree behind the gazebo?
“We were here with our daughter,” Wesley continued. “We were heading to the swings when we spotted him. It’s a park. Why does anyone need to be hiding in the woods? Unless he’s there to watch kids. So we called the officers over. We hoped they could talk to the guy or scare him off.”
“Who was it?” Anderson asked. “Did you recognize this guy?”
Imani shook her head. “No. We’re new to Desparre. We don’t know that many people yet. After the blast, he was gone.”
“What did he look like?” Anderson asked.
“He was white,” Imani said. “In his thirties, probably. Brown hair, I think.”
Excitement thrummed along Jax’s skin and he suddenly understood how the FBI agents probably felt when they got a promising lead. He’d seen it on their faces before, the sudden thrill of the chase, but he’d never felt it so intensely himself until now.
Rodney Brown had reddish-blond hair, but from a distance it might seem brown. And he was white, would be in his thirties now.
“Anything else you remember?” Anderson pressed. “Height, maybe? Or facial hair?”
Imani shook her head. “No facial hair. But he was pretty tall. Close to my husband’s height, I think.”
Jax frowned, studying Wesley, who was probably only an inch shorter than Jax’s six foot one. Rodney was five foot eight. Then again, the distance between the swing set and the woods was probably twenty feet. If the guy had been skulking close to the trees, maybe that had thrown off her perception, made it hard to get a good look. Plus, a bomb had gone off shortly after she’d seen him.
Then again, maybe it hadn’t been Rodney she’d seen. Maybe it was Rodney’s elusive roommate.
* * *
KEARA SLIPPED INSIDE the police station. She checked in quickly with Sam, who was sitting at the front desk again today, then let out a relieved breath when she reached the empty bullpen.
She’d been at the bomb site and talking to members of the community since 7 a.m. Checking the time on her phone confirmed it was now past 3 p.m. She hadn’t stopped for lunch and there was only so long the scrambled eggs Jax had cooked that morning could hold her. She didn’t have an appetite.
Not after seeing the blood staining her park. Not after talking to the hospital, hearing the words extremely critical and coma when she’d asked about
both Nate and Talise. But her stomach growled and her head pounded, and the coffeepot in the bullpen was calling her name. So was a quick break and a little solitude, before heading back out to talk to more people, find out if anyone had seen something that might help them find the bomber.
After dumping the sludge at the bottom of the pot that someone had brewed early that morning, Keara started a fresh one. Then she leaned against the wall, started to close her eyes.
Just before they drifted shut, she saw the stack of files on her desk through the glass walls of her office. The cases with the symbols.
Technically, they all belonged to the FBI. She probably wasn’t even supposed to look at them. She definitely wasn’t supposed to have them.
Pushing herself away from the wall, Keara grabbed the coffee carafe and poured everything that had brewed so far into a mug. Then she strode into her office, pushed the door shut and sat at her desk, staring at the stack of Yes files she and Jax had been so excited about yesterday.
There were four murders and an arson in those files. Add in the murder of Celia Harris in Houston and the bombs in Luna and Desparre and what did it all mean?
Keara slapped her hand against the desk in frustration, making it sting. Then she took a long sip of her coffee, willing the headache away, and got to work.
First, the murders. Celia Harris had been abducted, left in an alley, her killing brutal, from multiple stab wounds. She’d been a tough victim to grab, a pillar of the community with young kids and a husband at home. The symbol had been spray-painted onto the wall behind where her body was found. That had been seven years ago in Texas.
Skipping over the arson for now, Keara opened up the next murder. Five years ago, in Nebraska. The victim was a nineteen-year-old boy, on his way home from college. He’d disappeared from one side of town, only to show up on the opposite side a day later, with the symbol drawn in permanent marker across his back. He’d been killed in the time in between, from blunt force trauma to the head. He was a popular kid, a basketball star at his college. But he’d also been brought up on two sets of sexual assault charges and was estranged from his parents.
Four years ago, in Iowa. The victim was a middle-aged man, an ex-marathon runner scheduled to speak at the small town’s high school track meet. The event was a big deal in the town and when he hadn’t shown up, it had caused a huge uproar. His body being found later that night in a cornfield was the biggest crime they’d seen in more than a decade. He’d been shot three times, the symbol drawn thickly in pen on his arm.
Three years ago, in South Dakota. The victim was a popular middle school teacher who’d survived a heart attack the year before. She’d been grabbed and killed within a few hours, but a witness to the kidnapping had only been able to say her killer was a white male. She was strangled, found on a playground with the symbol spray-painted on the slide behind her.
Two years ago, in Montana. The victim was the newly elected mayor of a small town, with deeply polarizing views. He’d been last seen staggering drunk out of a bar. He was found a day later, in his own backyard, dead from a blow to the head. The medical examiner hadn’t been able to determine if he’d fallen and cracked his own skull open or if someone had done it for him, but there had been a strange symbol spray-painted on the back of his house.
Keara stared at the glass wall into the bullpen of the station she’d come to call her own. The symbol undeniably connected these cases in some way, but the manner of death was different across all of them, the symbol never exact. It was possible there was a single killer making his way north to Alaska, committing one murder a year. Perhaps there’d been another crime in the gap after Montana and before the two bombs in Alaska, maybe in Canada while he made his way farther north.
Maybe one person had committed the murders and someone else—someone with the same knowledge of the symbol—had set the fire and the bombs.
She flipped open the arson case from Oklahoma six years ago. A brand-new rec center, the pride of the community, had opened the week before. The fire had destroyed half of it and damaged the other half so badly that it would have needed to be razed anyway. The city had never rebuilt it. Behind the rec center, on the brand-new basketball court, the symbol had been spray-painted from one end to the other.
Frowning at the case, Keara downed the last of her coffee and debated getting more. But even though it was calming her headache, her too-empty stomach was protesting. Setting the mug aside, Keara leaned back in her chair.
How similar was setting a fire and setting off bombs? They seemed pretty different to her, both from the practical standpoint of knowing how to do it and from the potential motivations. But maybe the killer was also the arsonist and the bomber had just gotten started.
It didn’t feel right. No matter how she arranged the crimes in her mind, it didn’t make sense. She couldn’t imagine one person killing in so many different ways, with so many different victim types. And she couldn’t imagine a pair of killers grabbing victims together, then randomly switching to arson, then later to bombings.
But she wasn’t a psychologist. What she needed was Jax’s insight.
A brief laugh escaped. Yeah, she wanted Jax’s help right now, but that wasn’t the only thing she wanted from him. She wished he were sitting across from her to lend his quiet support, too. So she could stare into his dark brown eyes and calm the frustration boiling inside her over all the pieces of this case that didn’t quite fit together.
It had been a long time since she’d wanted to work with a man on a case in quite this way. Seven years, to be exact.
Guilt flooded, followed by an image of Juan staring contemplatively at her. The ache of missing him had faded with time, but moving on now would be a betrayal of everything they’d had together.
She was a cop and her husband had been murdered. There couldn’t be room for anything else until she’d found the person responsible and made him pay.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
If Jax was home in Anchorage on a Friday night, he’d be having dinner with friends, or maybe talking a couple of the agents into taking him to the shooting range. He’d thought he was mostly finished with the travel when he’d left the Rapid Deployment Team. But Friday night while he was in the middle of a big investigation with a lot of victims who needed him was just another night.
Tonight, though, instead of wanting to grab a quiet dinner and crash, Jax wanted to see Keara. “What do you think, Patches?”
She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking, because her tail started to wag as she stared up at him.
The two of them were on the outskirts of Desparre, back at the diner where he’d met Keara on Monday. Knowing they’d let Patches in had made it an obvious choice for a break. He’d ordered a sandwich. Enough to calm his grumbling stomach, but not so much that he couldn’t eat again if Keara was up for dinner. Beside him, Patches was happily chewing the treat the restaurant owner had handed her, ignoring the dog food Jax had brought.
“Spoiled,” he told her and she wagged her tail again.
Giving her a quick pat on the head, he dialed Keara, anxious to hear her voice. Although they’d gone to the crime scene together that morning, she’d left way before he had, to canvass the community. He’d spent the day in Desparre, too, but he’d been focused on the victims and families with the biggest emotional need. He and Keara had talked to the same people several times today, but never at the same time.
He missed her.
Her phone rang and rang. Just when he was expecting voice mail to pick up, Keara answered, sounding distracted. “Hello?”
“It’s Jax,” he told her, although he assumed she knew it from the display on her phone since she’d long since entered his contact information.
He could hear papers shuffling in the pause that followed and then finally she sighed and asked, “Did you speak to Imani and Wesley again today? Did you see the artist’s ren
dering of the person they saw near the woods?”
After Jax had left to talk to more victims—starting with the families of Officer Nate Dreymond and Talise Poitra—Anderson had called in a sketch artist to work with the couple. He’d asked Anderson to send him the picture once it was finished.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, people change. The picture we have of Rodney Brown is from seven years ago. But—”
“It doesn’t look like him,” Keara cut him off. “The nose is wrong. The cheekbones are higher. I know Rodney could have started going bald in the past seven years, but the hair seems off, too.”
“Sketches aren’t perfect,” Jax reminded her. “Imani and Wesley weren’t that close to the guy and it sounds like he tried to get out of view when he saw them looking at him.”
“I know. But the thing is, I spent the afternoon reviewing the cases your system spit out. I know we already agreed the bombings don’t seem connected to the earlier crimes, but Jax, I’m not sure any of them are connected.”
Jax frowned and set down his sandwich. Since the second bomb had gone off, he’d been thinking they were off base, too. But there was some reason the same symbol was showing up across so many cases. He couldn’t imagine a group of killers across the country, all equally skilled at evading police and all committing one crime before going dormant. “It could be a pair,” Jax reminded her. “Rodney and his roommate.”
“Maybe,” Keara agreed, but she didn’t sound convinced. “Jax, the thing is, we flagged all of the cases based on the symbols. I even considered sending the symbol to an anthropologist in case it has some kind of ancient significance, but it doesn’t seem worth it. It’s too rough and random, with nothing to indicate it means anything at all. I mean, you’re a trained psychologist, and you haven’t seen anything in it to give us a clue to its meaning. I went back and reviewed the details of the cases, too. They’re just as...inconsistent. Victimology is all over the place, and the MO is different each time, too. I’ve never chased down a bomber before and I’ve never had a serial murder case, either, but nothing I know about them fits what I saw in those case files. If you take the symbol out of it, they don’t seem connected at all.”
Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Page 48
