Ruthless (2 page)

This time he looked away. He couldn’t deny the truth any more than she could. Her lips started that confounded trembling again, and she couldn’t manage to summon the proper words to explain the rest of what needed to be said.

Someone would die
soon
… because of her.

Her heart pounded in her ears, ticking off the silent seconds. If he would just back off… give her some space… so she could do what needed to be done.

“All right.” He exhaled a heavy breath. “But you will not make a move without Sergeant Harper or Detective Wells right beside you. You will not go home or anywhere
else without one of them or without me. Understood?” He shook his head, the look on his face dead serious. “No exceptions, Jess. No pretending this time that the danger isn’t real and imminent.”

Relief rushed through her so hard her knees almost gave way. “You have my word. You can put a tracking device in my bag. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.” Truth was, that wasn’t a bad idea. As desperately as she wanted to do something besides sit here, she understood the danger was all too real. And definitely imminent. As badly as she wanted to stop Spears, she didn’t want anyone to die in the process—including her.

The MO he was using this time around was similar to the games he’d played before, he’d simply taken a different and startling new strategy to get from selecting his victim to abducting her. Spears wasn’t playing with her this time. Jess sensed that cold, hard fact to the very core of her being. What did a killer who sat at the very top of the most evil scale do for a finale?

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Dan said, hauling her back to the here and now. “I’m assigning a surveillance detail to you 24/7.”

Daniel Burnett, her friend, lover, and boss—not necessarily in that order—wasn’t going to take any chances this go-around. He knew her a little too well. Jess had a habit of going rogue when the need arose.

“Whatever it takes. Cooperation will be my middle name,” she promised. As long as she got to get back to work and out from under his thumb.

He assessed her a moment longer before heading for his desk to put his warning into action. “You’ll keep me apprised of your every move.”

“Absolutely.” She felt like a bird just let out of its cage as she gathered her bag and files. “I’ll head on down to SPU now and let you get back to your work.” The Special Problems Unit and her office was just a short flight of stairs or a brief elevator ride away—the latter being her preferred method of getting from here to there. Four-inch heels and stairs just didn’t go well together.

Dan shook his head. “I’ll have Harper come get you.”

Her jaw dropped. She couldn’t move about inside the building, for heaven’s sake, without an escort? Before she could demand an answer to that question, Burnett—she was too mad now to keep calling him Dan, even in her mind—made the call.

Opting to choose her battles, she snapped her mouth shut and decided that getting her way with Harper would be a whole lot easier than trying to get anything over on Daniel T. Burnett. He was far too hardheaded and impossible to persuade into seeing things her way when any measure of risk was involved.

“Harper’s on his way.” He tossed his cell phone back on his desk. “Don’t make me regret this decision, Jess. I’m counting on you not to let me down.”

“I gave you my word.” If her record didn’t show otherwise she might be offended. But she had a well-documented history of doing things her own way regardless of instructions from her superiors. “Besides,” she added with a shrug, “I’ve never once disobeyed orders unless it was the best for the victim or the case. You can’t say otherwise.”

That part was the irrefutable truth.

Even her former employer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, couldn’t claim she’d bent—or broken, more often than not—the rules without the best interest of the case at
heart. There were some evils out there that simply couldn’t be stopped by the book. The Player was one of those.

Fortunately, a rap at the door prevented Dan’s pursuit of that topic.

Thank God.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Harper glanced from Burnett to Jess.

She gave her detective a nod sans the victorious smile now tugging at her lips and waited quietly, obediently, as Dan laid down the law. Her frustration dissipated faster than fog clearing beneath the rising sun as the reality that she was really getting out of this office-turned-prison seeped fully into her veins.

I will get you, Spears.

When Harper had been fully informed of his grave duty, he gave a nod without so much as another glance at Jess. “I understand, sir.”

Jess was out of the chief of police’s office and heading for freedom before Harper could turn around. She bypassed the elevator, since it was monitored by security, and she needed a word with her detective in private. She waited until she and Harper were in the stairwell headed down to SPU before voicing her request.

“I need a disposable phone, Sergeant.”

“Something wrong with your phone, ma’am?”

At the door to their floor she gave him a skeptical look. “You don’t want to know the answer to that. Just get me one I can use without anyone tracking it.”

“I’ll send Cook to Walmart.”

“Thank you.” She finally let that triumphant smile she’d been holding back make an appearance. “We have work to do.”

He gave her a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

A kind of calm descended and Jess’s pulse rate steadied as she entered her own domain. Her small staff waited for her. SPU’s team consisted of her and only three others, and the floor space allotted for their offices was just one big room, but it was her unit and she couldn’t be happier for some sense of normalcy. The past forty or so hours had been unbearable.

“Good morning, Chief.” Detective Lori Wells looked as relieved to have her back as Jess felt at being here.

More so than anyone else at the BPD, Lori had as much reason as Jess to want Spears caught. His protégé, Reed, had kidnapped and tortured her just to lure Jess into a trap that mercifully fell apart, but not before people died.

“Good morning, Lori.” Jess gave her and then Officer Chad Cook, the youngest of their team, a nod. “Cook.”

“Ma’am,” Cook greeted. “We’ve missed you.”

A statement as simple as that shouldn’t have had her struggling to hold a fresh rush of emotion back, but it did. This was her new home and it felt exactly like that. A mere six months ago she wouldn’t have believed she would ever be back in Birmingham feeling like she belonged. But here she was and it felt right.

The television mounted on the wall opposite their case board was running the same news coverage as the one in Burnett’s office. Jess hoped someone out there would recognize those three women and call in. Soon. There was no way to know if one or all three were already missing or even where they lived. For now, the Bureau was focused on the state of Alabama, since the package containing the photos had been mailed from Montgomery. But the truth was they had no clue who or where these women were—
they had nothing except the photos and the promise of bad things to come.

Spears was too smart to get caught easily. He had no doubt selected very carefully for this pivotal game. Women who were loners, maybe had no families. Women who wouldn’t be missed right away. That strategy would buy him the time he wanted to draw out the game.

Every step he took was judiciously calculated for optimal gain and leverage.

While Harper pulled Cook aside to give him his task, Jess parked her stuff on her desk and headed for the case board. Lori, with a manila folder in hand, joined her there.

“I was waiting until you got here to start.” Lori opened the folder and revealed copies of the photos of the unidentified women and a photo of Spears.

The unsavory combo of anxiety, fear, and frustration almost got the better of Jess again. “Thank you.” She was extremely lucky to have Lori and Harper on her team. Cook, too. The vacant desk reminded her that SPU was a member short since Valerie Prescott had moved on to the Gang Task Force.

A sense of foreboding churned in Jess’s belly. Captain Ted Allen, head of Birmingham’s Gang Task Force, was still missing. More than a week now. Whatever else she knew, Jess understood with complete certainty that his disappearance had something to do with her. Yet she couldn’t connect Allen’s disappearance with Spears and his game. Had to be the high-profile Lopez drug case she and Allen had repeatedly butted heads over. Although there was plenty of gossip floating around the station that she’d had something to do with Allen’s disappearance. She didn’t like the captain, and liked the fact that he may
very well have planted a bomb in her car even less, but there was only one man she wanted dead enough to do the deed herself.

Eric Spears
.

If she let herself contemplate all that had happened in the last six weeks or so, she might just lose it. After all, what forty-two-year-old woman wouldn’t want a serial killer kidnapping innocent women to get her attention and a cop who hated her going missing—after possibly planting a bomb in her department vehicle? Gave new meaning to the term midlife crisis.

“I was thinking about a replacement for Prescott,” Lori said, evidently noting Jess’s lingering attention on the vacant desk.

Thankful for the reprieve from the other thoughts, Jess set the self-pity party aside for now. “I doubt we’ll get any cases thrown our way until this—” she blew out a big blast of frustration “—is over, but we do need to fill that vacancy. Who’d you have in mind?”

“Lieutenant Clint Hayes. He’s over in Admin right now, but he’s been looking for an opportunity to get in the field.”

Jess placed the photo of Spears on the case board. She hated those pale blue eyes of his. Not the same deep, true blue of Dan’s. Spears’s were that pale, ghostly color that warned pure evil thrived beneath them. “Give me some stats on Hayes.”

“Thirty-four. Single. Went to Samford. Finished law school with high honors but opted not to go that route. Instead he hired on with the BPD.”

Jess stalled before getting the final photo on the board. “Decided he’d rather be one of the good guys, is that it?”

Lori gave a halfhearted shrug. “Something like that.”

There was more to this story. “Something like what… exactly?”

“There was a morals issue in the background check,” Harper chimed in from his desk.

With the last photo in place Jess turned to her senior detective. “What kind of morals issue?”

“The state bar association discovered he had worked his way through college”—Harper strolled up, hands in pockets and wearing a smirk—“as a gigolo. They refused to certify his character.”

A frown puckered her eyebrows. Jess rubbed at what would end up another wrinkle if she didn’t stop the habit. A
gigolo
? Do tell. “Evidently he was never arrested for solicitation.” That kind of mark on his record would have kept him off the force as well.

“Never,” Lori confirmed. “Character references killed his chances with the state bar association—a couple of his own friends ratted him out. Cost him his chosen career and the city one hell of a sharp attorney.”

“Good Lord.” Jess looked from one detective to the other, certain she had misheard. “You’re telling me the bar association ignored his superior academic prowess and refused to admit him because he’d worked as a manwhore?” She could think of far worse things lawyers did every day, and it rarely got them disbarred.

“I’m telling you”—Harper chuckled—“that the BPD hired him
because
he was a manwhore.”

Now Jess was really confused.

“It was the mayor’s idea,” Lori interjected, wearing her own smirk now. “Rumor was that Clint’s little black book included Mayor Pratt’s wife’s name.”

In spite of the insanity going on around her, Jess had
to laugh. Seemed like for all their old money and power the mayor’s family and friends just couldn’t resist dancing around the dark side. And in the South, even in a city the size of Birmingham, everyone who was anyone knew everyone else. “Don’t you just love small-town justice?”

Harper leaned in closer. “You think he called up Mayor Pratt and asked for a favor, or do you think the mayor’s wife took care of it for him?”

“Good question.” Jess cleared her throat. “If the two of you think Hayes would prove an asset to our cozy little group, I’m fine with a probationary period.” She wouldn’t mention the idea that having a little dirt on the mayor would make her immensely happy. “Talk to him,” she said to Lori. “If he’s agreeable and Burnett approves it, we’ll bring him over as soon as possible.”

Before Jess turned her attention back to the case board she wanted one more administrative issue out of the way, since their youngest member was out of the room. “We need to start grooming Cook for the detectives’ exam.”

“I can handle that,” Harper offered.

“Excellent.” Whether or not Cook got a promotion wasn’t such a priority right now, but Jess needed to hang on to a few threads of normalcy. Spears was doing all within his power to take that from her.

Ruthless, that was what he was. Ruthless and pure evil. If she had her way he would die screaming.

Satisfaction warmed her heart.
Oh yes. I will get you this time.

“Your Realtor called.” Lori hitched her head toward Jess’s desk. “There’s a message. Something about the last week of September for the closing date on your house.”