Turning away, she began to dress. But as she slipped into her underwear, and then the suit that would cover all evidence of the previous night, she couldn’t help stealing little glances down at her body and longer looks into the mirror behind her.
She couldn’t forget that the love bites were there, nor could she forget the man who had given them to her—as, perhaps, had been Cole’s intention all along.
When finally her blouse was buttoned and all her skin was covered up, she slipped into her jacket. Twisted her curls into a loose chignon. Slid her feet into a pair of sensible loafers. And then shifted the collar of her shirt aside so that she could see the marks one more time.
It was going to be a long day, and every second of it would be spent thinking of Cole Adams and his undeniable, unbelievable, highly arousing claim on her body and her soul.
Chapter Nine
Two days later, it was disconcerting to realize just how right she’d been. She was knee-deep in three unsolved homicides, and all she could think of was Cole. Every shift in her chair made her wince as her well-used body protested any sudden movement. Every glance at her watch revealed the lightly bruised skin of her wrist, had her remembering just how fabulous it had been to be restrained by Cole’s hands. And still he hadn’t called.
She’d spent the last forty-eight hours waiting for the phone to ring, expecting to hear Cole’s voice on the other end. But it hadn’t—and she didn’t know if she was furious about that or relieved. What she felt for him was intense, too intense, and part of her wondered if she was better off without him—even if he did make her feel more than anyone ever had.
Shuffling through Cyndi Priner’s file for what seemed like the millionth time, Genevieve scowled in disgust. There was nothing here, nothing she and Shawn had missed. Nothing that might actually connect Cyndi to Jessica and Lorelei’s murders.
Not that she’d expected to find anything—she had gone over the file nearly every day since Cyndi had been killed and could quote its contents by heart.
Still, a smoking gun would have been nice—something, anything that might actually convince Chastian to move on this sometime before the next century.
“Hey, partner, you’re looking mighty serious there.”
Glancing up, she did a double take as her partner, Shawn, swaggered toward her. With his surfer-boy hair and brightly colored polo, he looked more like a San Diego beach bum than a New Orleans cop, but his instincts in homicide were right-on and had been for nearly a decade. “What are you doing here? I thought you had a few more vacation days left.”
He shrugged, then flashed her the grin that had gotten him everything he’d ever wanted. “I missed you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. Though the alligators in the bayou did have a sweeter temperament.”
She snorted. “Bite me.”
“It would be my very great pleasure.”
“I don’t know about that. The last guy who did said I was pretty bitter.”
“Nah.” He reached across the desk and picked up the small bag of chocolate chip cookies that was currently passing as lunch. “You’re not bitter—just an acquired taste.” He popped a cookie into his mouth.
“Oh, really? And you think you’ve acquired that taste?” She yanked her cookies back.
“More than most of the guys here have.”
“Like that’s hard?” She shot him a wry look.
“Not really.” He stole the last cookie from the bag and hopped off her desk. Then, after settling behind his own desk, said, “So, catch me up. I hear it’s been a hell of a week.”
“You have no idea.”
After briefing him on the cases she’d caught earlier in the week, she slid Jessica’s folder in front of him. “Look through it. Tell me what you think.”
Shawn spent a few minutes going over her notes and the details of the case. She tried not to watch him, tried not to react to every muffled curse or sigh. But it was hard—she was so wired about this one, so anxious for her partner to see what she saw, that she was afraid she’d jump out of her skin.
But when he raised his eyes to hers ten minutes later, there was no hint of recognition in them. Just an angry disgust he didn’t even try to hide. “I swear to God, these guys are getting sicker every f**king day.”
“A new day, a new perversion.” She repeated the words that were all but a mantra in the precinct.
“Isn’t that the truth?” Leaning back in his chair, Shawn studied her for a minute. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit. Fess up.”
“I don’t think she’s the only one.”
His eyebrows nearly hit his hairline. “You think there’s another body out there we don’t know about?”
“Maybe.” She grabbed her lukewarm Dr Pepper, took a long, slow sip as she formulated what she wanted to say. “I was thinking about those cases we never closed. You know, Lorelei DuFray and Cyndi Priner.”
Shawn froze, staring at her as if she’d grown another head. “What makes you think the cases are related?”
“The level of sadism. The obvious humiliation of the victims.” She shrugged. “Sheer gut instinct.”
“Yeah, well, we can set a clock by your gut instincts, so why hasn’t Chastian done anything about this yet?”
“He doesn’t believe me. Thinks I’m making things up.”
“ ’Don’t take his bullshit to heart. The lieutenant wouldn’t be able to find his ass with both hands and a mirror the size of the f**king moon.”
Genevieve giggled despite herself, and felt her tense muscles relaxing for the first time in days. His sense of humor and ability to call things like he saw them were just two of the many reasons she loved having Shawn as a partner.
“I know. I had the same thought yesterday.” She clicked into her email, scrolled through it. “That’s what has me so afraid.”
Her heart started pounding as she realized she had an answer from Jose. She opened it, felt her stomach cramp at the two terse sentences. Call made from unregistered, untraceable, prepaid cell phone. What the hell’s going on?
Cursing under her breath, Genevieve sat back in her chair and stared at the computer screen with blank eyes. Shawn was still talking, but she couldn’t hear a word he was saying. All of her concentration was focused on Jose’s cryptic email.
So her instincts about the phone call had been right on, after all. Not some kids being stupid, but someone who had something to hide. No other reason to use such a deliberately anonymous phone.
But was it the killer—or just someone with a grudge against her? God knew she’d made her fair share of enemies on the job these last few years.
Her gut screamed that the call had come straight from the man she was searching for, and she couldn’t ignore it—no matter how much she wanted to.
“Shawn,” she said, quietly breaking into his long-winded diatribe. “I think we’ve got a problem.”
“Besides a psychotic killer and no leads?” But his blue eyes narrowed, stared at her with an intensity that belied his laid-back looks. “What is it?”
She told him about the prank call—and Jose’s response to it—as succinctly as possible, and wasn’t the least bit surprised when he exploded.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before now?” he demanded.
“I didn’t know if it was important.”
“You have some woman-killing psycho calling you and you don’t think it’s important that he’s fixated on you?”
“Two phone calls is far from fixated! What I’m concerned about is what he said.”
The reminder stopped Shawn mid-diatribe, as she’d intended. “That there’s another body out there? Do you believe him?”
“I don’t think we can afford not to. Not at this point.”
He nodded his agreement, his eyes grim. “So where do we start looking for her?”
“That’s the kicker, isn’t it?”
They stared at each other for long seconds. Dismay and anger were winding themselves through Genevieve, and she could tell from the look on Shawn’s face that he felt exactly the same way.
Some woman was out there right now—either being tortured or already dead—and they could do nothing about it but wait. Wait for the next phone call, wait until the body turned up, wait until it was too late for another girl, another family.
Screw that! She had to do something—they had to do something. And at this point, their best chance of catching this sick bastard was to work the cases they already had.
Springing up, Genevieve strode to the large board parked against the back wall. Rolling it back to her desk, she pulled some thumbtacks and dry-erase markers out of her top drawer. “Let’s spread it all out, look at the time line.”
Shawn must have had the same thought, because he already had the case files open. “If you’re right and this is the same guy, it all starts with Lorelei DuFray.”
He grabbed the first folder on his desk, pulled out two pictures. One of thirty-three-year-old Lorelei as she’d been before July fifth—smiling and pretty and alive. And one of her after the killer had gotten done with her.
She’d been laid out nak*d in Jackson Square, her legs and arms bound behind her with thick rope, her body severely bruised. Her throat had been slashed—not deep enough to kill her instantly, but more than enough to let her bleed out slowly. Next to her in the photo was the long length of black satin she had been covered with when she was discovered.
Genevieve added pertinent details they’d discovered through three months of investigating, including the date Lorelei had gone missing, her approximate time of death and her unusual after-hours schedule, as well as her boyfriend’s name and alibi.
“Cyndi came next.” Shawn’s voice was harsh with anger as he pulled out photos of the forty-five-year-old nurse. Unlike Lorelei, Cyndi had been a blond—at least until the killer had shaved her head.
Two weeks ago, they’d found her brutalized body in the Dumpster behind Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop—one of the oldest buildings in the Quarter. She’d been fully clothed, her head bashed in. Shawn had originally wanted to call it a mugging gone bad, but the coroner had turned up evidence of rape and sodomy, as well as missing fingertips that indicated she’d gotten in some pretty good licks before the killer had taken her. If he hadn’t been afraid of his DNA being discovered, he never would have cut off poor Cyndi’s fingers.
They pinned much of Cyndi’s file to the board before moving on to Jessica Robbins and doing the same with hers. When they had done all they could, they stepped back and surveyed their handiwork.
“You know, any cop looking at this would think we were insane to believe they were connected,” Shawn commented as he leaned against the side of his desk.
“Blond, redhead, brunet,” Genevieve intoned. “Range of ages. Different method of murder in each one.”
“The only thing that’s the same is the rape—and the beating.”
“They were all killed about seventy-two hours after they disappeared,” Genevieve said as she stared at Lorelei’s vacant eyes. “But they weren’t all dumped right away. He held on to Cyndi for a while.”
“Or they just didn’t find her in the Dumpster until after she’d been there awhile.”
Genevieve was shaking her head before he finished. It was an argument they’d already had three times since catching Cyndi’s case “You’ve got to stop harping on that. Jefferson said no way, not with this heat. The rate of decomposition wasn’t nearly high enough. They found her within hours of when she’d been put in there.”
“So why would he hang on to her and not the others? It doesn’t make any sense.” Shawn shoved a frustrated hand through his hair, started to pace between his desk and the back of the room.
“Opportunity?” she commented. “The bar’s on Bourbon Street, for God’s sake. Maybe he couldn’t get her there before then.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” His tone was more than a little doubtful. “But we’re talking about a guy who was able to lay a girl out in Jackson Square in the middle of the afternoon and not be seen. Somehow I doubt a Dumpster at the back of a popular bar would give him much trouble.”
They fell silent for a few minutes as they studied the board. Finally, Shawn said, “You can see why Chastian’s giving us a hard time. These women don’t have a thing in common.”
“Not even neighborhood or occupation,” she agreed, going through the list she’d already run in her head dozens of times. “Even the manner of death and distribution of bodies is very different. I know all that.”
“You also know that a serial killer has a usual type and method and he sticks to that type religiously. This guy’s doing none of that.”