LITMIR.BIZ

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own way had committed some kind of heinous crime, but as far as we can see, the victims are just a group of average middle-class women. We’ve got a waitress—” she referred to the latest victim “—a supermarket checker, a teacher, a would-be actress, an insurance clerk, an airline stewardess, a bank teller, a private in the army, a girl who worked in a stationery store, a nurse, a paralegal and a grad student.” The last was her sister. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to tie them together. They didn’t belong to the same club, see the same doctor, like the same movies.”

      Charley pressed her lips together. She could taste her frustration rising like bile in her throat. There were days she was hopeful and days, like today, when she thought they were never going to get Cris’s killer. Maybe it was the rain, she reasoned. The rain always made her think of Cris. And that she’d lost half of her soul.

      “They didn’t even have the same things in their medicine cabinets,” she said in frustration. Every angle had been checked and rechecked. But obviously, they were going to have to check again.

      “And yet there has to be some kind of link,” Nick pointed out, saying out loud what she was thinking. “At least in the killer’s mind.”

      “Which could be totally psychotic and delusional. For all we know, he thinks he sees the same person over and over again when he kills his victims.”

      And when he saw Cris, did the killer think he was seeing her instead? Charley wondered. It was something that continued to haunt her. She and Cris had been identical, right down to the tiny white crescent birthmark on their left hips. There’d been times when their own mother hadn’t been able to tell them apart. It was their personalities, not their features that enabled people to distinguish between them. Asleep, which was the way the killer had found Cris, they could easily be mistaken for each other.

      No, you’re not going to do this to yourself, Charley silently insisted. Getting bogged down in endless self-questioning wasn’t going to get Cris’s killer. Wasn’t going to find him before he could kill another girl.

      She stepped on the gas and made the light before it turned red. Barely.

      “You always drive like that?” Nick asked.

      “Like what?”

      “Like you’re running a race with the traffic light to see who makes it to the finish line first.”

      “I don’t like to dawdle.”

      “No, but some of us might want to live to see our thirtieth birthday.”

      She raised her eyes to his as she turned into a parking lot. “Then you picked the wrong profession, Special Agent Brannigan. You want a long life expectancy, become an insurance investigator.”

      As she pulled into the first available spot, rain began to fall as if someone had upended a barrel. Pausing only to pull up the hood of her jacket, Charley got out of the vehicle. She waited for her partner to emerge on his side before she hit the security button.

      Nick turned up his collar. Not that it did much to protect him from the rain. He glanced in her direction as he made a run for the apartment building.

      “No umbrella?”

      She hated having to carry anything. Everything she felt she needed was stuffed into one small shoulder bag she resented having to drag along. An umbrella would have been too much.

      “Too inconvenient. Besides, haven’t you heard? It never rains in California.”

      Reaching the doorway, he turned his collar down again and wiped the rain from his hair with his hand. “Isn’t the rest of that line ‘but it pours?’”

      Throwing open the door that led into the building’s foyer, she looked over her shoulder. A spark of mild interest rose within her. “An oldies fan?”

      He’d never cared for labels, preferring to go from one thing to another. “My taste’s eccentric. I like most music. Helps while the time away.”

      Stacy Pembroke’s apartment was on the first floor, in the rear of the building. Since she was the only one of them who knew that, Charley led the way. “Time hang heavily on your hands, Special Agent Brannigan?”

      He kept pace with her in the narrow hallway, refusing to follow her like an underpaid servant. “It did when I was a kid, sitting between my brother and sister in the back seat of my father’s station wagon, traveling from Texas to New Jersey.”

      She made the connection instantly. “Army brat?”

      “Army.” Nick allowed part of her label. “But I was never a brat.” His mouth curved slightly. “Just ask my mother.”

      “Maybe I will.”

      The moment Charley walked across the apartment threshold, she sobered. Someone had died here, had the life squeezed out of her by the hands that belonged to a maniac. No matter what that woman’s offenses might have been, the victim deserved some sort of dignity.

      Just like Cris had deserved.

      CHAPTER SIX

      A SINGLE LINE of yellow tape separated the apartment from its brethren. That, and the aura of death.

      Only one man was stationed inside the confines of the late Stacy Pembroke’s one-bedroom apartment. The man was shifting his weight from foot to foot like a bird marooned on a tiny slab of ice, floating down a river and nervously trying to decide which foot would keep him steadiest.

      From his short-cropped haircut to his crisp white shirt down to his neatly pressed brown trousers, the man reeked of newness. Not new to the scene like Brannigan, but new altogether. New to the Bureau. New to the sharp reality of murder. He had the smell of someone who had just graduated from the academy and had drawn the Santa Ana office as his first assignment.

      Because he was thin, he appeared taller than he was. And nervous. Throwing off his restlessness, the special agent came to attention the moment she and Brannigan walked into the small, tastefully furnished apartment.

      In a beat, he was going to go for his weapon, Charley thought. She judged that he was more likely to shoot his own foot than get a bead on either one of them.

      Something made her doubt that the man behind her had ever been that nervous, that raw. Brannigan exuded confidence with every move he made.

      Charley raised her hand, as if she was gentling an overanxious poodle that fancied himself a guard dog. “Relax, newbie. I’m Special Agent Dow, this is Special Agent Brannigan. We’re on the task force that’s investigating this murder.”

      To back up her claim, Charley withdrew her wallet and showed the young man her ID. His eyes moved from line to line, then looked at her photograph carefully before stepping back. Only then did relief relax his features.

      “Newbie,” the man repeated, digesting the term. A tinge of color rose up on his cheeks. He had the kind of face that would always be boyish. “Does it show?”

      “Only when we look,” Charley told him. “Don’t worry about it. Even God had a first day. What’s your name?”

      “Jack Andrews, ma’am.”

      Nick noted that Charley winced ever so slightly at the polite salutation. His sister hated to be addressed that way. It made her feel old, she’d confided. Probably did the same for Dow.

      “Special Agent Dow will do, Special Agent Andrews,” Charley addressed the younger man. And then she surprised Nick as well as the new recruit by smiling and adding, “If we solve this case, you get to call me Charley.”

      The look on Jack Andrews’s face said that he would never presume to call her by anything so familiar.

      Nick turned to look at her, puzzled. “Charley? How did you get Charley out of Charlotte?”

      But even as he asked, Nick decided that the nickname probably suited her a great deal better than the name she’d been given at birth.

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