LITMIR.BIZ

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button on the wall, and waited for the secret compartment to open. That’s what he loved about this old house—the secret chambers. Like something out of a 1930s movie. How utterly delicious. There was one chamber between the study and the front parlor and another in the basement. Since he seldom went down to the basement, except when he personally retrieved a bottle of wine, he preferred the small, private, upstairs chamber.

      Entering this room transported Ruddy into another world, a realm of pleasure and satisfaction that he had created for himself four and a half years ago. He flipped on the light switch. Soft, mellow illumination filled the eight-by-fourteen-foot room. He moved slowly along the back wall, studying the photographs mounted side by side. Thirty-two enlarged photos of sixteen different women, each one a true beauty. Ruddy paused in front of the most recent addition to his collection: Gale Ann Cain—before and after. The before photograph had been taken years ago when she’d won the Miss USA contest and gone on to compete in the Miss Universe Pageant. The after snapshot had been taken with Ruddy’s tiny digital camera moments after he had killed her, less than forty-eight hours ago.

      “Thank you, my pretty flower,” Ruddy said.

      After months of searching, he had specifically chosen Gale Ann because of her fabulous red hair. Redheads were the most rare, the most precious.

      His fingertips traced his handiwork, gliding smoothly across the snapshot, pausing on her slender ankles.

      The sound of her screams echoed inside Ruddy’s head.

      The first kill had been the most difficult. He had hated the woman’s screams. But with each kill, the act itself had become easier, and eventually, he had begun to enjoy hearing their screams.

      * * *

      “The Beauty Queen Killer has struck again.”

      The words were no sooner out of Sanders’s mouth than Lindsay McAllister shot out of bed and ran barefoot to the open doorway of her bedroom where her boss’s personal assistant stood. He had awakened her moments before with a loud knock and an urgency in his voice when he called her name.

      “Have you gotten in touch with Griff?” she asked, knowing their employer had probably spent the night with his latest lady friend, a Kentucky divorcée who was visiting her sorority sister in Knoxville. The woman’s family raised thoroughbred Derby winners, and Griff had invested in the faltering horse-breeding farm last fall. She often thought her boss had a white knight complex. He seemed to like nothing better than rushing in to save the day.

      “Yes,” Sanders replied. “He’s on his way home. He should be here soon.”

      “Give me fifteen minutes to shower and dress,” Lindsay said.

      Sanders nodded. Not for the first time, she noticed the man’s military bearing. Although she had worked with him for three and a half years, she knew absolutely nothing about his past, but she suspected that at sometime in his life, he had been a soldier. She had no idea how old he was, but guessed his age to be somewhere between fifty and sixty. At five-ten, he was not a large man, but stocky-built, and with his head shaved as slick as a billiard ball, he looked like a muscular, physically fit fireplug. But what set him apart more than anything else were his eyes. An intense brown so dark that they appeared black. And there was an emptiness in those hypnotic eyes that perpetually puzzled Lindsay.

      “I’ll have coffee ready for you when you come down.” Sanders turned to leave.

      She called to him, “Who, where, and how?”

      Sanders paused, but kept his back to her. “Gale Ann Cain. Williamstown, Kentucky. He chopped off both of her feet.”

      “She was a dancer.” Lindsay voiced the comment more to herself than Sanders. The killer that the Powell Agency had been tracking for nearly four years murdered his victims in various ways, each specific to the former beauty queen’s talent in her pageant’s contest.

      Sanders’s shoulders tensed ever so slightly. “Lyrical dance. She’s a former contestant in the Miss Universe Pageant.”

      “You mean she was,” Lindsay corrected.

      “No, I mean she is. Ms. Cain is still alive.”

      “What!”

      “She didn’t die. Her sister found her before she bled to death.”

      “My God! Do you know what this means?”

      Sanders nodded, then walked away.

      Lindsay’s heartbeat accelerated. Her pulse pounded loudly in her ears. After over three and a half years of searching for a manically clever killer, they had finally gotten a break. If the victim was still alive …

      Lindsay closed her eyes and said a silent prayer for a woman she had never met, for a woman lying in a Kentucky hospital, missing both of her feet, the victim of a man to whom murder was some sort of sick game.

      After closing her bedroom door and heading to the bathroom, Lindsay shucked off her oversized orange Vols T-shirt and slipped out of her white lace bikini panties.

      When she had first moved from Chattanooga to Knox County to take a job with the Powell Private Security and Investigation Agency, she’d taken Griffin Powell up on his offer to stay at his sprawling twenty-room mansion situated on a hundred acres bordering Douglas Lake, near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. She had intended to stay only until she’d found an apartment of her own, but what should have been a one-month stay had turned into three years and counting.

      Lindsay turned on the shower, then gathered up a couple of towels and a washcloth. After placing the towels on the mat outside the ceramic-tiled shower unit, she stepped beneath the warm water and quickly lathered her short hair.

      Some people assumed that because she not only worked closely with the big man himself but she was the only Powell agent who lived in Griff’s home, the two were lovers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      Through their years together—each of them having their own agenda for being obsessed with the beauty queen murders— she and Griff had formed a bond of friendship. He had become more like a protective big brother than anything else.

      Stepping out of the shower, Lindsay towel-dried her curly hair and hurried through her daily morning routine. She was a low-maintenance kind of woman. Short hair, short nails, a little blush on her cheeks, light lip gloss, and a whiff of fresh linen body spray. On her downtime, she dressed for comfort. On the job she preferred a casual look—slacks, shirt, and jacket, all in neutral shades. Her only jewelry, other than a sensible Fossil wristwatch, was a pair of diamond ear studs. A Christmas present from Griff.

      After dressing hurriedly, Lindsay ran down the backstairs that led to the massive kitchen. Sanders stood behind the granite-topped bar, a glass coffeepot in his meaty hand. Griffin Powell, his unbuttoned overcoat hanging apart to reveal his rumpled white shirt and tuxedo, halted in the doorway leading into the kitchen from the mudroom, and wiped his snow-smeared dress shoes off on a sturdy floor mat.

      Lindsay paused on the bottom step as her gaze zipped from Sanders to Griff. A silent understanding passed between her and her boss. They were both thinking the same thing— how will this affect Judd?

      “Do you want me to call him?” she asked.

      Griff shook his head. “I’ve already tried. Both his home phone and cell phone are no longer in service.”

      Lindsay groaned. “I’m not surprised.”

      “Neither am I.” Griff shook the snow from his short, platinum-blond hair, then removed his overcoat and tossed it over a nearby kitchen chair. “The last time I saw him, he was just one step away from being a mad hermit.”

      “Will you try again to contact him or—?”

      “Why don’t you drive down there this morning and see what you find,” Griff said. “If he’s even halfway sane, tell him what’s happened, stay with him and try to keep him in line as much as possible.”

      The

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