LITMIR.BIZ

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were her reading material and were proving to be an even bigger frustration than the case itself. This massive, sprawling, unnamed and unacknowledged case.

      There were so many pathologists, coroners, methods, regulations, jurisdictions. No one did a postmortem exactly the same, much less were handling several of the individual cases as if there was a criminal component. She’d begun to feel she was interpreting without a Rosetta stone.

      When John Baldwin had talked her into coming on board the FBI as a consultant to the behavioral analysis unit, BAU II, to work with his infamous group of profilers, he’d promised she could pick her cases. True to his word, he’d brought her to Quantico, gotten her set up with passes and emails and paperwork galore, then set her loose in the BAU file room. They had so much work, and so few people to handle it, any help was welcome.

      And whether she was trying to prove her worth to her new team, or to herself, she’d chosen the big daddy of them all. A stack of files that were getting dusty, because no one could manage to link them, even though there was a single similarity between each victim—every woman was from the same hometown. New Orleans.

      She’d seen the box, labeled Cold Case. Read the previous profiler’s report. There was nothing tying them together. The women had died by various means. Stabbings and stranglings and gunshots, one a cardiac arrest from a drug overdose, even a bridge jumper. Nothing highly unusual, nothing esoteric, nothing sexually motivated or even creepy. On the surface at least.

      Baldwin had a feeling about the cases, had spent years compiling the ones he thought fit a pattern, and she’d learned to trust his gut when it came to crime. Despite the sometimes innocuous causes of death, the link to New Orleans shouted “connection” to him. But he couldn’t definitively tie all the cases together, nor could anyone on his staff.

      Sam had looked through the files in the storage room, shaking her head. The murders did seem unrelated—they were spread all over the country, with different MOs, different murder weapons, different victimologies of all ages and races and socioeconomic levels. And yet, like Baldwin, she sensed the tenuous thread holding them. All of these women had been murdered by the same person. She could just feel it. There was something here. This was a series. Eight of them at last count, over more than twenty years.

      Baldwin had just added what he thought might be number nine to the stack, a young woman named Olivia Rives, who’d been found shot to death in Minneapolis last month.

      Nine dead. Multiple jurisdictions. No apparent links outside of a hometown and a profiler’s hunch.

      A nightmare.

      She shot the Ardbeg, poured another and gathered up the thick stack of papers on the side table. No sense going back to bed just this moment. She’d read a while more, keep filling her brain with the disparate notes of nine different autopsy reports by nine different doctors and coroners.

      Maybe this time, something would be different.

Chapter 3

      McLean, Virginia

      ROBIN SOULEYRET’S PHONE rang at 3:23 a.m. Eyes snapping open, she saw the number on the caller ID. Surprised, she palmed the receiver. “You know better than to call in the middle of the night unless someone is dead. So who died?”

      There was silence.

      “Amanda? What is it? Are you okay?”

      Nothing. Then a click.

      That was odd. Robin sat up in the bed, realized she was still naked, glanced at the empty spot beside her. Felt the pillow. It was cold. He’d left. She tamped down the feeling that churned in the pit of her stomach. Annoyance? Relief? Sorrow? She didn’t know, but this was their deal. No strings, and definitely no feelings. They were just filling a need for each other.

      With a sigh, she reached down and grabbed the shirt she’d been wearing off the floor, pulled it on and dialed Amanda’s phone back.

      It went straight to voice mail. Her sister’s lilting voice filled her ears. “This is Mandy. You know what to do.”

      Robin tried to keep the irritation from her tone. Well, most of it, anyway.

      “You woke me up, little sister. Care to call me back, tell me what’s up?”

      Lying back against the pillows, she stared at the ceiling. Wished Riley hadn’t been in such a hurry to split. She wouldn’t have minded making him breakfast. Just this once.

      The room was dark around her, empty, but not lonely, never lonely. She’d chosen this life, known what it would be—all work, and no play. No real lasting relationships, with friends or lovers, no kids, no normality. Just a constant string of challenges, issues to be overcome. She’d realized long ago she was just an ant among other ants in a very strange hill, crawling across the world, bumping into a crumb here and there. Some were even big enough to take back to their queen.

      Which made her think about Amanda again. She tried the phone once more, to no avail.

      A vague uneasiness flooded her system. Maybe Amanda had dialed her number accidentally. Butt-dialed her. Or decided what she wanted to say wasn’t important enough to wake Robin in the middle of the night.

      “Fat chance of that, you little bonehead. Where are you?”

      She’d never get back to sleep at this rate. She got up, made a pot of strong Turkish coffee, measured in some sugar so it would be orta s¸ekerli, just sweet enough to add to the flavor, bring out the chocolate notes without overwhelming the richness. She inhaled the fumes as it began to boil, craving the dark, deep taste.

      Her Turkish friends would be aghast at her drinking coffee in the middle of the night, but as she liked to point out to them, she was an American, not Turkish, and by God she’d drink it whenever she wanted—in the morning, before her dinner, in the middle of the night. So there.

      Cup in hand, she made her way through the cottage to the back porch. The sky was as dark as the coffee, beginning its losing battle with the sun, which was still three hours off. She redialed Amanda’s phone.

      Nothing.

      Took a sip of the coffee, listened to the night things chirping and crawling in the bushes, imagined the birds and mice having an intimate, elegant cocktail party under the bough of the fir tree. Breaking bread with the enemy. Her specialty.

      When she’d finished the coffee, she knew it was time to make the call. She hated to do it, but she had no choice. Mandy was her little sister, headstrong and brave, but prone to getting herself into situations that involved delicate extrications. The girl seemed to live for close calls, and she managed well, considering. She’d only asked for help once, a month ago. Robin had been forced to turn her down, unable to break away from her own messed-up world to help. They hadn’t spoken since, and Robin was missing her impetuous sister.

      She dialed the number.

      Listened to the greeting.

      Punched in an extension.

      Waited a moment, then hung up.

      A heartbeat later, the phone rang.

      She answered, surprised to hear Riley’s voice on the other end. “Robin?”

      “What are you doing on the desk? I figured you’d be at home, sound asleep.” Or in my bed, sound asleep. Or wide-awake, an even better scenario.

      The unspoken words shimmered around her, golden threads of need and desire. She needed to get a handle on these nascent emotions, and quickly. Riley wasn’t thinking about champagne and roses and candlelight every time he bedded her, she knew that. Of course, Riley didn’t see the glorious colors dancing around his words, either.

      “I got called in. There’s been an incident in Georgetown.”

      The golden threads dissipated with a pop and something like fear skittered up her back. She didn’t recognize the sensation right away. She hadn’t

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