LITMIR.BIZ

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Kenzie said, squatting down to get a closer look at what the dog was digging up. She turned her head as more mud went flying at all of them. “O’Reilly, get him to stop for a minute,” she requested.

      “Jupiter, stay!” O’Reilly ordered gruffly.

      Getting in closer again, Kenzie frowned. And then she turned her head slightly as she looked back at Hunter. He was a few inches away from her. “You don’t need to breathe down my neck, Brannigan.”

      “I know. I thought that was a bonus,” he told her innocently. Then, before she could speak up, Hunter said what they were both thinking. “That torso has been in the ground too long to belong to John Kurtz.”

      She frowned, hating the fact that she agreed with Brannigan’s assessment. “And I’m thinking that it’s also not decomposed enough to belong to your cold case,” Kenzie added.

      “This makes three,” Hunter said quietly, as if saying the words too loudly would somehow make everything fall apart. “It’s official,” he told Kenzie and the officer. “Looks like we have ourselves a serial killer.”

      Kenzie felt her heart sink. Whether it was because she agreed with him, or because he was the one who put it into words first, she didn’t know. Either way, she had her cell phone out. She hit a number on her speed dial.

      “Who are you calling?” Hunter asked.

      She held up her hand, silently requesting him to stop talking.

      “Destiny?” she said, recognizing the voice of the person who had picked up on the other end. “Is the chief around?” she asked formally. “Thanks.”

      “CSI?” Hunter guessed.

      Kenzie nodded. Just then, the wind shifted. The next moment, Jupiter was off and running again. O’Reilly could barely keep up. In all probability he might have lost the dog had Jupiter not stopped in front of another mound. It was all dirt, not mud this time. Either way, the dog began digging furiously again.

      Watching what Jupiter was doing, Kenzie came to attention as the phone was being picked up on the other end.

      “Uncle Sean? This is Kenzie. Looks like I’ve got some unfinished business for your investigators. Detective Brannigan had the K-9 unit bring out a cadaver dog to go over the scene at Aurora Park where that head and hands were found today. The thinking was to find the rest of the body, but the dog dug up more bones. Old bones,” she emphasized. “How soon can you have someone from your team get here? Great. We’ll be here.”

      Ending the call, she slid her phone back into her pocket. She looked over toward O’Reilly, who was having more trouble restraining Jupiter. The shepherd looked eager to take off again.

      “The crime scene investigators will be here shortly,” she told the handler. She eyed the German shepherd. “Is he just excited, or—”

      “I think it’s ‘or,’” O’Reilly replied with a heavy sigh.

      Kenzie gestured toward the dog. “By all means, give him his lead,” she told O’Reilly.

      Once again Jupiter was off and running, with O’Reilly not too far behind.

      “Looks like that flash flood unleashed someone’s hidden graveyard,” Hunter observed. He made his way over to the third set of bones the dog had just dug up.

      “Yes, but whose?” she questioned, saying it more to herself than to the detective standing near her. She surveyed the area with dismay. “This can’t just be the work of one person—can it?” she asked him.

      “There’s no telling what one person is capable of,” Hunter answered. “The Green River Killer racked up one hell of a large body count before they finally caught on to him.”

      Kenzie shivered. She remembered reading about the case. The man who was ultimately responsible for the killings broke all the previous rules that had, everyone believed, once been set in stone. The serial killer wasn’t a withdrawn loner. Instead, he was a member of the community. A well-respected member who taught Sunday school on occasion, ran a youth group and was a man whom everyone liked. No one would have ever suspected him of doing anything wrong, let alone killing so many women.

      With the playbook rendered completely null and void, that meant anything was possible and just about anyone could be a killer.

      That unfortunately left the suspect pool wide-open, she thought.

      “Looks like this means we’re going to be keeping company for a little while longer, Kenzie,” Hunter told her.

      Kenzie jumped. For a minute, lost in thought, she had totally forgotten that he was there. Annoyed that Brannigan had managed to make her react like a skittish teenager, she asked him almost belligerently, “What makes you say that?”

      “Isn’t it obvious? My killer is your killer,” Hunter pointed out simply. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to pursue the guy separately.”

      From where she stood, pursuing the killer separately made a lot of sense, Kenzie thought. Mainly because she didn’t want to work alongside Brannigan any more than she had to. In her opinion, the man was as shallow as a raindrop and she was in no mood to be subjected to his feeble attempts to impress her or to dazzle her with his so-called detective skills.

      “Why not?” she asked, challenging him. “This way, we can approach the crimes from two separate points of view.”

      “We can still do that, but together,” Hunter countered stubbornly. “And it’ll go faster if we don’t have to stop and call each other every time a new idea hits one of us. All we’ll have to do is look across the table—or however you intend to have your bull pen arranged,” he told her.

      Stunned, she realized just what he was getting at. “You’re talking about getting a task force together,” Kenzie cried, part of her still hoping that he would deny it.

      But he didn’t. Exactly.

      “That all depends,” Hunter answered loftily. “Do the two of us constitute a task force?”

      Suddenly feeling cornered, she searched for a way to put Brannigan off. “I need permission to get a task force together,” she told him.

      Hunter looked totally unfazed by her excuse. “You’re a Cavanaugh. Do you really need permission to do something?” he asked skeptically. It was obvious that the detective didn’t think so.

      So, he was one of those, was he? He thought she was privileged. Well, she didn’t think she was privileged and she certainly didn’t act as if she was, Kenzie thought, annoyed.

      “It’s because I’m a Cavanaugh that I need permission,” Kenzie informed him, incensed that Brannigan had the gall to put her on the spot like this. “Just because I have that last name doesn’t mean I’m privileged.”

      The smile on Hunter’s face seemed to mock her and she would have given anything to physically wipe it off his lips—with her fist.

      “The chief of Ds told you to say that, didn’t he?” Brannigan guessed. His expression made it abundantly clear that he got a tremendous kick out of what Kenzie was saying.

      She was not about to confirm Brannigan’s guess, even though she grudgingly admitted that it was dead-on. As things stood between them, she would rather die than come out and say that.

      Instead, she resorted to wordplay. “That doesn’t alter the circumstances,” she informed Brannigan with a toss of her head.

      “All right,” he obliged. “So go ahead, ask the chief for permission to put a task force together. The sooner you do, the sooner it’ll be granted—” he glanced down at the body parts that Jupiter had just unearthed “—and the sooner we’ll be on our way to finding the SOB who gets his jollies doing this sort of sick thing.”

      “SOBs,” Kenzie corrected pointedly.

      Hunter

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