CHAPTER ONE #2
“Move in with me,” he repeats, his hands coming down on my shoulders. “I’m crazy about you.”
“I’m not a relationship kind of girl.”
“What do you call what we’re doing?”
“Sex. Friendship.” I’m confusing him and I think me, too. I should have left out the friendship part, except I do like him. Quite a lot actually. Frustrated at myself, I add, “I don’t know.”
“You just described a perfect relationship, Lilah. That’s what we all want. Sex and friendship in one place.”
Note to self: friendship is a really bad word with men. “Look. Rich. I mean, you’re like the perfect Cali surfer dude: gorgeous and sweet, but—”
“Surfer dude and sweet? Holy fuck.” He drops his hands from my shoulders and scrubs one of them through his longish, curly blond hair. “That’s how you see me?”
I hold up my hands. “No. God no. I’m sorry.
See? I suck at this stuff.” I toughen my voice to make sure he knows how serious I am.
“You’re an all-American G.I. Joe badass.
You would die for just about anyone. You are amazing, Rich.
Absolutely fucking amazing. Too good for me.
I’m the one that’s the problem. I have issues.
Big issues. That’s why I don’t do commitment.
” I shove a strand of hair from my face.
“And I can’t do this now. You know I can’t do this now. ”
His jaw sets hard and he gives me a disgruntled, reluctant nod. “Go. Deal with Murphy.”
I don’t argue. I step around him and dart for the living room, pausing in the doorway long enough to say, “Lock up when you leave. Sick fucks love me.” I take off for the front door.
“What the hell does that make me, Lilah?”
“The exception,” I call out, and he has no idea how true that statement rings.
Thanks to that early-Wednesday-morning jogger getting us all out of bed at the crack of dawn, I travel from my Los Feliz neighborhood to Santa Monica in thirty minutes, which would be unheard of any other time of the day.
Parking my gray Ford Taurus in a lot near the beach is just as easy.
I step out of the car, slip my FBI badge over my neck, fight a gust of September seventy-something wind, and head down the sidewalk toward the pier.
Weaving my way through the now-sleeping perpetual carnival of the boardwalk, I make a beeline for the Ferris wheel certain to lead me to the end of the pier.
Turns out, the growing crowd around the yellow tape on the nearby beachfront does the job just fine.
I approach several uniforms and show them my badge. “Who’s the detective in charge?” I ask.
“Oliver,” one of them tells me.
Great, I think, moving on along the sidewalk. That man hates me. I’ve made it all of ten feet across the sidewalk, about to hit the sand, when I hear, “Special Agent Love.”
At the sound of Detective Oliver’s voice, I grimace and turn to find the fortyish “Gray Fox,” as the ladies on the force call him, joining me. And yeah, I guess he’s good-looking. If you like the stereotypical, cigarette-smoking, perpetually-wrinkled-suit-wearing good cop with a bad attitude.
“Detective.”
“Are you going to do a better job for me this morning than you did two days ago?”
And here we go. “It was a professional hit, Detective Oliver,” I say tightly. “You don’t just get a read on him, or her, with a snap of your fingers.”
“You didn’t get me a read at all.”
“This isn’t a thirtyish perp with two kids and a dog you can track down in the suburbs. There are papers written on this shit. They don’t fit profiles.”
“I don’t give a fuck about papers, college girl. And if you and your people are coming onto my scene, you had better find a way to get me a profile.” He starts walking, exiting the sidewalk to hit the sand.
Irritated, I whirl around and pursue him, catching up quickly. “My services are volunteered as a professional courtesy, not to invade your personal space.”
“Funny,” he says dryly. “I don’t remember being given an option this morning when I declined your services.
” We reach the dock area where various officials have gathered several feet from another taped-off area.
One of the badges motions to him, and he in turn motions toward the cluster of people gathered by the dock.
“Go. Get me answers this time,” he says before showing me his back.
Grinding my teeth, I face forward and walk, pushing through the layer of personnel to find Joe, the redheaded forensic guy—which is actually what everyone calls him—leaning over the victim, his thick-rimmed glasses inching down his nose. “Hiya, Agent Love.”
“Hi, Joe,” I say, but it’s not him that has my attention at present.
It’s the dead, naked male body in the sand, water washing over his bare feet, and the chill racing down my spine, and not because I’m squeamish.
Because this is exactly how we found another victim only two nights ago, and we never found the victim’s clothes.
I don’t expect to now either. The absence of clothes on the body, or anywhere to be found, is assumed by most on the scene to be an effort to hide evidence.
But not by me. My gut said there was more to it two days ago, and it most definitely does now as well.
I step closer and Joe moves to the dead man’s head. “Bullet between the eyes,” he says, glancing up at me and indicating the clean hole in the center of the brows. “Look familiar?”
“All too familiar,” I say, removing plastic gloves from my bag as I squat in the sand and inspect the remains.
“Clean entry,” Joe adds. “Perfect precision, no mess, no fuss.”
“Were the clothes taken off before or after the murder?”
“Before.”
I don’t ask his reasoning. He’ll detail it in his report.
“And the case two days ago?”
“Also before, and pending blood-splatter analysis and confirmation, of course, this case is a virtual clone to that one.”
“Only that was a woman,” I say, looking for any signs of struggle he might have missed, while I struggle myself with my hair that I should have tied back in this damn wind.
“But that doesn’t rule out a serial killer, right?” he asks, sounding a bit too excited about the prospect.
“Serial killers and assassins are different breeds,” I say. “And we’re at two victims, which does not equate to a serial killer, at least by definition.”
“Assassin? You think this is an assassin?”
“Yes,” I reply simply.
“What kind of assassin takes off the victim’s clothes?”
“This one,” I say absently, my gaze catching on the tattoo on the man’s arm, the arm not shoved half under his body and into the sand, a foreboding knot forming in my stomach. “Can I see that ink?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “I wanted to look at that, too. It looks interesting.” He moves to the side of the man, shifting the arm, and the ease of movement says I’m right: the guy is practically still warm. “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo myself,” he says.
“Time of death?” I ask, focusing on the case.
“He’s fresh,” he says. “I’m estimating three a.m., maybe three thirty.” He changes the subject. “I’m thinking Superman. Do chicks dig Superman?”
“What?” I say, looking at him.
“I was thinking I’d get a Superman tattoo.”
“If you’re trying to embrace your resident geek status, it works.”
“Who says I’m the resident geek?”
“Everyone except you, apparently. Embrace it. It works for you.”
He glowers. “Seriously, Agent Love. Could you just—”
“The tattoo, Joe,” I say, feeling that knot in my stomach growing.
“Right. Tattoo. His. Not mine.”
He flips the arm just enough that I get the full view of the tattoo, and I hear nothing else he says.
I see the Virgin Mary with blood dripping out of her mouth, and suddenly I am back on another beach.
My lashes lower and I’m living the exact moment I was grabbed from behind.
I had twisted around and thrown an ineffective defensive move.
The ineffective part, and the punishment I’d received for being that weak, is the reason that I now train just as hard in my physical combat skills as I do on constantly honing my profiling abilities.
I’d gone down hard on the sandy ground with a heavy male body on top of me, big, muscular arms caging me.
One of his beefy forearms had been etched with a tattoo, moving and flexing with his flesh while he assaulted me.
A tattoo of the Virgin Mary, bleeding from her mouth.
Praying to her or anyone else did nothing to save me.
“Special Agent Love.”
At the sound of my name, I snap back to the present to find Detective Oliver standing behind Joe, glowering at me, not the dead body. “Are you sleeping or getting me my answers?”
I inhale and stand up, turning to find Assistant Director Murphy a good twenty yards away. Yanking my gloves off, I start walking in that direction, only to have Detective Oliver catch up with me. “Hold on there, sweetie.”