Confess (The Blue Line Series Book 1) (7 page)

He pulled the cover from underneath her waist and wrapped her, turning her to one side, and sliding in close until he slid in behind her and locked her against the warmth of his heaving chest.

She nuzzled her back into him. Her voice hummed low. “You said couch, locked door, and eggs.”

A low laugh vibrated through his chest. “That was before I saw you come in my lucky boxers. I’ll never be able to wear them again and not feel your body shake in my hand.”

She snuggled her back harder into his chest. “As long as you haven’t changed your mind about the no strings part.”

He laughed in answer and fell silent with her head nestled into the crook of his neck.

Lacy couldn’t be sure how long she’d laid there, only that she’d started to drift when something buzzed from the table by her head.

She closed her eyes when he reached over her to grab his phone. He checked to see if she was asleep before he pulled his arm out from under her and take the call to the hallway.

He pulled the door, too, but a thin ribbon of light still permeated the dark bedroom, and his voice carried.

“Another one? Just like the first.” His voice was hard. Cold. “No. Don’t let it out of your sight until I see them first. Nobody can see them before I get there, got it? Good. Thirty minutes tops.”

The floorboards outside the door creaked under his pacing.

She knew that call. The one that always came in the middle of the night and reminded a cop there was a job to finish. Reminded him he was needed elsewhere. The call that had taken her father away more times than she could count. The call that had made her mother invisible and drove her to leave.

She wasn’t willing to disappear into the sheets every time Mitch’s cell rang in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t make that mistake. It didn’t matter anyway. One night. No strings attached. He wasn’t hers.

Still fuming from his early morning wake up call, Mitch claimed an empty desk at the Rebel PD and fanned out a stack of decade old case files he’d convinced the office secretary to supply for the price of a hot coffee and a warm smile.

In his years before becoming a detective, he’d poured over the online version of the Wray files night after night like some people binge watched Netflix.

Every detail. Every name and date and evidence number of each of the thirteen murders that took place within a fifty-mile radius of Rebel over a ten-year period. He knew every damn one by heart. Every victim’s picture he’d burned into his brain.

But something was missing. Just as a killer always has a motive for committing murder, they also have a reason to stop, though Wray’s dry spell still remained a mystery.

A detail he’d bet his balls someone in the department had gone to great lengths to hide. But why?

He leaned back in the rickety officer chair and folded his hands behind his head. Just as he’d known she would, Lacy popped into his thoughts. She’d been asleep when he left to investigate the newest evidence in the case, and gone when he returned. Nothing left but a stack of folded cloths on the dresser and a still warm spot in his bed.

Thumping his pen on top of the stack of files, he replayed the last few hours.

Bishop, his long time mentor and current superior, called with a tip from a group of local hunters. While setting up their deer blinds in the pre-dawn hours, they’d uncovered two lengths of blue nylon rope stained in blood from near the same spot search and rescue dogs had dug up a girl’s half buried body a week before.

The description of the body, brunette, torn clothing, rope burns on her wrists and ankles, crushed skull, brought back vivid memories of Sadie.

Other than the age difference, the body came close to being the same work as the man who’d killed Sadie, but something wasn’t the same. Maybe it had been the years between killings, but why go after grown women when Wray’s MO years before had been young girls? Wray had always been meticulous in cleaning up his crime scene. Why the rush job now? It didn’t add up in his head even if Nashville and Rebel were more than happy to write off the new murder as Wray’s work. To a cop not versed in Wray’s patterns, it would be easy to mistake the few similarities as evidence, but not to the guy who’d spent his adulthood and the last years of his youth searching for his cousin’s killer.

That thought led him right to the empty side of his bed where Lacy had slept the night before and the sting of rejection finding her gone.

He’d tried to call her cell, but she didn’t pick up. It wasn’t until he’d had the dispatcher in Nashville search for Connie’s number that he found out she’d safely seen Lacy home.

Those few seconds of doubt cut years off Mitch’s life, a fact he intended on making known once he found Lacy again. He just had to find a way to make sure she knew he couldn’t be shaken as easy as a pre-dawn slip out the backdoor.

He flipped open the report file from the newest murder and searched for similarities to link the new killing with the thirteen others spanning Wray’s ten year killing spree. To the untrained eye there would be several, but he knew Wray better than he knew himself. He’d find proof Wray wasn’t the killer.

The young girl with blonde hair to her shoulders, soft green eyes, and the kind of infectious smile that put people at ease stared back from the photograph as if begging for his help. Underneath were pictures of her mutilated body. Her wrists tied, her clothing torn, blood soaked through and dried to the thin fabric of a white sundress.

The coffee in his otherwise empty stomach churned. After years of working homicides, he’d never developed the iron resolve that made his line of work bearable. Even though Bishop thought his sensitivity was an asset to the job, Mitch cursed the constant emotional connection to victims on his caseload. His personal demons got in the way of distancing himself from a case.

He slammed the folder shut and stared at twelve more just like it. All young girls approaching their teens. All taken from small towns within a small radius of Rebel in the middle of the night and found disfigured on deserted roadsides in shallow graves, rope burns on their arms and legs and crushed in heads.

He pushed his fingers through his hair. His thoughts grimly wandered to the dark place where he kept Sadie hidden, then surprisingly to Lacy.

He cursed under his breath. He’d held Lacy tight and listened to her breath until sleep took him over last night. Then Bishop’s call came through.

No note. No sign she’d ever been there except his shirt and one pair of boxers folded neatly on his nightstand. Somehow, that one detail irked him the most. She’d taken the time to fold his clothes. The only thought that managed to snuff out the anger was the image of Lacy curled up in her own bed still wearing his boxers and reliving last night in her dreams.

He’d always been the one to sneak his arm out from under a slumbering fling and exit stage left with an empty promise to call.

Lacy hadn’t even felt the need for the guilt-induced promise.

He’d never been on the receiving end of the dismissive treatment. It left him hollow.

Maybe he shouldn’t have made her beg. Dominant personalities didn’t like to give up control. Maybe he’d been too forceful with her. Come on too strong for strangers.

The thought made his guts twist tighter. She’d been so unyielding. So challenging. He’d let her get under his skin in a way he didn’t normally let women get to him. The more she held him off, the deeper he wanted to sink into her.

In their last moments together, with her wrapped in his protection and the gentle sounds of her breathing in his ear, he could have easily lost himself. He could have forgotten about the sick son of a bitch hunting young girls like wild game for sport near Rebel. But he had to stay focused. Lacy could be next, just as easily as any other young, attractive woman wondering the streets alone in the dark.

The thought unnerved him, the only reason he risked exposing himself to the chief by asking the secretary for access to the older case files.

“Kilpatrick.” Deluna stood over his desk, coffee in hand, sarcastic grin glowing over the rim. “You didn’t waste time pissing off the old man, did you?”

“I’m not in the mood.” Mitch scowled at the young officer, not sure if the comment was directed at his night at the bar and later Lacy, or the pile of files scattered across the borrowed desk.

Deluna barked a dry laugh. “Well, you better get in the mood. The chief’s looking for you, and I don’t think it’s for a personal invite to the shin-dig at his house tonight.” Deluna nodded to the wooden door set into a wall beyond a row of desks. His gaze slid back to Mitch. “If I’d known you didn’t have jurisdiction in Rebel—”

“You were too drunk to know the difference. You would have run your trap even if I’d told you I was Richard Wray, live and in person.” That comment seemed to shut the rookie up.

“Either way, the chief’s hot, and I’d place bets it has more to do with the case than his daughter doing the walk of shame with a massive case of beard burn up her neck.” He sipped his coffee. “Small town. People talk. New guys tend to get the works from the gossip mill.”

“They can all go to hell,” Mitch bit out. “A girl’s dead, and the most important news in town is the chief’s daughter’s extracurricular activities?”

“That and the chief’s birthday party for his son. He’s invited the town. The whole town, which, at the moment, includes you.” Deluna winked.

Mitch rolled his eyes up from the files. “If you have a point, I suggest you make it.”

“Maybe I was wrong about you. I got the feeling last night you were fishing for information about the Wray cases. An invite to a party with the whole town drunk off their asses by nightfall would be easy pickings for Intel. I guess I pegged your motives wrong.”

Deluna sauntered off, the look of amusement on his face giving away the fact he’d spent time on the wrong side of the chief and was more than willing to let someone else handle this shit-storm.

But the party comment hadn’t gone unnoticed. For his age and lack of experience, Deluna had a level head on his shoulders.

Mitch groaned and stood. He walked across the open room of desks in perfect lines, knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a response. “Chief.”

“Sit,” the older man instructed from behind an open case file. His graying hair and sunbaked skin made him look far older than the fifty-five years his police profile confessed, but Mitch recognized him right off.

He’d never forget the face of the man who’d sat with him in the department lobby thirteen years ago while his aunt and uncle heard the gory detail of their daughter’s final moments.

Andrews had been a detective then. His face had held the warmth of a caring man. His voice a comfort to a scared boy. He’d repeated everything was going to be okay so many times, Mitch had almost believed him.

The cold man staring him down now as if he couldn’t decided to shot him or kick him the hell out of his town wasn’t the same man.

Andrews surveyed Mitch for several long seconds, trying to place his face, but didn’t find enough of the boy he’d known to remember the connection they’d once shared.

Not that Mitch could blame him. After his father split, he’d taken on his mother’s name, and the innocent boy Andrews comforted during the horrible hours following Sadie’s death ceased to exist.

“So, you’re the ass-wipe detective horning in on my murder investigations.” His stare bore bullet holes in Mitch’s face.

“Investigation.” Mitch eased into the hard, wooden chair and stretched his legs out, sending Andrews an unmistakable air of confidence. “As in one. A young girl by the name of Shannon Corbin.”

The chief shook his head and removed his glasses. His dark eyes watered in anger, and his cheeks puffed. “Don’t presume to tell me my business, son. I went to school with that girl’s father. I was there when they dragged her body from her shallow grave.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Mitch put his hands on the chair rails and leaned forward. “But maybe your closeness to the case blinded you to the facts.”

Andrews slid his glasses back in place. His mouth bowed in a frown. “Son. I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to.”

Faking out his competition had become second nature by the time Bishop had gotten ahold of him in basic training. “I know exactly who I’m talking to, Sir. A chief with an unsolved murder on his hands who isn’t asking the right questions. Is the killer Wray? Why go dormant for thirteen years? Why change the MO from young girls to women? Why get sloppy after years in hiding? Wray didn’t kill this girl or the one you found two weeks ago.”

“Slow down, Detective. Let’s not start throwing around assumptions we can’t back up.” Red washed over the chief’s face.

Mitch smoothed a hand over his cleanly shaven cheek. It’d be so easy to pull the ace in the hole, the length of rope that had been overlooked at the crime scene, from his front pocket and demand the chief order forensics to take a look. The same length of rope that would cost him his job if he sent it to Nashville to investigate. “Back up, I can’t. Not now anyway, but it’s not an assumption. You’re looking for the wrong killer.”

“You better have a damn solid reason to suggest negligence on the part of my department.”

Mitch stood and shoved his hands in his pockets. He rubbed the smooth plastic evidence bag containing the length of rope from the scene. “Call it a gut instinct.”

The chief’s voice turned to gravel. “We don’t deal in gut instinct here, boy. You’d better remember that if you want to keep that shiny detective badge.”

“Then Nashville will just send another pain in the ass to investigate. The next one might not be so willing to let threats slide.”

“Since when is Nashville interested in what happens in Rebel Rapids?”

“Since the uncle of one of your victims is running for city council. Seems he doesn’t care for the accusations his darling niece was mixed in with the wrong crowd and ended up dead. A serial killer makes for a much more compelling story during an election year, don’t you think, Chief?”