FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series (11 page)

Frankly, though, having heard everything the deputy director had to say about the endless machinations going on behind the scenes, and the grumbling about jurisdiction over this Reaper case, what he most wanted was a hot shower and a cold martini. He seldom drank, and never on the job. And even if it was technically after hours, being here in Hope Valley, Virginia, was being on the job. So a hot shower would have to do.

Ironic, really. His first supervisor, the man who’d given him the good advice against ever getting too comfortable with a martini glass while working for the bureau, was the same man Wyatt had helped bring down last year. His former friend had been right in the thick of evidence tampering, witness manipulation, coercion. The kind of corruption that went against everything Wyatt stood for and every reason he’d joined the bureau.

He lifted an imaginary glass and sadly murmured, “Thanks for the tip, old friend.”

Shrugging out of his jacket and loosening his tie, he glanced at the room. Simply furnished, it held the most basic of hotel accommodations. He’d traveled enough to have predicted the number of drawers in the dresser and to visibly assess the comfort of the bed. He’d wager there was a Gideon Bible in the top drawer of the nightstand, and that somewhere within was a hand-drawn phallic symbol left there by a bored former occupant.

Fortunately, though, the whole place looked—and better yet, smelled—very clean. No greasy dust coated the slats of the air vent above the bed. No visible stains marred the worn carpet, and not a smudge of dirt or mildew darkened the bathroom tile. All in all, things could be much worse.

Deciding to ask Dean to just bring him back a sandwich, he reached for his cell phone. But before he could even lift it and dial the number, it rang in his hand. “Blackstone,” he answered.

The slightest hesitation and the quick, almost surprised inhalation told him even before she spoke that Lily Fletcher was calling. He smiled just a little. Lily, the newest member of the team, hadn’t quite gotten used to him and never appeared to know how to act. Had he ever been so young and untried? So enthusiastic and eager to please?

Once. And look where it had gotten him.

“It’s Fletcher, sir. Sorry to bother you; you’re probably at dinner or something.”

He sighed. “Please, Lily, call me Wyatt, especially on the phone and after hours.”

“Sorry.” A sudden hollow sound and subsequent knocking told him she’d dropped the phone and was fumbling to pick it back up.

His smile widened. He could almost see her at her desk, her petite form swallowed up in the oversize office chair they’d scrounged up for her from some old storage closet. Her blond hair would be mounded on top of her head, the small, wire-framed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Behind those glasses her eyes would be shining with intelligence or moist with heartfelt emotion—the latter not the best trait to have in this line of work, but no matter how often he warned her to remain detached, she was helplessly enslaved to her feelings.

Actually, those feelings had been one reason he’d brought her over to his team. She’d recently suffered a personal tragedy, the loss of her nephew and her sister. Almost desperate to get out of a closed-in office and into the field, if only to rebel against the impotence every crime victim felt, she’d asked for a shot, and he’d given it to her.

So far, he hadn’t regretted it. Her personal history hadn’t interfered with her job. Though he couldn’t deny that whenever office conversation turned toward child abuse, like some of the sick goings-on at Satan’s Playground, Lily Fletcher went whiter than any of the monuments gracing the city where they worked.

“Sorry, I dropped the phone,” she mumbled a moment later.

Of course she had.

Before she’d dropped it, her desk phone would have been tucked in the crook of her neck so she could leave her hands free. The slim fingers would be flying across the keyboard as she coaxed miracles from the machine, just like Brandon Cole often did.

And that was the other reason he had hired her, despite her lack of field experience and her tendency to get too involved. The woman was as brilliant as Cole, but she played by the book. Brandon Cole did not. Frankly, Wyatt needed them both for exactly that reason. “It’s all right.”

“Listen, Brandon asked me to call you. Hold on; I’ll put you on speaker.”

He held, then heard, “Hey, boss! Hear you may have ID’d the first victim?”

“It appears so. You got the message that I want you and Lily here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, uh, about that.”

“Yes?”

“Not sure we should leave. Something’s happening, boss.”

“What is it?’

“Hold up, I might have …”

Containing a sigh of irritation, he waited, hearing the clicking of keys in the background. As if realizing he was growing impatient, Lily explained, “He’s trying to get back into the Playground.”

“Bastards went underground again a couple of hours ago,” Cole added.

Damn.
In the week since Brandon had brought Satan’s Playground to their attention, the group had changed servers twice. Brandon kept following them, like a child following a trail of bread crumbs, all over cyberspace. He wouldn’t find anything as sweet as a gingerbread house at the end of his journey, and the evil waiting on the other side was darker than any children’s tale could conjure up.

Finally, he heard a triumphant whoop. “Got you!”

“He’s back in,” Lily explained.

“I heard.”

Brandon jumped into the conversation. “Okay, here’s why I wanted to talk to you. It looks like the unsub is gearing up for a new auction.”

“It’s only been a month since his last one.”

“I know. He’s accelerating.”

Never a good thing. “When will it take place?”

“I’m not sure,” Brandon replied. “I haven’t been able to break into the actual auctions yet; I don’t even know whether they’re real-time or silent. But I started seeing chatter about it right before the site went dark.” More clicking. “I guess everybody gets excited when the Reaper gears up for his next kill.”

Breaking into the auctions was on top of Brandon’s priority list. If they could get inside and find a way to trace the money trail, they’d be able to nail somebody, either the auction winner or the Reaper himself. Right now, they wanted the killer very badly. But every member of his team also wanted to bring down the twisted clients who paid to have their evil fantasies carried out.

“How soon will you know?”

“I’ll stay here all night if I have to.”

Wyatt nodded, closing his eyes and rubbing at the corners of them. They hadn’t expected this additional pressure, not so soon. The first auctions had been two or three months apart, the last few narrowed to about six or seven weeks. Now, barely a month. “What are the chances of disrupting the auction? Doing something to crash it?”

“Only if you want these sickos to know we’re watching them,” said Lily.

“Then they’ll close up shop and dive into a hole so deep it could take months to find them again,” Brandon added.

Damn.
A cold rush of helplessness spread over him and Wyatt sank to the bed. All the other auctions had ended in someone’s horrible death, which had been put on display at Satan’s Playground within seventy-two hours. Meaning they had only days now, not weeks, in which to find the unsub and stop him.

Or else have front-row seats to another brutal, sadistic murder.

T
hey started the search early.
With a lot of land to cover, and only seven people—Stacey, Taggert, three of her deputies, and two other FBI agents who’d arrived last night—to do it, the job was shaping up to be a major one. Better, in Stacey’s opinion, to get started just after dawn and take advantage of whatever brief amount of coolness the day might provide. Despite their being shaded from the vicious sun by a thick canopy of pine, oak, and cedar, the woods hugging Warren Lee’s fence had a closed-in, cavelike feeling that held the heat in and made even the simple act of breathing difficult.

Besides, it wasn’t like she’d slept for more than twenty minutes at a stretch all night, anyway. She’d lain awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to fathom what Dean Taggert had told her: that there might very well be a serial killer living right here in Hope Valley. It was so far beyond her comprehension, he might as well have told her aliens had landed.

That wasn’t the only thing that had inhibited her rest. The mourning she’d done for poor, sad Lisa hadn’t helped. And when she had fallen into minutes of fitful slumber, she’d found herself dreaming of Dean Taggert. Odd dreams she couldn’t quite remember, but which had left her feeling tense and uncomfortable.

“You’re sure your guys know what they’re doing?”

She made an effort not to stiffen at Special Agent Taggert’s bluntness as they paused, shoulder-to-shoulder, having cleared another section of their search area. He might have been Dean at the diner, but today he was again all hard-edged FBI agent. Which was fine with her. She’d spent enough time wondering why on earth she found a man who brought murder and horror into her safe, secure world so damned attractive.

She almost wished Taggert had been the one who’d left this morning, rather than his boss. Blackstone had stopped by only briefly before heading back to Washington, apparently because of a new lead in the case. Maybe that was just as well; she had a hard time picturing the supervisory special agent mucking around in the woods in his crisp black suit and highly shined shoes.

“They’re not going to go tromping on any potential evidence, are they?”

“They’re fine,” she snapped. “Completely trustworthy.”

Stacey had thought long and hard before deciding which of her deputies could be counted on to do this job right—not only the search, but keeping the reason for it quiet, at least for the time being. She’d have to tell Winnie Freed, and soon, but she’d be damned if she’d go to the woman without at least trying to find her daughter’s remains first. News of a death was bad enough for anyone to deal with. Not having a body to bury meant Winnie would doubt—would question.

Would torture herself with false hope.

So Stacey had to put off telling the woman at least long enough for one good search for Lisa.

“We need to pick up the pace,” Taggert said. “This is taking too long.”

“Are you sure your guys know what they’re doing?” she asked, not sure why she wanted to goad the man.

He frowned, his mouth pulling tight. Not a great sense of humor on this one.

“Pretty sure. Want to hear their qualifications?”

“I’m sorry. But we’re not even sure what we’re looking for, Agent Taggert,” she said, her tone remaining cool. She was pretty impressed with how well her deputies had reacted today and didn’t appreciate the implied criticism. She only wished her chief deputy hadn’t put himself out of commission by falling off his damn roof.

“We’re looking for anything,” he said. “Absolutely anything we can use.”

“Even if any blood could possibly survive in the elements, we know Lisa was standing on a tarp that would have caught most of it. I don’t imagine we’re going to stumble over an enormous red circle on the ground with a neon sign saying, ‘It happened here.’ And I doubt this killer was stupid enough to leave his knife lying around for us to find.”

He thrust a hand through his thick, dark hair, frustration oozing out of his every pore. “I know. But a complete visual pass is imperative. Then we’ll move on to dogs, see if we can get something of Lisa’s and try to get them to pick up a scent.”

“That’s a long shot.”

“Tell me about it.” His jaw flexed as he cast a slow look around the clearing in which they’d parked, and which he’d designated as base of operations. She sensed he was seeing the entire forest, not just the trees. “This whole thing is an incredible long shot, and God knows we don’t have time to spare on a wild-goose chase.”

Realizing he hadn’t been criticizing, merely expressing his own anxiety, she unbent a little. Glancing at the sweat on his brow, the dampness of his unbuttoned dress shirt molding against his broad shoulders and thick arms, she murmured, “How are you holding up in this heat?”

“I’m fine.”

“I sense you spend more time in an air-conditioned office than in the woods.”

“You might be surprised. I’ve never been a desk-jockey type.”

“Have you been a Boy Scout? Because any ten-year-old with half a brain would have known better than to dress like that today.”

He jerked his head up, as if unused to women throwing snarky comments in his direction. A guy as tough and good-looking as this one probably got lots of compliments and come-ons instead.

A tiny smile that looked more menacing than friendly, like it didn’t get much use, appeared on his lips. His eyes narrowed, his dark gaze homing in on her, every ounce of his attention focused in her direction rather than on the search. The full onslaught of that heated concentration suddenly made her heart skip a beat in her chest. “I wasn’t exactly the Boy Scout type. But something tells me you already knew that.”

That frankly assessing look would have sent any self-respecting good girl running in the opposite direction. Stacey shivered despite herself. Because he was about as far from a Boy Scout as she was from a suburban housewife.

“Nobody’s ever called me Mr. Nice Guy,” he warned. And again, she had the suspicion he was talking about more than just this moment, this case. As if confirming that he might have spent some of last night thinking about her, too.

She wasn’t scared off. Because nice guys? They were a dime a dozen in Hope Valley. And she was a good girl who’d been good so long she couldn’t even remember why she kept getting her birth control pill prescriptions refilled.

She’d started having a suspicion, though, ever since he’d walked into her office yesterday afternoon.

“Maybe nice is overrated,” she murmured.

Finally, as if realizing he was watching her a little too closely, building the already thick tension between them, he shook his head, hard. “You’re right about the clothes. But I didn’t exactly pack shorts and flip-flops.”