True Love Lost (An FBI Romance Thriller (book 3)) (65 page)

“Christ,” Whitefox was nauseous. Just the idea that the man had been hacked at like that not only made him sick, but it freaked him the hell out. “What kind of lunatic are we dealing with?”

“A dead one if Ethan gets to her first,” Elizabeth paused. “Let’s keep this quiet until we can break it to him gently.”

“Lyzee, there’s no way to gently break that to him.” Hearing it himself gave him goose bumps and the creeps.
“Once he hears that the man was emasculated there’s going to be an eruption of global proportions.”

“I’ll tell him once autopsy is done. Desdemona, don’t send it via email. I’ll hand deliver it to him, and break it to him. This is going to take him right over the edge, and it’s going to be ugly.”

“Agreed. Can you keep him out of the autopsy? Since I’m doing this one alone and the trace retrieval, it’s going to take me a while to get it done the right way. I’m going to need at least six hours.”

“Callen, you need to take him to interview Carly Kester at the bookstore. If we can keep him distracted during the autopsy, then he won’t try to even come down and watch it.”

“I’ll keep him busy,” he replied, as the three of them hoisted the man into the back of the van.

“Transport Derek once you make the call to Christina and the team. I’ll keep Ethan occupied until you can get Derek prepped for trace removal.” Elizabeth didn’t want her husband anywhere
near autopsy when the man’s clothes were removed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to even see that, but if she had to, she’d do it to keep him from witnessing it. What had her worried right now was that her husband was a powder keg and a lit match just waiting to meet and explode. The look on his face said it all; he was battling internally for control of his temper.

Elizabeth watched the van pull away, and she pulled off her gloves and stuffed them in her pocket. Now she needed to go find her husband and keep him from losing his temper on any witnesses.

Surprisingly, she found him sitting at a table talking on the phone to Gabe. Obviously, he called waking him up. Maybe that cheered him up a bit. There was nothing he liked more than rousing his boss from bed. It was a little game he liked to play. Usually it made him smile, but when he looked up at her that wasn’t the case. Ethan Blackhawk had the scary look on his face, and for the first time it even had her pretty rattled. It was like waiting out a natural disaster. She felt like a killer tsunami was getting ready to break through and sweep all the hapless victims out to sea in a wave of anger.

Elizabeth motioned to the waitress on duty for two cups of coffee and even went and picked them up at the counter, tossing down cash. “Make sure we have privacy,” she said to the woman that she’d never seen before. “Hey?”

“Yeah?” answered the redhead.

“When did Wilma May leave?” she asked, looking down at her own watch.

“I came on at eleven, and I think her shift ended around five p.m. She was gone before I got here, but I can check the time cards if you want.”

“Yeah, do that, please.” Elizabeth carried the two coffees over to the table, just as her husband was hanging up the phone. “Here’s some coffee. You’re going to need it. I have a feeling we’re done sleeping until we get to go home,” she said, dumping creamer in
the coffee and sliding it across the table to her husband.

“Is Derek on his way back?” he asked, softly.

Elizabeth nodded. “Tech team is on the way in, and we can check on them and get them started before we head back. Until then, want to talk about how ready you are to blow?”

Ethan wasn’t surprised his wife could see right through his carefully built outer
façade. The rage he was feeling at that moment was so great, that he didn’t even think he could discuss it with the woman he loved. If he even started discussing the situation, he’d lose it. “No, I think we best just let it go.” He looked up at her and fully expected a fight or at least for her to push him to get him to open up.

“Okay
. What did the manager on duty say?” Elizabeth switched the focus back to the circumstances at hand. If she could keep him talking, by the time they returned to the station the bookstore might be open, and her brother-in-law would be next up to bat on keeping her husband busy.

“
The night manager went to take the trash out, and when he opened the lid, he looked in and there was Derek. Right after that he called it in, and then we arrived. It was only him and the redhead working. I think she said her name was Tiffany, and she confirmed the story
. ‘Cup of Joe’
was dead at the time.”

Elizabeth leaned back and sipped her coffee. “Profile this for me, knowing what we know Ethan.” There had to be something they were missing.

“Female unsub, and she’s removing pieces of males. One might say she’s trying to collect something, or pieces of someone.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“We know she’s blonde, and I would say that she’s about your age, maybe a little younger. But I’d say around thirties.”

“Okay, agreed.”

“She isn't hacking them to pieces, it’s controlled. It’s almost like collecting organs and limbs with a definite purpose. I prefer when the killer leaves us a note, it makes it so much simpler.”

Elizabeth wasn’t sure if he was joking or not
, since his voice was dead monotone. Oh yeah, he was holding back the tsunami.

“Poisoning is a controlled killing. You can’t be hurried or rash, a part of her is enjoying the act of the drugging the victim. I want to say that the killer is using something easily found at hand. Poisoning isn't an elaborate crime. The killer makes the conscious effort to take a life, by adding a toxic substance to the coffee. There’s little planning unless it’s a spouse. They plan and plot,” he said, drinking his coffee.

“Good to know.”

Blackhawk tried to smile. He didn’t want to take this out on her, but he was just tied up in knots over it all.

“How do you feel about the profile?” Elizabeth asked.

He sighed. “You know what pisses me off?” he asked, looking her right in the eyes.

“No, tell me.” She took a sip of her own coffee.

“
It’s like you live in here,” he pointed at his head. “You know for a fact that the profile has me tied up in knots, and you know I’m not buying my own rationale.”

“It’s the marriage thing, Ethan.
I’m sorry me being a wife is pissing you off.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

Elizabeth looked him in the eyes. “My job is to know people, just as much as you do. We wade through this shit every day of our lives. If I couldn’t tell the man I love is on the edge, what the hell kind of agent am I, and what kind of wife?”

Blackhawk’s cheek twitched.

“You and I can talk this out,” she paused when he tensed. “Or how about you listen to what I have to say and then go from there?”

Blackhawk didn’t want to
talk it out, so that only left one option. “Ok, shoot.”

“Here’s where I’m having a problem, and it’s probably where you’re getting caught up too. You and I tend to be in sync for lots of things in our life, and especially as partners working an assignment. We’re two halves
of a whole.”

“
So you think I’m wrong too?”

“I
can’t figure out how this woman is transporting the bodies. I don’t mean by car, I mean by lifting. I’m pretty strong, and I can lift a good deal of weight, minus now with the baby. But generally, I could carry Desdemona if I had to do it. Maybe a few hundred feet, a half a mile if it’s a fireman’s hold, but I couldn’t carry Derek. He was my size. I might piggy back him if he were alive, but as a body? It’s dead weight.”

Blackhawk drank his coffee and considered her words.

“Now you and Callen have both carried me around. Just a few days ago you were both tossing me back and forth and not even breaking a sweat. At home you’ve carried me up two flights of stairs when I’ve fallen asleep, and you probably didn’t get winded.”

“You’re not
heavy.” Now he did smile, when she lifted an eyebrow waiting for the word ‘yet’.

“Could you carry your brother?”

Blackhawk weighed it in his mind. “Callen weighs about what I do, give or take five pounds. I can do pull ups at home and that’s dead lifting my own weight, so yeah, I could carry him, but a limited distance.”

Elizabeth just stared at him not wanting to say the words. The profile didn’t fit for her.

“I get what you’re saying, but profiling is a science. A woman is most likely to use poison. Look at our victims. All of them are men, which means something happened in her life that caused her to want to take the men apart- piece by piece. Maybe she was abused by a spouse or boyfriend.”

“We need to ask Sheriff Duffy for any domestic related cases in the last year.”

“I get what you’re saying Elizabeth. I really do, but I just think this one has us both tripped up.” Blackhawk watched the tech van start to pull in and he stood. “Why don’t you head back to the station, and I’ll stay here and work? It’s miserably cold out here, and I don’t want you freezing our baby into a uterus-cicle.”

“He’s perfectly fine, he’s all cozy warm and surrounded by subcutaneous fat.”

Blackhawk looked over at her and gave her the look.

“I
know! All that time around the doctors in autopsy is making me weird isn't it? I used to be so much cooler,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it.

“I love you, Elizabeth. Thank you for being my wife.” Without her he would have been brooding, but in twenty minutes she managed to untangle some of the knots in his gut and make him tolerable again. Now at least he could carry his tech team when they needed him. His grandfather was right, without Elizabeth Blackhawk, the men in their family were screwed.

“I love you too, Cowboy. We can take care of this together,” she said, zipping up her parka and slipping into gloves. “Ready?” she asked, pulling up her hood.

“As ready as I think I’ll ever be.”

They pushed out the door together, and once again, team Blackhawk would get through what threatened to break them.

Callen
assisted Desdemona as she loaded the man’s body onto the gurney and wheel him into the prep area of the makeshift morgue. Part of him wanted to get the hell out of there, but part of him couldn’t leave her to do this on her own. “Need my help?” he offered.

“I tell you what,” she said, pulling her scrubs over her clothes. “You can sit there and keep me company, and not have to look at Derek.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to do it,” he muttered. Just the idea was making his stomach roll.

“I’m really good at detaching myself emotionally and not focusing on the fact it was a person. Right now I just think of this as a mystery that I need to solve. He isn't going to be Derek any longer to me. I can’t see him as a friend, or I won’t be able to do this.”

“You’re very strong, Desi,” he said, and it was the truth. It couldn’t be easy to have to put your hands in death daily, and not let it crack you under the pressure. “I’d have nightmares if I had to do it daily.”

She shrugged. “The dead don’t judge the living anymore, and I like to believe I can help them on the last stop before burial. If their lives were stolen, then I can at least tell the story of their death. Pass it off to the people like Elizabeth and Ethan that would find justice no matter what the cost.”

“I appreciate what you did for my brother, by not telling him about his injuries.”

Desdemona pulled out her tools and then started looking for trace. “Your brother
is a really good guy. In fact you have a pretty great family. Your grandfather was scary at first, but he reminds me of a big teddy bear.”

“What did you two talk about?”

“Marriage and kids. He was pressuring me to marry you,” she said, and began pulling fibers off the tech and dropping them in little cylinder containers for trace.

“And are you going to?” he asked, thinking about the rings that were back in his bag next to their bed.

“Seriously Callen?” She pointed down at the man and looked over at him. “We can’t discuss getting married while I do an autopsy.” Desdemona deflected the topic.

“Sure we can,” he answered. “I’m not asking you right now, I’m discussing the possibility of it becoming a reality in the
future. If my grandfather thought I was asking you to marry me while you were conducting an autopsy he’d kick my ass.”

Desdemona laughed. “
I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I’m scared you’re going to get hurt, and lose you.”

“But what if you don’t marry me and I get hurt? It could go either way, since I
’m an FBI agent, and I’ll be out on assignments.”

That was the other part of it. Could she be married to a man that wore a target on his back every day when he left the house?

“Granted, my official title is Liaison to the Native American Community. I don’t know how many people will want to kill me then,” he said, grinning.

“Not funny, Callen,” she said, doing the fingernail scrapings onto the paper. “That’s the other problem I’m having. I don’t know if I can handle you being shot at daily.”