Unforgivable (26 page)

He tossed his gloves into a biohazard bin before picking up a file from one of the many desks that lined the sides of the lab. “You want to talk here or—”

“Let’s go to my office.” She led him across the lab,
grateful to be away from the interested gazes of her coworkers. Based on the reactions she’d been getting all day, she was pretty sure the rumor about her and Snyder’s little love triangle had infected people’s brains.

Mia left the door open after Mark entered. No sense providing more grist for the rumor mill.

“So, what did you get?” she asked.

“Well, as you’re undoubtedly aware, the techniques originally used to test this evidence aren’t nearly as sophisticated as what we use here.”

“I understand.” Mia had run the original tests herself, which Mark knew from her signature on the evidence tag. “That’s why I requested the evidence again,” she continued. “I was reminded of the case recently, and I knew we could do more than what was possible six years ago. We’re light-years ahead of the lab up there in terms of equipment and expertise.”

Just as she’d done during their first conversation, she made it sound as if all of this was routine—she’d simply remembered some evidence she’d once analyzed and asked Mark to contact the agency handling the case to suggest a reexamination using new techniques. Helping to clear cold cases was part of the Delphi Center’s mission. When possible, they even ran the tests for free.

What Mia had neglected to mention, though, was that this case was personal.

She also hadn’t fully explained to Mark why she’d needed him to conduct the analysis instead of doing it herself. Until Mia dispelled the cloud hanging over her reputation—if she ever did—she didn’t want to jeopardize this case or any other by directly handling evidence that might one day be used at trial. Better to have
someone else perform the tests, someone Mia knew and trusted and whose expertise rivaled her own.

Someone like Mark.

But now, she saw the problem with her plan. One of the traits she valued about Mark was his intelligence, which was manifesting itself right now in his steady gaze.

“Interesting to me that this case resembles that San Marcos girl you were working on. The one found in the park?”

Mia raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment.

“It’s been attracting a lot of interest lately. This morning, we had a call about it from the FBI.”

Mia’s stomach dropped. “We did?”

“Special Agent Delmonico. He called straight up to the lab, wanted to talk to the tracer in charge of the case.”

“He went around Snyder.”

“Apparently so.” Mark looked at her for a long moment. “I told him you were on sabbatical.”

Mia couldn’t talk. All she could do was nod. Whatever shot she’d had of working this out with her supervisors and with Rachel was gone. The FBI was involved now. Her professional misconduct would—literally—become a federal case.

Mark seemed to sense that he’d dealt her some sort of blow. “Anyway, let me tell you what I found,” he said, looking at his notes again. “First, the dress. Lots of blood there, all of it from one contributor, unfortunately: the victim. And I reexamined the duct tape. Nothing.” He flipped a page in his file. “Also submitted, black thong underpants. No blood. No semen. I tested for touch DNA on the waistband—”

“Tape-lift method or scraping?”

“Both,” he said. “Again, only the victim’s profile. She must have removed the garment herself. Maybe he ordered her to do it, or the encounter started out consensual.” He flipped another page. “No bra. No other clothing, except shoes. That’s where it got interesting.”

“It did?”

“Your first round of testing didn’t come up with any usable blood.”

“
Usable
being the key word,” Mia said. She remembered the tiny blood droplet she’d found on the shoes so many years ago. Back then, because of budgets and equipment, she’d been limited to a technique that required a sample the size of a quarter, at least. Now she could get a profile from a sample the size of a pinhead.

“And?” she asked hopefully.

He peeled off his glasses. “And I came up with a second contributor. Possibly her killer.”

Mia’s breath whooshed out. This was what she’d hoped for.

“Now, I’m no detective,” Mark said humbly, “but my thought is, he probably removed her shoes before the attack. Or she did, and the shoes were somewhere else while the stabbing occurred. They were practically clean, except for some dirt on the soles. Then maybe he picked up the shoes and dumped them with her body so they wouldn’t turn up in his possession if anyone took the trouble to look. He could have been bleeding by that time.”

Point by point, Mark was reciting the scenario playing out in Mia’s head.

“A stabbing attack,” Mia said. “That’s very violent.”
Amy flashed into her mind. Mia tried to keep her sister out of her thoughts while she was working, but every now and then, Amy caught her off guard. “Very violent, very intense. And she probably struggled a lot, despite her bindings.”

Mark nodded. Having seen the dress, he knew the kind of emotion that had gone into Laura’s murder. “Fifty-three puncture wounds,” he said. “Be unusual if he didn’t nick himself at least once, either pushing in the blade or pulling it out. I submitted the profile but haven’t heard back yet from Darrell.”

The phone on the wall rang, and Mia turned to it, surprised. Very few people had her direct line. Ric. Vivian. Panic shot through her, and she lunged for the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me,” Sophie said. “I’ve got an Agent Delmonico on the line for you. He says it’s urgent.”

“Damn it.” Mia took a deep breath and tried to steel herself. Ready or not, it was time to face the music. “Okay, put him through.”

“I’ll let you take that.” Mark dropped the file onto her counter and nodded as he slipped out. “You’ll be the first to know if we get a hit.”

“Thanks,” she said, as Sophie connected the call.

“Glad I caught you,” the agent said. “Just this morning, someone told me you were on sabbatical.”

Caught.
Mia wondered if that word choice had been intentional. “What can I do for you, Mr. Delmonico?”

“I’d like to meet with you, if it’s not too much trouble.” His voice was friendly, but something in his tone bothered her.

“About what, exactly?”

“I’ve got an offer for you.” He sounded as if he was smiling now. “You might say it’s an offer you can’t refuse.”

She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it. Surely she’d heard wrong.

“Sorry,” he said. “Bad joke. Miss Voss? You still there?”

“What is it you want, Mr. Delmonico?”

“Meet me at your house in one hour. I’ll be happy to explain it.”

Ric watched from one of El Patio’s back corner tables as his brother entered the bar. With his short-cropped hair, overcoat, and dark suit, he looked like the quintessential fed, and Ric tried not to let that irk him.

Rey pulled off his coat and tossed it over the back of the chair. “Holy shit, Ric.” He sank into the seat. “You put your foot in it this time.”

Ric turned his attention to the waitress who’d just appeared. “Another Jack Daniel’s. Rocks.”

Rey asked for his bourbon with Coke and waited for the waitress to get all the way back to the bar before tearing in again.

“You think you could have given me a little warning? A few hours’ lead time before dropping this bomb?”

“I didn’t drop anything,” Ric said. “You guys already had him on the radar.”

“Yeah, for misusing campaign funds. For hiring hookers. But three homicides? You know what’s going to happen when this hits the news?”

“How’s it going to hit the news?” Ric asked, although he knew it would. Everything did, eventually. “You guys got a leak?”

Rey glowered.

“Okay, cheap shot,” Ric conceded. “But I’d keep an eye on that Ranger. I don’t like him on this task force. He complicates things.”

“Funny, Laranya Singh said the same thing about you, and people listen to her. You’re lucky to be in on this investigation. So am I.”

“Why are you, anyway?”

He scowled. “My boss seems to have this idea that I can play nice with the locals, maybe rein in my hothead brother.”

Rey sighed heavily as he leaned back and loosened his tie. He looked stressed, tired, and Ric felt a stab of guilt over it, because his brother had spent the better part of the weekend doing him a favor by helping Mia.

“You really stuck your neck out,” Rey said. “And you know what’s going to happen if you’re wrong? You’re going to go down in flames. Not Singh. Not Delmonico. Not the pretty district attorney.
You.
”

“You think I’m wrong?”

“I don’t know yet.” The waitress returned with their drinks, and Rey switched to Spanish to keep the conversation private. “What have you got on him? Besides what you shared in the meeting.”

“You think I’m holding back.”

“I know you’re holding back. You wouldn’t get in front of a room full of badges and make a statement like that based on some clerk at a country club. What else you got?”

Ric paused, choosing his words carefully. “These two prostitutes—”

“Three, if your hunch is right about the bones up at Lake Buchanan.”

Ric nodded. “Right. These three cases, they’ve all got the same MO. Sexual homicide, with some extra kinky elements. The bondage, the piquerism. These are lust murders. Then you’ve got two other murders, linked to those three, but they’re pretty much execution-style. And those shootings were carried out with the same gun. To me, that says we’ve probably got a wealthy and well-connected john. He’s into pain, bondage, whatever—he gets off on some really twisted shit. And every now and then, he gets carried away, actually kills the girl, then calls in his janitor to clean up the mess.”

Rey stared down into his drink, as if digesting the scenario.

“There might be another victim,” Ric added.

“Who?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know yet. It’s a bludgeoning death from Burnet County. Girl was dumped in a lake, weighted down with a cinder block. They’re still looking for an ID.”

“So, what’s the link?”

“Young, blond, defensive cuts on her hands. It’s a pretty thin connection so far, but I’m working on it.”

“Tell me about Ashley Meyer. You’ve got a lot more on her. What’s the ME say?”

“That she was killed indoors. He found carpet fiber on the body and abrasions on her back.” Ric paused. “What I’d really like to get a look at is the inside of Jeff Lane’s lake house. You ever been up there?”

“No.”

“Big place on Lake Buchanan. Not too far from where that skeleton was recovered.”

“The lieutenant gov’s lake house,” Rey scoffed. “Good luck getting a warrant.”

“I was hoping you guys could help with that.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I won’t. Anyway, Jonah’s got his own theory of the case. He thinks maybe this guy’s into plain-vanilla sex, but if anyone ever realizes who he is and tries to shake him down, he calls his fixer in to get rid of her. The guy makes it look like a lust crime to draw attention to the fact that she’s a hooker, barely worth anyone’s time to investigate. Either way, the john’s directly involved, and he’s looking at murder charges.”

Rey shook his head.

“What?”

“Our profiler likes the first one,” Rey said.

“You guys brought in a profiler?”

“He’s working long-distance. But he’s seen everything we have, and he thinks we’re dealing with two different perps. The hookers are sexual homicides— real ones, not staged—and the other two are hits, just like you said. Only Frank Hannigan wasn’t the target. Mia was.”

Ric bristled.

“I’m still not clear how she fits in, by the way,” Rey said. “Why go after someone like her?”

Ric rattled his ice cubes. He’d lost a lot of sleep over that question. “I think Mia holds the key to this case, whether she knows it or not.”

“You wanna explain that?”

“The things she can do with DNA. It’s really amazing. And people know how good she is, especially around here.”

“So she’s good at her job. So what?”

“She saw the first case when she was working up in Fort Worth. Didn’t have the resources to get the best tests done on that evidence.”

“You’re talking about Laura Thorne, the one killed out by Jeff Lane’s country club?”

“That’s right.”

“So Mia ran the evidence … ?”

“Couldn’t get the killer’s DNA, but she remembers the case vividly. Fast-forward six years, she’s at the Delphi Center, gets a similar case. Lane’s fixer gets wind of it, realizes she’s probably smart enough to make the leap between two totally separate cases in two totally separate jurisdictions, decides he needs to take her out. That’s what he was trying to do when Frank Hannigan got in the way.”

“How’d he know she was handling the case?”

“Called the lab,” Ric said. “Twice. Claimed to be Jonah, too, which goes to show he’s got an inside line on this investigation, because he knows which law-enforcement agency to say he works for
and
which detective to impersonate.”

Ric watched his brother absorb all of this as he sipped his drink.

“By the way, Mia thinks the person who tried to kill her is a cop, or at least someone in law enforcement,” Ric said. “I’m convinced he also had some military background.”

Rey closed his eyes and swore.

“When he didn’t kill her in the first attempt—which was staged to look like a carjacking—he figures time’s been lost,” Ric said. “There’s a chance she might have
told someone her suspicions about the cases being connected—which she did. She told me. So now he’s got to worry about a DNA scientist putting it all together and also an incriminating DNA profile sitting right in the lab. So he gets her to destroy the evidence before he goes after her again. Now, even if anyone tries to connect the cases, there isn’t any DNA to back it up.”

“Then why’s he still after her?” Rey asked. “The evidence is gone.”

“I don’t know.” Ric swigged the last of his drink, trying to take the edge off his mood. His brother had just touched a nerve. Ric knew more about these cases and about Mia than anyone else involved. And yet he hadn’t figured out why someone was still gunning for her.