What Burns Within (22 page)

“Yes, I agree,” Vish said, gesturing for the other men to leave. Craig noticed Lori’s boyfriend’s face pinched when he looked at Hawkins, who paused for a second before complying.

“He’s just being protective,” Lori muttered once the room was empty.

“How long have you and Vish been together?” Craig asked as he pulled up a small chair, sitting across from her.

“Oh, not Vish. I meant, you know.” She waved her hand. “Hawkins.”

She was still staring off, at some spot on the floor now.

“If something happened to me, Daly would be a mess,” he told her.

Lori looked him straight in the eyes then. “You’re shit to work with as a partner, Craig. You’ve got Daly’s stamp of approval on everything, and you’re so fucking competent you make it hard for anyone else to look like they’re pulling their weight.”

She leaned forward, still staring right at him. “But now, now that it’s me, you know…” She glanced away and blinked, lip quivering. She took a breath and looked him in the eyes again. “I’m glad you’re on this.”

Craig wasn’t. He hoped the truth didn’t show on his face, though he felt pretty certain that Lori knew he couldn’t stand her. She leaned back against the couch and gave him a wry smile.

“I guess I’m in charge of this interview, aren’t I?”

The hand that had been supporting her head earlier rubbed her forehead. Craig first noticed the shaking of her shoulders, and then the hand fell down over her eyes, her other hand clamped across her mouth as she started to cry.

When Tain and Ashlyn arrived at the lab, Greg Galloway was leaning back in his chair, stretching and making no attempt to stifle a yawn.

“Between this case and the rape cases, you guys are seeing me into a new apartment,” Greg said. “The overtime has almost doubled my salary.”

“Good to see someone’s happy about all the crime,” Tain muttered.

“Doing your best to spread happiness across the earth, eh, Tain?”

“I reserve one week of the year for promoting joy. December eighteenth to the twenty-fifth, annually.”

Greg grinned. “I’m surprised you don’t have a standing rental for a Grinch costume. Don’t let his dour demeanor taint you, Ashlyn.” He winked at her.

“He’s not that bad,” Ashlyn said, feeling her back straigh ten and her shoulders stiffen. “Where is everybody?”

“Another rape case. Second one today.”

“Jesus.” Ashlyn glanced at Tain, then Greg. “Any leads on that?”

“If there aren’t, there’d better be soon. This rapist graduated to murder, and you know what that means.”

“SSBB,” Tain said.

“Big time.”

Ashlyn’s brow wrinkled as she looked at Greg, who didn’t offer an explanation. She glared at Tain.

“Shit storm beyond belief.” Tain turned to Greg. “What have you got from the recreation center?”

Greg leaned forward so his chair was level and pulled out a file. “Prints galore. You’d think half the people in Coquitlam had cozied up to that pop machine at one time or another. I had the prints run, and you got no hits. Your guy could be there—” he shrugged—“or not.

“We didn’t get any tire treads from the back parking lot. As you already know, there was no security footage back there. I know that Daly had the officers ask everyone detained in the recreation center, and nobody remembered seeing a vehicle parked around back either.

“However, there are two red-light cameras within close proximity to the Southside Recreation and Fitness Center. I have already made a call and asked Traffic to pull all records of tickets within a two-hour time frame, an hour on each side of the abduction.”

“Good thinking,” Tain said.

“What about—”

“Patience, Ashlyn, I’m getting there. We did recover prints from the fire door, inside and out. Fewer prints than we got off the pop machine, and we ran them against each other. There were four sets of prints that were on both the fire door and the pop machine, but—”

“None of them are in the system. Still—” Ashlyn glanced at Tain—“it’s better than nothing.”

“And that’s just about all I’ve got for you. We checked the floor thoroughly. There was no evidence of any kind of chemical or a substance that might have been used to incapacitate Lindsay, no blood to suggest she’d been injured…” He looked at them. “But then, you have a tape, right? I’m just boring you with the details.”

“Still, this is more than we have for Taylor Brennen,” Tain said, turning to leave.

Ashlyn put up her hand to stop him.

From the corner of her eye Ashlyn could see Tain frown, but she ignored him. “Before we go, I have a question.”

Craig wasn’t sure how much time had passed, exactly. When you’re waiting time always seems to drag. Eventually Lori’s shoulders stopped shaking. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “It was just like all the…all the others.”

“What did you do when you got home?”

“I, uh, made a plate of food, poured some wine, ran a bath and grabbed a book from the bedroom.” She rubbed the side of her face absently. “Sailing…Vish wants to take a holiday…sailing. Uh, you know. Up the Inside Passage.”

“Sounds nice.”

“So, I had a bath.” She stared off for a moment, as though she’d forgotten what she was talking about. Then she snapped back. “Read. Ate.”

“What did you do next?”

There was a long silence, but no change of expression on her face. Just the vacant stare. This time when she spoke the words came fluidly. “I went into the bedroom. I felt him before I saw him, you know? The room was dark, so it must have been around ten by then. I’d just tossed the towel on the floor when there was this movement….”

After a moment of silence Craig quietly asked, “What happened then?”

“He was trying to twist me around. I kicked him. It must have hurt because he hit me.”

“Is that when he…?” Craig glanced at the ban dage on her head.

She reached up and touched it automatically, then nodded. “He, uh, he called me a bitch.”

“He spoke?”

Lori stared at Craig for a moment. “Shit, yeah, he did. I reached back and tried to claw him as he was pushing me down….” Her face twisted, her gaze now focused somewhere off in space.

“It’s okay, Lori. It’s not your fault.”

“Doesn’t make me feel much better, though.”

“Was there anything else that was…” Craig searched for the least offensive word. “Different? He spoke, he hit you. Anything else?”

She shook her head. “I tried to fight, but then I heard a knife click open, right beside my head. I heard that blade pop up, and I went numb…I just knew. Everything seemed so quiet, like the world had just stopped, you know, but then I heard the pitter-patter of the rain.”

“Do you have any idea how he got in?”

“I never heard anything, but I ran the shower after my bath. I don’t remember hearing him leave. He, uh, when he was done, he took the blindfold and gag off and told me if I said anything, he’d carve me up like a Christmas turkey. It seemed like forever, you know, lying there, and then I guess I just zoned out, waiting for him to either kill me or go. The next thing I remember is waking up this morning.”

“Your hands were still bound?”

She wrung her hands for a moment. “Sonofabitch really tied them good.”

Craig nodded at the rope burns on her wrists. “You did that trying to get free?”

“Yeah, for all the good it did me. It wasn’t until Vish came home and found me that I got untied, and even then he finally had to cut through the rope.” She swallowed. “Sorry. Tampering with evidence and such.”

“It’s okay. We’ve seen this rope five times before. I doubt he’d leave anything on it now.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Five?” She sat up a little straighter. “What do you mean, five?”

“You weren’t the only woman he attacked yesterday, Lori.”

“He’s graduated to multiple assaults?”

It was Craig’s turn to avoid her penetrating stare, and she leaned forward and twisted his face until he had to look at her.

“What is it? What could be worse?”

He knew he couldn’t keep the lie out of his eyes, and he watched as the unspoken truth hit home, her hand dropping from his face.

Tain tossed a folder on his desk. “Would you sit down or go for a jog or something? I’m getting tired just watching you.”

Ashlyn spun around. “I thought you were reading those files.”

“I am. My awareness of your pacing is preventing me from concentrating.”

She hopped up on his desk on the far side of the stack of case folders he was going through, her legs swinging, but she kept her feet from banging off the drawers. “Good thing animosity doesn’t hinder your work, eh?”

Tain glanced up at her. “You know, I didn’t really enjoy having everyone hate me.”

“And now?” She waited until his brow wrinkled and grinned. “I’m just kidding, Tain.”

“So what’s with Greg, anyway?”

Ashlyn felt her lip curl, despite Tain’s teasing tone. “Could he be any more obvious?”

“Guys look at you like that all the time, Ashlyn.”

She froze, then glanced at him as the way he’d said that started to tweak thought pro cesses in the back of her brain, hinting at things she hadn’t ever considered and wasn’t sure she wanted to think about.

Tain had always struck her as being handsome, once she’d been able to get past his shitty disposition. Of course, she knew now that he’d been assigned to push their former supervisor to the edge and to find a leak in the department that was hindering their progress on the investigation.

And he was tall, athletic, with dark hair and a warm smile when he finally let his guard down. She’d seen him take things to heart, knew he felt deeply and was a compassionate person underneath the indifferent exterior.

But she’d been more than a little distracted with her partner at the time, as much as she tried to suppress it. Craig’s memory still had a pretty good grip on her, along with all the ‘what ifs.’

Tain had turned his gaze back to the file, but she knew he wasn’t reading a word.

“What are you so antsy about, anyway?” he asked, finally appearing to give up on the pretense of reading.

“Just an idea.”

“I’m listening.”

She shot him a quick glance, then looked away. “I was hoping to talk to Daly.”

He was studying her face. That much she was sure of. It wasn’t just because she knew him, had worked with him before, seen the layers of his personality and understood how his mind worked, that she was certain she was under scrutiny. It was the way she felt her cheeks burn and her breath stick in her throat, like her body was having an allergic reaction to his stare.