Tactical Advantage (5 page)

“That’s not much.”

Annie refused to be so pessimistic. “It’s more than we had a few minutes ago.”

“So why bring Rachel Dunbar back here to kill her? He could have done it in the privacy of whatever hellhole he takes his victims to.” The beam of Nick’s flashlight followed her as Annie pulled a swab and Luminol from her kit to verify that the spatter and smears on the wall were blood. “Leaving the body here feels like he’s showing off what he can do. Rubbing it in our faces that KCPD hasn’t been able to break the case yet.”

Shuddering at the disturbingly blunt commentary, Annie suggested an explanation of her own. “From the account of Bailey Austin, the first victim the task force worked with, she was raped at a building that was either being built or remodeled—where there were signs of construction. She remembered a clear plastic drop cloth that covered everything. He’s keeping that location clean—traceless.”

So why be less cautious about the evidence here?

“If it’s a construction zone, he’d have work crews coming and going who might find the body—or at least recognize that something violent happened there.” Nick snapped his nimble fingers as an idea hit him. “Plus, the walls and layout could be changing daily. My dad’s a contractor. I’ve seen empty lots become complete houses in a week. It’d be damn near impossible for a witness to give an accurate description—the whole layout might change before we could follow up on it.”

“It has to be someplace that’s familiar to him. Or maybe the location is someplace he created specifically for these assaults.” Two drops of Luminol turned the cotton swab a telltale purple. Definitely blood.

“You think the rape is part of some kind of ritual?” Nick’s gaze narrowed. “That there’s a special significance to where the Rose Red Rapist takes his victims?” He turned the beam of light into the depths of the alley, swinging the flashlight from one strip of yellow crime scene tape to the strip blocking the front sidewalk. “So what’s all this then, Sherlock? A bloody coincidence? Our guy hasn’t made mistakes or left this much evidence behind before.”

Sherlock?
Annie glanced up. Nick’s dark hair and the charcoal-gray heather scarf he wore were getting dusted with the snow coming in at the edge of the tarp. She prided herself on noticing the details of her surroundings, but those keen senses were supposed to be focusing on a murder scene, not the detective demanding answers from her. The frigid temps must really be addling her brain. She forced herself to look away and point out the bags labeled and stowed in her kit. “I don’t know. This is different from the other crimes scenes I’ve investigated. I’ve never had this much trace before. It’s almost as if...”

“As if what?”

Annie shook her head. “I don’t like to speculate.”

“Humor me.”

“It’s as if we’ve got two crime scenes in one location. The abduction, which could account for the handprints on the wall here, and the murder...” She turned her own light toward the darkness at the back of the alley, where a second tarp did what it could to protect the evidence there. “Which happened back there.”

“And all the blood is the vic’s?”

“I don’t know yet. There’s an awful lot. I’d have to—”

“—analyze it.” Nick muttered the end of the sentence as though he was impatient to move on to a new topic. He brushed the snowflakes off the top of his hair, leaving shiny dark spikes in their wake. To her surprise, he seemed to give her idea some merit. “Dr. Kilpatrick believes there’s more than one unsub we should be looking for.”

Annie recalled the conclusion reached by the forensic psychologist assigned to the task force when she’d been investigating the Rose Red Rapist’s last attack before tonight’s grim events. “She thinks there are two different profiles to these attacks, indicating more than one man is involved in the crimes—the rapist and someone who cleans up after him. This could be trace from the initial abduction. And if Rachel Dunbar struggled—meaning he didn’t knock her out with one blow the way he usually subdues his victims—then it could have been a messy confrontation, giving the cleaner more impetus to silence the one woman who could possibly identify the rapist.”

“The Cleaner?” Nick’s blue eyes glowed with something that looked like derision. “You’ve given our accomplice a nickname? Better not let the press get wind of that.” He thumbed over his shoulder toward the dark storefront across the street. “They’ve already given our perp a cutesy name because the first rape happened outside the Fairy Tale Bridal Shop.”

Annie pulled up to every centimeter of her five feet two inches of height. She hadn’t been trying to glorify the perp’s cleverness or give the press any more fodder for sensational headlines. She had simply been stating facts. “Like I said. It’s just speculation. I’m trying to figure out what the evidence says.”

“And it’s telling you we have two crime scenes at one location.” Maybe that skeptical gleam was Nick’s deep-thought expression because it sounded like he was actually agreeing with her theory. “One from the Rose Red Rapist and one from an accomplice in some freaky sort of tag team. Could be a crazy fan who wants a taste of that violence, too.”

Annie stooped down to replace the Luminol bottle in her kit and take out unopened swabs in sterile cases to obtain fresh samples of the blood smears for typing and DNA analysis. “It sounds kind of sick, but it looks to me like we’ve got a rape addict and some sort of enabler.”

“Now there’s a dysfunctional relationship.” Nick swore. “I liked it better when we were after just one nutcase.”

“It’s only a theory,” Annie hastened to clarify, dabbing at the bricks. “I can’t prove the identity of the second attacker or what his motives might be yet. I can’t even confirm that there
was
a second man in this alley tonight.”

“But your gut tells you Dr. Kilpatrick is right—that there are two attackers?”

Annie snapped the vials shut and pulled the marker from her pocket to label them. She slipped them all into her pocket, exhaling a sigh that clouded the air between them. “The evidence seems to indicate that.”

Nick nodded, apparently satisfied with her assessment of the crime scene. “Finish up here. I’m going to call Spencer and see if he convinced an M.E. to come in early and look at the body yet. I’ll ask for a quick measurement of the victim’s hand size so we can speed the identification of those prints.” He pulled his cell phone off his belt, giving her a glimpse of the weapon holstered beneath his jacket. “When the uniformed officers get back, I’ve got some more doors to knock on. Will you be okay if I leave you here for a few minutes to make a couple of calls?”

Being left to fend for herself felt all too familiar. She’d had a lot of practice over the years putting on an equally familiar brave smile. “I’m okay on my own.”

But he was already backing toward the sidewalk at the front end of the alley. “I won’t go too far. Holler if you need me.”

“Don’t scare anybody while you’re out there.” The teasing remark felt much more normal than the memory of friendly conversation and his warm touch still moving through her veins.

“Don’t freeze your nuggets.” He gave it right back with a wink and a grin, flipping open his cell phone as he disappeared around the corner. “Yo. Hey, can you connect me to...”

More certain of her actions as a criminologist than of her
re
actions to Detective Fensom, Annie stepped back to snap another picture of the blood spatter and snowy handprints on the brick wall.

The camera’s mechanical noises and the pop and snap of the blowing tarps covered the soft staccato of something shuffling around in the back of the alley where it bisected another throughway between buildings. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the T-shaped intersection, a lid got knocked off a trash can and hit the snow-packed pavement. Startled by the noise, her pulse picked up speed as the metal disk spun around and around until it stilled into silence. Only then did she release the breath she’d been holding.

“Wind must have caught it,” she hypothesized on a whisper.

Annie lowered her camera and peered into the black hole at the end of the alley. Several seconds of answering stillness tempered her initial alarm and she relaxed and returned to her work. Backing up, she adjusted her camera to take a wide shot of the handprints on the brick wall. A soft whirring sound brought the image into focus. A click snapped the picture.

Muffled footsteps, crunching over the snow, scurried across the back of the alley. Tensing at the new disturbance, Annie swung her gaze around into the darkness. “Hello?” She wracked her brain to come up with the names of the two officers she’d met earlier, blocking off the alley. “Officer Galbreath?” She couldn’t come up with the second name. “I hope you brought coffee.”

No answer.

No sound besides the wind and tarp, either. She should have been able to breathe easier. But that wary uneasiness wouldn’t leave her.

Because she’d had no luck spotting the unwanted company with her flashlight, Annie raised her camera and snapped a photograph. She glanced down at the small digital screen. Shadowy blobs darker than the middle of the picture lined either side of the alley. Trash cans and power poles most likely.

Probably nothing to worry about.

But there was something else, farther back, its shape distorted by the ruffling tarp, framed in the tee where the two alleys connected. The hair at her nape pricked to attention. She raised her gaze from the camera to the tunnel of shadows leading down to the dim light at the crossroads.

Someone was moving in the other alley.

“Officer Galbreath?” The second name popped into her head. “Foster?”

It made sense for the two officers to take a shortcut coming back from the Shamrock Bar, as cold as it was. No one else would cross the yellow crime scene tape blocking each end of the alley, would they?

No one she wanted to run into, at any rate.

Screw independence.

“Detective Fensom?” She retreated a step toward the sidewalk and called over her shoulder. She wondered if he was still on his phone to his partner. Had he been a rat and gotten inside his Jeep to warm up while he made the call? “Nick?”

Speaking of rats, maybe that’s all this was. Even though she didn’t particularly want to meet a swarm of those either, it would be a plausible explanation for the sounds—rats tunneling beneath trash bags, rifling through Dumpsters and knocking things over.

She almost hoped that she’d step on a rat or some other critter to prove to herself that any threat she felt was only in her imagination. But a rat would still be moving. And the only thing she was hearing now was her own pulse throbbing in her ears.

“Nick?” A shadow darted around the corner and rushed toward her. Way too big to be a rat. “Nick!”

Annie was in full retreat as the figure dressed in black charged. She raised her flashlight, the only weapon she had on hand as the black coat and dark eyes behind a stocking mask took shape. One arm swung her way, but she deflected it. Another arm knocked the flashlight from Annie’s cold fingers. She screamed.

Two big hands locked around her shoulders and threw her against the Dumpster. Ignoring the bruising pain, she shoved backward against her attacker, ramming her elbow into his gut. “Stop fighting,” he muttered on a voiceless rasp.

“Nick!” she screamed.

But the man, much larger, much stronger, palmed the back of her head and shoved her forward. Her forehead connected with immovable steel, splitting open skin, numbing the point of impact. Annie collapsed to her knees as the darkness swirled around her and the snow rushed up to meet her. More scuffling noises buzzed through her foggy senses. The corner of the tarp broke free of its mooring and whipped against her.

And then she was jerked upward by the camera strap looped around her neck.

“No!” The thick strap strangled her and she instinctively scratched at the choking vise. The strap loosened for an instant and she latched on tight, holding on as he yanked her to her feet, trying to pull the camera from her neck.

“You crazy—”

“Hey. Hey!” Another voice was shouting, a man’s voice. There was no mistaking the drum beat of running footsteps now. Or the deep shout of Nick Fensom’s voice. “KCPD!”

All at once, the tension left the camera strap and Annie tumbled backward. She rolled onto her hands and knees and pushed herself up, snatching the swinging camera against her stomach as the dark figure ran toward the back of the alley.

“Stop where you— Damn it, Annie, get down!”

By the time she focused in on Nick’s gun and realized she was in the line of fire, Nick had rushed past her. He charged through the alley like a linebacker chasing down the quarterback and disappeared around the corner into the darkness. Both the attacker and her savior were gone.

Clear thoughts were still trying to work their way into her jumbled brain as Annie untangled the plastic tarp from her legs and staggered to her feet. A man had been hiding in the shadows, waiting to attack. How long had he been watching to make sure she was alone? Who was he? Why her? She was going to have plenty of bruises on her body, along with a crazy headache. She hugged her camera tightly to her chest.

The squeal of car tires spinning to find traction and shouts in the distance diverted her thoughts to a different question. Had Nick Fensom really come to her rescue?

She was leaning against a brick wall, still puzzling out that last observation, when the detective in question came jogging back around the corner. The stocky shadow became a leather jacket and dark hair, blue eyes and stiff-lipped concern as he approached.

He tucked his gun into the back of his jeans as he spoke into the phone at his ear. “Track down those two cops and tell them to get their butts back here now. We’ve got a trespasser on the scene. Fensom out. Annie?” He stuffed the phone into his pocket and closed his hand around her arm. “CSI Hermann?”

“I’m okay.”

But when he pulled her away from the wall and turned her, Annie’s knees wobbled. Nick’s face swirled out of focus and suddenly her feet left the ground. “Easy, slugger. I’ve got you.”

She identified soft cold leather beneath her cheek before she realized that Nick had scooped her up in his arms and was carrying her out of the alley and along the sidewalk toward his silver Jeep. Annie’s focus bounced along with every step, making her dizzy, and she squeezed her eyes shut. But other nerve endings were working just fine. The solid chest didn’t move when she pushed against it. The muscular arms were locked firmly around her shoulders and knees.