Tactical Advantage

But he wasn’t used to leaving his family when they needed him, either.

Nick pulled on his jacket and zipped it against the cold as he headed for his Jeep. “One problem at a time,” he silently promised everyone who needed him tonight. “One problem at a time.”

Chapter Two

“What’s your problem, Hermann?” Nick Fensom’s deep-pitched voice teased her from above. “I’ve already canvassed apartments on both sides of the street, and you’re still in the same spot where I left you.”

Annie glanced up from the alley where she was working and glared at the stocky, dark-haired detective casting a shadow over her open evidence kit and work space. The tarp tenting over their heads from one wall of the alley to the other snapped with the wind and strained against the ropes she’d tied off like full sails on a seagoing schooner. She was knee-deep in trash bags, blood spatter and blowing snow—her cold fingers shaking as she struggled to open a paper evidence bag so she could drop the beaded evening purse she’d found beneath the nearby Dumpster inside. She pulled the flashlight she held between her teeth out of her mouth to answer.

“Well, let’s see, Detective Smart Mouth. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s snowing. Can you piece together the clues and figure out why this is taking so long?” She could do sarcasm, too. “You got the easy gig, spending a couple of hours inside where it’s warm and dry.”

“And crashing parties or waking up surly, annoyed building supers and frightened tenants.”

Annie scoffed at his trials and tribulations. “It’s not my fault if you showing up ruins a party and scares little old ladies.”

He deflected the zinger with a smug grin. “Actually, I was invited to join a couple of New Year’s celebrations. I was also asked to arrest the noisy neighbors on the floor above one apartment. And there was a nice Mrs. O’Halloran who invited me in for champagne and cookies if I was interested. I had to tell her I was still on the clock and, regrettably, turned her down.”

Point to Fensom. Annie bristled. Her only invitation tonight had come from the lecherous drunk neighbor across the hall. “No one’s stopping you from leaving. I bet Mrs. O’Halloran’s cookies are still toasty warm if you want to go sample them.”

“She was older than my grandmother, Hermann. You know, anybody overhearing our conversation might think you don’t like me.”

“There’s no one listening in, so I don’t have to pretend to make nice.”

Point to Hermann. The teasing grin vanished, and for a split second, Annie was tempted to apologize. But a man with that much self-confidence couldn’t really be offended by the quips they routinely traded each time they were forced to work together, could he? Rather than explore the possibility that there might be a sensitive human being beneath that cocky charm, Annie opted to change the topic.

The idea that she and Nick Fensom truly were alone in the middle of this wintry night in a place where a dead body had lain only hours earlier sent a little shiver of unease down her spine. It merged with the chill that vibrated her grip, and she swung her light toward the yellow crime scene tape at the end of the alley. “Where did the two uniformed guys go?”

“Relax, Hermann, I’ve got your back for a few minutes.” He tilted his head toward the cross street at the end of the block. “The Shamrock Bar is just around the corner. They started serving free coffee and snacks after 1:00 a.m. in case anyone’s been partying too hard tonight. I sent the officers to get four coffees and give them some time out of the cold.”

She’d like to dive into a bath-sized pot of hot coffee right about now. Including her in the drink run was an unexpected consideration that took the edge off the defensive hackles Nick’s presence inevitably raised in her. “I suppose they’ve been out here longer than either one of us. They’ve earned the break.”

Still, sterile plastic gloves were no match for hours of working in the wintry night, photographing potential evidence, digging through bags of garbage and cataloguing everything she’d found thus far. The bag she’d been fighting with refused to open for her stiff fingers. The knees of her jeans where she kneeled had soaked through to the skin, and the tendrils of hair sticking out from beneath her stocking cap had kinked around her face and stuck to her cheeks with the precipitation in the air.

Meanwhile, other than the puffs of warm breath that clouded the air around his head, Detective Fensom looked solid and warm and vexingly unaffected by the dropping temperature.

As if reading her condemning thoughts, Nick turned the banter back to the job. The beam of his flashlight joined hers to better illuminate her work. “What do you have there?”

“I found the victim’s purse.” Giving up on the paper sack for now, Annie lifted the camera hanging from her neck and snapped a picture of the beaded evening bag wedged between the rear wheel of the Dumpster and the alley’s brick wall. Then she picked up the bag and opened it. “Clearly, this wasn’t a robbery.” She pulled out three neatly folded twenties and a credit card. A driver’s license, five business cards, a comb and lipstick rounded out the contents. Annie read the name on the license and business cards. “Rachel Dunbar. Twenty-seven years old. She was an investment analyst.”

“A successful professional woman. That fits the victim profile of the women the Rose Red Rapist targets.”

Annie returned the contents to the purse and picked up the evidence bag again. Juggling the purse, the bag and her flashlight with her frozen hands proved to be a challenge, but it didn’t stop her mind from speculating. “Why is there no phone here? I wonder if she had a cell phone in her coat or if the killer took it from her. I can’t imagine a woman going out at night on her own without a cell.”

“When I check in with Spencer, I can ask if the phone was on the body. I’m guessing her attacker took it from her, though,” Nick speculated. “It keeps her helpless, at his mercy. Our unsub is all about control and dominance over the women he assaults. He obviously can’t have her calling 9-1-1.”

Frowning, Annie nodded toward the bag already tucked into her evidence kit. “So he takes the phone, but leaves the brick he killed her with? I always thought our guy was smarter than that. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Let’s gather the evidence first and analyze it later.” Nick knelt beside her, the bulk of his shoulders and chest blocking the wind as he plucked the sack from her fingers and opened it for her. Annie’s fingers were still shaking as she jotted down the time and date and signed the sealed bag. He dropped the sack inside her kit and reached for her hands. “I need to get you out of the cold, too. How much more do you have to do?”

Annie’s mouth opened in surprise as he tucked her flashlight into the CSI vest she wore over her coat, and pulled off his leather gloves to capture her fingers between his palms. “What are you doing?”

He peeled off her latex gloves next. “What does it look like?”

Gasping at his firm, yet light, touch, Annie was stunned into silence. Nick Fensom had never touched her before, other than an accidental brush of contact as they passed each other in a crowded room or handed off a file folder at a meeting. And now he was holding her hands and instilling warmth as if he had some proprietary claim to do so.

The gentle massage of Nick’s bigger fingers over hers was almost painful as the blood began to warm her heat-deprived extremities. A little hiss of pain brought his gaze up to hers. “Easy, slugger. You’re okay.”

“Slugger?” A baseball reference?

He glanced up at the blue-and-white KC on the cuff of her stocking cap. “Looks like you’re a Royals fan.”

“I am.”

“Me, too. Who’d have thought you and I had something in common?”

“Yeah.” Witty comeback. But her thoughts were shifting from shock into the critical observations that usually filled her mind.

Sensation returned to her hands and Annie began to feel every supple movement of his fingertips, every callus that marked his broad palm. She could feel the heat radiating from his body, from his skin into hers.

Nick Fensom was being nice? On purpose? Where were the wisecracks that forced her to stay on her mental toes? The annoying arguments that threatened to undermine her investigative expertise? The heat he rubbed into her once-numb hands was blossoming elsewhere inside her, too. Her cheeks began to thaw with the traitorous flush of her physical response.

Up close like this, Annie noticed just how blue Nick’s eyes were. Their dark cobalt color was emphasized by the shadows between them, yet there was a sparkle of energy there, a light that gave them a sharp contrast to the coffee-brown darkness of his hair. And maybe it was just the close proximity she wasn’t accustomed to—or the thickness of his insulated leather jacket—that distorted the dimensions of his body. She knew he hadn’t grown any taller, and yet his shoulders and chest were broader than she remembered. They were wide enough to block the worst of the wind and snow and allow the air between them to warm and fill with the scents of the sterile solutions she used, along with the leather and faint garlicky deliciousness emanating from him.

“You’re like a furnace,” she noted, drawing her focus back to the reviving heat of his fingers around hers. Was he feeling this unexpected jolt of awareness, too? “Why are you doing this?”

“Speeding the process so I can get out of here before dawn. Your hands are like ice.”

“Oh.” So she’d been analyzing the color of his eyes and wondering if the dark stubble dusting the angles of his face would be sandpapery or soft to the touch while he’d simply wanted to get out of here sooner. Awkward. He probably had a hot date he’d left in a snug apartment somewhere, and Annie’s poky thoroughness was keeping him from getting back to her. With plenty of embarrassment to infuse her blood and keep her warm now, Annie jerked her hands from his and grabbed a fresh pair of gloves from her kit. “I’m fine. You can stop.”

“I don’t mind.” She flexed her fingers and reached up to extricate her flashlight from the net pocket in her CSI vest where Nick had stuck it. But her hands were chilling again and he’d jammed it in there good and why the heck couldn’t she manage her own equipment? Nick plucked the flashlight from her vest and pressed it into her palm. “Here. We’re part of a team, right? We have to help each other out.”

“Right.” Go ahead and be practical and coordinated and temptingly warm, she accused him silently, pushing to her feet and feeling about as graceful and misguided as a teenage girl who’d just had a run-in with her high school crush. She must be suffering from hypothermia to have hallucinated any sort of fascination with Nick Fensom. “I’m almost done. The path of blood droplets I was following has tapered off considerably.”

“O...kay.” He drawled out the word, clearly questioning her abrupt retreat. Nick pulled on his black leather gloves and straightened beside her. “By the way, you’re welcome.”

Annie lifted her gaze from the void of snow on the bricks behind the Dumpster. “Sorry.” Rubbing her hands truly had been a nice gesture, which was certainly more observant of her discomfort and more considerate than she’d given the burly detective credit for being. “You didn’t have to do that, but I appreciate it. I’ll do my best to get done before daylight, so we can both get someplace warm.”

And so she could find some time to herself to remember that Nick was just a cop she worked with, a streetwise pain in the posterior she frequently butted heads with—not the man who had suddenly blipped onto her sexual-awareness radar with his big shoulders and blue eyes and surprising consideration.

“Sounds like a temporary truce to me.”

Annie nodded her agreement, savoring the cold slap of wind on her face that brought her thoughts back into focus. She bent closer to the bricks as the bare spot took shape. It was a handprint, dotted with a few weeping trickles of blood. There was another handprint, another smear of red, climbing up the wall to where the falling snow clung to the bricks above the Dumpster and covered up the rest of the pattern. “This has been moved. Our vic got to her feet and pulled herself up along the wall here. And...something else.”

Nick waited for Annie’s nod before putting his shoulder to the Dumpster and shoving it aside a couple of feet. Then the beam from his flashlight joined hers. “That second handprint’s bigger. Looks like a scuffle to me. Two people fell against the wall—caught themselves. But this can’t be where she was killed. There isn’t enough blood.”

“That blood pool is farther back in the alley. She had her head bashed in back by where the alleys cross, beyond any line of sight from the street—with the brick I bagged up in my kit, I’m guessing. These are something different.” With her sterile gloves still in place, she tested one crimson spot with her fingertip. “The drops here aren’t as tacky. They’ve been here longer. This may be the initial attack site.”

“Where he first abducted her and hauled her away to a secondary location to rape her.” Nick’s shoulder nudged hers as he came in for a closer look. “Maybe this one got a look at her attacker, and they struggled. Could that be our perp’s handprint?”

Nudging him back out of her way, Annie focused the camera hanging around her neck and snapped a photograph. “I doubt we’ll get any fingerprints from our unsub—the lines are blurred enough that I’m sure both were wearing gloves. Wait a minute.”

“Did you see something?”

Before Nick could finish his question, Annie grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand in front of the prints on the wall. “Hold that right there.”

Before he could voice another question, she’d snapped another picture.

“Now take your glove off and hold it up there.”

She didn’t miss the dubious arching of his brow, but Nick did as she asked. “And my hand is photogenic because?”

“It’s a comparison shot.” Next, she photographed her own hand in front of the bloody prints on the wall before stooping down to pull a tape measure from her kit. “The smaller prints are about the size of my hand, so I’m guessing they belong to the victim. We can verify that once I talk with the medical examiner. But the other print is considerably larger.”

“Man-size hands.” Nick regloved and stepped to the side, clearing out of her work space. “The rapist’s?”

“Possibly.” She recorded the exact measurements in her notebook and stuffed it back into her coat pocket. “It’s something we can compare if we find handprints at other locations, or we bring a suspect into custody.”

“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 reactions 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.