Mine to Keep: Protection Series Book 4, page 10
And… my ovaries exploded.
Okay, well, maybe not, but something sure broke inside me, sending a flood of moisture between my thighs. How did he know so much about women? And not just their bodies but what made them tick and why? Holy hell, there was no doubt—not that there ever had been—that Charlie would be a fantastic lover.
Too bad for me, I was his superior and shouldn’t ever cross that line.
“Get the fuck off me.” Twisting around, Hicks maneuvered out of Charlie’s loosened hold. Pointing a finger between my brows, he snarled. “I warned you.” With that threat, he threw open the door and stormed out of the break room.
“Rhyan.” The vibration in Charlie’s strained voice drew my focus away from the open door. A quick breath stuck in my lungs at the intensity of his tight features. “What the hell happened in here before I walked in?”
“Nothing,” I muttered, waving him off like Hicks’s accosting me wasn’t as big of a deal as it actually was. I was never in any real danger. “He felt the need to put me in my place, I guess. But instead of convincing me to drop the case, he gave me a different angle into the victimology and what connected them.” Peeking up from beneath my fair lashes, I forced a small smile. “I’m fine, really. Not that big of a deal.”
“Then why are your hands doing that?” He jabbed a finger at my trembling hands like they had personally offended him.
I slid them off the stained table top and pressed both palms to the tops of my thighs.
“That, um….” The hard plastic shifted beneath me as I turned to the vending machines at my back. “I need to eat. Sometimes I get shaky when my blood sugar is low. It’s why I came in here.” I stopped, no longer caring about food or my health, just digging into this new angle to see if it had any validity. “But that can wait. We need to dig into their electronic footprints for the weeks leading up to the night the victims went missing and the night before they were reported missing.”
“No.”
I whipped around, gaping at the hard, commanding tone directed at me. Charlie righted the chair he’d knocked over and moved past me. I followed him, unsure what in the hell he was up to and why he looked so damned determined. He held the back of his phone to the vending machine and pushed a series of buttons. Neither of us spoke, the break room quiet except for the whirl of the machine and the clunk of food falling in rapid succession. The squeak of the metal hinges pierced through the silence, followed by a crinkle of plastic as Charlie scooped the various bags and candy bars out of the tray.
Dumping two handfuls of junk food on the table directly in front of where I sat, Charlie pointed to the center.
“There. Eat something, and then we work on this new angle.”
“Charlie,” I said, suddenly too tired to fight him on this. “We need to find their connection—”
“Fine.” Fingers wrapped around the back of a chair, he twisted it around midair, slammed it back down, and wrapped his long legs around the back, resting a single forearm along the top. His dark hair shifted as he tilted his head toward the food. “You eat, and I’ll talk.”
I pressed my dry lips into a tight line, attempting to keep my shy smile suppressed. Besides my mother, no one had ever been this concerned about my health and eating habits. It was overbearing but sweet, and somehow endearing.
Conceding to his demands, I picked through the pile, selecting a Snickers and a snack-size bag of Goldfish. Charlie watched, not saying a word as I ripped both open.
“Talk,” I said.
“Eat.”
Blowing out a frustrated breath at his cocky dominance, I dumped half the Goldfish into my palm and shoved them all into my open mouth, my defiant gaze never leaving his.
“Happy?” I said around the mouthful, a few bits of crumbs spilling out.
“Not even close, but better.” He studied my lips with an intensity I couldn’t read for several seconds before he shook his head, as if breaking himself out of a trance. “Do you want to file a harassment claim?”
“You weren’t that bossy about the food.” I held the small bag higher, covering my smirk.
“This isn’t a joke.”
“Though if you tried to feed me, I would’ve drawn the line at that.”
“Riggs,” he growled, knuckles of the hand wrapped around the chair back going white.
Clearly I was pushing my limits with his restraint. “No, I don’t want to press any charges. Hicks is an egotistical asshole, and yeah, he confronted me in a way I wasn’t comfortable with, but I wasn’t in any danger. During his rant, he let something slip that might explain his obsessive need for the cases to remain suicides. It has more to do with him not wanting to be wrong than anything, which is typical for a man like him.”
“I want to bash his face in,” Charlie muttered under his breath. He raked a few fingers through the long section of his hair, making several dark locks fall across his forehead.
“That won’t solve anything and would interfere with the case, plus end up with you in jail. Not sure how much you think I make, but coming up with bail money would be a stretch.”
Some of that anger faded, the tightness around his eyes and lips softening. “But it would make me feel better.”
“True.” I sank my teeth into the chocolate goodness, biting off an unladylike thick chunk. “He called you a gangbanger.” I studied the artwork decorating the tops of his hand and the few tattoos peeking out from beneath his collar. “That was uncalled for. He knows nothing about you.”
“I walked in on you scared with that motherfucker pinning you to the vending machine, and that’s your takeaway?”
“How can he be a good detective when he lets his own assumptions get in the way? It’s super judgey.”
Charlie huffed, tipping his face up to the ceiling like he was praying for patience. Maybe he was. Maybe I was finally exhausting him with my presence. My gut twisted, the candy bar now like thick mud in my mouth.
“I’m used to it. I don’t worry about what others think of me, and neither should you. Surrounded by straitlaced agents and officers every day, I’ve gotten used to the stares and comments.”
“Why did you get them in such visible places?” And hidden ones, but if I started thinking about his bare chest, I’d get no work done. “Did you not know you wanted to be in law enforcement when you grew up?”
Charlie flexed and straightened his long fingers, staring at the designs. “I knew I wanted to be in a role where I could make a difference. It was a goal of mine since childhood, but that’s a story for a different day. The tattoos, well, my obsession started small, with one across my chest, and then I just kept going back for more. After being invisible for so long, the visible tattoos drew people’s attention, good and bad.”
The wrapper in my hand crinkled as I crumpled it in my tightening fist. “And by people, you mean women specifically.”
He peeked up through those dark lashes and smirked. “Maybe.”
“How in the hell could you be invisible?” I said, covering my mouth as I talked and chewed. “The dark hair, captivating blue eyes, those lips—”
“What about my lips?” A knowing, cocky smile spread across his face as a flush heated mine.
“Nothing,” I grumbled. Needing a distraction from his attention, I shoved away from the table, gathered my trash, and tossed it in the large gray trash can by the door. “But you know how you look. Even without the tattoos you’d attract attention.” The chair’s feet scraped against the concrete as I sat and scooted closer. The food was already helping, my mind clearing and anger easing. “Thanks for the food, by the way.”
Elbow to the chair’s edge, he rested his chin on a raised fist. “Remember last night when I mentioned I didn’t always look like this? I was a skinny fuck throughout school. It wasn’t until college that I put any actual weight on. Tall, scrawny, and pissed off didn’t draw in the women or friends.”
Well, that sounded lonely.
“Why were you pissed off?” I asked, picking up on that one tidbit of the conversation that seemed heavy with resentment.
His focus shifted to just over my shoulder. “My mother was murdered when I was a teenager.” Without thinking, I leaned across the table and grabbed his tight fist, squeezing in what I hoped was a comforting gesture. “And no one cared. It wasn’t until the killer moved on to women who mattered that the police even began connecting the cases.”
“We all matter,” I said with so much force that Charlie’s unfocused gaze shifted back, eyes wide.
For several seconds, we just stared at the other, maybe really seeing each other with none of the pretense or masks for the first time. Or maybe that was just me. Instead of the gorgeous, somewhat cocky, tattooed badass, I saw the real him, the one he kept hidden beneath the dark ink and sharp smiles.
“Fun fact,” I said, clearing my throat to break the growing intensity between us. “Did you know only female mosquitoes bite?”
And just like that, the spell was broken. A wide, carefree smile split his face, and his shoulders relaxed. “Well, then, Agent Riggs. I clearly am not a mosquito.”
I arched a brow. “Because you’re not a tiny, annoying bloodsucker who spreads malaria?”
“Because I’m all male, and I bite. Often.”
I swallowed hard, suddenly very thirsty.
Charlie observed my working throat. Popping out of the chair, he once again held his phone to the machine and pressed a series of buttons, followed by a loud thunk. A chilled bottle of water slammed down onto the table.
“Okay, so let’s assume the victims were out looking for a fun night,” Charlie mused as he paced the short length of the wall of windows. “A one-night stand, maybe. Where would they find that?”
Tapping a short nail against the plastic bottle, I considered all the options. “You’d go out with your girlfriends if you intended to find a random hookup at a bar, though none of the victims’ friends said they were with them the night they went missing.”
“Which means they went out alone.”
“Most women wouldn’t feel comfortable picking up a stranger alone, especially one who’d been married for a while. She’d feel out of practice in a way.”
Charlie nodded. Stopping at the table’s edge, he rummaged through the remaining food, selecting the bag of tiny chocolate chip cookies, and ripped it open. “When I get fat, I’m blaming you.”
And you’d still be hot was what I wanted to add, but I kept my words down with several gulps of water.
“So if they wouldn’t go out alone,” he continued, “each victim went out to meet a specific someone. Someone they had talked to, built a trust of sorts with.”
“How do people meet each other if it’s not random at a bar?” I asked, picking at the plastic label.
“Really?” I lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “There are dozens of apps out there they could use. I’ll run a few searches when we get back to the hotel.”
“Nothing too in-depth,” I said with a pointed look. “We’re under too much scrutiny right now to add unauthorized searches to the list. But that’s a good thought.”
“I’ll request their phones from the families and go through those too. Do you want to head back now? I can grab the Suburban.”
My lips parted to tell him no, that we needed to stick around here to flush the details out and just run the searches later, when his last word resonated.
“If they went out alone, then where are their cars?”
He blinked. “Let’s go find out.”
Back in the makeshift office, I handed two case files over to Charlie. Not bothering with sitting, I flipped open the file of victim number three. Palms pressed to the top of the table, I leaned over the file, skimming the lines of notes.
“They found this woman’s car in an impound lot,” Charlie muttered, “but it doesn’t say where the company towed it from.”
“I’m willing to bet the others are the same. So that means the victims went out on their own to, let’s say, meet the unsub, and then they never returned to their cars. Where are the vehicles now?”
“Returned to the families,” Charlie said like a curse. “Any evidence would be lost. Too much time has passed.”
“And if they were left behind, I doubt there would be any anyway. Seems like the unsub lured them to a location and never stepped foot in the victim’s car. But we should ask the family if we could search through the most recent victim’s car just in case. Who knows, maybe a receipt or something can help narrow down a location.”
“I can handle that,” Bryson chimed in. I glanced over my shoulder and nodded at him. “Hey, there’s some talk going around that Hicks tried to shake you down. That true?”
I hooked a thumb at Charlie. “He has dibs on handling the situation.”
“So there was a situation,” he said, clearly upset at the thought.
“Yeah, well, he’s an asshole who thinks he can throw his weight around. Which, do you know if he’s up for promotion?”
“Not sure, but I can ask around.” I shot him a thumbs-up and went back to scanning the files. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, that wasn’t my first time holding my ground against someone like him, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Men like Detective Hicks think intimidation works because I’m a woman, but he clearly doesn’t understand the depth of this redhead’s stubborn streak.”
“How are we profiling this guy?” Charlie asked, eyeing me.
Moving to the front of the whiteboard, I surveyed the pictures.
“White male would fit with the statistics, even though he crossed racial lines. Based on the ages of women—” I tilted my head from side to side, “—they could be attracted to him because he’s younger than them.”
“Can I disagree with that?” Charlie spoke up, making me turn. “I would say older. If they’re breaking away from their husbands for a night, they don’t want an amateur. They’ll look for someone who’s attractive and looks like they can handle them in the way they’re wanting.”
“And what are they wanting?” I questioned.
“To forget,” Charlie said. “To have a night where they don’t exist except for that moment. An older man would draw their eye because he’ll look like—”
“He can rock their world, then let them return to the nine-to-five,” I finished for him.
He grimaced and nodded.
I cocked my head to the side, studying the sexy agent. Was that what he was used to? Being that person women would use as an escape, then leave once they had what they wanted—a night to never forget?
The idea of someone using him, not giving anything back, had a frown tugging at my lips. Clearly, he was lonely if he bargained for my friendship yesterday. How many times did Charlie give a woman what she wanted before she left, taking any possible connection with them?
“Okay, mid-forties white male. Medical background, maybe even a doctor.”
“Because all women love a doctor?” Bryson questioned. Plopping into a chair, he leaned back, resting a foot atop the table.
I shook my head. “The unsub has medical knowledge to some extent. He’s killing these women without leaving a mark. That takes understanding of the human body and extreme patience. A knife to the throat or head trauma would be quicker and end with the same result.” I pointed to the most recent victim’s picture. “There’s a reason he kills them this way. Until we find out their COD, we won’t know his signature, which could lead us to him. This means something to him.
“We need to know where those cars were found before being towed. That will give us a basic geographic profile. Agent Bennett, you locate the vehicle’s last known locations. Agent Bekham, you dig into their electronic footprint for the two weeks leading up to the night they went missing and really drill down to that night. Anything could be significant: a bar receipt, a gas station purchase.”
Charlie nodded. “I’ll also look into their out-of-the-ordinary purchases at lingerie stores. If they were planning a night with the unsub, they no doubt bought something new for the occasion.”
“Yes, great.” Grabbing the water bottle, I started toward the doors. “I’m going down to talk to the ME. We need a cause of death. Let’s reconvene here in a few hours.”
9
CHARLIE
Hours after we split up, each working on our own assignment designated by the bossy Agent Riggs, I found her in the morgue. Instead of storming in, I watched her through the small window. She sat on an autopsy table, lips moving a mile a minute with the ME nodding along.
With their attention on each other, engrossed in whatever they were discussing, I took the moment to observe Rhyan in her element. Cheeks flushed with excitement instead of arousal, unlike this morning, eyes shining with intelligence and fire, she was beautiful.
Rhyan Riggs was a knockout, and it had nothing to do with her outer shell. Sure, her body was every man’s wet dream, and those eyes shining with innocence and strength could gut you in one look, but it went deeper than all that.
The need to uncover the scars that lurked beneath the surface, to learn who hurt her and then hurt them in return, burned deep in my veins. Earlier she said, “We all matter,” but why did I get the impression she didn’t feel that statement included her?
Soft vibrations along my thigh had me reaching into the depths of my pocket, retrieving my cell phone. My brows furrowed at the unknown number calling. After tapping the green circle, I pressed the phone to my ear.
“Bekham,” I stated while continuing to watch Rhyan through the small square window.
“Agent Charlie Bekham,” the feminine voice asked breathlessly.
“You got him, but I’m afraid your friend steered you wrong. You can’t use my number as your personal 1-900—”
