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  No, his concern was the inconvenience of it all. The descent of a bunch of FBI agents chasing bodies they would never find might interfere with his plans and restrict his movements.

  It also might bring exposure of other things. Things he wasn’t responsible for. Someone else was.

  “You asshole,” he hissed, suddenly enraged. Because if those other activities were uncovered, the interest in those crimes might spill over onto him. People might come around, ask questions, do a search.

  “Don’t panic,” he reminded himself, focusing on the main issue. Lisa.

  How did they know she was dead? For the past year and a half everyone had accepted the fact that the little slut had run off somewhere on her own. Why had that changed? What evidence could they have?

  “They’re bluffing,” he told himself. “They must be.” Wanting a distraction from the worry, he busied himself tidying his special room. He kept it clean and normal-looking, on the off chance that anybody came in here. The idea of somebody invading his privacy, learning about his other life, was enough to make him sick. Nobody could interfere with that life. He wouldn’t allow it.

  What if they know about the Playground?

  Impossible. The security was rigid, the existence of it shared in cyber whispers. He doubted there was another person within two states of here who was a member.

  Or perhaps his closest neighbor was.

  That was one thing that made Satan’s Playground so wonderful.

  But there had been a lot of extra security in recent weeks. Maybe someone hacked in. . . .

  Maybe he should quit.

  Bile rose in his throat at the very thought of it. Quit? Leave the only place he’d ever belonged? No. He’d never do that.

  In fact, he’d do whatever it took to keep that world safe and intact. Including removing anyone who threatened its existence. FBI agents. The sheriff. Anyone.

  He could. So easily. They would never even realize he was the enemy until he took their heads off their bodies. Just as he had with that girl from the mall. The loud one. The mean one. The one who had screamed awful language and was no lady, just another whore. She hadn’t used those words on him for long.

  Almost smiling as he realized just how little anyone in this drab, colorless place knew him, he was startled by a sudden ding from his computer speakers. He had mail. Not in the playground, but an e-mail to the identity he wore in the dirt world.

  Not recognizing the generic address, he almost ditched it as spam. But the subject message—You’ll Want to Read This—intrigued him. It seemed different, though it was probably someone offering to make him wealthy, or teach him the secret to better sex.

  Ha. There was no secret. Because sex could never be as good as draining the blood out of a woman until the light left her eyes and the spite left her lips.

  Nothing could.

  Bent over his chair, he leaned down and clicked on the message to open it, ready to delete it at once.

  Then he read the words on the screen. His heart pounded.

  He saw the image below the words. His pulse surged.

  He read the final demand. And he slowly lowered himself to the chair.

  The message was simple: I know what you did. Below it was a fuzzy, black-and-white photograph, apparently taken from a surveillance camera. It wasn’t very good quality. But it didn’t need to be. The image clearly showed the two most important things: his draped form putting a large, body-size wrapped object into the back of a truck. More disturbing—an easily recognizable license plate.

  “No,” he began to whisper, the word rising in volume as fury crawled up his throat and began to choke him. “No! You can’t do this!”

  But the message writer apparently thought he could.

  The anonymous e-mailer wanted money. A lot of it, which he didn’t have. And he wanted it within seven days.

  Or the picture would go to the FBI.

  Chapter 9

  Though he’d seldom played standard investigator games throughout his career, in the few times he’d done so, Dean had always found himself in the role of bad cop. His naturally stern, unsmiling demeanor and size made him the tough guy, the ball-breaker. He was the one ready to throw the book at a suspect, the angry official who’d convince the perp he’d spend the rest of his miserable excuse of a life in a ten-by-ten cell if he didn’t cooperate.

  Today Stacey was bad cop.

  And it was just about the sexiest thing he had ever seen.

  “Don’t shoot me for saying this, okay?” he said as they entered her private office a few hours later, after having interviewed most of the people at the tavern. Except her brother and his friend, whom Stacey wanted to deal with on neutral turf.

  She pushed the door shut behind them. “What?”

  “When you grabbed that guy playing pool by the front of his shirt, and told him you were going to dig into his past until you found out if he’d stolen a piece of bubble gum as a kid, I almost got a hard-on.”

  Surprised laughter erupted from her mouth. She probably wasn’t as surprised as Dean. That kind of frankness hadn’t been part of his vocabulary in a couple of decades. His ex hadn’t exactly been the sexy-innuendo type. She’d been a combination of Martha Stewart and Fran Drescher. Domestic wannabe with an annoying voice. And no interest in snappy verbal foreplay.

  But with Stacey, he didn’t feel as though he had to watch his mouth. In fact, he felt capable of saying absolutely anything. It was, after all, only the truth.

  She hung her hat on a peg and slipped out of her uniform jacket, revealing a few more of the curves she usually kept buttoned up tight. “I guess most women wouldn’t know how to react to that. But since I’ve been pretty damn hot to see you handle the Glock on your hip, I think I get it.”

  “Does that make us a couple of violence-loving wackos?”

  Shaking her head, Stacey stepped closer. Closer. Until the tips of her boot-clad feet touched his shoes and their clothes brushed. The place was wrong; the timing was even more wrong. But everything else about the moment felt utterly right. So no way in hell was he going to put an end to it.

  “No. I think it just proves what we were talking about earlier in the car. That we’re attracted.”

  Then she proved the attraction. This time, his was the shirt bunched in those slim, capable hands. He was pushed until his back hit the door.

  And he was being kissed.

  Her mouth connected with his, hot and hungry. She parted her lips, deepened the kiss, all warm, spicy woman. Stacey tasted so damn good to him after the long drought of personal connection; she quenched his thirst, emptied and refilled him at the same time. That slender body, pressed against the length of his, emphasized her femininity, despite her undeniable strength. The combination intoxicated him until he was almost out of his mind with the need to touch every inch of her.

  He let her have control for a few seconds, then took it back, turning her until she was the one backed into the corner. Their mouths continued to meet; they exchanged kiss after kiss. Each sweet, wet thrust of her tongue sent another surge of lust coursing through him and refilled the dry, empty well of physical need that had tormented him for so long.

  Groaning low in her throat, Stacey pressed herself harder against him. “God, I’ve wanted this,” she mumbled against his mouth. Tangling her fingers in his hair, she kept kissing him, as if once she’d started she couldn’t possibly stop.

  Not that he wanted to. Huh-uh.

  Dean dropped his hands to her hips, sliding his palms across the generous curves to tug her even harder against his aroused body. When she felt the rigid proof of that arousal, Stacey sagged a little in his arms, as though her legs had suddenly lost all their strength. His hands and the office wall kept her upright, pressed against him, exactly where he wanted her.

  Finally, though, voices from the vestibule pierced the hazy cloud of sensuality filling his head. With utter regret, he let go of her, ended the kiss, and stepped back. They stood staring at each other
for a good thirty seconds, both sucking in ragged breaths, both asking a million silent questions, and answering them with only their eyes.

  “You are going to come over for that beer, right?” she asked once they both seemed to have gotten it under control.

  He nodded, then had to at least pretend to play the gentleman. “I don’t expect—I mean, just a beer is fine.”

  “Yeah, uh, I don’t think so.”

  Wondering how this woman could so easily work him straight from pulsing desire into pure amusement, he had to laugh. “I bet you were hell on wheels growing up.”

  “I didn’t play with dolls, if that’s what you’re asking.” Her lashes half lowered, her mouth suddenly twisting down. “Except when I babysat Lisa.”

  She’d been a passionate, wild woman in his arms a moment before. Now the regret almost visibly washed over her. She’d allowed herself to forget for a moment. But he knew those snatched bits of happiness wouldn’t drive away the guilt until this case was solved.

  Still, she made a concerted effort. “Enough. My brain is ready to explode from the defensive ramblings of a dozen drunks. And I am sure I reek from having been inside that place for so long.” She glanced at her watch, then bent over her desk and scrawled an address and directions on a small sheet of paper. “Let me go home and shower. Then you can meet me at my place in forty-five minutes or so.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Wait.” She straightened, not yet handing him the paper. “Do you have a way out? Didn’t your boss take your car back to D.C.?”

  “Yeah, but Jackie and Kyle drove out in two cars so we’d have an extra vehicle.”

  “Oh, good. That means I can get home and take out a couple of steaks for us to throw on the grill, and still have time to wash the tavern smell out of my hair.”

  Her hair. He was very much looking forward to seeing it down around her face, knowing it would softly frame her fine features. “Leave it down,” he murmured.

  She lifted a questioning brow.

  “Please.” After their sensual encounter, he shouldn’t have felt strange making the request. But he did. Because it seemed intimate. Something a lover would ask.

  She swallowed hard, her throat quivering, as if she knew how often he’d pictured wrapping those strawberry blond strands around his fingers, then whispered, “All right.”

  He left the office without another word, without a touch. Because if he reached for her, or she reached for him, one of them would be backed against the wall getting their lips kissed off.

  “You’re taking a cold shower,” he told himself as he left the sheriff’s office and walked toward the inn.

  It was only after he’d reached the corner that he began to wonder what, exactly, he was going to say to Stokes and Mulrooney about why he wasn’t joining them for dinner. But, hell, the truth was as good as anything. Because if they hadn’t noticed the tension between him and the sexy sheriff, then neither of them deserved to carry a badge.

  Fortunately, though, when he got back to the flea trap a few minutes later, he saw a note taped to his door. The two of them had gone to check out the steak place just outside of town. So he didn’t have to explain a thing.

  Or maybe he was right: They were good enough agents that they’d definitely noticed and were giving him a night alone without requiring excuses or explanations.

  Dean’s cold shower lasted a long time. He felt every bit as grungy after their day as Stacey did, and he had extra incentive. Not having had sex in more than a year, he needed to bring his body temperature back within normal range; otherwise he was likely to go up in flames if she touched him at her front door.

  This wasn’t how he was supposed to get back in the saddle. Stacey wasn’t a mindless bar hookup. But he just couldn’t bring himself to care.

  He wanted her. He liked her. He admired her. He respected her.

  Why on earth would he even think about being with anyone else?

  It would be just sex, no question about that. Neither one of them was up for anything else, and they both damn well knew it. But sex between two people who liked and respected each other . . . what was wrong with that?

  After dressing and calling his son to say good night, he shoved the address and directions Stacey had given him in the pocket of his jeans. A quick stop at the liquor store on the corner—if she was supplying the steaks, he could show up with an extra six-pack—and he headed out of the main section of town.

  Unable to keep the smile from his face as he drove, he had to acknowledge that for the first time in months, he felt genuinely good about something that did not involve Jared. He hadn’t felt that way about anything else in his personal life since he’d realized just how far he and his wife had drifted apart. That had been about a month before he’d found out she was cheating.

  All that, however, was in the past. And, when he thought about it, he had to acknowledge a certain relief that she’d handed him an easy out of their cold marriage.

  Surprised by that self-realization, Dean almost drove right by Stacey’s house as he turned into her neighborhood. Spying the number on the mailbox, he swung into the driveway, parking right behind her dusty cruiser.

  He sat there for a moment, wondering whether he was losing it. Because coming to that kind of conclusion about his breakup after more than a year of feeling like the wounded party was both shocking and a little freeing. And it made him wonder if he would have arrived at it now if he hadn’t met a woman who’d driven him crazy with lust since the first time he’d shaken her hand.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, he was looking forward to seeing just what else he figured out about himself and about Sheriff Stacey Rhodes. Starting tonight.

  Smiling in anticipation, he grabbed the beer and walked toward the house, up the curving sidewalk lined by tall, ragged hedges. He came around the corner, intent on avoiding the sharp thorns on the ivy bushes. So intent he didn’t at first notice what was happening just a few feet in front of him.

  Then he saw it: the front porch stained red.The woman kneeling on it.

  The woman covered in blood.

  And he stopped smiling.

  Wyatt didn’t generally watch television. He had one, of course, and occasionally flipped on the news when he was making dinner or waiting for his coffee in the morning. But as for regular programming, he’d rather read a book. If, that was, he had time to read anything other than case files and reports.

  Considering the last work of fiction he’d read had been that da Vinci book everyone had been raving about, he supposed some would say he was bringing a little too much of his work home with him. Including tonight.

  For some reason, though, as he warmed up the meal his housekeeper had left for him, he flipped on the television, barely listening to it. Having it on, hearing the low murmur of other voices in the background, helped remind him that a normal world existed out there. Everyday people lived and laughed, completely unaware of just how cruel and capricious life could be. While he buried himself in these quiet, still places, drenched in horror as he tried to make sense of the crimes committed by the Reaper, the earth continued to spin.

  The antique dining room table he’d inherited along with this house in Alexandria was covered with files and photographs. Autopsy reports, interviews, and investigator’s notes competed for space. Additional boxes full of files sat on the chairs. Every piece of information currently available on each Reaper case was scattered across his elegant home, which had once belonged to his grandparents. With it came a wealth of darkness, entirely at odds with the serenity and calmness that had defined the lives of that kindly couple.

  “I’m glad you never saw anything like this,” he murmured as he spread out the brutal crime scene photos from the third murder and examined them yet again. Because there had to be something in them that would help them break this case. Like rereading a book, though, the more he studied them, the more his mind filled in what his eyes tried to skim over as too familiar. So he took out a small magni
fying glass, going over each inch.

  Nothing.

  Hearing the beeping of the timer, he put the photograph down, wondering how normal people would react to consuming a nice pasta marinara on a table covered with proof of human suffering and cruelty. The job had hardened him to it, but it hadn’t immunized him. So he took the plate to the couch, sat down, and put his feet on the coffee table, leaving the photographs in the dining room.

  He’d taken two bites when a news story came on that captured his attention. A photograph filled the screen, the headline scrolling across the bottom. Reaching for the remote control, Wyatt punched up the volume.

  He barely even noticed a moment later when his plate of pasta marinara slid off his lap onto the floor.

  At first, when she’d arrived at her house and seen the horror on her front porch and door, Stacey thought a teenager she’d busted had gone crazy with a can of spray paint. But she’d quickly realized the awful truth: The saucer-size circles and long, thin smears had not been made from paint.

  It had been blood.

  Thick blood, congealing into brownish pools and drawing flies in the hot summer evening. The coppery scent filled every breath she took. Overwhelmed by the smell—and by those awful, vivid memories that scent and the feel of the slick fluid inspired—she had just stood there, gasping for untainted air.

  And then she’d spotted the body, recognizing her immediately. The sad, lean corpse was mangled and broken, the once soft fur matted and sticky. But there had been no mistaking those gentle brown eyes, now blank and glazed with sudden, shocking death.

  Dad would be heartbroken, utterly devastated, and Stacey already dreaded telling him. For there had been no doubt the poor, pathetic creature was Lady, the freewheeling stray who’d adopted her father and made him her own.

  “He loved you, girl,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You did have a home and a family, whether you wanted them or not.”

  Those were the first words she’d been able to manage in the half hour since she’d arrived home. Before that, she had been too shocked to speak. She’d felt as thoroughly assaulted as if someone had beaten her. Just as whoever had left this vicious surprise here had intended.