Profile for Seduction Read online

  “Go on,” he said slowly.

  She took a deep breath. “Next time he calls, I’m going to be the one doing the taunting. Maybe you’re right. We’ve got to figure out what will set him off. If he wants me, he’s going to have to come and get me.”

  “Lea.” Crossing the room, he sat down beside her again. His hand on her shoulder startled her, the heat of his touch burning her skin through the lightweight fabric of her T-shirt. To her surprise and consternation, again she had the oddest urge to curl into that touch. She bit her lip to keep from groaning.

  “What?” she managed.

  “You need to understand…the reason I ask you how you feel about things is because I need to make sure I can count on you. If you freeze up, you could endanger both of us.” He leveled his blue gaze on her. “Despite his recent killing spree, Feiney’s main focus is drawing you to him so he can finish what he started. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  This time, she couldn’t suppress a shudder. “I know.” Her voice sounded flat and emotionless. Not at all as if her entire being wasn’t silently quaking at the thought of encountering the evil cloaked in human skin that was Feiney. What he’d done to her… What he’d done to his latest victims…

  She pushed the thought away.

  “I need to be sure you can handle this,” Marc continued. “Tell me. Can you?”

  Staring at him, she realized she wanted to put her fist through a wall. Yet his question had validity. He was certainly within his rights to ask if she could handle a confrontation with Feiney.

  Worse, she definitely owed him the stark truth, no matter how much she might not like facing it.

  Instead of automatically answering with vague reassurances, she thought long and hard. Everything inside her screamed a warning to run as fast and as far away as she could. As a woman, she never wanted to see Feiney’s deceptively pleasant face again.

  Except for one part of her. Her career had once defined her, meant everything. The woman with a proud family history of law enforcement, the crack shot, martial arts black belt, special agent part of her demanded she finish what she’d begun. A large amount of professional pride was at stake. She couldn’t allow one bad guy, even if he was the mother of all bad guys, to send her running for the hills, whipped and beaten. She’d have to draw on her insatiable anger—the very thing she’d been told she must shed—to carry her through.

  If she couldn’t do this, she didn’t see how she could ever look at herself in the mirror again.

  “Though the Bureau might be right saying that I need time to heal, I also recognize one other, very important truth.”

  Lifting her chin, she met Marc’s gaze and held it. “If I don’t do this, if I don’t come back into my own now, I never will. My career will be over.” She swallowed hard. “Hell, my life would be over, at least as far as I’m concerned. I’d never regain the self-respect I lost at that madman’s hands.”

  Seeing Marc watching her, a gleam of appreciation in his eyes, she debated how much more to say, how much to leave out. One thing she could never do was admit her fear. If she did, she was certain it would consume her.

  “That’s why it’s so important that I be the one to bring that bastard in,” she said quietly. “Not you, not the Bureau’s team, but me. If nothing else, I’m hoping that doing so will help me regain the self-confidence that unraveled into shreds when Feiney tortured me.”

  With this admission, she supposed she ought to have felt ashamed. Instead, she felt like a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “I can do it, Kenyon. I promise you, I won’t let you down.”

  His smile came slowly, but when it did, she felt validated.

  “You know what? I believe you. Now we need to come up with a plan, figure out a way to draw Feiney out.”

  “I don’t think we need to do even that much. To me, the solution is simple. We need to cut a deal with Feiney. Set up a meeting place, offer me up like a sacrifice. Trade me for the other girl.”

  “No.” Immediately, he shook his head. “Too obvious. He’d see it coming and would do something to that girl just to spite us.”

  “Maybe he would.” She regarded him curiously. “You sound like you think you understand him pretty well.”

  “Yeah.” He looked away, appearing embarrassed. “What I don’t often tell people is that I worked for the FBI for a while. I studied to become a profiler.”

  That she hadn’t known. “Really? What happened?”

  She could tell he didn’t want to say. But she’d just spilled her guts to him and turnabout was fair play.

  “I couldn’t do it. I saw what it did to the other guys, the profilers. The legendary burnouts, the suicides. Constantly seeing the dark side and feeling the lack of light, of hope, wore me down. So I quit. Left Quantico, stayed in Dallas and went to work for the Sheriff’s office. The pay’s not as good, but the job is much better.”

  By better, he meant easier. She’d heard about the profilers. Every agent who worked for the Bureau knew the stories. Not liking the surge of sympathy she felt hearing his confession, she blinked.

  “What about your family? How’d they feel about this change of careers.”

  He squinted at her. “Prying?”

  “Maybe I am,” she allowed. “I started thinking. You know everything about me, while I know next to nothing about you.”

  “Then by all means, I’ll tell you. Let me give you the short version. I have no family.”

  Now he’d startled her. “What?”

  “Yeah. I’m an orphan. I don’t even know who my parents were. Until I went into the military, I never had a home, unless you count the orphanage—which I don’t.”

  Fascinated, she leaned forward. “What branch?”

  “Air Force. At eighteen years old, they finally gave me what I craved—a sense of belonging. I stayed twelve years, until I got injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq.” He swallowed hard, then continued.

  “I survived, my team didn’t. And in case you wonder how I dealt with that, let me tell you. Not well.”

  “So you quit the military?”

  “Yes. That incident brought the realization that it was time for me to do something else with my life. Six months later, after I got out of the hospital, I found myself back in the States, looking for another career.”

  “And you became a cop,” she guessed.

  “Exactly. I took the first position I could find, working for the Washington, D.C., police force. During my time there, I made friends with a guy who worked at Quantico, and at his urging, I submitted an application to the FBI.”

  “There usually is a long wait period.”

  “Not for a guy like me. I had special skills in the military and they couldn’t wait to sign me up. I tested out as somebody who’d do well in profiling.” He shrugged. “It sounded interesting, so I accepted. When I completed my training, I passed everything with flying colors and, like all the other applicants in my class, awaited my final assignment with bated breath.”

  She remembered those days for her class well. Everyone hoped they didn’t get stuck in some awful place.

  At her nod, Marc continued. “The irony of being assigned to Dallas, Texas, didn’t escape me. After all, I’d grown up at the Children’s Home in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas. There, and various foster homes around Dallas, Fort Worth. The fact that I had no family or friends here made it, as least as far as the Bureau was concerned, as if I’d never lived here at all.”

  “Wow.” That was all she could say.

  “Yeah, but they were right. Though I’m not the type to become maudlin, sometimes I feel—er, felt that way, too.”

  Almost against her will, Lea found herself really liking him. To her, that was infinitely more dangerous than mere lust.

  “Okay, confession time over.” Suddenly exhausted, she pointed toward the door. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Right now, you’d better leave. I need to get back to sleep.”

  He stood. “All right. In the morning
, let’s get to work on a better plan, and some sort of timetable.”

  “I still think we should make the offer, just to throw him off base.”

  “I don’t. But, like you said, we’ll talk about this more in the morning.”

  “Good night.” She sighed, then stifled a yawn. “I need my beauty sleep.”

  Though they both knew this was a lie—that she probably wouldn’t sleep another wink that night—he went.

  Surprisingly, after he left she fell into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

  At 5:00 a.m., she came awake to the sound of Marc’s cell phone ringing in the guest bedroom. It gave off a loud, futuristic shrill, worse than any alarm clock, making her wonder when he’d changed the ring tone…and why.

  She heard him answer, his deep voice hoarse and froggy, though she couldn’t make out what he said. Pushing herself out of bed, she stepped into denim shorts and pulled on a bra under her T-shirt.

  In the bathroom, she washed her face and brushed her teeth before deeming herself ready to face the day—and him. Stomach in knots, she tried to settle her nerves, but she feared she already knew the reason for the early call.

  The body of Feiney’s latest victim had been found.

  As she left her bedroom, she nearly collided with Marc, also headed toward the kitchen, still talking on his phone. Brushing past him, she went for the TV first, figuring the Cowtown Killer would once again be all over the news. Exactly where he wanted to be.

  A commercial for a fast-food chain was on instead. A cheerful clown dressed up in a king suit, singing about a huge breakfast sandwich.

  Concluding his phone call, Marc came to stand beside her, his expression bleak. “They found a body,” he said, confirming her guess. “Only one, so far. They’re not sure what happened to the other girl, or even if he has her.”

  “I knew it.” She grimaced. “Though I haven’t heard it on the news yet, I’ll bet he’s set the body up the same way he did last time. Straw cowboy hat over her face. Daisies strewn all over the body.”

  Marc’s grim expression told Lea she was correct.

  “So he’s not innovating.” He dragged his hand through his hair, drawing her gaze. “It’s so freakin’ early. You got any coffee?”

  She nodded, struck again by the same uneasy sense of intimacy she’d felt last night. “The coffeepot is on an automatic timer. It should be done anytime now.”

  “Good.” He gave her a weary smile and returned his attention to the television. “I don’t know if they’ve made a statement yet, but the media monitors the police scanners, so they were all over the scene. The Fort Worth P.D. was keeping them back while the investigators got their pictures and bagged the evidence. I’m gonna need to go down there.”

  She’d thought as much. She’d give anything to be allowed to accompany him. After the news story came on, she’d mention it and see how he reacted.

  Heading toward the kitchen, she got out two mugs and poured coffee. “Cream or sugar?”

  “Black.”

  The same way she drank hers. Carrying them into the living room, she handed one to Marc. “Here you go.” When they both had steaming cups of coffee, they focused again on the TV.

  “Did you ask about the hand?”

  He gave her a blank look. “What?”

  “The victim. Did you ask if she was missing a hand?”

  “No.” He cursed. “The call woke me out of a dead sleep. I didn’t even think of it. I’ll call him back.”

  Punching numbers into his phone, he waited a moment then left a message. “No answer. I’m sure he’ll phone me when he gets a minute.”

  Yet another commercial came on, something about cavemen and bowling. Finally, the station logo and the music that announced the early morning news.

  They led off with a murdered woman’s body found by a Dumpster in back of JR’s, a bar in the Stockyards.

  The report was a sanitized version of what had happened, delivered by a perfectly coiffed woman in a purple silk suit. The police weren’t releasing details, the anchorwoman said, but it was widely believed this was the work of Gerald Feiney, aka the Cowtown Killer. They’d update this supposition once they had confirmation from official sources.

  The report concluded with a warning for young women to be careful when going out to bars.

  Predictable stuff. Less than what she’d expected, since no mention was made of the body’s disposition, which would provide a definite tie-in to the Cowtown Killer.

  She glanced at Marc. “The team put a lid on it, didn’t they?”

  “I’m assuming they did. I didn’t ask.”

  “I think that’s a mistake. People need to know the truth.”

  “They warned the women to be careful.” His dry tone told her he knew, as she did, how much attention the public would pay to this warning.

  “But they need to be told what to watch out for,” she insisted. “That way, they’ll take the warning seriously.”

  “Maybe Stan—or the Fort Worth police chief—is afraid to cause panic. You know how that kind of thing goes.”

  “Yeah, I do. Unfortunately.” She took a deep drink of her coffee. “They need to cause a panic. Feiney killed a lot of people. Women especially should be afraid. That way they’ll be more careful.”

  Even though they both knew human nature. The most dire of warnings would be heeded by few, no matter the cost. It was a sad fact that citizens frequently ignored warnings and pretty much did whatever they wanted, then cried foul when something awful happened.

  Which it would—she had no doubt about that. Clicking the TV off, she looked at him.

  Refilling his cup, he gestured at the table. “Let’s talk. You said something yesterday about coming up with a plan.”

  Frustrated, she jerked her head in a nod. “Yeah. You got a better one than offering to trade me for the girl?”

  “No. But that’s definitely out of the question. I was hoping you’d agree once you slept on it.” His slow smile was like the morning sun blazing over the horizon.

  Stunned, she could only stare. This was getting more and more ridiculous. Collecting herself, she yanked out a chair and dropped into it, indicating the one across from her. “Sit. Let’s figure out something.”

  Taking a long draw from his mug, he straddled the chair across from her. “Shoot. I’m all ears.”

  “Like I said, we’re going on the offensive,” she said, and waited for him to protest. When he only leaned forward, continuing to sip his coffee, watching her over the rim of the mug, she continued. “Starting tonight.”

  “Define offensive.”

  “I thought we could at least scope out the bars. You know he won’t hit JR’s, since he dumped the body there.” Feiney had been fastidious about killing at a different bar every time.

  “Scoping out the bars isn’t a bad idea. It’s not all that good either, but until Feiney contacts us again, we can give it a shot.”

  “You agree?” Surprised, Lea eyed him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “That’s an abrupt about-face from yesterday.”

  “Yeah.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “The team is staking out the bar where the two girls were nabbed. But you and I know he won’t go back there. And it’s most likely he won’t grab another one just yet. He hasn’t escalated that much.”

  “True.” Though she knew he would, the thought of what would happen once Feiney escalated made her shudder.

  “Plus we don’t have a second body,” he mused. “If he hasn’t already killed her, he’ll play with her for a while.”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. When she opened them again, she met his gaze. “Then what’s the point? If Feiney doesn’t even notice we’re out there, why do it at all?”

  “Oh, he’ll notice. Believe me. I’m sure he’s keeping tabs on you.”

  She barely suppressed a second shudder. “I don’t want to think about how. But you should know that just because he might have a captive, there’s no reason to think he won’t
go after someone else. He kept on killing when he was holding me captive. He wanted me to help him.”

  Regarding her thoughtfully, he drummed his fingers on the table. “Are you thinking he might be letting this latest captive replace you?”

  “I don’t know.” She hoped not.

  “More coffee?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t even finished my first cup. You go ahead.”

  “I drink a whole pot most mornings.” His sheepish smile was just as mesmerizing as the others. She stared, bemused.

  “So we agree? Tonight we’re going honky-tonking?”

  Peering at her over the rim of his cup, he finally gave her a slow nod. “Why not? But how do we choose the right bar? He’ll be setting us up.”

  “It won’t matter where we go, as long as we let him know we’re going to be there.”

  “There’s the rub. How do you propose we do that?”

  “Oh, he’ll call again.” She glanced at her watch. “If only to gloat about his recent kill.”

  As if on cue, her cell phone rang. Shooting Marc a look that said, “I told you so,” she flipped it open. Only instead of Feiney, it was Stan, ostensibly checking on her.

  “Just checking to make sure you’re okay. Any problems?”

  This in itself was so unusual she became alert.

  Marc had leaned forward, obviously hoping it was Feiney. After shaking her head to indicate no, she addressed the caller. “I’m fine, Stan. Though I saw on the morning news that ya’ll just found Feiney’s next victim.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Stan bristled.

  “Come on. This is me. We both know who killed that girl.”

  Silence, then finally Stan cleared his throat. “Yeah. Same M.O. as last time. It’s definitely Feiney.”

  “Let me ask you this. Was she missing a hand?”

  “No. We still don’t know where that hand in Kenyon’s fridge came from. How’d you know about that?”

  “Marc told me. Marc and I are…” She deliberately paused before continuing, knowing what inference he’d draw. “Friends.”