On Dangerous Ground. Maggie Price
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Big-time. You and I were in the police gym, for heaven’s sake. A relatively safe place.”
“Unless there’s some jerk cop in your face, wanting to roll around on the floor with you.”
Again, the image of their sweat-slicked bodies locked in an intimate clench flashed in her brain. She moistened her dry-as-dust lips and forced a smile. “There is that.”
A breeze stirred, picking up the ends of her long hair that in all the turmoil she hadn’t bothered to clip back. As if in reflex, Grant reached, caught a few strands and toyed with them. “I confess to being selfish,” he said, his voice as soft as the breeze itself. “I wanted to spend some time with you. Just spend time.”
He was standing close. Close enough that, even in the waning sunlight, she saw the individual crimson threads in his silk tie. The faint lines on either side of his mouth. The tiny specks of granite in the smoky gray eyes that gazed down into hers.
The breeze picked up. She smelled the salty tang of his skin mixed with the overtly male scent of expensive cologne. The heady mix made her knees weak. In another lifetime, she would have closed the distance between them and dissolved into a puddle right there in his arms. She held back a sigh. This wasn’t another lifetime. It was the same one in which she’d proven she could melt into his arms, but that melting had nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with sheer panic followed by desperate humiliation. She would not—could not—do that again to Grant or herself.
When she stepped back, the strands of her hair slid through his fingers. His closed his eyes for the space of a heartbeat.
“I need to tell you about the report I got from the OSBI,” she said, snagging her gym bag off the ground.
Grant looked toward the street where traffic hummed. The hand he’d had in her hair seconds ago curved slowly against his thigh. “And I need to bring you up-to-date on the search for Ellis Whitebear’s twin brother,” he said after a moment. Looking back, he unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and began rolling his sleeves up to reveal tanned, muscled forearms. “Look, I’m not feeling too fresh in all this heat.” His gaze slid over her baggy T-shirt and loose-fitting shorts. “You probably aren’t, either.”
Sky raised an eyebrow. She’d taught two hours of strenuous self-defense to the academy’s female recruits. Then worked up a sweat with Johansen. She’d put off taking a shower so she could talk to Grant before he left the Training Center. Now, her skin was moist from the heat. He was right—she definitely didn’t feel fresh.
“We need to compare notes, I missed lunch and I’m hungry as hell,” he stated, pulling a small ring of keys out of his pocket. “There’s a hole-in-the-wall drive-in two blocks over that serves killer chili dogs, fries and shakes that come in giant gulp size.” He swept his hand toward the Porsche. “They’ve got a couple of ceiling fans hanging from the metal awning. If we leave the top down, it’ll be cool enough to eat in the car.”
Sky blew a slow breath between her lips. She had spent the past six months avoiding Grant Pierce. She knew she should turn down his dinner offer, climb inside her Blazer and drive home. She needed to take a shower. She had a briefcase bulging with lab reports to review. It made sense to ask Grant to call her later so they could compare notes over the phone. That would be the smart thing to do.
Her gaze took in the man who stood inches away, his thick, blond hair rustling in the breeze, his starched shirt stretched appealingly across his broad shoulders, his handsome face an alluring arrangement of planes and shadows. God help her, this was one instant she didn’t want to be smart. She didn’t want to avoid Grant; she wanted to be with him. They would go their separate ways soon enough.
She tilted her head. “You’re sure that hole-in-the-wall has giant gulp shakes?”
Amusement slid into his eyes. “Positive.” He bounced his key ring in his palm. “If you talk nice, I’ll spring for double chocolate.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Does that lame line usually get women into your car, copper?”
The grin he shot her was pure male. “Works every time, Milano.”
“So, the OSBI chemist confirmed your findings.” Grant selected a French fry from the cardboard carrier wedged on the Porsche’s console, then looked over at Sky. He fought a smile when he saw that her eyes were barely visible over the rim of the cup that held her double-chocolate giant gulp shake. Silently he calculated the calories in the chili dog, fries and shake, and figured they might help add back some weight to her too-thin frame.
“Right,” she said, sliding her straw up and down in the creamy drink. “The DNA from the suspect blood found at the Benjamin and Peña crime scenes is identical. You can take that to the bank.”
“Since I checked and made sure Ellis Whitebear is still in his cell on death row, we can also take it to the bank that he has an identical twin brother.”
Sky pursed her lips while gathering up napkins and unused salt packages. “Unless that was actually Ellis’s blood on the bandage found under Carmen Peña’s body,” she mused as she dumped the trash into the paper sack the food had come in.
Grant set his shake aside. He’d thought of that angle, then discarded it for being too far-fetched. He had also worked Homicide long enough to know you never completely wrote off any scenario until you had cuffs on the suspect and a full confession. And sometimes even then you held your breath.
“You really think a man on death row would give a bandage with his blood on it to some other guy to leave at a crime scene?”
“If the man in prison wanted to make it look like he was innocent of the first murder. No way he could have killed the second woman while he was locked in his cell. So, logically, the cops might start to question if he’d actually committed the first crime.”
“If that’s the case, whoever planted the bloody bandage would have made sure the MO’s on both murders matched. That’d give us more reason to think the same person killed both women, and that the real killer had been running around free the whole time. We don’t have identical MO’s. Benjamin died in the communal laundry room off her office at the apartment complex. The suspect stayed around just long enough to cut her throat. Carmen Peña’s killer kidnapped her from her job at the convenience store. Took her to an abandoned house. He probably spent hours with her. Granted, he cut her throat, but he raped her, too. Repeatedly. The only real thing that links the crimes is the identical suspect DNA.”
“That takes us back to the twin brother theory,” Sky said, sliding her empty cup into the sack.
Grant nodded. “I doubt the brother even knows he left the bloody bandage at the house where he took Peña, not when he was so careful about everything else,” Grant continued. “He didn’t leave any prints. No semen, which means he either wore a condom or used a foreign object to rape her. You found no stray hairs on her body.”
“He probably wore a knit watch cap,” Sky stated. “Had it rolled down to cover his hair.”
“No footprints, no fibers from his clothing,” Grant added. “Nothing but the bloody bandage.” He tapped his fingertips against the steering wheel. “The guy was too careful. I put my money on the fact that the bandage was on his neck or face when he kidnapped Peña. The bandage is small, the size a man would use if he got a deep nick shaving. He put it on, and forgot about it. The defense wounds on the victim’s hands and arms suggest she put up a fight. The bandage probably came off in the struggle and wound up under her body. I doubt the guy knows he lost it there.”
“Or maybe he didn’t figure out until later what happened to the bandage.”
Grant thought for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “The body wasn’t discovered until at least two days after she died. He had plenty of time to return to the scene and look for the bandage.”
A car with a spitting muffler sped by on the dimly lit street. Grant flicked a look sideways, then let his gaze rise. A full moon had just broken through a group of oaks on the vacant