Bucking Bronc Lodge 04(20)

Frustrated, he pulled the file on the fifth victim, the woman who had died while Dugan was in prison.

June Kelly. The same physical characteristics—dark hair, brown eyes.

June apparently lived with her boyfriend, Wally Carlton, who was in the marines and currently deployed. She’d been a single mom, the only victim with children so far—well, other than Marie—and worked at a coffee shop outside of Austin.

According to friends, she had been faithful to her husband while he was overseas, but one of her husband’s friends who had recently returned from Iraq had been spending a lot of time with her and her little girl.

Maybe they had passed the friendly stage to something more?

Dugan had certainly traveled around. He probably thought choosing victims from different counties would slow the lawmen down from connecting the crimes, but computers made communication between departments easy.

Still, Dugan hadn’t physically murdered June. Someone else had.

Because they’d been impressed with Dugan’s work and wanted to win his approval? Because they were working together? Or because he wanted the same glory and fame the press had dolled onto the Slasher?

If the men were partners, the murders could have been a game. They might have even taken turns committing the crimes, establishing alibis for some to throw off the cops, then showing off their kills to one another.

The last file made him lose his breath.

Marie...

His hands shook as he flipped it open and looked at the photo. The crime scene photos were gruesome, almost identical to the other victims.

But the M.O. didn’t fit—he and Marie hadn’t been married. And she hadn’t been cheating. Although she had been dating someone else, which Dugan could have perceived as cheating.

No. This kill was personal, meant to get revenge against him.

Blackpaw’s theory nagged at him. He wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t at least consider the possibility that the man she’d been dating, Paul Belsa, could have killed her for some reason and made it look like Dugan.

Belsa could have somehow gained access to the police files or read the trial transcripts and learned the details.

Acting on instinct, he looked him up on Google. He clicked the link to the first website and information about Belsa’s business filled the screen, a list of international commercial real estate deals that were impressive.

That must have been how Marie met him, through the real estate office where she used to work.

His pulse drumming, Miles punched Belsa’s name into the police database and ran a check on him, but nothing showed. Not even a parking ticket.

That seemed odd, but not odd enough to paint him as a murder suspect. Besides, what motive would he have for killing Marie?

Wiping sweat from his brow, he closed her file, then focused on Dugan. The profiler insisted that understanding Dugan’s past would help them understand his motives and catch him. So far, it hadn’t worked. And he didn’t want to understand why the man would butcher women.

But if he had to get inside his head to catch him, he’d damn well do it.

Next he skimmed the interviews with Dugan. Dugan had been smooth, slick, confident, almost in-their-faces with the fact that he was smarter than the law. He also hadn’t indicated any animosity toward women, which Miles had expected to come through. No strict religious upbringing, which sometimes was the case with offenders of this type.

In fact, according to Dugan, he’d had the perfect family. A stay-at-home mother, devoted father, and he was a single child who they’d doted on. His mother had died of cancer ten years before and his father had been killed in a car accident. Neither event appeared to have triggered Dugan’s killing spree.

So what had set the man off?

A scraping sound jarred him from his thoughts, and Miles went to the window and looked outside. No cars, no animals in the yard...no one that he could see. But still, he felt as though someone was out there.

The scraping sound echoed again, and he frowned, then realized it was just a tree branch blown against the glass. Suddenly, another sound broke the quiet.

Thrashing. Something hit the floor. A cry.

Timmy.

His heart jumped to his throat, and he raced into his son’s room. The night-light he’d installed glowed softly, allowing him just enough light to see that there wasn’t an intruder.

But Timmy was thrashing in the bed, whimpering and crying, fending off the monsters in his sleep.

Miles swallowed back the pain the sight stirred, then lowered himself on the bed beside his son and shook him gently. Timmy jerked awake, his eyes full of terror.

“It’s all right, sport, I’m here.”

Timmy whimpered again, a raw sound that tore at Miles, and Miles stretched out beside him and pulled him against his chest. “I won’t let anything else hurt you, Timmy. Not ever again.”