Natural Law(44)
He faced her. “I told you, that wouldn’t work.”
“She knows who you are now, Mac. You could bring the whole squad in there, and it wouldn’t matter.”
“Yes, it would. Because she still has sense, and it might make her back off me and take another couple of victims to distract us for awhile. It’s a double-edged sword. If she knows me this well, she knows I’m the genuine article, even if I am a cop. It’s male subs that get her off, rouse the bloodlust. I’m a double treasure to her.” He waved the bag. “With this, she’s looking for a one-on-one gunfight.
“And we’re supposed to give her that gunfight?”
“We’re supposed to make her think we’re giving her that.” Mac hesitated, then made the decision he hadn’t wanted to make. He had to accept Violet’s offer, and overcome his desire to protect her. He didn’t like her being involved, but she was a cop, had taken the oath just as he had, to protect and serve. It would be an insult to her not to allow her to help. Even more important, it would be a disservice to the three dead men. Whatever resources offered to him, he had to use them. For them.
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Even so, it was an effort to hand over the card, not snatch it back when Darla reached for it. “She’s my back up.”
You’re a male chauvinist pig, Mackenzie.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Buzz off, sugar,” he muttered.
Darla gave him an odd look, took the card, looked it over. Did a double take. “You going outside the squad now, Mac?”
She’s already on the inside with me,” he said, keeping his gaze level with hers.
“She’ll watch my back and she wanted you to have that as an alternate contact. I hope…” he cleared his throat. “You’ve respected my privacy, gone above and beyond, but this is my case, my job. She’s volunteering for the duty. I’d hate to see it come back and bite her in the ass.”
“She got the experience to cover you in something like this?”
“Four years with state, a couple years before that as a Marine MP. I think she’ll do well enough. What she lacks in direct experience, she’s got in grit.”
“All right, then.” She pointed to the bag, “But this makes me real itchy, Mac. Let’s close this one. At the rate she’s piling up a body count, we’re going to have to move fast to keep the S&M angle out of the news. And the families have enough to deal with as it is.”
“No argument there.”
“Detective?”
Mac turned, cursed inwardly as he saw the young woman standing in the doorway.
The sister, pale but determined-looking.
“I’m Mara Turner, Edward’s sister.” She hesitated, then the words tumbled out of her, as if she were forcing them from herself rapidly so she’d get them all out at once before she could rethink the decision. “I needed to tell you…I knew about… Edward’s preferences. When I was staying at his place once, I found a magazine. We talked and I was open to hearing about it.” She colored at Mac’s lifted brow. “No, I’m not into it or anything, not at all, but he was my brother, and I mean, it’s the twenty-first century, you know? He was a good person with a good heart, and I trusted his judgment. He seemed glad to have someone… he trusted, to talk with it about, an open mind that linked him between that world and the one we knew him in. I just…I wanted to tell you that about three weeks ago he told me he’d been seeing someone really special. I think he was even a little in love with her. I told him he should introduce her to Dad, that this was just one aspect of his life. He didn’t, I mean…I take boyfriends home to meet Dad, and we sure as hell don’t talk about our sex life.” She managed a ghost of a smile that trembled around the edges.
“He said no.” Her attention drifted over to the house, to the bedroom window behind which her brother lay murdered. “He said she’d asked him herself, recently, if he was going to introduce her to Dad. Edward told me that he had said no, that he didn’t want to mix that part of his life… he couldn’t take the risk of integrating the two.
He was worried he’d hurt her, which is why I guess he called and talked to me about it, 154
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because it was bothering him. He cared. He didn’t like hurting people. Then a couple days later when we talked he said she was fine with it, that they were going out this weekend.”
“Did he describe her? Give a name?”
She shook her head, brushing away the tears that wouldn’t stop running. With a nod of thanks, she accepted the Kleenex Darla handed her from her purse.
“No,” she sniffled. “He never told me that, said he had to respect her privacy as carefully as he’d guarded his own. I wish…” her voice hitched and she turned away. “I wish that hadn’t mattered so much to him. I wish he were alive.” Darla moved to put an arm around the girl as she broke down completely again, sobbing. The sergeant murmured to her, cast Mac a quick glance before she guided her back into the house.
Mac turned and faced Edward Turner’s home, his eyes hard and hot as fired steel.
“Your little bloodbath is over, sweetheart,” he said between his teeth. “You come after me this time. You may take me down, but if I go, you’re going down with me. So help me God, this is your last one.”
He crushed the plastic evidence bag in his hand and headed back down the walkway, to start the painstaking process of going back over the room one more time for every possible clue.
“Mac, Mac!” Darla was hurrying after him, holding her radio.
“Sister okay?”
“Fine, fine. It’s not that.” She stopped at his side, taking a breath. “When you handed that card to me, I glossed over the name, just focused on the fact she was a trooper. But I know her name. You’ve been here, what? An hour?” He nodded, his brow furrowed. “What is it, Sarge?” The radio beeped and she raised a finger, responded. “I’m here, Roscoe.”
“Yeah, Sergeant.” The radio crackled in her hand. “I got it for you. The name of that trooper that got shot about a half hour ago.”
Mac stared at Darla. Everything in him stopped. Blood, breath, heart. Darla’s hand reached out, closed on his wrist as they waited three tense seconds for Roscoe to complete his message.
“Violet Siemanski. They’ve got her at Tampa General.” 155
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Chapter 18
As he had told Violet, his vehicle of choice was the Honda VTX motorcycle, and he was thankful that was what he had used to get him to the crime scene.
For the most part, he obeyed the law and practiced safe driving, except when he could find back roads where he could really cut loose and enjoy all the power the Honda had to offer. Now, he weaved in and out of Tampa traffic, went up on shoulders, barely stopped to check before he roared through intersections, cut the wrong way down one-way streets, and reached Tampa General’s emergency room nearly nine minutes after he bolted from the Turner house.
It was breaking all the rules, and he didn’t care. He flashed his badge as he went past the emergency staff. “The officer that was shot.”
“Exam One,” the nurse responded automatically, and Mac was around the corner and striding away before she could say anything further.
The curtain was pulled back about a third of the way, and so he saw her right away, sitting on an exam table.
She was wearing a hospital gown, her hair in a loose ponytail on her shoulders, her makeup gone. She looked tired, vulnerable, young. Doing her best to mask it, she was carrying on a half-hearted banter with the two troopers standing in the room, but he could feel her fragility. It wasn’t just a resonance of his own fear. Where they couldn’t see it but he could, her hand clutched the edge of the table. The rest of her was perfectly still, except for the slight alterations of her facial expression, as if she was concentrating all physical manifestations of what was going on inside her in that one hand, that one tiny tremor. The top tie of the gown was loose, so he could see the bandage. The bullet had taken a chunk out of the surface area between her collar bone and neck. An inch to the left, the slug would have torn through her throat. A few inches higher, it would have been her face. Few inches lower, through the chest.
It filled him with a fury for her, a fury he wanted to expel by breaking something, someone. But from Roscoe’s report, there was no one to expend his violence upon.
Violet had shot and killed her assailant, a junkie who panicked when she stopped him for an expired tag, who had fired at her point blank out the driver’s window.
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He stepped through the curtain, and her head turned. The first thing he saw in her face was panic. Then her expression altered, and what he saw there made his heart squeeze up hard in his throat.
Relief. Overwhelming relief.
Tears welled up in her eyes, but she blinked rapidly to try and hide the reaction that Mac had a feeling had stunned her as much as it did him.
He was to her in two steps, taking that shaking hand in his, zoning in immediately on where she was holding in her fear. He squeezed it, reinforcing the message that he was here. He was here. He wanted to pick her up, cradle her, but she was a cop, and he understood what she could and couldn’t do. But he wouldn’t keep it out of his face, his anger, his fear, his desire to shake her and hold her both.