Cut and Run (Criminal Profiler 2)

Both stood still, breathless and savoring the last remnants of the climax. He smoothed his hand over her belly in a possessive, almost regretful way, as he slowly pulled out of her and stepped back.

He vanished into the bathroom, and as he discarded his condom, she reached for her panties and bra. She shimmied into both and sat on the edge of the bed as she pulled her thigh highs on. He came out of the bathroom and shrugged on his shirt. She stepped into her pants and tucked in her blouse. Without a word she turned away from him, and he zipped them up. She worked the left and then right shoes on, and then tipping her head and jostling her hair back, she put her earrings back on.

He was buttoning his shirt, but she could again feel him watching.

She picked up her purse, caught the rigid set of his jaw. “Keep me posted on the Ledbetter case. And be safe, Captain.”

“Will do.”

As she moved past him, he caught her arm and held her. She watched, uncertain. And then he leaned in and for the first time, kissed her on the lips. It was still hungry, but there was also something deeper entwined with the desire.

When he pulled back, she moistened her lips. “A kiss? Are we going steady, Captain?”

“There’s nothing steady about us.”

“Thankfully, no.”

He released her arm. “Why’d you say yes to me the first time?”

“I don’t know.” She’d been very self-conscious that first time he’d entered her, and he must have sensed it had been a while.

Now without another word, she left the hotel room, the door shutting behind her as she made her way to the elevator. Wanting and loneliness trailed behind her, and she quickened her pace, knowing sooner or later they’d catch up to her.

In his car outside the Driskill Hotel, he tugged at the cuffs of his custom-made shirt, pleased that he’d blended so well with the city’s finest in their swanky hotel. There was a time when he would never have made it past the front door. The bellman would have taken one look at his ripped jeans and dirty hands and called the cops. But those days, he kept reminding himself, were long gone. Not only would he never go back, but he would do whatever it took to keep them as far away from him as possible.

He’d have followed Faith if not for the Texas Ranger who’d caught the elevator just as its doors were closing. He had seen the Ranger arrive earlier and noted the two had exchanged a few words, but then they had appeared to go their separate ways. Until the elevators.

So Faith and the Ranger had a thing. Interesting. No one else had seemed to notice them. Attention to detail was what had gotten him off the streets and earned him a reputation as one of the best to call when a problem needed to be discreetly taken care of. Granted, this latest list of names was going to be a challenge, but that’s why he got paid the big bucks.

The front doors of the hotel lobby opened, and Faith stepped out into the ring of light. She glanced at her phone as the bellman approached and a black four-door sedan pulled up. She tipped the bellman, slid into the back seat, and the car drove off, its taillights vanishing around the corner.

When he’d seen her picture in the lobby, he’d made a few inquiries about her in general. She enjoyed a solid standing as a forensic pathologist, had a curious mind, and had a reputation for being tenacious. He wasn’t sure why the likes of Jack Crow and Faith McIntyre were on the same list, but it wasn’t for him to question, only to execute orders.

He still didn’t know how much she did or didn’t know about the package, but that didn’t really matter. She was on the list, so he would make the time to have a chat with her.

His phone vibrated with an alert from the camera he’d posted at the country ranch. As he glanced at the screen, he wasn’t sure what he expected. A random coyote. A sagebrush’s prickly arms reaching up toward a moonlit sky.

He sure had not expected to see a woman walking toward the stones in the dark. She knelt, ran her hand over the rock, and then looked to the other two as if she’d recognized them for what they were.

He stared at her face for a long moment. Then did a double take in the direction of the car that had just carried Faith away. The woman at the ranch looked exactly like Faith. Jack had been so mutinously silent during their chat, and now he knew why. There’d not been one baby on that night in 1988, but two. Twins.

When the phone vibrated with a text, he cursed until he saw the number.

He perched a cigarette on his lips and flicked the flint wheel of a gold-plated lighter until a flame appeared. He inhaled deeply, savoring the burn as the smoke flowed out of his nose and mouth.

Are we on track with our project?

He stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette and then typed. All is going according to plan.

Have you found it?

He hesitated. Not yet. But I will.

Watching the woman walk back to the truck that he knew belonged to Jack Crow, he could feel the skin on the back of his neck prickle the way it did when there was a problem. Who the hell was she? And then it hit him. She was Jack’s kid. Macy Crow. She was the little kid in all the photos he’d smashed. When she had looked up at the camera, her gaze had been defiant and annoyed.

You need to wrap this up, his employer typed.

So you’ve told me. He was a professional and didn’t need coaching.

All this needs to go away quietly and quickly.

The tone of the text reminded him that no matter how far he’d climbed, there would always be someone adding their two cents. Very annoying, and he had his limits. I’m on it.

Macy had been to the ranch, no doubt tipped off by Crow. If she was curious enough to go to the ranch at night alone, she was tenacious like her old man. He admired her grit.

Where would he send Macy next, if he were Crow?

When

the answer came, he almost laughed.

CHAPTER SIX

Monday, June 25, 11:50 p.m.

Macy checked into a local, nondescript hotel that looked exactly like every other in the chain. With a pizza and diet soda and her backpack on her shoulder, she quietly slipped into a room near the staircase. Since she’d become an agent, she’d gotten more careful about knowing her exits and always having a retreat strategy mapped out in her head.

She tossed the pizza box on the bureau and her backpack on the bed. She grabbed a slice of pizza and turned on the shower. As she pulled off her hair tie, she bit into the pizza and toed off her boots. The first bite reminded her she’d not eaten in almost a day, and she polished off the slice in seconds. She stripped off her jacket, weapon and holster, shirt, and jeans and kicked her dusty clothes to the side as the steam rose up in the bathroom.

She stepped under the steaming spray, letting the heat sink into her muscles, and thought about what needed to be done. It was a given she would have to contact local police and let them know about the house and suspected old graves.

It would be easy to stay in the shower and drain every last bit of hot water from the hotel boiler, but that wasn’t going to help Jack.

“Get it together, Macy.” She shut off the water, toweled dry, and wrapped her hair and body in new towels. She grabbed two more slices of pizza, sat on her bed, and opened her computer. She went directly to YouTube and searched “Faith McIntyre, Travis County.”

Several results appeared immediately. The top one was a news report from earlier in the summer titled SAN MARCOS’S BODY RANCH. She took another bite of pizza and clicked on the link.

The first camera shots were of a metal fence enclosing land covered by tall grass and grazing goats. A young reporter stood at the entrance by a crude gate and started spouting statistics about the Texas State University Forensic Anthropology Center in San Marcos. It was a research facility stocked with donated bodies, stripped of all their clothing and laid out on their backs so that scientists could study decomposition rates. The camera panned over several bodies protected by wire cages.