Shelby's Secret (Once a Marine, Always a Marine Book 4) (5 page)

“You’ve done some homework.”

“I don’t want anyone around Shelby who can’t be trusted. She tends to trust a bit too easily for my peace of mind, and I won’t have her taken advantage of.”

The woman in front of him was a veritable dragon lady, but he could hear the love ringing in her voice. Shelby could inspire that kind of emotion, which is how she became one of the youngest Entertainers of the Year at the Country Music Awards. Two years in a row. “I will catch this guy.”

“Before he escalates and hurts her?”

Madge was stopped in front of what looked like an office. French doors were closed, and Mike could see Shelby in the dim room. She was huddled under a blanket, wedged into the corner of a brown leather couch. She faced a gorgeous view of the city and wasn’t aware he and Madge were just outside the doors. “I don’t lose. Ever.”

“I hope so, because Shelby has more than her life at stake here.”

Then she moved away before he could question that statement. He opened the door and went inside. The large glass windows showed his approach. He saw her gaze meet his in the reflection.

“Did Madge give you the third degree?” she asked.

Mike smiled a bit grimly. “She just let me know that she’d looked into my background.”

“She’s a bit of a steamroller, but she has my best interests at heart. She always has.”

“Did you read it?” He was genuinely curious if she’d wondered enough to look.

Shelby shook her head. “Madge rattled off the highlights, but looking into your life that way isn’t fair.”

“The way the entertainment field looks into yours?”

She raised her eyebrows slightly.
 

The look in her eyes was more innocent than he could believe, considering that she was a world famous singer.
 

Then she slowly nodded. “I’m not sure how I feel about you reading me that easily, even after all these years. You were doing that back at the station, too.”

“It’s not really reading you, Shel. Anyone not living under a rock has been bombarded with your life, your success, and your love life. You’ve been on the covers of magazines and splashed all over TV for years now.”

She rolled her eyes. “What love life?”

“You were engaged—what was it—five years ago?”

She snorted. Probably the most unladylike thing she’d done since becoming a superstar. The sound made Mike grin. It was such a normal little thing, something she used to do when they were younger.

“That was a train wreck from the beginning, and I never actually told the jerk I’d marry him.”

Mike half sat on the plush arm of the couch, at the other end from Shelby, who was still curled up in the corner. She hadn’t moved an inch since they started talking. She was holding a little too still. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, but her gaze was clear and steady. And she looked amazing. No make-up on, hair in a haphazard bun—she was stunning. “Well, his career took off for about six months after the story broke.”

“And that’s what the ass was after all along anyway. I was just a means to get him noticed.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. The guy was a bum and his career tanked as soon as the news came out that Shelby was no longer seeing him. Mike saw the cell phone on the table in front of her. Face down. He pointed at it because talking about Shelby’s ex-lover was starting a slow, angry sizzle somewhere near his heart. Time to get back to business. “Can I take a look?”

Her voice wavered a tiny bit. “It’s really bad.”

Mike had the absurd urge to scoop her up, blanket and all, and put her in his lap. She looked so sad and small, all bundled up and shut away from everything. One touch might shatter her hard-won composure, though, and he didn’t want to do that to her. Instead, he grabbed the phone from the table. The video was loaded and ready for viewing.

And she was right. The images were worse than the original crime scene.

Shelby’s hand had obviously started shaking during the recording, but the footage was steady enough to get the gist. Another warehouse, but he couldn’t determine the actual size from the small screen. The focal point was a bed. And the woman lying there.

She was naked, with a black satin sheet covering her breasts and genitals. The full-sized bed had splashes of red covering the edges of the mattress that had clearly dripped down to pool on the concrete floor. The illusion was a bed floating on a red pond.

The victim’s eyes were gone. Removed cleanly displaying little blood or damage to the orbital sockets. Her lips were bright red, matching the color of the substance pooled beneath the bed.

And her throat had been cut all the way across. Mike could see the white bone of her spine. Curly blond hair completed the picture and then the music started. Shelby’s third song off her first album. That album had gone platinum. And if he remembered correctly, the video had taken place on water, with Shelby rolling around on a bed singing about her lover being away.

“Can you tell where she is?” she asked.

Mike played it again, focusing on the background this time and not the body at the center of the shot. Finally, he shook his head. “Could be any of a hundred different places downtown. He could have even moved to one of the surrounding cities like Glendale or Peoria.”

“That poor woman,” she whispered.

“I’m forwarding what you have to one of my detectives. They’ll go over the video frame by frame to determine a possible location.”

“What about the first one? Do you know who she is yet?”

“We’re waiting for the autopsy. We’ve got the prints done and dentals, but it’s a matter of matching them up to missing persons. And if she was someone he grabbed from the street, then identification might take longer if she doesn’t have a record.”

“Why is someone doing this?”

“To get your attention. Something set this guy off. What’s changed in your routine lately? Or in your life?” He saw her glance away and stare out the window. “This guy thinks he knows you, intimately. He’s playing back your love songs and setting up his own sick little video homage to you. He’s been watching you, Shelby. Fantasizing about
you
. He wants something from you that only he knows about. We can only guess. So the question is, why now? What happened to make him snap?”

Shelby pushed off the blanket and stood abruptly. She swayed but steadied herself. “I’m not sure, but I need to show you something. It might or might not be relevant. I have a secret of sorts.”

***

“Is that even possible?” Mike asked.

Shelby smiled grimly, knowing he was trying to lighten the mood. “I’ve found that if you have enough money, almost anything is possible.”

When she was sure her legs were steady, she moved toward the French doors that led back into the interior of the house. “House” was a silly word to describe the place. Showpiece was more apt. Filled with artwork and marble and elegant furniture, it lacked the warmth that made a home. The structure was someplace big enough to house her security team and Madge comfortably. As for Shelby, she could have done with a bit less extravagance.

“Come with me.” She looked over her shoulder at the man sitting on the arm of the couch. He should have looked out of place in his jeans and rumpled t-shirt. The band named on the front of his shirt was
Rage Against the Machine
, which was ironic since Mike worked in one of the industries that particular band railed against lyrically.

But he didn’t look out of place. He moved silently, his face set in hard planes. He towered over her, causing a delicious little shiver. He could have been a millionaire playboy for all the notice he gave of his surroundings. As if he’d been raised with that kind of wealth—but he hadn’t been. He wasn’t impressed, and he never would be. Mike didn’t care about money. He cared about right and wrong.

“Tell me about this secret, Shel.”

She shook her head. “It’s better if I show you.” So she led the way to the staircase and went up to the second floor. Mike was right behind her when she stopped in front of a door. The lights were off in this part of the house, so the hallway was dark, but when she opened the door the room glowed inside.

The glow came from all the stars hanging from the ceiling, as well as the nightlight. Shelby didn’t look back at Mike, not sure what his expression would say. Instead, she walked toward the bed and the little figure sprawled out on top of the covers. Wearing the latest Pixar characters, the little girl had kinky-curly blond hair, pink lips that looked like cotton candy, and when her lids were open, sky blue eyes.

“This is my daughter.”

Chapter 5

“Can you focus on that back corner?” Daniel asked.

When the call had come, Daniel hadn’t been asleep, and he hadn’t been alone. The woman in question was a friend with fantastic benefits. They met from time to time to scratch the itch—an arrangement that worked well for two career-driven workaholics not willing to devote time or energy to an actual relationship.

Now he was in the office with one of the lab techs who hadn’t been asleep either. Lance Avery was one of those guys interested in all things techie. He played with the video Mike forwarded, enhancing as much as he could.

Daniel had already watched the video several times, each time searching for something new. Now he focused on everything about the space the girl was in, but the walls were bare. Nothing about the architecture stood out. The warehouse was likely just as generic as the first crime scene. “Damn, I was hoping for something useful.”

Lance shrugged, still playing with his system. “Give me a couple minutes. I want to zoom in on the right side. Something over there is blurry.”

Daniel saw the dark blur. About six feet high, it could have been a stack of barrels. Or crates. Smack in the middle of the blur was a white strip. Daniel moved closer to the screen. They had a still image from the video projected onto a wall in one of the bigger offices.

“Could be a label,” Lance said, squinting up from his computer.

Damn, it could be. Daniel tried to quell the excitement. He still couldn’t read it. “Any way to enhance the shot further?”

“Hey, this isn’t
CSI
—that computer shit they do isn’t even real. I can only focus so much before I lose everything and it becomes one big pixel nightmare.”

Running a hand through his hair, Daniel nodded. “I know, man. But something’s got to give. We have to find the crime scene before the fucking rats get there.”

“Rats nothing. Have you
seen
what those feral cats can do?”

Daniel grinned. “Dog person, huh?”

“Hell yeah. If I die, I don’t want my pet eating off my face, and those cats will. Dude, the moment you die, you’re nothing but kibble to them.”

The image cleared a bit more and it was a stack of crates. The thick white stripe was still blurry, but Daniel could make out a logo of some kind. “What is that?”

Avery had a magnifying glass over the screen of his computer. “Maybe a crown or hat of some kind? I can’t make it any bigger, or we lose the image altogether.” He held out the magnifier to Daniel as he scooted back to make more room.

Skirting the desk, Daniel moved closer to Avery’s screen. With the image magnified, it did look like a crown, but with three lines to the right and some letters that were too close together to make sense of. “Can you screen shot this? I’ll probably go blind looking at logos, but I know I’ve seen this somewhere.”

Hearing Avery busy tapping on keys, Daniel wandered back to the larger image.
Who are you?

But the victim couldn’t tell them anything, except who she was . . . eventually. Maybe that would help, maybe it wouldn’t. If she was indigent, then she was a random target that fit the killer’s needs. But if she wasn’t, then tracking her movements in the days before she was taken might provide useful leads.

“Oh shit.”

Daniel turned at the exclamation, eyebrow raised, armed crossed. “What?”

Avery was almost vibrating with triumph. Still tapping away on his computer, he turned his monitor and pointed. “I know what that symbol is.”

***

Tara Shumway was finally off shift.

He was waiting. He watched as she pulled the tie from her hair, letting the red corkscrew curls loose and running both hands through her head. He thought he could hear her moan at the release of all that hair.

Leaving the lobby of the emergency room, Tara glanced around before heading into the parking garage. The night had been busy, and that she was looking forward to getting out of her scrubs and into a bubble bath. He’d heard her conversation with a co-worker while they were on a break.

It was two a.m., and a good time to hunt. The voice was quiet, and he could focus and maintain the control he needed to use his disguise.

She held her purse close, keys in hand, like she did every night—keeping her head up and her body alert. Tara’s daddy had taught her well, and she was always vigilant. He knew all about her, and she talked about her Daddy often. But his warnings wouldn’t help her. Not tonight.

“Excuse me?” His voice startled her into a little jump.

She turned, wide blue eyes blinking into focus. She’d been deep in thought and not paying attention.