Cuffed & Collared (3 page)

A teasing smile played across her lips. “Neither do I, Mr. Ramsey. Stay out of my case, or you’ll discover just how little shit I do take and what I do to those who try to give it to me.”

Kyle watched her walk away, down the hall toward the bedroom. His teeth clenched over her high-handed orders, and his hands curled into fists. He was determined to look into Jazz’s death himself, because he was not intimidated in the least by Sergeant Malloy’s threat. But he was something else. He was excited by it and that fact just made him angrier.

****

Less than an hour later, Kyle stormed into his condo, flung his keys on the counter, then stopped dead in his tracks. Overwhelming emotion, grief and anger, froze him to the spot. His body shook with the effort it took to keep himself under control before he realized he didn’t have to anymore. Here in the safety of his private world, he could let go.

He hated living alone, apart from his daughters, his marriage broken beyond repair. But at that moment, he was glad no one was here to see him break down into the kind of tears he’d learned to suppress in early childhood. He bent at the waist and pressed the heels of his hands against his watery eyes. A sob ripped past his lips, and again, he was grateful to be alone in his misery.

Losing people he loved through old age, accident, and even illness was always hard. This was different. Murder was a kind of violation he’d never expected to deal with. Wrapping his head around the fact, accepting that Jazz was gone for good because someone chose to rob him of the rest of his life was impossible.

As Kyle stood, rocking with his grief, he fought to regain some semblance of rational thought. He wouldn’t do Jazz any good falling apart. He told himself all of this, and yet the tears insisted on having their time to spill out and wring him dry.

Long minutes later, he was finally done. With shaky steps, he headed for the wet bar and poured a couple of fingers of scotch. He downed that quickly and refilled the glass before stumbling to the couch. He slouched bonelessly into the cushions, sipping the second drink even though he wanted to knock it back, too. Hollowed out as he felt from his crying jag, getting shitfaced and being hung-over the next day at work wasn’t going to help his friend.

Neither would focusing on his residual anger at the cop in charge of the investigation. The woman had been infuriating, believing Jazz had conducted a kinky sex life that had led to his death. How dare she suggest such a thing? The pull of attraction he’d felt in her presence only served to add to his ire. She was flat out wrong in the direction she was heading, and he was an idiot for wanting her on any level.

With his head pressed against the back of the sofa, he pictured the last time he’d been with Jazz in this very room. They’d tied one on months ago when they had nothing better to do on a Saturday night. The evening had devolved into a bitch session, no other word for it, about their ex-wives, how much divorce sucked, and the difficulty of finding women to date or even just fuck given their heavy workload. Or, at least Kyle had complained about his dry spell. He’d also confessed to his best friend that the stress of the divorce and work was getting to him in a way it hadn’t ever before.

Jazz had suddenly fished around his pants’ pocket and handed him a business card. “I’ve got just the thing for you, my friend.”

Kyle had reached for the card and narrowed his eyes to focus on the tiny writing in stark black against a snow white background. There was simply a name, an address, and a phone number. He raised his eyebrows.

“Club Nemesis? That’s the goddess of divine retribution. So, what is this? A strip club or something? Not my style since college, you know that.”

“Not a strip club. It’s different,” his friend had claimed with a sly, drunken grin. “When you get tired of being the big shot litigator, stop by. You’ll sleep like a baby afterward, I promise.”

Kyle had tossed the card aside dismissively when Jazz wouldn’t divulge more. The memory of that night jarred him out of his miserable stupor. What had he done with the card? Reaching over to the side table, he yanked open the drawer. The card lay inside, slightly crinkled. Snatching it up, he studied it again with his more sober eyes. There still wasn’t anything to indicate what the club was like or what relevance it might have. Yet a feeling grew in the pit of his stomach that this piece of information might be critical to solving Jazz’s murder.

He should call the cop, Sergeant Malloy. Of course he should, but first he’d look into the club himself. He was a man who got things done, and at that moment, finding who killed his friend was paramount.

Chapter Two

“Hi, Pops.” Regan sauntered into her father’s living room and was gratified to see him sitting in his wheelchair watching television. There was something very comforting in this mundane predictability. It was especially true given the long, wretched day she’d had.

He turned the large wheels of his chair with the power of his massive arms in order to see her. “It’s past ten, and I bet you skipped dinner again.”

“Since when don’t peanut butter crackers out of the vending machine chased down by a cold cup of coffee count as dinner?” she asked.

“Since it’s your dinner we’re talking about, not mine,” her father retorted. Jack Malloy had been a cop for more than ten years before a drug dealer put him in that wheelchair while resisting arrest. “Lucky for you, I ordered take-out.”

She had meant to only make a quick check on her father before going upstairs to her apartment on the second floor of his duplex, but the smell of Chinese food lured her into the room. “I suppose a few spring rolls and some sesame chicken wouldn’t hurt.” Sitting down on the sofa, she snatched up a carton and a pair of chopsticks to dig in. It was just what she needed. Bless her Pops.

Muting the TV with his remote, her father asked, “Got something big going on down at the station, have you?”

“A serial killer,” she replied with a mouthful of food.

Her father’s eyes went wide. “Christ, Jesus, you’re not serious?” Unlike her mother’s side or her cousins, the Callaghans, her father was recent to America, having immigrated as a child. He still had a bit of Irish in his voice.

When she nodded to indicate she was indeed serious, he shook his head in dismay, although a glimmer of excitement lit his eyes. It gave Regan great satisfaction, knowing her work added some meaning to her father’s otherwise restricted life. With dead legs and a dead wife, he worked hard to keep active and interested in things and not wallow in the house.

“We haven’t had such a thing around here since the Strangler. You’re sure?”

Regan swallowed hard. “Why does everyone keep asking me that question?” Like her lieutenant. Fuller was a good cop and a good boss, but he was skeptical of her theories. “I’m as sure as I can be with only two victims. The M.O. for both murders is too similar and two bizarre for it to be anything else, unless we find a close connection between the vics to indicate it was directed solely at the two of them,” she conceded.

No such tie between Morales and Bennington had been uncovered, however, and her gut told her one wouldn’t be. Although the men were of a type, a rare type in her experience, they were too dissimilar to imply a personal relationship between them.

Her father pursed his lips and nodded gravely. “There’ll be hell to pay when it gets out. I still hear talk of how frightened women in this city were fifty years ago.”

Regan bit a spring roll in half, chewed, and swallowed. “Well, this time women appear to be perfectly safe.”

“Ah, crap, are we talking little boys, then?”

“No, grown men, and Pops, the killer is a woman.” She grinned at her father’s astonishment and quickly filled him in on her theory.

“What kind of man wants a woman to hit him?” he mused.

She had been wondering the same thing since Morales’ death, and she had no real answer yet. It was simply kink as far as she could tell. The images of her two victims popped up in Regan’s head, and because their killer had been careful not to touch their faces, they remained as gorgeous in death as they had been in life. She would have been happy to let either of them into her bed and into her body. Would she have been willing to tie them up and hit them, too? Sure, she felt a little thrill every once in a while when she took down some punk on the street, but this was different. It was cold-blooded—no, make that hot-blooded—and supposedly arousing.

No, she couldn’t quite imagine herself doing it. That is, until another image came to mind. Kyle Ramsey, a man in need of a good spanking in her estimation. He was too arrogant and handsome for his own good, or hers. And gorgeous was only the half of it.

There was something intoxicating about that man. She had sat and interviewed him like she would any other witness, and yet all she really wanted to do was toss her notepad and pen away, strip off her clothes, and straddle his body. She had been so wet when she returned to the station that she changed into spare panties and jeans she kept in her locker.

Thinking about him again was having the same effect, which was really gross considering her father was sitting only a few feet away. She gulped down the rest of her food, telling herself that chopsticks in no way represented a Freudian cock before she answered her father’s question.

“I have no idea, but JoJo uncovered the best lead we have. Both victims belonged to a club that caters to this type of fetish. I already interviewed the woman who runs it in connection with the first murder and came up with nothing helpful. This time, I’m going in strong and hard. It’s got to be the connection we’re looking for. For all we know, the killer works there.”

“Sounds about right. You want some ice cream?” he asked as she started clearing the empty boxes and left-over food.

“No, thanks,” she said with a smile.

“You’re too skinny, you know.”

“I have to be to chase punks,” was her teasing reply. “I’m going to dump these in the kitchen before heading up. Do you need anything, Pops?”

“Nothing, thanks, darlin’.”

“See you tomorrow, then.” She pressed a quick kiss on her father’s head when she passed him.

It wasn’t cool, living above her father in Charlestown, her old Boston neighborhood. She had grown up in the duplex, although in a small room in the downstairs apartment where her father stilled resided. Now she occupied the rental part that had helped her parents make the mortgage payments for many years. Not that she was technically a tenant, because her father refused to accept rent. He didn’t need it, he said, and she knew it was true. Her mother’s life insurance policy had paid off the last of the home debt.

No, there was nothing fun or sexy about where she lived, and bringing guys home was always tricky. What a good thing it was, then, that she had so little time for what amounted to a pathetic love life. Being a cop was her first and only love, anyway, the one thing she had wanted since she was a little girl.

As an only child, she had been the center of her parents’ world, and she had worshipped her father. She still did. Her mother’s sister had lived a block away with her cop husband and their three boys. Daire, Ronan, and Finn had treated her as not just an honorary sister but an honorary brother, too. Aunt Sheila and Uncle Rory were gone, cut down in a double murder that still remained unsolved despite her cousins’ efforts. Ronan and Finn had started their own families, albeit a hair unconventional ones. Daire still rattled around in his boyhood home, so Regan didn’t feel terribly odd living above her father.

Helping her father to get along, now that her mother was no longer around to do it, was no great hardship. It was more than duty. It was devotion, and if at the age of thirty, she was beginning to feel the lack of a husband and children, she only had to remind herself of how getting home at ten o’clock was not an unusual occurrence in her life. There wasn’t time for love and family.

There was time for sex, though, she reminded herself as she stripped off her clothes, washed her face, and brushed her teeth. There were enough nights when she went home with a guy or brought one back with her to keep her itch scratched. She had even had several relationships, although work had always strangled them dead. It didn’t matter. None of those nice, young men had really satisfied her. There was always something lacking, although she couldn’t really say what it was.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, Regan opened the bottom drawer of her night stand. Here was where she kept those men that truly satisfied her. They had beautiful faces and perfect bodies and were absolutely silent. She picked up her tablet, an expensive treat that allowed her to see thousands of men at the mere touch of buttons. She pulled up a relatively new image of a beefy blond lying naked on the beach. She hummed her approval and dipped one hand down her stomach to the junction of her thighs.

As late as it was, Regan wanted to take her time. She studied the model and let her fingers play lightly on the outside of her panties. They were already wet, because she was wet. It seemed as if she had been wet the entire day. She made lazy circles with her middle finger, pushing it just a tad between the slick folds.

She let her fantasy begin, imagining that she was touching not herself but the man in the picture. With her eyes half-closed, she could hear the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore and smell the salt water. In her mind, she was there, lying next to him, the sand rough against her skin. She started with his hair, she always started there, grasping and tugging the blond locks. Blond. She loved blond. It was rare and beautiful. You could get a man’s attention by anchoring your fingers through the strands and yanking back to make him look you in the eye. She imagined her fantasy man doing just that, giving her a look of invitation when his gaze met hers.

Yet there was only so much fun to be had with hair, so her fingers disentangled themselves, slid around his jaw and down his neck to his pecs. She liked a smooth, rock-hard chest and ran the pads of her fingertips back and forth across it, the skin slick from suntan lotion. It was silly for men to have nipples, of course, but they were there, so why not play with them? A caress, a tweak, a nip with her teeth. She loved the look on a man’s face when he realized she could arouse him with his nipples. Pressing her finger in to flick at her clit, she imagined she was doing just that.