Pitch Black (13 page)

In close confines, the sexual attraction he’d been telling himself did not exist had become an elephant sitting in the backseat. A whole herd of elephants. Because even when snappish and frightened, the woman was still attractive enough to make his heart skip a beat when he looked at her.

“Of course I’m doing it,” she finally said with a sigh, after he’d almost forgotten his own question. “But you’d better drive faster. I usually post by noon. Twelve-thirty at the latest. Won’t your guy think it’s strange if I don’t?”

“Yes.” His foot pressed the gas pedal harder. “We want to stick as close to your normal routine as we possibly can.”

“I know.” Staring at the dashboard as if it held answers to some deep question, she added in a low voice, “Just how deep am I about to dive into the psychotic end of the gene pool, Alec?”

A frown tugged at his mouth at the hint of nervousness in her voice. “Deep. But not for long and not into shark-infested waters.”

“Yeah, right.” She turned in her seat to face him. “If I was a character in a book or on an episode of
Criminal Minds
, I’m sure I’d be feisty, brave, and raring to go. But to tell you the truth, I’m scared spitless.”

He dropped a hand on hers and squeezed. Her slender fingers were ice-cold. Rubbing them lightly, he shared the warmth of his skin, though he knew some of Sam’s coldness probably came from the fear that had her in its grip.

He liked her more for the admission. For the fear. It showed she had common sense, was intelligent enough to know what she was letting herself in for. But he didn’t want it overwhelming her. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Sam. The unsub has no idea you’re working with us, or that we’re watching.”

“Unsub?”

“Unknown subject. He’d have no reason to target you at all.”

“Unless I piss him off.”

“You won’t,” he insisted. “All you have to do is act interested in what he has to say. We want him to keep coming back to your site. If he thinks you’re listening, he might do it, if only to try to prove he’s smarter than you. If we’re lucky, since he doesn’t know we’ve pegged him as our guy, he’ll post from work or from his house and then we’ll have him.”

It made sense; the plan was a good one. Still, Alec hated the thought of this woman exchanging even written words with the man who had killed so many.

“Thank you,” she murmured. It wasn’t until he felt her fingers tighten that he realized she was thanking him for warming her hand.

He pulled away, reaching for the controls to turn up the heat another notch. Though, honestly, he felt like opening a window and getting a solid faceful of cold air so he’d stop noticing things like the way she said his name. Not to mention how smooth her skin was or the way her hair smelled sweet, like something tropical, in the close confines of the car.

Wrapping both hands on the wheel, he shifted in his seat and put up a mental wall. A big one covered with Do Not Climb signs.
No climbing on the witness, jackass
.

His annoyance at his own reaction to her made him reach for something to keep that wall in place despite her warmth and her smell and the hitch in her voice when she’d asked how deep she was getting. “I still can’t believe you didn’t trust me with your CPU,” he said.

“Huh?”

He hadn’t wanted to drag her to D.C., and had tried to get her to let him take it. They needed to go through her old cache of e-mails, to see if the Professor had ever reached out to her before, perhaps under a different name. Figuring she could use a laptop to post to her message board from home, he’d planned to tell her what to say by phone. But she wouldn’t let her damned computer out of her sight.

“If you had let me take it, you wouldn’t be sitting here freezing your fingers off in a government car with a heater that blows cold air. Don’t you own gloves?”

“You know how socks disappear in the dryer when you’re doing laundry?”

Startled by the subject change, he nodded.

“Well, gloves disappear from my coat pockets. One at a time. I’m the black hole of death for winter gloves. I have a dozen of them, none that match.”

It was almost cute that she was being intentionally flip, wanting to avoid the real issue. But considering she was already too damn beautiful, he didn’t need her to be cute as well.

“Which wouldn’t matter if you’d just let me take the computer.”

“We talked about this at my apartment. . . .”

“Our techs know what they’re doing. They could have examined it and gotten it back to you within twenty-four hours.”

“Big Brother equipped? No way. Besides, how am I supposed to work?”

He ignored the spying accusation. “You have to have a laptop. Some kind of backup.”

“In an apartment too small to do jumping jacks in? Why would I need one?”

“Well, with what you do . . .”

“I had a laptop,” she admitted grudgingly. “It had a run-in with a golf club.”

Startled, he glanced at her. “Excuse me?”

“Watch the road. I locked down the hard drive so it might survive a fender-bender. But I’m not sure
I
would if it comes flying into the back of my head.”

He hid his amusement. And the indignation over the insult to his driving. “Golf club?”

“Long story.”

Damn, she was stubborn. “No backup, huh? What do you do if it breaks down?”

“I have a local computer repair shop on speed dial, and the owner makes house calls. That thing is all I’ve got, and my life is in it. So forget about taking it out of my sight.”

Her words sounded a little too vehement. He suspected they were true, especially judging by what he’d seen of Sam Dalton’s life. What the hell was he thinking, dragging this woman, who lived like a self-protective hermit, into the middle of a serial-murder investigation?

“Look,” he said, realizing there was another option. “You can still get out of this altogether. Take a vacation. You give us your passwords, fly to the Caribbean for a week or two, and we’ll take it from there.” They could study her wording, make the messages sound like they were coming from Sam the Spaminator.

“Sorry, no way.” She glanced out the window, not meeting his gaze, and her voice lowered. “I’ve had a man speak for me. I won’t let it happen again.”

He suddenly suspected she was talking about her ex-husband. Though he sympathized, sensing the divorce had been a bad one, he couldn’t let it go, really liking the idea of getting her out of town altogether. “So what if you’re sitting there typing? We’re going to be telling you what to say, aren’t we?”

“Maybe. But I still maintain some kind of control. I have a say, a choice.”

Again, that hint of emotion told him he had hit a nerve. Unable to help it, he murmured, “And it wasn’t always that way?”

She eyed him warily, but finally admitted, “No, it wasn’t.”

His curiosity got the better of him. “So why the Mrs.?”

“What?”

He’d done it now; there was no backing out. “When we met, why did you insist I call you Mrs. Dalton? You mentioned an ex. So did your loud friend who called.”

She groaned audibly.

“Sorry,” he said, remembering what else her friend had said. “Forget I said anything.”

“Will you forget you heard it?”

“Done. But back to the point: Your ex doesn’t sound like much of a prize.”

“Shh. Nobody’s told him that yet,” she said, rubbing a hand over her eyes.

“How long?”

“A year.”

“Married a year, or divorced a year?”

“Married four, divorced one. I guess I haven’t gotten used to being a Ms. or a Miss. Besides, though I’m not what anybody would consider a celebrity, I am in the public eye. I’d rather people not know my marital status or anything personal about me, which is why I try to keep any of that stuff out of my blog site or my bio.”

He didn’t tell her how easily he could have found out her personal info if he’d been ass enough to do more than professional research on her.

“I know, I know,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m not a teacher who doesn’t understand the subject matter. Someone who wants to know all there is to know about me could probably find it. I put up the basic walls, but there’s still a trail out there for anybody who cares to look.” She glanced out the window again. “Including my divorce decree.”

Her tone ended that line of conversation, and Alec respected her wishes. Driving in silence, he maneuvered through the late-morning traffic. They’d finally exited the downtown area and had a clear shot to the highway. Baltimore and D.C. weren’t separated by much land, but when you factored in all the cars, they might as well have been on different continents.

“So where’s your partner?” she eventually asked.

“Back at the office working on the IP addresses from Darwin’s comments.”

“If it were that easy, you would have caught him after he killed that help-wanted victim he pushed into the machine, wouldn’t you?”

The victim hadn’t been pushed, though he didn’t correct Sam, not wanting to speak of it. Because that poor woman had been led like a mouse through a maze, drugged, deafened by loud machinery, blinded by darkness and what must have been extreme terror. In her panic to escape the person who’d locked her in the warehouse where she was found, she’d stepped through a gate the Professor had left open and had fallen right into an enormous industrial hopper.

He couldn’t imagine an uglier death.

“No, it probably won’t be easy. But there’s a slim chance. He couldn’t possibly suspect we’d be reading your site first thing this morning, or that we’d recognize his posts so quickly. He might not have been as careful as he is when corresponding with his victims, whose communications will, he knows, be carefully examined.”

She tilted her head back against the headrest. “I still can’t believe Ryan was killed. Lured by a scam I warned about on my site a dozen times.”

“Well, like you said yesterday, most people think those warnings and cautionary tales are meant for others. They know the danger, but proceed right into it, figuring they’re the exception; they can’t possibly be gullible enough to be a victim.”

“I know. Which, Jimmy says, is what makes his job so easy.”

“Who?” he asked, surprised. Was she involved with someone? He wouldn’t have guessed it, based on how she lived, but it made sense given her obvious attractiveness.

He tried to ignore the sudden rolling in his stomach at the thought.

“James—Jimmy—Flynt. The con man I told you about on the phone.” Sounding almost bitter, she added, “I think he was amused by my sad efforts to save his future victims. The man has no conscience, despite lots of efforts to prove otherwise.”

Alec shifted uncomfortably in his seat, not wanting to overreact the way he had the previous morning, even though he didn’t like hearing Sam call the scumbag by such a chummy first name. He also was loath to point out the obvious. Though she hadn’t connected it, her observation about Flynt sounded a lot like the current situation. The Professor might very well be feeling the same way: amused by Sam’s efforts to save his victims from their fate. It was one explanation for his reaching out to her on her blog.

His own personal amusement.

He only hoped that amusement led the unsub to make a mistake. They needed only one break, one moment of carelessness. Then, with any luck, they’d nail the bastard.

When they arrived
at the FBI headquarters, Alec’s boss, a handsome, fortyish man introduced as Supervisory Special Agent Blackstone, was waiting for them. As the three of them rode up in the elevator, she couldn’t help comparing the men.

Alec’s hair was lighter, with golden steaks, and his eyes a bright, glittering green. A few lines beside them said he was capable of laughter. She’d gotten a glimpse or two of his smile and suspected the full throttle would be devastating.

Blackstone was as dark as his name. Inky black hair contrasted starkly with eyes a deep shade of blue. He was a hair taller, but leaner. And while he was cordial to the point of formality, nothing about him hinted at a jolly side.

Alec was sexy in a playful way, his boss in a brainy one. Any way you looked at it, they were both attractive as hell, and she had never felt more aware of how those fifteen pounds filled out her old khakis and tight sweater. Nor of the fact that she hadn’t even had time to put a drop of makeup on.

No more sleeping in for you
.

“We appreciate your assistance, Mrs. Dalton,” Blackstone said. “I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you too much.”

“Ms. Dalton,” she murmured, though she cursed the impulse after the words had left her mouth. Especially when she sensed Alec Lambert’s shoulders move, as if he had silently chuckled. “I’m willing to do whatever I can to help.”

“Except let your CPU out of your sight.”

She cast a quick glare to the right, seeing no expression on Lambert’s face, though he’d obviously murmured the jab. She said nothing. Considering he was the one stuck carrying the big box containing the computer all the way from the car, she didn’t figure she had the right.

“Alec, you should know I have calls in to the Behavioral Analysis Unit,” Blackstone said.

She didn’t have to glance over at his face to see this news didn’t please Alec Lambert. She saw the way his big hands tightened on the box, clenching it so hard his fingers left indentations in the cardboard.

“You know we have to bring them up to speed on this case.”

“Of course.” His bland tone revealed nothing. “What was the response?”

“They haven’t returned my calls.” Sam would have thought that a bad thing, but the impassive expression on Blackstone’s face hinted it wasn’t. In fact, she would swear his mouth was curved up the tiniest bit at the corners as he added, “It certainly isn’t our responsibility to make them respond to their messages.”

Alec’s fingers loosened. “Nope. It sure isn’t.”

Interesting exchange. It seemed neither man wanted the help of this other unit, which she found surprising. Then again, the brick wall she’d run up against when she’d interacted with the FBI in the past told her they weren’t always as interested in solving crimes as they were in making themselves look good.