“Try not to burn the building down,” I say, rolling my eyes at my sister. She just flips me off. The move makes me smile.
She really is the very best sister, and I love her. I can’t even think of what my life would be like if she was taken from our family forever, either when she was a little kid or last year. It’s hard enough knowing we had an older sister we’ll never know because she was murdered by a serial killer. Thankfully, we get to have her three children in our lives, even if Eric is away in the army, and Brooklyn is away at school. Seth is in the loving care of my parents, and we try to all be there for him.
What I want to do is go after Emma. I don’t do that. Instead, I chase my sister out of my office, taking the written dispatch note from her, and head down the hall toward the back entrance to the station. I push out the glass door and take a deep breath before jumping in my car.
I turn the keys in the ignition and tip my head side to side to crack my neck. I need to get my head back in the game. Whoever is waiting for me at the next crime scene deserves my total attention. So I use the time as I drive through town.
The address I was given takes me out into the suburbs, where my sister and Wes live. It’s a nice neighborhood, the kind only a lot of money can buy. I’m surprised by the surroundings as I see the blue-and-red lights flash in front of a decent-sized home. Until now, our previous two victims were young, single pregnant women. They had no family, no partners, and no money. So part of me thinks whoever is waiting is not connected to the baby snatcher case.
I pull my keys from the ignition and step down from my Tahoe, shutting the door behind me. I beep the locks on my key fob and drop them in my pocket before making my way up the three-car driveway.
“Hey, Cap,” Jones greets me in the front of the house.
“Hey, Jones. What do we have?” I ask him as I take the paper booties and latex gloves he has in his hands for me. Fuck, more blood. “Thanks.”
“We got another one,” he says sadly, and I look at him—really look at him. Jones and his wife, Linda, have been trying to have a baby for a while now to no avail. Last I heard, they were considering adoption, but it’s so expensive, and a cop’s salary does not allow for that.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” he answers. “I just can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would be stealing babies.”
“That’s what we’re going to find out, buddy,” I remind him.
“I hope so.”
I follow him into the house, and we don’t have to travel far, because the victim is lying in a huge puddle of blood on her living room carpet. Fuck. Not again. Between Claire and Emma both being pregnant, I’ve become really sensitive to this. It burns deep that someone could do this to women. But I use that burn to drive me to keep going. I have to find out what happened to these people. They deserve that justice.
“Weird,” Jones mumbles as he watches the scene. I can tell that, like me, he’s taking in every little detail. If ever there were a cop who worked harder to make detective, I never knew them. He has a sharp mind and a great gut intuition. So, looking at him, I can tell that something other than the gruesome picture painted in vivid detail before us is eating away at him. I just don’t know if he knows what it is yet.
“It’s more than weird,” I reply, even though I’m pretty sure he was just thinking out loud. “Something on your mind, brother?”
“The living room,” he answers me, and he’s still whispering, and that in and of itself has the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
“What about the living room?”
“Every one of these girls was cut up on the living room floor,” he replies. “Why here?”
He’s right. Every last victim, of which we now have three, was hacked to pieces on their living room floors, their babies stolen from their wombs, and left to bleed out and die all alone. But why?
“You think they were entertaining?” I ask.
“I think they all knew the same person,” he says. “Because I can’t think of one person who would cut out a woman’s baby and leave her to bleed like that, let alone three.”
“Amen.”
“Well thanks for the invitation to the party,” Emma chirps as she rolls into the room in her coveralls and plastic booties. “But we really gotta stop meeting like this.”
“Amen to that too,” I mumble, and Jones just nods.
“I’m going to go look around the house,” he says. “See what else stands out.”
“You got it.”
I don’t look at him as he walks out of the room, so I definitely miss that he left it with a smirk playing out on his face and a wink to Emma’s assistant, Maryann. I just keep my eyes on Emma as she tends to the latest victim.
“Come here, boss,” she says as she waves her hand at me, and I move to squat down where she’s doing her preliminary work before she moves the body to her morgue. “Look at this.”
“What am I looking at?” I ask as I stare at a small purple bruise.
“Another puncture mark,” she answers. “I found one on the original victim too, and I’m running another toxicology report on her as well. But at this point, I think it’s safe to say—”
“Don’t do it,” I warn.
“—that you have yourself a serial killer,” she finishes, and I let my head drop back to examine the ceiling.
“I really, really fucking hate when you say that,” I tell her as I stand up and look at her. She smiles brightly in a sweetness-and-sunshine way that both steals the breath from my lungs and scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
“I know.”
“Hey, Em?” I begin, but she interrupts me, her voice soft and low and shoots straight to my heart.
“Not yet, Lee.”
“We need to talk, honey,” I say just as softly, matching my tone to hers.
“I know,” she replies. Emma glances away for a moment before looking back, her blue eyes burning into my violet ones. “But not yet, Lee. I need to get this body to the morgue.”
“Okay.”
I stand back and watch as she jumps in the driver seat of the van that is ridiculous with her metal-band stickers all over the back. I know the minute she turns the key in the ignition, because Drowning Pool starts blaring “Bodies” at an inhumane decibel. And then she peels out of the parking lot, and I watch her head out into the night and away from me, but I do it for the first time in a long time with a small amount of hope burning like the last ember in a campfire through my chest.