Four sets of footprints. Two college students. The ninja. The rapist.
Where were the girl’s prints? The one who was attacked. The attack that the ninja thwarted. They had her hair. Fibers from her clothes. But no footprints.
Had the rapist carried her here?
But then wouldn’t she have made tracks when she got away?
There were none in the cordoned off area. But then again those two asinine college students had messed a lot of it up.
The girl had seen the ninja.
She would be able to ID the face.
If the ninja showed his face. And Owen would plunk down a good portion of Charlotte’s college fund that he didn’t. But the girl would have pertinent info.
Nguyen kept examining the scene. It had been vacuumed for fibers. A very few fingerprints had been lifted. They didn’t seem to have any from the girl. The ninja had held the blade and probably so had the rapist, but the handle had been wiped clean, the whole thing left sticking out of the man’s gut.
Owen was at a loss, and he didn’t have any coffee. Nguyen squatted in front of him as good a sounding board as any, and better than most. Better than Blankenship, that’s for sure. So he let his voice relay his rambling thoughts. “We need the girl.”
That was the name for her, the rapist’s victim‒‘the girl’. When they called her ‘the victim’ it became confusing whether they were talking about the rapist’s victim or the ninja’s victim. Nguyen understood. “But she’s long gone.”
“Can we issue an edict that all female students present themselves to the campus police? We can check under the fingernails of all the brunettes.”
Nguyen stood and laughed at him. “Aside from violating the Constitution and several amendments, it wouldn’t yield anything. There aren’t any scratch marks on the guy.”
Owen blinked. “She didn’t fight?”
“Not with her nails.” He walked off with his plaster casts cradled in his arms like babies. More waited on the ground at Owen’s feet, still curing.
Owen turned to go view the unscratched body. This just got weirder every moment.
Lee put the last slug into the man’s neck. The bullet made a small, fast suction noise as it left the barrel. Nothing compared to the crack of an unsilenced gun. There was more noise from when it bedded itself in the plaster behind the man, and more a half second later from the man’s mouth in protest at the pain.
The blood gushed from the neck wound and Lee wanted to be able to enjoy it, to imagine he could see where the blood level was. As though the man’s skin was transparent and you could watch the red drain from him as it came out the hole the bullet had made.
But Lee couldn’t watch. Someone had come up behind him.
He knew Michael Norikov could be trusted to die while he turned his back and so he whirled, using his hearing to put a slug into the wall beside the sneak even before he laid eyes on the-
Sin.
“Uh!” Again with the teenage angst. But she didn’t protest like a person who had a gun fired three feet from her head and aimed at her. She sounded like he’d just told her no TV tonight.
Lee turned back to the body, the grandson of one of Russia’s biggest crime families had expired while he was turned. The moment of death gone.
Damnit.
“Again?” She spoke normally, apparently not at all afraid of him. He admired that even as it pissed him off.
“You know you took several of mine, too. And I gave you Leopold.” He intended to hold that one over her for a long, long time.
Here they were, having a normal volume conversation in the middle of a house where neither of them had the right to be. It wasn’t the dead man’s house either. Norikov had only been visiting here, and that made it doubly dangerous that someone would walk in on them.
So Lee turned and left her there, wondering if she’d tack one of her silly bows on the body and mess up his neat bullet holes and blood puddle. He reminded himself that dead was the most important thing.
But she didn’t. Even though he was certain that she had her gift tag and bow and neat forty-dollar pen on her. Sin trailed him out the window where he had short-circuited the alarm wire and climbed through. She pushed through the sliced out screen behind him. Even as he jumped down and ruined them, he saw Sin’s big tracks under the window, indicating that she’d followed him in this way.
That little faker. She’d known he was here when she came in. What was that ‘uh!’ for back there? Was she trying to distract him? Itching for a fight?
Lee looked both ways and walked out the back. Two dog carcasses littered the ground not far from the window. Dobermans this time. Yeah, he was alpha dog. Dead was definitely beta. The family had something for guard dogs. And he had to say that Michael had been looking out the window, wondering about his damn dobies when Lee had walked up behind him.
But Michael was still dead.
And there hadn’t been time for Lee to make the dogs like and respect him. Michael had only come here on a whim. Lee had barely had time to check it out. Luckily the house three doors down had the same floor plan, and Lee had cased it. That family might have called the cops, but nothing would ever come of it except maybe they got themselves a better security system. Oh, and no more mafia neighbors.
Lee scaled the cheap cinderblock wall at the back of the cookie cutter mansion. It was ten feet high, but a sturdy pool chair put things in his favor. So what if the cops figured out he’d gone over the wall? He was gone.
Sin followed him, dropping to the ground on the outside in her typical silence beside him. But she didn’t say anything. Her leather clad butt and braided up hair were all he saw as she walked away.
Lee walked the other direction. The street back here was really only intended as a service entrance, and he pulled a vest and a black watch cap from under an old plastic lawn chair behind the next house. There were doors built into the fences, but the locks were fairly secure. Over the fence had definitely been the way to go. He slipped the clothes on, hoping to look more like the gardener if he was spotted. He’d left his car at the end of the street and had a good quarter mile to walk.
It was only about ten p.m., but the night was dark and deepening. Dogs barked occasionally through the tiny gaps at the back doors in the fences. The gates were all solid, the houses new enough that none of the owners had switched any of them out yet. And that meant no one saw him go by. And no one seemed to believe the dogs when they told their owners he was on the other side. One male voice had yelled “Shut-up, Damnit!” down to some big thing that was giving good solid barks. And someone else made noises in their pool and told something small and yippy not to bark because of what it saw. Lee imagined something illicit was going on there. If they could talk, the dogs would tell tales on him. But they couldn’t.
At the end, where the un-named alley made a T with the real street, Lee slid into his car. He made small un-obvious motions, sliding three of the silenced Hecklers out of their hidden holsters under his shirt and popping the clips out before placing them under the front seat. The old car was designed for keeping things there with a well that fit the guns nicely.
He turned over the engine, glad that his kitty didn’t make much noise. No one would be able to say when they heard a strange car drive away. He headed back to his motel by way of the scenic route. Just in case he was followed. Although he wasn’t sure who would bother. And no one did.
He let himself in with the plastic tagged key, liking places that didn’t require ID and didn’t care when the residents showed up or left. He put three of his guns into their duffel along with the rifles. He always traveled with a good armory, whether or not he intended to use it. The fourth he took into the bathroom with him. Just in case. Then he popped open a box of cheap hair dye and scrubbed in a lighter color with the latex gloves on his hands and a look of chagrin on his face. He was a little too good at this.
The box required a twenty minute wait to make his hair the appropriate hue. While Lee wasn’t concerned with achieving that exact shade of ‘praline’, he did need a change. Again, just in case.
He’d thought he’d be tired, but he wasn’t. And his brain took off while he sat in the grimy bathroom, a slave to the chemicals on his head.
He’d researched Sin. He’d dressed up‒meaning clean jeans and a newer T-shirt‒and gone into an internet/coffee bar. He’d looked up old newspaper articles on Leopold. None mentioned him by name, but certain hits were definitely his work. Lee had Googled keywords, and found what he was pretty sure was Sin’s case. Police reports were public access if you knew exactly where to look. He pulled up a case in Urbana, Illinois where an accountant and his wife had been murdered, leaving behind two daughters. It rang with Sin’s brief questioning, and smacked a little too close to his own experience with these guys.
He’d searched everything he could. There were other cases that might be hers. But they were way too old. Or way too new. And there was always something that made the connection wrong, like there had been only male children in the family. While Lee wouldn’t put a gender change beyond anyone who’d suffered that kind of trauma, it wasn’t Sin.
The Urbana killings had to be hers. The younger daughter was even named Cynthia. She hadn’t thought up the name and she hadn’t been joking. He’d simply heard the wrong spelling. She was C-y-n. But Lee sure thought his original version suited her better.
There was one problem. She said she was twenty-three. And that her parents had been shot when she was eleven. The dates didn’t match. Everything made sense if he afforded her one lie. The report was four years younger than what would match her tale. But the police files did put Cynthia at eleven at the time of the attack, so that was truth. The Urbana murders had happened eight years ago. Which made Sin just nineteen.
Lee checked his watch and climbed into the shower. When he emerged, he took a pair of scissors to the hair around his face. He did a decent enough job shearing off the longish hair that had covered his brows until a few minutes ago. He took off the shag over his ears and evened that into the still-a-little-long hair above it. He also shaved his face clean. He looked enough different from the man who had killed Michael Norikov earlier tonight.
He still wasn’t tired, and he really wanted a drink.
So with a sigh, and the deep conviction that no one would find him, he dressed up again. He was in town, and he felt like going out‒a rare thing. So he thought he’d go somewhere where broken bottles were accidents and not threats. He put on a new pair of black jeans, the crease still in them, and a different new t-shirt, although it was from the same three-pack as the other.
He decided to forego the ball cap as it would be suspicious in a decent bar and he headed back out in the car. Fifteen minutes later, he’d found himself on a stool in a place with neon out front and a quartered floor. Lee was in the section that served as the bar, behind him were booths and a few tables. To his right was a bank of pool tables and a line of men in untucked shirts and a few women with shirts that didn’t reach far enough down to tuck. One of them grabbed a loser before he could start a fight over his lost twenty and she hauled him onto a dance floor littered with sawdust to cover the fact that it was just open cement and an old jukebox that still took quarters. Everything was licked by shadows. Even the few lights that hung here and there were heavily shaded so no one had to see who they were going home with or grinding up against on the floor.
Lee ordered three fingers of half-decent whiskey and nursed the glass. He almost laughed out loud at the thought that this was a ‘decent’ bar. His old self, the man with the wife and child and closet full of suits and ties, would never have set foot in here. Of course his old self couldn’t hold his own in a fist fight and would have cussed someone out in perfect English for breaking his nose.
Now he was probably the riff-raff here. The pool loser was out on the dance floor with his ball cap hiding what he was doing to the neck of the woman in the just-too-tight jeans and his hands sliding around the skin of her bared midriff. Lee wasn’t jealous. The woman had nothing on Samantha. Except that she was alive.
An argument was going on between a blonde and someone else. Lee could only see the blonde because her fake platinum hair showed up in the dim light. Her opponent had the sense to stay dark. No one seemed to be getting hurt so Lee tuned it out.
At the end of the bar a pretty brunette was hitting on the man next to her. She hadn’t bared the skin at her waist, hadn’t stuffed it into the size-too-small denim that seemed to be the norm here. Maybe she hadn’t gotten the memo. She was drinking a beer and letting the man next to her slide his hand up an ever more exposed slice of thigh. She tossed a glorious mane of dark curls and giggled as she abandoned her beer on the bar and dragged the man over to the dance floor.
Lee rolled his neck, his attention drawn again to the fools at the pool tables. Money was changing hands despite several hand-lettered ‘no betting’ signs tacked to the wall. No one was enforcing it, even though it looked like a nice bar fight was shaping up over there. He wasn’t getting in the middle of that. Fools with spare change and beer weren’t his forte.
He tossed back more of the liquor he wouldn’t have deigned to drink three years ago. He’d pretty much quit drinking all together after a one night binge on some homemade Appalachian lightning. Lee was pretty certain it was close to medieval mead, except maybe with a little more paint stripper in it. What he had tonight was the ‘good stuff’ these days.
The bartender offered to top him off, but Lee refused. It occurred to him that he was drinking Sam’s life insurance policy. He lived cheap, so the money would last a good long time. Probably longer than he would. But with a quarter inch left in the glass, his stomach soured. It didn’t matter if he could afford it. It was how he had afforded it.
And he had to pee. It was time to go get some sleep anyway. He’d pass out in the motel and drive back to the cabin whenever the hell he woke up. He left the glass on the bar and had to walk through the dance floor to get to the john. The couples out here were bordering on necking right there on the floor, and there was nothing romantic about it. A giggle came from red, bee-stung lips where the little brunette was brushing away a hand that had wandered too high. Lee rolled his eyes as he pushed into the only half-way lit spot in the place and relieved himself. He washed his hands and the faucet creaked like it hadn’t been used in a while. No one here had a small child they cared about. You became a fanatic hand-washer when you became a parent.
He looked at his somewhat unfamiliar face in the mirror, although the shorter hair and lighter color actually made him look more like his old self. The lines radiating from the corners of his eyes showing how he’d aged ten or fifteen years in the past four, and the cheap t-shirt and bad haircut kept him from believing he was really that same person.
When he pushed out of the john door, back onto the dance floor, he heard a voice saying ‘no’. The brunette with too much make-up and too little clothing was pulled out a side door he hadn’t noticed before by a large male hand. She protested, although only lightly.
God, sometimes he hated himself. But he hated more to see a woman get hurt. It wouldn’t happen if they didn’t do that damned giggling and flirting before they said ‘no’ or probably even if they just said it and were clear about it. With pain and reluctance radiating from between his shoulder blades, Lee pushed open the door. The floor disappeared from under his feet, and two steps down was an alley between two buildings. Only the faintest traces of neon lit walls that corralled three sides of the rough asphalt. It glistened with old rain or old beer, reflecting rainbows and making Lee believe God had a sick sense of humor. An industrial trash bin, spray painted with graffiti and over-stuffed with bags smelling of rancid alcohol, blocked his view of the couple.
But he heard her say ‘get your hands off me’ with emphasis this time.
And when he looked over the trash bags, he saw two feminine hands held high, pinned against the wall, caught in the grasp of a larger, stronger male hand. That was surely a bad sign.
Lee sighed.
Cyn gave up her struggles after a moment. The man’s hand came up and cupped her breast, and she let him. But only for a fraction of a second.
“I said no.” Her head came forward, cracking into his nose, and letting loose a howl of rage that spurted from his mouth.
Her hands, staying together in his grip, tugged at his, flipping down and under‒a move impossible for his grasp to follow. It may have helped that he was backing up from the head-butt she’d laid on him.
Pissed, he hauled back to slug her. But to her practiced eye, the move came with waving red flags: the deep breath, the haul back to gather momentum, the look in his eye letting her know that he was getting ready to give as good as he got. Cyn saw all of it and waited. At the last moment she deftly stepped to the side, letting him throw his massive weight into his own knuckles as he crushed them against the brick where she had stood.
He was open to her now, chest facing her, right foot planted just under the right arm that was experiencing shock waves from the impact, telling Cyn just how hard of a punch he had thrown. Her knee came up to slam between his legs, but with inhuman speed he backed up, looking surprised.
With a quick blink she realized that he hadn’t backed up at all, he’d been hauled. Some idiot had come to her rescue‒which was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. First off, she didn’t need rescuing, and second, not a single one of those people in there had looked like a savior.
Her almost-attacker dangled from his collar, blocking her view of whoever held him. But Cyn didn’t need to see him when she heard the voice. Even though the words were to the idiot who’d bloodied his own knuckles.
“You’d best stop when a lady says ‘no’.”
The gunman.
What the hell was he doing here?
The dangling man’s toes found purchase on the ground but, instead of running, the moron turned and stared down the man behind him. “She’s mine. I’ll show her-”
The gunman spoke over him. “Trust me, you don’t want to tangle with her.”
Cyn thought the idiot didn’t want to tangle with the man in front of him either, especially over a lay that he was never gonna get.
But the moron still didn’t move.
The gunman rolled his eyes. “She’s pulled one over on you.”
Thanks, Asshole.
But he continued, “She’s sixteen.”
“Uh!” The indignant sound fell from her mouth before she could stop it. And in her stupidity she had only added credence to his accusation. So, standing there in the back alley with an angry, would-be rapist hovering between them, she got back at him the only way she could think of. “Dad!”
That was it. The man fled even before the gunman could narrow his eyes.
His voice was cold lead and hit her with the force of the bullets he sent into people so casually. “Is this your idea of sport?”
She didn’t answer. She wouldn’t have called it ‘sport’. Maybe ‘clean-up’. But she didn’t think the gunman would see it that way. “He’s a rapist.”
He didn’t. “No, he’s not. I watched you bait Leopold, which was fine. But you don’t bait men with sex then get mad when they want to collect.”
She started to open her mouth, but his words came before hers did.
“And don’t give me this ‘no means no’ crap. It only means ‘no’ when you mean it and I saw you in there. You were rubbing up on him and sending out ‘yes’ as loud as fireworks. You had no right to turn the tables on him out here.”
Cyn barely found the good grace to keep her mouth shut.
Cold anger swirled inside her. She stared out from her cooling shell and wished him to hell.
His voice was no warmer. “Something tells me you have no idea what you’re playing with.” His eyes slid up and down her body, over the small dress with enough rayon to make cling wrap seem baggy. She felt more exposed than she had when the idiot inside had pushed his hand almost far enough up her leg to reach her leathers.
Tamping it all down, Cyn turned to walk away.
His hand grabbed her arm, the heat of his palm pouring into her and surprising her, because he’d seemed so cold. Apparently his skin was the only thing warm about him, his voice was positively frigid. “If I ever catch you doing that again, I will lay you out just like I did Norikov.”
She didn’t doubt him for a minute. But, when his hand didn’t move and her anger didn’t simmer down, she did what she’d intended to do, just not to him.
Cyn spun and clocked him one right under the chin.
His head snapped back, but not far enough and, in the instant it took him to register that he’d been hit, his eyes came up with fury in them. His fist came out of nowhere, the warning signs harder to spot than they had been with the bag of untrained mush she’d been up against just a few minutes ago.
All she could do was sidestep and get herself partly out of the way. His knuckles made contact with her shoulder, sending her spinning. But she’d taken enough hits that even as she went around her arm came out, the side of her hand making contact with his neck.
To his credit he didn’t cry out. Most men did. The gunman had moved a bit with her blow, robbing her of some of the impact. Even so . . .
This time, when his knuckles came at her face, her hand came up and slapped at it from the side, the feather touch deflecting his aim just enough to make him miss. When he didn’t make contact, his bulk came forward, doubling the impact of her fist already headed low on his gut. Cyn had stepped into it, and his muscle didn’t absorb any of the blow. His forward momentum changed abruptly to backward.
But his hands were fast and he grabbed her arms. His leg kicked up, maybe by accident, but it was damned effective. The top of his foot made contact with her calf and took the leg out from under her, toppling her onto him as he fell back to the wet cement.
Just before the heavy jarring of impact, Cyn blew out all her breath, beating out the blow that would have stolen it from her anyway. But he did the same thing, the thick whoosh from his lungs mingling with her own. The thud they made hitting the ground was robbed of any victory in the battle, and Cyn just kept moving.
Her knee came up to catch him where it counted, but she wasn’t able to get him with his wits down. His leg knocked her knee out of the way, her only blow a less-than-effective glance off his inner thigh.
Even though he had her upper arms in a bruising grip, he held them out from him at a distance, and Cyn brought both her hands up, jamming the heels simultaneously into his lower ribs. That knocked just a little of the wind out of him, and she used the movement and the moment to shove backwards, landing on her feet between his legs and beating a hasty retreat.
Her retreat was backward though, because she wasn’t about to turn her back on this man, and he rocked onto his feet like lightning had blown him up. He shoved her, keeping her from the sideways movement that was necessary if she didn’t want her back to come up against the brick for the second time this evening. But that’s exactly what she did. Cyn didn’t slam her head into it, but he did effectively corral her.
He wasn’t stupid enough to take a punch at her. But he also wasn’t touching her, so she opted to strike fast and hard. Both hands came out fisted and lightning fast, one into his neck and one at his groin, her shorter stature putting it within her striking distance. He twisted, robbing her of her marks and letting her plow one fist into his hip and the other into his shoulder. Still they were good hits.
Still they weren’t good enough. His arms came around her, even as she realized her mistake in coming forward from the wall. His knee came up quickly between where she’d planted her front foot in her forward motion, it lifted her thigh, and the momentum lifted all of her.
Faster than what she’d thought him capable of, he had her off the ground and pinned into the wall, the weight of his body holding her there. She couldn’t draw a full breath with him leaning into her like he was. She was the superior fighter, but he was damned good and he outweighed her by a hundred pounds. Cyn bet every one was pure muscle.
Damn the man.
She fought back the only way she knew how.
She buried her teeth into his shoulder.
Or she tried to. Just as she felt the give of skin under the leather her mouth closed over, her head yanked back. His fist was tangled in her loose hair, and shy of yanking it all out of her own head, which she knew to be virtually impossible, she was screwed.
Cyn was grateful that she always went for two strikes at once whenever possible. Her right arm was wrapped around the back of his neck and her nails were poised, digging deep enough into his skin to let him know that she could rip out a handful of flesh and tendon should he do anything.
He didn’t move.
Neither did she.
Not that she really could. He had her head held back, completely controlled by the tangle of hair that she really wished she had cut at any time before today. Her left arm was pinned, his elbow pressing into her forearm and her hand unable to reach anything vital on him. Her legs straddled his hips in a position that was making her more uncomfortable by the moment, and left her with nothing to kick except the air behind him. Her non-heeled shoes, so useful for fighting, were now useless for gouging a hole in his hamstrings.
For a minute they stayed there, neither yielding anything except the need to breathe. Cyn refused to gulp for air like her body wanted. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Finally, his voice broke the stalemate.
“You aren’t ever going to do anything like that again.”
She wanted to ask which he was referring to: laying out rapists in back alleys, fighting with men she underestimated, or getting herself pinned against the wall in a compromising position.
She was about to concede to all of the above, when he clarified.
“No more man baiting.”
“No more.” The words were a bare whisper of sound across the lips that were hard to get together, he held her head yanked so far back.
“No more.” He repeated.
Even as she heard the words, she felt the yield in him. His free hand came against her lower rib cage, but not in malice. He applied pressure there, keeping her from dropping to the ground when he stepped back away.
Cyn complied by loosening her nails and not killing him by digging in and ripping out a third of his neck.
When she was standing, still with her back against the wall, he stepped back and offered an almost gallant nod. “Ma’am.” He motioned for her to leave.
It only took a second to turn and walk away. Normally, she’d never give her back to an armed opponent, but here saving face was more important. The insult of showing him her ass and shoulder blades as she walked off was worth the risk. He already knew he could take her, and she knew it too. She didn’t have anything else to lose, except that last shred of pride she was clinging to.