Baddest Bad Boys(4)

Jon jerked up the emergency brake on his pickup and sat there, feeling blank. The light was almost gone. He should move, so he didn’t have to fumble through the dark. He didn’t have the goddamn energy.

The Geddes case had gotten to him. He didn’t know why. He’d worked plenty of grisly murders over the years, but this one wiped him out. Wallowing inside the twisted mind of this perp had poisoned him.

William Geddes, the “Egg Man.” So called for the blue robin’s egg he’d place into the mouth of his victims—after he’d killed them, with agonizing slowness, in ways that defied the imagination. Five girls that they knew of, ages eighteen to twenty-two. Just thinking about the guy’s frozen face and staring eyes in the courtroom gave him the shudders. Fucking head case. And Jon had seen a lot of bad shit.

He’d finally nailed that pustulant shitbag, but not until five girls—at least, he hoped to God it was only five—had died, badly. The trial had wrapped up a couple weeks ago, a drawn-out, sprawling media circus, full of press and politics and pontificating bullshit. But he’d seen to it that the prosecution’s case had been watertight.

Geddes would be inside forever. Five consecutive life sentences, in a maximum security hellhole where that pumped up prick’s blond Viking good looks would not go unappreciated. Jon took a fierce satisfaction in that. Justice had been done, insofar as possible.

Cold comfort for the families of the girls, though.

So? He should be feeling accomplishment. Maybe even pride.

But he felt like shit. Nervous, jagged, on edge. He couldn’t sleep. He had nightmares, about blood, birds. He was tormented by details that couldn’t be explained. Uneasy about vibes that didn’t add up. He couldn’t pin down what the problem was. But he felt like it wasn’t over.

His boss hadn’t liked it, either. She’d kicked his ass out on a mandatory vacation after he’d been caught one too many times poring over the Geddes files after the conviction. That stung. He was a good cop. The one thing he knew he was good at. He may have been a rotten husband, he may be a no-good boyfriend, and God forbid he ever have kids. But when someone dissed him as a cop, it got his back way up.

It was the one thing in his life that he gave a shit about these days, though he knew damn well it was dangerous to care too much about anything. He’d grown up in a series of foster homes, some OK, some less so. He’d seen too many kids get exploited by predators. Now, when he heard about innocent kids being abused, something revved up inside him that he couldn’t control. Sleep wasn’t even an option. He started putting in those thirty-six-hour days without even getting tired.

Or maybe that was overstating it. Look at him now. Monumentally f*cked up. He got an unwelcome memory flash of how Vicki used to nag and bitch about how emotionally unavailable he was. But how could a guy be available to a woman who constantly whined? He tried briefly to remember if Vicki had whined during their whirlwind courtship. Maybe she had, and he’d been too hypnotized by her big, jiggling tits to notice.

Fuck it. This line of thought was not going to energize him.

He forced his leaden body into action. Shoved open the truck door, grabbed his grip and the bag of groceries. He made his way with heavy feet up the switchback path to the hillside cabin—and froze.

Footsteps around the corner of the cabin. Someone was passing through the foliage. The shush-shush of jeans legs, rubbing each other. The swish-slap of bushes. He heard every sound like it was miked.

He let the duffel, the groceries drop. His gun materialized in his hand, though he had no memory of drawing it, or flattening his back to the weatherbeaten shingles, creeping towards the corner…waiting—

Grab, twist, and he had the f*cker bent over in a hammerlock, wrist torqued at an agonizing angle, gun to the nape. It squawked.

Female. Long hair, swishing and tickling over his bare arm. A delicate wrist that felt like it might break in his grip. What the hell?

“Jon! Stop this! Let go! It’s me!”

Huh? The chick knew him? His body had ascertained that she was no physical threat, so he shoved her away to take a better look.

His jaw dropped when she straightened up, rubbing her twisted wrist. He tried to drag in oxygen, but his lungs were locked. Holy shit. No way had he met this girl before. He would have remembered. Wow.

Long hair swung to her waist. Big dark eyes, exotically tilted, flashing with anger. High cheekbones, perfect skin, pointy chin. That full pink mouth, glossed up with lip goo, calculated to make a guy think of one thing only, and suffer the immediate physiological consequences.

And her body, Jesus. Feline grace; long legs, slim waist, round hips. High, suckable, braless tits, the nipples of which poked through a thin cotton blouse. Low-rise jeans that clung desperately to the undercurve of that perfect ass. Who the hell…? This was private property, in the middle of nowhere. His dick twitched, swelled.

She did not look armed. He slipped the Glock back into the shoulder holster. “You scared me,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

Her eyes widened in outrage. “What do you mean, who the hell am I? It’s me! Robin!”

Robin? His brain spun its wheels to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Danny’s baby sister? He’d practically pissed himself laughing the night she’d juggled flaming torches in Danny’s kitchen, although Danny had been unamused when the rib-eye he’d grilled got unexpectedly flambéed. The steak had tasted faintly of petroleum fuel, but what the hell. She hadn’t burned down the building.