A Profiler's Case for Seduction(30)
But Mark wasn’t about to dismiss anything. The prickly feeling she talked about, the tensing of muscles and racing of the heart, were all survival instincts, the call to fight or flight.
“I don’t want you walking home alone anymore after dark,” Mark said, hoping that the strength in his voice would let her know this was a command not a request. “I’ll arrange to be at the bookstore each evening when you get off work and I’ll walk you back here.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she protested, her cheeks once again turning pink. “Mark, you’re here to catch a killer. You aren’t here to play babysitter to an overaged student with an overactive imagination.”
“Do you normally have an overactive imagination?” he asked, although he already knew the answer to the question. In the brief conversations he’d shared with Dora he’d found her to be practical and levelheaded, certainly not prone to dramatic imaginings or suffering from a hysterical personality.
“Well, no, but maybe in this case I’m just hypersensitive or something.”
“The bottom line is that you’re afraid to walk home alone after dark. I can easily fix that by walking you home each night.” He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt her. The murdered subjects had all been men and Dora certainly didn’t have the public adoration, the powerful aura that Melinda Grayson had, so he couldn’t fit Dora into any kind of a kidnapping scheme.
But he had a killer he couldn’t access, a kidnapping that didn’t make sense and not enough information to try to guess what might happen next or if the crime spree in Vengeance was really over. He only knew that he’d never forgive himself if Dora was murdered or kidnapped and he’d been warned in advance.
“Mark, you have important things to do here in town.” She made one last protest, but it didn’t have any teeth. Instead, he could hear the relief that had crept into her voice.
He smiled at her. “It’s a done deal. I’m going to escort you home on bookstore nights.”
“I’d like that,” she agreed, as the last of the fear finally left her eyes. “And now let’s get back to the kitchen and have our coffee before it gets cold.”
He followed her back into the next room, unable to stop his gaze from lingering on the soft sway of her hips beneath the black slacks she wore.
“Now tell me about this new suspect,” she said when they were once again seated at the table. “You said his name was Troy Young. How does he tie into things?”
“At the moment the only thing we know about him for sure is that he’s a rancher, recently divorced and struggling financially.” Mark placed his gun and holster at his feet. “He frequents Johnnie’s Tavern often, and he and Sheriff Peter Burris had some ugly run-ins when Burris was alive. According to the records we obtained, Troy was arrested or ticketed by Burris over ten times in the last year—arrested three times for public intoxication and once for disorderly conduct, and tickets for speeding and other minor infractions. Troy has made no secret of the fact that he hated Burris. He’d even threatened to kill the sheriff more than once when being arrested.”
“Does he have ties to the other two victims?”
Mark looked at her with new admiration. “Ah, your criminal-justice classes are showing. He’s only a viable suspect if we can tie him to all three victims and so far we haven’t found the connection to the other two, but we’ve only just starting looking at him. Tomorrow afternoon a couple of us are going to talk to him and see if he has a solid alibi for the time of the murders.” He added a teaspoon of sugar to his coffee and then took a sip.
“And the kidnapping? Has there been any progress on that case?”
Mark wanted to tell her that he didn’t believe a kidnapping had taken place. That somehow, someway, despite the appearance of Troy Young, in spite of his teammates’ views, he believed the beautiful professor was at the center of this whole storm.
“Nothing new. She seems to be a fairly isolated person, other than her two assistants. Nobody seems to know her very well.”
Dora cast her gaze toward the wall just over his head, a tiny frown dancing in the center of her forehead. “Her assistants probably know her better than anyone, but I know just before her kidnapping she was kind of seeing Andrew Peterson from the history department.”
Mark sat up straighter. This was new information. “None of us has managed to find that out.”