A Profiler's Case for Seduction(6)

Still, it had been nice for those few minutes to sit across from Mark and feel the stir of chemistry, knowing that it was an attraction that would go nowhere, knowing that she couldn’t afford any more mistakes in her lifetime. She was like a cat who had already misspent eight of the nine lives she’d been given. She wasn’t going to do anything to mess up this final chance.





Chapter 2



Mark stood at a whiteboard in front of his team in the conference room they had commandeered on the first floor of the county courthouse/city hall. The room was midsize and filled with the requisite long tables and chairs where his fellow agents now sat looking at him expectantly.

The team had changed in the three weeks since the bodies had been discovered. Agents had been pulled off this particular crime when a grave of twenty skeletons of young men had been discovered just outside Oklahoma City. Richard Sinclair was the agent in charge, but he ran a fairly loose ship and rarely yielded his power over the others.

For a moment, as Mark stared at the five agents at the table, his brain blanked on everything except the silky look of Dora Martin’s hair sparking in the sunshine the day before and the mysteries he’d sensed in the depths of her dove-gray eyes when she’d been so vague about where she’d come from and what she’d been doing before winding up in Vengeance, Texas.

“Earth to Mark,” Agent Lori Delaney said drily, pulling him from thoughts of Dora and to his task at hand.

“Sorry,” Mark said, and raked a hand through his hair as if the gesture would banish any further thoughts of Dora. He turned toward the whiteboard where photos of the three dead men were taped. Beneath their photos was information about each man written in Mark’s precise handwriting.

“Sheriff Peter Burris,” Mark began, intending to go through all the facts they knew about each of the dead men for the hundredth time since they’d been called out on the case. He tapped on the picture of the dead man. It was a crime-scene photo, the burly sheriff barely recognizable after having been strangled and buried in his shallow grave.

“He was found with a note card on his body that read Liar. We now know that Peter Burris was a dirty lawman who was blackmailing Senator John Merris among other illegal activities. At the time of his murder he was married to Suzy Burris, an accountant who has since been cleared of having anything to do with her husband’s death.”

Mark slid sideways to tap his index finger on the second photograph. “Next victim is David Reed, with a note card that labeled him a cheater. He was a sports writer, known to be a playboy. He had a drug problem and was into the illegal sports betting scene. Although he was married to Eliza Harvey, we know that he was having affairs at the time of his murder.”

“I definitely would have killed him if he were my husband,” Lori Delaney quipped, making the other agents laugh.

They quickly sobered as Mark continued. “Eliza was our number-one suspect until she was cleared, which brings us to victim number three, Senator John Merris, who was labeled as a thief by the card the killer left on his body. We all know now that the good senator was a nasty piece of work who siphoned millions of dollars from the Dawson Exploration Oil Company and padded his own bank account at the same time he put hundreds of people out of work.”

“It’s almost like our killer did the world a big favor,” Agent Donald Thompson muttered, under his breath but loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

“They were all dirtbags, but they were still murdered,” Lori replied. “And I want this killer brought to justice.” She was an intense young agent with dark hair and eyes. Mark knew this was the biggest case she’d worked on in her short career.

“All three men were killed within a twenty-four-hour period of time and each of them had been strangled or suffocated,” Mark continued. “As we know, what few leads we’ve managed to get have led us nowhere. There is no question that these men were all killed by the same person or persons, and strangulation is a particularly intimate form of killing, but we have yet to tie these three victims to any one person to make a connection.”

“We’re working on it,” Agent Larry Albright replied with a weariness Mark knew the whole team felt. So far this had been one of the most frustrating cases Mark had worked. He couldn’t get a handle on the killer, none of them could even agree on a specific motive.

Certainly the three dead men all had their share of unsavory secrets, but murder usually uncovered secrets of one sort or another. Nobody was exactly what they portrayed to the outside world.