Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 by Carol Ericson (beginner reading books for adults .txt) 📗

Keara stared at the glass wall into the bullpen of the station she’d come to call her own. The symbol undeniably connected these cases in some way, but the manner of death was different across all of them, the symbol never exact. It was possible there was a single killer making his way north to Alaska, committing one murder a year. Perhaps there’d been another crime in the gap after Montana and before the two bombs in Alaska, maybe in Canada while he made his way farther north.

Maybe one person had committed the murders and someone else—someone with the same knowledge of the symbol—had set the fire and the bombs.

She flipped open the arson case from Oklahoma six years ago. A brand-new rec center, the pride of the community, had opened the week before. The fire had destroyed half of it and damaged the other half so badly that it would have needed to be razed anyway. The city had never rebuilt it. Behind the rec center, on the brand-new basketball court, the symbol had been spray-painted from one end to the other.

Frowning at the case, Keara downed the last of her coffee and debated getting more. But even though it was calming her headache, her too-empty stomach was protesting. Setting the mug aside, Keara leaned back in her chair.

How similar was setting a fire and setting off bombs? They seemed pretty different to her, both from the practical standpoint of knowing how to do it and from the potential motivations. But maybe the killer was also the arsonist and the bomber had just gotten started.

It didn’t feel right. No matter how she arranged the crimes in her mind, it didn’t make sense. She couldn’t imagine one person killing in so many different ways, with so many different victim types. And she couldn’t imagine a pair of killers grabbing victims together, then randomly switching to arson, then later to bombings.

But she wasn’t a psychologist. What she needed was Jax’s insight.

A brief laugh escaped. Yeah, she wanted Jax’s help right now, but that wasn’t the only thing she wanted from him. She wished he were sitting across from her to lend his quiet support, too. So she could stare into his dark brown eyes and calm the frustration boiling inside her over all the pieces of this case that didn’t quite fit together.

It had been a long time since she’d wanted to work with a man on a case in quite this way. Seven years, to be exact.

Guilt flooded, followed by an image of Juan staring contemplatively at her. The ache of missing him had faded with time, but moving on now would be a betrayal of everything they’d had together.

She was a cop and her husband had been murdered. There couldn’t be room for anything else until she’d found the person responsible and made him pay.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

If Jax was home in Anchorage on a Friday night, he’d be having dinner with friends, or maybe talking a couple of the agents into taking him to the shooting range. He’d thought he was mostly finished with the travel when he’d left the Rapid Deployment Team. But Friday night while he was in the middle of a big investigation with a lot of victims who needed him was just another night.

Tonight, though, instead of wanting to grab a quiet dinner and crash, Jax wanted to see Keara. “What do you think, Patches?”

She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking, because her tail started to wag as she stared up at him.

The two of them were on the outskirts of Desparre, back at the diner where he’d met Keara on Monday. Knowing they’d let Patches in had made it an obvious choice for a break. He’d ordered a sandwich. Enough to calm his grumbling stomach, but not so much that he couldn’t eat again if Keara was up for dinner. Beside him, Patches was happily chewing the treat the restaurant owner had handed her, ignoring the dog food Jax had brought.

“Spoiled,” he told her and she wagged her tail again.

Giving her a quick pat on the head, he dialed Keara, anxious to hear her voice. Although they’d gone to the crime scene together that morning, she’d left way before he had, to canvass the community. He’d spent the day in Desparre, too, but he’d been focused on the victims and families with the biggest emotional need. He and Keara had talked to the same people several times today, but never at the same time.

He missed her.

Her phone rang and rang. Just when he was expecting voice mail to pick up, Keara answered, sounding distracted. “Hello?”

“It’s Jax,” he told her, although he assumed she knew it from the display on her phone since she’d long since entered his contact information.

He could hear papers shuffling in the pause that followed and then finally she sighed and asked, “Did you speak to Imani and Wesley again today? Did you see the artist’s rendering of the person they saw near the woods?”

After Jax had left to talk to more victims—starting with the families of Officer Nate Dreymond and Talise Poitra—Anderson had called in a sketch artist to work with the couple. He’d asked Anderson to send him the picture once it was finished.

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, people change. The picture we have of Rodney Brown is from seven years ago. But—”

“It doesn’t look like him,” Keara cut him off. “The nose is wrong. The cheekbones are higher. I know Rodney could have started going bald in the past seven years, but the hair seems off, too.”

“Sketches aren’t perfect,” Jax reminded her. “Imani and Wesley weren’t that close to the guy and it sounds like he tried to get out of view when he saw them looking at him.”

“I know. But the thing is, I spent the afternoon reviewing the cases your system spit out. I know we already agreed the bombings don’t