Chasing Evil (Circle of Evil) (14 page)

But he’d learned to trust his instincts. And they were telling him she’d been taken by the maniac who’d kidnapped, raped and murdered at least six women. The one who might have abducted yet another from Edina three days earlier.

The deviant who just might be harboring a rage toward the woman who’d written the profile on him that was now splashed all over the media.

Chapter 8

Eddies of pleasure continued to shimmer through Sophia, never-ending ripples in a sensual pond. Her heart rate still bucked and sprinted like a high-spirited filly. Cam’s weight, while heavy, was too comforting to want to separate from just yet.

Sophia wasn’t inexperienced, but she had been selective over the years. None of the men she’d slept with in the past had managed to elicit an ounce of the explosive response she felt with Cam. The thought had a thread of alarm mingling with recently sated desire. Of course, not one of the men in her past had much of anything in common with Cam Prescott, short of gender. Other than where their careers crossed, the same could be said of Cam and her.

Before grad school her life had followed a predictable, if dull pattern. Her childhood had consisted of arranged play dates with children of other professors at the university. Lessons for flute, piano and French, all of which she’d excelled at. And because a well-rounded child required physical activity, there had been golf, soccer and tennis.
None
of which she’d excelled at.

When Cam took a long ragged breath, she delicately traced his spine with the tips of her fingers, pleased when his damp flesh quivered beneath her touch. Her teen years at the all girls’ school had been filled with science club and chorus, band and dates with carefully selected suitable young men, some the same playmates from her childhood.

And all of it so controlled and planned it was as though she’d been raised inside a glass bottle. If she’d chafed at the firmly set parameters of her life, there had at least been no outright rebellion. Sophia had been raised much too well mannered for that.

Until Louis Frein had smashed that glass chamber, introducing her to a world her parents would never have chosen for her. For the first time in her life, she’d deviated from the path her parents had selected. More, she’d found a career at once challenging and fulfilling. It was the only choice she’d ever made that was totally her own.

She’d been paying for that deviation ever since. First with the never-quite-dissipated disapproval of her parents and then the disintegration of her marriage. Hefty prices for her decision. Perhaps well worth it, but she’d certainly learned that choices came with a cost. Which was why it was easier…wiser…to remain in control. Impetuous decisions invited far-reaching consequences. She preferred a guarantee that throwing caution to the winds wouldn’t come back to bite her in the end.

Which made inviting Cam Prescott into her life even more inexplicable.

With an effort she could tell cost him, Cam rolled heavily off her. “Sorry.” He positioned them both so they were on their sides, facing each other. Looping an arm possessively around her waist, he buried his face in her hair. “You should have gotten a crane. Are you still breathing?”

“I’m not quite sure how to summon a crane. If the situation had gotten dire, I am armed with the secret knowledge of your ticklish spots.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “A wise woman doesn’t give away all the weapons in her arsenal.”

“A wise woman doesn’t get herself in situations where she requires an arsenal.” So why was she even now scrambling for her scattered defenses? She felt totally, achingly vulnerable with him. What she knew about the man, other than the obvious, would barely fill a thimble.

He was sexy, but opaque. Hard, with glimmers of compassion. Reticent, yet intuitive. And despite her respect for no-trespassing signs, both figurative and literal, suddenly that reticence disturbed her.

“Are your parents alive?” she asked suddenly.

“Why?”

“I’m assuming you
do
have parents.”

“I came about in the usual way.” His hand began to slide lazily up and down the curves and hollows of her waist. “I have a mom. There must have been a dad at some point, but he was gone before I knew him. And then there were men.” His voice went flat. “Some better than others, but most whose charm disappeared about the time they convinced my mom to move in with them. My mother sees the best in absolutely everybody, but I learned at a young age that some people have no ‘best.’ Just traits that make them a little less than a total son of a bitch.”

Her heart clutched a little at the thought of him as a young boy, a revolving door of strange men in and out of his life. She had clients with similar backgrounds. Knew well the dangers of exposing a child to that lifestyle. “Did she marry any of them?”

“She’s married now. Not then.” One of his feet began to stroke hers. “When I was ten I got a paper route. Then another. A guy gave me a job delivering small orders from his grocery store on my bike. When I’d saved two hundred dollars I thought it was a fortune. I took it my mom, who still had a black eye from her latest ‘fall.’ Dumped it in her lap and told her she didn’t need men to take care of her anymore. I was old enough to be the man.”

“Oh, Cam.” Her heart quite simply melted. She could imagine him as he must have looked then. Too determined and serious for his age. With those golden brown eyes that even then saw too much. And knew, without being told, how much of the boy still existed in the man.

“My mom’s a crier.” There was an indulgent note in his voice. “Happy, sad, tired, proud…she’s an equal opportunity weeper. So, she cried, of course. Then she hugged me. Then she packed. It was just the two of us after that. She worked a series of low-paying jobs, and I pitched in. We scraped by. She married Larry about six years ago, after dating him at least that long. Good guy. Not a son-of-a-bitch.”

And that easily, that simply, her alarm quieted again. It was such a small thing, this freely revealing a snippet of his past. But for this man every nugget shared was like gold.

Sophia sighed a little, slipped an arm around his neck. “Cam. What am I going to do with you?”

He cupped her jaw, leaning in to whisper a kiss against her mouth. His voice took on a hint of wicked. “I have a few suggestions.”

It took effort to open her eyes. Sophie struggled to surface from an ocean of unconsciousness. Her limbs were weighted. Her mouth felt as though it were filled with sand. There was a jackhammer at the base of her skull, drilling reverberations that were echoed by the drum roll in her temples. Her thoughts were muzzy. She must have the mother of all hangovers. But she hadn’t drunk any wine last night, had she?

Lying there another few minutes, she became aware of a dark foreboding simmering inside her. The mattress she was lying on was soft. Too soft. It wasn’t the firm mattress she’d selected when she’d moved into the condo. She must be in Cam’s bed.

The thought had her trepidation easing. Pleasure filtered through the confusion. She’d never woken with a headache in Cam’s bed. A night spent tangled up with him always left her limbs weak and her mind dazed. The man had the most amazing hands. And mouth. Her palms itched to explore his hard body again. To map every intriguing place where sinew and muscle met bone.

Something furry skittered across her foot, jolting her fully awake. Biting back a scream she sat straight up on the mattress, kicking awkwardly at whatever had disturbed her.

Her actions intensified the pounding in her head. Sophia placed one hand on the mattress next to her, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass.

“Bitching about your quarters already? Typical woman. Never happy.”

Something wasn’t right. Cam’s voice sounded unlike him. Its pitch was higher, with an edge she’d never heard there before. The foreboding returned twofold, morphing into panic. Sophia forced her eyelids open. Threw up a hand as a shield when a bright spotlight drilled into her eyes. The shadowy man next to it seemed to split into two, the images wavering before they melded again.

It wasn’t Cam, but a stranger. The realization washed over like a douse of ice water. And she wasn’t in a bedroom at all. She swung her head wildly to take in the confines of her prison, the action sending waves of nausea through her.

“Where am I? And who are you?”

“Who am I?” The stranger was huge. At least he seemed that way, shrouded in shadows. Five-ten maybe, but with the build of a dedicated weight lifter. Muscles bulged unnaturally in his chest, arms and legs. Even his neck was thick, causing his bald head to appear to sit directly upon those massive shoulders.

Comprehension was dulled. It took moments to observe that the stranger was completely naked.

And so was she.
The realization had Sophia drawing up her knees, wrapping her arms around them as if donning armor. She was seated on a blowup mattress placed on cracked and crumbling pavement. One wall of her cell was stone, the sides wooden. And the front where the stranger had stationed himself to peer in at her was fashioned of metal bars too wide to completely wrap her hands around.
What was this place?

Memory quickly followed on the heels of that question. The man wasn’t a stranger at all. He’d come into her bathroom last night while she’d showered.

That recollection seemed to open the floodgates and memories rushed in on a torrent. She’d seen an intruder in the bathroom only seconds before he’d opened the shower door to drag her, kicking and swinging, from the tiled stall. With one of those muscle-bound arms holding her pinned against his chest and his free hand clapped over her mouth, their reflection from the vanity mirror had been something from a horror show. The helpless victim struggling with the masked intruder.

But sometime in their struggles his mask had worked up. She’d gotten a quick look at the features of the man now glaring at her with naked venom in his eyes.

It’d been like glimpsing hell.

“Not so high and mighty now, are you?” The smile that split his face made her shudder. “Most cunts aren’t once someone shows them their place in this world. I’m gonna be the one to put you in your place, all right. You and me got a score to settle.”

“How can that be? I don’t even know you.” Sophia was shocked by the reasonable tone she managed, even while everything inside her shrank in fear. “Maybe there’s been a mistake.”

“Oh, there has been. A big mistake. And you made it, bitch. Or should I call you Dr. Bitch?” The stranger seemed to be enjoying himself now, one foot raised to rest on the lowest metal bar, his hands wrapped around another. “Looked you up on the Internet after I saw your lies all over the news a couple days ago. Just because you got a bunch of letters after your name doesn’t make you an expert on people you don’t even know.”

“You’re angry with me,” she said evenly, trying to make frantic sense of what he was saying. “Why don’t you tell me what I did to disappoint you?”

“That!” The rage that bubbled out him appeared so suddenly, so violently that she reared back, even with the closed gate and space between them. He stabbed a finger at her. “You called it right there. All women are disappointments sooner or later. Goes without saying. But you…who the fuck are you to say those things about me? Inadequate? Displaced aggression? You’re going to pay for lying ’bout me getting fucked up the ass when I was a kid. You’ll be begging me to end you.” He pressed his face close to the bars, his face red, chest heaving.

Every organ inside her body froze. This had to be a nightmare. Sophia squeezed her eyes tightly closed, willing the scene away. But he was still there when she reopened them.

He’d quoted snippets from her profile of the offender in Cam’s case. But how could that have been on the news? When? She still couldn’t make sense of it.

“And you’ll die, all right. But on my say, not yours. First I’m gonna hurt you.” He said the words as if savoring them, and they seemed to calm him. “You can’t even imagine how much I’ll hurt you. And then I’ll do it all over again. Those letters after your name don’t mean shit to me. You’re just tits and ass and cunt, no better than the rest of your kind. I’ll use you like a filthy whore and when I get tired of you, you’ll be dead. Then the world will know you’re nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Did a woman make you feel that way once?” she hazarded a guess. “Is that why they have to pay?”

“You want to know what makes a man like me tick?” The temper had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He seemed almost amused. “Well, I’m going to educate you about that. I’ll educate you real good until the only question you’ll have left is when are you going to die?”

He pushed away from the gate, rattling it on its hinges. “You think about that until I come back for you.”

He strode out of her line of vision. She couldn’t seem to move, and she couldn’t blame her immobility on whatever drug he’d injected her with. Fear kept her limbs leaden. Her mind frozen. But a couple thoughts were clear enough. The man they’d been seeking so diligently had found her.

And he didn’t look at all like the stranger depicted in the forensic sketch Jenna had drawn.

The usual conversational buzz greeted Cam when he hit the briefing room. At his entry, however, the noise shut off as abruptly as if someone had flipped a switch. He caught the eye of Tommy Franks and gestured for him to join him up front. The older agent had been running the briefings in Cam’s absence and Cam wasn’t the type to elbow the agent aside upon his return. There was no place in their line of work for glory hounds.

With Franks at his side Cam, began without preamble. “As you all know there have been major developments in the case in the last few days. We’ll address the most pressing first.” He gave a nod in Jenna’s direction and she started the PowerPoint. A professional shot of Sophie appeared on the screen at the front of the room.

If the room was silent before, now it was tomb-like. “Sometime between eleven fifty-eight last night and twelve thirty-two this morning, we believe Dr. Sophia Channing was forcibly abducted from her home. The intruder somehow entered her locked garage and accessed the house through the attic crawlspace. A BOLO alert was issued at nine-thirty a.m. The Des Moines police department is manning a hotline and dealing with the tips coming in from the alert. So far none of them has elicited any leads on her whereabouts.”