Consumed by Wrath: An FBI/Romance Thriller (An FBI/Romance Thriller ~ Book 8) (71 page)

It was a damn odd day.

“Can we get meatless pizza?” she asked out of the blue.

“Sure
we can. Are you okay?” Ethan asked, placing his hand over her belly.

“Suddenly, Charlie and I aren’t feeling it.”

Yeah, as a matter of fact, neither were they.

                                *   *   *

Tony Magnus worked on the bones as his partner crashed on the sofa in the lounge. He had been up for most of the night working, and he looked like hell.

He sent him to get some down
time, so he could begin to focus again. For a while there, he was starting to act silly and say things that weren’t making sense.

It was a sure sign that the man was way past tired.

Working on the remains, he glanced up when the lab tech walked in from the other room.

“We’re just about done with all the trace,” said Harry.

“When you finish it, send it to Chris. He’ll read it over and get it to the Blackhawks. To me, it all looks like gibberish. I only speak bones.”

“Not a probably, Doctor Magnus,” they young man said. “Did you find anything else?”

The man shook his head. “No, nothing. They’re clean.”

Harry watched him use his tools to magnify. “Working for the FBI must be exciting,” he said, moving closer
to the doctor.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Chasing all the criminals and solving things must be very gratifying.”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t do a lot of sleuthing. I’m a bone man. Doctor Leonard does more for the team than I do. He’s more important.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it makes me wish I was an ME, sometimes. He gets all the exciting cases.”

Harry picked up a large cleaver lying beside the bones. “Is this what he used to kill Doc?”

Tony glanced over. “Yeah, we think it was something similar. The cuff marks in the bone match.”

He turned it in his hand and stared at the blade. “Poor Doc.”

Before he could say more, a
tech popped her head inside. “Harry, we need to finish this up.”

He turned. “I’ll talk to you later, Doctor Magnus.”

The man made some non-committal sound and continued on with his work. “Sure Harry. I’ll see you later.”

                                *   *   *

Sitting in the pizza place, they waited for the rest of their team to show up.
When they arrived, Callen had sent Cyra and Harper a text, asking them to meet them for lunch and a meeting. As they stared at the menu, someone approached the table.

Glancing up, they were face to face with Jacob Brome.

Great.

Ethan absolutely wanted to see another man
who had a relationship with his wife in the past. Why not have the man who took her virginity, stop by to say hello while they ate?

Now
, he knew why they rarely came to Salem to relax.

The place put him on edge.

“Hey, Jacob. How’s it going?” she asked, sipping her water. Already, the men were control freaking her food. They were making sure she was well hydrated, since pizza was high in sodium.

And they wondered why she wanted a break
from carrying a baby? Well, here it was.

“It’s good. Can I speak with you
, or are you busy?”

She pointed at the bench and waited for him to take a seat. When he was comfortable, she couldn’t help but notice the men beside her didn't look happy at all. Placing
a hand on each one of their thighs, she offered them comfort.

“What do you want to discuss?”

“I’m representing Denton Kline, and I’m going to ask that if you have any questions, that you address them to me.” He slid his business card across the table.

“Wait, you’re representing Denton Kline and
Barbara Harris?”

He shrugged. “Yes, why?”

“You don’t find that a conflict of interest? Her husband was sleeping with his wife and caused a divorce. They both got STDs, and are both part of a murder investigation.”

“I don’t know if you’re aware, but this isn’t exactly a big city. There aren’t that many lawyers in town. I’m
the best one when it comes to this kind of litigation.”

She stared at him. “Who else are you representing?”

“That’s not really any of the FBI’s business, and my clients have rights.”

Elizabeth started laughing. “You want to tell me, or do you want me to drag you outside and kick the shit out of you, like I did when I caught you and Melody Montgomery making out behind your daddy’s barn.”

Now, Blackhawk was grinning. Hell yeah! The man in front of him had gotten a beat down by his woman. Today was getting so much brighter.

“Lyzee knock it off. You know that I can’t break the rules and tell you
who I’m working for.”

Immediately, her arms crossed and a defensive position was taken
as she stared him down. “You’re right. Callen, what do we know about my first love, Joshua Brome?”

“Other than he was stupid to make out with anyone but you, because you’re hot?”

She snorted. “I meant FBI related, but thanks for that.”

The man looked nervous as both men flipped open their tablets and began working.

“It looks like he’s single. It looks like he was married to a Melody Montgomery Brome for six years until she filed. Damn, that had to suck,” Callen said, grinning.

“Wow, you married her. Go you,” Elizabeth said, cheerfully. “I’m sorry that didn't work out for you.”

He blanched.

“Oh, here we go,” stated Blackhawk. “It looks like he’s on the terrorist cell watch list. I hope he doesn’t try to use his passport to get on a plane. That could be awkward
when the TSAs strip search him.”

He stared at them wide eyed. “You can’t do that. You can’t screw with US citizens.”

They all laughed at how naïve that sounded.

“Yeah, one of the biggest government agencies would never do that. I mean, it could be a typo. Who could blame us then if we detained you or shipped you to Gitmo?
It shouldn’t take too long to sort that out. What’s the average stay time there, Cal?”

He tapped his chin. “Six years to life.”

At those words, the man looked freaked out. “I’m also representing the council against Duke William’s wife.”

“Wow, Joshua, you’re a busy, busy boy.”

He stared at her. “I’m actually glad I didn't end up with you. You’re a really horrible person,” he said, standing up. “You are the ideal FBI agent, using intimidation and muscle to scare hard working people. This is why US citizens dislike the government and are standing up to it.”

She
glared at him. The look must have scared the hell out of him, because he scattered like a roach when the lights came on.

Both men began laughing.

“Yeah, yeah, there’s no love lost there,” she said, finishing her water. “Now, can I have something with flavor in it, baby daddy?” she asked Ethan.

He waved his arm and a waitress appeared. “Can my wife get some juice? Do
you have orange?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, heading off to the kitchen.

“Seriously?”

Whitefox was having a hard time not laughing. When Elizabeth had been pregnant with his child, he was pretty much the same way.

“Yes, it’s high in folic acid and will be better for you than soda.”

When the waitress came back, she stopped her. “They will also be having orange juice,” she said, pointing at
her men.

Ethan hated orange juice
, and she knew it. Damn, she was going to be feisty for this pregnancy.

Hot damn!

He couldn’t wait.

When
the waitress was gone, Elizabeth focused on them. “It’s back to what I eat, you eat, Cowboy and sidekick of Cowboy.”

They were about to object, when Cyra and
Harper wandered into the restaurant.

“Have a seat. Would you two like some soda?” she offered, handing each one of them one of the men’s glasses. The women took sips and pulled out their tablets. “Okay, what do we have?”

Cyra began, “We met with the co-workers at the café and took their statement. It was pretty much what we knew. She left Saturday night, took Sunday off to work, and was a no show today. Only, we found something else out.”

That had their attention.

“Brandon Welsh, the waiter and manager of the café, told us that not long ago, there was an altercation.” Cyra told her what they knew and when she was finished, she waited for her bosses to say something.”

“A Native found a hair
in his salad?”

“Yep.”

“So, it could be Jason Walters or Maxwell Steppapaw,” she said.

“Yep.”

“Or it could any of a thousand other men who match that description, since there’s a Rez not far from here.”

“Yep,” Cyra said.

She closed her eyes. “I don’t know if it’s important or just something coincidental. Lots of people find hairs in their food.” God, she hoped that she didn't find one in her pizza.

When she glanced over at Ethan for some advice, he was grinning. “What?”

“Before you ask, I have no idea.”

“Callen?” she asked, turning to look at her.

“Got me.”

Cyra was glad she wasn’t in charge of this one. “
So, we headed over to her place to search it and borrowed a few techs. I didn't think you’d mind,” she said, continuing to cut her boss a break.

Elizabeth liked when her team worked independently, plus, Cyra had been a detective. She knew her way around a crime scene and didn't need Elizabeth babysitting her.

“It’s fine with me.”

The men agreed.

“When we got there, the back door was conveniently open, so we went in.”

“Are we talking, she left it open or you used your magic powers to open it with your mind?”

“I’m going to go with the first option, Director. I would never break the law, especially while training someone. That’s more your gig.”

Elizabeth snickered. “Yeah,
it’s called bending it, but carry on.”

“I looked around, but it looks clean. She was cooking in the kitchen
at some point, because there was a pot of some innocuous substance on the stove. It looked like chili and smelled like…a forest full of very musty mushrooms.”

“Did you taste it?” she asked, laughing.

“Hell no! There’s not enough fear of you in my body, to make me do something like that,” Cyra said, laughing.

“I’m deducting points, only because you could have made your partner do it.”

Harper looked appalled and everyone laughed. Then, she finally got that this was just her bosses being laid back. It was kind of cool.

“I personally would have the tech team
run the chili.”

Blackhawk called his team
and lit the fire under their asses. He wanted to make sure that someone looked at the food that she was cooking.

At this point in the game, they needed to cover all their bases
.

“Right now, Harper is running financials on Justine Stephens.
” She opened it up for her partner to add something.

“I also started running them on all of our victims. By tonight, I should be able to cross check them and see what they all have in common.”

“Good job, Harper,” Elizabeth said. “Way to own it. I love that in an agent.”

When the waitress came and placed the food in front of them, they all began eating.

“I can also add in the suspects if you want me to,” she offered. “If you give me who we have, I can take care of it.”

With her free hand,
Elizabeth pulled it up on her tablet. “I never thought I would say this, but we have too many suspects, and we don’t know what ties them together. When we leave here, we’re heading back to our place to work on it. If you both would like to join us, we can start breaking each suspect down.”

Both agents were go
od with that, especially the newbie. If anything, she was curious about the three bosses in front of her. One was calm and funny, the other handsome and quiet, and then there was Elizabeth. She was terrifying.

“Okay, how about
we finish eating and head out?”

They all were in agreement. They were about to do what she did best. It was time to break this apart, dig beneath and find the truth.

They had a killer to catch, and it was time to put a stop to this game, before someone else got hurt.

                                *   *   *

The killer was nervous as hell.

The FBI had found the heads and that meant that they were actively working on finding him.

With those, they might be able to do it.

Damn it!

How he wished he took them out of the plastic bags before tossing them in the river. This wasn’t good news at all. Why didn't he think this through a little better?

Taking a deep breath, he
began pacing back and forth. There had to be a solution, all he had to do was think.

God! He wished he was better under pressure, and didn't get nervous like this.

Closing his eyes, he focused on everything that he could possibly lose, and he knew that he needed to hold onto his composure and fight for his food.

They couldn’t have it.

It was his.

He worked so hard, and it made him feel so good.

His heart started pounding in his chest. He just needed a little time, and then he could eat everything in his freezer and get rid of the last woman’s head. If he did that, they couldn’t really prove it was him.

Yes, that was it.

He was going to eat the evidence.

Then
, he thought about it. It would take weeks, and he couldn’t throw it away. That was wasteful and would break his heart, especially after all the work that went into the hunt, the kill, and the preparation.

No! He
couldn’t do it.

He wouldn’t.

As he paced the kitchen of his house, he knew that there was an option that he could take, but it was going to be incredibly risky.

Going to the big chest freezer, he lifted the lid and stared in at all the beautiful food.

There was no way he could waste it.

It meant he had one
choice, and that was to buy himself some time. Yes, he could eat the evidence over the next few days and weeks, but it would mean messing with their plans. He was up for anything that would keep his stash safe.

He wondered if he could pull it off, again.

Like the last time, when he took Doctor Trudeaux, the wheels of justice slowed down. If he could toss a wrench in their machine, maybe that would throw them off track enough to get him through this.

He needed
a distraction.

He ran his fingers over his face
in frustration. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He did his job, and well. He was a good person. All he wanted was to have a really good meal when he came home from work at night.

He wasn’t a bad person.

Suddenly, he knew who the smartest person on their team was, since he had taken this route before. Why not repeat the performance?

It could work.

They may not see it coming.

If he took the ME, they wouldn’t be able to look at those stupid heads and find anything out.

Screw it.

It was now or never.

It all came down to this.

This was his only chance to escape from their reach and keep his beloved prize of the meat.

He would fight to the death to keep it.

There was no other choice.

~ Chapter Twenty ~

  Monday Afternoon

As they pulled up to Hotel Blackhawk, Harper Stanton stared at the house. It was nothing like she thought it would be. Her face must have given her away, because Cyra began laughing as she
parked behind their bosses and turned off the vehicle.

“It doesn’t look like them,” she said, simply. “I expected something with barbed wire and a fortress.
This looks like a normal family lives here.”

Cyra sent Chris a text, telling him where she was and not to worry about her. “You should see their
primary house. That looks like a castle.” Then again, who was she to talk? The house that she and her sexy ME husband lived in resembled a haunted mausoleum on the outside.

Appearances could be deceiving.

Cyra had learned that over the last four months. The biggest lesson had come when she finally figured out that her bosses were nothing like the preconceived notions that she had about them.

“Do you hang out with them often?” he
r partner asked, staring over at her.

“Chris and Elizabeth go way back. They’ve been friends for a long time. I’ve only been accepted into the group a few months ago. They come to our house, and we go to theirs.”

“The threesome thing is both weird and hot at the same time. As an agent, I’m intrigued, but as a woman I’m jealous.”

She didn't
comment on that. At first, she was completely put off by it, but now, she really didn't dwell. When they were just having dinner or barbequing, they weren’t thinking about who was sleeping with whom. It was just five people who were friends, hanging out and talking. Besides, they were a family now, and that meant something to her.

“
Yeah, they’re just normal people. Once you hang out with them, you aren’t focused on the sex part.”

Harper snorted. “Yeah, how is that even possible? Are we looking at the same men?”

“I’m happily married to my mad scientist. I don’t feel the need to check out my friend’s husbands.”

Harper
jumped out of the vehicle and hoped that never happened to her. The marriage part, and then the little ‘stop checking out hot men’ part too.

“Okay, so let’s go in. I’m dying to see this place.”

Cyra pointed at her partner. “Be respectful. Elizabeth can smell nonsense a mile away, and she will chew you up and spit you out.”

The woman rolled her eyes, as they headed up to the porch. At the door, Cyra knocked.

Callen wandered over with his tablet, his boots off, and a soda in his hands. “Hey! You don’t have to knock, Cyra. You’re always welcome to walk in.”

She smiled at him. “Yeah, with t
hree armed Feds inside, that sounds like a terrific idea. I’ll send the newbie in first next time.”

He offered her a fist bump. “Good one. We’re
in the family room, and Lyzee has the whiteboard set up.”

They followed him in, and Cyra gave her partner a dirty look
, and slap to the arm, when she caught her checking out Callen’s ass. The woman was in for a lot of pain if she got caught doing that in their home.

“Hey, come on in,” said Elizabeth. She was sitting on the arm of the couch, and Ethan was right beside her.

“We’re ready, boss lady,” said Cyra, dropping her bag and taking a seat by Callen. She figured it was for her partner’s well-being that she acted like a buffer between any of Elizabeth’s men and Harper.

“Okay, let’s start by breaking down all of our suspects
, and then I want to talk about the victims. The killer is picking them for a reason. We just need to find it, and we’ll have him. Hopefully, it will be before he picks his next meal.”

They all agreed with that one.

“Okay, let’s start at victim one, Jefferson Harris. What we know is that his wife is the biggest bitch I’ve ever seen in my life, me included. She was shacking up with Jason Walters, and using him as her sexy Native boy toy.”

Standing, she made notes on the whiteboard.

“We also know that Denton Kline had issues with the man. He accused him of stealing money from the town, but had no proof. The council has their lawyer working on it. Mr. Kline has his undies in a bunch, since his wife was hooking up with the deceased.”

Callen spoke up, “I checked,
and the wife has moved across the country and lives in California. She’s started a new life, so I doubt that she’s crying over her ex.”

“Good point,” Elizabeth said. “Next, we have Duke Williams. He
’s the friendly neighborhood pig farmer. He was accused of stinking up the air, and the council wanted him to knock it off. Duke took offense, and then disappeared. Before he was killed, he managed to get into a fist fight with Maxwell Steppapaw. They brawled, and then Duke called the police and had him arrested for assault.”

She made more notes. “I can’t see how these men are connected. Other than Jefferson Harris
being on the council, but they didn't start harassing Duke Williams until after Harris was already missing.”

Everyone in the room stared at the board.

“That’s just food for thought,” she said. “Moving on, we have Herman Peterson. He was out snapping pictures of the fairgrounds and doing a story on haunted places in Salem. That’s where he had a run in with Chief Runningwolf. The man’s out of our age spectrum for the killer, badly out of shape, and I don’t think a viable suspect. I feel pretty good with removing him. Has anyone found anything that said anything different?”

They looked around.

“Regarding the statement by Brandon Welsh at the café, he didn't say an old man argued with Justine, so we can probably remove him.”

“Okay, so, after his disappearance, we had a nine month gap of time. The bones showed up and Doctor Trudeaux started working on it. Within three days of getting the bones, he w
ent missing. The killer abducted him from his front yard. Because he had no cell phone, we can’t see if he called from somewhere, used cell towers, or anything else to triangulate where the man had been. All we do know is that Doc suspected someone was eating the flesh, and found the first traces of bite marks.”

Blackhawk pulled up his information. “The tech lab ran everything. Nothing was found in the house or his car that gave us an idea of who took them. We found blood, but it was Doctor Trudeaux’s.”

Elizabeth continued, only because she was feeling emotional, talking about the man who she loved that died. “Okay, next the killer took his first woman. No one hated Marjorie Willard, and she didn't have any issues with people. She was on the woman’s auxiliary and was taken outside a meeting.”

Callen spoke up, “Her husband claims
that he was home with his child, but no one could confirm or deny that.”

“See how this is one damn long list of potential suspects? Almost each person had someone
who had issues with them, with the exception of the women,” she said, pausing. “This brings up the next victim, Justine Stephens. We can’t prove that the pelvis we found was hers, but she suspiciously went missing and the people she works with believe that’s unlike her.”