Intimate Desires (The Love and Danger Series) (13 page)

Hannah was confused.  “Sam, I’m not sure what’s going on, but no men are trying to get me.  In fact, you’re the only man that has any right to touch me.”

Her words broke through his jealousy and he bent lower, his mouth capturing hers in a slow, tender kiss.  “I like the way you said that.  Say it again,” he commanded, his hand slipping under her purple sweater, finding the soft skin underneath. 

Hannah sighed and gave in to the kiss for a moment, but she pulled back before it could become too intimate. 
“You’re trying to distract me.”

He laughed deep and sexy.  “No.  I’m trying
to stake my claim,” he corrected. “Now get in the truck,” he commanded and lifted her up before she could object again.  She was just about to say something but he closed the door and walked around the front.

Hannah wasn’t sure if she was just too tired to argue, or too happy to care.  But sitting in Sam’s truck, riding down the still quiet streets of Chicago towards who knows where, she sighed and leaned back against the passenger seat.  “Are you ever going to explain what you meant back there?” she asked, looking over at him, admiring his strong profile and confident jawline. 

One side of his mouth went up in what she suspected was a smirk.  “Probably not.”

She laughed, but
took it as another joke.

Sam liked her laugh, wished he could get her to laugh more often.  She was sweet and cute and sexy beyond anything he’d ever known in a woman before.  And he wanted every part of her.  Unfortunately, she had no idea of all the other men who constantly tried to get her attention, tried to make her smile and gain just a smidge of her affection.  He’d seen it the other day when he’d been watching her work.  There were definitely women who came into the store, but the vast
majority were men who just wanted to chat with her.  She made it easy too.  She liked everyone and listened to all their stories, genuinely interested. 

When he reached the station, he saw that Brock and
Walker were already there while Colt was just pulling into the parking lot.

“Why are we here?  Should
n’t I go back to my apartment?”

Sam stepped out and came around.  “No.  I want you here where I can see you.  If I need to leave, I’ll hav
e another officer watch out for you.”

She put her hands on his shoulders as he lifted her down to the ground.  “Why?  I’m not in danger.  The men who are
dying around me are the ones in danger.”

Sam took her hand and led her into the station, then all the way back to the conference room, ignoring the startled looks from the other officers when they realized that he was holding Hannah’s hand.  He’d get lots of grief from this later on, but he didn’t care.  If Hannah was going to be here where he knew she was safe, he wanted to stake his claim as visibly as possible. 

“We’re going to work in here,” he explained and gestured to a sofa by the wall.  “Why don’t you relax over there? I’ll get you a newspaper or something to read.

Hannah took a seat, curling up against one end while
her eyes scanned the bulletin board that had all the information pinned across the surface.  She looked at the details, ignoring the gruesome pictures and tried to figure out what was going on. 

In the end, she curled her legs up underneath her
on the sofa and, because of her activities of the previous two nights, she was exhausted.  By the time Sam came back with a cup of coffee and a newspaper for her to read, she was already asleep. 

Sam watched her for a long moment before Colt and
Walker came back in.  Brock followed but he was a bit slower since he was busy flirting with one of the female officers.  All four of them loved the ladies, but Brock was much more aggressive in his pursuit. 

Once they were all seated around the conference room table, t
hey tossed out different ideas, researching possibilities on the computer, joked around and brainstormed.  When Joe came back in, he was out of breath and sweating.

“
Whatcha got?” Colt asked.  All of them were aware of a new tension, something urgent the medical examiner had raced all the way up from his office to share with them. 

“Ricin,” Joe blurted out without any preamble
as the four detectives turned to look at him.  “This guy wasn’t the last victim.  He was the first.”

Joe now had everyone’s attention.  Colt saw their captain walking by in the hallway and waved him in, wanting him to
hear this latest development. 

“Tell us more,”
Walker said when the captain was standing at the head of the conference room table. 

“The poison that killed the third man was ricin.  It’s actually one of the most lethal poisons in the world.  It isn’t easy to make either.  A person would need
some knowledge of chemistry and pharmaceuticals to handle this stuff without poisoning themselves.”  He took a deep breath and pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, mopping his brow.  “The problem with ricin is that a person doesn’t know they’ve been poisoned until hours later.  Then they come down with what they just assume are flu symptoms so most people don’t pay attention and don’t seek medical help.”

The four of them were more frustrated, all of them tense with surprise at this newest twist. 
“So we have no idea when this guy got his lethal dose of ricin?” Brock asked, leaning his palms flat against the conference room table. 

Joe was already shaking his head.  “
My techs are already trying to work the poison back to its source, trying to calculate the symptoms and how much damage the poison did to the victim’s body.  The time of death was approximately four o’clock this morning.  But I don’t yet know when the poison was administered. And just like the last two victims, the body had been moved after death.  I know that because there was vomit on the pants but none on the ground where he was found.  The vomit had blood in it, one of the last symptoms before death.  If he’d died there behind the coffee shop, he would have been so sick, he couldn’t move, plus there would have been vomit all around him.  So he was definitely moved.”  Joe shook his head, rubbing his neck as if he were truly disturbed.  “It can take days before a person dies and they are in pain as the poison takes over.  That’s why I’m saying this guy was probably the first victim.”

The four of them looked at each other, all of them trying to fit this latest piece of the puzzle into the bigger picture. 
“So we’ve got ricin and potassium chloride poisoning,” Walker summarized.

“And an overdose of a heart medicine called digitalis,” Joe said, pulling out another report.  “I wasn’t sure, but the final report came back late last night.  The second, or third, depending on how you want to quantify them, was killed by this drug.”

Unaware of the men standing in a small circle discussing the details, Hannah had woken up and taken in all the specifics she’d never heard before, her eyes alert and her mind going over all of the particulars.  “Plants,” she said and stood up, trying to focus her eyes on the bulletin board.

All the men turned to look at her, their startled eyes indicating they had forgotten she was still in the room. 
“Plants?” Colt was the first one to ask, voicing what they were all thinking.

Hannah looked at the six men, four of them standing at least a head taller than the other two, all of them terribly intimidating.  But she took a deep breath and walked clos
er to the pictures.  “Yes.  The poisons all have to do with plants,” she explained.  Pointing to George, the one they’d originally thought was the first victim, she said, “Potassium chloride is used in fertilizers.”  Moving to the second victim, she said, “Digitalis is essentially foxglove, a really beautiful plant that blooms in the early spring.” She looked back at the third picture, trying not to cringe at how horrible the man looked.  “And the third man, he was killed by ricin but that’s made from the crushed seeds of the castor oil plant, right?” she looked at Joe who seemed to pale at her conclusions. 

She took his slight nod as agreement. 
“So all of these people were killed by someone who had knowledge of medicine or an in-depth knowledge of plants and gardening.”

Brock shook his head
, the scar on his cheek not so obvious now that his stubble had darkened.  “Yeah, but the castor oil plant has to be grown in a hot house in this area.  And the foxglove is only a biannual plant.   Besides, the person would have to eat several flowers to get this kind of dose of the poison.  But all parts of the plant are poisonous.”  There was a very loud silence when he finished.  He looked at everyone around him, some of whom were looking at him with their mouths hanging open in surprise, and shrugged. “What?  I like plants.”

Everyone continued to stare at the extremely large, very masculine man who knew a great deal about
gardening.  It just seemed so completely opposite to what everyone saw in him.  “Anyway,” he continued, throwing irritated glances at the others, “I have no clue what the lethal dose is, but someone would really have to know what they are doing, and how to extract it.  Again, it’s poisonous and can cause some pretty severe hallucinations if accidentally breathed or even absorbed by the skin.”

It took several heartbeats for the rest of the group to
grasp, not only the information, but also the fact that Brock knew about the flowers.  It was so hard to see!  Brock was a huge, tough as nails kind of guy.  The connection was hard to grasp.  `

Hannah
blinked and shook her head, as if she still couldn’t see the enormous, black haired pirate stepping through a garden.  Then she swallowed as she realized the next piece of the puzzle, not liking the next link.  “I think they are all water soluble,” she said.  Looking at the six men, she shuddered.  “Or coffee soluble.” 

The men slowly nodded their heads
, already having gone there themselves. 

Joe saw her devastated look and piped in
, trying to ease the guilt that shouldn’t be on her slender shoulders but on the murderer’s.  “We don’t know how the ricin was transferred.  Assuming it was through a cup of coffee is stretching the possibilities.  It could have been in any drink, including just being breathed in.”

That made Hannah feel slightly better, but she still didn’t like even the slightest possibility that her coffee had been used to kill someone
, even though she hadn’t been the one to administer the poison. 

Sam broke through everyone’s thoughts when he said, “I think the killer might be trying to impress Hannah.” 

That little bombshell had the members of the conference room looking at each other oddly, as if stunned that they hadn’t thought of that angle before.  Everyone turned to stare at him, waiting for him to expound.  Sam shrugged, his eyes lighting onto the woman in question and Hannah’s heart raced with that look.  “You’ve seen her at the coffee shop.  She’s friendly with everyone.  How hard would it be, with a sick mind, to interpret her friendliness into something more?  A twisted, sick mind, can work magic on the most innocent of smiles.”

Hannah liked the way he’d said that.  It took the blame off of her, which she was very liable to do.  It put the impetus and sickness on the murderer instead. 

“So how do you narrow down all the guys that think they’re in love with Hannah?” Colt asked the question that was on everyone’s minds.

Hannah spoke up.  “
First of all, no one thinks they’re in love with me,” she said but had to stop there when three men looked at her like she’d just lost her mind, then their eyes slid over to look at Sam.  Hannah looked over at him herself and was astonished to see his eyes raised in question. 

She looked away, unable to hold the intensity of that gaze. 
“Anyway, I don’t have that much of an impact on anyone.”

Brock chuckled.  “I know of one man who is in love with you,
darlin’ and I agree with Sam.  The men you come into contact with at the coffee shop, they’re all smitten.”  His Texas accent was in full force as he winked at her from across the table. 

Hannah blushed for some reason and crossed her arms over her chest.  “So how do we proceed?” she asked
, not believing the “love” part but accepting that her friendliness might be misinterpreted by a sick mind.

Everyone turned to Sam and he knew exactly what they were going to suggest.  “We go back to the coffee shop.  We watch, observe and run the license plates of every person who goes all
goo-goo eyed at you.  We run background checks on all the men.”  He winked at her when he said, “And even the women.” 

Hannah really didn’t like that idea. “That seems like such an invasion of privacy,” she argued. 

“The alternative is to try and catch someone in the act of killing another person,” Colt explained.  “The odds of us catching this person, knowing that he hasn’t killed the same way twice so far, he seems to be selecting random people from the homeless community, we don’t know where they are killed much less how they are transported to the back of your shop…” Colt left the rest of the unknowns unspoken but hanging out in the conference room air… “It doesn’t bode well for success from that direction.”

Hannah thought about it for a moment and then accepted that she didn’t have a better idea. 
“Fine.  But you don’t keep records of anyone who doesn’t look like he,” she turned to Sam, “or she, is not the culprit.  Okay?”