Karma Patrol (27 page)

“I’ve always had faith,” she replied softly. “Even when I felt completely alone, I believed that someday I would find you.”

He leaned in slowly, giving her plenty of opportunity to pull away before he kissed her, but she tilted her head up and brushed her lips against his. It was a gentle kiss, a far cry from their earlier passion, but she felt the bond between them shimmer with contentment as he slid his arm around her waist and held her close.

“I’m glad you waited,” he murmured to her. “I don’t care if you’re inexperienced. I’m more than happy to teach you anything you want to learn, and I’m ready and willing to volunteer for any practice sessions you’d like to hold.”

Jade laughed, a combination of amusement and raw relief, and he squeezed her hand in his.

“I’ll try to be a fast learner,” she promised, only partly kidding, but Luke shook his head.

“We’ll go as slow as you want,” he corrected her. “You set the pace, Jade. I’m not going to rush you into anything. You’ve waited a long time for me; I can wait as long as it takes for you to be comfortable.” He hesitated, then added, “I realize this probably makes me a chauvinist jerk, but I like the idea of being your first lover. The idea of anyone else touching you makes me crazy. I want you all to myself…I want you to belong to me. I know it seems insane, since we’ve only been together for a day, but I want you so bad it hurts. I’m not just talking about sex—”

“You want to possess me,” Jade supplied, nodding in agreement. “To own me completely.”

“I…yeah. How did you—”

“I feel the same way,” she admitted. “It’s the soulmate bond. I want to claim you for myself, to carve my name on your soul and tie myself to you so that I’ll never have to let you out of my sight.”

“This bond is seriously screwed up,” he informed her, shaking his head. “Everything you’re saying sounds
crazy, but it feels right.”

“Can you feel the bond?” she wanted to know. “If I concentrate, I can tell the difference between what I’m feeling and what it wants me to feel. I think I can see it, too—sort of a golden thread that connects us.”

He shook his head. “All I can feel is how much I want you. I don’t see any gold thread, but you were born with the ability to see all of that karmic stuff. Maybe that’s why you can see it and I can’t.”

“The bond wants us to make love.” Jade sighed, resting her head against his broad chest. “I could feel it while we were kissing. I wanted it, too, don’t get me wrong, but—”

“But it’s too fast,” he agreed. “We need to take this slow, babe. I don’t care what the bond wants. It’s been a long time since I’ve been with anyone who was new to this, and I already promised I wasn’t going to push you into anything. We’ve got the rest of our lives to figure it out, right?”

Jade laughed, mostly out of relief. “Right,” she agreed. “For tonight, I think your idea was perfect. I’d like to find out what it feels like to fall asleep in your arms.”

“Sounds like heaven,” he told her softly, and pressed a kiss to her smile.

aron Sanford leaned back in his chair, tired eyes scanning the pictures stuck to the bulletin board. He objected to early mornings in general, and this morning he was laboring under the double handicaps of being worried about his partner and having gotten next to no sleep last night. Not that he regretted trading sleep for what he’d ended up doing instead…

“So this is all of them?” he asked, trying to get himself back on task, and Kalindi nodded.

“I went through all of the pictures that the uniforms at the crime scenes took, including the ones from last night. These are the only people who were present in the crowd during the aftermath of at least two of the three Midtown West shootings.”

“We think this guy is doing the shootings at least partly because he likes causing chaos,” Aaron said, recapping his conversation with Kalindi from the day before. “So he’s probably hanging around to watch.”

“There are four of them, including Jackson’s new girlfriend.” Kalindi tapped the photo of Jade with the pen she held in her hand, her expression pure disbelief. “A gorgeous freelance photographer who can afford designer dresses and goes home with random men. Are we sure she isn’t a prostitute?”

Aaron snorted. “You won’t know for sure unless you sleep with her and she asks you for money.”

“If I were inclined in that direction, I’d consider it just for curiosity’s sake,” Kalindi informed him. “She’s hot.”

“She’s way too hot for Jackson,” Mitch Parker opined from his desk, the words muffled by a combination of nasal congestion and throat inflammation, and Kalindi rolled her eyes.

“Go home, Mitch,” she advised her partner. “I know you want to help, but giving us all Ebola isn’t going to help anything.”

“This guy shot a cop,” Mitch replied, swiping ineffectually at his nose with a tissue. “We’re all hands on deck.”

“Just keep your hands off my stuff,” Aaron retorted, getting up and going over to the board to take a closer look at the pictures. Jade’s photo smiled up at him, a shot taken while Luke walked her to his unmarked car at the Westin shooting, and his lips quirked in a smile of his own as he remembered the interrogation that followed. “I don’t want to catch whatever strain of nastiness you’ve got.”

The three remaining suspects were a mixed bunch. Kalindi’s notes on their names and occupations were scribbled next to their pictures, and Aaron read them aloud.

“Clayton Cowden, stock market analyst; Scott Pearson, Navy special ops; and Marlene Jacobs, jewelry store owner. Gee, does one of these people stand out to anyone else as the most likely suspect?”

“Pearson is the obvious choice,” Kalindi agreed. “He’s a trained sniper and he has access to high-powered firearms. Unfortunately, he’s also here on some sort of top-secret something and the Navy is refusing to cooperate with the investigation. They said they’d consider involving NCIS if the FBI can convince them he’s the shooter, but they won’t let anyone so much as talk to him before that.”

“Even if they did let someone talk to him, it wouldn’t be us, because this case isn’t technically ours anymore,” Mitch finished for her, and she nodded.

“The Feds have handicapped us.”

“Maybe not,” Aaron disagreed, eyeing the other two pictures. “Let’s assume for the moment that it isn’t Pearson, since we’re never going to get close enough to get our hands on him and even the slow learners at the FBI will be able to figure out he’s probably the killer and put a tail on him. Focus on the two less likely suspects, the ones the FBI will ignore. What do we know about Clayton Cowden?”

“A few interesting things,” Mitch said, holding up the slender file folder he’d compiled. “For starters, his name is ‘Clayton,’ which screams serial killer all by itself. Age forty-two, lives about six blocks from the Westin where the second shooting took place.”

“Third shooting,” Kalindi corrected him.

“Second shooting in our jurisdiction,” he amended. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic,” she replied, her tone withering. “Please, continue. I’m riveted.”

Not for the first time, Aaron was grateful that he’d been assigned as Luke’s partner instead of Kalindi’s. She wasn’t as pessimistic as Luke, but her biting sarcasm had a tendency to turn downright vicious when she was low on sleep, and good-natured Mitch was far better at letting her snide comments roll off his back than Aaron would have been in his place.

“He works for a brokerage firm downtown called Ledbetter Klein. He’s been there for about six months, but before that he was working for a competing firm. I called both of them early this morning; Ledbetter Klein’s secretary stonewalled me, but the woman I talked to at SLT Enterprises was chatty.”

“I love a chatty secretary,” Kalindi said, sounding a little less irritated, and her partner nodded with conviction.

“Makes life so much easier,” he agreed. “She says Cowden was asked to resign after a few weeks of progressively more erratic behavior that eventually landed him in a psych hospital.”

“Erratic how?” Aaron asked, and Mitch shrugged.

“Talking to himself, getting paranoid, warning people about the coming of judgment day. He didn’t do anything violent and he doesn’t have a criminal record, but the firm felt like he was going to scare away customers. She says she had no idea he’d gotten another job in the same field.”

“I can’t imagine SLT gave him a positive reference.”

“Unless they were so desperate to get rid of him quietly that they lied to Ledbetter Klein. And if Ledbetter Klein is competition, they might’ve decided to play a little ‘screw your neighbor’ and send them the nutjob hoping he would scare off some of their customers.” Aaron studied one of the photos of Cowden, a generic-looking white guy with brown hair and absolutely no expression on his face. “So far, we have one commando and one head case. Who’s the third one again?”

“Marlene Jacobs,” Mitch supplied. “Sixty-eight years old, married with three kids. She and her husband own Jacobs’ Fine Jewelry in Hell’s Kitchen, so she lives and works near all of the crime scenes in our jurisdiction. No military history, no arrests. Not even a parking ticket.”

“One commando, one head case, and one upstanding citizen,” Aaron concluded. “I say we leave Pearson to the FBI, forget about Jacobs, and focus on Cowden. Do we have an address?”

“Last known address according to SLT is the same as what’s on his driver’s license,” Mitch said. “If Ledbetter Klein has another one, they aren’t going to give it to us without a warrant.”

“Hang on a second.” Kalindi had missed most of her partner’s last sentence, too busy flipping furiously through their files on the shooting victims. “There. Right there. One of the victims in our precinct’s second shooting was a patient care tech at Pembrook Springs.”

“So?”

“So, Pembrook Springs is a private psych hospital. I’ll bet you twenty bucks that’s where Cowden got sent when he started to crack.”

“It would explain why that guy was the only victim in that shooting who wasn’t a politician,” Mitch said, thinking through the scenario out loud. “This sniper would have to have incredible timing, though. In order for him to identify and kill three completely unrelated politicians
and
target someone he might’ve had a personal vendetta against, all in the same seconds-long shooting spree, he would’ve had to know exactly where each one of them would be and pick his location for the shooting based on…what, exactly? How did he know they would all be there at the same time? Either he’s got the best luck in the world or he’s psychic.”

“Are you hearing yourself right now?” Kalindi asked, rolling her eyes, and Mitch shrugged.

“Fine. You explain how he knew that all four of those people would be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for him to shoot them.”

“Maybe he called them and asked them to come. Does that seem just a
little
more likely to you than the sniper having magical psychic powers?”

“We should—” Aaron was interrupted when his phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID, frowning at the unfamiliar number. “Just a sec.”

He took a few steps away from his colleagues before answering the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey, stranger.”

“Shannon,” he breathed, glancing back to make sure Kalindi and Mitch weren’t close enough to hear him. Kalindi appeared absorbed in Cowden’s file, and Mitch was busy drinking DayQuil straight from the bottle. “Hey. Is everything okay?”