Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Carol Ericson (short books to read TXT) 📖

going to pass out anymore.” He pressed his forearms onto the kitchen table to stay focused on the case files in front of him and not on the way the lean muscles of her arms flexed as she poured herself a cup of coffee. “That’s an improvement.”

“Tell anyone what happened, and I’ll do more to you than wax that leg while you’re asleep. And thank you.” Silence settled between them as appreciation brightened her eyes, and Dylan nodded. She riffled through the pantry until she found a box of granola bars and crossed the kitchen with her bounty in hand. Her smile punched him straight in the gut. Taking her seat, she quickly discarded the wrapper around her on-the-go meal and studied the papers spread across the table’s surface. “How far have you gotten with the family background checks?”

“Just finished. There’s nothing here.” He leaned back in his chair, memorizing the way her eyes darted across the files in rapid succession as though she only needed a split second to review the text. He nodded at the murder board to his left. “If our killer is one of these men, as we suspect, he’s doing a damn fine job of making sure we don’t find him.”

Her voice hollowed, her gaze distant. “The man in that cave told me Del Howe had awakened something inside him the day he was attacked. Something like the New Castle Killer had showed him who he really was. Our suspect hadn’t ever killed before he set his sights on the investigating team working the case, but now he can’t seem to stop. Even if he manages to kill us, I don’t think he’ll ever be finished. He’s come too far to stop now.” She swallowed a chunk of her granola bar and tossed the rest onto the table, seemingly losing her appetite. “Have you checked hospital records for the type of injuries Howe’s victims sustained?”

“I ran the parameters through the system, but there were no hits on any patients suffering knife wounds around the time our victims were reported missing. Nothing came up under any of their names, either. Our guy might never have visited a hospital after escaping his captor, or—”

“Or he lied about how he sustained the injuries and gave a false name when he checked in.” Remi shuffled through the reports, iridescent blue eyes lighter than he’d seen in days. Her split lip wasn’t as swollen, the bruising already turning blue on her jaw. She flipped through page after page of background information he’d gathered. “Makes sense. If he was scared Howe would come for him again to finish what he started, the victim would’ve done anything to make sure the New Castle Killer couldn’t locate him.”

“Victim implies innocence.” Dylan pushed back his chair and stretched the stiffness from his neck and shoulders. The sting of tape pulling at the fine hairs across his side brought total awareness to the pain he’d ignored the past six hours while Remi had slept. “Whoever stabbed you and put a bullet in my side has killed twenty-six people that we know of. Not sure we should keep calling him a victim.”

“Then I vote we call them Killer One and Killer Two to keep things from getting confusing.” Her wide smile pierced straight through the lethargy closing in. She set the files down and stared at them. “There are so many moving pieces to this case. Some of which we can’t even see yet. Is there any mac and cheese left over from the other night?”

“Fridge.” Dylan set his palms onto the edge of the table. They were still waiting for ballistics to match the bullet from her abductor’s gun to other crimes and to see if the forensics lab could pull prints from Remi’s phone. But Dylan didn’t have much hope. Their suspect had ensured none of the murders could forensically be connected to one another or to him. He was methodical, calculated and more dangerous than any fugitive he’d ever chased. “Why did you want me in Oregon?”

Remi pulled the large container with their unfinished meal from the depths of the fridge and froze for the briefest of moments. “I was hoping me telling you what I’d done was part of a bad dream. Then I remembered I go out of my way to make sure I don’t have dreams.”

She set the container on the counter and made quick work of prying the lid free. “I investigated you before I hired you to work the New Castle case with the department. I wanted to make sure nothing could come back and bite me in the ass down the line. One of your past cases, the disappearance of a four-year-old boy, was what made my decision for me. The family was unloading groceries. When they turned back around, the boy had disappeared off their driveway. No one could find him, not even local police, so his parents hired you.”

He remembered the case, one of his first, but while he’d known she’d had to pitch his coming on the case to the people of New Castle County, he hadn’t realized she’d looked that far back into his career.

“The police I questioned said you were out in the field every day and late into the night, looking for him. Nearby parks, neighborhood pools, the fields around his house. When that wasn’t enough, you re-interviewed everyone the cops had taken statements from until you realized he hadn’t left his neighborhood at all.”

She scooped a spoonful of cold mac and cheese into her mouth and turned stark blue eyes onto him. “One of the neighbors had recently lost her grandson, about the same age as the boy you were looking for, and she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. She’d taken him home, thinking he was her grandson come to visit her. No one else had even considered the possibility. That’s when I knew I wanted you working the case. You were the kind of investigator who wouldn’t stop looking until