She knew it was time to walk away, but when Ben pulled her against him, he was so deliciously warm she almost wept. Letting the full length of her body press into his, she turned her head, resting it against his chest. She felt the cotton of his sweatshirt across her face, the tattoo of his heartbeat beneath her cheek. As she inhaled the scent of his soap, and the sexy, masculine smell of him, her hands snuck under his T-shirt, by their own volition, and splayed over his smooth, sleekly muscled back.
He sucked in a tortured breath.
She dug her nails into his skin, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a moan. If she got this hot from a simple touch, how could she keep her professional objective in sight?
“Summer-”
It was the name that brought her to her senses. The wrong name.
She jerked her hands away, pushing at his chest. His fingers were linked together across the small of her back, holding her in place. As she felt his response to her touch, an old familiar panic welled within her. That, as much as duty, made her say “I have to go.”
“Stay.”
“Don’t make me struggle,” she whispered.
He let her go, clenching his hands into fists as she slipped away.
CHAPTER 4
As soon as she returned to her apartment, still reeling from her date with Ben, Sonny went straight to the bedroom and took the case files out of the closet.
She needed to be reminded that Ben Fortune was a suspect, no matter what her instincts-or her body-told her. So what if he was ridiculously handsome? Serial killers were often charming, intelligent, and attractive. Some were accomplished liars, and experts at putting their victims at ease. On the surface they looked like anyone else, the average Joe or the boy next door, with no hint of the beast beneath.
Sonny spread the crime scene photos out on the surface of the bed, thinking that Ben was no more a killer than she was. Even so, she allowed for the remote possibility that her attraction to him was interfering with her professional objectivity. What an inopportune time to find out she wasn’t immune to lust.
The images of death weren’t any easier to look at the tenth, or even the hundredth, time around, but she forced herself to do another close examination.
Victim one, April Ramirez, was a brown-eyed brunette, very young, and very pretty. Daughter of cruise ship mogul Juan “Bailamos” Ramirez, she was found in Torrey Harbor at the base of Sunset Cliffs. She’d been raped and brutalized, her clothes torn from her body, and her wrists tied with her own bra. The marks on her neck, and the whites of her sightless eyes, spotted with aneurysms, told a terrifying tale.
The second victim was Sarah Knox, a free-loving, earth-saving blonde. She’d been a dedicated student and amateur drug dealer, cultivating hydroponic marijuana and a 4.0 GPA at SDSU. She was found nude, facedown on the beach near La Jolla Cove. Like April Ramirez, she’d been raped, and strangled with some type of cord.
Their killer knew better than to leave behind DNA, but there had been enough trace evidence at both scenes, namely wetsuit fibers, to link the murders together.
Was there also a connection to Olivia Fortune’s death?
Sonny had obtained a copy of Olivia’s file from the local police department, and there were many dissimilarities between Olivia’s murder and the more recent attacks. Ben’s wife had been killed in her own home, and this scenario suggested some degree of forethought or familiarity. There was also no indication of rape; the only genetic material present belonged to Ben.
There were more discrepancies in execution. Olivia had been strangled by a length of electrical cord, of the same size and circumference as the implement used in the later murders, but the marks on her neck looked very different from the marks on the other victims. They were multiple, for one, and tentative, for another. They were the kind of marks a fledgling killer would make, as though he wasn’t sure how much pressure to apply.
Or as if he was entertaining second thoughts.
Troubled by the idea, Sonny shuffled through the file folder, looking for more information about Darrius O’Shea.
A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, O’Shea had suffered a head injury during his final tour of duty. His marriage had dissolved soon after his return to San Diego, and in the following years he had few personal ties and no permanent address.
If not for the disability check he’d collected in person each month, one would have never known he was alive.
Less than forty-eight hours after Olivia Fortune’s body was found, the police arrested O’Shea for vagrancy. Upon finding a monogrammed towel with Mrs. Fortune’s initials stitched in gold thread, along with the infamous murder weapon, mixed in with his personal effects, two homicide detectives interrogated him.
O’Shea confessed to the crime eventually. Tests on the items in his possession left no room for error. And yet, he had no motive, no history of violent attacks. In addition to the towel, only a small piece of jewelry had gone missing from the Fortune household. Olivia’s wedding ring, which boasted a sizable rock, hadn’t been touched, and Ben’s money clip had been in plain sight, not far from the point of the attack.
O’Shea had been mentally evaluated and declared competent. The homeless vet was a man of few words, apparently, but his statement of guilt had been unequivocal. He spent the next three years in a maximum security prison. News of his death had been widely reported, although the specific details hadn’t been made public.
Sonny reorganized the files and pushed them aside, lying back on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, collecting her thoughts. For the first time in her life, she was having difficulty separating her emotions from the case.
It wasn’t like she’d never handled a rape/murder before. With her personal history, they were the most difficult, but she refused to let the past overwhelm her.
At least, not at work.
Tomorrow, instead of drooling over Ben Fortune, she would visit the prison where O’Shea had spent his last days. In order to move forward with the investigation, she had to delve deeper into the mind of the man who may or may not have killed Ben’s wife.
Once her dad fell asleep, Carly snuck away from the house, needing ultimate privacy for the ritual she was about to perform. He’d removed all the locks to her room, even the one to her bathroom, so there was no longer a place at home where she felt safe from discovery.
Now she was hidden amidst a cluster of rocks at the northern tip of Windansea Beach. It was dark, and late, and she was alone. This time she made sure no one followed her.
She sat down on the damp sand with her back against a flat rock, casting one last look around before she removed the washcloth from the pocket of her jeans. She unfolded it gingerly, careful not to cut her fingers on the razor blade it concealed, and pulled her shirt over her head. Placing the washcloth against the lacy cup of her bra so blood wouldn’t seep into the pristine white fabric, she lifted her elbow slightly, poised to draw the edge of the blade across a patch of smooth, unblemished flesh.
She inhaled sharply, savoring the moment, anticipating the quick flash of pain, the slick red trickle, and most important, the exquisite emotional release, as sweet and tender as a sigh.
Carly didn’t have an eating disorder, but it was easier to pretend she did at the group therapy sessions her dad made her attend. Several months ago, he’d caught her hunched over the toilet, vomiting her guts out after her first attempt at cutting. Lots of the girls at her school were bulimic or anorexic; like drug and alcohol addiction, it was a designer disorder. Nobody sweated you for puking in the john after lunch-the only trouble was elbowing past the other Barbie dolls to get your turn.
She couldn’t blame them, now that she’d seen their faces in group, had heard their stories, their confessions. Purging was the same as cutting, in a way. A fast tension reliever, an easy, purely physical liberation, a quick
