serial killer with heart. How lovely. Damn it, Warrick.” She slapped the folder down on her desk. “I want this guy in the worst way.” Emotions weren’t going to catch the killer. Only cold, hard, deliberate investigation would do it. And a great deal of luck. “What do you think made him stop for so long?”
He perched on her desk again. She was wearing a different perfume, he noted. It was sexier. He couldn’t help wondering if she was trying to compensate for her present state. At a different time…
He caught his thoughts before they could slip off to somewhere they shouldn’t.
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just shifted his base of operations,” he theorized. “Maybe our guy discovered that the world is a hell of a lot larger than just Orange County in California.”
It was a theory, but not one she subscribed to. Not after all the hours she’d logged in, looking for the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s pattern and coming up empty. “I don’t think so. No other murders matched this particular, meticulous MO. No, something made him stop. How do you crawl into the head of someone like this?” she wondered out loud.
He looked at her. There was a danger in that. “Careful that once you crawl in, you don’t forget how to crawl out again.”
She laughed, knowing exactly what he was referring to. “Been watching Al Pacino in Cruising again?” Though he denied it, the award-winning actor was clearly one of Warrick’s favorites.
“Hey, things like that happen,” he protested. “You become one with the criminal and forget where you end off and he starts.”
She shivered. “Never happen. There’s no way I would ever mentally bond with this character. He gives me the creeps.” Just touching the folder made her skin crawl. He had to get these women to trust him, played on their vulnerability and then struck. He was a loathsome creature of the lowest order.
Warrick was more concerned about her right now than the Sleeping Beauty Killer. “Why don’t you knock it off for a while?” He glanced at his watch. It was close to two. If he didn’t miss his guess, she hadn’t left her desk, except for bathroom runs, since she’d come in this morning. “Want to pick up some late lunch?”
She tilted her head, studying his face, suppressing a grin. “You buying?”
“No way.” Warrick laughed shortly. “I’ve seen the way you eat lately. We’ll go Dutch.” He moved behind her. “I will, however, help you out of your chair.”
Another crack, however veiled, about her weight. She could do without that, even though she’d gained a good twenty-eight pounds in the past two months. Before then, she’d stayed rail thin, actually losing weight because of an extra-long bout of morning sickness.
“Forever the gentleman. Thanks,” she waved him away, “but I’ll pass.” She opened the folder and spread it out on her desk. “I want to go through this file.”
Serial killers were not something a woman about to give birth should be concentrating on. Maybe that made him old-fashioned, he mused.
“You know, you could start thinking about decorating that spare bedroom of yours.” He knew from her brothers that she still hadn’t bought a single thing to reflect her pending motherhood.
C.J. looked at him sharply. Not him, too. He was the last one she would have thought would bother her about this. “Bad luck.”
He shook his head. “I never took you to be the superstitious type.”
Her shoulders rose and fell in a vague gesture. “We’re all superstitious in our own way.” It had taken her time to come to terms with this phase of her life, but now she wanted this baby, wanted it badly. And was afraid of wanting it. “I don’t like counting on anything unless it’s right there in front of me.”
Her comment surprised him. It wasn’t like her. “I thought I was supposed to be the cynical one.”
Her smile went straight to his inner core. It never failed to amaze him how connected he and this woman were. Even more so than he and his wife had been. As a rule he wasn’t given to close relationships, always keeping a part of himself in reserve. But there was something about C.J. that transcended that rule.
“Spend six years with someone,” she told him, “some bad habits are bound to rub off. But if you must know, you didn’t have anything to do with this one. My mother’s four aunts did a number on me once the cat was out of the bag.” Aided and abetted by her enduring trim figure, it had taken her five months to tell her family about her condition. They’d been wonderfully supportive, and ever so slightly annoyingly intrusive. “They had a dozen stories about miscarriages to tell me. Each.”
He leaned over the desk. A strand of her hair hung in her face, and he tucked it behind her ear. In typical obstinate behavior, she shook her head, causing it to come loose again. He wondered why he found that so damn attractive. He shouldn’t.
“You’re eight months along and the doctor gave you a clean bill of health. I don’t think you have to worry about miscarrying. Just about how to make the spineless wonder pay his fair share.”
Warrick was definitely too close—and making odd things happen inside her. C.J. pushed herself away from the desk—and her partner. “Warrick, I know that in your own twisted little way, you care about me. But get this through that thick head of yours. I don’t want anything from Tom Thorndyke. As far as I am concerned, this is my baby and only my baby.”
He crossed his arms before his chest. “Another case of the immaculate conception?”
Her temper was dangerously close to going over to the dark side. “Byron—”
He winced at the sound of his first name. One of these days, when he got a chance to get around to it, he was going to have it legally changed. Lord Byron had been his mother’s favorite poet while she was carrying him, but there was no reason that he had to suffer because of that.
“Okay, I’ll back off.”
“Thank you.”
He started to head for the door. “Want me to bring you back anything?”
She glanced at the folder on her desk. “Just the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s head on a platter.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Afraid that’s not the special of the day.” Warrick paused for a moment longer, looking at her. There was affection in his eyes, as well as concern. “Take some personal time.”
She just waved him off, then watched appreciatively as he walked away. The man had one hell of a tight butt.
“Damn hormones,” she muttered to herself as she began to pore over the folder he had given her.
Her hands braced on the arms of her office chair, C.J. pushed herself up to her feet. It was late, but she wasn’t finished yet. Time for her hourly sojourn to the bathroom.
She hated this lumbering girth that had become hers. In top condition since the age of ten when she’d picked up her first free weight to brain her older brother, Brian—an occurrence her father had prevented at the last moment—C.J. hated physical restrictions of any kind. The last two months of her pregnancy had forced her to assume a lifestyle she disliked intensely.
The
