style="font-size:15px;"> No trauma. No stress. No need to force herself to draw. Just margaritas.
* * *
JON HATTON HAD a barbecue brisket sandwich—he wasn’t ashamed to admit that he’d developed an addiction to the Texas staple in his week of being here—almost up to his mouth when he received the brief text. Another rape victim. Memorial.
Even though it broke part of his heart, he dropped his half-eaten sandwich and stood.
Jon threw down a twenty, more than enough to pay for his meal at the diner plus leave the waitress a hefty tip, and was running out the door less than fifteen seconds after he received the text.
CHRISTUS Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi—Memorial for short—was right smack in the middle of downtown. Jon knew where Memorial was. But not because of any information local law enforcement had provided him, only because of the maps he had studied.
Corpus Christi PD was pretty pissed that Jon, a member of Omega Sector: Critical Response Division, was even here. They had made it clear they didn’t find his skills as a behavioral analyst and expertise in crisis management needed or welcomed.
That was just too damn bad because they very definitely had a crisis on their hands. Corpus Christi had a serial rapist on the loose.
Five rapes in just over eight weeks. Actually six now, if the current woman in the hospital was also a victim. The local police, as probably any police force of a city this size, didn’t have the resources to deal with this type of situation. People were in a panic and no breaks had been made on the case.
Corpus Christi PD had wanted to handle the situation themselves. But once the story made national news, that option was no longer available.
Omega had been called in and Jon, highly experienced with situations where multiple skills would be necessary—profiling, crime and linkage analysis, investigative suggestions, multiagency coordination—had been sent.
Jon was good at seeing the overall big picture, at catching details other people sometimes missed. At taking all the individual pieces involved in a case of this magnitude and putting them together so that the whole was more than the sum of the parts.
He was also a pilot, an excellent sharpshooter and could kill a man a dozen different ways with his bare hands. But that probably wasn’t in his official dossier.
No matter what list of credentials Omega had provided for Jon’s arrival to help with this case, it hadn’t made any difference with the locals. Every piece of information was only reluctantly shared. Jon was the last person notified for any possible lead.
But call him Rhett Butler because, frankly, Jon didn’t give a damn. He wasn’t in Corpus Christi to sit around holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” He was here to stop a predator from victimizing more women.
A particularly smart predator who was too clever to leave behind any evidence so far.
So it wasn’t as if the Christi locals could be accused of not doing their jobs properly. Jon hadn’t been able to make as much as a single crack in the case himself, despite the time he’d spent in his week here interviewing victims and studying patterns.
It was a frustrating feeling when all he could do was wait for the bad guy to strike again and hope for a mistake. Not a feeling Jon was used to or that sat well with him.
This was the first victim that had been reported since Jon had arrived in town. He planned to make sure there wasn’t a next, regardless of how cooperative the Corpus Christi PD was. Or wasn’t.
The text notifying him of the victim hadn’t come from a member of the police department. Oh, Jon had no doubt they would eventually get around to notifying him of the victim’s existence. After all, none of them wanted to be accused of deliberately keeping info from him. But God only knew when that would actually be.
The text had come from Caroline Gill, a paramedic. Jon had met and befriended her and her partner, Michael Dutton, earlier in the week when he’d interviewed them about victim number two, whom they’d also transported a few weeks ago.
Dutton and Gill weren’t threatened by Jon’s presence here. They had talked openly with him about what they knew, what they’d heard. Jon had even asked them their theories about the case, since they had been the first people on one of the crime scenes.
Perhaps the paramedics’ opinions wouldn’t amount to anything useful whatsoever. But Jon had been doing this job for Omega Sector long enough to know that a break in a case could often come from unusual sources.
At the very least, his willingness to listen to them had gotten him the text that had him now driving through the city as fast as he safely could.
Jon parked at the closest nonemergency spot he could find at Memorial and jogged to the sliding glass of the emergency entrance door, ignoring the muggy heat that was so unlike the weather in his home state of Colorado. He pulled out his credentials to show the nurse at the front desk, explaining who he was here to see. He was glad when he saw Sara Beth Carreker, the head nurse who had worked in Emergency for years, walk up. Jon had talked to her a few days ago, also, since all the victims had been brought to Memorial’s Emergency Trauma Center.
Nurse Carreker’s nod was brisk. “I’ll show you back there myself. The patient has been moved into one of the private trauma care rooms.” Her lips pinched together.
“I take it that’s a bad sign?”
The nurse glanced at him as they walked down the hall. “Medically, it’s pretty neutral. Just my opinion, of course. You’ll have to ask the doctor for a professional statement.” The older woman’s eyes argued that she had seen more and probably knew more than a lot of the young doctors around here.
“So, physically she’ll recover. That’s not why she’s in the room.” Jon’s words weren’t questions.
“Yes.” Nurse Carreker nodded as they turned a corner. “Emotionally that woman needs as much privacy as she can get.”
“Anything you can tell me about her?”
“Young. A local. African-American this time, so that’s a little different. But the same type of bruising and craniofacial trauma.”
A black female. Jon’s jaw clenched. The demographic pattern of the women who had been attacked was widely varied, almost unheard of in a serial rapist. It was one of the reasons Corpus Christi PD had resisted asking for any federal help. Since serial rapists usually had a set type of woman they attacked, the department hadn’t thought the perpetrator was just one person.
Nurse Carreker stopped halfway down the hall. “Agent Hatton, y’all try to remember that this isn’t a case to that woman. Her whole world has just been destroyed.”
Y’all? Just because Jon didn’t use the word didn’t mean he didn’t know what it meant. How many people were here besides him? “Okay, thank you.”
The nurse patted him on the arm and left. Jon turned back toward the victim’s room. At least half a dozen of Corpus Christi’s finest were standing around outside the victim’s door. They alternated between glaring at and completely ignoring him as he approached.
Damn, this was going to be a long afternoon.
