at the shooting range, there was only one reason Daria was having trouble focusing on the matter at hand right now, and his name was Stefan Roberts. He’d clammed up completely the moment she’d mentioned his son. And that bothered her.
She knew Stefan’s son had just recently come to live with him full-time, but other than that he never spoke of young Samuel other than to say they’d had very little contact since the divorce and what there had been hadn’t gone well. Most parents she knew were happy to talk endlessly about their kids. Her friend Fiona, with three boys, could go on forever. Yet Stefan never mentioned doing anything with the boy, or his interests, or even his existence. So she sensed things were not going well on that front.
As if this case isn’t enough of a distraction, imagine trying to deal with it with a five-year-old at home.
She resolved to cut him some slack as they dived back into the case.
“This room,” he said rather sourly as they closed the door on the office, “is starting to look like the lair of a lunatic.”
She looked around at the whiteboards they’d wheeled in, covered now with photographs and names and locations and details, with a single, long timeline spanning them all. Those had been Stefan’s idea—he said he’d always been able to work better with as much of the case as possible right in front of him all the time. She’d found it worked well for her, too.
“I can’t argue that,” she agreed. Nor could she argue the fact that his deep, rumbly voice did crazy things to her insides. Which made no sense at all.
“Worked a serial killer case in Rockford once. He had a room in his house that looked a lot like this. Only thing missing is the spiderweb of string he had pinned up, making up his elaborate conspiracy connections.”
“Hmm,” she said, looking from board to board.
“What?”
“Just wondering if a ball of yarn might help.”
He laughed. He really did have a nice laugh to go with that deep, rumbly, sexy voice. And the rare grin that flashed with it was…well, breathtaking. “You got one around?”
“Not here,” she said. “I have a stash at home.”
He lifted a brow at her. “You hoard yarn?”
She put on her best snooty voice. “It’s not hoarding, Agent Roberts. It’s therapy.”
He gave another chuckle. “What do you do with it?”
“Knit.” He blinked. “And before you say anything derogatory, keep in mind knitting involves two very pointy tools.”
“I just…never pictured you as the knitting type.”
“What you don’t want to picture is me without it. Other people count to ten to hold on to their temper. I count stitches.”
“Point taken. Er, no pun intended.”
“Too bad,” she retorted. “It would have been a good one.”
And suddenly they were both laughing. And it was the most amazing feeling she’d had in a long time. That they could laugh amid what was going on was probably a bit macabre, but she couldn’t deny it felt good.
“Thanks,” he said. “I needed that.”
“Me, too. So, shall we get back on the merry-go-round?”
As had become habit now, they went through it all again. They’d done it so often they both had every step of the investigation practically committed to memory. But this was her first case anywhere near this magnitude, and Daria was determined to justify Trey’s faith in her.
They went over what little they had on the newest missing girl. They knew little except that she was from Denver, had been gone a week longer than expected and resembled the other victims. It wasn’t even certain yet that she was a victim of their quarry. But the resemblance was there, so they factored her in, although as of now she was in the category of “possible.”
Others were searching for her as an active missing person, and Daria sent up an earnest hope that she was found alive—and not simply because another victim would ratchet up the pressure on them.
“Blue Eyes,” Stefan muttered when they finally reached the newest bit of information they had.
“Helpful, huh?” Daria deadpanned.
“More than we had before,” he said. He turned to the laptop that was now booted up on the table in the center of the room. He tapped a couple of keys, and the recording she’d heard at least a dozen times played again. She listened to Lucy Reese, aka Bianca Rouge, tell her friend Candace—who had unexpectedly turned out to be the mother of the baby left on Fox Colton’s doorstep—that her date had passed out drunk, so she was down in the hotel bar and had connected with an older guy who was “still hot.” She had cheerfully referred to him as Blue Eyes and ended with a promise to see Candace later.
A promise she had been unable to keep.
It still gave her chills to listen to that rather ordinary message, given in such normal, even happy tones, by a woman who would soon be dead.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” she said.
“Used to what?”
Sighing, she looked at Stefan. “Hearing her sound so happy and chipper. It’s still distressing to listen to, knowing what happened to her.”
“Don’t ever get used to it,” Stefan said quietly. “If you ever get to the point where you can hear that, knowing, and not be distressed, it’s time to walk away.”
She hadn’t expected that. Sometimes this man surprised her. There were depths to Stefan Roberts that he kept hidden. It occurred to her to wonder if that might be part of the problem with his son, if he kept his feelings so masked the boy didn’t know how he felt, but she quickly pushed the thought away. It was, she reminded herself again, not her business.
An hour later they exchanged a glance, and both sighed at the same moment. He gave a low chuckle. “No sense putting it off any longer.”
“Agreed. Frame by frame this time?”
He nodded. He adjusted the settings on the video player on the laptop while she grabbed the remote and turned on the flat screen. This was going to take hours upon hours, she knew, going through all relevant feeds and angles of the security video from the hotel one frame at a time, but they’d so far been unable to find anything at all, even in slow motion, and this was their last shot.
“What do you want to start with?” he asked.
“The elevator lobby,” she said. “We know Bianca at least was upstairs first.”
He nodded and called up the video. It was already at the point where they had spotted Bianca coming out of elevator two. The timing coordinated with the message she’d left Candace, which was how they’d located this moment when she had come out of the elevator after leaving her drunken, passed-out client up on the third floor.
It
