Latent Danger (On The Line Romantic Thriller Series Book 2) Read online

  Latent Danger

  Book Two in the On The Line Series

  By

  Lori Ryan

  Copyright 2017, Lori Ryan.

  All rights reserved.

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. This book may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to people, places, persons, or characters are all intended as fictional references and are the work of the author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Latent Danger (On the Line Romantic Thriller Series, #2)

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Lori Ryan

  The Sutton Capital Series

  Legal Ease

  Penalty Clause

  The Baker’s Bodyguard

  Negotiation Tactics

  The Billionaire’s Suite Dreams

  The Baker, the Bodyguard, and the Wedding Bell Blues

  Cutthroat

  Cut and Run

  Cut to the Chase

  The On The Line Series (a Sutton Capital Spinoff)

  Pure Vengeance

  Latent Danger

  Wicked Justice (coming soon)

  The Heroes of Evers, Texas

  Love and Protect

  Promise and Protect

  Serve and Protect

  Honor and Protect

  Desire and Protect (coming soon)

  Cherish and Protect (coming soon)

  Kindle World Books

  Game Changer (Bella Andre’s Game For Love Series)

  Game Maker (Bella Andre’s Game For Love Series)

  Game Clincher (Bella Andre’s Game For Love Series)

  Stealing Home (Melanie Shawn’s Hope Falls Series)

  Any Witch Way (Robyn Peterman’s Magic and Mayhem Series)

  Acknowledgements

  I can never say enough to thank the people who help me on my books. It still amazes me that so many people, friends and strangers alike, will take the time to answer my seemingly endless questions as I plot and write. Thank you Elizabeth Neal, Iiz Burton and Beth Roth, Ernie Green, A.J. Scudiere, and Scott Silverii, PhD. You guys are fantastic! I’d also like to thank Connecticut’s Division of Criminal Justice Cold Case Unit for answering my questions. I like to try to bring as much authenticity to a book as I can. The work the men and women of that division do is awe inspiring.

  As always, any errors or creative license are my own. Please don’t blame these guys!

  Chapter One

  Zach Reynolds stepped out of the vehicle and looked around at the lonely stretch of road. It was a heavily wooded area and one of the only places dark and isolated enough for what they were about to see. The early morning hour meant the light would be dim once they entered the woods. Another twenty minutes or so, and the sun would be strong enough to begin to break through the cover. But not yet.

  “You think it’s her?” His partner, Ronan Cafferty, didn’t have to tell Zach who he was talking about.

  Carrie Athill, daughter of State Senator Jeffrey Athill, had been missing for three days. There were volunteers out in droves canvassing near her home and her school, flyers everywhere, and her face was on every newsstand and television station both nationally and in the local area.

  Zach and Ronan had been working the case from the start, and so far had nothing to go on.

  “I hope not.”

  “The age is right.”

  Zach nodded. The case was taking its toll on him. Carrie Athill was only seventeen.

  His niece, Naomi, was the same age. It was hard to block out images of her whenever they worked a case like this. Thankfully, it wasn’t often they did. New Haven, Connecticutcar maintained a fairly low crime rate, at least so far as major crimes went.

  They walked toward the area six yards in from the edge of the road, where portable lights, crime scene tape and the presence of the local medical examiner, Dr. Mary Kane, told him they would find the body.

  They’d been told the body of a teenage female had been found. It was about all they knew, so he didn’t say more. Zach was never talkative at six in the morning, but he was particularly quiet today. He’d really been hoping the Athill girl had run away from home and was hiding out at a friend’s house or holed up with a boyfriend somewhere. The last thing he wanted was for the case to end like this.

  Dr. Kane looked up as they approached, her sharp eyes and no-nonsense attitude always welcome at a crime scene. “Gentlemen.”

  Zach scanned the body, taking in as much detail as he could. The details weren’t pleasant, but he didn’t bother to think about the fact that they would be seared on his brain forever. It was the price they paid for the work they did. Not a lot of perks, shit you couldn’t erase or download if you didn’t want to remember it, but there were the payoffs when they saved someone or brought a criminal to justice. Some days, it had to be enough.

  He quickly assessed the girl was not Carrie. It didn’t make him feel much better, though, because the young woman splayed out on the ground was someone else’s daughter. It didn’t matter what her name was—she was dead, and her death hadn’t been peaceful.

  “What do you have for us, Doc?” Ronan asked.

  “Strangulation is the likely cause of death, but I’ll confirm when I get her on the table. You know the deal.”

  Zach frowned, crossing his arms as he took in the image before him. The girl looked close in age to Carrie. Unlike Carrie, this girl had brown hair and her lifeless eyes looked like they’d been hazel, not the bright blue they’d seen in photos of Carrie Athill. Even with the cloud of death, he could tell the eyes weren’t Carrie’s.

  The body lay on the forest floor, arms and legs askew. He didn’t see any signs that the body had been tampered with by animals. There had been no posing, n
o attempt to clean up the body or set up a supposedly serene stage for her. Ugly bruising that looked like it had come from a rope, ringed her neck.

  Her lips had been painted with a garish red lipstick, but the job was done poorly, giving the effect of a clown as opposed to makeup meant to enhance beauty. It was as if their killer meant to torment the girl, even in death. To humiliate and demean. He watched as Dr. Kane placed brown paper bags over the hands and she and her assistant prepared the body for transport.

  “Do you think she was killed here or are we looking at a dump site?” Ronan was blunt, but Zach didn’t object. They all tended to wall off any emotional reaction at scenes like this. The more you stuck to the facts, the easier it was to keep going. To do what had to be done to catch the person responsible and put them away.

  “She was likely killed elsewhere and moved.”

  Zach waited. He knew Dr. Kane would explain her reasoning. She always did.

  She held up her hand to halt her assistant before pointing a gloved finger to the side of the girl’s face. She indicated the purge fluid coming from the nose and mouth. It had dried and looked a lot like blood, only it was browner, uglier, somehow.

  “The pattern.” Dr. Kane used her finger to make a circle in the air around the side of the face. “Something laid against her face on either side and left a pattern.” Dr. Kane was pointing to the way the purge fluid drained from the side of the nose onto the cheek, but then the clear drain marks turned into smudges with a patterned marking, as though a blanket or other material had been wrapped around the body when the fluid was still damp. It was likely used for transport.

  “Blanket, you think?” Ronan asked.

  There hadn’t been any evidence of a blanket or other wrap around the body, but Zach would pull a few uniformed officers to canvass the area in case the killer dumped it nearby.

  “Possibly—” Dr. Kane began the sentence, but Ronan finished it.

  “But you’ll let us know more when you get her to the lab.”

  “Exactly.” Dr. Kane grinned.

  Zach hoped she’d find some trace evidence to give them something to follow up on. He cursed under his breath as he saw a news van pull up. The news had had a field day in March when a sniper was terrorizing the city. Now this.

  So much for New Haven being a city without a whole lot of major crime.

  “There’s something else, gentlemen.”

  “What’s that?” asked Zach as he eyed the news vans. So far, the uniformed officer up on the road was keeping them back.

  “Have you guys heard of the Marsh Killer?”

  Ronan snorted. “Who hasn’t?”

  Zach didn’t answer. The Marsh Killer was an old case. Very old. Thirty years back, three young women had been killed, their bodies found in the woods in New Haven. Only one had been left in the marshes in North Haven, but Marsh Killer had a better ring to it than Woods Killer, he supposed. His head had started running through the details of the case as soon as she’d said the words, and he saw the point she was making before she voiced it.

  “There are…similarities.” Dr. Kane seemed hesitant to even say it.

  “Jesus, I didn’t see it before. Did you work the case?” Ronan asked.

  Dr. Kane shot him a look. “It was a little before my time.” Zach buried a grin. He wasn’t sure how old she was. He’d guess in her late forties. “I came into the department about eight years after the murders stopped, but I’ve looked over the files. I pull out cold cases from time to time and examine them.”

  “I figured that would be on the state’s desk by now.” Zach was intimately familiar with the state’s cold case division for the very reason that he’d once been intimately familiar with one of its investigators. He didn’t dwell on the memory. Instead, he focused on what was pertinent. A case that old would have been transferred out of the city’s files and up to the state’s division long before this.

  Dr. Kane nodded. “True. The state’s attorney sent it to them years ago, but as far as I know, they’ve never gotten anywhere with it.”

  “We’ll need to see who in our department is assigned to work with them on it,” Zach said by way of response. Each cold case had someone in the local precinct assigned to work the case, but in a case this old, they probably weren’t very active with it.

  Zach eyed the news trucks. The press was going to go crazy if they got wind of the similarities in the case. “How close are the similarities?”

  Dr. Kane took her own look at the news vans before answering. “It’s not the same. The bodies were cleaned up and posed in that case, and the lipstick was neatly applied, not made to look clownish like they are here. But, the rope, the age and sex of the victims, method of death. All of that—it’s eerily similar.”

  “A copycat on a decades-old case?” Ronan asked.

  Dr. Kane tilted her head with a small shrug. “It’s possible. That, or coincidence.”

  Zach had a feeling they felt the same way about coincidences as he did. In their line of work, they rarely cropped up. There wasn’t time to speculate further. A vehicle Zach recognized came to an abrupt stop behind the news vans. He didn’t wait for the couple to get out of the SUV. He moved that way as Ronan took a call on his cell phone.

  By the time he got up to the road, the Senator and his wife were coming toward him. Toward the crime scene.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” They weren’t close enough for them to see the body. Maribeth Athill repeated the words over and over. There were sobs clogging her throat and he knew the woman had to be close to breaking down.

  He hoped the cameras were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear his words, but he needed to stop her before she got closer. Seeing that girl right now wouldn’t help the woman. “It’s not her, Mrs. Athill. It’s not Carrie.”

  She fell against her husband, a hand at her chest, but the tears came anyway. Tears of relief, most likely. Maybe also even a few tears at the fact their nightmare wasn’t over. Not having closure was a hell of a burden.

  Zach couldn’t imagine what it would be like—no. He couldn’t even go there. Couldn’t let himself dwell on what it would be like to know Naomi wasn’t safe in her bed at night. That she might be out there somewhere hurt or worse.

  Naomi’s parents had died when she was only ten years old. At the time, he and Luke were both still in the military, but Luke’s commitment was coming to an end. He left his career and raised Naomi. Zach had come to live near them when he left the military and had been a big part of her life. He would have done a piss poor job of raising her. Luke was better at that, but Zach still thought of her as a lot more than a niece.

  “We heard on the news,” the senator offered as explanation for their arrival on the scene, but Zach doubted it was true. He had a feeling they had more than one person keeping them informed at the precinct. Someone had tipped them off when the call had come in. That person wasn’t doing them any favors. Being out here was the last thing they needed.

  One of Zach’s first calls after leaving the scene would have been to the Athills. He’d told them before he would call them as soon as he had news on their daughter’s case and he would tell them again, but they wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t.

  He got them headed back toward their car, thankfully noting they didn’t stop to speak to the press, despite cameras being shoved in their faces. Zach saw one of the reporters turn his way and wave, trying to get his attention, but he turned away. Screw Ray Lansing. He didn’t have time for him.

  Ronan joined him as they walked back toward Dr. Kane, who had just finished securing the body for transport back to her morgue. “That was Cal. Says a missing person call came in late last night on a girl this age. Adrienne Edwards.”

  Ronan tilted his phone screen toward Zach where a picture their colleague, Cal, had sent was pulled up. She was a smiling girl posed in a typical senior class picture. She had a bright smile as she leaned against a tree, her arms set at a posed angle, one foot turned just so. Zach had always thou
ght those poses looked silly. Still, the girl was beautiful. And he had little doubt it was the one he’d seen laid out moments before, the life drained from her body.

  They stood and watched as the body was taken away and the crime scene technicians began to take pictures of the area where it had lain. Zach knew they’d photograph the space first, then scour it for any evidence that might lead them to their killer.

  “Identifying marks?” Zach asked, just to confirm the identification.

  “A small round birthmark on the back of her left hand.” Ronan looked at Dr. Kane as he spoke, and she nodded in confirmation.

  Both men cursed. Of course, they’d have the family identify her or maybe corroborate the ID with photos of the birthmark if the family had any, but it was looking like they had their victim’s name. Which meant a trip to the family to let them know their world had just changed forever.

  Chapter Two

  The address listed on the Edwards girl’s missing report had told them the home would scream money before they got to the front steps. The meticulously manicured lawn and pricey cars in the driveway confirmed it.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Edwards? May we come in?” Zach had only just gotten the words out when the woman standing before him seemed to crumple.

  “No! No, no, no.” Her face pleaded with them to let her have hope a little longer.

  Zach knew it wouldn’t help. Straight forward and direct was going to be the best way to break this news. They would be compassionate. They would give the family time to absorb it. But, they wouldn’t drag out the notification. They wouldn’t give hope where there was none.