Drop Dead Perfect (An Ellen Harper Psycho-Thriller) (15 page)

Then she curled her right hand in a fist and swung as hard as she could.

CHAPTER-25

Detective Brice Rogers paced toward Ellen Harper’s office, Bella Sanchez at his heels, then stopped to shake hands with a forensic tech he’d known in the academy. They exchanged pleasantries as his partner rolled past him and headed directly for Ellen’s office. It was as if she had a built-in homing device. He watched as she disappeared around the corner, and he turned back to his old team member and asked about his kids.

Then it hit him.

Sanchez
wasn’t simply uninterested in Brice’s conversation with an old acquaintance, or even eager to see the preliminary reports on this case, but was eager to seize an opportunity to continue the rumble between her and Ellen Harper. Fur was going to fly.

He said a hasty goodbye and sprinted down the aisle, bent on catching Sanchez before things got out of hand. Which would not bode well for his relationship with Sanchez either. She was a new partner, true, and he valued that. Yet, there was Ellie to consider . . .

Brice wasn’t sure where this new revelation had surfaced from, but he’d never seen Ellie Harper the way he saw her over the last two days. Even though they had worked together on a few cases before, her violet eyes hadn’t demanded this much of his attention. He liked her hair and how it framed her face. She wasn’t so much cute as striking. This came from not just her looks but from the way she carried herself. She was, quite simply, gorgeous and could command as much beauty as she wanted at any given moment. Women like that were rare. Never mind her long legs and tight jeans. He was still a man and was acutely aware of his appreciation for a woman’s physical attributes, but it was more than that with Ellie, wasn’t it?

Damn, Rogers. Two days. What’s it gonna be like after two more?

Making the next corner, he had glanced through the large window of Ellen’s office and caught a glimpse of Sanchez pointing a finger.

Oh, d
amn.

He vaguely heard
Sanchez saying something to Ellen. His hand was on the door to the lab just as Ellen moved around the corner of her desk. She was fast.

“Ellen! Stand down,” he yelled.

He took a step inside the door and ran smack-dab into the back of a man draped in a blue lab coat, who was apparently on the same mission of peace. They hit the floor in a tangled heap.

Pushing the tech away from him, he scrambled to his feet and started toward the two women . . . and stopped, his breath leaving his lungs as disbelief tugged at his eyes.

Ellen’s haymaker flew over the head of his partner, who never really saw it coming. The next instance, Ellen was sitting on top of Sanchez, a white-knuckle grip with each hand on the lapels of Sanchez’s blazer. Ellen spoke softly, her face wearing a determined, intense, but calm expression.

“We’re not doing this,
Sanchez. Enough is enough. You’re right. I should have been more sensitive to the question you asked about the dress. I’ve not been in a freaking happy place over the last year.”

“Get off me, Harper. We ain’t talking like this,” Sanchez demanded.

“Yes. Yes we are. I’m apologizing, and you’re accepting, got it? We got two murders, two kidnappings, and a dead CSI, who was not only my friend but a great guy with a family. He shouldn’t have gone out like that. He’s more important than this shit we’re doing. It’s petty, and you know what else? I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling mad, angry, and bitchy. I want to be over it, and you aren’t helping.”

“I don’t care about your damned life, Harper,” answered Sanchez.

“I get that. But
I’m
trying to care about it, and that means getting rid of the baggage. Our fight is baggage. I’m done. I’m moving on. But if you want to take a swing, then have at it. I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Brice watched Ellen rise and back up toward her desk as Bella sat up, neither taking their eyes from the other.
Ellen was tough. He could see that clearly; she had guts. He glanced at his feet . . . the kind of guts he hadn’t managed to muster thus far in his own life.

The lab tech he’d knocked to the floor got to one knee, looking a little dazed. Brice reached his hand down and pulled him from the tiled floor.

“Thanks. What the hell are you, a fullback? That hurt,” said Steve.

“Sorry. Just trying to stop the Chicago
PD Fight of the Century.”

“Yeah. I see that.”

He took two steps and bent toward his partner, offering his hand. She looked at him, back to Ellen, and then slowly shook her head as she reached for his outstretched arm.

She brushed
at the front of her jeans and gave Ellen a half grin. Brice stayed close to his partner.

“Okay. I get it. We’ve got more important stuff to deal with. And I’m sorry about the way your old man left you. It wasn’t my fault, Gringa.”

“You’re right; it wasn’t. So are we good?”

Silence.

“Detective Sanchez?” asked Brice. “The woman asked you a question.”

“I freaking heard it. I’m thinking.”

She frowned at Ellen. “Yeah. We’re good, for now. I gotta think some more. We ain’t going to be best friends or go shopping together, but I’m woman enough to keep it together, under one condition.”

“Name it,” said Ellen.

“You owe me a nail job. I broke three fingernails in that little fiasco.”

Ellen grinned. “I can do that. In fact, we’ll go together. You have a hard head.”

Sanchez nodded. “That might work, sometime. But not now. I still ain’t totally sure we won’t be takin’ swings at each other again. I’ll just give you the bill, and you can hand me the cash.”

“That’s a start.”

Ellen smiled again, and it took Brice’s complete willpower to pull his eyes from her mouth.

“So can we get to work?” he asked.

“We ain’t doing no damned group hug or nothin’, but yeah, we can shift gears. Big Harv sent me over to help with something. That’s why he pulled me aside,” said Sanchez.

Brice saw the sense of pride as
his partner seemed to stand a little taller. Moments like this one could tell you something about people, if you paid attention. Sanchez had some self-esteem issues, no doubt, yet there was a sense of pride shining now. And she had that one important quality all good detectives possessed: determination.

“What does he want you to help with?” asked
Steve. He’d moved closer to Ellen’s side, and the four of them were huddled like they were going to call the next play in a sandlot football game.

“He wants me to go over the video footage of all of the intersections where the women
were dumped and, of course, where Oscar was killed. He thinks another trained eye looking alongside you science geeks might make a difference on what we
all
see.”

“
Sanchez . . .” started Ellen.

“Hey. I k
now. It looks like busy work, ’cept it ain’t. I got this thing about spatial balance and symmetry. That’s part of the reason I got promoted to detective. And yeah, I know those words. My minor in college was design. I get what stuff should look like and where objects belong in a given area.”

“You are full of surprises, aren’t you?” said Brice, raising his eyebrows.

Sanchez batted her eyes. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Just then another lab tech stepped through Ellen’s door. Ellen moved so fast in reaction that Brice’s hand moved toward his gun.

“Ellen,” the tech said, almost out of breath. “I just got the reports back from the ME’s office regarding the two women. And you got to see this.”

Brice watched as Ellen’s violet eyes ignited. She stepped past him before he could react. But not before he caught another brief swirl of her scent.
Intoxicating.

“What do I need to see?”

The lab tech held the blue files in the air. “The killer left another calling card.”

CHAPTER-26

He watched her as she left the room, running like she was running for her life. The woman was intent on only one thing: the truth. Seeing what the facts would hold, what they could tell her. That was fine with him. In fact, more than fine. It pleased him to think that after all of this time, after all he’d suffered because of her single purpose,
he
was finally going to be the one to show
her
the true facts. Just like he’d shown that smartass ex-partner of hers.

Her dead ex-partner.

He smiled as he walked out of his hiding-in-plain-sight world.

The grin vanished while his countenance contorted into something far more appropriate for his mood as he touched the Glock holstered near his heart.

She thought she had anger issues? Just wait until she got a load of his take on how to deal with rage.

It would be a killer.

CHAPTER-27

Flipping the evidence review room door open with one hand, Ellen hurried to the wide, seven-by-seven table, followed by Brice and
Steve. The table had been a key resource of technology in the discovery of evidence clues and patterns throughout her tenure, and she hoped it would do the same today.

The table, affectionately called Einstein
by Ellen, was a special order for the Chicago Police Department. It was made up of seven perfectly square glass panes that were irradiated by a sophisticated set of lights, which could display a gambit of light spectrums, including black light and infrared, either individually or all the same setting at once. The light variance often displayed secretion patterns, blood spatter subtleties, and even hints of substances that could be analyzed via the centrifuge process.

Once, she’d even been able to trace the exact time a particular tree species found in a secluded region of Northern Michigan had gone through its reproductive cycle
in order to catch a rapist in a lie that ultimately led to his conviction.

Running her hand over the control panel, Ellen felt the coolness stimulate her fingers. She gently reached over to wipe away a small smudge that had been left by whoever had last taken advantage of her baby’s talents.

“Damn. That’s one lucky machine,” said Steve to Brice, grinning. “She doesn’t look at me like that.”

“Yeah. And if she touched you like that, well, you’d need a cold shower,” said Brice.

His voice revealed a spark of humor that Ellen had not heard before, and she found her mind wandering to what it would take to send him to a cold shower.

Stay focused, Ellie. We’ve got work to do.

A great thought in theory, except Superman was getting harder and harder to ignore and in every way.

“Well, if you gentlemen could do what Einstein here can do, I might consider taking you to dinner, at the very least,” she said.

“Pretty hard to compete with a forty-thousand-dollar table that exposes itself like this one, especially if you’ve got any geek in you at all . . . uh, and you named him?” said Steve, shaking his head.

“Yes, yes I did.
It’s a personal thing. He has the ability to show dozens of possibilities and to talk to us in all the specific languages of the light spectrum, so I thought Einstein was very appropriate—and he likes the name.”

“How do you know he likes the name?” asked Brice.

There was that low, quiet voice again. The man was hot in so many ways. She wondered if he even got it. Hell, she was just starting to . . . get it.

She glanced at him and then to
Steve.

“He told me—and don’t ask how. I’ve given away too many secrets already. Let’s get to it.”

The men nodded in sync. She noticed Brice’s incredible eyes focus on her face a little too long before looking away. Maybe she was reading too much into his body language. Maybe not. Either way, she felt a certain level of exhilaration that seemed to help amplify the reason they were here—for her, at least.

Maybe it was the idea that she was being thought of as important to this investigation—or
maybe it was the idea that Superman might have some of the same thoughts about her as she had about him. Whatever was going on, she’d try to figure it out later. Right now, she refocused as she opened the blue file folders and began to spread the transparencies that the ME’s office had provided on the translucent table.

Oscar’s camera was still missing, but luckily she’d
snapped most of the pictures of the bodies herself. So they’d gotten a break there, for whatever that was worth.

She’d requested regular paper prints of the pictures she’d taken, as well as the ones the ME had
shot once they got the bodies of Clara Rice and Holly Seabrook back to the examination room to perform the autopsies, but the color, x-ray-like transparencies were easier to manipulate and magnify. She preferred working with them. In a way, this method brought her artistic creativity into play and let her analyze what she saw until it fit with her mind’s eye.