Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (3 page)

The request seemed
odd to Riley. Prostitutes often did disappear without getting killed. Sometimes
they decided to do their work somewhere else. Or just quit.

“Does he have any
reason to think so?” she asked.

“I don’t know,
Meredith said. “Maybe he wants to think that in order to get us involved. But
it’s true, as you know, that prostitutes are frequent targets of serials.”

Riley knew that this
was true. Prostitutes’ lifestyles made them high-risk. They were visible and
accessible, alone with strangers, often drug dependent.

Meredith continued, “He
called me personally. I promised him I’d send my very best people to Phoenix.
And of course—that includes you.”

Riley was touched.
Meredith wasn’t making it easy to say no.

“Please try to
understand, sir,” she said. “I just can’t take on anything new.”

Riley felt vaguely
dishonest.
Can’t or won’t?
she asked herself. After she had been
captured and tortured by a serial killer, everyone had insisted she take a
leave from work. She’d tried to do that, but found herself desperately needing
to be back on the job. Now she wondered what that desperation had really been
all about. She had been reckless and self-destructive and had a hell of a time
getting her life under control. When she had finally killed Peterson, her
tormentor, she had thought everything would be fine. But he still haunted her,
and she was having new problems over the resolution of her last case.

After a pause, she
added, “I need more time off the field. I’m still technically on leave and I’m
really trying to put my life together.”

A long silence
followed. It didn’t sound as though Meredith was going to argue, much less pull
rank on her. But he wasn’t going to say he was OK with it, either. He wouldn’t
let up the pressure.

She heard Meredith
heave a long, sad sigh. “Garrett had been estranged from Nancy for years. Now
what happened to her is eating him up inside. I guess there’s a lesson there,
isn’t there? Don’t take anyone in your life for granted. Always reach out.”

Riley almost dropped
the phone. Meredith’s words hit a nerve that hadn’t been touched for a long
time. Riley had lost contact with her own older sister years ago. They were
estranged and she hadn’t even wondered about Wendy for a long time. She had no
idea what her own sister was doing now.

After another pause,
Meredith said, “Promise me you’ll think it over.”

“I will,” Riley
said.

They ended the call.

She felt terrible.
Meredith had seen her through some awful times and he’d never shown such
vulnerability toward her before. She hated to let him down. And she’d just
promised him to think it over.

And no matter how
desperately she wanted to, Riley wasn’t sure she could say no.

The man sat in his
car in the parking lot, watching the whore as she approached along the street. “Chiffon,”
she called herself. Obviously not her real name. And he was sure there was a
lot more about her that he didn’t know.

I could make her
tell me,
he
thought.
But not here. Not today.

He wouldn’t kill her
here today either. No, not right here so near her regular workplace—the
so-called “Kinetic Custom Gym.” From where he sat, he could see the decrepit
exercise machinery through the storefront windows—three treadmills, a rowing
machine, and a couple of weight machines, none of them working. As far as he
knew, nobody ever came here to actually exercise.

Not in a socially
acceptable manner anyway,
he
thought with a smirk.

He didn’t come
around to this place much—not since he’d taken that brunette who had worked
here years ago. Of course, he hadn’t killed her here. He’d lured her off to a
motel room for “extra services” and with the promise of a lot more money.

It hadn’t been
premeditated murder even then. The plastic bag over her head was only meant to
add a fantasy element of danger. But once it was done, he’d been surprised at
how deeply satisfied he’d felt. It had been an epicurean pleasure, distinctive
even in his lifetime of pleasures.

Still, in his trysts
since then, he’d exercised more care and restraint. Or at least he had until
last week, when the same game went deadly again with that escort—what was her
name?

Oh, yes,
he remembered.
Nanette.

He’d suspected at
the time that Nanette might not be her real name. Now he’d never find out. In
his heart, he knew that her death was not an accident. Not really. He’d meant
to do it. And his conscience was unsullied. He was ready to do it again.

The one who called
herself Chiffon was approaching about a half a block away, clad in a yellow
tube top and a barely existent skirt, tottering toward the gym on impossibly
high heels while talking on her cell phone.

He really wanted to
know if Chiffon was her real name. Their one previous professional encounter
had been a failure—her fault, he was sure, not his. Something about her had put
him off.

He’d known perfectly
well that she was older than she claimed to be. It was more than just her
body—even teenage whores had stretch marks from childbirth. And it wasn’t the
lines in her face. Whores aged faster than any kind of women he knew.

 He couldn’t put his
finger on it. But there was plenty about her that perplexed him. She displayed
a certain kind of faux-girlish enthusiasm that wasn’t the mark of a true
professional—not even a novice.

She giggled too much,
like a child playing a game. She was too eager. And most oddly, he suspected
that she actually liked her job.

A whore who
really enjoys sex,
he thought, watching her come nearer.
Who ever heard of such a thing?

Frankly, it turned
him off.

Well, at least he
was sure that she wasn’t an undercover cop. He would have picked up on that in
a split second.

When she got close
enough to see him, he honked his car horn. She stopped talking on the phone for
a moment and looked his way, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. When
she saw who it was she waved and smiled—a smile that looked, for all the world,
completely sincere.

Then she walked
around back of the gym toward the “service” entrance. He realized that she
probably had an appointment to keep inside the brothel. No matter, he would
hire her some other day when he was in the mood for a specific kind of
pleasure. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other hookers around.

He remembered how
they’d left things last time. She’d been cheerful and good-natured and
apologetic.

“Come back
anytime,”
she’d
told him.
“It will go better next time. We’ll hit it off together. Things
will get really exciting.”

“Oh, Chiffon,” he
murmured aloud to himself. “You’ve got no idea.”

Gunfire rang out
around Riley. To her left, she heard the noisy cracks of pistols. To her right,
she heard heavier weaponry—blasts from assault rifles and staccato sprays from
submachine guns.

In the midst of the
clamor, she drew her Glock handgun from her hip holster, dropped to a prone
position, and fired off six rounds. She rose into a kneeling position and fired
three rounds. She deftly and quickly reloaded, then stood and fired six rounds,
and finally knelt and fired three more rounds with her left hand.

She stood up and
holstered her weapon, then stepped back from the firing line and pulled off her
earmuffs and eye protectors. The target with the bottle-shaped outline was twenty-five
yards away. Even from this distance, she could see that she had clustered all
her shots nicely together. In neighboring lanes, the FBI Academy trainees kept
up their practice under the guidance of their instructor.

It had been a while
since Riley had fired a weapon, even though she was always armed on the job.
She’d reserved this lane at the FBI Academy firing range for a little target
practice and, as always, there was something satisfying about the gun’s
powerful recoil, the raw force of it.

She heard a voice
behind her.

“Kind of old-school,
aren’t you?”

She turned and saw
Special Agent Bill Jeffreys standing nearby, grinning. She smiled back. Riley
knew exactly what he meant by “old-school.” A few years ago, the FBI had
changed the live-fire rules for pistol qualification. Firing from a prone
position had been part of the old drill, but it was no longer required. Now
more emphasis was put on firing at targets from up close, between three and
seven yards. That was supplemented by the virtual reality installation where
agents were immersed in scenarios involving armed confrontations in close
quarters. And trainees also went through the notorious Hogan’s Alley, a ten-acre
mocked-up town where they fought off imitation terrorists with paintball guns.

“Sometimes I like to
go old-school,” she said. “I figure that someday I might actually have to use
deadly force at a distance.”

From her own
experience, Riley knew that the real thing was almost always up close and
personal, and often unexpected. In fact, she’d actually had to fight hand to
hand in two recent cases. She’d killed one attacker with his own knife and
another with a random rock.

“Do you think
anything prepares these kids for the real thing?” Bill asked, nodding toward
the trainees who were now finished and leaving the firing range.

“Not really,” Riley
said. “In VR your brain does accept the scenario as real, but there’s no
imminent danger, no pain, no rage to control. Something inside always knows
there’s no chance of being killed.”

“Right,” Bill said. “They’ll
have to find out what it’s really like just like we did a lot of years ago.”

Riley glanced
sideways at him as they moved farther away from the firing line.

Like her, he was
forty years old with touches of gray in his dark hair. She wondered what it
meant that she found herself mentally comparing him to her leaner, slighter
male neighbor.

What was his
name?
she asked
herself.
Oh, yeah—Blaine.

Blaine was
good-looking, but she wasn’t sure whether he gave Bill a run for his money.
Bill was big, solid, and quite attractive.

“What brings you
here?” she asked.

“I heard you’d be
here,” he said.

Riley squinted at
him uneasily. This probably wasn’t just a friendly visit. From his expression,
she detected that he wasn’t ready to tell her what he wanted just yet.

Bill said, “If you
want to do the whole drill, I’ll keep time for you.”

“I’d appreciate that,”
Riley said.

They moved off to a
separate section of the shooting range, where she wouldn’t be at risk of being
hit by stray bullets from the trainees.

While Bill operated
a timer, Riley breezed through all the stages of the FBI pistol qualification
course, firing at the target from three yards, then five, then seven, then
fifteen. The fifth and last stage was the only part that she found the least
bit challenging—firing from behind a barricade at twenty-five yards.

When she was
through, Riley took off her headgear. She and Bill walked up to the target and
checked her work. All the impact marks were clustered nicely together.

“A hundred percent—a
perfect score,” Bill said.

“It had better be,”
Riley said. She’d hate it if she were getting rusty.

Bill pointed toward
the earthen backstop beyond the target.

“Kind of surreal,
huh?” he said.

Several white-tailed
deer were contentedly grazing on top of the hill. They’d actually gathered
there while she’d been shooting. They were within easy range, even with her pistol.
But they weren’t the least bit bothered by all the thousands of bullets
slamming into targets just below the high ridge they walked on.

“Yes,” she said, “and
beautiful.”

Around this time of
year, the deer were a common sight here at the range. It was hunting season,
and somehow they knew that they would be safe here. In fact, the grounds of the
FBI Academy had become a sort of wildlife haven for lots of animals, including
foxes, wild turkeys, and groundhogs.

“A couple of days
ago, one of my students saw a bear in the parking lot,” Riley said.

Riley took a few
steps toward the backstop. The deer raised their heads, stared at her, and
trotted away. They weren’t afraid of gunfire, but they didn’t want people
getting too close.

“How do you suppose
they know?” Bill asked. “That it’s safe here, I mean. Don’t all gunshots sound
alike?”

Riley simply shook
her head. It was a mystery to her. Her father had taken her hunting when she
was little. To him, deer were simply resources—food and hide. It hadn’t bothered
her to kill them all those years ago. But that had changed.

It seemed odd, now
that she thought about it. She had no trouble using deadly force against a
human being when it was necessary. She could kill a man in a heartbeat. But to
kill one of these trusting creatures now seemed unthinkable.

Riley and Bill
walked off to a nearby rest area and sat down together on a bench. Whatever it
was he came to talk about here, he still seemed reticent.

“How are you doing
on your own?” she asked in a gentle voice.

She knew it was a
delicate question and she saw him wince. His wife had recently left him after
years of tension between his job and home life. Bill had been worried about the
prospect of losing touch with his young sons. Now he was living in an apartment
in the town of Quantico and spending time with his boys on weekends.

 “I don’t know,
Riley,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.”

He was clearly
lonely and depressed. She had been through enough of that herself during her
own recent separation and then divorce. She also knew that the time after a
separation was particularly fragile. Even if the relationship hadn’t been very
good, you found yourself out in a world of strangers, missing years of
familiarity, never knowing quite what to do with yourself.

Bill touched her
arm. His voice a bit thick with emotion, he said, “Sometimes I think that all I’ve
got left to depend on in life is … you.”

For a moment Riley
felt like hugging him. When they had worked as partners, Bill had come to her
rescue plenty of times, both physically and emotionally. But she knew she had
to be careful. And she knew that people could be pretty crazy at times like
this. She had actually phoned Bill one drunken night and proposed that they
begin an affair. Now the situations were reversed. She could sense his
impending dependence on her, now that she was just beginning to feel free and
strong enough to be on her own.

“We were good
partners,” she said. It was lame, but she couldn’t think of anything else to
say.

Bill took a long,
deep breath.

“That’s what I came
out here to talk to you about,” he said. “Meredith told me he’d called you
about the Phoenix case. I’m working on it. I need a partner.”

Riley felt just a
trace of irritation. Bill’s visit was starting to seem like a bit of an ambush.

“I told Meredith I’d
think about it,” she said.

“And now
I’m
asking you,” Bill said.

A silence fell
between them.

“What about Lucy
Vargas?” Riley asked.

Agent Vargas was a
rookie who had worked closely with Bill and Riley on their most recent case.
They both were impressed with her work.

“Her ankle hasn’t
healed,” Bill said. “She won’t be back in the field for another month at least.”

Riley felt foolish
for asking. When she, Bill, and Lucy had closed in on Eugene Fisk, the
so-called “chain killer,” Lucy had taken a fall and broken her ankle and almost
gotten killed. Of course she couldn’t go back to work so soon.

“I don’t know, Bill,”
Riley said. “This break away from work is doing me a lot of good. I’ve been
thinking about just teaching from now on. All I can tell you is what I told
Meredith.”

“That you’ll think
about it.”

“Right.”

Bill let out a grunt
of discontentment.

“Could we at least
get together and talk it over?” he asked. “Maybe tomorrow?”

Riley fell silent
again for a moment.

“Not tomorrow,” she
said. “Tomorrow I have to watch a man die.”