Cold Hearted (Cold Justice Book 6) Read online

  She jerked her eyes open, heart pounding, sweat clammy on her skin. Her breath formed a cloud of vapor. Damn. She’d thought she was over the flashbacks. A tap on the glass had her heart exploding in her chest. She swiveled in her seat. Shit.

  Ully Mason, a patrol officer from the Forbes Pines Police Department, stood on the tarmac, stamping his size twelve boots on the unyielding ground. Trying to get her breathing under control, she moved her hand away from her sidearm and buzzed down the window.

  “Got a call about a possible intruder at Cassie Bressinger’s place.” He eyed her steadily from under thick dark brows.

  “Again? I thought things had calmed down over there?” Erin’s head hurt. Dispatch had been getting almost nightly calls for months now. She’d thought the fun and games had ended with the trial. Obviously not.

  A small smile curved Ully’s mouth. He was a good-looking guy, and he knew it. “Guess they heard you were back.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The college kids had a better grapevine than Crimestoppers. Officially she was off duty, but if these bogus calls didn’t stop, the chief was going to have a coronary. “I’ll meet you there. If we don’t find any evidence of an intruder this time, we’ll arrest the caller for wasting police resources.” She checked her watch. Ten PM. “Let’s see if we can figure out a way to put an end to this bullshit.”

  “I need to gas up on the way over.” Ully wrapped his fingers over the top of her window. “Don’t go in without me. I can just see the head of the cheer squad swearing under oath that she shot you in self-defense.”

  “She’d enjoy it, too,” Erin agreed.

  Ully let go of the glass and walked away to his black and white cruiser. Erin buzzed her window back up. As far as Cassie Bressinger was concerned, Erin was the devil incarnate. Maybe she’d give Cassie something to bitch about this time.

  The frost finally cleared and warmth filled the cab. The Forbes Pines PD shared the large rambling red brick monstrosity of City Hall with the courthouse, DA’s office, and city offices. Politicians and lawyers liked to grandstand on the marble front steps. Cops and criminals skulked in the back entrance.

  Erin pulled out of the police station and took Roosevelt Road, then turned right along Main Street past the beautiful park that gave the town a natural elegance. Tall elms and wrought-iron benches lined the central walkway. On the other side of the park, the old sandstone edifice of Blackcombe College gave Forbes Pines a dignified, moneyed air. The college dominated every aspect of the town with at least half the population being students, or former students who couldn’t bring themselves to move on. Faculty and staff made up a large proportion of the rest of the town, and most of the local businesses depended on the university for survival.

  She often kidded with the other cops that they were more like campus cops than real police officers. That was before the trial made international headlines and cemented her position as Most Hated Woman in the county. Erin drove onwards, intending to do a big loop around the southern perimeter of university grounds to where the sorority and frat houses were located on the far eastern edge. She wanted to get a feel for the mood of the place in the wake of Drew Hawke’s conviction. It would take Ully at least ten minutes to fill up, so she had time. Term had started today and, despite the hour, there were plenty of students milling around in small groups. They eyed her truck suspiciously as she drove slowly by. Outside one of the large frat houses she locked gazes with Jason Brady, wide receiver for the Blackcombe Ravens. Wearing track pants and a Raven’s long-sleeved tee, he stood on the curb next to his jeep with his hands on his hips. He spat on the ground and mouthed the word “cunt” as she drove past.

  Good times.

  She carried on, past the gym complex, the faculty of science. Another half mile, and she cruised up and down the streets either side of Cassie Bressinger’s house. No sign of anyone lurking. She stopped the truck a few houses down from the small clapboard building. Many of the houses in this neighborhood were rented to students. A few belonged to low income families—research assistants, sessional instructors. Cassie Bressinger’s neighbor had a small plastic swing-set on a postage stamp-sized front lawn.

  Last time Erin had visited this address, she’d arrested Cassie’s boyfriend. No wonder the girl was about as friendly as an injured boar. There was a light on deep inside the belly of the house but nothing outside or downstairs. She tried Ully on his cell but couldn’t raise him. There were several reception dead zones, and the gas station was in one of them. She didn’t have a police radio in her truck tonight.

  She sat for a moment with the engine running, then felt ridiculous. She’d spent five years as an NYPD beat cop, and one year as an NYPD detective. She wasn’t some rookie who needed her hand held. Unlike most TV shows depicted, detectives didn’t normally work in pairs. Especially not in small rural departments. They worked alone, and they got the job done without a trusty sidekick.

  Cassie and her friends were probably sitting in the dark watching her and laughing their asses off, planning to repeat the routine, ad infinitum. Erin turned off the engine and killed the lights. She grabbed her flashlight from under the seat and got out of the truck.

  Last year had been the most grueling of her professional career, but it had ended with a conviction of the serial rapist who’d terrified campus. She should feel safer, they all should, but this was a football town, and the players ranked right up there with Holy Trinity. By arresting the star quarterback she’d brought herself nothing but trouble, and right now, she was about as popular as Pilate after the crucifixion.

  A siren went off in the distance, the sound echoing for miles across the stark winter landscape. A dog barked a few houses down, but the street itself was deserted, everyone tucked up warm and cozy in their homes—like she should be.

  Dammit.

  She crossed the road, then climbed the three steps of the sagging front porch. There was a moth-eaten couch to the right. Standing to the left of the door she knocked and waited. An eerie silence greeted her.

  “Forbes Pines PD.” She knocked harder. “Cassie Bressinger, you reported an intruder. Open up, please.” No one wanted cops in their neighborhood so she’d make sure the locals knew exactly who was responsible for this late night visit. She knocked again.

  Where the hell was Ully?

  If she’d really thought there was an intruder inside the house she’d kick down the door, but she doubted the chief of police wanted that sort of heavy-handed police work. He wanted the incidents to die down naturally without escalating the drama.

  A plan that currently wasn’t working.

  There was a narrow path between the fenced yards of this house and the next. She made her way through, the edges of her coat brushing the wood on either side. At the back of the property she stood on tiptoe and swung the flashlight over the top board. She shone her beam into the shadowy recesses, revealing overflowing trashcans and several boxes of empty bottles stacked outside the back door. No sign of a break-in.

  Something launched itself against the fence beside her, and the whole thing shook violently. Her heart ricocheted between her ribs and her spine. A frenzy of barking told her it was just a dog—Jesus H. Christ. The damn thing was lucky she hadn’t shot it.

  The jolt of adrenaline ramped up the tension and dialed her mood up to pissed. She strode back to the front of the house, intending to hammer on the door, but saw one of Cassie’s roommates walking toward her along the sidewalk.

  “What are you doing here?” Alicia Drummond demanded loudly. She carried a pile of books, and a hostile attitude. The feeling was mutual.

  “Police received a call about an intruder from this address,” Erin told her with a smile that could rip flesh from bone.

  “Sure they weren’t talking about you?” Alicia scoffed. She was a snotty law student on the fast-track to becoming a snotty defense attorney.

  Erin kept her retort to herself. Her mother always said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t s
ay anything at all.” Of course, her mother was one of the few members of the family who wasn’t a cop. Her father’s response was always, “You have the right to remain silent. Use it.” Erin lived by his maxim.

  Alicia balanced the heavy books under one arm while she dug for her keys. “We don’t want you here. You need to leave before I make a complaint.”

  “Nice try, Alicia.” Erin leaned against the siding. After only a few hours’ sleep and a five-hour time difference, she had zero tolerance for bullshit. She just wanted to go home to bed. “I need to talk to Cassie, because she’s the one who reported the intruder. I’m going to need her to come down to the police station and make a full report. Anyone else in the house at the time of the call also needs to come in.” The more inconvenient she made the consequences of this prank, the sooner they’d get the message that this was not okay. Cops had better things to do with their time.

  Alicia threw her a look of utter loathing. Then she went inside and flicked on the hall light. She went to slam the door in Erin’s face, but Erin stuck her boot in the gap.

  “Alicia,” she warned with enough of an edge that the girl met her gaze. “Cassie needs to stop making false reports before she gets herself into serious trouble.”

  Alicia’s gaze narrowed. “Fine. I’ll tell her to stop being so resentful just because the cops locked up her boyfriend for thirty years. I mean, what’s thirty years?”

  “Tell it to the judge and jury. I’m not the one who convicted him.” Erin removed her foot, and Alicia slammed the door shut in her face. Erin dragged a hand through her hair. These young women were so full of righteous indignation she actually admired them. Pity the guy they believed in was a violent scumbag.

  She headed back to her truck, wondering where Ully was and whether she should wait for him to turn up or just call him on her drive home. A scream rent the air and raised every hair on her body. She turned and ran back toward the house and collided with Alicia on the garden path. The woman who hated her guts threw herself into Erin’s arms and sobbed loudly. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

  “What is it?” asked Erin.

  “They’re dead!”

  Erin’s heart raced even as she braced herself for some dumb practical joke. “Who? Who’s dead?” She took a step away from the hysterical girl and made Alicia sit on the curbstone. “Who is dead?” she repeated sharply, trying to penetrate the fog of hysteria that encased the usually unflappable law student.

  “C-Cassie and M-Mandy.” Alicia’s skin was gray, her expression shell-shocked.

  If this was a joke, Erin was going to make them all go before the judge. A black and white cruiser pulled up in the street behind them. Ully. Finally.

  He joined her. “Sorry, someone ran a red, and I pulled them over.”

  “We have a report of two fatalities inside the house,” she told him.

  Ully’s eyes widened as he radioed for backup. They’d both assumed this was another false alarm. Her pulse thumped heavily in her veins. Had she screwed up? Had she been outside feeling sorry for herself as someone slaughtered two girls inside?

  She pulled her Glock from its holster and climbed the steps. Ully did the same, and they entered the front door fast, clearing the downstairs room by room—the living room and kitchen, downstairs bathroom. A door off the kitchen had probably once been a dining room but had been converted into another bedroom. Alicia’s books and bag were strewn carelessly on the bed.

  It was quiet inside, the ominous feeling of dread moving sullenly through the air.

  Erin jerked her chin toward the stairs and up they went. The door to the first room on the left was wide open. A girl lay on the bed staring unseeingly up at the ceiling. Erin recognized her from the trial last year, but didn’t know her name. There was bruising on her neck, and the whites of her eyes were spotted red.

  Erin ignored the way her heart jerked in her chest and moved to the center of the room as she and Ully finished searching the space. Once they were sure no one was hiding in the closet or under the bed, she pressed her fingers to the girl’s carotid.

  The skin was warm, but there was no pulse.

  Erin caught Ully’s gaze and shook her head, and they moved to the next room, checking under the bed, behind the door, and in the attached bath. Empty.

  Horror spiked as they entered the last bedroom. Signs of a scuffle were obvious. Papers and bedding lay strewn across the floor. Jagged shards of a broken mug were scattered on the carpet. Cassandra Bressinger lay naked, spread-eagle, wrists and ankles bound to the four corners of the bed. The same MO Drew Hawke had reportedly used to rape his victims, except she was face up, and battered until she was almost unrecognizable.

  Erin and Ully exchanged a glance. Had they been wrong? About Drew? About Cassie’s crank call? Shock and horror and an awful sense of culpability ripped through Erin. If she’d broken down the door earlier, would she have saved the lives of these two young women?

  To ground herself, Erin focused on the ritual of the job. Secure the scene. Assess the victim. She and Ully cleared the room, made sure there was no threat to life before Erin pressed her fingers to the side of this girl’s throat. No pulse. She hadn’t been dead long, but long enough for her lips to turn blue and eyes to glaze over.

  Careful of where they stepped and what they touched, she and Ully cleared the rest of the house. Sirens screamed as more uniforms started to arrive.

  “Secure the perimeter,” she told the senior patrolman. She didn’t want every cop in the town trudging through the crime scene or seeing the bodies. “I’ll make the calls.” Crime scene techs, the coroner, their boss. “And get someone to take Alicia Drummond to the police station to get a statement before she talks to anyone else.”

  Ully nodded and was already speaking into his radio.

  The first call Erin made was to Harry Compton.

  “What the hell do you want?” he answered groggily. There were only two detectives on the small Forbes Pines PD, and only one of them had recently taken a Hawaiian vacation.

  “Double homicide on Fairfax Road.”

  “Fuck,” Harry said and hung up.

  A man of few words.

  Then she called Chief Strassen and told him the case they thought they’d won last month was far from over. And the town that hated her guts was about to crucify her.

  * * *

  A bitter north-wind funneled down the street, an omen for the hostility Darsh Singh was bound to encounter in the next few minutes. It was still dark out. Snow lay in dirty patches on the barren ground. He’d thrown on the clothes he’d been wearing earlier that day, grabbed his belongings, and hightailed it to the airport. Now a thin navy windbreaker with “FBI” stenciled across the back in acid yellow was all that stood between him and a polar vortex determined to suck New England into the cold depths of hell.

  He’d been on a job in Boston when he’d gotten an urgent call from Acting Supervisory Special Agent Jed Brennan. On medical leave since before Christmas when Brennan had taken a bullet during an assassination attempt on the president, the agent had stepped in as temporary head of BAU-4 after ASAC Lincoln Frazer snapped his Achilles tendon during a criminal apprehension on the Outer Banks the day before yesterday. Considering Frazer had bagged a serial killer who’d been active for nearly twenty years, Darsh figured it was a small price to pay.

  Darsh’s own desk was overflowing with active case files. A series of rapes in Portland. A cluster of homicides in DC, not to mention the white slave ring he’d been working in Boston. But within twelve hours of coming back to work, Jed Brennan had received an anxious phone call from the Department of Justice about a potential goat-rope—a double homicide at Blackcombe College, Forbes Pines, Upstate New York.

  Blackcombe was renowned both as an undergraduate teaching institution and a world-class research facility, but that wasn’t the reason for its more recent brush with fame. The media spotlight had been focused sharply on the town following the high-profile trial and conviction of the star
quarterback for a series of rapes last year. The trial had ripped the town apart with opposing camps coming to blows on the courthouse steps and a near riot occurring when the verdict was read.

  Brennan had pulled Darsh off his other cases and told him to make this his priority.

  It was a delicate situation. Darsh had been tasked with not only examining the latest murders, but profiling the other crimes as well. To figure out if these new killings were a coincidence, a copycat, someone deliberately trying to make the Hawke conviction look shaky, or if the local PD had messed up and doomed an innocent man to prison. And he had to do it without pissing off the locals when they knew they were gonna be put under the microscope.

  Darsh pushed through the crowd of spectators who lingered despite the lateness of the hour and the sub-zero temps. He hoped someone here had the smarts to photograph the onlookers in addition to the crime scene. Killers often came back to observe the chaos they wrought. It was all part of the thrill. Unlike most fictional killers and rapists, the real life versions were generally as smart as a thumbtack. He flashed his creds at the police officer manning the outer perimeter and ducked under the tape. “Agent Singh. FBI. I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”

  “You’re FBI?”

  He ignored the skepticism. “That’s what they told me when I graduated the academy.” He pocketed his gold shield as the officer shouted to one of her colleagues before leading him to the two-story clapboard house surrounded by yellow crime scene tape.

  “Sorry.” The rookie was flustered. A dark blush worked its way into her cheeks and matched her cold-looking nose. “I wasn’t expecting a fed to show up.”

  Darsh signed his name on the log, put paper covers over his boots, latex gloves on his hands, and walked into the house. It was just as cold inside—front and back doors were wide open. At least it would slow decomposition.