No Holds Barred Read online

  Not that she’d had to worry about it. The triplets had flown in for the wedding and had returned to their respective colleges that night. She and her sisters had done the same the next day. Just as well. A man like Duncan Sutherland would likely wreak havoc on a girl’s life, something she didn’t have time for. She had enough problems to deal with in her work life.

  Work. Her mind veered back to the coming day.

  No. Not yet.

  Increasing her pace, Piper ran full out for the next two blocks—pushing herself into a zone where all she had to do was enjoy the speed and the wind whipping past her face. The next corner marked the halfway point of her run. As she circled to head back, she moved into a slower rhythm and allowed herself to finally uncork the work bottle and face her demons.

  Mentally, she made a list, one she’d been making almost every day lately. Good news first. She loved working for Abe Monticello, and up until a few months ago, she’d loved everything about the job. The only irritation she’d had to face was one of her fellow research assistants, Richard Starkweather. He wanted to date her and was having difficulty taking no for an answer. But she could handle that.

  And working for Abe Monticello was more than worth a minor hassle with a colleague. He was a larger-than-life man with a larger-than-average talent. At sixty-five, he had the sharpness of mind, the looks and the creative imagination of a man half his age. If he’d been half his age and unmarried, Piper might have fallen in love with him.

  Everything had been perfect until Abe had been hired to handle the appeal in a highly publicized case. It involved a man on death row who’d been convicted of murdering a young woman, but suspected of killing several others. Many, including the FBI, believed Patrick Lightman was the serial murderer the press had dubbed the RPK, or the Rose Petal Killer.

  Piper had been thrilled when Abe had assigned her to do the research for the appeal and write a brief. She’d worked on Lightman’s case for two straight months. She’d studied the court recordings, read the media coverage and she’d viewed the crime scene photos of Suzanne Macks, the woman he’d been arrested for killing. Her killer had taken the time to arrange a little picnic setting. A white sheet had been spread across the floor of the living room of her apartment. Suzanne had been lying on top of it, her eyes closed, her hands folded across her chest and her long dark hair fanned out from her head. Rose petals, hundreds of them, had been strewn everywhere.

  The Rose Petal Killer had left all of his victims exactly that way.

  Everyone had believed Lightman guilty. The jury had taken only an hour to bring in a verdict.

  But Piper had uncovered exactly what her boss had been hoping for—several procedural errors in the trial. She’d done the job and she’d done it well, but the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life was to hand her findings, along with the brief, over to her boss. Then a month ago, Abe had used what she’d written to successfully argue the case before the appeals court. And Patrick Lightman had been set free.

  A man who’d been convicted of viciously murdering a young woman and who might very well have murdered seven others was walking the streets and could possibly kill again. Piper figured it was the biggest mess she’d ever gotten herself into.

  For a couple of weeks, the media had created a circus surrounding the release of the Rose Petal Killer. Abe had taken all the heat. He was the one who’d received hate mail.

  But she was the one who had the nightmares. In them, she pictured Patrick Lightman out on the streets, following another young girl with long dark hair. If Lightman was the Rose Petal Killer, he could even now be selecting his next victim. And Piper would be responsible.

  Abe had taken the time to have a heart-to-heart talk with her. He’d reiterated his belief in the basic right of every citizen to a vigorous defense. The law always had to be applied meticulously and fairly in order to ensure justice. Piper believed that, too. In theory. But she was discovering there was a world of difference between theory and practice. What if Patrick Lightman killed again?

  The only answer Abe had on that one was that prosecutors and defense attorneys couldn’t afford to let the job get personal. Then he’d encouraged her to throw herself into the next case, one he was set to argue in court within the next month, and he’d invited her to sit in the second chair. It meant more work, but it would get her mind off Patrick Lightman. Just what Abe had intended it to do.

  Time to put it all back in the bottle. Picturing the process once again in her mind, Piper turned the final corner and sprinted for the entrance of her alleyway. At least the reporters had never bugged her at home. Piper took the stairs to her apartment two at a time. If she hadn’t let her mind wander back to work, she might have been more aware of her surroundings. As it was, her feet were both planted on the landing before she fully registered that the door to her apartment was open. In fact, it had been propped open with the ladder-back chair from her kitchen table.

  By that time, she’d glanced into the room and what she saw froze her to the spot. Hysteria bubbled into her throat and blocked a scream. Someone had staged the scene perfectly. Her coffee table had been shoved to the side. A white sheet had been thrown across the floor the way a picnic blanket might be spread across a patch of lawn. Strewn across the white cloth were hundreds of rose petals. Enough to appear as if they’d rained out of the sky. And red enough to look like blood.

  The only thing that was missing was the body of a young woman with long brown hair, her hands crossed over her chest, the scene she’d pictured several times in her nightmares.

  Piper pressed a hand against her chest. She had to think. She had to breathe. And she had to get away from here. Still, she wasn’t sure how long it took her to tear her gaze away from the rose petals and get down the flight of stairs. She ran then, and she didn’t stop to use her cell phone until she’d dashed into the coffee shop down the street.

  * * *

  IT WAS DUNCAN SUTHERLAND’S day off, and to make sure he enjoyed every minute of it, he’d scheduled a 7:00 a.m. tee-off time. Although he preferred a low-key, laid-back approach to life, there were some deadlines that had to be met. And a tee-off time was sacred. Plus, he needed a break from work. Ever since accused serial killer Patrick Lightman had been set free, Duncan had been reviewing the FBI’s files during every minute of his spare time. He’d been the lead profiler on Lightman, and he was determined to put the man back in jail. There had to be something in the files that had been overlooked, some detail or angle that he hadn’t seen yet.

  The first phone call came just as he was about to step into the shower.

  A quick look at the caller ID told him it was bad news. His brother Cam never called except to report trouble or ask a favor. Either one might interfere with the perfect day he had planned. Cam’s last call had been a favor. Duncan had transported a veterinarian from Montana to upstate New York to reunite him with his ex-wife.

  He let the phone ring four times, then gave up and answered. “Trouble or favor?”

  Cam laughed.

  So it would be a favor. “I’m teeing off in an hour,” Duncan warned. “And what time is it in Scotland anyway?” His brother had taken some time from his job at the CIA to run off to Scotland with Adair MacPherson. They’d recently become unofficially engaged and they were going to deliver the news in person to their respective parents, who were both on a working vacation there.

  “Relax. I just wanted to know if you’d given any more thought to going up to Castle MacPherson and poking around in the library?”

  “Some.” Cam had been nagging him about that ever since he’d shown him the sapphire earring that Adair and Vi had discovered in the stone arch. His brother believed that someone had been sneaking into Castle MacPherson for nearly six months, and they still had no idea who the intruder was. But the nocturnal visits had started right about the time the New York Times had run a feature article on the castle and those missing jewels that Mary Stuart had reputedly worn at her coronation. Cam’s theory
was that the visitations had something to do with the missing jewels. That would have been his own best guess.

  “You’re the profiler in the family,” Cam said. “If anybody can get some handle on who the intruder was, it’s you. You always had a knack for getting into people’s heads.”

  As the youngest of triplets, Duncan supposed that he’d developed that knack as a survival skill. And it had been part of what had drawn him to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. The other part of it had been what had drawn all three of them into some kind of law enforcement—the arrest of their father for embezzlement. They’d been nine when it had happened, and Duncan still carried the image in his mind of the three of them standing in front of their mother as the police handcuffed their father and led him away. Duncan also remembered what he’d felt—a fierce kind of happiness that David Fedderman couldn’t hurt their mother anymore.

  “He’s still out there,” Cam continued. “And the rest of Eleanor’s dowry has to be at the castle somewhere. You don’t want to miss out on a chance to find it, do you?”

  It was Duncan’s turn to laugh. As the middle triplet, Cam had always felt the need to compete, especially with Reid, the first born. “You should try that ‘miss out on a chance’ tactic with Reid. You could always get him with it when we were kids.”

  “I intend to,” Cam said. “But serving on the vice president’s Secret Service detail is keeping him hopping. Besides, the strategy will work more effectively after you find either the necklace or the other earring. Help me out here.”

  “Not on your life. My philosophy has always been to not take sides when it comes to the two of you and your competition.” Waiting it out until the dust settled had always worked well for him.

  “It was worth a shot. But you can’t tell me that you don’t want to find part of Eleanor’s dowry. You were fascinated by those sapphires when you were a kid.”

  A brother, especially one with CIA training, knew what buttons to push. The truth was Duncan had been thinking about visiting the castle. The summer he was ten and they’d had daily playdates with the MacPherson girls, he’d spent hours studying Eleanor’s wedding portrait, and he’d memorized the legendary jewels. Two thumbnail-sized sapphires hung from each earring and one of the jewels on the necklace rivaled the Hope Diamond in size.

  There was a story there that hadn’t been told. Tradition held that the jewels had been Eleanor’s dowry, but there was no record of what had happened to them until the first earring had shown up less than a month ago when lightning had struck the stone arch and loosened some stones. Someone had hidden it. Who? And why? Those were the questions that drove all of his investigations.

  “So—will you go?” Cam prodded.

  Duncan shifted his thoughts back to the conversation and stalled. “I thought that you and Adair had run off to Scotland to see what you could dig up about the sapphires on that end.”

  “That’s our plan, but the rest of Eleanor’s dowry is at the castle. And I still think there’s something in that library that holds the key.”

  Once again, he had to agree with Cam’s assessment. The security had been beefed up at the castle, and the local sheriff was sending regular patrols now.

  “The air is a lot fresher up there than it is in that basement you work in at Quantico,” Cam said. “It’ll be fairly quiet. No wedding is scheduled, just a photo shoot for some fancy architecture magazine. Daryl will be visiting Vi on the weekend. The two of you might be able to get in a game of golf.”

  Daryl Garnett was Cam’s boss at the CIA and he’d recently become engaged to Vi. He was also a scratch golfer. Leave it to a brother to know your weaknesses. Duncan glanced at his watch. The minutes to his tee time were slipping away.

  “If I tell you I’m planning on going up there this weekend, will you go back to your fiancée and our parents and leave me alone?”

  “You’ve got it, bro. My job with you is done,” Cam said, and clicked off.

  It wasn’t until Duncan was stepping out of the shower a few minutes later that the second call came. And it meant he’d have to cancel his tee time and perhaps even his trip to the castle. There was a chance that the Rose Petal Killer had selected a new victim.

  2

  DUNCAN SHOWED HIS BADGE TO THE young uniformed officer standing on the landing of the small apartment then ducked his head to step inside. The space was small—one room where a minimum of furniture had been artfully arranged to separate the eating area from the living space. The floor between the couch and fireplace was completely covered by a white sheet sprinkled liberally with bloodred rose petals very much in the style of the Rose Petal Killer.

  He’d get back to that in a moment. For now he took in the other details. A tiny kitchen was tucked into an alcove and a door directly ahead led into a bedroom the size of a closet. No surprise that the place was so crowded, considering all the people in it. Two of the men he didn’t recognize. They were carefully dusting surfaces for prints. The other two he knew on sight. They stood just inside the bedroom. One was Detective Mike Nelson, who’d given him the call when he’d stepped out of the shower. Duncan had consulted on a case of Mike’s the year he’d been hired to work at Quantico and they’d been friends ever since. The other man he recognized as Abe Monticello, whose head, like his own, was nearly brushing the ceiling. He was the reason that Duncan had missed his golf game.

  Abe hadn’t called him personally; instead, he’d called his sister, who happened to be Duncan’s boss.

  It had been a rough month for Adrienne Monticello. The division she commanded at Quantico had worked on the Rose Petal Killer cases, and her brother had been responsible for setting Patrick Lightman loose. Since she considered Duncan to be the division’s expert on the RPK, Adrienne had asked him to go over to Georgetown and give her his personal take on the scene. Mike Nelson had called him, too, and asked if he could stop by.

  It didn’t surprise him at all that Abe Monticello had wanted the FBI involved in this from the get-go. He was a smart man and very savvy about handling the press. Someone had broken into the apartment of one of his research assistants and staged a scene that matched the romantic little sets that the Rose Petal Killer had designed for his victims. Abe would want to step into his favorite role—the white knight, charging in to save the day.

  Both Adrienne and Nelson had called him because they wanted the answer to one question. Was this the work of the real Rose Petal Killer or a copycat? He imagined Nelson would prefer the former. The detective, along with everyone else in law enforcement, would like to get Lightman back behind bars.

  Abe Monticello wanted the answer to be “copycat” because he’d spent a lot of time in front of TV cameras during the past few weeks speaking in defense of the legal system and the way it worked to prevent the violation of every citizen’s rights. The speech might not play so well if Patrick Lightman started murdering slender young brunettes again. Or threatening to.

  Well, you couldn’t please everyone, and Duncan already had a feeling about which man would be happier about his opinion. His insights into the criminal mind were usually right. His mother had told him when he’d joined the FBI that his interest in behavioral science had begun with his trying to figure out what had motivated his father to become an embezzler.

  David Fedderman had been born to wealth and privilege, but he’d abused both. In his position at Fedderman Investments, a firm that his grandfather had founded, he’d run a successful Ponzi scheme for years until it had collapsed and Fedderman had been arrested on several counts of fraud.

  Of course, his father’s arrest and eventual incarceration hadn’t been the end of the story. His mother had had to battle Fedderman’s parents for custody, and as soon as she’d won, she’d legally changed all their names back to Sutherland and accepted a position teaching at a liberal arts college in Chicago. As to figuring his father out, that hadn’t been much of a challenge. David Fedderman had been one of those men for whom running a con and living life on a constant
adrenaline rush was worth more than family or wealth. It had been worth risking everything. He was still serving time in a federal prison, and Duncan would have bet good money his father was still running scams.

  Analyzing what he was seeing in front of him was a lot more challenging. The way the white sheet was spread was fairly accurate, the edges folded in to make what looked like a perfect square. The Rose Petal Killer had been meticulous about that. In the tiny room, the sheet filled most of the available space between the couch and a TV stand against one wall. Duncan dropped to one knee and caught the edge of the sheet between his thumb and his forefinger and rubbed. Then he studied the rose petals. They all looked fairly fresh.

  Nelson spotted him first and walked to the back of the sofa. “Thanks for coming, Sutherland. Take your time.”

  He didn’t need any more time to answer the question he figured was foremost in Mike’s mind, but he’d learned a long time ago that the information he provided would be taken more seriously if he strategically delayed the delivery. “Any sign of a break-in?” he asked.

  “No. She was out for a run when it happened. Claims she locked the door and took the key,” Nelson said. “The only person who has a spare key is the woman who runs the dress shop downstairs. We’ll question her as soon as she opens up.”

  The lack of evidence of a break-in was consistent with the RPK’s pattern. The widely accepted theory was that his victims let him in. But that hadn’t happened in this case.

  “We didn’t find any evidence that the lock was picked,” Nelson continued. “But a pro wouldn’t have had a problem with it.”

  And a duplicate key made from a wax impression was also a possibility, Duncan mused. A robbery ring recently arrested in nearby Baltimore had accessed house keys by distracting parking valets at high-end restaurants. The customers would return home after an evening of fine dining to find their houses stripped. A stalker with the patience and skills of Patrick Lightman might have used a similar method to gain access to his victims’ homes.