No Holds Barred Read online

  It was when he was replacing the edge of the sheet that Duncan spotted the thin envelope that lay just beneath. He pinched the corner of it to draw it out.

  “I want to know if Ms. MacPherson is in danger,” Monticello said.

  As Duncan glanced up and met the older man’s eyes, his mind was racing. “Ms. MacPherson?” Piper wasn’t a common name and he recalled that Piper MacPherson had gotten her law degree from Georgetown Law School.

  “Yes,” Abe said. “She works for me. I want to know just how much danger she’s in.”

  Abe hadn’t mentioned her first name yet, but Duncan was beginning to get a feeling. Then Piper strode into the room and confirmed it in spades.

  He hadn’t seen her in seven years, not since they’d stood beneath the stone arch at the castle and listened to their parents exchange vows. But every detail of her appearance slammed into his mind and pummeled his senses. The slender frame, the long, long legs that extended from narrow ankles to running shorts, the compact curves, slim waist and the dark brown hair that hung in a ponytail. He’d never been so aware of a woman as he’d been the day of the wedding. Or now.

  “Whoever did this isn’t the Rose Petal Killer,” she said as she walked with economical grace toward Nelson and Monticello.

  The voice with its low pitch and huskiness rippled along his nerve endings. It was the kind of voice that tempted a man to come closer. A whole lot closer. He imagined the mythical sirens who’d lured sailors to their deaths might have had voices exactly like hers. Which was why he’d kept his distance on their parents’ wedding day. He’d been about to graduate from college and had his sights set on the FBI. And their parents’ marriage had made the MacPherson girls family.

  “Of course it’s not,” Abe Monticello said.

  “The FBI is here to determine that for us,” Nelson said.

  Duncan stayed right where he was. For a moment he still needed the distance, but he knew the second she became aware of him. He could see the tension ripple through her, and even as she turned, he braced himself. Seven years was still a long time.

  But as he looked into those amazing amber-colored eyes, once again he felt the impact like a blow. Desire sprang up, primitive and strong enough to nearly have him rising from his crouch. Then he felt his mind empty as suddenly as if someone had pulled a plug. All he could see was her. All he wanted was her.

  For seven years, he’d tried to convince himself that what he’d felt that day was a fluke. A onetime event. And he’d succeeded in compartmentalizing it.

  But he knew now exactly what he’d known then. Piper MacPherson was it for him. The only one. For seven years he’d compartmentalized that, too. He’d tried to convince himself that she was family, and that meant hands-off. But as he continued to sink into the depths of those golden eyes, Duncan had a feeling that the lids on all those compartments had been blown clean off.

  “You,” she said.

  In Duncan’s opinion, she’d summed up his situation nicely. And what in the hell was he going to do about it?

  * * *

  PIPER CLOSED HER EYES. There was always the chance that she was hallucinating. Or her habit of visualizing was getting the best of her. But when she opened her eyes again, Duncan Sutherland was still crouched on the floor of her apartment.

  For an instant, she certainly hoped it wasn’t longer than that. She felt just as she had when she’d stopped short in the open doorway of her apartment and seen the rose petals strewn over the white sheet.

  Except that it wasn’t just shock she was feeling. And her blood hadn’t turned to ice. Instead, it seemed to be sizzling through her veins like an electrical current, melting bones and paralyzing muscles so that she wasn’t sure she could talk. Or move.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “This is FBI agent Duncan Sutherland, Ms. MacPherson,” Mike Nelson said. “He works for the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico. I asked him here because he worked on the Rose Petal killings.”

  “I know Duncan,” Piper said. Okay, she was breathing and talking. In a couple of seconds, she’d get her thoughts back on track. Should she try stuffing him into a bottle? Would he fit?

  A young uniformed officer appeared in the open doorway. “Sorry, sir. She got away from me.”

  Piper managed to drag her eyes away from Duncan and glanced back at Nelson. “He was kind enough to get me coffee, and the caffeine helped me think.” And she was thinking again. Finally. She waved a hand at the sheet. “I came up here to save you some time, Detective. This isn’t the work of the Rose Petal Killer.”

  “Tell me why not,” Duncan said.

  Bracing herself, Piper turned to face him and managed to take one step closer to the edge of the sheet. And him. “Because the rose petals are so fresh. I read all the files. He used to buy the flowers over the course of days and save them up.”

  “Too many roses purchased at one time, one place, might have drawn attention. Plus, there was some speculation that he bought them over time as little anonymous gifts for his victims,” Duncan said. “And if they saved them, he used those older petals.”

  She narrowed her eyes. She’d read those very words in the files she’d worked on. And those details had never been released to the press nor had they made it into the court records. Duncan had worked on the cases, all right. Of course he had. He might even have consulted with the police on the Suzanne Macks murder.

  “What else is different?” Duncan asked. “Take your time.”

  She shifted her gaze to the sheet. “I should have done that instead of panicking.” She sank to her knees to get a better look. But what she was looking at and what she was feeling were two different things. She was close enough to touch him now. She could certainly smell him—sunshine and soap and something else that bumped up that sizzle in her blood.

  Focus.

  Ruthlessly, she shifted her attention fully to the details she’d only glanced at before. The edges of the sheet were tucked in to form a perfect square in the available space. That was right. No wrinkles. The RPK had always been neat and precise.

  Suddenly, she frowned. “There are fold marks in the sheet, as if it’s been newly purchased.”

  “Good point,” Duncan said. “What else?”

  Lifting the edge of the sheet, she rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. “This is wrong, too. The texture is too rough. The thread count should be higher. He always used Egyptian cotton.”

  “You did read the files,” Duncan murmured. “You worked on the appeals brief, didn’t you?”

  After taking in a deep breath, Piper met his eyes and nodded. She’d prepared herself to find anger, maybe condemnation, censure at the very least. And why not? She’d set a killer free. And now she was facing a man who’d probably worked very hard to bring that killer to justice. But what she saw in the clear green depths of Duncan’s eyes was understanding.

  Something moved through her then, something she couldn’t begin to name. But even as her gaze lingered on his, those green eyes darkened and triggered very different feelings. The rush of desire, the flood of heat, was intense and immediate, as if a button had been pushed. The impulse burst into her mind of just grabbing him, shoving him onto that sheet and rolling with him across it as she stripped him out of those clothes.

  No. That couldn’t happen.

  But the thrill of what that might be like mingled with the accompanying shock that she’d actually thought of doing it. Wanted so badly to do it.

  Here.

  Now.

  If they’d just been alone.

  But they weren’t. She dragged her gaze away from him and back to the sheet with its bloodred petals. What in the world was wrong with her? No man had ever made her think this…crazily before.

  “Ms. MacPherson did an amazing job on the appeal,” Abe Monticello was saying. “I’ve invited her to take second chair in the trial I’m scheduled for in a couple of weeks.”

  “She did an excellent job,” Duncan ag
reed. “Thanks to her, a shoddy lab was shut down. For a while, our hardworking law enforcement agencies will be very careful about the way they collect and store evidence, and judges will think more precisely about what kind of evidence to admit into the record.”

  “Before we throw a ticker-tape parade, let’s remember that the amazing appeal set a serial killer loose on the streets,” Nelson added.

  “So put him back in jail,” Abe said. “In any case, our experts seem to agree that this incident is the work of a copycat.”

  “Not so fast. Before we jump on that bandwagon, we’d better take a look at this.” Duncan lifted his hand, and out of the corner of her eye, Piper saw the thin envelope he held between two fingers.

  “I found this tucked under the sheet.” As he spoke he opened the unsealed flap and pulled out a piece of cream-colored vellum, the kind that a formal announcement might have been printed on.

  He turned it so that she could see what was written in block letters. THE NEXT TIME, YOU’LL BE THE ONE LYING BENEATH THE PETALS.

  It was only as Duncan read the message aloud to the other two men that the meaning began to sink in. A sliver of fear worked its way up her spine, but a little flare of anger chased it away. She shot to her feet. “Leaving a note was never part of the RPK’s pattern. Who would do this?”

  “Someone who’s angry because we won our appeal,” Abe said. “So it’s clearly not Patrick Lightman. He’s got to be very happy with the work we did.”

  “Well, someone definitely isn’t,” Nelson muttered.

  “Agreed. Your job is to find out who’s threatening Ms. MacPherson,” Monticello said.

  Duncan rose to his feet, but whatever he might have added was forestalled by the commotion at the door of her apartment. Turning, she saw her colleague Richard Starkweather stride through the still-open door.

  “Piper, thank God you’re all right.” He started toward her.

  Duncan quickly stepped in front of her. “Who are you?”

  Richard frowned at him. “Who are you?”

  “He’s all right,” Abe said. “Richard Starkweather is one of my research assistants.”

  Because Duncan was completely blocking her view, Piper edged to his side. Two men now flanked Richard, a uniformed officer and Detective Nelson.

  “What are you doing here?” Nelson asked the question that was foremost in Piper’s mind.

  “I came to see if Piper was all right. It’s all over the news that the Rose Petal Killer has struck again.” He gestured toward the petal-strewn sheet. “They’re running footage of the crime scene on all three local news stations. It’s even posted on YouTube. When I recognized Piper’s apartment, I had to come over here to make sure she was all right. Surely you can understand that, Officer.”

  “Detective,” Nelson corrected.

  When the TV blared on, Piper turned to see that Abe was using the remote to find a news channel. The moment he did, they were all viewing a video clip of the scene in her apartment. It was exactly what she’d encountered when she’d returned from her run. There was a shot of the room that took in her kitchen, the open door to the bedroom, all the way to the fireplace. Then the picture on the TV screen narrowed to a close-up of the petal-strewn sheet. She felt a sliver of ice work its way up her spine.

  A reporter’s voice was saying, “This was the scene early this morning when attorney Piper MacPherson returned to her apartment. Our source tells us that Ms. MacPherson worked on the appeal that set accused Rose Petal Killer, Patrick Lightman, free. Will she be his next victim?”

  Mike Nelson pulled out his phone. “I’ll find out how they got that video clip.”

  “Whoever set up this little scene could easily have shot it on his cell phone before he left,” Duncan said. “Then he could have attached it to an email. Starkweather just said it’s accessible on YouTube.”

  Abe switched channels and caught another replay of the tape. A reporter gave the same information in a voice-over.

  Piper made herself look carefully at it this time. “Someone shot the scene from the open doorway, then stepped inside for the close-up of the sheet. But why would anyone do this?”

  There were three full beats of silence before Duncan directed a question to Abe. “Who knows she worked on the brief? So far you’ve kept a tight lid on that.”

  “Intentionally,” Abe said. “No one from my office leaked it.”

  “Well, somebody found out,” Duncan said. “And whoever did this is angry enough at her to paint a target on her back.”

  Great, Piper thought. She could picture it clearly in her mind. How could a day that had started out so normally become a nightmare so quickly?

  3

  TWO HOURS LATER, DUNCAN STOOD in the alley gazing at the wooden staircase that led to Piper’s small apartment. Finally, he was alone.

  Monticello had left first, waiting only until Piper had showered and changed so that he could personally escort her to work. Most members of the press who’d finally tracked down Piper’s apartment had scurried after Abe’s limo.

  Mike Nelson had lingered longer. His men had talked to Piper’s landlady, who owned the high-end dress shop beneath Piper’s apartment, but the spare key was hanging from a rack in her office. One of the police department’s tech men had tracked down the email message that had been sent to the TV stations. Both it and the attached video clip had been sent from a stolen smartphone. The owner hadn’t even noticed it was missing.

  The uniformed officers had questioned shop owners, but the incident had taken place hours before most of them had unlocked their doors. When Nelson had left, he’d taken everyone and everything with him—crime scene techs, the uniforms, the sheet and the rose petals. Back at the precinct, Nelson and his partner would begin the tedious job of trying to track down where the roses and the sheet and the vellum note paper had been purchased. Tedious work, but it might pay off. They might get a description, even a name.

  Duncan had hung around, instead of getting a late start to his golf game, because he did some of his best thinking as he wandered through a deserted crime scene. The quiet, the lack of other people, helped him to see things more clearly. He was frequently called in to consult on cases to do exactly what he was doing now. Lingering, noticing the small details, theorizing. He agreed totally with Piper. It wasn’t Patrick Lightman who’d done this. Adrienne was checking on the man’s alibi, but there were too many things about the scene that didn’t fit into the RPK’s M.O.

  So who had done it? And why? Those were the key questions any profiler asked.

  First, the perpetrator was smart. He’d had to gather data on the Lightman case and on Piper’s schedule. And to pull it off as a media event in such a short amount of time, he’d had to have contacts at the local new stations.

  No matter what angle Duncan viewed it from, he didn’t think it was the work of a copycat who was planning to kill other women in the “style” of the RPK. His gut told him that the “who” was someone who had a personal vendetta against Piper. But whoever was trying to get to her was going to have to go through him.

  Duncan wasn’t sure when he’d made that decision. Perhaps it had been when he’d been studying the rose petals strewn across the sheet and Abe Monticello had mentioned her name. For just an instant, he’d seen the image of her he’d carried somewhere in his head all these years. He’d seen her lying beneath those petals.

  Or perhaps it had been a decision that had been made for him seven years ago, when he’d stood under that stone arch with her. He was Scottish enough that he couldn’t ignore the power of legends.

  When he made the decision, it was irreversible. And it would lead to complications. While she’d been kneeling next to him studying the little picnic scene, he’d wanted his hands on her. And once he started down that path.…

  When his cell phone rang, he wasn’t surprised to see Reid’s number on the caller ID. That meant that the news about Piper had made its way to Scotland. And when there was trouble, Cam always m
ade the first call to Reid, the oldest brother.

  “I’m assuming you’ve got Piper’s back,” Reid said.

  “Yes. I assume that our family in Scotland got the news and contacted you.”

  Reid laughed. “Sibling jealousy just never completely fades away. If it makes you feel better, no one has contacted me. I’m in France again with the VP and I caught it on the evening news. I thought I’d check with you before I got the call. I knew Piper was living in D.C., but I wasn’t aware that she was working for Abe Monticello or that she was working on the RPK case. Your paths didn’t cross during the trial, I take it.”

  “The FBI refused to share anything for that appeal.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Wish I had a better handle on that.” Then Duncan gave his brother a condensed version of what had happened and what they knew or theorized so far. While it helped to run through all the essentials again, it increased his sense that Piper could really be in danger.

  “Could be it’s someone who’s unhappy with the fact that she helped to set Lightman free.”

  “That’s a long list, but the police will have to start with Suzanne Macks’s family, especially her twin brother, Sid.” They’d been through quite a bit already. So if he could find anything that would narrow the list and eliminate them.…

  “I assume you have a plan,” Reid said.

  “Working on it.”

  “If I were you, I’d consider getting her the hell out of Dodge. Working on the vice president’s security detail, I don’t often have the luxury of doing that when my guy becomes a possible target.”

  “I’m considering that.” The problem was to get Piper to agree.

  “I’ll leave it in your very capable hands, and I’ll call the Scotland group to let them know that you’re handling it.”

  After glancing at his watch, Duncan glanced down the alley, trying to see and think about it the same way the man who was threatening Piper’s life had. She’d told Nelson that she ran at the same time every morning. That didn’t surprise him. Her route took her past the shops on the street. Turning, he stepped out of the alley and glanced up and down the street. It was bustling now with both cars and pedestrian traffic. At six o’clock, she would have been easy to spot from a variety of locations. A regular routine made a serial killer’s work easy.