Lethal Attraction: Against the Rules\Fatal Affair Read online

  “I’m sorry I dragged you over here for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing—” Her words got stuck in her throat when he ran a finger over her cheek. His touch was so light she would have missed it if she hadn’t been staring at him.

  “You’re tired.”

  She shrugged, her heart slamming around in her chest. “I haven’t been sleeping too well lately.”

  “I read all the coverage of what happened. It wasn’t your fault, Sam.”

  “Tell that to Quentin Johnson. It wasn’t his fault, either.”

  “His father should’ve put his son’s safety ahead of saving his crack stash.”

  “I was counting on the fact that he would. I should’ve known better. How someone could put their child in that kind of danger…I’ll just never understand it.”

  “I’m sorry it happened to you. It broke my heart to read about it.”

  Sam found it hard to look away. “I, um…I should go.”

  “Before you do, there’s just one thing I really need to know.”

  “What?” she whispered.

  He released her hand, cupped her face and tilted it to receive his kiss.

  As his lips moved softly over hers, Sam summoned every ounce of fortitude she possessed and broke the kiss. “I can’t, Nick. Not during the investigation.” But oh how she wanted to keep kissing him!

  “I was dying to know if it would be like I remembered.”

  Her eyes closed against the onslaught of emotions. “And was it?”

  “Even better,” he said, going back for more.

  “Wait. Nick. Wait.” She kept her hand on his chest to stop him from getting any closer. “We can’t do this. Not now. Not when I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation that involves you.”

  “I didn’t do it.” He reached up to release the clip that held her hair and combed his fingers through the length as it tumbled free.

  Unnerved by the intimate gesture, she stepped back from him. “I know you didn’t, but you’re still involved. I’ve got enough problems right now without adding an inappropriate fling with a witness to the list.”

  “Is that what it would be?” His eyes were hot, intense and possibly furious as he stared at her. “An inappropriate fling?”

  “No,” she said softly. “Which is another reason why it’s not a good idea to start something now.”

  He moved closer to her. “It’s already started, Sam. It started six years ago, and we never got to finish it. This time, I intend to finish it. Maybe not right now, but eventually. I was a fool to let you slip through my fingers the first time. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Startled by his intensity, Sam took another step back. “I appreciate the warning, but it might be one of those things that’s better left unfinished. We both have a lot going on—”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, handing her the hair clip.

  Sam felt his eyes on her back as she went to the door and let herself out. All the way home, her lips burned from the heat of his kiss.

  CHAPTER 8

  Early the next morning, as she stood over the lifeless, waxy remains of Senator John Thomas O’Connor, age thirty-six, it struck Sam that death was the great equalizer. We arrive with nothing, we leave with nothing, and in death what we’ve accomplished—or not accomplished—doesn’t much matter. Senator or bricklayer, millionaire or welfare mother, they all looked more or less the same laid out on the medical examiner’s table.

  “I’d place time of death at around eleven p.m.,” Dr. Lindsey McNamara, the District’s chief medical examiner, said as she released her long red hair from the high ponytail she’d worn for the autopsy.

  “That’s shortly after he got home. The killer might’ve been waiting for him.”

  “Dinner consisted of filet mignon, potatoes, mixed greens and what looked like two beers.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I’m waiting on the tox report.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Stab wound to the neck. The jugular was severed. He bled out very quickly.”

  “Which came first? The cut to the neck or the privates?”

  “The privates.”

  Sam winced. “Tough way to go.”

  “For a man, probably the toughest.”

  “He was alert and aware that someone he knew had dismembered him,” Sam said, more to herself than to Lindsey.

  “You’re sure it was someone he knew?”

  “Nothing’s definite, but I’m leaning in that direction because there was no struggle and no forced entry.”

  “There was also no skin under his nails or any defensive injuries to his hands.”

  “He didn’t put up a fight.”

  “It happened fast.” Lindsey gestured to O’Connor’s penis floating in some sort of liquid.

  Sam fought back an unusual surge of nausea. This stuff didn’t usually bother her, but she had never seen a severed penis before.

  “A clean, fast cut,” Lindsey said.

  “Which is why the killer was able to get the knife through his neck while he was still sitting up in bed.”

  “Right. He would’ve been reacting to the dismemberment. He might’ve even blacked out from the pain.”

  “So he never saw the death blow coming.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Thanks, Doc. Send me your report when it’s ready?”

  “You got it,” Lindsey said. “Sam?”

  Sam, who had reached for her cell to check for messages, looked over at the other woman.

  “I wanted you to know how terrible I felt about what happened with that kid,” Lindsey said, her green eyes soft with compassion. “What the press did to you…well, anyone who knows you knows the truth.”

  “Thank you,” Sam said in a hushed tone. “I appreciate that.”

  *

  By seven o’clock, Sam was in her office wading through four sets of phone records drawn from the senator’s home, office and two cell phones. Her eyes blurry from the lack of sleep that she blamed on Nick’s kiss and the memories it had resurrected, she searched for patterns and nursed her second diet cola of the day. Most of the calls were to numbers in the District and Virginia, but she noticed several calls per week to Chicago that usually lasted an hour or more. She made a note to check the number.

  A few other numbers popped up with enough regularity to warrant a follow-up. Sam made a list and turned it over to one of the other detectives who had been assigned to assist her.

  Grabbing another soda and a stale bagel left over from yesterday, she stopped to brief Chief Farnsworth before heading out to meet Freddie on Capitol Hill. A crush of reporters waited for her outside the public safety building. When she saw how many there were, she briefly considered going back to ask a couple of uniforms to help her get through the crowd. Then she dismissed the idea as cowardly and stepped into the scrum.

  “Sergeant, how close are you to naming a suspect?”

  “How was the senator killed?”

  “Who found him?”

  “What do you think of the headlines in today’s paper?”

  That last one made her stomach roil as she could only imagine what the papers were saying about the detective the department had chosen to lead the city’s highest profile murder investigation in years. She held up a hand to stop the barrage of questions.

  “All I’ll say at this time is the investigation is proceeding, and as soon as we know anything more, we’ll hold a press conference. I’ll have no further comment until that time. Now, would you mind letting me through? I have work to do.”

  They didn’t move but also didn’t stop her from pushing her way through.

  Rattled and annoyed, Sam got into her unmarked department car and locked the doors. “Fucking vultures,” she muttered.

  Outside the Hart Senate Office Building, she dropped two quarters into the Washington Post box and tugged out the morning’s issue where a banner headline announced the senator’s murder. In a smaller s