When he didn’t respond in the way he usually did, she drew back and narrowed her eyes. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s just ...”
“The swearing-in on Tuesday? The breaking news?”
“Fine timing, huh? Whole bloody stamp-out-crime angle could backfire on me now.”
“Come—sit. Fire is on, wine is open.” She padded on stockinged feet into the living area and seated herself on the sofa. She patted the cushion next to her. “Talk to me.”
“Joyce, maybe we should stop for a—”
“Sit.” Her features turned serious. “I can help, Jack.” She had the ability to switch her business mind on or off in the blink of an eye, toggle back and forth. It made him wonder sometimes who the real Joyce Norton-Wells was at any given time, what she was really thinking in that calculating brain of hers. “Chief Gunnar called me at home to apprise me of what’s happening,” she said as she reached for her glass of wine. “It looks serious.”
“Hell yeah—”
“No, I mean big, Jack.” She inhaled deeply and crossed her gorgeously honed legs. “We could have a serial killer on our hands.”
He lowered himself slowly onto a chair near the window, preferring—needing—to keep a little distance between himself and her, for now. She leaned forward. “As you know, the office of the attorney general is entitled to be told in advance of potentially major or difficult prosecutions.”
A sense of foreboding rose inside him as he measured Joyce’s dark eyes. They showed a glint of excitement. She had a taste for ugly battles. And he knew that whatever she was about to say, it was regarding a fight that was looming, something he didn’t want as he took office on a very slim mandate.
“Go on.”
“We ordered a rush on the medico-legal autopsy for the body found floating in the Gorge this morning. The PM is being performed as we speak—”
“At night? On a Sunday?”
“Extraordinary circumstances.” She hesitated. “Something came up in the preliminary external examination.”
The sinister feeling inside him furled deeper.
“A lock of her hair had been cut off.” She paused. “And she’d been circumcised.”
He stared, pulse quickening.
“Metro PD feels her case is linked to that of the young woman found in the cemetery and possibly to two earlier sexual assaults that they know of.” She watched him, as if gauging his stomach, his stamina for something like this. “A ritual lust killer, Jack, someone who has escalated from rape to murder and who might be devolving very fast, given the apparent back-to-back timing of these two very recent homicides.”
“I don’t need this.”
“Maybe you do. When the MVPD catch this guy, and theywill, our prosecution of him is going to be sensational. It’ll garner international attention. Gunnar is looping my office in from the start so that Crown counsel will be well prepared and apprised of all facets of the investigation—we want to ensure no balls are dropped, no legal holes left. I’m working to have a team of top prosecutors ready to clear their slates for this. We cannot afford a misstep.”
He surged to his feet, strode to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and stared out over the lights of the harbor.Hiscity.
“Jack?”
“You get off on this, don’t you? You actuallywantthis. Youlikeit that young white girls are being sexually mutilated and killed in this city because you think it will further your career, shine the limelight on your office when it comes down to prosecuting him.”
“Jack—”
“Eighty-nine votes,” he said, still facing the view. “That’s my mandate.That’smy ‘victory’ over Patty Markham. It’s all I got. And polls show that it was my zero tolerance on crime policy that won me that slim margin.” He turned to face her.
She’d kicked off her heels, curled her legs under her butt, and was watching him intently. She reminded him of a Rene Russo type in looks. Sexy as all get out in an older woman kind of way that spoke of experience and confidence in her own sexuality. And power. Assistant Deputy Attorney General Joyce Norton-Wells knew how to break men’s balls with a smile and her intellect—and sometimes a calculated display of cleavage or calf.
Outwardly sophisticated and cool, yet inwardly ferocious, a blisteringly intelligent lawyer, leader, activist. Was it the penumbra of her power and genius that he loved to cloak around himself? Was it feeling part of a secret team, the sense that they belonged to an inner sanctum, that they both were going somewhere big in this country? Was it the sex? The titillation, the salaciousness of a clandestine relationship?
Whatever it was, it aroused them both. He was quite simply addicted to her.
“What makes you think they’ll get him soon?”
