Page 6 of The Broken Places

Teresa held up the woman’s uninjured palms. “Not on her, but the man has some.”

She’d cried and screamed and suffered, but she hadn’t fought back? Maybe she’d been too out of it to defend herself.

“So if there was an unknown perpetrator, the women were drugged and didn’t fight back, but the man wasn’t? Or became lucid at some point, at least enough to fight back,” Lennon surmised. Ambrose didn’t react to her statement, still looking around the room, seeming both thoughtful and troubled. She didn’t require his input, however; the toxicology report would confirm or deny her guess.

One of the police officers guarding the door laughed at something the other one said, and Ambrose’s chin rose quickly, his eyes hanging on the two men.What’s with this guy?The dude was different. And quiet. And for whatever reason, he did not strike her as an FBI agent, even though that’s what he’d said he was and he had the badge to prove it.

She wasn’t usually judgmental, but he made her feel unbalanced, and she decided she definitely didn’t want to work with him. No maybes about it. She’d fix this when she got back to the station. He could do his bureaucratic thing, but Lennon didn’t need to hold his hand while he did it. In Lennon’s world, she’d learned to trust her first impressions. She was analytical to a fault, which was one of the qualities that servedher well as an inspector, but she had no desire to dig deeper and unpack this dude.

Teresa had turned the woman on the floor slightly, and the eyes of the teddy bear beneath her peeked out. “What do you think is with the stuffed animals?” she asked. “Creepy, right?”

“Yeah, and different than the first two scenes.”

“There are more toys in the bathroom,” Teresa said.

Lennon glanced at the mostly closed door. “Seriously?” She walked to the bathroom and pushed the door open. Inside was a row of plastic toys on the edge of the bathtub. A chill rolled down Lennon’s spine. She’d stepped into the aftermath of plenty of murders, but there was something about toys amid a brutal crime scene that was very disturbing.

Especially one that also had overt sexual overtones.

When she turned around, Agent Mars was behind her. She hadn’t even heard him approach. “What are you thinking?” he asked, his eyes stuck to the children’s figurines lined up on the bathtub. Two princesses, a light-green bear ... a unicorn with a rainbow mane.Girls’ toys.“About this scene in particular.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just looking at this scene unconnected to the others?” She chewed at her lip. “A role-play, maybe?”

“Role-play?”

She turned toward him fully, and he backed up immediately, a step, and then two. The distance he put between them was excessive. She’d brushed her teeth and showered after her run, so she didn’t think it was that. “Well, sex toys,” she said, gesturing to the bedside table, “and kids toys? The two absolutely do not go together. So. Say the guy”—she pointed back toward the dead man on the bed—“has a thing for kids and hires a couple of prostitutes to role-play his kiddie sexual fantasy, right? That’s how they end up here at this abandoned motel. And then a fourth party shows up and stabs them to death.”

He seemed to think about that. “What would be the motive?”

“Maybe the dude”—she inclined her head back toward the male’s body—“didn’t keep his fantasy strictly to role-play. Maybe someonewho knew that offered him free drugs and then came here where he knew he’d be, and killed all three of them.”

The agent’s brow dipped, and he looked around again. “Someone came to this hotel while he was in the middle of ...” He waved his hand toward the purple dildo. From this angle, with the light shining on it, Lennon could see that it had glitter either on it or in it. “To avenge something he’d done to a kid?”

“Just spitballing.” It was Tommy’s word, and he’d used it regularly.

He watched her closely, obviously assessing, and it made her uncomfortable, so she looked away. And again, she missed the hell out of her partner. They were in the habit of throwing out every possibility at a scene, no matter how far fetched. It helped her. The constant dialogue. The mental removal from the physical location. Ambrose obviously didn’t work that way.

“Or,” he said, surprising her so that she turned back to him, “there was another partner, the drug-fueled orgy they all agreed to partake in went sideways, and the killer stabbed all the partiers.” His expression was strangely hopeful, and she got the feeling he’d thrown out the idea—which was an actual possibility—as a way to work with her rather than against her.

“Why?” she asked.

He blinked, those bedroom eyes widening and then drooping again. “Why what?”

“Why did the fourth mystery partner, if there was one, stab the other orgy members?”

He looked at the man lying on the bed, his gaze then moving to Teresa, who was putting the teddy bear into an evidence bag. “This kind of scene? Who knows. Could be anything. Might be nothing. Drugs don’t exactly make people logical.” His eyes met hers, something passing over his expression that she didn’t catch in time to name. The guy was taciturn, and it made her trust him even less.

She crossed her arms and chewed at her lip. Reticent or not, he wasn’t wrong about drugs making people illogical and impulsive. She’dseen people killed over a baggie of weed or a side-eye. The idea of motive could be dialed way back when drugs and mental issues were involved. On the streets, you might be killed over nothing at all. A personal scenario going on in an individual’s mind and nowhere else.

Hell, someone might have taken one turn too many with the purple, glittery plastic phallus.

Whatever was going on, she still couldn’t figure out where the cocktail of hallucinogens came in. Lennon heard at least a few voices just outside the room, and a moment later, two more criminalists came through the door.

Her muscles relaxed slightly. Lennon’s job was done here. Now it was time for the tech team to gather and catalog and arrange for these bodies to be sent to the medical examiner. She greeted the criminalists and then stepped outside the room. She heard Agent Mars introducing himself to them but didn’t wait for him to join her before heading toward the stairs.

As far as she was concerned, her very brief partnership was now over.

CHAPTER FOUR

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