Page 67 of What About Love

“Holy shit,” she whispered as she scanned the description.

“What are you thinking, Angie?”

Angie jumped as Cap’s voice shot like a bullet through the room. She looked around for him.

“He’s conferencing in by phone, lass,” Kieran explained.

“Right,” she said, nodding. “Sorry. It’s just, I should have put this together before.”

“Put what together? Clue us in, darlin’,” T insisted.

“Felicia’s book is titledTo Serve and Protect.” Every man at the table looked at her blankly. “It’s an erotic romance, and according to the publisher’s note, it contains violence and BDSM themes.” They still didn’t react until she added, “The heroine in the book is a cop, as are two of the victims.”

“Finally, a pattern,” Kieran uttered as he flipped open his laptop.

“What about Marilyn? Her profile doesn’t list her profession.”

“Hang on, lass, and I’ll tell you.” His fingers flew over the keys. “Jaysus,” he breathed as his eyes scanned the screen. “She was a violent crime reporter and, you won’t believe this, but her last byline was a story on the disappearance of Elaine Danson.”

The facts swirled in her mind as she mentally lined them up one way then rearranged the details in another. A memory, vivid and painful, blocked out her vision of anything else. It was of a man looming over her, his black scowl recognizable despite his hat and shaggy beard.

She couldn’t forget the searing heat of his blade piercing her chest or the cold-hearted way he’d wiped the blade clean on her blouse. His callous laughter as he’d left her to bleed out on the cold, hard tiles of the courthouse floor still haunted her.

“You’re shaking, Angie.” T’s breath brushed against her ear as he leaned close, his warm hand gliding across her bare back. “What is it?”

“Is there a problem?” Eric cut in.

Angie twisted in her seat, her fingers curling around T’s forearm. In a distant voice she barely recognized, she explained, “T, don’t you see? These women, they’re me. Or as close to me as it comes. If something’s off, he changes it, like dying a redhead’s hair brown. He’s doing it to make them more like me.”

She saw when it all clicked into place, his look of surprise yielding to a fierce scowl. As she had in her moment of epiphany, he surged to his feet and gathered the files. He rifled through each one, pulling out each victim’s photo and stat sheet, and aligning them in two rows in the middle of the table. After studying them carefully for several minutes, his worried gaze came back to her.

“Someone is targeting Angie look-alikes.”

Eric scowled. “How can this be when she’s only been in LA for three days?”

“Not someone,” Angie explained with eerie calm. “Richard Stapleton.”

“Fuck,” T bit out, his fingers stabbing through his hair. Still on his feet, he pushed back his chair and began pacing.

“The height is off a bit. They were all taller,” Eric murmured as he moved into T’s vacated place to further study the details.

“I couldn’t stand working for him,” Angie intoned numbly. “He was short and hated it, so I drove it home every chance I got by wearing heels purposely to provoke him. Three and four inches at least, which put me at six feet. I towered over him and it really got to him, always demanding I sit down when we met. It was stupid, I know, but he was such a colossal ass and a sexist bastard, talking down to me and giving me fluff assignments because I was a woman. It was my small taste of retribution, which felt good, at the time.”

“I need to see a picture of this asshole,” Eric stated sharply.

T stopped pacing and looked at Kieran with his laptop. “Access the San Antonio files. There’s a folder on him with at least two pics.”

It took Kieran only a moment before their new primary suspect came up on the screen. The first photo was recent, of him in a suit and tie while the chief of police at the SAPD. The other was of him as Dick Benson, a dirty beat cop in DC a decade prior.

Eric perused them closely for a moment and shook his head. “He’s not one of our members. I meet with each one before they’re granted membership.”

“What if he’s using a disguise?” Angie suggested.

“It’s possible. We use thumb printer scanners. If we had Stapleton’s prints, we can run them through our system for a match.”

“We don’t. However, our friends at the FBI in San Antonio do,” Cap advised through the speaker. “I’ll get Jonas on it. He has access to your systems.”

“This ups the ante for our girl going under cover,” Eric stated. “If this is Richard Stapleton, I see two reactions on his part. He gets scared and moves on to some other club, or he gets greedy and goes after the real thing.”

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