Lawman. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ FBI involved so you guys could do a profile of the killer for us, and he laughed. He said the deaths had no connection. So I went to the captain, and he called your ASAC. Thanks.”

      “No problem,” Garon mused. “Most veteran cops hate paperwork and complications. Nobody wants to be looking for a serial killer. But we might catch this one, if we’re stubborn enough.”

      Marquez pursed his lips. “I asked one of your squad members about you,” he said. “He says that you’ll chase people to the gates of hell.”

      Garon shrugged. “I don’t like letting criminals get away.”

      “Neither do I. This guy’s a serial killer. I need you to help me prove it.”

      Garon paused while their steaks were served. “What sort of similarities are we talking about, with that cold case in Del Rio?”

      “All I have is sketchy information,” came the reply, “but the manner of abduction was the same, and they narrowed the suspects down to a stranger. The victim was assaulted and stabbed. I don’t know about red ribbons. I filled out our case on the form for VICAP and I did turn up several child murders in other states. But none of the children were strangled and stabbed, which may signify some other perp.”

      “Or he might have changed his habits. Maybe a gun gave him more power in an abduction.” As they both knew, a murderer might change the way he killed, but if the crime had a signature, it usually wouldn’t vary from crime scene to crime scene.

      “Any red ribbons in those other cold cases?” he asked, because the ribbon did seem to serve as a signature in at least one case.

      “No. At least,” he added, “there were none in the information I accessed. As I said earlier, we always hold back one or two details that we don’t feed to the media. Maybe those detectives did, too.”

      “Did you try calling the detectives who worked the Oklahoma cases?”

      “I did. The first Oklahoma one was sure I was actually a reporter trying to dig out unknown facts in the case. I gave him my captain’s phone number, and he hung up on me. He said anybody could look that information up online. Nobody at the second police department knew anything about a cold case.”

      “How about the other Texas case?”

      “That’s a doozy of a story,” Marquez told him with pure disgust in his tone. “It’s in Palo Verde, a little town up near Austin. I couldn’t get their single policeman on the phone at all. I tried e-mailing him, along with my phone number. That was week before last, and I’m still waiting for an answer.”

      “We get a lot of kooks e-mailing us for various reasons,” Garon told him. “And we get about two hundred spam messages a day. The captions are so misleading that you occasionally open one without meaning to. It’s always a scam or a link to a porno Web site. Even with filters, they get through. Maybe your message ended up in the deleted files.”

      “I hate spammers,” the younger man muttered.

      “We have a cyber crime division that spends hours a day looking for scams and shutting them down.”

      “Good for you, but that still doesn’t solve my problem.”

      “You can fly to Oklahoma and show your credentials in person, can’t you?”

      “I can barely pay my rent,” Marquez said miserably as he finished his steak. “I can’t afford the airfare.”

      “Your department would pay for the tickets,” Garon said.

      Marquez’s eyebrows met his hairline. “Like hell it would,” he shot back. “Didn’t I tell you that I had to buy my own damned digital camera because my lieutenant wouldn’t authorize the expenditure? He likes his job and the city manager goes over departmental budgets with a microscope.”

      “I know how that feels.”

      “No, you don’t,” the younger man assured him. “Unless you’ve had to bring in a receipt for a cup of ice water you bought from a convenience store to back up claiming it on your expense account!”

      “You have got to be kidding!” Garon exclaimed.

      “I wish I were,” the other man said sadly, shaking his head. “I guess they’d lock me up for a whole giant Coke.”

      Garon chuckled helplessly. “You need to come and work for us,” he told Marquez. “You could even have a Bucar.”

      “A what?”

      “A bureau car,” Garon told him. “I get to drive mine home at night. It’s like moving storage for all my equipment, including my guns.”

      “Guns, plural?” the detective exclaimed. “You have more than one?”

      He gave the detective a wry look. “Surely you have access to body armor and stop sticks and a riot gun…?”

      “Of course I do,” he muttered, “but it’s not my own. As for stop sticks, I pull my service weapon and try to blow out tires as long as the suspect isn’t near anything I might conceivably hit by mistake. As for a riot gun…” He pushed back his jacket to display his shoulder holster. “This is it. I hate shotguns.”

      “They let you wear a shoulder holster?” Grier asked. “We aren’t allowed to.”

      “I don’t know if I want to apply to the Bureau if I can’t wear a shoulder holster. Besides, they move you guys around too much. I like being near home.”

      “To each his own.”

      “Who else is going to be on this task force you’re setting up?” Marquez asked.

      “We’ve got the sheriff’s department, because the murder took place out of town in the county, along with a K-9 unit, a Texas Ranger…”

      “A Ranger? Wow,” the other man said with a wistful sigh. “I tried to get in, five years ago. I passed everything except the marksmanship test, but two other guys had higher scores than I did. That’s quite an outfit.”

      “Yes, it is. My brother was a Ranger, before he came down to work in San Antonio. He was with the D.A.’s office as a cyber crime expert, then he moved to Jacobsville.”

      “He’s chief of police there,” Marquez nodded.

      “Quite a guy, your brother. He’s making some major drug busts.”

      Garon felt a ripple of pride. He was proud of his brother.

      “Who else?” Marquez persisted.

      “We have an investigator from the D.A.’s office who specializes in crimes against children. We’ve volunteered our crime lab at Quantico for trace evidence.”

      “We have one of the best forensic units in the country.”

      Garon smiled. “I know. I don’t have a problem with letting them process data.”

      “When do we meet?”

      “Tomorrow СКАЧАТЬ