Jump The Line (Toein' The Line Book 1) Read online

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that and just keep thinking about how lucky I am.”

  Is she serious? Or is she truly acknowledging her good fortune to be working with me? Doesn’t matter. I’m stuck with her. We’re working the case of“Megalo Don,”our serial biter, who brutalizes young girls, literally chewing and eating them, and then dumps them in the alley behind Omar’s. So I’ve got to deal with her. “Glad to have you on board,”I mumble, about as glad as I’d be to rewrite the Ohio Revised Code.

  “It’s a chance in a lifetime for me,”she says.

  Yep. The case is a career maker for anyone, much less a rookie like you.

  Former Miss Kentucky and a former freelance reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, DeeDee’s a well-heeled hothouse flower. She quit her work at the Enquirerwhen NPD hired her. HR bitched about the conflict her work as a former stringer posed, but since her mama is Newport’s mayor, they shut up quick. Never mind the political conflict: no one in Newport gives a shit about that, not even HR. But DeeDee won’t last. When she gets bored dabbling in murder, she’ll do NPD the favor they deserve and move on.

  I prep myself mentally. How shall I deal with DeeDee now?

  Got it. Same as I do all women. Women want equality. I’ll give it, even though I wish there were one female left on Earth who’d let me be on top—just once. For now, I’ll mentor DeeDee the same as I would a man. No breaks.

  “I eat here because I don’t have time to cook,”I say, hoping to straighten her out. “And speaking of time, we’ve got plenty of work to do. And very little time.”

  “I’m ready,”DeeDee says. “Captain Meyers has already given me my orders.”

  The hell? Meyers is already doing everything he can to make my life a living hell. Man hates me. “That’s not how this is going to shake down,”I say. “Agreed, we both work for Meyers. Agreed, you and I are partners. But I’m senior on this team. You’re rookie. I’m calling the shots.”

  I admire her pluck. Instead of the hurt look some women would fake, the one I’m expecting, she puts on an amused frown. “Why, I swear. Aidan Gerard Hawks, you are cold as ice. Cold,”she repeats, her southern lilt laced with rebuke. Then she fidgets. “You just took what I said the wrong way, that’s all.”

  “Did I?”

  “I hope you don’t curse like that all the time,”she says. “I can’t bear cursing.”

  It irritates me the way she uses my full name, like my mother does when she’s upset. Why does she go out of her way to give me a mental wedgie? Why does it bother me? “Better get used to it,”I say. “I fucking love to cuss.”

  “I like a challenge,”she says, and then winks.

  What’s with women who feel it okay to wink but lawyer up if a man holds open her door?

  “Be cold to me if you want, but”—she shakes her finger—“I’m known to melt ice. . . .”

  I’m from Cincinnati, but I work in Newport, so I like Kentucky, but natives like DeeDee make“ice”sound like“ass.” Right across the river in Cincinnati, women plainly say“ice.” So on top of everything else, I detest her southern belle accent.

  “It’s‘ice,’ dammit,”I say,“not ass. Now let’s get busy.”

  * * *

  Being trained—“mentored”as Captain Meyers prefers—is never a cakewalk for a rookie. It’s time to test Ms. Laws’ mettle. I toss a color photo across the table top. It lands near DeeDee’s fruit compote. She’s been nibbling, so the mostly uneaten grapes and cantaloupe look pretty damn lonely.

  “Hmmm,”she says.

  To her credit, she doesn’t shoot up from the table and run off to vomit. I cut my rookie some slack. Not much, but some. “That’s Megalo Don’s most recent vic,”I say.

  “Time of death?”

  “Can’t say for sure until the coroner’s report comes in, but he left her in the alley some time last night or early this morning,”I say,“over near Sixth and Monmouth.” After I dumped your ass and called Wes, a real cop. I’d taken DeeDee with me to Omar’s to warn the dancers to be careful leaving the bar. I thought the dancers might relate better to a female cop. When I got the call about the body, I sent her back to the cruiser, telling her giving chase on foot to Alaina Colby—and the bigass Coke truck she and her partner had heisted—wasn’t my idea of good police work. That’s when we’d had our little argument.

  “Then y’all are sayin’ this perp’s MO is same as with the last two vics’?”

  “Could be,”I say. “Both MOs look the same. We found the last one in the same alley. Megalo, if it’s him, left her in a commercial grade lawn bag near a dumpster behind Omar’s.”

  “What does Captain Meyers say?”she asks.

  I give her a hard stare and hold back a purely acid thought—What the fuck do I care? The captain’s opinion is a sore point with me, one I won’t share with DeeDee. I also don’t tell her that, when the second body showed up week before last, Captain Meyers had warned me,“Get this mess cleaned up, Detective Hawks. Pronto. Or I’ll have your badge.”

  Captain Meyers was responding to pressure from Newport’s city council, under pressure from voters to lower the city’s crime rate. “Shame DeeDee’s working for the Enquirerand NPD is a conflict,”I’d told him. “She could make up better statistics for NPD and then write whatever the hell NPD wanted her to.”

  The remark hadn’t gone over well.

  Do I dislike my boss? No, he’s a good administrator—as they go. He’s a good cop.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass,”I say, finally,“but if you want my opinion, he worries more about tracking data, about solve rates, and about NPD’s image, than he does finding killers and protecting and serving.”

  “Wow. Don’t hold back,”DeeDee says.

  “Not to worry.” I rake my gaze across her and watch her squirm. “Holding back in anything’s not my style.”

  That’s a lie. Recalling the most recent vic’s body dumped like garbage behind Omar’s pisses me off, same as it does Captain Meyers. But I hold back telling DeeDee what I think’s the real problem eating at the captain. It’s not that the vics have been brutally murdered. It’s the fact Sixth and Monmouth’s a few blocks from Newport’s city building, thanks to Irene Blackmoore. She leveled the neon-signed, black-windowed nude bars in old Sin City, clearing space for the new town hall. So the only two rat holes left, the Brass Ass and Omar’s, are in city hall’s back yard.

  I want to tell DeeDee,“Doesn’t look good, does it? Bodies piling up back there faster than last week’s garbage?” But I hold back, aware I’ve more problems than one man needs. Yet another problem giving me heartburn, and one more reason I don’t share what I know with DeeDee, is the way Captain Meyers sucks up to Mayor Darlene Laws, DeeDee’s mother. Rumor has it he’s doing Darlene. Maybe my ego won’t let me admit it, but I doubt it. I know from experience that Darlene demands sexual anarchists in bed, not impotent derelicts like Captain Meyers.

  Popping a grape between lush pink lips, DeeDee gives up her game of fifty questions and uses her butter knife to trace something on the photo. “Mmm,”she says, as I watch intently,“he’s a serial biter and gosh darn—Aid—are we looking at a signature here, or what?”

  “Good,”I say, uneasy because I agree. My rook’s turning out to be more than merely perceptive—and more than a fluffy Barbie doll. Sure, bite wounds are clearly visible in the photo. But it would take a solid background in criminology, a deeper level of forensic knowledge than I at first believed DeeDee has, to discern a serial biter’s signature in the middle of the vic’s mushed-up shoulder.

  I grudgingly give my rook more credit. “The vic’s neck and shoulders are literally gnawed off, as you can see,”I explain, agreeing with her. “The bite wounds are so deep here”—I point to the right shoulder—“he’s reached bone in multiple spots.”

  “Why, yes.” She glues her gaze to the photo. I sit back and watch her use the butter knife like a Ninja. “He sure does love to bite,”she says, pointing to deep punctures. “But Aid, look
here. He’s left this spot of flesh nearly intact, except for this pattern right . . . damn . . . here.” She emphasizes her point by spearing the vic’s mottled shoulder in the photograph. “It’s like he wants us to be able to identify his signature, don’t y’all think?”

  I smile. Did she just say damn? Did Miz Sweetness and Light, who doesn’t like cursing, just fucking cuss?

  She swings her gaze up to meet mine, her face so close I can kiss her. I get a whiff of her perfume. Joy de Jean Patou? Expensive. Nice shit. Heady. I relax. Not to worry, Aidan. You’re safe from her wiles. I like the trampier scents, the earthier smell of wet glistening sweat on a woman’s bare thighs—

  Fighting a bolt of lust shooting uninvited up my thigh to my groin, I buckle down with my rook. “The perp’s definitely making a statement,”I agree, pleased by DeeDee’s take on the vic’s bite wounds. “He wants us to ID him. He’s taunting us, playing with us. And I think you’re right,”I admit, again grudgingly. “He’s displaying his signature.”

  “Why, yes, Aid, he’s mighty proud of those vicious bite wounds, isn’t he? It’s like he sees himself as some kind of artist with human flesh.”

  I stare hard. I’ve trained several rookies, but this one’s a puzzle, a mixture of camp and chic—and cop—like I’ve never seen. “We’re talking a chewed-up human being here, and you view our perp’s handiwork as‘artistry?’”

  She frowns. “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

  “How . . . cold you are,”I say, and then I give her a high-five and my first real atta-girl smile. “Rookie Laws, I’m thinking you’ll make a good cop.” I stop her big wide-mouthed grin with a cautionary lift of my hand. “But don’t let that go to your head,”I warn. “I’m a bastard to work with.”

  “I’ve heard,”she says, working hard to stop that sunny smile. “I’ve heard.”

  * * *

  Ignoring our food we examine the bite-wound patterns, potentially the perp’s signature, as Rookie Laws correctly believes.

  “But tell me, Aid,”she begs,“what the hell, precisely, is this here pattern?”

  Once again, she’s stooped to using my own foul-mouthed“pig”vernacular—the cursing. This time, I file her slip away in a mental drawer under“two-faced”and“deceitful liar,”qualities every good cop needs. I like her better every time she swears, yet her pretending she doesn’t is one more reason for me to be on a bullshit BOLO around my rook. This one’s slipperier than bat shit, and I’ve every reason to worry about her based on my physical reaction.

  “I don’t know what the hell it is,”I say,“not . . . precisely.”

  I can’t give DeeDee an answer. Not yet. But my little voice keeps warning: move carefully. She’s smart like a fox, not the dumb southern belle she’s playing. Hiding my concern, I agree with a sureness I don’t quite feel, although I’m certain I can later find a way to support it. “But I think you’re right. That’s his signature, narcissistic bastard. It’s the reason we call him Megalo Don.”

  She shoots me a pouty frown, fake as a tin badge. But my own primal attraction to her plastic blonde allure helps me admit—helps me know deep in my skull—Captain Meyers has found a way to get even with me for sleeping with Darlene. Yep. The captain’s planted a bomb in my path. It’s DeeDee Laws. I’m sure she’s after the Megalo Don collar, and Captain Meyers is after my badge. It’s a classic squeeze-play.

  And how have I started off mentoring my rookie, trying to defuse this ticking time bomb?

  Like a teenager smitten by a glimpse of DeeDee’s double D-cup canons, I’ve just pulled her into the investigation by allowing her to define Megalo’s signature as“artistry with human flesh,”and then complimented her to boot.

  “You know who I mean?”I say, fighting to interpret her perplexed look, to combat my own frustration. “Megalo Don. We named him after the shark—”

  “Aid,”she interrupts, anger seeping to the surface at last and tainting her syrupy southern belle drawl,“I’m a rookie, so I’m appreciative of being under your ah, your, ah—tutelage. But Mama sent me to Smith. C’mon, don’t y’all think I know about . . . sharks?”

  I get her point. How could I miss the fact she went to Smith? She’s smart. I’d have guessed Wellesley: her personnel folder says she’s a candidate for the FBI academy. But that’s not what keeps sending danger signals to my brain. It’s the fact DeeDee inserts Mama Laws into this and every conversation we have. Does she know about me and Darlene? Has the captain told her? Are the two of them colluding to get me tossed out of NPD? What happens when she finds out I’ve slept with her mother?

  “Y’all need to give me some credit, Aidan Gerard Hawks. I knowMegalodon’s a shark that went extinct a few years back.”

  “Sorry,”I say, not the least. Maybe Smith cultivated its hothouse posies better than I had at first thought, but Mama Darlene and those Smith battleaxes neglected their biology curriculum: Megalodon’s been extinct for thirty-thousand years. I don’t bother telling her. She knows. The stupid blonde act is as fake as DeeDee’s boobs.

  “Any ideas who Megalo Don might be?”I ask, signaling our waiter.

  “No clue,”she says, dabbing her pink mouth and making me wonder how she can eat a two-grape breakfast and yet have such an athletic build. My gaze drifts downward to her chest. I yank it back.

  “I mean, I’ve no clue yet,”she corrects. “I’m sure going to find the bastard, though. I mean we,”she adds, correcting her mistake. “You and I are going to find him. I, of course, am here to learn from you, Aid—”

  “Call me Aidan, except around our peers and superiors. Then it’s‘Detective Hawks.’”

  “Sure thing,”she says. “Aidan.”

  I’ve no doubts about who’s going to nail Megalo Don. Picking up the photo we’ve been examining, I slide DeeDee’s check toward her. If I treat her like an equal, maybe I’ll discourage any more of her groveling solicitous advances. Maybe I’ll also head off the urge to down her right here on the table and just give her what she’s wanting. I hate the barbaric heat spreading uninvited through me. I don’t want to, yet I can’t stop wondering whether DeeDee would be like her mother in bed?

  Nah, my good angel says, don’t go there.

  My bad angel remains silent—smug bastard.

  Chapter 7

  Who am I?

  “Little Man,”my mom used to call me, before she ended up in a garbage bag gnawed on like last Thanksgiving’s turkey. You’d say having my mom make fun of my size as a kid is the reason I’m fucked up. You’d call me sociopath.

  I’m not that easy to shrink, so stop with the Mickey Mouse bullshit psychology.

  Thinking of all I want to tell Detective Hawks when I get the chance, I ease from my booth, liking the feel of the seat rubbing my ass. Why do I like the sensation?

  I indulge my desire to shrink myself. I do a better job of it than Hawks could, anyway.

  I don’t want to know who I am: I don’t care. But I need some insight into me so I can quit doing whatever I find predictable about my behavior. Being predictable is what could get me caught and getting caught’s not what I’m about. I’m not the victim. In Hawks’ parlance, I’m called perpetrator. Killer.

  What does the seat feel like?

  It feels like . . . skin. Ha! That’s why I love its feel. Shrink session is fucking over, dimwits. I’m in control, not you.

  I watch Detective Hawks shuffle by the cash register. Women can’t get enough of him. Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched them fawn over him, practically beg to cuddle up with him. I see why, too. He’s physically everything I’m not. All man, most silly bitches would say. Why are some men born with that kind of physical prowess, while others, while I—

  Hold on. He’s glancing irritably toward my hiding spot. Oh-ho, he’s pissed no one’s available at the register to take his money. He hates inefficiency, makes being perfect his chief MO. Finding order in chaos is one reason NPD’s promoted him, shooting his ass up through their ranks like he’s royalty.

&nb
sp; “But that will change,”I say,“before I’m done.” Kings are born to be murdered—crucified!

  I smile at the decrepit old couple in the booth next to mine, right behind the fake ficus. “Hello,”I say, bigass smile spreading across my face. They’re gumming an impossible mountain of pancakes and looking perplexed. “Bet I know what you’re thinking.”

  Why is the young man chatting us up? Who in fuck is he?

  Good question. I snicker. If only they knew what—no, if only they knew who—I ate for breakfast. Not pancakes, damn sure.

  “Sorry, young man, do we know you?”

  They frown when I squeeze deeper into the ficus’ leaves. Gotta hand it to them. It is an odd move. They probably won’t finish those pancakes in this millennium. “Can’t eat your pancakes and have them, too,”I snigger, jumping when someone drops a glass.

  I hate noisy places like this, but cops spend a lot of time in restaurants and bars, which makes it a fun challenge to keep tabs on my detective-king’s every move. People talking and laughing doesn’t distract Detective Hawks’ focus. I’m guessing it makes working in places like Arnee’s easy for him. As for me? I prefer dark, private spaces. And no people.

  “People bring out the worst in me,”I tell the old couple. “Make me want to dissect a kitten while it’s still breathing. Kiddin! I had you going, didn’t I?”I say, watching the old fucks tuck napkins into their plates and toddle to their feet to leave.

  But this morning, Arnee’s noise—the breakfast chaos, the clatter of silverware and relaxed chit-chat of the breakfast clubbers—works out great for me, too. It’s perfect cover.

  Breaking off the conversation I’ve started with mom and pop, I squeeze from my hiding spot and crane my neck. Shit! Here comes the blonde cop. She thinks she’s queen of the world, or what? I watch her sauntering toward me.

  “I’m going to freshen my face, Aidan,”she calls back to him over her shoulder. Wink, wink, she goes. Repulsive! She’s not on my most-wanted list, but I’d like to kill her just for shits and giggles.