Ruthless Read Free

out the game.
    Every step he took was judiciously calculated for optimal gain and leverage.
    While Harper pulled Cook aside to give him his task, Jess parked her stuff on her desk and headed for the case board. Lori, with a manila folder in hand, joined her there.
    “I was waiting until you got here to start.” Lori opened the folder and revealed copies of the photos of the unidentified women and a photo of Spears.
    The unsavory combo of anxiety, fear, and frustration almost got the better of Jess again. “Thank you.” She was extremely lucky to have Lori and Harper on her team. Cook, too. The vacant desk reminded her that SPU was a member short since Valerie Prescott had moved on to the Gang Task Force.
    A sense of foreboding churned in Jess’s belly. Captain Ted Allen, head of Birmingham’s Gang Task Force, was still missing. More than a week now. Whatever else she knew, Jess understood with complete certainty that his disappearance had something to do with her. Yet she couldn’t connect Allen’s disappearance with Spears and his game. Had to be the high-profile Lopez drug case she and Allen had repeatedly butted heads over. Although there was plenty of gossip floating around the station that she’d had something to do with Allen’s disappearance. She didn’t like the captain, and liked the fact that he mayvery well have planted a bomb in her car even less, but there was only one man she wanted dead enough to do the deed herself.
    Eric Spears
.
    If she let herself contemplate all that had happened in the last six weeks or so, she might just lose it. After all, what forty-two-year-old woman wouldn’t want a serial killer kidnapping innocent women to get her attention and a cop who hated her going missing—after possibly planting a bomb in her department vehicle? Gave new meaning to the term midlife crisis.
    “I was thinking about a replacement for Prescott,” Lori said, evidently noting Jess’s lingering attention on the vacant desk.
    Thankful for the reprieve from the other thoughts, Jess set the self-pity party aside for now. “I doubt we’ll get any cases thrown our way until this—” she blew out a big blast of frustration “—is over, but we do need to fill that vacancy. Who’d you have in mind?”
    “Lieutenant Clint Hayes. He’s over in Admin right now, but he’s been looking for an opportunity to get in the field.”
    Jess placed the photo of Spears on the case board. She hated those pale blue eyes of his. Not the same deep, true blue of Dan’s. Spears’s were that pale, ghostly color that warned pure evil thrived beneath them. “Give me some stats on Hayes.”
    “Thirty-four. Single. Went to Samford. Finished law school with high honors but opted not to go that route. Instead he hired on with the BPD.”
    Jess stalled before getting the final photo on the board. “Decided he’d rather be one of the good guys, is that it?”
    Lori gave a halfhearted shrug. “Something like that.”
    There was more to this story. “Something like what… exactly?”
    “There was a morals issue in the background check,” Harper chimed in from his desk.
    With the last photo in place Jess turned to her senior detective. “What kind of morals issue?”
    “The state bar association discovered he had worked his way through college”—Harper strolled up, hands in pockets and wearing a smirk—“as a gigolo. They refused to certify his character.”
    A frown puckered her eyebrows. Jess rubbed at what would end up another wrinkle if she didn’t stop the habit. A
gigolo
? Do tell. “Evidently he was never arrested for solicitation.” That kind of mark on his record would have kept him off the force as well.
    “Never,” Lori confirmed. “Character references killed his chances with the state bar association—a couple of his own friends ratted him out. Cost him his chosen career and the city one hell of a sharp attorney.”
    “Good Lord.” Jess looked from one detective to the other, certain she