What if she’d discovered something about his next identity? What if that’s the reason she ended up dead? If she could tell police who he was going to be next, then he couldn’t afford to let her blab. What showed up between the time her husband disappeared and the time she was found?”
“She never woke up from her coma. We never got to talk to her personally. Everything in her file, we got secondhand from her mother and her friends. I’ll let you read the interviews.”
Aware of the heat discharging from Dom’s body, she studied Laynie once again, wishing the dead woman could speak. “Did anyone look into her phone records?”
“Of course, we traced them back. Cell and landline. All her calls were to her mother. None after her teary call, saying that Willis had disappeared. We looked at her credit card purchases and came up with a gas receipt. Nothing else.” Dom handed her four other photographs—men this time.
Luci lined up each “husband’s” photo in a row. Warren had managed to keep the photographer far enough away that details were hard to extrapolate. “There’s just enough difference to make you wonder if it’s the same person or someone he happens to resemble.”
Dom’s hand brushed hers as he pointed out the differences. The heat of his skin jolted through her.
“The hairstyles and color change,” Dom said. “So does the weight. These are things he can easily manipulate.”
“But some things stay the same.” Luci frowned and focused on the photos. She didn’t have time to let herself get distracted by Dom and the shipwreck of emotions he seemed to raise from her. Jill’s future depended on her figuring out the key that unlocked Warren’s secrets.
“His eye color,” Dom said. “He could use colored contacts, but for some reason, he doesn’t. And each woman also described an Alpha Omega tattoo on his left pec.”
“Hard to hide a tattoo from someone you’re intimate with.” Luci shuddered. Intimacy. Warren had gotten Jill into bed quickly and easily. “Is that part of his pattern? Using sex to dull any alarm bells that might try to ring?”
“It’s worked five times so far.”
Luci spread each photo of the various incarnations of Warren on the dashboard. Below, she placed a picture of his victims. “None of the women look similar. They range from tall to short, from plump to skinny, from blond to brunette.”
“He’s more interested in their investments than their looks.”
“But still, there has to be some reason he picked them.”
“Opportunity’s a big part of it.”
Luci twirled the end of her braid between her fingers. “But he seems to make his own opportunities—the cruise, the party. He bumped into Jill at the country club. He has to stalk them ahead of time to know where they’re going to be, how to run into them in a way that doesn’t spook them.”
Dom raked both hands through his hair. “He likes water, so he heads for cities near the water. Bigger cities give him the cover to pop up in those places and make it look like fate.”
“That doesn’t fit Austin. Yes, it’s a city, but it’s not near water.”
“Laynie’s parents have a home on Galveston and a big yacht to cruise the gulf. That’s where he met her.”
The calm measure of his voice softened the jagged edges cutting hers, made her want to lean on him. She tried to ignore the buzz that heated her blood whenever his arm or his hand brushed close to her.
“Okay,” Luci said, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, forcing herself to focus on Warren. “So he likes water. Why? What does it mean? That he was brought up near water? Jill said he was from Florida. Is that his home base?”
“Or his base of operations.”
“What makes you think so?”
“The Social Security numbers.” Dom listed them. “They all have the same first three numbers. What state do you think that prefix belongs to?”
“Florida?” she guessed.
He nodded once. “They’re all real. They all belong to the name listed.”
“I see dead people?”
Dom’s rough bark of laughter rolled inside her like summer thunder. “No, they don’t belong to dead people—just made-up ones.”
“Okay, so he bought the Social Security numbers along with the rest of his ID in Florida or from someone with Florida connections. Florida’s a big state with a lot of shoreline. How are we going to find his point of operation?”
Dom huffed out a breath that hinted at his frustration. “We’ll keep combing the haystack until the sun hits the needle.”
That would take time Jill didn’t have. Somewhere in this information was a clue she was overlooking. Luci was sure of it. “Other than their large bank accounts, all the women had one other thing in common. A seven-year-old son.”
Dom’s mouth tightened. “The young child is part of his pattern. We’re thinking that he sees the woman having a child as making her more vulnerable, an easier mark.”
“Maybe, but I think there’s more to it. Look at the pattern. Not just any young child. Always seven-year-old boys. Never a girl. Not six or eight or twelve. Always seven. There has to be a reason.” Luci swallowed hard. The importance of that fact scraped her throat raw as it went down. “Jill has a seven-year-old boy.”
Keeping his voice calm and cool, Dom told her how he’d followed the con man’s footsteps from Texas, the place of his last con, along the coast to Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, waiting for a chance to catch him in the act. “He’s armed, Luci. He hasn’t used a weapon yet, but I’ve seen him carry.”
She blew out a breath, just as if she were getting ready to squeeze a trigger. She’d tried to outrun herself, but beneath the harried suburbanite there still hid an expert marksman. He just had to remind her she’d once loved the hunt for justice.
“Do you know who he really is?” she asked, staring out the window as if she were scouting for the enemy.
“No. I’m still trying to work back to that.”
She shifted her attention to his face. Her braid slinked forward over her shoulder like pale gold silk. The heat of her gaze burned all the way to his gut. He forced his shoulders to relax, his face to remain neutral, his pulse to slow.
An orange-streaked sky blazed behind her. The breeze ruffled the rough shear of the bangs that framed her eyes. His fingers itched to brush the strands back, to tangle with the wispy softness of her hair. He slipped his fingers beneath his thighs and waited.
“So what next?” she asked, gaze flicking back out the windshield of the truck.
The rules of negotiation were simple enough: know your opponent, understand the challenge, introduce new alternatives, set the rules and go for the agreement. He knew Luci, all right, knew what made her tick, what made her laugh, what made her cry. He understood that after Cole’s death she’d tried to reinvent herself, that nothing could be the same. So he had to concentrate on her love for her family, on her worry for Jill, on her need to preserve her personal circle of safety. He had to make sure he gave her the opportunity to suggest alternatives. Working indirectly would work better with someone strong like Luci. And he somehow had to get her to agree to let him step back into her life, even though every minute in his presence would remind her of Cole and the way he’d died.
“Well, here’s the stickler,” Dom said, keeping his voice flat. “Even with a file full of this guy’s predation, there isn’t a D.A. in the country who’ll want to take on the case unless I can prove he had criminal intent going in. Now you and I know that all he sees in Jill is dollar signs, but the D.A. feels the court will see only a fighting couple disagreeing on distribution of wealth. Not much sympathy