A Profiler's Case for Seduction - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,24

room. From a slit in the curtains at the window he could see the yellow neon sign flashing Vacancy. The motel. He wasn’t in some makeshift graveyard. He was in his motel room in Vengeance, Texas.

He clutched the gun so tightly his fingers ached, making him wonder when he’d grabbed it and how long he’d been holding it. With a hand that trembled he placed it on the nightstand and turned on the bedside lamp. A shudder slowly worked its way up his spine.

Thank God he hadn’t fired the weapon. He could have killed somebody in the room next to his. He stumbled from the bed and into the bathroom, where he sluiced cold water on his face. When he was finished he dried his face with a towel and then stared at his reflection in the mirror.

This had never happened before. He’d always been able to easily tap into the head of the killer, but not the victim. But he’d been there as a victim, helpless and choking, feeling the life slowly squeezed out of him and knowing that he would soon join the other two dead men in a shallow grave of his own.

His heart finally slowed to a more normal rhythm and he left the bathroom, his mind twisted in confusion. Why now? Why identify with any of the victims? It was as if he’d been there when those three men had been strangled to death, as if he’d seen the way it had gone down with Melinda’s glee and her partner’s cool efficiency.

Had the dream simply been a manifestation of his need to be right? Of his desire to make Melinda the guilty party because he didn’t believe the whole kidnapping issue that his teammates had bought into so easily?

He got back into bed, his brain refusing to turn off despite the fact that it was just after two in the morning. The dream bothered him despite the fact that it was just crazy and all in his head.

He finally fell back asleep and woke up in a foul mood. As if the wild dreams about Melinda and some unknown male killing him hadn’t been enough. When he’d finally fallen back to sleep, he had dreams of Dora.

Erotic dreams of the two of them together in his motel room bed. Her smell had permeated the entire place, and her imagined warmth had been a tangible ache when he’d awakened alone in the bed. His intense physical attraction to her had been so unexpected.

He’d told himself she would be a perfect tool to use in his investigation, but he knew now he was only fooling himself. Dora Martin wasn’t about to solve these crimes for him; nor did he believe she had any relevant information that might lead to the killer or killers.

What she did have was hair that looked as soft as silk, eyes that held just enough mystery to make him want to explore and an indefinable spark that kept him wanting more from her...of her.

After rolling out of bed he’d taken a long shower, then had dressed and tried to forget Dora Martin. He attended the usual briefing, where they were all told that there was intense pressure coming from Darby College officials as well as the mayor to clean up this whole mess before homecoming week.

This mess. Mark was sure the powers that be in the small town of Vengeance would like nothing better than to somehow sweep this all under a rug, but three men were dead, one of them a state senator. Homecoming was only two weeks away and nothing new had come to the surface to shed the tiniest light on any of the murders or the kidnapping of Melinda Grayson.

They’d interviewed spouses of the dead men, neighbors and friends. Mark himself had conducted a long interview with Senator Merris’s aide, Frank Kellerman. He’d found the thirty-eight-year-old man to be angry and closemouthed despite the fact he was cooling his heels in jail for the kidnapping of Peter Burris’s baby and sister-in-law. He refused to shed any information that would help the ongoing investigation of the murder of his boss.

Dead ends, and Mark had seemed to have lost his ability to crawl inside the killer’s mind. They didn’t even have enough information to formulate a viable profile that fit both the kidnapping and the murders.

The usual murder suspect would be a Caucasian male between the ages of twenty-eight and forty. The consensus was that all three men might have known