A Profiler's Case for Seduction - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,5
of his view.
Silly, she told herself, gripping her laptop against her chest. She was just being silly because for over three years she’d scarcely noticed the male population around her. Somehow FBI agent Mark Flynn had managed to sneak beneath her antimale radar.
No harm, no foul, she thought as she stopped beside a trash container. She finished the last of the coffee and then tossed the foam cup into the trash and continued her walk to the bookstore, her thoughts still consumed by the handsome Mark Flynn.
She hoped his team could not only solve the murders but also find out who had kidnapped and beaten Melinda and then had released her. It made no sense, and to date, nobody had come up with a reasonable motive for what had happened to the professor.
So far the investigation into the murders had spilled secrets left and right about the three male victims, tawdry tales of bribery and betrayal. They were ugly secrets that had everyone gossiping about who the victims had presented themselves to be and who, in truth, they had been.
Dora wanted the FBI to get to the bottom of the crimes, but she certainly didn’t want anyone digging around into her life, past or present.
Her past was filled with shame and regret, a place she tried not to visit in her dreams or thoughts. Her present was still filled with a secret she didn’t want known. Not because it would embarrass her, but rather because it would embarrass one of the two people who had plucked her up from the stinking back alley of her existence and given her a reason to live.
Professor Melinda Grayson was not only her teacher but also her older sister and her salvation. Dora would turn herself inside out to keep people from knowing that she was related to the esteemed, intelligent professor. She would never want Melinda’s reputation to be tainted by her own past.
Still, it had been nice for those few minutes to sit across from Mark and feel the stir of chemistry, knowing that it was an attraction that would go nowhere, knowing that she couldn’t afford any more mistakes in her lifetime. She was like a cat who had already misspent eight of the nine lives she’d been given. She wasn’t going to do anything to mess up this final chance.
Chapter 2
Mark stood at a whiteboard in front of his team in the conference room they had commandeered on the first floor of the county courthouse/city hall. The room was midsize and filled with the requisite long tables and chairs where his fellow agents now sat looking at him expectantly.
The team had changed in the three weeks since the bodies had been discovered. Agents had been pulled off this particular crime when a grave of twenty skeletons of young men had been discovered just outside Oklahoma City. Richard Sinclair was the agent in charge, but he ran a fairly loose ship and rarely yielded his power over the others.
For a moment, as Mark stared at the five agents at the table, his brain blanked on everything except the silky look of Dora Martin’s hair sparking in the sunshine the day before and the mysteries he’d sensed in the depths of her dove-gray eyes when she’d been so vague about where she’d come from and what she’d been doing before winding up in Vengeance, Texas.
“Earth to Mark,” Agent Lori Delaney said drily, pulling him from thoughts of Dora and to his task at hand.
“Sorry,” Mark said, and raked a hand through his hair as if the gesture would banish any further thoughts of Dora. He turned toward the whiteboard where photos of the three dead men were taped. Beneath their photos was information about each man written in Mark’s precise handwriting.
“Sheriff Peter Burris,” Mark began, intending to go through all the facts they knew about each of the dead men for the hundredth time since they’d been called out on the case. He tapped on the picture of the dead man. It was a crime-scene photo, the burly sheriff barely recognizable after having been strangled and buried in his shallow grave.
“He was found with a note card on his body that read Liar. We now know that Peter Burris was a dirty lawman who was blackmailing Senator John Merris among other illegal activities. At the time of his murder he was married to Suzy Burris, an accountant who has since been cleared of having anything to do with her husband’s death.”