Strong, Sleek and Sinful - By Lorie O'Clare Page 0,164

Already buildings lined the Interstate as she got closer to her destination.

It had been two months since she last talked to Perry. Once she was buried in the Nicaraguan jungle, Internet access was limited to a “must have” basis. Chatting online with a man who’d changed her life didn’t qualify as a “must have.” And as she’d done throughout her career, she’d engrossed herself in the community, what there was where she was located down there, and taken on her assignment with everything she had. But even after being wounded and her time in the hospital, nothing she’d done managed to get Perry out of her mind.

Was he the one?

It was a question she’d fallen asleep asking herself too many times over the past few months. Now, with a slight limp she was promised would go away with continued physical therapy, thoughts of moving to a desk job had crossed her mind. It wasn’t the most appealing thought, but there was a job opening. Susie, her supervisor, was a bit too attentive to the needs of her agents at times, and had mentioned it while visiting Kylie in the hospital.

After being released, spending a week with her parents, she looked up the job opening online. John Athey’s position, supervisor of the FBI field office in Mission Hills, still hadn’t been filled. Paul qualified for the position but had turned it down. More than likely because he wouldn’t be able to sit and play his computer games as much.

“God, am I doing the right thing?” Kylie groaned.

When she’d mentioned to Susie she might come back up here to see how everyone was doing, her supervisor set up an appointment for her to meet the area field supervisor. There were no obligations, but it was more or less a job interview. “A desk job,” Kylie muttered, wondering if she could handle it.

Her mother didn’t have the insight to see it; there was still so much mending to do between the two of them. Kylie wasn’t sure if they would ever return to the closeness many mothers and daughters shared, especially now that her father was ill and most of their conversations and actions stemmed around him. But her supervisor questioned Kylie’s motives. She hated admitting her consideration of the job was based on where she might stand with Perry.

The night John Athey took a bullet to his head and Lieutenant Franco was arrested appeared a blur in her mind. Franco had ranted about Perry being the one, that all they had to do was check his computer at the station. Perry was too calm when he announced how he’d bugged his own computer, making it clear to everyone around them that he was innocent. He had set it up so anyone typing on his computer at the station would send all keystrokes to his computer at his house.

It was the days that followed that were clearer in her memory. Learning how the two men had worked together, capturing girls, torturing them, building a Web site where people could pay to see the atrocities done to many of the teenagers which they’d run out of Franco’s house. Perry had a friend in the FBI, who never blew her cover, but verified the ISP location. Athey had prevented anyone in his office from gathering the information. Rita Simoli and Maura Reynolds’ bodies were found in shallow graves on land John Athey had owned. Franco had started spilling his guts, especially after he learned his partner in crime had killed himself, anything to lessen the charges. Kylie doubted anything he said would get him anything less than life in prison. She wouldn’t be surprised if he still got the death penalty. And after it was all wrapped up, the flight out of Kansas City, talking to Perry on the phone a few times before leaving the country, and then after that a handful of times online.

Kylie accepted his story about the lady police officer at the crime scene the night she watched her grope Perry, that her actions weren’t reciprocated. Perry stressed that over and over again, his story never changing, nor his disgust for her indifference to the grotesqueness of the scene. Like Kylie, Perry was leery of any law enforcement officer who, so early in their career, wasn’t affected by the blood and gore they were sometimes exposed to.

Remembering how he had tried calling her several times a day the first couple days after she left Kansas City and how their phone conversations