Deadly Heat (Deadly #2)(58)
Author: Cynthia Eden

“I thought you were taking some time off,” Kenton muttered.

“Got tired of that.” Sam licked her lips. “I—I have something I wanted to show you.”

Monica pushed away from the table and walked slowly to her side. “Are you okay?” Her voice had softened, letting in a whisper of worry.

Uh-oh. For Monica to show worry, something bad must have happened to the woman.

Sam’s smile was brittle. “Fine. Don’t worry about me.”

Ah, Lora knew how those words felt. Like a lie.

The new agent pushed a file at Monica, then glanced Lora’s way. “Uh… you’re Lora, Lora Spade?”

She tossed her a smile and tried real hard to look friendly. “My name gets around, huh?”

“I’ve been… pulling your records.”

Oh. Not so good, but she kept her smile in place.

“I’ve been pulling a lot of records. You’re not directly linked to the other victims.” She crept away from Monica and took the empty seat on the right of Lora.

Her words registered slowly. Not directly linked? Right. That’s what she’d been trying to tell them.

“And from what I gathered, they didn’t know each other either.”

“Sam—that’s Special Agent Samantha Kennedy—can find anything on a computer,” Kenton said, appreciation warming his voice. “The woman can dig every skeleton out of your closet with a few keystrokes.”

A dangerous talent.

“I didn’t just use a computer this time. I started to see a pattern, and I knew I had to do more digging.” Sam’s lips pulled down.

A pattern?

“I went to Memorial Infirmary and did some talking to the nurses there. It turns out, a few months back, one of Jennifer Langley’s patients… ah, received the wrong medication.” Her hands brushed the tabletop, skimming just below the pictures. “This was the third time that someone had a dose of the wrong meds on her watch.”

Uh, interesting, scary, but…

“Jennifer was suspended,” Sam continued. “The cops didn’t press charges against her because there wasn’t enough evidence.”

“Shouldn’t our cops have found this?” Kenton demanded. “Malone was sending a team to question friends and family members of all the victims—”

“Captain Lawrence is fully aware of the allegations against Jennifer Langley. He’s been investigating her.”

Lora didn’t speak. She just watched and waited.

“Let’s talk about the other victims first.” Sam’s gaze darted to Lora, then back to Kenton. “We’ll come back to the cops.”

That didn’t sound good.

One of Sam’s brows rose. “Did you know that Tom Hatchen was arrested eight months ago for domestic violence?”

“No.” Kenton’s immediate reply.

Lora blinked and remembered a small woman, with short black hair, staring up at the blazing remains of that garage. Her face had been dazed and blank with shock.

Sam licked her lips. “His arrest was right there, nice and pretty for me to see in the system.” Her gaze darted to Kenton.

“Then why wasn’t the guy locked up?” Lora demanded. If Pete had arrested him…

“Because his wife changed her story. After two days, she withdrew her complaint, even though she had a broken arm, a broken jaw, and a dislocated collarbone.”

Well, damn. “Okay, so the guy was an ass**le, what does that have to do with Phoenix deciding to attack him?” She scanned the agents, trying to gauge everyone’s reaction. Was she missing something?

Monica wasn’t looking up. Her gaze was on the file that Sam had given her. She scanned through the pages quickly.

Kenton’s gaze was up and on Sam. “What about Skofield?” he asked.

“Charlie Skofield was paralyzed in a car accident a year ago.” Sam took a breath. “The other driver—she was killed on impact. Skofield—”

“Had been drinking,” Lora finished. Right. She’d already told this to Kenton. There’d been no missing the stench of Charlie’s breath as he’d slurred and said “The bitch c-came out of nowhere, h-hit me…”

“When I started digging into Skofield’s past,” Sam continued, “I found more arrests for DUI. Some dating back years.” A faint frown pulled her brows low. “His license was already suspended when he hit the other driver. He should never have been on the road.”

Lora blinked. The tension in the room had ratcheted up, too high.

“And then you have Louis Jerome… a known drug dealer. A guy who seemed to slip right through the system, because he knew how to make deals with the Feds.”

Louis Jerome. The poor bastard that they’d found dead in a closet.

“That kid—” Ramirez stabbed a finger toward Sam. “Michael Randall, he’d done time for arson.”

“No.” Lora shook her head. This one, she knew. Randall had never set foot in a cell. “He was mentally unstable. He got sent for counseling at Meadows Rehab.”

“But a young girl died in the fire he set,” Sam said. “And if Randall hadn’t been a minor, maybe he would have seen the inside of a prison.”

Maybe. Maybe not. Randall had been sick.

“Wait a minute.” Kenton’s eyes narrowed, and then he reached forward and started searching through the pile of papers. “The transcript from his call. I need that damn transcript.”

Monica leafed through the papers with him.

Lora waited, her hands starting to sweat.

“Here!” Kenton yanked up some stapled pages. “He told us… The weak die. The fire burns. She kills. She judges the wicked.” Kenton exhaled on a hard breath. “She judges. He was f**king telling us, and I didn’t even see it.”

“Well, call me blind, but I don’t see it.” Okay, wait, maybe she did. Tom and Charlie—they’d committed crimes. Jennifer, too, from the sound of things, and everyone knew about Michael Randall. So… Lora sat straight in her chair. The vics had all broken the law, and yet—

“They got away with it.” Monica glanced at the photos, her stare lasering in on them, one at a time. “His victims—Jennifer, Tom, Charlie, Jerome, and Randall. Even Larry—they all got away with crimes. The cops didn’t punish them. Those people didn’t pay for what they did.”

“The fire judged them.” Kenton ran a hand over the back of his neck. “That bastard was telling us everything.”