Their Baby Girl...?: The Baby Mission / Her Baby Secret

Culpepper poked his head into the room. “Was that the sound of raised voices I heard?” He walked into the room. “Back one day and you two are at it already, C.J.?” And then he looked at the conference table. His eyes lit up. “Ah, doughnuts.”

He reached for one, but C.J. pulled the box away from him. He looked at her accusingly.

“Uh-uh, if you’re going to insult me, you can’t have any. I brought them.”

Culpepper folded his hands together, palms touching and held them up before her. “A thousand pardons, oh wisest of the wise. That was just my sugar-deprived brain, running off with my mouth. If you were arguing, it was only because Warrick was provoking you.”

C.J. laughed and pushed the box toward the heavyset man again. “Better.”

“No one was doing anything to anyone,” Warrick told the other agent firmly. He slanted a look at C.J. to get his point across. “Now feed your habit, Culpepper, and let’s get to work on this.”

C.J. tossed her hair over her shoulder, ready to do battle. “Fine with me. Let’s nail this son of a bitch once and for all before he finds another victim.”

C.J. glanced at Warrick’s profile, then lowered her eyes to her keyboard as he turned in her direction. Her fingers flew over the keys, drawing up screens she had already looked at a hundred times if not more.

She didn’t know which was driving her crazier: the fact that after a few days the murder investigation seemed to have ground to a halt again—this despite phone calls coming in all hours of the day and night from helpful and not-so-helpful citizens who gave information that only led to dead ends, if they led anywhere at all—or that there was this restless tension intermittently buzzing through her. A restless tension that seemed to rear its head every time she and Warrick were near one another.

C.J. flipped to another screen, scrolling down. She knew this was stupid. Warrick was right, she argued with herself, absolutely right. Nothing had happened. After all, it wasn’t as if he had actually tried to kiss her. It was a brotherly peck gone awry, that’s all.

She hit the keys harder. She saw Warrick giving her a curious look. Damn it all, no brother she knew had ever kissed his sister like that.

Quietly C.J. took a deep breath. She had to get a grip on herself and let this die a natural death. After all, what was the big deal? Okay, so they had reacted to each other like a man and a woman. She hadn’t been kissed by a man in almost nine months and he reacted like—well, like a man. All men took advantage of a situation if given the opportunity, some just less than others.

The kiss and her reaction had been an aberration, a freak of nature, like a thunderstorm in the wrong season, that’s all.

Why was she letting it creep into each night and snare a toehold on each day?

C.J. looked over to the main bulletin board. Her eyes swept over the faces of the women there, women whose likeness were imprinted on her heart. Rising, she crossed to it.

She had no business even thinking about something so petty as a kiss at a time like this. Warrick was her partner, her backup, her friend, and she was his. That’s all.

And that was enough.

Warrick looked at her over his computer. Her hands were clasped behind her back and she was studying the board intently.

“You’re being quiet again,” he observed. “It’s not like you. You make me nervous when you’re quiet.”

“Why, because you’re afraid I’ll pounce?” Not waiting for an answer, she turned from the board. “Just trying to get into the killer’s head.”

She looked over her shoulder, back at the board. Missing were the photographs of gruesome deaths, of savage beatings or stabbings. That wasn’t the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s style. Each victim was tenderly, perhaps even lovingly arranged. The latest victims even wore makeup that appeared to have been applied postmortem. They looked just like princesses waiting for their princes to come and wake them up. She chewed on her lips and looked at Warrick.

“You think he’s a mousy man? You know, someone who yearns after the unattainable?”

He had never been able to crawl into a murderer’s mind, maybe because he couldn’t begin to identify with the kind of person who would willingly, sometimes even joyously take another human being’s life. He marveled that C.J. could do it.

“Profiling’s your department, not mine.” Warrick moved over to the bulletin board with the map of Orange County on it. Each small pin designated a site where the victim was found. He wondered if there were going to be more pins before they caught the killer. “I just think he’s one sick bastard.” He looked at the blown-up photograph of the latest victim’s nails. “Someone who obviously has a nail polish fetish.”

Standing next to him, she studied the photograph herself. “Maybe not a fetish. Maybe he’s just trying to do something nice for them.”

He caught a whiff of her perfume. Light, stirring. He wished she wouldn’t wear it. Abruptly he directed his thoughts back to the conversation. “Not strangling them would have been nice.”

Half aware of what she was doing, C.J. waved her hand at him, asking for silence. She was piecing this together as she went. “I mean like the kind of thing a guy would do for his girlfriend.”

Culpepper came over to join them. “No guy I know paints women’s fingernails.”

C.J. frowned at the other man. “That’s because every guy you know has just learned how to walk upright without scraping their knuckles on the ground.”

“Hey,” Rodriguez protested, walking into the room in time to catch the tail end of C.J.’s comment, “I take exception to that.”

C.J. inclined her head toward the youngest member of their team. “Present company excepted, of course.” She became serious again. “But what I’m talking about is when a guy tries to pamper a woman.”

She looked from one man’s face to the other and knew that as far as they were concerned, she was speaking a foreign language. She turned her focus on Rodriguez. After all, he was the one who was getting married and should be informed about this kind of thing. Her guess was that he was generally ignorant of the little niceties that women craved.

“You know, draw her bath, wash her hair for her in the sink, do her nails.” Nothing. Rodriguez’s face was still blank, and Culpepper was laughing. She threw up her hands. “What am I, speaking in tongues here? Haven’t any of you guys ever heard of pampering a woman?”

Culpepper stopped laughing. “That kind of thing really turns women on?”

She patted his chest. “Try it tonight on Adele and see.”

He snorted, waving away the suggestion. “If I try washing her hair, she’ll probably think I was trying to drown her.”

“You’re not supposed to drag her by her hair to the sink,” C.J. pointed out, then shook her head as she looked at Warrick. “See what I mean? Neanderthal. I rest my case.”

Warrick had the impression she was saying more to him than the actual words conveyed. But then he told himself to knock it off, he was starting to babble in his head.

Wanting to kiss a woman did that to a man.

He shut his mind down.

Culpepper regarded her with blatant curiosity in his eyes. C.J. thought for a second that perhaps she had a convert. “How about you, Jones? Does that kind of thing turn you on?”

She might have known better. This was getting a bit too personal. “Solving murders turns me on.”

“Oh, tough lady,” Culpepper deadpanned.

“Yes, and don’t you forget it,” she cracked, returning to her desk. She wondered if another canvass of the area where the last victim was found would yield anything. Maybe someone remembered some thing they hadn’t mentioned the first time around.

She felt as if they were going in circles.

“Hey, Jones,” Rodriguez called. “I almost forgot. It’s your turn to field the crank calls.”

She groaned, rising again. The more time that passed since the murder, the higher the ratio of crank calls to actual informative ones. “What are they down to? A hundred a day?”

Rodriguez sat down at his own desk. “Give or take.”

She groaned louder as she walked into the adjacent room.

Chapter 7