Once Craved

Meredith continued, “He called me personally. I promised him I’d send my very best people to Phoenix. And of course – that includes you.”

Riley was touched. Meredith wasn’t making it easy to say no.

“Please try to understand, sir,” she said. “I just can’t take on anything new.”

Riley felt vaguely dishonest. Can’t or won’t? she asked herself. After she had been captured and tortured by a serial killer, everyone had insisted she take a leave from work. She’d tried to do that, but found herself desperately needing to be back on the job. Now she wondered what that desperation had really been all about. She had been reckless and self-destructive and had a hell of a time getting her life under control. When she had finally killed Peterson, her tormentor, she had thought everything would be fine. But he still haunted her, and she was having new problems over the resolution of her last case.

After a pause, she added, “I need more time off the field. I’m still technically on leave and I’m really trying to put my life together.”

A long silence followed. It didn’t sound as though Meredith was going to argue, much less pull rank on her. But he wasn’t going to say he was OK with it, either. He wouldn’t let up the pressure.

She heard Meredith heave a long, sad sigh. “Garrett had been estranged from Nancy for years. Now what happened to her is eating him up inside. I guess there’s a lesson there, isn’t there? Don’t take anyone in your life for granted. Always reach out.”

Riley almost dropped the phone. Meredith’s words hit a nerve that hadn’t been touched for a long time. Riley had lost contact with her own older sister years ago. They were estranged and she hadn’t even wondered about Wendy for a long time. She had no idea what her own sister was doing now.

After another pause, Meredith said, “Promise me you’ll think it over.”

“I will,” Riley said.

They ended the call.

She felt terrible. Meredith had seen her through some awful times and he’d never shown such vulnerability toward her before. She hated to let him down. And she’d just promised him to think it over.

And no matter how desperately she wanted to, Riley wasn’t sure she could say no.

Chapter Three

The man sat in his car in the parking lot, watching the whore as she approached along the street. “Chiffon,” she called herself. Obviously not her real name. And he was sure there was a lot more about her that he didn’t know.

I could make her tell me, he thought. But not here. Not today.

He wouldn’t kill her here today either. No, not right here so near her regular workplace – the so-called “Kinetic Custom Gym.” From where he sat, he could see the decrepit exercise machinery through the storefront windows – three treadmills, a rowing machine, and a couple of weight machines, none of them working. As far as he knew, nobody ever came here to actually exercise.

Not in a socially acceptable manner anyway, he thought with a smirk.

He didn’t come around to this place much – not since he’d taken that brunette who had worked here years ago. Of course, he hadn’t killed her here. He’d lured her off to a motel room for “extra services” and with the promise of a lot more money.

It hadn’t been premeditated murder even then. The plastic bag over her head was only meant to add a fantasy element of danger. But once it was done, he’d been surprised at how deeply satisfied he’d felt. It had been an epicurean pleasure, distinctive even in his lifetime of pleasures.

Still, in his trysts since then, he’d exercised more care and restraint. Or at least he had until last week, when the same game went deadly again with that escort – what was her name?

Oh, yes, he remembered. Nanette.

He’d suspected at the time that Nanette might not be her real name. Now he’d never find out. In his heart, he knew that her death was not an accident. Not really. He’d meant to do it. And his conscience was unsullied. He was ready to do it again.

The one who called herself Chiffon was approaching about a half a block away, clad in a yellow tube top and a barely existent skirt, tottering toward the gym on impossibly high heels while talking on her cell phone.

He really wanted to know if Chiffon was her real name. Their one previous professional encounter had been a failure – her fault, he was sure, not his. Something about her had put him off.

He’d known perfectly well that she was older than she claimed to be. It was more than just her body – even teenage whores had stretch marks from childbirth. And it wasn’t the lines in her face. Whores aged faster than any kind of women he knew.

He couldn’t put his finger on it. But there was plenty about her that perplexed him. She displayed a certain kind of faux-girlish enthusiasm that wasn’t the mark of a true professional – not even a novice.

She giggled too much, like a child playing a game. She was too eager. And most oddly, he suspected that she actually liked her job.

A whore who really enjoys sex, he thought, watching her come nearer. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Frankly, it turned him off.

Well, at least he was sure that she wasn’t an undercover cop. He would have picked up on that in a split second.

When she got close enough to see him, he honked his car horn. She stopped talking on the phone for a moment and looked his way, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. When she saw who it was she waved and smiled – a smile that looked, for all the world, completely sincere.

Then she walked around back of the gym toward the “service” entrance. He realized that she probably had an appointment to keep inside the brothel. No matter, he would hire her some other day when he was in the mood for a specific kind of pleasure. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other hookers around.

He remembered how they’d left things last time. She’d been cheerful and good-natured and apologetic.

“Come back anytime,” she’d told him. “It will go better next time. We’ll hit it off together. Things will get really exciting.”

“Oh, Chiffon,” he murmured aloud to himself. “You’ve got no idea.”

Chapter Four

Gunfire rang out around Riley. To her left, she heard the noisy cracks of pistols. To her right, she heard heavier weaponry – blasts from assault rifles and staccato sprays from submachine guns.

In the midst of the clamor, she drew her Glock handgun from her hip holster, dropped to a prone position, and fired off six rounds. She rose into a kneeling position and fired three rounds. She deftly and quickly reloaded, then stood and fired six rounds, and finally knelt and fired three more rounds with her left hand.

She stood up and holstered her weapon, then stepped back from the firing line and pulled off her earmuffs and eye protectors. The target with the bottle-shaped outline was twenty-five yards away. Even from this distance, she could see that she had clustered all her shots nicely together. In neighboring lanes, the FBI Academy trainees kept up their practice under the guidance of their instructor.

It had been a while since Riley had fired a weapon, even though she was always armed on the job. She’d reserved this lane at the FBI Academy firing range for a little target practice and, as always, there was something satisfying about the gun’s powerful recoil, the raw force of it.

She heard a voice behind her.

“Kind of old-school, aren’t you?”

She turned and saw Special Agent Bill Jeffreys standing nearby, grinning. She smiled back. Riley knew exactly what he meant by “old-school.” A few years ago, the FBI had changed the live-fire rules for pistol qualification. Firing from a prone position had been part of the old drill, but it was no longer required. Now more emphasis was put on firing at targets from up close, between three and seven yards. That was supplemented by the virtual reality installation where agents were immersed in scenarios involving armed confrontations in close quarters. And trainees also went through the notorious Hogan’s Alley, a ten-acre mocked-up town where they fought off imitation terrorists with paintball guns.

“Sometimes I like to go old-school,” she said. “I figure that someday I might actually have to use deadly force at a distance.”

From her own experience, Riley knew that the real thing was almost always up close and personal, and often unexpected. In fact, she’d actually had to fight hand to hand in two recent cases. She’d killed one attacker with his own knife and another with a random rock.

“Do you think anything prepares these kids for the real thing?” Bill asked, nodding toward the trainees who were now finished and leaving the firing range.

“Not really,” Riley said. “In VR your brain does accept the scenario as real, but there’s no imminent danger, no pain, no rage to control. Something inside always knows there’s no chance of being killed.”

“Right,” Bill said. “They’ll have to find out what it’s really like just like we did a lot of years ago.”

Riley glanced sideways at him as they moved farther away from the firing line.