CHAPTER THREE

New partner? FBI? She hadn’t been told the feds were getting involved in these cases. “When did this get decided? And why?”

He’d unclipped the badge he had hanging on his pocket and now held it up to her as though she were a suspect who’d demanded identification. “Just yesterday. You were off. Which, ah, you probably know.” He gave her a fleeting boyish smile. “Anyway, Lieutenant Byrd called thirty minutes ago and informed me about this call. I didn’t expect there to be another scene this soon.”

“No, neither did I.”

“Same pills? Same victim description?” He looked over his shoulder to the second floor, where police activity was increasing, and then turned back to her.

“Yes,” she said. “Was the bureau sent all available details regarding the two previous cases?”

“Yeah. I looked over the basics but haven’t had a chance to read them in depth.”

“Okay. Come on,” Lennon said, moving around him and heading for the stairs. Whoever this Ambrose Mars was, he was temporary as far as she was personally concerned. She’d speak to Lieutenant Byrd the minute she got back to the station and shake the guy. She’d been told she was going to get paired up with someone else as soon as possible, but she’d expected it would be one of the other inspectors she already felt comfortable with. She had no desire whatsoever to work with some stranger over others she already knew had her back, and was annoyed she hadn’t received a heads-up. As if she needed one more thing to make her feel less than competent. But regardless, if the FBI had sent him here and he was going to work this particular case, he’d need to see the scene before anything else. And maybe Teresa had some information by now too.

He followed her to the room, where two officers were now standing guard, greeted each of them, taking a moment to pull on booties and gloves, and then stepped inside, where Teresa was just setting her camera back on top of her case. She’d lifted the woman slightly, and Lennon could now clearly see the stab wounds on her chest and torso too. Her heart clenched. That look on her face. Jesus. What had she experienced in her final moments? No one should die violently, but clearly, her death hadn’t been quick. She’d cried. She’d screamed. She’d suffered.

“All three were stabbed, just like the others,” Teresa said. She looked up, her gaze hanging on Ambrose for a moment.

“Does it look like they did this to each other?” Lennon asked.

“It’s hard to say without an examination of the wounds, but I can’t imagine how it would work for three people to stab each other to death. Wouldn’t there be someone left standing?”

“Unless his or her injuries were so severe, they just lay down next to the others and died once it was all over.”

Teresa appeared to consider that for a moment and then shrugged. “Anyway, again, no murder weapons present. Whatever was used might have been stolen from the first two scenes, but all three? Also, with three people, you’d definitely need more than one weapon.” Her eyes moved back to Ambrose, who was looking around the room, a small frown hanging on his lips.

“Teresa Wong, this is Agent Ambrose Mars. He just got here yesterday.” She hadn’t even asked where he’d arrived from, but all that could wait. And didn’t matter to her anyway.

“Hi, Agent.” Teresa used her gloved wrist to push her glasses up her nose. “Welcome to the jungle.”

He gave her a small smile that held some confusion, as though he wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not, and then walked over to the desk where the unknown pills had been left. His spine seemed to straighten in some minute way as he stared down at them. “Do you recognize those?” Lennon asked.

He startled slightly and looked back at her as though he’d forgotten she was there. “Only from the two previous case files. These substances appear to be the same as what was found at the other scenes, yes?”

“Yes. That lavender color is unique. The lab will confirm but they’re most likely the same, which means they’re hallucinogens.”

Ambrose walked toward where Teresa was on the floor, taking samples from under the woman’s fingernails. “Defensive wounds?” he asked.

Teresa held up the woman’s uninjured palms. “Not on her, but the man has some.”

She’d cried and screamed and suffered, but she hadn’t fought back? Maybe she’d been too out of it to defend herself.

“So if there was an unknown perpetrator, the women were drugged and didn’t fight back, but the man wasn’t? Or became lucid at some point, at least enough to fight back,” Lennon surmised. Ambrose didn’t react to her statement, still looking around the room, seeming both thoughtful and troubled. She didn’t require his input, however; the toxicology report would confirm or deny her guess.

One of the police officers guarding the door laughed at something the other one said, and Ambrose’s chin rose quickly, his eyes hanging on the two men. What’s with this guy? The dude was different. And quiet. And for whatever reason, he did not strike her as an FBI agent, even though that’s what he’d said he was and he had the badge to prove it.

She wasn’t usually judgmental, but he made her feel unbalanced, and she decided she definitely didn’t want to work with him. No maybes about it. She’d fix this when she got back to the station. He could do his bureaucratic thing, but Lennon didn’t need to hold his hand while he did it. In Lennon’s world, she’d learned to trust her first impressions. She was analytical to a fault, which was one of the qualities that served her well as an inspector, but she had no desire to dig deeper and unpack this dude.

Teresa had turned the woman on the floor slightly, and the eyes of the teddy bear beneath her peeked out. “What do you think is with the stuffed animals?” she asked. “Creepy, right?”

“Yeah, and different than the first two scenes.”

“There are more toys in the bathroom,” Teresa said.

Lennon glanced at the mostly closed door. “Seriously?” She walked to the bathroom and pushed the door open. Inside was a row of plastic toys on the edge of the bathtub. A chill rolled down Lennon’s spine. She’d stepped into the aftermath of plenty of murders, but there was something about toys amid a brutal crime scene that was very disturbing.

Especially one that also had overt sexual overtones.

When she turned around, Agent Mars was behind her. She hadn’t even heard him approach. “What are you thinking?” he asked, his eyes stuck to the children’s figurines lined up on the bathtub. Two princesses, a light-green bear ... a unicorn with a rainbow mane. Girls’ toys. “About this scene in particular.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just looking at this scene unconnected to the others?” She chewed at her lip. “A role-play, maybe?”

“Role-play?”

She turned toward him fully, and he backed up immediately, a step, and then two. The distance he put between them was excessive. She’d brushed her teeth and showered after her run, so she didn’t think it was that. “Well, sex toys,” she said, gesturing to the bedside table, “and kids toys? The two absolutely do not go together. So. Say the guy”—she pointed back toward the dead man on the bed—“has a thing for kids and hires a couple of prostitutes to role-play his kiddie sexual fantasy, right? That’s how they end up here at this abandoned motel. And then a fourth party shows up and stabs them to death.”

He seemed to think about that. “What would be the motive?”

“Maybe the dude”—she inclined her head back toward the male’s body—“didn’t keep his fantasy strictly to role-play. Maybe someone who knew that offered him free drugs and then came here where he knew he’d be, and killed all three of them.”

The agent’s brow dipped, and he looked around again. “Someone came to this hotel while he was in the middle of ...” He waved his hand toward the purple dildo. From this angle, with the light shining on it, Lennon could see that it had glitter either on it or in it. “To avenge something he’d done to a kid?”

“Just spitballing.” It was Tommy’s word, and he’d used it regularly.

He watched her closely, obviously assessing, and it made her uncomfortable, so she looked away. And again, she missed the hell out of her partner. They were in the habit of throwing out every possibility at a scene, no matter how far fetched. It helped her. The constant dialogue. The mental removal from the physical location. Ambrose obviously didn’t work that way.

“Or,” he said, surprising her so that she turned back to him, “there was another partner, the drug-fueled orgy they all agreed to partake in went sideways, and the killer stabbed all the partiers.” His expression was strangely hopeful, and she got the feeling he’d thrown out the idea—which was an actual possibility—as a way to work with her rather than against her.

“Why?” she asked.

He blinked, those bedroom eyes widening and then drooping again. “Why what?”

“Why did the fourth mystery partner, if there was one, stab the other orgy members?”

He looked at the man lying on the bed, his gaze then moving to Teresa, who was putting the teddy bear into an evidence bag. “This kind of scene? Who knows. Could be anything. Might be nothing. Drugs don’t exactly make people logical.” His eyes met hers, something passing over his expression that she didn’t catch in time to name. The guy was taciturn, and it made her trust him even less.

She crossed her arms and chewed at her lip. Reticent or not, he wasn’t wrong about drugs making people illogical and impulsive. She’d seen people killed over a baggie of weed or a side-eye. The idea of motive could be dialed way back when drugs and mental issues were involved. On the streets, you might be killed over nothing at all. A personal scenario going on in an individual’s mind and nowhere else.

Hell, someone might have taken one turn too many with the purple, glittery plastic phallus.

Whatever was going on, she still couldn’t figure out where the cocktail of hallucinogens came in. Lennon heard at least a few voices just outside the room, and a moment later, two more criminalists came through the door.

Her muscles relaxed slightly. Lennon’s job was done here. Now it was time for the tech team to gather and catalog and arrange for these bodies to be sent to the medical examiner. She greeted the criminalists and then stepped outside the room. She heard Agent Mars introducing himself to them but didn’t wait for him to join her before heading toward the stairs.

As far as she was concerned, her very brief partnership was now over.