“Back to brooding, I see,” Ty observed wryly as he patted his chest down, making certain his guns weren’t overly obvious before he shrugged into his jacket. “Better than actively whining, I guess.”
Zane was silent for a moment longer before grunting and moving to the table to start stacking folders. “Yeah, well, I guess you haven’t f**ked it out of me yet,” he muttered.
“Gonna take more than I could ever do,” Ty shot back as he gathered his badge and wallet.
Shaking his head, Zane fell quiet again. He couldn’t keep up the argument if he had any intention of conducting himself properly on the job.
All it would take would be one good complaint back to Burns about his lack of professionalism. And as much as local cops hated Feds? Zane didn’t want to take any chances. He shoved several files into a canvas briefcase and then reached for his gun.
It was going to be a long f**king day.
etective Steve Pierce’s gaze slid from his partner back across the table to Zane. “We’ve been on this case from the beginning. There isn’t Danyone else who can give you more information, and we got none.
Talk to the coroner, maybe. Or that lady profiler of yours, Scott.”
“We’ve spoken to Scott,” Ty told him with a curl of his lip. “We don’t want to be told what’s happened. We want to be told what you think.
Here’s your big chance to let us know you actually have synapses firing.”
The detective leaned back in his chair, eyes flickering from Ty to Zane, sitting across the table from him. He crossed his arms stubbornly and regarded them silently.
Zane’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and he looked away from Pierce, instead addressing Holleman. “You’ve been to all the scenes. Surely you have some sort of feeling worked out about all this.”
Ty rolled his eyes and looked away, his attention wandering to the wanted posters on the walls. He despised these men. Cops he liked, on a whole. Sometimes, he thought he would have been better as a cop than a Fed.
But these two men in particular were complete dicks.
“You wanna hear my feeling?” Holleman responded with hostility.
“My feeling is that you people are so concerned with your meetings and paperwork that you’re wasting our time with them. We could be out there right now—”
“Yeah, you’ve been doing a bang-up job so far, Steve,” Ty drawled without looking away from the nearest poster.
Zane would have laughed if he weren’t already so annoyed. These two ass**les had been jerking them around for almost an hour now, making snide remarks about the victims and even more insulting comments about the FBI’s operation. “The only reason we’re in this meeting is to try to get some help. Like Pierce said, you’ve been here the whole time. No one else knows more about the case. The sooner you fill us in, the sooner all of us can be out there.”
Pierce smiled smugly. “All right, then, I’ll give you the rundown.
Some of these cases are a serial, sure. But not all of them. How’s that for insight?”
“Which ones don’t you think fit?” Ty demanded.
“The drug addict, for one. The hooker, for sure. And the other two girls, the roommates. We did some digging; turns out they got around quite a bit,” Pierce told them.
The hand Zane had on his thigh below the table clenched into a whitened fist. “Got around, huh?” he asked, voice deceptively quiet. Earlier comments about victim carelessness had been bad enough. This was enough to make Zane’s blood boil.
“So what?” Ty asked nonchalantly, not even registering his partner’s annoyance. “They got around. So did your momma, but nobody dyed her hair purple and suffocated her.”
Pierce’s face twisted. “Asshole,” he snarled. “They got around a lot more than any self-respecting college girls ought to,” he insisted.
“Christ,” Ty laughed incredulously. “Have you been to a college campus lately?” he asked.
“We figure they were out hooking casual,” Pierce continued, undeterred, “and just got the wrong guy to take home. Fits.”
“What makes you think they were hooking?” Ty asked as he leaned forward and cocked his head.
“Client list,” Pierce grunted.
“Otherwise known as an address book?” Ty asked wryly.
“Fuck you, Grady,” Pierce snarled.
Zane could feel the fury just roiling in his stomach as his teeth ground together. He directed his question to Holleman. “Are you sure you don’t want to add something constructive to this conversation, to oh, I don’t know, make it worth more than a waste of oxygen?”
“Unlike you two lovebirds, my partner and I tend to agree on these things,” Holleman answered calmly.
“So,” Ty said loudly as he leaned forward in his seat. “You decided the two co-eds were hooking. That’s wonderful. Did you write them off immediately or did you attempt to track their relatively small circle of ‘casual clients,’ as you call them, and include it in the cross-reference done on all the 180
acquaintances of the victims?” he asked pointedly.
“Waste of time,” Pierce insisted. “Those so-called serial tokens—a real slim thread of shit holding these cases together, by the way—the one found with the girls was obviously a rip-off. Little plastic trinket rings. I mean, come on. Probably the guy got his rocks off, did a copycat, and went jonesing for another whore.”
“A copycat?” Ty repeated with a predatory smirk. “You mean you released that detail to the public? That he leaves meaningless tokens with his kills?” he drawled knowingly.
Pierce stopped mid-breath. “I didn’t say that,” he barked.
“Actually, yes, you did,” Zane snapped, unable to keep quiet any longer. “Just like you said you blew off common procedure for connecting murder cases.”
“Fuck off, Garrett. You got no idea what NYPD procedures require,”
Pierce snapped.
“Yeah, IQ over forty probably helps,” Ty drawled in amusement.
Holleman held out a hand and glared at them. “Shut up, wiseass. The tokens have not been released to the general public, all right?” he told them.
“At least you’ve done something intelligent,” Zane muttered. He knew he was quickly losing hold of his temper.
“Something better than you two ass**les, trying to lord it up over here in this ivory tower,” Pierce snarled at Ty. “If you and your little paper-pusher here even got out on the street to see a scene, I’d probably have a heart attack and die.”