“Don’t blow my illusion.” She poured a cup, mixed it to her liking, and let the first taste slide down her throat with a moan.
She caught him staring at her and smiled. “What?”
He licked his lips with a look of hunger.
The female in her wanted to purr. His hunger wasn’t for coffee, and she knew it. “You’re bad.”
“I like your moans. Missed them last night.”
But he’d been right about the intensity of their joining without making any noise. “I think we’ll have an opportunity to moan again.”
He fidgeted in the chair and directed his attention to her tablet. The game she played was on display. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to see if there are any clues here. Any patterns.”
She moved to sit in his lap, and tapped the screen, collecting money from her virtual buildings. “Find anything?”
“Not really. This guy raided you a few times in the last couple of days, but then so did this woman.”
“It’s part of the game. Once you find a weak player, you tend to go back to them over and over to increase your stats. It’s nothing personal.”
“It is if the guy behind all this is playing this game. You said yourself there are diehards on here.”
She sipped her coffee and pressed revenge button over the players that hit her in the night. “Well let’s see if we can provoke a response off these people.” She bombed a few defensive buildings, making the player weaker, and then raided a building or two, stealing their virtual money.
“What are you doing?”
Judy explained her strategy and repeated it with two more players. “If they’re diehards, they’ll come back hitting. If they don’t care, they’ll just stay away.”
“And if they’re our guy, they might just try and wipe out your base?”
She shivered. “It’s a game. You can’t wipe out a base. But yeah, you can have a bully on the game. Eventually they get bored and move on.”
“Or they hunt down the player in real life and hurt them.” He squeezed her waist. “There are crazy people out there.”
She knew that now. Wouldn’t look at the game the same way again. If it wasn’t the only link they had to a possible suspect, she’d delete the thing now. “Any activity on my Facebook page?”
“Nothing. A few friends left comments about your red dress.”
She smiled.
“Love that dress.” He nuzzled her neck.
She pushed him away when her dad walked in the room and cleared his throat.
“I can take the morning off . . . drive you to the airport,” Judy told her father after she showered and readied herself for another day.
Rick was in their room, giving her time to talk to her dad alone.
“I rented a car,” Sawyer said, looking past her and down the hall.
“Still . . .”
He blew out a long-suffering breath and turned his gaze toward her.
He looked miserable.
“I’m sorry I’m disappointing you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like some of the choices you’re making, but I’m not disappointed.”
“You look like you are.”
Her dad attempted a smile, sucked at it, and let the facade drop.
Judy found herself smiling.
“I like Rick,” he said. “I’d like him more if he’d told me his intentions.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one he talks about his intentions with?”
Her words wiggled into her father’s brain. “I suppose.”
Judy stepped closer to her dad. “I know you’re worried about me. But I’m OK. I really am.”
He nodded and opened his arms.
She hugged her dad and heard him sigh. “You need me . . . day or night.”
Emotion sat in the back of her throat. “I know.”
Sawyer kissed the top of her head and let her go. “You go . . . I’ll lock up when I leave.”
“Love you, Dad.”
“Love you, too, baby.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rick sat across from Dean and Neil, their collective heads huddled in an effort to find a thread between Judy’s war game pastime and the guy stalking her.
Her office had been quiet, no sign of anyone entering her space and leaving any gifts for her to stumble upon. There hadn’t been any headlines of attacks . . . no evidence the police were even watching Rick.
Quiet. Too damn quiet.
“Something is here,” Dean said under his breath. He had Judy’s Facebook open and spent a painful amount of time tracking her friends and searching for links. Neil was working through the online game as a player and attempting to find the real names behind a few gamers.
“I think so, too,” Rick said.
“Maybe the guy backed off the game. Deleted his profile.” Neil typed with two fingers, then switched to a computer and continued the two-finger search.
“Doesn’t fit the profile,” Dean told them. “He’s going to want to watch the fallout.”
Rick sat back from the pictures of the crowd collected by Russell and Dennis at the courthouse and compared them to the shots of the gathering of people outside the garage when word got out about the initial attack. He then compared them with those collected outside the scene from the murder. They’d collected a handful of hours of news coverage, which Rick was going through one frame at a time. Life as a Marine was easier. Identify your target, point, and shoot. Next! “I’d never cut it as a detective,” he said.
“Well shit!” Neil’s voice rose with excitement, something seldom heard from the large man.
“What?” Rick inched the wheels of his chair closer to Neil’s to see what he was well shitting about.
“What’s this?” Neil pointed at the tablet with the game opened on a profile of a team member.
“A joke?” The profile name read Major Harry Dog. To give Harry some credit, many of the profile names were plagiarized off real people from General Grant to Hitler. Other names were obvious jokes, Dare Devil, Betty the Baker, Mominator, Lord of my Rings . . . the list went on for thousands. The list of those playing alongside Judy was limited to about sixty. Then there was the list of those beating her on the game and staying in her cache, which increased the list by several hundred.
“Read this and tell me what you think about the person behind it.” Neil sat back while Rick and Dean inched in.
Rick glanced at the profile, saw a man in desert camo with a hard hat on the cartoon character. The nation’s flag was Britain. From the amount of missions completed and fights won, the man had been playing for some time. “A man from somewhere in Europe who obviously doesn’t have much of a social life if he spends this much time online.”