Leslie Parrish: Black at Heart

A book in the Black Cats series, 2009

Supervisory Special Agent Wyatt Blackstone had never had to attend the memorial service of one of his own team members before. After today, he hoped to God he never attended another one.

Especially since it was his fault Lily Fletcher was dead.

Against his better judgment, he had allowed a woman he knew shouldn't be in the field to participate in a sting operation with another FBI Cyber Action Team. She'd had no business being there. Lily had been an IT specialist, a computer nerd, young, untried, sweetly enthusiastic. But also haunted by her demons. Those demons had driven her to work a case she should never have been involved in. They had pushed her to be in on the takedown of a suspect with twisted cyber fantasies of abusing children had haunted her dreams.

And there, everything had gone straight to hell. One › agent dead on the ground. Lily wounded and trapped before bleeding to death in a vehicle driven by a desperate madman.

He was tormented by the thought of those awful, desperate hours she had endured.

The memorial service had been small and private. The FBI had not made it a media event, as they could have. Wyatt hadn't wanted it that way; none of the group had. Because of the screwups that had led to her death, and his team's recent successful capture of a serial killer known as the Professor, the bureau acceded to his demands.

Lily had had no surviving family and very few friends outside the bureau. Though many agents and FBI supervisors had attended the service in the nondenominational chapel, few had continued on to the cemetery. Not Arlington, though she had been entitled to that. Instead, Lily's thirty-year existence in this world was marked with a simple headstone in a small, private churchyard in Annapolis. Others nearby bore the names of her sister, her nephew, and her parents. He hadn't known her mother and father had died on the same day during I Lily's childhood until he read the dates.

An entire family gone. Plucked off one tragedy at a time.

After the chaplain's final graveside prayer, only Wyatt and the other members of his team, who had formed a family of their own, had remained. Ignoring the bitterness of the January day, they'd talked quietly, said their good-byes. Then they'd all drifted away, lost in their own sadness, wondering how things might have turned out, differently.

Wyatt didn't think he would ever stop wondering.

Even now, hours later, as he sat in the dark in his house, nursing a tumbler full of whiskey, he found it hard to believe. Sweet, quiet Lily, so eager to please despite being so visibly wounded by the horrors that had befallen her, was gone. Senselessly killed by someone who hadn't been fit to touch a single strand of her golden hair.

"I'm sorry," he murmured, lifting his glass to his mouth. "I should have protected you."

He sipped once. Then again. He needed the fire to spread through his body, burning out the anger, the helpless frustration. The grief.

Wyatt never allowed himself to grieve. He'd learned as a child how futile it was to wish someone back from the dead, to ask why horrible things happened, to give in to sorrow.

But Lily? He could grieve for Lily.

Realizing it was almost midnight, he finally rose, needing to go to bed. The past several nights had been sleepless ones. Tomorrow was another workday, another chance to keep moving forward, stopping whatever ugliness he possibly could.

Before he even reached the stairs, though, his cell phone rang. Wyatt pulled it from his pocket, slid it open, and lifted it to his ear.

"Blackstone."

No response at first, but a hollowness told him the line wasn't dead.

"Hello?"

Another long pause. Then a soft voice emerged from the silence like a specter appearing out of his own memories.

"Wyatt?"

He froze, haunted by the pain in that one whispered word. "Who is this?"

"Help me, Wyatt. Please help me."

Seven months later

As far as murder victims went, Dr. Todd Fuller didn't, on the surface, seem a likely candidate to be sliced to ribbons in a no-tell motel in the middle of nowhere. A respected dentist from Scranton, he had a wife, a pricey house, a nice car, a thriving practice, no criminal record. A charmed life, in fact.

There was nothing charming about him now.

Wyatt surveyed the scene from the doorway, wondering why he still had any capacity to be surprised by what man was capable of doing to his fellow man. After everything he had witnessed throughout his life, including some of his very earliest memories, he shouldn't be able to register dismay for the fact that such things were possible.

Yet he found himself having to close his eyes and take a moment to prepare before entering the room- because scenes like this one were usually reserved for twisted movies that delivered terror to the masses. Not the real world.

Steady now, calm and emotionless, he stepped inside. He skirted the wall, his shoes covered with plastic, and gave a nod to the crime scene investigators in acknowledgment of their work area. He didn't bend to examine any evidence, didn't focus on anything except the overall feeling that lingered in the room long after the crime had been committed.

He could only imagine the rage that had inspired it. In his years with the FBI, he had seen multiple homicides with less blood, inner-city gang-war battlefields without as much gore.

Todd Fuller had suffered greatly in his final hours.

Some murders were passionate and some impersonal. He had met killers who claimed to have merely lashed out in a moment they regretted one second too late and others who truly believed they had simply taken care of something that needed to be done. A few were remorseful, some soulless and happy with what they had achieved. Others calculated their crimes, meticulously planned them, with death the goal and the act of killing merely the means to achieving it.

This had been like all of those, and yet, like none of them.

Wielding a knife on a helpless victim, feeling the gush of warm blood spill from his veins, could never be an impersonal act. But the planning involved, and the time it had taken, would have required a level of removal, a dispassion. This killer hadn't lashed out; he had reined in. Inhaled his rage and his emotion. Controlled himself completely while also savoring every minute of it.

In this room, the killer had calmly and patiently accomplished the objective-a man's death-in the most vicious way possible.

Wyatt knew all that. Because it wasn't the first time he'd seen this unsub's handiwork.

Like the two that had preceded it, this murder had been carefully orchestrated by someone whose goal was not just death. Something deeper was at work here.

Pleasure? Insanity?

Revenge? Are you wreaking vengeance on all of them because you can't get to the one you want?

He thrust that thought away, not wanting to let any preconceptions color what he was about to learn regarding the murder of the dentist.

"You Blackstone?" a voice asked.

Nodding, he watched as a plainclothes officer stepped into the doorway. "Detective Schaefer?"

"Yeah. You made good time. Didn't think you'd show up until midmorning."

Considering how little he slept these days, it had been no great feat to leave his Alexandria home within thirty minutes of the detective's four a.m. phone call. And the desire to arrive before the body could be removed had prompted him to drive a little faster than normal. He'd pulled up outside the western Maryland hotel just as the automatic streetlights had clicked off, the hazy, gray morning chasing away the last remnants of dark night.