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He gestured toward the men still carrying the black rubber boats above their heads. “That’s what these guys are starting to learn. Teamwork. Identify an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and use that information to keep your team operating at its highest potential.”
A red-haired girl on a bicycle rode into the parking lot. She skidded to a stop in the soft sand a few yards away from Luke and Syd, and sat down, watching the men on the beach.
“Yo, Tash!” Luke called to her.
She barely even glanced up, barely waved, so intent was she on watching the men on the beach. It was the girl Syd had met yesterday, the one who’d been at the base with Lieutenant Commander Francisco’s wife. She was looking for someone, searching the beach, shading her eyes with her hand.
“Frisco’s not out here right now,” Luke called to her.
“I know,” she said and went right on looking.
Luke shrugged and turned back to Syd. “Check out this group here.” He pointed at the men with the boats. “See this team with the short guy? He’s not pulling his weight, right? He’s not carrying much of the IBS—the inflatable boat—because he can hardly reach the damn thing. The taller men have to compensate for him. But you better believe that the vertically challenged dude will make up for it somewhere down the road. He’s light, probably fast. Maybe he’s good at climbing. Or he can fit into tight places—places the bigger men can’t. Shorty may not help too much when it comes to carrying something like an IBS, but, guaranteed, he’ll do more than his share in the long run.”
He was quiet then, just watching the SEAL candidates. The group of runners—the candidates in the second phase of BUD/S training—collapsed on the sand.
“Five minutes,” Syd heard distantly but distinctly through a bullhorn. “And then, ladies, we do it all over again.”
The instructor with the bullhorn was Bobby Taylor, his long dark hair pulled back into a braid.
As Syd watched, one of the candidates approached Bobby, pointing up toward the edge of the beach, toward them. Bobby seemed to shrug, and the candidate took off, running toward them through the soft sand.
He was young and black, and the short, nearly shaved hairstyle that all the candidates sported served to emphasize the sharp angles of his face. He had a few scars, one disrupting the line of his right eyebrow, the other on his cheek, and they added to his aura of danger.
Syd thought he was coming to talk to Luke, but he headed straight for the little girl on the bike.
“Are you crazy?” His less-than-friendly greeting was accompanied by a scowl. “What did I tell you about riding your bike out here alone? And that was before this psycho-on-the-loose crap.”
“No one wanted to ride all the way out here with me.” Tasha lifted her chin. They were both speaking loudly enough for Syd to easily overhear. “Besides, I’m fast. If I see any weirdos, I can get away, no problem.”
Sweat was literally pouring off the young man’s face as he bent over to catch his breath, hands on his knees. “You’re fast,” he repeated skeptically. “Faster than a car?”
She was exasperated. “No.”
“No.” He glared at her. “Then it’s not no problem, is it?”
“I don’t see what the big deal—”
The black man exploded. “The big deal is that there’s some son-of-a-bitch psycho running around town raping and beating the hell out of women. The big deal is that, as a female, you’re a potential target. As a pretty, young female who’s riding her bike alone, you’re an attractive, easy target. You might as well wear a sign around your neck that says victim.”
“I read this guy breaks into women’s homes,” Tasha countered. “I don’t see what that has to do with me riding my bike.”
Syd couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer. “Actually,” she said, “serial rapists tend to do something called troll for victims. That means they drive around and look for a likely target—someone who’s alone and potentially defenseless—and they follow her home. It’s possible once they pick a victim, they follow her for several days or even weeks, searching for the time and place she’s the most vulnerable. Just because all of the other attacks we know about occurred in the victims’ homes doesn’t mean he’s not going to pull his next victim into the woods.”
“Thank you, voice of reason,” the young man said. He gave Tasha a hard look. “Hear that, wild thing? Uncle Lucky’s girlfriend here sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.”
Uncle Lucky’s girlfriend…? “Oh,” Syd said. “No. I’m not his—”
“So, what am I supposed to do?” The girl was exasperated and indignant. “Stay home all day?”
Tasha and her friend were back to their fight, intently squaring off, neither of them paying any attention to Syd’s protests.
Luke, however, cleared his throat. Syd didn’t dare look at him.
“Yes,” the young man answered Tasha’s question just as fiercely and without hesitation. “Until this is over, yes. Stay home.”
She gave him an incredulous look. “But, Thomas—”
“How many times in the years that we’ve been friends have I ever asked you for a favor, princess?” Thomas asked, his voice suddenly quiet, but no less intense. “I’m asking for one now.”
Tears welled suddenly in Tasha’s eyes and she blinked rapidly. “I needed to see you. After hearing about that diving accident…”
The harsh lines of his face softened slightly. “I’m fine, baby.”
“I see that,” she said. “Now.”
Syd turned away, aware that she was watching them, afraid that her curiosity about their relationship was written all over her face. Thomas had to be in his twenties, and Tasha was only in her teens. He’d referred to them as friends, but it didn’t take a genius-level IQ to see that the girl’s attachment to this man was much stronger. But he was being careful not to touch her, careful to use words like friends, careful to keep his distance.
“How about I call you?” he suggested, kindly. “Three times a week, a few minutes before 2100—nine o’clock? Check in and let you know how I’m doing. Would that work?”
Tasha chewed on her lower lip. “Make it five times a week, and you’ve got a deal.”
“I’ll try for four,” he countered. “But—”
She shook her head. “Five.”
He looked at her crossed arms, at the angle of her tough-kid chin and assumed the same pose. “Four. But I don’t get every evening off, you know, so some weeks it might be only three. But if I get weekend liberty, I’ll drop by, okay? In return, you’ve got to promise me you don’t go anywhere alone until this bad guy is caught.”
She gave in, nodding her acceptance, gazing up at him as if she were memorizing his face.
“Say it,” he insisted.
“I promise.”
“I promise, too,” he said then glanced at his watch. “Damn, I gotta go.”
He turned, focusing on Luke and Syd as if for the first time. “Hey, Uncle Lucky. Drive Tasha home.”
It was, without a doubt, a direct order. Luke saluted. “Yes, sir, Ensign King, sir.”
Thomas’s harshly featured face relaxed into a smile that made him look his age. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said. “I meant, please drive Tasha home, sir. It’s not safe right now for a young woman to ride all that distance alone.”
Luke nodded. “Consider it done.”
“Thank you, sir.” The young man pointed his finger at Tasha. “I don’t want to see you here again. At least not without Mia or Frisco.”
And he was gone, lifting his hand in a farewell as he ran back to the rest of his class.
Luke cleared his throat. “Tash, you mind hanging for a minute? I’ve got—”
The girl had already moved down the beach, out of earshot. She sat in the sand, arms around her knees, watching the SEAL candidates. Watching Thomas.
“I’ve got to finish this really important discussion I was having with my girlfriend,” Luke finished, purely for Syd’s benefit.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Not funny.”
“Damn,” he said with a smile. “I was hoping I could get you to squawk again. ‘I’m not his girlfriend,’” he imitated her badly.
“Also not funny.”
His smile widened. “Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s—”
“Let’s call it a healthy difference of opinions and let it go at that.”
Syd closed her mouth and nodded. Fair enough.
He looked out over the glistening ocean, squinting slightly against the glare. “The reason I wanted you to see this, you know, BUD/S, was to give you a look at the teamwork that takes place in the SEAL units.”
“I know you think I’m going to get in your way over the next few days or weeks,” Syd started. “But—”
Luke cut her off. “I know you’ll get in my way,” he countered. “When was the last time you ran a seven-and-a-half minute mile?”
“Never, but—”
“The way I see it, we can make this work by utilizing your strengths and being completely honest about your weaknesses.”
“But—” This time Syd cut her own self off. Did he say make this work?
“Here’s what I think we should do,” Luke said. He was completely serious. “I think we should put you to work doing what you do best. Investigative reporting. Research. I want you to be in charge of finding a pattern, finding something among the facts we know that will bring us closer to the rapist.”
“But the police are already doing that.”
“We need to do it, too.” The breeze off the ocean stirred his already tousled hair. “There’s got to be something they’ve missed, and I’m counting on you to find it. I know you will, because I know how badly you want to catch this guy.” He gazed back at the ocean. “You, uh, kind of gave that away in Lana Quinn’s office.”
“Oh,” Syd said. “God.” What else had she said or done? She couldn’t bring herself to ask.
“We’re both on the same page, Syd,” Luke said quietly, intensely. “I really want to catch this guy, too. And I’m willing to have you on my team, but only if you’re willing to be a team player. That means you contribute by using your strengths—your brain and your ability to research. And you contribute equally by sitting back and letting the rest of us handle the physical stuff. You stay out of danger. We get a lead, you stay back at the base or in the equipment van. No arguments. You haven’t trained for combat, you haven’t done enough PT to keep up, and I won’t have you endanger the rest of the team or yourself.”
“I’m not that out of shape,” she protested.
“You want to prove it?” he countered. “If you can run four miles in thirty minutes while wearing boots, and complete the BUD/S obstacle course in ten minutes—”
“Okay,” she said. “Good point. Not in this lifetime. I’ll stay in the van.”
“Last but not least,” he said, still earnestly, “I’m in command. If you’re part of this team, you need to remember that I’m the CO. When I give an order you say ‘yes, sir.’”
“Yes, sir.”
He smiled. “So are we in agreement?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You obviously need to learn the difference between a question and an order.”
Syd shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“OKAY,” SYD ASKED, “it’s ten against one. Do you fight or flee?”
“Fight. Definitely fight.” Petty Officer Rio Rosetti’s Brooklyn accent came and went depending on who he was talking to, and right now it was one hundred percent there. When he was with Syd, he was one hundred percent tough guy.
Lucky stood outside his temporary office, eavesdropping as Lieutenant Michael Lee added his quiet opinion.
“Depends on who the ten are,” Lee mused. “And what they’re carrying. Ten of Japan’s elite commandos—I might choose the old ‘live to fight another day’ rule and run.”
“What I want to know,” Ensign Thomas King’s rich voice chimed in, “is what I’m doing in a ten-to-one situation without the rest of my SEAL team.”
Syd fit right in. For the past two days, she and Lucky and Bobby had been working around the clock, trying to find something that the police might’ve missed. Syd worked with the information they had on the victims, and Bobby and Lucky went through file after file of personnel records, looking for anything that connected any of the officers and enlisted men currently stationed in Coronado to any hint of a sex crime.
Admiral Stonegate’s handpicked trio of SEAL candidates spent their off hours helping. They were a solid group—good, reliable men, despite their connection to Admiral Stonehead.
And after only two days, Syd was best friends with all three of them. And Bobby, too.
She laughed, she smiled, she joked, she fumed at the computers. It was only with Lucky that she was strictly business. All “yes, sir,” and “no, sir,” and that too-polite, slightly forced smile, even when they were alone and still working at oh-one-hundred….
Lucky had managed to negotiate a truce with her. They had a definite understanding, but he couldn’t help but wish he could’ve gone with the girlfriend alliance scenario. Yes, it would’ve been messy further down the road, but it would have been much more fun.
Especially since he still hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that kiss.
“Here’s another ‘what if’ situation for you,” Lucky heard Syd say. “You’re a woman—”
“What?” Rio hooted. “I thought you wanted to know about being a SEAL?”
“This is related to this assignment,” she explained. “Just hear me out. You’re a woman, and you turn around to find a man wearing panty hose on his head in your apartment in the middle of the night.”
“You tell him, ‘no darling, that shade of taupe simply doesn’t work with your clothing.’” Rio laughed at his joke.
“You want me to kill him or muzzle him?” Thomas King asked.
“Rosetti, I’m serious here,” Syd said. “This has happened to eleven women. There’s nothing funny about it. Maybe you don’t understand because you’re not a woman, but personally I find the thought terrifying. I saw this guy. He was big—about Thomas’s size.”
“Flee,” Mike Lee said.
“But what if you can’t?” Syd asked. “What if there’s no place to run? If you’re trapped in your own apartment by a known rapist? Do you fight? Or do you submit?”
Silence.
Submit. The word made Lucky squirm. He stepped into the room. “Fight,” he said. “How could you do anything but fight?”
The three other men agreed, Rio pulling his boots down off the table and sitting up a little straighter.
Syd glanced up at him, her brown eyes subdued.
“But we’re not women,” Rio said with a burst of wisdom and insight. “We’re not even men anymore.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” Thomas said.
“I mean, we’re more than men,” Rio countered. “We’re SEALs. Well, almost SEALs. And with the training I’ve had, I’m not really afraid of anyone—and I’m not exactly the biggest guy in the world. Most women haven’t got either the training or the strength to kick ass in a fight with a guy who outweighs ‘em by seventy pounds.”
Lucky looked at Syd. She was wearing a plain T-shirt with her trademark baggy pants, sandals on her feet instead of her boots. Sometime between last night and this morning, she’d put red polish on her toenails.
“What would you do?” he asked her, taking a doughnut from the box that was open on the table. “Fight or…” He couldn’t even say it.
She met his gaze steadily. “I’ve been going through the interviews with the victims, looking for a pattern of violence that correlates to their responses to his attack. A majority of the women fought back, but some of them didn’t. One of them pretended to faint—went limp. Several others say they froze—they were so frightened they couldn’t move. A few others, like Gina, just cowered.”
“And?” Lucky said, dragging a chair up to the table.
“And I wish I could say that there’s a direct relationship between the amount of violence the rapist inflicted on the victim and the amount that she fought back. In the first half-dozen or so attacks, it seemed as if the more the woman fought, the more viciously he beat her. And there were actually two cases where our perp walked away from women who didn’t fight back. As if he didn’t want to waste his time.”
“So then it makes sense to advise women to submit,” Lucky figured.
“Maybe at first, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. His pattern’s changed over the past few weeks.” Syd scowled down at the papers in front of her. “We have eleven victims, spanning a seven-week period. During those seven weeks, the level of violence our guy is using to dominate his victims has begun to intensify.”
Lucky nodded. He’d overheard Syd and Lucy discussing this several nights ago.
“Out of the six most recent victims, we’ve had four who fought back right from the start, one who pretended to faint, and Gina, the most recent, who cowered and didn’t resist. Out of those six, Gina got the worst beating. Yet—go figure—the other woman who didn’t resist was barely touched.”
“So if you fight this guy, you can guarantee you’ll be hurt,” Lucky concluded. “But if you submit, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of his walking away from you.”
“And a chance of being beaten within an inch of your life,” Syd said grimly. “Keep in mind, too, that we’re making projections and assumptions based on six instances. We’d really need a much higher number of cases to develop any kind of an accurate pattern.”
“Let’s hope we don’t get that opportunity,” Mike Lee said quietly.
“Amen to that,” Thomas King seconded.
“I still think, knowing that, I would recommend zero resistance,” Lucky said. “I mean, if you had a shot at this guy just walking away…”
“That’s true.” Syd chewed on her lower lip. “But actually, there’s more to this—something that puts a weird spin on the situation. It has to do with, um…” She glanced almost apologetically at the other men. “Ejaculation.”
Rio stood up. “Whoops, look at the time. Gotta go.”
Syd made a face. “I know this is kind of creepy,” she said, “but I think it’s important you guys know all the details.”
“Sit,” Lucky ordered.
Rio sat, but only on the edge of his seat.
“Actually, Lieutenant,” Mike said evenly, “we’ve got a required class in five minutes. If we leave now, we’ll be on time.” He looked at Syd. “I assume you’ll be writing a memo about…this for the other members of the task force…?”
Syd nodded.
“There you go,” Rio said with relief. “We’ll read all about it in your memo.”
All three men stood up, and Lucky felt a surge of panic. They were going to go, leaving him alone with Syd, who wanted to discuss…Yikes. Still, what was he supposed to say, “no, you can’t go to class?”
“Go,” he said, and they all nearly ran out the door.
Syd laughed. “Well,” she said, “I sure know how to clear a room, don’t I?” She raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you don’t want to follow them, Lieutenant? Read about this in my memo instead?”
Lucky stood up to pour himself a cup of coffee from the setup by the door. He had to search for a mug that was clean, and he was glad for the excuse to keep his back to her. “Nothing about this assignment has been pleasant. So if you think this is something I need to hear…”
“I do.”
Lucky poured himself a cup of coffee, then, taking a deep breath, he turned to face her. He carried it back to the table and sat down across from her. “Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”
“According to the medical reports, our man didn’t…shall we say, achieve sexual completion, unless the woman fought back,” Syd told him.
Oh, God.
“We need to keep in mind,” she continued, “the fact that rape isn’t about sex. It’s about violence and power. Domination. Truth is, many serial rapists never ejaculate at all. And in fact, out of these eleven cases of rape, we’ve got only four instances of sexual, um, completion. Like I said, all of them occurred when the victim fought back, or—and this is important—when the victim was forced to fight back.”
“But wait. You said a majority of the victims fought back.” Lucky leaned forward. “Couldn’t he have been wearing a condom the other times?”
“Not according to the victims’ statements.” Syd stood up and started to pace. “There’s more, Luke, listen to this. Gina said in her interview that she didn’t resist. She cowered, and he hit her, and she cowered some more. And then, she says he spent about ten minutes trashing her apartment. I went in there. The place looked like there’d been one hell of a fight. But she didn’t fight back.
“I’m wondering if this guy was trying to simulate the kind of environment in which the victim has fought back, in an attempt to achieve some kind of sexual release. When he went back to Gina after he tore the place up, he kicked the hell out of her, but she still didn’t do more than curl into a ball—and, if my theory’s right, she therefore didn’t give him what he wanted. So what does he do? He’s angry as hell and he tears at her clothes, but she still doesn’t resist. So he grabs her by the throat and starts squeezing. Bingo. Instant response. She can’t breathe—she starts struggling for air. She starts fighting. And that does the trick for him, maybe that plus the sheer terror he can see in her eyes, because now, you know, she thinks he’s going to kill her. He achieves sexual completion, inflicts his final moment of pain upon her by burning her, then leaves. The victim’s still alive—this time.”
Oh, God.
“It’s really just a matter of time before he squeezes someone’s throat too hard, or for too long, and she dies,” Syd continued grimly. “And if taking a life gives him the right kind of rush—and it’s hard to believe that it won’t—he’ll have transitioned. Serial rapist to serial killer. We already know he’s into fear. He likes terrorizing his victims. He likes the power that gives him. And letting someone know she’s going to die can generate an awful lot of terror for her and pleasure for him.”
Syd carried her half-empty mug to the sink and tossed the remnants of her coffee down the drain. “Fight or submit,” she said. “Fighting gives him what he wants, but gets you a severe beating. Still, submitting pisses him off. And it could enrage him enough to kill.”
Lucky threw his half-eaten doughnut into the trash can, feeling completely sick. “We’ve got to catch this guy.”
“That,” Syd agreed, “would be nice.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUKE O’DONLON WAS WAITING when Syd pulled up.
“Is she alive?” she asked as she got out of her car.
The quiet residential area was lit up, the street filled with police cars and ambulances, even a fire truck. Every light was blazing in the upscale house.
Luke nodded. “Yes.”
“Thank God. Have you been inside?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I took a…walk around the neighborhood. If he’s still here, he’s well hidden. I’ve got the rest of the team going over the area more carefully.”
It was remarkable, really. When Syd had received Luke’s phone call telling her Lucy had just called, that there’d been another attack, she’d been fast asleep. She’d quickly pulled on clothes, splashed water on her face and hurried out to her car. She felt rumpled and mismatched, slightly off-balance and sick to her stomach from exhaustion and fear that this time the attacker had gone too far.
Luke, on the other hand, looked as if he’d been grimly alert for hours. He was wearing what he’d referred to before as his summer uniform—short-sleeved, light fabric—definitely part of the Navy Ken clothing action pack. His shoes were polished and his hair was neatly combed. He’d even managed to shave, probably while he was driving over. Or maybe he shaved every night before he went to bed on the off chance he’d need to show up somewhere and be presentable at a moment’s notice.
“Is the victim…?”
“Badly beaten,” he said tersely.
As if on cue, a team of paramedics carried a stretcher from the house, one of them holding an IV bag high. The victim was strapped down, her neck in a brace. She was carried right past them—the poor woman looked as if she’d been hit by a truck, both eyes swollen shut, her face savaged with bruises and cuts.