Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel by Mari Carr (desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

I should check again, and without the rest of Josephine’s body—”

“Trust yourself. I do.”

Dammit. Annalise’s emotions were already too close to the surface, and his words had just set her heart racing. She swallowed deeply. “Thank you,” she said, her voice sounding thick even to her own ears.

“Where are the victims from?” Jakob asked, his question helping her switch her focus from how badly she wanted to kiss him to the case once more.

“Besides Josephine, one was killed in Brussels, the other in Krakow.”

“Belgium, Poland, Ireland. But all large cities,” Jakob said.

“Yes, and it means he is most likely a fluent English speaker.”

Jakob folded his arms. “Convince me.”

Annalise raised a brow. “Convince you?”

“Convince me this is actionable.”

Annalise felt her brows climb higher up her forehead.

Jakob shrugged. “That’s what we said at the BND.”

“The BND?” Bundesnachrichtendienst was German foreign intelligence.

“I was a BND agent. Right after university. The Masters’ Admiralty recruited me from there.”

“I didn’t know that about you,” she said softly, though she didn’t know why she should be surprised to learn he’d worked in intelligence. He’d proven himself highly intelligent, so much more than a bodyguard or hired gun, or even many of the police she’d worked with. And now his comment about neck breaking…

“It was years ago. Before I became a Ritter,” Jakob replied.

“Very well then, I’ll convince you.” She set aside her notebook and laptop and adopted the tone she used when she was teaching. “The last known location of each of these people was walking down a city sidewalk. It’s one of the things Eric noted. It might not seem that important, but it is. Why?”

Jakob’s brows drew together, his arms still folded.

She waited a moment to see if he would say anything. When he didn’t, she continued. “They lived in the cities where they were taken. These people were going through their daily routines.”

“They were complacent.”

“There might be an element of that, but for the most part, people are more secure when they are somewhere familiar. Habits and routine are a kind of protection…at least when it comes to this sort of situation. When you’ve seen something a thousand times, your brain will take note when there is change. People may be less consciously aware, but they are also more prone to pay attention to oddities. You notice things like when a business you’ve walked by many times changes their window display. Or they repaint the pedestrian crossing.”

Window-shopping and walking around the city were things she’d had to abandon because of the stalker.

As if he’d realized what she was thinking, Jakob stood. She waited for a moment, holding her breath. Wondering if this time he’d come to her. If he’d hold her tight. He’d done it before, the night she’d opened the box of flying roaches, and then in the hospital hallway outside her sister’s room after the rape.

Jakob went to the living room wall, standing sentry where he could see the front door and window.

It was the place he stood to keep watch, the place he stood when she had bad nights, nights she couldn’t bear to even sleep. On those nights, she would sit up on the couch, essentially taking over his bed, and he would stand guard.

“They were on familiar ground,” he said softly.

“Yes. Which means that their guard may have been down, as you said, but it also made them inherently less vulnerable. That, plus the public nature of where they were taken most likely means that the unsub approached them and used some sort of ruse or pretense to get them to deviate from that routine enough to be vulnerable.”

Jakob nodded. “And English is widely spoken in all those countries?”

“Yes, I checked, and over half the population in both Belgium and Poland speak English fluently.”

“And most of them are probably in the large cities.”

“Precisely.”

When she smiled, Jakob smiled back. It was for only a moment, but it was enough to take her breath away.

“Do you believe you have enough to start a profile?” he asked.

Annalise glanced at her notes and took a deep breath as something she hadn’t felt in a very long time washed through her.

Excitement? Self-assurance? The thrill of the chase?

All of those things that had made her good at her job were suddenly there again, and she was tempted to rise from the couch, walk over to Jakob…and what? Hug him? Kiss him? Drag him to her bed?

She dismissed those notions and picked up her pen, flipping the pages of the notebook until she found a blank sheet of paper.

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Chapter Five

Walt added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee after taking a sip as Eric smirked. The fleet admiral drank his coffee black and strong and obviously viewed Walt’s desire for added sweetness as a personal flaw.

Walt rolled his eyes in response, unconcerned what Eric thought. He was a Southern boy through and through, so that meant he liked sugar. A lot. In his coffee, in his iced tea, and in his mama’s so-sweet-you-get-a-cavity-looking-at-them Christmas cookies.

Maybe the flaw was Eric’s. God knew the man could use a little sweetness in his life.

They’d arrived at the restaurant in Frankfurt a half hour before the meeting time they’d arranged with Dr. Annalise Fischer and her bodyguard, Jakob. Eric claimed he wanted to do some reconnaissance of the place.

The fleet admiral took paranoid behavior to the next level. But considering his position and the current case they were working—he, Walt Hayden, was on a case. Ha!—Walt didn’t have a problem with the extra precautions.

He and Eric had spent the last few days cooling their heels in a Frankfurt hotel, while they waited for Annalise to create her profile of the serial killer. It was safe to say no one would ever accuse Eric of being a patient man. He’d prowled the room like a caged tiger, until Walt had hit his limit and gone out to play tourist in Frankfurt, a city he’d never had the opportunity to visit before.

“Hello.”

Walt rose at the sound of Annalise’s