If only she would let him defend her now.
Joe sat down. He was in great shape for his age. Rapidly approaching fifty, the special agent in charge looked years younger.
He smiled at Laura as he opened his folder. “I am so sorry to have to go over all of this again, Laura. I know it’s an old wound for you.”
“I don’t know about that. It feels pretty fresh today.” She clasped her hands together.
“Let’s get right to it.” Brad sounded unctuous and self-important.
He’d changed his shirt and put on a new tie, but he couldn’t hide the way his nose bulged. Rafe hadn’t broken it. That was a bit disappointing. Brad was in the middle seat, the driver’s seat, and he seemed to utterly relish it.
Brad drummed his fingers along the top of the table. “So, we’ve gone over the facts of the case. You became involved in the case roughly a year after it had been established that there was a serial killer working the DC area.”
Laura took a deep breath and plunged in. “Yes. It was spring roughly six years ago. I moved from another unit. I had been a special agent for four years before that.”
Brad huffed a little. “That’s young to join the BAU.” Laura shrugged. She didn’t mention the amazing work she’d done in the Crisis Negotiation Unit. She didn’t talk about how she’d graduated at the top of her class from Harvard where she’d put herself through school. She merely shrugged. Cam wanted to shove her exemplary record in Brad’s face. She hadn’t gotten into the BAU on her looks.
Brad moved on. “So, you came into the unit as a special agent, and roughly a year later, you turned in a profile of the killer known as the Marquis de Sade. Did you realize at the time that you turned in the profile that Senior Special Agent Edward Lock was the unit’s senior analyst?”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Everyone knew that.
Cam sat forward. This wasn’t going the way he’d thought it would.
He caught Rafe’s glance, but Rafe seemed as confused as Cam.
“Yes,” Laura replied. There was a little flustered pause in her voice. “I was aware of that.”
Brad smirked as though he’d caught her in something. “Who actually asked you to turn in a profile?” Laura tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “Um, no one, but I thought it was important. I thought I had a very fresh look on the case. I have degrees in psychology and criminal justice. I knew what I was doing.”
“But no one actually asked you to turn in a profile?” Brad asked.
Rafe sat forward. “Joe told the whole team that any information we gathered on the case would be welcome. He wanted everyone’s thoughts. It wasn’t out of line for anyone to work up a profile. We’re all trained.”
Joe nodded. “Yes. I like to keep the lines of communication open.
I think it’s important for any team. I worked that way then, and I still work that way today.”
Edward adjusted the glasses he always toyed with when interrogating a subject. He put them back on and stared at Laura like a bug he’d pinned down for study.
Cam started to get a very bad feeling about the way this was going to go. “What does this have to do with anything?” Brad held up a hand. “Mr. Briggs, you are here out of courtesy. If you can’t stay out of this interview, I am going to ask you to leave.” Cam started to get out his chair. “I’d like to see you try to get rid of me.”
Joe shook his head. “Cam, please. I know this is hard, but Special Agent Conrad has reasons for asking the questions he is asking. We spent time deciding on these questions. We all agreed to them. We’re in a bind here. We haven’t had a break in this case in years. We need a fresh approach.”
Laura put a hand over his, and he reluctantly sat down. His heart rate was creeping up along with the need to kick a little ass. He looked back at the large two-way mirror on the opposite side of the room. There would be a whole bunch of people watching this, and one of them would be his new boss, Sheriff Nate Wright. It probably wouldn’t do Cam a bit of good to start his new job by punching his former coworkers in the face. He needed this job. Cam needed to fit into Laura’s world.
He allowed himself to relax back in his chair as Brad pelted her with questions about how she became involved with the case. Laura answered each one in short, professional terms. She explained why she’d written her profile. She talked about how she’d collected her data. In short, she told the asshole that she’d done her job.
“How long had you known Jana Evans?” Brad asked, flipping through his large folder.
A long sigh came out of Laura’s mouth. “I met Jana Evans our freshman year of college. She was studying journalism. We ended up rooming together for a couple of years. After we graduated, she moved to New York, but I moved out to DC when I joined the BAU.
She got a job at a TV station in DC about three years later, and we got back in touch.”
Brad smirked as he asked his next question. “Is that the time you started to feed her confidential information?”
“What the hell?” Rafe got to the outburst before Cam could. “Joe, what is this? I was told we were asking former Special Agent Rosen about her ideas on who the Marquis de Sade is.” Joe’s left eyebrow rose. Sometimes it was easy to forget he wasn’t just one of the guys. “You are also here on my sufferance, Special Agent Kincaid. If we hadn’t been friends for many years, I would have kicked you off this case the minute I figured out you were sleeping with a witness.”
Rafe opened his mouth to argue, but Laura charged in. “In Rafe’s defense, I wasn’t a witness when I started sleeping with him.”
“And Briggs?” Brad practically sneered.
“Well, it was the same night,” Laura said brazenly. “So no, I hadn’t met the Marquis de Sade at that moment. I was just a coworker. It was probably not the most professional thing I could have done, but it had nothing at all to do with the case.”
“You better change your line of questioning,” Cam said through clenched teeth. He wasn’t about to sit here and let them insult her.
“Or we could stop this entirely,” Rafe interjected. “Perhaps we should. A lawyer might be helpful.”
Cam didn’t disagree at all. It sounded like a perfect idea. Laura didn’t need a lawyer for anything criminal, but a lawyer could fuck with these pricks in a way neither he nor Rafe could.
“I’m not getting a lawyer,” Laura said with a resigned huff.
“You will if I call one,” Cam shot back. He hated fighting with her, but he couldn’t let her refuse good counsel.
“Just get on with it,” Laura said.
Brad’s shoulders moved up and down in a negligent shrug, as though he didn’t really care, and Cam believed it. “Fine then. If your cavemen are done, I’ll move on. In your original report, you talked about a phrase the man who abducted you used. Do you recall what he said to you?”
Laura’s eyes took on a haunted, vacant look. She seemed to go somewhere deep inside herself. “He liked to talk. He talked to me for hours. I don’t remember a lot of it, but I remembered that one phrase.
He told me that the only way to a woman’s heart was the path of torment. He said he knew of no other way so sure.” Cam had looked it up. The real Marquis de Sade had written it.
He’d had a lot to say, most of it garbage in Cam’s mind. The Marquis had believed that all moral principals were fancies, not anything concrete or real.
“That’s a bit specific,” Brad said. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”
Now Laura was the one staring through Brad. “Well, a girl rarely forgets what’s been said just before a man in a plague doctor’s mask whips her, cuts her, and shoves a knife through her gut multiple times.
I was tied down at the time, and he’d whipped me viciously. I hate to admit it, but he did have my attention.” Cam felt his gut twist. His brain tended to go to a black place when he thought about what had happened to her. When he read it on paper, it was bad enough. When he heard it coming out of her mouth in that dead monotone she employed whenever the subject came up, it was devastating. She’d been taken and brutalized. She’d been tortured for hours. He loved her. Guilt festered like a sore. He was responsible for her. She’d let him take pleasure in her body and solace in her heart. He owed her protection, and he’d failed.