If You Know Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense

all over her office. Cases about women raped, and murdered. She’d tried to keep the scope relatively narrow—young, attractive, from the Midwest.
    There were still too many. She felt raw inside. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend had walked in on her a few hours earlier after taking one look at the files.
    “When are you going to let this go? They found the guy.”
    No, they didn’t
, she wanted to argue. But it wouldn’t matter if she argued or not. He wouldn’t believe her. And it didn’t matter if he did or not.
    He’d stared at her, something in his eyes that was pity, anger, and sadness. Then he’d turned and walked out. Somehow, she’d known he wouldn’t be back.
    It didn’t matter. Nothing did. Except the search. She had to keep looking. Keep searching. For what, she didn’t know. But Nia couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t leave it alone.
    It didn’t matter that they had found the guy. She had to keep looking … it was like the monkey on her back, riding her, pushing her, driving her. She had to keep looking, had to, had to …
    Eyes heavy and gritty, she flipped through the file of a twenty-one-year-old nursing student who’d been assaulted and killed in St. Louis. They hadn’t found the killer. Nia’s heart ached for the girl. But beyond thegrief, the heartache, she felt nothing when she read the reports, looked at the pictures.
    Nothing that told her
this
was what she was looking for—
this
was what she needed to find. Not that she was
expecting
to feel something. She just …
    Shit. She didn’t even know what she was expecting. Looking for. Hoping to find. She reached for the nearly empty can of Monster, took a sip, and then reached for the next in her “hopeful” pile. But exhaustion made her clumsy and she ended up knocking over the “hopeful” and the “not-so-hopeful.” Swearing, she made a mad grab at fluttering pages, eyeing the mess around her desk.
    “Hell.” Pushing her hair back, she hoped the people who’d sent her all these files had some recognizable sort of organization. With a groan, she scooted away from her desk, tempted to just ignore the mess and head to bed.
    She might have just done that, too. She was so tired, so damn tired.
    But a picture caught her eye.
    She couldn’t say why.
    Staring at it, though, she
felt
something.
    A burn. That
thing
she’d been waiting for
—this
was what she’d been searching for,
who
she’d been searching for. There wasn’t anything really intriguing about the woman’s face. She looked nothing like Joely.
    She had hair so pale a blond, it didn’t seem natural at all. Big blue eyes, big round breasts … a lot like a Barbie doll, right down to the bright pink-and-white sundress that barely skimmed her ass. Everything about her sparkled, her smile, her eyes, the diamond bracelet on her left wrist.
    Her name was Kathleen Hughes.
    The next picture of her wasn’t quite so attractive.
    She was lying on a slab, her skin that pale, bluish-graycolor of death, and the pink pleather dress she wore was splattered with blood, gore, and dirt.
    Nia sifted through the files, finding everything pertaining to Hughes and then she started to read. She had nothing in common with Joely, other than being physically attractive, and young. Joely had excelled in all things—this girl was big into partying, hard and fast, making up for what looked like a relatively normal, borderline-boring childhood. She’d barely been coasting along in college and had been working some on the side at a club as a stripper.
    Nothing in common with Joely.
    But looking at Kathleen’s face, Nia’s gut twisted, burned, and adrenaline roared inside her. It couldn’t be anything, though. Because Kathleen had just died two months ago.
    Joe Carson had been dead now for nine months.
    Still …
    Unable to resist, she continued to read. Brutally raped. Drugs in her system. Roommate confirmed she’d been using for a while. No boyfriend—her last serious boyfriend had a solid alibi—he was an ER doctor at a hospital in Detroit, a Dr. Jared Roberts, and he’d been working in said Detroit hospital the night Kathleen died … in Chicago.
    She’d been seen leaving the club with a guy—only description was “an older dude.”
    Nia frowned, checked the info in the folder on the ex-boyfriend. Somehow pink pleather Barbie didn’t look like the sort of girl a doctor would date. He was thirty-five … and originally from Kathleen’s hometown of Madison,