Lover Beware

looked at the younger cop—Jacobson—his thumbs hooked over his gun belt and his hip shifted in a cocky fashion as he continued to appraise her. She was well acquainted with that look. “You got something to say, Jacobson?” She narrowed her eyes.
    He shrugged and grinned. “Sure as hell don’t look like FBI. Not with those legs.”
    She continued to stare at him, saying nothing, not so much as blinking, until color touched his cheeks and he averted his eyes.
    As they moved aside, Anna continued on her way, each step exacerbating the pain in her temples, her annoyance at the cops’ attitude quickly forgotten as she ducked her head against the unbearable sun and made her way toward the distant mourners. Hundreds of them. Friends. Family. Business associates.
    Her gaze shifted from the mourners to the surrounding graves—cement and granite tombs, ancient and new, clustered close enough together one could barely move between them. City of the Dead. Damn creepy.
    Although the cops had cordoned off the cemetery for the Damascus funeral, her gaze still shifted along the tombs, searching. It was an established fact that killers would often attend their victims’ funerals. The files she had pored over in the last twenty-four hours, since getting the call from headquarters, attested to the fact that the animal who had been slaughtering New Orleans hookers was a power freak. Got his rocks off on domination. Enjoyed inflicting terror in his victims even more than he enjoyed the actual killing. That kind of sicko would take supreme pleasure in watching the tragic aftermath of his heinous murders unfold.
    But therein was the perplexity. Laura Damascus and her two children didn’t fit the profile of the killer’s previous victims.
    As Anna eased her way through the crowd, she recalled the conversation she had had with her superior, Dr. Jeff Montgomery. The phone call had come no more than two hours after she had tied up a particularly harrowing and disturbing case—a pair of sexual serial killers who had preyed on thirty-four victims in the Chicago area. Before that there had been a case in Seattle; before that, D.C. She was balancing dangerously on a tightrope of complete exhaustion, if not total burnout, and the last thing she needed was to be so quickly reassigned to New Orleans—especially after learning that she was well acquainted with the latest victims.
    How the hell could she remain emotionally uninvolved when she had shared pizza and beer with Laura and J. D. Damascus? When she had attended Laura’s baby shower and witnessed J.D.’s pleasure on the birth of his son, William?
    Not only that. Now she would be forced to come face-to-face with the one and only man with whom she had ever been in love. The son of a bitch who had broken her heart. Jerry Costos, District Attorney. C.B. Chauvinistic Bastard. Had her future been left up to him she would have spent the remainder of her life barefoot and pregnant.
    As she stepped to the edge of the mourners, her heart sank and the emotion that she had forced back during the last many hours began to surface. The last six years she had invested in becoming one of the FBI’s leading female agents and profilers had honed her ability to shelve personal involvement. Working shoulder to shoulder with the machismo attitude that women were too fragile to handle the gruesome and dangerous circumstances of murder had toughened her into a person she hardly recognized any longer, and too often didn’t like. But for such a sacrifice, she had become damn good at her job. One of the best and most respected.
    But this. Dear God, this was something else.
    Three coffins were placed side by side and draped in blankets of roses and lilies. A mother’s coffin. Her son’s. Her daughter’s. As the priest’s voice rose into the humid, flower-fragrant air, the family formed a semicircle around the caskets, faces blanched in shock and despair.
    Flanked by his mother and brother, J. D. Damascus wept into his hands, sobs shaking his body. The mourners gasped and cried out as Damascus dropped to his knees, his cries rising to a heartbreaking wail.
    Then he was there, as Anna knew he would be. Jerry Costos, Damascus’s best friend, gently moving Helen Damascus aside and falling to one knee beside J.D., sliding one arm around his shoulders to comfort and support him.
    Anna thought she had prepared herself—had erected her infamous steel wall of emotional detachment around her heart in