Page 1 of K-9 Justice

CHAPTER ONE

The cartel had come for one of their own.

Ivy Bardot tried not to let the heat get to her, but there was no fighting it. The body had been left in the middle of the desert. Just like the others. A message. For her.

Dark hair splayed out from around a thin face. Wide eyes that had seen so much within the walls of Socorro Security stared into the sky without any life behind them.

The elements had done their job, stripping moisture from the victim’s ocher skin and leaving nothing but a thick rawhide behind.Victim.That word wasn’t supposed to fit. It wasn’t supposed to touch anyone on her team. She’d tried to make sure of that since founding Socorro. Every operative was trained to take care of themselves. No matter the circumstance. Search and rescue, emergency protocols, food and supplies in every vehicle, combat training. It didn’t matter the face staring back at her had seen more violence and blood out of the field rather than in. Ivy was responsible for all of them.

What had Dr. Piel done wrong?

“That her?” Chief of police Baker Halsey let his shadow cast across the cracked desert floor. Alpine Valley’s protector had done his job. He’d taken Ivy’s suspicion and run with it. Right out here into the middle of nowhere.

Only problem was, this wasn’t the first time she’d been here.

In this exact spot. Staring at another victim who’d been stripped bare and left to rot. Not just one. Three before now.Déjà vu grabbed hold and refused to let up, dragging her back three years, when she’d still been working for the FBI.

“Yeah. That’s her.” Ivy tried to swallow around the mass in her throat, but there wasn’t going to be any relief here. Sweat gathered beneath her blazer, and her mouth dried. “Do we know anything about where she’s been the past three days?”

Right on time. The killer she’d known had taken and held his hostages for three days before dumping them in strategic locations in the middle of the New Mexican desert. She and her partner had never been able to narrow down the location of their final moments. Though, looking back, she’d known this day was coming. That she would pay for letting a killer get away.

She just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Or to one of her own.

“Nothing yet. The medical examiner is stuck in Albuquerque. Won’t be able to retrieve the body for a couple more hours,” Halsey said.

“She deserved better.” A pressure she’d become familiar with over the course of the past two years bubbled behind her sternum. Purpose replaced the cold leaking of grief in her gut, and the distractions bled to the back of her mind. Ivy cataloged everything she could about the scene. No tire tracks. At least, none that they would be able to match to a specific make and model. The man who’d done this was careful, calculating. He’d gotten the best of her once upon a time, but she’d changed. She could be just as calculating when she had to be. “Grab some gloves. We need to turn her over.”

Halsey seemed uneasy at the idea. There were rules in a crime scene. No one touched the body until the coroner or the medical examiner had a chance to do an external exam and document and photograph the victim, but they didn’t have two hours to wait for the right authorities to get here. The relentless heatcould be destroying evidence as they spoke. “Like I said, the ME won’t be here for a couple hours.”

“I know that. I’m asking you to break protocol.” Ivy hated the manipulation lacing her voice, but there were times when it was all she could do to keep the bad guys from winning. “I need to see her back.”

Halsey considered her a moment. He’d been involved with one of Ivy’s operatives enough to get a read on her himself. That was one of the things she liked about the chief of police. Always asking questions, never satisfied with the answers. Eager to dig beneath the surface and find the truth. Whatever Halsey saw in her expression then had him convinced what she was asking was worth the risk of contaminating a crime scene. He pulled a set of latex gloves from his back pocket and shoved both hands inside before crouching beside the victim. “Looking for something particular?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.” Her breath seemed to double inside her chest, taking up too much space for her lungs to function properly. Nervous energy skittered up her spine as the chief gently rolled Dr. Piel onto her front.

And there it was.

The markings she’d decoded—too late—carved into the woman’s back. Fresh. Jagged. Unrepentant.

“What the hell is that?” Halsey asked.

A bead of sweat escaped her hairline, dissolving her controlled appearance in an instant as the secure world she’d built around herself cracked wide open. “A message.”

A shift rippled through the chief as the implications of her answer settled in. “A message. For who?”

She didn’t have all the information yet. She could be getting ahead of herself, but instinct said this was the same man. The same killer. The one she’d fought to what she’d believed to be his death two years ago at the hand of her trusted pocketknife. Onlyto learn he’d escaped that dark basement when she’d recovered. There was something she had to do. “Take care of her, Halsey. I’ll be in touch.”

The chief repositioned the body as though they hadn’t just broken the entire rule book of their investigative training manuals. “Where are you going? We need to coordinate so we can figure out where she’s been the past few days.”

“I need to make a call.” Ivy forced herself to take even steps in the direction of her SUV. To prove she could. That another body—a colleague—killed in the same manner as the victims from her last investigation for the FBI couldn’t get to her. That she was as untouchable as she’d convinced herself she was when she’d built the most resourced security company in the world. But she was quickly learning that no amount of training or weapons, no amount of operatives and their K-9 units, could protect her from the failure clawing up her throat.

She locked herself inside her SUV, not even giving herself the chance to find relief from the heat. Halsey blocked most of her view of Dr. Piel through the windshield as he draped a tarp over the body. They couldn’t risk the sun speeding up decomposition if they wanted an accurate assessment of time of death, but the woman’s feet were still visible. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She’d worked too hard and too long for the past to be able to reach her now. Ivy punched the vehicle’s start button with her thumb, and the engine came alive.

This wasn’t a onetime incident.

Her stomach rolled at the idea of another one of her operatives turning up dead. Jocelyn, Scarlett. But that wasn’t the only way to hurt her either. While the killer preferred female victims over male, every one of her operatives had bound themselves to their significant others and partners in the past two years. They’d built their own families, one even welcoming their first child. If anything happened to any one of them…

Nausea churned hot and acidic as she pulled away from the scene. She’d built Socorro Security out of a need to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. Those like the three women abandoned and killed for no other purpose than to draw Ivy and her partner in. Cartels likeSangre por Sangrefed off innocent lives, poisoned the very people they went out of their way to use, abducted children into their ranks and killed anyone in their way. But Socorro had put a stop to that. Ivy and her operatives had sacrificed and risked their lives for this. They’d made a difference. According to their inside source, upper management within the cartel had gone into hiding. The few remaining lieutenants were on the run. She’d done that. She’d saved lives.

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