Omega's Kiss: M/M Mpreg Alpha Male Romance Read online

  Morrison gave no indication that he noticed the intense concentration of alpha scents, but he did pick up his pace as he walked through the bullpen. It gave Ray an opportunity to get a good look at his ass, which he both appreciated and kind of resented. After all, he needed to not be thinking these kinds of thoughts about Lawrence Freaking Morrison's son. He was supposed to be above this sort of thing.

  Ray closed the door behind them and sat down across from Morrison. It felt strange, having his back to the door like this. It felt like he was the visitor. "All right, Mr. Morrison. Let's talk. I can probably guess why you're here today."

  Morrison was unfazed by Ray's tone. He folded his hands on top of his briefcase. "The court has already notified you of my request for a new trial."

  "It has. I'm not entirely sure why you think it's a valid request." Ray leaned forward. "Look, I'm really sorry that you have to come to grips with the fact that your father is a serial killer, but the fact of the matter is that the evidence was overwhelming. That conviction is solid. It's hard, to find something like that out about your own flesh and blood. I get that."

  Morrison's jaw tightened, but he didn't let loose with a stream of pathetic excuses as Ray had been expecting. Instead, he spoke in a calm, cool tone. "Exhibits A and B." He reached into his briefcase and pulled out photocopies of credit card receipts.

  Ray picked them up. The receipts were from a hotel in Annapolis, Maryland, and dated April of 2002.

  Morrison pulled something else out of his bag and passed it to Ray. It was a printout with two pictures, both with date and time stamps. "Library Studies Convention, Annapolis, 2002," Ray read aloud. "That's Morrison, right there. One from April 3, one from April 5." Ray's heart sank. "There's no way he could have gotten back and forth from Annapolis in time to kill Bonnaire or Alumi."

  Morrison didn't grin. He didn't smirk, or give a shout of triumph. He merely said, "That is the preliminary basis of my request for a new trial. How many more victims am I going to find, where my father has an ironclad alibi?" He shook his head.

  Ray's hand shook. "Okay. This is…this is bad. It's very bad. I'll take a copy of this and bring it back to you—"

  Morrison held up a hand. "Keep it, Detective. I have lots of copies. Trust me."

  "Okay then." Ray swallowed. Of course the guy had multiple copies. His father's freedom depended on it. "But here's the thing. The case of these two women is bad. I'll grant that there's no way Lawrence Morrison killed those two women. And I'll do what I have to in order to make sure that those two women are stricken from the list of his victims, but Mr. Morrison, I'm sorry. They got caught up in the rest of the victimology because they fit the profile for his usual victims and because he has a pattern. I stand by those convictions." He took in a breath and let it out. "All twenty-two of them."

  Morrison did smirk now, and he turned his head away. "I can't say that I'm surprised. You're the one who sent him up in the first place. The person who did kill Melina Bonnaire and Ada Alumi is still out there, somewhere. Serial killers don't just stop killing. Are you honestly ready to have that on your conscience?"

  Ray clenched his jaw. He didn't mind helping out a grieving man. While Morrison's father was still alive, he was going to spend the rest of his life up in Shirley. That created real grief, and Ray could respect it. At the same time, he didn't have to tolerate someone impugning his commitment to the job. "I'm convinced that I have the right man. What exactly is it that you want from me?"

  "I want the name, date, and time of death for each of my father's alleged victims." Morrison wasn't intimidated, not in the slightest. He met Ray's eyes squarely, without hesitation. "I can do the rest without your help."

  "What rest?" Ray threw his hands up into the air. "I was wrong about those two, and I admit it, but Morrison, he's guilty. He killed twenty-two women. That includes your mother, for crying out loud. Doesn't that bother you?"

  "It would bother me." Morrison shrugged. "If he'd done it. He didn't. I know my father. I know killers. My father is not a murderer. I'm not exactly new to this game, Detective."

  Ray stood up. "All right. Do you have an email address?"

  Morrison chuckled. "I thought carrier pigeon would suffice." He produced a card and passed it over to Ray. "They look so festive with a long line of dot matrix paper tied to their little legs."

  Ray had to laugh at that, even though he was still furious. "All right," he said, shoving the card in his back pocket. "I'll get that data for you and send it out within the next day or so." He shook Morrison's hand and ignored the little jolt of electricity that arced through his body when their skin connected.

  Ray left the room immediately. He figured that a guy like Doug could probably find his own way out. Ray had never met an omega who affected him so strongly before, and of course he could do nothing for him. He needed to get away.

  He saw his friends all turn their heads to watch the slender omega walk out the door. Then all of those heads turned back to stare at him as his boss, Lt. Devlin, walked out of his office. "So," Devlin said. "That's the son, huh?"

  Ray slumped down in his seat. "Yeah." He picked up a pen and twirled it in his fingers. "Yeah, that was the son. Apparently the son is a big shot lawyer whose practice consists mostly of appeals."

  "I hate appeals." Nenci screwed up his face and glowered at the door Morrison had just walked out.

  Tessaro flipped Nenci off. "You hate everything, man. Just go drink some tea or something." He turned to the rest of them. "I mean I feel bad for the guy, you know? How much must it suck to have your dad kill your mom?"

  "Right?" Ray leaned back in his seat. "Although I wouldn't recommend saying that in front of Morrison. He's already found two victims that the senior Mr. Morrison couldn't possibly have killed. We'll have to take a look at the evidence and make sure that the time of death is really correct, but I'm pretty sure that he's right on those cases." He sighed, running a hand over his face. "It just gives him false hope."

  Devlin cleared his throat. "What makes you so sure it's false?"

  Ray looked up at his boss in shock. "Sir, you're kidding me, right? I mean you were right there with me, the whole time. Larry Morrison was the last person to see his wife alive. His behavior after the discovery of the first part of Mrs. Morrison wasn't that of a grieving widower; he seemed more likely to be bidding good riddance to bad rubbish. And then there's all the circumstantial evidence."

  "All of which has been wrong before." Devlin grinned at him. "I'm pretty confident that we got our guy too, but I'm not going to pretend that people don't get wrongly convicted. We're supposed to be here for justice, not vendettas. It can't hurt to take the time to look back over the case and make sure we got it right." He grimaced and rolled his shoulders. "Not that we're going to have a choice, considering that Morrison Junior petitioned for a new trial. And given what he found, I think he'll probably get it."

  The entire squad groaned. Ray had been the lead detective on the case, but they'd all pitched in once they realized that they weren't dealing with a single cold murder but a long term active serial killer. The case had been grueling, and when they'd finally closed it and gone to trial Ray had personally paid for champagne for the entire squad.

  He got up from his chair and walked over to the nearest empty whiteboard. "Hey, Camille, would you mind terribly asking the records department to send up the boxes from the Morrison case?" he called over his shoulder, and picked up a dry-erase marker. "Okay. What do we know?"

  Robles' fingers flew across the keyboard. "Okay. Emiliana Romola Morrison, of Lakeville, was reported missing by the priest at her church when she didn't show up for a church group meeting in February of 1998. According to Detective Wilson of Lakeville PD, Mrs. Morrison never missed group." He tugged at his collar. None of this was new to him, but the details were still chilling. "According to her husband, Lawrence, they'd had a difference of opinion and she'd gone 'for a walk.' She often stayed out all night to pray about their 'differences of opin
ion,' so he hadn't called it in."

  Ray put the date on the far left of his timeline. "Okay. What's the last murder?"

  "Clarissa Baldovini, age forty-five, in 2014. Body dismembered and scattered just like the others, with the remains found in Massasoit State Park and in various lawns and bush sites in Lakeville and Taunton." That was Morris, who was finally starting to look a little more with it since his omega had almost been killed.

  One by one, the other guys on the team read out the names of Larry Morrison's victims while Ray plotted them out on the timeline. They hadn't done this the first time they'd investigated Morrison; they'd been looking into the cold case of Emiliana's death and discovered the serial killer almost by accident. Now that they were looking at the crimes together, and thinking in terms of serial killers, one fact became glaringly obvious. "We're missing victims," he said, staring at his timeline.

  "Right." Devlin wiped at his mouth. "Between 1998 and 2000, assuming that the wife was the first. There should be more victims in that space."

  Morris jumped to his feet. "Do you think that he maybe got scared off by the blood or something? Or that maybe there was another triggering incident?"

  "It happens sometimes." Tessaro shook his head. "Not often. More often, there will be some kind of a gap, but not like this unless they leave the area. Morrison ran the town library. He just went about his daily life. The only change that was made was that he and his son left the Church."

  Nenci poked at his keyboard, but his eyes were far away. "If I remember correctly, I think the priest there was a member of the Order of Lot. Really not a fan of alphas, omegas, or anyone else who likes the company of their own gender. That would have been around the same time that the younger Morrison would have tested for the omega gene, so it's not unreasonable that they should leave."

  "I wonder if that's what the fight was about?" Ray scratched his head. "Doug doesn't seem at all bothered by the fact that his father killed his mother, but if she bought into that way of thinking it's possible that he just doesn't care."

  Robles bobbed his head from side to side. "Maybe. I mean maybe he's just kind of numbed himself to it, too. I don't know. Remember he doesn't accept that his father did kill his mother. So, we have that to contend with." He rubbed at his cheeks. "Man, I am so not looking forward to having to comb through all of this again. Especially if we might have two of these guys out there, you know?"

  Ray did know. It had taken police forever to put the pieces together because the killer had struck all across the southeastern part of the state, making it difficult to put any kind of pattern together. If the crimes belonged to more than one perpetrator, that would make teasing out the reality even more difficult.

  Devlin put his hands behind his back. "Well, you boys know what to do. I'm confident that you'll prove your case."

  Tessaro elbowed Ray. "Well, it could be worse."

  Ray turned to his friend with a bleak look. "How?"

  "The guy's omega son could look like a boot. At least you've got someone nice to look at while you two butt heads."

  Ray couldn't argue with that. He sat down to compile the list that Morrison had asked for. It was a lot of work, but it would be a good tool for him and the rest of the team too.

  Chapter Two

  Doug stood up at the front of the classroom. It hadn't been all that long since he'd been one of those students sitting in the seats. He could remember listening intently, trying to decide if a career in law was really for him. The thought of being on the other side made him far more anxious than he'd ever been standing up in a courtroom, for reasons he chose not to examine too closely.

  "Hi," he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "My name is Doug Morrison. I'm an attorney with Findlay, Allison, and Jones. I'm here to talk to you today about careers in law, specifically criminal law, and help you evaluate whether or not this might be a field that interests you."

  Some of the students wrinkled their noses. Others leaned forward. One or two yawned. All of these were reactions that Doug had expected. The student body here at Suffolk was significantly more diverse than the one at Yale had been, but they had a lot of fundamental similarities. They were young, hungry, and determined. A few professors sat in the back of the room, including Bill, one of the partners at Findlay, Allison, and Jones. They'd brought him here tonight.

  One of the rear doors opened, and the scent of basil wound its way around Doug's brain. Why would Detective Langer show up here? That made no sense at all. Doug's eyes couldn't stay away from the handsome detective, even though Langer tried his best to stay hidden in the shadows.

  You're not here to ogle. You're here to speak. He forced himself back to the classroom and focused. "So. On television, you've got a kind of two-sided portrayal of criminal law, right? You've got your hard-working, zealous prosecutor, who always does “The Right Thing” and is only ever working on one case at a time, and always has the right information. Then you've got your filthy, dirty, sleazy defense attorney—and you can tell that he's a slime bag, because he's always got his balding hair slicked back with enough product to spackle an entire brownstone—who doesn't care about right and wrong, just wants to get his client off. Sound about right?"

  Doug waited for the nods and he chuckled along with a few of the sheepish students. "It sure would be nice if real life worked out that way. First of all, prosecutors do work hard. And I do think that they want to do the right thing. This whole thing where they only have one case at a time, and they can take their sweet time with it? Nah. That's a fantasy. So is the one where they can always bring charges when they know they've got the bad guy.

  "Look. Prosecutors, and cops, and jurors, and judges, are human. They have their own biases and their own issues, and that's perfectly normal. The thing is, because of their positions, they need to be extra careful about letting those biases interfere with their jobs. But it does happen. Right? So the people who get accused, who may not have done anything wrong, need representation too."

  Doug looked around the room. He'd have liked to have said that he was taking the measure of his audience, but in reality he just didn't want to be obvious about looking at Langer. The detective was leaning back in his seat, watching Doug with a piercing stare.

  "So, you get defenders. You get regular defense attorneys. I do that. I also do a lot of appeals work. I know—I'm supposed to be wearing a super sleek suit and driving some kind of Italian sports car, right? We charge when we can. We do pro bono work if we can. There are other types of law that pay better, but for me, it's worth it."

  A young, blond man near the front of the audience raised his hand. "How do you justify helping violent criminals get out of their sentences?" A few other students nodded. So, he noticed, did Langer.

  "Tell me something. Are you familiar with the Innocence Project? How about the case of the Central Park Five? The criminal justice system isn't perfect. I can't think of a better system, but that doesn't mean that ours doesn't make mistakes. Those mistakes, I should point out, tend to fall more heavily on people with lower incomes and on people of color—people who have less access to higher priced attorneys and who are more likely to be dependent on an overburdened public defender system. People are being tried for serious crimes all over this country without ever meeting their lawyer before the trial begins, and that's not a knock on the public defenders. They work very hard, but there just aren't enough hours in the day to represent the number of clients on their caseload. And they sure ain't being paid enough to do the work they're doing.

  "That's part of the reason that we have an appeals process in the first place, okay? It acknowledges that there may be miscarriages of justice. I have no problem with incarcerating those who are actually guilty. I just want—like, I think, most people—to make sure that the people being punished are the people who actually did the crime." He shrugged. "It seems like we're all on the same side, really. I mean look at it this way. A surgeon doesn't do their work in a vacuum. Someone else is looking at
it. And if something goes wrong, someone else has to check that bit of surgery out, and correct it. Both the original surgeon, and the surgeon assisting, want the same thing. They want the patient to be healthy."

  In the back of the room, Langer nodded. Doug was ashamed to admit to the little jolt that ran up his spine.

  Langer raised a hand. "Have you ever defended a client you knew to be guilty?"

  Doug laughed. "I'd have to recuse myself from the case. If I'm suspicious, if the evidence is truly overwhelming and I can't refute it, I usually encourage them to take a plea deal. There are some guilty people in prison." A little titter went around the room. Langer joined in, much to Doug's shameful gratification.

  Most of the questions after that were fairly generic. One student, who seemed to be very young, wanted to know what his undergraduate major had been in order to prepare him for his career now. Others wanted to know about internships and mentoring. A few asked about unusual cases, or typical cases. One asked about a typical workday.