Eight

Hollis moved closer to the body. It was a young man, early twenties, she guessed, with long brown hair. His eyes were open and glassy. There was no point in checking for a pulse. He was dead. Very dead.

This was what had made her skin tingle earlier. This, not Peter. At least not just Peter. She could feel a shiver in her throat. The Chinese food that had been quietly digesting was now moving back up. She locked her jaw, closed her eyes, and tried to focus. She could hear Finn behind her, sounding relaxed and even a bit sleepy.

“Who is he?” he asked Peter.

“Not sure.”

Hollis opened her eyes. There was no way she was going to be seen as fragile or afraid while the men discussed the murder with vague disinterest. But she wasn’t just going to join in either, pretending this was somehow ordinary. Dead bodies at the Larsson household—just another Thursday night. She took a long breath, then reached into the dead man’s jacket pocket and pulled out a cell phone and a slim canvas wallet. The first ID in the wallet was for Bradford University. Tomas Silva. History Department.

“He’s a grad student,” she told the men.

“I think he gets a failing grade in staying out of trouble,” Peter said.

That was too much. Hollis spun around. “Is this funny? You killed this kid?”

Even at five foot eight, the top of her head only reached to Peter’s throat. She wasn’t intimidating, she knew that. But she was angry.

“He was here when I got here,” Peter protested. “And I would lower your voice, Hollis. Your neighbors aren’t aware of this young man, but shouting will draw attention.”

Finn moved between Hollis and Peter. “You’ve been inside with us. How do you know no one has seen anything?”

Peter opened the front door and signaled toward a black van parked across the street. Two men got out. Hollis half expected them to be in black suits and trench coats, like in the movies, but they weren’t. Both were wearing jeans and t-shirts. Nothing that would draw attention to them, except for guns tucked into their belts.

Fixers. That much she could guess. But what were they here to get rid of? The young man in the chair, or Finn and her?

Peter pushed Hollis and Finn back in the house. Hollis looked around. Her cell was upstairs, but she’d had Finn’s at one point. Where? The kitchen, she remembered. She moved away from Peter toward the other room, and the table with tea, lemon cookies, and a cell phone.

Peter followed. As she grabbed the phone, he put his hand around her wrist. She twisted her arm to slip from his hold. Nothing happened. She had a black belt in karate. She’d spent weeks getting out of wrist grabs just like this. She twisted again. Peter’s grip held. Finn grabbed Peter’s other arm, but he held Finn off just as easily. “Will you both be good children?”

“You’re not going to hurt us,” she said.

“Of course, I’m not,” Peter said. “Stop twisting around.”

Hollis wanted to keep fighting but what was the point? She nodded. Finn sighed. Peter let them both go.

“Don’t call the police,” he said. “You’ll look like a fool.”

“You can leave,” Hollis said. “We’ll tell the police we heard a noise and came down and found him.”

“And they’ll find that plausible?”

Probably not, she had to admit, but what were they supposed to do?

“I could tell them that an offshoot of Interpol wants us to get involved with an international criminal organization and somehow this kid was mixed up, so his body was placed in our living room as a threat. But that seems even more ridiculous.”

“You think he was dead when he was brought here?”

“The alternative is that he broke in and sat in our chair. Then someone else broke in and shot him,” Hollis said.

Peter considered it. “Why a threat?”

“Did you kill him?”

“I told you. No.”

“It’s a message of some kind. And not a happy one. If it’s not you, then it’s TCT.”

Finn moved back toward the living room. “The body is gone,” he said.

Hollis didn’t believe him. It had been less than a minute since Peter had signaled the men. But when she followed Finn, she saw he was right. Where there had once been a dead man, there was now an empty chair, and where his head had been resting, there was a blood stain the size of an orange.

Hollis let a small noise, half gasp, half cry, escape from her throat. The nausea that had subsided while she was angry was returning. Was this her life now? Murdered college students in her living room, dangerous spies cleaning up the mess that even more dangerous criminals left behind?

Peter put his hand on Hollis’s shoulder and she very nearly jumped. “We’ll get that cleaned,” he said.

“It’s not my chair I’m concerned about.”

But if she was willing to admit it (which she wasn’t), she did like that chair. It was the first piece of furniture that she and Finn had bought after their wedding. It was a bit worn but still beautiful.

“Whoever did it must have walked up behind him and shot him in the head,” she said.

“You think he was shot?” Peter asked.

“The stain is where his head was. Would you stab someone in the head? Seems like a place you would shoot someone.”

“Logical. And I agree, not much blood. Another indication he was killed elsewhere and moved here,” Peter conceded. “But it doesn’t appear that they walked up on him and shot. The young man was held somewhere. Did you notice the bruises on his wrists?”

She hadn’t and felt embarrassed about it at first. Then annoyed that she’d been expected to notice. All the questions weren’t because Peter hadn’t figured out what happened—he just wanted to know if she had.

“You think he was held, maybe tortured, before being shot?” she asked. “Tell me again that bringing him here wasn’t some kind of a threat.”

Peter, for once, seemed at a loss for words.

Finn didn’t seem to be paying attention to the conversation. He had pulled back the curtain slightly and was staring out the window. Hollis couldn’t tell if he was worried that someone might see a body being moved or just amazed by the efficiency of the two men.

“They’re getting back in the van.” He turned to Peter. “What are they going to do with him?”

“An alley, I imagine. Something that will make the police think it was a mugging. And since Hollis lifted his wallet and phone, in a way, they’ll be right.”

Hollis looked at the wallet on the coffee table. “It’s Tommy. It has to be. Angela said her friend Tommy had dropped off the package, but she said someone had paid him to do it.”

“He lied,” Finn said.

“I suppose. But how can he be a master criminal? He’s a grad student. Is he planning to take down the world’s economy between classes?”

“Or he was paid to watch you,” Peter suggested.

“And whoever paid him, killed him?” That didn’t make sense to Hollis, but something else did. “Or you guys killed him, you or someone else in Blue. Which, if you did, you should stop lying about it. You hardly need to concern yourself with your reputation around us.”

Peter’s eyes widened. To Hollis, he seemed genuinely surprised by the insult. But he said nothing in his or his agency’s defense. Instead he motioned for Hollis and Finn to sit down. Hollis did, but Finn put up a momentary show of protest.

“If ‘Tomas Silva’ is dead then this whole thing is off,” Finn said.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Peter said. “I’m going to leave now. If that was Silva, someone else will likely contact you. I want you to do what they tell you. Exactly what they tell you.”

“What if they tell us to do something illegal?” Finn asked.

“We’ll know, and we’ll intervene. But the more you seem to be on the side of TCT, the more they will trust you and the less danger …” He stopped.

“The less danger we’ll be in,” Finn finished for him. “Or we could say no. Tell whoever contacts us to call you, and take a nice long vacation somewhere no one can find us.”

“There is nowhere you can go that they can’t find you. And, for that matter, where we can’t find you.” Peter spoke evenly and softly, like he was talking to hysterical children. But Finn was calm, and Hollis realized her heart was now beating normally and her stomach was no longer roiling. She decided they were both in their safe place—taking an intellectual approach to the situation rather than allowing themselves to indulge in the fear that was just below the surface.

Finn looked over at Hollis. He said nothing, just looked into her eyes. She nodded slightly. He nodded back. It was all the communication they needed.

“It doesn’t seem like we have much choice,” he said. “For now. But the first chance we get to walk away, we will. And I want you to promise me that we’ll never be bothered again. We go back to our lives and you stop breaking into our house.”

Peter seemed ready to laugh but didn’t. “I didn’t drag you into this, Finn. Your Irish friend did. When you find him, do us all a favor and say the same thing to him.” He wrote a phone number on a piece of paper, left it on the coffee table. “Dire emergency only.” Then he got up, took the dead man’s wallet and cell phone, and walked toward the door.

“I’ll send the men back in for the chair,” he said as he was leaving. “There’s room in the van. We’ll have it good as new in a few days.”

“Don’t bother,” Finn said. “I always hated that chair.”

Hollis didn’t say anything until after Peter had left but once he was gone, she had to ask. “Since when have you hated that chair?”

“I just said that because I didn’t want them to take it.”

“So you like it.”

“If I’m being honest, then no, I never really liked it.”

“Yes, you did. You picked it out.”

“You picked it out,” he corrected her. “We’d been married for three months. I just wanted to make you happy, so I went along with whatever you wanted.”

She tried to remember if that was true. It couldn’t be. He was always disagreeing with her, wasn’t he? “How do you feel about our china pattern?”

“White, with a narrow silver band and little white dots along the edge. Always loved it,” he said, though it didn’t sound genuine. “Do we have cotton swabs?”

“In the bathroom.” She was about to ask why when Finn disappeared. When he returned, a dozen swabs in his hand, she realized what he was doing.

“We’ll take this to Dr. Richardson,” he said. “She’s a DNA expert, probably the best at the university. Doesn’t she owe you a favor?”

Hollis had helped Elaine Richardson with a grant proposal, just two colleagues offering support. It was hardly the sort of favor that would allow Hollis to show up with a bag full of cotton swabs asking for … what?

“She’s going to want to know why I need her to type these. And even if I come up with a reason, she’s going to need to check the databases for a match. That’s a lot to ask her.”

She wasn’t really explaining it to Finn, she was explaining it to herself, on her way to coming up with some half-acceptable reasons to show up with blood on cotton swabs asking Elaine to help her match the blood with a person.

It didn’t matter anyway, Finn wasn’t really listening. He was collecting sample after sample and dropping them into a plastic sandwich bag. When he’d collected about a dozen swabs in the baggie, he handed it to her.

“If we know who that kid was, maybe we’ll be able to figure out what he was doing here, and that will help us with …” He paused. “With whatever comes next.”

Hollis nodded. Finn needed to do something, have answers. She did too. They were read first, ask questions later type of people. Research, knowledge, it was always the way. Or, Hollis thought as she looked at the blood stain on the chair, it had been until now.