Nick sat quietly in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio as Sin pulled up to a block near the house the Mechanic was staying in. As soon as she pulled up to the curb, he climbed out, keys in hand.
There was every possibility this was a fool's errand. Every chance it would get them killed. But so was every day and Nick was becoming a believer in doing what he could. He'd always had his heart in Atlanta, in Vasilescu, but he'd done that.
Nick had rebelled against his grandfather's traditional strong-arming ways, realizing early that everyone could have a lot if no one got too greedy.
Something he'd learned though was that people just got too greedy. The species wasn't very evolved and it was starting to depress him. A lot. "Are you ready?"
She nodded with a small smile, though if it was for anything but cover, he couldn't tell.
They wore long coats with thick padding at the necks. Sin had on a ball cap and a wig of short pale brown hair. They both wore sunglasses against a thankfully bright sun. Even their leather gloves looked perfectly in keeping with the day. Unless they were physically detained, no one would ever know this was them.
Having waited until fifteen minutes after the man left, they casually walked down the street, and went up to the Mechanic's door. Sin knocked, waited, knocked again.
When the door remained unanswered, they headed back down the walkway and directly to Gilligan's car as though it were their own. Even as they walked he began repeatedly pushing the button on the small device in his pocket.
Bracketing the car on either side, Nick immediately pulled his "key fob" and began openly trying the options. At the passenger side door, Sin was doing the same with her half of a carefully divided set of codes.
After a moment, he made a point to appear frustrated—the way anyone would if they went to their car and the fob wasn't working. He was about to hold it up, motion to Sin some inane act for any old biddies watching through their curtains, when the car beeped and blinked the running lights at them.
The door popped open and they both climbed in. There was no telling whose code had opened the door, and Nick couldn't care less. They'd gotten in.
Getting out was going to be harder. Because who would climb into a car, program the GPS and get out? So they had to go for a drive and get back before the Mechanic noticed his car was missing.
They didn't know how long he'd be out, but Sin voted that it was worth the chance and Nick had agreed.
"Two birds?" He asked and his sister nodded back.
He headed for Ann Evalyn's neighborhood.
As soon as Annika had made her comment, Sin had pressed the Dunhams for details. How was Kimmel out running around?
They'd grilled Annika and Owen.
The woman had looked like Ann Evalyn, but they hadn't gotten too close. Annika would have recognized her face, but it was hard to see without stalking her. The woman had picked up some piece of mail and grabbed a small towel by the door, clearly left there for returning from her run, waved to a neighbor, and headed inside.
Sin and Nick both agreed that was all wrong. Ann Evalyn was a bitch through and through. She didn't run and she sure as hell didn't wave to her neighbors.
The Dunhams had interrogated Sin in return, leading her to start telling about Ann Evalyn’s death. Which in turn left Owen nearly yelling, "No, no! No Sin! No Anni, everyone shut up!"
Owen Dunham was in enough shit with his open deal with Nick. Right now, the former agent knew everything and couldn't move anything. Nick stipulated they had to find Lee before anything could be negotiated with the FBI. Having Dunham on his side protected the ex-agent but also bought Nick a get-out-of-jail card should shit go sideways on them. Sin had no such deal, only the goodwill of the others.
She had sighed at them. "I am confident that Ann Evalyn Kimmel was deceased. And that's something I actually know a bit about."
Dunham had coughed into his hand, choking on air, as she said that. But in the end it only meant that Nick and Sin were driving around the neighborhood, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The dead didn't rise again, and this one sure as hell wouldn't have gone jogging.
Sin was messing with Gilligan's GPS and a moment later she exclaimed, "They've been trading the GPSes out!"
That got Nick's attention. "Who would do that?"
"Paranoid people!" She laughed but it came out more as a cynical bark. "I turned on the tracer in the unit and it doesn't even have last night when I followed him out to the other car."
"He could erase it." A good tech guy could dig out the info, but the standard tools allowed you to erase your tracks.
"No. It has tons of back information, just not for this car."
Nick nodded, and about five minutes later, he was turning into Ann Evalyn’s neighborhood, and trying to get his sister's attention from where it was focused on the panel that housed the built-in system. She sighed. Loudly.
"Nothing. . . . If the system was ever turned on, it's been erased since then. No matter what I try, it gives me an error code." At last she gave up on it and looked up at her surroundings.
"Wow." It wasn't surprised, but definitely not what she expected. "No police crime scene tape, no gawking neighbors. Her car is right there. I'm impressed."
Nick was, too. Impressed and concerned. The complete lack of any detail about the owner dying meant the Kurevs had come in, and fast. They had managed to remove the body without anyone really noticing, or else it was still in there. Nick told this theory to Sin.
"It's not still in there. Someone is living there as Ann Evalyn. The smell alone would be unbearable. The body's gone."
"Which means they figured out that she was missing very, very fast."
Sin nodded absently and Nick wondered, too, if Ann Evalyn had tipped the brothers off to her entrapment.
None of it boded well.
Owen had no idea what he was doing here. Except that he had every idea.
He followed Sin out of the car and into the brush separating them from the large boathouse building. Dressed in his casual clothes—did he own anything else anymore?—in colors and fabrics she picked from his suitcase to blend in.
What was he blending into, he wondered. Urban decay? Old boathouse?
Nick should be here. Except he couldn't be and that was Owen's own damn fault. Well, it was indirectly for not stating in no uncertain terms exactly what Nick could and couldn't tell him.
"You can't strike a deal with me then tell me you're headed off to perform yet another illegal activity!" He shouldn't be yelling. He rarely yelled. Except lately, when it was hard to keep his voice below alerting-everyone-in-a-mile level. "I'm not your get out of jail card! If you keep doing this shit, it gets harder to cut the deal and impossible to keep you out of prison."
He remembered grinding his teeth. Owen only hoped he wouldn't need massive dental work when he got home. They had to find Lee, quick.
"Someone needs to go with her!" Nick seemed to have plenty of practice at being angry without yelling. Just another thing that grated on Owen's nerves lately. He wanted to help. He just didn't want to be . . . Here.
"If you tell me and I don't stop you, then I'm not a very good representative of the law, am I?" It felt like yelling at a teenager. Nick looked like he didn't care or didn't understand. Owen had set him straight. "I'm your broker, you idiot. If you compromise me, you compromise your deal!"
"Are they really going to ask you about this?" Nick hadn't even flinched at being called an idiot and Owen wasn't sure if he was glad that it rolled off his back or mad that it didn't stick into him and hurt the way it was supposed to.
And the question just pissed him off. "No, probably not. Not this, specifically. But they WILL ask something that would require evasion if you tell me these things."
"You can't evade?" Nick asked, straight-faced.
Why was this conversation still going on? Owen wanted to bury his face in his hands, buy a plane ticket, and get the hell out. He didn't want to broker a deal for Nicolae Stelian.
But he did.
"No, Nick. I can't evade. I'm the worst liar on the face of the earth."
Nick's gaze suddenly flew beyond Owen's shoulder and he turned to find Annika nodding in agreement with his statement. She shrugged one shoulder and said simply, "Well, you are."
The conversation had somehow still gone on with Owen nearly yelling again, "No, I can't forget I heard this. You can't go do this. You can't or your deal is over."
So Owen wound up coming along with Sin. He consoled himself that he hadn't committed any crimes . . . Yet. He was merely skulking around, carrying tools used in the commission of crimes, and following a known and wanted criminal with the intent of committing a crime. He hoped he got to meet his youngest child face-to-face and not through bullet-proof prison glass.
Sin motioned him to tuck in tight against the wall, as though he wasn't trained in search and seizure procedures. He did what she told him.
They were on point two of the four point list—Nick and Sin having apparently 'scoped out' the bar the night before. They didn't give Owen and Annika any details and Owen didn't ask.
The sun was out, typical of a Chicago cold snap apparently. Sin had insisted that his clothes be matte colors and his shoes have common treads. He wasn't used to this.
They slunk through the bushes, Sin nearly disappearing into the sparse foliage even though she was barely a few feet ahead of him. Dressed in greys, like she'd managed to get him partially into, she was just another smudge on the unkempt boathouse wall. Owen tried to do the same.
They slid around to the front, the small parking area deserted, and headed straight for the door. Owen tucked in behind Sin, his Glock already in hand because he didn't like the feel of the place. Still, he kept it out of sight, prepared to act casual and wave to anyone who came by.
"Don't look." Sin spoke after trying the knob on the door.
Turning his head away, he waited through the clicks that indicated she was picking the lock. He told himself he didn't know that.
As they came through the door, a noise came from the back, instantly changing the rigor of Sin's stance. Even he thought, Lee! But he didn't move forward. Not yet.
The bright daylight outside bounced off everything and slightly illuminated an open space in front of them. But once Sin closed the door behind them, the dark inside was more than their eyes could take.
That part, he wasn't used to. He'd been part of assault teams that kicked their way in or used battering rams. They didn't go in and close the door behind them so no one would know that they were there.
His heart rate ticked up a notch. The corners were blanketed in darkness; he couldn't tell what might pop out at him, but Sin never faltered. A new revelation hit him: he'd always been taught to protect his own life. Every agent knew there were things they might die for, but agent safety was always made a priority.
Sin did no such thing.
She stood there inside the doorway, Owen at her back, ready to face bullets while her eyes still adjusted.
She must be made for the dark, because Owen's eyes hadn't yet adjusted and he'd always been one of the first in the crowd to dark adapt. He trusted her. He had to, she was already moving.
The sound came again from the back room.
A moan, a query buried beneath it.
Owen thought it could be a trap, but that didn’t matter, as Sin was leading. And she was smart enough to head to the quiet room. It only took seconds to get to the peeling, teal blue door that stood sentry to the second room. As Owen adapted to the dim interior, he saw the large warehouse was shortened by the two rooms cut into it for some kind of locked space.
He was turned, checking behind him, when the sound came again. But it was the sight his adjusted eyes saw that stopped him. "Hey."
He spoke softly, didn't use her name, made sure the sound carried no farther than the five feet separating them. It took her a moment to check in front of her before she turned around to look.
His hand still on the gun, he used the other to gesture into the room.
She nodded.
The square, dirty pillars went all the way to the roof.
The general debris along the floor showed someone had been coming and going recently. As Owen scanned farther into the room, no longer convinced someone was going to jump out before he and Sin opened one of the doors, he saw the damage in the far corner.
Something had been there. The floor showed signs of a struggle, maybe several of them. The position of the pillar matched the photo of Lee.
He didn't get Sin's attention, her focus had returned to the door in front of her and he saw that while he now gripped his gun in two hands, Sin used only one. Her other hand held a kama, a weapon he'd never heard of before encountering her work.
They progressed within kicking distance of the first door and placed themselves on either side of it. At her nod he bashed the door, barely getting his foot out of the way as she blazed in, a wraith streaming by.
She was shaking her head before he even entered.
The room was empty and the barely human noise came from next door.
Owen didn't trust the sound. It could be Lee, trying to call out through a gag or a hood. It could be a looped sound recording, enticing them to a door that would explode when kicked open. Owen had seen stranger shit.
Only he didn't think the darker possibilities mattered, and he and Sin did their choreographed dance at the second door, though with more trepidation. If a door was going to combust or hide men with machine guns it would be the one with the bait-sound behind it.
But as he pulled his foot back, Owen found he was still alive and Sin was rushing into the gap, unconcerned with what lay beyond. Through the opening all Owen could see was that she'd lowered her weapons as she dashed inside.
Sin figured she might as well be chewing gum as she stepped up the long, fancy driveway on Nick's arm. Her wig was in place, as was the overabundance of make-up and the leathers combined with cheap, buy-anywhere clothing. She'd leave her skin cells behind, but she couldn’t change that.
Sin knew what she was doing. She had a clear goal here: get into the Kurev house again, scout more info about the holdings, and get a glimpse of the new Ann Evalyn. What Sin wasn't sure of was if she was doing the right thing.
There were still two more locations that made Owen Dunham's list. New info might narrow it down, though Sin would bet hard their list was actually incomplete. The boathouse earlier had been proof that the Kurevs were up to far more than she had expected. But she tried to shake off the memory and focus on moving forward.
Ann Evalyn might not even be here. Sin might have gotten dressed up for nothing.
The concern that she'd made the wrong decision was new to her. While lives had sometimes hung in the balance, she always trusted her decision. This time the life was Lee's and the weight seemed more than she could bear, swaying her decisions one way then another.
Nick subtly reached out and touched one of the cars parked along the side of the drive, leaving fingerprints on it. They'd both rubbed their three middle fingers in a black light gel before walking up the drive. Sin had a spare tiny pot of it in her purse, Nick had one in his pocket, and they were marking the cars as they went by.
She reached out and touched the next one—three fingers against the paint, low on the support that bracketed the back window. It might be useful later to see who had been here.
They could mark household objects, too. While Sin didn't know how that might be useful, she was a regular boy scout of the underworld—always prepared. Nick almost smiled about something, but Sin was already speaking when she realized it.
"Three."
"Yes, Hayley." The conversation was a simple code, a reminder of their breakaway signal to each other. This wasn't the cleanest entry, but it didn't make sense to be obvious about it either.
Sin didn't like going in this way; she hadn't vetted the people here. At all. Well, some of them were Nick's people, but they wouldn’t act out tonight. They had strict instructions to fly under the radar until he gave the signal. He hadn't given it yet.
And she was walking into a situation almost completely out of her control.
Probably Ann Evalyn wouldn't be here tonight. How could she be? Wouldn't people recognize if someone tried to pass herself off as another person? Then again, Nick and Sin hadn’t made the list, they’d simply invited themselves. So maybe she would be here.
Sin wondered again if the gamble was worth it.
Then she forced the thought aside as she reached the front entrance and the doors pulled wide, the servant stood guard against the cold but not the intruders on the doorstep. Instead, he ushered them right inside.
They found their way back to the same party room, only this time Sin arrived well into the party. She listened with half an ear as Nick mentioned running into Hayley out on the street where she'd been forced to park so far back.
It took only a moment for a few hellos as a party girl looking for a good time. She fought the urge to make conversation.
Casually, she and Nick went their separate ways, friends for a walk up a long driveway, nothing more. She scanned the people around her, looking for this new Ann Evalyn, checking for faces from the last party, wondering if any of them saw through the alterations to her appearance and recognized Sin beneath.
The crowd was as dense as it had been the last time she'd been here. Only this time she knew what the Kurevs could do. Not just the picture that had been mailed. She understood now the broken jaws, shin bones protruding through the skin, untreated. She understood ragged fingernails, bloodied from being broken beneath the quick.
Previously she'd lumped the Kurev boys in with Nick to a certain extent; they ran drugs, guns, made money illegally. But she was off that bandwagon. The stories she'd heard in the last twenty four hours were as depraved as any she'd heard before.
Kaspar and Roman had no morals. None at all.
They trafficked in human lives, some of them kids.
She was thinking about the possibility that her trajectory might change. If Owen got enough information, there would be no stemming the tide. The feds would crash down on this place and Sin would have to slip away. Find the Mechanic, make sure he didn't tie up loose ends like Lee.
If the Feds came in, the Teflon brothers would lock up everything they could. She might never find Lee. But she'd gone hunting with Owen today and Owen Dunham operated only one way.
He was right. There had been only one choice, get the man to a hospital or let him die.
That was it. How they got him to a hospital was another story. A story Owen was writing while she and Nick were here, scouting, scouring, for anything. Just in case.
Her anger was laser sharp. Where before it had simmered just below the surface, now it pierced and she had a harder time playing the fool amongst the monsters.
For a moment, Sin thought of what she'd seen today, then thought back to what she'd done. Even recently. But she'd never moved without proof. While her methods were similar, her morals were very different. Her level of vetting a potential victim much clearer. Even Owen said he'd hesitated to bring her in more than once.
Had Dr. Dunham wanted to take her and Lee down, he could have. Where she'd always thought herself invincible, she understood now that she was a mere mortal like everyone else, and that she'd always had and always would have weak points.
It took a moment to remind herself to keep a happy face on. She was at a party and supposedly too stupid to worry about anything. That was why she almost walked into the line of sight of the woman in the red dress.
She casually ate a handful of chips, brushing back her dark hair. Her brown eyes smiled at her companion, and she might have spotted Sin had someone not called to her as he walked up.
"Ann Evalyn!"
She turned to him, giving a clear view of her face, halting Sin's breath and freezing time.
She pushed the button on her phone, signaling the abort to Nick and turned to walk out of the party.
It wasn't Ann Evalyn.
It was worse.