Diana sat open-mouthed, listening to Reese. She shouldn’t have been surprised. The other night she’d driven out of town to talk to Will after everything was cleared and they were dismissed from the scene Yulia Churkin had left behind.
Reese had pocketed the old picture Yulia tossed out, and there was nothing Diana could do about it. She’d been safer asking Reese to keep it, rather than have it logged as evidence, but was incredibly stupid to believe Reese would simply tuck it away and forget about it. Still somehow Diana had deluded herself into thinking this monologue would not come to pass. Yet here she was, listening to the words coming out of her friend’s mouth.
“You’re Cynthia May Beller. Born and raised in Chicago until the age of eleven, when your parents were killed during a home invasion.” Reese rattled the stats off as though they weren’t revelatory, as though they were simply the facts of a case, as though the identity of Cynthia Beller had been so easy to come by. That stupid fifth-grade yearbook was a killer. Her simple smile, her easy openness . . . it was all less than a year before she’d started to disappear forever.
Reese’s eyes were more cautious than her mouth. Even as she spoke, Reese was monitoring her reaction—and Diana was not prepared. She should have protested right away. At the first statement she should have told Reese the whole idea was ridiculous. I am not Cynthia May Beller; I’m Diana Williams Kincaid, born and raised in Texas. But she’d been too shocked to refute the words, and she was now stuck with the damning information pouring from Reese’s mouth.
“You and your sister, Gwendolyn—Wendy in her yearbook photo—were placed in foster care. And there’s not much on you after that. You managed to completely disappear by the time you turned eighteen.” Then Reese stopped spewing facts about Cynthia and started in on why Diana wasn’t real. “Diana Kincaid went to a defunct high school, which she didn’t graduate from. She has a GED. And no one in your hometown remembers the Williams family.”
Diana sat still for a moment, silent, not sure if she was more disturbed by what Reese had just rattled off or by the fact that Nick didn’t look the slightest bit rattled by it at all.
Reese had just laid her hand down; Nick was the wild card. It was him she looked to. “Nick?”
“I knew.”
“You knew?” Somehow Reese was the only shocked person in the whole scenario.
He nodded but seemed to be thinking deeply. There was no way to know if he was deciding what information to let out, how to let out the truth, or if he was simply fighting his way through the strong medication he was on. Diana made an unusual decision and decided to wait and not judge what he said.
“When you came into the department, your background check was good. You were already cleared by the station, and I’d recruited you myself. But when I had free time, I dug a little, made a few phone calls. The defunct high school was concerning, since you were so young. And then there was the work history—when I tried to follow it, all the places were gone. There was no one to verify who you were, what you’d done. That was unusual. It could happen, but it was odd.” He shrugged. “Your past doesn’t completely add up.”
Diana nodded. They were right, her past didn’t, not the way she’d presented it to the station, anyway. She waited, wondering when one of them would bring up the Christmas Killers.
Nick looked her in the eyes and she braced. It must have been obvious, because Reese reached out and took her hand. It was all Diana could do not to shake the hold off, not to use the back of her hand to shove Reese out of the way or her foot to push Nick back into the couch. She could run. She could disappear. All they would be able to say was that they’d seen one of the Christmas Killers, but she was gone.
“Diana,” he looked to Reese as though her presence made a difference in what he said, or maybe as though his medicine made him momentarily forget she was there. It was just what Diana needed: a highly placed person knowing everything about her. Well, not everything. Not yet.
“Diana,” he started over. “I know why people change their identities. And we’re all too aware of what can happen in foster care.” He looked to Reese again, and this time her friend nodded, still not letting go of Diana’s hand, still keeping her in that uncomfortable holding pattern. “Neither of us is going to say anything.”
Reese jumped in. “I have the picture. Here!” She reached into her pocket and pushed the old, folded, and worn yearbook photo toward Diana. “You do whatever you need, but there’s no evidence now. There were no cameras back there and I never reported the picture. It’s as good as gone.”
Holy shit.
Reese and Nick had written her off as an abused child. . . . She took the picture from Reese and, while the other two watched, ripped it into tiny pieces before standing and dumping it into Nick’s kitchen trash.
Let them think she had completely disavowed her previous life. They were looking at her strangely, but it served her purpose that an abused kid might want to make it as though that other life had never existed. On the contrary, when she really thought about it, Diana was proud of Sin’s ambition, her ability to accomplish something, that she’d made a difference. Even if that difference was smaller than she’d thought. Even if that life was now charging at her from behind the shadows, reaching out to grab her and pull her back in.
She didn’t need a picture to remember the child she once was.
And she didn’t need evidence waiting around where someone—anyone—could find it. Apparently Sin and Lee weren’t buried as deeply as she’d thought, as she’d intended.
She came back and sat down. “I’m Diana now.”
Reese nodded and seemed that she was going to leave it alone, but then she turned back to Diana. “But how did you know it was Churkin?”
Thinking fast, Diana cut corners off the truth and held it up. “I suspected Nick was in with the Vasilescus, and that meth house bust seemed odd—new meth, upper-scale customers. I went looking for Vasilescu connections . . . and, God bless the Internet, but the name Kurev came up.” Yeah, it had come up because she’d repeatedly searched it, but she didn’t say that. “There were photos. I figured out our guy was Ivan, and then I looked through any known associates and saw her and another suspected hit man: Stanislav Shvernik.”
She’d said that before thinking through the ramifications. She’d gotten that info from Owen Dunham. It was entirely possible that the two assassins had no ties to the Kurev mafia family in any official records other than the FBI’s. Diana just hoped she didn’t have to explain that one.
“Shvernik?” Reese asked.
Nick took up the reins, and Diana wondered how he was going to say that he knew this information. “He’s another assassin much like Churkin. He’s not as clean, record wise. But mostly the same kind of work. Precision, tactical hits. That kind of no-evidence-left-behind operation. No room brooms for these two.”
This time Diana played the staring game, waiting for Nick to give up some connection to the Kurevs. She didn’t have long to wait, but it wasn’t Nick who gave it up.
Reese sighed. Obviously this one hurt, but it had probably hurt her more in the finding of it, less now in the telling. It was a shame she’d fallen for Nick; it wouldn’t do her any favors in life. “Nick, you’re not safe here.”
He pointed at his head wound, the nasty gash, the stitches, and the missing hair that bared it all. Diana wasn’t sure if he was saying he couldn’t go somewhere else because he was injured or if he was merely pointing out that he wasn’t safe anywhere.
“Nick.” Reese tugged at the issue, like the determined dog she was. “The most powerful mafia family in the US sent an assassin after you. You can’t stay here.”
“I wasn’t safe at the hospital either. We’re best with each other.”
Reese wasn’t paying attention. She was looking at something in her brain, her eyes focused on the middle space, and Diana knew she was playing with some of the pieces she already had, seeing how other edges fit together. She didn’t think she’d like what Reese came up with.
Bingo.
“So the Kurevs run Chicago and they’re after Nick. And Diana, your family was killed in an unsolved home invasion in Chicago.” She looked Diana in the eyes, sharp and focused now, and Diana felt the pieces snap into place. “Was your parents’ murder a Kurev hit?”
Well, shit. Knowing she couldn’t get out of it, Diana only nodded.
“Are they maybe here after you, too?” Reese’s head tilted, as she immediately recognized that eleven-year-old Cynthia and thirteen-year-old Gwendolyn were left alive at the end of the hit, even though they’d been home and seen the whole thing happen. Reese’s eyes came back to focus on her, and Diana decided next time around she was going to have dumber friends. “Was leaving you girls alive a mistake? Are they trying to clean up the witnesses?”
Diana almost let her breath whoosh out of her lungs in sheer relief. Okay, smart friends still allowable. If you didn’t give them all the pieces they made the parts they had fit together. “I think so.”
“Holy shit, Di! You were running from the mob!”
“It was safer if you didn’t know that. But yeah, it’s as good a reason as any to change your whole identity.” That, at least, was completely true.
Reese seemed to stop and absorb for a minute. Diana could almost hear the gears in her brain turning, but she was ready to ask a question of her own. On more solid footing with this one—Nick was in the hot seat this time—she had enough of the answer to judge if he was telling the truth and decide if the rest of it was real, too.
Ironically, Reese beat her to it. The blond ponytail bobbed with thought, and then her mouth opened. “Nick, your recent teaching trips to Chicago are pretty suspicious in light of the Kurev development.”
Yes, Nick, they are . . . Diana thought. Brown eyes darted to her; he knew it, too. But Diana waited, hoping he believed she knew the whole thing, and thus would tell them all of it. She raised her eyebrows, making sure he understood the ball was in his court.
“I do lecture.”
“I know.” Both women said it at the same time. They had each been recruited through one of his very dynamic classes. He never said, “Come join the PD,” but he’d made it sound like an incredible job. And he hadn’t oversold anything.
“I went to Chicago to talk to the Kurevs.”
“Why?” Reese pulled back, for the first time actually affronted by something in the conversation. She hadn’t even flinched when he let out that his own grandfather tried to kill him, but a sit-down with the Kurevs and she suddenly seemed appalled.
So Nick dropped another bomb. “Nothing leaves this room. . . . Vasilescu is under new management.”
“You?” Diana asked.
“That’s why he shot you.” Reese filled in.
The acknowledgment came only in that he kept going from there. “I had to establish boundary lines with the Kurevs. Tell them they couldn’t move their pink meth here. Explain that Ivan wasn’t killed on my watch.”
Crap. The conversation could not turn this way. As far as Diana knew, neither of them had a clue she’d killed Ivan. While this may be the perfect time to wring out what they did know, Diana found she wasn’t quite ready for the answers. So she waited quietly, hoping that would change the direction of the conversation.
Her hopes were only partly answered. And not answered well enough.
“Turns out, they don’t want to move their meth, and they don’t really believe me about Ivan. Apparently, he was here looking for some old assassin. Someone who decimated the Kurevs several years back. I don’t know that that person is here. We haven’t run into him.” He leaned back on the couch. “Ladies, my head hurts. Can we continue this later?”
Having effectively shut down the conversation, he asked for more Percocet. Reese and Diana agreed that he couldn’t be moved. So they loaded guns and set up watch times. Leaving Nick on the couch where he was already asleep, Reese settled into his bedroom while Diana took first watch.
It was only moments before she was the only one awake. She paced the house at regular intervals, checked the street out front and the back fences. She used the open space of the kitchen for practicing, as she had in the old days. She imagined Leopold, Mai, Svelichko . . . watched them die again. Remembered her “tiger-proof” fighting dummy and practiced kicking her new imaginary opponent in the head.
She found a few ready weapons around the house: a full wine bottle and a broken piece of chair rail waiting for repair. She carried her Springfield, loaded and ready. And she heard Reese awaken and come into the kitchen a bit before she was due on watch.
Her friend rubbed sleep from her eyes, the sweatshirt and yoga pants having doubled as pajamas quite nicely. At first it sounded like she was still half asleep, the statement seeming disjointed and off topic. “I see you.”
Diana nodded.
“Nick says the Kurevs came looking for an assassin. I easily found the Christmas Killers from my phone web search. Diana?”
Her jaw hardened, but she didn’t stop running the scenario in her head. She struck out with a fist, right hand, arm straight, thumb side up, power from the shoulder and hip. Pulling that hand back before anyone would even register that it had shot out, she moved her right foot in front, advancing and bringing her left fist up under the chin area, following it with another rapid hit. This time her hands stacked behind where the head would be, pulling down and bringing the chest area in contact with her knee that was rapidly coming up.
She did all of it silently, hardly acknowledging Reese’s presence or what her friend was really seeing.
Reese waited until she finished, then asked softly, “Don’t you bow at the end?”
Shaking her head, Diana stared straight ahead. “Not this time. Bowing is a sign of respect.”
“Do you think Nick knows?” The turns in the conversation had been whipping her thoughts so fast that Diana figured her headache was only beaten by Nick’s gunshot. She shrugged in answer.
“I don’t think he does. I won’t fill him in unless you want me to.”
Diana shrugged again and went back to beating up her imaginary opponent.
Not so imaginary any more.
His head swam and he pushed his fingers into his side, as though he could simply plug the holes and make the bleeding stop.
Will glanced down at the amount of blood on the seat. It was quite a bit. More than it should be. Looking up, he stared suddenly into the grill of a huge trash collection truck, seemingly almost on top of him.
Grabbing the steering wheel tight enough to blanch his knuckles, he yanked it sharply to the right, then veered wildly back into his own lane, his heart no longer beating.
Two cars honked. Another person yelled.
Thank you, Chicago.
The thought passed in and out of his brain, quickly followed by wondering how the EMTs would realize he didn’t lose all this blood from the crash. Because he would crash if he didn’t make a decision soon. So he made one.
Hitting the freeway, counting on the bull barriers to at least keep him from killing someone head on, Will went south on 90, heading towards Indiana, Gary specifically.
Forcing his eyes open wider helped keep him in a mild amount of pain, which helped keep his head clearer—though clearer was definitely a relative term. He really thought he’d gotten away clean.
Phone, phone, phone.
Will removed his fingers from the hole in his left side, briefly wondering if he’d found the only one or if there were maybe more. Both hands slippery now, he dug through his side pocket, the movement shooting painful flares through his wound. None of it boded well for his future.
He was grateful for the small, cheap burner phone. It had actual buttons to push, a benefit when trying to dial with wet, bloody hands. Shaking now, looking down at the phone and back up at the road in a pattern he could no longer time accurately, he dialed an old number from memory.
Three rings later the voice hit him like ice water, jerking him awake and shaking him to pay attention. Will watched the road signs, trying to calculate his exit through thoughts as slippery as his hands.
The voice on the line got exasperated. “Hello? Hello? I can’t hear you. I’m hanging up now.”
“No!” Will nearly yelled it, jerking the wheel and pulling the car back from where he’d drifted out of his own lane. He could not get stopped by the PD. That would be the end of him. “Todd?”
He’d contemplated an ER visit, then discarded it. He could break into a pharmacy, but nothing at this time of night would be the same as he remembered it. The small, family-owned shop he remembered might not even still be there. Also, his chances of getting out clean were slim to none. Luckily, the phone number and the sound of that voice had stayed the same.
“Lee, is that you?”
“Yes.” Will nearly cried it.
“I kept this number just in case you ever called. I just wanted to know that you weren’t really dead.”
“I almost am. I need you.” He traded hands on the wheel, barely able to hold on now for the blood smeared everywhere. He pushed his left hand back into the hole on his side, and tried to keep the small phone stuck under his chin. Carrying on a conversation—this conversation—was almost more than he could do. But if he didn’t, he wouldn’t survive the night. “Do you still have that office in Gary?”
“Yes.” There was a question in the one word and Will rushed to fill the space.
“Meet me there, fifteen minutes. Don’t say anything to anyone . . . please.” He pushed his fingers further into the hole in his side, not sure if that helped to stem the blood flow, but the pain did help keep him alert. “I’ll be around back.”
“Sure thing. I have to leave right now, though.”
“See you in a few.” Will disconnected, thinking that his brother didn’t know him as Will Kincaid at all. Didn’t know him with dark hair. Didn’t know him with the extra muscles and the hard expression he’d acquired over the years. Didn’t know he’d also acquired a wife and another life. Didn’t know him.
He tracked the place from memory; the strip mall was attached to a larger shopping center now and had been upgraded and refaced in recent years. His brother was doing well for himself. Will slipped the car around to the back door.
Waiting proved more difficult than driving. The movement had kept him awake. Other drivers would honk if he started to veer off the road or into one of them. But here, the lights were dim, the parking lot was quiet, and there wasn’t much except the hope of seeing Todd one more time to keep him from drifting off into the black quiet that his blood loss offered up.
He’d done just that—slipped away—what felt like only a moment before the car door was thrown open and his brother yelled, “Holy hell, Lee!”
Eyes going wide at the sound, Will got the first sight of his brother in almost eight years.
“Shot.” It was all he could manage to say as he looked up into eyes the same blue-gray as his own. “Sorry.”
“Let’s get you inside.” Todd scooped him up under the legs and behind his back to slide him out of the car, but was only able to prop him up and help drag him to the back door of the complex.
It seemed to take forever for his brother to find the key and lead him down the hall to the farthest back room—which was clearly decorated for the youngest patients at the dermatology clinic. His criminal brain taking over, Will decided that at least the kids’ room was the last place anyone would think to look for blood spatter.
“Aaggh.” He couldn’t keep the yelp in as he climbed up onto the standard office bed. Footprints lined the hallway in a dull red, mostly from his left foot, where the blood had soaked down his pants.
“Keep pressure on it. I don’t know what I can do here; I may have to send you to the ER.”
Will nodded. “If you do, I’m a homeless guy you found and tried to help.”
“Yeah, right.” Todd used a finger to circle his own face and then pointed at Will’s.
Will pointed up to his head. “Dark hair.”
“Shut up. Drink this; you need fluids.” He shoved a bottled water at Will. “Let me look.”
Obeying, Will sucked down almost half the bottle. The water felt so good, he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his brother stood there, fistful of gauze held ready, gloves on. He had a tray set up, sterile paper lining it. Somehow he’d even laid out sutures and several scalpels and clamps when Will blinked. Todd used his foot to hook the stool behind him and wheel it into place, sliding it right under him as he set his butt down. “Let go now.”
Todd flipped his clear visor down, then looked at the hole in Will’s side, cutting at the fabric and gently peeling it out of the way. The wound didn’t pulse anymore, just oozed thick red blood that his brother kept dabbing and soaking up, his head tilting one way then another.
Todd looked older but still as Will remembered him. He looked much the way Lee had looked a decade ago—a middle-class, professional male. He still had on the button-down shirt and gray slacks he’d probably worn into work today. Maria, his wife, had probably cooked him dinner and run the kids around. The words were out of Will’s mouth before he realized he needed to ask, “How’s Maria? The girls?”
“Maria is happily married to a man named Arthur Middleton.”
“What!” Will almost sat up. He’d checked up on his brother periodically. Internet searches revealed he was living in the same house, at the same job, but Will hadn’t seen anything about the divorce. Todd pushed him back but kept looking into the hole in Will’s side as he continued cleaning it.
“I get the girls every other week. Week off, week on. It works.”
“Holy shit, Todd. What happened?”
A sigh, a push with the gauze. “You aren’t shot. You have a piece of what looks like stucco lodged in you.”
“Shit. Can you pull it out? Then give it to me. You don’t want that here.”
“Is it nuclear?” Todd almost grinned. “Oh, it’s evidence. Running from the mob?”
“You’re very funny.” He tried the old glare on his brother.
“I’m actually very serious. Look at you.”
Will laid his head back. Todd and Maria had seemed so stable. It just proved that you could never tell what went on in a family. “I’d rather you tell me what happened with Maria while you dig it out. Can you?”
“I can try. Hold this.” He pushed Will’s hand into place, holding the gauze while he stood and drew up something in a syringe. Will didn’t ask and just sat still while he was shot full of local anesthetic and told it was the best he was going to get in a dermatologist’s office. “Maria freaked out after Sam and Bethy died. I thought you were in with the mob. . . .”
Will saw the opening for what it was and filled it with what he could. “I didn’t know. Not until just before Sam and Bethy.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. But Maria thought you’d turned, that you’d brought it to all our doorsteps. I was convinced you were alive, and she thought I was crazy. And she’d just lost her best friend and her niece in a horrid way and thought I wasn’t upset enough about it.” He turned back to Will and poked at his exposed side a little bit. “Do I need to be listening for sirens?”
“I don’t think so. I wasn’t anywhere that would report this, and even if they did, no one has the info on the car and no one followed me.” He felt pressure and a little pain, but managed to stay still as his brother dug in his side.
“Got it.” Todd held up a chip of dirty white painted stucco covered in Will’s blood.
It almost hurt more to have the thing out. What did hurt more was Todd diving back in and pulling out chip after chip while he talked. “I think every marriage has a breaking point that it won’t survive. Some marriages are stronger, some are weaker, and ours wasn’t very strong at all when it came down to it.”
Will winced. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t have any idea that this came back to hit you, too.”
“Don’t act like it was your fault. I married a pretty girl, thinking all women were emotional creatures to be coddled and cared for. Looking back, I didn’t think much more of her than that. It wasn’t you.”
God, that sounded familiar. He and his brother had been two of a kind. Todd didn’t let him wallow. He changed the subject, pulling the deep stuff out of the conversation and simply pushing it aside, an old family trait. “So, aside from running from the mob, what have you been up to?”
What could he tell? He didn’t want Todd involved any deeper than he already was. “How do you know I was running from the mob?”
A stark, deep laugh rolled from his brother as he yanked yet another stucco chip from Will’s side.
“Ow!”
“Shut up.” Todd laughed the words at him. “You come in here, shot up and running from something. Don’t bitch about the service. You’re going to live; now lie still.”
He had a point. Will would have shrugged if it didn’t hurt. He planned to let the whole “running from the mob” thing drop. But Todd didn’t.
“You worked for an organization that was later revealed to be in deep association with and wholly owned by Kolya Kurev, head of the local mafia. Your death was suspicious.”
“My death was clean!”
“There was no body.”
Will protested. “The river current would have taken it away.”
The droll look on his brother’s features told Will what a great job he’d done of killing himself. “Yes, that’s why you’re here now, bleeding on my table.”
“Do you have the girls this week? New wife?” Will suddenly wondered if he’d pulled Todd away from important things.
“Nope and nope.” Todd was probing the wound again, poking at the surrounding skin and apparently picking out smaller chips of the motel. “Girls are with Maria and Arthur. I recently broke up with my latest girlfriend. I was watching TV by myself and had just cracked open a beer.”
“Sorry you missed out on your beer.” He was going to be all right, Will thought. And he got to see his brother.
Todd expressed almost the same thing. “Well, I wish you weren’t trying to bleed to death on me, but it is good to finally see you. I’m about ready to try closing you up.”
That was a good thing.
“This is going to hurt a bit and take some time. But it’s all I’ve got.” Todd held up an instrument that resembled a metal stylus. At Will’s frown, he explained. “It cauterizes but it’s tiny, for derm stuff. Not for wounds. So you get to get cauterized without general anesthetic about a thousand times.”
“Is that necessary?” He eyed the instrument with trepidation.
“That depends. Do you want to drastically improve your chances of healing up okay?”
Will closed his eyes and thought of Diana. “Yes.”
Todd sat back down and started wiping away at the wound. Will thought that felt uncomfortable until he felt the electric zing of the instrument. He heard it make a soft sound a little too similar to a bug zapper going off, and after a moment he caught a whiff of burnt flesh—his own. “You could have—agh!—warned me.” He spoke around zaps.
“You are my brother. You disappeared for years, let us all think you’re dead, and then show up late at night with what you claim is a bullet wound.”
Yeah, Todd was right. Will was getting the better end of this deal. He laid back and closed his eyes again. He pictured Diana in her uniform, leaving for work. He could almost see the little house in White Oak with flowers he’d planted out front blooming in the springtime. All the things were gone, but he had the memories, and he still had Diana.
His brother zapped away for a while, Will holding himself as still as possible. It was hard not to flinch. Todd’s words seemed to come out of nowhere.
“So who is she?”
“Who?” It was a bad cover.
“Please. I saw you after Sam and Bethy died. You were raw and in pieces, and you were . . . for all intents and purposes, dead. But you’re alive now. Not just existing, but . . . you’re trying to get to something. Someone.”
Todd zapped him a few more times and then started wiping at the areas around the major hole in Will’s side. He then zapped at those wounds too.
Will must have gone lightheaded. Surely Todd didn’t say what Will heard.
“Is she the other Christmas Killer?”