Wednesday, October 16
4:00 P.M.
Dallas, Texas
MOST DAYS SPECIAL AGENT Atticus Spenser loved his job—but today sure as hell wasn’t one of them. At the moment, he and his partner, forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Caity Cassidy, were “off the books,” working a special assignment: protect the interests of the tall, red-haired, pain in the ass striding beside them.
Fellow agent Alex “Dutch” Langhorne had always seemed more like a cactus needle swimming beneath Spense’s skin than a colleague, and as far as he could tell, the feeling was mutual. But during a recent fund-raiser for Texas governor and presidential hopeful, Matthew Cambridge, Agent Langhorne had found his wife, Cindy, brutally murdered; her nude body posed in an upstairs bedroom of the Worthington Mansion. And like any family, dysfunctional or no, when one of their own was in trouble, the FBI rallied.
So now, accompanied by Dallas police detective, Monroe Sheridan, they approached the newly cleared crime scene on foot in order to get the lay of the land. To Spense’s trained eye, the expansive grounds revealed no obvious escape routes or hiding places or even a decent place for a kid to build a fort—only yards of manicured green lawn, redbrick paving stones, and widely spaced trees. Spense’s family had lived a short stint here in Dallas, and the pungent scent of honeysuckle reminded him of that time.
“What are those?” he asked, spying some climbing bushes covered with familiar-looking orange berries.
“Pyracantha.” Caity’s knowledge of all things botanical sometimes got him wondering if her doctorate were really in horticulture. The smile she sent him made him glad he’d expressed an interest in the local flora.
If he were being honest, he’d have to admit his current foul mood was as much due to the fact his vacation had been canceled, yet again, as it was to his contentious relationship with Dutch. Spense had hoped to get Caity alone on a nice secluded beach somewhere far away from murder and mayhem. She needed to learn how to unwind, and he’d prepared the perfect tension-release plan: sand, sangria, and a whole lot of Spense.
Instead, here they were, sweating it out in the damn Dallas heat. He’d almost forgotten the way the humidity could turn a polyester shirt into a wet suit. Pressing a handkerchief to his forehead, he glanced over at his fellow agent, who didn’t appear inclined to break a sweat. Was it ice in Dutch’s veins keeping him cool or simply his European heritage? If anything ever happened to Caity, Spense knew he’d never be able to hide his distress. He applied the handkerchief to the back of his neck. He and Langhorne were cut from very different cloth.
“Dammit to hell.” Detective Monroe Sheridan’s expletive broke into Spense’s thoughts, and he looked up to find the source of the man’s consternation: A few yards ahead, in the mansion’s drive, a kid circled on a beat-up yellow bike. Steering with one hand, the boy appeared to be snapping pics on his phone with the other.
“Stop! Police!” Hand on a holstered Taser, Detective Sheridan charged straight at him.
Jackass. Spense’s temperature rose several points above Sheridan’s IQ—or at least above the man’s commonsense quotient. “Take it easy,” he called out to Sheridan.
Too late. The kid raised his hands, shouting, “Don’t shoot!” His front wheel lifted in the air, then the bike tilted, first dumping the boy on the ground and finally clattering on top of him.
Caity sped after Sheridan. It took Spense and Dutch only a few long strides to catch up to where she now knelt beside the fallen boy.
“What’s your name?” she asked softly as she began checking out his cuts and scrapes and examining his twisted limbs.
“My friends call me Artard, but my name is Aaron.” The kid’s voice came out high and shaky. Not surprising, considering he probably thought Sheridan had been ready to shoot him. Even if he knew the difference between a Taser and a pistol, from a distance, he couldn’t have told them apart.
“Well, which do you prefer?” Caity asked matter-of-factly, not hinting at the offensiveness of the nickname. Spense’s chest expanded. Caity was like that. She knew feeling sorry for the kid would cause him even more embarrassment. She understood a lot of things most people didn’t.
“Aaron.”
“All right, Aaron. I think you’ll live. You feel okay? Like you can stand up?”
Aaron’s gaze darted to Sheridan, and his eyes widened.
Caity threw an arm around him.
“Nothing to be scared of,” Dutch said. “You’re not in trouble or anything.”
“Oh hell yes, he’s in trouble. He’s interfering with my crime scene.” Sheridan folded his arms, glaring down at the boy.
“Not your crime scene anymore. It’s been cleared,” Spense reminded the detective.
“It’s still private property. I ought to arrest his little Artard ass for trespassing.” Sheridan bent and scooped a cell phone off the ground.
“Hey, you can’t take my phone!”
The kid was right. The detective needed a search warrant to look at the contents of the phone.
A mean glint came into Sheridan’s eyes. “I might still drag you down to the station. Haven’t made up my mind yet.” He made a show of scrolling through the pics. “Delete. Delete. Delete,” he said, tapping the phone. Then Sheridan grabbed the kid’s collar, as if to yank him to his feet.
Spense inserted himself between Sheridan and Aaron and knocked the detective’s hand away.
“Watch yourself, Agent Spenser, or else . . .”
“Or else what?” Spense spun around. He was a good half foot taller and had at least fifty pounds of muscle on the detective.
“Just watch yourself, that’s all.”
Spense took the boy by one arm, and Caity took him by the other, then they gently helped him to a stand. Blood oozed down from a scraped knee, and his shorts were dirty and torn, but other than that, he seemed to be none the worse for the tumble.
“Be sure to wash those abrasions with soap and water when you get home. A little Neosporin wouldn’t hurt either. But you don’t need stitches.” Caity was still scrutinizing Aaron’s injuries.
“He said agent? Are y’all with the CIA?” The kid had a Texas drawl, and again, Spense was reminded of his childhood. His family had moved out of Dallas, rather abruptly, when he was six. He didn’t recall much, but some distant part of him went nostalgic in a really weird way. Aaron’s nickname reminded him of what some had called him back in the day. Only then, nobody sugarcoated a thing. Retard, plain and simple was the name that had been hurled at him on the playground.
Caity brushed debris from Aaron’s shorts. “Not CIA. I’m a psychiatrist.”
Spense thumped the kid conspiratorially on the back. “I’m with the FBI. Special Agent Spenser.” He tilted his head at Caity. “Dr. Cassidy isn’t an agent, but she works along with us, helping to solve crimes. She’s what we call a civilian consultant.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
The kid had a pair. Spense liked him even more than when he’d first spotted him playing junior detective, checking out a major crime scene on a decrepit old bike that had probably been handed down from an older sister—most boys weren’t into yellow with flower decals. “I’m working on that, Aaron. Maybe you could put in a good word for me.”
“I don’t think she cares what a kid like me thinks.”
“Sure she does. See how her mouth is twitching over there? Every time she looks at you, she has to work real hard not to smile. That means she likes you. She likes you a lot.”
Aaron’s muted brown eyes brightened. “She does that with you, too. I’d say you’ve got a good chance with her.”
“You’re very observant, kid. I think you’d make a good profiler someday. In fact, you remind me of myself when I was younger.”
“You’re a profiler? Like on Criminal Minds?”
“Yep.”
“He’s a good one, too,” Dutch said, surprising Spense with a rare compliment and more conversation than they’d had during the entire forty-five-minute ride in traffic after Dutch had picked them up at the airport.
“I bet he could profile you down to a T,” Caity added.
“Would you profile me? Please?” Suddenly Aaron couldn’t take his eyes off Spense, and that made Spense feel an unexpected rush of responsibility toward him.
Sheridan dragged a hand across his face. “Look, I get it. I might’ve been a little hard on Artard here. But do you two have to keep making it up to him up all day long? We came here for a reason.”
“We have plenty of time,” Dutch said.
Spense wondered if he had a human side after all. Then again, maybe his colleague just wanted to avoid the crime-scene walk-through and Sheridan’s questions as long as possible.
Spense widened his stance, studying Aaron. “If I were to profile you, I’d start by noting that you’re a lover of Flaming Hot Cheetos.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Easy, there are red powder stains on the tips of your fingers,” Caity chimed in.
Aaron stuck his hands behind his back, hiding the evidence.
The kid’s giant grin alone was enough to keep Spense going, but the happy glow on Caity’s cheeks gave him an added incentive. Plus, he never minded showing off a little.
“You’re extremely loyal to your friends, even though you hate it when they call you Artard.” He lowered his voice. “By the way, if you don’t like that nickname, I think you should say so.”
“That’s horseshit. You got no way to know if he’s a loyal friend or not,” Sheridan protested.
“Sure I do. After all, he didn’t try to save himself by ratting out his buddy—the one who’s hiding just around the corner.” Spense jerked his head, and they all followed his gaze to a narrow trail of flattened grass in the yard—it looked to have been made by a bicycle tire and led straight to the side of the mansion. “And what else, let’s see . . . you hated girls until about six months ago, when you discovered that the most beautiful girl in the world goes to your school.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because you’re fourteen.”
“But how—”
“Easy. You’re obviously older than thirteen.”
“Obviously.”
“And if you were fifteen, you’d have your learner’s permit already. If you had your learner’s permit, you wouldn’t be checking out a crime scene on your bike. You’d have cruised by in the car, with your older sister as your driving supervisor.” Spense whipped his Rubik’s cube out, scrambled and unscrambled it, then handed it to Aaron with a flourish. “This is for you—I’ve got plenty more. Practice up, and you’ll find out what your brain can really do if only you’ll let it.”
“You’re some kind of a genius or something, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be too impressed, kid. The older sister was a lucky guess . . . sort of—that bike used to be hers, right?”
Aaron nodded.
“Want me to take a picture of you holding up my FBI creds?”
Caity held out her hand to Sheridan, wiggling her fingers insistently. He let out a long sigh before handing over the illegally confiscated phone.
“Say cheese,” Caity prompted.
After posing for a couple of shots, Spense scrawled his personal number on the back of his card and gave it to Aaron. “Call me next week, and if I’m still around, I’ll take you and your buddy down to the FBI building. We can have lunch in the cafeteria.”
At last, the buddy poked his head out from around the side of the mansion and began walking his bike toward them, slowly at first, then picking up speed. “Will you show us the X-files?”
Another true believer. If he had a nickel . . . Spense laughed and clapped Aaron on the back. “I think you guys are going to have to settle for a tour of the cafeteria . . . but maybe I can throw in the FBI gift shop, too. Now leave your information with Agent Langhorne in case we need to contact you.” He nodded at Dutch. “And then hit the road before Detective Hard-ass over there hauls us all downtown.”
As the boys walked their bikes off to the side and huddled around Dutch, Caity tiptoed up to whisper in his ear, “You’re going to make a great father someday.”
“If I remember my high-school biology correctly,” he replied, in a low tone, “I’ve gotta get past second base with you, first.”
A soft, seemingly involuntary sound came from her throat, and a pretty flush colored her cheeks.
He grinned. All signs pointed to his hitting a home run in the near future.
“Sorry to interrupt this little episode of Undateable,” Sheridan groused, “but we’ve got work to do.”
Now that Aaron was out of harm’s way, Spense nodded his agreement. There was a mystery to be solved, and he was itching to get to it.
Wednesday, October 16
4:00 P.M.
Plano, Texas
A SIMPLE HIT had been all that was ordered; however, the woman had earned a slow death, if not a magnificent one. Fortunately, Malachi’s reputation as the Thresher was spotless, and his various employers generally left the manner of homicide to his discretion. He touched the target’s forehead with his fingers, anointing her husk with the ointment—a blessing of sorts—then rose to his feet. He tilted his head and surveyed his work.
She looked quite at peace, lying there on her dingy kitchen linoleum, in spite of the messy way her insides were pushing and shoving their way out of her body cavity, as if trying to escape a cruel world.
Malachi did not hold a romantic view of the afterlife—rather he believed in ashes to ashes, dust to dust, for all but a chosen few. Certain lives were more important than others, and thus the accomplishment of taking them was that much greater: a truth that small minds could not comprehend.
The traditional view, as handed down from the pulpit of his mother’s church, was that all lives held equal worth. Thus, by logical extension, all men deserved the same death. But anyone with the courage to open their eyes and take a good look at the pinhead lolling beside them on the bus, the train, or in the next office cubicle would see that merely having the property of life does not in and of itself make a creature worthwhile. Amoebas live, but they do not matter. Perhaps a number of others might agree with him on that particular point, but then their puny minds would go on to delude them into believing that they were better than said amoeba.
Wrong!
Possessing the quality of a beating heart, the ability to think and emote, was simply not enough. Being human doesn’t mean you matter. Some men matter, but most do not. Malachi mattered precisely because he had the ability to discern the difference.
That was his gift: He could hear the hum of a human’s soul.
If said human had one, that was, because, of course, not everyone did.
He’d not heard the hum on his target today, but still, the woman had displayed a rudimentary spirit, trying to outwit him with lies and false promises in a futile attempt to get away. Such behavior was admirable, and even though she did not possess a soul, he knew he would take pleasure in her pain. Her courage marked her as more than an amoeba. Smiling at her shell, he slipped on his noise-canceling headphones, then vacuumed the room, wiped all surfaces clean of prints, and exited out the back door.
After stowing his vacuum in his trunk, he climbed into his new SUV. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the number, and as he’d feared, the call came from a certain employer—his one and only dissatisfied customer. Malachi could not allow his previously unblemished record to be spoiled by one little mishap. Especially a mishap that wasn’t even his fault. One way or another, he was going to have to clean up the mess in Dallas.