The table was pretty standard. Owen thought it looked like every other conference table he’d ever sat at. It was made of that nice, heavy kind of hard wood that let you know it had cost money. That seemed the only purpose of the quality of the wood. Conference tables didn’t get chipped from small children banging knives and forks and god knew what into them. It also had a really nice finish. Again, he couldn’t figure out why. This one wasn’t in any danger from crayons or Tonka trucks filled with too many Barbies to meet any seat belt safety laws. He sighed. Owen wanted another child.
But it wasn’t like he was home enough for the one he had. And his wife would likely wise up and leave him one of these days. He gave more of his time to serial killers than he did to her. What was ‘I love you’ when his actions spoke otherwise? He was just so tired. He hadn’t slept in long enough that he was wondering if a nice pine table would have a noticeable softness difference if he just laid down his head . . . right here . . .
His brain had blocked out the voices. His grudge ninja had thankfully kept him out of town during the last of the ‘let’s all share’ conferences his Agent in Charge insisted on. These meetings were one of the few things that he truly thought Bean was an idiot about.
Brandow’s voice was droning as it presented the third of three cases he was working. “Jefferson, I think this body that washed up may be your missing Russian mafia guy. Initial matching of hair and blood type look positive. We’re waiting on full scale DNA. We didn’t rush it because, well, he’s not going anywhere.”
Owen heard the slap of photos hitting the table, but didn’t look up. He was wondering what he might do if he were home with his wife right now. Charlotte was in school . . . maybe they could make good use of that nice, cheap pine table they had in the dining room.
Brandow’s voice cut through again. “He washed up on the Jersey Shore. It’s possible his buddies did him in, but this isn’t their style.”
Another voice‒Owen wasn’t paying enough attention to recognize it‒commented. “Looks like someone went baby-harp-seal on him.”
That had everyone standing up and looming over to get a better look. But as the gears clicked into place, Owen practically scrambled across the table to pull the pictures from the hands of whoever held it. He didn’t see the agent, only the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven glossy of the bloated body laid out at the morgue.
Even with the wet expansion of the naked skin, and the reality that a photo always lost, puncture wounds were visible everywhere. A particularly large one bored through the man’s flaccid dick. The others were neat and small, but you could have fit a quarter through that one. Shit.
But the damning evidence was the slice work. More violent looking than in previous cases, it was definitely his. “This is my ninja.” Owen looked up at Brandow and Jefferson for the first time. “Can I get copies of all this?”
“I thought your ninja left bodies with big red bows? Nothing of the sort here. No throwing star marks on the chest, no tiny fibers providing evidence of paper tacked into him. This is a new M.O. then?”
Owen didn’t know any of that. It wasn’t like his ninja not to mark his kills. “What’s the death date?”
Jefferson shrugged. “We’re waiting on testing. Like I said, he’s mafia, so we aren’t about to go after his killer full score. We aren’t in any real hurry here.”
But Owen was.
Jefferson must have seen it. “Chill, Dunham.”
Not bloody likely. He still held the photo clasped tightly in his hand, his half-dead mind now churning like butter. Why would the ninja dump the body? He’d never dumped anyone in the water before. Not even that Korean on the docks. The ninja had left him all of ten feet from the bay, trussed up with a bow. Was Leopold not worthy of a bow?
That couldn’t be it. Leopold was worthy of three. Maybe the body just didn’t fit all the articles that needed to be clipped to it, so the ninja didn’t try. Or maybe the ninja had done all of that, and the mafia had found him and disassembled him before dumping their dead comrade into the water.
That was more likely.
Owen discarded that as fast as it came. There were no star marks. The ninja had never done this one up. Was he interrupted? Or had he simply anticipated that the family would get there first? Did he think, like Owen did, that the Russians would have noticed him missing long before the cops got to him?
That would mean that the ninja didn’t want to leave the bow and the articles for the mafia. Why? Could they ID him if they had the clues?
Owen looked up, only to realize that in his crazed thinking he had left the meeting and was walking back to his office. Startled that he’d done such a thing, and stolen Brandow’s photos in the process, he waited to hear Bean’s voice yelling down the hall to him. When it didn’t come, he opened his door and began jerking open file drawers. He dumped copy after copy of the articles the ninja had tacked to various bodies.
These were his own copies, already transferred onto regular sized white paper, each clearly marked with the date it was found and the name of the victim along with the date of death. Somewhere in here was a clue to who the ninja was. A strong enough clue that it hadn’t been left for the mafia to find. Because they would recognize him.
Maybe he was one of them turned traitor. Maybe that was how he knew where to find them, how to get into their homes.
Owen poured over the papers for a few hours before he needed coffee. He hadn’t found it yet. But he would.
He called Annika to tell her not to expect him for dinner, and he wondered if there was any underlying bitterness in her sweet acceptance. But he didn’t have time to dig for it, or try to fix it. Not now.
Ten and a half hours later he sat at his desk staring at the same articles. They’d been arranged and rearranged numerous times. Notes had been made in the blank spaces down the sides. Owen had searched the names of those who’d been implicated in crimes and, figuring the ninja wouldn’t implicate his own work, tried to see who was missing. There were no sounds beyond the door. Not that any could have overcome the roaring in his brain. The office was officially closed for the night. The front desk was no longer manned. Every other light in the hallway was off, and security guards made random checks. Which Owen thought was a hysterical waste of taxpayer money, since whoever broke into the FBI wouldn’t be thwarted by a rent-a-cop. Nor were the guards anywhere near as well trained or armed as the men and women they were ‘protecting’.
But the man on his floor was nice enough, and Owen said ‘hi’ as they passed on his way back from one of his too few breaks. His fresh cup of coffee almost sloshed in his hand as he heard the man say ‘hello’ to Nguyen behind him.
Owen turned. “You’re still here?”
“Yeah, your damned ninja prints won’t let me sleep.”
He didn’t have to clarify. The scientist meant footprints. They hadn’t gotten a single fingerprint from the guy at any kill. “What about them?”
Nguyen cracked a huge smile.
Owen could only smile in return. He hadn’t figured out yet what he was going to get from the articles, but Nguyen had something from the lab for him that should come gift-wrapped, that was for certain.
“Your ninja wears size ten Skechers.”
Yeah . . . he waited.
“Only when he’s on a job. The weight in the tracks isn’t right. He did a good job with it. But that’s what was bugging me. He didn’t press into the ground right. And that’s because the ball of his foot is about three-quarters of an inch further back than it ought to be.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Your ninja wears a size seven or eight on a regular basis. The ten isn’t his regular shoe size. And he’s been going to a hell of a lot of trouble to throw us off his tracks. Literally.”
Lee sat back in his car, not tired at all. His lighter hair startled him every time he caught a glimpse of it in the rearview mirror. Occasionally he cranked the engine and drove around the block. He stopped in a new but equally shaded parking spot each time.
The clunker/kitty had served its purpose, staying unobtrusive and running well. If Sin realized she’d been followed she didn’t show it. Lee was unsure until she had arrived at the motel and locked up her car. She’d looked around as she manually clicked the lock into place on the small cream-colored sedan that she drove. She walked to the end of the hall, returning with a soda in her hand, and Lee had to wonder where the hell she’d kept any money on that dress or if she’d just jacked the drink right out of the machine.
Then she let herself into room 113 with no pretense of subterfuge and disappeared behind the deep green door riddled with peeling paint revealing that it used to be orange. The curtains twitched. And, while Lee knew the night would be uninteresting, he was interested.
It was about four a.m. when he circled the block again. This time parking in the spot next to her car. He, too, fetched a soda from the machine at the end of the hall and, returning to his vehicle, he dropped his change beside her sedan. When he stooped to pick it up he stuck a cheap tracking device on the underside of her car.
He’d had good luck using one on Norikov, which was funny because the mafia son should have been sweeping his car every time he got in. But he’d missed Lee’s, maybe because it was so cheap and low-tech, and he’d died because of it. Maybe Sin wouldn’t see either.
Lee pulled out of the lot and this time parked across the street. He stayed behind trees, keeping to where he could only see the car through a slit in between the massive trunks. He had to have a view of the car. If Sin was smart enough to look for a bug, then she’d also be smart enough to pop it off and leave it there in the parking lot. That way, anyone who was just watching the bug would sit quietly, thinking the car hadn’t moved, and only when they got suspicious would they discover they’d been tracking an empty parking space.
Lee wasn’t going to be that person.
It was seven hours later that Sin came out. And she looked a hell of a lot more like ‘Cyn’ to him. Her hair was pulled halfway up in a barrette that had gone out of style before he’d shed his old skin and gone to ground. Sam would never have been caught dead in what the girl was wearing‒baggy sweat pants and a red turtleneck that fitted nothing. There was also a large, black-framed pair of glasses sitting on her nose. Lee laughed out loud.
She dumped her stuff in the car and disappeared from view. He frowned until she returned a few minutes later with a small receipt in her hand, presumably from checkout. He wondered if she had paid by credit card and if there was a record of Cynthia May Beller staying here last night. His frown pulled tighter.
Still, when she pulled out of the lot he hung back, then stayed a good distance behind her. There was enough traffic here and enough side streets crossing that he needed to keep reasonably close. The same problem luckily also afforded him cover. So he carefully balanced between too close and too far with the cars. But he didn’t think he was in much danger of Sin spotting him.
Flipping the switch on the tracking device, Lee listened as the car was filled with an obnoxious beep beep beep. The speed of the synthetic chirp was correspondent to the receiver’s distance from the bug. It got a little longer when she made it through a stop light that he didn’t, but he caught up in time to see her take a turn and aim for the freeway on-ramp.
In the past several years he’d often followed people. He’d often stayed awake and alert for days on end. But he couldn’t remember ever being this jazzed about following someone he didn’t plan to kill.
Sin hit the gas and Lee hung back a little further, allowing the beeping of the bug to space out as he got a little distance from her. Occasionally he got close enough to get a visual, especially when they were approaching exits. She could turn off and he wouldn’t know it except that the bug would get very far away very quickly. He didn’t want to have to turn around at the next exit and backtrack and play a bad game of ‘hotter/colder’ at an unfamiliar stop.
Cars in between shielded him from her view, and then there was the forgettableness that he had worked so hard for which worked to his advantage as well. He’d slipped a dark ball cap on his head, and wore it low. She probably wouldn’t recognize him if he pulled abreast of her, but he didn’t take that chance.
Two hours and no stops later, she exited onto a cross road that was smaller and seemed to lead to better places, but it wasn’t a stop, only a turn. A single gas station graced the exit, and the building didn’t look as though anyone had graced it in a long while.
She drove until she hit a small town and, much to Lee’s surprise, she pulled into a rental car office.
Son of a bitch.
He lost her. She didn’t come out of the office. The bug was on the cream colored sedan and would now beep incessantly from the parking lot until the next person rented it. He laughed a bitter laugh from his spot across the street in the shade. Sin didn’t know he was following her‒what a crock of shit. As usual he’d underestimated her. And she’d shaken him good.
He sat there for twenty-five minutes, waiting for her to come out and wondering if she already had. A handful of cars had pulled out of the lot while he’d stewed. Sure none of the drivers had looked like Sin, but even Sin hadn’t looked like Sin this morning. He turned the car around and headed for home, wondering when he’d see her again and how.
As he pulled up to the light, a gray and metal object overtook his rearview mirror. A shuttle bus. Like a spot-on-the-map place like this needed a shuttle bus. But as he blinked he registered that it had just pulled out of the rental car lot, and he wondered if Sin was on it.
What the hell. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. He kept his car slow, letting the bus driver get antsy and pull around him. Then he tailed the rolling metal box down the street. It stopped all of two miles later, purging itself of riders‒one of which, he was happy to see, was Sin.
While he was thrilled that he’d made a good guess, Lee was also pretty certain that his little operation was over. Sin had walked into the bus station with the rest of the sheep-people. She had blended right in with her sweats and black rimmed glasses. No one would notice her. Which was certainly not to be said of the other two personas he now knew.
Disgust filled him, to be so close to following her, and yet be so thwarted. She’d disappear in the bus station. He couldn’t leave the car here at the curb, he’d have to go find a parking spot, then get inside, re-find Sin, find out which bus she was on, and then follow it. Big mess.
Again the decision was made simply because he didn’t have anything better to do. And she hadn’t quite sloughed him off yet, though she sure was giving him a good rub. Parking was close to the building but around back from the entrance, and when he finally got inside Lee wondered if she’d already hopped a bus. He grabbed a newspaper and sat down to wait. Pretty much he kept up to speed on the evils of the big world, only he tended to gorge on newspapers and magazines only once every week or more. What happened yesterday was always unknown to him. A few of the articles actually caught his attention, and it was difficult to stay focused on finding his lost cause.
The red shirt saved him. Sin walked across the far end of the terminal, bag in hand, seemingly in response to an announcement. Since he hadn’t been paying attention to the garbled wording coming over the speakers Lee had to follow her out to the bus lines. Having no bags, he did his level best to look like he was climbing on one of these busses. Sin got on one that said Raleigh NC.
That raised his eyebrows. Sin had been pretty close all along. He wondered if he’d ever run into her and not known it. Waiting until the bus pulled out, he then went back out the front thinking he’d reclaim his car and pay off his parking fees. In the terminal, amidst all the soft clatter of people, and harsh noise of announcements and busses, he stopped and looked up to see if he could get the route. It was a long way to follow a bus, but if he knew where they were headed, he could get there early.
What he saw, when he finally found the right bus line, burst his little superior bubble. Lee realized that he had never taken the bus‒and clearly didn’t know what in the hell he was doing. It wasn’t like an airplane; the bus stopped along the way. Each city a chance for Sin to exit and disappear.
If he just showed up in Raleigh in two days and greeted the bus, he was likely to find Sin long since gone. Her line was going through Dallas, Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville. Maybe Sin was even closer than he’d just thought. But he was going to have to tail that bus across the country.
It pulled out of the station behind him. Or one of the busses did. He high-tailed it to his car, cranked the engine and shot out of the lot, getting pissed at the wait to pay his measly parking fare. When the bus hit the freeway Lee sent up a prayer that it was the right one and raced to overtake it. Luckily his car was in good working order and the bus was a lumbering beast, slow to get up to speed even though the on-ramp had aimed down to the freeway giving it the help of gravity.
When he was far enough in front, he looked into his rearview and saw Raleigh NC in letters across the front. Slowly it cycled, ticker style, through every stop. With a breath out, relief washed through him head to toe, and Lee was forced to admit that he wasn’t following her just for lack of something better to do.
Sin was the most interesting thing to happen to him in a damn long time. She was the only thing besides booze and revenge that had breached his consciousness in three years. She took on grown men in fist fights and won.
Letting off the gas and allowing his car to slip back into the tail stream of the big silver bus, he smiled. Well, she hadn’t won against him.
But then again, that was likely only because he had an idea what he was up against. A good portion of her strength came in surprise. She danced around a lot, like small fighters do, ducking and weaving and avoiding the blows that had the power to lay them flat. No one expected her to last past the first one landed on her. But she always did, and she hit back, packing a serious punch in those little fists. But Lee had seen all that in action before he fought her. Leopold hadn’t. None of the others probably had either. There was a good possibility that a few had even laughed in her face.
She’d probably gotten off on killing those guys. But even then‒even knowing how she fought, that a good solid blow that would KO a big man wouldn’t take her down, that he couldn’t let her get behind him‒the best Lee had been able to get off her was a stalemate. He didn’t have to look in the mirror. He could feel the bruises in his neck. They were deep down in there, too. Four purple circles where her fingers had planted themselves and threatened to tear flesh. Lee didn’t doubt her capability to rip his throat out, and he didn’t trust her to simply leave it as a threat and not follow through.
It had meant he hadn’t won the fight. Neither had she. But he was a good hundred pounds heavier and over six inches taller than she.
He kept his eyes on the taillights of the bus.
It was a damned interesting little fix here.
Two hours later, the bus pulled into the El Paso station. The girl in the sweatpants and blobby red turtleneck got off. Her bags were slung over her shoulder. He hadn’t seen it before, but she had trouble pushing up her glasses because her arm was wrapped, child-like, around a large teddy bear. Her face stayed mostly hidden. But if it wasn’t Sin, then she was getting followed way too often, and he might ought to just butt out and hope he stayed alive.
But it was her. He saw as he circled the parking lot at a discreet distance. He even pulled into a spot and leaned over like he was checking through his luggage or such, while she circled wide like she was lost. Lee didn’t buy that for a hot second. Then she keyed open the passenger door on an older model sedan. The finish was a dull silver shade, one hubcap was mismatched, the sides sported a few dents here and there, and Lee smiled. It was an utterly unremarkable car.
He wondered if it was truly hers. Or if she had paid for another rental just to leave it at the lot here.
Sin slipped behind the wheel and started up. Lee exited the lot two cars behind her. He wouldn’t want her to look into her rearview and recognize his eyes. After all this, he didn’t doubt she’d shake him like a wet dog if she knew he was back there.
They hit the freeway, again aimed for Dallas, and he shook his head. She was still headed in the same direction. He got close. He hung back. He had to pee, and his car actually needed fluid‒he was about out of gas. When he reached the point that he was concerned he was going to burst and the car was going to run dry, Sin pulled off at a mildly populated exit.
She gassed her car, paying cash, and Lee had to do the same. Taking a huge chance, but not wanting to lose her if she took off with a full tank and he had nothing but fumes, Lee pulled his cap low and went into the small store. He picked out a bag of chips and a few beef jerky strips to kill the time while she waited at the counter. He turned his back when she went out the door, creating the wicked mechanical chimes that grated his nerves. Although he had to admit that might be due to the fact that his nerves were pretty high strung as it was. He did not need a repeat of the previous night’s alleyway last-man-standing here at the gas station. An arrest would only get him in serious shit.
But he knew the same applied to her. So he was taking his chances.
He pushed a few bills across the counter to cover the food and gas. He’d calculated an amount that would pretty much fill up the tank, but not require him to need change. Not being remembered was too important. And if Sin left, so would he.
The guy in line behind him swished a fountain drink that sloshed like the ocean, and Lee gritted his teeth against the need to pee. He shoved back out into the bright light and kept his back to Sin as he gassed up the kitty. She finished when he was still five dollars from done. And that was bad. He couldn’t leave the five behind. Someone would think it strange. So he squeezed the handle a little harder, as though he had control of anything to do with the gas, and watched from low under his bill as she pulled into a fast food joint across the street.
She bolted inside, making him a little nervous, until he remembered that Sin didn’t run from anything. If she’d seen him, she’d have walked right up and confronted him. Or just clocked him.
He drove over to the same side of the street and packed his car in with a few others down the row from hers. Even though his bladder was about to burst, he took the time to fetch another bug and quickly check the receiver. It let off a loud continuous whine, the bug was so close, and Lee shut it off as fast as he could.
He did the change dropping technique again, and again picked up his quarters. One had actually rolled under her car, and it couldn’t get better than that. Except, of course, if Sin saw him. He imagined a foot kicking his ass into Sunday if she spotted him down under her car. So he slapped the device on and got the hell away. He looked inside the store window and saw her.
She was coming from the back. Probably leaving the ladies room and heading for the counter.
Shit. He ducked his head, and made like he was checking out the other restaurant. That was better. His back was to her. The bug was planted. He could pee. The smell of frying fish slapped him in the face when he entered. But, like Sin had, he headed straight for the head. Three minutes later, and feeling three pounds lighter, he washed his hands fingertips to wrists and pushed his way out front. He ordered things that could be eaten with one hand while chasing someone, not caring for the flavor or food quality. Taste was one of those things that had turned to a uniform shade of mid-gray as he had held Samantha and Bethy, limp and bloodless, in his arms that day. He ate to keep active. Alive wasn’t the word for it.
So he didn’t check his order, and he didn’t care what he had, except that lemonade wouldn’t make him pee as fast as all that caffeine in soda would. Sin’s car was gone by the time he got back in his, and the first thing he did was hit the switch on the receiver. It let off a series of high-pitched blips, each a little further apart than the ones before it.
Twisting the key, he set the car to purring and went back out onto the freeway in the same direction, as it was the best guess to where Sin was headed. The beeping picked up a little speed, and inside four minutes he made visual contact with her car.
Lee ate, drank, and drove. He didn’t have CDs to play. He didn’t listen to the radio, not that there was much in the way of stations out here in the back beyond of Texas. He didn’t watch the scenery go by. Just kept his gaze steady on those little red tail lights, like a man watching a prime piece of ass go by. He listened to the steady static in his head, more like the roar of ocean than a rumble of thoughts or thunder. He gained no wisdom, no insight, no advantage. He simply followed.
He stopped when she stopped, ate when she ate, and stayed as far back as possible. He began to wonder if she’d gotten suspicious of seeing the same car over and over, but there were actually several cars that had kept good pace with them. Being out here between major cities in a big expanse of Texas, it was likely they were all going to the same place, at least for now. He wondered how he would handle it when she stopped for the night and he would need to change cars. He could not successfully trail her another day in the same vehicle. If there was anything Sin wasn’t, it was stupid.
Behind him, sunlight was scraping the top of his rear window and he caught the first blinding rays of sunset in his mirror. He stayed well back from Sin, relying on the beeping that had wound him up in a Chinese-water-torture effect early on, but had now grown to the normal rhythm of driving.
It was only when the beeping suddenly began to space itself apart, rapidly showing that he was losing ground on her, that he blinked. He pushed the gas to catch up, but the noises only came further and further apart. With a frown he slowed and listened as the noise slowed, too. Sin was behind him.
But there had been no exits. Or maybe there had been and he’d just had an easy time of it lately and had gotten complacent and not paid attention.
No. He hadn’t been complacent. It had been monotonous, but he hadn’t missed anything. So how the hell had she gotten behind him? Had she gone all Bat mobile when he wasn’t looking and just taken to the sky or some shit like that?
Lee looked for a more earthly explanation. Sin was corporeal if nothing else. When she hit, you knew she wasn’t a wraith or anything other than solid. She also wasn’t one much for gadgets, he noticed. He had guns and ammo and moving parts. The girl basically played with sharp sticks. So the Bat mobile idea was too far fetched.
Had she just driven off road?
It was the only thing that made sense. She had pulled out into a stretch there where none of the others in their moving pack of cars went with her. Out ahead on her own, she might have taken a sharp turn off.
He was fucked anyway. So he pulled off at the next exit, the beep only coming once every minute or so. It came each time. Just when he was certain the last beep had been the end of it, the machine would cough out another one. It was like listening to a heart monitor and waiting for the patient to just die already. But the beeping didn’t die. And about eight minutes into sitting there, it picked up, startling Lee.
“Halleluiah.” It was whispered to the interior of the car. It was another notice that he wasn’t an uninvolved bystander. That he wasn’t just killing time.
The beeping picked up, reached a maximum, and started to slough off again. If he was right, that meant she had just passed his exit on the freeway and was heading on. Hitting the gas for the umpteenth time that day, Lee shot up the ramp, correcting his assumption. All the beeping meant was that the transmitter was passing his exit. He wouldn’t believe his luck until he saw her car.
He amended it one more time: he wouldn’t believe his luck until he saw her car with her driving it.
Still, he spotted her tail lights and dull silver finish about five minutes later. He slowly closed distance until he saw long dark hair and a red shirt. That didn’t mean it was her. But he wasn’t about to get any closer.
He’d either had phenomenal luck today or Sin was going to twist his head on his neck and leave him there for dead the second he got out of his car. It was too dark to see it at first, but about half an hour later he realized what was making that sensation of something touching the back of his brain. Something was different, and he’d finally figured it out. During the time that he had lost her, Sin had swapped out her plates.
Smart girl.
It was deep night when she finally turned off the freeway. Lee sucked in his breath, grateful that he was far enough back to make the turn without riding her tail to do it. He was the only other driver that took the exit. His headlights were burning into her eyes from her rearview, and he had to turn off soon.
He took the first road he saw and prayed it didn’t lead to a closed arboretum or the driveway of someone she knew or something ridiculous that would get him killed.
It turned out to simply be a poorly paved road to seemingly nowhere, as much of what was out this way appeared to be. He would have to wait and trust the bug to track her.
After a minute, he turned around, going back out to the road Sin was traveling. The beeping was spacing out, but the road was long and straight. If he drove without his lights he’d alert someone. Or get pulled over‒with no driver’s license, or any other ID. Lee Maxwell just didn’t exist anymore. If another car came along, it would serve as a buffer, and he could pull in behind. But he had no such luck.
Instead he waited until he couldn’t see her tail lights. Then he waited that long again, knowing that the small red back lights would be lost to his vision at a much shorter distance than his headlights would disappear to her. He followed the beeping through a small town with three stop-lights, feeling caught in a big metal game of cat and mouse.
Beyond the town he lost her all together. And he wound up playing warmer/colder in the dark, trying out a street here, a gravel road there, all of them wrong until one made the beeping stronger. The driveway curved through overgrowth and Lee thought it would be mighty dumb of him to come out from under the cover of trees and find his headlights shining right on her parked car or something, anything, that would tell her he was there.
So he switched the receiver to vibrate and tucked it into his pocket. It felt odd against his thigh, and there was nothing to be done for the slight buzzing sound that went with the humming movement that replaced the beeps. Checking his guns, he made sure he had one in each holster and his jacket open for quick and easy grasp of the handles, he climbed out of the car.
The overhead light in the kitty didn’t come on. The door didn’t ding or creak in the hinge. Contrary to looks, the car was pretty stealthy. He even held the handle up, pushed the door into place and let the grip back down. The buzz came against his thigh again. It startled him, but a startle to Lee was quite different than a startle to someone else. Or even to whom he’d used to be. It just engaged his brain, and loosed some adrenaline, until he placed it, then he moved on.
The vibrations came more frequently as he approached. A small glow shone in the distance and Lee went after it like a kid creeping down to the tree before dawn on Christmas. At one point he stopped dead, something catching his vision. It was just the tiniest of glints in the black, but it saved his ass. A strand of barbed wire ran at knee height in front of him. Here in the trees it blended in and was nearly invisible. Slowly checking up and down, he found another right at his neck height. He frowned. Barbed wire to the jugular was not his late night cup of tea.
Just then his mouth slanted wide, a big shit-eating grin lit his face right there in the night by himself. He’d been afraid that Sin had found the bug and he was tracking someone else. But who the hell else would hide two strands of barbed wire to clothesline someone coming through the woods? No one. That’s who. This was pure Sin.
Checking again, he ducked and high-stepped through, then walked more slowly. Lee wouldn’t put it past her to have another one for any fool who got cocky enough to think they’d gotten through her system. Sure enough, he found a second set, at different heights, too, about eight feet out from the edge of the lawn.
But he didn’t go under. He was close enough. The receiver was at such a short distance that it was going off about every second. The buzzing noise and almost itching sensation that accompanied it was a welcome reminder that he’d trailed her to the end point. The transmitter was in that garage. And Sin was in that house.
But it was the house that held him. In the middle of barbed wire and trees and nowhere, was a neat little house with a small yard of lush green grass. Rose bushes lined the perimeter, and he wondered if Sin had read what he’d read before he’d planted Sam all the bushes around their fence‒that roses were more effective than the fence at keeping out thieves. No one wanted to carry household objects through a patch of thorns.
From what he could see in the starlight that shone down on her little patch of yard, it looked like the house was a sunny yellow with white paneling around the bottom. Flowers were planted in various beds against the sides, sprays of purples and pinks and yellows were all starting to come into season. There was no light shining around the windows and he wondered if she’d gone straight to bed upon arriving.
Lee couldn’t help but wonder if Sin lived here after all. He was beginning to think that maybe Cynthia May Beller did.
He was still standing in her woods, looking at her house, when the spitting sound started. It was all the warning he got. In seconds he was drenched. Sprinkler heads had popped up, fully loaded and firing as they came. The spitting turned to an even hiss as the heads all came into action around the yard and began a night-time, conservation watering.
The sprinklers were all at the perimeter of the yard, meaning each covered grass and woods. It only took Lee a second to understand the seemingly foolish system. He was wearing it. About two pounds of water.
If he’d been about three feet to the right, he would have been blocked by a tree and stayed mostly dry. As it was, no one would want to get close without full rain gear. Anyone coming in under cover of darkness would leave prints and track mud. Lee looked down, although all he could see of his own feet out here in the wet dark was the faintest of outlines. He wondered if she mixed some special mud or such to track him with‒if he was standing in it now.
He also realized that anyone caught off guard by the water was about ten times as likely to go right into the barbed wire it was sprinkling through. He shook his head. Sin did not want anyone here who wasn’t coming up the drive and waving.
He stepped back a few feet, and turned to go. His eyes failed him. Staring at even the slight glow of the house meant he had to let his eyes adjust to the darkness this way. So he took a breath and waited. Lee did not want to hang himself on her barbed wire.
It was noticeably warmer inside the house. Unfortunately it was just as dark as the pitch night outside. Annika had left the porch light on for him, but no others. He didn’t think she was leaving him one of those typical female messages. Owen was pretty sure she was just saving energy as there was no telling when, or even if, he’d get home at night.
He’d left work early yesterday and picked Charlotte up from school, much to both his wife and daughter’s delight. He hoped it made up for the fact that he’d spent all day and into tonight with Nguyen in the lab. Trying, desperately, to find anything on the damned ninja.
He wandered into the kitchen after hanging up his jacket by the door. Neatness was the least of the concessions his wife deserved just for putting up with him. He flipped the light and smiled. Sitting on the stove was a cling wrapped plate. Not only was dinner waiting for him, it was piled high. He shucked the wrap and shoved the whole thing into the microwave, the cycling noise of the appliance already removing his thoughts from home and turning them, machine-like, back to work.
He had other cases. They were fairly simple though. So he solved what he could. He interviewed, he closed. The damn grudge ninja was eating him as thoroughly as he was now consuming his food. He didn’t sit to eat. Owen figured he’d done enough sitting on his ass. He also wondered if he had all his hair left. He’d surely pulled fistfuls out or just stressed it all to the point of falling away.
His thoughts took off in frustration. The ninja would kill again. And Owen needed to crack the case. The ninja was methodical, prepared, and lethal. As Nguyen had pointed out, the little bastard was going to a lot of trouble to throw them off track. The shoe thing had been great. Apparently he’d even stiffened the sole to make it break in the right place, looking like the ball of the foot was where it should be. But it wasn’t. However, he’d gotten it past Nguyen at a handful of sites before the scientist caught it. Nguyen also suspected the soles had been attached to a different shoe, as none of the sneakers the company carried with that tread offered enough ankle support to allow for the size difference the ninja was sporting.
Owen’s plate was clean, and he wished he’d taken the time to enjoy it just a little bit more. Or maybe just a little bit at all.
But even as he rinsed the plate and loaded it into the half-full washer, he thought about his job. He’d joined the FBI to catch the bad guys and to be smarter than everyone else. His own personal jury was still out as to whether the ninja was the bad guy. He was certainly removing seasoned criminals from the pool with alarming efficiency. The FBI, a large, national organization with thousands of employees, didn’t seem to be able to take down the mob the way the ninja was. Then again, there was that whole the-FBI-had-to-follow-the-law issue. The ninja had no such constraints and no real compunctions about breaking the rules.
However, if the ninja wasn’t the bad guy, then what was Owen doing? Was he in it to be smarter? Because he wasn’t feeling much smarter here. He walked into his bedroom, softly closing the door behind him. He undressed to the quiet sounds of the house, doing a good job of it. Between FBI training and too much practice climbing into bed long after Annika had, he was a pro at it.
“Hey, baby.”
Her voice surprised him. “You’re awake.”
“Um-hmmm.”
Okay, maybe she wasn’t all that awake. But he could see that she held her arms out to him from the faint light leaking in around the doorway and the edges of the curtains. And he could see that he didn’t deserve her.
Owen slid into a bed warmed by his wife’s slim body and curled her into his arms. This he could do. When she asked him to tell her about the case that was keeping him, he fell even more in love with her. He would say each day that loving her more just wasn’t possible, but then she would do something like this, and he would.
Breaking more than one federal law, and knowing Annika was more trustworthy than‒clearly‒even he was, he told her what Nguyen had found, and how frustrated he was. How he hadn’t found the girl’s footprints at the scene.
She listened intently. Asked questions that showed him she’d been paying attention, and had been even long before tonight. And then she put her arms around him. “Owen, you need to make love to me.”
He smiled. Russian women came in two varieties that he was aware of: the babushka kind, with the warts and facial hair and gnarled fingers, and the supermodel kind. His wife was of the supermodel variety, and even without that, he was insanely attracted to her. After twelve years together, the slightest sexual hint from her still made him hard. Her words put him at attention. But it was the way she said it that made him ask, even as he smiled, “Why is that?”
“Because, when you are done and I am satisfied, I’ll tell you what I think.”
The chuckle welled up in his chest, “You could tell me now.”
“No.” She tightened her grip around him and ran long, smooth legs against his own. She was right, he wouldn’t hear what she said, his brain was already in his dick. “When I tell you what I think, you’re going to get out of bed and go back to your office. So you’ll make love to me first.”
“That good, huh?”
But she was already peeling her sleep shirt off, sitting up over him. Her breasts were clear in shades of gray now that his eyes had adjusted. “Yes, I am that good.”
Thoughts of her thoughts fled his brain, he couldn’t hold onto anything but her. He knew where to touch her, how to touch her, what she smelled and felt like. But his memory was always poor compared to reality, and his hands and mouth sought actual sensation. His soul yearned for a connection with her that would tie her to him when he disappeared for days on end.
“Jesus.” He hissed when he touched her and found her wet already. He fought to slow down and not just take her, so he turned his attention to kissing her everywhere. On the tide of her second orgasm, he slid into her, knowing and enjoying the way her eyes looked heavenward as he did. She moved with him, biting her lip and fighting back what had once been loud screams before they had a child.
Owen held out as long as he could, then slipped under the pull of his own sweet release and collapsed as gently as he could on top of her. He pushed himself off and to the side even as he gathered her and held her close.
His brain was slipping away into sleep as her fingers found their way through his hair. “Owen, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Anni.” His eyes were falling closed.
“There are only four sets of footprints at the scene, because there were only four people there.”
He sighed. “There were five, we have evidence of the girl the rapist attacked.”
She smiled, he could feel it against his chest. “Sweetie, is every agent on this case a man?”
Waking just a little, he thought about that. “I guess so, but that’s not a sexist thing. There just don’t happen to be many women in our division.”
“Fine, but that’s why you’re missing it.” Her hand traced a lazy circle on his chest, and he enjoyed the few moments he didn’t care about the ninja, even if Annika was bringing it up.
“There were only four people. Your ninja is the woman the rapist attacked.”
“Annika-”
He stopped himself even as he said it. Owen sat bolt upright and climbed out of bed buck naked, speaking the words just to try them on his tongue. “The ninja is a woman.”
Annika nodded against the pillow where she still reclined. “She baited the rapist, and when she got him, she took him down.”
He was breathing heavy now. In his mind he could see the scene, see every foot print, and if he overlapped the girl and the ninja the scene played out in perfect sense. Ninja prints led away from the indentation in the ground. It was why no one had come forward. Why the girl didn’t scratch the man, which was most women’s reaction to attack.
He climbed into his clothes with a speed he usually didn’t employ even on an urgent page. He leaned back over his wife who, bless her heart, smiled at him. “I love you, Anni. In ways you’ll never know. I’m sorry.”
But she waved a hand at him to go. “This is why you had to make love to me first.”
Her grin didn’t falter. Or if it did, Owen didn’t see it. He was already out the door.
The ninja’s height. The weight. The quarter-sized hole in Leopold’s cock. It all made a lot more sense if it was a woman. She’d have to be really strong and very well trained. But they already knew that much. Why not a woman?
He paged Nguyen.