Cyn blinked as Lee’s words rushed over her full of hot air. She yelled back, the deer was long gone and anyone who might have cared to hear them had already heard. “What the fuck was that?! That was me being gracious! You horned in on my kill!”
“That was mine!” He yelled back, before sucking in enough air to fill the Hindenburg and visibly trying to contain himself. After several deep steadying breaths and an insulting, under his breath count to ten, he spoke more calmly this time. “Svelichko was mine. You thought he was yours. It was a mistake.”
She folded her arms across her chest, knowing it was immature, but hell, he’d already done his count-to-ten crap, why not? “I don’t make mistakes. It’s how I’m still alive.”
He was looking out the front windshield now, staring at trees, his gloved hand resting on the steering wheel as though he were driving. “Clearly, neither do I. And, clearly, at least one of us, if not both, made a mistake here.”
His right hand reached down, and before she realized what he was doing he started the engine and began reversing out of the woods. They were moving and she was sitting in the car with him, something she’d had no intention of doing. That alone spoke volumes about how slow she was on the uptake around him. Maybe she had made a mistake. With a sigh, Cyn gave her best shot at concession. “I memorized my list and shredded it. I left it in four different dumpsters in three different counties.”
He laughed, a hearty laugh that poked at her brain for some reason, but Cyn ignored the feeling. “That’s paranoid. I just burned mine.”
“Yeah.” Her voice sounded as glum to her ears as she felt about that one. “I realized that as I left the second dumpster. By then the pieces were too tiny to burn without getting my fingers, and I just decided to finish what I started.”
Lee didn’t speak as he drove. He pulled the watch cap off his head with one hand while the other steered. That meant there were no hands to smooth the blond strands that were matted and sticking out in every direction. He tucked the cap under the seat and produced a ball cap. Starting to put it on his own head, his right hand swung with the easy motion of too much practice simply pulling the hat down into place, but a quick sideways glance had him passing it to her instead. Cyn took the cap and had to adjust it to fit her head. Hers apparently wasn’t as inflated as his and she popped the plastic tabs two notches smaller before she could wear it without it slipping down and striking the bridge of her nose.
Figuring the point of the cap was to keep them from looking like the people who’d left Svelichko’s just minutes ago, and to be as obscure as possible, she pointed at his head. “If you don’t want to get noticed, you might want to fix that.”
“Oh, shit.” He moved his head to see in the rearview, and for a brief moment both hands left the wheel to rake through the mess and bring it to enough semblance of order that he wouldn’t get any stares. Luckily, they were still on deserted two-rut paths that cut through trees and private property and the ruts were fairly straight. A few seconds later his hands clasped the wheel again as the woods cleared and he looked left and right before pulling out onto a paved road with a few cars smattered here and there to account for ‘traffic’. No one paid any attention to them.
Taking a moment, Cyn checked out the interior of the car. It was nicer than she would have expected from the outside. She’d first noticed rust spots and the occasional place where the rust had graduated to a full-on hole in the body. That, of course, was after she noticed the car itself, and they’d been practically on top of it before she even saw what it was. But for all the obvious age and damage, it didn’t clink or rattle and the engine hummed with easy life. “Where’d you get this thing? Rent-A-Wreck?”
His mouth quirked up at her remark, even though his eyes didn’t leave the road. “Rent-A-Wreck doesn’t have them this good. The engine in this thing is top notch. I keep her tuned up myself. No records. And you have to admit, she’s practically invisible.”
Her eyes flew wide. “This is your car? You didn’t rent?”
“It’s mine. I can’t rent. I don’t exist.” The twist of his lips didn’t register even as rueful, and his eyes hardened even as he said the words.
Again with the being slow on the uptake. Why was she only just now thinking of this? “Where are we going?”
That time the smile reached his eyes. He knew she was being slow, and he thought it was funny. She’d have been mad if it wouldn’t have to be at herself.
“We’re going to drive through somewhere because I am suddenly hungry. Then we’ll park somewhere else and talk. We’ve got to figure this shit out‒better than we did last time.”
Or one of us is going to have to kill the other. Cyn thought it but bit her tongue to keep it from passing her lips. She didn’t want to kill him, and he didn’t have the heart to kill her. The empty clips. The missed opportunities. And the damn sympathy, because she’d told him. No, he couldn’t do it. She sighed and settled back, knowing that, no matter how hungry he was, they weren’t stopping anywhere near here.
With discrete movements, she pulled sais then kamas from the pockets and loops on her pants. Without leaning too far forward, she slid them one by one under the seat, grateful for the old design of the car. There was a slight well under the cushion to keep the weapons from sliding forward if Lee hit the brakes. She pulled the remaining knives from her jacket, counting as she went, and mentally chalking up each one she’d left behind, making sure none were unaccounted for. Surgeons got sued for leaving gauze in people. Cyn figured if she left a knife behind randomly, she just might get the electric chair. So she recounted events until every blade added up. Then she bound them with a ponytail holder she plucked from the end of a braid and tucked those, too, under the seat. Next was the dagger and sheath. By the time she pulled the stars out and very carefully, so as not to slice it, wound the other pulled ponytail elastic around those, she could see Lee was trying very hard not to stare.
“How many fucking weapons do you have on you?”
“You know, you shouldn’t say things that you don’t want someone to overhear.”
He frowned. “The car’s not bugged and I wanted you to hear.”
“No,” She smiled and still didn’t answer his question. “Sometimes people in the other cars are deaf and they lip-read. You don’t want them to call the cops and tell them you asked me about implements.”
He sighed into the night, a deep sound of exasperation that was sweetly satisfying to her ears. She couldn’t kill him, but pissing him off was certainly a pleasing substitute.
“There are no deaf people in the cars around us. And how the hell will they call the cops if they’re deaf? They can’t have one of those typing things in the car with them. And they can’t read my lips from the other lane.” He rolled his neck as though to work out the kinks she was putting there.
Her smile was small but sure. “I only say it because I read of a case where a man was caught exactly that way. He was bragging to his friend about robbing a liquor store while they were driving. A deaf woman in the car in the next lane read his lips, memorized the license plate and called when she got home. The cops showed up and arrested him.”
He sighed again, unable to come back to that one.
Cyn managed to enjoy silence for all of thirty seconds before he started shooting off that mouth again.
“So, I saw a news report where a guy stole a prescription pad and wrote himself prescriptions for Vicodin and Percocet and all the good stuff to sell on the street, and he was caught before the doctor even knew the pad was missing.”
Cyn waited.
But it didn’t come. What was the damn point of that? She was forced to voice it. “So?”
This time Lee returned that small sure grin, as he clearly thought he had her. But she was going to wait and see. He hadn’t had her anywhere near as often as he’d expected. “See, the pharmacist called the cops. Why?”
“Pray tell.”
“Because she could read the writing on the prescription, and she thought that was suspicious that it was so clear. Sure enough, while the guy was waiting to have the drugs filled, the cops called the doctor, the doctor counted the pads and realized one was missing, and the cops showed up and arrested the guy.” His smile widened and he took a left turn a little sharply, throwing her into the door for punctuation.
Glad she’d automatically strapped herself in, Cyn glared. But nothing came of it. Lee, too, was belted. He probably realized, as she did, that a car accident injury, even a minor one, could send them to prison. While her brain processed that and the story he’d told, which she still didn’t get the point of, her fingers began untwisting her hair. By the time she had it down, now a big ruffled mass of kinks from the tight braid job, she hadn’t figured it out.
She turned in the seat, looking at his profile. “So what’s the fucking point of the story? You might have gotten caught if someone lip-read you asking me about the w-word, but I have never stolen a prescription pad.” Her shoulders were knotted from trying to figure him out, and she needed a moment of Tai Chi to center herself. Of course that was best accomplished in a grove of trees, with sunshine and blue skies, and as far away from Lee as possible. He totally screwed with her Chi.
He grinned, screwing it up a little further. “The point is, your handwriting can get you caught.”
That was no damn point at all. “So?!”
“So,” he turned his head and looked square at her. Although she wasn’t pleased with that, as he looked incredulous, like she was being far too dense to see the obvious, but she didn’t see it. “You’ve left your handwriting on those tags at every scene. You’ve been beyond cautious about fingerprints, hair, everything, but you’ve left a handwriting sample at all but one place I’ve seen.”
Even as she gulped for air she saw the concerned look on his face. The small frown that pulled tighter and tighter. Air filled her lungs even as she fought off the reaction. He was worried for her.
But that didn’t matter.
Cyn let out a peal of laughter that had tears springing to her eyes almost instantly. Her arms wrapped around her waist as, moments into the fit, her sides were already hurting. She sucked air to fuel the next sound, which could only be described as a very unladylike guffaw. She cackled, she wiped at the tears, she looked up and saw his now confused face, and laughed some more.
Not wanting to draw attention to them or the car in any way, she fought to get some composure. Luckily they were on the freeway now and probably no one had noticed a thing. Cyn was extremely grateful that he hadn’t sprung that on her in the city. The cops would have pulled her over for being on drugs.
With deep even breaths she slowly got herself together.
Lee drove on. His face now a wealth of disbelief. He hadn’t known what to do with or about her before, and now it was only worse. “You’re going to have to explain that, because the way I see it, you fucked up leaving those notes.”
“You’re worried about me.” She was starting to add ‘that’s sweet’, when he interrupted, making her glad she hadn’t.
“I’m worried about me. We know too much about each other.” His lips pressed into a thin line. “Your clinical insanity is a threat to my freedom.”
Her head tipped, acknowledging that he was part right. They each had the power to bring the other down, in more ways than just in combat. So she attempted to soothe his worry, “But I’m not insane.”
He didn’t say anything, just kept driving into the black night, further and further from where her car was parked. As always, it would be good where it was until at least noon the next day. Cyn wasn’t going to let delays or a need to head the opposite way lead to her being brought down by a parking ticket. She’d never needed the contingency before, but tonight she was glad she’d planned for it. What was disconcerting was that she wasn’t in control of the situation. What was more disconcerting was that she wasn’t truly bothered by that.
She couldn’t take him in a fair fight. Or probably even an unfair one. He was armed to the teeth, and, while she’d slid her weapons under the seat and out of immediate reach, his were still in holsters. He was fast enough to make her wonder if he’d been a wild west gunslinger in a past life. At any moment, he could have a bullet in her before she literally even knew what hit her. But she was fairly relaxed for having just come off a kill and being in a car headed very much the wrong direction.
After a few beats she realized he wasn’t going to comment on her ‘I’m not insane’ remark. So she continued, “I’m also not left handed.”
“What?” His head whipped around to look at her, then he snapped his eyes back to the road as soon as he realized what he’d done.
“I’m not left handed.” And she was still ahead. “I wrote all those notes with my left hand. I practiced for years to make it look natural, but that’s not my handwriting. The notes only link one note to another, and it’s not like the crime scenes aren’t all linked with my handiwork already. I don’t leave evidence behind.”
“What about all the times you practiced? If they find out who you are, they might find some of those old pages.”
She shook her head. She’d been thinking ahead for years. “I burned or shredded and flushed every single practice sheet. I also practiced in ink that would run when it got wet, further destroying any evidence.”
He still shook his head. “What if someone remembers you writing with your left hand?”
“They’d have to have been spying on me very furtively. I made a point to always be alone, and to immediately destroy anything I did. Even the early stuff that was too pitiful to link to anything.”
“Jesus, Cyn.”
She shrugged. So she was single-minded? So were a lot of girls. They were bent on getting married or having a career. She truly made the world a better place. And she was getting those bastards back for what they’d taken from her. “Those notes are the only remaining samples of that writing. And you’re the only one who knows I can do that.”
“Why’d you tell me?”
Why had she?
Cyn shrugged again. “Because that isn’t going to be the thing that puts it over the edge. You already knew enough to call the feds on me if you wanted. And you were worried that I’d left evidence behind. I didn’t. So you can sleep better.”
They were off the road now and he was pulling into a drive thru and asking her what she wanted. She hadn’t been hungry before, but suddenly as he spouted off two orders‒which apparently were both for him, because he turned and looked at her like what-did-she-want?‒her stomach growled at her. Nothing was healthy, but she ordered a combo with a grilled chicken breast and decided to screw it and have the fries and soda.
Five minutes later she had a hot, heavy paper bag on her lap and had already sucked down a third of the bathtub of soda and almost half her fries.
Lee watched her sneak bites of food, but didn’t say anything. “Look, forget finding a place to park. Your motel or mine?”
Her eyebrows rising, Cyn stopped mid chew, “I’m assuming that isn’t a come on?”
“No, not a come on. When were you planning to leave town?”
A shrug slid across her shoulders, as usual, she’d leave whenever she woke up. “Somewhere just after first light.”
“Me, too. That means we need to figure this out fast.” His hand snaked into the bag and pulled out hot fries that he shoved into his mouth all at once with no grace.
“Where are you staying? Out this way?”
“A half hour further.” He pointed along the freeway lights, the direction they’d been headed. His eyebrows raised. “Twinsburg.”
“I’m the other way entirely.”
He sighed. “How seedy is your place? Did you need ID to check in?”
“Of course.” He didn’t?
“That’s what I figured. That means my place is less likely to remember us coming in, and more likely to house low level thugs than someone who does what we do. We should bunk at my place. Which means we need to head to yours.” It was braced with a soul weary sigh as it had already been a long night. But with a roll of his neck and a twitch in his seat, Lee visibly shook it off and sat up straighter, ready to face the haul.
Cyn didn’t shrug out of it so easily. “Back the way we came then. And I’ll need my car.”
“Unwrap my sandwich for me?”
Lee tried to work the crick out of his neck without being obvious. No one was around the back of the motel at three a.m. when they finally arrived. The other patron back here was still out.
Lee had suggested they leave her car in a spot in town for the remainder of the night. There were a few other cars gracing the street where it sat, but the little silver sedan screamed rental and probably would have stuck out like a sore thumb pulling in here. Sin hadn’t protested.
When he closed the door behind her, each of them let the bag they’d carried slide off their shoulder and onto the bed. She snorted with disgust. “I had two beds.”
“You also checked in with ID and into a room for one. That place was far more likely to look at us than anyone here would be.” He shook his head. “I saw a security camera in the lobby. What were you thinking?”
She frowned at him, that same I-don’t-make-mistakes look she’d given him earlier. “For your information, I didn’t give the camera a decent look at me at any time. The only person who saw me was the clerk at check in. Furthermore, I was thinking, that since I used another fake ID, if anyone came looking for me it would have to be with a photo in hand and at that point it would be a little too late to worry about the camera.”
She didn’t add so-bite-me but he read that in her face, too.
Lee refrained from saying anything. Mostly because she was right. She used IDs but she did seem to have enough different ones that anyone looking for her wouldn’t find her by paper trail. They’d have to be looking for her. And he didn’t know how they’d find her without knowing what and who she was.
“Are we sleeping in shifts?” The question came at him from out of the blue, and he was totally unprepared for it. The last time he’d slept in shifts was when Bethany had been a baby and she’d been sick. There hadn’t been anyone to takes shifts with in so long. He blinked a few times, wondering how to answer.
“Why? Are you a heavy sleeper?”
Something crossed her face, but he couldn’t identify it, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. “No. Can we discuss this whole thing in the morning? I’m tired now. We were on the road forever.”
She yawned and stretched, looking a little like a sleepy kid and a little like a killer. Kinky hair exploded out from under the too big ball cap, her large liquid eyes could have suckered a cocker spaniel puppy, but the leather get-up and the bag of weapons next to him were pure pro.
“Yeah. Can you share the bed or do you want me to take the floor?” He didn’t know where the manners had appeared from again. She could just as easily sleep on the floor as he could. Hell, she was the only person on earth who was harder than he was. The concrete under the old carpet probably felt downright squishy compared to her.
But she yawned again, “We can share. As long as you know that if anything touches me, I’m skewering it.”
“I figured as much.” He laughed again and felt the lead creep into his bones as he finally admitted how exhausted he was. He leaned back on the side of the queen that he already occupied, peeled his jacket, kicked his shoes off and slid under the covers. He decided to sleep in his jeans in deference to Sin’s odd sensibilities, anyway he was too tired to change them even though he thought he might still be wearing microdroplets of Svelichko’s blood.
Figuring he’d be out as soon as his head hit the pillow, Lee was surprised to hear Sin shuffling around in the bathroom. She scrubbed at something, and he heard the sandpapery noises of her toothbrush followed by splashes of water.
Owen had walked off the plane and onto the night-cooled tarmac at Mitchell Air Force Base around four a.m. It would be another forty-eight hour crime scene binge. So naturally it had begun at the end of an already long day.
Why the hell the ninja couldn’t kill someone in the early morning was beyond him. Blankenship was more of a cross to bear than a help of any sort at these times. His partner had sat beside him in cushy seats on the Task Force Lear Jet they’d been given this time, throwing out comments about the case while Owen looked at faxes as they came in. Special Agent Blankenship had hogged some of the pages as they’d spit out. He’d pointed and talked, mostly stating the obvious and putting the ‘special’ in Special Agent.
Owen was definitely quitting once this case closed. He wouldn’t be able to work with anyone who actually had a decent thought after this. He was too used to running the show with Blankenship around. And he wouldn’t be able to put up with this for much longer. Period.
Hauling his bag over his shoulder and not caring if his partner kept up, Owen headed to the car that awaited them. The local Agents had just pulled up to give updates, stating they’d secured the scene and swept the police out. Of course the cops had responded en masse to the 9-1-1 call that had tipped this one off, and in doing so they’d contaminated almost every room in the house and certainly the scene. Owen had expected no less.
What he still prayed for were long brunette strands of hair.
That would show that the ones already in custody belonged to the ninja. It would almost certainly make the ninja female‒as it would be heavy circumstantial evidence that a fifth person, an attacked woman, didn’t exist at the scene of the campus rapist. And it would place the owner of the hair at both scenes.
He prayed for a fingerprint‒one of those knives would hold a nice one. If he was going to dream, then he’d wish for a full set. Owen had practiced with throwing knives at the range a few times, talked to the FBI expert, and taken a quick lesson from the weapons man. The correct grip wasn’t a fist but more the way you would tightly grasp the edge of a paper. All the fingertips would touch the handle, and her knife handles were smooth metal.
He prayed for a fiber or a tool that only came from one place in the world. Something they could trace. He doubted they’d get anything of the sort.
Instead he listened to the briefing, then quickly flipped open his cell phone and left a quick message for Annika. After all these years of him leaving at the drop of a hat, she didn’t always pick up the phone when he called to say he’d gotten in safe. She said she trusted he’d gotten there, and that she needed to sleep through the night as she was going to be a single parent for the next few days. Even as he thought the outgoing message he got was clearly a sign from the Gods Of The Obvious that he needed to leave the job, he thought about the fingerprints he was leaving on his phone. The ones he’d left all over the plane, in this car, there was even a smudge on the window. And, given his propensity to push car doors open with his palm, he had to assume there was at least a partial there. How could the ninja ever leave a scene that perfectly free of fingerprints and fibers?
It had to be very well planned.
When he got back home, he’d spend his days working that angle with Nguyen.
Agent Nguyen seemed to read his thoughts from the facing seat in the back of the short limo. There were no lights and no foiled bottles of champagne back here, this was strictly a working vehicle. If things went as Owen expected, there wouldn’t likely be anything to celebrate. They weren’t even close. With a sigh the lab agent looked at him, “Are you looking for your own fingerprints?”
Owen nodded.
“Well, if you ever do anything illegal, just cut out a few big arrows and point them at yourself. You are the easiest man to track that I have ever seen. You touch fucking everything.”
At that moment, Blankenship looked at his own hand clasping the door grip beside him and released it, as though it might do any semblance of good. Owen fought not to roll his eyes.
But Nguyen continued with the razzing, “It would be harder to track a shedding dog that had just walked through a mud puddle.”
“Thank you.” Owen made no effort to keep the wry tones out of his voice.
The local agents looked back and forth at each other. Their eyes told the story that they were sizing up the agents on the case, and Owen concluded that they’d read it right. Their looks held respect for Nguyen and bewilderment at Blankenship. How that man had even gotten into the Bureau in the first place had to be a marvel of family connections.
The Agents spilled out of the car without speaking as they reached the scene. Uniforms held the perimeter, and to their credit they looked discrete and quiet. The dark shirts and pants blended into the night, only small silver glints off their badges gave away their positions. Yellow crime scene tape had been used sparingly, just across the gate to the yard and the driveway. Two patrol cars sat in the cordoned off drive more silent than the dark around them.
Good.
Blankenship flashed his badge, but Owen and Nguyen didn’t bother. They simply shook hands and Owen introduced all of them. “I’m Special Agent Dunham, this is my partner Agent Blankenship. And Special Agent Nguyen, who runs our mobile lab. The local mobile FBI crime scene lab will be arriving for him in a short while. If you could do us the favor of keeping the scene quiet, we’d very much appreciate it.”
The local mobile lab was likely to be just as discrete as their own, but you never knew. And it didn’t hurt a bit to make friends with the local cops. These guys got all the coolest scenes taken away from them, and likely their own homicide guys were already in a snit. Owen made sure to remember names and spend Bureau money ordering coffee and food for the cops.
After repeating back each of their names and committing faces to memory, Owen walked up the pretty stepping stones that led to the grand house. It was a misleading sunshine yellow, with pretty white gingerbread trim. A plastic child’s playhouse sat off to the side looking well used and loved with a little sprig of silk flowers adorning the front door. They were a smaller version of the ones on the heavy steel mesh door on the front of the house. The steel door offered far better protection than a flimsy screen, but it had decorative scroll work and was painted to match the pretty trim. Several of the neighboring houses had the same type of measures in place, so there was nothing out of the ordinary here. Nothing that said ‘fortress’ or ‘mafia’. Nothing that told of the people that lived, or now didn’t, behind the door.
With the white linen handkerchief he always carried for such things, Owen tugged at the top edge of the steel door. It had been left slightly ajar by the local police so that no one would need to touch the knob again, thus salvaging any fingerprints that hadn’t already been rubbed to oblivion. He pushed at the heavy inner door with its leaded glass inserts and cautiously stepped over the threshold.
The living room spoke of wealth and what passed for taste. Svelichko’s wife, the daughter of Russian immigrants herself, had grown up with far less money than this. While she hadn’t gone Graceland on the place like some nouveau riche were prone to do, she had fallen too far to the safe side. Everything was in shades of cream and white. Lights blazed throughout the entire house, but Owen already suspected the only actual color he would find would be the rust brown of blood in the upstairs bedroom.
As he and Nguyen followed the commanding officer on the scene up the stairs, Owen noted that another set leading down into the basement was tucked underneath it. Given the lush carpeting on the stairs and the style of the remainder of the place, he suspected the downstairs was just as lavish and pale.
The police officer spoke as he led the agents up, offering the same few trite phrases that Owen had heard at every ninja scene. Things to the effect of ‘couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bastard,’ ‘we left it as clean as we could,’ and ‘man, that shit is fucked up’.
Owen so desperately wanted to tell them it was a woman. Just to see the looks on their faces. But he couldn’t reveal that. Only a small handful of Agents under Bean’s supervision knew of that little probability. And it needed to stay that way.
At the doorway to the bedroom, another man in blue stood guard. To his credit, he stood straight, not leaning on the wall, and he seemed alert. Owen had looked for, but hadn’t seen, any tread marks or footprints on any of the carpeting up to here. Nothing they could identify beyond the usual ‘people had walked here’ marks. He looked up at Nguyen as he pointed discretely to the floor, and Nguyen shook his head ‘no’.
“It’s like blowing snow, man.” Nguyen had already started donning the sterile paper over-suit that they would wear into the bedroom to get a good, up-close look at Svelichko. “The carpet’s too thick, it absorbs everything and leaves nothing.”
Owen pulled his suit on, too. He tried to not look into the room, but he’d already seen enough to know that the mafia man was in his jammies, the body cold but not old. And he was staked out like a tent. Worse than the last one. Also, this one had been phoned in by Svelichko’s own cell phone. No one had spoken to the 9-1-1 operator, just left empty silence. Officers had come to check out the scene and found the dead body. Given the empty call, they had looked for the offending phone, although Owen had thought it only logical that the man couldn’t have made the call himself. Neither hand looked able to retain any tension, and he was clearly dead in a bad way. So they’d stepped their officer footprints all around the scene and shed invisible strands of true blue poly-cotton blend all over the victim. But at least they’d ultimately found the phone outside by the dead bodies of the dogs.
That meant that the ninja had most likely made the call herself. Damn. She’d been right here. She’d held that phone and alerted them. She was likely still in the area. But the neighbors had already been questioned and had seen nothing. As they had no idea what her name was or what she looked like, unless someone phoned in saying that a brunette woman was throwing knives at them, it would be like finding a particular piece of straw in a haystack.
Taking a fortifying breath and letting go of the desire to turn tail and try to trace her, Owen pushed his sterile-papered self through the doorway. As he’d suspected, Svelichko’s eyes were wide and glossy, his skin was the ashen color of the departed. Given the number of holes in the lung region, he was pretty certain the man had been close to this particular shade of gray even before he was dead.
There were small pools of blood in varying spots on the floor, indicating that he’d been wounded before he’d been staked, while he was still mobile. One came out from under the dust ruffle and even left a smear on the hem of the cream colored silk. With his sterile baton, Owen leaned way down and lifted the edge of the fabric. After a moment where his eyes adjusted, he made out a dark shape attached to the underside of the frame. It looked like a .357. But Svelichko clearly hadn’t gotten it.
Another gun lay off to the side of the room. Certain that it didn’t belong to the ninja, Owen figured Svelichko had pulled it on her and she’d knocked it from his grasp. And with some force, too, as it was a good distance from the body and there was no evidence of a struggle on that side of the room.
Nguyen’s eyebrows went up. He pointed. “Sock.” He grinned.
The bastard had a sock stuffed in his mouth. Owen fought back his own corresponding smile, and wondered if the man had gotten too mouthy for his girl. Nguyen padded across the room and lifted the hamper lid with his own sterile poking stick. “Looks like it’s one of his own. Fifty bucks says it’s dirty.”
“I ain’t taking that one. I’m with you.”
Even without the money riding on it, Nguyen bent over the open-eyed face, without touching anything, and sniffed. “Oh yeah, it’s dirty. Niiiiiice. Wait.”
Owen looked up at the lab agent as he sniffed again. “Isopropanol.”
“That uncommon?” Owen asked.
“It’s rubbing alcohol, doofus.”
“Thank you.” Owen didn’t think he’d been called ‘doofus’ since about third grade. But if it was rubbing alcohol, then he probably deserved the title. Of course it wasn’t something they could trace. It never was.
Blankenship’s voice hollered up the stairs, and Owen only hoped that the moron didn’t wake the neighbors. They didn’t need any interference. Any. “Point of entry is in the basement, we got broken glass.”
“Out or in?” Owen asked in a fairly normal tone, as Blankenship was at the top of the stairs and visible through the doorway now.
“In, and it looks like out as well. Hard to tell.” He went off to check the rest of the place. The only good thing about Blankenship was that he’d learned to stay out of the way. And he made really great useless statements to the media. If they didn’t want anything usable said, but didn’t want to use the ‘no comment’ line that only riled the media, they sent Blankenship. The man could talk reporters into a near coma and give nothing of value.
Owen turned back to the body. As he looked closely he would see stains at the edges of where the alcohol had been. “Looks like she poured it over the cuts, after they were made.”
“Bitch!” Nguyen smiled as he said it though. “That had to hurt.”
Owen pointed with his little baton. “Look how tight the ropes are, he struggled there at the end. Probably against that pain. That’s just plain mean.”
“No one ever made the mistake of calling this one ‘sweet’. She was out for suffering even at the beginning.” The lab agent was gathering small samples with spatulas and baggies even as he reminisced. “Remember the hole in Leopold’s dick? That was just for sheer pain.”
“As a male, I’ll still remember that when I have Alzheimer’s and no longer recognize my own children.” He shook his head, his eyes still tracking along the body as they looked for anything new. “I already woke up in a dead sweat one night with a nightmare based on that one.”
Nguyen gave a rueful smile and held up fingers, “I’ve had that dream three times already. Ex-girlfriends wielding ninja weapons. It is not fun.”
Owen laughed, even as Nguyen frowned. He’d never taken his eyes off the body, but now he focused on the hand, and then the foot. He wandered a few feet away and bent over to look at the carpet, where a few blood splatters defined a point. “Dunham.”
That was all he needed to say. With the look on his face giving urgency, Owen came right over to where his friend was pointing.
“Look.”
A hole in the carpet surrounded silver. A slug.
“Holy shit.”
“A bullet.” They said it at the same time.
Nguyen said something coherent first. “Do you think it’s Svelichko’s?”
But Owen was already wondering, and Nguyen was heading back to the body, the sock stuffed in its mouth not doing a damn thing to prevent it from telling tales. It was suddenly screaming them.
“The bullet is facing that way. Given the embedding and the angle, it was shot from about . . . there.” Owen followed his own finger through the doorway. “Do you think Svelichko hit the ninja?”
Nguyen’s usually even voice sounded excited. “Svelichko has bullet holes in him.”
“What?” The grudge ninja didn’t use bullets. Did she? Then again, she’d never staked anyone down until a year or so ago when they’d found the one man tacked to the wall. She’d been evolving. The alcohol was new. So were the bullet holes. “Son of a bitch. Are they from that gun?”
Nguyen went back over to the gun, leaned over, and sniffed it. “No. No powder smell. This thing hasn’t been fired in recent history. If the gun that fired those is here, then we haven’t found it yet.”
Blankenship appeared at the doorway again. Unfortunately, he was speaking again. Owen forced himself to listen.
“The cell phone that made the 9-1-1 call was next to some dead dogs. It looks like it was tossed over the fence, so we have an exit point from the yard. No prints on the phone except what the Crime Scene guys say look like Svelichko’s.”
Owen nodded. He’d expected nothing less. This night had been far too long. The sun was coming up beyond the rich cream sheers and while he hadn’t expected the place to be a wealth of answers, he sure as hell hadn’t expected so many new questions.
“Oh, and the dogs were shot, point blank.”
Later, as Lee blinked at stark sunlight fighting its way around the edges of the cheap curtain, he realized he’d passed out cold last night. He sucked in air, wondering what time it was. Judging from the sunlight, he’d slept later than he’d planned.
Sin was curled up facing away from him, at the far side of the bed. Her hair had lost most of its fuzzy kink, plastering itself down her back as he peeled the covers up and away. He waited for her to jump and lunge at him with something sharp, or at least offer a bone-breaking fist to his face as she woke. But Sin did none of it. She breathed deeply in long, chest moving inhalations.
Lee pushed at her shoulder, his eyes blinking, denying reality, as he saw what she was wearing for the first time. Beneath his fingers was soft flannel, pink with black-outlined fluffy white sheep jumping fences and cavorting all over the men’s style cut. Jesus, she looked like a girl.
But as he pushed her shoulder again, he felt the bra she wore underneath. She was Sin. No vulnerability, no give. She might as well have worn a sign that said ‘keep out’. “Wake up. It’s late.”
“Huh?” She rolled onto her back, and therefore crowded him on the bed that wasn’t really all that large to begin with. She pushed long hair out of her face as she squinched eyes at him that weren’t quite awake.
“We need to get going.”
He didn’t say anything else, just slid out of his side of the bed and headed to the shower. He scrubbed up with his one bottle of shampoo/soap that he always used, rubbing his head and face at the same time and wondering what the hell he was going to do. Bracing his hands against the tiled stall wall, he planted his feet behind him just wider than his shoulders. This meant his feet were almost in the opposite corners. Hot water sluiced over him and he let it do what it could for the cricks in his shoulders. What the hell was he going to do about Sin?
He couldn’t keep an eye on her from Appalachia. And they’d screwed up this one, big time. If they did it again, they might end up in jail, or in side-by-side electric chairs. He didn’t trust her. He trusted her to act like Sin, but that meant that he could count on her to fight to the very end. Whether that meant she’d throw him out as a bone to someone trying to get her, he didn’t know.
She was a loose cannon, and you had to keep an eye on those.
Lord knew she probably felt the same way about him.
But what he was actually going to do about it, he didn’t know.
He patted himself with the motel towel, but it was so much the opposite of fluffy that it less absorbed water from him than it just scraped his skin dry. Emerging from the bathroom with the towel around his hips earned him a glare from Sin, and it occurred to him that she was standing, pink flannel and exuberant sheep and all, between him and his Heckler. He hadn’t even thought to take it into the bathroom with him like he usually did. His clothes were draped over a towel rack that the motel hadn’t seen fit to leave a towel on, and he didn’t have Sin’s moves.
He was as vulnerable before her as he had ever been.
She stared, as though the sight of him was an insult to her nature, then tromped past him into the bathroom. In one hand she clutched a case of toiletries that left a trace of perfume as she marched by.
That was odd. Sin surely didn’t have any sensibilities to offend. But he was glad to have a clear line from himself to his gun again.
Hearing the door click behind him as she locked herself into the bathroom, he waited for the telltale shoosh of the water in the shower before peeling off the towel and sliding into clean jeans and a t-shirt. He picked his navy ball cap off the side table where Sin had left it just a handful of hours ago and tried to fit it to his head. It took a moment as she had adjusted it a few sizes down.
With the shower droning on behind him, he couldn’t resist. After sliding the Heckler, unsilenced, down into the side of his jeans, he lifted the pillow she’d slept on to find her sais. This time both handles pointed to the edge of the bed, where her hands would have been as she’d been curled to that side.
He almost smiled. What a pair they made. Sleeping with weapons under their pillows. Ready to take all comers.
It was the sais under the pillow, and the large fluffy teddy bear sitting on top that he hadn’t noticed before, that made him realize something for the first time. He actually liked Sin. And she liked him for the same reason.
She was the only person he knew of in the whole world who understood him.
His brother Todd didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He’d helped with cashing out Sam’s and Bethy’s life insurance policies, and then Lee had left his remaining family behind. He’d just felt so removed from all of them‒his parents, his co-workers, the couples he and Sam knew from Bethany’s school. They all had become spirits to him, not on the same plane, not speaking his language. He had wandered his own world for years now, making real contact with other humans only before he killed them.
Aside from Sin.
Of course, the obvious answer to that was that she wasn’t human either. In fact she was worse than him. He had to wonder if she’d been at it from the moment Leopold had left her house and left an eleven-year-old-girl alive.
Lee thought all this as he packed his bags, repositioning the rifles, shifting the ammo. He was only seven rounds lighter than when he came, but his load was noticeably lessened.
He had only the faint tick of the bathroom door handle turning to warn him she was behind him. He hadn’t seen her take any weapons in with her, but then again David Copperfield only wished he had a jacket as cool as hers. Lee wouldn’t put it past her to sleep in cheesy flannels that were not only cute but loaded to the hilt.
Her voice didn’t startle him, but what she said did. “I slept like a rock last night. You?”
He nodded as he turned and looked at her. She again looked like her nineteen-year-old self. She wore tight jeans and a tighter t-shirt. Her hair hung in wet ropes around her face.
“Yeah, me, too.” He had to admit to that. One‒he hadn’t woken up until late. There was no excuse for that if he hadn’t been sleeping like a rock. Two‒if he lied to her, she’d likely kill him.
Her eyes looked at the wall off to the side, “I never sleep like that.”
He just nodded and went back to packing. He was done quickly and sat on the edge of the bed in awe as she ripped at her three teddy bears and shoved the sais, kamas, and dagger down their gullets. With the quick sure movements of a quilter, she rapidly put the bears back together without leaving any obvious marks of tampering. He was impressed, and found it all too fitting that the girl with the drawer of leather underwear had pink sheep jammies and teddy bears that were as lethal as she.
She packed the remainder of her things into a small handful of carry-on size bags. And before she finished, Lee began a dialogue that would change things one way or another. He wasn’t sure when he opened his mouth if she would agree or kill him.
“We fucked up.”
She grunted and wiped down her shampoos and shower lotions before packing them into a purple plaid zipper case.
“If we fuck up again we could wind up dead.”
“Yup.” She agreed, but just went about packing, not helping the conversation at all.
“We need to operate out of the same place.” She paused a beat, and he kept talking before it got into her mind that he was crazy or dangerous and she decided to rip open a teddy bear on him. “So we don’t get in each other’s way. So we can take out whoever whenever.”
He didn’t know what to say after that, so he shut up and waited.
Sin kept packing.
It was a full minute of her shuffling around the room, pulling things out of the closet and folding them in the way that spoke of working in a clothing store, before she finally replied. “You want to move in with me?” She didn’t quit moving and her body language said nothing other than did-you-remember-to-check-under-the-bed.
“I can’t.”
“Oh, well.” She shrugged as though he’d been talking about a box of cereal.
“I can’t shoot at your place. You’re too close to civilization. Like you, I practice all the time.”
Sin nodded, this time looking at him, as she zipped up the last of her matching luggage and gathered up the teddy bears in her arms, before plopping on the bed.
Lee took another breath. “You should come out with me.”
She squinted. “I have a job. A life. I can’t just leave.”
“Sure you can.” He shrugged. “You don’t have those things‒Cyndy does. You’re not Cyndy. Quit the job.”
She stared at him like he was nuts. And he probably was. Only as he spoke did he feel the tug of missed human communication. Even the fight over Svelichko last night had been more than he’d spoken to another single human since the last time he’d talked to Sin. He tried another tack. “Do you need the money?”
“No.” She shook her head, still looking square at him with confusion plain on her face.
“Then why do you have to keep the job?”
“It’s cover.” Like he should know that.
“You don’t need that kind of cover. You can just go to ground.”
Probably unconsciously, she hugged the bears tighter. “But I have a house, a car, a . . .”
“We’ll lock up the house. Sell the car. You quit your job, dying mother or something-”
She laughed at that. “Aunt. I’m visiting her now, helping her through another round of chemo.”
“You can move your practice gear out, there’s plenty of room. You can devote yourself to whomever you want, know I won’t get in the way, and spend the remainder of your life not worrying about getting permission from your boss to do what you need to do.” Lee made perfect sense to himself. But the incredulousness that crossed her face told her he’d struck something and it probably wasn’t good.
“The remainder of my life?” She physically withdrew, pulling back even as she was already out of reach. “Are you suggesting that there isn’t much of it?”
He was just as flummoxed by that as she apparently was by him. “You can’t be serious. I don’t expect to last more than another year or two in this business. Do you think you’ll go on living like this?”
Her jaw worked, lush lips trying to form words, the teddy bears’ necks bending as she squeezed them until they gave. Sin stared out of wide eyes, looking like he’d said he wanted to unleash the plague.
Great‒his only human contact was a moron. She wasn’t a fool, but did she really think she could grow old like this? People like them had a limited life span. It wasn’t anything he’d really put to thought, and God knew he hadn’t talked to anyone about it before, so he didn’t really know how to go about doing it. But his truncated life was just a fact he had accepted as he’d stood bloody and lost in his own living room. He’d held Sam and Bethany, one limp body in each arm, as though he could bring them back by loving them enough. By being sorry enough. By something, anything. And he’d known then that he was starting on his own path to join them.
But Sin seemed to think this was a career of sorts.
By the time he’d formulated something to say, she was looking at him with pity rather than horrified bewilderment. Her working jaw made sounds and his brain strung them together into intelligible phrases.
“I can’t come live with you. Not if you’re planning on dying. I’m not.”
“I’m not planning on it.” She twisted every damn thing around. He sighed. “I just figure it’s an inevitability in this business.”
“No.”
Sin stood up as though to leave, then plopped back down on the bed. He had seen the gears shift in there, and watched as it had clicked into place that he would have to drive her back to her car.
With an exasperated sigh, one he had used on Bethy the night before she died when she wouldn’t clean up her room, Lee cocked his head. “Well, then, how do you propose we solve this problem? The lists sure didn’t cut it.”
“I don’t know.” She practically yelled it at him as she stood again, this time flinging the teddy bears onto the bed behind her. They landed with fluffy precision, her years of practice evident even here, even as the one bear bounced just a little oddly, not squishing exactly right, and giving a little sign of the weapons inside him.
Sin was breathing rapidly, and only then did Lee realize what he was asking. He had no issues with abandoning the shack‒he’d twice simply abandoned lodgings on a moment’s notice in the past several years. If he lost the kitty‒probably the thing he loved most‒he’d shrug and find a way to get another car. His clothing, his practice bottles, even the Hecklers, were all manufactured items, and utterly replaceable.
Lee’s eyes put together the story the pieces told right in front of him. Sin would sooner rip his arm off than let him rip the arm off one of the bears. She’d likely painted the walls in her home herself. Maybe she’d said it was for security, so no one saw what she had, but she’d chosen colors. Decorated. Probably designed the lamps and a good handful of the hidden weapons herself. She was attached to her life.
He sighed. “Is there someone there you can’t leave?”
She shook her head too fast to be lying.
No, it wasn’t the people Sin was attached to. She’d likely learned that lesson the hardest way she could. At gunpoint. But she was sewn tightly to her things.
He tried again. “You can bring all your stuff. Don’t sell the house. We can keep it as another base.” She couldn’t sell the house anyway. No one could ever know what was there. The real estate agent would call the CIA after just a walk-through. “We can try it and see if it works. Maybe we come up with a better solution. I can buy you another car if need be.”
She shook her head, shaking off his offer. Lee had to wonder for a moment if he really needed humanity this much, to try to forge some bond with this girl who was everything less than human. Only as he thought it did he see that the bond had already been forged. And he, the more human of the two, was the one who saw it for what it was.
Her voice was haughty. “I don’t need your money. I don’t need the paycheck from my job. When I turned eighteen I got access to my parents’ life insurance policies. And they’d been heavily insured.”
He nodded. The stories were just too similar. “So tell me about it in the car.”