The ride home from Idaho was long, and Lee wasn’t sure he liked all this new insight into Sin. To make things that much harder they were going to Tennessee by way of Wisconsin, not that any really direct interstate existed, but there were a hell of a lot of faster ways to go about it. Again, they didn’t want to be seen, and didn’t want anyone following them to know where they were headed.
Sin still hadn’t forgiven him for calling her fucked up. The conversation was stilted, at best. So halfway through the second day he waved his version of a white flag. He drove through a Dairy Queen for Blizzards, something he knew she enjoyed, and surely hadn’t gotten enough of as a kid. “You know, Sin, you shouldn’t feel guilty over your sister’s death. You did everything you could.”
“Hmmm.” It was mumbled around vanilla ice cream and frozen bits of m&m. For all the things the restaurant was willing to pack in there, Sin was a purist.
“You were just a kid. You didn’t deserve what happened, and you aren’t responsible for the clean-up.”
She nodded, but didn’t look at him. She even spooned up another mouthful and went to the trouble of finishing it before she responded to him. “That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have done more. None of us deserved any of it.”
“Maybe.” He used the red plastic spoon that looked just like the one he remembered as a kid to scoop up his own ice cream. He’d had his loaded with little bits of everything, and surely he would wind up with Oreo’s stuck in his teeth. He was wondering how bad it would look, when Sin spoke again.
“You didn’t deserve what happened to you either.”
He swallowed. “That’s debatable.”
“How? The Kurevs aren’t known for being just.” Her head turned and she looked at him for the first time in over thirty-six hours. It sure wasn’t how he’d wanted to open a real conversation. But she’d told him her side. He was living with a girl who’d murdered her first victim at fourteen, not a pretty sight. He couldn’t afford to be held up as innocent.
“I was responsible.” The ice cream had lost its taste and he wondered why he hadn’t foreseen the conversation shifting this way when he’d opened his fat mouth.
“Then so was I.”
“No. It’s different.”
She shook her head, but still managed to eat the ice cream. Nothing stopped food from going in that girl’s mouth. He wondered if she would lick down an ice cream cone over a fresh kill if he handed her one.
Starting again, he fought through the knot in his stomach. “I brought on Sam and Bethy’s deaths. Probably much the same way your father brought on what happened to you all.”
“What are you talking about?” Her face hardened into stone and she stared at the road ahead, not seeing.
“I was an accountant. So was your Dad. I got a job with Black and Associates, which turned out to be a front. I didn’t know it, but that’s because I was stupid. The money they offered me right out of school was just too good. Seriously too good. With my cushy job I had the cash, so I married Sam. We bought the house. Two years later we had Bethy. Just after she was born I was asked to do some more serious work.”
Sin hadn’t looked one way or the other. But the Blizzard was disappearing one spoonful at a time, no longer a treat but a method of self preservation.
Lee kept going. “I was flattered at the promotion, and never really thought about it. I think most people are like that.” He shrugged. “When I realized whose money I was working with, and what I was being asked to hide, I protested. Lord knows why I only then got a brain, but . . .”
“What happened?” Her voice was flat, but at least she was speaking.
“They put me in my place. Leaving my job was not an option now that I had figured out what was going on. So I thought I’d get them. I filled out their tax returns that last year, did everything the way they wanted, got all the signatures. I abused loopholes and hid all kinds of money in bad deductions. Then, after it was all ready to go, printed up and signed, I signed it, too, and I checked the box.”
“What box?”
Good girl. As much as it twisted inside him to tell what he’d done to Samantha and Bethany, he needed Sin with him now. And she needed to know what he’d done, why he had to fix it. Not that he ever would be able to.
“There’s a small box on every tax return that says something to the effect of ‘check box to claim any illegal contraband’.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” He almost smiled. “The mafia is always getting away with all kinds of things. The government put it there to help them press charges of tax evasion when they couldn’t prove the money was gotten illegally. If they can’t get you for the contraband, they’ll get you for not checking the box and paying the taxes on it.”
“No way.”
He let a small smile out. “Next winter, check out that tax return form. They all have it. So, I marked it. Figuring the government would be tipped off.”
After a deep sigh, and no help from Sin, just the sound of her spoon scraping the bottom of her cup, he continued. “It was stupid, so arrogant, to think I could get away with that. They knew it was me, and they just took out Sam and Bethy to punish me. They came back after the funeral, tried to rough me up, but I was too drunk to feel it. It didn’t matter what they did to me, without Sam and Bethany nothing really mattered.”
He remembered sitting in the bar, feeling his eyeballs peel from the expensive whiskey he’d been drinking like beer. “My brother found me, sobered me up, slapped me around a little. But the Kurevs would come after me, so I disappeared. When I was sober I was . . .”
She nodded. “Mad isn’t the word. It doesn’t begin to cover it. When was that?”
“About three and a half years ago now.”
Her lips pressed. “And what does that have to do with my Dad?”
Looking at her for the first time since he confessed to being responsible for the hits placed on his family, he wondered what she was thinking behind those pressed lips and serious eyes. Again her face looked far younger than her years, while the eyes staring bleakly ahead looked hundreds of eons old. If he hadn’t looked it up, he would never have guessed her true age. “Did you never wonder ‘why you’?”
“I try not to.”
“It wasn’t random, Sin. Your Dad was an accountant. Do you know who he worked for?”
“He wouldn’t have worked for them.” But after hearing his own story, she was clearly wondering and unraveling threads that must have been held together with denial for all this time.
Lee spoke what she was thinking. “Neither would I. And I bucked them when I figured it out. And look what it got me.”
She sniffed‒a sound he had never heard from Sin before. “At least you can say you are your own man. You stood up for what you believed.”
His heart crushed inside his chest, and his lungs wouldn’t fill with air. But he kept driving. He’d felt this before, and unfortunately he would survive it. He imagined this was what it felt like to be lung-shot, and that allowed him to enjoy the pain just a little. “I’d rather have Samantha and Bethany back. I may be my own man, but I don’t exist.”
“Well, what about me? I don’t exist either!” Her voice rose an octave, and he wondered where all the emotion was coming from in the girl who’d been cool as an iceberg the whole time he’d known her. But maybe there was far more lurking beneath the stunning, glacial surface. “It wasn’t my fault. Even if it was my father’s!”
“I know. You’re right. You were an innocent victim.”
“I was eleven. What the hell does an eleven year old do to deserve that?” Her teeth pushed together, locking tight. Her eyes didn’t blink, and her cheekbones were harsh slashes across her face. “Thinking it was my father’s fault doesn’t help. I prefer to remember him as a good man who loved us.”
“Don’t change. He was probably all that. But he was human, too.” His lungs let in air again, although he wasn’t sure why, and he hadn’t wished it. “I’d prefer my girls think the same of me. But I brought it down on them.”
Her expression unchanging, her words lacked inflection. “That doesn’t mean that my father did, too.”
“Think, Sin. Someone did. The Kurev family doesn’t do random violence. They aren’t out committing home burglaries. They hit your family for a specific reason. Someone triggered the attack on you. And I’ll bet every penny it wasn’t you or your sister.”
She didn’t respond.
So much for that conversation.
“When I’m done,” He mused, telling her what he hadn’t ever told anyone. Not that there’d been anyone to tell. “I’m going back to Black and Associates. There are a few key players there that I’d like to take out. But they’d recognize me, so I’d have to end it there.”
Still she didn’t speak.
“Dunham.” The voice at the door was accompanied by a hand that held out four white tablets.
Owen stood, and thanked the other agent, before taking the Tylenol from her and popping it back. He swallowed it with coffee, the heat of the drink making the tablets dissolve into a powdery grit as they went down his throat. The bitter taste they left seemed appropriate, matching his feelings about marching in here a few days ago and announcing that he didn’t think this was the ninja’s first shooting kill.
Agent Bean had agreed with his/Annika’s reasoning and put him and Blankenship right on it.
Owen had the mother of all headaches going on forty-eight hours now. He’d been sucking down Tylenol and alternating it with Motrin, a trick he’d learned from Charlotte’s childhood fevers. The medications didn’t attack the system the same way, so you could take both simultaneously. Taking one, then two hours later popping the other, allowed you to stay continuously over-medicated. He added his usual over-dose of caffeine by way of coffee to the cocktail in his bloodstream. Still the headache was merely reduced from jackhammer status to woodpecker.
He’d set Blankenship to work on finding other kills. But it had been too much for one person. So Owen had joined in, and looking through files of shooting deaths was like killing yourself with a safety pin. Eventually you would die from all the pricks, right?
Just the case numbers when he cross-referenced ‘shooting deaths’ were too many to look at. He’d even had to pull actual files with Blankenship, which they did randomly, until they could figure out what to search for and against. That had taken the better part of yesterday morning.
They’d opened folder after folder and flipped through killing after killing. But the vast majority had stray bullets. That, of course, wasn’t noted in so many words in the Agents’ documentation. Because damn near everyone had stray bullets. ‘Ace marksman’ wouldn’t cut it either. Owen was certain, though, that if he saw a photo of his girl’s handiwork with a gun, he’d just know it. In his head he could see the torso, peppered with clean shots.
He sighed out loud,
At least they’d realized they could have the computer sort out anything that said ‘execution style’. The ninja did not give her victims the quick way out. She made them suffer. Unfortunately, the agents who reported the cases weren’t required to mark a victim suffering scale on each case. If they had, he’d have his girl in no time. Instead he had about fifteen thousand files to go through and only a few things to cross off.
Blankenship appeared in the doorway already vacated by the Tylenol bringer. Agent Westin was a great agent, and she’d recognized his headache and taken care of Owen. She’d also made sure to take care of herself. Which meant, as soon as she delivered the drugs and a small smile, she’d gotten the hell out. Blankenship didn’t look as good as Westin did in the doorway. In fact he looked like the file room had pulled a full out poltergeist attack on him. “We can get rid of anything with a ‘domestic’ or ‘spouse’ suspect.”
“Yes.” Thank you, God. These weren’t domestic abuse cases. Blankenship was right. And when Blankenship was right, the world had gone to hell. But Owen typed in the order to remove domestic cases, and about four thousand dropped off the list.
Well, the computer said it dropped about four thousand. His screen still looked as full as it did before. And the woodpecker was still at it in his head.
He wanted to filter it for mafia, but that would be a last resort. He would lose about half the related cases if he did, because his ninja went after seemingly random side people, too. Owen was still looking for a connection there. Or rather Annika was. She dropped Charlotte off in the mornings and spent her day online, looking up the ninja’s bad guys and trying to find the web that held it all together, however tenuous.
Owen stopped for a moment and wondered if Agent Bean didn’t already know about Annika’s side sleuthing for him. Surely the FBI could tap his home computer. Surely they had checked his Russian born wife, up and down, before letting him into the Bureau. He’d had more than one dream where she told him she was a double agent working for some Russian government.
He’d woken from that dream in a cold sweat each time. He would wake and watch Annika, as she rolled over and looked at him with concern because he’d roused in the dead of night. He’d had it about once a year after joining the Bureau. He’d been in the process of signing up when he’d met her. So she could be an agent. Not that that made any real sense.
But the dreams had stopped about three years ago, when she’d looked at him in the middle of the night with such love. Even though he’d refused to tell her what the dream was about, she’d comforted him, curled into him, and fallen back asleep. He’d decided then that, if she was an agent, he’d just have to pack up and follow her back to Mother Russia. He would play sleuth at home while she worked for the KGB by day. He’d drive Charlotte to school and cook dinner and ask to see her case files.
The dream hadn’t come again.
And he was leaving anyway. It didn’t matter if the Bureau knew about Annika’s help. The only issue would be if they kicked him out before he could solve the ninja case. Because he desperately wanted to do it.
There had to be something.
Annika would find it.
Owen told Blankenship he was going to lunch. His stomach didn’t need food. He’d fed it a full meal of pills and coffee. Next he would need ulcer surgery. What he needed was a break.
So he sat in the commissary, eating a tuna salad on wheat toast sandwich for no particular reason. Most of the other agents were doing the same as him: chewing and staring off blankly into space, cases churning through their heads. What a nest of anti-social freaks. No, this wasn’t helping him relax.
So Owen decided it was time to choose a new career. He couldn’t make a list of ideas, in case someone saw it. But staring at the middle space and not speaking to anyone was a perfectly acceptable way to spend your lunch at the Bureau. So by the time the sandwich was gone, except for the overly curly lettuce he’d dumped on the side of his tray, he’d decided to go into consulting. He just hadn’t figured out how to get any consulting jobs.
He had visions though. Of a house in the suburbs. A picket fence. Maybe a tie, but no suits. Maybe he’d work in jeans and a t-shirt. From home. There was a certain appeal to it. Of course how he’d come up with this jeans-and-t-shirt job he still didn’t know. That brought up an image of him printing up advertising flyers and putting them on car windshields. Or tucking them in front doors. Except of course where people had guard dogs. The vision of him and his flyers running like a scared girl almost had him laughing. And he’d have to run. He wouldn’t be with the FBI anymore. He wouldn’t have his Glock. If he had the gun on him he wouldn’t be above using the barrel of his 9mm to stare down a dog.
He stifled his laugh until it hit him.
The dogs.
That was what they should search for. Executed dogs.
He stood abruptly, almost knocking over the flimsy table. But no one seemed to notice. The woodpecker in his head had stopped hammering.
Cyn stared through the window, feeling the burn building inside her. Lee hadn’t moved, and she had told herself she would let him lead. But the burning was making that less and less likely. If he didn’t move in the next two seconds, she was going to.
She couldn’t watch anymore.
The window in the back of the church was clean and sparkly, someone had put some love and care into cleaning it. Shame they weren’t paying as much attention to who they left their kids with. And this was one sick fuck.
She’d read an article about it in the Tempe Wrangler, several kids had accused the preacher of serious crimes. All she’d been able to do was hand the article to Lee. They’d packed the car within an hour. He hadn’t asked any questions.
They’d found a motel, ridden bikes through the heat, drowning themselves in water just to stave off the dehydration that came so easily here even in the late autumn months. They’d found the man’s house. They’d found his office. And they’d broken into both, installing cameras and recorders.
Though it was Cyn’s first experience with the equipment, Lee had used it a bit before. He said he’d watched hours of footage of himself at his cabin in Atlanta, until he was sure he could install and operate it correctly. They had ridden the bikes again yesterday and eaten steak sandwiches at the mall, and Lee had forwarded through hours of tape while Cyn marked moves in the tiny space of the motel room, just to keep limber.
Lee’s voice had cut through a very carefully mocked head kick. “He’s guilty.”
“What?” Coming closer, she’d stood behind Lee’s shoulder, but he’d flipped over the tiny TV screen that he was now using to watch tapes.
“Don’t watch, Cyn. Just don’t.”
Her stomach had turned then.
They’d come this evening to end it, thinking they might find him alone, but no. The church had been full, maybe not like Sunday morning, but a large number of people had been coming and going. So Lee and Cyn watched through the cameras as the man shook hands and thanked the church people for caring about him, for believing in him. For trusting him with their children. For their continuing faith in him. Her stomach had turned even then, but not like now.
He was alone in his back office with a little boy. And he was starting.
Lee still hadn’t moved. Cyn did. She put her eye to the corner of the window and made certain that the office was otherwise empty. The preacher had locked it behind him, so there wasn’t any real danger of someone coming in.
She pulled the mask down over her face, and quickly took out the pane of glass with her towel-wrapped fist. When she put her face into the hole she had created, both the man and the child looked terrified. Her eyes locked on the boy, and she realized it wasn’t the first time he’d been here. “Leave. Lock the door behind you.”
She’d whispered it, to keep her voice from getting recognized, but she wouldn’t have been able to produce more sound if she’d tried. There were people still in the church. Many had left, but her heart pounded. She’d never done this before. And she wouldn’t have done it now, except this man had to be stopped. Today. What she’d seen earlier on the camera had made it impossible for her to wait.
His eyes flew wide even as his hands flew into action. He adjusted his clothing, but Cyn leaned through the window and threw two knives, pinning his hands near his crotch, where he’d been straightening his pants.
The clicking of the tumblers caused her to jerk her head up to look at the door, but it was sliding shut, the doorknob lock clearly engaged. The thought went through her head, Good boy. Some part of that kid knew what was happening. And some part of him approved.
She slid into the room, followed quickly by Lee. He held out an envelope with the two tapes they’d collected. Already sealed, it held the words ‘the good Reverend Deehan’ in Cyn’s left-handed writing.
The man whimpered but made no other noises as Cyn approached. She was ready to cover his mouth, kill him quickly if he gulped in air for a scream. She had yet to meet a single person who didn’t give away their moves. You just had to know what to look for.
She took the envelope from Lee and pulled another knife from her jacket, this time she held it with the blade protruding downward from her fist, and she rammed it into his chest, deep into a lung, holding the envelope in place.
Although she wouldn’t have thought it was possible, wide blue eyes got wider. The face was charming, friendly even, and he’d probably used it to his full advantage. Cyn wasn’t into killing on hearsay, and she enjoyed the shock in those eyes because of what she’d seen.
But there was no time for more. Stepping back, she pulled the letter and folded red ribbon bow from under her jacket and let Lee finish the job. With a few fast sucking noises, bullets slammed into the man at close enough range to leave powder burns. His throat opened in a tiny hole, before blood filled it and marred the perfect circle. The crotch of his pants jerked then stained bright red. And silently she thanked Lee for that. Everyone should know. The man’s eyes looked downward, maybe feeling what had happened, but not the pain of it, not yet. At last a bullet entered the chest, just a little left of center, and the last wobbling hold the preacher had maintained on being upright fled as he sank to the thick Persian carpet.
His eyes held a glassy stare in the face that had charmed too many children, as well as their parents. Some wouldn’t believe. Wouldn’t want to. But the tapes would be there to speak for those who couldn’t. Cyn sure as hell didn’t want them.
Even as she tacked the bow and the note to him, Lee went around the room removing the two cameras they’d installed. Lipstick sized tubes, they caught enough of the happenings that no one would doubt what this man was guilty of. Lee undid the screws as carefully as he felt they had time for, and had reclaimed both the pieces even before she was partially out the window. He followed quickly.
They kept to the bushes, sneaking out, then they had walked almost brazenly into the space behind the building. Tempe offered very little in the way of tree cover, which was Cyn’s preferred method for changing after she left a scene. But here she settled for the back of the green Toyota. She was in a t-shirt and low side pigtails in under two minutes, one of Lee’s ball caps planted firmly on her head. Even as she popped the car in gear and pulled out from behind the buildings where they’d stashed it, she slapped a garish pink lipstick across her mouth.
In her passenger seat, Lee had slipped out of his long-sleeved shirt and was sliding into a tee. Just the warmer clothing alone would have been suspect in Tempe at this time of year, and he balled it up and stashed it under the seat. He used a spritzer bottle she now kept stashed in the glove compartment to put water on his hair and keep it from sticking out in all directions, from looking like he’d just pulled a ski mask from over his head.
Fifteen minutes later they were walking into the motel, Lee holding her hand, her shoulder pressed to his arm. Partly it was for show. Partly it was because she was threatening to shake.
She wasn’t used to this. Cyn felt her brain churn with thoughts that it had been too fast. It was quick by necessity. There was no real way to get to this man otherwise. His apartment had been less of an option than the church, as he had another minister staying with him. The cameras there had yielded nothing, and she and Lee had taken them out this morning, posing as repairmen.
They’d been seen.
She’d had blonde hair, and he’d put embroidered ball caps on both their heads, so no one got a good look at their faces. Except for one little old lady whose glasses were so thick that Cyn had looked right up at her and smiled a big grin, knowing that even if this woman was put on the stand as the only eyewitness to their ‘crime’ no one would believe her. Then Cyn had petted the little dog and made nice.
To add to that, the speed with which they’d dispatched the preacher to the hell he lectured on had not been what she wanted. The slow death had its purposes, one of which was suffering, and in that respect this man had not paid enough. The note and the tapes would make certain that no one would praise his sainthood when they buried him. The Robert Listle scenario had not repeated and Cyn would not let it.
But the other reason for the slow death, was simply to make sure that everything had gone right. That fuck-ups had not occurred, and that you hadn’t left hair or objects behind. Surgery was a slow and painstaking process for the same reason, and she wished to stay in this business. Not behind bars. That meant no errors.
For the first time, she’d let her emotions, her feeling for those children, push her to hastiness. If this didn’t kill her then she needed to learn from it. It couldn’t happen again. No matter what the forces pushing her. She said as much to Lee after he finished stashing the things in the spaces around the room. Even in a two-bit flea bag room, the two of them could hide an arsenal for an army. Even the cops would be hard pressed to find all of it.
Grey eyes looked her up and down, as Lee seemed to realize for the first time that she was still standing in the middle of the room. She wasn’t shaking, but only the control she’d fought and trained so hard for ensured that.
He didn’t speak, but opened a mini-fridge that was doubling as a bedside table. It was covered in dark wood veneer contact paper and would have been too tacky for words if it hadn’t blended so well with the rest of the bad décor. Pulling out a can of Coke that he must have stashed there earlier and a fifth of Jack Daniels, Lee divided the soda into two squat plastic cups and topped them with the Jack before handing her one.
As a rule, Cyn didn’t drink. There’d been no need. She didn’t want dulled senses. But now she rescinded that decision and slugged the soda that, with the Jack in it, was a little flat, a little hot, and had a strong over-sweet aftertaste. It didn’t kick as harshly as she had thought it would, though.
She was almost done when Lee spoke, and she had to wonder if she was drunk because she hadn’t expected what he asked.
“So where the hell do you keep all that stuff in your jacket?”
“What?” She swished the drink, suspecting that she’d had enough, but then slapped the rest of it back, enjoying how it pushed her thoughts to the side and beginning to finally understand alcoholism.
“Every time I see you wear it, it’s like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat. I know there’s a logical explanation, but I don’t see it.” He kicked back the end of his own drink, but the effects weren’t anywhere near as strong on him as they had been on her. At least not visibly. Aside from the smell in the cup, he looked like he’d been drinking soda. “I mean, you throw a knife then another just appears in your hands, then stars come out of nowhere.”
She smiled. She loved that jacket, had designed and sewed a good portion of it herself, altering a basic design she’d found in a chain store years ago. With a flourish, Cyn crawled under the bed and hauled out the backpack, in turn pulling the jacket from the bag and slipping into it to demonstrate.
If anyone came to question them, and saw her in the leather coat, they were toast. But no one had followed them. No one likely even knew the preacher was dead yet. And no one was going to knock on the door to offer maid service or to chat, not here. So she ignored the possibility and showed off the pockets.
“See, down the sleeves?” Cyn held up her arm showing both the underside and back of the forearms. Small squares of matching leather were tightly stitched on and held about five stars each. “I took apart another identical jacket to make all the extra pieces, so it would all match.”
Lee nodded and reached out to feel the pockets. He watched closely as she pushed a finger under one tip of a star and rotated it quickly out of its slot. “Slick. How do you keep the pockets from curving with your arm?”
Again, the grin smothered her face. “At first they did. I had to cut little metal squares and stitch them in the lining to keep them flat. Otherwise they bent and the stars got caught.”
She shrugged out of the sleeve and pushed it into his hands, watching while his fingers felt the metal backing she’d put there.
“Hey, the knives.” His fingers traced the long compartments inside the body of the jacket.
Slipping the sleeve back on, she opened it and showed off her stash the way a street vendor sold cheap knock-off watches. The throwing knives were in slim pouches that ran vertically along her ribcage under her arm.
“Why so far back?” Lee reached for the fridge again.
“Well, there’s a story there.” She sighed, “I put them in the front, thinking they’d be easier to grab. Practiced with them there. Then went out one night to perpetrate some crime. I didn’t make it to my destination. I leaned over the top of a fence and punctured myself with my own knives.”
“No way.” He sat up and looked at her.
“Yup.” Lifting her shirt hem she showed off a small v-shaped scar along the right side of her belly. “With my breasts in front the tips were already aimed at me. So when I leaned on it, in they went.”
Lee looked at the scar again, then shook his head, even as he offered her the refilled Jack and Coke.
This time she sipped it. “I moved the pockets after that, and did much more thorough testing on all the additions afterward.”
“No more scars?”
“Nope.”
His drink was half done, but the cup was small anyway. So Cyn didn’t worry about the effects too much. Lee helped her out of the jacket and searched it again before folding it and stuffing it into the backpack and shoving the whole thing under the bed.
Worn out from the night, and certain that they hadn’t been followed, Cyn reassured herself that they wouldn’t be caught. She shucked her leather pants, leaving them on the floor, before she pulled back the covers and curled up in the bed.
She woke to a smell she wasn’t familiar with. Her eyes didn’t open, even though she knew it was early morning, that she usually woke at this time, but she felt a little fuzzy, and wondered what could be wrong. Almost without her input, her chest heaved a deep breath, re-equilibrating her system, and the smell came again. Half of it wasn’t smell at all, but heat. The other half was comprised of something male with a hint of something sweet.
The muscles at the back of her head tightened, and from behind her eyes she remembered the Jack and Cokes she’d drunk the night before. That was the sweet part of the smell. The male part was familiar even though she wasn’t used to it.
Forcing herself to blink, Cyn saw that she had slept in her t-shirt and leather underwear. Her nose was almost pressed into Lee’s chest, and when she looked up, through slow heavy blinks, he was looking at her much the same way. Like ‘what the hell are you doing here?’
“Hmmm.” It was all she could manage before she rolled away. Her feet found their way to the bathroom easily enough, and she climbed into the shower, breathing deeply and letting the steam open her lungs. She was reminding herself not to drink again, when she realized she’d come in without anything to change into. Cyn re-reminded herself why she hadn’t drunk before, and sighed.
In a moment, she’d figured out what to do. After finishing washing off with the one cheap bar of soap the motel had provided, she called Lee to bring her some clothing. His feet shuffled uncharacteristically beyond the doorway and his hand reached in through the open crack where she was holding a towel around herself and wondering why she wasn’t more concerned.
His voice was a little mumbled, but Cyn didn’t comment. Surely he could hold two cups of Jack and Coke. So maybe it was her brain that was mumbling. “I brought your leather undies, too. But where’s the duct tape?”
“Ha ha.”
She changed quickly, and by the time she had emerged into the room, she’d made certain she looked like a college kid. “Your turn.”
Lee didn’t respond, just sat staring at something on the wall behind her. Only then did the sound penetrate. A woman spoke from the television in serious tones, and the words “minister, here at this church,” caused Cyn to stop and take the seat next to Lee on the end of the bed.
She watched as the over-made up woman in the red suit gestured to the scene behind her, a view just outside the church they’d broken into last night. The camera pulled back and showed the growing crowd at the edge of the police tape, trying to get a glimpse of . . . what, Cyn wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for.
Another woman now stood beside the too-bright reporter, and was introduced as a cleaning lady in the church. Her thin gunmetal gray hair was wound repeatedly, directly on top of her head, and she had that look on her face that said she was going to call everyone she knew and tell them she was on TV. She explained in excited but serious tones, and poor grammar, how she had found the man who had given her a job and saved her. A tear, maybe even real, rolled down her cheek as she talked about what a good man he’d been and how kind he’d been to her and so many others. She would miss him.
Smiling her pity and condolences, and placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder, the reporter effectively ended the sob story and turned her attention to informing her audience that there were tapes, and it was speculated that they would provide proof for the accusations that had been leveled against the man.
“Even more concerning is the way the body was found. Apparently he was wrapped in a large red bow and sported a note resembling a gift tag.”
Cyn smiled.
“That’s not good.” Lee’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“Yeah, well, he’s dead, and that’s good.”
“True enough.” He stood and shuffled into the bathroom.
An hour later they were long gone.
Owen’s head pulsed at jackhammer speed, and until he took enough medication to kill himself he wasn’t going to be able to make it stop. Since he wasn’t sure he was going to heaven, death might not even be enough.
From the crowd gathered beyond the yellow tape, and the sheer numbers of officers whose sole job was just to hold them at bay, it looked like he might already be dead. If he was, he was definitely in hell.
Owen stopped for a moment and prayed again that he was dreaming, nightmaring more like, but the image didn’t fade when he opened his squeezed eyes. So he probably wasn’t dead yet.
The three of them had taken off their suit jackets and ties, having gotten the warning of the gathering mob only after they were already in the air. That the cleaning lady had found the body was bad enough, but the growing crowd was a thousand-fold worse. There was also the problem that the Phoenix office had been on site for a while now. Their crime scene team had already reported that they had tapes and had found screw holes in the plaster of the walls where the cameras that captured those images had been mounted.
That the victim had been very guilty was of less concern to Owen than the fact that he’d been tied and tagged like a used car. The bow alone told of his guilt, at least Owen believed that with all his heart. His ninja was in no way indiscriminate. And she had excellent timing. They’d been onto something with those dogs. The files that search had yielded looked like pure gold. However they were still sitting on his desk waiting to be sifted through. While instead of sorting files, he was here, and here was bad.
He didn’t mind having another dead body on his hands. It was the crowd. Because, as the three of them stood at the perimeter without their suit jackets and ties, they weren’t recognized as the feds. So it was required that they flash their badges, which brought on a swarm of reporters.
“Sir, you’re with the FBI?” He’d no more than clamped his teeth together than he heard Blankenship say ‘yes’. Owen felt his eyes roll back.
“And why are you here?”
Not the most eloquent of questions, but it got the job done. He pinched Blankenship’s arm this time, and his partner gave the same tight non-smile that he and Nguyen passed out like candy. He tried to remind himself to be grateful that they’d just been lucky the media hadn’t fallen on them like a soggy blanket before this.
He pushed past and made his way into the crime scene, thinking that his desire to get into the church without being recognized as Bureau had been as short-lived as it had been stupid. Inside, he and Nguyen donned their paper suits while they sent Blankenship out to stand perimeter. All of it a vain attempt to keep the media ignorant.
The minister lay inside, slipped down to a seated position against the solid front of his desk. His hands had leaked blood around the familiar knives that pinned them to his lower abdomen. The same kind of knife entered deep into his chest and held an invitation sized manila envelope. The envelope had been sliced open by the cops, who’d been told not to remove it. Whether that was an act of defiance or just plain stupidity, Owen wasn’t certain.
They’d already reported that the tapes were a serious batch of child porn. Owen found himself looking at the body and being grateful that the man was dead. But not knowing what to do with the holes that had leaked red onto his clothing. Three knives. Three bullets. His little ninja wasn’t reverting back to hand and weapon combat only. She’d moved forward, continuing to combine her weapons with ballistics. And from the stack of files that was waiting on his desk, she’d been trying her hand at ballistics for a while. Going on three years now. At least.
And here was the latest, the broken window showing entry, shards of glass littering the carpet under the window as well as the sill beyond. People had been in the church when the man had died, the ninja had come and killed and gone, all with parishioners nearby.
She was escalating.
Owen knew that meant his time was coming.
The bullet holes were in perfect alignment. One through the trachea, surely just for pain. One in the crotch, meant as a punishment, and maybe a warning. One in the chest, just a little left of center. His ninja was no dummy. From the kidney and lung shots he’d seen in the past, Owen knew his ninja knew her organs. But Annika had been reading up, and found that was what ninjas studied: anatomy. They made low impact blows to highly sensitive nerve clusters, taking their enemies down by making their own bodies work against them. It was the first explanation he had heard that offered a decent reason for his little ninja to be able to fell the large mafia men.
He talked with the local homicide dick, who explained that the camera made no attempt to hide the angle from which it was shooting, and the screw holes had been obvious once they looked in that direction. But the cameras themselves were gone. Owen withheld his comments about the tapes having been removed and viewed when the FBI had specifically told them not to touch the scene.
His girl was entering the technological age, too.
The bow was the same as they’d seen before, the gift tag just like all the others. Owen recognized the handwriting immediately. He’d found himself looking over shoulders in the grocery store, checking out shoppers’ lists, waiting to see that handwriting, anywhere else but tacked to a dead body.
Unfortunately, there was nothing really new here.
Nguyen shone his fluorescent lights around, then his halogens. He picked up hairs that he could see. A brunette strand, pinched tight in tweezers, was held up to the light and examined by sight.
Owen had started to get excited, but Nguyen shook his head even without looking away. “It’s not hers. Too short, and looks too young. The end is cut, so this hair was worn at this length.”
Of course it wasn’t hers. Annika had said they weren’t going to get another one.
They left three hours later, not surprised to see that more people had gathered, more news crews had arrived. He pushed his way through, Nguyen trailing him with his mouth shut tight, his baggies of evidence concealed in his shoulder bag. He looked like any other businessman heading off to work. Blankenship brought up the rear, his smile less clamped, more open.
Reporters ditched their current interviews to turn on them, and Owen imagined he could drown in the sea of them, the rhythm of the pounding in his head could have been the slosh of tall black waves breaking over him.
There was nothing he could say. The horses were out of the gate.