Owen had handed in his letter of resignation. He was done with the FBI. He had a very low level professorship awaiting him at UCLA. The University was big enough to climb the ranks if he so decided and had a big enough name to get him to the next place if he didn’t like it there. There would be a world of opportunities for Charlotte in Los Angeles. Annika could do whatever she wanted. Everything awaited.
A change awaited.
That was maybe the most important thing. This last run-in, putting him so close to the Christmas Killers, had left him so drained. As the three agents had driven away from the hospital, with evidence in hand and a slew of agents still combing the place, Owen had found a moment to be grateful that he hadn’t come muzzle to muzzle with the gunner. Not one of his men could shoot like what the evidence said the gunner could. And none of them could go hand to hand with the ninja. They would have had power in numbers, but Owen didn’t know if even that would be enough.
These two wanted out, it seemed. This last round of firecracker activity, where no one had gotten killed and the FBI now held the documentation it needed to put Kurev, and most of his cronies, away for a damn long time, had been a final bid. That meant they likely wouldn’t appear again. Not unless Owen’s pager went off and went off damned soon.
Had they all met face to face, it would have been a bloodbath. And Owen was more and more happy it hadn’t happened, because he sure as hell didn’t know if he would have walked away or not.
He leaned back in his chair, in his office, and looked around. Four more days.
The map still hung across the back wall. The pins had made it all the way through the colors, the last dark cluster in Chicago, from three weeks ago. The small plastic heads were all deepening shades of true red. A.k.a. fucked. But Owen didn’t feel fucked. He felt empty.
He stretched and walked down the hall to visit Nguyen, stopping for his coffee along the way and having the nerve to already feel nostalgic about it.
Nguyen looked up, his paper coveralls far neater and more pristine looking than any suit had been. “What now?”
“Nothing.” Owen perched on the edge of the desk. “Anything new?”
“Same old, same old.”
The hair had matched. The two strands from the hospital had been identical to the one from the campus rapist scene. They’d run DNA analysis then, and bingo. But Nguyen had done that almost three weeks ago.
Nothing much else had turned up. There were no new scenes.
Owen had artist renderings from anyone who had seen their faces. The BroMenn Medical Center employees had seen both of them. The physician couldn’t recall either with enough clarity to make a sketch. The nurse could. As could the guard at Black and Associates on the first night they’d entered.
The problem was, it had rendered several entirely different drawings for each of the killers. They could all be the same person, he supposed. But the descriptions were for different nationalities, hair colors. The eye shape and nose width was different enough in each drawing to make certain that not a single one was believable.
Nguyen left the file out and went back to work.
Owen watched for a few minutes then thumbed through the hefty folder. There were pages of Nguyen’s typed notes, baggies of evidence. In particular, two‒clipped together‒with matching long brunette strands. There was also a small silver recorder. Owen picked up that baggie. “What’s this?”
Nguyen looked up from across the room and smiled. “Listen to it.”
The recorder itself wasn’t evidence, according to the label on the bag, so Owen plucked it out and hit the play button. He heard the FBI operator answer and identify herself, followed by a long patch of silence, then a sneeze and a whispered ‘damnit’.
It was female. Even through the whisper he’d bet his salary on that. It was the ninja’s voice, or as close to it as they were going to get. Owen listened again.
“You know,” Nguyen interrupted the small joy he was feeling at hearing the sounds repeatedly, “it seems there are people in the Bureau who are on the Christmas Killers’ side.”
“What do you mean?”
Nguyen shrugged. “Just that the initial recording got deleted from all the base files.”
“Huh?”
“No one can find it. What you hold in your hand is the only copy we have.”
Owen’s brain was running with that one when Nguyen reined him back in.
“I haven’t copied it.” He waited until he caught Owen’s eyes before continuing. “And there you hold the only recorded evidence in your hand. On a little recorder that you can buy at any Radio Shack around the country.”
Was Nguyen suggesting . . . ?
He didn’t say, but Owen’s gears were churning. He had four more days.
With only a nod to his friend, he wandered back out into the hall, feeling more out of place than he had in decades. When he arrived at his office, seemingly by his own two feet, Blankenship was waiting in one of the guest chairs.
Owen sighed. Only four more days of Blankenship. He seated himself and put his coffee on his desk, directly on the ring he had first made years ago. When Blankenship stood and closed the door, the day just got weirder.
His junior partner seated himself, looking nervous and excited all at the same time. Owen wondered what was going to blow up, and if it might be Blankenship.
“So, I had all the paperwork from BroMenn Med Center, from when the killers visited.”
Owen had seen it. It was typed in by the night check-in girl. The ninja had claimed to be right handed and therefore unable to sign. She was to do her best once the cast was dry, but left the hospital before she could. It was a useless batch of info and that was why he’d sent Blankenship crawling after it.
“Okay, the gunner gave all the info to the night clerk.” Blankenship flipped through papers, “He said they were from Chicago, and he gave 1067 South Washtenaw Avenue as the address.”
Owen had seen that.
“But, that address has been occupied by a Mrs. Margaret Landley for over forty years.”
No surprise.
Blankenship was up to a mile a minute, “But more interesting is that four doors down is a daycare. At 1055.”
“So?”
“It became a daycare four years ago after the house on the lot wouldn’t sell. And it wouldn’t sell because the wife and daughter of the happy family that lived there had been shot to death. The job smacks of Sergei Leopold, by the way.”
Owen leaned to the edge of his seat. Holy shit.
“Yeah,” The junior agent smiled. “I just followed Margaret Landley and found it. Thing is, the murdered mother is the daughter of Mrs. Landley. Who lived at the address the gunner gave us. And the father, who found his murdered wife and child by the way, was a Mr. Lee Maxwell, no middle name. He was an accountant with Black and Associates until he disappeared shortly after the demise of his wife and daughter.”
Blankenship smiled like a maniac.
Owen almost fell out of his seat. “Are you serious?”
The junior agent nodded like a well performed puppy.
“Do we have photos of Lee Maxwell?”
“Well,” Owen could see it all falling apart. “We have his high school photo. There’s nothing else on the web. But I already have calls in to the family. I just can’t figure out why he gave us that address.”
Owen was having trouble absorbing all of it. His head was spinning and his partner wanted him to think. All he could think was that sending Blankenship on all those stupid paper chases had actually turned him into a good researcher.
Jesus.
He shrugged. “I guess he needed an address and that one made sense. He probably wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“But why not make one up?”
“The med center’s computer program will reject it if it doesn’t exist or if the zip codes don’t match. You need a real address. Maybe that one was handy.” His world somehow still on its axis, he dismissed his partner. He needed breathing room. “Good work, Blankenship.”
Owen hadn’t seen any of that coming in a million years.
He hovered around the office looking up what he could on Lee Maxwell in a haze until he went home for dinner. Annika knew something was up, but didn’t question him until after Charlotte was in bed. Owen spilled everything.
At last, when he’d divulged every piece of information he knew, she gently asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
She nodded. “Well, just in case, I’m going to invite Charlotte’s little friend Jessica over to spend the night this weekend. She’s got the most beautiful long brown hair. You can decide any time between now and Saturday.”
Cyn turned the key in the lock and swung the door from the garage to the kitchen wide open. It was late, but Lee would be up still. So she hollered out, “Hey, honey, I’m home.”
It still felt like a bit of a joke, but far less than it had when they’d moved in three years ago. The place had been damned expensive, but there was a lot of money from her parents’ deaths and from Samantha and Bethany’s insurance policies still left over. And she felt she was finally honoring their memories, that their deaths had been avenged.
“In here!” Lee sat in the dining room, his laptop on the table. He wouldn’t emerge from tax season for a while, and they’d decided to go on a real vacation then. That alone was exciting. Cyn was hoping to go shark diving or bungee jumping. A bag of Doritos was open at Lee’s side and he looked up as she came into the room‒he’d slid so easily into being a husband.
Not that they’d ever gotten married. But they’d bought rings, because their hacker had put them in the system as married. They’d also bought Lee’s CPA license and an excellent test score along with their new identities.
Cyn had retaken the damned GED. High school records were a bitch, apparently. And she hadn’t really been old enough for a college degree to be forged. She was half a term away from earning a real one now anyway.
Lee stood up and stretched. “How did it go?”
“Great. Like always.” Only now was she beginning to feel secure enough to make friends. Not many, not really good friends. But it was a start. “Was that your dinner?”
He nodded.
Without talking much, they put together a very late meal and sat on the couch eating. Halfway through Cyn started in on him. “I want a baby.”
“I know.”
“Now.”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t just pick one up at the store. We said we’d try in the summer.”
It made him nervous. The house, the job, the wife‒he was fine with all of that, but the child still scared him a bit. She pushed. “I want to try now. Maybe it won’t work until summer. But we’ve been here a while. We’re settled in. Nothing’s happened in three years.”
She tried to look her most pleading and her most motherly all at the same time. She was probably too young to be a mother. But who wasn’t? She was definitely already too old in too many ways.
Half his mouth quirked. “Okay.”
That was all it took. She smiled the grandest smile she knew, and went back to eating her dinner.
A few minutes later she broke into his thoughts, as he was obviously already getting concerned about this future child. “You know, I stopped by the ATM on the way home tonight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The light was out where I was walking back to the parking structure. And this guy came out of nowhere.”
“What?” His fork stopped midway to his mouth. He stared at her. “What did you do?”
“I tried to just run, really I did. But he was too close.” Words flew out of her mouth in an effort to explain. She’d asked about the baby first on purpose. “He mugged me!”
“You mean ‘he tried’.”
“Yeah.” Cyn attempted to sound apologetic, and didn’t quite make it. She really needed an outlet these days. “I let him have it.”
Lee’s voice was strained. “Is he dead?”
“No!” The nerve of him! She tried to conjure up a little hurt at the offense, but didn’t quite muster that either. “He was just a mugger.”
“Where is he?”
“In the bushes under the burned out light.”
Lee stared at her.
“He’s tied up. He can get out, so he won’t wind up with the cops, but he’ll be damned embarrassed.”
“Sin. You fell off the wagon! After three years.” He sighed. Lee was trying to be mad at her, she could tell. After about thirty seconds he broke loose and laughed.
Owen took the walkway back to the parking structure. The light was out. It would just figure. His hand still automatically felt for the Glock at his side, but it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for several years.
He was finished with Los Angeles. It hadn’t been the bastion of opportunity he’d wanted. And he’d come to some hard conclusions. Mostly that he’d been a fool. In those first days, he’d lied to himself, believing that the ninja hadn’t factored in at all. But LA was where he would have gone to surface, if he’d had a history like she did. He had harbored a useless hope.
But it was time to cut his losses and pack it in. Charlotte was in junior high now and they all needed real roots. After three years out of the Bureau, it was finally time to leave it behind. Owen breathed in the night air of his last spring in California.
The sidewalk cut an alleyway between the backside of the classrooms and the cement parking complex. Tall trees had been added for shade during the day and probably for looks as well. But all the people with night classes, like the associate professors, had to walk down a tree-lined and fairly dark path even when the lights were on.
He kept his ears alert. The Bureau guys would find him and mock him mercilessly, even from a distance, if he got himself mugged. Owen moved his bag from his hand to over his shoulder. He liked the weight of it. Teaching agreed with him, and more, better opportunities awaited him in North Carolina.
Much of it was as he’d expected: young faces, some older, looking to him at the front of the classroom. The students seemed to like him. He’d taken real pride in his evaluations that first Christmas. The night classes cut into some of his time with Charlotte, but he saw her far more than he ever had before. He even got to have lunch with Anni several times a week now.
He was smiling right as he heard the sound. The bush to his right shook. Owen tensed, waiting for whomever was hiding there to pop out and try to get his bag. He figured he could take a mugger.
But no one popped up. He would have thought the attacker had seen him and decided not to come out. So why keep shaking the bushes?
Cautiously, Owen walked over and peered down into the underbrush where the non-working light was anchored. A young man in only a t-shirt and jeans squirmed against the pole. A moment’s assessment showed that he was tied to it, his arms and legs held in front of him, wrapping around the post. He’d squirm himself out of it in a few more minutes.
Ever skeptical, Owen just looked.
“Dude,” the kid called up, “Can you help me out?”
“I don’t know.” Something didn’t ring true.
“I got mugged!”
He saw the piece of paper then, and clearly this guy wasn’t going to attack him while he leaned over. Owen picked up a bank slip. “This your receipt?”
“Yeah.”
“Mugger got your money?”
“Uh-huh.” Still the kid struggled against his bonds. Owen could see now that he’d been tied with a sweatshirt. Probably his own, he looked a little cold.
“How much money did you take out?”
The voice faltered. “Forty dollars . . .”
There was almost a question at the end.
“Nope! Wrong‒you took out eighty!” He squatted down with his elbows resting on his knees. “Let me guess, you mugged the person this receipt belonged to and they taught you a lesson.”
Owen felt everything gel as he said the words. The kid had barely nodded before the next words were out of Owen’s mouth. “Brunette? Slim? Pretty brown eyes?”
The kid had nerve to look at him like he was crazy. “I didn’t see her eyes.”
But Owen was already gone. Her eyes. His fist clenched the slip and his feet pounded the pavement, he had slammed through the building doors and unlocked his office before he could think rationally.
Still in his coat, his breathing heavy, Owen called up his computer program into the school directory. He found white pages online and jotted down the address before searching and printing a map. He almost forgot to lock the door on the way out.
As he walked back to the car, he reached for his cell phone and called Anni, ignoring the rustling in the bushes as he went by. Over the sound of the kid calling out to him, he told her he’d be late, but he’d need to swing by the house. He gave instructions for the small silver recorder he kept in his desk, and she was standing at the end of the front walk with it when he pulled by.
He took a deep breath, “Thank you. I’ll be back within the hour.”
Anni had smiled at him, as understanding as always, and didn’t ask for an explanation.
Owen hadn’t needed his records to know the name. Diana Kincaid had run through his mind before.
Blankenship had found even more paper trails in those last few days before he’d left the FBI. Owen had packed everything in and handed off the dead file to the next agent. But not before his partner had pointed out that the hospital record was for a Cynthia K. Wiggs. He’d also found a rental car‒a gold Acura sedan‒returned to the rental lot at the airport, keys left in the drop box forty-five minutes after Casto’s assault. Blankenship had scrounged up the parking lot security tapes. A petite female with blonde hair turned the car in and walked to the edge of the lot to climb into a small, non-descript, older, brown car. The tape was fuzzy and there was no way to distinguish faces, but it appeared she hadn’t used her right arm at all. The car had been rented to Cynthia Elizabeth Carrol.
So they had a good idea what the car looked like. And Owen still felt some gratification for having pegged it. Blankenship had dug further and found nothing. The same kind of significant nothing they’d always found. There was a driver’s license from Arkansas and the one credit card. And not a damn thing else. Cynthia Carrol didn’t exist.
It was Annika who suggested the ninja used ‘Cynthia’ both times because it was what she answered to. Owen hadn’t shared that with anyone at the Bureau. It was also Annika who had gifted him with a printout three days after they’d moved into their new house. Knowing it still ate at him, she’d been doing research. And she’d found a family from Chicago who’d suffered a horrible home invasion. Both the parents had been killed, and the daughters left alive. The report was well over ten years old, but the father was Claymore Beller, an accountant for Black and Associates. The younger daughter was Cynthia. The last known picture of her was her sixth grade school photo. Owen had seen it. Nguyen’s damn DNA had been right. Cynthia Beller was only now twenty-four.
He hadn’t needed any suggestions to make his brain wander. He couldn’t help it. At first all petite brunettes had caught his eye. It could be her. He might dismiss the woman for some reason‒too young, too old, too fat, too weak‒but he looked. He’d wondered where the Christmas killers had gone. He wondered if he was right and they had come to LA.
Both his first two quarters he’d had a class with a Cynthia in it, and he’d watched the first day as students filed in, his eyes on the brunettes. The first Cynthia had been blonde with blue eyes. That he could work around, but the fact that she was nearly six feet tall and far too heavy meant it wasn’t his ninja. The second Cynthia had been African American. The third quarter had produced no Cynthias at all.
Owen settled for using his criminology classes to see if anyone could offer reasonable explanations for unsolved cases. Because they were unsolved, and FBI property to boot, he’d had to give hypotheticals. But he had a handful of papers about breaking into houses and getting into the criminal mind.
This term he’d posed a situation that still ate at him after three years. A dead body in a small room by itself, recently fired gun in hand, four rounds missing from the chamber, two rounds are in the body, only the dead man’s blood is found. He’d started the discussion in class, and the group had figured out fairly quickly that a second person had been involved. They’d wondered if the dead man had fired then moved into the room.
Enjoying the banter, Owen had followed that through: you’re holding a gun that you clearly know how to fire, it has bullets left in it and you let someone shoot you? The man didn’t put the bullets in himself, and his own bullets aren’t to be found . . . He’d left the class with an assignment to write their suspicions in a paper.
He’d spent over a week reading all kinds of weird ideas, and writing lengthy replies and asking for re-writes. It was a big workload for him. But it was fun and Owen had enjoyed it. He’d even shown one to Anni. The student had suggested that the other gunner had worn Kevlar.
Anni had agreed, it was the best explanation to date, and she knew what he’d been digging for. He was still digging. Even though he’d sworn to himself he’d leave it behind. He kept looking for missing pieces from other, older cases, and trying to fill a wealth of gaps regarding the Christmas Killers. He hadn’t had all the papers graded by the next class, and he’d started into another discussion on the ballistics reading he’d assigned.
His eyes had strayed repeatedly to one girl in the room. Her shirt read “Charlotte”. Owen knew he kept looking at it because it was his daughter’s name. But, because the girl was attractive and he didn’t want any harassment issues, he’d tried not to stare. But before the end of the class, his brain had told him he was looking at a petite brunette. And in his bag was a paper suggesting that a person could walk away with bullets and leave no blood by wearing Kevlar.
He wanted to dismiss it. It was ridiculous.
But this time when he handed the papers back, he paid attention. The brunette had raised her hand for Diana Kincaid, the writer of the Kevlar paper. This time he looked at her on purpose. She wrote her notes with her right hand. But still he wanted to see her handwriting.
She’d asked a question after class that night and‒with three other students standing around‒he’d pulled the klutziest move he could think of. Making a wild gesture, Owen knocked his coffee cup off the edge of the desk. With lightning reflexes, Diana Kincaid had caught it. She’d set it back upright, without a spilled drop, and kept talking as though nothing had happened.
Unable to stop digging, and certain that he’d find proof that she couldn’t be the ninja, he’d stalked her as best he could. He looked her up in the school records. She was listed as ‘dropped out of high school’. She’d been accepted on a GED she’d obtained in northern California two months to the day after Reynoldo Casto had broken the ninja’s arm.
After that, he’d looked for more solid evidence. He was a logical man, and there was every possibility that he still so badly wanted to find the ninja that he’d conjured one up. He’d given out blue-book exams at midterm, forcing the students to hand-write their essays. He figured he’d probably seen Diana’s handwriting somewhere before, but what if he hadn’t? And he was so close to convinced. He’d wondered.
But no. It wasn’t the same writing. And Diana Kincaid wasn’t a lefty.
He’d dropped it.
But now, as he tore through the streets of Los Angeles, he wondered if she could chose to be.
Heart pounding, Owen pulled up to the curb and took a moment to look at the cute house. It was small and, like his, had to have cost far too much money. But it looked cozy and inviting. Like a home.
He grabbed the bank slip and checked his pockets, then climbed out of the car before he could change his mind. The short walk up to the front door was made of stepping stones with large dragonflies impressed on them. He wondered if they’d come with the house or if Diana Kincaid and her husband had picked them out. He steeled himself to knock twice on the door.
She opened it, “Dr. Dunham?”
“Hi, Diana.”
A tall man stood behind her, his hair a shade between blonde and brown, his eyes a warm grey, and full of puzzlement.
Owen found his voice. “I was leaving class and I found this on the walkway by the ATM.” He handed over the slip. “I think you dropped it.”
“Oh!” She looked at it and seemed to recognize it. Even though there was no name on the small paper. “Thank you.” Her brows quirked, showing a series of emotions‒confusion and bewilderment‒as they crossed her face in rapid succession. “I hope this wasn’t out of your way.”
“Oh, no.” He smiled, hiding the mental score he tallied. Diana Kincaid had confirmed she was at the scene. For half a second, all he could afford really, Owen stood there, memorizing everything he could about the two of them. “I just figured you’d want it, so I dropped it by.”
She nodded and waited, staying where she was in the doorway. The man still standing guard behind her.
Owen decided to go for broke. “Well, goodnight then, Cynthia. ‘Night, Lee.”
“Goodnight.” She smiled at him as she reached out to close the door, and then her face changed. Her body stilled and her eyes went empty. They stalked the scene in front of her, ready to make a move. And Owen knew she understood what she’d admitted.
His voice was soft as he pulled the recorder from his pocket. “You’ll probably want this. It’s the last piece of real evidence.”
Slowly, she reached out and took it. Tied to the cord was a large, red bow. With wariness in her eyes now, not fear, not his ninja, she pressed the ‘play’ button and listened to the FBI officer answer the call, herself sneezing and saying ‘damnit’.
She looked at Owen with a question in her eyes.
But all he said was, “Goodnight, Diana. Will.” He tipped his head, and started down the walk.
It was Lee Maxwell’s voice that said “Thank you.” It was the first time Owen had heard the gunner speak. Or maybe it had been Will Kincaid.
Diana called out, “I’ll see you in class next week, then?”
“Of course.” He waved and climbed into his car. He was going to sleep his first good night in forever.
Thank you for reading Vengeance.
When Kolya Kurev's son finds them, everything Sin and Lee thought was safe is in jeopardy. Not everyone will survive Kurev's Retribution.
The next book in the Vendetta Trifecta is Retribution. Find out what’s next for Sin and Lee.
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Retribution
Chapter 1
“Hello, Sin.”
Shocked into stillness, Diana froze for only a split second. That barest of moments cost her; no one was there when she jerked into action and spun around. Rather, everyone was there. Crowd control was exactly what it was cracked up to be. Though cops were everywhere, they were outnumbered one hundred to one by game-goers.
She must have heard it wrong; she hadn’t heard that name in years. Diana had long ago left Sin and that life behind. Far behind. Dead.
Slowing her heart rate by sheer force, a skill she’d learned early and used often, Diana opened her eyes, scanned everyone, looked for anyone she recognized from a past long since buried. But she saw nothing. In the sea of faces around her not a single one popped out. The crowd had a soul, moved like a tide, and cleanly carried the person who whispered those words in her ear away with the current of bodies.
“Hey!” Reese looked over at her.
Diana’s head popped up. “Hey” was not the usual form of address from one officer to another. Given the look on Reese’s face, this had not been her first attempt to get Diana’s attention.
Reese held two large men at bay, each of her fists twisted into a collar, each man holding his hands docilely on his head. People often dismissed the tiny blonde, but it was a mistake they made once. Only once. She and Diana had become fast friends upon meeting, coming in as rookies together and working their way up.
Reese yanked one collar toward Diana and indicated that the men were being cuffed but not arrested. Not yet.
Using the barest of words and handling the cuffs with a fluid economy of motion, she restrained him. In Diana’s opinion, they were dipshits who were likely to just keep being stupid and would probably wind up with something filed against them before they were done. Reese was pretty lenient. She didn’t cuff just anyone.
“Hand him off to me and head back to your post.” The male voice over her shoulder startled Diana.
“What are you doing here, Nick?”
He rolled his eyes. “Back in uniform for the game. Go.” He took the man, who never turned around to see that it was Diana who cuffed him, and she headed back to her post. Back into her life.
A life that was relatively normal. Or it should have been.
She was the proud owner of an accountant husband and a steady paycheck. Police work was a good fit for her. Though she and Will tried several years earlier to get pregnant, they’d struggled with it, miscarried, and made the decision to wait. All normal problems.
She enjoyed her problems and embraced the tears that had come. They were ordinary tears and thus the events made her happy even as they made her sad. Will had freaked out a little bit when she’d gotten pregnant and then again when she miscarried. If she ignored why he freaked out, it was all perfectly average.
So she didn’t think much about the fact that Will didn’t want to lose a second child. That his first wife had met her better angels wrapped around her daughter. That he hadn’t been able to protect her from the high-speed, cop-killer bullets designed to do maximum damage to two people who had never done anything to deserve it except be associated with Will in the days before he became Will Kincaid. Diana ignored all that.
She focused on the fact that her fake background had survived the investigation necessary to become a police officer, and she buried Cynthia Beller once and for all.
Or so she had thought.
Until she heard those words.
Diana scanned the crowds, cursing her short stature and wondering if she’d really heard it or if—for some reason—she’d suddenly hallucinated the sounds.
The second was the better option. But she could come up with no good reason why today would be the day for her brain to fabricate something like that. She could make up a rationale for it, but that would involve lying to herself. And she’d stopped lying to herself when she was eleven, when she used a kitchen knife to cut the duct tape from her wrists and had dialed 911 to report the crime against her family.
Hello, Sin.
It rang in her head, rattled around her skull, repeating and probably warping.
She struggled to recognize the voice, but no matter how many times she replayed it, she couldn’t place it. It didn’t even linger in the back of her brain, nagging, telling her she had an idea or that she’d heard it before. No, there was nothing.
Pulling her attention forcibly to the present, Diana told herself that—even if the voice was real—it was gone, pulled away by the surge of the crowd. Normality was her best cover, and normal Diana would be neck deep in the job at hand. There would be no way to explain her lack of focus to her fellow officers.
They weren’t like her, didn’t think like she did. But despite the rumors and what everyone liked to say about them, cops weren’t as a general rule as stupid as they were made out to be. These guys were sharp, and it would only take one of them thinking that something was off kilter to lead to some digging.
Her background would stand up to some research . . . but only so much. She’d already screwed up a few times. Already let Sin out of the bag on a few occasions that no one should have seen, times that shouldn’t have happened.
So maybe Cynthia Beller wasn’t as far gone as Diana had thought. Maybe her old self was closer to the surface than she liked to believe.
And maybe someone had seen that . . .
Will was nervous.
He was nervous because Diana was nervous, and she was never nervous. She was the one who made him want to come back to life, the one who made a full life seem possible and—if not entirely safe—at least safe enough.
But she’d heard something today, and though she wanted him to believe she’d brushed it off, it had clearly gotten through that tough shell of hers.
In four years, nothing had gotten through.
That FBI agent had come to their house, handed them a recording device holding what was supposedly the last piece of evidence the FBI had against them, and left with a smile on his face. Diana had broken the recorder. In true echoes of the Sin she’d been, she’d buried part of it in the backyard, burned the actual recording chip, and put the remaining parts in three different trashcans at three different types of locations in three different counties over four days.
Then she’d wiped her hands of it—acted as though getting rid of the plastic got rid of the whole problem.
Will didn’t wash his own conscience so simply.
What they’d done could easily carry the death penalty. He didn’t think any jury would push it that far. He truly believed any lawyer worth his or her salt would play the card that he and Sin had been on the right side of things, driven by what some could easily call a multiyear temporary insanity.
But former FBI Agent Owen Dunham knew their new names. He possessed the confirmation he wrangled from them in a moment of their own sheer stupidity that they were exactly who he thought they were. Though his evidence was only verbal, he knew where they lived.
Diana had gone back to school, back to the former agent’s class the next week, aced his course, and signed up for another one. She was on her way to the police force, then Quantico. Had big plans to join the FBI. She could have her big plans; Will wanted a small life with few interferences. Somehow, he’d let her talk him into not running.
Aside from her coursework and only typical professor/student interaction, Diana had not had any contact with Dunham in the time since. Will had never seen the man again or heard the name Lee Maxwell associated with himself in all that time. And slowly, he had felt his muscles unclench. It had taken months. He hadn’t really sensed the moment tension left him; he only realized one day that it was gone. That he believed he was safe from the ghosts that surely still pursued him.
Tonight the solid earth beneath his feet on the south side of Atlanta had turned to shifting sand when Diana came home and told him.
Sin had followed Diana.
She’d been here all along, somewhere inside, lurking. Though Diana had done an excellent job of shedding her old skin, sometimes Sin popped up. Sometimes Diana the police officer wanted to hunt rather than just collect and detain. Sometimes her eyes darted out and she saw things she shouldn’t or understood nuances a girl from a small town outside Dallas wouldn’t. Tonight it was just a subtle tension that told him she was on high alert.
A high alert she hadn’t been on since they’d first become their new selves back in Los Angeles.
A high alert brought on by words she couldn’t prove, couldn’t reclaim, couldn’t place. Words she might have even imagined.
But there was no reason he could come up with—console himself with—that she might have fabricated the warning now. There was nothing in their current lives indicating that the old had come back to haunt them. Or if there was, he had missed it.
That thought was as scary as anything else. Though he lived Will Kincaid’s partially fictional life, he was still Lee Maxwell as much as Diana was Cynthia Beller. She was in the back room after dinner, doing fifty push-ups. His wife was more concerned with staying buff than he was. He was happy—at least he thought he was—in his tie and button-down shirt. His computer had a wireless ten-key pad that he used as often as most people used a mouse. He owned a keyboard with programmable buttons that he set up for common tax equations, and lately he’d felt the beginnings of a good case of carpal tunnel syndrome coming on. He was a personal rather than corporate accountant like Lee Maxwell had been. His hair was just a shade darker than Lee’s, his eyes at the same time keener and sadder.
His wife was doing push-ups and sit-ups in the room that had once been designated for a child. Now it held weights and mats and a punching bag—all normal workout tools, none of the weapons or gear she’d once played with regularly.
But while she stayed pumped as a plan for her future and tried to look like a normal fitness-nut cop, he stayed pumped from their past. He never truly believed they could live out Will and Diana’s lives.
Or maybe he had. Maybe that’s what turned his stomach tonight—that somewhere along the line he had started to believe it could work. Suddenly two words could change everything. They could disappear into the air, a figment of Diana’s often overactive imagination or they could be the harbinger that foretold of an epic crash.
He stood up from the table, clearing his plate and the one Diana had left behind when she went to work out immediately after eating. Then he walked into the bedroom as calmly as he could and changed into an old T-shirt and sweatpants as though it wasn’t stark raving fear that drove him. With a battered towel slung over his shoulder he went into the back room, the sound of whispered counting getting louder as he came through the open doorway.
“Mind if I join you?”
Never breaking count or motion, she smiled and nodded as though he always did this.
Clearing a space beside her, he started his own set of reps—knuckle-down push-ups. Every time his nose neared the mat, he heard two words.
Hello, Sin.
“I have to go to work, Mom.”
He was a grown man. Thirty years old. Grown men left for work. But this dance they did was routine. He waited a beat . . . there it was.
“Why do you go to this job? You know your grandfather wants you to work for him.”
Nick smiled. “Because this job is better.” He kissed her and headed out the door before she could ask him to explain. He couldn’t. Not to her. While he could easily lay out his logic and say the words, she still wouldn’t understand. He’d said them hundreds of times before he realized that a kiss and a smile were much easier than the truth.
At least he wasn’t in uniform today. He’d made the sorry mistake of being late for crowd control and hadn’t left enough time to change twice. His mother had seen him, everything but the shirt and patches, and she hadn’t approved. Her eyes narrowed in a way that he was never sure about. Was it the purview of all mothers? All Romanian women? Or was it simply her own?
That had been a shitstorm brewing soft and silent for twenty-four hours. So today, he was grateful for the shirt and tie; he could have been a businessman. He was a businessman. Only no one really knew that.
The drive in was uneventful and left his head full of thoughts. His grandfather was slowly heading downhill. There were mild memory lapses and changes in emotion that weren’t fully explainable by circumstance. His closest people were covering for him. But Bun’s time at the top of the family business was coming to a close. And Bun was left with Nick—his only grandson—to take over.
For a moment, Nick felt his hand clench on the steering wheel. There were a lot of problems with Bun’s ideas. In this day and age, Nick’s illegitimacy should not have been an issue. His mother, a self-proclaimed American, should have been a liberated woman, free to have a child on her own. But she wasn’t. And she’d suffered much at the hands of her father and the rest of the family for her decision. She should have left but didn’t or couldn’t, and she suffered as much for staying as for her other choices.
It might have been better—would have been better—if Nick’s father had been anyone else. Even an unknown would have left both his mother and himself in higher regard. But no, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, she had fallen hard for his grandfather’s greatest rival’s son. The rival had died, leaving only the son to bear Bun’s full hate. Of course, in the end the son had been no such Romeo; her love had been the only thing sustaining that union. And Nick grew up as the bastard while Bun waited for another heir that Nick’s uncles failed to produce. Their early deaths tasted of irony in the back of Nick’s mouth. His cousins were all female, most with no ambition to take over the business. Those that did have ambition were constantly pushed down and held back because of their gender.
Though his family lived in America and made their money from Americans, it appeared that they themselves were not yet American, regardless of three generations of integration.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Nick’s greatest hope was for family. His female cousins adored him. How could they not? In an Old World business, Nick was not a chauvinist. To his grandfather the women were at the least meant to be decorative and at best strategic. To Nick, they were loyal.
So he tightened his tie as he parked in the back and exited the car. His key card gave him access to almost all the doors in the building and his diligence gave him access to all the avenues his grandfather had never thought about.
Nick smiled at his coworkers as he headed down the hall. He loved his job. And more than that, he loved that he was building his future on this foundation.
“What crawled up your ass, Di?”
Diana pressed her lips together. She’d wanted this. Wanted friends, female friends. But she hadn’t counted on the fact that normal was sometimes damned obnoxious.
Sometimes she and Will didn’t speak to each other for several days. They moved around each other, existing in the same house. Sometimes they sat side by side on the couch, watching TV or even making love, and barely said a word. They just weren’t chatty people.
But Reese was the bane of all that was holy. What Diana couldn’t figure out was why she liked the other woman so much. What did she really see in this small, navy-blue-clad creature, with her arms crossed and her hip jutted out as she waited for a legitimate answer to her crude question?
For a moment, Diana stood by her patrol car in the waning sunlight and considered her options.
She could just pull her gun and shoot the woman. Wipe the frown right off the too-blue eyes, pink lips, and peachy skin.
She could take Reese down, put her into a choke hold and shut her up that way.
Or she could answer. Thank God she was known for being short of words, so a terse answer wouldn’t throw any red flags.
But the reasons she couldn’t do it were all the reasons Diana liked, no loved, Reese. Reese was what her sister, Wendy, should have been: beautiful and grown and strong. Reese didn’t take anybody’s shit, including Diana’s. No, Diana couldn’t really just take her down. Not without a good fight. And not because Diana would pull her punches. It would hurt because Reese could dole out far more pain than anyone would ever think could come from a little former ballerina.
So Diana gave the answer that she saw as her only option. “I don’t know.”
She did know. But as much as she liked her life and her friends, she would never tell about Sin. Diana pulled open the door of her squad car, wondering why she was back in uniform.
“You’re lying.” Though Reese called bullshit, she didn’t put any venom behind it. “Something spooked you at the game, right?”
What the hell? “Yeah, you arresting everyone in sight.”
“They had Kubotans and small rolls of duct tape. And one of them had handcuff keys in his pockets.” The exaggerated shiver belied the topic. Cops had died over misses. Reese didn’t miss.
“It’s not illegal to carry cuff keys.” Damn, her car was hot. Always a joy when wearing Kevlar. Who knew she’d end up wearing the stuff nearly every damn day?
“So they keep telling me. But I feel better arresting people for little things when I find cuff keys in their pockets.” She slid in and shut her door, opened her laptop, and waved goodbye, thereby letting the topic of the tension drop.
Twisting the key, Diana started her own engine and tried to focus on work. There was a BOLO for a car in her area just before shift change, which meant the perp was probably long gone, but hey, she’d keep her eyes peeled for a black Mercedes. She had a warrant to run down, but she and Reese would meet up for that later in the evening, when Mr. Restraining Order was more likely to be home.
Will had spoken less to her in the last two days than Reese had just now with them back on shift. But he’d checked in regularly. Had she heard anything again? No, she had likely imagined the whole thing. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in someone’s crosshairs and that she deserved it.
Ready to crash by about four a.m., Diana instead parked off in a dark corner and typed up her reports on the in-car laptop. She was scrutinizing the writing—the decidedly unbrilliant, just-the-facts-ma’am style suiting her—when the call came in.
With a sigh, she flipped on the lights and responded.
Dispatch was reporting something suspicious in the area. Enough for lights, but not enough to know what the hell she was going into. What she did know was that the area was relatively nice and not one they got a lot of calls from. Arriving on scene, she flipped both her blue lights and headlights off and simply observed.
The house was unassuming: small, yellowish in color, grass mowed occasionally, if not trimmed within an inch of its life. Several cars graced the driveway, and Diana noted the fact that both the number and the wide range of quality of the cars were unusual. Add in the odd hour and she knew the suspicious call from a neighbor was probably the right idea.
Pulling back out of sight, she waited, watching the house and reporting in regularly as she waited for support. While she ran license plate numbers, adrenaline started seeping into her system in tiny quantities, but she ignored it. She knew better than anyone that these things could go in any direction, and the best thing to do was stay in control.
So when a middle-aged man walked out of the house and climbed into one of the back cars, Diana kept her eye on him. His car had checked out clean, and he appeared to be the proper owner of the vehicle.
A burst of static told her Cummings was just around the corner. Not her favorite fellow officer, but he was more than capable of the job, a good person for watching a suspicious house. Slowly she turned her car and followed the man in the compact, mid-level sedan. Three blocks later, her lights went on as her quarry started weaving.
Luckily, there was no one on the streets at this time but the two of them, and he gave up relatively quickly and pulled over. Walking up to his window, Diana called it in. “Ward Daniels, can I please have you step out of the car?”
The use of his name had his head snapping up. “I have two kids, a wife, I—” He looked frantic, trapped, scared. All of which were appropriate given what she’d seen of him, but his roiling fears didn’t speak well for her safety. This had to be by the book, piece by piece and slow.
In the end, he didn’t freak out on her, just let her put the cuffs on and stood facing his car while she searched him. Aside from the usual wallet and change she found only a small zipper baggie of pink crystals. She held them up, “Pink?”
“It’s . . . better.” His voice was soft, his words resigned.
She almost grinned at the thought. Better? There was never anything better. But she followed protocol, pushing his head down and ducking him into the back of her squad car. There was something comforting in following the routine, something soothing in having the rules made for her, though she would never have guessed that five years ago.
Her decision that he was an easy catch evaporated as she headed back toward the house. He asked her to let him go, promising to never do anything like this again. Told her his marriage would disintegrate if his wife found out. Diana refrained from laughing and suggesting that he not buy illegal drugs in the dead of night if he wanted his marriage to stay together. Three blocks later, she was ready to deliver a sharp blow to just under his jaw or choke him out. He would not shut up.
Lights off, she sat back and watched the scene, ears perked around the blubbering of the man in the backseat. Outside the boundaries of the property, officers were stalking and picking off the people coming out one by one as they left.
Sitting out of sight again, she watched through the windshield and called dibs on another “person-of-interest” she saw leaving the house.
This was another male, younger, healthy, and sane looking. Seemed like the best bet since she had to double up. The out-of-state plates on his car were concerning, and the call-up as a rental was even more so. Maybe he hadn’t been the best perp to choose, but he was hers now.
Again, she turned her patrol car, followed the nondescript sedan and wondered what she was getting into. This one didn’t even try to flee, just pulled over at the first rotation of the blue lights and looked bored.
That was probably the worst possible outcome. His boredom—and clear familiarity with procedure—indicated that this was not his first time. He knew his rights and operated within them, even going so far as putting his hand on his head while being cuffed without being told to.
Her heart rate, having run at slightly above normal the whole time, kicked up another notch. She wasn’t at kill-level yet, but she was definitely well above normal. A search turned up nothing more than a wallet and some change. His keys sat on the front windshield where she’d had him place them as she approached the car, and that became the sum total of his possessions. No pink crystals on this guy.
Another flag.
Why would he be in that house at four thirty a.m. if not to buy drugs? Blubbering Dad there had made it pretty clear that someone was dealing meth out of the place. So Donald Kinsington seemed more suspicious for his lack of evidence.
After he was in the car, she ran his license and—though nothing was wrong—the record was almost too squeaky. The fabricated-background kind of squeaky, and she should know.
There was something scratching at the back of her brain . . . something that bothered her and she couldn’t place it. Years of practice had her exterior shell remaining calm while her thoughts churned. Everything inside her stilled as her head scrambled to organize and pull her memories while in the back of her car meth-dad blubbered to Kinsington. Kinsington ignored him, even though Ward Daniels said enough to at least place Kinsington inside the house.
That was good. Cucumber-cool Kinsington was likely to claim that he’d never been inside the place, that he was walking through the backyard for some odd reason—no law against that, right officer?—at four thirty in the morning, and clearly he had no idea that there was meth in the house. Oh, and he needed to call his good friend, his lawyer. So it was nice to have meth-dad slobbering implications all over the place. But Kinsington kept his mouth closed all the way through processing, not even telling the other man, now openly crying, to shut the hell up.
Diana spent the next several hours processing her two guys. She parked them in holding cells and then called Nick in to interview them both. She listened to chatter about the house and whether the PD would watch, search, or just wait.
Long after the official end of her shift, she stopped by to check on Nick’s progress to see if anything had shaken out. But he reported nothing unusual. Kinsington had claimed they had nothing to hold him on, not unless the homeowner pressed charges for trespassing. Since no one could find the actual homeowner, that was highly unlikely. The man wouldn’t say anything else, and Nick suggested they let him sit for a little while longer.
Meth-dad didn’t seem to understand his rights at all and told everything he knew. Maybe too much. Poor Nick was going to have to listen to all of it. Diana laughed at him and wished him good luck.
Methodically, Diana headed into the locker room, changed out of her uniform, and climbed into her own car. Will would be gone when she got home, and she would normally nap for a while, but her brain wouldn’t shut down. The scratching at the back of her thoughts was even stronger than before.
Just to prove herself wrong, as soon as she got home she lifted the floor board in the back of the closet and pulled out a jump drive she’d stuffed in there. It held some pictures she’d filed, things she’d kept, things she’d looked at before, information she’d continued to follow. She’d prove that the worst wasn’t on the table, and then she’d be able to relax, eat, sleep.
But as she flipped through the files and checked records, her fears gelled and her blood ran cold.
Donald Kinsington existed; he even lived in Virginia, but he wasn’t the man she’d cuffed tonight. The man she saw matched to one of the pictures in her files. She worked to forgive herself for not seeing it before. Blamed his altered facial hair. But she’d looked into his eyes, and before, in another life, she’d looked into eyes just like his at the moment the life had left them. She’d been responsible for that, so she should have recognized it. She might not have placed his first name just from her own recollection, but she should have been able to tag him.
The man she’d just handed off to Nick was none other than Ivan Kurev.