Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
She sighed her exasperation. “You really think I haven’t heard all of that before? I mean, hello.” She gestured to herself. “Nice tits.”
Sam laughed, but quickly stopped. Ow. “Shit.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You want to rewind to my question—are you all right? And maybe rework that apology while you’re at it… ? Pull up your shirt, let me see.”
He gingerly pulled up his shirt, but there was only a red mark on his side. It wouldn’t be until later that it would turn the colors of the
rainbow. And it would. It was going to be a piece of art. “Damn it,” he swore, because it was right where he usually carried Ash.
“Does it hurt to breathe?” Alyssa asked, her fingers cool against his skin.
“Yeah,” Sam admitted, drawing in his breath when she got too close. It was his lower rib, definitely. “It’s cracked.” He met her eyes again. “I am sorry,” he said, but then had to add, “that I got hurt.” It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t give her that. He was not going to apologize for scaring the crap out of that dipshit. And he had. He’d definitely scared Mick Callahan when he’d had him against the wall—which was what made the man get extra mean.
She shook her head, clearly frustrated with him as she headed back into Maria’s office. “Call Jules back, will you? And tell him that he can cross bailing you out of jail off his to-do list.”
Jenn had left her bed unmade.
“Sorry about the mess,” she told the three Navy SEALs who stood awkwardly, just inside her apartment door, because, really, there wasn’t anywhere else for them to go.
They’d just come from surveying Maria’s condo—checking the security of the windows, doors, and even the walls, and getting an overview of the lobby, the elevators, and the hallway in the assemblywoman’s building.
Jenn had witnessed the way their big brains worked as they looked around, as they evaluated the space in which Maria lived, as they thought out loud and strategized what-if scenarios.
What if they had to get the assemblywoman quickly out of the building?
There were both front and back stairways, plus a freight elevator that wasn’t used by the residents, which had a lock that they could easily override if necessary.
What if they brought Maria in and discovered someone was hiding there, waiting for her?
That wouldn’t happen if one of them searched the place each time they entered, which they always would do. And if they did surprise someone hiding there, whoever stayed in the hall with Maria would take her out of the building via the freight elevator, while the other dispatched the intruder.
What if they came under direct attack via the condo’s single door?
They’d hustle Maria into the master bathroom, which was the safest, most secure room. Positioned in the bedroom, with the proper weapons and ammunition, they could hold off an attacking army if need be.
What about the windows?
The drapes and blinds would have to be kept tightly shut, since every building in the area was a potential sniper’s hiding place.
Which was when Jenn had chimed in, because Maria, absolutely, wasn’t going to like that.
They’d asked her some questions, then—did the assemblywoman live alone?
She most certainly did.
Did she have a boyfriend, either in the area or living elsewhere? Or maybe just someone with whom she was friends, with benefits?
Dan Gillman—Lucky—had asked that one, and Jenn had looked at him sideways.
It was more than obvious that he’d wanted to know this for personal reasons. But with a completely straight face, he’d explained that if they were going to be camping out in Maria’s living room tonight, they didn’t want to accidentally kill her boyfriend when he popped in unexpectedly from Chicago.
But no, Maria didn’t have a boyfriend, not in Chicago or anywhere else. As for friends with benefits, they were going to have to
ask Maria directly. Jenn knew that she
did
have an asshat of an ex-husband named Bobby in Atlanta, but he certainly didn’t have a key.
And as for anyone else, besides Jenn, who might also have Maria’s key … ?
She knew Maria paid a cleaning service to come in once every few weeks, usually while she was in Albany. And that meant that someone from the service must have a key. Plus the building’s superintendent could always get in—but not while the night lock was on, of course.
As they all took one last look around, Jenn overheard the youngest of them, Tony Vlachic, comment to Jay, sotto voce, about how small Maria’s place was.
With two bedrooms, a real eat-in kitchen, and a thirtieth-floor panorama of the city’s skyline from its floor to ceiling windows, it was palatial compared to Jenn’s studio.
Where they all now stood, squeezed in together.
Her apartment was a single tiny room, cramped even when the air mattress was deflated and folded back into the sofa. The view from
her
window was of the air shaft. In a city that was constantly changing, the ugly, claustrophobia-inducing brick and the rows of other people’s windows was a seasonless mix of 1890s tenement and 1960s thank-God-someone-finally-invented-the-window-air-conditioner.
And yes, to be fair, sometimes—rarely—in the winter, falling snow would settle romantically on the battered and acid-rain-scarred tops of her many neighbors’ air conditioners. But Jenn could miss seeing it if she blinked. It melted quickly in the heat from the building and the humanity within.
“Nice and cozy, huh?” she said to the SEALs now as she turned on another lamp.
Dan pushed free of the others and stepped into her tiny galley kitchen. He turned around, took another few steps, which put him
into the munchkin-sized bathroom. He then came back out, and opened the door to her overstuffed closet, as if expecting to find another room, or maybe an alternative universe awaiting him there.
“Jesus,” he said as he stared at her jammed-in organizational system of shelves and baskets, of which she was pretty darn proud. “You could crew on a submarine.”
Jenn looked up from trying to squeeze the last of the air from her mattress, so she could fold it up and turn it back into her couch, which would turn her bedroom back into her living room. “Is that some kind of Navy insult? Your mother wears combat boots, you could crew on a—”
“No,” he said with laughter, as he turned to look at her. His smile was really quite lovely up close like this. “It’s not. It’s … impressive. Those guys fit their entire lives into, like, a shoe-box. Talk about close quarters—both for living and working. I couldn’t do it. But you probably could.”
“I bet there’s not a big demand, though, for executive assistants on the USS
Depthcharge.”
He laughed again. “I don’t think
Depthcharge
is on any Navy shortlist for names for submarines,” he pointed out. “Depth charges are what you drop from a surface vessel to find and sink a sub.”
“I knew that,” she said as the metal bedframe finally folded back into the sofa with a
boing
. “I was being ironic. I’d be fine with the tight living conditions. It’s the part where the sub might sink that would be problematic for me.”
“Speaking of problematic,” Jay pushed back his hood to say. “I’m pretty sure Ms. Locke intends for two of us to, um, camp out here with you tonight. Maybe you should leave the bed open so we can see how much floor space there is.”
“There isn’t,” she said. “Floor space. I mean, unless we move my coffee table. We could store it over at the office, I guess, but even then …”
“You’ll have to get sleeping bags,” Dan told Jay. Interesting, his
use
of you
, as if he’d already assigned himself to guarding Maria. “One in the kitchen, one kind of halfway under the pullout part of the sofa-bed—”
“And I would step
where
, if I needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night?” Jenn asked.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” Tony said.
“You know, I really don’t need anyone to stay,” Jenn said. “Let alone
two
of you. I mean, let’s be realistic here. It’s Maria who’s being threatened. She’s the one who needs protection—”
“I know that’s what it seems like,” Dan interrupted. “But that thing
was
in
your
desk.”
“Ms. Locke is thorough,” Jay Lopez chimed in, terminally polite beneath his parka. “Until Margaret Thorndyke is found—”
“I’m sure she’s out shopping,” Jenn said. “She shops like she’s single-handedly attempting to stimulate the economy. She’s got a walk-in closet the size of my entire apartment.”
“Lopez has got a walk-in closet the size of your apartment,” Dan pointed out.
“You’re in New York City now,” she told him. “You’ve got to readjust your definitions of small and large.”
“You’d be okay if it was just one of us staying here with you?” Tony asked her. “Because, you know, some women might feel threatened by that, or be afraid some of the neighbors might think, you know, something inappropriate.”
“And my bringing
two
Navy SEALs home won’t make them think something inappropriate? Especially since their apartments are the same size as mine?” She looked at them. “Guys. I have brothers. You don’t scare me. You don’t offend me. If one of you really has to sleep on my kitchen floor tonight, I’m not going to feel threatened—I’m going to feel sorry about the fact that you obviously pulled the short straw. Just do us both a favor and don’t eat dinner at the Mexican place that’s down the street? When the heat finally kicks on in here, which it’ll do in”—she looked at her watch—
“about two hours, it’s going to make the office seem chilly. FYI, my AC unit is winterized. We can’t turn it on, we can’t open the window.
The
window, singular. So bring shorts and ix-nay on the eansbay, boys, because I
will
make the lucky winner go out into the hall to fart.”
“It’ll be rank and rating,” Tony told her.
“I’m sorry … ?” Jenn didn’t understand.
“We’ll use our rank and rating,” he explained, “instead of drawing straws—to determine who sleeps on your kitchen floor. Which means it’s probably going to be me.”
“Sorry,” Jenn told him as she led the way back into the hall and locked her door behind her.
“It’s okay,” he said with a smile. “I’m not a big fan of beans anyway.”
He remembered the day when the plan became crystal clear.
Not the details—just his goal and the potential outcome. The details came later. They always did.
He’d researched for months, every moment he could spare spent locked in his room, surfing the Internet, finding out all that he could about
her
, about Alyssa Locke.
He made lists of her friends, her family, her acquaintances, even her clients at Troubleshooters Incorporated, and he googled them all regularly, too.
He found out that Alyssa was born in Washington, D.C., that she had two sisters. Only one still lived—Tyra. Lanora, her youngest sister, had died while giving birth.
He knew that her mother had been the victim of a violent crime when Alyssa was only thirteen, that her estranged father had died in a car accident several years earlier, and that she and her sisters had gone to live with an aunt.
He discovered that, like her mother before her, Alyssa was married
to a white man. Her husband’s name was Roger “Sam” Starrett, and he was a former Navy SEAL who didn’t deserve her, who worked beneath her, who’d planted his seed inside of her …
The news of her pregnancy had made him reel with anger, with disgust, with seething hatred for this man who had the audacity to touch her, to make love to her, to defile her so completely and permanently. Swept up by his rage, he’d come to his senses in his car, driving west, toward California.
His blind urge to destroy had taken him as far as Utah, where he stopped because the certainty inside of him warned that he could not kill the husband—a Navy SEAL—without getting caught or killed himself.
And he didn’t want justice half as badly as he wanted the ultimate satisfaction of gazing into Alyssa’s eyes as he took out his knife.
So instead, he’d tried to relieve the pressure by killing a woman in the parking lot of a mall just south of Salt Lake City. He killed her husband, too, just to see what that would feel like, but none of it was any good. The certainty inside told him that it wouldn’t be, until it was Alyssa—so he didn’t extract any of their teeth or leave behind a note of any kind.
He did linger, though, and when the police came as they always did,
she
wasn’t with them and he knew that they didn’t connect the murders to those he’d done before.
They didn’t know it was the Dentist.
She
didn’t know it was him, either.
Because if she’d thought it was, she would’ve come, regardless of her pregnancy.
She
would
have come. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her. He was counting on that fact.
So he drove back east even though he wanted to go to San Diego, to catch just a glimpse of her. But he knew his anger at her swollen belly and his hatred of her husband would overwhelm him, so he kept himself away.
When he found out that she’d had the baby, and that it was a boy, he knew, absolutely, his destiny.
He would take her, as he’d planned, regardless of his chances of survival.
But if he
did
survive—which he was becoming more and more determined to do—he would then track down and kill the husband, and take and raise the child
—her
child—as his very own.
Jenn didn’t look up from her computer as Dan went into the assemblywoman’s office. Everyone else had gone for the day—she was the last one to leave.
“Hey, Tony, I’ll be ready to go in … just a … few more minutes,” she said, her fingers flying across her keyboard.
Danny slipped his bag off of his shoulder and put it on the floor with the sleeping bag that Lopez had picked up from some sporting goods store. He didn’t bother to correct her, instead taking the opportunity to really look at her while her attention was elsewhere.
She was actually kind of pretty, in a supersized way. Not that she was fat. She was just… sturdy. Strapping. Statuesque.
Goddess-like—if there was a Goddess of Awkwardness.