The Lost Key (13 page)

107 Avenue A, Unit 5

4:30 p.m.

The light was blinding, the force from the blast knocked him sideways against the entryway wall. Nicholas shook his head, trying to get his vision and his hearing back. Mike was beside him, shaking him, shouting something at him, but he couldn't hear her. He felt a trickle of wet from his ear; his hand came away red. He numbly realized someone had thrown a flash bang.

You're getting slow, Drummond.
Maybe it was the aftereffect of being Tasered this morning, but he couldn't seem to get anything moving right.

It wasn't only the flash bang, he'd also taken a shot to the chest, center mass, and thank the good Lord above he was wearing a Kevlar vest, at Mike's insistence, or his first day with the FBI would have been his last.

Mike was yelling at him. “Can you get up? Are you okay? Come on, Nicholas, talk to me. There's no one here, I checked, well, except—can you get up?”

With a huge wheeze, air filled his lungs and he was able to move again, his hearing and sight returning. Mike's hand was
gripping his arm, helping him up. “That'll teach you for going in first,” she said, and punched him.

“Better me than you.” He managed to get up. “Okay, I'm fine now. Knocked the wind out of me, is all.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Stop doing that to me, Nicholas. What happened?”

“A guy started shooting when I opened the door, then he tossed a flash bang at me as he went out the window.”

“Was it Adam Pearce?”

“I don't know, the flash was too quick. We gotta go after him, now, before he gets away.”

She drew a deep steadying breath. “There's something else, Nicholas,” and she pointed. He looked into the living room, only fifteen feet away, directly to his right, and saw a dead girl, long brown hair spread about her head, lying on her side, near a pale blue sofa, her eyes blank.

“It's Allie McGee, has to be,” Mike said as she ran to the side window that gave onto the alley.

She spotted the man climbing down the fire escape, not fast because he had to unlatch and lower each section as he went. Nicholas said, “I'll go down the fire escape, you take the stairs. There may be more of them.”

As he went through the window, she speed-dialed Ben. “Allie McGee's been murdered, Nicholas is chasing a guy down the fire escape. Hurry, Ben.”

It had all happened in only a few seconds, she thought blankly, only two snaps of the fingers. It had seemed a lifetime.

She looked back at Allie McGee, felt anger fill her gut and headed for the stairs. They should have brought backup, should
have—Ben would be here fast. Besides, Nicholas wouldn't let the man get away.

He's going to get away.
Nicholas saw the man had nearly reached the second floor. He'd lost precious time. Nicholas shook the rest of the cobwebs clear and went after him. He didn't have to unhook the fire escape sections as he went, so he could run flat out down the rusted metal steps. He saw a flash of dark hair, saw the man look back up at him. No way was Nicholas going to let him get away. He grabbed the edge of the second-floor ladder and slid down eighteen feet, landed hard, rolled, and jumped to his feet only seconds after the man had hit the ground and begun to run. He was limping, but he could still move fast. Good thing he was no Mr. Olympic. Nicholas caught up with him quickly.

He heard Mike shouting, running around the building toward him. Before she could get there, the man turned and lashed out with his leg, trying to catch Nicholas in the stomach. Not Adam Pearce, and not as young as Nicholas first thought. This guy looked like a hired thug, vicious, hard, a bright red scar slashing down his face. He looked no-holds-barred, a veteran of many a fight before, some he'd lost, given the ferocious scar on his cheek.

He saw the kick coming, turned so Scarface's foot hit his hip bone, a numbing shot that would have put him down if it had caught him full-on. Scarface was fast, and agile, whipping around for another kick, but instead he sent the edge of his hand to Nicholas's throat. Nicholas jerked back and the meaty fist glanced off his cheekbone, followed by Scarface's right fist smashing into Nicholas's shoulder. His damned limp didn't seem to be bothering him at all now.

Nicholas was bigger than Scarface, as well trained, and as dirty. He whirled around, leg out, tripped him, but the moment his back
hit the ground he sprang back up like a jack-in-the-box and came at him again, forcing Nicholas back, ever back.

Nicholas countered every move grimly, and they danced together, arms and legs clashing hard, blood running freely from Scarface's nose. Nicholas gave up finesse and went for brute force, slamming both fists on his shoulders, pushing him hard. As he stumbled backward, Nicholas found his opening. He got a good glimpse at the surprise on his scarred face as his fist crashed into the wide, whiskered jaw. Scarface went down, out cold, falling hard, his head bouncing on the asphalt. He was down, finally, no longer a threat.

Nicholas stood over him, breathing hard, hands still fists, until he realized Scarface was definitely not getting up.
Don't let him be dead
,
Zachery will skin me alive.

Nicholas flipped him over on his stomach. As he snapped cuffs on him, he heard Mike scream his name.

He thought she'd been close, he'd heard her running footsteps before the fight with Scarface.

He whipped around to see his worst nightmare.

Another man, big, older, built like a boxer, had an arm around Mike's neck, and a pistol pressed to her temple. His mouth was stretched wide, a rictus of a smile, and Nicholas saw blood smeared over his mouth. Mike had smashed him in the face before he'd managed to grab her. He licked away the blood, the terrifying smile still on his mouth. He said nothing at all. His finger began to move on the trigger.

Nicholas didn't think, his gun was in his hand, coming up smoothly, and he squeezed the trigger and blood blossomed out of the man's forehead a heartbeat later.

Mike went down, under him. Oh, God, he'd hit her, he'd hit
her. But no, she was yelling his name and he saw her pushing and shoving, fighting to push the man off her. Nicholas realized he was frozen in position, chest heaving, arm still locked straight in front of him, his finger still in the Glock's trigger guard. He dropped his arm and holstered his gun and ran to Mike. He pushed the man's body the rest of the way off her, yanked her to her feet, ran his hands over her arms, her chest, touching her face. “Are you okay, are you okay?”

He was shouting and she flinched. The gunshot had come so close to her, and it had hurt her eardrums, but she nodded, forcing herself to breathe deeply, in and out, to calm herself.

Nicholas pulled her tight to his chest, eyes shut, the breath gone from him again. It was too damn close, he'd nearly lost her.

And the sirens began to wail behind them.

N
icholas held a chemical ice pack against his cheek, tapping away one-handed on a laptop they'd found thrown behind the sofa in Allie McGee's living room, and wondered, yet again, what in the bloody hell they'd gotten themselves into. In the course of a single day, three dead, one in cuffs, Mike nearly shot, him Tasered, beaten, shot, and flash-bombed. It wasn't even dark yet. And no Adam Pearce. But Allie McGee was dead. He hated it. He felt stiff, sore from the blows he'd taken and the jarring jump from the fire escape, his chest burned from the bullet in his vest, his clothes were ripped, actually quite ruined, and Nigel would not be happy, but, on the other hand, he was alive, he could see and hear again and he was trying to do something useful with the computer.

His life was becoming some sort of exceptionally violent country-and-western song, the kind his uncle Bo liked to listen to.
Tase me, shoot me, knock me down . . .

He laughed to himself.
You're punchy, Nicholas, it's all the adrenaline, and yes, the deep and abiding fear you felt at the very idea of losing Mike.

The image of the second thug with the gun to her temple, blood running down his face, that madman's smile, like it had been
painted on and Mike's mouth moving silently. Now he realized she hadn't been silent at all, she'd been screaming
“Shoot him, shoot him.”
He'd never even heard her.

NYPD was on the scene along with Ben and three more FBI agents, dealing with the aftermath of the battle in the alley. He'd answered about a thousand questions from the NYPD, and Ben told both of them they had to leave the crime scene now, and that meant this one and Allie McGee's apartment. He'd relented only when Nicholas agreed to go back upstairs. “Stay out of the way, both of you know the drill. Don't get us all in trouble.”

He and Mike had trudged back to Allie McGee's apartment, waiting on the identification of the men who'd broken in and killed her.

The place was a wreck. The flash bang had thankfully not caught anything on fire, but Nicholas and Mike's mad scramble across the room to the window had resulted in an overturned table and chair, tampering with the initial crime scene.

But Allie McGee was the worst part of all.

Mike watched Louisa Barry carefully process Allie McGee's body for evidence. It hurt too much to keep looking, so she turned to watch Nicholas typing. She was still shaking, only inside now, and it was understandable, she supposed, given that if Nicholas had shot just two inches to the left, her head would have splattered all over the wall of Allie McGee's building. He'd seen the man was going to shoot her brains out and he'd acted, hadn't hesitated. She'd seen determination, wild fear, and something else before he'd fired. It was certainty, that was it. She was very glad he was on her side.

Nicholas never looked up from the computer. Mike finally
made herself go to Louisa, who met her eyes, read the unasked question. “Yes, before they shot her, they did a number on her.”

“They were trying to get information.”

“Looks that way. I don't know if she helped or not. We'll need the ME to give us a certain time of death, but she's not in rigor yet. You interrupted them, Mike, you and Nicholas.”

“We may have gotten her killed, you mean.”

Louisa shook her head. “No, she was dead before you arrived. They'd already torn this place apart. Now it's going to take the rest of the day for me to put this all together. Your shirt, Mike, you're a mess. There's a lot of blood.”

“Thankfully not mine. Keep me posted.” She turned to go, and Louisa said in a hard, flat voice, “She didn't have a chance, Mike, you know that. She was only a kid, against very well-trained professionals. I'm very glad Nicholas killed one of them. As for the other, I hope he rots forever in Attica.”

“He will.”

“This has gotten to you, Mike, I can see that. You've got to try to keep some distance, some altitude. It will all come together. It always does.”

And with that, Louisa kneeled back down next to the body of a young girl who should have been at school when those men came looking for Adam, looking for something to show them where he was.

Don't blame yourself.
But she did, because she'd failed to get the information about this apartment and Allie McGee from Sophie Pearce in time. She felt a raw burst of anger toward Sophie Pearce, but remembered Lia telling her about all her phone calls, trying to locate him. So she didn't know where her brother rested
his head when he was in the city. Still, if she'd only told them sooner, they'd have been able to get here faster, and Allie McGee wouldn't be dead.

There were pictures of Allie all around the apartment, some of her alone, some with her family—she had a younger sister and an older brother and two blond smiling parents whose lives were about to be ruined—but the majority were photographs of her with Adam Pearce.

She crossed the room to sit on the arm of Nicholas's chair.

“How's it coming?”

A few more clicks. “This computer is shot to hell,” Nicholas said. “The hard drive's been wiped, and I can't get it back. Maybe Gray can harvest something off the chip, but from everything I can see, there's bugger all there.”

“Adam Pearce is a hacker, so he has backups, right?”

“Yes, but we need to get our hands on him first. Bloody hell, Mike.”

“My thought exactly. At least we know Adam is still alive.”

“We
think
he's alive. We hope he's alive. And all he's left behind is his dead girlfriend and a broken computer.”

“And he didn't kill her. I find that comforting.”

“Nor did he crash his hard drive. You're right, he had nothing to do with this.”

Nicholas closed the lid on the ruined computer. “There is something, we've got one extra power cord here, to a Sony Vaio. That means there's a laptop missing.”

She felt a spurt of energy, or hope. “It had to be Adam's. He was here, but then he left.”

Nicholas's cop eyes got cold and hard. “Whatever he knows, whatever happened, he's now out in the cold, no friends, no father,
no girlfriend. Only his sister, and we're watching her, and he's got to know that, and so she's off-limits. Which means there's no one to help him, and no way to predict exactly what he might do next.”

Nicholas's mobile rang, and the screen showed Zachery's number. And he knew what it was about. He'd left another dead body. On his first day.

It was Maryann, Zachery's assistant, who was a longtime fixture in the New York Criminal Investigative Division. She'd seen it all, heard it all. And her voice said it all.

“Agent Drummond, the SAC would like to see you in his office.”

“Would you please tell him I'll be back downtown as soon as we're through here? I am not involved, I am only observing.”

“I'm sorry, Agent Drummond, but he's requested you return to Federal Plaza immediately. With Agent Caine. We'll see you in fifteen minutes.”

That was official. He was in trouble.