Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
She kissed him again, and with a confidence that would have astonished her had she been watching this play out from afar, she reached down into his still unfastened pants to find him and wrap her fingers around him.
Because he’d said it himself—that he wanted, more than anything, to make love to her again.
“Oh, yeah, I like
that,”
he breathed into her mouth, as his body confirmed his words.
“Good,” Jenn said. “Help me get this bed opened up, and we’ll give Mrs. Harrison downstairs something to
really
complain about.”
M
aria wasn’t used to cloak and dagger. She also wasn’t used to not having the final say.
“Ma’am,” Alyssa said, gently but firmly. “It’s important we don’t talk about this here, but I
will
explain when we get where we’re going.”
“How about you tell me what’s going on in the cab?” Maria suggested.
“Fair enough,” Alyssa conceded, even though they weren’t taking a cab. They were being met, at the service entrance of this building, by several cars from the FBI. But she didn’t want to tell Maria that. Not here, where it was entirely possible the killer was listening in. “Pack only what you need for tonight and for the morning. Our team will be available to come back here and pick up anything else you might need, but we must get out of here. Now. Without any further discussion.”
The assemblywoman was a few years younger than Alyssa, but she hadn’t gotten to where she was by being a fool. She knew something bad had gone down, and she had about a million questions in her eyes, but she finally nodded.
“I’ll get my bag.” She turned back, though, to ask, “May I bring my laptop?”
“No, ma’am,” Alyssa said. “But we’ll make sure you have access to a computer and to the Internet when we get… where we’re going.”
“What about Jenn?”
“She’ll meet us over there.” Alyssa prayed that that wasn’t a lie. Sam hadn’t been able to reach Danny or Jenn, and had sent Izzy and Lopez out to kick down her apartment door, if need be.
Someone capable of kidnapping and killing Margaret Thorn -dyke could damn well target Maria’s chief of staff next.
But Maria nodded—she wanted to believe Alyssa—and vanished into her bedroom.
Sam, meanwhile, was bundling Ashton into his cold-weather-wear, the hood of which had little mouse ears. Despite the awful news, it was hard for Alyssa not to smile at Ash, especially when the baby, perpetually cheerful, delivered up one of his silly, drooly smiles. And especially when Sam smiled back at him, talking to him the whole time he dressed him.
“You know I’m gonna take a picture of you in this thing. And when you’re thirteen and permanently mortified, I’m gonna post it on your facebook page.” He glanced up as if he knew Alyssa were watching, and told her, “Tony just called. He’s two minutes away. When he gets here, we’ll go. I’ve got all of Ash’s gear. When we get where we’re going”—a location that only Sam and Jules knew—“I’m going to recommend that we call a time-out. Just a short one,” he added when she started shaking her head no, “We don’t want you wrecking another shirt.”
“Too late,” she told him. “Besides we don’t have time for even a short break.”
“Tough sh … sugar.” He made a face at Ash. “Daddy almost said a bad word.” He looked back at Alyssa. “We’ll make time. While we’re waiting for … you know who to arrive.”
Alyssa glanced at her watch. Jules’s ETA wasn’t for another few hours.
“There’s plenty for the team to do between now and then,” Sam said, somewhat cryptically. She knew he was talking about getting hold of an electronic surveillance device and doing a sweep of this apartment, as well as Jenn’s place and the office.
Maybe there
was
time for a break, of sorts.
Sam knew that Alyssa didn’t like breast-feeding Ash in public. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because she felt it undermined her authority as team leader. Particularly when her team consisted of several extremely immature Navy SEALs.
It was tough enough, being a woman in charge of a truckload of testosterone, without rubbing their faces in the fact that she was female by feeding her baby in front of them.
She’d tried the discreet blanket thing, but Ash was a grabber, prone not just to exposing her to the world, but to waving the blanket gleefully in the air and drawing everyone’s attention.
Maria came back out of her bedroom, rolling an airline-carry-on-sized bag behind her. She’d changed out of her yoga pants and sweatshirt, and into standard Manhattan-wear: black pants, black blouse, black jacket, black high-heeled boots.
It was the kind of outfit Alyssa would’ve worn to a meeting at the White House, and Maria had put it on, along with makeup, just in case someone spotted her during the fifteen seconds they were going to be out in public.
What a life she’d chosen for herself.
Although she probably thought the exact same thing about Alyssa.
Sam’s phone beeped and he answered it, relaying to Alyssa, “Tony’s here.”
Alyssa reached into her jacket and drew her sidearm from the holster she’d stopped to put on after that phone call from Jules. She didn’t mind so much being seen without makeup or underdressed, but getting caught unarmed—that was a potential career killer.
In fact, it was a potential killer, period.
She’d gone into Savannah’s little apartment and picked up the suitcase with which the TS Inc team always traveled—even on a so-called low-key assignment such as this one. It contained a wide variety of weaponry, including a small amount of that old SEAL favorite, C4 explosives. A Navy SEAL could use it not just for big explosions, but for little ones, too. Like, to open a locked door, fast. So it was, and would continue to be, a staple in the Troubleshooters equipment locker.
She hefted the bag now, setting it on the floor by the door, which she knocked upon twice.
Tony knocked back, also twice, from out in the corridor, and she unfastened the variety of bolts and nightlocks.
He was dressed up, shivering slightly. He probably didn’t have an overcoat, just a utilitarian cold-weather jacket that wouldn’t have worked with the nicely tailored suit and tie he was wearing. He’d fixed his hair differently, too. It was gelled to be artfully messed, and he looked adorable.
“Sorry to have to call you,” she said.
“So am I,” he said sincerely, and she knew Sam had told him why he’d gotten called in. “But my friend knows that I have to go when I have to go, and this was—”
She put a finger on her lips and he nodded. He also patted his left shoulder, and she knew that he, too, was now armed.
“Let’s move,” she said, glancing back at Sam, who nodded. He was ready—although she knew that carrying Ash had to hurt.
Maria had put on her coat, and Alyssa walked beside her as Tony led the way to the elevator.
It was being held by a woman and a man—both of whom were so clearly FBI agents that they might as well have had the letters tattooed on their foreheads.
Was I ever that obvious?
she wanted to ask Sam as they rode down thirty floors in silence.
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised as if he knew exactly what
she was thinking—which he always did—as he rocked back and forth to keep Ash from fussing until they reached the lobby. The female agent took Maria’s bag from her as they exited the elevator, leading the way to the back of the building, where the cars were waiting.
As they stepped outside, the snow was still falling, but the heat from the passing traffic kept it from sticking to the street. On the sidewalks though, it was turning into something thicker and darker—and slippery, without a trace of pristine winter wonderland.
They rode together—Tony, Sam, Maria, and Alyssa—in a car that had, thanks to Jules’s thoroughness, a car seat ready and waiting for Ash.
The phone call came just as the luggage was loaded, the baby strapped in, and the doors were locked, as the driver pulled away from the curb.
The number on Alyssa’s cell screen was Jules’s. Her stomach sank as he didn’t say hello. He just said, “Bad news.”
“The DNA test?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her. “It’s a match.”
“Margaret Thorndyke,” she confirmed. Sam, who was sitting across from her, shifted his foot. Just slightly. So that his boot was touching hers.
“Yep,” Jules said. “It’s her. Was her. Shit, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” Alyssa said. “Thank you for calling. I have to go. I’m with the assemblywoman and, um …”
“I’ll be there soon,” Jules promised.
Yeah, but not soon enough. Back when she was partnered with Jules, when she, too, had worked for the FBI, he was always the one who broke the bad news to murdered loved ones. He was good at it—if someone could be good at that kind of thing.
Alyssa closed her phone and met Maria’s eyes.
“They found Maggie?” the assemblywoman asked.
“Not exactly,” Alyssa said. “Ma’am, the news isn’t good. We know, for sure, that Margaret Thorndyke is dead. The … body part … from your office was human. It was hers.”
Maria drew in her breath sharply, and turned pale. But other than that, her composure was remarkable. She nodded. “I knew it was bad,” she said. “When you took me out of… But I didn’t think …” She cut herself off to ask, “Do you honestly believe that my apartment is bugged?”
“I don’t know,” Alyssa said, another thing she’d learned from working with Jules. Being truthful about what they did or didn’t know helped win hearts and ensured cooperation. “We’re taking precautions, though,” she continued. “Being extra cautious.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Tony murmured.
“I don’t understand,” Maria said, and her voice shook only slightly. “Who would do this? What do they want?”
“I don’t know that either,” Alyssa admitted. “But we’re going to find out. And then we’re going to find him. Count on it.”
Alyssa was good.
He knew when the news about Margaret’s heart came back from the lab, because she immediately circled her wagons.
They gathered—all of them—not in the office, and not in Maria’s condo either, but in a different location, probably a hotel room, which was smart, because he couldn’t listen in on them there.
Not that she’d had a chance to look for the bugs he’d planted, both in the office and in Maria’s condo—but she’d find them soon enough, unless he could get there first.
He didn’t need to hear what she was saying. He could imagine it, and imagine what she was doing, and he floated in the euphoria, knowing that now—right now—she was, at long last, thinking of him, too.
• • •
Izzy was worried.
Whoever they were dealing with here, he was a psycho. “How hard is it,” he asked Lopez, who was a trained hospital corpsman, “to cut a heart out of someone’s chest?”
“In one piece like that?” Lopez answered. “It’s hard.”
That’s what Izzy had thought.
It wasn’t just hard, it was gruesome and macabre. And freaking twisted.
And if they got to Jennilyn’s apartment to find the place in a shambles and Jenn and Gillman hacked into little pieces, it would be yet one more way that he’d failed Eden. Despite the animosity between his wife and her brother, Eden loved Danny. Izzy knew that. He understood it on a visceral level, because he, too, had brothers who could treat him like royal shit, and yet he still loved them.
The walk over to Jennilyn’s apartment was a relatively short one—just a few city blocks, but Izzy wanted to get there, fast. He wanted to break into a jog, but Lopez wanted to walk—and to keep calling Danny’s cell phone. Again, and again, and again.
“Holy shit,” Izzy realized. “You think they’re doing it? You think Fishboy’s already talked his way into her pants, and … what? The music’s up so high and they’re both screaming so loudly they can’t hear their phones ringing?”
Or they were singing along.
Jennilyn LeMay didn’t exactly strike him as the Celine Dion type, but for some reason, that was the picture that immediately leapt to mind. Dan Gillman leaning buttoned-to-the-neck Jenn over her kitchen counter, banging her while singing along with
My Heart Will Go On
at the top of his lungs.
The mental image would have made Izzy laugh his ass off, if
there weren’t some psychopath looney-tunes nutfucker out there, carving people’s hearts out of their chests.
Lopez sighed as he shut his phone, and Izzy knew he was right—or at least that Lopez thought he was right, and that Lopez believed that Gillman and Jenn were bumping uglies.
“Wow,” Izzy continued, “I didn’t see
that
one coming. I mean, Danny was practically doing the cartoon wolf thing with Maria. You know,
ah-roo-ga, ah-roo-ga
, the heart thumping out of his shirt, the salivating fangs, and the bulging eyes—
the better to see you with, my dear…”
He broke into song:
“If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody baby, except your assistant, uh-huh!
What a douche bag. Talk about the big bad wolf, Jenn was practically wearing a little red riding hood and skipping through the forest.”
Lopez usually didn’t say much whenever they were paired up together without the rest of their merry band, apparently preferring to let Izzy narrate away to his heart’s content. But right now, he actually spoke. And it was chiding, which hurt. It always hurt when Lopez—whose real name was Jesus—did the disappointed thing. “People who live in glass houses, man.”
He didn’t bother with the rest of the adage
—shouldn’t throw stones
.
“What?” Izzy asked defensively, even though he knew damn well that Lopez was talking about Eden, who had been seventeen and three hundred and sixty-four and three hundred and sixty-fifths, when Izzy’d first met her.
Eden, who was also Danny Boy’s little sister, which had been a huge no-no, but also Eden, who had never in her life worn an innocent little red riding hood, not even back when she was ten years old.
Eden, whom Izzy had married because she was in trouble, knocked up and carrying some sleazebag’s kid; because her parents were assholes; because her own brother had washed his hands of
her, leaving her to suffer her stepfather’s ongoing emotional and physical abuse.