The Perfect Stranger (18 page)

She didn’t want to go back to the empty cocoon that muted every color, every sound. Every sensation. She wanted to see and hear and taste, to feel. The good, and the bad.

She wanted to live.

That’s what gave her the strength to keep her thoughts sharp, despite the 9mm pressed into the small of her back. Forcing the icy numbness that had once defined her world, Saura opened the door and walked inside the sterile apartment she’d last stood in the night before, when John had fastened a necklace around her neck and promised to be listening, watching.

Now he did neither.

Behind her the door closed and the bolt clicked into place.

Working hard to keep her breath steady, she turned to face the man with the soft black hair and empty gray eyes. The last time she’d seen him he’d been posing as a waiter, and he’d smiled at her. Now he wore a black turtleneck and pants, and there were no smiles.

He’d closed in on her like a predator and leveled the gun at her heart, told her to walk. That if she did as instructed, the men with guns trained on her family—on Cain and Renee and Gabe, on her Uncle Edouard—would not be told to shoot. That she would see her lover again.

“Now what?” she asked.

With the gun he gestured her deeper into the apartment. “Now you give me the folder.”

The folder. She swallowed hard, kept her chin at a fierce angle. “What folder?”

He stepped closer. “Are we really going to do this, Saura? Play games? Pretend we don’t know what’s going on here?”

The cool condescension in his voice sent a chill through her. “I’m not pretending.”

“Then give me the files you took from my father—now.”

Father.
The word reverberated through her, sent her heart into a frenetic rhythm. “Your
father?
”

“Nathan Lambert,” he said in a voice so hatefully quiet it seemed like venom. “The man you killed.”

The room started to spin. Slowly at first, a blur of white with slashes of red and black. Then faster. Louder. “No,” she whispered. No, she didn’t kill Nathan. No, this man with the dead eyes couldn’t be his son. Andrew was…dead.

“That’s right,” he said, smiling now, much as he’d smiled that night at the party, with the cool confidence of someone who knew how to get what he wanted. “What is it they say about the sins of the father?”

She shook her head, stepped back. “I didn’t kill him.”

“No?” His eyes glittered. “You were there, weren’t you? Using him, lying to him. Standing next to him.” He stepped closer. “Don’t tell me you really think those bullets were meant for
him.
”

The horror of it stabbed through her. And in the dark corners of her mind she could see it all again: Nathan standing by her side; staring into the night; his eyes going wide and the abrupt movement toward her, the way he’d put his body in front of hers…“My God…”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Something sinister flashed through Andrew’s eyes, eyes so very like his father’s. But different somehow. Lacking something. “Having your life saved by the man you were trying to destroy.”

Ironic
wasn’t the word she would choose. “A life for a life.” The statement barely squeezed through the tightness of her throat. “Is that what this is about?”

“The file,” he said. “It’s about the file.”

And finally she knew. Finally she realized. All along they’d thought it odd that Lambert’s activities would suddenly escalate. Escalation wasn’t the M.O. of a man nearing retirement. But now all the pieces fell into place, creating a picture they’d never anticipated. Nathan wasn’t the one delving deeper into the black market, ferrying young girls and drugs and guns, substandard pharmaceuticals, into the country. It was his son. Andrew was the one escalating. And Nathan, the father, had been the one poised to take the fall.

Then they grow up, and you can’t do anything at all…

“I’m not going to let you blow this for me,” Andrew said. His voice held no emotion whatsoever. “Just like I didn’t let that cop friend of yours stop me.”

Alec.
The truth stabbed through her. He’d known. He’d found out. “I don’t have the file,” she whispered.

Andrew moved so fast she had no time to brace herself. “Then you’d better find a way to get it.”

The phone clipped to John’s belt vibrated, but he made no move for the distraction.

Mike D’Ambrosia’s mistake had been to relax. John’s father had been lulled into a sense of security by a posh neighborhood and a well-furnished house, a deceptive smile. He’d let down his guard, and he’d died.

John had heard his mother cry herself to sleep night after night. And then as months turned into years, he’d heard other sounds from her bedroom, laughter and the creak of a mattress, thumps against the wall and animalistic sounds he hadn’t been able to identify until he’d gotten older. And as the boy he’d been turned into the man, and his mother’s desperation again turned to sobs, he’d made a vow to never be caught off guard. To never relax, never let his senses dull to the point where he didn’t see what was in front of him and behind him. Beside him.

And for almost twenty years, he’d been successful.

His mistake, John now realized, was to believe that if he lived without living, if he kept his guard hammered into place, he’d never be caught by surprise. He’d never falter, never stumble, never stare at anything he hadn’t seen coming.

He hadn’t seen this coming. He stood in the small pink room with his back against the wall and his Glock in his hand. He wanted to be angry. Goddamn it, he wanted to be furious. To ground himself in the hot sting of betrayal. He’d been deceived. He’d been misled. He’d been driven to his freaking knees by a guilt that grew and festered with each passing day.

All because of a lie.

But as he swallowed against the hard grind of his throat, he realized that not all surprises destroyed.

“I don’t remember much,” the grizzled man was saying.
Alec. Sweet Christ have mercy, Alec.
It was a vagrant who’d been burned beyond recognition in the explosion, a vagrant who lay in the crypt outside of town.

Once cool and urbane, the son of privilege who could coerce as easily as he could seduce, now looked like a son of the swamp. His dark brown hair was long, unevenly cut. A full beard covered his jaw. Scars streaked along one side of his neck, and another along his temple. And his eyes, there were shadows there. Secrets. “Vi found me, says I was barely lucid, but I made it clear that if she turned me over to the authorities, I was a dead man. Somehow she got me here and cared for me, didn’t let me die.”

Sitting on the edge of a twin sleigh bed with a patchwork quilt, Alec glanced toward Cain, standing stock-still in the doorway. “It was only later that I found out why she was there, that she’d lost her youngest daughter to black-market heroin and had found an address among her things, and a name.”

John swore softly. “Lambert.”

“And the warehouse,” Alec confirmed.

Cain crossed to the small window and nudged aside the room-darkening shade.

The phone vibrated again—this time John switched it off.

“I couldn’t let anyone know.” Dressed in an old red-and-gray flannel shirt, Alec looked about fifteen years older than the last time John had seen him. “If he found out I survived…he would have stopped at nothing to lure me into the open.”

“Tara,” John muttered. God, Alec’s wife.

Something sharp and volatile flashed through Alec’s eyes. “I was already dead to her. The explosion didn’t change a thing.”

John wasn’t so sure of that, but now wasn’t the time.

“Why now?” Cain strode from the window and squatted in front of his former partner. “Why make contact now?”

Alec grabbed a manila folder from the pillow and shoved it at Cain. “Because of Saura.”

Everything inside John stilled.

“Saura—” Cain barked.

Alec stood, suddenly looked like a caged animal. “I tried to stop her,” he said, “tried to warn her, but she didn’t listen. She didn’t understand.” He took the file from Cain and opened it, pulled out several pictures. “Now she’s in his path.” Alec lined up the series of shots on the quilt. “He’s escalating, spinning out of control—”

“Alec.” The relief was immediate. John stepped forward and put a hand to his friend’s forearm. “He’s dead.”

Alec spun on him, his eyes wild. “Not Nathan,” he said. “The son. Andrew.”

Everything tilted. John swung toward the pictures, saw the younger, slightly rougher version of Nathan, the son who’d allegedly been killed in the line of duty.

He recognized the girl, the young Russian who’d been found running naked in the Quarter. In this picture she was dressed in a pair of gold pajamas with terror in her eyes. In the next she lay sprawled on the floor, with a man towering over her.

“He’s dangerous,” Alec was saying. “Greedy. Makes his father look petty in comparison.”

Cain already had his cell phone in hand. “You think he killed him?”

“It’s possible,” Alec said. “Andrew thought his dad thought too small, didn’t see the possibilities.”

But John did. And he knew. The escalation in black-market activities—not the father, but the son.

“Identity theft, computer viruses, black-market pharmaceuticals…it’s just the beginning,” Alec said. “If there’s a market, Andrew wants to serve it.”

“She’s not answering,” Cain said, and something inside of John stopped. Against the sudden vacuum he grabbed his phone and stabbed it on, fumbled with the small keys until he could see the recent calls. Two of them. Both from the same unlisted number.

Then he saw the symbol indicating a voice-mail message.

“Be okay,” he muttered, not giving a damn at the way Cain and Alec stared at him. “Be the hell okay,” he growled, stabbing at the keys until he got the message to play.

“John.” Saura. Sweet God. The sound of her voice went through him on a hard rush. “About tonight. I wanted to let you know I decided to come back to the city after all—Cain brought me back to my apartment.”

His heart stopped. His eyes met Cain’s.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t mind bringing the file over here,” she said with a breeziness completely at odds with the last time he’d seen her—When he’d let her walk away.

When he’d wanted nothing more than for her to stay.

“We can get pizza or something…”

H
e could be anywhere. Still with Darci. Back at his house with a bandanna over his eyes, forcing his body through a disciplined tae kwon do routine. His phone could be turned off. He wasn’t on active duty after all. And he’d told her goodbye. There was no reason for him to check messages—

One hour and seventeen minutes. That’s how long had passed since she’d left the voice mail.

One hour and two minutes. That’s how long remained until John was allegedly coming over for pizza.

She’d tried to talk Andrew into letting her take him to the file, but he’d refused, said he wasn’t about to let her lead him into a trap. Instead he was laying one, using her as bait.

“Maybe I should try again,” she suggested. Make sure he knew. Make sure he understood. Restless, she started to stand, but with a single cold look from across the room, she eased back into the club chair. Andrew sat across from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs, the gun pointed at her.

She’d expected him to tie her up, but he’d yet to lay a hand on her. It was almost as if—

As if he didn’t want a single mark on her body.

“Why?” he asked. “Didn’t you say you were supposed to call him and let him know where you’d be?”

Her throat tightened. “Yes.”

“What’s the matter then? Feeling sentimental? Guilty? Want to hear his voice one last time?”

One. Last. Time.
“If you would just let me get the file on my own—”

“It wouldn’t change a thing,” he said mildly. “Detective D’Ambrosia was already a dead man when he woke up this morning. If you hadn’t invited him to his execution, he would’ve bit it tonight. This just escalates my time frame.”

Escalates.
There was that word again.

Swallowing hard, Saura shoved the horror aside and stared at Andrew. She was still alive for a reason. He needed her for something, probably insurance or leverage, a bargaining chip to make sure John bent any direction Andrew wanted him to.

But she wasn’t going to sit quietly by and let him get away with murder. Not even to himself.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” She didn’t try to hide the censure from her voice. “You said I killed your father…but it was you.”

Something hard and brittle flickered in the gray of his eyes. “He couldn’t see that you were using him. If you’d gone back inside with him…”

She could have blown everything sky-high. She’d been prepared. She’d had the sleeping pills, the camera. “He was your father,” she whispered. “He was standing right next to me.”

Andrew checked his watch. “I took tighter shots in the army.”

“But you missed!”

“I had you all the way,” he said in a voice stripped of emotion. “If that fool hadn’t moved—”

“You’re going to blame it on him?” Incredulity drove her. “Are you sure that wasn’t your intent all along? You wanted to take his place, didn’t you? Isn’t that what this is about? Being better, doing more than he did.”

The lines of his face tightened.

“You aim for me, but take him out instead—” She saw the flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Call it an accident, blame it on me, on him…go to bed with a clean conscience…”

His eyes hardened.

So she pushed harder. “Your father loved you.”

“He loved the idea of me,” Andrew shot back. “One weekend a month, two weeks a year, as long as I did what he wanted me to.”

“He was trying to protect you.” Never in a thousand years had she imagined she’d be defending Nathan Lambert.

But Andrew laughed. “He was trying to
stop
me. He said he’d do whatever it took. He was a scared old man who couldn’t see that the world had changed, that the opportunity was endless. He was complacent, content to sit back and—”

“He would have taken the fall for you.” The words tore from somewhere inside her. For over twenty-five years Nathan had eluded the authorities. He’d paid off cops and judges; he’d coerced and terrorized. But in the end, he would have taken the fall for his son…

“Maybe,” Andrew said with an indifferent shrug. “But now that he’s gone—and once you and the cop are gone—everyone will stop looking in my father’s direction, won’t they? They’ll realize they were wrong.”

The words chilled. Because they were true. Andrew would have carte blanche. No one would know.

“Not even your brother will look.” He leaned closer, smiled wider. “He’ll be grief-stricken, might even blame himself. He knows you’ve been going through a hard time. Maybe if he’d stayed home, watched over you instead of going off…”

Everything inside her stilled.

“He’ll be haunted by the thought of the cop walking in and trying to stop you, of the struggle for the gun…of it going off.”

Suicide. He was going to stage her suicide. But first, he was going to make it look as though she accidentally killed John.

“Once he was down…there was nothing to stop you from turning the gun on yourself.”

Cain—God, Cain. Andrew was right. He would blame himself, torture himself. Losing Renee had almost killed him. “That’s ridiculous,” she hedged.

“Is it?” Andrew taunted. “Are you sure? Correct me if I’m wrong, but you won’t be the first in your family, will you?”

People saw what they wanted to see, what made the most sense. Other than John, no one even knew she was investigating Lambert. And John, he was on leave. No one knew of his activities either. There would be no reason to link their deaths to the surge in black-market imports—just as there’d been nothing linking Gabe’s father to anything shady.

“Uncle Troy did not kill himself,” she said against the awful tightening inside.

“That’s right.” Andrew looked disgustingly amused. “You believe that nutcase cousin of yours, don’t you? You think it was my father who shot your uncle in cold blood.” His slow, controlling smile mocked. “Guess you believe the other rumors, too, about voodoo and stained glass windows that weep blood.”

She didn’t allow herself to move, not even as the odd glow in his eyes made something inside her shift. There’d been no motive, the sheriff had said. No reason for anyone to kill Troy Fontenot.

Finally, after over twenty years, Andrew Lambert had just filled in the last elusive blank.

“I don’t know, what do you think?” she mused. “A piece of leaded glass smuggled out of southern France, a five-hundred-year-old depiction of the rapture, rumored to bleed when the sun hits it just so…” Now it was she who leaned forward. “Think someone might kill for that?” she asked, intrigued by the way Andrew straightened. “Think there might be a price for something like that on the black market?”

“You’re as crazy as he was,” he muttered. But the words were piercingly hollow. “If my father had given half as much attention to the future as he did the past—”

“What?” she pressed. “He would have realized it was a good thing to import shoddy pharmaceuticals? That there was a market for malnourished teenaged girls who can’t speak the language, much less defend themselves? That it didn’t matter who got hurt, so long as—”

The knock stopped her. She twisted toward the door with a hard slam of her heart, felt something hot and jagged rush through her. No, she wanted to scream.
No!

Andrew surged to his feet and crossed the room, pointed his gun toward the entryway. She knew what she was to do now. She knew the plan. One misstep and John would pay the price before he even had a chance to react.

“Saura?” came John’s voice, and the rhythm of her heart changed, deepened.

“It’s open,” she called. “Come on in.”

The door pushed open and he was there, striding inside with a briefcase in one hand and a white paper bag in the other. He looked…normal. So ridiculously normal that she wanted to scream. With his blue jeans, long-sleeved black T-shirt and leather jacket he looked like any other man arriving for a night of takeout and videos. He even wore the earring. And cologne. The scent of leather and soap and man nearly broke her heart. There was not one sign that he knew, that he understood—except for the gleam in his eyes.

“Hope Chinese is okay,” he said.

“Perfect,” she said, but did not move. Couldn’t move. Wasn’t about to set Andrew off before John could assess.

He shut the door and strolled toward her. “Don’t know about you, but I’m starved,” he was saying. “I was hoping we could eat before tackling the file.”

Her throat tightened, but somehow she smiled. “Stop,” she said, and then Andrew was there, stepping into John’s line of vision with his gun no longer trained on John, but on her.

“I’d listen to her if I were you,” he said.

John froze. “Easy,” he said.

Andrew stepped closer. “We’ll see about that.”

The cleft in John’s chin deepened. He looked hard at her, promising without speaking, holding without moving, then like a shutter closing, his attention shifted to Andrew. “Let her go. I have what you need. No one needs to—”

Andrew laughed. “Don’t mistake me for my father,” he chided, gesturing toward the briefcase with his gun. “You can drop that now. And the paper bag.” He watched while John obeyed. “Now your gun.”

Saura’s heart kicked hard.
No,
she wanted to scream, but with a calmness that chilled, John used his index finger to retrieve his Glock and toss it toward Andrew.

“Hands up,” he said, and again, John obeyed. So completely calm. “Now put them on the wall,” Andrew instructed, and again, John didn’t argue, didn’t even hesitate.

He had a plan. In that one fractured moment, Saura realized that more clearly than she’d ever realized anything.

Andrew stood five feet from her, not close enough for her to ram an elbow into his gut or stomp on his foot, do anything to distract him. And she knew why it had been so important that he not tie her up, not mar her in any way that would be incongruous with his tidy little murder/suicide plan.

“Get the briefcase,” he barked, motioning with his gun.

Slowly she did. She glanced at John standing against the wall, his feet shoulder width apart, his palms splayed flat, and knew she had to do this for him. Had to do it right. Going down on one knee she opened the latches and flipped open the lid, stared at the contents. Keeping her breath steady, she picked everything up and slowly stood, turned toward Andrew.

“Take two steps,” he said, and she realized he wasn’t about to let her get any closer than that. Maybe he suspected.

“Now open the file,” he said after she did as instructed, and again, she obeyed, revealing the encrypted spreadsheet she’d recovered the night before. “Show it to me,” he said.

That would be a little more difficult. Balancing the folder on one hand, she held up the page with her other hand—and saw the movement out of the corner of her eye. From the window.

Then everything shattered.

Andrew twisted toward the shower of glass, just as Cain stormed inside from the fire escape. She saw Andrew’s gun lift and heard her brother shout, didn’t stop to think. She drove forward and rammed the sharp rock John had placed in the briefcase into Andrew’s bicep. His shot went wide, and then John was there, tackling Andrew and wrestling him to the ground, while Cain and two other men dressed in SWAT vests surged in from the blown-out window.

The single gunshot stopped her heart. For one horrible second everything froze. Then she was on her knees, lunging for where John and Andrew lay sprawled together. Cain dropped beside her and as they reached, John moved, pulled away from Andrew with a grim look in his eyes and no weapon in his hands. The SWAT-team members rolled Lambert’s son over, revealed the gun in his hand and the blood oozing from his gut.

Then everything blurred. She saw John’s mouth work, but heard nothing, was only aware of him crawling toward her, reaching for her and dragging her into his arms. She buried her face against his chest and felt the Kevlar, felt her throat tighten and her heart thrum.
“John.”
Her
étranger.
She swallowed hard and held on tight, was vaguely aware of the way his hands ran along her back and tangled into her hair.

Lost in the moment, in him, it took a moment for the fifth man to register. Tall. Grizzled.
Familiar.
She squinted against the fading sunlight pouring in through the shattered window. Then she blinked.
“Alec.”

“It was my father.”

Standing in a puddle of soft yellow light on the porch of her family’s ancestral home, Saura turned. She’d showered in the three hours since he’d last seen her, had changed into a pair of faded jeans and a soft pink sweater. Her long dark hair was loose, her face wiped clean of makeup.

John wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her look more beautiful.

She didn’t rush him, didn’t say anything, as she watched him walk toward her through amazingly calm brown eyes.

His heart kicked anyway. “Earlier you asked me who died and took me with him…” The question had practically skewered him. Now he tightened his fingers around the silver discs in his hand. “Who died and made me a coward.”

The unseasonably warm breeze blew hair into her face, but she made no move to brush it away.

“It was my father,” he said, closing the distance between them. “I was eight years old.”

Her eyes darkened, not with censure or horror, but with the warmth and compassion he’d come to crave. “John—”

Slowly he opened his fingers and stared down at his father’s dog tags. “I didn’t understand at first. Dads weren’t supposed to die, not until their children were grown and had children of their own. But as I got older, I learned things.” Found out details. Realized his dad’s death could have been prevented. “And grief turned to anger. If Dad had been more careful—If he hadn’t been thinking about my baseball game he was supposed to be at—If he and my mom hadn’t argued the last time they’d spoken—” He bit off the words before he made a damn fool of himself. “I saw the wreckage he left in his wake, and I promised myself I would never do that. I wouldn’t be like him. I’d be
better.
” He took a breath. “I’d do what he should have done.”

He saw the moment she’d connected the dots. “Just like Andrew Lambert,” he muttered.

The irony burned. Two sons. Both driven by their father’s sins. One now lay dead. The other—