Versions (The Blacklist Series Book 1) (5 page)

T
he dried exoskeleton
of a common housefly caught in a slender web wafted in the air current at the edge of the vent above her desk. In the three hours and fifty-five minutes that she’d watched it since lunch nothing about it had changed… While so many things about her life had hooked a u-ey and left her choking in a plume of dust and smoke.

The electronic chirp of her desk phone sent a ripple of shock through her. Rin looked at the time on her monitor and then at the phone. Damn those four minutes. She snatched the receiver.

“Department of Defense, Accounts Analysis, Darinda Lee.”

“Babe,” Nate’s upbeat voice filtered through the line.

Her impulse control sure was getting a workout today. Instead of slamming the phone in his ear—the only benefit of having a desk phone—she strangled the hard plastic. Anger churned, but she managed to breathe through the worst of it. “Hey. You never call me at work. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, Zach’s team has a big game tomorrow night and he needs some help seeing the weakness in their defense. So, I’ll be home late tonight.”

“But you’re a football coach, not basketball.”

“Defense is defense, babe. And you’re talking to the champ.”

She only hoped he had a weakness she could exploit. Drilling an opponent’s weak spot was the only thing that had kept her alive during junior high and high school. His overinflated ego deserved her attention. “Doesn’t it take offense to win a game?”

“My offense is getting stronger.”

“I’ll hang out here. I have a pile of work to do.”

“See you tonight.”

“Whip ’em into shape,” Rin said because she hoped she wouldn’t see him tonight and she couldn’t bring herself to say so. Not that she had much of a choice but to see him.

Alive, angry, and confused beat dead by a marathon’s length.

She’d planned a mad dash to the Pentagon Library, but being in this place with eyes on her everywhere she went—even to pee—set her skin crawling. How easy would it be for Nate to get the footage and see her snooping? Besides, she knew where the best records of her mother’s accident were held, and they weren’t in a library.

Rin collected her briefcase and hot-footed it through the maze of cubicles, corridors, and robust security measures. When she exited the main gate on foot and made it to the bus stop in time to slip through the closing doors, the tension cramping her shoulders eased…because she left good-girl Rin at the corner.

A swipe of her SmarTrip card afforded her a back-row seat sandwiched between young black men. Her slouch of utter exhaustion mimicked their own I-don’t-give-a-shit-postures. They eyed her as though she’d been beamed from a hovering spacecraft. Rin bit the inside of her lip. “What? Never seen a white girl before?”

The guy on her left laughed.

The college athlete—she’d bet money—on her right planted his size 13 spit-shined white Dunks on the floor, leaned forward, rested his forearms on his knees, and turned his head until they were nearly eye level. “Never on the bus to our neighborhood.”

“I’m older than you. So, that makes it
my
neighborhood.”

“Callin’ bullshit,” the big guy boomed.

“Then you’ll get your Dunks dirty.” She smiled. “Graduated from Spingarn.”

He gave a hearty laugh.

“No shit?” his friend asked with wide eyes.

“None.” She swiped her hand level in the air.

“I’d have given my sac…” he coughed. “I really wanted to play there. My grandpa played for the green wave with Ollie Johnson,” the big guy said.

“All-American two years in a row,” Rin marveled.

“She knows her stuff,” Leftie nodded.

“What are your names?” she inquired.

“He’s Darius,” the baller said, “and I’m Antonio.”

“Nice to meet you, Darius and Antonio.” She shook their hands in turn.

“I’m guessing you’ve moved on to bigger and better things?” Darius asked. “Don’t hear tales of the elusive albino trottin’ round the neighborhood.”

“You know, things are better than they were when we were in junior high, but a lily white dime…” He grimaced. “No offense.” Rin grinned and shook her head. “But a lady like you could attract all kinds of unwanted attention, especially at night.” Antonio rubbed his expansive palm on his saggy jeans.

“Let’s just say I know my way around trouble,” Rin offered.

Darius’s brow tightened. “What’s your name?”

“Darinda, but you can call me Rin.”

“You’re old man Lee’s granddaughter?” Antonio’s head whiplashed and he looked at her through a sideways glare. “Nah. You’re too soft.”

“Yeah, she pretty much ran Trinidad back in the day,” Darius awed.

Rin rested her head against the glass and closed her eyes against the flood of memory.

“Fuck,” one of them breathed.

The bus rocked its way over potholes, jerked its way to stops, and puttered on time and again. On the fifth stop, the young men shifted and the canvas of backpacks rustled. Rin roused. “Gallaudet, huh?”

“It’s not Kentucky or Arizona, but here they pay me to play a game I love.” Antonio shrugged on his book bag.

“And I get to bag all the bitc…babes he doesn’t have time for,” Darius admitted. “It works out.”

She situated her briefcase and, when the bus stopped, stood with the guys. On the street, Antonio presented his fist. “Do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends on the favor.” Rin tapped it with her own.

“Smart,” Darius said, offering his clenched hand for a goodbye.

“Get out of here before dark,” Antonio demanded.

“I’ll do my best,” Rin conceded, tapping Darius’s hand. “Y’all are good boys. Stay that way.”

The guys nodded. Rin bowed her head and turned away from the college entrance. She walked up the sidewalk, staring across the road at the spired steeple and American flag atop Chapel Hall until it disappeared behind an oak. On this thoroughfare the lush green trees and the cars parked beneath them lined the road. Home. A surprising smile tugged at her lips. When visiting as a little girl she raced her grandparents between trees. She’d cut innumerable swirling successions of cartwheels on their lawn.

Continuous blocks of row houses sat across from the college’s wrought-iron fence, their barred windows and scum-covered brick as uninviting as ever. A few of the units boasted chic paint jobs. The bright red doors had the effect of a stop sign on thieves. It said, ‘Young professional with more money than sense. A one stop shop. Come on in.’ Kind of like vacant houses did.

Green wavy grass peeked from the second block’s street corner—the only large plot of grass for several square blocks. Her grandparents’ lawn and painted yellow house with smart black shutters began the next row of homes. Shriveled corpses of mums and some other kind of flowers cluttered window boxes on every damn window. Rin shuddered at the evidence that life left the place nearly a year ago.

Regret clouded her vision. One missed Sunday dinner was now a missed opportunity to tell her MeMe goodbye. She blinked the moisture away, kicked off her heels at the curb, and hopped over the low stone wall onto nature’s carpet. Her pale polish and even paler skin contrasted against the earth. The world she lived in was ruthless concrete. She appreciated the suppleness of nature, but it was far less predictable.

She trundled through the yard. At the carport in back she brushed her feet off and slapped on her shoes. With a turn of a key in the deadbolt the ancient door groaned open. Rin hurried through the kitchen, living room, and up the stairs, ignoring the pangs of the past and its photo displays. When she reached the landing the wood shrieked under her weight. Gooseflesh stampeded over her skin. Not at the sound, but at the three closed doors that greeted her.

May. She’d been here two and a half weeks ago to clear the mail from the door slot and check on the place. And she hadn’t closed the doors. Why would she? The masses of wood cut off circulating air, creating a veritable second-story oven. A temperature spike of twenty degrees should have baked the sweat from her pores. Instead, a chill clung.

“If someone’s in here, now’s your chance to get the fuck out,” she hollered.

Nothing stirred.

Rin unwound the briefcase from across her body and hung it on the knob at the top of the banister. Then she pulled off her shoes and set them next to the bag. Without pondering the stupidity of not running out of the house, she flung the first door wide. At the foot of her grandparents’ bed, scrawled in red block letters, lay the word QUESTION.

Someone could have played her like an electric guitar. That’s how tight her muscles tensed at the invasion. The empty closet gaped across the room. Thankfully she’d given her grandmother’s clothes away a few months ago. A cherrywood dresser stood wedged into the corner, the fifties wallpaper bracketing it on each side. As opposed to an intruder. Rin glared at the word and then turned to the second door.

Mouth screwed tight, she all but ran at the second door. AND. The single blood-red word stained the white tiles of the narrow bathroom. The floral shower curtain concealed the tub’s interior, while the window yawned, sending the barest wisp of a breath through the frame, rippling the nylon.

Yeah right. The unsuspecting fool heads straight for the window and
bam
, the killer leaps from the shower. Not gonna happen here.

Rin eased from the door on silent steps, grabbed her grandmother’s Waterford crystal bowl filled with potpourri, slipped into the doorway, and hurled the glass at the shower curtain.

On impact, the heavy bowl billowed the fabric and then met the wall. Chunks of crystal blasted in every direction, plinking and bounding across the ceramic-lined room. Rin’s heart ricocheted in her chest the same damn way. She sucked in several shaky breaths. So, no one hid in the shower.

With measured steps Rin hopped to the window and looked out. The tar roof that covered the porch didn’t house a criminal either.
Question and…
Suddenly, fear, an emotion she hadn’t truly experienced in so very long, crawled into her head like a spider and spun a web so sinister she stepped toward the hallway without maneuvering through the crystal mine field.

“Son of a bitch,” she hissed. She plopped on the closed toilet lid and pulled her left foot high. Red coated the pad from the tip of every toe to the cliff of her heel. She hiccuped a breath. The pain had been sharp, but not enough to draw this much blood. Unless it hit an artery.

Rin zeroed in on the point of rapidly-dulling burn. A shard of translucent crystal protruded from her low arch. She grit her teeth and pulled the piece free. The bit measured a few centimeters by a few centimeters. Not big enough to cause much damage.

She lifted her left foot and found it soaked in red too. Her gaze dropped to the muddled AND. The paint was still wet. Whoever did this hadn’t done it long ago.

Her gaze flew to the hallway, what little of it she could see. It wasn’t enough for her comfort. Carefully this time, Rin stood and stamped stupid toe prints across the bathroom floor. No help for it now.

Though she expected what her old bedroom would say, the word DIE written in dripping streaks of red knocked her back a step.

Question. And. Die.

Rin sprinted to the chest of drawers on the far wall from the closet and dared some asshole to jump from its closed doors. She’d channel every bit of fury she’d stored over the last five years of good living and pummel him into a bloody pulp.

Fuck. The truth had versions and so did she.

She needed to find her mother’s version of the truth. Then, maybe one day, she could find the true version of herself.

At the white drawer with the pink butterfly knobs, Rin yanked. The bottom drawer gave way without the arduous heave her MeMe gave when prying the thing to stash another of her clippings. But the wooden hollow usually brimming with newspaper articles was empty.

R
in slammed
the door on her car and peeled out of the secure parking lot to dirty looks from the handful of guards on duty. Her finger itched to flip them double salutes, but this wasn’t their fault. No, it wasn’t. And she was about to give a big
fuck you
to whoever messed with her grandparents’ house and took her clippings.

She’d never wanted them. That hadn’t stopped her MeMe from filing them away until the day Rin needed them. Well, damn it all, today was the day. She broke several traffic laws in her fit to get to the nearest hospital.

The thousands of questions pinging around her head would find answers, despite—hell—in-spite of the threat. She’d stared down a gang and let them beat her into the ground as part of some screwed up ritual. And not much menaced her since. Some kindergarten finger paint wouldn’t.

When she wheeled into a parking space on the third level of the dank parking structure her tires squealed. She stuffed her phone, all the cash she had in her wallet, and her license into various pockets of her slacks, and then patted the tape in her front pocket for reassurance. If a bullet or goon took her out before she found answers, she wanted the world to know something was amiss. But if these guys were professionals, they’d think to check her pockets. So, she stuffed the tape into her bra and got out. The humidity climbed with the temperature. She shed her suit jacket for the sleeveless shell underneath and prayed too many sweat marks didn’t show in the white silk.

Rin clacked her way inside to the bank of elevators on heels she’d surely wear to the nub by the end of the day. The stench of sickness and sterility melded in her nostrils, rivaling that of the nursing home in putridness. She dodged a gurney exiting the center car. A young man dressed in scrubs carted an unconscious old lady with an array of IV liquids swinging at the top of a metal rod.

“The morgue,” Rin demanded with a feigned air of authority.

“Take this to the ground level, exit left, past the chapel and waiting room, hook a right at the next hallway, detective sign-in is at the desk on the left.” The guy rattled the instructions with his gaze centered on her breasts.

Ha! Her a cop? She’d spent loads of time in a police cruiser…behind the metal divide. “Thanks,” she offered with a sarcastic bite, before stepping onto the vacant elevator. He shuffled on without a reply. The doors closed and the car lurched toward the sky. “Damn.” Rin folded her arms and waited.

At the twelfth-freaking-floor the car finally changed direction until the elevator halted for passengers on the ninth floor, and eight, and sixth. She wedged into the corner and tapped the fingers of her right hand against her arm. The surging adrenaline upped the tempo to a frantic pace.

“Jesse, stop,” a mother, with a nondescript toddler on her hip and a little boy at perfect elbow-whacking height, chided the oldest. “That’s driving me nuts.” The boy, bless his heart, stood with nothing more than a pouty slouch, which exaggerated at the unfounded accusation.

Rin cut the kid a break and ceased the incessant drumming.

“Thank you,” the mom breathed. The kid threw his arms up.

The mass of bodies shuffled off the elevator on the ground floor, but all veered to the right toward the cafeteria, gift shop, and main entrance. Rin rushed in the opposite direction down a narrower corridor so stark-white it made her look tanned.She bobbed and weaved through the guy’s instructions. The closer she came to her destination, the colder the air grew.

A portly fellow with sweat beaded across his brow despite the sub-zero temperatures sat behind a desk next to the door labeled ‘Morgue’. Rin pasted on her sweet-as-sugar smile, which had worked magic on many unsuspecting marks back in the day. She draped her forearm across the high countertop of the station and leaned in, boobs first. “Hi, Rusty,” she said, scoring his name from the badge clipped to his royal-blue scrubs’ pocket.

He gave a jerky nod and a wave of uncertainty bathed her. She looked around and not a soul milled or hustled about. Sure, her boyfriend, the CIA…agent…operative…whatever the hell they called them, could kill her at any minute, but so too could this big, funny-acting slab of beef and there wasn’t anyone around to see it. Hell, he worked in a morgue for Christ’s sake.

“I’m working on my thesis,” Rin lied smoothly. “It’s about the ecological benefits of natural burial over embalming and cremation. I’d love to talk with your resident medical examiner or pathologist.”

“We don’t staff a medical examiner and our pathologist doesn’t come in for a few more hours.” He swiped at the moisture now dripping from his forehead. “But I’m a diener. I might be able to answer some of your questions. I can even lend you a few books.” He coughed. “I’m studying to be a pathologist.”

Wariness caviled with the need for answers. “Thank you, Rusty. I’d appreciate any help. Can you tell me the order of death to burial for cremation? Like the body, where is it taken? Is it left anywhere unattended before or after incineration?”

Rusty’s gaze narrowed on his feet. “Sure, there’s a hospital procedure guide for cremation in the back, even though the hospital doesn’t perform them. We release the bodies to the funeral homes for burial prep. If you’d…” He looked at his feet again and squinted. “If you’ll head through those double doors. I’ll get someone to man the desk and I’ll show you what I have.”

“Thanks.” She stepped toward the doors he pointed to, trying to see behind the wide wall of desk. Filing cabinets and the width of the desk itself shielded Rusty’s lower half from view. Maybe she’d caught him whacking off or reading a Cosmo. She dismissed the alarm bells because everything in her life set them off right now.

Rin pushed past one of the heavy doors and stopped so abruptly the thing nearly whacked her in the butt. She’d expected an office or hallway. Instead, blinding fluorescent fixtures illuminated a metal table. Grating covered the top, making it look like an extra-large colander. A faucet with one of those salon hair-washing attachments protruded from one end. What looked to be a football punt stand sat in the center of the table just beneath the spigot.

On the right side of the room a bank of three-foot by three-foot silver-faced cooler doors lined the wall fifteen deep. The only thing keeping her inside the house of horrors was that the bodies were stowed safely behind those secure doors and not under a flimsy sheet with their feet hanging out. She shuddered and stepped toward the rows of books stacked neatly on shelves over a counter that ran the length opposite the body-wall.

Odorous chemicals she never wanted to identify or smell again stung her nostrils. Rin rubbed the end of her nose and perused the titles littering the work space.
Forensic Pathology: Principles and Practices. Medicollegical Investigation of Death. Gunshot Wounds: Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques.
Neon sticky notes and dog-eared pages feathered the books. At least Rusty wasn’t kidding about studying.
Her gaze lifted to the shelf and scanned for the word ‘cremation’.

All this and more polluted the Internet, but she wanted concise information from the source. Thinking of her source, she wondered what the hell was taking him so long. Only not for long. Her vision alighted on a text with the word she was searching for. She snagged a pen from the desk and reached for the book.

A click pierced the quiet. The blindingly bright room turned pitch. Books, the freaky autopsy table, and the wall-o-corpses, and every other weird thing in between, disappeared in a sea of syrupy black. Rin pinched her eyes shut and slammed her hand over her mouth, fighting the urge to scream. This wasn’t happenstance. Strain as she might, no sound other than the drone from the air vents filled the large square room. But she sensed a presence. To her dread, it wasn’t a ghost.

The power of the human wraith—or just maybe the power of her overactive imagination—drove her toward the gruesome table in the middle of the room. If she could get it between her and whoever stalked her in the eclipse of artificial light, she could dodge them and make it to the door. Rin lowered her hand for balance, cinched her grip on the pen in her other hand, and ventured one easy step at a time.

Three down. Her foot quaked on the fourth step. She reached out, feeling for the cold metal. Her open palm met something hard and hot under the thin cotton of a T-shirt.

Rin sucked a year’s supply of oxygen from the room. She pitched left and ran hard, slipping on the polished floor. The rumble of feet in pursuit should have echoed in the space, but only a whisper rippled the air a moment before the steely iron of hands scorched their way down her arm and banded her wrists.

She teetered on heels, but the restraints kept her from plummeting to the floor. Her attacker raised both her arms high over her head in one large hand and bound her waist with a merciless forearm. The instinct to fight back lay somewhere in the corner of her mind huddled in a terrified lump. All the spit had apparently evaporated from her mouth. She couldn’t swallow, let alone scream.

The metal wall came hard and fast. Her cheek ground against the raised edge of one of the body lockers. His body blanketed her own as hard and immovable as the metal to her front, only hot. No way was this soft-middled Rusty.

There hadn’t been much doubt about the gender of her attacker, but now she knew without a doubt. The hard ridge of a—respectably large, in any other situation—cock pillowed into the cushion of her ass cheek. So, it wasn’t Nate.

Wits returning, Rin struggled for freedom. She used the wall as leverage and shoved backward, only managing to stroke him far too intimately. Yanking her arms, his grip tightened impossibly. Next, she levered her heel and tried to stomp a hole through his foot. Strong legs bound her thighs to the wall, making her efforts futile at best and completely draining at worst.

Sweat slicked her skin. She panted in rage and exhaustion. He didn’t seem the least hindered with her shenanigans. The moment she stilled, his arm left her middle. A locker to her immediate right popped open. It coursed a breeze over her torso and the putrid smell of death and ammonia tripled.

She turned her face away and gagged. A metal-on-metal squeak resonated in the four walls. He pulled her right hand from above her head. Rin tried to break free, but this guy was immovable. He knew just how to pin her to make her useless in defending herself. “Fuck you,” she growled.

“Do you want to end up on a slab like this guy?” he asked.

Her world spun more than it had all day, and that said something. She’d heard the honeyed voice, now growling in her ear, before.

Luck.

“Answer me.” He pressed her hand down to the cold, dead body. “Do you want to join this bastard?”

Rin cringed away, but moved nowhere. He shifted them closer to the body. “No. No!” She hollered the answer.

He regrouped her hand in his and yanked the hem of her shirt from her pants.She stopped breathing. His hand slid up her side and across her bra. Two hot fingers dipped between her breasts and removed from the intimate spot the tape she’d taken from Nate’s recorder.

“Then don’t go down this path. It will get you killed,” he ordered.

“By you or Nate?”

The warmth cocooning her in the frigid room lifted. She didn’t hear the whisper of receding footsteps, but just like that he was gone. The threatening presence vanished. In a lightning flash, the lights popped on.

Rin’s gaze fell on a thin, white body bag. She jerked back, her eyes sweeping the rest of the room. No one, but her and the person on ice.

She sprinted on wobbly feet toward the door and burst through to the corridor. Luck was nowhere in sight, but Rusty sat in his chair where she’d last seen him. He hunched over his desk with his head resting atop both his arms.

Let him be alive. Let him be alive.

The chant went round and round in her mind as she stepped closer to the guy and extended two fingers. She pressed them to his neck. “Oh, thank you.”