Her Dark Web Defender

by Dana Nussio

  After storing the note in a brown-paper lunch bag from the kitchen in case he needed it for evidence later, he hurried to the shower. No time to waste. He had to get to work so he could warn her. Someone thought they were asking too many questions. Or they were getting too close to a murderer.

  It was more than that. How had the suspect found them instead of the other way around? The task force was supposed to work in secret. Information was only distributed on a need-to-know basis. How had anyone discovered their identities and addresses? Did that mean that there was a leak in the task force, or, God forbid, one of their colleagues was involved?

  Killed the cat...and the girl. He shook his head to expel the words that kept replaying inside it. Whoever had left this message not only had his and Kelly’s identities and addresses, but he also was aware that the two of them had been together. That person knew that he could get to Tony by threatening her.

  This game was a different one than they’d thought they were playing in the beginning. The cat was chasing a mouse that had turned rabid. The hunters had become the hunted. He had to stop them. No matter what, he couldn’t let anything happen to Kelly. He had to get to her now. Had to warn her. The rules had changed, and new lines needed to be drawn. They could trust no one on the task force. No one except each other.

  * * *

  Kelly’s hands trembled as she stared down at the note she held. She’d waited to pull it out of her purse until she’d locked herself inside the handicap stall in the public women’s restroom, where no one could see her leaning against the wall.

  Particularly not Tony. She’d been dodging him ever since he’d shown up at work late, with some excuse about car trouble. How could she tell him that their night together seemed like a lifetime ago? That no matter what feelings she might have for him, she couldn’t worry about them right now.

  The words on that paper had changed everything.

  Don’t ask questions when you won’t survive knowing the answers.

  As she read the message again, handwritten in block print, her whole body shook. That voice from her nightmares might as well have been reading those words aloud. Her hands were so clammy she could barely hold on to the note.

  Someone had not only made it inside her locked building while she slept with Tony, but the trespasser had also left a warning in her mailbox about her work on the task force. Was it from the chat rooms? BIG DADDY. It had to be him. She was more convinced than ever that he was also the man from her childhood.

  Stay quiet, or I’ll be back for you.

  She hadn’t stayed quiet. Nor had she stopped looking for answers. Now he’d returned for her, just as he’d promised. This time, he knew where she lived.

  A scream built inside of her, and she bent at the waist, swallowing mouthfuls of air to keep quiet. Stop. She had to get control of herself. She couldn’t let Tony or anyone else on the task force see her like this. Tony already knew part of the truth, and if she told him about the letter and her theories, he would feel obligated to have Special Agent Dawson remove her from the task force.

  She couldn’t let that happen. Closing her eyes, she wiped her sweaty forehead with her fingertips. All these years, she’d hoped for a chance to track down the man who’d stolen her best friend and her own childhood. Now that she was this close, she wouldn’t let anyone else stop her from doing that. Not even the man who’d left her bed only a few hours before.

  Tony would think this was about her rejecting him. She didn’t want him to believe that, but if he did, he would keep his distance from her. At least then she wouldn’t have to tell him the truth.

  Anyway, she could handle this alone. She wasn’t that little girl the creep had threatened into silence eighteen years before. Maybe the fear of him would never go away completely, but she was stronger now. Smarter. She’d had enough training to be able to take down any assailant. Even him.

  Kelly crumbled the note and stuffed it back into her purse, not even caring that she’d contaminated evidence. She couldn’t submit it to the lab, anyway, without risking that she would be moved from the investigation for her safety.

  She stepped to the sink to wash her hands. “He said he’s coming for me. Well, let him come.”

  Had she spoken those words aloud? She wasn’t sure until someone knocked on the women’s restroom door. She didn’t answer, but she opened the stall and waited.

  “Kelly, I know you’re in there.” Tony said in a stage whisper from the other side of the steel door. “I heard your voice.”

  She rushed to the door and yanked it open. “Are you kidding me? Are you really following me into the restroom?”

  “Nothing else worked. I mean...who are you talking to?” He leaned his head in and peeked around.

  She closed the door enough that he had to move or have his head pinched. “Lucky for you, it’s empty. Is this the way you go about flying under the radar in a public building?”

  “I checked around first. Besides, this is important.”

  “Fine. We’ll talk about it. Later. But not here.”

  “Guess you only talk to yourself in there.”

  It was a tiny jab, brought on by hurt feelings that she couldn’t do anything about right now. That didn’t make her feel any less guilty about it. When she opened her mouth to apologize, he shook his head.

  “There are a lot of things we need to talk about, but they’ll have to wait.”

  “You tracked me down here to tell me that?”

  Again, he shook his head. “Special Agent Dawson wants us all in the office. Now. There’s been another victim.”

  Chapter 16

  A photo of a fourteen-year-old Toledo girl stared back at Kelly from her laptop screen. The circumstances of her disappearance resembled those in the Brighton murders. Rhinestones were found near the crime scene. From a tiara? The victim even had a secret online life.

  The smile in the picture remained static, but the blame appeared to intensify in those wide brown eyes. If Kelly and Tony hadn’t been too distracted with each other to stop a killer sooner, maybe Harper would have been safely home with her parents. That letter in Kelly’s purse, the one that probably wasn’t connected to either case, couldn’t matter right now. Not when another child was missing.

  “You okay?”

  She turned back to find Tony watching her from the cubicle doorway, his stark expression suggesting she wasn’t the only one affected by the recent development. If there had been any doubt that the case involving the local girls was a federal one, now the abduction of a child, possibly over state lines, all but guaranteed it.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Do you think Harper’s already dead?”

  “Do you always have to use their first names?”

  “Makes them real to me. They are real.”

  Tony nodded but stared at the ground. “It’s already been forty-eight hours.”

  He didn’t have to say more to make his point. Like with any abduction, each hour the victim was missing added to the grim likelihood that they wouldn’t be able to recover her alive.

  “If only we’d been focused on finding Sienna’s and Madison’s killer instead of...you know,” she said.

  He straightened and glanced from side to side as if to see if their conversation had been overheard. Obviously, she needed to be more careful. Here and everywhere else.

  “Yes, we’ve been...distracted. But I still need to talk to you.”

  “Our focus should be on bringing Harper home safely. If it’s possible. Can’t we just put this conversation off for—”

  “No,” he said in a stern voice. “We can’t.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “This is important.”

  This time, Kelly leaned forward in her seat to see around him. She wasn’t the only one speaking as if they were alone.

  “I already checked,” he told her. “The
others must have stepped out to get something to eat.”

  That made sense. They were all going to be putting in more overtime hours until they found some leads. Or, rather, if.

  She peeked at the bottom of her laptop screen. It was well after dinnertime. That didn’t matter. She couldn’t have eaten, anyway. The idea of going home wasn’t appealing, either.

  “Then what is it?”

  “You’re in danger.”

  She swallowed. How did he know about BIG DADDY? Had she given something away? She tried to keep her expression blank, but from his lifted brow, it was clear she’d failed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Rather than answering right away, he crossed his arms and continued to watch her. He probably used that same tactic when he was conducting suspect interviews. She didn’t want to share anything with him, yet she was tempted to cough up everything she knew.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  She pressed her spine against the chair back. “It’s nothing. It’s not a big deal.”

  “What isn’t a big deal?”

  She considered continuing to fight what was becoming a losing battle, but finally she reached down and pulled her purse from beneath the desk. Her hands trembling, she clutched the wadded-up note and handed it to him. He smoothed it out and read. When he looked up at her, he waved the paper.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Someone stuck it in my mailbox.”

  He flattened his palms against the sides of the cubicle doorway.

  “Somebody who was inside your building.”

  She nodded though he hadn’t posed it as a question. “Probably while you...while I—”

  “While we were upstairs together,” he finished for her.

  She crossed her arms, wishing she could protect herself from the guilt that swallowed her. If only they hadn’t been in her apartment, doing all those things with vibrant colors that had suddenly lost their sheen, then... What? Would that have stopped BIG DADDY from finding her before she located him? Could anything stop him?

  He tapped the note. “‘Don’t ask questions when you won’t survive knowing the answers.’ We shouldn’t have put you out there. Like frickin’ creep bait or something.”

  “We’re making too big a deal of this. Somebody probably left that message by mistake.”

  “You mean that threat was intended for someone else?”

  She blinked, his words jarring her from her own denials. “That’s not what I—”

  “Because somebody sure made the rounds last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She accepted the letter he handed back to her and then set it facedown on the desk. “You know why I was late for work this morning?”

  “Car trouble?” That was the message that had circulated in the office.

  He shook his head. “Slashed tires. Four of them. The car had to be towed from your place.”

  “You were still there when I left? How did I miss that?”

  “You were in a hurry. And preoccupied.” His gaze lowered to the paper on her desk and then lifted again. “Because of that.”

  Kelly couldn’t keep from trembling. BIG DADDY knew about Tony? Probably knew they’d been together. What did that mean? Would he go after him, too?

  “Your tires and my note don’t have to be connected. Yours was probably just kids getting into trouble.”

  Which of them was she trying to convince?

  “Awfully coincidental,” he said with a shrug. “At first, I thought it was kids, too. Then I wondered if it could have been one of your ex-boyfriends.”

  Was he jealous? Did she want him to be, even now, when that was the last thing she should be worried about? She couldn’t sit anymore, so she pushed past him and paced up the aisle between the rows of cubicles.

  “I don’t have any jealous exes, if that’s what you’re asking. They’ve always been relieved to get rid of me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Her steps slowed, but she didn’t look back at him. If she did, all those feelings she’d tucked away since that morning might crawl out again.

  “But then I went home, and I changed my mind.”

  This time, she spun to face him. “What happened?”

  “Someone trashed my house.”

  Her breath caught as he filled her in about his front door and the damage to the rest of his house.

  “And then someone left me a warning, too.”

  He grabbed a brown lunch bag from his desk, slid on gloves and unfolded a piece of paper from inside it. Then he held it up for her to see. The message was on different paper, and the words were cut and pasted instead of printed like on hers, but the message was the same. They’d been asking the wrong questions, and someone wanted them to stop.

  “Curiosity killed?”

  She hated that the last word came out with a squeak.

  “Not just the cat, either. He seems highly motivated to keep us from taking our investigation any further.”

  She couldn’t help it this time. She shivered visibly. “He knows where we live, Tony. Both of us. How did he find out that information?”

  “There has to be a leak in the office. Otherwise, how could one of our guys have identified us, let alone found our addresses?”

  Our guys. Clearly, they agreed that one of the possible suspects from the chat rooms had found them out, but only one of them had a pretty good idea about the man’s identity.

  “Did you file a police report about the vandalism to your car or house?”

  He shook his head and then pointed to her. “About the threat?”

  “I didn’t, either. What would I have said? That I received a threatening note that I suspected might have come from one of the guys I met online in a joint task force investigation?”

  “I see how that would have been a problem.”

  “How can we keep this from the rest of the task force?”

  “We have to. Someone has blown our cover, and we can’t afford to let him know that we know. We also can’t go home.”

  “That’s an unnecessary precaution.” But even as she said it, she knew he was right. Deep down, she’d known it all day.

  “We’ll stop by both of our places, pack bags and move into a hotel tonight.”

  Immediately, she shook her head. They couldn’t stay together. Not after last night. And not after all the discoveries that they’d made today.

  His jaw tightened, and he lifted his chin. “We don’t have any choice. If someone made it inside your building, he can also get into your place. The door to my house doesn’t even lock now.”

  “I get it. It’s just—”

  “My note didn’t say curiosity would kill the guy, and I wasn’t the one warned that I wouldn’t survive knowing the answers to my questions. You’re in danger. Not me. There’s no way in hell... I mean I can’t let you put yourself at further risk just because you’re embarrassed about last night.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just, well, last night was a mistake. We can’t be together. We’re coworkers. We should never have taken our minds off the case—”

  “Just stop. Pretty soon you’re going to say that it was your alter ego and not you in that bed.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  He blew out a breath. “Then we’ll worry about your relationship phobias later. Right now, we need to make sure that we both stay alive long enough to close these cases.”

  She opened her mouth to argue with him, but then it struck her that he’d at least acknowledged that she wasn’t the only one in danger. She closed her lips. Whether she wanted to believe it or not, they were in this thing together, and they were in deep.

  He frowned, two parallel lines forming between his brows.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get your own
bed, clear across the room.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. “And I promise never to touch you again...unless you ask me to.”

  Kelly nodded, pushing aside the sadness of knowing she wouldn’t ask.

  “I could always stay with one of my fellow troopers for a few days.”

  “You realize it could have been one of them who spilled the beans about our work to the wrong person, right?”

  “That’s not true. None of them would—”

  She stopped as it became clear that if one of her friends had given away details, it would have been because she’d shared too much. She would have been the mole. He was watching her as she looked up again. She wasn’t alone in recognizing that this all could come back to her.

  “The truth is we don’t know who told, who they shared information with or what their motive was for doing it,” he said finally. “We just can’t risk our lives out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.”

  “Sure, I’m loyal. They’re my friends. They’ve always had my back.”

  He shook his head. “This is different. We’ve touched on something that someone really doesn’t want us to know about. Something he or she is willing to kill to keep hidden.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. The suspect in our murder investigation should be on the run. How could he have had time to track us?”

  Tony stared down at his gripped hands and then looked up again. “I don’t get it, either, but that’s the reason we have to keep quiet until we come up with some answers. We might have a suspect who’s underground with a bunch of time and unlimited access to the Internet, or it might be something else.”

  “Something bigger than abductions or murders?”

  “Maybe it’s not about bigger crimes. Maybe it’s more about who’s implicated in them. But until we know for sure...”

  Something acidic welled in Kelly’s gut, threatening to back up into her throat. Could one of their colleagues have provided information to a wanted suspect? Or worse? Could someone they thought they knew be avoiding capture by staying close to the action?

  She might have tried to defend her coworkers again, but the click of the office door unlocking drew her up short. Robert and Don were talking as they entered the office, both carrying fast-food bags and supersize soft drinks.