Winter's Secret

by Mary Stone

Bree nodded. “Definitely. So, I don’t suppose the door’s unlocked?”

  The man reached into his suit jacket. “No, it’s locked, but I’ve got the key.”

  The muddy daylight glinted off the silver as he held out the key for them to observe.

  The detective was being so smirky that Winter chuckled. “Do I want to know how you got that?”

  Detective Schaeffer grinned. “See that gnome by the flowers at the base of the stairs?”

  As she followed his outstretched hand, she nodded. The gnome held a shovel in its hands, and its pleasant smile and rosy cheeks insisted nothing was amiss. To the side of the nonchalant garden sentry, a patch of yellow chrysanthemums had started to bloom.

  “I used to have one just like it at my house.” This time, the comment came from Detective Vinson. The corners of her green eyes creased as she smiled. “It was for my kid. She’d forget her head if it wasn’t attached to her body. It looks like a regular garden gnome, but one of its shoes comes apart so you can store a key inside.”

  Winter returned her gaze to the pair and nodded. “A fake garden gnome. I’d be afraid some bad guy would have one just like it and target every house with a gnome.” Though she worried for a second that the comment might have come across as derisive, both detectives snickered.

  Vinson nodded. “That’s why I also have a security system and changed all the outside doors to keyless locks.”

  “Good thinking,” Winter said as Schaeffer pulled open the screen door. Once the lock disengaged with a metallic click, he gave the interior door a tentative shove.

  The air around them seemed to freeze as they all peered into the shadowy foyer.

  A handful of coats hung from hooks mounted to one wall, and on a mat beneath the jackets were several pairs of shoes. Two pairs clearly belonged to Jon Falkner, and the remaining three—boots and two pairs of tennis shoes—must have been Natalie’s.

  “Hello?” Detective Schaeffer called. “Hello? Is anyone home? This is the Baltimore Police Department. We’re here to check to see if you’re okay.”

  Detective Vinson’s green eyes flicked over to Winter and Bree. “We already knocked for a solid ten minutes, and there was no answer. Unless the person in there just took a handful of Ambien, I doubt anyone’s inside.”

  Bree’s expression turned grim. “No one alive, anyway.”

  Detective Vinson merely nodded.

  Glancing back to his partner, Detective Schaeffer dropped one hand to his service weapon and unsnapped the holster. Vinson followed suit as the two took the first few steps into the foyer.

  Bree and Winter each brandished their respective handguns and followed the detectives into the gloom. None of them actually thought there were Russian gangsters hiding in the shadows, but Winter wasn’t willing to take the chance with such a formidable adversary.

  As the screen door slammed closed, Winter’s breath caught in her throat.

  Her pulse began to hammer in her ears, and she could hardly hear as Detective Schaeffer announced that the immediate area was clear. The icy rush of danger surged through her veins, specks of darkness dancing along the edges of her periphery.

  Something was wrong.

  She opened her mouth to provide a warning to Bree and the detectives, but her tongue felt thick and fuzzy.

  Swallowing in a desperate effort to return some of the moisture to her mouth, Winter squeezed her eyes closed against the encroaching darkness at the edge of her vision.

  That had to be what was wrong. She was about to have a vision.

  But there had been no headache. No warning. No semblance of the usual tip-off her body provided before she lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Instead, she was overwhelmed with paranoia and anxiety. Her palms were clammy, her breathing labored.

  Someone stood behind her. She could hear them as they breathed.

  Whirling around on one foot to face the attacker she was sure was there, her heart pounded a merciless rhythm against her chest.

  The muddy daylight streamed in through the screen door as a handful of dust motes floated through the air. All five pairs of shoes sat on the gray and green mat, and all the coats hung on their hooks.

  Aside from the dust, the area was still. Empty.

  There had been someone there. She had heard them.

  The panic that raced through her body wasn’t the result of unfounded nervousness. That overwhelming anxiety had been real.

  Winter couldn’t recall a time when she’d felt such a visceral reaction to…nothing.

  “Winter?”

  She barely stopped herself from leveling her Glock in the direction of the woman’s voice.

  Bree’s brows drew together. “Is everything okay? Did you see something?”

  Nothing visible to you.

  Forcing a smile, Winter kept both arms at her sides to conceal the tremor in her hands. Rather than give voice to the bizarre rush of panic, she shook her head. “No, nothing.”

  Bree tapped a finger beneath one nostril. “You’ve got a bloody nose.”

  Winter bit back a string of four-letter words as she reached into the pocket of her jacket for a tissue. “Shit. Thanks. It’s probably the dry air up here.”

  Bree didn’t look convinced, but before she could question Winter more, Detective Schaeffer rounded a corner at the edge of the living room. “It’s clear. No one’s here, and nothing seems to be out of place.”

  “Something happened here.” Bree’s voice was calm and certain. She sounded like she had just given them the answer to a basic math question.

  Schaeffer returned his matte black handgun to its holster. “I don’t doubt it. The Russians are good at this type of thing, though. Kidnapping for ransom is part of their business model, and whenever someone owes them, they love to use family members as collateral. It’s not surprising that they’d leave it without a trace.”

  Winter pulled a pair of gloves from the collection bag she kept in her pocket and began to put them on. “There’s always a trace.”

  The detective shrugged. “True enough. We’ve got some officers keeping an eye on Mrs. Dalton and her son, but the brass doesn’t like us pulling people into federal safe houses unless we’ve got something to indicate that they’re in danger.”

  Bree scoffed and pulled out her own gloves. “Eric Dalton’s deal with the Russians isn’t enough for that? You said yourself that they’ve got a habit of abducting family members.”

  For the second time, Schaeffer shrugged. “You’re right, but this city’s budget is stretched thin enough as it is. If we threw everyone in a safe house when we thought they might be in trouble, we’d be bankrupt before the first fiscal quarter ended.”

  Despite the reassuring presence of Bree and the two city detectives, Winter couldn’t shake the lingering haze of paranoia.

  When unbidden images of a newly released horror film began to surface in her thoughts, she squeezed her eyes closed and pinched the bridge of her nose. She’d watched the trailer for the film a few weeks earlier—it had been a welcome distraction from the veritable mountain of paperwork with which she had been saddled.

  Even though she’d expressed interest to Noah and Autumn about going to see the movie once it came out in theaters, Winter and Noah had been sucked into their newest case before they had a chance to make plans.

  She was certain the images in her head were scenes from the film, but she didn’t know how in the hell they’d gotten there.

  Now, her sixth sense was responsible for spoiling movies. Great.

  She suppressed a groan as she dabbed a few tissues under her nose, making sure the bleeding had stopped. All she needed was to contaminate the scene with her own DNA. She’d have some explaining to do then.

  When she stepped closer to the kitchen, her vision became clearer. Winter hadn’t experienced the terror, the breathing. But Natalie had.

  With feet that felt like lead, Winter made her way to the ceramic tile that marked the start of the modest kitchen. From benea
th the closed lid of the trash can, she spotted an unmistakable red glow. A red glow that didn’t illuminate the drywall behind the can.

  Her breathing grew labored as she stepped farther into the kitchen, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. But she didn’t stop moving forward. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed on the red glow.

  Reaching out, she gripped the trash can’s lid and lifted. Although she braced herself, expecting to find something horrible like a decapitated head, she breathed out a sigh of relief when only the broken shards of a plate glowed red like they were fragments from a radioactive disaster.

  The din of Bree and the detectives’ voices drifted over to her, but she didn’t pause to try to make out their words. As she turned to face the row of cabinets above the sink, she heard it again.

  The breathing, its cadence calm and measured.

  Now that she was sure the sound had been manufactured by the part of her brain responsible for the headaches and visions that had plagued her since she was attacked by Douglas Kilroy, she was able to push past most of the rush of fright and anxiety.

  Even with this knowledge, as she advanced to the sink, she might as well have been trudging through quicksand.

  Every instinct instilled in her since even before she’d joined the bureau told her to turn around and run, but she pointedly reminded herself that the paranoia was part of the strange vision.

  A sharp sting in the side of her neck jerked her attention away from the careful examination of the pristine countertop. She winced as she snapped a hand up to clasp at the site of the pain. Though she half-expected to see her palm smeared with the remnants of a wasp or a hornet, her hand was clean.

  It was clean because Natalie hadn’t been stung by a wasp. She had been drugged with a syringe.

  Winter finally turned her attention back to Bree and the detectives in the other room. To her relief, only Bree’s eyes were on her.

  The taller woman raised an eyebrow. “What are you thinking?”

  With a slight shake of her head, Winter looked back to the wooden cabinet. “There’s a broken plate in the trash can. I think Natalie dropped it.”

  She stopped herself before she could elaborate on how the attack had occurred. Though Bree had caught on to Winter’s uncanny ability to spot details in the environment while they worked the Douglas Kilroy case, she’d never asked about the specifics.

  And as long as she didn’t ask, Winter had no intent to share.

  Like she told Autumn earlier in the month, she had to take stock of what her mind had revealed and work backward. Winter knew that Natalie had been stabbed in the neck with a hypodermic needle, but she couldn’t well blurt that out without a reasonable shred of proof to back it up.

  Pulling herself from the contemplation, Winter glanced between Vinson and Schaeffer. “Detectives, you asked around to see if any of the neighbors saw something unusual, right?”

  Detective Vinson emerged from behind the kitchen island to stand at Bree’s side. “Yeah. None of the neighbors saw anything bizarre that night, but none of them said they really paid attention to the comings and goings of the Falkner’s.”

  Winter nodded. “What about the garage? Were either of their cars there?”

  “There’s one inside, but without looking it up, I can’t be sure if it’s Natalie’s or Jon’s,” the detective replied.

  As she stepped away from the counter, Winter glanced to the carpeted hallway that led to a set of stairs and a bathroom. At the end, a beige door was closed—the door to the garage.

  “What about the plate?” Bree’s voice snapped Winter’s focus back to the edge of the kitchen.

  Swallowing against the pit of anxiety that wouldn’t relent, Winter nodded and gestured to the trash can. “Well, I think it’s possible that Natalie was holding that plate when she was…attacked. Could’ve been something fast-acting like a sedative administered in a syringe, or a substance she inhaled. Something like that. Or this whole kitchen would be a mess.”

  Detectives Vinson and Schaeffer exchanged glances, but after a brief pause, they both nodded their approval.

  Bree tilted her chin in Winter’s direction as a request for her to continue.

  “Right.” Winter waved a hand at the trash can. Suppressing the consistent onslaught of fear and panic was just short of exhausting, and she was doing well to maintain a coherent dialogue. “The plate. I think that whoever attacked her, the Russians most likely, cleaned it up. Natalie and Jon sent messages to say they were going to be out of the office, so I think it’s a safe bet that the Russians didn’t want anyone to realize the couple had been kidnapped. At least not right away.”

  “That’s not uncommon with them,” Detective Vinson said.

  As Winter neared the carpet, every muscle in her body tensed in preparation for a fight.

  Though she knew the confrontation was a thing of the past, she still couldn’t push past the damn anxiety. There was a prominent ringing in her ears, and she squeezed her eyes closed as she swallowed the bile that stung her throat.

  Before either of the detectives or Bree could catch on to her fragile physical state, she forced open her eyes and took in a deep breath.

  Gesturing to the carpet with an outstretched hand, she dabbed at a new dribble of blood running to her upper lip. “Here. Look at this.”

  Bree’s footsteps were little more than a whisper of sound as she crossed the tiled floor. “Drag marks.”

  “Yeah.” Winter nodded. “Drag marks. I think that Natalie got home that night, and her husband was already gone. I doubt the Russians grabbed him from here, but they had someone waiting for her until she got home from seeing a movie with her friends. She went to get herself something to eat, right over there.”

  Both detectives’ eyes followed Winter’s outstretched hand as she pointed to the sink.

  When neither of them offered a word of dissent, Winter forged ahead. “She was standing there when someone came up from behind and drugged her. It had to have been something fast-acting, or we’d see more broken items in here than just a plate. She either dropped the plate or knocked it off the counter when she fell, and it shattered. The kidnapper dragged her body down this hallway, loaded her into a car, cleaned up the scene, and took off.”

  Bree’s eyes studied Winter’s face intently before shifting her gaze back to the carpet. “The car would’ve been in the garage, right? Otherwise, they’d have risked the neighbors seeing them drag an unconscious person across the driveway.”

  Detective Vinson cleared her throat. “They’ve got a security system. Its software might keep tabs on who opens the garage and when. We’ll call the security company and have them send you guys whatever they’ve got.”

  Winter offered the woman an appreciative nod. Finally, the adrenaline had started to recede. “In the meantime, I think we ought to get some crime scene techs over here to check for trace evidence. There’s a possibility that the kidnappers used Natalie’s car to drive her to wherever they took her, so we should check on that too.”

  As the other three nodded, Winter didn’t have to hope she was right about her brief reenactment of Natalie’s abduction.

  She knew she was right.

  15

  When she spotted the flicker of movement as the silver sedan approached, Bree blew out a sigh of relief.

  Hers and Winter’s flight back to Richmond was scheduled to depart in an hour and a half, and if she wanted any chance to fight through the security checkpoint with enough time to sprint to her gate, Bree needed to leave soon.

  As Special Agent Drew Hansford pulled up to park beside her in the dilapidated lot of an abandoned warehouse, she raised one hand to offer him a quick wave.

  With a smile, he returned the gesture of greeting and stepped out onto the pockmarked asphalt. Bree pressed a button to disengage the locks as he reached for the passenger side door.

  The cool afternoon air rushed in with Drew, and Bree was glad for her jacket. She’d lived in Baltimore for years,
but by now, she had adjusted to the more temperate climate of Virginia.

  Drew raked a hand through his sandy hair, his face a scowl of disgust. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it lately, but I really hate hanging out with the Russians.”

  Bree’s burst of laughter was almost involuntary. “I can’t imagine they make for great company unless you’re in the mob. Have you found anything yet?”

  He leaned back heavily in his seat. “Not sure. Honestly, I think what I haven’t found is a little more peculiar. You said Eric Dalton claims he made a deal with the Russians to start laundering money for them as a way to pay for part of the five-hundred grand they gave him, right?”

  Bree nodded. “Right.”

  “See, that’s the weird thing.” As his pale eyes met hers, the glint of good humor dissipated. “I’ve heard a lot of shit about what’s going on with the Russians. Just high-level shit, real basic information, but none of it has involved a yoga studio. I haven’t even heard any of them mention a new partner for getting their dirty money clean. Either they’re really making an effort to keep this shit on the down-low, or…”

  He left the statement unfinished and shrugged.

  Tapping a pensive finger against the steering wheel, Bree pursed her lips. “They might be. We figured the secrecy was part of the reason they’d be after a business relationship with Eric Dalton anyway, right? Maybe they’re keeping a tight leash on the whole thing.”

  Drew shook his head again. “Still. It’s just weird that I haven’t heard anything. I’ve been undercover with these guys plenty of times before, and I’ve got rapport with them. Not for anything really hardcore, but the basic financial stuff.” He poked himself in the chest. “I’d hear about that. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying it’s weird.”

  Bree blew a piece of hair out of her eyes. “That’s the thing about the Russians, though, isn’t it? They don’t operate traditionally like the Italians or even the Irish. They’re more like the cartels, you know. They’re…innovative, I guess. Maybe this is like a new prototype for their money-laundering operation. Hell, maybe they plan to launder money for other syndicates.”