by Pamela Clare
“No, nothing. I … I just … Sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you, not after everything I put you through last night.”
“Mia, it’s okay. What’s going on?”
Her words came out in a rush. “I’m afraid, Joaquin. It’s probably all in my head, but I can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching me. I’m afraid that this isn’t over, that Andy and Jason are just the beginning. You probably think I’m crazy, but I’m not.”
Maybe it was her fear, or maybe it was just instinct, but Joaquin knew at that moment that there was something Mia hadn’t told him or the police. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of her.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. You’ve been through a lot these past few days.” He glanced at his watch, tried to gauge whether he was good to drive. Two beers in two hours. No problem. “How about I come get you, and we head to my place? You can tell me what’s going on, and you won’t be home alone. I’ve got a spare room if you decide you want to stay the night.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at a club called Igneous Intrusion.”
“I know where that is. Stay put. Don’t go anywhere alone, not even to the restroom. I’ll be there in about ten minutes. I’ll text you from outside.”
Matt got to his feet, worry on his face. “You’re leaving?”
“Sorry, man, but she’s at a nightclub scared out of her mind.” Joaquin grabbed his parka off the back of Matt’s kitchen chair. “She thinks someone’s watching her.”
“Maybe she really is out of her mind. Are you sure you don’t want me to come? Someone needs to have your back. I’m a neutral third party. Besides, then I can check her out for myself, see what kind of vibe I catch.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard.” That’s why there was a Glock in his pocket.
Joaquin picked up his camera bag—he never left it in his vehicle—and headed toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Matt walked him out. “Okay, fine. But I’m drinking what’s left of your beer.”
Mia sat at a table, bass thrumming, nothing left of her Diet Coke but ice. She shouldn’t have bothered Joaquin. He’d had to deal with enough already because of her. Besides, she’d never been the kind of woman who needed a man to rescue her. Still, she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t felt better when he’d said he was on his way.
She felt it again—prickles on the nape of her neck. She turned to look, doing her best to make it seem casual. The place was packed, and the lighting dim, making it hard to see individual faces.
Damn it.
She wasn’t helpless. She had her SIG in her handbag, and it was loaded. No, it wasn’t legal to carry a weapon like this without a permit in Colorado, but she would rather get busted with a concealed weapon than caught by a killer without one.
There was a lull between songs, the abrupt absence of music leaving sudden quiet in its wake. The prickling sensation returned, stronger this time.
On instinct, she looked up.
A man in a black hoodie.
His face was hidden by shadows, but the moment she spotted him, he walked away and disappeared, swallowed by the crowd on the balcony.
Her cell phone buzzed, making her jump.
It was Joaquin.
I’m here.
She hadn’t taken off her parka, so she grabbed her handbag and backpack and hurried out the door, glancing back to see if the man in the hoodie was there.
Joaquin sat double-parked in his truck, engine still running. He threw the passenger door open.
She hurried over and climbed inside, locking the door. “I didn’t imagine it.”
“What?”
“There was a guy on the balcony—a man in a black hoodie. I looked up and saw him watching me. The moment he realized I’d seen him, he vanished into the crowd. I didn’t get a look at his face. It was shadowed.”
Still, there had been something familiar about him.
Joaquin muttered something under his breath in Spanish then nudged his truck into traffic. “Where’s your vehicle?”
“I took the light rail. I wanted there to be a record of everywhere I went.”
“Smart.” He stopped at a red light, his gaze on his rearview mirror. “You need to report this, let Wu know.”
“I don’t think he’d believe me. He always thinks I’m lying.”
The light turned green.
“Then I’m calling Darcangelo. He’s up to date on this case. He’ll get Wu to listen.” Joaquin’s phone was plugged into the console on his dash. “Call Darcangelo.”
A few seconds later, a voice Mia recognized came over the speakers.
“Hey, Ramirez, you keeping out of trouble?”
“Mia’s here with me, and I’ve got you on speaker. We’re on our way to my place. She spent the day in public because she was afraid to be alone. But just now she saw a guy in a black hoodie watching her. The moment he saw that she’d seen him, he disappeared.”
There was a pause. “Tess and I are in the middle of dinner with Hunter and Sophie and their kids. Give us thirty minutes, and Hunter and I will head your way. Where can I find you?”
“We’re going to my place.”
“See you there.”
The call ended.
Mia looked over at Joaquin. “I’m sorry to wreck your evening.”
“You did the right thing calling me.”
“I wish I’d gotten a look at his face.”
“I hope you’ll tell my buddies everything you told me. What you said about this being only the beginning—what did you mean?”
Mia looked out her window. “It’s just a gut feeling.”
“If you know anything, now is the time to speak up.”
What could she tell them? What had happened at Tell al-Sharruken was classified. The Army had done all it could to bury it. If the story ended up in a police report and made its way into the papers, Mia could face charges.
Was she willing to go to prison for a hunch?
She couldn’t be sure that the fallout from that nightmare was behind this. Still, she had to tell them something. She didn’t want anyone else to disappear or die. How much could she say? All she knew for certain was that the bastard behind this knew her, Andy, and Jason.
That meant he had once been a brother in arms.
She had seen him. She had looked right at him. Had she recognized him?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She’d been spooked and had left the bar right after that, climbing into some asshole’s pickup truck. But Mia didn’t have a man in her life. She was the Iron Maiden, the Ice Queen. If you touched her, she’d freeze your dick off. As far as he knew, no one had ever had the balls to try.
He’d gotten a glimpse of the guy’s face through the windshield of that pickup and was sure he’d seen the bastard once before somewhere.
Where? Where? Where?
If only his goddamn head didn’t hurt so much.
He’d been surprised to find out Mia hadn’t been arrested. The papers said she’d been questioned. That was it. She wasn’t even a suspect in Garcia’s death. The cops must be total morons if they couldn’t follow the trail of breadcrumbs he’d left for them. The bloody towels and bath mat and the driver’s license. The text message.
Did he have to write her name in blood or something?
Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, sagged against the concrete support of the highway underpass, the pain unbearable.
“You okay, buddy?”
He opened his eyes, found a drunk shuffling toward him, bottle in hand. He fumbled in his pocket for an Oxy, chewed it. “Fuck off.”
When that didn’t work, he drew his pistol, waved it in the drunk’s face.
“Well, that’s bad manners.” The drunk shuffled away. “Asshole.”
He bit back a cry. The drugs never kicked in fast enough. It wasn’t going to end until he killed himself. God, he’d do it now, bu
t this bullet was meant for someone else. And then there was Mia.
Then it came to him.
The news photographer.
That’s who he was. The bastard driving that truck had taken the photo of Mia that had run on the front of the Denver Independent. His name was probably there below the photo. Even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be hard to find.
Just follow him home from work.
That’s what he’d done with Garcia. Poor, stupid Garcia.
Mia could try to hide, but he would find her.
8
Mia stepped out of the elevator and followed Joaquin down the hallway. He must earn decent money to have a condo in the River North Art District. RiNo was Denver’s trendiest neighborhood, full of galleries, brew pubs, clubs, boutiques, and restaurants. He stopped outside number 407, unlocked the deadbolt, and stepped aside to let her enter, flicking on the lights before locking the door behind them.
“Wow.” Some of her anxiety melted away. “I guess it pays to be a newspaper photographer.”
This made Joaquin laugh. He took her parka and hung it with his in a closet. “Make yourself at home.”
She found herself standing in a small foyer and looking into an ultra-modern kitchen with stainless steel appliances and European-style cabinetry. A row of pendant lights hung above a kitchen island, a glass bowl filled with apples and bananas sitting on the granite countertop. “Nice place.”
Beyond the kitchen was a small dining area with a table of reclaimed wooden planks, a bench with a multi-colored cushion on one side, chairs of molded plastic in bright turquoise on the other. The table itself was all but buried beneath mail and newspapers, a laundry basket with folded clothes sitting on one end.
The living room had a blocky sectional sofa in soft gray and a rustic wooden coffee table that was covered with books and newspapers. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a deck that faced west—toward the mountains. It was too dark to see the mountains now, but city lights glittered below.
“Sorry. The place is a mess.” Joaquin gathered up the mail, shoved it into the laundry basket, and disappeared down a small side hallway.
“I think it’s beautiful.” Her gaze traveled over the photographs on the walls—a field of Aquilegia caerulea—Colorado blue columbines—a bald eagle standing on a frozen lake, a jagged mountain peak against a blue sky, ocean waves unraveling on a sandy beach. “These are yours?”
He called to her from another room. “On my days off, I try to get out to shoot. Let me show you the spare room.”
She followed him down the side hallway.
“I’ve got my own bathroom, so this one’s yours.” He pointed to a small bathroom with a tub and shower stall at the end of the hallway. “My room is to the right here, and the spare room is there to your left. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” Mia walked into the bedroom, flicked on the lights, and found herself surrounded once more by color.
The bed had an antique iron frame, its green paint chipped to reveal the metal beneath. A hand-pieced quilt of fabric in every color Mia could imagine—rich blues, hot pinks, vibrant reds and purples, greens, oranges, yellows—covered the bed. Photographs adorned the walls. Two older black men playing chess in a park. A rusted car frame in the middle of a lush forest, its interior filled with ferns. Sunrise through a sandstone arch somewhere in the desert.
Joaquin came up to the door behind her. “You hungry?”
“No, thanks.” Stress always killed her appetite. “You’re incredibly talented.”
“Sometimes I get it right.”
“Sometimes? Are you blind? These are beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
She followed him back out to the living room and sat on the sofa, more tension melting away. Being here ought to have felt awkward. She barely knew Joaquin, after all. But she felt more relaxed now than she’d been all day.
“Want something to drink? I’ve got beer and soda and, well … beer and soda.”
“Can I have a glass of water with ice?” Her gaze moved over the books on the coffee table, stopping when she saw his name. “You published your photos.”
So that’s how he’d been able to afford this place.
“I’ve got a couple of photography books and a textbook.” He walked over to the sofa, handed her a glass of water. “After my Pulitzer, the paper published that. It’s a ‘Best of’ book with photos dating back to its first edition in 1890. That gave me the idea to write an instructional book about news photography. It got picked up by Columbia as a textbook. I released a book of Colorado nature photos about six months ago.”
Mia picked up the book, turned through its pages. The photographs of Denver as a cowboy town were fun. There was the state capitol, newly built and festooned with ribbons and banners. There was Pearl Street—nothing but mud and wooden walkways. “Are the photos that won you the Pulitzer in here?”
He bent down, flipped toward the back. “Here.”
The photographs told a story. Armed men in body armor fast-roping onto the balcony of a building. A man doing CPR on another man who appeared to be dead, a woman with dark hair leaning over him in tears, dead bodies on the floor around them. “This is it, isn’t it—that shootout with the cartel?”
“Yeah.”
Mia stared, transfixed, at the next page. It was Julian Darcangelo, but he was badly wounded. Another man sat behind him, holding him and applying direct pressure to a gunshot wound in his shoulder. Mia didn’t have to know anything about the two guys to know they were close friends, closer than brothers. The pain and exhaustion on Julian’s face and the worry and love—yes, love—on the other man’s face told the entire story of that moment in a way that words never could have.
“Powerful.”
“You’re going to meet him in a minute.” Joaquin tapped his finger on the other man’s face. “That’s Marc Hunter.”
Mia’s stomach knotted. She closed the book, set it aside. “I saw what I saw tonight. I hope your friends don’t think I’m overreacting.”
He sat on the corner of the coffee table, looked into her eyes. “Trust me, Mia. They won’t.”
Joaquin stood off to the side, listening while Mia told Darcangelo and Hunter what had happened tonight. Darcangelo asked most of the questions. The man had once worked as a deep cover agent for the FBI, tracking down sex traffickers and freeing their victims. He had a lot of experience working with terrified, brutalized women.
Not that Mia seemed terrified. She was calm, composed, almost business-like in her responses. He had no difficulty imagining her in a uniform. Still, he could tell from the shadows in her blue eyes that she was afraid. Not for the first time, he wished he’d been there tonight. He’d have gone after the bastard.
“I left the restaurant and walked down to that nightclub—Igneous Intrusion.”
Darcangelo nodded. “I know the place.”
“I went there because there’s a security camera on the corner. I got a Coke, sat at a table away from the dance floor, and tried to figure out what I should do next.”
“What do you mean?” Hunter asked.
“I didn’t know whether I should go home, go to a hotel, or call someone. I’m tired of having a cloud of suspicion over my head. I had nothing to do with Andy’s disappearance or Jason’s murder.”
Hunter nodded. “Got it.”
“I’d been there for maybe ten minutes when I got the feeling I was being watched. I tried to be casual about looking around. I moved to the other side of the table. The music ended, and something made me look up. A man was standing on the balcony, watching me. He didn’t have a drink in his hand. He wasn’t dancing. He was just standing there, watching me. The moment he saw me looking at him, he stepped back into the crowd. That’s when I called Joaquin.”
“Did you get a look at his face?”
“No, sir. It was dark, and he was wearing a black hoodie that shadowed his face.”
Darcangelo and Hunter exchanged a glance.
The black hoodie. It seemed like a random detail, but given that the man who’d killed Jason Garcia had been wearing a black hoodie, it probably wasn’t a coincidence.
A killer might have gotten close to Mia tonight. What sucked is that Joaquin hadn’t been able to tell her that. He had promised Darcangelo not to say a word about the old woman and her video. Thank God Mia had called him.
The men waited for her to go on.
She folded her hands together in her lap, her fingers laced so tightly that her knuckles were white. “There was something familiar about him. I can’t say what. I got the feeling that if I had seen his face, I would have recognized him.”
“It makes sense to me,” Hunter said. “If these two cases are connected—”
“If?” Joaquin blurted.
Hunter shot Joaquin a stony glance. “If these two cases are connected—and it seems to me that they are—whoever is behind this has to be someone who knew both victims and who knows you. You are the thread that brings it together, which is why the department has been so interested in you.”
“Who would want to hurt you, Mia?” Darcangelo leaned in close, but Joaquin could see that he was careful not to touch her.
Mia looked away, squeezed her eyes shut, her composure crumbling, the fear she was trying to hide naked on her face for just a moment. She had something she wanted to tell them, something she was afraid to say.
“You can trust them, Mia. Tell them what you told me.”
She shut her emotions down, looked over at him, nodded. “I’m afraid that the killer isn’t finished. I’m afraid he’s got other people in his crosshairs … and that I’ll be one of them.”
Darcangelo and Hunter seemed to consider what she’d said.
“There’s a missing piece here,” Hunter said. “Why, Mia?”
“Any information that sheds light on this might help us save lives, including yours,” Darcangelo said.
Mia glanced up at Joaquin, an almost pleading look in her eyes. “If I tell you, I could go to prison.”
Okay, that is not what Joaquin had expected her to say.
Prison? ¡Mierda! Fuck.
