by Cindy Dees
She smiled and her lip stung painfully. She winced and smiled smaller. “They don’t know what hit them.”
“I’ve got some lip balm in the other room. Lemme get it.”
She followed Dex from the kitchen but stopped in the doorway of his bedroom. The male aura in the room was too overwhelming. She took the little pot of lip balm and backed into the relative safety of the living room.
“I’m going to need a written statement about what happened in the alley. That way I can keep your guy in custody for more than forty-eight hours. Oh, and there’s a staff meeting at four o’clock this afternoon. You’re on the agenda.”
“Me?”
“Yup. I want to cover possible threats to Anya so the guys on the cameras can keep a better eye out for threats to the two of you.”
She nodded, suddenly too tired to argue about needing to be watched over. “I’d like to go back to my place and change. Then I’ll come in and write your statement.”
“I’ll walk you home,” he said casually.
Enough was enough with the chivalry bit. “Car doors I can stand. But I don’t need an escort to get me across the parking lot!”
“Fine. Then I’ll follow you.”
“You like irritating me, don’t you?”
“I do,” he answered evenly. “Your eyes are pretty when they sparkle like that.”
Whoa. Time to get out of Dodge! She headed for the door, pronto. And, dammit, she was brought up short when his hand got to the doorknob. He opened the door with a flourish. She scowled over her shoulder but didn’t deign to comment. She sailed down the stairs as regally as her aching ribs would let her and headed for home. Dex could come along or not as he pleased.
He pleased. He strode along beside her all the way to her front door, and stood there watchfully while she unlocked it. Before she pushed it open she announced, “And I don’t need you to check inside the closet or under the bed. I can clear my own space, thank you very much.”
“Don’t forget to do it, then,” he replied steadily.
“Thanks for the first aid,” she mumbled.
“Any time.”
Any time indeed. Why did it make her acutely uncomfortable to know exactly which apartment Dex lived in and what his temporary home smelled like?
Isabella shook off a case of writer’s cramp from the hasty report she’d just composed, describing the attack in the alley. She headed into the briefing—without a cup of coffee for the boss—and noticed right away that a new warmth permeated the crowd, like she’d passed some test. The Medusas were in their usual place, leaning against a wall near the front. She joined her teammates.
“How’re you feeling?” Vanessa murmured to her.
“A little creaky.”
Aleesha chimed in, “I’ll bring some of grandmama’s goop over to you tonight.”
Isabella grimaced. The Jamaican herbal recipe worked great on aches and pains, but it smelled like rotten grass. No, make that rotten grass concealing dead fish.
Dex started the meeting. “For those of you who aren’t aware of it, Captain Torres was jumped by three men in an alley this afternoon. She fought them off and apprehended one of them. He’s in custody and being questioned now. He appears to be of Middle Eastern descent but is pulling a John Wayne and refusing to speak at the moment.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up, “You mean Torres beat up that guy? He’s a mess!”
Dex replied, “She did that to all three of her attackers before they attempted to flee.” Was that actually a note of pride in his voice? Isabella stared in shock. She was only vaguely aware that a hundred male gazes had swung to her, most showing approval, a few registering something more along the lines of disbelief.
“Cripes,” Misty muttered. “They’re acting like they don’t think a girl can make a proper fist, let alone throw a punch.”
Vanessa added under her breath, “Welcome to the twenty-first century, boys.”
Isabella schooled her expression to neutrality, but a kernel of pleasure warmed her. She’d done it. She’d acted like a real Medusa and kicked butt. Maybe she wasn’t as big a fraud as she’d thought.
The briefing broke up after Dex told everyone manning the cameras to keep an eye out for small groups of young Middle Eastern men approaching Anya Khalid.
Isabella snagged a spare desk and called the home phone number listed in Harlan Holt’s file. No answer. The wife was probably still at work. She dialed information and was passed to the main switchboard at Syracuse University. Emma Holt’s office phone rang a good twenty times, but no one picked up. Isabella redialed the switchboard and asked for the Biology Department. A secretary answered.
Isabella said, “Hi, I need to speak to Professor Holt. Could you tell me when a good time to catch her would be?”
“Normally, she’d be in her office from two to four on weekdays for office hours.”
“Normally?” Isabella queried.
“She’s not in today. She hasn’t been in for the last several days. She’s ill.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Isabella asked.
Luckily the secretary was the chatty type. “I don’t know. Her husband didn’t say.”
Her husband? Emma Holt hadn’t called in herself? “Did he say when she’d be back to work?”
“No. Maybe you should try again next week.”
Isabella answered absently, “Thanks. I will.”
She hung up and logged onto the computer. Using a good Internet phone book, she looked up the Holt’s phone number and was directed to their street address in Syracuse and was even provided with a pop-up map to the Holt residence. She clicked the mouse to display several addresses on the same street, then did a reverse search in the phone book and was rewarded with the names and numbers of the Holt’s neighbors. She picked the house next door and dialed the number.
“Mrs. Tannager? I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I’m a friend of Emma Holt’s. I’m trying to reach her. I heard from the university that she’s ill, and I haven’t been able to get in touch with Harlan. The Biology Department gave me your name as an emergency contact.”
The woman made a sound of surprise. “She’s sick? Why, that’s strange. Harlan told me just the other day that Emma had to leave the country on a research trip. I hope she hasn’t picked up some horrible disease like one of those African fevers that melt your body. I saw a television show on it just last night. I was telling my husband how terrible it would be to die that way—”
Isabella interrupted gently. “When did you say she left the country?”
“Well, let’s see now. I saw Emma four—no, five—days ago checking the mail. Such a pretty thing she is, so slender and graceful. I keep telling her she’d make a fine ballet dancer—”
“Five days? Have you seen her car come in or out of the driveway since then?”
“Why, no. It’s parked right where it always is, behind the house. I’m sure Dr. Holt must have driven her to the airport.”
“Of course,” Isabella agreed. “Have you seen him in the last several days?”
“Oh, no. You know, he’s the fellow who invented that new ice everyone’s talking about. He’s over in Lake Placid making sure it all goes just so. Emma told me he’s hoping to sell his formula to the National Hockey League and some big international figure skating group. He’s hoping to quit teaching and go into research full-time on the money he makes from the sale.”
Isabella made a sound of pleased surprise while her mind raced. Told the office she was sick. Told the neighbors she was out of town. Nobody’d seen the woman in days. Two things were for certain: Emma Holt had disappeared, and her husband had something to do with it. She ended the call and dialed Vanessa. “Aleesha and Karen have babysitting duty until midnight. And I need to make a visit to Harlan Holt’s house in the meantime.”
Vanessa replied, surprised, “The guy who’s doing the ice?”
“Yup. But I can’t go alone or His Highness will have my head for taking
too big a risk. Because, you know, I’m a weak female who can’t look out for myself.”
Vanessa chuckled.
“So, Viper, are you up for a field trip?”
Chapter 6
Lazlo glanced around the airport nervously. Ilya should be here, but damned if he could spot the guy. Knowing the bastard, he’d sneak up behind Lazlo and scare the piss out of him just to show that he could. The guy was psycho.
The commuter flight from New York pulled into the gate, and in spite of himself, Lazlo’s pulse leaped. He hadn’t seen his family in more than two years. Although he’d lived away from them for the past decade, he still missed them fiercely.
Thankfully, seeing their son skate in the Olympics had been sufficient reason for the Chechnyan government to issue visas for this trip. Because of the incriminating knowledge his parents possessed about certain now-legitimate members of the Chechnyan regime, they’d never been granted exit visas before. Of course, these visas also came with three minders—Ilya Gorabchek and two of his associates.
Somehow, some way, Lazlo would figure out a way to get his parents and two sisters away from the Chechnyan thugs. For good.
Harlan Holt cowered behind the steering wheel as a man slipped into the car beside him. One of the guys from his bedroom!
“Drive.”
“Where to?” He took his foot off the brake.
“Around.”
He pulled into traffic. “You said you’d bring me proof that she’s alive.”
The man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a sloppily folded piece of paper. Harlan snatched it, unfolding it and squinting down at the writing. He glanced up and jerked the car back into his own lane. His heart pounded as the passenger snarled something about not getting them both killed.
H.—I’m alive and they’re not hurting me. Please do whatever they ask. I love you—E.
That was it? He’d expected more. A description of the living conditions, what she was eating, maybe even a confession of being afraid. Emma might be a scientist, but she was more talkative than evidenced by this terse little note. “What have you done to her?”
“We have done nothing to your wife.” The guy added menacingly, “So far.”
If it wasn’t his beloved Emma they were talking about, Harlan would curl his lip at the guy’s melodrama. But, Sweet God in Heaven, they had his wife, and he could only imagine the horrors they were inflicting upon her. Sudden certainty overcame him. “You dictated this note to her, didn’t you?”
The man shrugged. “This is not intended to be a communication. It is merely proof that she still lives.”
“I want to talk to her. Now.”
“No.”
Hysteria rose in his chest. Wild thoughts spun in his head about driving off a mountainside and turning this monster into a bloody pulp. Except then there’d be no one left to save Emma. It was a struggle, but he squashed his violent impulses.
“Did you do as we instructed?”
“Yes,” Harlan said through gritted teeth. “The chemical you gave me was mixed into the ice.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, all of it. And I had to mess around with the polymers to get it to freeze with that stuff in the mix. What is it, anyway?” The big bags of white powder he’d been given weren’t labeled. The substance hadn’t given off any distinctive odor or shown any unique qualities that would identify it. It hadn’t bothered his skin when he’d touched it, and a tiny taste of it on his tongue hadn’t produced any numbing or painful effects. And there’d been a lot of it, several hundred pounds. Thankfully, it had been a fine, talcumlike powder that didn’t add any appreciable grit to his glass-smooth ice.
“I will ask the questions. You do as you’re told. Turn right here.”
He followed the guy’s directions for the next several minutes.
“I did what you wanted and put that stuff in the ice. Now give me back my wife.”
“All in good time, Doctor.”
“When?” A note of hysteria crept back into his voice. “You said you’d set her free when I’d gotten the ice relaid with your chemical in it.”
“Until we are finished with our work we also need you to be silent. When we are done, you may have your wife.”
“Alive and well,” Harlan added forcefully.
“Yes, yes. Alive and well. Stop the car.”
Harlan stepped on the brakes so hard the tires squealed, and both men were flung against their seat belts. His passenger swore in some foreign language.
The guy threw open the door and paused long enough to say, “Keep your cell phone on. We’ll contact you that way. In the meantime, disappear.”
He stared. “Excuse me?”
“Disappear. Don’t talk to or be seen by anyone. We’ll know if you contact the authorities. If you do, your precious Emma is history.”
Holt stared in dismay at the man’s retreating back. The Lake Placid bus station was crowded with tourists heading out for an evening of fun. A small town, Lake Placid’s streets couldn’t handle thousands of additional vehicles. So, during the Games, spectators were forced to park outside the city limits and use the many white Olympic buses with their stylized, multicolored, five-ring motifs. Only residents and Olympic officials got cars.
The man disappeared into the crowd, just another tourist among the thousands. Except that tourist was up to something terrible. Something he was willing to kill an innocent woman to protect. Harlan fingered the baggie of powder in his pocket. He pulled away from the curb and pointed his car southwest. Toward Syracuse. Or more precisely, toward his lab.
Isabella crouched in a frozen rhododendron bush, last year’s leaves pitiful protection against the abundant light. With all the glaringly white snow cover here in Syracuse, it didn’t take a lot of moonlight to turn the Holt’s backyard into a brightly lit expanse. God, it felt good to wear all her usual gear. Her Glock pistol felt solid against her hip. Who’d have ever guessed she’d grow up to miss having a gun strapped to her side? Not bad for a girl who was supposed to stop her education after high school, find a nice boy, marry into a big family, and be an obedient, silent daughter, wife and mother.
“No movement back here,” she whispered into her throat microphone.
“None here,” Vanessa reported from the front of the house.
“None over here.” Kat’s hiding spot was over by the detached garage. “One car inside the garage. Engine block’s cold.”
Isabella blinked. Kat had gone inside? She hadn’t heard sounds of entry or movement, and the wall of the garage was right at her back. But then, as a sniper, getting into and out of places quietly was part of Kat’s job.
“Let’s converge on the house,” Vanessa murmured.
Isabella took one last look around. Given the blue glow emanating from a back window of the bungalow next door, the neighbor, Mrs. Tannager, was watching television. No other neighbors appeared to be awake. Wincing as her feet crunched in the snow, Isabella sprinted across the yard and crouched under the master bedroom window. She glanced down. Stared. And looked again. Pointed a narrow flashlight beam at the ground.
“I’ve got something,” she murmured. “Back bedroom. Come have a look.”
Frozen into the mud at her feet were a jumbled set of footprints. Why would those be here in the back of a dormant flower bed in the dead of winter? She squatted down. At least three men had been here. And—holy cow! A barefoot print. It was February in upstate New York! Nobody in their right mind came out here at this time of year barefoot. She looked closer. Narrow foot, about the same length as hers.
Two shadows materialized beside her.
“What do you make of these prints? Check out that bare print. It’s female.”
While her teammates examined the tangle of prints, Isabella shined her flashlight at the side of the house. “Forced entry marks.” The paint around the sill was chipped, and the wood hadn’t had time to age.
“This bare print’s pointed away from the window,” Ka
t breathed. “Whoever made it was headed out the window, not in.”
“Emma Holt ran away from home?” Vanessa asked.
“After she broke into her own bedroom through the window?” Isabelle added.
The three women squatted, taking a hard look at the footprints. Carefully, they used their hands to dust away snow that obscured the trail as it led away from the house. Vanessa pulled out a camera and took pictures with low light film. They found two more partial bare prints frozen into ice beneath the fresh snowfall from last night.
“She stepped here and the heat of her bare skin melted the snow enough to make these frozen prints.” Isabella said. “Why did she leave her house barefoot?”
Kat added, “We could tell more if we got inside and had a look around.”
The Medusas were trained in rudimentary crime scene analysis. The other side of that forced window might indeed yield some interesting information. Isabella whispered, “We have no authorization to break in.”
Vanessa’s grin flashed. “Then I guess we’d better not get caught.”
Isabella grinned back. The Medusas never had been very good at playing by the rules. Quickly, she assumed a wide-legged stance under the window. Kat stepped onto her thigh and quickly jimmied the simple window lock—and undoubtedly didn’t leave scratch marks behind like the last intruder. In a matter of seconds, the sash slid up quietly. A quick push against Isabella’s leg and Kat disappeared inside. Vanessa climbed up next, and then it was Isabelle’s turn to reach up and grab her comrades’ hands. They lifted her over the sill until she could lay across it and ease herself inside.
The room was a shambles. Bed sheets and pillows were strewn over the floor.
Kat knelt by an askew area rug. “The way it’s laying, I’d say someone was dragged across it from the bed toward the window.”
“Could Harlan have fought with his wife, maybe knocked her out, and then dragged her out of here?” Vanessa asked.
Isabella shook her head in the negative. “Emma put her weight down on those footprints. She was conscious when she made them.” She knelt down to examine the bedspread where it lay on the floor. And frowned. “Why hasn’t Holt cleaned up this room? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks like a layer of dust.”
