Winter's Mourn

by Mary Stone

“I can’t,” Aiden muttered tersely. “The drive’s too narrow. Hang on.”

  He reversed quickly, the engine whining. Winter turned around as well, straining to look out the back window. The driveway was dark, the trees on either side crowding out the moonlight. As soon as they broke out of the trees, though, she could see the house, backlit with an orange glow.

  24

  In a strange parody of the first time they’d pulled up, the butler again pulled the front door open as if he were waiting for them. This time, however, the man was distraught, cradling his right hand. He wore an expression of someone dangerously close to shock.

  He ran unsteadily down the steps, his hair mussed, and glasses crooked. “Thank God you’re still here. I don’t know what happened. Something exploded.”

  “Kennedy,” Aiden demanded. “Is he still in the house?”

  The butler let out a half-gasp, half-sob, sagging a little. If Noah hadn’t stepped forward to brace him, he would have collapsed.

  The old man’s eyes filled with tears. “I tried to get into his office.” He held out his hand. The skin on his palm was already badly blistered. “The door was locked. Only Mr. Kennedy has the key. Please, please help him.”

  Winter was through the front door before Noah or Aiden could stop her.

  Dimly, in the back of her mind, she wondered what kind of explosion could cause such a quick, intense heat. The butler shouldn’t have been able to burn himself on the doorknob so quickly. Even if someone launched an incendiary device through the office window, causing a violent explosion, it should take time to build up enough heat for the metal doorknob to get hot enough to burn.

  Already, the house was hazed with a thick layer of black smoke. She pulled her shirt up over her nose, knowing it was a futile gesture, and tried not to breathe.

  She went straight to Kennedy’s office. Smoke leaked out from beneath the heavy, solid wood door. She’d be dealing with a backdraft situation if she tried to kick it in. The sudden inrush of oxygen would feed the fire, and she’d be lucky to survive the flames that would burst from the room.

  If Kennedy was still in there, there wasn’t anything she could do for him from this side of the door.

  She went to the next room instead.

  It looked like a large parlor, with furniture arranged in conversational groupings. The smoke was lighter, and she had no problem locating a reddish-orange glow on the left-hand side of the room. There was no vent, as there had been in the other room, but a square of color showed up against the flat paneled wall anyway.

  Whatever was hidden in there, she wanted it.

  Already feeling the tightness in her chest from the smoke, she looked around the room for something she could use to make a hole in the wall. There was a fireplace on the other side of the parlor, and she grabbed a heavy black poker from the tool stand beside it.

  Holding it in both hands, she swung at the wall. Again and again, until she’d made a small hole in the plaster and paneling. The smoke in the room was getting thicker, and she kicked at the hole to widen it. More red light spilled out. Some from the firelight shining through on the other side and some from the object hidden within the cubby.

  Finally, when she cleared an area about the size of a shoebox, she reached in.

  Winter hissed out a breath as her questing fingers touched hot metal. She pulled her sleeve down over her hand, using it to protect her palm from the worst of the heat. Thick, dark smoke poured through the opening she’d made, and she felt dizzy with the effort it took to hold her breath.

  Wrenching against the object, ignoring the pain that blossomed in the palm of her hand, she maneuvered a small lockbox until a corner of it stuck out of the ruined paneling. She yanked on it in frustration. Her throat ached with the effort of not taking a deep breath, and she caught her breath on a choking cough.

  Picking up the poker again, she went back to work widening the opening in the wall.

  “I’ll get her,” Noah barked.

  “No, you stay out here with him.” Aiden nodded at the man Noah had helped to the ground. “Call 911.” When Noah opened his mouth to argue, he cut him off with a hard look. “I’m pulling rank, Dalton. Do as I say.”

  He took the front stairs two at a time. The foyer was dark, and the smoke was rank, heavy with a chemical odor he couldn’t immediately identify. He didn’t know what it was, but he didn’t want to breathe any more of it than was necessary. The office was to the left, but before he could head that way, he caught a flicker of movement at the top of the stairs.

  Cursing silently at Winter for being so headstrong, he hesitated a moment but headed up one side of the curving staircase at a run. He had his doubts that this explosion was an accident, so conveniently timed with their departure. Kennedy was deep in whatever this situation was.

  The hallway at the top of the stairs led off in two directions. He turned toward the right, where he’d spotted the movement.

  The hall was lined with doors on both sides, all closed. He pushed them open as he went, scanning rooms. Sumptuous guest bedrooms alternated with luxurious bathrooms, all vacant. Urgency ate at him. Winter was in the house somewhere, doing who the hell knew what, and he was chasing shadows.

  The last door on the left opened on a huge master bedroom. There was a fireplace on one wall big enough to park a small car in. Like the office downstairs, the room was lined with bookshelves, a sleek flat-screen mounted on one wall. There were two doors. Weapon drawn, he pulled one open.

  Aside from a walk-in closet the size of most people’s living rooms and racks full of clothes, there was nothing else in the room. The other door led to a bathroom. Wherever the shadow had gone, it wasn’t in there.

  He headed out of the bedroom, frustrated.

  The smoke was already thicker on the lower floor, and he headed for the office. Movement caught his eye in the room before it. He swung around in time to see Winter pull something free, low on the wall. She fell back to the floor when it came loose and went into a spasm of coughing.

  Narrowing his eyes, he swept into the room. She squinted up at him, the whites of her eyes already bloodshot. Not bothering to speak—she’d hear about this later—he tucked his gun back in its holster and scooped her up.

  “The case,” she rasped, struggling in his grip. “Be careful.”

  Shifting Winter’s weight in his arms, he grabbed a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his coat. He wadded it up to protect his hand and grabbed the box by the handle. Even through the crumpled linen barrier, the heat radiating from the box was intense.

  The crackle of fire eating at the other side of the wall beside them was audible. He shifted her again, ignoring her protests, and headed out of the room. By the time they got to the front door, he could hear sirens approaching.

  Noah had moved the butler farther away from the house. He was crouched over the man on the ground, the First-Aid kit from the storage area of Aiden’s Acura open on the ground beside him. When they came through the door, he looked up at them swiftly. Aiden could read the hot fury in his face, even from the distance.

  Aiden didn’t care. Making friends on the job wasn’t his priority and never had been.

  He deposited Winter on the ground next to the injured man and moved his SUV as the first firetruck roared up the drive. Paramedics followed shortly as the evening was broken by the sound of diesel engines, the blast of air brakes, and the shriek of sirens.

  As soon as Winter had been handed over to the paramedics, who quickly snapped an oxygen mask over her face and started treatment for the mild burn on her palm, he jerked his head to Noah, silently telling him to join him.

  The bigger man followed Aiden a short distance away, resentment clear in every step he took. “Look,” Aiden snapped out, as soon as they were out of Winter’s earshot. “We don’t have time for your wounded ego. I saw Kennedy in the house.”

  “Why didn’t you go after him?”

  Aiden shook his head in disgust. “I did. He was upstairs. Dis
appeared into the master bedroom.” He turned his back on Noah and headed for the back of the house. “I searched it, but he was gone.”

  Noah followed, his footsteps surprisingly soundless for a guy his size. “You think he staged that little fire to make it look like he was a target.”

  “Maybe briefly. More of a distraction and a way to get rid of whatever was in his desk.”

  “How do you know he had anything in his desk?” Noah stopped beside Aiden and looked up at the back of the house, at the window Aiden was studying. To their right, firefighters had already beaten back most of the blaze in the office. The brick was blackened outside, but aside from smoke damage, the house would survive to last another hundred years or more.

  “You saw the way Winter was looking at Kennedy’s desk. Like she could see straight through the wood to whatever he was hiding in there.”

  Noah shot him a sharp glance, and Aiden curled his lips into a smug grin. “You think you’re the only one who knows what Winter can do?”

  Noah scowled and took a step toward him. “I think Winter thinks I’m the only one who knows what she can do. How the fuck do you think you know anything about her? Her now, and not the scared kid she used to be?”

  Aiden looked steadily back at him, almost pitying Noah. It was obvious the big guy had a thing for Winter. He didn’t begrudge the guy his protective attitude. He was here for the same reason. And, like Dalton, he didn’t trust anyone else to watch her back.

  “I’ve known her a lot longer than you have,” he finally said. The terse words were an understatement.

  He’d watched Winter go from a skinny girl barely in her teens, struggling to find a reason to keep going after waking up from a coma to find her family gone. She’d struggled so hard to live, to thrive, after the attack. And he, the FBI agent she blatantly hero-worshipped? He hadn’t managed to catch her family’s killer. He’d never even come close, and it was a source of constant fury. But the child’s adoration had never slipped.

  Then, in a little over a decade, Winter had transformed herself from a young and grieving girl to a hardened and purposeful woman, but he could still sense her vulnerability. It still simmered just beneath the surface. It lurked in the intense blue of her eyes. Beneath the stubborn set of her jaw.

  He also knew that she’d come out of the coma different than the way she’d gone in. That it was virtually impossible to be a normal kid, make it to a normal adulthood, after going through a childhood trauma like she had.

  She’d come close. He’d kept tabs on her through the years. It had been rocky at the beginning, but once her grandparents moved her to Raleigh, things got better. Since her college days, though, Aiden had seen something different in Winter.

  She had almost an eidetic memory. She could leap to conclusions that were impossible for most. She could see things no one else could, and he realized that sight went beyond the physical. She knew things she shouldn’t. And he’d seen firsthand the toll that ability took from her when she’d passed out in front of him, blood streaming out of her nose.

  He’d also seen something else she hadn’t wanted him to see. Something he’d tried not to acknowledge in himself. Winter wasn’t a child anymore. She was a strong, mysterious, intelligent woman. The years that had once distanced them seemed to have shrunk. The balance between them, mentor to student, had shifted into something new. She fascinated him, almost to the point of obsession.

  Mentally, he shook himself. Dalton was still watching him with a mixture of dislike and suspicion.

  “Kennedy got out of that room somehow,” he said, nodding up at the windows of the corner bedroom. “When those guys are done, we’ll see if there’s anything left in his office, but whatever’s in there won’t include his body.”

  They went back to Winter, who was impatiently trying to get a heavyset woman in a blue uniform to let her up from the cot she’d been assigned to in the back of the ambulance.

  “I’m fine,” she appealed to Aiden. She was a little pale, still, and a bandage was wrapped around her hand, but her blue eyes snapped with annoyance. “Will you please get her to let me up? We need to get a look in that box.” Her voice was muffled, but he could still hear the smoke-roughened rasp of it through the plastic oxygen cup over her mouth.

  Aiden met the eyes of the paramedic over Winter’s head. She rolled her own at the stubbornness of her patient but nodded reluctantly.

  “The box is taken care of for now,” he told Winter as she dropped lightly down from the back of the ambulance. “I locked it in the back of the car. Right now, we’ve got a different focus. I saw Kennedy in that house before I found you. As soon as we’re cleared by the fire department, we’re going in to look around.”

  Noah spoke with the Bethesda police officers that had arrived while Aiden called Max Osbourn to update him on the situation. It wasn’t discussed, but as the ranking agent, Aiden had stepped into the de facto position of lead on the investigation. Technically, Winter remained AIC, and Osbourn was still officially overseeing, but they all knew what the real deal was.

  Winter talked to the fire chief on scene, and after another few minutes, they were allowed to go in and conduct their search. The four Bethesda officers took the main floor, and Aiden led the way upstairs. They went over each room on both sides of the staircase and found nothing. When they entered the master suite on the second floor, Aiden went to the wall beside the fireplace. Looking up through the window outside, he’d been able to see that the north wall of the bedroom ended about five feet before the actual corner of the upper floor.

  Knocking on the wall, he heard an echo instead of the solid thunk of plaster on brick. Noah joined him. “Secret passageway?” the younger agent said. “Kennedy is rapidly turning into a Scooby Doo villain.” He tugged on a wall sconce, but it didn’t budge.

  Winter stood behind them without speaking for a moment, studying the brick. She reached out and ran the fingers of her uninjured hand under the mantlepiece. A section of the wall, formerly seamless, unlatched with a click. Aiden wedged his fingers into the crack that had formed and pulled it open. Instead of a dark, musty stairwell, there was a drywalled landing with a covered light fixture overhead.

  Aiden flipped the switch to illuminate the staircase. A flight of narrow stairs went up to the attic, and the other descended to the main floor.

  “It’s not a secret passageway. At least it wasn’t originally. This was retrofitted from the servant’s stair that was originally built in the house.”

  “So it probably leads down to the main floor and maybe farther down into the basement.”

  Aiden nodded, starting down. “From the cool air coming up, I think it does. And there’s likely another exit down there.”

  They bypassed the main floor and continued down. Winter took the lead at the basement level. Despite the beauty of the rest of the house, Kennedy’s basement was a cold, cavernous space that ran the length of the home. She led them unerringly through the darkness, lit only by a penlight on Noah’s keychain, her steps quick and sure.

  At the other end of the basement was a short flight of steps that led up to the door. She pushed it open, and they found themselves a few feet from the garage. Woods—real ones, not like the manicured tree garden at the front of the property—stretched off into the darkness twenty feet away.

  “We can have the Bethesda guys call in a canine unit,” Aiden said, his face a blank mask of fury. “But Kennedy is likely long gone.”

  25

  It was nearly midnight by the time they left the Kennedy house. The inside of Parrish’s SUV stank like smoke, and Noah was just petty enough to hope that the fancy leather upholstery never lost the odor.

  He glanced up at Winter, slumped in the passenger seat, her head against the window. She was out cold, her breathing steady and deep. Her black hair had come loose from its neat twist hours ago and hung down in a dark curtain, shielding her soot-stained face.

  He’d hated Parrish for making him stay behind while she ran
into danger.

  Aiden met his eyes in the rearview, just for a moment with a cool, assessing glance, and then he looked back at the road. They’d come to an understanding. Not verbally. Noah didn’t want to converse with the uptight prick any more than necessary. But they each understood their priorities, positions firmly established.

  Winter would come first.

  The fire investigator had determined the origin and cause of the fire. Books and papers—presumably the incriminating contents of Kennedy’s desk—had been piled up just on the other side of the office door. The whole mess had been doused with a mixture of gasoline and styrene, made up ahead of time. He’d been prepared for their arrival.

  Winter was lucky to have not taken in any more smoke than she did. He had a very sudden and unprofessional urge to kill the man, just for that.

  Kennedy had literally made homemade napalm by dissolving a Styrofoam plate in gasoline. It thickened the mixture, making it burn hotter and longer. He obviously didn’t want any material left intact that could be read by anyone after the fire.

  His tactic had worked. The gasoline he’d splashed around the room, coupled with the mixture on the papers, had created an initial explosion that settled into a nice, long-burning, hard to extinguish blaze. It had continued to eat at the floorboards of the office and nearly collapsed the floor beneath before it could be put out.

  Kennedy himself had escaped through the clever staircase to the basement, and from there, who the hell knew. The canines hadn’t been able to track him.

  Winter shuddered awake as they pulled into the lot at Holiday Inn Express just outside of D.C., her eyes wide and dark. Noah had booked them three rooms earlier in the evening, figuring they’d have things to follow up on the next day. She glanced around quickly and seemed to relax once she oriented herself.

  “Time to open the box,” she said, wincing a little at what must’ve been a sore throat.

  The Holiday Inn was a step-up from their little hotel in Harrisonburg. They trooped into the lobby and picked up their room keys at the front desk.