HARD FAL

by CJ Lyons

  “So they never found him to question him?”

  “Oh they found him. Three months later his decomposed body was discovered at Black Moshanon State Park. He’d been shot.”

  “See. Your guy, this Daddy character, was tying up loose ends. Compulsive and obsessive—on an emotional level. Control, that’s what he wants. Absolute control.”

  “Maybe why his tastes skew so young. But then why let June out of his control at all? Why not kill her outright? Solves all his problems.”

  “I’ll bet she was his first. But not his last. And he’s been tracking her all this time.”

  “But now she finally poses a threat to him, so he’s going on the offensive?” That didn’t feel quite right.

  “No. I think now she finally has something he wants. Her child.”

  Lucy leaned back in her chair, the mid-day sun warming her face. “Sometimes I worry about how easy it is for us to think like these sick, twisted creeps.”

  Nick’s sigh resonated through the phone. “So do I. Another thing to keep in mind when you make your decision.” A chime sounded—his next patient arriving. “Gotta go. Love you.”

  Her decision. Letting her know he’d support her, whatever she decided. But also a warning that he and Megan would be the ones who had to live with her choice.

  Shit. How screwed up was she that she’d rather focus on worming her way into the mind of an obsessive child predator than deal with her own future?

  Chapter 8

  SPECIAL AGENT ISAAC WALDEN swiveled his chair so that he could look past June and the others to keep an eye on Lucy. So typical, the stubborn way she limped around her office, checking her plants before finally allowing herself the comfort of sitting down. Lucy never took the easy way out, whether it was standing up for a victim, chasing a target, or acknowledging that her body needed more time to heal.

  In so many of their cases, time was the enemy. And Lucy refused to surrender.

  Should he tell her that time was also running out for Seth? No. Not his secret to share.

  He glanced at the former prosecutor. Close examination revealed the ravages of the fight he was losing. Thinning hair; sagging, sallow skin; an unhealthy yellow-green pallor. According to the doctors, Seth should have been dead and buried weeks ago, but the man was as stubborn as Lucy, refusing to slow down until he was certain that June and her unborn child were provided for. Family first, that was what was keeping Seth alive.

  A sigh rippled through him as he watched Seth sooth June’s hair, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder. She covered his hand with her own, an unconscious gesture of intimacy that reminded Walden of his own wife. Five years this Thanksgiving he’d lost her, but not a day went by that he didn’t feel her presence with him. Her voice chiding or coaxing him on dark days when all he wanted was to stay in bed; the glint of her smile in every pretty girl he passed; the ghost of her warm touch when he returned home at the end of the day as if his apartment wasn’t cold and empty.

  “We need a money trail,” Walden mused. June and Seth glanced over at him, Taylor’s rapid-fire typing didn’t falter. The kid was annoying that way, able to multi-task and handle several lines of thought simultaneously.

  “Good thought,” Taylor said. “I already applied for a warrant for the ad—even on Backlist, ads have to be paid for. Funny that. The guy could have posted on a dozen DarkNet forums anonymously and for free. If all he wanted was to stake a claim, declare his intentions to his fellow pedophiles, why go public?”

  “He wanted our attention,” Seth said.

  “He wanted your attention,” Walden corrected. “You’ve been chasing this Daddy creep for years. Maybe you’re getting close?”

  Seth shook his head mournfully. “Not that I know of. But we did submit filings for a new batch of civil suits right before June went in for that ultrasound. Maybe he’s connected to one of those cases?”

  “You’re suing men who have already been convicted of possessing the Baby Girl images, so I doubt it. The investigators would have already combed through their lives.”

  “Maybe he’s worried one of those men could lead us back to him?” June asked. “Maybe that’s your money trail? Who they bought the images from.”

  Walden beamed at her. She’d come so very far from the girl he’d met four years ago. That girl would have never spoken up when surrounded by three men. She would have sat quietly, waiting for their instructions.

  “Good thought,” he said, although he was certain the original investigations covered it. Although they didn’t have his secret weapon: Taylor and his team of cybersleuths. “Seth, can you forward me the criminal case numbers? We’ll start combing through the evidence, see if anything was missed.”

  “That’s going to take time.”

  “My guys are pretty fast,” Taylor said. Not boasting, simply stating a fact. “And now that I have the hospital database hack, they can eliminate potential subjects who don’t have the skill set necessary.”

  “Wait, you already figured out how he broke into the hospital records?” Seth asked.

  Taylor leaned back, finally giving his keyboard a rest. “Well, yeah. You said time was of the essence.”

  “Kid, you’re a genius,” Walden proclaimed. From the maze of cubicles, the other cybertechs laughed, several launching Nerf bullets and arrows at Taylor who ducked and grinned. “How about I treat you to lunch?”

  Seth frowned at that, glancing at Oshiro who was working the phone at the desk opposite. The US Marshal radiated the same intense energy as Lucy, not sitting as he spoke, instead doing a two-step shuffle, pacing the narrow space behind the desk chair.

  “You didn’t tell anyone you were leaving DC.” Walden understood why Seth was so over-protective of June, but with Oshiro on the job, she was in good hands. “No one knows you’re here.”

  “I know. But—”

  June’s stomach growled, interrupting whatever worry Seth was about to voice. They all glanced at her, Walden chuckling and Seth with an indulgent grin.

  “Guess the kid’s made her position clear,” Walden said.

  Oshiro hung up and turned to them. “I’ve set up a bunch of dummy purchases in the DC area in case anyone’s following your credit cards and booked you into a vacant grad student apartment here. Last place anyone would look for a pregnant woman and a former US Attorney.”

  “How’d you find a vacant student apartment in the middle of the semester?” Taylor asked.

  “Didn’t. Called a friend’s kid and offered him a free week in a four star hotel with all the room service and pay-for-view he could want. He’s dropping off his keys in an hour—said to excuse the mess and you might want to wash the sheets.”

  Walden stood, clapping his hands together. “Lunch. I’m treating. Hofbräuhaus.” Maybe this detail wouldn’t be as difficult as he’d thought. Between Oshiro handling protection and Taylor’s geeks tracking their subject, he and Lucy might have little to do except file the paperwork.

  If this was going to be the last SAFE case, not a bad way to go. Especially after they nailed Daddy once and for all.

  Chapter 9

  BY THE TIME Walden knocked on her door to tell Lucy that they were headed over to the Hofbräuhaus, she was engrossed in her second reading of the Baby Girl case files. The first time through she’d been looking at the big picture of the events leading up to where they were today.

  Now she was combing for clues. If they could identify and locate the man known as Daddy, they could end this.

  “Did you realize he didn’t actually put the Baby Girl images up for sale until after the incident at the mall?” she asked as she rubbed her eyes. She should use reading glasses for working at the computer but hated the way they pinched her nose.

  “Yes. I figured he thought it was less risky that way, disseminating them after she’s gone.”

  “I’m not sure. Seems to me, if he was ready to auction her off, he could have gotten more money for her by putting those up first.” She frowned. Fe
lt like she was close to understanding something important about how Daddy’s mind worked.

  “But he made a ton of money from the images—why bother selling her at all? Why not just destroy the evidence?”

  Lucy rolled her shoulders. “He’s been so careful, covering his tracks all these years. Selling June and releasing her images might be the only two mistakes he’s made.”

  “Not much to go on—at least not for the past decade we’ve been hunting him.”

  “Are you really going to take a job with the Bank squad?”

  Her abrupt change of topic didn’t faze him—Walden was not easily fazed, period. “I think I’m due for a little peace and quiet. Something in short supply around here.”

  He was talking about what happened two months ago. She sighed. Couldn’t everyone move on past that so things could get back to normal?

  Except she had no clue what normal meant any longer. Just that it was going to be damned hard to return to anything remotely resembling it without Walden there acting as her counterweight.

  “Are you coming to lunch?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” she said, barely glancing up from the computer monitor.

  “Sure?” He turned the affirmation into a question.

  Lucy jerked her head up. “I can manage driving myself a few blocks. I just want to finish catching up.” She hadn’t been involved first hand, didn’t have the intimate knowledge of the case that Walden, Oshiro, and Seth Bernhart had. Plus, she could sense there were patterns here, swirling just beneath the surface of all the random facts.

  He met her gaze and nodded slowly. “Have a care, Lucy. This case will swallow you whole.”

  “Then why’d you bring it to me?” Especially now, she didn’t add.

  “Seemed a no-brainer when Seth called me yesterday. Right place, right time, right investigator.” Lucy wondered if he meant himself or her. Didn’t matter, she was in it now and wasn’t about to be a liability, even if she was on modified duty.

  She waved him away. “Order the Jagerschnitzel for me. I’ll be there in twenty.”

  “You better. I’m not going to let good food get cold and go to waste.”

  He left and she turned back to the case files. They had Walden’s investigative magic all over them.

  It wasn’t often that they were able to identify a victim of child porn, not with images found randomly on computers all over the world and dating back a decade. Hell, they hadn’t even realized the collection was a collection of the same girl’s images, not until Walden pieced it all together.

  She imagined Walden, hunched over a computer in a dark room, spending his days and nights, hundreds of man-hours, examining frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel, the worst kind of horrific images. Four years ago when he worked the Baby Girl case, he’d just lost his wife. He should have been lost in mourning—Lord knew, she would have been if she lost Nick.

  Instead he’d poured his heart and soul and grief into saving one little girl.

  New technology had helped to locate computers with the Baby Girl images but it had been a quirk of nature that had led Walden—and later, Seth Bernhart, the AUSA in charge of prosecuting the subjects who’d possessed the images—to June.

  A birthmark. Not very large, just big enough and distinct enough to show up with image enhancement. They’d known the images were all taken in the same location but they hadn’t been able to prove they were all of the same girl—not as if they were time-stamped and not every subject had possessed the entire collection, so they found them randomly and out of order—until Walden followed the birthmark as it slowly grew with her.

  Walden used the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s database, thinking best case scenario he’d find a missing person’s report or worst case a Jane Doe autopsy report. Instead he discovered a Jane Doe found report. From almost a decade before.

  And then, with the help of Children and Youth, he and Bernhart had tracked June. Too late to save her but in time to help them maybe save others with Bernhart’s legal strategy.

  When Lucy looked up, it was almost two o’clock—forty minutes since the others left for lunch. She grabbed her cane and bag and left her office, hoping Walden had ordered for her.

  She was surprised to see Taylor still there, hunched over his keyboard, his face scrunched in concentration, resembling a toddler putting together a puzzle for the first time. As she watched, two of the High Tech Crimes guys were crouched low, trying to sneak up behind him, Nerf submachine guns at the ready.

  Taylor’s fingers barely broke their rhythm as he pulled a lever beside his computer, unleashing a catapult filled with Ping-Pong balls at one would-be assassin and, using the reflection in the computer monitor to aim, shot the other one with his pink pistol, firing over his shoulder.

  “Awg…” Both techs moaned in fake dying agony as they writhed on the floor.

  Then Taylor caught sight of Lucy. She was smiling but he spun in his chair, suddenly serious. Not because of her, she realized. Because of the damn cane.

  “Clean that up,” he ordered the techs. “Someone could slip and fall.”

  They scrambled to clear a path for Lucy, mumbling, “Sorry, boss.” She wasn’t sure if the words were for her or Taylor.

  She crossed to his workstation without incident. “Thought you went to lunch with everyone else.”

  “No.” His gaze slid back to his monitor with its lines of code. “This medical records hack…it’s…poetic.”

  “Right.” She knew better than to question his sense of cyber-esthetics, or to interrupt him when he was in the middle of analyzing code. “Want me to bring you back something?”

  “Walden’s got my order. I think I’m close to isolating his signature—”

  Lucy left him to his cyberprowling and took the elevator down to the garage. She hated elevators so it was almost as much punishment as the stairs but she was already exhausted and hungry and needed to conserve her energy. She was ready for another of the anti-inflammatory pills the doctors had prescribed—ibuprofen on steroids, he’d described it—but they ripped her stomach apart so she could only take them with food.

  Her foot and ankle—hell the whole damn leg, not to mention her back spasming from holding her body so stiffly—throbbed with the force of a sledgehammer. She opened the door of her Subaru Forrester and carefully shifted her weight onto the driver’s seat. Before her injury she never would have imagined how complicated the mechanics of getting into and out of a vehicle could be. After she’d come home from the rehab hospital, she’d tried riding in Nick’s Explorer but it was too high to climb, forcing her to always put weight on her injured foot.

  She’d needed a new car anyway, thought she’d just get another Impreza like her old one. She’d loved that car, the way it could out-accelerate just about anything on the road, especially around the twisty switchback mountain roads. But it was too low-slung. So she’d sacrificed both her five-speed manual transmission and her sports car for the SUV. She had to admit she did like riding up higher and she’d been able to adjust the seat and steering wheel so that it was as close to comfortable as any vehicle could get with her foot howling with each pothole, sharp turn, or sudden stop.

  Thankfully the Hofbräuhaus was a straight shot down Carson from the Federal Building. And no potholes.

  She pulled alongside the Cheesecake Factory, hoping to find a parking space. The Hofbräuhaus was directly in front of her. Beside it was the terraced amphitheater where summer concerts were held. The concrete steps that served as seating also led down the steep hill to the Heritage Trail that ran alongside the river and the boat landing. On either side of the steps were zigzagged handicapped accessible ramps and there were large concrete planters with small trees and shrubs scattered throughout the plaza.

  No joy with parking, she’d have to circle around the block or hit the garage on Carson. As she pulled up to the stop sign on Water Street and signaled her turn, a group of people emerged from the Hofbräuhaus across the stre
et. June and the others.

  Seth had his arm around June’s waist but he was in earnest conversation with Oshiro. June tilted her head up, her gaze searching the clear blue sky, hair ruffling with the March wind. There was supposed to be a storm front moving in later today but right now the sun was shining. June broke away from the men, her fingers trailing down Seth’s arm, squeezing his hand before wandering off to perch against a nearby planter. The way she closed her eyes and stretched her body, basking, it was as if she hadn’t seen sunlight in ages.

  Seth and Oshiro continued their conversation, bodies angled toward each other, shoulders and heads hunched like football players huddled together on fourth and long. Walden spotted Lucy and sprinted across the street, coming around to her driver’s side window. In his hand was a plastic bag, hopefully brimming with food for her and Taylor.

  She rolled down her window. It was breezy, in the fifties—not bad for a Pittsburgh March. Walden leaned in. “Knew you wouldn’t make it. Don’t worry, I have you covered.” He raised the bag, releasing the enticing aroma of Jagerschnitzel into the Forrester.

  “Thanks. I lost track of—” Motion from the group across the street caught her attention. No. Not the men standing at the curb waiting for Walden to return with the car. Rather a motorcyclist speeding down Water Street. The street was clear of traffic, yet he swerved directly at Seth and Oshiro. “What the—”

  Before she could finish her thought the motorcyclist raised a hand and aimed a gun at Oshiro and Seth Bernhart.

  Chapter 10

  WALDEN DROPPED THE food and sprinted across the street as Lucy shouted a warning to Seth. Oshiro spotted the weapon and spun to push Seth down. The gun went off.

  The motorcycle jumped the curb, ramming Oshiro, the largest target, knocking his feet out from under him, and pushing him into Seth as he fell. With both men down, the motorcycle, a large, wide-based Harley, screeched as it changed trajectory. The cyclist wore a visor, darkened to hide his face so it was impossible to get a look at him.