Beauty & the Beast: Vendetta

by Nancy Holder

  Ducking out of the office, she saw the security guard, who was on his phone, and asked him to unlock a bathroom. It was then that she saw the glow of an office window farther down the hall.

  He said, “No need to unlock it, ma’am. These eggheads work around the clock.” He pointed to the end of the hall, past the office light.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  She walked down the hall and stopped at the door of the occupied room. She rapped once, then opened the door.

  An attractive middle-aged woman looked up from a bank of computers similar to Suresh’s. She smiled pleasantly at Tess.

  “Yes?”

  I don’t have jurisdiction, Tess reminded herself, but she flashed her badge anyway. The woman’s lips parted.

  “I’m Captain Vargas, NYPD,” she said. “We’re here investigating a case. May I ask you a few questions…” She looked at the nameplate on the woman’s desk “…Ms. Vanderberg?”

  Startled, Anne Vanderberg lifted her hands off her keyboard and folded them against her chest. “Is it all right with Steven? Steven Lawrence, I mean. He’s our CEO.”

  “This is a matter of urgency,” Tess replied. “Do you know Ravi Suresh?”

  “Yes, of course. We’re on the project.” She blanched. “I have a security clearance. I need to speak to legal before I talk to you.”

  The project.

  “We have a warrant,” Tess said smoothly. “But I just need to know a few basic questions. He’s been gone from work for a few days.”

  “Yes. I figured he was ill. We’ve all been working so hard.” Ms. Vanderberg reached for her phone. “I really should talk to legal first.”

  “So that leaves the rest of you holding the bag,” Tess continued. “Makes for interruptions.”

  “Not really. Ravi’s part was pretty much completed.” She cocked her head. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “You must have strict protocols to safeguard your work—”

  “May I help you?” a voice said from the door. Tess turned. A fifty-something man, quite handsome, stood in the doorway with her old friend the security guard.

  “Steven.” Ms. Vanderberg heaved a sigh of relief. “This is Captain…” She shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m Steven Lawrence,” the man said. “The CEO of Chrysalis.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Tess replied. “We’re investigating a possible homicide that may involve your employee, Ravi Suresh.”

  His brows shot up. “A homicide? The other detective told me this was a suspected suicide.”

  Tess wanted to shoot Goss. Instead she plowed ahead. “Did Ravi Suresh have any enemies at work?”

  “I need to call our attorney,” Lawrence countered. “You understand. It’s not that we have anything to hide. It’s simply that we deal in projects at the highest level of secrecy and we must remain in compliance.”

  She could argue that he had to answer her questions. She could go back into Suresh’s office and wait with Goss for verification of their warrant, or for the tech guys to show, whatever. But she had a feeling that the FBI, Homeland Security, and other government agencies were about to tie up this entire investigation with red tape.

  And she had Suresh’s cell phone.

  She said, “Of course, sir. We understand completely and we’ll do all we can to be of service. This portion of the investigation will be in the hands of Detective Goss. She’s the lead on this case.” She nodded at Anne Vanderberg. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

  When she reached the door, Lawrence moved politely out of the way. As she walked back toward Suresh’s office, the CEO and the security guard followed closely behind. The vibe she got off Lawrence was that while he was concerned about Ravi Suresh, he wasn’t worried about anything else.

  “Still waiting,” Goss told Tess when Tess walked into the office. “I’m sure we’ll have an answer soon.”

  “Right.” Tess masked her own frustration and anger. “I’m going to move on. I’ll catch a cab. Will you call me if you find anything?”

  “Yes. I promise, Captain.” Goss looked from her to Lawrence. “Have you heard back from your attorney yet, Mr. Lawrence?”

  The man shook his head. Tess mouthed Later to Goss.

  * * *

  That used to be me, she thought as she hailed a cab and gave the driver Cat’s address. “By the Book” Vargas. God, I must have been so annoying. She managed a plaintive smile. Still, back in the day, Cat and I had the highest clearance rate in the precinct.

  Before she got in her car, she flashed her badge and went back up to the crime scene. Correction: Cat and Vincent’s apartment. The cell phone felt heavy in her pocket.

  “Anything?” she asked Detective Goss’s partner, the haircut guy.

  He rolled his eyes until the CSU who’d performed the blood test said, “Captain Vargas is Detective Chandler’s best friend.”

  Whatever the detective was going to say next went left unsaid. Instead, he supplied, “We have two assailants. I talked to the ME’s office and the autopsy is going to start on the John Doe in about an hour.”

  An hour. Tess was in agony but she didn’t let it show. This guy was getting things done faster than Goss. Still, she remembered the lightning-fast results she’d become accustomed to when Evan Marks had still been alive. She’d had no idea at the time that he was hunting down the mysterious “human hybrid” whom Cat was protecting—that being Vincent, of course. Nor that Evan had laid down his life to save Vincent and Cat from Muirfield once he had learned the whole story.

  Handing Haircut her card, she said, “I’d be grateful if you would call me personally with any updates.”

  She was making an end run, ignoring procedure and asking him to go outside his chain of command. So much for Goss’s idol worship of her and her adherence to protocol. He nodded and looked at her card as if memorizing her number and put it in his wallet.

  “Sure thing, ma’am,” he said. Then he added kindly, “We’ll find Detective Chandler’s sister.”

  So someone got it. Someone knew it was about more than Ravi Suresh and his “suicide.”

  “You ever want to move precincts, let’s talk,” she said.

  “Name’s Chuck Steinberg.” They shared a look, sizing each other up, and then she was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When Tess pulled to the curb in front of JT’s place, she found a quartet of guys in hoodies loitering around the front door. Was that a flash of metal? As in a gun?

  “Hey,” she said, showing her badge.

  One of them swore and the four scattered. What was that all about?

  She let herself in… and found JT on the other side of the door, baseball bat in one hand, tranq gun in the other. He leaped at her.

  “Hey, whoa,” she said, grabbing the bat and lowering JT’s arm—much more considerately than she would have if her attacker had been one of those guys outside. “Were those dumbos harassing you?”

  “You could say that,” JT replied. “But you’re here now, so it’s time for Tums and Scotch instead of murder and mayhem. Good news, I hope?”

  “Lifted Suresh’s phone.” She grabbed the cell out of her pocket and handed it to him. “Hopefully, a lead.” She pointed to it. “Let’s look at his phone calls. And? This is all off the books. I can’t have our activity detected.” She followed him as he carried the phone over to his Robin-cave, good feelings supplanting her ire at Detective Goss. JT would save this day.

  I stole evidence, she thought. Scratch that. I may have saved a life.

  “Hacking’s what I do best,” he said, sitting at his command center, and she bent over him and kissed the top of his head.

  “That’s debatable,” she replied. Then she sobered. “This has got to break the case.”

  “It’s not a case. It’s Heather,” JT replied, and she kissed the top of his head again and hugged him. He depressed the button on the side of the phone to activate the power. />
  “I didn’t turn the phone on before because I didn’t know if there was any kind of ‘find my phone’ app on it. I didn’t want to lead anybody here.”

  “Well, you know what they say, ‘All roads lead to Rome,’” he replied drily. She didn’t respond, so he tried again. “I’m beginning to think my place is listed as a New York City must-see attraction.” She still didn’t quite get it. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  She hovered over his shoulder while he plugged the phone into one of his electronic devices and brought up a screen. Lines of computer code pixilated into existence.

  “No tracker app,” he reported. “In fact, it’s shielded from detection. Interesting.” He studied the screen for a moment, then typed with his usual rapid-fire staccato style and sat back. “This is serious stuff.” There was a lilt of admiration, even excitement, in his tone.

  Yes it is, so please hurry, Tess thought, but held her peace. Exhaustion washed through her. She was drained, yet mounting anxiety fired off more packets of adrenaline into her system. Her hands trembled and she moved away, pacing, running her fingertips along the ridges beneath her eyebrows to keep a headache at bay.

  I should call Cat to tell her it’s not Heather’s blood, she thought. She’s probably losing her mind. But that was all she had so far. There were no guarantees that Heather was still alive. And if she called Cat right now, nothing would be resolved. It would be scant comfort that the blood on the couch belonged to someone else.

  “I need to hack into the medical examiner’s records, too,” she said, thinking aloud. “Or maybe just go down there, see if I can ID Suresh as the jumper. There’ve got to be selfies of him on that phone.”

  “I don’t think so, Tess,” JT said. “This looks like an ‘all work and no play’ kind of phone. He’s probably got… I’m in. Check it out.” He pointed to his largest desktop display, where a string of ten numerals followed by a string of seemingly random letters began to crawl down the face of the monitor. “Ten numbers probably means phone numbers. And the letters might be encoded last names.”

  “Right.” She nodded, hope a tiny spark flickering in her gray field of fear. “Which you can decode.”

  “Given enough time,” he said under his breath.

  They both knew that time was in short supply. Tess flipped open a laptop that he’d long ago configured for her to use— firewall-protected six ways to Sunday—and she looked up “Ravi Suresh” on Referenda. An article about the annual Chrysalis 5K for ALS research popped up, complete with a photograph of Team Chrysalis. Ravi Suresh was the second from the left in the first row. Steven Lawrence stood beside him and at his feet, a little French bulldog was dressed in a miniature version of their run T-shirt, featuring the Chrysalis logo of a cocoon superimposed over a chambered nautilus. Tess’s gaze moved from the image to Princess Mochi’s empty bed and she felt a tug.

  “You said you found her,” Tess ventured.

  “May have,” he corrected. “I have a work number for the mom of that little girl who wanted a dog. The one you met on the walk before Mochi peed on your head. Her grandmother says she took her. The girl, I mean.” He grunted. “The nana is into Firefly. How about that?”

  “Huh.” Tess had no idea what that was. Maybe in happier times she could find out. If they ever had happier times again.

  “Okay, here we go,” JT said, leaning forward.

  Each random string of letters reassembled into a word. And not just a word, but what appeared to be last names. And the name that came up the most was:

  “Anatoly Vodanyov,” JT read aloud.

  Tess blinked. “Are you kidding? He’s a Russian mobster. He’s involved in all kinds of criminal activities. Everyone is after him. Homeland Security, Interpol, FBI. And us. As in NYPD. And also us as in you and me, apparently. Can you do anything with that phone number? Like, hack into his phone or anything?”

  “Without a way in? Only late at night when you’re watching James Bond,” he countered. “If you could get a warrant—”

  She paced again. “That ship has sailed.”

  JT kept skimming the list. Then he brightened. “Oh, hey, this is interesting. After, like, a dozen calls in a row to Vodanyov, Suresh hardly ever called him. He started trading calls with this number”—he pointed to the screen—“to someone named QQQQQQ.” That’s all I can get. It’s so encrypted not even I can unencrypt it. Unless it’s just a string of Qs.”

  Tess processed that. “So whatever he was doing, either Vodanyov passed him along to the next guy in the organization or he stopped dealing with Vodanyov in favor of this guy,” Tess said. “Maybe he got a higher bidder.”

  “On what?” JT was thinking aloud. “Chrysalis is into some pretty woo-woo scary-level stuff. Weaponry, bionics, cloning… I wonder if they can clone a chihuahua yet.”

  “You said you found her,” Tess retorted.

  “I have a good lead on her,” he answered. “Look. Here are more calls to Q. Is there someone bad named Q besides the Q on Next Generation? There was also a Q in James Bond, you know.”

  “It’s like another language,” Tess murmured.

  Her phone rang. It was Detective Goss. “Captain Vargas, I’m still waiting for forensics. I did get a few things. Suresh is working on something very hush-hush. It’s a weapon and it has something to do with computer chips. That’s all Chrysalis is saying.”

  A chill tiptoed up Tess’s backbone and knocked at the base of her skull. So this nightmare originated in high-level spooky stuff, as she had feared.

  “Is anything missing? Let’s see if this makes sense: Ravi doesn’t show up at work, maybe he’s stolen the prototype, tries to sell it.” To the Russian mob or somebody named Q.

  “It doesn’t appear that anything like that has happened,” the detective said. “A whole bunch of Chrysalis higher-ups are here with Lawrence but the vibe is concern for Suresh on a personal level only. They aren’t acting like they’ve had a breach.”

  Maybe they’re just really good actors. You were riding with one to Chrysalis just a little while ago. Tess said, “Did you catch Suresh’s home address?”

  There was a beat, and then Goss said, “Yes, ma’am. That’s why I called you. Here it is.” She rattled off an address in Brooklyn. Tess wrote it down.

  “Can you meet me there? Is anyone else going there?” Tess asked.

  Another pause. “Captain Frost is looking for more hands. There was a shooting on Houston that we think is unrelated to this case, but it’s still in our jurisdiction. So we have to respond. He’s on scene now. So no one else will be at Suresh’s apartment anytime soon. No one on the books, I mean.”

  If Tess could have managed a smile, she would have. So much for worshipping “By the Book” Vargas. Goss was getting out of Tess’s way all on her own. Maybe this was her way of apologizing for those things she had said about Cat.

  “Thanks,” Tess said. “I’ll remember this.”

  She hung up. “JT, I have Suresh’s home address. I’m going over there.” When he began to push out his chair, she placed a hand on his shoulder. “You know you have to stay here.”

  “You’re going with backup.” He was not asking. He was demanding. Shaking her head, Tess headed for the old bank vault filled with safe deposit boxes that was part of JT’s place. She opened the box she used to store extra weapons and ammo.

  “No?” JT said as she returned. “You can’t go alone. You may be running straight into the arms of the Russian mob.”

  “I have to do this, JT. By myself. Off the books. If Cat and Vincent were here—”

  “I’m here,” he tried again. She read the frustration in his eyes—and also the capitulation. He knew he would be more helpful by staying behind and serving as headquarters. “I’ll pull up everything on Vodanyov and his people, see what I can put together. I’ll start running facial recognition software on them. And Heather, and Suresh.” Off her tight expression, he said, “Hey, we found Vincent, remember? Alive and well. Relatively well,�
�� he amended. “And now he’s better than ever.”

  “Thanks, JT.” Now she did manage a weak smile. “Cat may call in. Tell her everything we have. She may be able to put some things together on her end.”

  “On it.” His body language said one thing; his features said another. His fear for her was warring with his desire to support his soldier as she entered the field of battle. Tess had always been about action, movement, heading into the fray. She had shaken JT’s world upside down in so many ways.

  What if I don’t come back from this?

  She gave one more thought to the pregnancy test kit, and the fact that she was even later than when she’d bought it, and put her arms around him for a real kiss. A real farewell.

  No, no, no. I am not thinking that way. I am thinking Heather is back here with me safe and sound.

  As for Suresh, Anatoly Vodanyov and the mysterious Q, Detective Goss could take care of them. They were her jurisdiction.

  “Call me if anything pops.” She took off her jacket, put on her shoulder holster, and slipped her jacket back on. She caught JT’s green complexion and figured she should have gone Rambo out of his line of vision.

  Then she was out the door. It was dark and she caught movement in the shadows. She pulled out her gun.

  “This is the NYPD,” she declared. “Step out.”

  There was a rustle in the bushes. Beneath moonlight and streetlight, a shadow spread across the sidewalk.

  “I say again,” Tess bellowed.

  “Don’t shoot me.” Hands high in the air, a kid moved onto the sidewalk. He was wearing a hoodie—she guessed one of the four she had chased away a few minutes before. She didn’t re-holster.

  “Ma’am, if you know that man, you gotta help him,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “My crew coming back for him soon as you gone.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He shot them with some messed-up gun. Is he a animal trainer? Like for attack dogs and shit?”

  Tess had to conceal a chuckle. She didn’t suppose Vincent would appreciate being labeled an attack dog, but when he beasted out, he was more animal than human. For eleven years, JT had contained Vincent in a tiny world to keep him from harming himself—and others. It turned out that Cat’s voice—Cat’s love—was even more effective than a tranq gun. She could talk Vincent down so that he could reassert his humanity through sheer force of will. It was as Cat and Vincent said: They were better together. Stronger together. In so many ways.