Paradise Crime Series Box Set

by Toby Neal

  Sophie’s skin crawled with tension as she made the first cut into the razor wire. With her NV visor, she could see the electrified wire that Dunn had cut on his initial attempt. She cleared away a two-foot section of wire and tossed it back down on the other side of Dunn, who had begun to move his arms and legs, making tiny moaning sounds.

  She whispered into her comm unit. “I’m going in, Dunn. When you feel up to it, keep an eye out for me.” And over the fence she went.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sophie hit the ground, her knees bent to absorb the drop. She sank into the soft, dislodged soil of the garden’s disruption and moved forward quickly to a heavy-duty dump truck next to the hole, already piled high with dirt from the digging site.

  Watching the daytime surveillance, they’d seen the dump truck already make a trip to the entrance of the bay to empty the garden soil into the ocean. This was the reason they had had to move so quickly.

  Sophie swung the backpack off of her back, extracting the sniffer device. A long steel rod ended in the ninhydrin technology unit, a round attachment. A stabilizer clamp around her forearm and a handle to hold gave the device the look and feel of a metal detector. Sophie swung the device along the edges of the deep excavation hole, watching the LED display attached to the rod for a green light that would indicate human remains.

  It was hard to keep an eye on both the LED display and the surrounding area with the helmet on. It also inhibited her hearing, which at this point she concluded would be her best indication of someone approaching. She removed the helmet, setting it on the ground, and moved away from the hole to scan the mound of dirt in the back of the dump truck. Her eyes flitted over the destroyed garden, the amber-lit yurts in the distance, the dark shadow of the fence nearby. All of it felt so familiar from her time at the retreat, but menacing now.

  The LED display lit suddenly, a strong green seeming to leap off of the small black square to pulse in her vision. Sophie fumbled to take out an evidence bag, and scooped a handful of dirt from where the signal had showed. She hadn’t packed the trowel—that was still in her backpack on the other side of the fence—so she used her hands to scoop the dirt into the bag. Her fingers encountered something hard—probably a stone. She fumbled it out of the soil.

  She held a bone, darkened with dirt but still pale enough to discern. Probably a phalange. Smooth, round and about the size of a half-smoked cigarette, it lay like a talisman in her palm.

  “I was hoping you’d come back.” Dougal Sloane’s voice was casual. Sophie spun, dropped the bone into her pocket and reached for her weapon with her spare hand—but froze as moonlight shone on the chrome-plated Beretta in Sloane’s hand. “I knew it would be you, Mary Watson.” The way he said her name confirmed he knew it wasn’t real.

  It was a bad idea to test her new, untried vest with a 9mm at close range, and her lifeline to help was four feet away in the helmet she’d foolishly taken off. “They say men with big guns are overcompensating,” she said, equally conversational.

  Sloane snorted an almost-laugh and took another step toward her. His eyes were dark caves, the bald top of his head gleamed, his teeth flashed white. “Psychoanalyzing me, eh? Don’t think you want to do that, m’dear. You won’t like what you find.”

  Sophie fumbled the sniffer detection unit’s forearm grip off, letting the unit drop to the ground. Her mind scrabbled to think of a way out as Sloane took another step closer. “Not sure how you got out of here the first time, but I won’t make the mistake of leaving you alive again. This is an ideal opportunity to bury you with the rest.”

  So that’s how it was going to be.

  A deep calm settled over Sophie.

  Time seemed to slow. The details surrounding her impressed themselves on each of her senses: the rich, loamy scent of the dirt around them. Moonlight on the chrome barrel of the Beretta was oddly beautiful, as was its ominous black bore. Even Sloane’s Scottish accent felt rich, grace notes over the aural tapestry that was the song of the coqui frogs in the background. The humid night air felt like satin on her skin.

  Maybe this is where all your struggles are meant to end, the depression whispered. He is going to kill you.

  Hello, darkness, my old friend. I won’t give in to you now, or ever. I have to at least try to live.

  Sophie gathered her strength from her core, an invisible inward coiling, and leaped at Sloane, the longest standing broad jump of her life. Her hands caught his wrist, deflecting the weapon upward.

  The massive boom of the gun going off felt like a bomb in her hands. She felt a blast of heat on her face—then she felt nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Voices sounded nearby but muffled, as if heard through a thick cotton blanket. “You’re going to be all right. Stay with me, Sophie. Stay with me!”

  Dunn. He was always so bossy, so demanding. Always wanting more than she had to give.

  There was a long stretch of nothing. Perhaps. Or maybe it was only a moment or two.

  She was drifting, somewhere gray, like walking in the morning fog through the marsh of a rice paddy, as she’d done as a child in Thailand. The ground was spongy below her, the sky too close and the color of lead. Memories played intermittently, like glitchy videos.

  Her mother Pim Wat’s beautiful face close to hers, kissing her cheek, stroking her hair. Sophie had been sick, and it was one of the few times her mother had been well enough to take care of her. “You are going to be beautiful.” Her mother’s voice was so loving, her small hand sliding around the outside of Sophie’s face, stroking the bones. “Even with this hair from your father.”

  Her mother’s hair was long, straight, black, and shimmery as a fall of silk. Sophie’s was dense, curly, with the structure she’d inherited from her father’s African-American roots. She’d dealt with it by cropping it short, too impatient to figure out how to manage the wayward locks.

  She heard a rumble in the gray mist—her father’s voice. She’d always loved his voice, so deep and melodic, a good part of his success as an ambassador. He could talk anyone into anything with that voice. Now it was nothing but a rumble in the distance, a rumble that felt like home.

  But where was home? Certainly not the bare little apartment Mary Watson had rented. She really just wanted to sleep. If she could just lie down and rest, maybe all of this would make sense.

  Someone was talking over her head.

  Marcella. Her friend sounded upset, with that edge she could get in her tone when something was bothering her. “I’m going to tell you this and assume you can hear me. They say you can hear things. Maybe you’ll even remember them, and you better listen when I tell you…” Marcella’s voice caught. “Don’t do this. Wake up, Sophie. You’re my best friend. I need you.”

  Sophie hated the sadness in Marcella’s voice. She looked around in the gray, but couldn’t see a way out. She tried to run forward but her legs felt too heavy.

  “Thanks for sitting with her,” Dunn’s voice said.

  “You don’t have to thank me. She was my friend a long time before she was your partner.” Marcella sounded harsh, angry.

  “I’m sorry I let this happen to her.”

  “You should be.”

  Dunn and Marcella did not sound like they were getting along, and it really wasn’t fair to Dunn. He was unconscious when she went over the wall. He would have stopped her if he could have; he would have taken the bullet for her. Somehow she knew this.

  Remembering that about Dunn felt like it meant something.

  The struggle to get through each day, to keep the depression from crippling her, that familiar sense of futility, hopelessness, and loneliness—it was gone. If this was the afterlife, it was boring, but it was peaceful.

  Perhaps time passed. She heard snatches of conversation, but not anything that she connected with enough to notice until Waxman.

  Waxman was close to her. She could imagine herself, lying on the hospital bed or wherever it was. Her former mentor and boss
was speaking directly into her ear on the left side. Maybe the light gleamed on his prematurely silver hair like it used to.

  “Sophie. I want you to return to the Bureau. We need your skills. We always did. We can reinstate you with no loss in seniority, I promise. We were wrong to try to take DAVID from you… I should have looked the other way about your use of the program, but I worried about controlling it, about the legal issues…and I’ll be honest. I wanted it for the Bureau. But now I just want…you to come back.”

  Sophie honestly wished she could lift a hand and touch Waxman’s face. Reassure him. He sounded so broken. But even when she yelled, nothing happened in the gray.

  Another stretch of time. Or not. Maybe she was getting closer to getting out, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “Sophie. Sophie. I know you can hear me.” This voice was speaking from her right side this time. A sensation accompanied it, something tingly, dimly felt and far off, like circulation returning to a frozen limb. “This is Sheldon. I’ve gone through a lot of trouble to come see you.”

  Sheldon. Sheldon Hamilton. The Ghost. She felt a small, warm feeling at the thought of that brilliant, enigmatic, beautiful man sitting beside her, speaking into her ear, stroking her hand, her arm. That’s what he was doing, even though she couldn’t feel anything but the far-off knowledge of a sensation.

  “We’re all alone in this room, Sophie. I thought I would have so much longer to figure out how to make all of this work.”

  What was he talking about? His shady dealings in Hong Kong, his desertion of Security Solutions, the real reason for his disappearance—his vigilante activities? She had to get out of here! The Ghost was sitting right beside her and she could catch him at last. Was that why she wanted to catch him, or was it the crazy attraction she had for him? “I thought I’d have time to build trust, to let you know how I felt about you and figure out how we could meet. From the first time I saw you, I felt something new. You were a worthy opponent. A worthy—counterpart.”

  Sophie tried to call out. She tried to move, and in the gray she was able to, but she knew that in the stubborn, unresponsive body she was trapped in, none of that was visible. It was painful to hear his voice, Dunn’s voice, Marcella’s voice, her father’s voice—even Waxman’s voice—and not be able to respond.

  “We could have a future. That’s what I want with you. I know you don’t agree with my methods, but I know you agree with their utility, their necessity. I hoped that somehow we could find our way through all that to be partners. Friends. Lovers.” Sheldon’s voice shook on the last word. “Please come back.”

  Oh, she wanted to. How hard she tried.

  Fighting the gray was like the worst episode of depression she had ever had, the heavy inertia of it pinning down every limb. She was trapped here, stuck here, and peaceful as it was, it no longer felt like a place she wanted to stay.

  She had things to do, and there were people who needed her…people who loved her.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sophie’s bed was cranked up so she could see the view out of a top floor window of Queen’s Hospital. Poufs of cumulus cloud sailed by over a cerulean ocean dotted with sailboats, white lines of breaking waves at popular Waikiki surf spots a punctuation. High-rises glittered like fool’s gold in the sun, and Sophie could even see the waving palms along busy Kapiolani Boulevard, fronting the beaches.

  She’d woken during the night, grateful for the dimness of her room, illuminated only by the LED lights on the monitoring equipment. Her movement seemed to have set off some sort of alarm, because a nurse appeared at once. She pulled up Sophie’s eyelids and shone a blinding light into them, waking her father, whose voice came anxiously from a reclining chair in the corner. “Sophie? Sophie, are you there?”

  “Yes.” It was all Sophie could do to make her throat work enough to get the word out. She was in terrible pain, her head and face throbbing, her throat dry, and for a moment, she wished she could stay in the comfortable gray forever.

  But only for a moment. She was glad to have escaped.

  Now, hours later, hydrated and medicated for pain, her father Francis Smithson beside her, Sophie watched the sunrise. Because the sun came up on the other side of the island, she could see the line of its light hit the water out in the ocean and gradually recede to strike the tops of the buildings, the palm trees, the surf, the beach.

  Her father held her hand. She couldn’t remember that happening since she was a child. He had large hands, long-fingered like her own, the backs the color of buttery leather, soft and pinkish on the palms. Her thumb stroked a callous around the web of his thumb.

  “That’s my signing hand.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “I sign a lot of papers.”

  Sophie would have nodded but moving her head hurt too much. She had been injured in some terrible way that she was afraid to know exactly. The bandages on the right side of her face and head felt stiff and bulky, and adhesive pulled at her skin. She’d asked for them to be loosened and had been told they were on so tight because they were pressure bandages.

  At some point she had been intubated and so her throat still felt dry and abraded. Her father squeezed her hand. “I’m so glad you’re awake. You’re going to be okay, Sophie.”

  Sophie turned toward him very carefully, keeping her head propped on the pillow. Even with pain medication it throbbed, as if her brain was too big for her skull, which was probably what had happened. The round must have creased her skull, creating enough swelling to keep her unconscious for a while. “How long was I sleeping?”

  “You were in a coma for three days. It was touch and go there for a while.” He squeezed her hand again as she gazed into his large brown eyes. She shared those eyes, but lighter brown and set at a tilt, the evidence of her mother’s Thai heritage. Francis Smithson was the product of her white grandmother and black grandfather. This pairing had given him an angular face, full lips, and level brows. His hair was buzzed short and looked just like Sophie’s, but for the swatches of gray at his temples.

  There was a guardedness in the way her father looked at her, in the way the nurses treated her—there was something very wrong about her face, and it was time to ask about it. “Why are there so many bandages on my face?”

  Her father let go of her hand and rubbed the short nap of his hair, looking out the window. “When that man fired on you, the bullet went through your mouth, destroyed your cheekbone, and creased your temple.”

  Sophie tried to comprehend this.

  She remembered leaping for the weapon. Moonlight, gleaming on the chrome barrel of the gun. Her hands grabbing Sloane’s wrist, thrusting upward. She thought she’d been able to deflect the barrel from her face—but apparently not.

  “Through my mouth?” No wonder it hurt so much to talk, to move the muscles of her jaw. “My teeth?”

  “Your mouth was open. The round missed your teeth by a fraction. You were so lucky.” He took her hand again. His trembled.

  She didn’t feel lucky. Now that she knew the extent of her injury, the strange pulpy sensation in her cheek made sense. The round had gone through her cheekbone on its way to creasing her skull. Her face must be destroyed on one side.

  “As soon as the swelling goes down, we’re having the best plastic surgeon in the United States flown in. You’ll be good as new in no time,” Her father declared, in the official speechmaking voice he used for United Nations addresses.

  “I think I need some more medication.”

  “Now that you’re awake they took you off the morphine drip. We have to make do with these.” Her father fumbled some pills from a small paper cup into his hand and poured her some water. She swallowed the medication with difficulty. “They want you off the hard stuff and to be able to monitor your own pain levels.”

  Sophie wanted to ask about the case, but her father was not the one to speak to about that. The pain pills worked quickly, making her pleasantly floaty and drowsy. “I’d like to speak with Jake Dunn whe
n I wake up from my nap.”

  “He will be relieved. That man has made a pest of himself. I had to send him away.”

  Sophie could well imagine Dunn’s restless pacing and bossy manner, and she would have smiled if it hadn’t hurt so much.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack.” Dunn glared at Sophie, gray eyes accusing.

  “Like how I felt when you got electrocuted?” Sophie raised her brows, and winced. The muscles of her face were still traumatized by the gunshot wound. She was actually looking forward to being under general anesthesia for the repairs to her face. She didn’t let herself think about what her face currently looked like, or even what it was going to look like after the surgery.

  “Yeah, about that. Can’t believe I made a rookie mistake like that. My excuses: it was dark and I was in a hurry. Just goes to show you it never pays to be in a hurry.” Dunn winked to make his comment into an innuendo as he lowered his bulk into the hard plastic chair beside her bed. “I spent a lot of time on this chair in the last few days. And these don’t get any more comfortable.”

  “I didn’t ask you to hang around,” Sophie said defensively. “My father is here. Marcella is here. Just give me a situation report.”

  “You wound me, madam. You’re my partner. And it should’ve been me shot in the head, quite frankly.” Dunn’s brows drew together as his face grew serious, his gray eyes intent. “You should never have gone in without backup.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.” Sophie took a sip of water to ease her scratchy throat. “Just tell me what happened. I thought I got his gun hand up in time, but I guess not.”

  “What’s not good is that I didn’t get a good enough look to positively identify the shooter. I got to the top of the fence, just in time to see you jump at him as he shot you in the head. I fired at him, and he threw you into the pit and ran off.”