Stalked lk-5

by Allison Brennan

  “Oh, God, Sean,” she whispered, and he smiled.

  “I wish I could do this for you every night,” he said, and began rubbing the balls of her feet.

  “I could fall asleep so easily.”

  “Don’t you dare.” He wished she didn’t get this tense. Tomorrow, she’d be back working on the case, focused on everyone except herself. He would do this for her nightly, and enjoy it.

  Lucy rolled over and smiled at him. “Take off your clothes.”

  “Aren’t you bossy.”

  “I don’t like to be naked alone.”

  Sean stripped, then ran his hands up her legs, across her stomach, kissing her body as he went. He kissed the faded scars across her breasts, then entwined his hands with hers. He stared at her, her dark eyes craving him as much as he craved her. Her lips parted and she tilted her face up to meet his.

  “I love you, Luce.”

  She smiled and kissed him. “Make love to me.”

  “I’ve missed you so much.” He kissed her lips, her jaw, her neck. He loved her neck, so smooth and soft and sensitive. His tongue explored the sweet trail under her jaw up to her ear and she gasped, clutching his shoulders, when he lightly bit her earlobe.

  She breathed his name, a whisper of desire, then wrapped her legs around him.

  His penis reached for her as if it had a mind of its own. He thrust into her quickly and she gasped, meeting him halfway. He held himself still, wanting to savor this moment, his hands still clasped in hers, sweat coating their bodies. In tacit agreement they tried to hold off the urgency. Sean moved slowly, needing to relish this moment, to remember every sweet spot of Lucy’s body. The way she moved. The way she moaned. The way she whispered, I love you.

  Lucy shifted beneath him and the friction made him groan. It was always like this with them, he wanted slow and prolonged, but the sexual combustibility always burned hot when they were alone and naked. Lucy had learned that her touch, her scent, her body, her voice, just made him crave her even more; she enjoyed his needs, she enjoyed him. They’d built up trust and love over these months, and Sean would never forget this moment, like he never forgot any of the moments they were together.

  He’d never get enough of her, never wanted to get enough. “Lucy,” he breathed into her neck; then he leaned up and stared at her glowing face, and her eyes opened. She smiled and surprised him. She flipped him onto his back and sank deeper onto him. Her back arched and her eyes partly closed. Droplets of sweat ran between her breasts, glistening in the faint light, and he grabbed her hips, his orgasm hitting him with a power he didn’t want to control. He held her body down on his and she froze, then let out a quiet cry as every one of her muscles tightened then relaxed simultaneously. She collapsed on top of him.

  Lucy smiled into Sean’s chest, her skin slick with sweat and lotion. She listened to his rapidly beating heart, loved the way his arms tightened around her, holding her close.

  “I need a shower,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “We should conserve water.”

  “Yes, we should.”

  Lucy rose from the bed, took Sean’s hand, and pulled him up.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Never thank me for loving you.”

  “I meant, thank you for doing all this. Flying me here, searching for answers when we don’t even know all the questions.”

  “Huge hardship. Traveling to my favorite city with my favorite woman and making love in the same hotel where I first told the woman I love that I loved her. Yeah, I’m suffering big-time.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  He kissed her. “I do. What’s important to you is important to me. I thought you knew that by now.”

  She touched his face with her fingertips. “I’m very lucky.”

  He smiled. “Yes, you are.”

  She laughed and pulled him toward the bathroom. She turned on the shower.

  “I’m the lucky one,” Sean whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FBI Academy

  For the duration of the investigation, Hans Vigo was staying at a small house on the perimeter of the FBI Academy. It was late when he returned to campus after talking to Kate and Dillon, but he was in no mood to retire.

  Something had been bothering him all day. Ever since Lucy told him her notes had disappeared.

  What was in the McMahon file that someone didn’t want Hans to see? Was it connected to Tony’s death or completely unrelated? A crime of opportunity?

  The halls were quiet at midnight. Two guards patrolled the grounds, the security desk was manned, but everyone else was asleep. The campus wasn’t even half-full-many of the new agents took advantage of Saturday night to get out, visit family, go see a movie. And since it was the first weekend Class 12–14 was allowed recreation, most of them were gone.

  Staff was minimal, and only a handful lived on campus-no instructors, only the class supervisor and field counselors. Because of budget cutbacks, only one class supervisor was here now. In the past, there were up to four supervisors supervising up to eight new-agent classes. Now, there were only three new-agent classes working their way through, and one supervisor.

  Times were changing. They could train to cover attrition, not to add to their ranks. There was more crime, smarter crimes, but they couldn’t bring on enough people to handle the current workload. Around the country, every law enforcement agency was cutting back, and while the different agencies worked better together than when Hans first started, they were all understaffed.

  No sign of that changing in the near future.

  Hans turned on the lights. He was the only one down in the basement this late, but he liked working in solitude.

  He had already boxed up the new-agent class files for whoever would replace Tony. Hans wished he’d remained close to his old friend. Death was permanent.

  Tony had been emotionally tortured, but Hans didn’t believe he had been tortured enough to kill himself. Not deliberately. But he’d always had a problem with drinking, and the fact that he was keeping a bottle in his desk had upset Hans. Alcohol was a serious problem in law enforcement, particularly with someone who dealt with the darkest of human beings. Hans had had his fair share of battling personal demons and frustrations, but he hadn’t turned to the bottle or drugs.

  Hans remembered all too well the Rachel McMahon murder investigation. The jurisdictional fights. The media circus. The lies that the parents told, the friends, the family-until Rachel was found dead and the truth washed ashore from a sea of guilt.

  Tony had known from the beginning that the McMahons were lying, but he’d been tossed from the case after he and the chief of police nearly came to blows over the father’s interrogation. That was one of many missteps that impacted Tony’s career-why he’d never risen through the ranks the way he should have. It didn’t matter that Tony had been right on every count; he didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He broke rules under the philosophy it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.

  Unfortunately, he rarely sought forgiveness.

  It didn’t surprise Hans that Tony had bonded with Lucy Kincaid. Lucy had outstanding raw instincts that couldn’t be taught but could be honed. Field experience would turn her into one of the best agents they could train.

  Except she also had the same weaknesses as Tony. She tried to be a rule follower; she tried to be who she thought she needed to be to reach her goals. But in her heart she was just like Tony Presidio: gut driven, tenacious, stubborn, empathetic. She would break every rule if she thought she was doing the right thing, and that would leave her where Tony had been: unfulfilled in his career and marginalized because he was unpredictable.

  Maybe leaving the Academy was the best thing for her. She could get a job in almost any law enforcement agency in the country. Her skills would be in high demand. And if her past proved a barrier, RCK would bring her on board without hesitation, and not just because Sean and Patrick were p
artners. The organization had been slowly growing more powerful and in demand over the last few years, and while that worried some people in power, it didn’t worry Hans.

  Every new agent was thoroughly vetted. Each one went through extensive psychological and background screenings. It was this vetting process that had affected Lucy’s placement, because while she passed all the psychological tests, the panels felt she was too calculated in her responses and that her master’s in criminal psychology may have given her the leverage to cheat the tests. She had been cold in her interviews, didn’t have any outside interests, and they feared she had a vendetta.

  But ultimately, Hans was selfish and he wanted to train Lucy to be the agent he knew she could be. He’d been watching her these last four weeks through the one person he trusted to keep his interest confidential. She’d been doing fine, and she’d passed the tests he’d set up for her, confirming that he’d been right to ask Rick Stockton to overrule the hiring panel.

  Tony had been drinking prior to going into cardiac arrest. He had his heart pills on his desk, telling Hans that he’d been experiencing chest pains but chose self-medication over the doctor.

  A murder at Quantico would be bold, brazen, and extremely difficult. Poison to induce cardiac arrest would take medical knowledge and opportunity.

  Why would someone kill Tony? He wasn’t involved in the politics of the Bureau, had never aspired to be anything but a field agent. He could be grumpy and he rode his students hard, but he was always fair.

  It all came back to the Rachel McMahon investigation and the missing file. Tony had figured something out about the case, and either the file was stolen after he died as a crime of opportunity or he was murdered because of his knowledge of the file.

  Hans had read over all the official records this afternoon, but there was nothing that jumped out at him. Nothing that would warrant anyone wanting Tony, Stokes, Theissen, and the reporter all dead.

  But while Hans had been involved in the original investigation, he hadn’t been as involved as Tony.

  Hans pulled the security log from Thursday afternoon to see which card keys accessed the basement. There were no unauthorized accesses, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t. Yet circumstantial evidence indicated that if Tony had been murdered, someone he worked with had killed him.

  If Tony was murdered.

  Hans called his friend from the lab, Trisha Morrison.

  “Hans, it’s nearly midnight,” Trisha said.

  “I’m sorry. And you’re not going to like what I’m calling about.”

  “You want results.”

  “Yes. I know it’s early, but-”

  “They’re being run, Hans. That’s the best I can do. I’ll be at the lab tomorrow and will check on the tests personally. But it’s going to take at least another day, and if we don’t find anything, I’ll need to run a broader test.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Hans hung up. There was nothing more he could do tonight. He locked up, checked out at the desk, and walked the quarter mile to the small bungalow he was living in for the duration.

  The cool, fresh air cleared his head, and he realized how exhausted he was. It had been a long forty-eight hours.

  He followed the trail around a fenced construction area, where the new hostage rescue facility was being built. The security lighting was weak and flickered. A scaffolding to his right seemed out of place. He sidestepped it, then tripped over a toolbox and fell hard on his knees.

  Pain shot up to his pelvis and he feared he’d broken his leg. He rolled over to catch his breath when a crashing sound startled him.

  He couldn’t get away from the scaffolding before it came falling down and pinned him to the ground. The weight of the wood and pipe and equipment was stifling. Blood dripped into his eye from a deep cut on his forehead.

  He sensed more than saw movement to his left. He tried to turn his head but couldn’t. A sharp pain exploded his temple, then he felt nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Six Years Ago

  Soon after I became an emancipated minor on my sixteenth birthday, I got my GED and was accepted into SU. It was far enough from my crazy mom and dad that I didn’t think about them much. The first year I kept to myself. I was younger than everyone, the classes weren’t as easy as I’d thought, and I focused on studying. I just wanted to blend in while I figured out what to do with my life.

  The doctor had been wrong-I wasn’t going to be six feet like my dad. By the time I was seventeen, I was six foot one with more to grow. I think I always thought of myself as short because my height felt funny on me. I didn’t really know what to do with it. I tried to disappear in crowds like I used to, but I couldn’t. Too tall, too skinny, and I think people were kind of scared of me because I was so quiet.

  Even though I was free, I felt oddly trapped. Like I was waiting. Waiting for someone to tell me my life had purpose. Waiting for someone to tell me what I should be doing. Waiting for answers to all the questions I’d had as a kid-answers that would never come.

  Then I met Cami.

  Cami was a year older than me. Beautiful. Sweet and shy, maybe a little skittish. We met in the library the beginning of my second year at SU and I think, for me at least, it was love at first sight. Even though we didn’t have any classes together and she lived with her aunt in town, we studied together nearly every afternoon. I looked forward to seeing her, and on the days I couldn’t or she didn’t make it I was sad.

  Cami left for the summer, and when she returned in the fall I wanted to marry her. She was everything bright in my life. My past was finally buried; my mother had remarried and moved to Texas, my father was still in Seattle, but I hadn’t spoken to either of them in over two years, not since the day I became an emancipated minor. The time, and college, and Cami all healed me.

  For the first time since Rachel died, I was at peace.

  The peace didn’t last.

  The sensation that someone was watching me again started at the beginning of my third year. I started to feel the pricks in the back of my neck, just like in high school. The mysterious and cryptic notes began again, only instead of being put in my locker they were left in my dorm room. Or in my car. Or as a bookmark in whatever I was reading.

  I became jittery and nervous and all I wanted to do was disappear again. I kept it all from Cami because I wanted to protect her. I filed police report after police report, but after the third time, they just stopped caring. I’d become an annoyance, and one of the cops clearly thought I was lying for the attention.

  He certainly didn’t know me. I would gladly be invisible if I could.

  But I should have realized that whoever hated me, whoever had followed me from Newark to New York, would try to hurt someone I loved.

  My junior year, I moved off campus and gave Cami a key to my apartment. I wanted her to move in with me, because she was having problems with her family. But she was a bit old-fashioned, and I liked that about her. She’d often stay until late but always left in the middle of the night. I wished she would take me to visit her aunt, but she said it was “complicated.”

  I knew all about complicated families.

  It was the morning before Halloween when I had coffee with Cami and asked if she wanted to see a movie that night. She said she’d meet me at my apartment. And she sounded happy for the first time in weeks, and that made me happy. I’d been afraid she wanted to break it off because of my questions about her aunt, and my moodiness.

  I got hung up after my last class because the professor wanted to talk to me about a story I’d written. He wanted me to submit it to the campus magazine. I said sure, whatever, but he wanted to talk. Talking wasn’t my strength. So I listened to him, about how talented I was, about how I should be majoring in communication or journalism or the creative arts instead of early childhood education. I listened until he wanted me to give him answers; then I told him I was late for a date.

  I had a beat-up old car, but I rarely
drove since my apartment was only a half mile from campus. But it was days like this, when I was late, that I wished I had it. I called Cami to tell her I was late, but my call went to her voice mail.

  I walked briskly, then jogged, and by the time I got to my apartment I was running. I felt it in my stomach that something was wrong, just like I did the night of the storm when I woke up and went to Rachel’s room and she wasn’t there.

  I ran up the two flights of stairs to my apartment and heard Cami crying from my bedroom.

  “Cami? Cami? It’s Peter.”

  The cries stopped, and I ran down the short hall to where she stood in the doorway. I looked over her head and saw everything.

  Arcs of blood on the walls. The smell of death. The butchered pig in my bed.

  Cami turned to face me, her face white and wet with tears. “I can’t be here,” she said. “I’m sorry. Oh, God!” She ran out and I let her go. I stared at the gross violence and knew that next time it would be me.

  I called the police, and this time a new cop came to my apartment.

  His name was Charlie Mead. He looked at my room, then looked at me and said, “Tell me about it.”

  I told him everything. I told him about being followed in high school, about the roadkill left in my locker, about my bike being sabotaged. I told him why I ran away, how I was sent to live with my father, and why I filed for emancipation. It all came out in a rush; I don’t think I’d ever said as much at one time in my life.

  Charlie said, “Let’s make sure your girlfriend is okay.”

  I nodded, and he drove me to her aunt’s house. I’d never been inside, but I’d dropped her off several times over the year I’d known her.

  Charlie walked with me to the door. I stood behind him, mostly because I didn’t want Cami to be scared. Charlie could convince her that she’d be safe, and he had some smart questions I hadn’t even thought about. Like had she seen anyone, had she touched anything, had she ever seen someone following us.