Dangerous Curves

by Pamela Britton

Agent Ashton picked right up on it. “The man is a civilian whose impression of the FBI is now less than favorable, especially when it appears to him that I was taking your side by refusing him information.”

  “But surely he understood that as a civilian, he doesn’t have a right to know.”

  “What he knows is that an agent under my direction started mouthing off to him.”

  Cece tipped her head down, rubbing her temples as she spat out the inevitable. “I know. And I’m sorry.” And even though she technically worked for Bob and the San Francisco office, she said the words with as much sincerity as she could muster. “It won’t happen again, sir. The stress of yesterday must have affected me more than I thought.”

  She had to stay on good terms with the Charlotte office. They were her only “in” to the investigation, and if she stared alienating people, they’d keep her “out.”

  “See that it doesn’t happen again,” Agent Ashton said.

  “Any word on who tipped off the press?” Cece asked.

  There was a pause, and for a moment Cece thought he wouldn’t answer. To her shock, he said, “It appears one of the perps did.”

  “One of the perps?” she asked.

  “We’re going under the assumption that this is a terrorist faction we haven’t heard of before.”

  Terrorists? But that didn’t make a lick of sense…unless they knew something she didn’t know.

  “Did we get another communication from them?”

  “We did.”

  Well, what did it say? “Is it possible to have a copy faxed to me here?” she asked.

  “Negative,” Agent Ashton said quickly and firmly. “You’re to continue in your capacity as protection for Sanders.”

  “But I can still help with the investigation while I’m doing that.”

  “Frankly, Agent Blackwell, my office is more than capable of handling the investigation on its own. This has now moved to our jurisdiction, thanks to the attempt on your life yesterday. We’re not a bunch of backwater rednecks here, contrary to what you might think.”

  Whoa! Where the heck had that come from? “Of course not,” Cece said. “I don’t know what gave you the impression that I thought that.”

  “I’ve had dealings with the San Francisco office before.”

  Oh, jeesh, so that was it. This wasn’t personal, this was politics. Someone from her office had stepped on Ashton’s toes before. Was it Bob? Was that the reason for this thinly veiled hostility? She sighed.

  He must have heard it, because he said with more venom than before, “So while I appreciate your offer of help, your orders are to stay glued to Sanders’s side.”

  Glued to Blain’s side. Terrific. Just what she didn’t want to become—a human Post-it note. She’d hardly be able to help with the investigation that way.

  “Surely there’s something—”

  Click.

  Cece folded her own phone closed. Jerk. She wrapped her hands around the cellphone as if it was Agent Ashton’s neck, shaking it for good measure. She’d like to toss the thing on the floor and stomp on it, but that was just a nice fantasy. Besides, there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  She turned on her sensibly short heel, heading for the fabrication shop. She didn’t know where Blain was, but she didn’t need his help for this. In fact, she’d rather he be out of the loop.

  She found Mike Johnson, Blain’s crew chief, right where she thought he’d be, standing in front of a giant red toolbox organizing the contents of its drawers. Cece doubted that he was their suspect, but she hated the fact that she couldn’t be sure. She’d run into him earlier when she’d poked around the place, and wasn’t surprised he hadn’t moved from his spot. The drawers were a mess, as was the whole shop. It looked as if a tornado had come through—or the FBI.

  He glanced up when she walked in, seeming less than pleased to see her.

  “I had nothing to do with this,” she said, lifting her hands, having to squint against the light reflecting off the cement floor, thanks to an open roll-up door. When she’d reconnoitered earlier, she’d gauged the back of the shop to be secure enough that she didn’t have to worry about explosives being tossed inside.

  Mike flung a shiny socket that probably cost a couple hundred bucks into the drawer, where it bounced and tinged off other sockets.

  “Can’t they search a place without destroying it?” he asked, his Southern drawl much more pronounced than Blain’s. “I swear they dusted everything in this place for prints.”

  They probably had. “They were looking for evidence,” Cece said. The room was huge, bigger than the average home, with light blue walls and spotless red toolboxes around the perimeter. Numerous race cars were lined up near the toolboxes. On the shorter walls were doors that led to different departments: engine, fabrication, dyno room. She could hear a motor being tested now, despite the fact that the walls were supposed to be soundproof.

  “Well, what the hell am I supposed to use to clean this stuff off?” he asked. He held up a hand black with powder.

  “Hand lotion will get rid of it.” He didn’t look pleased to have to use anything to take the stuff off. “I’m sorry, Mike, but it had to be done. We’re running pretty low on clues.”

  The crew chief looked away, but not before she saw his resigned expression. “You guys have any idea who’s doing this?”

  “Can’t say,” she replied.

  He nodded and picked up another socket, wiping it down before snapping it into place next to a slightly smaller version, and for a second Cece thought about how many people this thing had affected. These men might be forced to find new jobs if the Charlotte office couldn’t break the case in a reasonable amount of time. Hell, the whole sport might suffer with tighter security, no more pit passes, no more autograph sessions, no more shaking drivers’ hands. She could only guess at the kind of security measures that would be put into place this weekend. If they even held the race, which was all the more reason why she should work the case on her own, something she intended to do, starting now.

  “Hey, I need to speak with whomever the Charlotte office planted undercover.”

  He looked up at that. “You don’t know?”

  She frowned in frustration. “I haven’t been told bubkus.”

  Mike’s eyes widened.

  “That’s the reason I can’t tell you anything, not because I don’t want to.” Not precisely true, but she needed to treat him like a suspect. “I think it’s because I’m an outsider. Stupid. So I’m going to take matters into my own hands, starting with a little chat with whoever’s working the case here. Hopefully, they can tell me something.”

  Mike nodded, and for the first time he smiled. “Nothing wrong with that.” He pointed with a ratchet toward a doorway. “They’ve planted a couple of people. One of them’s in the dyno room.”

  “Thanks,” Cece said, heading off in that direction.

  “He should be out here helping us clean up,” he called after her.

  She couldn’t help but smile. “I’ll tell him that.”

  If Mike said anything else, Cece didn’t hear him, because the moment she opened the dyno room door she wished she had a set of earplugs. Good Lord, she couldn’t believe how loud it was. Even with the engine being tested behind a thick wall of what she assumed was soundproof glass, it sounded like the inside of a tornado, not that she’d ever been inside one of those.

  Two heads turned to her when she entered, one of them Agent Thurman.

  “Hey,” she said in surprise. “I thought you were doing surveillance.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “When I could be undercover at the corporate headquarters of Sanders Racing?”

  Cece shook her head. The other guy looked back at the controls of the dynometer, the sound of the engine abruptly lowering after he dialed one of the knobs.

  “I see your point,” she said, noting that the guy at the controls looked more like a computer geek than a motorhead, with his skinny face and wire-rimme
d glasses.

  “Can I talk to you?” Cece asked Agent Thurman.

  When they were outside the room, she couldn’t resist saying, “I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

  “Can you believe it?” Thurman said. “That engine might be used at Daytona.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, neat. Cece wasn’t exactly in a rah-rah racing mood today. “Listen,” she said. “I need to know what’s going on with the investigation.”

  Apparently, Agent Thurman hadn’t been told not to talk to her because he said, “We found a few things yesterday that look promising.”

  “Like what?”

  “A few fingerprints that don’t match our list of latents. A broom handle that looks like it was used to push the load into place.”

  In other words, not much.

  “But our biggest break was a former employee with a criminal record who was fired two months back.”

  Cece perked up.

  “Apparently, he went ballistic when he was let go.”

  Definitely good news.

  “They took him into custody early this morning.”

  Cece turned on her heel.

  “Where you going?” Agent Thurman asked.

  “Out,” she answered.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE but a few minutes to find out who the suspect was—thanks to the steely-eyed Linda, who looked only too happy to give her the address if it meant Cece would leave. A stop at a vacant computer terminal and she had driving directions. When she told Blain she was leaving, he didn’t even ask what she needed his car for, probably because he was too busy meeting with his general manager, and it didn’t look pretty. In fact, the place was as grim as a dentist’s office, not surprising given what was going on.

  And so Cece found herself on her way to the Charlotte Bureau’s number one suspect’s home—or apartment, as the case may be. She called her real boss on the way, but Bob wasn’t in and so she left a message telling him what she was up to. To hell with Agent Ashton. She reported to Bob, and she’d do exactly that.

  Beep. “Five Bravo Five, where are you going?” The voice rang in her ear as she started the car.

  “Just a little errand, boys,” she said cheerfully.

  “You’re not authorized to leave—”

  She shut off her radio. They were just going to tell her she couldn’t go. To hell with them. Maybe they’d follow her, maybe they wouldn’t. Chances were they’d stay with Blain, since they’d figure she didn’t need protecting, and by gum, she didn’t.

  It didn’t take her long to get to one Brian Johnson’s two-story apartment complex. It was the kind of complex frequently featured in Cops, one with a flimsy wrought-iron rail across the top landing and parking spots in front. She pulled in, and when she got out, a glance to the left and right revealed no feds parked nearby. Gone. Humph.

  The door to the suspect’s apartment was closed, but it took her less than a second to jimmy the lock.

  “Jeez-oh-peets,” she said, staring around at the dim interior. The place was messier than her own apartment, which was saying a lot. Mr. Johnson appeared to be something of a slob, because it hadn’t been her fellow agents who left the place like this. Tossing a suspect’s home only happened on TV.

  She closed the door behind her. To be honest, Cece didn’t know what she expected to find. Any evidence would have already been taken away. But there was always the slim chance the Charlotte Bureau might have missed something. Hell, in the movies they always missed something. But, Cece reminded herself, real FBI life rarely worked that way. Like she really had a chance of finding a race car schematic with a giant X circled where a bomb should go.

  So she didn’t hold out much hope of spotting anything. But she did hope to get a feel for the person they had in custody, maybe get a sense of whether he was good or bad. There were ways to do that. A look at the kind of stuff the person read—Guns & Ammo or People? Guns & Ammo, she noticed, along with race magazines, a couple of them dog-eared. She turned the pages to see a picture of Blain and his team in the winner’s circle, with Randy Newell grinning from ear to ear.

  To her surprise, she felt a brief stab of sadness. Such a talented driver to have been snuffed out.

  Was she standing in the killer’s home?

  She put the magazine down, absorbing the place. There were no photographs. Another telling clue. Loner. Fit the profile.

  All firearms would have been taken away, but she looked for a gun safe. There wasn’t one, but that didn’t mean a pistol couldn’t have been hidden beneath his mattress.

  Not only had the place been dusted for prints, swabs had been done, too—likely looking for signs of nitrates. Nothing appeared to have come back positive. Interesting.

  Further poking around revealed little else. Frankly, she didn’t know much more than before, except the suspect appeared to fit the profile of a killer, but that didn’t mean much. A few combat magazines and a pink slip did not a killer make.

  Sighing, she let herself out. Damn. At this rate she’d be better off buying a game of Clue.

  “Colonel Mustard in the library,” she muttered to herself.

  The apartment was on the second floor, and so she had a good view of the space where Blain’s fancy import was parked. No sign of her fellow agents. Not surprising. Their primary focus was Blain, not her. And so she was careful as she headed toward her car, her hand poised over the pistol she carried beneath her jacket, her heels clicking down concrete steps to the street.

  The pistol turned out to be useless, because things happened so fast Cece didn’t have time to react. A car made a sudden, screeching halt at the back of Blain’s vehicle just as she took the last step. She pulled her weapon, but it wasn’t exactly FBI policy to shoot at reckless drivers, and—damn it—she couldn’t see through the car’s tinted windows.

  One window rolled partway down.

  Cece removed the safety.

  Something flew out of the car.

  Bad guy.

  “Damn it!” she yelled in outrage, squeezing the trigger at the same time she dove to the ground.

  If felt like a giant stomped on the earth. Cece landed hard. A thousand earthquakes, a hundred rock concerts, a million degrees of heat.

  And then silence.

  But only for a second. Then the din of car alarms, someone screaming—

  The screamer was her. She howled in outrage as she came to her knees, looking for her weapon, diving for it, but when she came up, it was too late.

  Gone.

  The perp was gone.

  She pushed to her feet, ran a few steps. No use.

  And then she saw Blain’s car, or what was left of it. The shiny new import was nothing more than a burning hulk, the cars on either side of it partially decimated, too.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Frustration made her want to toss her weapon to the ground. Instead she took a deep breath, her knees aching where they’d hit the pavement, and reached for her phone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT REALLY RANKLED to be brought home by Agent Ashton. Cece felt like a teenager who’d been caught drinking on prom night. It didn’t help that the man was thoroughly, completely pissed. They’d had words. There’d been the mention of writing her up. She had a feeling the only thing that stopped him was his need for bait, otherwise she’d have been sent packing.

  “Disobey me again, Agent Blackwell, and I’ll have you suspended.”

  The words had been dropped into the dense silence that had filled the car. Cece wanted to tell him to go ahead and suspend her. But she was in the wrong. She’d almost gotten killed today. If she’d been in that car…

  But she hadn’t been, even though the killer had obviously thought Blain was. And if either of them had, all that’d be left of them now would be atoms floating in the atmosphere. The realization that someone might have killed Blain today twisted her insides into knots.

  “I understand,” she said, doing her best to stay calm.

  Age
nt Ashton’s watery blue eyes held her own for a second, his age-spotted hands clenching the steering wheel in such a way as to let Cece know that he was envisioning her neck.

  “Go,” he said.

  She went, opening the car door so quickly, her hand slid off the handle so that it snapped back and pinched her skin. Damn. That hurt. No, damn the whole day. Damn the whole week. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The bad guys weren’t supposed to get one off on her. She should have been more alert. And dammit, she shouldn’t have left Blain’s side.

  Cece walked up the brick path to Blain’s front door, wondering how many agents were watching her, and what they were thinking. Probably that she’d blown it. And that she couldn’t apprehend a suspect to save her life.

  Damn it.

  She opened the door.

  Blain stood in the hallway.

  A very unhappy Blain.

  A very angry Blain.

  Oh, crap, just what she needed.

  “Tough day at the office?” he asked in a calm and level voice.

  It was so completely the opposite of the tirade she’d been expecting that she found herself nodding.

  He opened his arms.

  Cece went still. No, that wasn’t true. Her mind spun in a million different directions, only to settle on one thought; she, Agent Cecilia Blackwell, was feeling really, really sorry for herself.

  “Come here,” he said gently.

  And from nowhere came the urge to cry. It was totally ridiculous, that urge. Why the heck did she want to start bawling? She was a tough-as-nails FBI agent, one who’d worked her way up to the top of her class, who—until this case—had proven herself over and over again to her fellow agents.

  She went into his arms, her eyes stinging by the time she got there. And the man she wanted to forget, the dratted man she’d spent a decade despising, just folded her up in his embrace. It felt good to have that sheltering security. Felt good to have someone to lean on.

  He shook.

  Cece could feel the tremors rack his body. She pulled back.

  The worry she saw in his eyes took her breath away. Yes, he was livid. She could see that. But he was also very, very scared.