“So,” Daniels said as he finished eating, “this guy knew about the O.E.P., he knew Leanne had an implant, he knew about the tunnel, and he knew how to get in and out of it without being seen.”
They fell silent, digesting all that. It had seemed clear from the beginning that they were dealing not with a random terrorist, but with somebody who’d specifically gone after Leanne Carr.
This new information took things a step further.
This didn’t sound like someone who’d followed her, found out where she worked and figured out a way to get her there to kill her. For the perp to know this much detail, have such insider knowledge, he had to be someone who was very familiar with the site. Familiar enough to know about a tunnel so secret that even the president of the United States hadn’t known of its existence.
“So who knew all those things?” she murmured. “And of the people who did, who would want Leanne Car dead?”
“I’ll have a list by tomorrow.”
“Excellent.”
She hoped it was a short one. A very short one. Already, she populated it with an obvious name—Jack Williams. She made a mental note to check on where Leanne’s boss had been the other day during the time of her attack, and the next night, when Brian Underwood was murdered in Philadelphia. She also resolved to make a few phone calls and find out what she could about Kilgore. He was Secret Service and had a high level security clearance, but he was also an asshole. Assholes didn’t necessarily equal murderers, but her instinctive dislike and distrust of the man made her want to know at least a little more about him.
She had no idea whether Bailey or Johansen knew. It seemed doubtful, but if they’d been working on the site for months, it was at least possible. And certainly the lead architect and his key people would be aware, as well as the construction workers who’d rebuilt it.
Shit. Maybe the list wouldn’t be that short.
“Now, tell me what else you found out from your eye-spy routine today,” he said. Then he tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck, and pulled off his uniform jacket. “Wait, never mind. First, I gotta take a leak.”
He had been here a few times and knew where the bathroom was, so he didn’t wait for her to give him permission. He merely left the kitchen, walking through the dining area into the living room. And there, apparently, he stopped.
She heard his low whistle, and wondered what had caught his attention.
“Holy shit, Ron, if I’d known you were having a porn party, I woulda brought my collection of Big Tits In Tube Tops blue-rays.”
Confused, she walked out to join him and realized he was looking at the oversized computer monitor sitting on the living room table. She’d been watching Leanne’s backups when he’d knocked, and had been so startled she hadn’t even paused the slideshow. During the last several minutes while they’d talked, Leanne’s memories had continued to play out on the screen.
And oh, God, were they hot.
“That’s our victim,” she whispered, seeing Leanne’s peach-tinted fingernails scraping the bare chest of a naked man, whom she was studying with obvious lust and desire. She was in no way paying attention to his face, instead focused entirely from the neck down. As they watched, she tangled her fingers in his wiry hair and moved down to lick his nipples, kissing her way down his midriff, his abs…lower.
“Whoa,” Daniels barked when it became pretty obvious they were about to see a birds-eye view of a guy getting blown.
Ronnie hurried over to the couch, grabbed her hand-held and paused the show. Seeing where the picture had stopped, she rethought that strategy—hmm, not circumcised—and stopped the thing altogether.
“So, should I pop the popcorn?” Mark asked.
“I was just about to,” she admitted. “But I think I’ve lost my appetite.”
Many parts of this job pressed her squick button. Seeing a woman having hot sex up against a wall in a dimly-lit room within a few days of her brutal murder smashed that sucker flat.
“It’s pretty nasty, partner, but we need to find out who Mr. Big Dick is,” Daniels murmured, knowing her well enough to know she dreaded going back and watching the whole scene.
But he was right, they did need to find out, and they wouldn’t be able to i.d. him by the erect penis they’d both so unfortunately gotten to see, up-close and personal.
“I know.” She threw herself back on the couch, feeling her headache start to come back.
“Want me to watch it for you?” he asked, his tone not holding the slightest hint of salaciousness. He wasn’t offering because he wanted to get any kind of voyeuristic thrill, he was doing it because he knew she didn’t want to.
“No, I need to do it,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But thanks.”
As uncomfortable as it might be to watch something like this in front of someone else, she knew Daniels would provide a great backup set of eyes and a needed second perspective. Besides, watching it tonight, with him, seemed less troubling than the possibility of sitting through it tomorrow, with Sykes. That she couldn’t even stand to think about.
“Can you stay and help me slog through it? I’ve got a week’s worth of images here and I guess I should find out not only who this guy is but just how often this kind of thing was going on.”
“You sure?” he asked, his tone a little gruff, like he was suddenly embarrassed by the idea.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay. Give me a minute,” he said, heading toward the bathroom like he came here every day of the week.
Funny how comfortable he was—how comfortable they were around each other. Maybe that’s why she didn’t feel any sexual vibe between them, the way he apparently still did. He was just Daniels—eating like a slob, bitching about needing a beer, stopping to take a piss. Just her partner. Not somebody she thought about in a sexual way.
Even so, sitting here with him, watching somebody else have sex, was going to be anything but fun. Yet it had to be done. Though she knew she couldn’t have a drink after the recent head injury, she strongly wished she could go to the pantry, pull out a bottle of scotch and take a shot.
“Okay,” Daniels said as he returned and plopped down on the couch beside her. He had pulled a note pad out of his pocket and flipped it open. “In case I need to make an emergency sketch of that guy’s cock and balls.”
She snickered in spite of herself. “You jackass.” Then her laughter faded and she cued up the files. She’d scrolled back to what looked like an image of Leanne walking down a lit corridor, fully clothed, and re-started the program there.
“Hey, that’s the White House!” Daniels said, leaning forward and dropping his elbows onto his knees.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed, recognizing the hallway dissecting the main floor.
Leanne was alone, glancing down at a file folder tucked into her arm, jotting a note on the exterior of it with a pencil.
Suddenly, the image went dark. But not because the lights had gone off—she could actually see tiny slits of brightness shining between…
“Are those somebody’s fingers?” Daniels asked.
“I think so,” she said, putting the image together in her mind. Somebody had clapped their hands over Leanne’s eyes. She didn’t appear to struggle—her own hands didn’t come up and pull at the ones blocking her vision. Had her lover grabbed her for a quick assignation? The timing certainly fit—they were only a couple of minutes away from the blow-job scene.
The hands over the eyes moved away and Leanne was again looking down the hallway. She was also moving again, but the perspective was odd. Things in front of her were getting smaller—farther away—rather than bigger and closer.
“She’s walking backward,” Daniels said.
“Yes. Like she’s being tugged away by the guy who grabbed her.”
Tugged away playfully, sexually…by someone who’d played these games with her before.
Perhaps he had his arm around her waist and was whispering in her ear. They had no way of
knowing. She only knew that Leanne didn’t seem to be at all worried or trying to get away. She was voluntarily taking those steps.
Suddenly Leanne begins to move her head, so she can look down. A man’s hand is visible on her breast. An arm is looped around her waist. Still no struggle going on. She’s liking this, letting it happen. The hand is cupping her, claiming her, pinching her nipple through her thin blouse.
“Wait, stop!” Daniels snapped.
Ronnie did so, immediately.
“Back up a couple of frames.”
She again did as he asked, not sure what had caught his attention. She stared at the screen intently, going back frame by frame, watching Leanne’s head move back up in tiny jerks. She saw the same deserted hallway, the plain-tiled floor, the bare white walls that would one day be elegantly decorated and trimmed with elaborate paintings and artwork.
And then she saw something else.
“Who’s that?” she whispered, realizing this was what must have drawn Mark’s keen eye. She had obviously blinked because the image was well in the background and didn’t appear for long.
“I don’t know,” he replied, moving close to the monitor so he could study the man, who was visible in the shadow of a nearly closed doorway up the hall. He was facing the camera—facing Leanne and her mystery man—but Ronnie didn’t think they’d even noticed him. He appeared in a couple of frames—there for two or three seconds and then gone. In those seconds, his shadowy, indistinct image had been caught by the O.E.P. device, but not seen by the people upon whom he was spying.
Interesting.
She moved forward again, to the frames immediately after he’d disappeared inside that room, and noticed the door had been left open a few inches.
“He’s still there spying,” Daniels said, “you can’t see him but you can practically feel him.”
“Definitely.”
But who? What kind of person would see two people behaving in an extremely inappropriate manner—in the frigging White House—and, instead of confronting them about their behavior, would merely step back and spy on them?
Creepy to the nth degree.
“Can you keep going backward, so we can maybe see the name or room number on that door?”
She did so, sending Leanne back in time, and further up the hallway, to the moment right before her mystery man had put his hands over her eyes. Their victim never got close enough to the door in question for them to read any identifying signs, but it didn’t matter. Ronnie suddenly realized right where it was. She and Daniels had been in it two days ago.
“That door leads into the operations office where we held our meeting,” she said, knowing she was right. “I remember it being the last door before that alcove you can see a little further down the hall.”
“You’re right.” Daniels crossed his arms over his chest. “Lots of people in and out of that office every day, I would assume.”
“Hey, you know what they say about the word assume making an ass out of you and me,” she mused, remembering everything she’d learned the other day. “From what I can recall, it sounded like SAIC Kilgore had pretty well claimed that room for his own office. I don’t think he liked being out in his trailer, he wanted to be able to tell people he had an office in the White House.”
“So, the head of the on-site Secret Service unit is a Peeping Tom?”
“I don’t think that bothers me as much as the fact that he didn’t put a stop to something that was so inappropriate,” she said.
“Not to mention he didn’t tell us one damn thing about this incident. There’s no way he wouldn’t remember, this was only, what, a week ago this past Tuesday?”
She checked the timestamp on the file. “Yes.” Just seven days before Leanne’s death. So why hadn’t Kilgore said anything?
“What kind of law enforcement officer doesn’t mention that a murder victim was having a secret affair with someone on the job?”
“A shitty one,” she replied. “Or one who didn’t want to mention it because it might reveal some secret of his own.”
“Like?”
“I dunno. Maybe he did something about that knowledge. Maybe he used it to try to put the moves on Leanne?”
“Ick.”
God, did she hope Leanne hadn’t kept Kilgore quiet by giving him some of what she’d given to the mysterious man from the closet. That was one sex scene she definitely didn’t want to sit through. “I guess it’s possible it wasn’t Kilgore,” she admitted, “but I’m definitely going to have to ask him about it.”
“Oh, goody. He liked you, I could tell.”
She snorted. “Okay, you ask him about it.”
“I can hardly wait.” He kicked his long legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. “I think we can get back to our porn star wannabe now.”
She noted the time and the image number. Then, keeping the speed slow, she started the slideshow again. They watched the hands covering Leanne’s eyes, watched the backwards steps.
Suddenly, they’re back into a cluttered storage room. Leanne is pushing the door shut. She twists the lock on the knob—there was no coercion here. Her hand rises and she flips off the light switch. Darkness. She turns around to face a shadowy man-shape who is utterly undistinguishable.
“Damn it,” Ronnie whispered.
“Chill. It gets brighter, you know it does.
Yes, she knew…she’d gotten a much better look at this stranger’s junk than she’d ever want to. She only hoped the lighting improved before things progressed to the drop-to-your-knees stage. She’d really prefer to see his face and identify the man before she had to take another gander at his genitals.
The couple on the screen shifts. Leanne turns, walking deeper into the room, close to an uncurtained window. She glances back, looking at her own hand, which is twined with a masculine one. She tugs him with her, away from the door, into a private corner of the small room, pushing some boxes out of the way.
The window is now easily visible. It is night out. Why is she working so late? But there is light coming from somewhere—enough of it to brighten the corner of the room. Perhaps construction lighting, used to aid night-shift workers on this project, which had been worked 24/7 in recent days?
Leanne reaches the back corner. Stops. Turns around and stares at the shadowy man moving toward her. She’s looking at his body, staring with lustful intent at the tented crotch of his pants. She watches him move his hands to the top of his shirt and begin to slide the buttons free.
He comes closer. She lifts her hands to help him. Her pale fingers are stark against the…the…green shirt. It’s a green shirt. A dark green shirt.
Recognition began to tingle in the back of Ronnie’s mind. Her suspicion grows, though she has trouble believing it at first.
The shirt is undone, tugged up out of the pants. Leanne moves in to kiss his throat, her focus on the cords of muscle in his neck. Then on his jaw—smooth, hairless. Then his cheek—youthful looking. Then his nose—straight, small.
Then his lips, parted for a kiss.
The couple looks at one another and he shifts a little, as if wanting to better see her face. In that moment, he moves right into the light coming from the window, which shines like a spotlight on his features.
Ronnie’s suspicions are confirmed; she knows him immediately. But the shock makes it hard to believe for a second.
“Him?” Daniels barked in disbelief. “That was the dude she was going down on? That punk’s hung like a race-horse?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, not as stunned that Leanne had chosen this particular man for her lover, or even as surprised as Daniels was by the man’s endowment. Frankly, she found it far more shocking to think about how he had behaved on Wednesday.
How could he have stood there, in clear sight of his lover’s mangled remains, giving Ronnie her first run-down of the crime scene they’d been called out to investigate?
Because their victim’s mystery lover was the man who’d led Ronnie
to Leanne Carr’s torture chamber. It was Secret Service Special Agent Bailey.
Chapter 13
As Dr. Eileen Cavanaugh had predicted, Ronnie woke up the next morning feeling a lot better. She wouldn’t describe herself as completely back to normal, but her headache had finally gone away and she was no longer woozy or off-balance. The staples in her scalp were the tiniest bit itchy, which she took as a good sign.
Quickly showering, she got dressed for work and headed into the kitchen. Rather than grabbing a quick bite and heading right out the door, as she would on most Fridays, she made herself a big breakfast. She was starving, having eaten next to nothing in the hospital and only grabbing a frozen dinner last night. So she scrambled some eggs, fried some bacon, made fresh coffee and squeezed orange juice.
She made enough for two. Not because she had company—Daniels certainly hadn’t spent the night. He’d left at around one a.m., after they’d gone through more of Leanne’s data dump, in which they’d found another X-rated encounter between the murder victim and Agent Bailey.
No, it wasn’t him she expected to share her breakfast with. She had already told Daniels she’d be in a little late, and glanced at the clock while she ate, waiting for the pounding that would almost certainly be sounding on her door at any time.
It came at 7:50.
“Girl, I know you’re in there, open up and let me see how bad it is.”
Biting her lip, knowing Max was going to lose his shit when he saw her, she went to the door and opened it. “Good morning.”
“Ack!”
He burst in, a flurry of hands and motion, immediately pushing her into a kitchen chair so he could examine the damage.
Max, who was utterly gorgeous, charming, had great taste and worked as a hair-dresser, should, by all rights, be gay. Instead, he was the most hetero guy she knew. He was worse than Daniels when it came to women and his apartment door should revolve for ease of entrance and exit. His picture could be posted online to illustrate the term man-whore, and he loved to chortle about his sexual exploits whenever they had a movie night or got together to have a few beers.
Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) Page 20
