by CJ Lyons
Like the image of Prescott’s bloody face that kept inserting itself into her vision.
Alone in pitch black more immense than anything she’d experienced in her life, she’d wanted to cry, to scream, even run to the man with the scar if he’d save her from the darkness and the dangers hiding in it. Yet she continued on, moving forward toward the river.
Something scurried across her foot and she jumped, shaking her leg into the air, flinging it away. A snake? No, too small. But there were snakes here—deadly ones. The next step she took could be fatal.
Or she could stand here cowering and let the jaguars find her. As it was, she was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
Frozen with fear, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the map in her head. She couldn’t be far from the river. Its headwaters were on the mountain, near the temple she’d discovered. From there it flowed to Lake Invierno, where, according the map, there was some kind of hospital or clinic. Only a few miles as the crow flew, but the way the river meandered, it would be six or seven miles across country.
But a hospital meant help, a phone, maybe even a security team who could rescue the professor and his people. So that’s where she was headed.
That was the plan. All she had to do was find the river. Then she could save herself and the professor’s team. Even if she was too late to help Prescott.
Keep calm and carry on, she imagined the professor’s voice—really Sean Connery’s voice, as she’d never actually spoken to the professor—in her mind. All her life she’d dreamed of having adventures, becoming a real-life Indiana Jones. Surely she could survive one night in the wild?
She opened her eyes. Stared into the night. Shapes of tree limbs and vines and leaves slowly took form, gathered from the black-on-black shadows. Better yet, beneath the chirps and squawks and rustling noises of the jungle, was the low-pitched rush of water. The river was close.
Using her walking stick like a blind person—a twist of the ankle and she could be stranded here in the jungle, left to rot and die—she stumbled across the treacherous terrain.
The sound of the water grew louder. Almost there, almost there.
CHAPTER FIVE
A piano riff jangled through the night. Both Caitlyn and Carver jerked awake, backs to each other as they sat up in bed. She held her Glock on the front door and window while he covered the shadows that crowded the rest of the room, including the connecting door to the room beside them.
The jazz notes sounded again. “Phone.” She exchanged her Glock for the cell.
He remained at full alert, tension vibrating through his muscles, arm held straight, his weapon an extension of his body. She ignored the phone even though the number on the screen belonged to her boss, and took a moment to press her body against his, stroke her hand down his taut muscles, coming to rest on his gun hand. Carver allowed her to take his semiautomatic from his now trembling grip.
His gaze darted from one shadow to the next. Then he met her eyes. He hauled in a breath, swallowed twice, hard, jerked his chin in a nod to let her know he was back, safe again in the here and now. She gave him a quiet smile: been there, done that, had the scars to prove it.
Her phone rang again. This time she answered it.
“Tierney.”
“It’s Yates.” The Assistant Director had set up her new position as Local Law Enforcement Liaison and she now reported directly to him. “I need you to head out to Miami. Have you booked on an eight A.M. flight from BWI.”
She sat up straight. The AD never played travel agent. Certainly not in the middle of the night. “What’s up?”
“Cruise ship crime. I’ll e-mail you the details.”
Crimes involving U.S. citizens on cruise ships fell under FBI jurisdiction, but no one liked them. By the time the FBI had a chance to begin its investigation, there were always delays in reporting, crime scenes contaminated, witnesses scattered. She’d read about one case where a girl had gone missing and the cruise line never notified anyone, simply gave her luggage and belongings to Goodwill when they docked and forgot all about her. Poor parents finally found out weeks later when she didn’t come home from her dream vacation. Never did learn what happened to her.
“Wouldn’t a cruise ship fall under the Miami office’s purview?” Her deal with Yates was that she got to choose her own cases—no way in hell would she ever pick a cruise ship crime.
“Parents happen to be close personal acquaintances of the Director. Not to mention the Attorney General, Vice President, and several prominent party leaders.” His tone made it clear that he didn’t like this any more than she did. “Given your repeated forays into the public spotlight—”
“I never asked for—”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re the FBI’s bright and shining star and now you have to pay the price and make us look good. Damn good.” A hint of warning undercut his last words.
No sense arguing. She hung up and threw the phone back onto the nightstand.
“What time’s your flight?” Carver asked, glancing past her to the bedside clock.
“We have time,” she assured him. She ran her fingers down his breastbone, slowly, teasing. But her mind jumped back to ten minutes ago when the phone rang and they’d both jerked awake.
Even coming out of a deep sleep, body charged by adrenaline and the hypervigilant reflexes that had kept him alive every day while undercover, Jake hadn’t looked to the front of the room, the most likely direction to invite danger.
He’d trusted Caitlyn with his life. As a partner, someone whose skills he respected, he relied on her to protect them both.
Caitlyn’s cheeks suddenly felt cold and she couldn’t meet his eyes. She covered by nuzzling his neck, avoiding the Reaper tattoo that ran up beneath his hairline. She was used to holding strangers’ lives in her hands—not someone she cared about.
He cupped her chin in his palm and raised her face. His lips found hers. She forced herself to stop thinking. Always thinking too damn much.
*
They stopped for breakfast at a diner off the interstate. From here Caitlyn would head south to the airport and Carver would continue to her apartment in Manassas. A fact he didn’t seem too happy about.
“Weather’s supposed to be great all week,” he said, shuffling and reshuffling his pancakes as he smothered them with apple butter instead of syrup. “Be a nice ride down to Miami.”
“Yeah, and all of it through Reaper territory,” she reminded him. “Not to mention the U.S. Attorney would probably slap you behind bars as a material witness just to protect your sweet ass.”
“Protect his case is more like it.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s such a game with those guys. I can’t stand sitting there listening to them argue and dissect every decision I made, talking about whether or not it will play well in front of a jury. Like this is a sitcom and me risking my life just isn’t funny enough to grab the ratings.”
She wished there were something she could do to help. But big cases like this one meant a long time before justice was served. The whole thing could drag out for years. With his life and career left in limbo. “How about I call LaSovage? You could help him out with tactical training, still be close enough to D.C. to run up if the AUSA needs you.”
He brightened at that. LaSovage was a member of the Hostage Rescue Team stationed at the FBI Academy at Quantico. He was always looking for people with street smarts to work with the new agents in training. “Thanks, that’d be great.”
They dug in to their food, both in no rush to leave despite the clock ticking away the minutes until Caitlyn’s flight.
“That guy yesterday,” he said.
“Schultz?”
“Yeah. I saw the video of the takedown. Saw how he left his kid there, hung out to dry. What would you have done if she hadn’t listened to you? Would you have shot her?”
Every rule of law enforcement said yes. Noncompliant subject with lethal intent and a weapon, officer safety came first. If it were anyo
ne else, that’s exactly what she would have said, would have quoted procedure verbatim. But this was Carver and she wanted to always tell him the truth.
“No.”
He nodded as if expecting as much. “You saw yourself in her. Defending a parent.”
“Being betrayed by one’s more like it. You know what Schultz told us when the sheriff asked him about why he ran and left her? Said it was her own damn fault for not shooting us like he’d taught her to. If she had, he would have had time to get away clean. Can you believe that? Didn’t care if we shot her or if she shot us.”
“What did you expect? The guy’s obviously a sociopath.”
“Why are you so obsessed with Schultz?” Then it hit her. “This isn’t about him. It’s about my mother.” Another sociopath—a fact she herself didn’t recognize until two months ago. Talk about blind spots.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I’ve been debating whether or not to give this to you. It came while you were gone.”
The address was a prestigious criminal law firm in Asheville, North Carolina. She was tempted to throw it away unopened, just as she had her mother’s numerous letters written to her from jail. Funny, her mother had never written her a letter in her entire life—not until she was locked up behind bars for murder. Now she seemed to have all the time in the world to reach out to her daughter.
Caitlyn opened the letter, conscious of Carver watching her. She unfolded the stationery with the fancy letterhead designed to impress and intimidate. The words that followed were chosen for the same impact. As she read them, she heard her mother’s voice instead of some anonymous lawyer’s.
“They’re informing me that they’ll be subpoenaing all of my medical records for the preliminary hearing.” Threatening her was more like it.
Carver got it right away—sometimes it freaked her, the way he could tune in on her thoughts and feelings. “That guy you dumped, the doctor, they want him.”
“Why? Paul was a radiologist, never involved in my case after he made the diagnosis.” And saved her life by finding the brain aneurysm that was close to rupturing. The one good thing to come from her encounter with a psychopath who had almost killed her.
“No, but he was involved with you.” Carver frowned at the remnants of his breakfast. “He told me he didn’t think you should be working, carrying a weapon. Said you’d somehow fooled the FBI doctors into letting you back on the job after your brain surgery.”
Her job was the thorn in her relationship with Paul and one of the reasons why she’d left him. Then she realized what her mother was after. “They want to discredit me as a witness—”
“As the prosecution’s only witness.” His frown deepened and he surprised her by reaching across the table to place his hand over hers. “If they destroy your credibility, implying your brain surgery made you unstable—”
“She could get away with murder.” A cold-blooded, premeditated murder. The idea sparked through her veins with fury. Mother or not, she wasn’t going to let someone commit murder right before her eyes and walk away. She couldn’t—it was what made her different from her mother. Caitlyn believed in justice. If she lost that, she would lose everything.
Then Carver took the scenario to its logical conclusion. “I don’t care about your mother. Caitlyn, you could lose your career. You’d never be able to work again with something like that on your record.”
CHAPTER SIX
Jake regretted his words as soon as he spoke. Caitlyn was headed out on a case; she didn’t need her focus divided between the job and this shit her mother was dumping on her.
They made a hasty good-bye in the diner’s parking lot and sped off in opposite directions. He fought the urge to turn the bike around and go after her. But she’d hate that, hate him for assuming she needed him, needed anyone.
Never should have brought her the letter, he thought as he steered the Harley through the predawn gloom. Should have just left it at home for her to deal with when she got back. Or better yet, he could have opened it and found a way to deal with the scumbag lawyers and Caitlyn’s bitch of a mother himself, saved Caitlyn the worry. But he’d wanted to remind Caitlyn there were no secrets between them—and that he wanted it to stay that way.
They both had issues with trust. He understood that. Hell, she was the first person he’d told his real name to in a year and a half. He was the only one who knew everything that had happened in January when she went home to visit her family. They were both vulnerable and skittish about how much they shared with the rest of the world.
He wanted her to know that her life, her secrets, they were safe with him. Didn’t matter if this thing between them, sweet as it was, didn’t last—
The thought brought with it a burning that reached up from his gut through his chest like bad Chinese food cooked by Mexicans and served in a Jewish deli. Heartburn.
The damn Employee Assistance shrink the FBI had ordered him to see was right. She’d said that after long-term undercover operations, agents responded in one of two ways: They either holed up, digging into a psychological bunker, shutting out the rest of the world. Or they found someone they could form an attachment to, use as a lifeline to guide them back to their life.
When he was a kid on the farm, he’d seen a chick do that. Thought the beagle was its damn mother. It was funny then, watching that fuzzy little bird follow the beagle all over the yard. Not so much now. He was no innocent chick and Caitlyn was definitely no damn beagle.
She was everything he wasn’t right now, everything he needed: brave and bold and fierce and passionate and smart and kind and fearless.… At first he’d been worried about putting her in danger by staying close to her. But she’d pointed out that the Reapers had as much reason to want her dead as they did him. So then he’d told himself he was protecting her by being with her.
But he knew in his heart, it was the other way around. He felt like he could breathe when he was with her. The rest of the time he just went through the motions: repeating his story for the record over and over and over again, jousting with lawyers and the brass who picked apart each of his actions and decisions, all the while knowing that a case like this could drag on two, three years and when it was all done, he’d be done. No more undercover work, no more career, no more … anything.
Caitlyn kept him from looking into the dark clouds of his future. Kept him anchored in the here and now.
She’d left twenty-three minutes ago and he already missed her.
*
Caitlyn used her time waiting at the terminal and then on the flight getting caught up with her other cases and gathering background on her new one. When her boss created this position, he’d warned her that a lot of her job would be triage: learning to say no to cases she didn’t have the resources to help close. Especially as the entire Local Law Enforcement Liaison Office consisted of her and a shared administrative assistant who handled her paperwork and phone calls. No budget other than what Yates approved on a case-by-case basis—not until she proved her worth.
Still, she insisted on reviewing every case before saying no. Wrote up a letter to the originating agency providing suggestions of new investigative avenues they could pursue. Ended each with an offer to stay in touch.
After two months on the job, she was juggling seventeen active cases—mostly cases she was working long-distance, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. She’d already helped close nine: three with boots on the ground and the others via phone and Skype—and had three dozen to finish reviewing with more arriving in her in-box every day as word spread.
Time spent on a plane was time spent incommunicado, away from her cell phone, giving her the chance to catch up. Yates, her boss, was pleased with her progress and so was she. She loved the work. Yet when she left the office every night and realized there would be even more pleas for help waiting for her when she returned in the morning, it was exhausting.
Carver helped. He reviewed cases with her—his accountant�
�s eye for detail was a huge asset, finding things she overlooked at first glance. He seemed to enjoy it as well. She knew he was bored to tears, shuttling between the AUSA’s office and the FBI’s Washington Field Office for debriefings and spending the rest of his time trapped in her one-bedroom apartment. A man like him, forced to hide out like that—it was worse than a prison sentence.
She was mostly to blame for the danger he was in. Usually undercover operatives weren’t present for the takedown and arrest. If things went right, they were far away from the final action, their real identities protected.
Things hadn’t gone right in North Carolina. There’d been no time to call anyone else, so Carver had been the one to arrest the Reapers’ leaders. Before they could kill Caitlyn. Or she them. She really hadn’t been in the mood to kill anyone that morning, so she owed Carver for that. Big-time.
More than owed him. She liked having him around. What she’d said back at the motel was the truth: He was easy to be with. Unlike work, where she had to guard against getting overinvolved in cases she’d have to later decline. Plus, she had to present herself as always in control: to the locals who came to her for help, she was the face of the FBI. It had never felt like that before when she was in the field working cases, and she still wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.
Carver was the one piece of solid ground she had to stand on. He knew about her family, the lies, the betrayals, and he didn’t care. She could tell him anything and he would never use it as a weapon against her.
He was the one person she trusted. Which was scary as hell. Not because she was afraid of him ever hurting her: she’d been betrayed in the worst ways imaginable and had survived.
Carver frightened her because the people Caitlyn trusted tended to end up dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
To Caitlyn’s surprise, she was met at the gate in Miami by a man in a pilot’s uniform holding a sign with her name on it.
