“Yeah, well after you tell a girl you might be an axe murderer, that makes most of them wanna bolt.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Tell it to a judge,” Strike said. Her breathing was rapid, her eyes focused on the door. Should she run? Maybe the right play was to act cool, say yeah, Christen, you’re a good guy. I would’ve never pegged you for a wife killer.
Although half the place had already pegged him exactly as such, even before this little revelation had come out. Which probably wouldn’t work in his favor during the investigation. No one would believe him now.
He was good as guilty.
“I know who did it.” Christen reached into his pocket and took out a small yellow piece of paper. He slid it across the table in the center of the room. “And I know how she died.”
“Because you killed her?” Strike couldn’t believe that the words had actually come out of her mouth. Poking the bear. She actually had two skills—shooting things and shooting herself in the foot with ill-timed words. No need to sell herself short. She was world class at both.
“It’s a rare neurotoxin,” Christen said. He turned to the door and removed the chair. “They’ll trace it all back to me. He had to have set it up that way. Shouldn’t be more than a week, maybe two if the lab has to special order the test during the autopsy. But they’ll find it, sure enough.”
“Is this a confession?”
“It’s a plea,” Christen said. His hand lingered on the knob. “Head to the location on that piece of paper and track down the Amber Alligator. Find the guy, prove he’s trying to weaponize this stuff. It’s my only shot. The people who killed her, they’re forcing my hand. They want what’s in my safe. He wants what’s in the safe.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the best student I’ve ever had. That was no favor, pushing your application through despite your…rebellious youth.”
“Now you tell me.”
“I told Madsen to accept you because I saw potential. Which you’ve exceeded. So prove it to everyone, Agent Strike.”
That did have a nice ring to it, even if it wasn’t official. Nor would it ever become official if she agreed to do this crazy favor.
Christen slipped out the door before Strike could ask what was in the safe. She walked over to the table, breathing a sigh of relief that she hadn’t ended up like this guy’s wife. There weren’t any cameras in this room, either.
Amateur move.
She picked up the piece of paper.
An address in Florida, with the words the Amber Alligator. A single name, no surname. Johnny.
Real helpful.
Strike balled up the note and shoved it into her pocket.
Forget this. She had to eat lunch.
3 | Down the Rabbit Hole
Or not. Lunch at the cafeteria was horrific anyway—a cut below college, and that was saying a lot. Besides, this note was like a ribeye to a starving dog. Strike was helpless once she’d picked it up and seen the address.
But that didn’t mean she was just going to book a flight to Florida on a whim. Even if she was a sucker for best ever type of compliments.
Strike wiped relish from her chin, savoring the frank from Mitch’s Hot Dog Emporium. She popped the last bit of bun into her mouth and then grabbed the binoculars. Still nothing.
A little Google search had given her all the information necessary to locate the scene of the crime. So she’d caught lunch after all—just in Christen’s old neighborhood, a block from his idyllic, tree-lined street.
The only thing missing were kids playing hockey in the middle of the road, shuffling the nets in and out to let slow-driving mini-vans drive past. Strike had a feeling, given the murder, that the helicopter parents were all holding their precious children a little closer today.
Strike never had that problem. Which might be why she was inclined to do things like this and go completely off the reservation. What had her shrink called it in high school?
Attention seeking behavior.
Her phone buzzed. Erica. Where are you? I didn’t see you after lunch. Madsen is gonna freak if he doesn’t see all of us at the run.
Yeah, that was exactly the type of person Strike was. Trade in her first-place rank in the class, make her comrades run an extra three or four miles, uphill, to pay for her transgressions. All so she could have a decent meal and chase smoke.
The yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the light breeze. A sprinkling of leaves came down from the orange-gilded treetops. Strike fiddled with the radio. Stake outs were never gonna be her strong suit as a field agent. No, she was a more hands-on type of gal.
She popped the door open and headed over to the crime scene, donning the FBI windbreaker she’d swiped from the lost and found. Might as well look the part.
There were two cop cars parked in the driveway, lights off, empty. She could see the outline of shadows flitting past the windows.
“Just turn around, Samantha,” she said to herself beneath her breath as her knuckles raised up to the door. “It all goes away if you just turn around.”
Sounded like something her father would say, after she set off fireworks in the neighbors’ garage. After she stole them from the local gas station. Or the time she came home piss drunk from junior prom and threw up on the 18th century Venetian sofa in the sitting room. If you just behave, all of this will go away.
She knocked extra loud, just so there could be no mistake.
A half minute later a tall man answered the door. “Yes?”
“Agent Samantha Strike, FBI.”
“This isn’t a federal case.”
“The victim’s husband is a federal agent,” Strike said. She pushed past the police officer, lifting his light brown fingers aside to step inside the home. It smelled antiseptic, like the place had just been bleached. “Crime scene cleanup already got here?”
“Not much to see, so yeah,” the man said. He whistled, and his partner appeared—a woman, short, stocky, the type you wouldn’t want to get in a fistfight with. Young, but with a weary face that had already been aged a lot by the job. “Carter, you hear anything from the feds?”
Officer Carter shook her head. “No one tells me nothing, though.”
“So that’s Officer Carter,” Strike said. “And you are?” She extended her hand and flashed an easy smile, like there was no reason at all to doubt her presence. Even though, if anyone knew anything, her sudden appearance made zero sense.
She hoped the general authority and panache of saying FBI would cover that.
The tall man stared at her hand, then shook it. “Officer Robins.”
“A pleasure.” Strike walked towards the kitchen. The newspaper article had explained that this was where Alyssa Alger had died suddenly of unknown causes. Poisoning suspected, although cause of death was as yet unconfirmed. All this while her husband, Christen Alger, looked on and called the paramedics. “This is where they found the victim?”
“Husband was next to her body when they first showed up,” Robins said. “Sobbing. Wouldn’t let ‘em come close. Had to be pried off so they could confirm she was already dead.”
“Rough,” Strike said. She turned away from the kitchen and examined the rest of the home. Nothing special. Two story suburban townhouse, newish. Cream carpet, white walls, furnished from a store that sold their wares in flat-pack boxes. The kitchen had been painted a sort of pale pink. The paint looked a little fresher. Modern, if not chic. The look of a cash-strapped young couple eager to own a home and put their own mark on it. “Any sign of another assailant?”
“Mr. Alger was the only one present.”
“Agent.”
“Excuse me?” Robins said.
“It’s Agent Alger.”
“Right—of course,” Robins said, but his tone of voice suggested he didn’t really care f
or the correction.
Strike began walking up the stairs to the second floor bedroom. From the hesitant footsteps behind her, it was apparent that Robins had little idea why she would head upstairs. Indeed, nothing in either Christen’s vague explanation of the events nor the preliminary news report suggested that there was anything to see up here.
But Strike wanted to see the safe. And it sure as hell wasn’t downstairs, next to the faux-leather futon.
“Excuse me, Agent…?”
“Strike.”
“Yes,” Robins said. “Surely your superiors briefed you on the investigation.”
“I like to do my own thing. That okay with you, Robins?” Strike said as she pushed the door to the bedroom open. “Unless you’d like to call my boss, and he can tell you all about it. Drives him nuts, but hey, what’s that they say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t mess with success, right?” Strike turned around, her phone in her outstretched palm. “He’d love to have a chat with you.”
“No, that’s fine.”
Strike heard Robins stop in the doorway, like he wasn’t allowed in any further. She shrugged and began searching the room. In here, the signs of domestic bliss were far more muted. In fact, it seemed that Alyssa had done away with any trace of her former husband. The drawers contained only woman’s clothing, the bathroom stocked with concealer and pink razors. A picture on the nightstand of her and the girls enjoying mojitos at a local club. No sign of any man.
No sign at all, except the bed was unmade, the sheets tousled in such a way that suggested to Strike that maybe—just maybe—Alyssa Alger had seen someone else before Christen had come to visit.
Or she just hadn’t made the bed, since she lived alone and saw no need. That was a possibility.
Strike whipped the sheets back, but no clues presented themselves.
“The report mention anything about a safe, Robins?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Interesting,” Strike said. She stepped into the walk-in closet. Amidst the well-ordered shoes and color-sorted blouses, she found a wall-safe.
Open. Courtesy of a blowtorch.
“You fellas leave the house empty at all today,” Strike said, peering inside. Picked completely clean. “Coffee break, a little snooze, maybe?”
“We were gone thirty minutes,” Robins said. “Had to get some forms from the station. Why?”
“I think you might have missed something,” Strike said, right after snapping a picture of the empty safe. “One for your report.” She edged by a dumbfounded Officer Robins and headed downstairs.
After taking one last glimpse at the crime scene—the black kitchen tile bearing no evidence that a woman had perished there only hours before—Strike exited the house. Before starting the engine, she fired off a text message to Christen.
What’s in the safe, asshole?
That would get his attention. Bedside manner be damned. If she was going to take heat from the higher-ups on this one, she damn sure needed to be well-informed. Either he’d killed his wife and come back for whatever was inside—sloppy, but a possibility—or her death had been a message, the brazen theft its emphatic postscript.
We can hit you at any time, any place. We’re always watching.
Time to head to Florida.
4 | Florida
No answer. Naturally.
This red flag didn’t stop Samantha Strike from booking a flight to Florida. She rented a car in Jacksonville and began to drive, passing through the widest range of Americana one could imagine—opulence to empty fields to trailer trash—on her way to her destination.
Sampson, FL. A humid, tiny town barely worth a mention, except this is where the Amber Alligator led, along with the mysterious no-last-name Johnny. Allegedly. If it wasn’t all a setup. Damn her sense of obligation.
Someone could take advantage of that, if she wasn’t careful.
Strike slammed the door of the rental sedan and smoothed out her jeans. The burning midday sun flickered overhead, threatening to drop below the horizon. The rest of the Replenish’s parking lot stood still. The name was a misnomer—paint peeling, posters for house bands fluttering in the wind, the place looked more like a death trap than an oasis of refreshment. A decrepit convenience store stood nearby, lights flickering absentmindedly, as if to half-heartedly alert potential patrons that yes, it was open.
“You don’t look like you’re from around here, hon,” a masculine voice said from behind her—the kind that could pull off calling a complete stranger hon without inciting a groin kick. Strike felt a slight flutter in her stomach, but refused to turn around.
No one got her that easy.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“Not when you look like that.” The voice’s owner stepped into view, sliding between the car and Strike. She felt his fingertips lightly brush the back of her jeans. This guy. She knew the type. He flashed her an easy, whitened smile. Close cropped hair, wearing designer shades. Like a party promoter, but without the cheese. Just natural. Maybe thirty, but could fit in with twent-year-olds as easy as the old folks.
Effortless.
“I don’t look like anything.”
The handsome man gave a light snort. “Around here, they can smell bacon two miles away. You they smelled at the airport.” He extracted a pack of import cigarettes from his breast pocket and took one out with his teeth. “Lucky he called me beforehand, so I could fix you up. Help you out. He’s in a bit of trouble.”
“I’m lucky, huh,” Strike said, but somehow, despite her predilection towards skepticism, she was already feeling that he was telling the truth. “So what’s inside?”
“You’ll find out, I guess,” the man said.
She felt her knees wobble.
Come on, you’ve gotten training for this type of crap. Just a bunch of body language tricks.
She took a step back, unsteady, and almost fell on the pavement. He reached out and grabbed her shoulder, holding her there like he was an undiscovered force of physics, a natural phenomenon of the universe more powerful than gravity. Which was when Samantha Strike thought oh shit, this isn’t going to turn out well, before she even knew his name.
He held her there, then pulled on her arm slightly, righting her back on her feet. “Andras Kobina.” He flashed that smile again. “Just call me AK.”
“Like the gun,” Strike said, more of a murmur than a statement. She felt herself being tugged towards the entrance of the Replenish.
“Exactly,” Andras said, “welcome to Vice. A badass nickname could save your life. And a badass partner could save it twice.”
“It could?”
“First things first, girl,” Andras said, stopping her before the door and holding on to both of her shoulders, like a makeover artist assessing a near hopeless case. “You gotta untuck this.”
His hands swooped into her waistband and tore out the edge of her black tank-top, allowing it to spill over in front of her jeans.
“And this,” Andras said, reaching his arm around her ear, close enough that her nose brushed his skin, allowing her to almost taste the faintest—most perfect—hint of pine-scented cologne. His fingers snaked through her hair. “You gotta get a little rhythm. Feel the pulse. Loosen things up. I’ve been working this beat a long time, and I am this close, this goddamn close, and if this note I took from your pocket is any indication, you want the same thing as me, to nail this guy’s ass against a wall, any damn wall at all. So I’m gonna bring you along with me, instead of doing it all on my own.”
Strike felt her ponytail tumble over her shoulders in an endless cascade. Protocol said that she should keep it tied up, give any potential assailants less opportunity to wreck her shit. But she was already far away from the rules—had torched the book and spit on its ashes—so what was another infraction, any
way?
Andras backed up, sizing up his handiwork. “Not bad. Better already. Less pork. Kind of like a chicken, a baby. Innocent.”
He held up the crumpled note with the address and the Amber Alligator and Johnny’s name on it.
Strike blinked and touched her back pocket, like she’d been the victim of a magic trick. “But how?”
“Fast hands, fast mouth, fast gun,” Andras said. “All you need to know about surviving. Feel that pulse, find the rhythm.” He snapped his fingers in a steady beat.
“I don’t know what that means.” But it sounded kind of cool. Besides, this guy knew how the game worked, right?
“Every block, every beat, it has a current. A flow.” Andras chewed on his cigarette as he lit it. “You find that heartbeat, mesh with it, and you’re in. Out of rhythm, you’re out on your ass. No one trusts you, you don’t have shit in this life.” He took out his badge from beneath his fitted T-shirt. Then he put it back, out of sight, no place for it in this world. “Doing this for eleven years.”
“But…”
“How’d I know who you were?” He grinned again, and Strike turned away. This guy was like candy. Too much and you’d get sick, but it was a bitch to draw yourself away. “Christen said you’d be coming down.”
“Of course he did,” Strike said. She paused, a foreign hesitance coming over her. “So.”
“You ready?”
“I look all right?”
Andras smirked and flicked the half-smoked cigarette past her shoulder. “It’ll do, babe.” He pushed the door open and marched through. He didn’t hold it, but kind of slowed it down with his fingertips so that Strike could just slip by as it slammed shut.
She followed him through the beer-soaked dive, glancing at the old tube TV sitting on a hefty reinforced wall mount. A grizzled woman, no older than forty but at least twice that in the shit I’ve seen years, eyed Strike suspiciously. Strike tried to add a little casual bounce to her step, blend in where she didn’t belong.
It didn’t work, but the bartender didn’t seem to mind. She just served the drunk guy at the far end of the bar.
The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 50
