by Kylie Brant
Declan shrugged off his gray Columbia jacket, and hung it on the back of a dining room chair. Although that was perhaps a charitable way to describe the cramped area adjacent to the kitchen counter. The apartment was essentially one room with a kitchenette tucked into the corner. A minuscule bathroom and tiny bedroom opened off the main area. It was small. His presence always seemed to shrink it.
Dropping on the couch, Eve picked up the book she’d been reading that morning. But instead of opening it, she watched him draw his gloves on before handling the weapon he’d taken from their would-be kidnapper and unloading it. After scanning the space for a moment, he put the clip on the shelf of the closet where they’d hung their coats before disappearing into the bedroom. A moment later he returned and jammed his gloves into the pocket of his coat. “For future reference, I put my gun under the mattress. His is in the bedroom closet next to yours. I should have asked before, do you know how to load your weapon?”
“Yes.”
His expression grew speculative, but he said only, “Good. First available chance we’ll have the one we took off our friend tested for prints, so I’ll need to get it to…”
“Adhamh,” she provided when he seemed to search for how to say Adam in Scottish. Ah-guv.
“Yeah.” When his gaze didn’t move away from her Eve opened her book, pretended to read. Found herself staring blindly at the page. “What exactly do you do in the course of your job?”
Although she’d managed to dodge similar questions over the past couple of days, she knew he wouldn’t be put off again. “Translate foreign documents. Provide interpreter services for diplomats as needed.” She flashed him a smile. “Boring stuff.” The explanation always satisfied her family. But they were conditioned to expect the mundane from her. For some reason Declan looked unconvinced.
“Uh-huh.” His eyes were the color of dense impenetrable fog, a stark contrast to his dark hair. And his unblinking gaze was more than a little unnerving. “Boring stuff that requires you to know how to load a gun and to carry a knife in your boot?”
“Single woman, living alone.” With effort she focused on her book again. Turned the page although she hadn’t read a word. “Just makes sense to take precautions.”
“I suppose, although I can’t imagine any of the females in my extended family having the fortitude to hold a knife to a stranger’s throat, much less carrying one to begin with.”
“Lucky for you, perhaps.”
His dark brows rose.
“You said they get angry when you offer advice,” she clarified, more than a little relieved that the topic had shifted away from her. “Best that they aren’t armed.”
He tapped an index finger against the corner of his right eye. “See this scar? Bella threw a ceramic elephant at me when we were eleven. I must have dodged into it, because athletic she’s not. Split the skin and required four stitches.”
Fascinated despite herself, Eve gave up the pretense of reading and stared. “Is she your sister?”
“Stepsister from my mother’s third marriage.” He unbuckled the shoulder harness and set it with the weapon on the small table beside the leather recliner he favored. “She still has a hair trigger temper.” Amazingly, his tone was indulgent. “There are eighteen of us in all, step and half. Flotsam from my parents’ serial marriages. We keep in touch. Habit, maybe. Spend a week together at my grandfather’s home in Hyannis Port every July. With everyone’s kids and spouses the group numbers almost fifty. By mid-week my ears are ringing and I’m looking for a quiet place to hide.”
Eve tried and failed to think of a single time her family had ever taken a vacation together. There had been outings growing up, of course. Museums, opera and ballet, most with an au pair in attendance rather than her parents. Margaret and Ronald Larrison’s lives revolved around their careers. Their research. Her siblings were enough older than her that they’d been away at private schools by the time her memories started. And when she’d been old enough to follow in their footsteps it had been with something akin to relief.
She could, however, heartily empathize with his wanting to hide from his family when they got together. Holidays often affected her the same way.
As usual thoughts of her family had her slamming mental doors. “When do you think they’ll reach out again?”
He went to the coat closet and reached to take something off the shelf. The place had been equipped for this assignment prior to their arrival, and one piece of equipment that he used daily was the hand held bug sweeper. He paced the small area now, holding the device in his outstretched hand as he scanned the place. “Soon. They’ve obviously been watching us since they knew where we’d be. Probably split up, so as not to draw attention until they were ready to make their move. Now they have to go back to their boss, whoever it is, and admit they failed. He won’t be happy, but we still have something he wants. My guess is he’ll ask nicer next time.” Finishing with the small living area, he moved toward the kitchen.
She recognized sugar coating when she heard it. Eve slanted a look at the door. It seemed just as likely that they’d try again, with more force the next time, but there was no sense debating the point with him. They’d find out soon enough.
Curling her feet up on the couch beside her, she tugged the coverlet over her lap and returned to her book. Patience had been a trait hard learned, but it had served her well throughout the long years at private academies. Eve lifted her gaze to study Declan as he moved into the bedroom with the detection device. She was less well acquainted with faith, at least when it came to depending on another.
As she’d told him, she carried the knife because she was unused to depending on others....for anything. But the most disconcerting part of the day was the realization that armed or not, she’d never doubted that Declan Gallagher would have protected her. For a woman used to relying only on herself, it was more than a little alarming to discover that level of trust for a man who was for all intents and purposes a stranger.
_______
Jaid Raiker entered the room serving as her husband’s home office, only to stop inside the door.
Adam was on his cell. There were times in the past few months when she’d imagined it was glued to his ear, which was unfortunate, since he detested speaking on the phone. More often than not he insisted on video chats. He preferred to look in the face of whomever he was talking to if possible. She’d often considered him a human lie detector.
But he’d foregone that personal preference as a safety precaution. He hadn’t wanted to allow any hints of Royce’s new location, not even to those he trusted most. Because when it came to their son’s safety—or hers—Adam trusted no one but himself. She couldn’t fault him for that.
He gestured for her to stay so she closed the door. She strolled about, the ornate trappings lost on her. The estate was luxurious, but it had been selected for its remote location and security. And though it was petty of her Jaid thought it resembled a prison more than a home. Maybe Royce’s complaints were rubbing off on her. More likely it was the constant restrictions on their lives that were driving her a little mad. Almost three months of forced inactivity would be enough to get on anyone’s nerves. And that wasn’t taking into consideration the continued threat to her son.
“I assume Royce is otherwise occupied.”
She jerked around. Finished with his call, he was regarding her with a knowing glint in his eye. “He’s in the home theater watching Devlin and Ramsey’s live stream as they visit the National Zoo. That will keep him occupied for hours. Thank you for arranging it.”
“He’s always been a fan of the Strykers. And the pandas.” He watched her pace for a bit longer. “Gallagher hasn’t checked in. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
The news had her shoulders slumping a fraction. “Oh. So no contact has been attempted with them yet.”
Ad
am shrugged. “I’ll hear from them when they have something of note to report. I wanted to show you something else.” He held out a hand and it took little urging for her to go to his side. His arm slipped around her waist and he walked them around the desk to face his computer screen. “I told you about the unidentified corpse matching Hobart’s general physical description.”
Pulse quickening, Jaid looked at him. “You said Caitlyn Fleming and Aislynn Nichels were working together on the facial reconstruction. Have they finished?”
As an answer he reached out with an index finger to tap some keys, bringing up a continuum of photos. “They tried superimposition first, and the match was close enough to compel them to make a full cast.”
She nodded. The method would have had the women aligning Hobart’s photo ID retrieved from the cyber trail on the school’s server and then superimposing it over the skull of the corpse. The sketches would have been less helpful in the process, since they differed somewhat from each other. Their value had been the similarities described by both subjects and their likeness to the photo.
Intrigued, Jaid peered more closely at the screen as Adam clicked through the pictures. The first several shots show 2D images of the skull before it had been cleaned and after. The next photos depicted the clay cast that had been made of the skull, with the tissue depth markers in place. This type of forensic work had always fascinated her, but her focus now was on the possibility that she was looking at her son’s kidnapper. Quickly she scanned the images of the model with prosthetic eyes, progressed to the ones with the eyelids and brows blocked in. The final shots had the cheek area and nose approximations added.
She hissed in a breath, almost unaware of the reassuring hand Adam placed on her shoulder. “It’s him.”
“It would appear so. Uncanny, really, how closely it resembles the drawings.”
“I don’t want this shown to Royce.” Jaid couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from the finished reconstruction. “There’s no need, is there?”
“Probably not.” They were both silent for a moment as they contemplated the 3D model of the man who would have taken their son from them. “Mrs. Gonzalez at school can make the ID. But there’s no doubt in my mind. I’ve already alerted the homicide detective that gave me a heads up about the body that his John Doe is almost certainly one of Royce’s kidnappers.”
She’d been with the Bureau for over a decade. Had always known, logically at least, why agents weren’t allowed to work on cases with which they had personal ties. But she was still unprepared for the flood of emotion that warred within her right now.
There was a primitive part of her—a part she wasn’t particularly proud of—that was glad the man was dead. It came from a deep primordial place inside that only another parent would recognize. This man would never threaten Royce again.
But the agent in her realized that they now had one less person who could provide details about why her son was targeted. And the need for those details trumped any visceral thirst she might have for revenge. In death, the man who had called himself Hobart gave them little real information. The prints on his corpse hadn’t matched any in the AFIS database. Dental work was a dead end without the man’s real name.
Adam’s voice at her side interrupted her dark reverie. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’m okay.” This development was a step in the right direction. After weeks of more questions than answers, she needed to concentrate on the fact that finally they’d found one.
“Jaid.” It was his tone that alerted her. And the expression on his face when she looked at him had her stomach knotting.
“What is it? Just tell me, Adam.” The man was capable of an almost brutal brusqueness. Which made his uncharacteristic hesitancy doubly alarming. He only gestured to the desk chair silently. Without a word she sank into it, mentally steeling herself.
“The ballistics evidence on the John Doe was unbelievably slow.”
She smiled slightly. “Well, not everyone has the premiere forensics lab in the country at their disposal. Police crime labs are notoriously backed up, and even at the bureau lab evidence tests are prioritized.”
“Exactly.” His intense regard had all her instincts quivering. “And this case would have been low priority. An unidentified victim. No weapon retrieved. No brass. No leads. The wonder is really that they went ahead with the detective’s request for a ballistics report at all.”
“I’m not a fan of your new kid gloves approach,” Jaid said evenly. “What is it you’re trying very hard not to tell me?”
“I just got off the phone with Detective Ramos, who caught this case.” With a slight inclination of his head he indicated the images on the screen. “Both bullets were recovered from the body. By submitting the markings to the IBIS/NIBIN ballistics databases, they were able to match the bullets to a half a dozen unsolved homicides in the past decade. But it was a murder from about nine years ago that caught my attention. That body was never identified either. And it was found within a half mile of where Hobart was dumped.”
He closed out of the window they’d been viewing and brought up an email. Clicked on the attached file. But Jaid didn’t need to see the photo of the unidentified man to guess who would be pictured.
Even after the intervening years, seeing the lifeless face of her father again stabbed with a relentless pain. It was a moment before she could speak. When she did her voice was husky with unshed tears. “They buried him in a pauper’s grave. No ID. No service. He warned me not to try to find him. Not to do anything that would call attention to our relationship.”
“Because doing so would have led them to the child.”
She nodded. After being absent from her life for fourteen years, it had required an act of sheer desperation for Royce Benning to seek her out and hand over a weeks old baby for safekeeping. He’d left her and her mother when Jaid had been eleven and she hadn’t seen him since. They’d no longer shared anything, not even a last name. But perhaps one could never really sever that familial bond.
“My father managed to convince me that Royce’s life depended on me keeping his identity secret.” He’d claimed the boy’s mother had already been killed. Her father’s murder six days later seemed to have lent credence to his concern for the boy. She’d watched all the crime databases. Contacted the detective who’d caught the case to make discreet inquiries. Her father had been tortured before his death. But Jaid knew that he’d died without revealing the secret of the child he’d given his daughter for safekeeping.
She could do no less. So an elaborate ruse had originated, one where she’d claimed the boy for her own. And he was hers, in every way that mattered. He’d been named for her father, although she’d had no real evidence that he was the child’s parent. It hadn’t mattered. Despite all the unanswered questions about his birth, she was the boy’s mother and she’d do whatever it took to keep her son safe.
“You said you did a sibling DNA test.”
She looked down at her lap, half surprised to see her fists clenched there. Deliberately she loosened her fingers. “Twice. They’ve gotten more sophisticated. Now they compare a million markers. It’s obvious that Royce is mixed race, but I still thought…given Benning’s involvement… Jaid shook her head. “There’s almost no statistical possibility that my father is also Royce’s.” The results had only mattered in that it had left her with more questions than answers. She and Royce were family, and that bond had been forged the moment he’d been handed over to her care.
She could feel Adam’s gaze on her. “Being in the bureau I had access to all the crime databases. There was no kidnapping reported at the time of a child matching Royce’s description.”
“Jaid.” His voice had been ruined from injuries sustained on his last case for the bureau. But hearing the gentleness in it now nearly made her weep. “I’ve never judged you. Whatever the circumstances of his bi
rth, Royce was lucky when your father put him in your care. But given what we’ve learned through the ballistics report, we have to consider the undeniable proof that your father’s death and that of the man who tried to kidnap Royce are linked.”
Her stomach went leaden. “Which means his kidnapping had nothing to do with one of my old cases. Nothing to do with you.”
His touch light, he brushed her hair away from her face. “It appears to have everything to do with the mystery surrounding Royce’s birth.”
_______
The gag in the man’s mouth muffled his screams. Xie Shuang finally tired and lowered the whip, seemingly gratified by the bloody crisscross of welts and open wounds across the man’s back. “You fucked up.” The man nodded, his eyes rolling wildly although Malsovic knew he didn’t speak a word of Chinese.
But pain was a universal language.
“If you fail me again, you die. Nod if you understand.” This was delivered in Slovenian, badly mangled as usual. But the man’s head bobbed frantically. A boot to his backside sent him sprawling and at Shuang’s gesture Malsovic moved forward to haul the man up and out of the room.
When he returned minutes later his employer was seated behind the cheap polished desk, the laptop open. The printer next to it hummed. And when that flat black gaze shifted from the computer screen to him, Malsovic felt a prickle of something very like fear.
Men—and women—had underestimated Xie Shuang in the past, and many had ended up dead. Malsovic had so far managed to evade a similar feat, but at times it felt like an orchestrated dance with the devil. Èmó. The nickname was spoken only in hushed tones, but it was apt.
