The End of Lies: The Single Lady Spy 4 (The Single Lady Spy Series)

by Tara Brown

  “Can I please just take the shot? I don't trust your overworked hands.” She finally laughed as she arrived at her punch line. “This is supposed to be a clean shot, hit style from a distance.”

  “No.” I glanced down at her, disappointed but she laughed harder. “Not only is that offensive, but Jack is listening, and he doesn't want to hear about my nonexistent sex life.”

  “That’s true. I am listening and I could have lived without knowing Evie names her vibrators,” he complained in our ears, making Luce giggle more.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny any information regarding that. And anyway, we’re on a mission. Focus.”

  “You focus. I want this done fast and easy.” Luce gave me some attitude.

  “I was never going to let this asshole off with a simple gunshot to the head. I want this one up close and personal. I’m stabbing his eyeballs out.” I handed Luce the goggles and started the climb down, shaking the entire tree. It wasn't big enough for us to climb, not really, but it had been the only one even close in size.

  “Evie, Coop said no grab-assing. It’s cold. I wanna go home. It’s two weeks before Christmas, I can’t afford an injury.”

  “She really can’t,” Jack piped up again.

  “Shut it and watch my six.” I ignored them and continued the silent trek across the yard of the man who had made jokes about human trafficking while at a fundraiser for the victims. Turns out, victims he enjoyed, regularly. He was a fan of choking. Not everyone made it through though. So there he’d sat at the fundraiser, making a joke about women he’d murdered. He was special to me and I was about to show him just how special.

  When I got to the back door I looked up, like Jack was somehow God, and whispered, “You sure there’s no one inside?”

  “No heat traces at all. So unless he chills with thermal masking camouflage on, I’m gonna say he’s not home. I’ve taken out his security, and the backup security. If you want to go in, this is your chance.”

  “Okay.” I slid two hairpins from my head and started to pick the lock. As the slight click sounded, I froze, but nothing happened. I turned the handle and inhaled, waiting as the door opened. “I’m in.” I crept into the dark, pausing a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light coming from the moon and streetlights of the normal neighborhood out front. I never would have guessed that Heinrich would live in such an ordinary place. He appeared to be a regular man living in a nice part of Germany, near Munich in Kirchseeon, a neighborhood backing on the Anzinger Forest. He had a pool and a nice garage at the back of the stately property. His house was Bavarian style out front and incredibly minimalist and updated, modern in fact, inside. His wife was wealthy and connected, her own life and work taking her on trips all over Europe. Which it seemed helped Heinrich to be able to spend his time hanging with trafficked girls.

  He was a gem.

  I strolled the main floor of the house, searching for anything out of the ordinary. “This is the sort of person the book Room was based on, where you discover a secret cellar and a twenty-five-year-old who’s been missing for ten years,” I whispered.

  “I was legit just thinking the same thing,” Luce agreed quietly. “This house is creepy, even though it's not. It’s a normal house but I sense the evil in the air.”

  Finding the door to the basement made the hair on my arms stand up, even under my black Under Armour long sleeve tee shirt. I shuddered as I picked the lock and braced for something awful. Torture dungeon or snuff room or something heinous I wouldn't quite recover from.

  What I found was worse.

  I pulled the door back all the way and gasped. “Luce! Cellar!” I gulped and stepped inside the expansive room. The size and decor were not at all what I'd anticipated.

  Luce’s footsteps were a touch louder than normal as she hurried to me, groaning when she saw it. “I knew it. I had a bad feeling about this guy.” She cringed and stepped inside with me, shining her flashlight on the walls. “No windows down here?” she asked.

  “No. And a double thick steel door stopping sound transfer.” I followed her flashlight around the room, my head twitching back and forth as my brain refused to comprehend what we had here. “Jack, you getting this?”

  “What the actual fuck is this?” He said the exact sentence my brain was asking.

  “I think this side of the room is filled with souvenirs from the girls he’s murdered.” I pointed my flashlight at the wall to the left of me where small braids lined it, one of every shade of hair color possible but a lot more brunette than anything else. He had them displayed in a glass case with a single tiny embossed letter next to each lock of hair. Below them was another glass case with small bits of something dried, shriveled and creepy looking. I didn't get close enough to see, but I could tell each piece had an embossed initial next to it as well. There was one piece that looked newer, resembling skin, making me conclude they were all skin. I tried not to get too close. I didn't need to investigate any of the evidence. That wasn't my specialty.

  “Wow, someone is a psychopath,” Luce muttered as she walked to the wall on the right where Hitler and his cronies were celebrated in newspaper clippings and framed photos. Next to the pictures, tools of the torturing trade lined the huge wall, some old and rusty suggesting they were original pieces. I shivered and backed away.

  Straight ahead of me was a small seating area consisting of two burgundy leather chairs with a small round table between them. Two glasses, both empty, sat there with an ashtray in the middle and a stubbed-out cigar. The wall behind the chairs was covered in newspaper articles, everything from Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac Killer. He was obsessed with murder, torture, and mania.

  "Why does he have two chairs? Who the fuck is sitting in this room with him? Who the fuck sits and drinks in a space like this?" Jack was getting emotional. "I mean, honestly, how did he find another person in the world that was like, ‘You know what I could go for? Skin bits and scotch and Hitler’? Actually, forget I asked. I know the answer to that. This is where Craig's List has brought us. Societal decay."

  "Maybe he's so crazy he's the only person here, but he's playing both parts," Luce offered.

  I couldn't speak. My mouth dried and soured at the same time.

  “I’m getting Coop,” Jack said abruptly after he rode our eyes through the room again.

  Luce and I froze, waiting in silence for Jack to return.

  "Luce, Evie?" Coop broke the silence after what felt like an eternity. "You okay?"

  "Not emotionally," Luce answered quickly.

  "Okay, let me take a look at what we have."

  Luce and I were silent again as we paused for Coop to decide how this was going to play out. Heinrich wasn't like the others we’d killed or framed or destroyed publicly. This was an upper management issue.

  It was also something we hadn't come across yet.

  “I knew he was a sick fuck the moment I saw him laugh at the gala, but I never expected this,” I confessed to the dark and Luce who had shut off her flashlight.

  "This is one of those one-in-a-billion moments," Luce agreed.

  "Actually, serial killer to non-serial killer ratio is closer to one in every hundred and fifty thousand people. If FBI stats are to be believed. And that's just in the US," Jack spouted off comfortably.

  Luce and I gave each other a confused look, clearly both wondering how he just knew that number.

  "You know I can see you giving each other the horrified stare in your eye cams," he added softly, making Luce laugh inappropriately, considering our location.

  "Jesus, this is nasty. Why do you always have to lift up the rocks, Evie? I said a shot to the head on this one, make it appear like a professional took him out," Coop grumbled into our earpieces.

  “Lucky I didn't one-shot him,” I defended myself and our find. “This might help close a lot of unsolved cases of missing people or bodies found.”

  “Lucky us.” He didn't sound like we were lucky.

  “Anyway, we sh
ould call the police and have him ruined. This is the sort of thing one doesn't exactly get off scot-free on.” I paused. “Media and police, just in case.”

  “Agreed,” Luce said.

  “That’s smart. He will be ruined and lose everything and there’s no way to cover this up,” Jack added. "Killing him only closes the lid on this crazy, which would be a disservice to the dead."

  “You guys never make anything easy. It’s never just the simple instructions we’re given.” Coop sighed with a slight bit of a growl in it. “Fine.” He smiled, I heard it in his voice, but it was that bitter grin I hated. “Evie, guess you girls get to play your favorite role for the police.” He chuckled and then he was gone.

  "What's that?" Luce glanced back at me, turning the flashlight on and shining it under her face. “Is this the belly dancing whore thing again?” Her expression almost made me smile. Almost. But there was no smiling or joking in a tomb like this.

  “I guess so. But I don’t intend on hanging around for police.” I put my hairpin back and pulled the small knife from my pocket and opened it as I nodded at Luce. “You got any lip gloss?”

  “I do.” She fished it from her pocket.

  “Put it on.” I placed the knife between my lips as I grabbed the tiny tube of hand cream I kept on me to help with winter-weather hand cracking and rubbed it on my hands to help the blood go further. We traded, her taking the cream and slathering it on while I took the lip gloss and smeared it on thick across my lips. Giving her back the lip gloss, I pocketed the hand cream and grabbed my blade to cut my fingertips on my left hand with a tiny poke.

  “The things we do to fuck evil people over,” Luce lamented and took her own blade and did the same.

  She pulled off her black long sleeve shirt, revealing a white tank top underneath. She pulled that off, flashing her hot pink sports bra at me. She handed me the tank top, which I ripped into strips as she put on her black shirt again. I handed her some of the strips. She stretched and smeared her blood on them and then tied them to one of the displays as I did the same thing on the other side of the room. I didn't look at the pieces of flesh or the hair; I focused on the bloody strips of cloth I'd made to resemble shackles.

  Squeezing my fingers, I dripped my blood on the floor and stepped in it, turning and clawing at the leather chairs and smearing my bloody fingerprints and lips on the glass as Luce did the other. We then went for the handle of the door. I grabbed my hairpins and sacrificed them to the floor, covered in my blood. Luce dripped her blood too and stepped in it. We hurried from the room, running frantically, like we’d escaped, turning in circles and unaware of the way out. We didn't speak on it, she followed my lead. When we got to the back door, we smeared blood on the inside and out, touching the doorframe so the police would see but ensured every fingerprint was too smudged. They would get partials, but nothing more. We dropped blood along the side yard to the front of the house and ended our trails there.

  “We need to call the police, Jack, but I don't speak German.”

  “I do and it’s already done. I’ve put in a call as a German citizen who found two beaten, bloody, and half-naked young women running scared from this address. One of the young women screamed about the cellar and Heinrich. She cried and begged me to help them, but when I got out of the car to help, they ran off.” He said it flatly, typical Jack and a major lack of emotion. “I’ll call the media then tag some news teams about it on a fake Facebook account I have.”

  “Okay. Meet you at the chopper.” Luce sounded tense. I was tense and unsure I would recover from that. It was a moment that would change the way I parented my daughter when she was a teenager. It would frame how I felt about her doing anything on her own or being independent. A realization I had as I ran through the forest behind Luce and wondered where the dead girls’ parents were. Who were these girls in the glass cases, nothing left of them but a piece of dried flesh and a lock of braided hair?

  There really wasn't any getting past something like this.

  The Holocaust memorabilia was disgusting and disturbing, but the evidence of modern torture and murder made me sick in a way I was unsure how to cope with.

  I needed closure.

  I just didn't know how to get it.

  29

  Season Three

  March 2014

  “How’s the game going?” I asked as I rushed into the rink and stood at the top of the seats where Coop watched, leaning on the half wall. His commute to the arena was much shorter than mine this time. He’d come from the office, whereas I came from our private airstrip.

  “Good.” He nodded. “Mitch has two goals. One more and I owe him—”

  “Oh my God, tell me you didn't bribe my kid into getting a hat trick again?”

  “He’s our kid and I did. Absolutely. Motivation is good for teenaged boys. Have you noticed how much less he’s been playing videogames lately? He’s been working on that slap shot and the back flick. He’s been coming to the gym with me.” Coop paused and scowled at me but I didn't care. I was stuck on the words “our kid.” The way he spoke so nonchalantly about loving my kids was the hardest part of resisting him for my four seasons. I rethought them constantly but knew this was the right path for me. It had basically become a personal challenge to prove I wasn't just a sex fiend.

  “I have noticed he’s not playing videogames as much,” I confirmed.

  “You look weird,” he said and lost all the charm he’d held a moment ago.

  “What?” I peered down at my all black outfit. “I just came from work.” Meaning I’d just checked someone off our list.

  Luce and I had flown in from a hit at a spa in the Appellation Mountains where we had administered a subtle dose of traceable poison. Our victim fell asleep and died, peacefully with no pain.

  I didn't like killing her. She wasn’t a terrible person, but she had helped cover up some appalling acts committed by a major politician, one who happened to be on our list. She had lied for him when asked to confirm something she'd seen, afraid of the retaliation that would befall her. Recently, she came forward about it all and was in the spotlight for the testimony it was believed she would give. We poisoned her to look like the politician did it, making him appear guilty of covering his tracks. The FBI would find the poison in his car and his prints at the spa on a glass we stole from his house. Framing some of the people from the list was equally as much the job as murdering others. But when someone like her, a relatively innocent person, had to die, I didn't love doing this, hence the poison. She had died an enviable death at least.

  “It’s the makeup. It’s too much. You never wear that much makeup.” He lifted his sleeve and started delicately wiping my cheeks and lips. He was close, too close, and smelling so good. My body tightened. “How’s the four seasons going?” he joked, reading my expression no doubt.

  “Good,” I squeaked out. “Great,” I lied. It wasn't going great. It was hard.

  The fact it had been over half a year since I’d had sex made me think about sex constantly. And it wasn't decreasing. At all. I assumed the arms dealer who had made me love sex again had broken old me. And new me was like a college boy.

  “You ready to throw in the towel yet?” He cracked a smug grin.

  “Nope.” That was a lie but I persevered.

  The seven months since Servario’s death had changed a lot for me. It had changed a lot for us all and most of it was for the good.

  Luce and Jack were engaged, the wedding set for the fall at the chateau we had stayed at before.

  Coop was giving me the right amount of space to get over things at my own pace but also wearing tight tee shirts and jeans and being crazy sweet to my kids. He was like a dad, spending more time with Mitch some weeks than my mom did and she still lived with us.

  Fitz was in Dorset with my father, who still hadn’t come home, helping with the Burrow scientists who were starting to feel the confines of their lives and wishing for more. I was waiting for the moment my father started
to clean up that mess by taking them out. It had been wishful thinking they would all acclimate.

  My sister was pregnant with her first child, and insanely in love with a scientist who taught at a university in England.

  Elise was dating a man who skirted the lines of the bad-guy persona, but Mom said she was happy and had moved on. And as much as I didn't want to care about her, I did. I was happy she was living her best life.

  For me the seven months had been spent focusing on my kids, which had become easier with us only working two or three times a month at the most, and for only four or five days at a time.

  I’d also been doing some me time with hot yoga every couple of days, which was amazing. And I had started taking a painting class once a week.

  “Hey, Evie.” Jeff, our neighbor from when we lived in the other house, came rushing over, interrupting my thoughts. “I haven’t seen you in ages. I heard you guys bought over in the new part by the pond.” He embraced me, looking better than I’d seen in years. He was fresh-faced, had lost a bit of weight, and was smiling brightly.

  “Yeah, we did. How are you guys doing? How’s Megan?” I forced that last sentence out, not caring how she was doing at all. She’d slept with James, making her one of many women who had banged my ex-husband. Dead husband. Whatever he was.

  “I think she’s doing fine.” He shrugged. “Haven’t seen her in a couple of weeks. She’s in Thailand doing a yoga instructor course.”

  “What?” I scoffed rudely.

  “Yeah. Her midlife crisis was zesty to say the least,” he joked and it dawned on me why he looked so good. He was single. The divorce diet had done him well.

  “How’s yours going?” I teased back.

  “Actually, it’s been too busy for me to have one. I’m the full-time dad.” He nodded at the ice to the left of me. “Zack made the team with Mitch. So the season has sucked all my time up, which I’m making sound worse than it’s been.” His cheeks flushed and he glanced down at his shoes. “And Dara is as busy as she always was. She’s in ballet and been asked to join the competitive class.” He sounded bewildered as he shook his head. “Honestly, when this all ends this summer, I’m going to lie in the backyard with a beer in my hand for a week straight.” He laughed but he sounded tired. I knew the sound. It had been me before James died. Either time. “How about you? How’s the new house?”