We’re coming, Madison. I gave the signal and we swarmed over the floor from three sides, all of us skirting around rusted old machines and bolts of fabric left behind, fabric which might have been pretty once but had been shredded by mice and God only knew what since then. We were silent, trained for missions like the one we were on. There wasn’t a sound on the floor except the dripping of rain water.
Everyone looked at me, questioning. I looked around, trying to figure out where they’d be. The offices all looked dark, empty, the windows that used to look out on a bustling factory floor showing broken chairs and outdated calendars.
Then, I heard it. A squeaking noise. Hinges. We froze in place, weapons drawn, as a beam of light stretched across a section of the floor. He had tacked dark fabric or paper or something over the windows of the office he used, in the back corner, to block out the light coming from inside. But the door to the office was now open.
“I know you’re here!” His voice was high-pitched, nasal, taunting us. My blood ran cold and hot at the same time. He was a monster, and he was so close. Almost close enough to touch.
“You think you’re so smart, huh?” he laughed. “You have no idea how smart you’re not. I’ve been sitting here, waiting for you, all this time. I knew that stupid junkie would get picked up for something dumb and spill his guts to keep his worthless ass out of jail. It took you forever to get here.”
Did that mean the girl wasn’t there? My heart sank a little, but I hardened myself. “We just want Madison, Jonathon. She’s all we want now. Let us take her back to her parents.”
“Gee. I wish it were that easy.” He started walking closer to where I stood, like he was heading straight for me even though I was concealed in shadow. “Only she’s sort of not here.”
“Sort of?” I watched him come closer.
“As in, not on this planet.” His laugh turned my stomach. “I mean, her body is, but her soul or spirit or whatever? Miles above us.”
“You’re lying. You don’t have the guts to take a life,” I said.
“Try me, Detective Lewis.”
My heart stopped for a moment. How did he know my name? I turned and signaled for half the team to swarm the room now that our guy was far enough from the open door. I stepped out from where I’d been hiding and trained my weapon on the chest of Jonathon Smythe, meeting him face-to-face for the first time.
I woke up dripping sweat. The sheets were wet beneath me, cold. It was the middle of January and I never did like sleeping with the heat up anyway, so my bed was almost unbearable. Maybe that was what woke me.
I sat up just to get away from the cold, clammy mess. Four o’clock. Not worth changing the sheets at that point. I bent over, elbows on my knees with my face in my hands. The dream had come almost every night in the weeks leading up to Smythe’s parole. A living nightmare if there ever was one.
And his hearing was that very morning.
I went through my usual routine—shower, shaved, dressed, changed up the bed—but instead of heading over to the office, I stopped by the bakery for coffee and bagels and drove to SoHo. It was hardly six o’clock when I got there, but I knew she’d be up.
“I was expecting you.” Suzanne was still in her bathrobe when I knocked at the door to her apartment. The light was on in the kitchen, but the rest of the place was dark.
“I thought I’d bring breakfast.”
“You thought you’d sit and talk things over,” she murmured with a knowing smirk. “Come on. When’s the last time you did something like this?”
“When’s the last time you allowed me to?” She stepped back and let me come inside, and I followed her to the kitchen. It was a nice little place, perfect for the two of them.
“So today’s the day, huh?” I sliced bagels while she added milk and sugar to her coffee. I glanced over at her when she wasn’t looking and could’ve sworn she hadn’t aged a day even though ten years had passed since our divorce.
“Yeah, this is it.”
She sat at the little table and patted the chair to her right. I took it as she said, “You don’t know that he’s going to pull the same thing he did before.”
“That’s exactly what I do know.” I ran a hand over the back of my neck and remembered how vivid the dream was, how I could almost feel that cold water dripping under my collar. Or maybe it had been sweat trickling over my skin while I slept. “I can’t shake the feeling that there was something more I could’ve done.”
“You did enough.” She covered my wrist with her hand. “Pax, look at me.” Her eyes were wide, sorrowful. “You gave up your life for this. You worked like a man possessed. Even after he was inside, you worked like a dog to help put the case together. Everything you could’ve done, you did. I mean, you sacrificed us, for God’s sake.” There was no accusation in her voice. We had hashed it out enough times for all the anger to be smoothed out. It was a fact. I had screwed up, big time. I pushed her away and focused every bit of my energy on putting Smythe behind bars for the rest of his life. Or so I thought at the time. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought ten years would mark the end of his sentence.
“Animals like him don’t just stop doing what they’re doing,” I said. “He’s not like you and me. Ten years in prison wouldn’t be enough to make him give up. If anything, all he’s been thinking about all this time is how much fun it’s going to be when he gets back out there.”
She shivered. “You’re really freaking me out right now, Pax.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. He’s a psychopath.”
She played around with her coffee cup. “Does Madison know?”
“I doubt it. I reached out to her parents, but they don’t want anything to do with it. She’s away at school, clear on the other side of the country. She even changed her name.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” Suzanne mused. “The poor kid needs to get on with her life.”
I couldn’t imagine Madison Bridges as a twenty-two-year-old woman. She would always be the little girl we found in one of the closets in that factory. Half-naked, shivering, thin to the point of starvation. But alive.
A door opened down the hall from the kitchen, and I turned in surprise. “What’re you doing up?” I asked.
Lizzie rubbed her eyes as she came to me, and I pushed back my chair to make room on my lap. At ten, she was already all gangly arms and legs, ready to sprout up and turn into a woman any day. But she was still a baby, too. I pressed my lips to the top of her blonde head and smelled the shampoo she’d washed with before going to bed the night before.
“I heard your voice,” she mumbled, still half-asleep with her head on my shoulder. “I didn’t want to miss you.”
“You should be sleeping. You don’t have to be up for school for another hour,” Suzanne said with a soft smile. I wrapped my arms around my baby and let her drift back to sleep in my lap. It wouldn’t be much longer that I’d be able to hold her like that.
***
The hearing was scheduled for nine o’clock, and I was waiting in the small room down the hall from the warden’s office when the parole board entered and sat at a long table in the front. The only two people sitting in the chairs facing that table were me and Charles Graham. My buddy, the warden. He knew what it meant to me to sit and watch a monster get paroled. It was amazing to me that Madison, or whatever she was calling herself those days, could get herself together enough to even go to school like a normal person after what he did to her.
The door opened behind me, and in walked two guards. Between them was a short, skinny, spiky-haired man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses. He walked with his head down, cowed, like he didn’t dare look up at us. But he knew I was there. I knew he knew.
His lawyers entered behind him and set themselves up across from the parole board. I listened while they gave long-winded speeches as to why their client, a model prisoner from the start, should be allowed the chance to begin again. He was a new man, they swore. He’d been to counseling
, he’d earned his college degree in social work. He’d even started counseling fellow inmates. He was someone they all looked up to and respected. He’d even rehabilitated more than one hardened criminal.
All the while, I stared straight at the back of his head. It was all words. None of them meant anything. An animal was always an animal no matter how they decorated their cage. I remembered the cold, empty eyes when we’d finally met face-to-face. There was nothing inside him but emptiness and a need to watch other people suffer.
The board felt differently, it seemed, since they were more than happy to chalk him up as a success story and set him free. I bit back a curse as he stood, triumphant, and thanked his legal team.
“We knew this was coming,” Chuck muttered beside me.
“Yeah. I know.”
“Tell me you’re not gonna stalk this guy now,” he muttered.
“I’m not gonna stalk this guy now.”
“Liar.”
I didn’t bother answering, since he was right. I was lying. I had to find a way to keep him on my radar without making a big show of it. Because he’d know. He’d be waiting for me. He’d been stringing me along for almost two years with his letters, hadn’t he? I’d burned the first batch, then burned each one right after it arrived.
I stood, disgusted by the legal system, and was just about to leave when he turned to look at me.
Our eyes locked. It felt like everything else dissolved until it was just the two of us in the world and nobody else. Me and a psychopath who felt I was the one responsible for putting him behind bars.
Then he smiled. Just then, in that moment, I knew I was the only one in the room who had ever seen what truly lived inside him. The model inmate fell away and what was in front of me was a monster. A monster who was free to roam the streets again.
Chapter One – Marcus
“Marcus.”
I froze like a deer in headlights. Pax’s voice was sharp, and everybody who worked at Lewis Security knew what sort of mood he was in when he sounded that way. Then again, he’d been in that mood for weeks. Maybe months. He’d come in looking like somebody just pissed in his Cheerios and leave looking the same way. Even Christa couldn’t get him to smile, and she was usually the one who always could.
I turned away from the basement stairs, which I’d just been about to walk down, and went to his office instead. The door was open, and he was behind his desk as always. Even on a Saturday night.
“What can I do for you?” It was unusual, getting called in like that. He almost never called the surveillance team in for personal meetings. The field agents, sure. Not the guys who hung around downstairs or set up systems in client homes.
He sat back in his chair, eyes on me. I could feel him sizing me up. Physically, I was just the same as any of the other guys. I worked hard to stay in the sort of shape basic training had gotten me in, even though my job didn’t exactly require me to be in peak physical condition. It hadn’t back when I was an Army surveillance leader, either, but I didn’t have a choice back then.
“Have I ever sent you off-site for an assignment before?”
I leaned against the doorframe with a sandwich still in my hand, but I forgot all about wanting to eat it just then. “Um, aside from setting up systems? No.”
“So you haven’t done surveillance for me in another location.”
“No, sir.”
“Would you like to?”
Would I? I wasn’t totally sure. I was a creature of habit. I liked getting up at a certain time, going to work at a certain time, saying hello to the same people, setting my things down the way I always did, running tests the way I always did. Getting the previous shift’s status report, looking over anything suspicious, then sliding on my headphones and getting to work.
“I guess so?”
He snickered. “I didn’t know you would have to think so hard about this.”
“I’m sorry. You’re taking me by surprise.” I told myself to shut the hell up and do whatever the man asked me to do. He signed my checks, for Christ’s sake. “Yeah, sure, I’ll go wherever you want. Who are we talking about? An office building? A mansion?”
“No. A bank out on Staten Island.” He looked up at me from the report. “You game?”
“Bank surveillance? Sure thing.”
“Great.” He scanned the information. “Looks like the bank manager is the one hiring. He’s worried about his employee who might have seen the robbery taking place. It’s all pretty up in the air right now. I’ll go down to the hospital to find out more and get back to you.”
“Are you sure you want me on-site like this?”
He frowned. “Since when do you hesitate?”
“I’m just saying, I usually sit down there.” I pointed down the stairs, to the basement. “Wouldn’t one of the field agents be better for an on-site job?”
He smirked—it was better than a frown, at least. I was starting to wonder what was eating at him. “You mean you’re that dedicated to sitting down there? I thought you would be glad to get out for once.”
“I am, I am.” I wasn’t. “I was just making sure.”
“I don’t like being second-guessed. You know that.”
“I know.”
“And if I didn’t think you could handle a job, I wouldn’t assign you to it.” He was about two seconds away from going ape shit.
“I know that, too.” He had a way of making a guy feel about two inches tall. “Sorry. You know how attached I am to my equipment in the basement.”
“Whose equipment?”
I winced. “Your equipment. Of course. You know what I mean—I think of it as mine, since it’s my responsibility.” I might as well have been back in school, called to the front of the room for the teacher to shame me in front of the class. At least it was late enough that there wasn’t anybody there but him and the surveillance team.
He nodded, lips pursed. “Regardless, it’s decided. This is all just a heads up. I thought you’d wanna know.” He stood and picked up his coat, flung over the little couch across from the desk. “We’ll probably go in and set her up tomorrow.” He didn’t look at me as he put on the coat.
“Sure thing. Just let me know where to be and how big a space, and I’ll be there.” I followed him out of his office and watched as he left without another word. What was on his mind? He was never exactly the friendliest, warmest boss, but he wasn’t usually so distracted, either. Something was weighing on him, and he was taking it out on us.
I could’ve been a little more agreeable, too. I knew that. I thought it over as I walked downstairs to my equipment. It was like my baby, that bank of monitors, the alarms that would sound if anybody got too close to a client’s home. I kept it in top condition and replaced it whenever a better model came out. It was up to me to make sure we were always locked down, not to mention safe from hackers. They were getting smarter all the time, and we had worked with some pretty wealthy clients.
Danny and Jenna went out for their break when I got back to my station—if they heard my conversation with Pax, which they must have, they were decent enough to pretend they hadn’t. Or it could’ve been that they were in too big a hurry to get where they were going, which was probably off to some cozy spot where they could fool around. At least they weren’t fighting. I couldn’t stand when they were fighting.
All was well, according to what I observed via the wall of monitors showing me the activity of every home in which an agent was stationed. Dylan was in Greenwich Village, Brett was on the East Side, Shane was in the Hamptons. Lucky bastard. I checked in with the teams we had on the ground around the different locations, too, and ran diagnostics on the motion sensors. Only three active cases just then—Christa and two of the others had just wrapped things up earlier in the week. I guessed it was as good a time as any to send me out, while we were in a lull.
I knew what I was doing at my station. Not that I wasn’t up for a challenge, but at headquarters, I knew who I was. I knew what to do.
I was master of my domain—Danny and Jenna didn’t have half the know-how I did, and neither did any of our backups who worked the other shifts. I was head of the team for a reason. Sending me somewhere else would throw everything off. Knowing the two lovebirds I worked with, they’d be too busy fighting over some stupid bullshit to notice something happening on a monitor. Then what?
I was a control freak, and I knew it. I hoped the people at the bank didn’t mind too much when I took over for them—then again, if they had their shit together, they wouldn’t have gotten robbed. Maybe they needed my help.
Chapter Two – Lauren
The first thing I remembered was waking up on the floor. It was cold, hard tile. I was sure the cold was leeching into my bones as I laid there. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a dust bunny under a desk. The cleaning crew really needs to get their act together, I thought, as my eyes slid closed again. All I wanted to do was sleep.
Wait, what’s happening? My eyes snapped open again. I turned my head and looked up at the ceiling. The room was dark except for a few big, white security lights in the corners. They didn’t do much for the middle of the room, which was where I was just then. The middle of the bank.
I looked around, turning my aching head slowly. It hurt to think, much less move. What happened to me? I touched two fingers gingerly to the spot where the pain seemed to be radiating from, right in the back of my skull, and winced when I made contact. An egg was already forming there. I had done a number on myself.
But what happened? Why was I on the floor, scared of something I couldn’t name? Because I was scared to death, that much I knew. My heart raced out of control. But why? Maybe it was waking up at work, in the dark, alone. On the floor. With a bruised head. That alone would send anybody into a fit.
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