Perilous Trust

by Barbara Freethy

  Something was wrong.

  "Karen, it's Damon. I'm looking for Alan."

  "I had his calls transferred to me."

  "Why?"

  "You don't know?"

  "Know what?" A bad feeling crept down the back of his spine.

  "Alan is dead, Damon. He died this afternoon."

  "What?" His hand tightened around the phone. "What are you talking about?"

  "He was killed in a single vehicle accident in a rural area in northern New Jersey."

  "My God. That's…" He had no words.

  "I know. It's tragic," she said.

  For the first time, he heard a tremor in her voice.

  "And it doesn't look like it was an accident," she continued. "He was traveling at a high rate of speed and there were no skid marks, no evidence that he attempted to brake before crashing into a pond."

  "Any witnesses?"

  "A hiker—from almost a mile away. He didn't see much."

  "Other vehicles?"

  "The witness thought he saw another car on the road, but he was so stunned by the accident scene that he wasn't certain. He did call 911 and the police got there quickly, but it was too late."

  "I can't believe this," he muttered, his pulse racing, his head hammering with questions and a deep-rooted pain that was starting to take hold.

  Alan was dead? How was that possible?

  "None of us can believe it," Karen said. "Did he tell you where he was going today—why he was in New Jersey? He didn't show up for work, and he didn't call in sick."

  "I haven't spoken to him since Monday. He said he had some things going on, and since I was finishing up my case on MDT, we agreed to speak next week." He paused, wondering if Alan's death had any connection to the attempt made on Wyatt's life. Wyatt thought Alan had set him up, but maybe someone had set them both up. He wanted to ask Karen, but after Wyatt's paranoia and now Alan's death, he didn't want to say too much without thinking everything through.

  "I have to go," Karen said. "There's a lot going on."

  "What can I do to help?"

  "We're going to be working all night to see if we can identify anyone who might have posed a threat to Alan, but with the number of cases he's worked on the last twenty-plus years, it's going to be a long list."

  "I'll be in shortly." He cleared his throat. "What about Alan's daughter? Has she been notified?" His stomach twisted again at the thought of Sophie receiving the horrific news.

  "Peter and I spoke to her several hours ago. She was—shattered."

  His heart split apart at the thought of the beautiful blonde with the warm, gold-flecked, brown eyes, irresistible smile, and soft, sexy, kissable lips. He hadn't seen her in four years, not since the one night they'd spent together—a night that never should have happened.

  Since then, he'd tried not to hear about Sophie. When Alan had brought her up on the odd occasion, he'd quickly changed the subject. She was a part of his past, and that's where he'd been determined to leave her.

  But now…

  He could only imagine the pain she was in. He felt like someone had just torn off his right arm, and Alan was only his mentor, not his father. Sophie had to be dying inside.

  "How—how is she doing?" he asked, feeling as if the question was completely ridiculous, because of course she wasn't doing well.

  "I don't know. Peter and I spoke to her around four. We told her we'd meet her at her apartment around six thirty. She wanted some time to catch her breath and regroup. When we got here, we found her door open, and her apartment trashed."

  "You're at Sophie's apartment now?" he asked, his pulse quickening.

  "Yes."

  "And Sophie?"

  "No sign of her. We're trying to trace her phone. Hopefully, she's just taking a walk or went to see a friend. Do you know any of her friends? You and Alan have been close for a long time. Do you know Sophie as well?"

  "No," he bit out. "I have no idea who her friends are."

  "All right. So, why were you calling Alan? Is it something I can help you with?"

  He hesitated, then said, "It doesn't matter now. I'll see you back at the office."

  He put the phone in his pocket and let out a breath. Since he'd arrived at the park, his entire world had shifted. First, Wyatt acting paranoid, hyped up, and completely off-balance. Then Alan…

  He couldn't believe Alan Parker was dead. The man wasn't even sixty years old yet. He was healthy, fit, and energized—a natural leader, an intelligent boss, a good friend.

  He should be used to people vanishing from his life. It had certainly happened often enough, but he never seemed to be ready for it. Not that those people had died; most had just walked away from him.

  But this wasn't about him. This was about Alan…and Sophie.

  With a quick glance around, his nerves now on edge, he left the shadow of the trees and walked through the park, his thoughts turning to the woman who'd made a huge impression on his life, an impact so big he'd run away from her as fast as he could.

  He'd met her at a very, very low moment in his life—and also in hers. They'd both been mourning the loss of a good friend—Jamie Rowland. Jamie and he had been Army buddies for ten years before switching careers to join the FBI. Sophie had known Jamie in her childhood, her father Alan and Jamie's father Vincent having worked together at the Bureau.

  He'd met Sophie at Jamie's wake. He hadn't known who she was beyond the fact that she was a gorgeous blonde, who was hurting as much as he was. Her eyes had held a haunting pain, and her sweet mouth seemed to tremble between gulps of wine and champagne as she came to terms with her grief.

  They'd had an instant, intense physical attraction to each other, a desire to lose themselves in a happier place, and for two strangers—a surprisingly deep understanding of what they'd each needed that night.

  It was only later—when he'd realized who she was—who her father was—that he'd realized how stupid he'd been to sleep with the daughter of someone who had the power to kick him out of the academy from which he was so close to graduating.

  But apparently Sophie had never shared their one-night stand with her father, because Alan had not said a word. And he'd certainly never spoken about it to anyone, especially not to Alan, a man who had helped him shape his new career in the FBI.

  Now Alan was dead.

  Sophie must be going out of her mind—wherever she was.

  Was she just crying away her grief in a bar somewhere? Or had someone taken her? The same someone who had forced Alan off the road?

  God, he hoped she wasn't in danger, too. But the fact that her apartment had been broken into did not bode well.

  He stepped off the curb and raised his hand to hail a cab. A moment later, he was on his way back to the office. While the cab made its way slowly through the city traffic, he pulled out his phone. First, he sent a text to Bree that lunch was on for the next day and that he wanted to talk some baseball with her.

  After that, he went on the Internet to visit the same baseball chat room where Wyatt had left him the message. They spoke in coded baseball lingo, each of them using the name of a player from the 1986 World Series Mets team. They'd started the private forum while at Quantico, during missions where they needed an outside way to communicate. They'd always referred to Alan as Coach when they were on academy assignments. Wyatt had been Fernandez, after the lefty All-Star pitcher. He didn't know if Wyatt would check the forum again, but it was his best chance at getting him a message.

  He thought for a moment, then typed in: Coach is dead. Fernandez in trouble. Need the starters back on the field. Who's available?

  Three

  Sophie had almost used her credit card to rent a car, but then she'd thought about all the ways her card could be tracked. She didn't know who she was running from, but her father had told her to be careful, especially where law enforcement was concerned, so she'd found an ATM and withdrawn seven hundred dollars in cash, the maximum amount she could take out of her account in one day. Th
en she'd grabbed a cab to a rental car office and booked the cheapest car she could find.

  Her father had told her to go to her happy place and that was five hours away—a lakeshore cabin in the northern Adirondacks. She had no idea why he would send her there to start her on this crazy, sad, frustrating scavenger hunt. Nor did she know why he had spoken so cryptically about protecting herself when he hadn't told her who she needed to protect herself from. A name would have been nice.

  Unless, he hadn't known exactly who was dangerous?

  Or perhaps he'd run out of time…

  How she wished she'd picked up the phone when he'd called, but he probably hadn't expected her to do that. He knew she kept the phone off when she was teaching. Why hadn't he called her in the morning before she'd gone to work when they could have actually spoken to each other?

  She had so many questions and no answers.

  It was still difficult—make that impossible—to believe he was dead. It felt like a dream—a very bad dream. If only she could wake up!

  Her phone vibrated again, and she knew she had to get rid of it. It had been buzzing off and on for the last thirty minutes.

  She picked it up off the console and clicked to hear the new voicemails. It made her angry that there were other voices covering up her dad's voice now. She needed to ditch the phone as he'd asked, but she didn't want to let go of her last connection to him.

  The first call was from Peter Hunt. "Sophie, we're at your apartment, and you're not here. It looks like your place was broken into. I'm concerned about you. Where are you? Please call me back as soon as possible."

  Her apartment had been broken into? Maybe by the two guys she'd seen going into it.

  The next call was from her friend, Kathleen, a fellow professor at the university. "Oh, my God, Sophie. I was just watching the news and heard about your dad's accident. I am so, so sorry. I want to help. Please call me back or come over. I can't believe this has happened. I know how close the two of you were. I want to be there for you. Call me back."

  Maybe she would call Kathleen back—but not now, not yet.

  She clicked through to the next voicemail from her friend and neighbor. "This is Becky, Sophie. I just heard the news. I'm really sorry. But right now, I'm more worried about you. Where are you? There are police in your apartment, and the landlord said your place was broken into, and no one knows where you are. There's a news crew out front, and guys in dark suits knocking on everyone's door asking if they saw anything or heard anyone. I just got home a few minutes ago so I don't know what happened. If you're in trouble, I want to help."

  She was happy now that she hadn't gone into her building, that she'd followed her instincts and run. Whatever her father had been trying to warn her about was already happening.

  She had to follow his directions, however crazy they might seem. She had to be smart and stay safe until she could figure out what was going on.

  An exit sign called her attention, and she impulsively moved to the right, getting on a highway going away from her destination. She stayed on the road for ten miles, and then she pulled off to the side, her engine still running.

  She picked up her phone and played her dad's messages one last time, trying to burn the words and the sound of his voice into her head. She searched for clues in every sentence, wondering if she was missing something, but she was as confused as ever when she was done, and huge, rolling waves of pain ripped through her, threatening to take her under and drown her in sadness. She couldn't let that happen. She had things she had to do.

  "Good-bye, Dad," she whispered.

  She got out of the car, put the phone in front of her front tire, then got back behind the wheel and drove over it. She got out once more to check that the phone was shattered. Satisfied, she kicked the pieces into the nearby brush. Once that was done, she returned to the car and pulled back onto the highway. She drove another five miles, then took the next exit and doubled back the way she'd come.

  If they traced her phone to this area, hopefully they wouldn't know where she was going next, or at least not right away. She had no doubt that the FBI could find her with all their resources. In fact, all they had to do was talk to Vincent Rowland.

  Vincent and her dad had come up together in the FBI and had bought cabins next to each other at the lake over twenty years ago. They had been the best of friends and felt that they needed a place to go where they and their families could be safe. They'd set up layers of secrecy regarding the ownership of the cabins, and when they were there, they used fake names. Her family had been the Framinghams; and the Rowlands were the Baldwins.

  It had been a fun game when she was a kid, and on the summer trips to the lake, she'd become good friends with Vincent's son Jamie and his daughter Cassie. Unfortunately, after her mother got sick, trips to the lake had become less frequent. After high school, her dad hadn't wanted to go there anymore; the cabin held too many memories. She'd occasionally gone up with Jamie or Cassie for a weekend, but those outings had also dwindled as their lives moved in different directions.

  Jamie had gone into the military. Cassie had moved to California. Vincent had divorced Jamie and Cassie's mother and quit the FBI to travel and play golf, while her father had gone to Quantico for a while to run the academy.

  Maybe her father hadn't considered Vincent in his rush to keep her safe from some unnamed danger. Or maybe Vincent was the one person her dad trusted not to betray him.

  She frowned, thinking back to the voicemails she'd just listened to. Her father had told her to avoid the FBI, which included his best friend Peter and his number two, Karen Leigh.

  Their questions to her now took on different overtones. Had they been interrogating her because they wanted to solve her father's murder, or because they wanted to know what she knew? Hopefully, there would be more clues at the cabin.

  Pressing her foot down on the gas, she sped up, careful to stay close to the speed limit; she couldn't risk a traffic stop.

  As the hours passed, and her adrenaline rush began to fade, she took a chance and stopped at a drive-through coffee stand so she could make it through the mountains without falling asleep.

  She turned on the radio for a distraction, and the music helped for a while until she got to one of Jamie's favorite songs—a song his sister Cassie had played at the wake she'd held for Jamie. The wake had just been for Jamie's friends; the family had had a more formal service a day earlier with an official burial, but Cassie had wanted to toast her brother in a place he'd loved very much, and Sophie had been more than happy to go along.

  The last time she'd been on this road had been the weekend of that wake.

  While it had been cathartic to be with other people who loved Jamie as much as she had, it had also been incredibly sad. Jamie had been one of her confidants, even more than his sister, because for all his carefree charm and jokes, he was also a deep thinker, and they'd had a lot of really good conversations over the years.

  Many of the people at the wake had been coupled-up, including Cassie, who'd brought her boyfriend of the moment.

  But she'd been alone—and so had a very attractive, dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes and a gaze that had scorched her soul the first time he'd looked at her.

  She'd never felt such a strong, visceral reaction to a man—almost like a punch in the stomach—something so hard it took the air out of your lungs, weakened your legs, made you feel like you could fall if you weren't careful.

  Of course, she hadn't been careful.

  She'd accepted a glass of wine from him and then another and another. They'd sat by the fire on the beach and talked about Jamie and then the music had started and she'd had the crazy idea to dance. Somehow, they'd ended up far from the beach…

  She swallowed a sudden knot in her throat.

  Damon Wolfe had come into her life at the absolutely worst possible moment.

  She hadn't known anything beyond his first name that night. She hadn't wanted to know. All she'd wanted was hi
m. The pull between them was impossible to resist. She'd never felt such an intense connection, and she didn't want to question it. She just wanted to let herself feel it, and it had truly been amazing.

  But when the sun came up, she was alone.

  She'd found out later that Damon was training to be an FBI agent at Quantico and that her father was one of his instructors.

  She didn't know if her dad was the reason that Damon had never followed up with her, but it hadn't really mattered. She'd known from the first second she'd met Damon that he wasn't a man she could keep for more than a night. And perhaps it was better that way.

  Damon was pursuing his life as an FBI agent, and she was doing the same, following her dreams to be an archaeologist.

  She supposed she should be glad now that her father had seen her get her doctorate, had heard about her first discovery, had watched her teach a class, but all she could think about was all the things he wouldn't see…her wedding, her children, the rest of her life...

  The pain felt overwhelming, made worse by the fact that she couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't go to her friends for a hug, couldn't share her sorrow with people who had known her father, who knew her. But her dad had told her what she needed to do, and she would do it. Hopefully, one day it would all make sense.

  * * *

  When Damon got into the office, there were a dozen agents gathered around the long table in the conference room adjacent to Peter Hunt's office. Peter Hunt was the special agent in charge of the New York field office, serving just under Walter Holmes, the assistant director in charge. They oversaw a dozen specialized divisions and task forces, one of which was the organized crime division run by Alan Parker.

  Karen Leigh, who had been second in charge of Alan's division, stood at the front of the room, giving her thoughts on what organizations might be involved in Alan's death—if his accident had been instigated by one of the crime families or syndicates under his watch.

  "We believe these three organizations require the most scrutiny," Karen said. She pointed to a whiteboard where three names were listed. "The Rasulov group, a Russian crime syndicate operating out of Brighton Beach, led by Sergei Rasulov; the Venturi family, a longtime Italian Mafia family run by brothers, Stefan and Lorenzo Venturi; and lastly, an offshoot of the Japanese Yakuza gang run by a new player Toshi Akita," she said. "Our department will be focusing our investigation on these players, but any other information is vital and welcome."