“Sorry to have to call you,” she said.
“So am I,” he said sincerely, and she knew Sam had told him why he’d gotten called in. “But my friend knows that I have to go when I have to go, and this was—”
She put a finger on her lips and he nodded. He also patted his left shoulder, and she knew that he, too, was now armed.
“Let’s move,” she said, glancing back at Sam, who nodded. He was ready—although she knew that carrying Ash had to hurt.
Maria had put on her coat, and Alyssa walked beside her as Tony led the way to the elevator.
It was being held by a woman and a man—both of whom were so clearly FBI agents that they might as well have had the letters tattooed on their foreheads.
Was I ever that obvious? she wanted to ask Sam as they rode down thirty floors in silence.
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised as if he knew exactly what she was thinking—which he always did—as he rocked back and forth to keep Ash from fussing until they reached the lobby. The female agent took Maria’s bag from her as they exited the elevator, leading the way to the back of the building, where the cars were waiting.
As they stepped outside, the snow was still falling, but the heat from the passing traffic kept it from sticking to the street. On the sidewalks though, it was turning into something thicker and darker—and slippery, without a trace of pristine winter wonderland.
They rode together—Tony, Sam, Maria, and Alyssa—in a car that had, thanks to Jules’s thoroughness, a car seat ready and waiting for Ash.
The phone call came just as the luggage was loaded, the baby strapped in, and the doors were locked, as the driver pulled away from the curb.
The number on Alyssa’s cell screen was Jules’s. Her stomach sank as he didn’t say hello. He just said, “Bad news.”
“The DNA test?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her. “It’s a match.”
“Margaret Thorndyke,” she confirmed. Sam, who was sitting across from her, shifted his foot. Just slightly. So that his boot was touching hers.
“Yep,” Jules said. “It’s her. Was her. Shit, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” Alyssa said. “Thank you for calling. I have to go. I’m with the assemblywoman and, um …”
“I’ll be there soon,” Jules promised.
Yeah, but not soon enough. Back when she was partnered with Jules, when she, too, had worked for the FBI, he was always the one who broke the bad news to murdered loved ones. He was good at it—if someone could be good at that kind of thing.
Alyssa closed her phone and met Maria’s eyes.
“They found Maggie?” the assemblywoman asked.
“Not exactly,” Alyssa said. “Ma’am, the news isn’t good. We know, for sure, that Margaret Thorndyke is dead. The … body part … from your office was human. It was hers.”
Maria drew in her breath sharply, and turned pale. But other than that, her composure was remarkable. She nodded. “I knew it was bad,” she said. “When you took me out of… But I didn’t think …” She cut herself off to ask, “Do you honestly believe that my apartment is bugged?”
“I don’t know,” Alyssa said, another thing she’d learned from working with Jules. Being truthful about what they did or didn’t know helped win hearts and ensured cooperation. “We’re taking precautions, though,” she continued. “Being extra cautious.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Tony murmured.
“I don’t understand,” Maria said, and her voice shook only slightly. “Who would do this? What do they want?”
“I don’t know that either,” Alyssa admitted. “But we’re going to find out. And then we’re going to find him. Count on it.”
Alyssa was good.
He knew when the news about Margaret’s heart came back from the lab, because she immediately circled her wagons.
They gathered—all of them—not in the office, and not in Maria’s condo either, but in a different location, probably a hotel room, which was smart, because he couldn’t listen in on them there.
Not that she’d had a chance to look for the bugs he’d planted, both in the office and in Maria’s condo—but she’d find them soon enough, unless he could get there first.
He didn’t need to hear what she was saying. He could imagine it, and imagine what she was doing, and he floated in the euphoria, knowing that now—right now—she was, at long last, thinking of him, too.
• • •
Izzy was worried.
Whoever they were dealing with here, he was a psycho. “How hard is it,” he asked Lopez, who was a trained hospital corpsman, “to cut a heart out of someone’s chest?”
“In one piece like that?” Lopez answered. “It’s hard.”
That’s what Izzy had thought.
It wasn’t just hard, it was gruesome and macabre. And freaking twisted.
And if they got to Jennilyn’s apartment to find the place in a shambles and Jenn and Gillman hacked into little pieces, it would be yet one more way that he’d failed Eden. Despite the animosity between his wife and her brother, Eden loved Danny. Izzy knew that. He understood it on a visceral level, because he, too, had brothers who could treat him like royal shit, and yet he still loved them.
The walk over to Jennilyn’s apartment was a relatively short one—just a few city blocks, but Izzy wanted to get there, fast. He wanted to break into a jog, but Lopez wanted to walk—and to keep calling Danny’s cell phone. Again, and again, and again.
“Holy shit,” Izzy realized. “You think they’re doing it? You think Fishboy’s already talked his way into her pants, and … what? The music’s up so high and they’re both screaming so loudly they can’t hear their phones ringing?”
Or they were singing along.
Jennilyn LeMay didn’t exactly strike him as the Celine Dion type, but for some reason, that was the picture that immediately leapt to mind. Dan Gillman leaning buttoned-to-the-neck Jenn over her kitchen counter, banging her while singing along with My Heart Will Go On at the top of his lungs.
The mental image would have made Izzy laugh his ass off, if there weren’t some psychopath looney-tunes nutfucker out there, carving people’s hearts out of their chests.
Lopez sighed as he shut his phone, and Izzy knew he was right—or at least that Lopez thought he was right, and that Lopez believed that Gillman and Jenn were bumping uglies.
“Wow,” Izzy continued, “I didn’t see that one coming. I mean, Danny was practically doing the cartoon wolf thing with Maria. You know, ah-roo-ga, ah-roo-ga, the heart thumping out of his shirt, the salivating fangs, and the bulging eyes—the better to see you with, my dear…” He broke into song: “If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody baby, except your assistant, uh-huh! What a douche bag. Talk about the big bad wolf, Jenn was practically wearing a little red riding hood and skipping through the forest.”
Lopez usually didn’t say much whenever they were paired up together without the rest of their merry band, apparently preferring to let Izzy narrate away to his heart’s content. But right now, he actually spoke. And it was chiding, which hurt. It always hurt when Lopez—whose real name was Jesus—did the disappointed thing. “People who live in glass houses, man.”
He didn’t bother with the rest of the adage—shouldn’t throw stones.
“What?” Izzy asked defensively, even though he knew damn well that Lopez was talking about Eden, who had been seventeen and three hundred and sixty-four and three hundred and sixty-fifths, when Izzy’d first met her.
Eden, who was also Danny Boy’s little sister, which had been a huge no-no, but also Eden, who had never in her life worn an innocent little red riding hood, not even back when she was ten years old.
Eden, whom Izzy had married because she was in trouble, knocked up and carrying some sleazebag’s kid; because her parents were assholes; because her own brother had washed his hands of her, leaving her to suffer her stepfather’s ongoing emotional and physical abuse.
Bottom line, though, Izzy had married Eden because he’d wanted her, and marrying her had made her his—even if only on paper, if only for a very short time.
“I’m just saying,” Lopez told him, dialing Dan again. “You might want to shine a little of your indignant light onto your own inner cartoon wolf, Zanella, and see what you find growing there in the darkness.”
But Izzy wasn’t buying it. “I loved her,” he said. “Eden. You honestly think Gillman feels anything for this girl besides ooh, baby, yes, baby … Near, far, wherever you are …”
“I think this girl,” Lopez said, not batting an eye over the fact that Izzy had broken into song, “is a woman, while Eden was a girl. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you. Gillman is a douche bag. I just happen to think you’re one, too.”
“And what are you?” Izzy asked as they went up the stairs to the front door of Jenn’s building. “The king of perfect? Pope Jay Lopez, the first?”
Lopez didn’t answer that, because on the other end of the phone, Gillman had finally picked up. He wasn’t chopped up into little pieces after all.
“Dan,” Lopez said. “It’s Jay. Where the hell have you been, man?”
Jenn threw up.
Maggie Thorndyke was dead. With her silly collagen lips and her perpetual hope that if she could just get a little bit more in shape, spend another hour a day at the gym, take one more DVD lecture course or this time really learn to speak another language, then Mr. Right would finally find her. She’d lived all of her years waiting for the moment that her life would begin.
But it hadn’t begun. It had ended some time in the past two days, at the hand of a horrible murderer.
And Maggie’s eternally hopeful heart had ended up in the desk drawer of one of the few people she’d let get close enough to maybe—almost—be called a friend.
The last of the Chinese food Jenn had eaten two orgasms ago left her stomach, and she flushed the toilet, wiping her mouth with a damp facecloth that Dan had left in reach, on the edge of her sink.
“Don’t touch me!” she’d told him when he’d first followed her into the bathroom. “Don’t! Just, don’t…” So he hadn’t touched her, but he hadn’t run away, either. He’d stayed there in the bathroom with her, closing the door to give her some privacy.
Privacy. Right.
His friends were out there in that room that surely smelled like sex, with her bed pulled out, sheets rumpled and damp—as if they couldn’t guess what Jenn and Dan had been doing, pretty much constantly since they’d gotten home, several hours ago.
It hadn’t seemed so sordid back when Dan was kissing her, when she was lying in his arms.
But now it was just another blot of awfulness in a night that was up for the all-time awfulness award.
After Dan had finally answered his phone and realized that Jay Lopez and Izzy Zanella were moments from knocking on her door, they’d both scrambled to throw on some clothes.
He’d all but ripped open his sleeping bag, too, flinging it onto the kitchen floor in an attempt to make it look as if they’d been sleeping separately. At 8:45 at night. Gosh and gee whiz, they’d both been plum tuckered out, and they’d fallen right to sleep. Which was why neither of them had noticed the forty-plus phone calls they’d each gotten on their cells.
Maybe Alyssa and Sam’s infant son Ash was naive enough to believe that, but the two SEALs who’d been sent out on this search and rescue team certainly weren’t.
Nor was it likely to be believed by anyone else back at Maria’s condo. Including Maria, who would be a mix of astonished, ecstatic, approving and appalled at Jenn’s impetuosity.
Although, why Maria hadn’t called on Jenn’s landline, she didn’t know. Unless … She always turned the ringer to silent when she left in the morning, so as not to disturb Mrs. Harrison, her downstairs neighbor, who complained at the slightest noise from upstairs.
When Jenn had arrived here tonight, with Dan and a bag of Chinese food in tow, she’d neglected to turn the ringer back up.
Even then, she’d been overly distracted by the incredibly good-looking guy whom she’d then had sex with. Twice.
As she sat on the bathroom floor, leaning back against the ancient black and white tile on the wall, she realized that she’d buttoned her shirt wrong. She was off by one button, all the way up. Perfect.
Dan was sitting on the floor across from her. There was just enough space in the tiny room for them both to sit without touching.
He spoke. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your friend that way. Zanella’s an asshole, with the sensitivity of a retarded amoeba.”
His teammate, Izzy Zanella, was also his brother-in-law. Or rather, soon to be ex-brother-in-law.
They’d talked a bit more about their families in between orgasm number two and Dan’s realization that the weird buzzing sound across the room wasn’t the radiator, but rather his phone vibrating in his pants, jangling against a few coins he had in his pocket.
Before the sky had fallen, and Izzy and Jay had come in, announcing that the heart was not just human but had belonged to Maggie, she and Dan had laid there together, in her bed. He’d had his arms around her as, with her head on his broad shoulder, she’d traced his various muscles and tattoos.
He’d asked about her family, and she’d told him how lucky she was that her father had gotten the help he’d needed as early as he did, about how, despite that, her oldest brother had been badly damaged, about how, being the only sister among her four brothers, she’d always had her own bedroom, while her brothers had had to share. She’d gotten used to having privacy and to this day, preferred it—which was why she lived here in this utility-closet-sized studio rather than sharing an apartment with Maria or another friend.
In turn, he’d told her a little bit more about his severely dysfunctional family. He’d said that he worried about his little brother, Ben, who lived with his clinically depressed mother and his Nazi of a stepfather—a man who’d started mean and gotten meaner after being injured in a car accident.
Dan told her that he sent money home every month, but he wasn’t sure if Ben ever benefited—other than having the rent paid and a roof over his head.
They’d been talking—really talking—and, God, she liked him so much. Too much.
“Maggie wasn’t really a friend,” Jenn admitted now as she rebut-toned her blouse. “I mean, I liked her, but I didn’t really know her that well. I don’t think anyone did. She had trust issues—trouble letting people in, you know?”
Dan nodded.
“So we didn’t exactly hang out together,” Jenn told him. “But she was a huge part of the campaign. She didn’t just donate money, she spent a lot of time volunteering in the office and … Why would someone kill her? God, Maria must be so upset.” She pushed herself to her feet and found her glasses on the edge of the sink. Putting them on made the world go back into focus. “I’ve got to get to her.”
Dan stood, too, still not touching her. But he also didn’t move to open the bathroom door. He just stood there, in front of it. “That’s where we’re going. The team leader moved her out of her apartment, too. Lopez said you should pack an overnight bag.”
“Have the police been called?” Jenn asked, realizing immediately it was a very stupid question. “Of course they have. They were probably the ones who called with the lab results. Sorry, I’m … just really rattled.”
“The FBI AIC should be arriving soon,” he told her. “He’ll be able to answer all your questions.”
“AIC?”
“Sorry. Agent in charge. His name’s Cassidy. He’s good. He’ll be taking over the investigation. He’ll probably bring a whole team in. They’ll catch whoever did this.”
They. Not we.
“Does this mean that the Troubleshooters team is going home?” she asked.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “Maybe. Probably.”
“Ah.” She looked away, afraid of what he might see in her eyes, and he stepped
forward and touched her, gently lifting her chin so that she had to meet his gaze.
“I’m here, Jenn,” he told her. “For as long as you need me. Regardless of whether the team stays or goes. Okay?”
He was tall enough that she had to tilt her head up to look into his eyes. He was perhaps even more handsome with his hair a mess from her running her fingers through it, and from his lying back in her bed to smile up at her while she’d climbed atop him.
He hadn’t bothered to button the overshirt that he’d pulled on when he’d been unable to find his T-shirt, and it now hung open, revealing tantalizing glimpses of his sun-kissed chest.
She’d gotten him naked for that second time, but he hadn’t pushed to get her clothes all the way off, which was a little weird, but nice. Even though they’d had sex twice in a very short amount of time, she wasn’t sure she was ready for him to see her naked. And somehow he seemed to know that.
He, however, had a body that was meant to be on display as frequently as possible, with sculpted muscles and smooth, tanned skin, and quite a few intriguing tattoos—among them a chain of barbed wire that circled the big bicep of his right arm; and a single word—coexist—made up of a variety of philosophical and religious symbols, on his back, between his shoulder blades.
“Okay?” he asked again when she didn’t answer.
He’d just promised that he’d stay as long as she needed him—as long as it fell reasonably within the boundaries of his ridiculous two-week time frame.
She sighed and answered, “Dan. I, um …”
He cut her off. “Just say okay—that, yes, you hear me. You don’t need to decide anything right now—in fact you shouldn’t. Just… pack a bag so that we can get out of here.”
Jenn nodded. “Can you ask your friends to wait for us in the hall and … may I have the bathroom to myself for a minute, please?”
“Absolutely,” he said, and let himself out, closing the door behind him.
She locked it, and only then did she let herself cry.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
“I’m sorry,” Assemblywoman Bonavita said, sitting forward in her chair and looking from Alyssa to Sam to Jules and back. “Are you actually questioning … me? I’m a suspect in Maggie’s murder?”
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