Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian)

by Karen Robards

  “Gotcha, boss,” Freddie said with a sympathetic smile for Nick as he went by them. “Good to see you again, Mr. Cappuano.”

  “Likewise,” Nick said, still focused on Sam. “And you can call me Nick.”

  “You should’ve told me what you saw,” Sam said after the door closed behind Freddie. “If you had, I could’ve called it in, and maybe we would’ve nabbed him. Instead, you go off on a Rambo mission that yielded squat.”

  Nick contemplated that. “You might have a point.”

  “I might? Really? Wow, thanks.”

  “I’m sorry, all right?” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I just reacted. So shoot me for wanting to get whoever is stalking you.”

  “How do you know they’re not stalking you?”

  “Because I’m a whole lot more boring than you are.”

  “You’re not boring. Stupid occasionally, but never boring.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but a shadow, but that shadow was definitely watching this house.”

  “If you see him again, tell me.” She pinched his chest hair and tugged just hard enough to raise him to his tiptoes and bring tears to his eyes. “Don’t you dare risk yourself like that again. You got me?”

  “I got it,” he said through gritted teeth. After she released him, he rubbed a hand over his chest. “I only let you get away with that shit because I was taught it’s bad manners to flatten a woman, even if she deserves it.”

  “Whatever,” she retorted on her way back into the house where Skip, Celia and Freddie waited for them.

  Skip’s sharp eyes skirted over Nick’s bare chest and feet.

  “Um, I’m going to go find a shirt,” Nick said, starting up the stairs.

  “Might not be a bad idea,” Skip said.

  “Leave him alone, Dad,” Sam said. “He’s already convinced you’re going to have him killed.”

  “Also not a bad idea. Why didn’t I think of it?”

  “Dad…”

  “Relax and let me have some fun with the boy, will you? I so rarely get to have any fun these days.”

  Freddie smirked.

  “What’re you smiling at, Cruz?”

  The smile faded. “Not a thing, ma’am. Not one thing.”

  “I assume you’re not just here to bum another meal. What’ve you got for me?”

  “Some of the others are heading over from HQ to help out,” he said. “Want me to wait and brief everyone at the same time?”

  “Give me the highlights.”

  By the time he had run through it, she had paced a path in the living room rug.

  “I was thinking on the plane ride home,” Freddie said, “that the other women he dated were like substitutes for the one he couldn’t have. All of them resemble her in basic features, and I’m no shrink, but maybe he turned on the kink with them because he was frustrated he couldn’t be with the one he wanted.”

  “That’s probably why he freaked when Natalie pressured him about getting married. In his own twisted way, he felt like he was already married, even if he was unfaithful to her. I mean, how does he marry someone else when she’s off raising his kid in Siberia?”

  Nick came down the stairs, his hair wet from the shower.

  “You heard all that?” Sam asked, alarmed by his pale face and flat eyes.

  “Enough to get the gist.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, surprised when he shook off her sympathy.

  “Don’t protect me. Do your job. Find out who did it.”

  “Okay,” she said, understanding that he was absorbing the blow the best way he knew how. Turning back to Freddie, she was interrupted when the front door swung open. In flooded most of the HQ detectives, carrying platters of food, six packs of beer and soda, and armloads of chips. Each of them paused to squeeze Skip’s hand on their way into the kitchen to deposit the food.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked Gonzo.

  “They take a stab at you, they take one at all of us,” he said, his chocolate-brown eyes fierce. “Everyone’s on their own time. Give us something to do.”

  Touched and on the verge of choking up, she said, “Thank you.”

  “They posted the LT list today. Congratulations.”

  “You’ll be there soon enough,” she said with a twinge of guilt over how she’d gotten there. Gonzo made detective a couple of years after her, so at least she hadn’t snagged a spot from him. “For sure.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “There was someone out there.” She gestured to the door. “Nick saw him watching the house. He went vigilante on me and scared the guy off.”

  “I’ll call it in and get someone posted outside.”

  “If it was just me, I wouldn’t want it. But my dad’s here and Celia…”

  “Say no more. We’re on it.” He glanced over at Nick. “So. You and the witness, huh?”

  She winced. “Don’t.”

  Gonzo’s handsome face lit up with amusement. “I won’t, but others will. You have to know that.”

  “Hopefully, the gossip mill will run its course and the story will die a natural death when someone else fucks up.”

  “Not before you take some serious abuse.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Sam?” Nick said. “Why don’t you come have something to eat?”

  “He likes to feed me,” she whispered to Gonzo.

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  Thirty minutes later, after everyone had eaten, Sam called them into the living room. “Let’s get back to work.”

  “Before we do that,” Freddie raised his Coke bottle in salute to Sam, “a toast to my partner, soon-to-be Lieutenant Holland.”

  As Sam glared at him and plotted his slow, painful death, the room erupted into applause and whistles. She glanced at her father and found him watching her, his eyes bright with emotion.

  He nodded with approval and pleasure—more pleasure than she’d seen on his face in two years.

  “All right,” she said, putting a stop to the merriment before they forgot they were there to work on a homicide. “Thanks for the food, the toast and the help. I appreciate it. Before we go any further, I need to ask if you all mind that Nick is here. He’s been very helpful to us on the investigation—”

  “He’s been critical,” Freddie said.

  Sam sent him a grateful smile. “Still, if anyone’s uncomfortable…”

  “No problem for me,” Gonzo said.

  The others mumbled their agreement.

  Sam released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and turned to Freddie. “In that case, Cruz, let’s hear what you found out in Chicago.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I ALSO DUG into the girlfriends like you asked me to,” Freddie said, consulting his notebook. “Tara Davenport has no tattoos or unusual piercings. The people she says she was with on the night of the murder confirm her story, and security tapes show her arriving home at 10:18 and leaving again at 9:33 the next morning. Elin Svendsen’s date, Jimmy Chen, a major muscle head, confirmed they had dinner and went to a dance club for a couple of hours. He dropped her off at her apartment just after two in the morning. The building has minimal security and no video, so I couldn’t confirm that she stayed in for the rest of the night. She has a tattoo on her left breast—a heart with a Cupid’s arrow—and both nipples are pierced.”

  “I don’t even want to know how you found that out,” Sam said, drawing chuckles from the other detectives.

  “Not the way I would’ve preferred, that’s for sure.”

  “Go, Cruz!” Detective Arnold said with a bark of laughter.

  “Aw, our little boy’s growing up,” Gonzo said, dabbing at a pretend tear.

  “Up yours, Gonzo.”

  In deference to her partner, Sam stifled the urge to laugh. “Is that it?”
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br />   “You didn’t tell me to,” Freddie continued, “but I dug a little deeper on Natalie Jordan. St. Clair was her maiden name, and I got a hit on that. Apparently our girl Natalie lost her college boyfriend in a suspicious fire in Maui about fifteen years ago.”

  “You don’t say.” Blood zipped through Sam’s veins as pieces began to fall into place. Whether they were the right pieces, she’d soon find out.

  “She and the senator had been broken up for years when he was killed,” Skip said. “Hardly the same thing.”

  “True,” Sam said. “Give us the details on the fire, Cruz.”

  “Brad Foster, age twenty-one, killed in a suspicious house fire while on a two-week vacation in Maui with Natalie St. Clair.”

  “Two weeks in Maui for a couple of college kids?” Gonzo asked with a low whistle.

  “Apparently, Foster’s family was loaded. His parents owned the beach house. Anyway, from the reports I found in the newspaper, Natalie went out for a morning walk and while she was gone the house went up. Police suspected arson but couldn’t prove it. Her alibi for the time of the fire was flimsy. They looked really closely at her but never charged her with anything.”

  “Good work, Cruz,” Sam said. “We’ll have another chat with Mrs. Jordan tomorrow.”

  “I should also add that I found no unsolved dismemberment cases in the District, Virginia or Maryland,” Freddie said. “I can widen the search if you think it’s worth it.”

  “Hold off on that for now. Gonzo, what do you have from the search of O’Connor’s cabin?”

  “Nothing other than some additional references to the kid, Thomas—cards, letters, artwork from when he was younger—but you’ve already got that.”

  “What about the immigration bill, Dad?”

  Skip took them through the finer points of the proposed law. “There’s a lot of passion on both sides of this issue. There are those who feel that keeping our borders open to people in need is what this country is all about—‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…’” When he was greeted with blank stares, he added, “Emma Lazarus? The poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty? Did you people go to school?” Rolling his eyes, he continued. “The other side argues that immigrants are a drain on the system, that charity should begin at home and we can’t take care of the people who are already here.”

  “Would killing the senator kill the bill, too?” Sam asked Nick.

  “That’s exactly what it did. We had it sewn up by one vote. The Senate’s in recess until January. Depending on who they get to take John’s seat and whether he or she supports the bill, we might get lucky and get it back to the floor for a vote sometime next year. But either way, the supporters will have to start all over to make sure they have the votes. Even a month is a long time in politics—plenty of time for people to change their minds.”

  “So if someone was out to stop it altogether, killing him would accomplish that,” Sam said.

  “It’ll certainly delay it indefinitely. Getting a bill through committee and on to the floor for a vote is no simple process. It took more than a year of writing, rewriting, compromising, meetings with various lobbies and interest groups, more compromise. Not simple.”

  Listening to him, Sam had a whole new appreciation for how John’s death had affected Nick’s professional life. The failure to pass the immigration bill had to be a bitter defeat on top of the personal tragedy. “In that case, his murder seems too well timed to be coincidental.”

  “Someone couldn’t bear to see him get this win, you mean,” Freddie said.

  “Which takes us right back to his brother Terry,” Sam said.

  Nick shook his head.

  “Speak,” Sam said.

  “I’ve said this before—Terry doesn’t have the balls to kill his brother. He’s an overgrown boy trying to live in a man’s world. This would take planning and foresight. Terry’s idea of making a plan is deciding which bar to hit on a given night.”

  “Still,” Sam said, “he had motive, opportunity, a key and can’t produce his alibi. I want to bring him in tomorrow morning for a formal interview.”

  “Can’t that wait until after the funeral?” Nick asked, beseeching her with those hazel eyes of his.

  “No. I’m sorry. I wish I could spare the O’Connors any more grief, but the minute they lied to me about Thomas, they lost the right to that courtesy. In fact, I could charge them with obstruction of justice.”

  “But you won’t,” Nick said stiffly.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “I noticed Terry never completed the court-ordered safe driving school after his DUI,” Freddie said.

  Sam smiled as she turned to Gonzo and Arnold. “Will you pick up Terry O’Connor in the morning? While he’s our guest, we’ll have another chat with him about his alibi. Coordinate with Loudoun County.”

  “Can do,” Arnold said.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” Nick said, frustration all but rippling from him.

  “So noted.” To the others, she said, “What’ve we got on the bombing?”

  Higgins gave them an in-depth analysis of the four crude, homemade bombs they’d found attached to Sam’s car and Nick’s. “We got a partial print off one of the EDs on Mr. Cappuano’s car, and we’re running it through AFIS now,” he said, referring to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

  “We’ve worked our way through the Johnson family and the majority of their known associates,” Detective Jeannie McBride said. “For the most part, they were hardly sympathetic to hear you’d nearly gotten blown up but were adamant that they had nothing to do with it.” With a chagrinned expression, she added, “A few said they wished they’d thought of it.”

  “Nice,” Nick muttered.

  “We didn’t pick up any vibe that an actual order had come from either of the Johnsons,” McBride said.

  “And it would have,” Sam said. “After six months undercover with them, I can tell you nothing happens without one of them ordering it.”

  “Agreed,” McBride said.

  Sam ran her fingers through her hair, which she had left down the way Nick liked it. “I’ve got a bunch of shit running around in my head, so I want to go through it from the top if no one minds.”

  When the others nodded in agreement, she began with Nick finding the senator’s body in his apartment. “He’s murdered on the eve of a vote that would elevate his standing in the Senate by passing legislation on a hot-button issue. The murder itself, at least on the surface, is personal, with all the trimmings of a love affair gone wrong. However, as Detective Cruz correctly pointed out, the dismemberment could’ve been intended to throw us off, to send us down the personal road. Keep in mind there was no forced entry and no sign of a struggle, leading us to believe the killer was someone he knew, someone he was comfortable with and not surprised to see.”

  “And someone who had one of the many keys he’d given out,” Freddie interjected.

  “Yes. We’ve interviewed three of his past lovers, discovered he had a few fetishes, and uncovered a son his family kept hidden from the public for twenty years. The mother of that child appears, for all intents and purposes, to have been the love of his life and, for some reason, the only one who didn’t experience his wilder side. It would stand to reason that his often-cavalier treatment of other women and his fixation with internet porn stem directly from the stymieing of the most important sexual relationship in his life. That it wasn’t allowed to flourish or take its natural course, set him up for all kinds of psychological issues that he worked hard to keep hidden from even the people closest to him.” She glanced at Nick and found him staring at the wall, his face impassive.

  “The senator’s relationship with his parents, his father in particular, was complicated by the teenage pregnancy and the resulting child. When John reached adulthood, his father threatened to disown him if he married Patricia Donaldson or acknowledged his son. If Ms. Donaldson is to be believed, protecting his politi
cal career and reputation was more important to Graham O’Connor than his own grandchild.” She looked to Freddie for confirmation. With his nod, she continued. “On the same night he discovered the senator’s body, Mr. Cappuano reported an intruder in his house, which the Arlington police investigated. Toss in Destiny Johnson’s threats in yesterday’s paper and the bombing today. Is that everything?” She looked to Freddie. “Am I forgetting anything?”

  “Stenhouse.”

  “Right—the O’Connors’s bitter political rival. His motive would be derailing the bill and deflecting the accompanying glory that would have fallen on John, the son of a man he told us he hated.”

  “But he would’ve had no way into O’Connor’s apartment,” Freddie said. “Or at least he wouldn’t have had a key.”

  “Which keeps him at the bottom of the list, but still a person of interest,” Sam said. “A man in his position could probably get a key if he wanted one badly enough. So how’s it all related? How’s our dead senator related to a break-in at his chief of staff’s house? If we’ve ruled out Johnson, how’s it related to a bombing at the same location?”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” Skip said.

  All eyes turned to him.

  Sam’s brows knitted with confusion. “What do you mean, Dad?”

  “Goes back to timing. What else has happened this week?” Before Sam could reply, he said, “In the course of the investigation, you’ve rekindled an old flame.” He glanced at Nick. “Who might be put out by that?”

  “We’re both single, so other than my superiors, I can’t think of anyone,” she said, wondering where he was going with this.

  “Are you sure?”

  And then, all at once, she knew exactly what he was talking about—or rather whom. “Peter,” she gasped. “Oh my God.” Curling her fist into her stomach, she had to sit when her legs would have buckled under her.

  The room fell silent. Her rancorous divorce, complete with restraining orders and accusations of mental cruelty and emotional abuse, was hardly a secret to any of them.

  Nick sat next to her, and Sam didn’t object when his arm slid around her shoulders.