Winter Black Box Set 2

by Mary Stone

  For a moment, Winter looked thoughtful. “I guess you’re right. Noah’s a hell of a lot sharper than he lets on, and Aiden, well. You’ve met him.”

  With a laugh that was more of a snort than anything else, Autumn nodded. “Exactly. And they’re both your friends. They both care about you, and you know they won’t abandon you or let you down if they do find something. Maybe you felt alone when you started this journey, but you aren’t alone anymore. You’ve got me, you’ve got Bree and Shelby, Noah, Aiden. The FBI crime scene unit. Even your boss, Max Osbourne. He’s a good dude, and believe me, he’s got your back. It seemed more like he was your uncle than your boss.”

  Winter let out a quiet chuckle. “He can be a hard-ass, but you’re right. He’s a good person.”

  As she met Winter’s eyes, Autumn grew more serious. “I suppose what I’m getting at is this. I saw that look on your face just now, and I’ve seen it before. And let me tell you, none of the times I saw it were indicative of anything good. Not even close. Now, obviously you can throw yourself at this thing with abandon, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you.” Her lips bent into the smallest of grins. “Short of committing you to a psych ward for a seventy-two-hour hold, anyway.”

  “Maybe that’s what I need. Three days in a padded room.”

  “For real, though.” Autumn stretched out her legs. “That path, the one where you throw everyone who cares about you to the wayside so you can keep the control over something important to you, it doesn’t lead anywhere good. You won’t be more effective if you wear yourself down to the bone, but you will be more effective if you let the people who care about you help you.”

  As Winter’s expression turned wistful, Autumn reached out to clasp her shoulder.

  “I know it’s easier said than done. Trusting people is hard. I had to teach myself how to do it all over again, but the alternative? It might seem easier in the short-term, but if you push everyone away, you eventually look around, and no one’s there. We’re resources, you know. We’re resources, and we’re all here to help you.”

  For a long moment, a silence settled in on them. Winter’s face was thoughtful, her gaze back on the house across the street.

  After what might have been thirty seconds or five minutes, Winter’s eyes flicked back to Autumn. “You’re right. I know I’ve told you a little about the Kilroy investigation, and I’m sure Noah’s told you some too. It was a pretty dark time for me, and I did some shit I’m not proud of. I did my damnedest to push away the people, or the person, who cared about me, all because I thought it’d get me closer to Kilroy. But like you said…” She shrugged, tucking a stray hair behind her ear.

  “They helped you get there,” Autumn finished for her.

  Winter’s expression brightened a little. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”

  As Autumn squeezed her friend’s hand, she kept her thoughts about Justin Black to herself.

  Months earlier, Aiden Parrish had come to ask her a theoretical question about what would happen if a young kid was taken and raised by a sociopath. Her outlook for the hypothetical kid was bleak. No matter how resilient, no matter his genetic makeup, even if he came from a long line of literal saints, the kid’s prospects for normal mental and emotional functioning were bleak.

  Gazing back at the house, Autumn now knew who that hypothetical child was.

  8

  When Bree met with Winter that morning to discuss their approach to the investigation for the day, she half-expected to see Noah seated at her side. Instead, Winter was the only occupant of the conference room.

  Winter’s bright eyes flicked up from the screen of her laptop as she lifted a distracted hand. “Morning.”

  “Good morning.” Bree returned the pleasant look and pulled out a chair to sit across the circular table from her friend and fellow agent. “So, anything new about this whole Eric Dalton thing?”

  With a sigh, Winter pushed back in her seat, stretching her arms above her head. “No. I heard back from the agents in Baltimore, and they said nothing seems out of the ordinary. They can’t find Natalie or her husband, but they got ahold of Jon’s boss. Sounds like Natalie had a couple days off work, and she and Jon were going on a trip up to New York. They haven’t answered any phone calls, but that doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary for a couple on vacation.”

  “No, not really. But…I don’t know.” Thinking everything through, Bree drummed her fingers against the polished surface.

  Winter leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “I worked in organized crime for a while. I didn’t deal with the Russians, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of how organized crime works. There are many parts of Eric Dalton’s story that just don’t make sense when you look at them from an organized crime angle.”

  Winter closed her laptop and turned her curious stare to Bree. “Which parts?”

  Bree laughed. “Honestly? Just about all of it. Okay, maybe not quite all of it, but a lot of it.”

  Winter pulled over a notepad to make some notes. “Do you think he’s just making it all up? I don’t know why, maybe Munchausen syndrome or something? Something where he’s just desperate for attention.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Bree slid one of the folders across the table for Winter to review. “We saw all the hospital statements and the doctor bills. That part of it is real, there’s no doubt about that. What I don’t understand is how he convinced them to give him that much money. Even to the Russians, half a million dollars isn’t chump change.”

  Winter whistled as she leafed through the hospital bills. “What about his life insurance policy? If he’s got a one-million-dollar policy, wouldn’t they turn a profit if they had to kill him?”

  “They would, yeah.” Bree nodded. “Even then, it’s a stretch. Not only would they have to kill Eric, but they’d have to go through the effort to collect the payout. He said that was his collateral, but I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but it just doesn’t seem right.”

  “Yeah.” Winter tapped a pensive finger against her cheek. “I don’t know. I agree with you, though. There’s something going on here that we’re missing.”

  “I’ve got a friend who works in the Baltimore field office.” Bree tapped the other folder she’d brought into the room with her. “That’s what I was going to bring to you today. I plan to talk to Max once we’re out of here, and with his approval, I’m going to head up to Baltimore and pick my friend’s brain.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  Bree nodded, hoping she was doing the right thing. “He’s worked in organized crime since he got out of Quantico fifteen years ago, so he knows his shit. None of us here know all that much about how the Russians work, but my friend has spent time undercover, so I believe he’ll have some insight for us. No doubt about it.”

  Whether the news would be good or not, Bree was less sure.

  When Aiden received an email update about recent evidence collected in the kidnapping case of Justin Black, he rubbed his thumbs into his tired eyes before squinting at the computer monitor. To the best of his knowledge, there were no agents actively assigned to Justin’s case. Much of the Violent Crimes Division’s focus was on Eric Dalton and the mess he’d gotten himself into, and the remaining agents were looking into a multitude of other cases.

  He opened the digital record of the Justin Black case, and sure enough, there was no one actively assigned to work the investigation.

  Why, then, had the Harrisonburg PD sent a handful of trace evidence to the Richmond FBI office for analysis?

  His suspicions fell solidly on Winter. He hadn’t talked to her much over the last couple weeks, but he was fairly certain he would have gotten word if she had gone rogue to look after her brother’s disappearance. She was assigned to the Eric Dalton case, and at the beginning stage of the investigation, Aiden doubted Max Osbourne would sanction a side project into Justin’s disappearance unless there was a damn good reason.

  And if there was a
damn good reason, Aiden would have heard it. After all, Aiden had been a part of Justin’s case since the young boy was kidnapped after his parents’ murder.

  As he glanced over the recent addition of the potential evidence from Harrisonburg, his eyes widened.

  “What the hell?” he muttered to himself.

  According to the scanned copies of the evidence release forms, Winter had been the agent on site when the crime scene techs arrived. And the address.

  He doubted he’d ever forget that damn address. For years, that address had haunted his dreams.

  Heaving a sigh, he leaned back in his chair and fixed his stare on the dimpled ceiling of his office. He could recall the last time Winter had visited her childhood home. Specifically, he remembered the pitiable shape she’d been in when Noah Dalton carried her out of that damn house.

  A litany of questions about Winter’s motive for visiting the house flitted through his head, but he would only find reliable answers if he went directly to the source herself.

  Pushing himself from the comfortable seat, he stretched his arms and legs before heading toward the door. But as he stepped into the hallway, he wondered if she would even be here today. During the Kilroy case, she had skipped more days of work than she’d been present for.

  Part of him expected to make it down to the Violent Crimes section to be told that no one had heard from her. That same part of him anticipated a return to the same state of mind he’d occupied all those months ago. He was used to charming and manipulating the occasional person to further his ambitions, but even he could admit he’d gone too far.

  Lost in the midst of his contemplation, he had to do a double take when he stepped off the elevator. Though her attention was fixed on her phone, Winter stood off to the side of the hallway. Before she had a chance to notice the scrutiny, he took stock of her appearance.

  Her long, glossy hair was fashioned into a neat braid that hung over one shoulder of her white, button-down dress shirt. The shirt itself was spotless, and she’d completed the ensemble with a pair of dressy black slacks and shiny flats.

  She looked normal.

  As he took the first few steps off the elevator, her bright blue eyes snapped up to meet his. “Oh. Morning, Aiden. What brings you down here?”

  Her greeting was normal.

  She seemed fine.

  What the hell was going on?

  He didn’t see any reason to dance around the subject. “I got a message about an update to your brother’s case. Figured I’d come down here to see how that came about.”

  A flicker of recognition passed behind her eyes, but he spotted no hint of the anxiety or irritability he had expected.

  Seriously. What in the hell was going on?

  With a quick glance in either direction, Winter gestured to the open doorway of a nearby conference room.

  Wordlessly, he nodded.

  After he followed her into the small space, he flicked on the light and eased the door closed.

  He half-expected to see the same cold, unfeeling look in her eyes that had been so commonplace during the Kilroy investigation. Instead, she still looked normal. Intense, but not on a level that was disconcerting.

  Crossing both arms over his chest, he pinned her with a matching stare. “Well, let’s hear it.”

  She tucked the smartphone into the pocket of her slacks and nodded. “You know that email I got a couple weeks after the end of the Lopez investigation? The one that called me ‘sis?’” At the mention of the message, her expression turned grim.

  Aiden didn’t let his gaze waver. “I remember it. You sent it to Cyber Crimes, right?”

  “Right. Well, they sent me a message the night before last to tell me that they’d been able to trace the geographic location from where it was sent. They didn’t get anything else, but…”

  He clenched his jaw. “But what?”

  “It was sent from Harrisonburg, on a wireless connection. The email domain was disposable, so they didn’t get anything else from it. The sender also hid their device, so there’s no telling if it was sent from a phone, a laptop, tablet, or what have you.” The cadence of her voice was hurried.

  “Harrisonburg?” Aiden echoed. “Is that why you went back to that house? To see if he had been there too?”

  Slowly, she nodded. “Look, he disguised the email address and the device he sent the message from, so why wouldn’t he use a proxy server to conceal the geographic location? He could’ve used a proxy to make it look like he’d logged in from Norway or China or anywhere else in the world, but he didn’t. He let them find the location.”

  Well, there was no point in arguing her logic now. She had been right, after all. “What did you find?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I thought you said you got the message from forensics? Don’t you know all of this already?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t look that closely at it. I figured I’d come to find the source and get the information firsthand.”

  Lips pursed, she studied him in the moments of silence that ensued. “You think I can’t handle it or something?”

  There it was. There was the self-righteous indignation he’d seen so often during the search for Douglas Kilroy.

  With a slight sigh, he rubbed his eyes. “I can tell you expect me to refute that, but honestly? It’s accurate. You’re not the only one who lost their shit a little during the Kilroy investigation, remember? Dedication is one thing, but obsession is something completely different.”

  For what had to be the fifth time, he was surprised at the lack of ire. Her blue eyes were wary and even a bit rundown, but the fire of hostility had fizzled out.

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, she nodded her understanding. “Autumn was with me. That’s basically what she told me too.”

  His eyes flicked back to hers as his pulse spiked. “Autumn? Why?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Because she’s my friend, and she wanted to help me. Because I asked her to help me.”

  For several seconds, he merely stood there, transfixed in a rare moment of surprise. Winter had asked Autumn to help her with the single most sensitive aspect of her entire life.

  A pang of guilt edged its way in beside the surprise. Winter wasn’t a volatile newbie who needed his constant attention. She wasn’t the single-minded, self-destructive vengeance machine she’d been during the Kilroy case. He should have known better. He should have trusted her.

  After a long moment of awkward silence, he cleared his throat and nodded. “You’re still on the Eric Dalton case right now, aren’t you?”

  Her visage was still steely as she nodded. “I am. But right now, it’s still not really clear where it’s going. Could be something that just takes until the end of the week for all we know right now. I’m going to focus on his…issue while CSU works through what they found at the house.”

  A weight seemed to lift from Aiden’s shoulders. As he met her determined gaze, he was struck by another twinge of pride. Winter had come a hell of a long way since the beginning of the year, and he was glad to see that her progress still held up in the face of what was, to her, the ultimate stressor.

  He nodded his approval. “That’s a good plan. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on what’s happening in your brother’s case. If anything comes up or anything changes, I’ll let you know as soon as it does. I’ve got some free time this week, so I’ll look back over what we gathered the first time around.”

  All at once, her tense demeanor slipped away. Her eyes still held the same glint of determination, but the grim expression was gone. “Okay. That sounds like a plan.”

  With a slight smile, she extended a hand.

  As he accepted the handshake, he returned the expression.

  He was right. She was going to be a damn fine agent.

  9

  In an effort to allay at least a portion of Noah’s suffering, Winter had offered to accompany him to dinner with his father that night. According to Noah, he hadn’t been able to concoct a sui
table excuse to turn down the unexpected offer, but he didn’t want to add to her misery by asking her to join him either.

  Winter had dropped Bree off at the airport earlier that afternoon, and by now, she had landed in Baltimore. Autumn was inundated with follow-up paperwork from an evaluation she had conducted that day, though she’d assured Winter she would be available if anything came up. But otherwise, Winter was on her own for the night.

  She hadn’t yet told Noah about the message from Justin. Throughout almost all their interactions that day, his demeanor had been marked by the same irritability and strain as the day before. Though Noah didn’t want Eric’s presence in his life, the man’s presence was undoubtedly marked by a slew of painful memories and feelings of betrayal.

  So, even though Eric Dalton’s case didn’t yet warrant a tremendous amount of mental bandwidth, Winter was glad for Aiden and Autumn’s help. If she knew that discovering Justin’s whereabouts was in good hands, she could focus her efforts on being a good friend to Noah.

  The knowledge that they’d obtained a lead into Justin’s disappearance would have only been a new source of stress for Noah. In addition to the discomfort of his biological father’s presence, he would be worried about Winter. And right now, Winter was confident she had the situation under control.

  To her relief, Noah offered a running commentary of his night out with his biological father. Before he summoned an Uber to take him to the restaurant, he had told her that he was certain he would be hammered drunk by the end of the night. Now, three hours later, he sent her a text message to lament his sobriety.

  If I knew I was going to be stuck being mostly sober for this whole damn thing, I would’ve at least driven myself so I could make up an excuse and leave when I wanted to. The message ended with a couple angry cat emojis.