DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

“Amelia was attacked at the hotel where we sent her.”

  Megan frowned. Her eyes fell to the carpeted floor.

  “Do we know who? Why? Does it have something to do with the case she was working?”

  “No. This is about me.”

  I took a heavy seat in an armchair, resting my hands on my thighs as I tried to organize my thoughts.

  “I’m sure it’s not—”

  “It is,” I interrupted before she could finish her thought. “Thirty years ago, my mother and father were murdered in a hotel in New York City.”

  Megan’s eyes filled with sympathy. “I know.”

  My head came up sharply. This was news to me.

  She shrugged. “Peter is very thorough. When Luke, Peter, and I first started Dragon, Peter insisted that all employees be closely vetted. We found references to the murders when we did our background check on you.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “It’s your business. I figured you’d come to me if you ever wanted to talk about it.”

  That was Megan in a nutshell: thorough and respectful.

  I dragged my fingers through my hair and sighed. “Someone has been committing copycat murders over the past few months. Two in Louisiana, one in California. Each one in towns where I’ve lived. And this, tonight … I’m pretty sure it was an attempt at another murder by the copycat.”

  Megan’s eyes narrowed. “You think someone has been copycatting your parents’ murder and you didn’t think it was important to inform me before this?”

  “I was handling it.”

  “How?”

  “Waverly and I were investigating it.”

  She made a sound that told me she was annoyed. “Waverly? She’s the one you trusted to help you with this investigation?”

  “She was the only person I knew who had the skills to learn the things I needed to know.”

  “We have an entire tech team at Dragon. You could have come to me.”

  “I didn’t want to put you in danger if I was right—and clearly, I am.”

  “Instead, you put Amelia and Waverly and God knows who else in trouble by handcuffing me and making it impossible for me to get ahead of this?”

  The accusation in her voice cut right through the alcohol that still pickled my brain.

  “I was trying to protect you.”

  “You were being a cowboy, trying to take control and going off half-cocked without the help of your team!” She shook her head, anger dancing in her eyes. “Have you learned nothing after all this time? Have you not realized how important you are to Dragon? To me?”

  “Megan …”

  I didn’t know what to say. And she had no patience to hear it. She got up and began to pace, clearly agitated.

  “You’re sure it was the copycat who attacked Amelia tonight?”

  “As sure as I can be. One of the men, the would-be rapist, came as close as he could to admitting it without actually saying it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He knew who I was when I walked into the room and he said I was in for more than I could know.”

  She nodded, clearly not questioning my words, just my motivations.

  “And you’ve been investigating with Waverly? What have you learned?”

  I leaned forward again, the room beginning to spin a little. I wasn’t sure if it was the subject or the booze, but my stomach didn’t really care.

  “Not a lot. Waverly was able to track a credit card we believe was used by the killer in California. She also tracked the alias used to rent a house where we believe Rosalie Matthias—”

  “Rosalie Matthias was Kasey’s case, right? The bipolar woman who went missing from here in Houston? Wasn’t her brother-in-law arrested in that case?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does this have to do with the copycat killer?”

  “She was tattooed and murdered in a house leased to the same alias. And the tattoos on her body? They were the logo for the hotel my parents were murdered in at the time of the murders.”

  “What’s her connection to all of this?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t been able to establish a connection between Ms. Matthias and myself. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

  “Or it’s not just about you.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I couldn’t really wrap my mind around that one, though. No one else would have known that logo or seen the connection between those tattoos and the other murders. The cops still hadn’t put together that the murders in Louisiana were related to one another, or that the one in California was also related. No one would have connected Rosalie Matthias to all of this if her sister hadn’t been instructed to bring Dragon in on the case and if I hadn’t been attracted by the murder in a hotel on Coronado.

  It was about me.

  Megan stopped pacing and watched me, her arms wrapped around her chest.

  “What else did Waverly find?”

  “Not much. She traced the alias on the house lease to several other locations we know the killer was at one point or another, but it’s essentially a dead end.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “There’s a virus on my phone. Someone’s been listening in to every conversation I’ve had over … months. We don’t know for sure how long, but it has to be months. I think that’s how the safe houses were compromised.”

  Alarm flashed in her eyes. “You have that phone on you now?”

  I shook my head. “A spare.”

  “Who do you think did that?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” I stood up, my stomach growing more and more unsteady. Movement might help. Or make it worse. “I had the tech department run tests on the other phones owned by Dragon at the office, but they only found a few things, nothing like what was on my phone.”

  “So it looks like you’re the target.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why now? Why after all this time?”

  That I wished I knew.

  “Willard is still in prison and the other … he died.”

  She nodded. She knew as well as I did what had happened to the other man. She had stood with me when the mortuary confirmed his identity and when they had packed him into an urn and dropped his ashes into a cardboard box. She had cried in my arms when we walked away, finally allowed to truly grieve the loss of Sam without the shadow of her murderer hanging over us.

  “Speaking of which …” I spun on my heel and regarded her. “Why did you hire Waverly? You knew she was wealthy and that she didn’t need a job. Why did you hire her?”

  “I liked her.”

  “It never occurred to you that she might have had ulterior motives for wanting to work at Dragon?”

  “Like what?” she scoffed. “She was bored. She wanted a place to go every day. Surely you understand that. I did.”

  Megan had grown up wealthy. Her parents owned and operated one of the largest telecommunication companies in the country, yet she’d gone to the military and before beginning her own business.

  “Did you know she’s that man’s biological daughter?”

  Megan frowned. “What man?”

  “The man who shot Sam.”

  Megan tilted her head. “That’s not possible.”

  “It is possible.”

  “He didn’t have a family.”

  “He did. They simply disappeared while he was on trial to escape the press.”

  Megan shook her head. “Waverly is barely thirty. She’s not old enough—”

  “She was an infant when he killed my parents.”

  “Then she couldn’t—”

  “I was six when my testimony led to his arrest and eight when I testified against him in open court. Do you really think she wouldn’t have heard those stories as a kid and couldn’t have formed the same sort of bias against me as her father did?”

  “But you were sleeping with her.”

  It was the first time she had said the actual words. Sh
e’d implied that she knew on several occasions, but she’d never come right out and said it.

  “I didn’t know until tonight.”

  “But she knew. How could she sleep with you if she knew and held this sort of grudge?” She shook her head. “She’s not capable of that sort of deception, Hayden.”

  “How do you know that? Did you know who her father was?” It sounded absurd even to my own ears, but it shut Megan up for a moment.

  We stared at each other, my head still spinning, my stomach still churning.

  “I didn’t know, Hayden. We did a thorough background check on her like we have every employee since we started Dragon and nothing came up. Absolutely nothing.”

  “I know. I looked at the report before coming here.”

  “Then you know—”

  “But why did she come to you? Why would she want to work for Dragon when she made so much money with smart phone apps?”

  “She said the apps were just a joke, something she got into with some college friends as a sort of friendly competition. She said she wanted something more challenging. I bought it. I understood.”

  “She was singing to the choir. But now … doesn’t it seem a little suspicious in light of all this?”

  “A little, I suppose. But I honestly can’t believe Waverly would be capable of that sort of deception. I really can’t.”

  “We’re just going around in circles,” I muttered as the phone began to ring. I watched as Megan crossed to the landline that was plugged into the wall in the kitchen. She glanced over her shoulder at me as though she thought I knew who might be on the other end. I had to admit to a little curiosity myself since it was going on four in the morning.

  I crossed the room to the fireplace and stared into the darkness inside of it, wondering vaguely why someone would even want a fireplace in a humid clime like Houston. We occasionally got some cold weather, but not often enough that a normal heating system couldn’t keep up. But, again, fires were romantic, weren’t they? Maybe Luke liked to—

  And that was an image I really didn’t want to entertain.

  “Hayden,” Megan said, her voice so soft that I knew instantly something was wrong.

  I turned and saw the caution on her face. That, too, suggested trouble.

  “Waverly … we installed a security system in her house when she first came to work for us and she’s kept it …”

  “Yeah?”

  “The alarm went off about twenty minutes ago. That was Vincent on the phone, looking for you.”

  Fear cut into me every bit as cold and hard as any knife.

  Oh, God. Not Waverly. Not after what I just did to her … not ever … oh, God.

  I was already headed out the door. Megan called after me, but I didn’t stop until I was halfway to the driveway and realized I hadn’t driven myself. I cursed under my breath, spinning on my heel just in time to see Megan tugging a T-shirt over her head, her pink sleep bra revealing a secret or two as she rushed down the sidewalk.

  “I’ll drive.”

  I didn’t feel that required a response other than my body climbing into the passenger side of her gold Escalade.

  What the fuck was happening here?

  Chapter 7

  Waverly

  My house was swarming with bodies. Security from Dragon. Cops. A couple of crime scene investigators. Vincent Caplin, head of investigations for Dragon.

  I had to admit to a little surprise at seeing Vincent.

  I was curled up on the couch, a throw wrapped over my shoulders. My hands were shaking, but it wasn’t from cold. Thank God for that Tae-Bo class I had taken back in college!

  “Just start from the beginning,” a detective dressed in a cheap suit that had obviously been worn one too many times this week said.

  Where else would I start?

  “I’d gone to bed …”

  Hayden stormed out and I sat on the floor for a long time, sobbing like a damn baby. Ashamed of myself, ashamed of the whole situation, I’d pulled myself together and climbed into the shower, determined to wash the self-pity away and rebuild my false bravado. Only Hayden had the power to hurt me the way he had and it was stupid of me to keep giving him the space to do it. But I couldn’t help myself. When it was good, it was damn good. But when it was bad …

  I was dressed and brushing my teeth when I heard a noise in the hallway. The girly, weak side of me automatically assumed it was Hayden come back to apologize.

  Should have known better.

  I stepped out into the hallway and he grabbed me from behind. His hands were everywhere all at once, tugging at my arms, brushing against my breasts, his fingernails ripping into the thin skin near my armpits. I struggled, pulling free of his grip each time he got ahold of me, only to have him grab me somewhere else like an octopus determined to trap its prey. I kicked at his shins and slammed my hip into his thighs. I did everything I could—even tried to bite his arm when it came too close to my face.

  He cursed against my head, his breath blowing my hair around. I managed to pivot, catching sight of just the profile of his face as I managed to throw a punch, connecting with his jaw. That stunned him just enough to allow me to throw another punch, this one landing right in his bread basket. I didn’t wait around long enough to allow him to recover from that one.

  I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door closed. There was no lock and no time to find something to brace against it. He was already banging against it before I could move away. I ran to the nightstand by my bed and searched through the top drawer for the gun Texas state law told me I could carry. He had me by the shoulder just as my fingers touched the cold metal of the gun’s handle. He slammed me down onto the bed and climbed on top of me, his face a mask of anger.

  “You women think you’re so fucking strong,” he muttered close to my face. “You have no idea.”

  I fought him. He hit my head, slamming his fist into the side of my face twice. That whole seeing stars thing that people say in movies and books? It’s actually true. I saw many stars for a long moment. But then his hands were sliding under the shirt I’d put back on—Hayden’s shirt—and that pulled me back into reality.

  I managed to raise the gun and press it against his ribs.

  “Let me go, asshole,” I said as he froze on top of me.

  “You’re crazy!” He jumped off of me, holding his hands up where I could see them. “I’m not getting shot—again!—for one of you bitches!”

  And then he was gone like he’d never been there in the first place.

  “Which way did he go?” the detective asked.

  “I don’t know. I was a little busy being freaked out.”

  The detective rocked back on his heels, eyeing me with weariness. “Have you noticed any disturbances in the rest of the house? Anything missing?”

  Just as the words finished forming on his lips, the front door burst open and Hayden came rushing into the house, Megan not far behind him. Vincent moved a cop aside so that Hayden had a clear shot to me.

  He eyed me for a long second, anger flashing momentarily in his eyes when he spotted the bruise forming on my cheek. Anger and something else that I couldn’t quite read. All that mattered was that he didn’t come to my side.

  Megan glanced at him as though waiting for him to do something more. Then she sighed and came to me, kneeling in front of me as she took my hands.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  She touched my cheek, then ran her fingertips over the bruises. I ignored her question and watched as Hayden stepped back from talking to Vincent, clearly getting my story secondhand. He glanced at me as he spoke, but it was like he was looking at a stranger.

  “He’s still mad.”

  Megan’s eyebrows rose. “He’s pretty upset. And a little drunk, I think.”

  “He told you?”

  “He’s told me everything.” She squeezed my hands. “He wouldn’t be this heartbroken if he didn’t care about you.”

  I shrugg
ed. Megan watched me, concern clear in her eyes. But before she could say anything else, the detective handed me his business card.

  “If you think of anything else, call the number on there.”

  “I will.”

  “We’ll do the best we can, but it seems like a random break in and those are fairly hard to solve. If I were you, I’d make sure there’s bullets in that gun next time.”

  He walked out, but not before pausing to speak to one of the crime scene investigators, gesturing toward my desk.

  I’d lied. Again. I told the detective that nothing in the house was disturbed, but that wasn’t true. Someone had riffled through my desk and attempted to log on to my computer. I hadn’t had a chance yet to see if anything was gone or damaged, but just a glance told me that someone had had a good idea of what they were looking for.

  The pile of research I was doing for a new smart phone app was undisturbed, but the pile of printouts I’d gathered on the murders Hayden had me investigating was spread all over the top of the desk.

  I was something of a neat freak, especially when it came to my work. I never would have left my papers that way.

  But I didn’t tell the cops because they would have asked a bunch of questions I was pretty sure Hayden wouldn’t have wanted me to answer. But Megan would understand.

  “I think it was someone connected to Hayden’s investigation,” I said in a low voice.

  Megan studied my face. “What makes you say that?”

  “I think there was someone else here and whoever it was went through my research.”

  Megan immediately got up and went to Hayden. They whispered together for a minute, his eyes moving over me again. Then he nodded before turning back to Vincent.

  Megan held her hand out to me. “Let’s go pack a bag.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  As Megan pulled me to my feet, the throw that had been wrapped over my shoulders fell away. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying in vain to hide the fact that I was only wearing an oversized man’s T-shirt over my curves. And the shirt had a rip in it that I hadn’t noticed until the cops arrived and covered me with the throw.

  Megan snagged the throw and tossed it over my shoulders again as we made our way to my bedroom where a group of crime scene investigators were still working.