by Paige Tyler
If Trevor was involved with the people who’d murdered John Loughlin, why act like he was hunting down the killer? And if he wasn’t involved with the rogue agents and honestly wanted to find who’d done it, why was he so reluctant to talk to her?
“His name is Seth Larson,” Trevor said, shutting off the engine. “The DCO brought him in to specialize in cybersecurity and data protection. Like I said before, he was hired three weeks before the bombing and quit two days later.”
As if that explained it, Trevor opened his door and stepped out of the vehicle. Alina quickly unbuckled her seat belt and jumped out, practically running to catch up with him as he headed for the apartment building.
“You do realize that when he started working at the DCO could easily be a coincidence, right?” she asked as she fell into step beside him. “And as far as quitting right after the bombing, I’m betting a lot of people bailed after that.”
Alina took his silence as confirmation as they entered the building and climbed the stairs.
“Do you have anything else on this guy?” she asked. “Some indication of a payment, a personal beef with Loughlin, a connection with the rogue agents who went on the run?”
Trevor shook his head as he stopped in front of apartment 231. “Nothing like that. But Larson was previously employed by a man John had been trying to apprehend for years.”
“What man?”
“An extremely powerful man who has used other people to do his dirty work. As it happens, he’s also the same man who got Seth Larson the job at the DCO.”
That didn’t tell her much. And while Trevor appeared to be searching for the bomber, he didn’t seem to be trying to find any of the rogue agents.
She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but before she got a chance, he reached out and pushed the doorbell. He immediately followed that up with a few knocks that were louder than the bell.
The door was jerked open so fast, Alina automatically reached for the sidearm on her hip but stopped at the last second at the sight of a young guy in jeans and a T-shirt with wire-rimmed glasses and at least three days of stubble on his face, a little blond boy standing behind him.
“I heard the bell,” the man said, clearly pissed off. “You didn’t have to knock, too.”
Trevor frowned and opened his month to say something no doubt abrupt and snarky, but his words were cut off by a soft, frightened voice.
“Daddy, do you have to go away again?”
Larson glanced over his shoulder at his son. The little boy, who couldn’t have been more than eight, was close to tears.
“No, Cody. Daddy’s not going anywhere. I’m just talking to some old friends.”
Cody moved closer, studying her and Trevor, his blue eyes curious. “Friends?”
Larson looked at them, a pleading expression on his face. “You two are friends, right?”
Alina smiled at Cody. “Yes, we’re friends of your dad. We worked with him a little while ago.”
That seemed to satisfy the little boy, who turned without another word and headed back into the living room. When he was out of earshot, Seth Larson frowned at them.
“I don’t remember seeing either of you from the time I was at the DCO, but I’m guessing that’s where you know me from,” he said.
“Yes,” Trevor said, his tone softer than Alina would have expected. “I’m Trevor Maxwell, and this is my partner, Alina Bosch. We’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the morning the bombing happened.”
Larson threw a quick glance at his son, as if he was afraid Cody might have heard, but Cody was lying on the floor coloring and didn’t even look up. “Sure, I can talk. Just…don’t use that word—bomb. I don’t think Cody knows what it means, and I really don’t want him to. He’s autistic, and sometimes he gets upset easily.”
Alina nodded. Beside her, Trevor did the same.
Larson led them into the small, tidy apartment, past an eat-in kitchen, and into the living room. There was a couch against one wall, with a TV and bookshelves opposite it. A fancy computer sat on the coffee table, some kind of accounting spreadsheet showing on the screen, but Alina barely took notice of any of it. Cody was far more fascinating.
Spread out on the floor around him must have been nearly a hundred completed pictures torn out of coloring books. Every one of them was absolutely amazing. While the colors were unusual—trees in blues and purples, people in every shade of the rainbow, skies in yellow with orange clouds—there wasn’t a single crayon mark out of place or outside the lines. In a word, they were breathtaking.
Seemingly oblivious to them, Cody finished the picture he was working on, then carefully pulled it out of the book and set it aside before starting the next one.
Larson motioned them toward the couch. “You two want a soda…or water? Sorry, but that’s all I have in the house.”
Alina shook her head as she sat. “No, I’m good.”
Trevor declined the offer as well, moving carefully around the pictures on the floor as he grabbed a place beside her on the couch and pulled out a pen and spiral notepad from a cargo pocket. Larson sat down on the floor with Cody, making sure to move his son’s artwork aside first.
“To be honest, I’m kind of surprised no one stopped by before this,” he said.
That confirmed what Alina had thought. It shocked the heck out of her at the same time. She was an agent, not a cop, but talking to every single person who’d been in the complex at the time of the bombing seemed like common sense.
“On the day of the…incident…you showed up for work two and a half hours before your normal duty time,” Trevor said. “Mind if I ask why?”
Larson’s gaze went to his son, a smile curving his mouth. “I went in early so I could grab a few hours before Cody got out of bed. He loves his grandma—she watches him for me when I’m at work—but he can be a handful sometimes.” He frowned at them. “My boss—Lisa Marino—said it was okay. I’m sure she’ll confirm that if you ask her.”
Beside her, Trevor visibly relaxed. “Lisa left the DCO two weeks ago. I’ll try to get in contact with her, but that could take a while.”
“How about Karl Thomas? Is he still there?” Larson asked. “He knew about me going in early.”
Trevor nodded. “I think he’s still there. I’ll check.”
Larson looked at Cody again, his expression thoughtful this time. “I guess a lot of people left after what happened.”
“Is that why you quit when you did?” Alina asked. “Because of the…incident?”
Larson was silent for a moment as he watched his son color. Tears formed in his eyes, and he blinked.
“I had to,” he said, turning back to them. “I loved the work, and the people there were amazing, but the hours were already getting tough on Cody…and his grandma. Trying to go to work early might have helped a little, but a full day at work was still too long to be away from him. When the other stuff happened, I realized that if I’d walked past the admin building forty-five minutes later to get that cup of coffee from the cafeteria, I could have been caught up in…in everything that happened. Then Cody wouldn’t have anyone except his grandma, and she’s too old to care for him full time. I couldn’t take that risk.”
“How long have you been taking care of Cody on your own?” Trevor asked.
“About a year,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I guess Kristy just couldn’t deal anymore. She bailed one day while I was at work. I was mad at her for a long time, but I finally gave up on that. I know now that she did the best she could.”
Alina glanced at Cody to see if he’d react to the mention of his mother, but he continued to color like he hadn’t heard a thing.
“Do you stay home with him full time?” she asked Larson.
Larson nodded. “Pretty much. Like I said, my mom comes over to take care of him now and then, but he doesn’
t like me to be out of his sight for long.” He gestured to the laptop on the coffee table. “I do a little consulting work long distance to help pay the bills, but it’s tough. I really thought I’d struck gold landing that job with the DCO.”
Alina remembered thinking something very similar when Dick had offered her a job there. That reminded her of what Trevor had said before they’d knocked on the door, about there being an extremely powerful man involved in getting Larson hired at the DCO.
“Can I ask how you heard about the job at the DCO?” she asked Larson.
“I’d done some work for a subsidiary of Chadwick-Thorn back before Kristy left, then some consulting work in April for the main corporate office over near Anacostia-Bolling, installing and networking a fancy security system,” Larson said. “While I was there, I got the opportunity to meet with Thomas Thorn, and after the security gig was done, he offered me an IT job at the DCO. It had everything I was looking for—good hours, great pay, amazing medical benefits, challenging work. It was mostly internal security stuff like monitoring DCO employees to make sure none of them were inadvertently sending classified material over unclassified computer systems. Things like that.”
Interesting. Was Thomas Thorn the man Trevor had been talking about? The one John Loughlin had been trying to put in jail for years? If so, no wonder Trevor hadn’t wanted to say anything. The previous director of the DCO had been chasing a man who was not only the CEO of one of the biggest and most politically connected defense contractors in the world, but also a former senator? There was something scary big going on here.
She was still thinking about that interesting tidbit of information when she realized Trevor was asking something else. Alina forced herself to focus on what her partner was saying.
“You mentioned that you were near the admin building forty-five minutes before the…incident…getting coffee. Did you see anyone else around?”
Larson thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it was still dark at that time, but I saw three or four people around the main building.”
“Did you recognize them?” Trevor asked.
“I hadn’t worked there long enough to learn almost anyone’s name outside the IT section,” the man said. “Sorry.”
Trevor frowned, but Alina wasn’t ready to walk away from the potential clue just yet. “Do you think you could ID the people you saw if we gave you some photos to look through?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Larson said. “But do you think you can bring the photos here or email them to me so I don’t have to leave Cody with my mom?”
“Of course,” she agreed.
While Alina added his name and email to the contact list in her phone, Trevor scribbled something in his notepad. She thought he was writing down notes on what they’d talked about, but then he tore the paper out of the pad and held it out to Larson.
“Give this guy a call in a few days,” Trevor said. “I think he can set you up with some IT work you can do from home. Tell him I sent you. I put my number on there, too, just in case you need anything.”
Alina glanced at Larson’s little boy as she stood. “Bye, Cody.”
Since Cody didn’t look up from his coloring book, she thought he hadn’t heard her, but just as she and Trevor followed Larson to the front door, the boy jumped up and ran over with one of the pictures he’d made. When he held it out to her, she saw it was the one he’d been working on when she and Trevor had first gotten there, the one with the yellow sky and the orange clouds. She took it very carefully.
“Is this for me?” she asked.
Cody didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and went back to his coloring book, starting another page.
“Thank you,” she said, but he was already lost in his work.
She glanced at Trevor as they headed outside to their SUV. “What was that all about?”
He pushed the button on the key fob to unlock the doors. “What was what all about?”
“That number you gave Larson. Do you always give suspects the name and number of prospective employers?”
Trevor shrugged. “I think it’s obvious that guy isn’t a suspect. He’s just someone who might have seen something. Besides, he could use a little help.”
Alina couldn’t argue with any of those things. “It was a nice thing to do.”
He only grunted in answer.
They didn’t talk much as they headed north on Highway 2 back toward Fredericksburg and the interstate. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was low on the horizon. It would be nightfall by the time they got back to the DCO complex.
As the last few beams of the sun’s light slipped through the trees lining the road, Alina replayed the day’s events. To say she was confused about everything she’d seen and learned was an understatement. Her new partner wasn’t anything like Dick had described. Other than the fact that he was very closed-mouth when it came to sharing information, Trevor seemed like an okay guy. Well, there were the fangs, claws, and glowing gold eyes. Those were going to take a while to get used to. Even so, she wasn’t ready to brand him the traitor the director of the DCO claimed him to be—yet.
Chapter 3
“Keep your eyes closed and just relax.”
Tanner Howland frowned even as he said the words. He wasn’t sure he was the best person to help another hybrid get a handle on their inner animal, especially since he was still trying to figure it out most of the time himself, but Sage Andrews, the woman the DCO had rescued from a lab in Tajikistan a while back, was in a really bad way. Besides, he couldn’t say no to anything Zarina Sokolov asked him to do. Meeting the beautiful Russian doctor had been the only bright spot in his dark existence since he’d been captured and turned into a beast over a year ago. If not for her, he probably wouldn’t even be alive right now.
He, Zarina, and Sage sat on the floor in the small living room of Sage’s dorm room/prison cell on the DCO complex while two armed men stood guard outside the door.
“That’s it,” he said. “Breathe in and out, nice and slowly.”
As Sage inhaled and exhaled, Tanner looked for any sign that the beast inside her might take over and she was about to lose it. Beside him, Zarina did the same. He would have preferred her to watch this exercise from farther away, like on a closed-circuit television in another room. But Zarina insisted she needed to be close in case Sage lost control.
When he’d tried to argue, Zarina had folded her arms—a sure sign he wasn’t going to change her mind no matter what he said. “Who taught you how to control your inner beast?” she asked. “Me, that’s who.”
But while that was true, Tanner didn’t like the idea of Zarina putting herself at risk. He’d been watching out for her ever since she’d saved his life in Washington State after a pair of psycho doctors had injected him with a serum that turned him into a hybrid like Sage. He wasn’t about to stop now.
Across from him, Sage’s brow knit, like she was fighting for control. Tanner tensed, but after a moment, she relaxed again. While he’d had more than his share of episodes since being turned into a hybrid, sometimes it seemed like Sage was more beast than human. If there was any doubt of that, all a person had to do was take a look at Sage’s living arrangements, and the truth was obvious.
Since she was prone to violence, staying in one of the normal dorm rooms like he did was out of the question, so John Loughlin had turned one of the outbuildings into a small efficiency apartment of sorts. Her bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room took up the back half of the building while the front was part medical facility, part guard station. In between the front and back sections was a wall of steel bars as thick and heavy as anything you’d expect to see in a real prison.
It wasn’t the nicest way to treat a woman who’d never asked for any of this to happen to her, and Tanner hated it more than anyone, but there wasn’t anything else they could do. Sage gave in to her ani
mal rages once every few days. The deep scratches along the walls and floors were a testament to that. A petite, slender girl with long, wavy, dark hair and expressive gray eyes, she looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. But when the animal inside took over, Sage turned into something extremely dangerous.
That was why Dick kept two armed guards there 24-7. Currently, both men were standing outside the steel bars of Sage’s cell watching them, disdain on their faces. They both hated and feared Sage. The only reason they treated her halfway decently at all was because the DCO might be able to use her later. That said, the thought of Sage escaping and going on a rampage through the training complex terrified the new director.
Honestly, it terrified Tanner, too. If she got out of here, it would be up to him to stop her, and he wasn’t sure if he could stop a raging hybrid without losing control of his own inner animal.
“We’re going to do the door exercise again, Sage,” he said quietly. “Just like we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, okay?”
Sage gently wrapped her graceful fingers around the silver cross on a chain around her neck, her lips moving in a silent prayer. She’d told Tanner that she had grown up in a very religious family and that her father was a pastor of a church back in her hometown. In fact, the first things she’d asked for after she’d calmed down enough to talk to anyone were a cross and a Bible.
After a few moments, Sage nodded, letting him know she was ready.
“I want you to imagine that you’re standing in front of a door in a dimly lit room. It can be any kind of door you want. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something you can easily remember.”
She frowned, then relaxed again.
“Do you have the door set in your mind?” Tanner asked.
“Yes,” she said, the tips of her fangs clearly visible.
“Relax, Sage,” he said softly. “We’re in no rush. Take a minute and center yourself. Concentrate on the door as you breathe in and out.”
That was the thing with Sage. All it took was a word or a noise or a bad memory, and the beast was off and running.
