by TL Schaefer
Fury began to bubble through me. This guy was a piece of work and a complete dick. He was also getting exactly the reaction he wanted. I leaned forward, placed my elbows on the table and met his gaze. And didn’t say a fucking word.
“You’d know how to hire a hit, wouldn’t you, detective?” he said it like he had a lemon wedge in his mouth. “Hire it out and make it look like an accident. But you fucked up. Your guy killed your husband, but left another attorney alive. And he’s talking.”
I didn’t even twitch as I stared him down. Grief was beginning to edge out anger. It was real. Joe was dead. Really dead. A knife twisted inside.
This asshole might be shaping the truth to get a confession, but he wasn’t lying about Joe being gone. About one of his colleagues surviving. A distant part of me wondered who it was, if they’d ever come to dinner at our house. Why couldn’t it have been them, instead of Joe?
Williams sighed, as if he just didn’t know what to do with my lying, murderous ass. If the circumstances had been different, I might have laughed at his theatrics.
“You might as well come clean. We’ll find the car, trace the money. You know we will.”
“You don’t have a fucking thing,” I finally said, pushing away from the table and settling back in my chair. “I came here for answers. Run along and find someone who can get them for me and stop wasting my time.”
He sat back as if I’d Tased him, his face twisting in anger. “You’re a piece of work, Foudy. They said you were a heartless bitch.”
“I’m sure they did,” I kept a poker face. He would not rile me. Would not. “Either charge me, or find someone who can give me answers. We’re done here.”
He stood so quickly he almost flipped the chair and stormed out of the room, leaving the door partially open.
I waited a beat, then stood and poked my head out of the room. “Can you get me a bottle of water while I wait?”
MY OLD CAPTAIN, ISAI Perez, was someone I'd shared a beer or three with over the years while we told grossly inflated war stories, his about the Army, mine about the Air Force. He’d also been a welcome ally as a minority who’d fought his way up the food chain through impeccable work, taking on the shit jobs no one else wanted and making the hard calls when necessary. He was military through and through and we’d been kindred spirits of a sort.
He busted into the interview room about five minutes after Williams left, and ushered me out of the interview room and into his office with a friendly hand at my back.
The detectives in the bullpen watched silently.
I settled into the guest chair. I knew, at a gut level, that Williams had been playing cowboy on his own, likely trying for brownie points. He hadn’t been acting at Perez’s direction. And now he was offering me a measure of respect by pulling me into his office, treating me like a human. Because he'd done that, I did the same.
"Just to get it out of the way, and to make Williams look like the fool he is, I have an alibi. From what I understand of the timeline from Joe’s mom, at the time of his death I was at my shrink’s office. I’ll grant whatever permissions y’all need to speak to her.”
Captain Perez nodded, and in his expression, I could see that they'd already eliminated me. At least personally. They’d still be looking to ensure I hadn’t hired a professional to kill Joe. Since I hadn’t, relief swept through me and I let out the breath I'd been unconsciously holding.
"You're clear, Monica, same thing with Tori."
As relieved as I was, the fact he could even consider a twelve-year-old of murder was chilling, and all too realistic. I’d seen it on more than one occasion.
"When did you last see Joe?” he asked. “Can you think of anyone who would do this?"
This was where it was a good thing I was already cleared. Our divorce would have been serious fodder for suspicion.
"Joe and I divorced a few months ago," I admitted, then took a deep breath. The air tasted stale, with an undercurrent of pine air freshener. Same old, same old. The familiarity of it unclenched something inside.
Perez had earned my trust a long time ago. As a veteran he’d understand what I had to say in a way a civilian couldn’t. "My PTSD has gotten worse, bad enough we decided it would be best if they went to Joe’s parents’ house until I figured it out. And finally I just couldn’t hold them hostage to my nightmares anymore."
"It's why you left the force, isn't it?" Perez asked, comprehension dawning.
I nodded. "I couldn't take the chance of being armed. Not when it was hitting me that hard."
He rubbed a hand over his forehead. "Shit, Monica. You should have said something, not given up your shield. We could have worked something out."
"I told you I was at my shrink’s office this morning, so it shouldn’t be a surprise I’ve already gone down that road, if that's what you'd have suggested. I went to the VA as soon as it started getting bad." I wasn't real big on admitting my weaknesses, but for Perez I would.
There was no way I would have taken a desk job. The thought of enduring the pitying glances of fellow detectives made me shudder.
Curiosity I could handle, pity, no.
In my heart I knew I’d made the right decision, even if it cut me to the bone.
What I didn't tell Captain Perez today was that my symptoms hadn't started getting bad until about a year ago, when I'd uncovered a world I'd never even imagined. The world of the Colorado Academy for Superior Intellect—CASI. And once those blinders were off, you couldn't put them back on.
I ROLLED TO MY HOUSE after seven that night. It’d warmed up considerably in the last few days, and now as the evening went to gloaming, the damp feeling that precedes a spring shower hovered in the air, though winter still lurked in the background, ready to flex her muscles. Kids wearing hoodies and shorts were out playing in driveways, darting between houses, and generally causing mischief.
I shouldered through the front door, not bothering to garage the car. I'd be headed for Lawrence and Elizabeth's as soon as I showered anyway.
I needed to get the stink of the station off me, the stench of futility.
Perez hadn't been able to shed any light on the driver who'd killed Joe, and had confirmed what dickwad Williams had said about another lawyer being injured in the hit and run.
Because of HIPAA laws, he couldn’t tell me the injured lawyer’s name, just that he was recovering in the hospital. The offending vehicle was basically an invisible car downtown, since there were thousands of them.
Dark four-door, tinted windows, Texas plates. The fact so many models looked almost identical wasn't helping to even identify the make of the car. Traffic cams were in the area, but not much help, at least not this early into the investigation. The fact Joe had been a defense attorney and a cop's ex-husband would make the process go a hell of a lot quicker, though.
The driver had hit Joe first, dead center, then the other victim, in such fast succession there weren’t even broken headlights that could clue us in to the make and model of the car. Even the pieces of the grille had been standard to about ten different kinds of sedan.
If the other lawyer couldn’t give us a suspect, or even a motive, it'd be the traffic cams, a witness or nothing.
I knew the odds of us finding the perp diminished with each passing hour.
I peeled off my clothes and stepped into a scalding shower, trying to wash away my permeating sense of bleakness.
Joe and I hadn't loved each other in a long time, if ever, but we'd created a beautiful child, and had been friends, of a sort. I knew Joe had wanted a trophy wife, back in the day. It was what was expected as a Foudy.
When our brief foray into dating resulted in a pregnancy, none of us, including his parents, were thrilled. But there was no way in hell I was going to terminate a pregnancy, it just wasn't in my bones. All of the Foudy's had been dead set against it as well, and so Joe and I married, and the Foudy heir was born.
Mama had been over the moon to have a grandchild to fuss over. And
regardless of how our union came to be, Tori was worth every moment.
Later, Joe and I mostly fought about me continuing to be a cop. I'd understood where he was coming from, but there was no way I was going to sit home and bake cookies and do the social thing. I’d never been that woman, never would be.
The fact we'd argued about my job, my schedule, my gun, didn't change the fact we both loved Tori to distraction.
It was that thought that rolled through me as I stood under the hot water, and tears streamed down my face.
Inside, I just felt sad, as if I'd lost a touchstone in my life. And I had.
By the time I stepped out of the shower I felt hollower, but ready to face our daughter.
TORI DIDN'T GREET ME at the Foudy's front door, which was surprising. Surely Elizabeth or Lawrence had told her I was coming, just a bit later than usual? It was weird she hadn’t called or texted me back either.
I’d been so caught up at the station, my subconscious had reassured me she was fine with her grandmother.
Even Valentina seemed to be MIA tonight, so I pushed through the front door and headed into the house. Hearing voices from the kitchen, I walked through the ornate parlor, past the grand staircase leading to the bedrooms, and finally into Elizabeth's master-chef kitchen. Not that she ever cooked.
Elizabeth and Lawrence stood next to the breakfast bar. Across the miles of granite was the one man I hadn't anticipated seeing, and he looked pissed.
He spun on one heel as I walked in, his mouth tightening as his gaze swept over me from head to toe in one smooth, assessing arc. The shower had cleaned me up, and I'd put on makeup, but it was hard to hide a crying bout, no matter how adept you were with concealer and foundation.
As usual, the force of Heath Farrell’s personality washed over me, seeming to relax and rile me at the same time, stirring something deep I’d spent the last thirteen years trying to ignore.
My attraction to him was a battle I’d been fighting, and mostly winning, since the day we met. But he’d been Joe’s best friend, back in the day. Given today’s circumstances, the curl of lust licking through me at the mere sight of him made my guilt ratchet up even higher.
Regardless of my body’s response, my mind went into the defensive mode I always seemed to fall into whenever he was around. And the first question it supplied was an easy one. What in the hell was Farrell doing here?
In the two seconds it took to think that, I had my answer.
He'd been Joe's friend, and had serious clout with organizations way above my pay grade, even when I'd been a cop. Had held some kind of high mucky-muck position in the National Security Agency. Ran a mysterious company called Global Dynamics now.
Of course the Foudys had called him. I would have done the same in their shoes.
If nothing else, that calmed me a bit, knowing he was here because of Joe.
I hadn't seen Farrell in seven months, and in those months, he seemed to have aged. He still looked like he was carved from icy granite—cold, hard, implacable—but there were lines around his blue eyes and mouth that hadn't been there last fall, and we'd gone through some serious shit then.
He'd gone into seclusion after we’d beaten Dave Gordon’s crew of Russian mercenaries. Had grabbed his kids and headed for the hills. I didn't blame him.
Having your children almost snatched—twice—was enough to make anyone paranoid. While Gordon had seemed to be the mastermind of everything that happened to us, it didn’t ring true, and we'd never been really sure who was behind the attempts, nor the end goal of the convoluted plans we'd foiled.
I wasn't sure I ever wanted to know—as long as they left me and mine alone.
Then Farrell spoke, and my life tilted even further sideways, when sideways had become my new norm. "Monica," he said, gesturing to one of the tall barstools. His voice brushed across my skin like silk. "Please have a seat."
"I'll stand," I said, took a deep breath and planted my feet. Whatever was coming wasn't going to be good.
His mouth tightened again, as if he was angry with me, then he shrugged, giving up. "Fine. Tori's missing."
The parquet floor dropped beneath me and I grasped the cool, cool marble of the breakfast bar for support. The bright room around me grayed, and for a second I thought I was going to pass out.
Then Farrell's hand was at my back, guiding me to the barstool he'd just mentioned. Bastard had been right. I needed to sit.
He swung the barstool around to face him. If anything, his expression was even more forbidding, as if something might explode out of him given the slightest provocation.
“How do you know she’s missing?” I was more than willing to question everything coming out of his mouth—as long as it wasn’t the truth.
Tori couldn’t be missing, couldn’t be in danger. Couldn’t.
Something cracked inside me. I’d left my daughter alone and something happened to her. Didn’t matter that she’d been at school. She was my daughter, and I should have kept her safe.
"There's been no ransom demand yet. She was picked up at Greenbrier this afternoon about ten minutes after Joe's accident." He looked pained using the word accident, as if he was having just as much trouble as the Foudys and I at wrapping our heads around Joe's death.
My brain blanked for precious seconds, frozen like a winter lake. It would be easy to lose myself in it, to not feel anything. To let someone else take the lead and just be numb. It was so much easier to stay numb.
Then I swallowed convulsively as a memory hit hard.
Still images illuminated by an old-time photographic flash.
A memory that had nothing to do with my daughter and everything to do with what happened when I froze in the past.
Dun-colored mud-and-brick houses, American soldiers in full battle rattle, nine-year-old Yar playing soccer in the dusty street, the pale soles of his bare feet flashing. The clicking sound almost echoing through the preternaturally still air as the IED engaged. Exploded. The carnage afterward.
The reverb inside my body as the blast wave rolled through the square. I’d been helpless then, an observer shocked into immobility when intervention would have certainly meant losing my own life.
The taste of terror, the smell of old explosives, the burn of my retinas was as real today as they’d been almost fifteen years ago and they sparked something inside.
Down deep a flame flared to life, began to sear me from within. I embraced it as it melted away the ice, as it consumed me. Anything to push away the terror that threatened to bring me to my knees. To render me ineffective and useless again.
This wasn’t downrange and I wasn’t powerless. This wasn’t Yar, the loveable Afghan boy the squad had adopted. This was my daughter, one of the only reasons I crawled out of bed every day, and I’d find her if it was the last thing I did, the last breath I inhaled.
There was nothing in the world that would stop me from saving my child. Not one fucking thing.
"Why the hell did the school let her go?" My words sounded toneless, even to my own ears. All my energy had been diverted within.
"Call from Joe's office, the password was correct," he said. "When I heard about Joe, I checked on Tori immediately."
The way he said it made the hairs on the back of my neck stir. "Why, Heath? What made you think of my daughter's safety when Joe was killed? I didn't even think of that. There was No. Fucking. Reason. To."
Lawrence shifted uncomfortably as I cursed, but I didn't care. This wasn't a situation for Foudy refinement. My daughter was missing and my ex-husband was dead. Refinement had been catapulted out the window about six hours ago.
"After what happened in Denver, I've been keeping an eye on all of you," he admitted quietly.
His words should have surprised me. They didn’t. Farrell was a control freak, and everything that had gone down with CASI over the last year had made him even worse.
But there was something new, a crack in the veneer that had always coated him. Something that called
out to me, begged to soothe, to heal, to comfort.
I shoved the feeling away. This wasn’t about Heath Farrell, this was about Tori. And Joe. That’s all it could be about.
"I knew about Joe within minutes, but it took my man longer to get to Tori. Until today, I thought the security at Greenbrier was enough. Until today it has been. My own kids are going there, for God's sakes."
I sat back in surprise. I hadn't known that. I hadn't known Farrell was even in town until today. But then again, why would I? Dallas was a big city, and Farrell ran in circles that gave me a nosebleed. Circles a rung above even the Foudy’s, if that was possible.
"Are your kids okay?" I asked, surprised that I gave a damn right now. But I did. Even though I was terrified that my only child might be in harm's way, I'd never wish the same circumstance on another parent. Never.
"They're fine, although I'm getting sick and fucking tired of moving them around like chess pieces." His expression was just as stark, just as furious as I felt inside. Farrell rarely displayed emotion, but when it came to his kids, he was a beast. I could sympathize.
“The alarm on the apartment I was keeping in their mother’s name, as a cover, went off right about the time Tori was taken. There was no one there, thank God.”
Jesus. That signaled some kind of coordinated attack. It sounded just like something we’d seen over the course of the last year. Something connected to CASI.
I sagged against the bar stool. "Do you think Joe's death and Tori's abduction are connected? And now another attempt on your kids?" I couldn’t see how they weren't, but Heath had a much broader site picture than I ever would.
At this point we were almost ignoring Lawrence and Elizabeth. "They have to be," he said, anger once again lacing his words.
"Where do we go from here? I'm not going to sit on my hands, Heath." Not again. If this was related to CASI, I was going to take the war to them. It was time to end this once and for all.
He smiled, and there was such frost in his expression it scared me for a moment. "We have our own weapons," he said. "Sara and Brian will be here in the morning. They were out of town but are on their way now."
