Kitabı oku: «Internal Affairs»

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, JESSICA ANDERSEN is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say hi!

Chapter One

The pain speared from his shoulder blade to his spine and down—raw, bloody agony that consumed him and made him want to sink back into unconsciousness. But at the same time, urgency beat through him, not letting him return to oblivion.

The mission, the mission, must complete the mission.

But what was the mission? Where was he? What the hell had happened to him?

Cracking his eyes a fraction, careful not to give away his conscious state if he was being watched, he surveyed his immediate surroundings. Tall pine trees reached up to touch the late summer sky on all sides of him, their bases furred with an underlayer of smaller scrub brush. There was no sign of a cabin or a road, no evidence of anyone else nearby, no tracks in the forest litter but his own, leading to where he’d collapsed.

He was wearing heavy hiking boots, dark jeans and a black T-shirt, all of which were spattered with blood. Something told him not all of it was his, though when he moved his arms, the agony in his right shoulder ripped a groan from his lips. He felt the warm, wet bloom of fresh blood, smelled it on the moist air.

Shot in the back, he knew somehow. Bastards. Cowards. Except that he didn’t know who the bastardly cowards were, or why they’d gone after him. More, he didn’t know who the hell he was. Or what he’d done.

The realization brought a sick chill rattling through him, a spurt of panic. His brain answered with I’ve got to get up, get moving. I can’t let them catch me, or I’m dead.

The words had no sooner whispered in his mind than he heard the sounds of pursuit: the sharp bark of a dog and the terse shouts of men calling to one another.

They weren’t close, but they weren’t far enough away for comfort, either.

He struggled to his feet cursing with pain, staggering with shock and blood loss. He didn’t know who was looking for him, but there was far too much blood for a bar fight, and the pattern was high velocity. Had he killed someone? Been standing nearby when someone was killed? Had he escaped from a bad situation, or had he been the bad situation?

He didn’t know, damn it. Worse, he didn’t know which answer he was hoping for.

The mission. The words seemed to whisper from nowhere and everywhere at once. They came from the trees and the wind high above, and the bark of a second dog, sharper this time, and excited, suggesting that the beast had hit on a scent trail.

One thing was for certain: he needed to get someplace safe. But where? And how?

Knowing he wasn’t going to find the answer standing there, bleeding, he got moving, putting one foot in front of the other, holding his right arm clutched against his chest with his left. The world went gray-brown around the edges and his feet felt very far away, but the scenery moved past him, slow at first, then faster when he hit a downhill slope.

He saw a downed tree with an exposed root ball, thought he recognized it, though he didn’t know from when. His feet carried him away from it at an angle, as though his subconscious knew where the hell he was going when his conscious mind didn’t have a clue. Urgency propelled him—not just from the continued sounds of pursuit, which was drawing nearer by the minute, but also from the sense that he was supposed to be doing something crucial, critical.

His breath rasped in his lungs and the gray-brown closed in around the edges of his vision. He tripped and staggered, tripped again and went down. But he didn’t stay down. He dragged himself up again, levering his body with his good arm and biting his teeth against the pained groans that wanted to rip from his throat.

Instead, staying silent, he forced himself to move faster, until he was running downhill through trees that all looked the same. He saw nothing except forest and more forest. Then, in the distance, there was something else: a rectangular blur that soon resolved itself into the outline of a late-model truck parked in the middle of nowhere.

Excitement slapped through him, driving back some of the gray-brown. He didn’t recognize the truck, but he’d run right to it, hadn’t he? It stood to reason that was because he’d known it was there. More, when he’d climbed into the driver’s seat, he automatically fumbled beneath the dashboard and came up with the keys.

It took him two tries to get the key in the ignition; he was wobbly and weak, and he couldn’t lean back into the seat without his shoulder giving him holy hell. But he had wheels. A hope of escape.

He couldn’t hear the dogs over the engine’s roar, but he knew the searchers were behind him, knew the net was closing fast. More, he knew he didn’t have much more time left before he lapsed unconscious again. He’d lost blood, and God only knew what was going on inside him. Every inhalation was like breathing flames; every exhalation a study in misery. He needed a place to crash and he needed it fast.

After that, he thought, glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing piercing green eyes in a stern face, short black hair, and nothing familiar about any of it, I’m going to need some answers.

Knowing he was already on borrowed time, he hit the gas and sent the truck thundering downhill. There wasn’t any road or track, but he got lucky—or else he knew the way—and didn’t hit any big ditches or deadfalls. Within ten minutes, he came to a fire-access road. Instinct—or something more?—had him turning uphill rather than down. A few minutes later, he bypassed a larger road, then took a barely visible dirt trail that paralleled the main access road.

The not-quite-a-road was bumpy, jolting him back against the seat and wringing curses from him every time he hit his injured shoulder. But the pain kept him conscious, kept him moving. And when he hit a paved road, it reminded him he needed to get someplace he could hide, where he’d be safe when he collapsed.

Animalistic instinct had him turning east. He passed street signs he recognized on some level, but it wasn’t until he passed a big billboard that said Welcome to Bear Claw Creek that he knew he was in Colorado, and then only because the sign said so.

His hands were starting to shake, warning him that his body was hitting the end of its reserves. But he still had enough sense to ditch the truck at the back of a commuter lot, where it might not be noticed for a while, and hide the keys in the wheel well. Then he searched the vehicle for anything that might clue him in on what the hell was going on—or, failing that, who the hell he was.

All he came up with was a lightweight waterproof jacket wedged beneath the passenger’s seat, but that was something, anyway. Though the fading day was still warm with late summer sun, he pulled on the navy blue jacket so if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t get a look at his back. A guy wearing dirty jeans and a jacket might be forgotten. A guy bleeding from a bullet wound in his shoulder, not so much.

Cursing under his breath, using the swearwords to let him know he was still up and moving, even as the gray-brown of encroaching unconsciousness narrowed his vision to a tunnel, he stagger-stepped through the commuter car lot and across the main road. Cutting over a couple of streets on legs that were rapidly turning to rubber, he homed in on a corner lot, where a neat stone-faced house sat well back from the road, all but lost behind wild flowering hedges and a rambler-covered picket fence.

It wasn’t the relative concealment offered by the big lot and the landscaping that had him turning up the driveway, though. It was the sense of safety. This wasn’t his house, he knew somehow, but whose ever it was, instinct said they would shelter him, help him.

Without conscious thought, he reached into the brass, wall-mounted mailbox beside the door, found a small latch and toggled the false bottom, which opened to reveal a spare key.

He was too far gone to wonder how he’d known to do that, too out of it to remember whose house this was. It was all he could do to let himself in and relock the door once he was through. Dropping the key into his pocket, he dragged himself through a pin-neat kitchen that was painted cream and moss with sunny yellow accents and soft, feminine curtains. He found a notepad beside the phone and scrawled a quick message.

His hands were shaking; his whole body was shaking, and where it wasn’t shaking it had shut down completely. He couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel much of anything except the pain and the dizziness that warned he was seconds away from passing out.

Finally, unable to hold it off any longer, he let the gray-brown win, let it wash over his vision and suck him down into the blackness. He was barely aware of staggering into the next room and falling, hardly felt the pain of landing face-first on a carpeted floor. He knew only that, for the moment at least, he was safe.

Chapter Two

Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney’s day started out badly and plummeted downhill from there.

It wasn’t just that her coffeemaker had finally gone belly-up. She’d known it was on its last legs, after all, and simply kept forgetting to upgrade. Sort of like how she kept forgetting to replace her anemic windshield wipers because they only annoyed her when it was raining. Or how she hadn’t yet gotten around to having the maintenance crew that served the Bear Claw ME’s office fix her office door, which stuck half the time and randomly popped open the other half.

No, it wasn’t those petty, mundane, normal irritations that had her amber-colored eyes narrowed with frustration as she worked her way through her sixth autopsy of the day, dictating her notes into the voiceactivated minirecorder clipped to the lapel of the blue lab coat she wore over neatly tailored, feminine pants and a soft blue-green shirt that accented the golden highlights in her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair.

No, what annoyed her was the memo she’d gotten from Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s people, turning down yet another request to hire new staff, even though she’d only proposed to replace two of the three people she’d lost over the past year—two to the terrorist attacks that had gripped the city in the wake of a nearby jailbreak, one to the FBI’s training program. What annoyed her further was the knowledge that she was going to have to work yet another twelve-hour day to catch up with the backlog. It didn’t help that her three remaining staffers—receptionist Della Jones, ME Stephen Katz, and their newly promoted assistant, Bradley Brown—were all taking their lunch breaks glued to the TV in the break room, with the police scanner cranked to full volume as they followed the manhunt that was unfolding in Bear Claw Canyon, not half an hour away.

Sara didn’t want to think about the manhunt, or the fact that the combined Bear Claw PD/FBI task force had lost two men in an op gone bad, leading to the manhunt. She didn’t want to think ahead to those autopsies, and felt guilty for hoping the dead men weren’t any of the cops or agents she knew. She also didn’t want to think about the fact that until terrorist mastermind al-Jihad and his followers were brought to justice, people in and around Bear Claw were going to keep dying.

She didn’t want to think about it, but she had to, because it was happening even as she stood there, elbowdeep in the abdominal cavity of an overweight, chainsmoking sixty-three-year-old man whose badly clogged arteries suggested an all too common cause of death. The autopsy was routine, but the events transpiring outside Sara’s familiar cinder block world were anything but.

Bear Claw City was at war.

It had been nearly ten months since al-Jihad had managed to escape from the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw Creek, gaining freedom along with two of his most trusted lieutenants. Since then, it had become clear that al-Jihad’s network was deeply entrenched in Bear Claw, twining through both local and federal law enforcement.

Each time a conspirator was uncovered and neutralized, new evidence surfaced indicating that the internal problems extended even further, and that al-Jihad was continuing to unfold an elaborate, devastating plan that the task force just couldn’t seem to get a handle on. The cops and agents had uncovered pieces and hints, but the terrorists’ main goal continued to elude them, even as the groundswell of suspicious activity seemed to suggest that an attack was imminent.

Of course, the general population knew only some of what was going on. Sara knew more than most because her office was intimately involved with the BCCPD, and because she was close friends with a tightly knit group of cops and agents, three couples plus her as a spare wheel.

The seven friends had banded together the previous year when FBI trainee Chelsea Swan—though back then she’d been one of Sara’s medical examiners—had fallen in with FBI agent Jonah Fairfax. Fax had assisted in the jailbreak in his role as a deep undercover operative, only to learn in the devastating aftermath that his superior was a traitor and he’d been unknowingly working on al-Jihad’s behalf. Sara, Chelsea, Fax and the others had managed to foil al-Jihad’s next planned attack, but they’d only managed to capture one of the terrorists, Muhammad Feyd, who’d proven to be a loyal soldier and had defied all efforts to get him talking.

Al-Jihad and his remaining lieutenant, Lee Mawadi, along with Fax’s former boss, the eponymous Jane Doe, remained at large even now, ten months later. In that interim, there had been other, smaller incidents, along with a deadly riot at the ARX Supermax. Which Sara so wasn’t thinking about right now.

She didn’t want to remember the men who’d died in the riot, or the one man in particular whose death had hit her far harder than it should have.

Focus, girl, she told herself. The day’s only getting longer the more you stall.

Concentrating on the innards at hand, Sara went through the process by rote, weighing and sampling, dictating notes as she worked. But although the actions were automatic—they ought to be, after six years on the job, two heading the Bear Claw ME’s office—they weren’t without compassion. Sara’s top-flight surgeon mother might consider her daughter’s medical skills wasted on the dead, but Sara knew she worked for the families as much as the corpses, and took satisfaction from providing answers, shedding light onto causes of death that might otherwise be misinterpreted.

Contrary to what some popular TV shows might portray, only a small fraction of the bodies coming through the ME’s office were instances of foul play. The vast majority was made up of an almost equal balance between natural causes and accidental fatalities. Her current case fell into the former, i.e., a catastrophic cardiac event brought on by a high-risk lifestyle and inconsistently treated hypertension.

As she stripped off her protective gear and headed for her office to finish up the necessary paperwork, Sara found herself wishing that more of her recent cases had been so straightforward. It wasn’t that she wanted her life to be easy or boring, but she’d gone into pathology because she’d grown up a passenger of her parents’ roller-coaster ride of emotions, and she hadn’t wanted the highs and lows of living medicine.

Little had she known she’d wind up in the middle of a terror threat that had the entire city by the throat, and that she’d be far more enmeshed in the case than she would’ve preferred. Granted, the investigation had moved away from her office in the months since the prison riot, but her close ties to members of the task force kept her involved, as did the caseload she’d been forced to assume in the face of a serious manpower shortage.

The lack of staff members in the ME’s office was yet another of Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s unsubtle efforts to get rid of all the young, energetic hires made by his forward-thinking predecessor, who had been disgraced and ousted when damning photographs had surfaced involving the mayor and several girls of questionable age.

That had been too bad as far as Sara was concerned; she didn’t condone the former mayor’s ethical lapses, but she thought he’d been taking the city in a positive direction by bringing fresh blood into the crime scene unit, the ME’s office and several other tech-based divisions of city government. Since the ex-mayor’s departure, Proudfoot had been undoing those advances, piece by piece, making no bones about the fact that he intended to return Bear Claw Creek to the “good old days”—i.e., the days of minimal technology and pay-to-play politics.

Proudfoot’s efforts had been blunted somewhat by the terrorist threat, but his image lurked at the back of Sara’s mind on a daily basis. She knew he was just waiting for her to mess up badly enough that he could get rid of her and return the ME’s office to the age of dinosaurs, with his cronies in charge.

“Which is another thing that belongs in the category of ‘things I don’t want to think about right now,’” she said to herself on a long sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off the headache that always encroached when she thought about all the things she was trying not to think about these days.

The list was long. And frankly, it didn’t leave her much to think about.

“Hey, boss.” The hail came from Stephen, the sole remaining medical examiner beside herself. He was tall, lean and graying, a good ten years older than her own thirty-five, and had worked in the Bear Claw ME’s office for nearly a dozen years. Miraculously, though, he didn’t seem to resent that Sara—young, female, relatively inexperienced—had been hired in above him as his boss. If anything, he seemed happy to let her have the headaches that came with the position.

“Hey yourself.” Sara didn’t ask about the manhunt, didn’t want to know. “You’re headed out early today, right?”

He nodded, a soft smile touching his lips, lighting his usual neutral expression. “Celia and I are bringing Chrissy for a checkup.” Chrissy was the change-of-life baby, nearly twenty years younger than their eldest, who had surprised Stephen and his wife the year before. By all indications, little Chrissy would grow up dearly beloved by their entire extended family, and most likely spoiled rotten.

The quiet joy on the older man’s face squeezed at Sara’s heart. She nodded, forcing herself to feel happy for him rather than sorry for herself. “Tell Celia I said hi.”

“I’ll do that. I can come back after, if you want me to.” He glanced at the wipe board that hung in the hallway opposite their office doors, where the pending cases were listed. “Things are backing up.”

They were, indeed, and a large part of Sara wanted to keep the office running around the clock until they’d cleared the board and gotten ahead of the looming mountains of paperwork. But logic said that Proudfoot wouldn’t be impressed with that show of efficiency. If anything, he’d take it as an indication that she’d manage just fine with an even smaller staff.

She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. Head on home. I’ll clear what I can, and we can start over tomorrow.”

He sent her a long look. “Promise me you won’t stay past normal human quitting time? It is Friday. You know…the weekend?”

She winced. “You got me. We’ll start over on Monday.” Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be in over the next two days. She had abolished the weekend and overnight shifts due to staff constraints, but she still liked to come into the office herself, when everything was relatively quiet.

Two years earlier, it would’ve been easy to promise Stephen she’d leave for the weekend, because she would’ve known there was someone waiting for her at home—someone to cook with, eat with, laugh with, love with.

Even a year ago, having more or less recovered from the catastrophic implosion of that relationship, she would’ve had plans of some sort. She and Chelsea would’ve hooked up with Cassie Dumont-Varitek and Alyssa McDermott, their friends in the BCCPD crime scene unit, and had a girls’ night out. Or maybe they would’ve “double dated,” with Cassie and Alyssa pairing up with their husbands, while Chelsea and Sara hung together.

It wasn’t the same these days with Chelsea gone into the FBI training program on the East Coast, though. Sara had tried going out with the others, and had felt like a fifth wheel. Chelsea had been the glue holding them together. Without her, it felt as if the rest of them were trying too hard. Even when Chelsea and Fax came back to the city, they were most often there on task force business, maybe with a little wedding planning snuck in on the side.

Things had changed. The others had moved on, leaving Sara behind.

Summoning a smile, she waved Stephen away. “Go on, get moving. You wouldn’t want to keep your women waiting.”

But he didn’t move. Instead, he gave her a long, intense look. “I’ll do the agents when they come in, if you’d like. I can be here tomorrow morning, assuming they release the bodies that early.”

He was talking about the manhunt, the men who’d died. She closed her eyes, feeling guilty over the stab of relief brought by the offer. “Have they announced the names?”

“Not yet.”

She nodded, knowing that even though she hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, the knowledge of the deaths, and the echoes it brought, had permeated her. “I’ll let you know.” Which was as close as she was going to get to confessing that she couldn’t handle how close the terrorists were hitting, and how much it bothered her that things seemed to be ramping up rather than settling down these days. It was hard not to wonder where it would all stop, and how many would die in the attack most of the task force members thought was imminent.

Her mother and father were in rare agreement that she should give notice and get the hell out of Bear Claw Creek. Sara had seriously considered the option…for about thirty seconds before coming to the realization that she couldn’t do it. This was her home; she wasn’t giving up on it. And what was more, she wasn’t walking away from her job or her remaining staff members.

This was her department, damn it. She might be going down, but she was going down fighting.

After another long look, Stephen headed out. Telling herself she appreciated his concern, that it didn’t make her feel even lonelier than she had before, Sara completed the necessary paperwork on the cases she’d autopsied so far that day, then suited back up and returned to work.

She processed three more routine cases over the remainder of the day and did her best to tune out the news bulletins when she passed through the break room, or got near Della’s desk, where the fiftysomething admin assistant had a police band radio turned low. Still, Sara couldn’t avoid knowing that the senior agents had called off the op, that the search dogs had followed two different trails ascribed to the terrorists, both of which had dead-ended in vehicle tracks heading for the main roads.

It seemed that the op had been a quick scramble into the state forest, based on intel that several of al-Jihad’s people were holed up in a remote cabin, strategizing. Sara didn’t want to know but couldn’t help hearing that the two agents had lost their lives in pursuit of a small knot of men who appeared to have been carrying bodies, while a lone man had escaped in the opposite direction, and vanished into the wind. She didn’t want to know that the cabin had been stripped bare, and had burst into flames within minutes of the terrorists’ escape, torched by a hidden incendiary device.

As usual, al-Jihad’s people had been well prepared. Sara wasn’t sure what the op had aimed to do, or what the terrorists had planned or accomplished in the forest, but she knew the names of the dead men now, whether she wanted to or not. Both FBI agents, they weren’t among her friends or acquaintances, but they’d had their own friends and families, their own loved ones who’d been cruelly left behind. More bereaved to add to the list that had grown over the past ten months.

Sadness beat through Sara as she kept working, starting another case because it wasn’t as though she had any pressing reason to go home, Friday night or not.

Della and Bradley clocked out around five-thirty and left arm in arm. Bradley had been mooning after Della—who was a good decade his senior and the mother of two grown children—for as long as he’d been working there. Sara smiled, her heart warming at seeing them so obviously together, though she found herself wondering how she’d missed that change in relationship status. Then she had to remind herself not to dwell on the fact that everyone around her seemed to be pairing up these days. Everyone but her.

Biting back a sigh, she got back to work. By the time she called it a night, around 7:00 p.m., her shoulders, back and neck were burning from the strain. She would’ve killed for a massage, or at least an hour in a whirlpool, but she couldn’t bring herself to hit the gym this late on a Friday.

There was a fine line between being single and being pathetic.

Consoling herself with the thought of a long, hot bath, she collected her hybrid from the parking lot, which was located between the BCCPD’s main station house and the connected building that held the ME’s office.

The twenty-minute drive home was an easy one, and the sight of the small stone-faced house eased something inside her, even in the darkness.

She’d fallen in love with the place on her first drive through the city. The cottagelike house had been way out of her budget, but she’d taken an uncharacteristic leap and bought it on an adjustable mortgage, then switched over to a fixed loan as soon as she was able to afford the higher payments. These days she was managing the expenses, though there wasn’t much left over at the end of the month for extras or savings. She didn’t regret the purchase for a second, though. It was her home, plain and simple.

The house was easily big enough for two people—hell, for a small family—but she’d resisted the option of taking on a roommate because she liked to keep her space the way she liked it, with none of the rapid changes she’d endured during childhood. The one person she’d shared her home with—albeit for only a few months—had fit into her world so seamlessly, despite their obvious differences, that she’d thought it would last. It hadn’t, of course. And the final words between them had been angry ones.

“Stop it,” she told herself as she parked the hybrid near the house, then gathered her bag and coat to head for the kitchen door.

She didn’t know why her ex was so much in her mind lately, but enough was enough. He wasn’t coming back, and they hadn’t been together for the year prior to the prison riot that had taken his life. His death had been tragic, but it didn’t magically erase his sins, didn’t erase his betrayal. Not by a long shot.

Muttering under her breath, she fished in her bag for her keys, unlocked the door and let herself through. Two steps into the kitchen, with the door swinging shut at her back, she stopped dead as the smell of blood tickled her nostrils. It was a familiar odor, of course, but it wasn’t one that belonged in her house.

She stayed frozen for a moment, adrenaline kicking her heart into overdrive.

Logic said she should get out of the house, get somewhere safe and call for help. But something she couldn’t name—anger at the growing suspicion that an intruder had broken in, maybe, or a complete and utter lapse of her usual good judgment—had her flicking on the lights and moving farther into the house.

She didn’t see anything out of place in her pretty kitchen, but the back of her neck prickled, warning her that someone had been there who shouldn’t have been. Holding her breath, she eased through the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living room. And froze in horror.

A man lay on the floor beside her sofa, blood soaking the carpet beneath him.

Sara stifled a scream, swallowing it in a bubble of hysteria. Her saner self said, Run! Get the hell out of here! But something had her stalling in place as her heart hammered in her chest.