Secrets of the Dead (5 page)

She hissed in a breath, almost unaware of the reassuring hand Adam placed on her shoulder. “It’s him.”

“It would appear so. Uncanny, really, how closely it resembles the drawings.”

“I don’t want this shown to Royce.” Jaid couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from the finished reconstruction. “There’s no need, is there?”

“Probably not.” They were both silent for a moment as they contemplated the 3D model of the man who would have taken their son from them. “Mrs. Gonzalez at school can make the ID. But there’s no doubt in my mind. I’ve already alerted the homicide detective that gave me a heads up about the body that his John Doe is almost certainly one of Royce’s kidnappers.”

She’d been with the Bureau for over a decade. Had always known, logically at least, why agents weren’t allowed to work on cases with which they had personal ties. But she was still unprepared for the flood of emotion that warred within her right now.

There was a primitive part of her—a part she wasn’t particularly proud of—that was glad the man was dead. It came from a deep primordial place inside that only another parent would recognize. This man would never threaten Royce again.

But the agent in her realized that they now had one less person who could provide details about why her son was targeted. And the need for those details trumped any visceral thirst she might have for revenge. In death, the man who had called himself Hobart gave them little real information. The prints on his corpse hadn’t matched any in the AFIS database. Dental work was a dead end without the man’s real name.

Adam’s voice at her side interrupted her dark reverie. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m okay.” This development was a step in the right direction. After weeks of more questions than answers, she needed to concentrate on the fact that finally they’d found one.

“Jaid.” It was his tone that alerted her. And the expression on his face when she looked at him had her stomach knotting.

“What is it? Just tell me, Adam.” The man was capable of an almost brutal brusqueness. Which made his uncharacteristic hesitancy doubly alarming. He only gestured to the desk chair silently. Without a word she sank into it, mentally steeling herself.

“The ballistics evidence on the John Doe was unbelievably slow.”

She smiled slightly. “Well, not everyone has the premiere forensics lab in the country at their disposal. Police crime labs are notoriously backed up, and even at the bureau lab evidence tests are prioritized.”

“Exactly.” His intense regard had all her instincts quivering. “And this case would have been low priority. An unidentified victim. No weapon retrieved. No brass. No leads. The wonder is really that they went ahead with the detective’s request for a ballistics report at all.”

“I’m not a fan of your new kid gloves approach,” Jaid said evenly. “What is it you’re trying very hard
not
to tell me?”

“I just got off the phone with Detective Ramos, who caught this case.” With a slight inclination of his head he indicated the images on the screen. “Both bullets were recovered from the body. By submitting the markings to the IBIS/NIBIN ballistics databases, they were able to match the bullets to a half a dozen unsolved homicides in the past decade. But it was a murder from about nine years ago that caught my attention. That body was never identified either. And it was found within a half mile of where Hobart was dumped.”

He closed out of the window they’d been viewing and brought up an email. Clicked on the attached file. But Jaid didn’t need to see the photo of the unidentified man to guess who would be pictured.

Even after the intervening years, seeing the lifeless face of her father again stabbed with a relentless pain. It was a moment before she could speak. When she did her voice was husky with unshed tears. “They buried him in a pauper’s grave. No ID. No service. He warned me not to try to find him. Not to do anything that would call attention to our relationship.”

“Because doing so would have led them to the child.”

She nodded. After being absent from her life for fourteen years, it had required an act of sheer desperation for Royce Benning to seek her out and hand over a weeks old baby for safekeeping. He’d left her and her mother when Jaid had been eleven and she hadn’t seen him since. They’d no longer shared anything, not even a last name. But perhaps one could never really sever that familial bond.

“My father managed to convince me that Royce’s life depended on me keeping his identity secret.” He’d claimed the boy’s mother had already been killed. Her father’s murder six days later seemed to have lent credence to his concern for the boy. She’d watched all the crime databases. Contacted the detective who’d caught the case to make discreet inquiries. Her father had been tortured before his death. But Jaid knew that he’d died without revealing the secret of the child he’d given his daughter for safekeeping.

She could do no less. So an elaborate ruse had originated, one where she’d claimed the boy for her own. And he was hers, in every way that mattered. He’d been named for her father, although she’d had no real evidence that he was the child’s parent. It hadn’t mattered. Despite all the unanswered questions about his birth, she was the boy’s mother and she’d do whatever it took to keep her son safe.

“You said you did a sibling DNA test.”

She looked down at her lap, half surprised to see her fists clenched there. Deliberately she loosened her fingers. “Twice. They’ve gotten more sophisticated. Now they compare a million markers. It’s obvious that Royce is mixed race, but I still thought…given Benning’s involvement… Jaid shook her head. “There’s almost no statistical possibility that my father is also Royce’s.” The results had only mattered in that it had left her with more questions than answers. She and Royce were family, and that bond had been forged the moment he’d been handed over to her care.

She could feel Adam’s gaze on her. “Being in the bureau I had access to all the crime databases. There was no kidnapping reported at the time of a child matching Royce’s description.”

“Jaid.” His voice had been ruined from injuries sustained on his last case for the bureau. But hearing the gentleness in it now nearly made her weep. “I’ve never judged you. Whatever the circumstances of his birth, Royce was lucky when your father put him in your care. But given what we’ve learned through the ballistics report, we have to consider the undeniable proof that your father’s death and that of the man who tried to kidnap Royce are linked.”

Her stomach went leaden. “Which means his kidnapping had nothing to do with one of my old cases. Nothing to do with you.”

His touch light, he brushed her hair away from her face. “It appears to have everything to do with the mystery surrounding Royce’s birth.”

_______

The gag in
the man’s mouth muffled his screams. Xie Shuang finally tired and lowered the whip, seemingly gratified by the bloody crisscross of welts and open wounds across the man’s back. “You fucked up.” The man nodded, his eyes rolling wildly although Malsovic knew he didn’t speak a word of Chinese.

But pain was a universal language.

“If you fail me again, you die. Nod if you understand.” This was delivered in Slovenian, badly mangled as usual. But the man’s head bobbed frantically. A boot to his backside sent him sprawling and at Shuang’s gesture Malsovic moved forward to haul the man up and out of the room.

When he returned minutes later his employer was seated behind the cheap polished desk, the laptop open. The printer next to it hummed. And when that flat black gaze shifted from the computer screen to him, Malsovic felt a prickle of something very like fear.

Men—and women—had underestimated Xie Shuang in the past, and many had ended up dead. Malsovic had so far managed to evade a similar feat, but at times it felt like an orchestrated dance with the devil. Èmó. The nickname was spoken only in hushed tones, but it was apt.

“Those men were yours. You are responsible for their failure. Cretins, both of them.”

He replied in Serbian. “Hobart was not my pick. Neither were the two who now sit in a cell.” He stood ready to dodge. Shuang was prone to throw whatever weapon was handy when angered.

But no missiles flew. “They will not talk. They know their families’ fates depend on their silence.” But still that gaze never wavered from his. “The plan must be changed. I will deal with Gallagher myself. You will arrange our meeting.”

He swallowed the questions that sprang to his tongue. Shuang wasn’t known for taking risks, and dealing with Gallagher directly was a definite risk. Not for the first time he mourned having to share his discovery about the boy. Not that there had been much choice at the time.

He knew better than to voice his doubts. “As you wish. But what will be done with him and the woman once they’ve outlived their usefulness?”

Shuang shrugged carelessly. “That much has not changed. You will kill them.”

_______

By no stretch
of the imagination could their apartment building ever be described as quiet. The walls were wafer thin and the constant serenade of babies wailing, televisions blaring and music pumping bombarded them all day and well into the night. Eve’s ability to sleep through a small explosion was as legendary in her family as was her appetite, and considered just as indelicate. But that talent seemed to have escaped her tonight.

Every new sound, every set of footsteps past their door set her senses on high alert. Ears straining, she’d bolt upright on the couch and wait, barely breathing until they faded in the distance.

It didn’t take much imagination to recognize the source of her newfound anxiety. Declan seemed certain there would be another contact soon. How did they know it would come in the daylight?

He’d gone to bed at midnight, hours earlier. If he lay awake similarly vigilant, she could hear no signs of it. Through the open door Eve could barely make out his form beneath the covers on the mattress. It was unmoving. Maybe he was as adept as she was at sleeping through a din.

Or maybe he had far more experience than she did at sleeping comfortably with a half-naked person of the opposite sex close by. One that was for all practical purposes a stranger.

The thought suffused her with heat. It wouldn’t be hard to surpass her experience in that area. Most of the men she came into contact with at work were decades older than her. Which meant she had plenty of practice dodging unwanted male attention, but far less with men who actually interested her. Not that any of her work colleagues or acquaintances fell into the heartthrob category, a niche seemingly carved with Declan Gallagher in mind.

To be fair he didn’t seem to be one of those men aware of the potent combination of black hair, smoky eyes and sardonic grin. Which made this situation bearable. If he seemed unaware of her as a woman at least he wasn’t acutely conscious of his own assets as a male. Assets that she shouldn’t be wasting valuable sleep time considering.

Eve re-arranged the blanket and shifted on the couch. It was comfortable, as was all the furniture that had been delivered to the cramped space. She was willing to bet it was of a much higher quality than had ever graced this area before. But the furnishings were in keeping with the supposed descent in their circumstances. Good pieces that had come from their fictional too expensive house.

She picked up her cell and checked the time. Blew out a breath. It was already two, and one thing she’d learned about Declan was that he was an early riser. Regardless of her usual ability to sleep through anything, somehow her senses went on high alert when he was in the room. That hyper-awareness was just one more thing about the man that had her inner alarms shrilling.

Punching her pillow with a little more force than necessary, she turned over and pulled the coverlet up to her chin.

Thinking about the man in the next room was no guarantee of summoning sleep, so she concentrated instead on mentally cataloguing the level of sound coming from the surrounding apartments. It had quieted somewhat and she knew from the past few nights it would quiet even more over the next hour once the building’s occupants had stumbled home from the bars and the prostitutes had called it a night.

Her breathing slowed. Every random rattle of pipe or creak of the floor was familiar. So was the shuffle of footsteps in the apartment above. The baby’s cry, that was just as quickly hushed. Nothing out of the ordinary.

One moment she was drifting off the sleep and the next she was jerking to a sitting position, heart pounding so loudly that it sounded in her ears. She scanned the interior shadows, trying to place the source of her sudden fear. Nothing moved. She could still see Declan on the bed. The footsteps overhead were absent. Even the baby’s whimpers were silenced.

Then it came again, an almost imperceptible squeak. A shoe against the cracked tile floor outside their door. Hauling in a breath, she attempted to calm her breathing. Just another resident on his or her way home. She told herself that. And would have believed it if it weren’t for the flat white paper that slipped under the door, like an ethereal wisp of fog.

Frozen, she stared at it, her heart doing a tattoo beat in her chest. Try as she might she could hear no other sound. Was the person still out there or had he slipped away? Her limbs abruptly thawed and she jumped from the couch, tiptoeing across the room to sidle along the wall. Feeling vaguely ridiculous she reached out a bare foot and slid the paper toward her until she could pick it up. Still she heard nothing from the hallway so Eve took the note back to the couch and picked up her cell, using the screen’s light to read the message.

The words on it had her scurrying into the bedroom, stopping just inside the doorway. “Declan!” she hissed. She threw another glance over her shoulder. Was that a sound outside the door? The possibility had her crossing the steps to the bed and nudging the side of the mattress with her knee urgently. “Declan!”