by Nancy Holder
Her mouth dropped open. Her face prickled. Was this really happening?
“No problem.” She smiled at him and forced herself not to make a mad dash for the glass desk. She scooted around behind it and picked up the headset. “I know how to use this. I’m good to go.”
“Wonderful. Merci. I’ll email you a short list of calls to let through. The email address is ‘receptionist at Silverado dot com’. The password is ‘silverado’ backwards.”
“Got it.”
She sat down and got situated. Mr. Summers went back in his office. She made sure the email was open on the screen and checked the buttons on the phone. Then, just as she was about to bask in her good fortune, she noticed a stack of pretty business cards embossed with a big L on the right side of the keyboard. No, it wasn’t L. It was eLaine Tugong, Designer. And the phone number looked very familiar. Heather pulled out her cell and checked her recent calls. She’d called that number at least a dozen times.
It was L’s phone number.
Elaine was L.
Heather wanted to throw up. She sat for a few seconds in complete stupefaction, and then on a hunch she started scrolling through the receptionist email account. At all her jobs, she had occasionally forgotten to open up her personal email account and used her work account to send and receive messages. She had to assume Elaine had done the same.
There. And there. And there. Messages to and from Walker. With no guilt whatsoever, she opened all of them.
Hi, babe, you were right. It’s a winner! Thank you.
There was an attachment of a photo of her corset. Heather checked the time the email was sent: Walker had taken a picture of it and sent it the night he had slept over.
A winner…
She gasped. Elaine had to be referring to the New Looks competition. Were they trying to steal her design?
She began to scroll through Elaine’s emails to Walker. There was another attachment of her muslin pattern for the corset. Her throat tightened as it became abundantly clear that Walker had feigned interest in her to gain access to her costume submission—for Elaine.
“At least she steals from the best,” Heather murmured. Her heart was shattering, but rage was rushing in to fill the cracks. The freaking nerve. All she had to do was copy these emails and show them to Mr. Summers and—
There was one from Couture Bleu magazine:
Dear Ms. Tugong,
Thank you for forwarding your designs to us. They were fresh and original—exactly the caliber of work Mr. Summers described when recommending you to us for our spring internship program. We are happy to tell you that we have accepted you into our program, which will begin on April 10th. We appreciate your efforts to scout for other promising students at Silverado. Some of them show real promise and we’ll be contacting them as other opportunities open up.
Heather caught her lower lip between her teeth. So was Elaine claiming credit for other people’s designs—hers, for one?—or was she secretly trying to help them? And what did Mr. Summers have to do with it?
This was all seriously messed up.
An email dinged and she jerked, startled. It was Mr. Summers’ list of approved callers. Just as Heather skimmed it, a call came through from an allowed name and Heather transferred it.
Another call followed, then another, and she was about to forward some of the emails to herself and take pictures of the screen with her smartphone when Mr. Summers approached and said, “Okay, that’s it. Thank you, Heather.”
Her hands hovered over the keyboard but he was just standing there; surely he would see what she was doing. Should she tell him?
“Mr. Summers…”
His cell phone rang. He put it to his ear and said, “You can go. I’ll log out.”
“But…”
He raised an imperious brow, clearly displeased that she wasn’t leaving.
I know the password, she reminded herself. I’ll try to find out what’s going on tomorrow.
“Thanks. It was fun to route the one call.” She smiled at him as if everything was fine with her. But inside, she was a boiling cauldron of freakout. Whatever Elaine’s ultimate goal, Walker had totally used her. She’d had such a crush—still did—and he was after her design… for Elaine. She had to get real; it wasn’t to help her, Heather, in any way.
I will not cry.
“So good night, Heather,” Mr. Summers said, impatience bleeding through.
She got her purse and rose. Coat, hat, gloves, right. If her boots touched the floor, she didn’t feel it. The world was orbiting around her and it took every ounce of willpower to push the front door open. The tears were threatening; it was sleeting and miserable and she was crushed and humiliated.
She was about to jaywalk to get to the subway station when a black low-rider slipped up to the curb and a window rolled down. She was about to walk past it when a familiar voice said, “Hey, baby, wanna buy a gun?”
Heather actually smiled. “No way,” she said. And then she wiped her eyes of the tears that had won the battle for her face.
J-Bag’s smile fell. “Heather? What’s wrong?”
He sounded like a different person, like just a guy, not some banger, and she pressed her lips together. She just stood there like an idiot.
Leaning across the seats, he opened the door. “Get in,” he told her.
“Why? So we can go murder someone?” she said, agonized. Men were awful; they were thieves and felons.
“Shit, girl, get in.” He held out a hand.
And Heather took it. She got in and he zipped away from the curb into the icy downpour and the gray, fierce traffic. He glanced over at her and she pressed her fingertips to her forehead, lips quivering.
“Hey, so, what’s going on?” he asked.
“First-world problems.”
He snorted. “Man problems. No woman cries like that because her tiara delivery is late.”
“Wrong.” She was done in. She needed a good sob session. Instead, she found herself telling him the entire horrible story.
“Did you snag one of eLaine’s business cards?” he asked when she was finished.
“Damn it. No. I got flustered.”
“Well, get one tomorrow and we’ll figure out where she lives. And then I’ll pop her for you.” When she stared at him, he grinned impishly. “I wouldn’t do that. But he did steal your shit. My guess is it’s still at her place, including that cheating dirtbag. We can start with the money clip and see what’s shaking with your corset once I tie them up and threaten to blow their heads off.”
“J-Bag,” she began and he waved her off. “Seriously. No violence. And, um, why are you doing this?”
“Seriously? I like you,” he replied, and when she blanched, he added, “Not in that way. This is a friend helping out a friend, if you want it like that.”
My life is so odd, she thought. She inclined her head a smidgen and murmured, “But no beating them up or vandalizing their homes.”
“We’ll get back your hundred bucks, too,” he said. “And? I’ll only take twenty percent off the top.”
That made her smile. “Deal,” she said.
Yes, her life was odd, but that was just another word for “interesting.”
Right?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Shyam Badal is listed in the Riker’s internal records as dead,” J.T. said as he looked up from his computer screen.
“Beast,” Cat and Tess said at the same time.
“Seems most likely,” J.T. agreed.
“If it’s him, maybe he’s taken Aliyah himself. Or has a confederate who rescued her from Lena Mueller,” Tess suggested, sounding hopeful.
“Or maybe someone is trying to use her as a bargaining chip. Get Badal to come in,” Cat said.
“Mazursky,” all three said at once.
“I hate that guy,” J.T. muttered.
* * *
Meanwhile, across town…
“Going somewhere?” Vincent asked James Farris as the man sat
in his Audi and uselessly cranked the ignition. They were in the garage where Farris stored his car, which many New Yorkers did. Cars were a pain to drive and park on the crowded island of Manhattan. Public transportation made more sense. However, if you were trying to flee the fury of a beast whose lover had been put in danger, it made sense to grab your own set of wheels.
Just as it made sense to disable that Audi by pulling out the distributor cap, if you didn’t want it to go anywhere.
With the abatement of the storm, it had been easier for Vincent to track Farris to this garage. He was hopeful that he would soon pick up the scent of Aliyah Patel.
“Who—what?” Farris said, but his look of abject horror betrayed him; if he didn’t know who Vincent was, then he had a pretty good idea.
Vincent reached in and pulled him out, then placed him on his feet against the side of the car. The man was shaking. Vincent could hear his pounding heartbeat and made some mental calibrations. If this guy lied to him he might give himself an aneurysm.
“Who are you working for?” Vincent asked him. “And don’t lie. I will know.”
“Lena took her on her own. We hadn’t received orders to do anything but keep her under observation. I don’t have the first idea where she took her.”
He was telling the truth. “Who,” Vincent said impatiently, “do you work for?”
“I’m new at this. Lena brought me in a couple of months ago. She got herself transferred to New York because they’d found out about the antidote. They knew the FBI was looking for it, too.” As Vincent opened his mouth, he said, “I don’t know who they are. But they’re rich.” His breath stutter-stopped. “I was going to be set for life.”
“For doing what?”
He looked down, then away. Vincent smelled fear on him, that and something else. Maybe it was shame.
“People at Vanek are forgotten,” he said in a voice that would have been barely audible to anyone but Vincent. “And we have access to equipment, drugs…”
Vincent was disgusted down to the depths of his soul. “You were going to provide test subjects for the fear project?”
Farris nodded. “I swear to you, I was told it was for an anti-anxiety medication and the FDA was dragging its heels about approving human trials. Until Aliyah Patel was brought in, and Lena told me she was suffering from the effects of the experiment. And I wanted out. I was on the verge of telling you and Detective Chandler all about it. But they threatened my life.”
He doesn’t know about me, Vincent realized. “What exactly did Lena tell you?”
“That the murders in town were being committed by a test subject. Someone who had been driven insane by the experiments he had undergone.”
He. “Did they specifically say ‘he’?”
“No,” he said wretchedly. “It was all this weird legalese. ‘The subject’ this and ‘the subject’ that. Never identified. I thought it might be Aliyah when they first brought her in. When she attacked that police officer, I was sure of it.”
Vincent was stunned. Why had that not occurred to any of them? He had smelled the beast scent for the first time in this entire case when he had gone to her in the interview room. What if instead of the scent being an artifact of the crime scene, it was a biological part of her?
“I’m telling you, Lena took Aliyah on her own,” he said. “Honest. We weren’t given the order. She was trying to save the poor kid…” He exhaled, and it was as if all the oxygen in his body simply left. “I told her not to do it. I said she’d pay.”
“She has,” Vincent said. “She’s dead.”
“Oh, God.” The man’s legs gave way, and Vincent allowed him to sink to the floor of the garage. He buried his face in his hands and let out a wracked sob. Vincent felt absolutely no pity for him. A less evolved beast would have torn him limb from limb right there and then.
“Did they tell you to put a trace on Detective Chandler?” he asked.
Farris nodded. “I got a call while she was in my office.”
At this, Vincent had to turn away. Sheer rage threatened to call out his beast side, and he couldn’t afford the luxury of a loss of self-control. Once he was fully human again, he turned and loomed over the distraught man.
“You didn’t ask why?”
“No,” he whispered. “Don’t you get it? These are not people you ask questions. You just do what they say.” He swallowed hard. “Lena’s dead, oh, God. But what about Aliyah? Is she dead, too?”
“She’s been taken.”
He covered his mouth with his hand. Then he said, “Let me help you find her. Please. Let me do something.”
“You’ve done enough,” Vincent retorted coldly. The man’s face crumpled, but still pity did not come. “Do you know who Agent Mazursky is?”
The man’s heartbeat told Vincent that he did. “We’re supposed to call a number and report in if we hear anything, especially about him. They’re after him. He has something they want. But I don’t know what it is,” he added anxiously.
He was telling the truth about being ignorant. Vincent said, “Give me the number. If there’s a code word or something you have to do to prove who you are, tell me what it is. Now.”
Farris cringed. “They’ll kill me.”
“We’ll protect you,” Vincent said. He wasn’t sure what they would do with him afterwards, but that wasn’t his immediate concern. “You said you wanted to help.”
“Of course.”
“All right, we’re going to call them,” Vincent said. “I’m going to write down exactly what you should say.”
Farris dialed in and inputted the code.
“What have you got?” said an electronically disguised voice on the other end of the line.
“Mazursky found a vial on Howison’s body,” Farris said, reading from Vincent’s script. Vincent had him lie to shake things up. Delivering misinformation was a time-honored war tactic.
“How do you know this?” the voice demanded.
“Lena Mueller told me.” May as well make it something they couldn’t verify.
“How would she know?”
Farris looked at Vincent, who pantomimed shrugging in ignorance. “I don’t know. She mentioned it tonight.” Then he said on his own, “Is Aliyah Patel all right?”
“What do you mean?” the voice snapped.
Vincent’s stomach dropped to the floor. They don’t have her. They didn’t take her.
“Hello?” said the voice. “Answer the question.”
Vincent mouthed Lena.
“I thought you knew,” Farris said. “Lena Mueller took her out of here earlier tonight.”
“What? How would we know that?”
“The other operative in the facility,” he replied, and Vincent frowned at him in surprise. This was news. But Farris gave his head a shake.
“We don’t have another operative in the building.” Vincent was surprised the voice would be so forthcoming. “So you’re saying Aliyah Patel has been abducted?”
“Or rescued.” At a sign from Vincent, Farris hung up.
“That was almost fun,” he said.
I will not kill him, Vincent thought. At least, not now.
* * *
Vincent returned to J.T.’s with Farris in tow and told Cat, Tess, and J.T. everything that had happened. Cat and Tess traded somber looks. Their best theory continued to be that Mazursky had abducted Aliyah and murdered Lena Mueller, but for what specific purpose, they didn’t know. Leaving Farris in J.T.’s custody, they divided up and began the search of the five crime scenes they had not already examined for components of the antidote. Cat and Tess took the two near each other in Greenwich Village: one on Houston Street, and one near the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library.
To their dismay, they discovered hiding places at each domicile, one in the wall and one in the floor. And no vials, jump drives or other items that could have been used in the formulation of an antidote.
“Someone’s beat us to it,” Cat said i
nto the phone to Vincent.
“I was luckier in crime scene number four,” Vincent announced. “That’s Attenborough on the list. I’ll send you a—”
And then he was cut off.
“Vincent?” Cat half-shouted into the phone. “Are you there?” But she was speaking to dead air.
“Not good,” Tess said. “Keep trying, and let’s go to the scene.”
The squad car’s lights and sirens fully engaged, Tess wove through traffic while Cat hit redial a dozen times, two dozen. Her stomach was clenched in knots. She had a terrible feeling that Vincent was in real trouble and she couldn’t shake it no matter how hard Tess tried to talk her out of it. Tess ran down possible scenarios: Cell phones in New York were notorious for dropped signals. Someone may have arrived on scene and Vincent cut the call so as to remain concealed. All those things had happened to them on cases. There was no reason to expect the worst.
“I can’t shake it,” Cat said, and they looked at each other with sudden realization.
“Fear pheromone flashback,” Tess suggested, and Cat nodded.
“I guess I need that antidote too,” she replied.
“Number four” was where a man named Nils Attenborough had been found shredded to pieces. It had not been his home, only where his homicide had occurred. They drove through the city into blocks of abandoned, burned-out buildings mixed with occupied structures. The ones that were being used were in no better condition than the ones that weren’t. Brick and sooty snow, trash, rust and neglect greeted them at every turn. Deeper they went, past chain-link fences guarding empty lots and a huge, snowy pit that might have been the start of a massive construction project, long abandoned. There the traffic thinned and Tess took off the lights and siren, opting for the element of surprise in case they needed some kind of advantage. They didn’t know. Vincent hadn’t returned any of Cat’s calls.
Cat verified the address as they pulled off the street and trundled into a grid of disintegrating factories and storage facilities. As she opened her door, it began to snow. She looked up at the angry gray sky and crossed her fingers for a quick, light snowfall. She and Tess drew their weapons and kept to the shadows as they approached the front door of their destination. The body had been discovered on the ground floor about thirty feet to the east of the foyer.