Midnight Kiss

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Hope.” He carefully kept exasperation out of his voice but it had to be there.

  “Hmm?” His eyes were light blue with narrow striations of dark blue.

  “Hope. Kyle? DNA?”

  Oh God, there she was again, mooning. At least she wasn’t drooling. Was she?

  She surreptitiously ran a hand over her mouth, which — yes, thank you God — was drool-free.

  Kyle. DNA. A dead friend. A lifetime of lies. Danger built right into her DNA. That was enough to bring her down to earth.

  “Yeah. Kyle came right over and showed me the DNA results.” If she closed her eyes she could see the scene. Kyle, his friendly, droopy face unusually sober and serious, sitting on the edge of her couch in her pretty, tiny apartment, right under her original Star Wars poster. Another story of hidden genetic connections. Luke Skywalker’s father had turned out to be a monster. And hers?

  “And … who were they?” Luke said and she realized she’d gone into another fugue state.

  She needed to sharpen up, focus. Focus is what would keep her alive.

  “Well, not my parents, for one.” Luke straightened a little at that. “I was right. There was no genetic connection at all between me and my parents. Both of them were mostly Slav. Polish and Russian extraction, Kyle said. I am of English extraction with some Irish thrown in. But that’s not all.” She plucked at an afghan that was hanging over the back of the couch. It was made of cashmere and touching it soothed her. “Not only were they not my parents, they weren’t man and wife, either. They were siblings.”

  Luke blinked, which she was sure was an expression of great astonishment for him. He didn’t seem to be someone who wore his feelings on his sleeve. She gave a wry smile.

  “Yeah. They were brother and sister.” Hope held up a hand. “That isn’t quite as skeevy as it sounds. Or maybe it is, I don’t know. Not sure of much of anything these days. But I never actually saw them kiss or even hug. They slept in separate bedrooms. And looking back, they didn’t behave like man and wife. I don’t know if they behaved like brother and sister because frankly, I don’t have any experience in that field, but they were more like partners in an endeavor than — than a couple. So clearly, that endeavor was to be Neil and Sandra Ellis and to pretend to be my parents.”

  Luke’s eyebrows drew together in a scowl. So expressive it was as if he’d spoken.

  “Yeah.” She had felt the same way.

  “So if they were — were pretending to be your parents, there was a reason.”

  “Uh huh. I think they were paid to pretend to be my parents. Like a job.”

  He thought it over. “Well, this is so weird, why not? What led you to that conclusion?”

  “Like I said, they always had plenty of money, but I never saw them work. Ever.”

  He leaned forward a little, the frown still there.

  Yes, that was exactly what she felt like too. The more you knew about the situation, the more you felt like you’d fallen into a rabbit hole.

  “And the adoption angle?”

  Hope nodded sharply. “Yeah. That’s the only thing that makes sense. I have looked — and trust me when I say I’m pretty good at looking, it’s what I do — and I can’t find anything. Though I don’t have the resources to hack into the systems of every adoption agency in America and — given that I seem to be English and Irish — abroad. I spent a sleepless forty-eight hours searching every adoption agency I could find, including some in England since apparently that’s my main heritage, with no luck at all. But in the meantime I asked Kyle to attack the problem from another angle.”

  “You asked your friend to match your DNA to as large a database as possible.”

  She nodded. “By this point he was as intrigued as I was.” She smiled a little. “I think part of that was that he was an Ashkenazi Jew and his family could trace its roots back five hundred years, uninterruptedly. He said he couldn’t fathom not knowing where he came from. So I sent him another DNA sample from me and he said he’d get back to me in a couple of days. I spent those days scouring the web and pacing in my apartment.”

  “And?”

  She looked at that handsome, exhausted face and sighed sadly. “Yesterday, Kyle called me up, really excited and — and worked up at the same time. He said he’d got some astonishing results, results that could change everything. That he was on his way over.”

  Luke’s jaw muscles clenched. “That’s what he said? He found that your possible parentage could ‘change everything’?”

  “His exact words. I saved his call to a cloud server. It ends very badly. Can I open my laptop?”

  “Sure.” A wave of uneasiness crossed his face. “But —”

  “Don’t worry. I have a very strong proxy IP. No one can find me.” She pulled out her laptop and felt better just touching it. It was a piece of hardware, yes. But it was also her life and it had never let her down. Unlike people. “So, when I turn on the audio file, you’ll hear a loud background noise. It’ll be his car.” She glanced at Luke. They’d driven here from the airport in a car so soundproofed there hadn’t been a whisper of noise from the engine. “He doesn’t know anything about car mechanics or maintenance and his car probably has the equivalent of three or four serious diseases.”

  Luke was bent forward, elbows on knees, big hands clasped between them. His face was intent and she knew that he would pay very close attention.

  “Okay, here we go.” She clicked on the file and the room was filled with a loud hum and then Kyle’s breathy, high-pitched voice, vibrating with excitement. “Hey Hope! Got some … some amazing results from the DNA analysis and matchup. I didn’t want to email them to you because … because, well, you’ll see. It’s like you’re related to Bigfoot, only not so nice. So I’m on my way to your place. At first I shot blanks more or less everywhere, and I thought maybe the DNA wasn’t on file. It took me some time to cycle through a bunch of databases and I wasn’t getting anything. But you know a specific set of DNA files became classified years ago.”

  She shot Luke a questioning look and he nodded. There had been a massive scrubbing of DNA files of top officials of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service.

  “So, technically, some big shot DNA has been removed from the data banks. But whoever scrubbed the files wasn’t very good because they left a … space, I guess you could call it. Sort of like a missing brick in a wall and footprints leading away from it. I called in our good friend and hacker extraordinaire, Dragondude95, who lives for puzzles like this and he found our missing DNA. He said it was in a super secret file behind firewalls and fire-breathing dragons and the name was actually redacted, so he had to climb over some more firewalls. And shit, Hope, you won’t believe who you are related to! I mean, closely related to! Your grandfather, in fact. This is serious shit and given what’s going on at the moment, it could change everything. Absolutely everything. I’m talking history-altering, game-changing shit. Can’t wait to see your face when you realize who it is because —”

  The loud screeching of torn metal, shattering glass, a scream. Hope looked down at her knees, because she knew she was listening to the sound of a friend’s death. Murder. Each time she heard the recording, it felt like the accident went on and on and on. This time, too, the crashing noises went on forever. But finally the noise stopped and there was the sound of groaning, then screaming.

  A crunching sound. She’d listened to the recording three times before realizing what it was. The sound of shoes walking over shattered glass. She was expecting it, but she still jumped at the sound of a gunshot. The screaming stopped abruptly. On the recording was a moment of shocking silence, then the crunching sound again, fading. The killer walking away.

  Luke’s face had tightened, the skin over his cheekbones taut, the brackets around his mouth deep. He’d gotten it immediately.

  “He was killed,” Hope said numbly. The words were hardly out of her mouth when she realized she’d said a no shit, Sherlock thing, but Luk
e only nodded soberly.

  He touched the side of her laptop with a long finger. “ASI has sound engineers on call. They’re good at isolating sounds.” He shot her a look. “Do you know where this happened?”

  Hope nodded, throat tight. She blew out a breath. Waited for her throat to loosen up enough to talk. “Yeah. I hacked into police radio. It was on the corner of Madison and 4th. It’s a straight line from his office to my house. He’d obviously gone into work, logged onto the company system and … and realized what the results meant. Though now we’ll probably never know. He knew I’d be home because I told him I was conducting research to see if I’d been clandestinely adopted. He called me en route and — and that happened.”

  “Okay, you give me the make and model of his car and his phone and we’ll see from his GPS what his route was, just to be certain.” He frowned. “I’ll have to wait to ask Felicity. Her husband, Metal, would have my head if I called right now. He guards her naptime like a dragon guarding its hoard of gold. She wants to see you, but Metal nixed that for the moment.”

  “I can do it. I’m not a hacker, per se, I’m a data analyst, but this is easy stuff. I can do it. I’ve been too — too shocked to analyze Kyle’s death, but I can do it now.”

  “And I’ll have a sound engineer analyze the footsteps. I think maybe from the gait and the volume of the crunching maybe we can estimate height, weight. Certainly the engineer can analyze and identify the caliber of the weapon.”

  Caliber of the weapon … Hope shuddered. Maybe it had been her exhaustion, maybe the fact that all of this was entirely outside her experience, but she hadn’t really focused on the essentials. All she really knew was that someone had shot and killed her friend Kyle Ackerman.

  Because of her.

  The police report said it was a shot to the head. Like an execution. She made a mental note to find the medical examiner’s report, however hard it was going to be to read. She’d study it, pass it on to Luke and his teammates. She owed Kyle that much.

  He’d died for her, after all.

  It all came down to her, to some kind of — what? Some kind of original sin? Something in her origins, in her background, that was dangerous and that had gotten someone killed. And might just kill her.

  Hope bowed her head, exhausted, trembling, sad beyond words. To her shame, a tear fell down her face and plopped on her clasped hands.

  Oh God. She couldn’t let him see her crying. She couldn’t —

  A large, warm hand covered her clasped hands. She was cold all over except at that point where his hand touched hers. They sat there for a moment, while she got herself under control. She lifted her head to apologize but he spoke first.

  “None of this is your fault,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. And I know it feels terrifying, but you’re not alone anymore and we will get to the bottom of this.”

  He said it like an established fact. The sun will rise in the east tomorrow. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.

  “It’s too late for Kyle,” she whispered.

  Luke gave a sharp nod. “It is. Kyle was an innocent and someone with something to gain killed him. The world is full of people like that. The kind of people who just swat other people out of the way when it suits them. We have to stop them. That’s what ASI is all about. They don’t let things like this stand.”

  Hope looked at him. At the brackets around his mouth, the jaw muscles clenched. He meant every single word. It was like cracking open a door to a world she’d never suspected existed, except in fantasy games. A world where evil was real and present and there were brave men and women who fought it. Hope had no idea if she was brave enough to be a warrior but she was sitting next to someone who was. He’d been a decorated soldier, Felicity said.

  Which meant that he’d been shot at and hadn’t run away. Had run into danger. Into fire.

  “So what did you do next?” he asked.

  “I knew where Kyle was from police radio, so I hacked into the traffic cams. It took me a few minutes and by the time I saw the traffic cam view, whoever shot Kyle had gone. I just — I just looked at the scene. At the smoking ruins of his car. At his torso, half out of the upside-down driver’s seat window. He’d been trying to crawl out when —”

  Her voice cracked and she looked away, willing the tears back. Thinking of Kyle, who’d survived a bad car crash only to be shot while trying to crawl away.

  And all because of her. Because of something in her past clawing its way into the now.

  Emotion welled up, unstoppable. It took her a moment to be able to speak. Luke’s big hand tightened around hers.

  She drew in a deep breath, let it go. “Something caught fire. The car didn’t explode like in the movies, but it did start to burn. Then suddenly EMTs showed up and then the police. No sound of sirens, of course.”

  Another terrible memory. Kyle half-in, half-out of the vehicle, being pulled all the way out, the bullet wound in the head horribly visible, a black hole. Blood pooling in a black puddle around his head. The police stretching yellow tape — which showed up light gray in the black and white video — around the car. The EMTs loading poor Kyle onto a gurney, then into the ambulance and driving away.

  “And then?” Luke asked, after she fell silent, memories like nails driven into her heart.

  “Then I followed them on traffic cams. I wanted to follow where they were taking him. I thought I’d go where they took him, to pay my respects to him.” She glanced at him. His jaw had tightened even more. You could cut glass with it. “What?”

  “Bad move.”

  She sighed. Yeah, it would have been a bad move.

  “You’re right, it would have been a terrible move, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was following the traffic cams when my cellphone pinged.”

  “Some alert you’d set up?”

  She nodded. “The security system in the building. From the lobby.” He’d immediately understood. It had taken her precious seconds to understand the sequence of events. Kyle talking to her on his cell, then the alert. She’d been slow all along the way in a deadly game where catching up after the fact meant death. Where speed meant life.

  “Four men walked into the lobby with ski masks on. My building has a doorman, Geraldo. He doesn’t man the front desk much but he’s pretty good about paying attention from a small room behind the front desk. There are monitors covering the grounds, the lobby and the corridors. He must have pressed an alarm button. I watched him come out from the small room and one of the men just —”

  Her voice went hoarse. She closed her eyes and saw the scene inside her eyelids. She’d never forget it, the casual brutal killing, the utter shock and horror of it. She opened her eyes to find Luke watching her, head tilted slightly. Showing no surprise at all at her next words.

  “They — they were walking fast, like … marching, almost synchronized. As they walked by the front desk, Geraldo came out from the back room. One of the men just lifted his arm. He was holding a gun and to my shame I only noticed then that they were all armed. He lifted his arm straight out and shot Geraldo in the head. Without even aiming. Just put his arm up, shot Geraldo, put his arm back down and carried on without breaking his stride. Like stepping on an ant. They filed into the elevator and I could see in the cam them punching in the 5th floor. My floor.”

  Geraldo had dropped like a stone, the only evidence of him being there a slight pink mist in the air and blood spattering the door behind him.

  “They traced the call.” Luke’s voice was pensive. “Came after you right away. Almost simultaneously.”

  She nodded.

  “Two teams. One for your friend and one for you. That’s a lot of manpower. You’d have to assume they had other teams ready.”

  “Oh God.” The breath left her chest in a painfully jagged whoosh. She hadn’t put it all together. She’d just reacted to all the events, but hadn’t analyzed them. She was an analyst but not this kind. Not the real-world real-time killers-on-the-loos
e kind. “That’s — that’s really scary.”

  He dipped his head, face sober. “It is. But you escaped.”

  That iron anchor on her chest lifted, just a little. “I did. My apartment is around the corner from where the elevator opens. I threw my laptop in my backpack, put a burner cellphone in the microwave, turned it on and grabbed a couple of other burner phones I always keep around.”

  He cocked his head. “Cell in the microwave, eh? That was good thinking. Most people would hesitate, particularly if they had an expensive cell. And most people keep a lot of data in their cell’s memory.”

  She shook her head. “It was just a burner. I have a very expensive cell, yes, but I can always buy a new one. I keep all my contacts and info and messages in the cloud, and trust me when I say that the data there is secure. It was just a burner though, so I was essentially trashing a piece of plastic. I could smell melting plastic as I went out the door. The burner was a distraction. I knew they’d spend a few minutes trying to salvage it. Buy me some time.”

  “That was good thinking on your part.”

  She sighed. “I think in terms of computer security all the time. But never in terms of personal security. Got a real crash course in that.”

  He looked straight into her eyes. “You’re a good student.”

  Yes, she was. She’d gotten straight As all her life. But this — this was another school. A hard, cruel, pitiless one, and she didn’t think she’d aced the exams. A friend of hers had died, as had the doorman of her building. Maybe if she’d thought it through, maybe if she’d taken a moment to consider consequences, Kyle and Geraldo would still be alive.

  But no. She’d been breathless with curiosity, burning up in a fever of restlessness to know. To know whether this vague feeling of unease around her parents was on her or was on them. It hadn’t even occurred to her that opening that door might be dangerous. That she might be cracking open a door onto a monstrous hell.