by Camy Tang
She heard the sound of fumbling at the card-key lock.
Rachel grabbed her pipette, although its light weight felt useless in her hand.
The locks disengaged, startling her. She tightened her grip on the pipette.
Then Edward burst in, and she almost cried out in relief.
“Rachel, Alex found Steve Schmidt’s address.”
The narrow San Francisco street wasn’t particularly dirty, but something about its eerie emptiness made Edward move closer to Rachel as they picked their way past the battered cars parked on the sidewalk. With parking at a premium in the city, the residents had apparently forfeited a safe walkway. However, the street didn’t have much traffic, and walking in the middle of it still gave them ample time to see any cars approaching.
Considering his brother had used his contacts to find this address, Edward hadn’t expected the neighborhood to be very upscale. A friend of Alex’s who owned homes divided into apartments for rent had known another apartment owner who had been willing to search his records and had found Steve listed as a renter in one of his buildings.
“We should have just waited for Detective Carter to do this,” he said.
“I need to do this,” she replied mulishly. “I need to look in his face. I hired him. I trusted him.”
The buildings stretched to the sky, their foundations precariously clinging to the steep hillside. Edward and Rachel leaned forward as they climbed, searching the building numbers.
There. Number 307.
It had a garage door, unlike many of the other houses on the street, but the weather-beaten door was padlocked shut and there was a sporty MINI Cooper parked in front of it, a newer car than most of the others on the street.
“I wonder if that’s his,” Rachel said. “It’s about two years old, and he must have been paid a lot to steal my data.”
At that moment, a young blonde woman rattled down the rickety stairs that ran along the side of the narrow three-story house. She paused as she saw them, but beyond a tight nod, she squeezed past, clicking her car keys. The MINI Cooper beeped as the car alarm disarmed, and she climbed inside.
Rachel shrugged. “I guess not.”
Edward paused to watch the woman, and noticed that she reached down to adjust the driver’s seat and slide it closer to the steering wheel.
Maybe Rachel’s initial comment had been right.
He took longer strides to catch up with Rachel as she climbed the stairs. They reached the third-floor landing and knocked on a door with an upside down C hanging from the middle of it. Remembering the woman and the car, Edward positioned himself closer to the door and tensed as he waited.
They could hear footsteps inside hastening to the door just before it was flung open. “Claudia, I knew you’d—”
Frozen, a tall young man with dark brown hair stared at Rachel for a full second.
Then he tried to slam the door shut.
However, Edward jammed his foot inside the apartment against the door and threw his entire weight against it. He had anticipation and a good fifty pounds on the research associate, and Steve stumbled back into the apartment.
Edward swung the door open wide, and Rachel followed him inside. “Hi, Steve,” she said sweetly.
“D-Dr. Grant.” The muscles stood out on his thin neck, and his shoulders moved stiffly as he caught his balance against the sagging, faded plaid couch that stood in the center of the spacious living room.
“Not happy to see me? I don’t blame you.” Rachel’s eyes and voice were strangely impassive as she regarded him.
“Of course I’m happy to see you,” he quipped with a sickly smile. “Are you here to hire me back?”
Rachel bent to study the ancient television sitting on old telephone books in front of the couch, with a PlayStation 3 beside it. “I would have thought you’d buy a nicer TV with the money they gave you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Grant.”
“You probably spent it all on the car.” Rachel stood up and turned to face him. “I would have gotten a Miata.”
Something—some edge in her voice, in her eyes—belied her calm tone, her neutral face. Steve opened his mouth as if to answer her, but that something made the words freeze on his tongue.
“You probably don’t even have an aunt who lives in Sonoma, like you told me.” Rachel folded her arms. “But I don’t think your credentials were fake. You were a slacker, but you did know what you were doing.”
As if she didn’t expect an answer, she ambled over to the wide picture window that looked out over the city from the front of the house. “As you can see, Edward is a very large man.”
Steve shot him a quick, wild look.
“So, Steve, tell me who hired you to steal my data.”
Steve glanced at Edward again, this time for a long minute, searching his eyes, measuring his height and stance. Then Steve shook his head. “I’m not telling you. The other guy was bigger.”
Rachel whirled toward him a little too quickly. Then she took a short breath and backed down, resting a hand at her throat. “Who was he?”
Steve shook his head again. “No way.” His hands, dangling at his sides, twitched.
One of Steve’s pinky fingers looked as if it had been broken.
A thug, maybe, had taken care of the transaction with Steve—hiring him, paying him and leaving a reminder to make sure he wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
Like them.
Rachel wandered to the other end of the living room, where the dingy carpet gave way to linoleum and the open kitchen boasted dirty pots tilted in the sink and piled on the electric stove. Next to the kitchen stood a small wooden desk with an old laptop. Rachel touched a key and an old video game popped up on the screen.
“I’m assuming this means you didn’t hack into my computer yourself,” she said. “I would expect a hacker’s desk to look more like my cousin Jane’s—full of machinery and better games.”
Steve’s neck flushed, but he remained silent.
“I guess I was right,” Rachel continued. “You were hired to sneak your ‘girlfriend,’ or the real hacker, into my lab. You hadn’t worked for me long enough to realize that the security guard did a lab walk-through every few hours, so he interrupted her. She left a time stamp on my computer.”
At this, Steve smirked. “You fired me two years ago, Dr. Grant.” Not confessing anything, but pointing out that it took her that long to realize something had been stolen.
Edward’s hand flexed.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. I didn’t notice it very quickly.” Rachel’s voice was even more calm, as if she were having this conversation with one of her sisters out in their rose garden on a blissful summer day, not in this dusty apartment that smelled like mice.
She turned to face him, her head tilted to the side. “They tried to kill me, you know.”
Steve stopped breathing for a moment, then his thin chest rose and fell rapidly under his cartoon T-shirt.
“They’ll be after you next,” she told him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice came out strained.
“If it were me, I wouldn’t trust in any amount of money to keep someone from talking.” Rachel nodded at Edward. “We can protect you.”
Steve snorted, although his breath came out shakily. “I don’t need protection.”
Frustration flashed across Rachel’s face for a moment, then was gone. “Please just tell us who hired you to steal my data.”
“I didn’t steal anything.”
“Just the name of who paid you to sneak that girl into the lab. That’s all I want.”
He shook his head, his thin lips pressed tight.
A sliver of fire then cracked through Rachel’s expressionless mask, revealing an inferno raging beneath the surface. Her jaw tightened as her eyes burned into Steve. “It was my data…my work….” Her voice shook.
Edward knew she would regret it if she lost control here, in fr
ont of this weasel. He stepped forward and pulled her toward the door. “If you change your mind,” he told Steve, “you know where to find us.” He steered Rachel out of the apartment, a bit surprised that she didn’t resist him.
As they closed the door behind them, the same girl who had left the apartment and gotten into the MINI Cooper paused on her way up the stairs. “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Were you visiting Steve?”
“Yes,” Edward said, not quite trusting Rachel to answer calmly.
“I’m Claudia. Are you friends of his?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if you want to talk to him right now.”
Her eyes widened. “Is he okay? I know he can be a jerk sometimes, but…”
“He’s fine,” Rachel said, her voice even. She squeezed past the girl, heading down the stairs. “But it may not be in your best interests to be around him for the next few hours.”
Alex had promised to give them a couple hours’ head start, but by now, he would have told Detective Carter about locating Steve’s address.
Steve’s next visitors would be the police.
TWELVE
They had gone all that way for nothing.
Rachel picked at her pasta, seeing Steve’s smug face instead of the angel hair. For a moment, near the end of the visit, her frustration had been molten magma, bubbling and boiling thickly. She had wanted to launch herself at him, to shake him out of his defiance.
“Rachel.”
Edward’s voice made her blink, and she saw the hardly touched chicken, tomatoes and basil of her dinner in front of her eyes once more.
“The restaurant’s closing,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”
They hadn’t spoken much on the drive back to Sonoma. He hadn’t even asked her if she was hungry before turning into the restaurant parking lot. Probably because she would have told him she didn’t want to eat. He had forced her to order something anyway.
He paid their check and guided her out of the warm restaurant into the frigid night air.
“Horatio’s a good detective,” Edward said as they walked to his truck. “We can trust him to—”
A rough hand grabbed her arm and pulled her away from Edward even as he was jerked in the other direction. Off balance, she still managed to swing an arm at her attacker, but she only softly clipped a shoulder.
Her frustration at Steve seemed to pour out of her now, firing her fists as she pummeled the man. She connected with an unshaven jaw, a collarbone, an ear.
Fingers bit into her arms and then she was airborne. She slammed into a car with a painful thump—solid steel that jiggled on small wheels. But no alarm went off to alert the restaurant staff.
She had to set off a car alarm.
She was barely on her feet, sagging against the car. Her back ached from the impact, but she rolled to the side, her hands sliding against the windows, trying to find her feet so she could run. But the man’s hands pinned her shoulder against the car.
She kicked, but didn’t have a good enough foothold and nearly fell, sliding down the side of the car. He pushed at her again, and a headache slammed her between the eyes, clouding her vision for a moment.
When it cleared, she suddenly recognized the man attacking her.
The same one who had tried to get into the card-key doors at the spa. The one Naomi had said tried to steal her laptop.
“You!” She tried to claw at his face, but he shoved a forearm against her neck and pinned her to the car, fumbling for something in his jacket with his other hand.
“Rachel!” Edward wrestled with another man, although she couldn’t see clearly. The parking lot was dark and they were too far away from the closest streetlight.
She couldn’t let them hurt Edward.
She stamped her foot hard on the man’s instep.
“Ooof!”
His arm across her throat loosened, and she jabbed a fist into where she hoped his solar plexus was.
She was free.
She couldn’t scream—her throat had closed up. She stumbled toward a sedan parked several yards away. The car alarm. If she could set off the car alarm…
“I’ll kill your boyfriend!”
She hesitated, looked over her shoulder.
The other man struggled with Edward. It looked as if they were fighting for control of a gun, but the attacker was a few inches taller and broader across the shoulders. “Shoot her!” the man told Rachel’s attacker.
Then she noticed the man she recognized from the spa held a gun pointed right at her.
She wasn’t very far away. He had a perfect shot.
And in that moment, everything slowed down. She saw everything in minute detail.
The man’s eyes were big and white as they stared into hers. His mouth pulled wide as he gritted his teeth.
His fingers moved against the handle of the gun.
Oh, God.
And suddenly she understood—the vastness of the universe God had created, the mystery of the life He gave to everything in it, the unknown of death that only God could fathom.
And how small she was. How fleeting her life. How inconsequential she was.
And the immense contrast of how much He loved her despite all that.
Staring down the barrel of that gun, staring into that man’s eyes, she had only one thought.
Lord, I surrender.
One heartbeat. Then another.
And still the man waited. Hesitated.
“Shoot her!” the other man shouted again.
But he didn’t.
Suddenly Edward swung around, using the centrifugal force of his movement to throw his attacker into the man pointing the gun at her. The two men went down in a heap.
The gun clattered to the asphalt, and there was a cracking sound as it went off. She instinctively flinched and dropped to the ground, expecting a bullet to hit her, but miraculously, nothing happened.
“Hey!” A voice from the restaurant shouted.
She turned and rose to her feet in time to see the two men running off, and in time for Edward to pull her roughly into his arms.
She was safe.
But for the first time, she became aware of another presence with her.
She felt Him. A sense that she was not alone. That she wouldn’t be alone even if Edward weren’t there.
He had been there for her. And He was with her still.
She held Edward close until her racing heart had slowed, breathing in his musk and pine, feeling the thud of his own heart.
Then she pulled away slightly. He reluctantly loosened his hold on her.
She reached up, drew his head down and kissed him.
He gasped against her mouth. But then his arms pulled her tighter and he sank into the kiss. It seemed as if he poured into her all his relief and care.
She drew him closer. She wanted him closer. It felt as if this was where he belonged.
He broke off the kiss and pressed his cheek against hers, content to hold her tight against him. “I was afraid,” he whispered. “I thought…”
She knew what he thought. She had thought the same thing.
They held each other, feeling the warmth of their embrace and the chill of the night air.
She still felt God’s presence with her.
He had thought he would have to watch her die right in front of him.
Edward remained close to Rachel as the police sergeant explained he would be taking their statement.
“Where’s Detective Carter?” Edward asked the young man.
“He’ll be here,” the sergeant said. “He was out of town for most of today, but he radioed to say he’d be here in a few minutes.”
Out of town. Probably in San Francisco, talking to Steve Schmidt. Would Horatio have gotten more out of the research associate than they had? Would he be able to arrest him?
Hopefully the detective wouldn’t arrive too quickly. Edward wasn’t looking forward to confessing that they had visited Steve before the police did.
> Rachel explained what had happened to her, how the man had pulled her away from Edward, how she had fought back, how she’d recognized him as the same man who’d tried to get into the spa lab, how he had pinned her against the car—she pointed to an old Crown Victoria parked nearby, which apparently belonged to one of the restaurant chefs. The police had discovered the dropped gun near the front tire, so they hadn’t allowed the chef to drive home.
“I heard Edward cry out,” she said. The look she gave him was a strange mixture of worry and relief. “So I stomped on the man’s instep and hit him in the gut.”
Edward blinked at her. He’d been so busy wrestling with the other man that he hadn’t noticed how she’d escaped. A few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have thought that sweet, calm Rachel would fight back that way.
“I couldn’t scream,” she said, and her voice wavered as her eyes unfocused, remembering. “So I ran for the other car to try to trip the alarm. The man said he’d kill Edward, and I turned and saw him pointing a gun at me.”
Edward had seen her bolt away, and he had concentrated on getting free. But when his attacker had yelled to the other man, “Shoot her,” Edward had hesitated in fear for her.
He’d seen her shocked, frightened, frozen in place. He’d seen the man pointing the gun at her.
And then a look came over her face, a look he couldn’t explain. She had closed her eyes once, and when she opened them, it was as if she didn’t see the gun, she didn’t see the man. She saw something else that made her face relax, that instilled strength in her eyes.
And the man hadn’t fired.
“The man hesitated,” she told the sergeant. “I don’t know why.” She finished giving her statement, and then the policeman turned to Edward.
“The man attacked me from behind,” he said. “I saw the other one pull Rachel away from me.”
“You said he had a gun?”
“I saw it right away in his hand, so I grabbed at it. We were wrestling for a while—after a few minutes, I was losing my grip because my hands were sweating and I couldn’t keep hold of his wrists.”
Up until that point when he felt his fingers slide over the man’s skin, he had felt mostly anger and determination. But when he realized he might not be able to take the gun from him or even hold on to the man’s arms, panic had been like a rivulet of ice water running down his back. He had feared for Rachel, for himself.