Hard Evidence

by Pamela Clare

  "Who's the DB?"

  "I was hoping you could make him. Looks like she lit him up with her little twenty-two—a couple slugs to the chest. The son of a bitch didn't make it three steps inside the house before she popped him."

  A vicious sense of satisfaction surged through Julian.

  Good for you, Tess.

  But the feeling was quickly washed away by his certainty that Tessa had been terrified when she'd pulled that trigger. She'd been fighting for her life and had killed a man—and he hadn't been here.

  "The question is, how'd he get in?" Irving walked to the back door, checked the lock, then turned to face Julian. "Either she let them in, or they had a key."

  "She wouldn't have unlocked the door—not unless it was someone she felt certain she could trust." Julian forced his mind to think through it. "The guy in the bag is proof that she didn't trust them. She doesn't usually carry the pistol. She would have had to run and get it. She must have known something was wrong before they got in."

  That probably meant they'd had a key.

  Two people knew where he lived, but only one of them had a key to the house.

  Dyson.

  The realization left him feeling hollow, sick, utterly betrayed. He had known it had to be someone close to Dyson, but he'd hoped to God it wasn't Dyson himself.

  That's when Julian saw it—a small silver disk sitting in the middle of the table. It looked like the disk from a high-end digital camera. Dread knotted in his gut, the images from the e-mail Burien had sent Tessa flashing through his mind.

  "That doesn't belong to you?" Irving asked.

  Julian shook his head, held out his hand for a pair of nitrile gloves.

  Irving slapped the gloves into his palm. "You don't have to look at it."

  "Yeah, I do." Julian pulled on the gloves, picked up the disk by its edges, and carried it back to his office, surprised to see it that the door was still closed and intact. He unlocked it, saw that his files were still there, his computer untouched. Clearly, they'd come for Tessa and weren't concerned about his evidence. Or perhaps the shots Tessa had fired had made them jumpy, forced them to hurry.

  Almost unable to breathe, he booted up his computer, placed the disk in a plastic adapter case, and loaded it, watching as his multimedia program launched, the seconds ticking by like hours.

  A blurry image opened on his screen. Tessa her head down, golden curls hiding her face, her hair swaying back and forth as if she were walking or being carried. And then a man's voice.

  "A bit of Mexican tar, and there's no fight left in her."

  Heroin.

  They'd drugged her.

  Julian felt his teeth grind.

  The camera pulled back enough to show Tessa being led toward the front door, a man's arms beneath hers, holding her up. She looked dangerously close to a fatal overdose, her body almost limp, her head nodding as if she were barely conscious.

  But she was alive. At least she was alive.

  "No!" She gave a weak cry, made a helpless effort to twist away.

  Julian's gut burned with helpless rage.

  Then the man's hand grabbed Tessa's hair and jerked her head back.

  "Say hi to the camera! Say hi to Darcangelo!"

  "Julian?" She searched for him as if she expected to find him standing there, hope slowly fading from her eyes, tears spilling onto her cheeks. Then she seemed to focus on the camera, her words slurred. "The camera crew… let the lion kill… the cheetah cubs. That's okay. They did… their job."

  Pain ripped through Julian's chest as he realized what she was trying to say.

  Despite the drug, despite her fear, she was trying to send him a message. She was trying to tell him to stick to his assignment—even if it meant letting Burien brutalize and kill her.

  Julian swallowed the rock in his throat, forced himself to keep watching.

  "Whatever, sweetheart." The man who held her up laughed, clearly mistaking her words for drug-induced babble. 'Take a good look, Darcangelo, because we're going to make a star out of her. Next time you see her, she'll be on DVD!"

  Not a fucking chance, asshole!

  Beneath me man's words, Tessa's voice had taken on the tone of a child singing a nursery rhyme, except that the words to mis rhyme made no sense.

  Then the clip ended.

  Julian clicked PLAY, watched it again and again until every second of it was burned into his brain—the hopelessness in Tessa's tear-filled eyes when she realized he wasn't there, the raw courage beneath her slurred message, the cruelty in the voice of the man whose fist was bunched in her hair, her nonsensical little rhyme as she drifted away in a heroin haze.

  It was clear that Burien intended to brutalize her on camera and send Julian the recordings. That fit Burien's sadistic M.O., his warped sense of fun. On the one hand it meant he didn't intend to kill her right away. On the other…

  There were so many ways to destroy a woman.

  Three years ago Julian had let his emotions interfere with the job, and Burien had escaped. God only knew how many women Burien had hurt since then, how many lives he had ruined. Every one of them was Julian's responsibility.

  And now the bastard had the woman he loved.

  The words came to his mind so naturally that it was a moment before he realized what he'd just admitted to himself.

  He was in love with Tessa.

  God, yes, he loved her. He'd loved her since the night she'd taken his rage inside her and answered it with tenderness. He'd loved her since she'd peeled off his Kevlar and kissed his bruised muscles, her concern for him spilling out in tears. Hell, he'd loved her since she'd melted against him in that hospital linen closet.

  Not that it did her one damned bit of good. He had tried to protect her from Burien, but he had failed. With leaks in the police department and a leak in the FBI, would he have been able to keep her safe anywhere?

  Yes. He could have taken off with her, gone underground, hidden her someplace even Dyson couldn't find her. He could have stuck to her twenty-four-seven. He could have been here.

  Instead, he'd stayed with his assignment. He'd done what a federal agent was supposed to do. He'd done his job.

  And it was a job he was going to finish—tonight.

  But it wasn't Tessa who was going to die. It was Burien.

  Julian was about to hit QUIT, his gaze lingering on Tessa as she drifted off, singing the words of her nonsensical rhyme—and it hit him.

  The words weren't nonsense. They were Spanish.

  Darcangelo, you idiot!

  He turned up the volume, scrolled back, and listened.

  "How much did you give her?"

  "No more than two hundred migs, I swear. Must've been really pure shit."

  "Her pulse is really slow, Alexi. If you want to keep her alive, you'd better hit her with naloxone or have someone watch over her and make sure she doesn't stop breathing."

  Tessa heard voices—two men and a woman. She knew they were talking about her, knew she needed to wake up, knew something was wrong. A vague sense of urgency prodded her, strands of memory knitting together—only to unravel.

  And then she was drifting again.

  Julian drew the straps of his new Kevlar vest tight, slipped into his double harness, then secured a pair of loaded .357 semiautos into the holsters. He already had two spare magazines tucked into his jacket and a seven-inch Ka-Bar blade in an ankle rig.

  If all of this wasn't enough, he'd just kick the shit out of them.

  He pulled on his leather jacket, stuffed a pair of black gloves in one pocket and a black ski mask in the other, and took the stairs two at a time. The house was now dark and empty, Irving and crime-scene cleanup having left about twenty minutes ago.

  Irving had pulled him off the case, officially listing him as off duty. It didn't make a damned bit of difference to Julian. Sanctioned or on his own, he was going after Burien.

  He'd just gotten behind the wheel of his pickup when his cell phone rang. He glanced at
the number. It was Margaux.

  "Dyson told me what happened," she said. "Don't get me wrong—I didn't like her. She seemed like a common bimbo to me—kind of helpless and stupid. Not your type at all. Still, I wouldn't wish Burien on my worst enemy."

  "What do you want?" He opened the garage door, backed down the driveway and into the street. "Somehow I don't believe you're just calling to express your heartfelt concern."

  "Give me a little credit here. You and I were lovers once, remember?"

  "Not if I can help it."

  She seemed to ignore the insult. "It was obvious when I saw you together yesterday how much you care about her. Dyson said you had some new evidence, and I thought maybe you could use my help."

  "Didn't you say it would be a cold day in hell before you'd work with me directly on anything again?" He slipped into traffic, headed toward Speer and the crime lab.

  "Well, then I guess the devil is wearing long Johns. What you got?"

  "A disk." He told her about the recording, told her how he thought Tessa was trying to tell him something at the end. "At first I thought it was just the drug, but then I realized she was speaking Spanish. I need to use the equipment at the lab to enhance her voice and get rid of the bastard who's talking over her."

  For a moment Margaux said nothing. "Dyson didn't mention anything about a disk."

  "I didn't tell him. I think he's the leak, Margaux."

  "God, I just can't believe that! You're fucking kidding me. Dyson?"

  "The evidence is pointing in one direction. If I can decipher what Tessa is trying to tell me on this recording, I might be able to prove it." He pulled up to a stop sign, where a group of college kids in Halloween costumes bounced and laughed their way across the intersection, probably on their way to a party.

  "I'm a lot better with computers than you are. How about we call a temporary truce and I meet you at the lab? I want to get to the bottom of this as badly as you do. I owe Burien a bullet, remember?"

  "Okay, a temporary truce. What's your ETA?"

  "Twenty minutes."

  "See you there."

  Chapter 26

  Julian got there first. He punched in his clearance code and took the stairs up to the darkened computer lab. Without turning on the lights, he booted up one of the computers and got it ready, launching the programs he'd need. He slipped on a pair of gloves and took the disk out of the paper envelope in which he'd sealed it, then popped it into the computer, turned up the volume, and let it play.

  He heard the elevator open with a metallic ding, heard the click of her boot heels against the tile floor, heard the lab door open.

  He glanced up, saw Margaux enter, red leather jacket screaming even in the darkness. He gave her a nod, shifted his gaze back to the computer screen. He'd taken a segment of sound and was working to break it down.

  "All right, let's see it." Margaux flipped on the lights, set her handbag aside, and looked over his shoulder at the screen, the odor of her perfume loud and repellent.

  Julian clicked the back arrow and let the recording play from the beginning.

  A bit of Mexican tar, and there's no fight left in her.

  No!

  Say hi to the camera! Say hi to Darcangelo!

  Julian?

  While Margaux watched the screen, Julian watched Mar-gaux. She seemed nervous. Her pulse beat hard against her throat, and there were little beads of perspiration along her hairline.

  The camera crew… let the lion kill… the cheetah cubs. That's okay. They did… their job.

  Whatever, sweetheart. Take a good look, Darcangelo, because we're going to make a star out of her. Next time you see her, she'll be on DVD!

  "Do you hear that?" Julian asked as Tessa began singing her little rhyme. "She's saying something in Spanish. If I could enhance it, get this stupid bastard's words out of the way, I'm sure she's trying to tell me something. She already gave me one hidden message—that bit about the lion and the cheetah cubs."

  Margaux shot him a disbelieving glance. "That sounded like heroin talking to me."

  "That's because you don't know her, and you're not really listening. She was telling me to do my job—to catch Burien even if it means letting her die."

  "She's a brave little cookie, isn't she? I bet she's not feeling quite so tough now."

  Julian ignored Margaux's attempt to provoke him—and the bolt of ice-cold fear that shot through his gut. "She's also incredibly smart. Do you know she pegged Burien on her own with no help from me? She looked for someone with ties to Zoryo and had a contact in Moscow fax her Burien's entire criminal record."

  "Really?" Margaux sounded genuinely surprised.

  The recording ended.

  Julian scrolled back to the moment Tessa started singing. "So how do I capture just her voice and enhance it? She's spelling something in Spanish, but I can't quite make it out."

  His pulse dropped. His breathing slowed. His senses grew sharp.

  "Well, first you need to save it as its own file." Margaux described the steps, but he was listening to something else.

  The tight creak of leather. A hand sliding into a pocket. The almost soundless tick of a finger coming to rest on a trigger.

  Julian dropped Margaux to the floor with two blows, the violence over in a heartbeat. She lay there, twisting in pain, her .45 skidding to a stop beneath the desk.

  Julian retrieved it, unloaded it, slipped it into his pocket. 'That was really stupid, Margaux. Security records would show you were the last person through the door. Your prints are on the light switch. They'd have pegged you right away."

  She groaned, rolled from her back to her side, her arms clutched around her middle.

  "Don't feel bad." He knelt down, forced her onto her belly, wrenched her arms behind her back, and cuffed her. "I'm sure you'd have taken me if I hadn't been expecting it."

  He patted her down, taking her extra magazine and the snub-nosed revolver she kept in a pocket holster. And then he found it—Tessa's .22. He held the little revolver in his hand— hard evidence of Margaux's betrayal.

  It took, everything Julian had in that moment not to rip her to pieces.

  Margaux looked at him over her shoulder. "You can't save her, Julian. It's too late."

  "For your sake, that better not be true." Julian stood, jerked Margaux to her feet, and slammed her into a nearby chair, staying out of range of her lethally long legs. Then he pulled out one of his SIGs, flicked off the safety, and aimed it at her. "Start talking."

  "How did you know?"

  "Just the way I said. Tessa told me." He reached over, careful to keep an eye on Margaux, and let the recording play again. When it came to the end, he sang along with Tessa. " 'Eme-a-ere-ge.' You thought she was just high on smack, but she was spelling in Spanish—M-A-R-G."

  "I should have gagged the little bitch." She shrugged, then gave what he supposed was meant to be a sexy smile. "Oh, well. You always were the more cunning linguist."

  "Don't make me puke."

  "We were good together—for a while."

  "We were nothing—just a couple self-centered head cases getting off together." The very idea of touching Margaux sickened him now. "What happened to you? How long have you been working for that son of a bitch?"

  "You really want to know?" She glanced at the SIG. "I guess you do."

  Julian listened as Margaux told him how Burien's thugs had caught her a full year before Operation Liberate, how they'd beaten her and taken her to him. Instead of killing her, as she'd thought Burien would do, he'd spent the next few weeks seducing her, fascinated by the idea of a female special agent.

  "I've always had a thing for powerful men," she said. "Alexi showed me what real power was. In those few days, he taught me things about pain—and pleasure—I had never imagined. Do you know how good it feels to break and to be forced to yield control?"

  Julian thought of Tessa and the way her tenderness had broken through him, torn him open, forced him to yield his most inner self
to her. But Tessa hadn't been trying to control him. She hadn't been trying to hurt him. She'd acted out of concern for him, out of love.

  Margaux was talking about dominance of the most violent kind.

  "Burien's a sadistic killer, a rapist, a sociopath! He enslaves women. How could you, as a woman, forget that?"

  "I didn't forget. I just quit caring."

  Julian stared at Margaux, almost unable to believe what he was hearing. He remembered that incident—at least the version of it she'd told him four years ago. They'd been lovers for about a month when she'd gone missing in L.A. Julian, who'd been in Mexico at the time, had been certain she'd been taken and would turn up dead in an alley. When Dyson had called him to say she'd escaped battered but alive, he'd been overwhelmed with relief,

  "So it was all a lie—how you'd fought your way free, escaped, gotten away with invaluable information about their operation?"

  If she'd gone to work with him that long ago…

  It hit Julian with the force of a bullet. Blood rushed to his head, his pulse pounding in his ears like thunder, rage surging from his gut in a red tide.

  He spoke through gritted teeth. "Burien didn't escape three years ago because I tried to save those girls and moved too early. He got away because he knew we were coming. He got away because you helped him!"

  "I made it look real. I took a bullet for him."

  Julian leaned down, shouted in her face, his hands aching to choke the life from her. "You let his goons kill two members of your own team, and you let me take the blame! Worse than that, you enabled a man who preys on women to keep killing!"

  He stepped away from her, barely able to control his loathing.

  It had to be Stockholm syndrome, trauma-induced psychosis, insanity. That was the only explanation for her actions. Burien must have beaten her, tortured her, twisted her mind.

  "Does Dyson know?"

  "That old dickhead?" She gave a snort. "He has no idea."

  "So for three years, you've been charged with finding Burien—"

  "And for three years, I've made sure he stays one step ahead of me." She looked up at Julian with not a trace of remorse on her face. "It's been amusing to watch you creep and crawl through the alleys, sniffing for him, always coming close but going away empty-handed."