And Had did approve. It wasn’t an exaggeration. From the time Reggie had come on the team, he’d seen the way she and Joshua had interacted. As much as he loved them both it had always seemed like such a bad idea.
Joshua acted like a lovelorn teenager around her, or else he was busy shoving her away like everyone else who tried to get close. For her part, Reggie seemed to lose everything strong and interesting about her when she was pining after the alcoholic former agent.
But Coop and Reggie together? That seemed much more feasible. They balanced each other in a way that she and Joshua never would.
The BAU agent seemed about to open her mouth when a voice hailed them from the direction of the barracks. Agent Klingler.
Had watched as the man moved with purpose toward them. Agent Shively had been a part of his team. A part of Had wanted to distrust the man for that reason alone, but there was another sensation that was much more powerful.
Klingler might have information that would lead them to Reggie.
And the accomplice.
* * *
Sariah assessed Agent Klingler as he approached, looking for any kind of deception or defensiveness in the man. There didn’t seem to be any. Either he was not involved in the murders or he was the best actor she’d ever seen.
“I’m glad you guys are safe,” he said as he came close, the relief on his face clear. “And I’m so sorry about....”
Sariah held up a hand. “It was Agent Shively that did this. Not you.”
Glancing to the side, Sariah caught sight of Joshua’s face. It was clear that he didn’t feel the same way. But then again, he was looking for someone to blame right now. Sariah wasn’t sure that anyone was safe around him.
For the first time, Sariah found herself missing the calming influence that his sober companion had on him. That was unexpected. She turned back to Klingler as he shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.
“I know, but I still feel responsible,” he muttered. “It just seems so impossible.”
“Is he someone you’ve known for a long time?” Sariah asked.
If he were, there was a possibility they might be able to get some additional information about the man’s background. Something that might uncover a new line of inquiry.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “He was moved onto my team while we were out in Columbia. But he came highly recommended. I can’t believe he would go off the deep end like this.”
“Seems like something a good leader would pick up on,” Joshua sniped.
That wasn’t completely fair, seeing as how his own psychopathic daughter had worked with them without him being any the wiser. But now didn’t seem like the right time to bring that up, so Sariah turned to Klingler, trying to smooth things over.
“We’re working with a very persuasive killer in Humpty Dumpty,” she suggested. “It’s possible he was targeted and recruited. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
She shot a look at Joshua, hoping he would back off. The former agent bent down to scratch Bella’s head but didn’t say anything further. It would have to do for now.
“That just seems so far-fetched,” Klingler muttered, clearly still thrown by the information. “Everyone he’s worked with from before seems to love the guy. That’s the report I got from all over. It’s the only reason I agreed to take him on the team.”
Something about what he had just said struck Sariah. “Did you say that everyone loved him?”
Her statement seemed to give the man pause. “Well, I mean, he was a little irritable, but I figured it was just him getting transferred. Or, you know, the heat.”
“A little irritable? That’s an understatement.” Every experience she’d had with Klingler’s second-in-command had been unpleasant. An idea flashed through her mind. “Wait a minute. Can you access his file from here?”
“As soon as we can get to a computer.”
“How quickly can we do that?” Sariah pressed.
If she was right about what she was thinking, it could change everything about the case they were working on. And they needed to know that sooner rather than later.
“Ah…” the CID agent uttered, clearly nonplussed. “About 30 seconds, I would guess, give or take.”
“Let’s do it.”
The charged silence and the slight frown on Klingler’s face told Sariah all she needed to know about what he thought of that imperative. But explaining would take longer than him figuring it out himself, if they were as close to a computer as he’d said.
And, of course, if Sariah was correct.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “Let’s go.”
They walked over to what Sariah guessed was the officer’s quarters. The space was newer and nicer that the barracks for the enlisted men, and as they stepped inside, there was a wash of air-conditioned coolness that enveloped them.
Agent Klingler made his way over to the nearest desk, sat down and began typing. Sariah, not wanting to push any more than she already had, stayed on the opposite side with Joshua, Had and Bella forming a barricade, as if to shield their conversation from others around them.
There was a beep from the computer, and Klingler frowned at whatever he saw there on the screen. “Well, that’s weird.”
“It’s not his picture?” she asked.
“How did you…?” he began, then stopped. “All right. You’ve got a theory, and I think I’m beginning to see what it is.”
“We’ve been infiltrated,” Sariah confirmed. “The killer was working right beside us the whole time.”
Even though what she had said seemed like it was just acknowledging what Klingler had already figured out, she watched him take a sharp breath. There was a pause, and then he let it back out again.
“Okay,” he said, running a hand through his short hair. “There’s some information that I haven’t had a second to share with you yet.”
“You had information that you didn’t share with us?” Joshua snarled.
Without even looking at him, Sariah shot out a hand to restrain the former agent. At the same moment, Had grabbed Joshua’s arm from the other side. Even with that, there was a moment where it seemed that the man was going to leap free and gouge Klingler’s eyes out.
The CID agent saw the interaction, but did nothing other than raise an eyebrow. “Yes, Mr. Wright,” he responded in an even tone. “I hadn’t shared it with you because I just received it.”
The pressure Joshua was exerting on Sariah’s arm diminished, but she kept it there, just in case. You never knew when Joshua could go postal on someone, especially when someone’s life was on the line. Someone he cared about, at least.
“What’s the information?” Had asked, his tone polite. Always the peacemaker.
“Well, there are two things,” Klingler said. “First, the tests came back from the Jackson crime scene. There were two donors. Both male, one matching Private Starling.”
“Wait,” Sariah stopped him. “I thought that information had come in quite a bit earlier. And that there wasn’t another donor.” Where had that information come from? Sariah racked her brain.
“Not sure where you would have got that. The lab was really backed up.”
“Have they mapped out the other donor?” Sariah asked.
Klingler nodded, then continued. “So the second part. The arm that was found,” the CID agent explained. “There was DNA evidence under the fingernails.”
“Was it a match for anyone in the database?” Sariah asked, her attention engaged. This could be the break they needed.
“Not yet,” he said. “We’re still waiting on the test to come back with the full work-up. But there was something else.”
“What was it?’ Joshua demanded, his jaw thrust out.
“The DNA belonged to a woman.”
* * *
If Reggie had thought that the heat from before had been bad, it was nothing compared to what she was experiencing now. Sweat streamed from every pore, bathing her body in sweat. S
he felt a rivulet of her body’s precious fluid drip down the side of her nose, tickling the skin there, making her want to scratch.
That wasn’t going to happen this time.
She’d come to consciousness in a dark space as Shively had been securing her hands behind her once more. Pleading, begging, nothing had worked. The sounds of her own pleas had bounced back to her from the close walls of whatever space to which the corrupt CID agent had taken her. Silence had reigned between them until right before he left the room.
“This will be the last we’ll see of each other, Officer Black,” he had bitten off, her name stark and official in his mouth. “It could have been so much more.”
She had started to protest, but he’d cut her off, his face filled with the brutality of a predator. He had gotten close to her once more.
“Just wait. She’ll tear you to pieces, love.”
And then it had been nothing but darkness. Darkness and heat.
He’d left a half-bottle of water right next to her, but it did nothing more than taunt her. Shively had secured her to a chair that seemed to be bolted into the cement floor. There was no way she could tip herself over to try to wriggle free. No way to reach the tantalizing wetness contained in that bottle that was inches away from her ankle.
So instead she sat in the burning black and obsessed over every moment back in the van. If she’d just moved her head a moment earlier, avoided that last punch to the jaw. Stayed conscious long enough to grab the wheel. They might have both died, but at least the world would be rid of that monster.
She drifted in and out of awareness, the moments of sleep punctuated with violent images of a man dragging his stubble across her check, down the slope of her neck, into the curve of her clavicle. All of this while digging his fingers into her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes. Waking from those images, she gasped for breath, shuddering with a chill that the heat couldn’t dispel.
When the unvarying dark cracked and a blinding ray of light struck her face, Reggie thought it another hallucination at first. But then a hand rested on her shoulder, and she felt the fingers digging into the tendons there, pain sparking along her arm.
“Hello, Reggie. I don’t have much time, so we’re going to have to make this quick for the moment.”
It was a feminine voice, the timbre altered by the echoes of the concrete walls around them. The distortions kept her from identifying the speaker, but there was something that tickled the back of her perceptions, much in the way speaking to Shively had before she’d realized who he was.
This was someone Reggie knew.
“Shall we get started?” asked the voice in a sweet tone.
And then the pain began.
* * *
The words reverberated through Joshua’s head.
The DNA belonged to a woman.
So why, in his head, did that keep turning into an old nursery rhyme he had sung for his daughter. Why did that tune keep haunting him.
“Do we have anything more than that?” Had was asking.
“Not yet, but we should be getting results back soon,” Klingler responded. “But just that information narrows our search by a significant margin.”
Joshua recognized the truth of that statement. A woman’s presence on a base would be noted far more readily than that of a man’s. And in order to capture the recruit from Fort Sill, their suspect would have had to enter the base at some point.
Was it possible that she had entered in with as much of a disguise as Agent Shively had? That her presence hadn’t been remarkable because of a uniform or by being a part of a team.
Agent Cooper seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Are there any other members of your team that haven’t served with you for long?”
Klingler wasn’t stupid. Without any more hinting than that, he picked up on Coop’s line of questioning.
“Since you told me about Shively, I’ve been thinking about that,” he confessed. “Every other member of my team is someone that I’ve hand-picked and worked with for at least two years. I’d vouch for them all.” He sighed. “Besides, there are only a couple of women in the group. Anti-discrimination can only go so far. It can’t create female agents out of thin air.”
Agent Cooper nodded, and Joshua thought about what her experiences must have been along those lines. He’d seen enough of it just in the time that he’d known her. Then he remembered the sight and sound of her gun firing, and his mouth hardened back into a thin line.
He knew that Shively’s shooting had been justified. Hell, he knew his daughter’s had been as well. But all he could see when Coop’s gun went off was a little girl with blonde tresses and a radiant smile, calling him Daddy.
And Jill came tumbling after…
Shaking his head to rid himself of the image, Joshua entered the conversation once more. “You’re saying that there is no one on your team that could even start to be a suspect?”
“I’m not saying that at all, Mr. Wright,” he responded, his nostrils flaring. “Your team can have access to personnel files and I’ll talk to them about coming in for interviews if you would like.”
Joshua felt a hand on his chest. Had. The young cop was urging him to calm down. There was another pressure point farther down. Bella was at his feet, pressing against his shins. Her brown eyes started up at him, her face filled with the worry that she always seemed to express when he got upset.
Swallowing bile, Joshua managed a curt nod at the CID agent. That was the best he could do under the circumstances. But he wasn’t prepared for what the man said next.
“What about your team?” Klingler asked.
Every head swiveled toward the agent, but it was Coop who asked what they were all thinking. Her tone made it clear that she was not happy.
“What did you just say?”
Agent Klingler swallowed, staring out at the three hostile faces that were pointed in his direction. But he didn’t back down.
“What I mean is that it’s just as likely that your team has been infiltrated as mine has been.”
Agent Cooper stared him right in the eye. “Look around you, Agent Klingler. Who’s the only female here?”
He waved off her comment. “Please. I’m not talking about you. There are several other options on your team. All I’m asking is that you look at them as seriously as I’ll look at mine.”
Joshua pondered what he was saying. Reggie was the only other female on their team, at least in an official capacity.
Bailey had come over from Klingler’s team, and he seemed to be willing to vouch for them all. That on its own didn’t mean that Joshua was willing to give her a free pass, but there was also the fact that she’d been with Shively and the team when they’d been fired upon. It couldn’t be her.
Jack and Jill went up the hill…
He shook his head, trying to clear the music from his mind. It was distracting him, invading the mental space that he needed to keep clean in order to do his job.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after…
Joshua froze.
The song had been plaguing him for a reason. There was an answer contained within its lyrics.
The male killer. The female accomplice.
“They’re brother and sister.”
Everyone stared at him like he had just said the moon was made of cheese. And considering the fact that the idea had come from a nursery rhyme, they might not be too far off.
Agent Klingler’s cell rang, and he answered. There was a brief exchange, during which the agent’s face went pale.
“That was the lab. The results came back.” He took a deep breath. “The blood samples show that Shively and our unknown woman share alleles in common.”
“They’re related?” Had blurted out.
Klingler nodded. “Looks like it may be a close relation.”
“Like brother and sister?” Joshua muttered under his breath.
“Jack and Jill killers,” Sariah said, nodding her head. He
r unwitting echo of the words coursing through Joshua’s mind gave him a chill.
But there was a puzzle to solve right now. No time to waste on coincidences.
“So who is it? Which one?” Joshua pressed.
There were only two options left on their team. Two women with whom they’d had close contact since the beginning of the case. He turned to face Agent Cooper. Her face was creased in the lines that meant she was thinking hard. They both spoke at once.
“Phoenix,” he said.
“Leslie,” came Coop’s idea.
They paused for a moment. Joshua thought through the implications of Agent Cooper’s accusation. How would that even work? She had been assigned to the team. Sent out by Agent Tanner to babysit him.
But that was how it must have felt to Klingler to find out that Shively was the killer. Still, the idea wouldn’t stick. He kept wanting to reject it out of hand.
“It would make sense,” Coop was saying. “We’d never suspect her. And she’s turned out to be a lot tougher than a sober companion would need to be.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Joshua countered. “You’re saying that because she’s tough she’s a suspect.”
“No. I’m saying that because we don’t know her she’s a suspect. She could have taken out the real Leslie at any point along her route here.”
Joshua shook his head, surprised on one hand that he was defending the sober companion that he kind of wanted to punch in the face. But on the other, how could anyone that met the woman think she was capable of what Coop was suggesting?
“Just look at the evidence,” he shot back. “Phoenix… is that even her real name? She shows up out of nowhere, she’s hanging around our team asking questions, she’s ex-military….”
“She saved us from a sniper attack,” Had stepped in to say.
Joshua refrained from exploding. “To gain our trust.”
Agent Cooper stepped between the two men, cutting off Joshua’s view of the younger cop. It was maybe a good thing. The last time he’d been this upset with Had, he’d socked him in the jaw. Why was he so angry? There was no reason for him to feel this protective of Leslie. Except for the fact that she was clearly innocent.
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