by RJ Blain
“However long it takes, though I can’t imagine it taking more than a week or two to get the all clear. There’s no point in arguing. You’ll be working as the anchor unless your team needs you on the ground, so you won’t be completely stuck in an office. You’ll still deploy. You’ll just be working out of the local police stations. Your new supervisor will have more details. I don’t know the specifics.”
I read between the lines; I was supposed to be grateful I wasn’t being yanked off active duty altogether. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What about me?” Jake leaned between the seats.
Our former boss lifted her elbow, pressed it to Jake’s forehead, and shoved him back. “You’re done. I should toss your tall ass out of my car and make you walk home. Be thankful we’re dropping you off at your house.”
I widened my eyes and sucked in a breath. “My car!”
“It was towed to one of our lots. Nothing seemed to be disturbed. You’ll be driven to New York in one of our fleet vehicles. Your car’ll be freighted to you next week.”
“Oh.”
“Anything else?”
“Was it really twelve days? It didn’t seem that long.”
“Considering your blood tests were positive for trace amounts of sedatives, we theorize your kidnappers had drugged you to skew your sense of time.”
“Those motherfuckers,” I grumbled. “I didn’t even realize. Jake? Did you know about this?”
How had they managed to drug me without me even suspecting I had been drugged?
“No, I didn’t know. I would have told you if I had. You hadn’t counted the number of times the guards shifted. I thought it had been obvious they were trying to confuse your sense of time, so I assumed you were aware you had been hostage for a long time.” Jake slumped in his seat and tilted his head back. “Sorry. It was a stupid oversight. I should have gone over the time tables more thoroughly.”
“There’s a reason we don’t normally allow people close to the vic to be involved in the investigation. Vision is clouded and emotions run high.”
I flinched at the reminder I had been a victim, turning my head to stare out the tinted window. “Am I that unpredictable?”
“There’s a time and a place for thinking outside of the box,” my boss replied, blunt as always. “It worked out this time.”
I thought about everything I had done from the instant Phil’s gun had touched my temple. Every step I had taken had had one goal: to get Annabelle out of the situation alive. The only unconventional move I had made was attacking Phil and incapacitating him so I could escape with Annabelle.
Instead of answering, I watched cars as the driver headed towards Jake’s house, which was located on the outskirts of Baltimore. Thirty minutes after leaving the airport, we arrived. Melancholy smothered me.
I had been happy enough to ditch my other partners, but saying goodbye to Jake the first time around had been bad enough. When the driver pulled into his driveway, I held my fisted hand out, staring at his house with its immaculate lawn and flower beds with perfect blossoms.
“Watch your back,” he said, bumping my fist with his.
Without another word, Jake walked out of my life for the second time.
Twelve hours after arriving in Baltimore, I reached New York. Four hours had been lost answering questions. An hour into the interrogation, I had come to the conclusion no one was going to learn anything new from me, but I cooperated in the hopes we had missed something in Colorado.
We hadn’t.
My new apartment, which was a ten minute walk from the FBI’s NYC headquarters, was a disaster area of boxes. The driver helped me unload the rest of my things from the SUV and left me trying to turn chaos to order. Despite purging half of what I owned during the moving process, I had doubts I’d make everything fit.
I called my parents to let them know I had arrived safe and sound, convincing them they really didn’t need to come to New York. Pops understood. Ma didn’t, but ultimately I had my way.
If anyone else clung and hovered, I’d hit someone. I was tempted to find a kickboxing studio in the city, but until the aftermath of Annabelle’s kidnapping blew over, I couldn’t afford to make myself a target.
I spent the weekend unpacking, venturing out of my apartment long enough to get groceries and go to a salon to dye my hair. I normally matched my natural color, but I decided to go with red and had her give me a shorter, spiked cut.
It startled me how two changes could make such a dramatic difference in my appearance.
My last effort to prevent anyone from recognizing me was to buy color-changing contacts. Amber eyes drew attention, but when I tinted them to brown, I barely recognized myself in the mirror.
If I had known of the hell waiting for me at CARD, I would have quit before I started. My kidnapping had built me a reputation among my team, and despite what Mitch had said in Colorado, it wasn’t a positive one.
My boss had been trying to warn me in Baltimore, but I hadn’t read between the lines. All three of my partners were older, and the fact a woman had qualified to join CARD didn’t sit well with them.
The worst was Andrew; his dark eyes narrowed whenever I entered the room. He was the oldest of the team, and he was cut from the same cloth as Simons. While Jerry was younger, he had at least ten years seniority on me, and he liked clucking his tongue whenever I deviated from their set game plan.
Silent and steady Brent had no use for me and liked to pretend I didn’t exist.
Our first case as a team came three days after I joined them. While I went out with them as promised, my job as the team’s anchor involved sitting in a police station in Albany monitoring the team’s comms.
Anchor was a nice way of saying out to pasture. I knew it, the team knew it, and so did the cops. The ones who didn’t toss pitying stares my direction ignored me.
Without being on the ground, without going over the evidence, without being truly involved, I couldn’t truly contribute. I relayed information from the FBI’s support staff to the other CARD members.
In the grand scheme, I was an over-glorified secretary with a gun.
There was one advantage to my post; I heard the results of the internal data first. Michelle Gianni, age five, had been kidnapped from her school in Pennsylvania. The Amber Alert had made a positive hit in New York, providing us with a trail to Albany.
The vehicle involved in the kidnapping had been dumped on the outskirts of the city. Five hours after our arrival in Albany, while the CARD team was on the scene with the vehicle, I did my own investigating, digging through the information we had on our vic.
I found the kidnapper in her school transcripts, pulled his record, and relayed the information to the team lead. Andrew thanked me but pursued his leads first.
If I had been more aggressive, if I had been on the ground, if I had done a lot of things differently, Michelle Gianni might have survived.
Ten minutes had spelled the difference between life and death, and we had been on the wrong side of the line.
I said nothing, but I knew the truth. Our supervisor, gray-haired and colder than ice Ian Malone, knew the truth, but he accepted our failure without a word.
The only one to accept any blame for Michelle’s death was me, and I carried the burden in silence. My doubts engulfed me, and Jake’s last words haunted me.
I watched my own back because there was no one to watch it for me. I had never missed anyone so much in my life. The gym became my sanctuary.
In the dead of night when no one watched, I retreated to the still waters of the pool. Hundreds of hours of coaching hadn’t helped me swim, but I doggy paddled my way around the shallow end until my world narrowed to my sore, aching muscles and bone-deep exhaustion.
It took me less than two weeks to recognize the truth. While CARD teams were required to have a minimum of four members, I wasn’t needed.
I’d been put out to pasture, belonging in name only. We were always on call, and my secure phone se
rved as my shackles. My entire job could be done between my phone and laptop. Showing up at the office was an unnecessary formality unless I had paperwork to fill out.
Paperwork was the one thing I could count on.
Andrew dumped everything on my desk to maintain the illusion I was worth my paycheck. Once upon a time, I would have learned the names and faces of every agent in the building. Instead, I kept to myself and waited for the ax to fall.
Two months after reaching my dream of joining CARD and learning the truth was a bitter pill to swallow, Andrew tapped on the door of my office, carrying a file in his hand. I stared at him in the numb daze that always settled over my shoulders when the man came near me.
“We’ve been called in. Here’s the brief.” Andrew slapped the file onto my desk. “We leave in ten. Get the preliminary preps done.”
I picked up the file, opened it, and stared into the smiling face of a young boy. According to the file, he was ten and had disappeared during the night. In silence, I read through the papers. Jacob Henry had been last seen at his home when his parents had put him to bed. The next morning, no one could find him.
There was nothing written on the circumstances of the disappearance. “Runaway?”
Andrew shrugged, turned, and left.
I picked up my landline, dialed the local police department in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and began making arrangements to turn their station into our base of operations. When Andrew came back ten minutes later, I was still on the phone hammering out travel arrangements. Without looking up at the team lead, I picked up the forms they needed to transport their firearms on the short flight and held them out.
“Hotel arrangements?”
I waited for Andrew to take the first set of forms before grabbing the confirmations out of my printer and offering them along with the reservation for an unmarked car, which would be waiting in Johnstown at the airport with a driver provided by the police.
“Good.” Flipping through the papers, Andrew halted in my doorway. “You’ve made a mistake.”
“There’s no mistake,” I assured him, unholstering my gun and locking it in the drawer of my desk. It was tempting to lock my badge in there, too, but I resisted the urge, instead stuffing it in my purse.
“You don’t have your air carry form in here.”
“I’m not bringing my firearm.” The Glock would sit and gather dust along with the rest of my skills. There was no point in bringing a weapon I wouldn’t use.
There was no point when I was going to take them to the airport and leave them there to do their jobs. I didn’t need to be in Johnstown to anchor. I could be anywhere. I could be nowhere.
No one would notice.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I have my qualification sheet should I require a firearm. I don’t need a gun to anchor.”
“Is there something you’d like to say to me, Agent Johnson?”
I grabbed my keys off my desk, turned off the lights, and left my office. If there wasn’t a missing ten year old in Pennsylvania needing the team, I would have told the man where he could shove my gun and badge. “No, sir.”
“You have a good eye for form detail. You don’t miss anything on that front, do you?”
I stared at him with dead eyes, wondering what had driven the man to offer something that sounded suspiciously like a compliment. “Sir?”
“You should probably get your information fixed in the system. Your eyes are brown. Was requesting an exotic color on your identification card necessary?”
I reached up, lightly fingered the contact, and removed it. I repeated the process with the second contact, holding them on the tips of my index and middle fingers.
“I actually do have something to say to you, sir. I quit.” While he gaped at me, I dropped the contacts to the floor, dug my badge out of my purse, and let it fall, too.
I left without looking back. They didn’t need another desk monkey in the FBI wasting time and resources. Someone—anyone—could serve as their anchor. No one needed me.
Chapter Twelve
I left my car parked in the FBI building’s underground garage. Once word of my abandonment of duty spread, I was sure someone would impound it. I added it to my list of things I no longer cared a single fuck about.
Why had I spent so much effort and heartache on CARD? Why had I thought I’d make a difference? There was zero indication I needed to remain an anchor; I had long since dropped off the radar in the public eye, serving my duty to boost the FBI’s reputation.
I already had the death of one child on my hands because I hadn’t been good enough to be anything other than a complacent desk jockey. I could predict exactly what Andrew would do. He would head to Johnstown, he’d work his case, and Jacob Henry would either live or die. Unlike Michelle, Jacob would probably show up within the next twenty-four hours, safe and sound.
Most disappearances worked out that way. CARD’s involvement didn’t necessarily mean anything.
I made it two blocks before someone caught up with me. I heard the slap of his shiny oxfords on the concrete approaching me from behind.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Andrew bellowed.
“Quitting. I thought it was obvious.” I kept walking.
When he grabbed my arm and yanked me around, I dropped my bag, jerked free and adjusted my stance, pulling my fist back to rearrange his face. Brent approached, followed by Jerry and our supervisor. Before I could strike, Brent lifted his hand and caught my wrist.
“We need you to deploy,” he said, his tone impassive. “Let’s not turn this into a pissing contest on who can accumulate the highest number of assault charges.”
Brent had a good point, although I’d rather choke than admit it. “Your supervisor is more than qualified to fill in as an anchoring desk jockey. You have your perfect team then, Andrew. One without a woman contaminating it.”
Had I always spoken in such a dead monotone? The four men flinched, and Brent released my hand. I stooped, picked up my bag, and shouldered the strap.
I made it two steps before a hand fell on my shoulder. I dropped my things and tensed in preparation to fight.
“Wait,” Brent ordered.
“You’re going to miss your flight.”
“We need you to deploy.”
“Your supervisor is more than qualified to fill in as an anchoring desk jockey,” I repeated. “You could probably pick anyone off the street with a high school diploma and basic literacy skills to handle the level of make-work you’ve tossed on my desk. I’m sure an entry-level secretary would be willing to help you out.”
“CARD deploys in teams of four minimum,” Brent reminded me.
I turned and pointed at the team supervisor. “Use him.”
Ian Malone arched his gray brow. “Interesting solution, Agent Johnson.”
“You are qualified, aren’t you? Or are you just going to hide behind your showcase trio of male agents? The only thing this so-called pathetic excuse of a partnership is doing is getting kids killed. I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up to save kids, not get them killed when I can’t browbeat you old, set-in-your-ways desk ornaments into following viable leads, which resulted in the unnecessary death of a little girl. Take your precious male egos and go fuck yourselves.”
Too infuriated to be bothered with anything anymore, I walked away, leaving my bag at their feet.
Leaving my wallet and keys behind was only the start of my mistakes. Too angry to pay attention to where I was going was my second. Spending so much time trying to drown myself in the pool without supervision had resulted in more endurance than was healthy when infuriated to the point of tears.
By the time I had calmed enough for rational thought to sink in, I was so thoroughly lost I had no idea where I was or how long I had been walking. Allowing my embarrassment to keep me from asking was my third mistake.
After that, I stopped counting my acts of stupidity. I’m sure I had broken at least a few law
s by quitting without warning. My career was over, and without it, I had nothing. For as long as I could remember, I had been driven by one purpose.
When I stripped away the layers of my life that had revolved around reaching my goal, I was left with no real options. Abandoning my duties in the FBI would be a black mark against me, ensuring no sane company would want me.
I had washed out, and it had only taken two months.
There was a chill in the late August wind, carrying the promise of fall. It wouldn’t be long until most schools were in session. There was always a surge in kidnappings and runaways near the start of the school season. In training, we had been warned about the phenomenon.
It should have been my time to shine, not crumble to pieces.
I had done my job. I had laid low to let the fallout blow by. I had given up kickboxing to keep under the radar and prevent anyone from discovering my whereabouts. Like everything else I had done in my life, I had done it to secure my position in CARD.
It had taken me less than fifteen minutes to throw it all away.
There were so many things I could have done. I could have requested a transfer to a different team. I could have requested to return to the violent crimes division I had left. I could have requested a transfer to just about any other division within the FBI.
Before I had burned bridges, I could have even applied to join an entirely different branch of law enforcement or a different agency.
Instead, I had trapped myself in the box of limited thinking. Instead of considering my options, all I had done was focus on what I had wanted and what I hadn’t got.
Quitting was truly the first of my mistakes. I should have gone to Johnstown, endured, and tried to pretend everything was okay. I should have done my job—the job I had worked so hard to get.
But no, I had allowed my emotions to break out of their cage. I had allowed my calm, cool exterior to crack. There was no one to blame except myself.
I had expected so much more. I had expected to make a difference.
I hadn’t expected to become an ornament and unnecessary addition to a team that didn’t want me. In Colorado, I had been given hope I was actually wanted in New York. Why had Mitch planted the seed of hope?