Hide From Evil

by Jami Alden

  Ibarra shrugged and tapped a few keys. “The fastest way would be for me to get into HITS.”

  The Homicide Investigative Tracking System was a statewide database of information about homicides and other violent crimes.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with that?” Ibarra asked.

  With every step, she was getting herself into deeper and deeper trouble. God, she hoped it would be worth it. Her gaze snagged on Sean, who had moved in front of the open window to take in deep lungfuls of cold mountain air. A warrior to the core, they hadn’t been able to break him, but the scars ran deep. If she had any doubts before, she knew in that split second she’d do whatever it took to expose everyone responsible for hurting him, and to erase any doubts Sean had about her. “Do it,” she said, her gaze never leaving Sean.

  He didn’t look up, but the tension coiling through his broad shoulders eased a degree. It wasn’t much, but she’d take it. Krista didn’t know when or how it had happened, but at some point in the last two days it had become very, very important what Sean thought of her.

  “You might want to do a check in northern California and Oregon too,” Sean said. “That’s where Nate said he was headed the last time I talked to him.”

  “When was that?” Krista asked.

  “After I was arrested, he came to visit, asked if there was anything he could do to help,” Sean said, his upper lip curled in a snarl. “I thanked him. Dumb fuck that I am, I never realized he was coming to gloat.” He shook his head. “Anyway, who knows what the hell else he was up to before he came back up here.”

  Another thought occurred to Krista. “Is it possible to flag any suicides that were rushed through?”

  “No problem,” Ibarra said. “And in the meantime I’m going to keep following the money thread and see what we come up with.”

  Even with the window wide open and chilly air flowing into his lungs, Sean couldn’t shake the tight, confined feeling. Ibarra’s office was huge, and the door was partially ajar, but Sean couldn’t convince his brain that the door wasn’t about to slam shut, lock itself, and trap them all inside.

  He forced himself not to look at Krista, who had positioned herself back behind Ibarra’s desk. Over the sound of his heart pounding in his head, he could barely make out their quiet conversation. He snuck a glance, snapped it back to the window, and told himself he didn’t care that she was standing so close to Ibarra, that every few seconds or so Ibarra’s attention wandered from his computer screen to the firm curves of Krista’s thighs and ass in those form-fitting jeans.

  And now he knew exactly how soft the skin was that was hidden underneath, knew exactly how she tasted between those long, sleek legs…

  And that was exactly why he had to stay over here in his corner and push her back into hers. He’d hurt her with his accusations. She was used to taking hits in the courtroom, but she hadn’t been able to mask the pain when he’d lashed out and questioned her integrity.

  A month, hell, a week ago, he wouldn’t have felt a lick of remorse for tarring her with the same brush as those she worked with. But having spent the last forty-eight hours in constant, too close contact, he didn’t believe her sincerity was false.

  And after last night, it was hard to dismiss the notion that she was starting to care about him.

  The thought filled his head with a rush of possibilities that he had no business entertaining. He tried but couldn’t shut any of it out, his tangled-up feelings for Krista, the pain over Nate’s betrayal, oozing like a fresh wound after what Ibarra had uncovered.

  He’d always been able to shut everything out when he needed to, first in the army when he was on an op and his life depended on it. Then in prison, when he closed up in on himself, the only way to stay sane when every bit of power was taken from him.

  But now—he couldn’t keep a lid on anything, and it was all hitting him at once in a giant tidal wave of suppressed emotion. The muscles in his chest tightened, making it hard to breathe.

  He had to get a grip. It was the only way to make it through. He moved closer to the open window and tried to calm his rapidly increasing heart rate as cold sweat misted his face. He couldn’t submit to the anxiety, not when he needed all of his brainpower to process what Ibarra had uncovered.

  Someone had paid Nate to kill those girls. It was so hideous that Sean wanted to believe those deposits were a coincidence. But he’d been in some bad places in the world, and he’d seen firsthand the kind of horror that human beings were capable of inflicting on each other.

  So no, he wasn’t exactly surprised. He was sickened. At Nate, for the horrible way he’d tortured those women. Not to mention whoever was paying him to do it. At Jimmy, who, though they’d never know for sure, might have had an idea of what Nate was up to but kept his mouth shut, even though it meant sending his best friend to prison.

  That was the kicker, the most nauseating thing of all. That he had stupidly trusted them. He’d always considered himself a good judge of character, but he hadn’t had even an inkling of what kind of twisted soul lived beneath Nate’s too handsome, all-American facade. And he and Jimmy had had their differences, but never in a million years had he thought his friend would not only stand by while Sean was framed for murder but give him a good hard shove through the prison doors.

  Now Ibarra had found that bank account, and while it might lead nowhere, it opened up the possibility that Nate and Jimmy were up to something even before they had left the army.

  And once again, clueless Sean had no fucking idea.

  He knew he was no rocket scientist, but Sean had never questioned his intelligence and especially not his street smarts. But ever since he’d found out what had really happened the night Evangeline Gordon had died, he’d started to wonder if he had no sense of people or if he was just stupid in general.

  He sucked in another breath and caught a whiff of something fresh and almost fruity, like sliced apples. Krista’s shampoo. He shook his head and told himself he was imagining it and looked over just in time to see Krista doing that twisty thing with her hair like she did when she was thinking hard, squinting at one of the monitors.

  Talk about stupid. He’d had some major missteps in his life, but sleeping with Krista had to be right up there in the top five.

  One night to scratch the itch? Yeah, right. More like one night to send him into overdrive, to conjure up the lust and God knew what else to mingle with everything that was blowing up inside him.

  He’d been trying not to look directly at her. Sort of like being afraid of looking into the sun for fear of being blinded, Sean was afraid that if he let himself look at her, the last logical brain cell in his head would die and he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from hauling her back to Ibarra’s guest room and spending the next month or so making up for the last three years of celibacy.

  Right. He only wished he could chalk his crazy attraction to something so simple. Now, as he watched her stare at the monitors, brows knit over the delicate bridge of her nose as though she could force the data to give up its secrets, awareness sizzled through him, chasing away the impending panic attack.

  He might be able to remind his brain why she was a systematic threat to his sanity, but his body didn’t have a single reservation about picking up right where they’d left off in the wee hours of the morning.

  Christ, it was a miracle he could even get it up after last night, and yet heat pooled in his groin and he shifted his weight in his suddenly too-tight jeans.

  Somehow she’d yanked him from one extreme to the other, forcing him from the cold comfort of numbness into wanting, needing, feeling with a ferocity that was too much for his overloaded system to handle.

  She looked in his direction then, as though she could feel the heat of his stare. He wondered if she had any inkling what was going on in his body right now. But he couldn’t indulge, no matter what.

  She drove him crazy, and he’d had his one slipup. Now it was time to pull himself back under control.


  When she met his stare, her frown relaxed and she gave him a tentative smile. Just that gentle curving of her lips cut straight through the haze of lust and made his chest twist with something. Something that carried a hell of a more powerful punch than lust.

  He dropped his gaze and backed away from the window. Without a word he made a break for the door, not stopping until he was outside on Ibarra’s deck. He looked out onto Ibarra’s semimanicured lawn that ended in the heavy stone wall that ringed the perimeter. Sean knew the wall was at least fifteen feet high, but from this vantage he could see over the barrier and into the open grassland that stretched for miles before giving way to the rugged peaks of the mountains.

  It took some doing, but eventually the roaring in his head quieted and he could feel himself coming back from the edge. The anxiety had fled, but it left him with a restless energy that made questions bounce around his head like a flurry of rubber balls and made his own skin feel like it was two sizes too small.

  Footsteps sounded on the hardwood planks. Sean didn’t even have to turn to know it was Krista. He had a bad feeling that in fifty years he’d still be able to pick her out by feel in a crowded room.

  “Are you all right? You looked like you were having a…moment there for a second.”

  He almost laughed at her terminology. “Nothing a little fresh air can’t cure.”

  “This has to suck, finding out Jimmy might have been working with Nate.”

  His muscles jumped at the light brush of her fingers on his arm. He wanted her to stay; he wanted her to go. He wanted to go back to the place where a slight touch of her fingers didn’t send him skyrocketing out of control.

  He wanted to lean into her touch like a scruffy stray who had just received the first gentle pet of his life. He wanted to lose himself and his pain. It had happened last night. With her, he’d forgotten about everything.

  With her hands running over his skin, her mouth on his, her legs wrapped around his hips as he drove endlessly, he’d lost himself inside her until his satisfaction had moved beyond the realm of mere pleasure and morphed into pure joy.

  It would be so easy to lose himself again. Which was exactly why he had to be on guard at all times.

  He stepped away and out of the corner of his eye he could see her shove her hand into the pocket of her jeans. “What’s hard is knowing what a fucking idiot I was. That I couldn’t see what kind of people they were when I was with them practically twenty-four seven for months at a time.”

  “Can you think of anything that was happening back then, anything that might have given you a clue that they were up to something?”

  Sean stared out at the rugged peaks of the mountains, but in his mind he was back five years, in the jungles of Colombia. He started to talk, almost as though to himself. “That last mission, we were brought in as security to support the rescue of two American doctors who had been taken hostage by FARC troops—that’s the Colombian revolutionaries,” he said for clarification. “Me, Nate, and Jimmy were on the advance team with two Delta Force guys to watch their backs while they tried to pinpoint the hostages and map out an extraction plan.

  “We split up, Nate flanking the group on the left, Jimmy the right, and I took up the rear. Within a few steps they had melted in to the jungle. You couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you. The only contact was over the radios. The Delta team had just gotten eyes on the hostages when all hell broke loose.

  “Gunfire everywhere. I dove for cover and looked to return fire but it was impossible to get an eye on anyone through the trees. Then I heard Jimmy screaming over the radio. He was hit and taking heavy fire, and some of it was from our own guys—no one could see what the hell they were shooting at. The Delta guys called in for air support but it would be several minutes before they could get the helicopters in the air. Jimmy was pinned down. I didn’t even think about it before I ran for him.

  “I went for the last place I’d seen him. He was behind a tree in a clearing next to a little jungle hut, and FARC troops were firing from a hut about ten yards away. I heard the bird coming and got Jimmy over my shoulder, somehow managing to avoid fire and get Jimmy out.”

  “So you saved his life and he screwed you over,” Krista said quietly.

  “Oh, it gets even better. Right as I get to the bird, Jimmy says, ‘Nate went down too. I saw him on the other side of the clearing.’ We’re all calling and he’s not responding.” Sean shook his head, disgusted at the memory of how worried he was, how sick he was at the thought of his friend dying at the hands of some teenage guerilla in the rot of a Colombian jungle.

  “I went in after him too. He’d taken one to the chest and somehow his radio got damaged. Got him back to the bird. Jimmy’s knee was fucked and they had to rebuild Nate’s shoulder and they both took their get-out-of-the-army-free cards.”

  He met her gaze, bracing himself for her pity. Dumb fuck who couldn’t tell enemy from friend. To his shock, all he saw was the warm glow of admiration. “And you were totally unharmed?” Krista said.

  “Not totally,” he lifted the hem of his shirt up a few inches and indicated the pucker of scar tissue that striped his right side.

  “I was wondering how you got that,” she said, and then blushed as though remembering how she’d come across it.

  Heat pulsed in his veins at the memory of her hand skimming over the sensitive flesh, pausing to trace it again, taking note of the unevenness. “I also got a Silver Star out of the deal,” he said, yanking himself back to bitter reality. “One of the highest honors you can get in combat, and I got it for saving the guys who ruined my life.” He shook his head.

  Then he felt something, like a finger tapping at the back of his brain, like it was trying to get him to remember something.

  He’d had that feeling often in the past three years, especially when he let himself think about the night Evangeline Gordon was murdered. He remembered going into the club, finding Evangeline. She’d tried to blow him off, told him she was too busy to talk to him until after she finished her shift. Sean had said he’d wait. He’d sat himself in an empty seat at the bar and ordered a beer.

  And that was it. He didn’t remember anything until he’d woken up, sixteen hours later, Evangeline lying in bed with her throat cut and her blood all over him.

  He’d tried desperately to break through the concrete wall that seemed to have come down in his brain, tried to respond to the tapping finger to remember what had happened. He’d learned the hard way it only led to excruciating headaches and even more frustration that he couldn’t remember something, literally, to save his own life.

  Now he had that same niggling feeling as he remembered back to that mission. Something bothered him that he hadn’t thought to question until now. “It never made any sense, how he and Jimmy ended up so close together. When we spread out, Nate was supposed to go twenty meters to the south, Jimmy was supposed to go to the west, and I was supposed to keep up the rear. Nate said he got turned around in the underbrush and had gotten off course. He was always kind of shitty at navigation so no one ever questioned it. But now…” Sean thought back to that night. “Even if he had gotten off course, it’s too much of a coincidence that he ended up just a few yards away from Jimmy.”

  “You think they planned something?”

  Sean blew out a frustrated breath. This was a waste of time. “Fuck if I know. Fuck if I’ll ever know, now that they’re both dead.”

  Krista cocked her head. “Maybe there was something in that building.”

  “Maybe,” Sean said and shrugged. “Could have been drugs, weapons, even cash. Wouldn’t be the first time someone in the military tried to get their hands on some spoils, but smuggling it by hand out of the jungle would be a damn stupid way to do it.”

  Krista’s brow knit but before she could ask the question clearly forming in her brain Ibarra came out onto the deck.

  “Any hits on the deposits into Nate’s accounts?” Krista asked.

  Ibarra made a
noncommittal noise. “Still parsing the data. But I did find some interesting connections. Have you ever heard of a company called West Hall Security?”

  “That’s who Jimmy used to work for,” Sean said.

  Ibarra said. “Right. Well as far as I can tell that makes you the only person who can confirm a single employee of that organization. After Nate was killed, it was like the company was dissolved and all past employee records seem to have disappeared. There isn’t even a record of Jimmy’s employment.”

  “What about the people who worked at Club One? We have a list of everyone from the initial investigation,” Krista said.

  “Unless someone has destroyed it,” Sean bit out. “So fine, yet again, critical information has either disappeared or is inaccessible. How does that help us?”

  “Hey, I’m working with what I’ve got here. As much as I hate to admit it, someone has been very good at covering their tracks, and I have to be especially cautious in my methods so I don’t tip anyone off that I’m snooping on your behalf.”

  “Sorry,” Sean said. “I just feel like I should be doing something instead of hiding up here like a pussy waiting for something that will point us in the right direction.”

  “I feel you,” Ibarra said. “He was always the brawn of the battalion while I was the brains,” he said with a little wink in Krista’s direction. “The shell company that owned West Hall was also processing payments to Jimmy Caparulo up until last week. So even though he technically quit, he’s been working for the same people the whole time. And that’s not the only thing. This company, JD Partners LLC, transferred ownership of Club One to Hexacorp just nine months ago.”

  Sean struggled to remember why the name Hexacorp name struck a familiar chord. Krista answered before he could ask.

  “That’s the company we traced back to Nate. The one he used to hide the fact that he owned Club One.”

  Chapter 13

  Krista held up her hand. “Okay, let me make sure I have this straight. Up until nine months ago, JD Partners owned Club One before ownership was transferred to Hexacorp, which we’ve already traced to Nate Brewster. But JD Partners effectively owned West Hall and also paid Jimmy as an independent contractor?”