Stephanie shook her head slowly, her lips tight.
A few moments passed.
What else could I say? What was she thinking? I had told the truth but couldn’t make her believe it. Each second felt like a thousand.
Finally, she opened her mouth and uttered one word barely above a whisper. “Okay.”
I felt every muscle in my body relax. Then I took a step toward her and gently wrapped my arms around her. And waited.
She kept her head tilted down and to the side, not ready to look at me.
I just waited, my eyes locked on her.
She twisted her head to the other side, and then up just a little—enough to see that I was looking straight into her eyes.
I inched closer so that our shoes touched and leaned forward—
She grabbed my face and planted her mouth on mine.
I pulled her close and hoisted her up. What felt like a thousand horses of pent-up stress and emotion broke free. She wrapped her legs around me and buried her face in my neck.
But all too quickly, she dropped to her feet, pressed her head against my chest, and cried.
I held her for what felt like an hour, never once moving my hands—just wanting her to feel safe.
“He took them from me, drugged them,” she whispered. When she finally pulled away, she pointed a finger directly under my nose, eyes as watery as morning mist. “Don’t think this means I forgive you. Got it?” Her tone was lighter than her words.
I just nodded.
Then we were kissing again.
A portion of Stephanie’s bounce returned, but worry crept up with it. “Where is he? Are we safe here?”
I took a deep breath, trying to gather my thoughts. The answer would be no until the conductor was either killed or locked up.
She knew my answer before I said anything. “Tell me something good,” she said, closing her eyes and dipping her chin. Her eyes popped open. “Faith. You mentioned faith.”
I tried to recall everything that had gone down in the past day. “I’ve found myself talking to him more. It actually felt real.”
She nodded but was silent.
I lifted one hand, palm up. “Apparently God and I understand each other when you throw in a psychopath.” I leaned against my dresser. “I don’t know. The conductor kept talking about the will and breaking it. I tried to show him that he was wrong.” An image of Dominguez shooting Adams flashed through my mind. “Turns out he was right.”
Steph grabbed my hands and leaned close. “We’re both here, and so are my girls. So what if he can manipulate someone? God says he can’t touch us—not in a way that matters.”
That took me by surprise. I’d assumed that whatever power God had promised his people lived in Steph—but I didn’t think for a moment such a thing had been given to me.
And what did that really mean, “not in a way that matters”?
A knock sounded at the partially open door.
“Come in,” I said.
It was Cody. “Everything, uh, better? Mmm, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have led with that. We think we have something on the conductor.” He looked directly at me. “We think we know what he’s after.”
The thought of knowing any sort of motive for the conductor had wreaked havoc on my mind. If I could know this lunatic, if I could just see into his thoughts for a moment, understand him on some level, I could steal some of his power. Get under his skin for a change.
Cody led Steph and me into the living room, where David had been more than taken care of. Freshly cooked spaghetti and what looked like a clone of Olive Garden’s house salad sat on the coffee table next to the reading chair in which he was reclining, ice packs placed around his wound. A bottle of ibuprofen lay on the floor, along with three empty glasses.
“Goodness,” Cody said. “It looks so much more pathetic walking into it new.” He turned around and whispered to Steph and me, “Guy is high-maintenance, especially when you’re trying to get him to talk.” He turned back toward David and clapped once. “Okay, David, tell Haas what you just told me.”
David grimaced. “It hurts to talk.”
I stepped between them, unable to extend one more patient moment. “Listen—”
“Hold on, hold on. I’ve got this.” Cody backed up a few steps, positioning himself closer to the center of the room. “David here has been doing little assignments for the conductor for a while, but the things of interest started after he faked drinking in public to distract you from Janet dropping the tablet. The conductor made him go full Hannibal Lecter after that. Apparently, Whiteface slipped the chief something that put him out like a light. That’s when David performed surgery on him, right in the press box during the game, inserting a tube under the skin of the chief’s back—even sewed him back up. Awful stuff, even for a guy like Renfroe.”
The pictures the conductor had sent to my phone—those had been of Renfroe?
Cody shook his head. “But listen to this. David was also instructed to bring up a webpage on the chief’s computer for him to find. The article was from the Trenton Telegraph, twenty years ago, a feature on the Celestial Orchestra’s first show, complete with a photo of Ivan directing a practice.” Cody straightened his back and held up three fingers. “The article featured three photo quotes from the three-person events committee at the time. Ready for their names? Chief Renfroe, Franklin Iseman, and—”
“Anita Postma,” I said.
Cody’s eyebrows shot inward so far they nearly touched. “Yeah . . . how’d you know?”
“Basketball game. Those three people were on the court when Ivan fainted.”
“And Iseman . . . he’s dead,” Steph said.
All of us looked at her.
“The blood on the ground, where you pile-drivered the conductor?” Steph said, looking at Cody. “That belonged to him. He had done something wrong, tried to profit from the string. Then the conductor gave me the choice of either having Iseman killed, or . . .” She clammed up.
I grabbed her hand tightly.
“I couldn’t do it—couldn’t choose,” she said. “But then Iseman attacked me and . . . I did choose. And the conductor killed him. Right there.” She covered her mouth and sat down on the couch, wiping her eyes of mascara. “After that, he started up with a lot of monster talk and telling me what a horrible person Markus is . . .”
I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her to my side. She rested her head on my shoulder.
“You did the right thing, Steph,” I said.
Cody nodded emphatically, then leaned in toward her and spoke without moving his lips. “Told you Haas was horrible.”
That got Steph to smile a little.
I looked at Cody. “Had you not shown up, what was his endgame? Turn Steph against me and then . . . ? What does it have to do with Iseman, Postma, the chief, Ivan?”
“Maybe that was it,” Cody said. “What has this guy done that’s made sense?”
I squinted and let my mind build a scenario. “We have a man who calls himself the conductor doing horrible things to people the week that the most famous conductor of this era is returning to the stage that kick-started everything for him twenty years ago. The conductor must be in his thirties or forties. Hard to tell under the makeup. That would have made him ten or twenty years old at the time of the orchestra’s original showing.”
Cody scratched his head. “Jealousy?”
“Could explain why Ivan fell at the game—the conductor could have slipped him something. But why hadn’t it been lethal? Is Ivan at the hospital? Is the performance still on tonight?”
Steph and David remained silent as we went back and forth.
“The paper says he went to the hospital, nothing life-threatening, but no one knows his status,” Cody said. “Event is sold out, hasn’t been canceled, and there haven’t been requests for refunds. Paper made it sound like this could just be more theatrics—Ivan staying close-lipped—creating suspense and mystery before the big twenty-year return.�
��
“A young boy interested in music, or perhaps a music major here at Trenton a couple decades ago,” I said. “He has a flair for music that breaks social norms, goes to the orchestra that night, becomes a fan, sees himself in Ivan. But then the Celestial Orchestra goes big.” I touched two fingers to my brow. “Fame puts Ivan into another stratosphere, and our music major is left trying to pay the bills because his opportunity passed him by. ‘There can only be one Ivan’—isn’t that what critics say? So maybe our conductor, who approached music in the same unique way, now comes off as a copycat, trying to ride the coattails of a man whose approach to music cannot be replicated without drawing scorn.”
Cody pointed at me absently. “Conductor takes revenge on Ivan for taking what the conductor feels belongs to him?”
I tried to finish the thought. “He organizes the string . . . to take back what was rightfully his.” I waved it off. “This isn’t it, Cody. It’s all speculation. We need to dig.”
Cody extended an arm out. “How?”
“I’ve got an idea. But first we need to bring in the cavalry.”
“Who?”
I realized it was time to tell my best friend that I’d been lying to him since the day we met. “Sit down a minute.”
I stepped into my room clutching my phone, thinking about the only person in authority I could trust with the truth. Enough was enough. Stephanie and the girls were safe now, and I needed to make sure they stayed that way. So I dialed a number I thought I’d never dial again.
The conductor could listen in if he wanted. I was coming for him.
I closed the door as I waited for her to pick up. It was best that Steph didn’t hear, not now at least. We’d talked about exes before and I’d told her that I used to work with this woman doing security at a casino. But that was all a part of my cover and would be pouring salt onto a fresh wound.
“Hello?” the answer came from the other end.
Hearing Zoe’s voice disarmed me more than I thought it would. “It’s Markus. I—I need your help.”
“Wow,” she said. “It’s been how many months, and you start with a favor? Word is that you’re quite the dirty cop.”
“You guys subscribe to the university press now? You know it’s not true.”
“Do I? The article sounded convincing.” She was toying with me.
“Zoe, I’m in trouble.”
I could hear her shift into agent mode, clearly exiting ex-girlfriend mode. “What kind of trouble?”
“A manipulator, sociopath . . . people are dead.”
“Markus. Where are you—how can I help?”
“He fabricated the story on me. He’s planning something deadly.”
“Explain.”
“He had me clean out the university’s armory—he has them.”
“You stole weapons,” she said. “While suspended. And then you gave said weapons to a killer?”
“I don’t have time to explain. I know you can’t do anything official, but I need a security detail at my house. Just for the day.”
“You would call while I’m up for a promotion,” she said. “The bureau’s going to know you called me. There’s so much wrong here, I don’t know where to begin.”
“He almost killed me and others I love. I need to keep them safe.”
“Stephanie? Her daughters?”
I knew my answer would hurt. “Yes. I can’t trust anyone else. I need to end this and there’s no other badge to turn to. They’ve all been blackmailed, bribed, or wouldn’t believe me.”
Zoe muttered something under her breath. Then, “I’ll do it.”
I closed my eyes. “Thank you. You don’t know . . .”
“I know,” she said.
“One more thing.” I sighed. “I need you to get in touch with the families of Clint Hopkins, Gabriel Dominguez, and Ian Adams.” I detailed where their bodies were located and told Zoe that they’d died heroes.
Then we hung up.
I turned around to find Stephanie peeking her head into my room. “Who was that?”
I looked at her, head tilted a little too far down. She knew who it was.
“Casino girl—who I assume wasn’t casino?” Stephanie tapped the doorjamb. “Good. Do what it takes.”
“I will.”
Stephanie walked away. I knew she was hurting, but I couldn’t think about that now.
I followed her into the living room. None of us had slept, but the new day and afternoon was upon us, bringing with it whatever the conductor had planned for the Celestial Orchestra performance tonight.
He had something planned. It had to be his endgame. The timing made too much sense.
Still, I wanted to keep a semblance of normalcy in the face of the trauma. After the girls awoke and the security detail arrived—two men and a woman who didn’t look the happiest to be here—I opened the kitchen for business.
I cracked two eggs into a frying pan as Isabella and Tilly watched intently from the bar stools across the counter, Steph bouncing the younger on her lap. Their eyes looked similar to how they appeared right before Steph would put them to bed—drowsy but not wanting to miss a thing.
But there was something else, something I could see in their body language, at least in Isabella’s: disorder. Though her young mind may have already been working overtime to block the events of the past twenty-four hours, a fragment of them was replaying in the recesses of her brain, quiet enough so that she couldn’t tell what it was, but loud enough to distract her from being fully in this moment.
I’d failed to protect them.
Even as a university cop in midsized Trenton, I’d failed. The girls would have to fight battles of their own in the one place I couldn’t show up, flash a badge, and keep them safe—the subconscious.
I looked up at Isabella. “I’m guessing you like your eggs . . . sunny-side up?”
She tilted her head, mouth hanging open a bit. “The sun doesn’t make eggs.”
I raised my brows. “You sure about that? Heat cooks eggs and the sun is . . .” I tapped the spatula against the frying pan.
“Hot!”
Stephanie managed a smile. “Strike that from your memory, kiddo.”
Cody—still ticked at me for not telling him I was FBI until a few hours ago—yawned as he slogged into the dining area.
“Watch this,” I whispered to the girls before proceeding to toss a blueberry across the room.
It sailed over Cody’s head and slapped against the floor.
“Why I was cut from basketball sophomore year,” I said.
“And freshman year, obviously,” Cody said.
The doorbell rang.
Cody immediately put himself into a position of cover, though trying to do so nonchalantly so as not to disturb the girls.
It was 3:45 p.m., David was asleep in the living room chair, and our security detail was positioned inside the house with strategic vantage points of the grounds outside. There was no reason for anyone to be at my door.
I clicked off the burners and met the security detail lead, a man who went by Hernandez.
Stephanie grabbed the girls. “Oh, let’s get that blueberry.”
“He threw it,” Isabella said.
Cody nodded at me and Hernandez. He would cover our approach to the front door while keeping close to the girls. The other two agents, Whalen and De’boer, covered the back.
I moved to the entryway. Checked the peephole.
And couldn’t believe my eyes. “I’ll handle this,” I told Hernandez. I opened the door and stepped outside, forcing the visitor to step back. “What are you doing here?”
Stephanie’s former husband wore dark jeans and a suit jacket and showed meticulous grooming habits. He looked as though he belonged on a movie set, and that made me sick.
“Easy.” Declan raised his hands. “Someone texted me—don’t even know the number—said my girls were in danger and to come to this address if I loved them. I got in my car and sped the whole way, wor
ried sick.”
“Were you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Are they here?” he said, taking a harder stance. “Who are you?”
I hated how quickly this man was able to shift his persona and aura. He was a con man, a fraud, playing a game of manipulation with everyone he crossed paths with. At least, that’s the profile I’d created after hearing Steph describe everything he’d done in their marriage.
He was also smaller than me, and I let my body language suggest it.
“What, you going to punch me out? If my girls are in there, get out of my way.”
He stepped into my space and I grabbed him by his jacket. “They aren’t yours. You lost that right and a whole lot—”
A mental image flashed through my mind and I let go of him.
This man was in his midthirties with similar height, weight, hair, and build. The voice didn’t match, but that could be faked, couldn’t it?
The door opened behind us.
“Declan?” Stephanie said.
“Daddy!” Isabella screamed, brushing past me before clinging to Declan’s leg.
He lifted her up. “Pumpkin!”
I stepped aside to make room for Stephanie on the walkway, never taking my eyes off Declan, mentally trying to paint his face white. Could it be possible that this man was the conductor? Is that why he hadn’t harmed Steph or the girls? Why he wanted me to “confess”? Or was my mind playing tricks?
Stephanie would have recognized him, right? The black-and-white makeup was thick and disguising, but could she really be fooled by someone she’d shared a life with?
“What are you doing here?” Stephanie was clearly trying to keep her disdain to a minimum for Isabella’s sake.
“Got a message saying you and the girls were in trouble, so I got here as fast as I could. What’s the trouble?”
Stephanie reached for Isabella. “You’re a few years short and a thousand lies too long. Give her. Now, please.” Her voice was losing its softness.
“Are you deaf?” Cody said, joining them on the walkway.
The String Page 18