O’Doul slaps the laptop closed, cutting the connection.
I swivel slowly around in my chair, look at the stunned faces staring down at me, and smile. “Any questions, ladies?”
Connor’s flashlight provides enough light that I can see how pale Rodriguez’s face is. He says, “That was pure luck.”
Connor is the one who responds, in a voice like silk. “No. That was pure talent.”
Our eyes meet. He gives a slight, annoyed shake of his head, chastising me for showing off, but I see the admiration in his eyes.
O’Doul snaps, “Posell, coordinate with studio security to find us another space to set up. Rodriguez, get all this shit ready to be transported. And you,” he says, jabbing a finger in the air in my direction, “come with me.”
He spins on his heel and heads for the door.
I stand and follow, Connor right behind me. Over my shoulder, I call, “When I get back, you better have my money, Rodriguez!”
I’m gratified to hear a low, aggravated, “Fuck.”
Fifteen
Connor
The elevators are out, so we take the stairs to the ground floor. The yellow beam of my flashlight leads the way. Harry doesn’t ask why I’m following along, but he doesn’t tell me not to, which is good because I don’t want to have to knock him on his ass.
From now on, wherever Tabby goes, I go. Hearing her tell Harry that Søren had “eliminated” people activated every protective cell in the caveman part of my brain. Which would account for my decision to corner her in the women’s restroom and start demanding answers and trying to renegotiate our agreement.
Damn, this woman gets to me.
We pass through the darkened lobby. An armed security guard unlocks the doors for us, letting us out into the night. It’s cold. The air is a bracing snap in my lungs, a welcome broom to sweep the cobwebs of jealousy, desire, and frustration from my head.
Whatever Søren did to Tabby, I’m going to make him pay for it.
In spades.
“Where are we going?” Tabby pipes up as we pass between two buildings along a red brick path.
“Coffee,” growls Harry, and keeps going.
In a few moments, we round a corner and enter a courtyard lined with palm trees. A patio is filled with tables with umbrellas, and through a wall of glass behind them I see a brightly lit cafeteria. I’m surprised it’s open all night, because the lot is deserted. We must have the FBI to thank for that.
Tabby groans. “Food! Thank you, baby Jesus!”
Once inside, we get coffee and sandwiches from a sleepy-looking young girl behind the counter and find a nearby table to sit down. The place is empty except for us. Tabby starts wolfing down her sandwich as if she hasn’t eaten in weeks, while Harry just drinks his coffee and watches her, his gaze contemplative and deeply unsettled.
A look I’m sure I’ve worn many times myself.
Deciding to keep my trap shut to see how this plays out, I take a bite of my sandwich.
Harry says quietly, “Tabitha Anne West, age twenty-seven, five-foot-six, one hundred thirty-five pounds, verified IQ of one hundred ninety-eight.”
Ah. So while his boys were searching for Søren Killgaard’s name in databases, Harry searched for Tabby’s. It doesn’t surprise me. He’s one sharp son of a bitch and damn good at his job. He wasn’t really cut out for the corps—lotta guys aren’t—but he’s a perfect match for the FBI. He’s a no-nonsense straight shooter with just enough balls to make him dangerous.
He continues, “No known religious or political affiliations, no history of substance abuse, no outstanding traffic tickets, property and income taxes never paid late. Mother Laurel, father Christopher, no siblings, grandparents on both sides deceased. Went to live with her uncle Scott in Boston after her parents’ deaths in a plane crash when she was eight. Graduated high school at fifteen, accepted to MIT on full scholarship. At seventeen, she discovered Uncle Scott with his face in a bowl of cereal at the breakfast table, dead from acute arsenic poisoning.”
I freeze. Poisoning?
The file I read listed her uncle’s cause of death as heart attack, and that it happened a year later, when she was eighteen. Stunned, I glance over at Tabby. She’s pale and unmoving, her eyes downcast, her gaze on her plate.
“Due to the presence of a note and her uncle’s history of depression, the death was ruled a suicide. Department of Children and Families was brought in to choose a guardian, and the minor was placed in foster care…for a period of one month, until she disappeared. School records show she continued attending classes, but officials were never able to locate her—”
“They never looked,” she says quietly.
“Wait,” I say, an odd tightness growing in my chest.
“—and when she became legally an adult at eighteen, the case was closed. Address records show residences for every year except 2007.” Harry gazes at her, long and hard. “So my first question is this. Where were you for that missing year?”
She raises her head and stares at Harry. When she speaks, the floor drops out from under my feet.
“Living with Søren Killgaard, of course.” Her laugh is low and bitter. “Actually, that’s a gross misuse of the word ‘living.’”
Shocked past words, I stare at Tabby. An interval of four heartbeats passes before Harry turns his hard gaze to me. “You said you vetted her.”
“I…I did…there was no missing year, there was nothing to indicate—”
“It’s not his fault,” says Tabby. “The FBI are the only ones who have the accurate data.”
My head is swimming. My heart is hammering. She lived with Søren. She told me she wasn’t in love with him. She led me to believe she hated him, but she spent a year of her life under the same roof with the man.
She fucking lied to me.
Anger turns my vision red. I’m trying to get my thoughts straight to ask a coherent question, but Harry beats me to it.
“You’ve made it obvious you can bypass our firewalls without even breaking a sweat, Miss West. Which means you can just as easily access any other database. So my next question is, why would you change those few details in public records but leave the truth for the FBI?”
She looks at him first, and then turns her eyes to me. “Because I knew someday I’d be having this conversation.”
Through gritted teeth, I ask, “What does that mean?”
She holds my gaze for a moment, her expression unreadable. She’s searching my face for something, but the only things I’m feeling are fury and betrayal, neither of which seem to satisfy her. She finally abandons her search and looks to Harry. “You’re familiar with Stockholm Syndrome, I assume.”
“Capture-bonding,” comes the immediate reply. “Where hostages express empathy for their captors, to the point of defending or sympathizing with them.”
“Or falling in love,” I hiss, hackles raised.
Tabby ignores me. “It’s a form of traumatic bonding—”
“You’re saying he held you hostage?” I interrupt angrily. “For a year? While you attended school during the day?”
She ignores me again and keeps speaking to Harry in a cool monotone as if discussing the weather. “An adaptive psychological defense built into our DNA. Identifying with an abuser is one way the psyche defends itself, especially in women.”
Harry’s calmly nodding. I want to tear out every strand of hair on my head.
“When my uncle died, I had no one left. No one. The government put me into foster care. The first week I was there, my foster father came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and tried to rape me. He didn’t succeed—he was a fat fuck, and I’ve always been strong—but my foster mother didn’t believe me when I told her. Neither did anyone at the DCF. I was denied transfer. The family had been fostering for years with no problems, they said. It must be me, they said.”
Her pause is fraught with anger. “He tried to rape me again a few weeks later.”
Listenin
g to her speak, my rage turns to horror which then turns to a violent urge to take her into my arms. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as helpless in my life as I do right now.
“But that time was different, because someone was there to help me. Someone had been watching me carefully, and when my stepfather pulled the covers off my bed and I screamed, he got a very unpleasant surprise in the form of a baseball bat to his balls.”
Into the silence I say, “Søren.”
Tabby swallows, and then nods. “He came through the window and beat my foster father to within an inch of his life, and I crouched on my bed and watched him do it. And did nothing to intervene. There was…” She clears her throat. “A lot of blood. Afterward, Søren told me that he saw me in class, that he knew something bad had happened to me just by looking at my face, and that he wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to me ever again. Then he left.”
Her voice grows quiet. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that I might not have been placed in that foster home by chance…or that my uncle’s death might not have been a suicide.”
Horrified, I lean forward. Harry murmurs, “Go on.”
As if gathering her strength, Tabby inhales and then lets the breath out slowly through her nose. “From my first memories, I was used to being different, which meant that I was used to being looked at oddly. That was a disadvantage. For all my precociousness, I never learned to recognize when a strange stare in my direction was dangerous. I was naïve.”
Lost in some dark memory, she closes her eyes. “When I later investigated my foster parents, I found that they had multiple complaints against them which had somehow been erased from the DCF’s files. When I further investigated my uncle’s death, I found it troubling that there was no arsenic found in the house, and the level in his blood indicated he’d been ingesting relatively small quantities for a long time. Which—if you’re going to kill yourself, why do it slowly? He owned several handguns, could have shot himself, jumped from the roof, any number of options seemed more logical than poisoning himself over a period of months.”
“But there was a note,” Harry points out. “In his handwriting.”
Tabby looks at him. “And some people can forge a painting so perfectly not even an expert can tell it isn’t an original.”
I say in disbelief, “You’re saying Søren met you at school, became obsessed with you, murdered your uncle so you’d be put in foster care, manipulated the system so a rapist would get you, and then waited for his chance to rescue you so you would then feel…grateful to him?”
“Pretty sophisticated for a teenager,” says Harry doubtfully.
“He was twenty-one,” replies Tabby. “And already a multimillionaire from stock market speculation. And yes, I think that’s exactly what he did, though I have no proof. All I know is that Søren is a master manipulator. He can make people do things and convince them it was their own idea.”
There’s something strange in Harry’s face that I can’t put my finger on, something darker than doubt. Studying her, he tilts his head in thought. “Or maybe the master manipulator is someone else.”
Suddenly, I’m out of breath.
I look at Tabby with wide eyes. When she sees my expression, she looks as if she’s been slapped.
We stare at each other. My brain says No, no, no.
And then, more faintly, something not so unequivocal.
Into our silence, Harry says, “I have no proof this person Søren exists, except for your insistence that he does. I do have proof that you’re perfectly capable of breaching extremely sophisticated network systems, because you’ve given me a lovely demonstration. I also know you recognized me the minute you saw my ugly mug, which strikes me as incredibly coincidental. Too coincidental. And judging by the way our boy here keeps staring at you, I’m guessing there’s a lot more going on between you than could be considered strictly professional.”
When he pauses, I look at him. He says, “Which may or may not also be coincidental.”
I cut my gaze back to Tabby.
She whispers, “Connor. You can’t believe that.”
I stare at her, remembering how upset she was when I kissed her against the wall at the hotel, only to show up in my room half an hour later, demanding sex. My brain is recoiling in horror from the idea that…she…
“You came to me for this job!” she cries.
You knew I would, I think, but can’t bring myself to say it.
Harry muses, “I also find it interesting that Victoria Price, your employer from the time you left MIT until she disappeared under mysterious circumstances three years ago, left you everything in her will. Including a twenty-five-million-dollar penthouse in Manhattan.” As an afterthought, he adds, “Her body has never been recovered, correct?”
A crackling pause follows.
In the moment before Tabby jumps to her feet, time is suspended. I see her lips flatten, see outrage flare in her eyes, see the exact moment her opinion of me goes from “not sure if I like you” to “wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.” Then, with a lightning-fast unfolding of limbs, she’s up, and then I’m up too, and my hand is wrapped firmly around her bicep.
Stiffening, she bites out, “Lay another uninvited finger on me and you’ll lose the whole goddamn hand.”
Looking back and forth between us, Harry says, “Well. At least I know one of you isn’t in over your head.”
I growl, “Tabitha—”
Before I can finish the sentence, someone calls Harry’s name from the other side of the room.
He rises. I turn and see one of his agents, the one named Chan, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He’s holding out a cell phone.
“It’s Professor Durand from MIT.” His gaze skips to Tabby. “He’d like to talk to you, sir.”
Harry waves him over.
As Chan walks closer, Harry says calmly to me, “You got your cuffs on you, Connor?”
Staring at Tabby, I nod once, a curt affirmative.
“Excellent,” he says, taking the phone. He smiles at Tabby. “Because depending on what the good professor says, you might need ’em.”
Sixteen
Connor
While Harry has a muted conversation a few yards away, Tabby and I stand in frosty silence, staring at each other. I’ve still got her arm in my grip.
Fighting the adrenaline coursing through my veins, I keep my voice controlled when I say, “Tabby—”
“Fuck you,” she snaps, eyes blazing. Her cheeks are bright red, she’s breathing hard, and there’s a good chance I’m gonna get a knee in the balls any second.
I try again. “Tabitha. Listen—”
“Off is where you should fuck,” she hisses. With a swift, practiced move, she manages to twist away.
All my muscles tense. I’m braced to chase after her if she tries to break and run, but she doesn’t do anything except angrily brush her hair out of her eyes. Then she glares at me with what looks to be hatred.
I open my mouth, but she cuts me off.
“Go. Fuck. Yourself. Asshole.”
Heat radiates up my neck. I curl my hands to fists and count to ten.
Then I count to twenty.
“You lied to me.” It’s fast and cutting, spoken before she can curse. Her response is just as quick, just as angry.
“Never.”
I have to breathe deeply for a few seconds before I can control the scream crawling its way up my throat. When I speak, my voice is raw. “You said he was ‘wrong.’ That you were the only one who thought so. That you weren’t”—my voice grows louder—“fucking him.”
Special Agent Chan, standing off to one side, throws us a curious glance, and then looks away.
“All true! And then you shoved your tongue down my throat before I could say anything else!” she spits back at me, so furious, she’s trembling.
The anger gives me some hope that she’s telling me the truth. I’ve met plenty of people who can convincingly lie, but I’ve never
met anyone who can force the physical signs of anger. The red face, the shaking hands, the ragged breathing, the dilated pupils, they all tell a tale. Rage is distinct, and honest.
The only other option, I force myself to admit, is that she’s angry she got caught lying.
I lower my voice so Chan can’t hear me. “You’re not gonna want to hear this—”
“Then don’t say it.”
“—But you worked for a huge liar for years. You helped Victoria create an entire identity that was a lie. You helped her lie to my friend Parker—”
“Because he screwed her and her entire family over! He ruined her life!” She throws her hands in the air. “Or so we thought! You know exactly what happened. Don’t turn it around on me!”
When I don’t respond, Tabby says bitterly, “Why don’t you just say it, Connor. Just say that you think I made up Søren. That I made up everything. That I’m the one who pulled the studio job, and being here to watch the chaos is just a big ego stroke. That the blackmailer is really me.”
I say nothing. She turns her back on me and stands with her arms crossed over her chest, shaking.
Then Harry walks over and casually says, “Nice guy, your Professor Durand.”
Tabby turns her head, listening.
“Spoke very highly of you. Fondly, in fact. Says you were the most brilliant student he ever had.” Pause. “Aside from one Søren Killgaard, that is.”
The breath I didn’t know I was holding leaves my chest in a gust.
Over her shoulder, Tabby says quietly, “You should send an agent to Durand’s house to verify it was him you spoke with. At some point, it will occur to someone on your team that phone numbers can be spoofed and rerouted, and we’ll be right back to square one. Go to his house and talk to him face-to-face, and then you can be sure.”
Harry looks at Chan, who says, “On it,” and leaves.
Then Harry says to Tabby’s back, “You ever think about joining the FBI?”
Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) Page 12