At Risk

by Inc. Thriller Writers

  She faced him, her features softened. “Goldman, you know they won’t help until he hurts me—that’s why I had to bring you into this. This ends, now. If you don’t want to be there, want the deniability, I suggest you leave. Because I’m going into my home and stopping him once and for all. I won’t ever be free unless I do this. He’ll keep following me, keep calling me, keep stalking me.” Her voice shook on the last note and she cleared her throat. “No. I won’t let this go on any longer. Are you coming or not?”

  Goldman nodded. “Of course I’m coming. Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”

  They got out of Goldman’s beat-up maroon Thunderbird, shutting the doors quietly behind them. She could feel the caller in the air, that palpable sense of foreboding she always got when he was near.

  The house was dark. The light in the living room was off. She never turned it out, kept the switch on the wall taped to the on position so it couldn’t be accidentally shut off. That one light kept the darkness at bay, kept him away from her life. He was in there, pawing through her possessions, making himself intimate with her things. How many times had he done that, she wondered? Five? Ten? A hundred?

  How many times was the recurring nightmare, that he watched her sleep, real?

  She took a deep breath. Felt the metal of the gun hard in her hand.

  She was in control now.

  Emboldened, she stepped up to the front door. It was unlocked, slightly ajar. If he knew they were coming, he would have shut it behind him. Right?

  She eyed Goldman, nodded and pushed open the door with the toe of her boot. It swung wide into the gaping darkness.

  She slipped through, waited for her eyes to adjust to the light.

  A shadow moved. She turned to face it. Extended the gun toward the outline that was him.

  “Don’t do that, Caitlyn.” The bastard’s voice was gravelly. “You don’t have to do this. I forgive you. I understand. We can try again. Maybe a new town, less distractions. You don’t have to work. I’ll provide for us.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Goldman whispered.

  The shadow moved to the right and Caitlyn fired. The muzzle flash blinded her for a moment, but she fired again, and again, and finally, when her fingers went numb, she heard Goldman yelling at her to stop.

  The lights came on. Caitlyn saw the man who ruined her life, lying on the floor. He stared at her as if she were the only person in the world. He looked vaguely familiar, but she brushed that away. He didn’t deserve her concern.

  She watched the puddle of blood spread across the hardwood, catching the edge of the carpet, and smiled.

  “I like red polish, you son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  Michael stared at the face of his love in awe. He’d made her happy at last. He could see it in the manic smile, the fire in her eyes. He’d been forgiven. He knew, now, that she was truly, madly, deeply in love with him. At this moment, she adored him. He was complete.

  And so it was done.

  He sang himself to death, the words he’d written for her whispered into the ether as the world went black.

  “If God is one, and man is six, together they make seven. I loved you, darling, loved you long. I’ll wait for you in—”

  * * * * *

  HARD DRIVE

  Bill Floyd

  The cop and the femme fatale theme never loses its appeal…and certainly not in this story.~SB

  It was sheer agony, trying to avoid meeting Nadia Yohn’s eyes. I knew that if I did, everyone in the room would see the spark and flash. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already obvious.

  But we were the only ones aware of it.

  I sat on our side of the table alongside the senior homicide detective, Carl Stimple, and Lori Wiese from the district attorney’s office. Across from us sat Nadia and her attorney, Tyler Beckenridge. It was hard to discern which was more highly polished—the walnut tabletop or Beckenridge’s pink scalp.

  Normally we’d have used the windowless rooms downstairs, but since Nadia had already lawyered up, everyone was obliged to pretend the whole thing was an interview as opposed to an interrogation. Nadia looked older than twenty-six today, probably owing to the circumstances, but she was still off the charts. Lips that managed to be suggestive without making any specific promises, auburn hair like burning leaves and those sparkling eyes. Lori Wiese regarded her with that condescending yet wary look older women sometimes reserve for those they’d have once considered competition—you just knew she’d already judged Nadia as a tart or worse.

  Stimple had, for all intents and purposes, been my mentor since I’d graduated up the ladder to homicide from the narcotics squad six months back, and I’d never been happier to let him take the lead.

  “Thanks for coming, y’all,” Stimple said. The senior detective’s face was mostly gray sideburns and droopy eyes, his good-ole-boy mannerisms cloaking a razor-blade intuition and an evangelical fervor for justice. His first lesson to me: In the absence of direct physical evidence, your best bet is the personal Q & A. Learn to read their faces, the nonverbal communication—the hint of a lie. Walk them down.

  Nadia was avoiding my eyes as diligently as I was hers.

  Stimple’s tack was to put the interviewee at ease at first, but his long pauses and deliberate manner made them more and more nervous as questioning progressed. “You guys know we found Liam Gregg’s body yesterday, right?”

  “All we know is what we saw on the news,” Beckenridge answered. “My client’s relationship with Mr. Gregg ended over a year ago, following his last run-in with the law.”

  “An eight-month sentence for dealing pharmaceutical-grade narcotics is hardly a ‘run-in,’” Lori Wiese interjected.

  Beckenridge waved it off. “Nevertheless.”

  Finally, I couldn’t help myself; I flicked my eyes her way, just wanting to see if she’d registered any reaction at all, any hint of grief for the man she’d lived with for nearly a year before his bust. I was the one who’d put Gregg down, back when I was still working the narco squad. That was how we’d met.

  Nadia was staring straight ahead, clenching her jaw. If I could see it so plainly, then everyone else could, too—she was keeping her expression blank because she knew that any hint of emotion might betray her, paving that road for Stimple to chase her down.

  But those eyes. I felt something inside me shift, and quickly looked down at my laptop, open on the table in front of me. The screen saver was a photo of my son’s face. We’d talked on the phone last night, but I hadn’t seen him in weeks.

  Stimple let the theatrical pause hang just long enough. “This is the second time in less than a month that someone connected to you has been found murdered, Ms. Yohn. Do you know how many murders we had within the Morrisville city limits during all of last year?”

  Beckenridge rolled his eyes. “I doubt Ms. Yohn has any interest in being a statistician for the police, Detective Stimple.”

  “No,” Nadia said softly. Beckenridge shot her a quick frown: Let me do the talking.

  “We had exactly one murder during all of last year,” Stimple said. “Now of course Raleigh, Durham, all the surrounding towns, they more than make up for our excess of civility. But this is two men dead within the past three weeks, both of whom had intimate connections with Ms. Yohn.”

  Beckenridge sighed. “Both of those relationships were defunct long before the past three weeks. And these men had plenty of enemies of their own.”

  “Were you still in contact with either of them?” Wiese asked Nadia directly.

  Nadia looked at Beckenridge and he nodded. She shrugged. “I was still getting checks from Bert. But I hadn’t seen Liam
since he got out of prison.”

  “Plenty of people make mistakes in their relationships,” Beckenridge began.

  I glanced at her again and this time she was looking at me. Spark. Flash.

  But Stimple didn’t miss a beat. “Ms. Yohn has quite an extensive record in that department, though, doesn’t she? Hell, I believe she even dated my son for a few months back when they were seniors in high school.”

  He’d offered it lightly, jokingly, but the atmosphere in the room turned even more awkward and sour. Nadia stared openmouthed at Stimple, caught off guard. He stared right back.

  Beckenridge wasn’t having it. “Now, Carl, no disrespect, but I hardly think we can pin what happened to your son on Ms. Yohn, can we?”

  Shit. They’d both crossed lines now—Stimple by bringing it up, Beckenridge with his less than measured response. Carl Stimple’s son, Ronnie, died in Iraq nearly eight years ago, victim of an IED. The whole town knew the story. We’d all hung flags on our porches when the news came.

  I finally jumped in. “I think we can stick to Ms. Yohn’s adult relationships. So, when was the last time you saw either of the victims in person?”

  * * *

  Nadia Yohn had married Bertram Everhardt when she was only twenty years old. Everhardt was a junior VP at IBM, which had a headquarters in the Research Triangle Park, adjacent to the Morrisville city limits. Everhardt was in his forties, a well-known figure at the Prestonwood Country Club and in the moneyed circles in Cary and Raleigh. Morrisville had been a small rural sort of town until the mid-eighties, when development and sprawl ensnared us among the northern transplants and newly minted immigrants who worked in the high-tech centers nearby.

  Nadia had been taking some classes at NC State and working a weekend gig as a hostess for a catering company when she caught Everhardt’s eye. Four months later they were married, and they cruised along for three years together before things went bad.

  Bertram Everhardt’s body had been found off a local bike path three weeks ago, less than forty-eight hours after his coworkers reported him missing. He’d been shot in the back of the head, double-tapped execution style. Everhardt was high-profile enough that Chief Roberson assigned both Stimple and me—the total manpower of the Morrisville Police Department’s homicide unit—to the case, along with a couple of guys from the State Bureau of Investigation to work the forensics. I should’ve come clean at that point, but I convinced myself I was trying to protect people—Nadia, myself, my ex-wife. I’d already caused such wreckage. I wasn’t thinking straight.

  We conducted a lot of interviews and the one theme that kept recurring was the friction between Everhardt and his ex-wife. Rumors abounded of wild parties at their McMansion back when they were still married, drug-fueled weekends that caused quite a stir among their mostly conservative peers. Morrisville was now one of those towns where everyone drove pricey SUVs and the kids attended private academies and the typical scrape-and-save cycle of American life was little more than a quaint rumor, so the Everhardts’ hedonistic streak stuck out.

  The man rumored to have supplied the pharmaceutical fun at these soirees was a local rogue named Liam Gregg. On the cusp of their fourth wedding anniversary, Nadia and Bertram had split, and she’d moved in with Gregg. Her lawyers eventually settled for lower alimony than many local wags had predicted, but still enough to maintain her in style for years to come. The suggestion was that there’d been adultery by both spouses. Everhardt’s friends said he’d nursed a grudge.

  Within a year of the split my narcotics squad had been given an anonymous tip on Gregg’s activities, which included tapping deliveries of Vicodin and OxyContin to local pharmacies. The eventual bust took down behind-the-counter employees of several chain retailers, along with Liam and a couple of lower-level dealers. Nadia was never implicated, but I’d had to interview her as part of the investigation.

  Her life had been upended and my own marriage was limping through its final rancorous months, the shell of my relationship with Sherri turning more toxic by the day, our young son, Toby, showing signs of anxiety and aggression even though he was only four years old. God, the things people do to each other.

  The first time I’d reached out to touch Nadia’s hand, in what I told myself was a comforting way, there it was: that spark, that flash. She’d grabbed my hand and linked her fingers into mine. In that one single entwining, I’d lost my marriage and whatever man Howie Logan had been right up until that very moment. I’d never seen that man again.

  I’d made all kinds of excuses. None of them were remotely legit. The truth was we’d just reached for each other, connected. Gregg took a plea deal that netted him eight months and Sherri found out about my fling with Nadia. I got separated and within a matter of weeks Nadia told me she couldn’t see me anymore. I’d been spinning in place ever since.

  No one bothered to report Gregg missing. He’d been living in a shabby apartment complex near I-40 since his release from state prison. A security guard found his body in the parking lot of a nearby defunct research facility, a cluster of glass-and-steel buildings that had been state-of-the-art until the parent company folded during the most recent recession. Gregg was crumpled near the entrance of the main building, killed in the exact same fashion as Everhardt, a double-tap to the back of the skull. Forensics showed it was the same 9 mm weapon that had killed both men.

  Stimple was pissed. Gregg had been our prime suspect for the Bertram Everhardt killing. Now only one common factor remained.

  * * *

  Beckenridge, still testy about his last exchange with Stimple, addressed himself to me. “Detective Logan, I’d like to remind everyone that we came in voluntarily. If we’d known that my client was being treated as a suspect—”

  “I don’t believe anyone’s used that term,” I said. Don’t look at her.

  Stimple broke in. “I would like to clarify something, though. Your client says she didn’t have any contact with Mr. Gregg after he was released from prison, correct?”

  “She said she hadn’t seen him.”

  Stimple grinned. He’d made his point, and now he pounced. “Because Mr. Gregg’s family gave us permission to look at his computer. We found a number of recent emails between your client and Mr. Gregg.”

  “He was threatening me,” Nadia said suddenly, loudly. “He was trying to get money.”

  Beckenridge laid a hand on her arm.

  “That seemed apparent from the content of the messages,” Stimple said. “As was your adamant refusal to be coerced. Which I admire. You even told him that he’d be sorry if he didn’t leave you alone.”

  “That—” Nadia began.

  “This interview is terminated,” Beckenridge announced.

  “We’d like permission to look on her computer,” Stimple said. “She might have information on there that could be helpful.”

  Beckenridge laughed at that. He stood and glared at us in turn, smarting from the ambush. “Nadia, let’s go.”

  She looked at me, drowning. I studied my screen saver.

  “We won’t have much trouble getting a warrant,” Stimple said, enjoying himself. “The SBI is helping us out on this one, and they’ve got some digital forensics guys who do incredible work.”

  * * *

  I was at home that night, eating leftover pizza and watching ESPN when my cell phone rang. I saw her number come up and thought about not answering it. But if she left a message, that would be even worse. Once my number showed up on her phone records, interested parties might be able to make an argument that my phone should be examined.

  And those digital forensics guys really can do some incredible things.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I asked her when I picked up.

  “Your emails are on my computer,” she said. “Going back the whole time we were seeing each other. I erased them but your ex
perts can find them, right?”

  I’d been thinking of little else since the meeting. I’d hidden the affair from Stimple and the rest of them because it was Sherri’s final request to me, the one I couldn’t deny after all the pain I’d caused her. She’d pleaded with me not to humiliate her any further. And if it came out, if Beckenridge discovered that Nadia was involved with a cop, he’d use it any way he could, in the media and in court.

  “Did you ever have an off-site backup?” I asked her.

  “Just my external drive.”

  “Where is it? In your house?”

  “Right beside the computer. Howie, I—”

  God, my name on her lips.

  “You shouldn’t have called me,” I said. But I couldn’t keep the emotion out of my voice.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Bertram or Liam,” she said, her voice breaking just a little. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I was in love with you, Nadia. But I’m still not sure I ever knew you.”

  “You lost a lot because of me. I’m willing to take responsibility for that, Howie. But not for this. And if someone’s killing the people I’ve been with, the men I’ve loved…” She didn’t have to say the rest.

  “Did you ever tell anyone about us?” I asked.

  “Never. I respected your wishes. Does anyone besides your wife know?”

  I stared at the TV. I wanted nothing more than to see her, to touch her. But that wasn’t real anymore. Our brief affair had allowed me to live out a consuming fantasy of breathless transgression. She’d nurtured the liar in me, the one who lied to everyone else and to myself, even if I never could lie to her. That fantasy had cost me most of the real world, and now we’d come to a place where it just might cost me the rest.

  * * *

  Stimple wanted me to help execute the warrant the next morning but I had to be in court to testify on one of my old drug cases. By the time I got done with my turn on the stand, my mentor had left no less than five messages on my phone, each more progressively anguished than the last.