Sacrificial Muse (A Sabrina Vaughn Novel)

by Maegan Beaumont

  FIFTY-NINE

  Two hours later, Michael heard Croft’s key hit the lock and he couldn’t help but smile. He watched while the other man walked in, tossing mail and his keys onto the kitchen counter before turning toward the fridge to pull it open. Back still turned, Croft hunkered down as if looking for something and came up with the half-gone carton of OJ. He took a long pull from it before putting it back to rummage around again. Someone with less experience would think Croft was weighing his options between the soggy sub and the pizza/science experiment. Michael wasn’t buying it.

  “If you’re looking for the .38 you keep in the crisper, you’re going to be sorely disappointed,” Michael said in a casual tone that froze Croft in his tracks. He stood slowly and turned, his expression a convoluted mixture of anger and anticipation.

  “I knew she’d call you, I just didn’t think she’d actually send you here to kill me,” Croft said, his voice tight. “Looks like Sabrina and I have developed a habit of underestimating each other.”

  Michael laughed. “She didn’t call me and she didn’t send me. As a matter of fact she made me promise not to kill you.”

  Croft took the few steps from the kitchen into the living area at a slow, steady pace, hands held open at his sides. “Then what are you doing here?” he said, his eyes drifting down to the scrapbook left open on the coffee table.

  He lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug, his fingers brushing against the .38, resting on his knee. “Turns out I’m not really good at keeping promises … but I guess you already know that, don’t you?”

  Croft lowered himself into a chair, keeping a cautious eye on him the whole time. “So now what? You kill me to keep your secret? It won’t change what you did.” His eyes drifted back to the scrapbook Michael had intentionally left open to the picture of Marisol Ramos. The look on his face when he finally lifted his eyes confirmed what Michael already knew: she was the reason Croft was after him, not some story.

  “Okay—I’ll bite,” Michael said, ticking the barrel of the gun over just a touch, training it on Croft’s chest. “What is it you think you know, exactly?”

  “That you’re a traitor and a murderer.”

  Traitor. The word tightened the fist around his spine and squeezed. “You’ll want to be very careful about tossing that word at me.”

  “Which one? In 2007, you took money from the Moreno cartel in exchange for killing your entire ops team. To kill her.” Croft said, his upper lip curling away from his teeth, turning his harmless-looking face into a vicious snarl. “In my book, that makes you both.”

  “I never—never—took money from Mateo Moreno.” Michael tipped his clenched jaw at the scrapbook on the table between them. “Not to kill my team and not to kill Marisol.”

  Marisol Ramos had been unique—a Sergeant Major in the Colombian National Police, the highest-ranking female officer in its history. Nothing more than a publicity stunt, one of many designed to scrub clean the CNP’s image in the aftermath of several corruption scandals that left Colombia on the brink of civil unrest. She’d been charged with a small team of poorly trained officers and given an impossible task: confirm or debunk the rumors that Moreno had acquired a fleet of drug-subs—fully submersible ships used to transport cocaine by the ton between Colombia and Mexico. It had been another PR exploit, a way to keep her busy between news conferences and public appearances. No way would a woman and a handful of idiots be able to infiltrate the most powerful cartel in Colombia.

  But that’s exactly what she’d done.

  Once Marisol uncovered Moreno’s operation, the Colombian government had little choice than to actually act on what they’d tasked her to do. By then Mateo Moreno had made enough noise to put him at the top of DEA’s to-do list, but their presence in Colombia had been too heavy—no way would they’ve been able to move on Moreno without him knowing. So they did what every agency from the CIA to the NSA did when they needed expert muscle to move on a target or carry out a mission: they borrowed operatives from the US military. The army was called and forty-eight hours later Michael and an eight-man team had been what they called sheep-dipped—temporarily discharged from service and deployed to Colombia under DEA jurisdiction to aide Ramos’s team in the infiltration and dismantling of Moreno’s fleet. In other words, they’d been sent into the jungle on a covert op to blow shit up.

  Ironically, it hadn’t been until after that day in the jungle that he even considered taking money for doing what up until then he’d done for nothing more than God and country.

  Croft scoffed at him. “So, I guess we can add liar to the list,” he said, too angry to notice or care just how thin the ice he was tap-dancing on really was. “You were the weapons sergeant in charge of providing long-range cover while the operation was carried out. Bullets consistent with an SR-25 were dug out of nine skulls—or what was left of them. Marisol’s included. An SR-25 … that’s the same make you carried in the service isn’t it, Cartero?”

  On the surface, he was calm. Expression carefully controlled to hide the fact that hearing that name was like a punch in the gut. There was no way Croft could know about it unless someone had told him, and the pool of someones was restricted to no more than a handful. “You, know, I remember you too. Not at first, but once I saw the picture of you two together, I remembered. You were in Colombia, doing a write-up on her for Time magazine—the highest ranking female officer in the CNP.” Michael smiled. “As I recall, you two were a bit sweet on each other. Nothing too serious, just enough to make you drag your heels about wrapping up your piece and moving on to the next story … or maybe she was your next story,” he said. “Maybe you used her feelings for you as a way to get intel on the Moreno operation.”

  Croft glared at him with just enough guilty indignation to confirm that there was at least some truth to this newly formed theory. “I cared for Marisol.”

  “I’m sure you did … but not enough to drop a story that could potentially put her in danger,” Michael said. “Which makes you no better than me.”

  Croft looked away, completely dismissing what he knew was the truth. “Killing me won’t change facts, and it won’t change who you are. What you did.”

  Michael could still remember watching it all unfold through his scope. A quarter-mile below, Ramos and her team, along with his, photographing the inside and out of Moreno’s subs—gathering intel while Webb, their engineering sergeant, slapped bricks of C-4 to their hulls and Fanning inserted the blasting caps. He’d just done his sweeps and given the all-clear to Zanetti, who’d been working comms, when he dropped like a stone, his head exploding in a spray of blood and bone. Tucker and Cobb had been next, followed by Hall and Lewis. It had happened within seconds. Multiple snipers carrying out a coordinated attack that he’d had little hope of stopping. It wasn’t what he’d done in that jungle that haunted him every day since.

  It was what he’d failed to do.

  “You’re right. It won’t.” He shook his head, trying to pull clear from a past he couldn’t change. One more promise he’d been unable to keep. “But it’d keep her safe for a little while longer.” Even as he said it, Michael knew that wasn’t true. Right now there was another, more immediate threat to Sabrina than Livingston Shaw. One he knew very little about and had little hope of stopping. He put that away for now and focused on what he could fix. “And to be clear, there is nothing I won’t do to you, no line I won’t cross to make that happen … so, where’d you get your information?”

  “I was there, remember? You and your team, Marisol and hers, you all walked into that jungle and no one heard from any of you again. A few months later, some banana farmer finds a mass grave in his fields—eleven bodies, all personnel accounted for … except yours.” Croft’s jaw tightened, the pulse at his temple pounding so hard Michael could see it plainly from where he sat. “Fast forward eight years and I’m chasing a story about some cop who was abducted by her long-lo
st, serial-killing brother and I manage to dig up the pilot who flew her to the hospital, only he’s telling a different story than everyone else. One that has him so spooked he hadn’t uttered a word of it until I show up. One that involves you—a guy who’s supposedly dead in the jungle somewhere but whose body was never recovered.”

  “Why would he tell you?”

  Croft sighed softly, flipping his hands off the arms of the chair he was sitting in in an exasperated gesture. “Said he remembered me from my war correspondent days and that he liked the article on casualty evacuation I wrote for Esquire. Said it’s what inspired him to start flying medevac after he left the service.”

  “Fascinating … but none of that explains how you know what I’ve been up to since then.” He fixed Croft with a look that had him shifting uncomfortable in his seat. “Or how you know about the snazzy little nickname the Colombians pinned on me.”

  Croft’s face went still, that look of smug satisfaction crumbling away to reveal the fear that hid just below the surface. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “El Cartero. The Postman … ”

  “Everyone’s heard of El Cartero. The Military channel ran a special on him last week.”

  “Yeah, I saw it. It was actually pretty accurate.” He bared his teeth in what felt more snarl than smile. “Who told you?”

  Croft locked his jaw, refusing to speak.

  “If you know that’s what they call me—and you must since you called me Cartero less than five minutes ago—then you must know what I’ve done to earn the name.” He stood, palming the gun on his way up to hold it casually at his side. “This is the last time I’m gonna ask nice.”

  Croft looked away with a defeated shrug. “When I got back from Texas, there was a manila envelope sitting on my kitchen counter.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Files. Pictures. Newspaper clippings … your life, basically. Every dirty thing you’ve ever done and who you did it for.” Now Croft looked at him again, that self-satisfied smile back on his face.

  “Where’s the file now?” He knew it wasn’t in the apartment. He’d had hours to look and had found nothing more than a scrapbook left in plain sight and a gun in the vegetable crisper.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” Croft said, the words were measured, like their bulk was being shoved through a very tight space.

  “Where is it?”

  “I gave it away. I think you know to whom.”

  The answer was like a fist in the throat. Yeah, he knew exactly who Croft gave it to. “Okay. Who left it?” he said, even though he had a pretty good idea. There was only one person who had that much dirt on him and could fuck him over that hard without fear of reprisal.

  “I don’t know … but whoever it was hates you even more than I do,” Croft said, suddenly sounding very tired.

  “What was the plan, Croft? You blackmail Sabrina so that she has no choice but to call me, and I come running so you could … what?” Michael said, his head cocked to the side. “Kill me? Expose me? I don’t get it. Where’s the coup de grace here? How do I get what I deserve?”

  “You don’t. Not without Sabrina getting caught in the middle.” Something passed over Croft’s face, a shadow, telling Michael something had happened to change his mind. “I’m not sure that’s something I’m willing to do anymore. I’ll have to settle for warning her about what kind of man she’s involved with.”

  “You care about her.” It wasn’t a question or a judgment, simply an observation based on experience.

  Croft’s gaze drifted past him to rest on the scrapbook on the table behind him, a slight smile lifting the corners of his mouth as if he were remembering something. “Let’s just say I’ve come to realize that Marisol would’ve liked her and she’d be pissed at me for using her.” His gaze popped back up to Michael’s face, the smile fading away into something sharper, harder to look at. “Did you kill her? Did you kill Marisol?”

  “No.” He lifted the .38, popping the magazine out before racking back the slide and separating it from the body of the gun. Next came the barrel and spring—it was nothing more than an unusable pile of parts in a matter of seconds. “I tried to save her and I failed. I failed all of them,” Michael said, tucking the magazine into his back pocket before dropping the rest of Croft’s gun on the coffee table. “My making it out of that jungle was equal parts skill and dumb luck, and it’s something I live with every minute of every day,” he said before heading for the door.

  “He saw you with her—the guy who killed those women,” Croft said in a rush that stopped him cold. “He saw the two of you together and he’s going to punish her for it.”

  SIXTY

  They drove in relative silence, each of them absorbed in their own thoughts, toward the Presidio Heights address listed as the Edwards’ place of residence. Sabrina looked over at Strickland behind the wheel. Felt her gut clench at the way he stared straight ahead, hands wrapped around the steering wheel. “I’m sorry.”

  “For which part?”

  “Well, all of it, but mostly for hitting you.” There was a red welt under his eye but to her relief, she didn’t think it would bruise. “I lost my shit. It won’t happen again.”

  He pulled off the street, parallel parking in front of a three-story ivy-covered brick building. “You called me Wade.”

  She looked away, chose a vine at random and followed its upward progress with her eyes until it reached the coffered roof. For a split second, time seemed to bend around her, forming a circle that fed her back into the dark. The stench of infection and old blood, the sound of her own shuffling feet and ragged breath. The rough scrape of her shoulder, slumped against the cement wall as she pushed herself forward. Wade’s fast approach followed by his heavy hands on her shoulders, dragging her down …

  Tell him, darlin’. Tell him where I am, that killing me didn’t do a lick of good. Tell him I’m inside you …

  She blinked, found the vine she’d been following and held onto it with her gaze. “I know.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to be here. Maybe you need to get Val and the twins and go somewhere until this is over.” Even as he said it, she could tell he knew he was wasting his breath.

  “It wouldn’t help. This case hasn’t done me any favors, but it’s not what bought me a ticket on the Crazy Train. Wade fucked me up. I’m broken, always gonna be broken—I know that—but the only time I feel halfway sane is when I’m working.” She looked at him now, fighting the urge to turn away when that look crossed his face. The one that said he pitied her. “I trust you,” she said, letting him see the wounds she usually kept covered. “I trust you, Strickland.”

  He looked away, tightening his grip on the steering wheel for a second before he dropped his hands away. “Is that why you requested a transfer back to SWAT without even mentioning it to me first?”

  Okay, time to put her money where her mouth was … “I didn’t. The transfer back is just another one of Mathews plays to get me kicked off the job. If I refuse, then I get suspended for insubordination. If I accept … he knows my chances of qualifying are slim and when I blow it, he can make a case that I’m not fit for duty.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he slammed his open hand into the dash—once, twice—so hard she heard it crack. “Goddamnit, Vaughn. Why? Why didn’t you say something? Why did you just—”

  “Because of that. Right there.” She pointed at the long, spider-leg crack in his dash. “Because you and Nickels. Val and the twins … you’re all I have. All I care about and I can’t—won’t—let you fuck up your life for me. Not anymore,” she said, dropping her hand back into her lap. “Mathews will keep coming. He’ll keep pushing until I’m out, and he doesn’t care who I take with me.”

  “So push back.” He looked at her, his face still and hard. “Call him. Make him fix it.”
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  She knew what he was saying, and hearing it come from him was a shock. He knew that strings had been pulled to get her re-instated and he thought Michael had been the one to pull them. Strickland was telling her to call him and ask for help.

  “I don’t have to call him. He’s already here.”

  Strickland’s jaw hit his chest for a second or two before he snapped it closed, followed by an expression that told her he knew Michael was the mystery man who the killer had seen her with.

  “He’s what Croft is after—not me.” She shifted in her seat, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “He’s doing what he does to minimize the damage without—”

  “So have him add Mathews to his list,” Strickland said, his tone so hard that for a moment she was sure he knew exactly what he seemed to be suggesting.

  “That would be a very bad idea,” she said. She looked at the house they’d parked in front of and thought about what she was supposed to do. Technically, she was no longer Homicide, which meant she had no business being here, but it didn’t matter. Thanks to Croft, she’d no longer be a cop twenty-four hours from now. If she was going to stop this guy, she was going to have to get reckless. Popping the car door open, she stepped out and stood, bending down to look at Strickland through the open door. “You coming?”

  SIXTY-ONE

  Sabrina stood at the foot of the carved limestone steps while Strickland took lead. She watched as he jabbed a finger at the doorbell, the distant chime of it echoing throughout the house, summoning whoever it was in charge of answering the door.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Within a few moments the door was opened by an older woman in a starched black maid’s uniform, her face as stiff as her apron. “I’m sorry but the Edwards are not receiving visitors at this … ”