by J. J. Stone
As James strode away from his car and headed back toward the motel, Ada called after him. “Hang on a sec.”
James paused and turned halfway to her, pointedly staying where he was. His brow crinkled slightly as he waited for her to speak.
Ada pushed off the bumper and walked up to him. In the five strides it took her to reach him, she racked her brain for the most effective way to go about this olive branch presentation. As she looked up at James’s perfect poker face, she prayed she wasn’t about to make herself look like even more of an idiot to him.
“Look,” she said, glancing at her hands. “I’m sorry for how I was a few days ago, when we were talking about the notes.”
James raised an eyebrow at her in disbelief. “Really?” He chuckled and turned away. “You’re fine.”
Ada found herself continuing. “Please, listen.” She waited for him to look back at her. “I know I’m not the most pleasant person to deal with. I’m not great in group environments like this.” She laced her fingers together and forced herself to meet James’s now bemused gaze. “I realize you’ve been trying to make me feel like part of the team, and I haven’t exactly been all that receptive.”
James turned to face her completely, all sarcasm falling away from his face. He remained pointedly silent.
Frustrated at her inability to adequately communicate, Ada tossed her hands up and then slammed them back down against her thighs. “This is my really horrible attempt at apologizing for being a jerk,” she blurted, taking slight comfort in the gradual crinkling around the corners of James’s eyes as he struggled to keep a straight face. “I’m ready for this weirdness between us to just not be there. I’m ready for us to maybe attempt to be friends.”
James thought for a moment before carefully answering, “I just wanted you to feel like I was someone you could work with, Ada.” He cocked his head to the side as a half-grin pulled at his lips. “I’m not the most pleasant person either, and we got off to a pretty rotten start in Seattle.” His hands plunged into his pockets as he shrugged. “I’ve been trying to fix that.”
A weight Ada didn’t realize was there lifted from her shoulders. She beamed up at the lead agent and nodded once. “Well, I’m good if you are.”
James smiled at her, and for the first time Ada knew it was genuine. “Come on, Miss Brandt. We have work to do.”
——
Sakima watched on his screen as Andrew Bean’s body was wheeled out of the warehouse, wrapped in a black body bag. The vapid reporter on scene mentioned something about the boy’s parents confirming that the child was in stable condition and would be released later that day. Disgusted, Sakima closed the browser window and stared at his laptop’s screen for a few blank moments. This was the third member that had been unable to complete the mission. Andrew had been the least successful at completing his objective out of the three cases so far. Either the FBI was getting better or Sakima’s recruits were growing more lax with their work.
He pushed out of his chair and moved away from the desk, taking in the wall brimming with pictures and papers outlining each of his followers. As he strolled up to Andrew’s spot on the wall, he slid a red marker from his pocket. Sakima uncapped the marker, hovered the red tip over Andrew’s headshot for one last moment, and shook his head. “Such promise.” He quickly slashed a red X over Andrew’s face. He was beginning to grow impatient. These people he had taken in, had granted a rebirth to, had imbued with every resource and tactic he had in his arsenal were proving to be a poor investment. As he looked at the three consecutive faces tattooed with red Xs, his gut told him it was time to push. He had bigger guns waiting in the wings, quietly biding their time, but Sakima had hoped that he would have more time to build up to them. However, given the pathetic start his movement was off to, he reluctantly knew he would have to forgo the original grandiose climb to the peak of his mission and start striking with more precise movements. He glanced down the wall to a pair of head shots. As much as it tugged at his perfectionistic tendencies, he knew he had to skip ahead in order to get everything back on schedule. He turned away from the wall and slunk back to his desk.
He had work to do.
CHAPTER 7
Ada stepped into the eerily silent hotel gym and let out a sigh of relief. The day had been brutal and everyone on the team had all but crawled back to the hotel once the warehouse and Andrew’s hotel room had been adequately catalogued. Dade mumbled something about crashing for the next few hours, Brenda deliriously droned on and on about a hot shower, and Janice slinked back to her room without a word to anyone.
As bone-weary as she was, Ada felt a strange pent-up restlessness stirring inside her. Ignoring the enticing sweet nothings her plush hotel mattress lilted at her as soon as she arrived back at her room, Ada changed into her workout clothes and set a direct course for the hotel gym. She thought about going for a run, but the burgeoning gray clouds scowling outside told her that an outdoor sprint would only end with an unwanted shower.
The hotel gym had a fairly standard offering of equipment. She stepped onto the treadmill and punched in her desired settings. The TV bolted into the far corner of the room was playing a Southern cooking show, something Ada had never been able to quite understand the logic behind. Dangling images of delicious but artery-clogging food in front of people slaving away on gym equipment just seemed like some special kind of torture.
The treadmill slowly whirred to life and she started off at a light pace. She slipped her earbuds in and selected a mellow playlist. Her brain was too fried to withstand anything with too much of a beat. As her music began, she concentrated on her rhythm and breathing, smiling inwardly as she felt some of her stress start to flake away with each tenth of a mile she pounded her way through.
She continued her pace for almost ten minutes when she glanced up at the wall of mirrors in front of her treadmill and spied a boxing bag hanging surreptitiously in a somewhat hidden corner of the gym by the weights bench. She immediately smacked the red button on the treadmill and gracefully slid off of it before it came to a complete stop. She pulled the earbuds out as she headed excitedly to her new workout opponent.
As she came up to the punching bag, she wished she’d thought to bring her gloves to California. There didn’t seem to be any hotel pairs stowed in the gym. She balled her fist and lightly swiped at the bag. Her naked knuckles scraped against the rough and worn bag, and she decided that punching was out of the question without some form of protection for her hands.
Not ready to throw in the towel and head back to the treadmill, Ada took a step back from the bag and repositioned her feet. In one smooth motion, she swiped her right leg toward the bag and grinned as it made contact, rocking the hundred-pound bag side to side with the force of her impact. She followed up with three more roundhouse kicks and then went back for her music. She had finally found an outlet for her nerves.
She started up a more tempo-driven playlist, rolled her shoulders and neck and went back to the bag. She switched her stance to her left side and drove her left leg toward the bag, delighting in each solid slap against the weathered plastic. Her breathing began to spike and she pushed through, tapping into the entrancing pool of determined stamina she usually reserved for long jogs.
With her back to the mirrored walls, Ada had entered her own world of aggressive release and was entirely unaware of anything else but the bobbing and swaying of the bag and the force of her kicks. At the end of a roundhouse kick, she decided to drive her knee into the bag immediately after. She drove toward the bag, expecting it to glide away from her, and instead nearly toppled backwards when the bag hardly reacted to her knee. It was only then that she noticed she wasn’t alone in the gym anymore.
She tore her earbuds out and felt her pulse pounding in her ears. On the other side of the bag, James was firmly holding it in place. He raised his brows at her. “Don’t stop now.”
Ada felt guilty that her first instinct upon seeing James was to grab her things and retreat back to her room. She planted her hands on her hips and tipped her head back to draw in a full breath.
“Unless you’re afraid of making a fool of yourself in front of me.”
Ada dipped her head back down and met James’s taunting leer with an acidic glare. She promptly pushed her earbuds back in and lunged at the bag. She spent the next minute unleashing a torrent of kicks and knee jabs, expertly switching sides and throwing every ounce of herself into her movements. She plowed her foot into the center of the bag with one last kick and was pleased to see James pushed back a step or two with the force. She shut off her music and wrapped her headphone cord around her phone. “All yours,” she said to James between raspy breaths.
James stepped out from behind the bag and Ada got her first look at the agent in something other than FBI garb. He was dressed in loose track pants and a faded FBI Academy t-shirt. He kicked off his running shoes and placed them to the side of the bag. He walked toward Ada and she crossed by him as she swapped places with him behind the bag. “I’ll go easy,” he said with a quick tweak of one eyebrow.
Ada rolled her eyes at him and braced herself against the bag, rooting her feet into the gym floor. There wasn’t much space between the bag and the wall, so she grew slightly concerned that she was about to put some dents in the drywall.
James’s first strike popped her body away from the bag a few inches. Annoyed, she pushed her right heel against the wall and hunkered down for his next hit. His follow-up volley berated the bag with continual force, Ada ricocheting off the bag like hail against a car. She glanced around the side of the bag into the mirrored wall behind James and watched his right fist clip through the air and land a solid hook into the side of the bag, dangerously close to her left forearm. She expected a smear of blood to be left in the wake of his hand, but when she glanced down she saw nothing. His hand came at the bag again, and Ada caught sight of the thick callouses on his knuckles. This was obviously not the first time he’d hit a bag without gloves.
After a few minutes of bone-jarring snaps and thumps, the bag stopped bucking and Ada pulled herself off of it. The fierce competitor in her wanted nothing more than to stay behind the bag. James Deacon had just handed her her pride on a plate. She ran her tongue over her dried out lips and winced as she felt a sharp sting. She quickly dabbed her fingertips against her bottom lip and hissed when she felt a warm wetness. A glance down at her fingers showed that somewhere in the midst of James’s onslaught, her lip must have made contact with either the bag or her teeth and split opened slightly. She sucked on the cut for a few seconds, trying to draw out most of the blood before James could see it.
“You alive back there?” James asked, infuriating swagger in his tone.
She wiped her brow, dabbed at her lip once more to ensure it wasn’t coated in blood, then stepped out from behind the bag and gave him a tight smile. “I’m guessing that wasn’t your first time.”
James studied a minuscule welt on the back of his left hand and shrugged. “I might have been boxing for the past few years.”
“That didn’t feel like regular boxing.”
A devilish glimmer shone in James’s eyes. “There’s a little karate and jiu-jitsu mixed in there. I like to dabble.”
Ada shook her head. “Bastard.”
James chuckled and rolled his neck, unraveling the muscles in his shoulders.
“You’re not even sweating,” Ada spat as she walked around the corner and retrieved her bag. She pulled a towel from the gym’s provided stack and dabbed her face off, secretly blotting her lip.
“Hey, I said I’d go easy.” James walked toward her and leaned against an elliptical machine. “You leaving already?”
Ada glanced down at the inside of her towel and spied a small circle of bright red. She balled the towel up and shoved it back into her bag. “Yeah, I have some emails to get to.”
“I knew you were the sore loser type.”
“I might be the sore loser type that likes to punch the person who beat them.”
James flicked his eyes to her hands and Ada self-consciously crossed her arms to hide them. “Those hands have never hit anything.”
“I thought we were supposed to be trying this friend thing out.” Ada felt that old familiar tang of quivering annoyance crawling around in her belly.
“I thought maybe you had a better sense of humor than this.” James let out a hearty sigh and scratched at the back of his head. “Not everyone appreciates my sarcasm. Sorry.”
Was it really all that surprising that one of the world’s snarkiest people also had an equally grating sense of humor? Ada regretted snapping at him and tried to remedy the situation. “I’m usually better at sensing sarcasm. I’m just really running on fumes right now.”
James nodded and stretched his left foot out, flexing his leg. “We’ll be getting out of here tomorrow morning, after the press conference.”
Ada pulled her bag strap onto her shoulder. “Great! That’ll give me an extra day at home to recover.”
“I mean, it’s just a busted lip. I think you’ll live.”
Ada’s hand flew to her lower lip and her cheeks blazed. “I thought it had stopped bleeding.”
James tapped his lower lip. “It’s pretty swollen right there.” His cheeky grin told her he was pleased with himself, but the softness in his eyes told her that he felt bad.
She looked at him for a moment, relaxed and free from his FBI confines, and she found herself wishing she’d righted things between them sooner. “I’ll grab some ice on my way up to my room.”
As she turned to leave, she watched in the mirror as James straightened and stepped after her. “I think everyone was planning on getting something to eat in the next couple of hours. You could come with.”
Ada met his gaze in the mirror and shrugged and nodded. “Just get me on your way out,” she said to him through the mirror. Then she hurried out of the gym before James could catch sight of her beaming grin. Friends were a nice thing to have.
——
The next morning, Ada followed the BAU team down to the hotel lobby. Still a few minutes from the conference room, she could already hear the simmering buzz of a room full of reporters. This was her first experience with the tail end of an FBI investigation. She had always managed to leave town before the final press conference, mainly because she wanted to avoid the cameras. Even now, as she neared the conference room full of incriminating cameras and microphones, she couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Before they’d started down to the lobby, she had made Brenda swear to find her a place behind the press conference stage.
As the team walked through the lobby and headed down the final hallway, Ada took a moment to absorb everything that had happened with this case. Despite the fact that they still didn’t have a suspect to question, James considered their time in Sacramento a success. They’d quickly located a notebook, they had the boy’s statement of his time with Andrew Bean, and they also had Andrew’s diary, which revealed far more than just his hunting methods. After spending the night pouring over the cluttered book, Ada believed she uncovered a glimpse into how Andrew began his rampage. Even James had agreed that it was something they would pursue.
Ada watched as Dade muttered something into James’s ear and the two men let out a simultaneous rumble of laughter. Something seemed to have clicked with the team. Gone were the awkward conversations and tense “discussions.” The team felt like a unit, and Ada felt a foreign heartache brewing at the thought of getting on the plane back to Seattle.
Brenda, Dade, and James paused for a moment at a pair of double doors. Janice came alongside Ada and took her by the elbow. “The door to backstage is this way.”
Janice and Ada ducked around the corner toward the single door at the back o
f the conference room. As they walked through the door and into the dark backstage area, Ada heard the room spark to life with a cacophony of questions as the rest of the BAU team entered the room through the main doors. Ada followed Janice up a small set of temporary stairs to stage left. She watched as Brenda ascended the front stage steps followed by Dade and James.
The reporters shouted questions at the trio as James stepped up to the podium. James held up a hand and the crowd lowered its volume to a low rumble. “Thank you for joining us this morning. Sorry for the early start time.” James paused and cleared his throat. He laced his fingers together and placed them on the podium. “To begin, I will give you the general details about the case. For obvious reasons, I will not be providing any victim names. As soon as I’m done with our official statement, I will open the floor to questions for five minutes only.”
Janice leaned toward Ada and whispered, “He must be in a good mood. He usually gives them two.”
Ada listened as James expertly delivered the statement she and Janice had crafted. She realized she was deeply proud of the work she had accomplished the past week she had been in California, something she never anticipated when she initially agreed to the entire gig.
Within a few minutes, James concluded his statement and was fielding questions from the once-more raucous crowd. Ada shook her head and murmured, “I thought these things went on forever. He’s going to have us out of here in under fifteen minutes.”
Janice kept her gaze on James and grinned. “This is his element. He’s not really a great people person, but put him in front of a mic and he owns the room.”
“It’s true,” Ada said quietly. She thought she heard something about an analyst and her ears honed in on the crowd.
James pointed to a reporter near the front of the stage. The woman collected her breath before shouting, “Are you still getting help from failed novelist Ada Greene? If so, why is she viewed as an asset to your investigation? Aren’t there better options available to you?”