by Sheila Lowe
Greedily sucking air into her oxygen-starved lungs, Jessica dragged herself to a sitting position and looked around the room. The gaping hole in the glass pane of the open French door, the scattering of broken glass on the floor. The horse’s head, its marble surface streaked with blood, lay on its side amid the glass.
Jenna—where is Jenna?
Kapur groaned, his fingers curling into a claw. Not dead. Palmer stopped screaming.
Jessica spoke into the hush. “I guess your little device still needs work.”
“Bitch, you just used up your last chance.” Palmer snatched a wad of cocktail napkins from the tray beside her chair and wedged them between Tariq Kapur’s head and the carpet. “It’s going to be hell to get this blood out.”
Suddenly, she whirled on Zach, who had lowered his gun and taken out his cell phone. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Calling 911. We need paramedics.”
“Put the phone down,” Palmer ordered. “He can’t be found here in this condition. We’ll get him out to your car and you can take him to a discreet doctor. You can find someone.”
“Senator, this man has a serious head wound. He can’t be moved until medical personnel check him out.”
“He can’t stay here! Do you hear me, Zach? He cannot stay in this house! Get him out of here.” Palmer reached over as she spoke and slapped the phone out of Zach’s hand.
Feeling as if her knee had been bashed with a crowbar, Jessica leaned on the cocktail table for support and struggled to her feet. “This is who she is, Zach,” she said as he reached out and gave her a hand. “All she cares about is getting elected. Can’t you see, it doesn’t matter to her who she destroys along the way?”
As far as Jessica was concerned, Dr. Kapur deserved no better than he had gotten, but the Senator’s callous disregard for her ally’s life was beyond comprehension. She glared at Palmer with loathing, as Zach, after making sure she could stand on her own, let go of her. “What made you willing to take this road, Senator? Why would you involve yourself in something so...evil as mind control?”
Palmer’s laugh had a bitter edge. “It’s not me who’s calling the shots. I sold my soul to the devil. I have to be elected—God wants me to be President; it’s a Divine Calling. These people are just a means to get there.”
“Do you know how little sense that makes? You can’t serve two masters, Senator.”
“I do what I have to do.” Christine Palmer turned to Zach, who was checking Kapur’s pulse. “Go find the sister. Drag the bitch back here by the hair if you have to. And if you’re too squeamish about Tariq, I’ll get someone else to do the cleanup. By the way, you’re fired.”
Zach straightened and there was something about the way he looked—no, the way he carried himself—some indefinable change in his stance. Jessica felt it as she had earlier at his apartment. It was as if he had slipped into a different persona.
When he spoke, his voice was a little louder, stronger. “I’m afraid not, Senator. This is where it ends.”
“You seem to have forgotten who’s been paying your very nice salary, Zach,” Christine Palmer sneered. “Don’t tell me you’re suddenly a starry-eyed idealist.”
“No, ma’am, I’m a special agent with the FBI.”
Christine Palmer froze. Then she lunged for his gun hand.
With his free hand, Zach caught hold of her wrist. An unwitting onlooker might have thought they were dancing as they struggled and twisted, their bodies pressed as close as lovers. Zach’s arm came up, pointing the gun at the ceiling. Palmer brought up her foot.
Still trying to process what had just happened, Jessica yelled a warning, but it came too late. Palmer’s stiletto heel raked Zach’s leg. For half a blink, instinct bent him forward; long enough for Palmer to get both her hands around his weapon hand and pull it down between them.
The gunshot was a deafening explosion.
Zach went down on his knees, his weapon still in his hand. His other hand clutched at his throat, where blood blossomed.
“You shot him!” Jessica cried, her ears ringing. “Are you crazy?”
“I didn’t shoot him,” Palmer screamed. “He shot himself, you saw it!” She whipped around and backhanded Zach across the face. “FBI? I hired a fucking FBI agent? You lied to me, you son of a bitch.”
As if she realizing only now what she had said, the Senator gasped. Her eyes went as glassy as Jenna’s had under the control of the transmitter.
Zach’s face had drained paper white. Blood seeped through the fingers he pressed to his throat and ran down his wrist as he struggled to get to his feet.
Jessica moved to help him. The greyish blue tinge to his lips worried her. She could tell that though he was going into shock he was struggling to stay upright and in control. Still clutching his weapon, he collapsed in a heap against her.
“Hang on, Zach, I’m calling for help.” Jessica said in a loud voice. She helped him to the floor and grabbed his phone, slid her shaking fingers across the screen. If he lost consciousness it would be all over.
She was waiting for the call to connect when a commotion outside drew her attention. Running feet on the patio. Loud slamming of doors in other parts of the house. Men in tactical vests, weapons drawn, swarmed into the room, yelling.
“Freeze. FBI! FBI! Drop the weapon!”
“Everyone on the floor! Get down! Get down!”
For the third time in the space of five minutes, Jessica found herself face down in the carpet. She could feel the flurry of activity around her as doors opened and closed. Agents moving fast, yelling to each other, each identifying a target. Phone exchanges with paramedics. Rapid fire questions for the Senator. “Who else is in the house? Are there any other weapons? Anyone else injured?”
Then Jessica heard a familiar voice that made her go limp with relief: “That’s my sister. Let her up. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Jenna.
Strong hands reached down and encircled Jessica’s arms, hauled her upright.
f o r t y – f o u r
FBI Special Agent Zach Smith woke up in a hospital bed with Jenna Marcott on one side and Jessica Mack on the other. He did not know which twin was which, but he did know that the man standing at the foot of his bed was Case Agent Roland Sparks, his boss.
Sparks told them that Zach had been lucky. The round fired from his service weapon had missed his spine by a fraction of an inch, cleanly exiting the back of his neck. The bullet had struck the trachea just below the larynx, requiring surgical repairs to muscle and tissue. The doctor had said it might take a week or more before he healed well enough for removal of the trach tube. Until then she would not know whether his voice would return to normal. For the moment, he was unable to speak at all.
“But why did he have to spy on us?” Jenna wanted to know after being assured that Zach was going to recover.
“Think of it more as keeping watch over you,” Sparks said with a touch of irony.
“By kidnapping us?” That was Jessica.
Zach, frustrated by his inability to speak, moved restlessly in the bed. Jenna covered his hand with hers, reassuring him with a smile.
“He knew our emergency team would be monitoring the situation,” Sparks said with an almost-smile. “When he picked up Ms. Marcott from the hospital and she told him about being kidnapped and implanted with a behavior control device, it instantly changed the direction of our investigation.
“We were suddenly looking at a very different matter from diversion of campaign contributions and illegal use of funds, which is what we had been investigating for several months. He called me for instructions, then brought you up to his apartment to keep you out of harm’s way until we could get our operation in place.”
“You mean you had your people up on that hill already when we got there?” Jessica asked.
“No, they were right behind you, waiting for Agent Smith’s signal. He was wearing a wire. We were listening in the car. Having a U.S. S
enator involved made it a highly sensitive situation.”
Jessica couldn’t help noticing how different Sparks looked in his dark grey suit and crisp white shirt with silver silk tie. She had not had time to think about his looks when the five-person emergency rescue team had burst into the study, guns drawn, everybody shouting at once. Leading his team into Senator Palmer’s home, Sparks had been wearing a bulletproof tactical vest over his shirt, FBI emblazoned across it in large yellow letters. He cleaned up pretty nicely.
Being laid out and handcuffed by the FBI, even for just a few minutes, was an experience Jessica would be happy to forget. Senator Palmer and each twin had been separately moved to other locations in the house until the agents were able to question them.
As a U.S. senator Christine Palmer was accorded greater deference than the run-of-the-mill arrestee would receive, but she had suffered the same indignity—on the floor, cuffed, patted down. She had immediately lawyered up and clammed up.
Later, Jessica and Jenna wondered to each other whether the senator, with the backing of the Morton Brothers, would manage to slide out of whatever federal charges might be lodged against her. More likely, since she was no longer of any use to them—her presidential campaign was of course in tatters—she would be left twisting in the wind.
Then there was the urgent matter of the device that had been implanted in Jenna’s head. The sisters had spent long hours being interviewed—or interrogated, as Jessica thought of it—on what they knew about Project 42. The flash drive had been commandeered, but Roland Sparks’ superiors pressed for more.
“You want what?” Jenna cried in horror when he forwarded their proposal. “You want me to leave this thing in my head so your people can experiment on me?”
Sparks had the grace to look sheepish. “That’s not quite what I meant, Ms. Marcott.”
“What quite did you mean, then?”
“It’s just that the scientists we’ve been talking to are viewing it as an incredible opportunity to study the effects of the microchip, and since it’s already implanted...Hey, don’t kill the messenger.”
She stared at him, trying to figure out whether he was serious. Were FBI agents ever not serious? She couldn’t tell. “You saw what I did to Dr. Kapur. He might have permanent brain damage—not that he doesn’t deserve it—but the effects of the device are totally unpredictable. You know about Matthew Casey attacking my sister. Why don’t you go experiment on him?”
SAC Sparks was shaking his head. “We will be talking to him, and all the other people in the study, too. Look, I’m not saying you should do it. But you do have a unique perspective, considering your former relationship with BioNeutronics....”
“Are you totally out of your mind? You must think I’m out of mine. This thing is gone the minute I can find a neurosurgeon to dig it out of my head. Now, am I under arrest for something, or do I get to leave?”
Sparks shrugged. “We have no reason to hold you.”
Jenna snatched up her purse and headed for the door.
f o r t y – f i v e
Jessica Mack gazed through the window at the ocean and thought about her last trip aboard Amtrak’s Surfliner. Three weeks ago—a lifetime—she had awakened to find herself traveling north with no idea of who she was or where she was headed.
Her memory still had holes in it, but her past was returning piece by piece and she was confident that with the help of Dr. Gold, everything she needed to remember would be restored. Meanwhile, she was returning to her apartment in Escondido to file for divorce and prepare herself for her Greg’s trial. It meant once again reliving the death of her child, but Jessica had come to understand that the pain of remembering Justin was more bearable than the pain of forgetting him.
On this trip, Jessica was traveling with her twin. Jenna had her own demons to face, her own grieving to do, but this time the sisters would grieve together and decide what they wanted the future to look like.
Senator Palmer had bailed out of federal custody. If a trial ever happened, considering her resources and all the high-priced lawyers at her disposal, it would be a long time coming and the results seemed dubious. Meanwhile, the media was wetting themselves over the juicy story, exploring every angle down to the last syllable, 24/7.
Zach remained in the hospital, recovering from his injury. The sisters had stayed at his bedside the first night and day, departing with a solemn promise to stay in touch.
There had been something in his eyes when he looked at Jenna—something that made Jessica believe that once her twin gained some distance from Simon Lawrie’s death, love could find her again. She had not mentioned this, didn’t need to; they were identical twins—two halves of the same whole.
“I couldn’t believe Zach’s boss wanted me to be their guinea pig,” Jenna said, pulling Jessica’s attention away from the scenery outside the window. “He couldn’t expect me to just leave this thing in my brain until they figure out how it works, could he?”
“Maybe he should have one implanted in his head, see how he likes it,” Jessica countered with a grin. “He was actually kind of hot.”
Jenna mirrored the grin back at her. “Yeah, Ariel, I saw you how you were looking at him.”
Jessica admitted with a secret smile that she would not be averse to putting Roland Sparks back in the frame. She was aware that it would be unprofessional for him to say anything while she was involved in the case, but she had definitely sensed a return of her interest. “Maybe I can transmit some thoughts to him without an implant,” she said.
They both laughed. And for just a few hours, they put aside their fears about the chip still embedded in Jenna’s head and pretend they were nothing more than two sisters taking a train ride south to Escondido.
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Turn the page for an excerpt
from the next exciting
Claudia Rose Forensic Handwriting Mystery
Coming in 2014
INKSLINGERS BALL
CHAPTER ONE
It started with a phone call.
The familiar ringtone had already jarred her out of a sound sleep, but Jovanic rolled out of bed and carried his phone into the bathroom, trying not to disturb her further. Claudia Rose lay in the dark listening to his low voice filter through the wall, wondering where the person at the other end of the line was sending him tonight. The numbers on the bedside clock glowed two thirty-three.
Rolling over, she reached for the thermal blanket crumpled at the foot of the bed and drew it up over her bare shoulders. The words themselves were indistinct, but she could tell by his tone that something was amiss.
Moments later, the sound of the shower beating against the wall told her the call had ended. Three minutes in and out; running water in the sink—brushing his teeth, a hurried shave.
Because he always considered her comfort Jovanic turned off the bathroom light before he opened the door. Yet, despite his quiet movements through the bedroom, Claudia knew from the click of the security snap that he had holstered his Glock; from the whisper of cotton against acetate that he was shrugging into his suit coat. She knew from the muttered curse under his breath when he stumbled against the sharp corner of the bed frame while hunting for his dress shoes.
Before heading out, he leaned down and dropped a light kiss on the top of her head. She propped herself on one elbow, seeking him through the shadows. “Where is it?” Her voice was still thick with the remnants of her dream.
“Shhh. Go back to sleep.”
“Tell me; where are you going?”
“Venice.”
“You sounded upset.”
Jovanic hesitated. “Homicide upsets me.”
“Not like that, it doesn’t.”
Already halfway through the bedroom door, he paused in the frame before turning back, chilling her with his words. “It�
�s a kid.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Like her fictional character Claudia Rose in the award-winning Forensic Handwriting Mysteries series, Sheila Lowe is a forensic handwriting expert.
She’s also the author of the internationally acclaimed non-fiction books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis and Handwriting of the Famous & Infamous. Sheila lives on the West Coast in Ventura with Lexie, the Very Bad Cat.
www.claudiaroseseries.com
www.sheilalowe.com
[email protected]