As they lay in the darkness of her bedroom, in the afterglow of their first time together, Anna’s heart pounding, her legs weak and trembling, her entire body still tingling with pleasure, she had known, with great certainty, that Brody was the boy—the man—she would be with forever.
Funny how things change.
MARLENE’S HADN’T CHANGED much, however. Anna hadn’t been here in years, and it may have been a little worn around the edges, but it had the same red patent-leather booths, checkered tables and surly, disinterested waitresses.
They found their usual spot near the jukebox, both going to it automatically. Although the “forever” that Anna had dreamt of never materialized, the familiarity of the place took her back to those simpler days, when all she wanted was time alone with Brody.
After the waitress brought their coffee, he said, “I think we need to talk about what happened last night.”
Anna was surprised. Brody had always been a doer, not a talker. A creature of impulse. And last night had certainly been an impulsive move for both of them—the product of nearly four years of pent-up desire that ended with the same pounding heart, the same weak and trembling legs, the same tingling of pleasure she got whenever she was with Brody.
But with everything that had happened since, she still hadn’t had time to process the moment, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to talk about it.
“Can’t we just leave it alone?” she said. “Enjoy it for what it was?”
“What was it?”
Anna thought about this, shrugged. “Two old friends trying to comfort each other?”
Brody looked wounded. “Is that all it meant to you?”
“To be honest, Brody, I’m not sure. I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t want it. Or that I wish it hadn’t happened. But we aren’t kids anymore. We have different lives now.” She sighed. “I still love you, you know. That’ll probably never change. But I have complications in my life. There’s Adam to think about and…”
She stopped herself.
Should she tell him the truth?
Could she?
“And what?” he asked.
Don’t, Frank had said. Don’t tell him.
Anna shook her head. She’d waited a long time for this moment, had tried desperately to contact Brody so that she could share the news, but now that the moment was finally here, now that they were sitting face-to-face, she couldn’t bring herself to say it—just as she couldn’t say it last night, when she lay in his arms.
This had nothing to do with what Frank had told her. Despite his overtures of late, she’d written him off long ago and his opinion had never been less important to her.
Still, she hesitated. Brody had a right to the truth—she knew that. But what she didn’t know was where he’d be a week from now. Or a year.
Would he still be in Cedarwood?
Was this something she could count on?
The emotions swirling around them were too raw, too volatile to be introducing something new and unexpected into the mix, and her instincts told her that now just wasn’t the time to broach the subject.
But if not now, when?
“Anna?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It can wait.”
Brody furrowed his brow at her. “What’s going on? I keep feeling like you want to tell me something but you’re holding back.”
“It can wait,” she said again then sipped her coffee in silence.
BY THE TIME THEY GOT back to Owen’s apartment building, it was raining. Not hard, but Brody knew that they were only a thunderclap away from an all-out downpour.
The good news was that the deputies and CSI wagon were gone. Not really a surprise, he supposed, since there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence to gather and the scene had been thoroughly contaminated, especially a week after the crime had taken place.
In fact, coming here again may well have been a waste of their time, but Brody believed in being thorough, and if that RFID tag was somewhere in Owen’s condo, they had to find it.
He didn’t expect the bodies in the van to be identified anytime soon, and that button—and the information encoded on it—was the only thing that might lead them to the truth.
After checking to make sure there weren’t any stray deputies lingering, they made their way up to the fourteenth-floor hallway and saw a fresh new criss-cross of yellow crime scene tape blocking Owen’s door.
Brody pulled it aside and turned to Anna. Ever since they’d left Marlene’s she’d seemed subdued and preoccupied. He knew there were a number of things weighing on her mind right now, and he had decided to give her space.
He’d certainly taken enough of his own.
More than enough.
“Key?” he said.
She came out of her fog then dug around in her purse until she found one. Reaching past him, she unlocked the door and pushed it open.
Brody took the modified RFID reader from his pocket, switched it on then stepped into the living room, feeling Anna right behind him.
The place didn’t look any different. Some of the clutter had been moved, and Brody was sure that the photographs Anna had found and any significant records or paperwork would have been bagged and tagged. But only a trained eye would know that anyone had been here since he and Anna had left the place yesterday.
He kept his arm extended and moved about the room, working his way past the sofa and chairs, the coffee table, the credenza against one wall, stepping gingerly around the contents of the drawers that had been dumped on the floor.
Nothing. The RFID reader remained silent.
They moved to the kitchen. The cabinets hung open and boxes of cereal, bags of flour and sugar and canned goods were scattered across the linoleum, along with pots and pans and drawers full of utensils.
Brody waved the device past all of them, crouching to get low to the floor.
Still nothing. The reader didn’t beep.
They crossed to the bedroom. As it had yesterday, the door hung open, and Brody knew that Anna wouldn’t like what was waiting for them inside, so he repeated his warning.
“You might want to hold back.”
But she shook her head this time. “No. I want to see. I want to know exactly what they did to him.”
They stepped past the threshold, and as Anna stood near the doorway, taking it all in with a look of complete horror on her face, Brody moved about the room, arm extended.
The sheets had been stripped off the bed, but there was still a deep crimson stain on the mattress and blood splatter on the headboard, painting a vivid picture of the violence that had taken place in the room.
There were a couple of trajectory markers, complete with string and flags, and Brody knew that the crime scene techs were trying to establish whether the gunshot wound had been self-inflicted.
In his opinion they should have done this the first time around, and he blamed Frank for not following through.
“You gonna be okay?” he asked Anna.
She had a dazed look in her eyes, but she nodded. “I think so.”
He went back to his task, but still the RFID reader picked up nothing.
As he reached the clutter left by the ransacking of Owen’s desk, he discovered something he’d missed before—probably because it hadn’t held much significance at the time.
It was a pink, rectangular sheet of paper. The duplicate layer of a form that had apparently been filled out and submitted. The header at the top read NORTHBOARD INDUSTRIES, followed by a list of checkboxes, indicating the items that were returned upon Owen’s separation from the company.
Anna had told Brody that Owen had been laid off shortly before his death, and his depression over the loss of his job had contributed to the idea that he had taken his own life.
All of the boxes had been checked off, and Owen’s signature was scribbled across the line at the bottom, along with the date of submission. Nothing unusual here, but one of the listed items caught Brody’s attention.
; “Look at this,” he said to Anna.
She tore her gaze away from the bed and crossed to him. He handed her the sheet of paper.
She took a quick glance. “What about it?”
“Item number three,” he said.
She scanned the list slowly this time, her expression changing as it registered. “A key card.”
Brody nodded. “Which would open just about any secure room in the Northboard building. I seem to remember that Owen had a pretty high clearance rating.”
“He was one of their top engineers. But what are you trying to say?”
“Look at the date under his signature.”
She did. “So?”
“He turned that key card in a few days after he withdrew the five grand and met with the guy at the garment factory. Ten to one the technology behind that card was RFID.”
Anna’s expression grew heated. This wasn’t the reaction Brody had expected. “So you think that’s what he was trying to have cloned? Is that what you’re getting at?”
“It only makes sense.”
“But why?”
“Come on, Anna, I think it’s pretty obvious. Northboard is one of the premier weapons manufacturers in the United States, with more government contracts than either of us can count. There’s a lot of information in that building, locked behind very secure doors, and access to that information would be worth a heckuva lot of money to interested parties.”
“So let me understand this,” Anna said, and he could see that the heat was rising. “You’re telling me that Owen got his key card cloned because he planned on selling that access.”
“I’m afraid that’s what it looks like.”
“You’re saying my brother was a criminal.”
“He’d just been laid off from his job,” Brody said. “These are tough times, and he had a mortgage to pay, a pretty high one from the looks of this place. And even with his skills as an engineer, there was no guarantee he’d get a new job anytime soon.”
Anna shook her head in disgust. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“What do you want me to do? Sugarcoat it?”
“I want you to listen to yourself. Owen was your best friend, for God’s sakes. You know better than anyone that he wasn’t some petty crook. He was a good man.”
“Desperate times lead to desperate measures, Anna. And who knows, maybe he was coerced. The guys he was dealing with weren’t playing patty-cake. Maybe after he got the card cloned, he had second thoughts. His conscience kicked in and he tried to back out on the deal, and he got himself killed because of it.”
Anna’s face was full of fury now. “I can’t believe you’re blaming him. You sound just like Frank.”
“I’m a trained investigator. I have to call it like I see—”
“Owen stood by you, Brody. When people were saying the same kinds of things about you, he told them they were out of their minds. That you’d never take a bribe.”
Brody sighed. “I know that, Anna. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. But we have to look at this thing logically. We can’t discard the obvious because we cared about the guy.”
“And why should I listen to you?”
“I’m just trying to get to the truth here.”
“The truth?” Anna cried. “You want the truth? You’re the guy who couldn’t be honest enough to tell me you weren’t coming back after you left. You’re the guy who ran away when things got tough, because there weren’t enough people like Owen around to support you.” She tossed the pink slip at him now, her anger at its boiling point. “And you’re the guy who abandoned his pregnant girlfriend when she needed him most.”
There was a sudden stillness to the air as Brody just stared at her.
Pregnant?
Anna had been pregnant?
Then the realization came down on him like a crumbling brick wall. “Are you telling me that Ad am…” He could barely get the words out. “…that Adam is mine?”
“I hate you,” Anna said suddenly then turned and ran for the door.
Chapter Fifteen
By the time he got downstairs, the rain was coming down hard and Anna was already climbing into a cab.
Brody raced after it, calling out to her, but it was too late. The car pulled away from the curb, throwing up a wide splash of rainwater in its wake.
Brody crossed to his Harley, his mind full of regret and guilt—but most of all, joy.
Adam was his son.
Their son.
His and Anna’s.
It killed Brody that he hadn’t known that Anna was pregnant when he left. If he had, he’d never have dreamed of going anywhere.
He could only believe that she hadn’t known, either. That the revelation had come in the month or so after he was gone, when he was impossible to get hold of. He could only imagine how she must have felt, holding this news and wanting so desperately to share it with him.
The thought made him heartsick. Ashamed. Angry at himself for being such a damned fool.
As he climbed aboard and kicked the bike’s engine to life, he thought about the instant connection he’d had with Adam, that feeling of warmth and affection as they’d spoken in the upstairs hallway. That bonding of blood between man and boy.
He thought about chocolate chip pancakes and pulling the boy into his lap at the dinner table and reading X-Men to him later on that night. All that time he had believed Adam was another man’s child—yet it didn’t matter to him. The kinship between them was unmistakable. Maybe if he had taken a moment to do the math, he would have realized the obvious truth.
That Adam was his son.
His son.
The idea of this seemed so surreal to Brody that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. As he pulled onto the road, he tried to picture the boy’s face in his mind.
Did he see himself there?
Did Adam look like him?
He remembered finding Anna in those young eyes, and he realized that must have been part of what had drawn him to Adam in the first place. That, and the way the boy had carried himself with a kind of quiet confidence, the understated maturity that had always been part of Anna’s DNA, and so lacking in his own.
All he wanted right now was to get to Anna’s house, to see her and Adam, to do whatever it took to convince her to let him back into her life, to let him be a father to their son—even if she couldn’t completely allow him into her own heart.
They could take it slow. Or fast. It didn’t matter to Brody, as long as she gave him a second chance. Let him prove to her that he had grown, that his selfishness was a thing of the past and would never again keep them apart.
When it came down to it, Brody was tired of being alone. His long, self-imposed exile had made him realize that. And he could think of no better way to remedy the feeling than to get to know his blood. His boy.
His Adam.
HE WAS ABOUT TEN MILES AWAY from the house when he realized he was being followed.
The rain was coming down in sheets, and he had made the mistake of allowing himself to be distracted. Didn’t notice the headlights behind him until it was almost too late.
He’d had to flip his visor up to keep the rain from obscuring his view, but he was riding against the wind and the drops came straight at his face, cold as ice, pummeling him without mercy.
The mirrors mounted on his handlebars were wet and blurred, but he could still see those headlights, turning when he turned, speeding up when he goosed the throttle and slowing down again when he eased off.
He couldn’t see the driver’s face or even make out the model of the car, but he had no doubt that it was following him.
And he wasn’t entirely sure the driver cared if he knew this.
One of the thugs from last night.
Who else could it be?
Turning a corner, he found himself on a long, lonely straightaway bordered by a stone wall on one side and a grassy, overgrown field on the other. With the rain coming down so hard, howe
ver, the field looked more like swampland—something out of a gothic horror flick set in Florida or Louisiana.
He was traveling at a fairly decent clip, about halfway along the stretch of road—only a couple of miles now from Anna’s house—
—when the car behind him made its move.
Without warning, the car swooped in directly behind him, getting a little too close for comfort.
Brody goosed the throttle and roared ahead, but the car rolled in close again, nearly kissing his rear tire.
Brody veered to the left and the headlights veered with him. He hammered the throttle now, shooting forward in a burst of speed, but the car didn’t hesitate this time, keeping a steady, relentless pace behind him.
Brody knew they had to be doing at least ninety now, and the car wasn’t breaking a sweat. Keeping up this kind of speed in the rain was a recipe for disaster, but he couldn’t seem to shake this maniac off his tail.
He veered to the left and the car went with him. Then, as if it had just been dosed by a shot of adrenaline, it sprang forward with a roar and rammed into the back of his bike.
Bumper met tire, the hit rattling through Brody’s bones. The Harley lurched and swerved, the force of the blow ripping him from the handlebars. He hurtled sideways, flipped once and landed in a puddle of mud at the side of the road, the back of his helmet slamming against the ground.
Somewhere at the periphery of his brain he heard his bike crashing as the car’s brakes squeaked, bringing it to a skidding halt. Gears shifted and it went into reverse, pulling up alongside him.
A car door opened and closed, followed by footsteps, as a dark figure moved through the pouring rain toward Brody.
He squinted up at it—a man by the size of him—but his vision was blurred, and darkness was rapidly crowding in on him, threatening to take him away.
The man hovered over him a moment, as if he’d felled an animal and was checking the extent of the damage. Then he turned and hustled back to his vehicle.
As the engine revved and the car tore down the street, Brody struggled to remain conscious. The rain cleared for a brief moment, allowing him a final, unfettered glimpse at the vehicle as darkness finally overcame him.
He was certain he’d seen that car before.
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