Mastiff Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Sad.”

  * * *

  Calder parked his truck in Quinn’s driveway, pleased to see her coming out the front door. He’d been with her just the night before, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Addie, too, seemed pleased to see her new best friend. She stood and bounced on the seat of the truck after somehow managing to get herself out of her car seat without his help.

  “Quinn! We’re here!”

  Quinn laughed as she lifted Addie out of the truck. “I see that. Did you have a good day?”

  Addie nodded. “We painted with our fingers!”

  “Awesome! Did you make me one?”

  “Yeah. But teacher made us leave it at school.”

  “You’ll just have to save it for me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Addie crawled out of her arms and ran up to the house, always excited to be somewhere new, to see things she hadn’t seen a million times before. Calder pulled Quinn into his arms and kissed her, not caring who might see. There had been reporters on her lawn for a few days, but once they figured out the story was elsewhere, they’d gone away. And he was both relieved—at least they had the freedom to do what they wanted now—and disappointed—she’d stayed with them while the reporters were harassing her.

  “My boss’s girl wants us to go to dinner together.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Would you be up to something like that?”

  “Oh, but it’s so normal. Why would I want to do anything normal?”

  He laughed, dragging her closer to him. She laughed, too, turning her head up to his. He kissed her again, but then Addie started yelling to them from the front door.

  “We better feed that child, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so.”

  He followed her into the house, thinking he really liked this domesticity thing. It was something he could get used to. Even his mother seemed to like having them out of the house every couple of nights. He heard her on the phone this evening planning a hot and heavy bridge tournament with her church friends.

  It almost made him choke up with happiness. The last time she played bridge was the day Andi died.

  They were all moving on. Finally.

  Maybe happiness wasn’t quite the myth he’d thought it was.

  Book 3

  Chapter 1

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Southeast Braeburn Drive

  “Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?”

  Ryder watched as the man shifted in his seat, staring straight ahead as though he hadn’t heard a word he said. Clearly nervous. Ryder couldn’t blame him. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen, probably riding around town alone for the first time. The boy clenched the wheel of his small sedan, his knuckles pale in the dim dome light. Ryder leaned forward a little to see the interior of the car better. There were school books on the floor with discarded fast food containers on top. And a heavy paper bag in the passenger seat.

  Must be dinner.

  Ryder straightened again, glancing out of habit more than anything else up and down the length of the car. The lights were all functioning properly, the blinker the kid had turned on when he pulled over still reflecting off and on against the trees and buildings around them. The lights of Ryder’s patrol car were still flashing, too, probably the source of the kid’s anxiety.

  “Hey, this doesn’t have to be a complicated process.”

  Ryder turned back to the kid and then everything happened so quickly he wasn’t even sure his eyes were really seeing what they were seeing. There was a gun, the muzzle surprisingly small as it pointed straight at his face. Ryder stumbled back, not afraid, really, just shocked. The kid fired, tears visible on his cheeks.

  “I can’t go to jail!”

  Ryder held up his hands, shook his head. “No one’s going to jail, kid. You just forgot to signal back there!”

  The kid shook his head again. “You don’t know what I’ve got here. But I can’t go to jail. I can’t let my mom down, my brothers! I can’t let them know what I’ve done!” He fired the weapon a second time. Both shots missed Ryder, but training taught him that the third probably wouldn’t. On instinct, he yanked his gun out of its holster, the first time he’d ever pulled his weapon with the intention of using it. His one thought before he pulled the trigger was of his wife, the girl he’d loved since the first day of sixth grade, having to lay him in the ground. He’d promised her that would never happen.

  He wasn’t going to let this kid make a liar out of him.

  Chapter 2

  Springfield, Illinois

  Kelly Hobart’s Apartment

  Two years later

  “He’s perfect, Kel! Seriously, the most perfect man you will ever meet!”

  Kelly shook her head, gesturing to herself as she swiveled in her office chair. “Do I really look like I’m prepared to meet Mr. Right?”

  “You’re beautiful!” Tracy gestured toward her own body. “People are always telling us how we look like twins. Don’t you think I’m beautiful?”

  Kelly regarded her friend and neighbor, assessing the other woman’s long hair and golden-brown skin. Tracy was a few years younger than Kelly, but she looked even younger. Her skin smooth as silk, her eyes filled with little green and blue specks. But they did have the same body type, the same mixture of African-American and Irish features. Yet, Tracy wore it much better than Kelly felt like she did.

  Kelly hated her rounded nose, hated the slight narrowing of the bridge. She hated that her jaw was so wide, that her brow was high, that her eyes were so widely set apart. And she wished her cheekbones had a little more definition to them. Her sister, Angela, wore the features perfectly. But Kelly had never liked her face in the mirror.

  Well, there was once a time when she did like her features. That was when he would look at her and tell her how perfect she was in his eyes. But he hadn’t done that in a very long time.

  “Kelly! You can’t leave a girl hanging like that!”

  Kelly laughed. “Sorry. You are beautiful, Tracy. But you know that!”

  “Do I?” Tracy crossed the room and looked at her reflection in the tall windows that let in so much of the morning light. Right now, the sun was on the other side of the building, allowing for the reflection and a wonderful view of downtown Springfield. “It’s been so long since a guy said those words to me that I’m beginning to doubt them.”

  “It’s been all of, what, a month?”

  Tracy glanced over her shoulder. “That’s more than long enough!”

  Kelly chuckled, turning back to the computer and the blank word processing screen that stared back at her. Her editor had called her this morning, demanding three chapters by the end of the week. The last book was selling like hotcakes, just falling off the shelves. They wanted the sequel ready to go out by wedding season in June. Never mind that writing great romantic fiction took time, and Kelly had worked on the last book for the better part of a year. Her editor assumed because it was a book populated by all the same characters as the last, it would be easier to write. But, in some ways, it was much harder.

  There used to be a time when all Kelly had wanted was to be able to spend her days doing nothing but writing. Now, she longed for some distraction to take her out of her own head.

  But a blind date was not her idea of such a distraction.

  “You should go out with him, Tracy.”

  “But he thinks that he’s going out with you! I set the Tinder account up in your name, even used that picture that we took at the lake this summer!”

  “Tracy!”

  “You’ve been here over a year and never gone out with a single guy, Kelly. You need to get out!”

  “I told you, I’m not interested in dating a new man.”

  “Your marriage has been over for more than two years. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  Kelly cocked her head slightly, wondering what one of her heroines would say to that question. She couldn’t come up with anything too terr
ibly clever.

  “It takes time to get over that kind of relationship.”

  “But, Kel, locking yourself in this apartment, writing your sexy novels, is not living! You need to get out, experience some of that romance you’re always writing about!”

  Kelly swiveled around again. “I love you for trying, Tracy, but I’m on deadline, and I’m just . . . I’m really not interested in dating right now.”

  Tracy groaned. “You’re going to be sorry! He’s a great guy. We’ve been texting for a couple of days, and he says all the right things. You could have gotten enough dialogue for fifty books talking to this guy! He’s like a dream come true.”

  “You should go out with him, then.”

  “I think I will.” Tracy nodded as though she was trying to convince herself and just had. “I will. You’re supposed to meet him at that new Italian place downtown tonight. I think I’ll go in your place.” She hesitated a second. “You don’t really mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  Tracy grinned widely. “He’ll never know what hit him.”

  She ran out the door like a child whose parents just promised her a trip to the toy store. Kelly shook her head, turning her attention back to the blank word processing page. Three chapters. Writing that much wasn’t an issue. Editing and polishing it by the end of the week? That was an issue.

  She’d better get to it.

  * * *

  Kelly thought it was a nightmare, at first. She rolled over in her bed, tugging the pillow deeper under her head, not even bothering to open her eyes. She knew by instinct that it couldn’t be more than a couple hours past dawn. And she had at least four more hours of sleep in her after staying up until 3:00 a.m. working on her book. But there was color, flashing lights. And it was annoying.

  It had taken some getting used to, living in the heart of the city like this. She’d grown up in the suburbs, and that was where they bought their house when she married her high school sweetheart. Car sounds, people laughing on the streets, emergency lights. It all took a lot to get used to, but she thought she had. But these lights seemed very close.

  Was she still dreaming? She’d had a lot of dreams about the night that changed everything, the night she rushed to the hospital thinking her husband had sustained a fatal wound on the job. It turned out to be quite a different scenario, but the flashing lights on the car that drove her there had found a permanent place in her dreams. Was that all she was seeing?

  But then she opened her eyes and the lights were still there. Blue and red. Strobing lights.

  She got up and went to the window, cautious enough to stand back a few inches so no one in the building across the way could see her—she wasn’t exactly dressed in her Sunday best. The lights were right outside the building, an ambulance and four police cars. The whole block was cordoned off, crime scene tape hanging between light posts. There were dozens of people milling around outside the building, a few disappearing inside, even though it was only 8:00 a.m.

  Kelly’s first thought was Tracy. Wouldn’t she be pissed she missed all this? She hadn’t seen Tracy since Saturday night. She wondered why she hadn’t come by to brag about her blind date. It must not have gone as well as Tracy thought it would.

  That was too bad. Even though Kelly wasn’t interested, she was kind of hoping things would have gone well, if only for Tracy’s sake.

  Kelly watched for a few minutes, not as curious about such a scene as someone else might have been. Kelly might have grown up in the suburbs, but she’d seen enough of this sort of thing, between being the daughter of a cop and marrying one. She was about to go back to bed when she caught sight of a familiar face.

  Forgetting her lack of clothing, Kelly moved up close to the window and stared down into the street. Standing with two cops in cheap suits was a blond woman dressed in business attire. Kelly had to study her a moment, the distance making it hard to see her features, especially since she appeared to be sobbing into a tissue, but she was pretty sure that was Tracy’s friend, the woman she worked with at the PR office. That was Michelle.

  Tracy had introduced them on a few occasions. Michelle picked Tracy up every morning before work because they liked to complain about their bosses over breakfast at a local café before they had to wade back into it for the day.

  But if that was Michelle, where was Tracy?

  And that’s when they brought the body bag out the front doors and carried it solemnly to the ambulance.

  Fear rushed through Kelly.

  That wasn’t . . . That couldn’t be . . .

  She ran out of the apartment, barefoot and wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. She ran down five flights of stairs, too impatient to wait for the elevator. On the third floor, she could hear the hubbub of voices in the hallway. That was Tracy’s floor. But Kelly kept going, needing to see the body, needing to know if it really was her friend.

  She burst out of the building, a couple of cops caught her, holding her back just a foot from the ambulance.

  “Who are you?” a man demanded.

  “I have to see her. I have to know!”

  “Who are you?” the man demanded again, his voice softening just slightly.

  “That’s Kelly,” Michelle said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “She’s Tracy’s neighbor.”

  The detective looked Kelly over, a raw curiosity in his eyes. He nodded just slightly, such a subtle nod that she almost missed it. But the patrol cops didn’t. One of them let her go and went to the back of the ambulance, pulling it open. The other pushed her forward, nodding less subtly to the ambulance attendant, directing her to unzip the top of the body bag.

  It was the worst few seconds of Kelly’s life. It was right up there with that ride to the hospital, the one where she was convinced the love of her life would be lying in the morgue, a dozen gunshot wounds to his chest. But her husband had been alive and well, unharmed, at the end of that ride. She couldn’t say the same for Tracy.

  The attendant pushed the edges of the bag open, exposing Tracy’s face. She was pale, ashy, like she’d forgotten her lotion after a day in the sun. There was blood smeared on one cheek, the hair on one side of her head matted with clots and things Kelly didn’t want to identify. And there were bruises that would never have a chance to expose themselves completely and then fade.

  Tracy.

  Kelly lifted her hand, unable to make herself touch her friend.

  “What happened?”

  The detective standing by Kelly’s shoulder spoke softly. “We think she was attacked in her apartment. There was a struggle. She was hit over the head with a blunt object and strangled.”

  “Did she interrupt a robber?”

  The cop shrugged, the movement of his shoulder brushing against Kelly’s shoulder as she continued to stare at her friend. “You knew her well? Been to her apartment a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you go with us into the apartment and look around? Her friend isn’t in the right frame of mind to do so.”

  Kelly just nodded.

  “If robbery isn’t the motive, then the only other option might be a friend, a former lover, who didn’t like being brushed off.”

  Kelly lifted her hand again, brushing her fingertips over Tracy’s forehead. She was cold.

  Had she been fighting off her killer while Kelly was two floors above her, writing sex scenes between her hero and heroine? Was she fighting for her life while Kelly was living in her head, telling a story that didn’t matter to anyone but her readers?

  The thought was almost unbearable.

  “This happened last night?”

  The cop shook his head. Kelly glanced at him, really getting a good look at him for the first time. He was surprisingly young, a black man with skin that shone like hot cocoa in the morning light, his head shaved bald, his eyes amber, jewel like. He looked like one of those actors on all those crime shows she used to like to watch.

  “Saturday night,” he said.

/>   Those words hit Kelly right in the center of her belly, forcing her to bend over slightly. Had Tracy been lying dead in her apartment since Saturday night? How was that even possible? Why didn’t anyone hear anything? Why didn’t anyone go check on her?

  Why hadn’t Kelly?

  “Oh, God!” she moaned, convinced what little was on her stomach after last night’s long writing session was about to come back up. The detective moved around her, wrapping his arms around her waist as he led her to the curb, calling for a bottle of water as he carefully eased her down onto her bottom. Kelly leaned forward, pinning her head between her knees, trying to catch her breath even as sobs tore through her.

  “I’m sorry,” the detective said softly as he held out a bottle of water to her.

  Kelly couldn’t drink, but she held the cold bottle between her hands, thinking of Tracy lying on the floor in her apartment all that time. What if she’d been alive when the killer left? What if there might have been a chance to save her if someone had been paying attention, if someone had heard the struggle?

  But Kelly knew that the walls in this old building were surprisingly thick. And she knew that Tracy had a lot of art on her walls, sound absorbing frames and pictures that would dull the transmission of sound. But, there must have been an insane amount of noise if she was fighting with someone. Hadn’t anyone heard anything?

  She was sick with the thought, wishing she knew more, wishing she could have done something more.

  “Whatever happened, happened fast,” the detective said almost as if he could hear her thoughts. “And the coroner thinks she probably died Saturday night. She didn’t lie there and suffer.”

  Kelly nodded, but that knot in her stomach that insisted she could have done something wouldn’t go away. Yet, her father had taught her that the best thing she could do whenever something tragic happened was to keep her cool. Be strong. Observe. Ask the right questions. She sat up a little straighter, setting the bottle down to run her fingers through her hair, tearing at the knots that sleep had left there.