by LENA DIAZ,
“Are you always a jackass, or is this a side effect of your stint in rehab?” So much for not letting the kid get to him.
“Bite me, Atwell. Tell me what I need to know.”
Jace reined in his temper and answered Austin’s questions. “In spite of Ramsey’s escapades, everything worked out, even better than hoped. I’m supposed to report to EXIT Inc. tomorrow morning to see about a job. Looks like I’ll be the inside mole for the next few days, or weeks, or however long it takes to bring EXIT down.”
“Time-out, genius. Something isn’t right. Ramsey’s not the type to do what you said he did. He wouldn’t go off half-cocked.”
Jace sat up straighter, his irritation forgotten in lieu of the alarms that were starting to go off in his head. “I’ve only known him for a few months, so I can’t predict his behavior. How long have you known him?”
“Long enough. Plus I’ve got detailed files on all of the Equalizers. And I’m telling you this doesn’t fit his profile. Are you sure he’s the guy you saw?”
A cold feeling of dread settled in the pit of Jace’s stomach. He checked his mirrors and pulled to the shoulder of the road. Then he tried to picture Ramsey, superimposing him over the image of the gunman.
At first blush, they matched up: about six feet tall, muscular build, Caucasian—something he was certain of because the gunman hadn’t worn gloves. And there was nothing remotely female about those hands or the person who owned them, so he discarded the possibility that the person underneath that ski mask could be a woman.
But had the gunman been standing up straight? Or had he hunched down against the cold? If so, he could be even taller than six feet, opening up more possibilities about his identity. But if the gunman wasn’t Ramsey, who was he?
And where was Ramsey?
“You still there?” Concern leached into Austin’s voice, lending it a sharper edge.
“The guy in the van wore a ski mask and a bulky black coat. I assumed he was Ramsey because I had no reason to suspect otherwise. But if you’re right about the profile—”
“I am.”
“If you’re right,” he repeated, “then let’s assume the gunman was someone else and talk it through. There’s no way another guy just happened to drive a white panel van up this mountain and decided to try to kill or kidnap Miss Cardenas at the same time that we were carrying out our mission. Whoever was in that van must have discovered what Ramsey was going to do and decided to take his place. Why, I have no idea. Have you tried calling him?”
“I waited to hear from one of you first, so I’d know the operation was complete. But as soon as you called, I sent him a text through my computer. He hasn’t responded yet.”
A tow truck chugged past Jace down the mountain road with Melissa’s dented-up Jaguar sitting on its flatbed. Jace checked his side mirror. A caravan of police cars was coming down the mountain, with the Cardenas limo cocooned in the middle like a protected head of state.
He grabbed his phone from the console and held it to his left ear so anyone passing would realize he was on a call and wouldn’t assume he had broken down on the side of the road. He didn’t want the delay of any of them stopping to help.
“Have you tried tracking his phone through GPS?” Jace asked.
“Duh. That was the second thing I tried after pinging him. I got nothing.”
The last of the cars headed down the road, its brake lights shining bright in the darkening gloom as a reminder that the sun would set soon. Every minute that passed without hearing from Ramsey made it that much more likely that something bad had happened to him.
“Okay. Keep trying his phone. Call Mason and let him know Ramsey’s MIA. In the meantime, I’ll check his house to make sure he’s not there and retrace his steps.”
Forty-five minutes later, Jace had checked everywhere he could think of and was back on the mountain, taking the same route that he believed Ramsey would have taken for their planned rendezvous. But he’d found nothing.
The sun had set. Temperatures were plummeting. If Ramsey was alive, and the gunman had left him outside in the elements, he wouldn’t last long. They had to find him, fast. And there was only one other option he could think of that might give them the information they needed to locate him.
He called the Equalizer’s home base again and headed down the mountain for the second time that day.
“You found him?” Austin’s anxious voice carried through the phone.
“No. Do you have any contacts who can patch you into the city’s traffic cameras? We might be able to track Ramsey’s movements and see where he met up with ski-mask guy.”
Austin snorted. “Oh sure. I’ll ring up City Hall and ask them to search through hours of video to find the guy who was supposed to scare Miss Cardenas off the road instead of the guy who actually did. That’ll go over well.”
“What happened, Austin? Did you hear they were giving out asshole genes, and you jumped at the head of the line?”
“Actually, I was second in line. Right after you, Asswell.”
Jace gritted his teeth and pulled around a slow-moving truck nursing its air brakes. “Maybe Mason or one of the others has a contact we can use. We’ll brainstorm our options, figure something out. I’m coming in.”
“What? No, no, no, hell no. Now that you’ve made contact with Cardenas, he’ll want to keep an eye on you until he’s convinced you’re legit. He might already have someone tailing you to make sure you’re not associated with any rogue enforcers. If you come to home base, you could compromise everything. You are not coming here.”
“Austin,” he bit out, “I was running special-ops missions while you were still figuring out how to get in some girl’s panties at prom. I know what I’m doing. I know how to make sure no one is following me. And I sure as hell don’t need your permission. I’ll be there in twenty, and you’d damn well better let me in.”
AS HER FATHER’S limousine turned out of her driveway and headed home, Melissa closed the double-glass front doors and slumped against the wall. She should have been worrying about the crazed gunman who’d forced her off the road tonight. Instead, she kept thinking about how hard it was pretending that everything between her and her father was okay. Because it wasn’t, and it hadn’t been for a very long time.
Wait. Shouldn’t the alarm be beeping, warning her to punch in her code before it went off? She straightened and checked the panel. The status light was green. Disarmed.
“Miss Melissa?”
She whirled around, panic seizing her for the split second that it took to recognize the heavy Italian accent of her once-a-week housekeeper. She clutched her purse against her side and pressed a shaky hand to her throat.
The older woman and her adult son had just climbed the steps from the sunken living room into the open, two-story foyer.
“You startled me.” Melissa gave a little laugh and shoved her long hair out of her face. “Why are you here so late, Silvia? And Stefano, you don’t see me enough at the office, so you decided to come visit me at home?”
She smiled to soften her words. Stefano’s role as an EXIT tour guide meant he was usually gone for weeks or months at a time, trekking clients through the Rocky Mountains. But this was the off-season, so he was in the office a lot lately, planning for future trips.
“I never get tired of seeing you, Melissa.” He winked, his spiky dyed-blond hair making her think of warm beaches and sand between her toes, something that would be highly welcome this time of year.
He leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks, a perfect gentleman. But he hadn’t always been that way. Since his mother was her father’s live-in maid, she and Stefano had grown up together. They’d shared everything from kindergarten to high school and had fought like true siblings. But even though she’d been guilty of just as many breaches of her father’s strict code of behavior, Stefano usually bore the brunt of her father’s wrath. That was why Stefano had moved out of the house the moment he’d turned eighteen. Thankfully, tha
t was all behind them. He and her father got along much better as employer and employee than father figure and maid’s son.
Silvia patted Melissa’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, bebe. I was worried when you didn’t show up at your father’s, so I called Stefano to wait here with me.” Her forehead wrinkled as her dark eyes studied Melissa. “Is everything okay?”
She tucked her purse beneath her arm and took the older lady’s hands in hers. Just as Stefano had been like a brother, Silvia Conti had been like a substitute mother after Melissa’s own mother and twin brothers had died when she was a little girl. But to this day, Silvia insisted on formalities, addressing her as Miss Melissa, or bebe only when she was worried or upset.
Melissa squeezed the other woman’s hands. “There’s nothing to fret over. I did have some, ah, car trouble, and Dad picked me up. By the time things were taken care of, it was already getting late, so we decided to skip our planned dinner. He drove me straight home.”
Stefano put his arm around his mother’s shoulders and pulled her against his side. “There. You see, Madre? I told you. Melissa’s a big girl. Nothing to worry about.” He tugged his reluctant mother toward the door and settled her coat around her shoulders before shrugging into his. “Come, Mama. Melissa doesn’t seem like she’s in the mood for company.”
Melissa smiled gratefully but made no move to take off her own jacket that she’d retrieved from her Jag before it was towed. Silvia might see the rip in her dress, and she would worry.
Stefano urged his mother out the door. “Take care, Melissa.”
She forced another smile and waited until they’d gone around the side of the house to the guest parking area before closing the door, shedding her jacket, and hanging it on the hall tree. Once Silvia’s little Honda was on its way down the driveway, with Stefano’s cherry-red BMW following close behind, Melissa flipped the dead bolt. She also settled the long iron bar in place over both doors, an extra lock her father had insisted upon when she’d bought the house but which she rarely used. Tonight, for once, she was grateful for her father’s hypervigilance.
His smothering overprotectiveness was the main reason that she’d moved out of his estate after college and purchased this property in the White Hawk Ranch area thirty minutes away. One of their worst, ongoing arguments was over her refusal to hire a bodyguard. But she had some handguns hidden in her office and her bedroom on the unlikely chance that she’d ever need them. She also didn’t want to feel like a prisoner, or pretentious because she had someone following her around all the time. And she’d never been paranoid enough to think someone was out to get her.
Until now.
After setting the alarm, she slipped out of her heels. She let them dangle from her fingertips and headed through the living room, then up the curving staircase to her bedroom at the end of the long, open-banister gallery.
Once she was ready for bed, she made a detour to the desk by the balcony doors and pulled open the top middle drawer. Two permanent markers lay inside: a black one and a red one. She took them both as well as the key that was hidden on the underside of the desk courtesy of a small magnet.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Silvia when she was here to clean. It’s just that there were some things the sweet woman didn’t need to know about, things Melissa wished she didn’t know about.
The recessed TV cabinet on the wall at the foot of her bed beckoned her forward. She fit the key in the lock and pulled the doors open. In the middle was a large corkboard she’d had custom cut to fit the opening. It matched the corkboards she’d affixed to the back of each door.
There were dozens of photographs tacked to the boards. Colored lines connected them in a complex spiderweb reminiscent of police procedural shows. Except that the man whose picture was at the top middle, the man where all of the lines intersected, wasn’t a stranger or an unknown subject.
He was her father.
She rolled the pens in her hands and studied the photographs and the words she’d written beneath them. Each piece of information was hard-won, from an overheard conversation, or a note her father didn’t know she’d discovered, or a long, painful search on the Internet.
To the left and right of her father’s portrait were photos of his previous assistants, along with security-badge pictures of his two current ones—Sebastian Smith and Tarek Vasile. She hadn’t been able to find any better pictures of them since they didn’t appear to have any social-networking accounts, at least not that she’d been able to find. That alone seemed odd. Everyone was on social media these days. But her wariness about them was heightened even more because of how secretive they acted and the way her skin crawled around them.
They’d been hired as a team, which was unusual. And when she’d asked her father why he’d hired two assistants, he’d claimed it was necessary because of the company’s recent expansion into North Carolina. And they’d supposedly come highly recommended. But somehow he always managed to change the subject whenever she asked to see those recommendations. And there was nothing in their human resources files about previous jobs. She’d checked.
The assistant prior to “the twins,” as she thought of them, had been killed in a home invasion. The one before that? Suicide. Either her father had remarkably bad luck in his choice of executive assistants, or something far more sinister was at work here.
Her stomach clenched as it often did when she looked at the names on these boards and considered the sheer number of people connected to her father who’d died young, violently, or suspiciously.
Including the man she’d been falling in love with. Thomas Hightower.
Bile rose in her throat, but she fought it down. It wasn’t as if she believed her father had killed Thomas, or anyone else. The man who’d fought through his grief for the family he’d lost and forced himself to carry on for his one remaining child could never commit a sin as ugly and horrific as murder. She didn’t believe that, couldn’t believe that. But she couldn’t ignore the evidence in front of her either. Someone was killing these people. And they were slowly and inexorably destroying everything and everyone that her father cared about.
She traced the lines between the names. Most of these people, thankfully, were still alive—at least as far as her research could confirm. Their names were written in black. Other names were written in red, either because they were dead or because she believed they were in danger. One specific subset of names she even put under the label “Enemies,” because she’d heard enough to know that her father thought they were out to get him. Names like Devlin and Emily Buchanan, Ramsey Tate, Mason Hunt.
She knew Devlin and Ramsey and couldn’t begin to understand why her father deemed them a threat. They’d both been excellent EXIT tour guides, extremely popular with clients for many years. And both had quit with no notice within a few months of each other. Shortly after that, she’d started hearing their names whispered in conversations between her father and his assistant at the time.
The other name listed with theirs, Mason, was a man she’d never met. It was only through overheard conversations a few months ago that she’d learned he even existed. Then, just as abruptly, he was never mentioned again. She could only pray that didn’t mean he was dead.
When she’d asked her father if he knew why Ramsey and Devlin had quit, he’d claimed not to know. But that was a lie. She’d overheard Eddie, the head of EXIT’s information-technology department, mention their names when speaking on the phone with her father last summer about an alleged outside hack into the computer system. But just as Melissa had been about to announce her presence and offer to help, she’d been frozen in the doorway by the rest of the conversation. It was bizarre and made no sense.
Eddie had talked about searching some “enforcers” database she’d never heard of to find out what real-estate holdings Mason had so they could find him. And although none of that made sense in terms of the company’s day-to-day operations, what alarmed her the most was the menace and finality
in Eddie’s voice when he swore he’d get the information. The deadly promise in his tone had sent shivers of dread down her spine and had her quietly backing out of the room without revealing her presence. That very night she’d purchased the corkboards and had begun her quest for the truth.
When she’d seen her father next, she’d asked him whether he had any security concerns about their company or its data. She’d purposely been vague and tried to make it sound like she was just asking as part of her due diligence to keep the company operating smoothly. The fact that her father said nothing about his conversation with Eddie had spooked her almost as much as the earlier overheard conversation. Because, for the first time, she realized she couldn’t trust him to tell her the truth.
She looked at the two pens in her hand: black for safe, red for danger. She pictured broad shoulders in a dark blue suit jacket over a fitted white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, minus a tie. Military-short dark hair framed a pair of smoky gray eyes that had looked at her with concern, protectiveness, and a hint of desire that had surprised her. But before she could dwell on the answering thrill that swept through her in reaction to that heated look, she’d seen her father’s eyes narrow with suspicion. And something else . . . something dark and frightening. A look that had her thinking about these corkboards back home, with all the blood-red lines.
Did her father think the man had ulterior motives? That he was connected to the mysterious deaths? It certainly seemed far-fetched to Melissa that an extremely capable, former bodyguard and Navy SEAL just happened to be there in time to save her from a crazed gunman. Perhaps her father was right to wonder about him.
That was one of the reasons that she’d rushed to offer the stranger a job. She wanted time to figure out how he might fit into the pattern if he even did. But more importantly, she wanted to protect him. If he’d garnered her father’s wary curiosity, if he fit into this web somehow, then he could be in danger from whoever was at the center of whatever was going on.