by Misty Evans
Stepping off the concrete, he peered up at the apartment. This was the safe house?
Hope was peering at him through her windshield. A quick scan of the area showed they were definitely alone in the alley and few of the buildings had windows. Even those that did couldn’t get a clear view of this alcove.
Brice took the steps two at a time. The key fit in the lock and a second later, the door opened.
“Hello?” He leaned in slightly. The place was small but immaculate—the complete opposite of the outside appearance. “Anyone here?”
When nothing but silence met his question, he deleted the less than nice text he’d been about to send Grey and went to get Hope.
“Here we are,” he said, guiding her out of the car and up the steps before she had time to even look around. “We’ll be safe here for now.”
She hesitated before stepping across the threshold. “Safe from whom?”
Jostling her into the apartment, he gave the area one more scan before shutting the door and locking it. When he turned, he found her arms crossed over her chest and her gaze boring into him.
“If this is another of your paranoid delusions…,” she started.
Delusions? “I may be paranoid but I’m not schizophrenic.” He moved around her, tossing the key on a side table. The entry was in the middle of a brightly colored kitchen and a comfortable looking living room. “Teeg found evidence that Turner was indeed murdered on that bridge, and not over a road rage incident.”
Her forehead creased in a frown. “What kind of evidence?”
“You might want to sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“A hit was put out on Turner on a murder-for-hire forum on the Deep Web. A forum hidden behind the pretense of a dating site. One linked to Joel, by the way. We don’t know who put out the hit, but there was a follow-up photo for proof of death.”
Teeg had yelled at him on his way out of the armory about what happened next. “Teeg took screen shots, but the postings disappeared the minute someone realized he was doing so. Wiped clean out. There’s no way to trace who posted the hit or who responded.”
“I don’t understand the Deep Web.”
He rubbed his forehead. How quickly he’d forgotten he was dealing with an innocent. “The part of the internet the general public doesn’t know about and never accesses. It’s a haven for criminal activity.”
At her blank look, he searched his mind for something she would recognize. “Blue Silk trial? Ever see that story in the news?”
Recognition sparked in her eyes. She smacked her forehead with her hand. “Of course. Sorry, it’s been another long, flippin’ day. I do remember that trial. Had something to do with a criminal kingpin brokering deals and laundering bitcoins into real money. The FBI wanted to charge him with being an accessory to murder-for-hire killings, as well, but the judge threw those out.”
Bitcoins were the commerce used on the Deep Web. “That’s the one.”
“Damn.” She ran her hands through her hair, pulling it tight at her temples. “So we don’t really have evidence to prove anything.”
“Except those screenshots. And the posting is in code. There’s no direct mention of Turner. Or Kenton Labs. It’s all circumstantial. Even the post-death shot. Any decent attorney could claim it was taken by a bystander on the bridge.”
She walked slowly over to a gray suede loveseat and sank down on it. Her eyes were big in her face as she peered up at him. “And now someone’s after you? Like as in one of these paid assassins?”
“Looks like they want to take down my blog, and the only way to do that is take me out.”
Her body gave a slight tremble as if she were cold. “Because you’re digging into this Turner thing?”
“We’re digging into this Turner thing. You and me. If I’m a target, so are you. We’ve both been poking the hornet’s nest and this is the fallout.”
She bent forward, elbows on knees, and hung her head in her hands. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
He rushed into the kitchen, throwing open cabinets until he found a bowl. Hauling ass back to Hope, he handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said, her face too pale. “That car that nearly ran over me on the bridge? You were right.” Her voice hitched as reality drove home exactly how deep the shit had gotten. “Someone tried to kill me!”
He eased down onto the love seat next to her and drew her against his chest. Filtered sunlight shone through the blinds, reflecting off dust particles floating in the air. “You’re safe here, Hope, with me.”
Chapter Thirteen
The bowl hit the floor as Hope brought her hands up to cover her eyes. Craziness. Turner, the Deep Web, an assassin. All of it. She drew in a long breath, squeezed her eyes tighter willing the sickness rolling in her stomach to beat it. Just hit the road. Vamoose.
Somewhere along the way, her life had whirled from her organized plan, spinning faster and faster with her trailing behind, chasing it like a frantic parent, desperate to grab hold and reel it back to safety.
Her life.
Her control.
She could do this.
But she needed Hawk’s hands off of her. When he touched her something short-circuited in her brain and she turned into a horny teenager. For the love of God, she hadn’t been with a man in months and the ones she had been with barely got her temperature above freezing. But Hawk? That man could melt an iceberg. Where was he when the Titanic needed him?
And worse, he made her feel weak.
At least that’s what it felt like right now. Like she needed coddling. Comforting. And that wouldn’t do. Not one bit. All the men before were just…there. With them there was none of this weakness. This vulnerability. Hawk was different. Extremely so.
And they were in a pickle here. She glanced around the safe house, took in the sagging window sheers littered with snags and pulls.
The pickle had crappy curtains.
Where is my brain?
She dug her fingers into her forehead. Think. “How long will we be here?”
He shrugged. “As long as it takes. And before you start bitching about not having your stuff, we’ll send someone to your place—a woman—to grab you some things.”
“I can’t even go home to get clothes?”
“No. Someone could be watching. But I have a friend, Caroline, she works with Teeg. She can go to your place.”
With all this subterfuge Hope might as well be a criminal on the run. And how the hell did she wind up the bad guy?
No. No good. These negative thoughts. Nuh-uh. All she needed was to corral her emotions, get this wild sense of chaos under control and organize it into pieces. When she’d been an intern chasing stories she’d mindmap all of her leads, drawing circles around them and connecting them with arrows until it all started to form some order. Until a story developed.
That’s what she’d do now. Pulling out of Hawk’s arms she popped off the love seat and paced the room to rid herself of the negative energy tearing her up.
“Hope? You okay?”
She spun back on him and pointed. “I’m fine. And I’m not an infant. So, as much as I appreciate this whole Tarzan thing you’ve got working, I don’t want to be babied.”
His eyes narrowed and his face took on a hard look she so far hadn’t come close to seeing. “Babied?” he repeated. “That’s what you think this is?”
“I don’t want to fight.”
“Jesus, Hope, you’re tough.”
Exactly what she wanted to be.
Wasn’t it?
Perhaps not with the way he looked at her, that steel gaze and...disappointment...yes, that’s what it was, all over him.
She held her hands up. “Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I could say I didn’t mean it, but that would be a lie and I won’t lie to you. I don’t want to be coddled. Am I scared? Yes. Do I want to give into that? No? T
hat’s all I meant. If I give into it, it’ll destroy me. It’ll prove I’m weak and you can bet your life that’s not something I ever want to be. So, please, let’s just do something here. Let’s figure out how we got into this mess and get the heck out of it. That’s what I need. Please.”
He studied her for a long minute and she imagined all the descriptors—whackjob, lunatic, psycho—roaming inside his brain.
Finally, he jerked his head. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I get it.” He grabbed his messenger bag off the floor and flopped it onto the crummy, about-to-fall-down coffee table. “You need to get some form of control back.”
Yes. Exactly. She nodded, thankful for the understanding. “What are we doing?”
“We’re going through all the screenshots Teeg gave me. We’ve got emails, copies of Joel’s phone bills, texts. It’s a lot of tedious crap, but hey, you wanted to do something. Gerard is looking deeper into the cab driver, by the way, and I’m still looking at Kenton’s board and the scientist—Dr. Block—for possibilities. For now, let’s hit Joel. He’s the one that led us to the dating site.” He handed over a stack about an inch thick. “Here you go, sweetness. Start reading.”
This is what she needed. Tedious or not, it was work. And progress. Even if nothing came of it, she wouldn’t be sitting here crying over her rotten situation.
She wouldn’t be collapsing under pressure.
She snatched the papers away from him. “You’re on, Hawk. What am I looking for?”
“I have no idea. Just start reading and flag anything suspicious.”
Two hours later, after a rather delicious lunch delivered from the Chinese restaurant three doors down, Hope had read through at least three hundred emails, texts and memos. Nothing suspicious. Not one darned thing.
“Hawk, I’ve got nothing here.”
He held up a finger. “Hang on.”
“Hang on what?”
He scooted to the edge of the sofa, set the sheets he held in his hand aside and rifled through the stack on the coffee table.
“What are you looking for?”
“Texts. From—” he glanced at the sheets he’d set aside “last month. Do you have anything dated last month?”
That would be easy to know because she’d sorted her stack into chronological order by item type. She perused the three piles in front of her, found the one marked TEXTS/JAN-FEB. ”Sure. It would be in here. What do you need?”
“February twenty-second. 3:07 PM. I have the first part of the exchange. I need the last bit.”
She fired through the stack. “Why? What is it?”
“Not sure. It’s Joel having a conversation with Charley and Charley talking about someone else. ‘My guy’, he’s calling him. Let’s see who his ‘guy’ might be.”
Hope located the pages marked the twenty-second and dragged her finger down the list of time-stamped texts. Did this kid do any work? Who had time to send this many texts in a day? His data rates must have been outrageous.
“Got it!” She held up the page and pointed. “Right here. Charley says ‘I’ll talk to my guy. Thanks for the info’.”
Hawk slouched back. “That’s it?”
“Yep. Why?”
“Damn. I thought maybe it was something. I got a weird feeling about it.”
Hope stood, stretched her back and rolled one hand. “Not so fast there, big guy. Let’s go with that. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. It’s a weird conversation. Almost like it’s in code. Joel is telling Charley about a restaurant opening next month and Charley is saying he’ll talk to his guy about it. I mean. Who cares? Google it. Right?”
“Right. Unless it is code for something else.”
Hawk waggled his finger at her. “Yep.”
“We need to see Charley’s emails or texts or whatever for the time period right after this. Maybe he contacted whoever ‘his guy’ is. Can Teeg get us that?”
A wicked grin slipped across Hawk’s face. “Well, look at you coming to the dark side.”
“Listen, baby, my career is going down in flames. I might as well.”
Chapter Fourteen
A storm was moving in, darkening the skies as dusk approached. Brice had gone back and forth with Teeg, spelling out what he wanted and pushing the kid to do whatever it took to hack into Charley’s accounts.
Illegal? Hell, yeah. So was bribing Supreme Court clerks and possibly being tied into a judge’s murder.
Thunder sounded overhead. A soft rain pelted the windows. Hope had disappeared a few minutes ago down the hall while Brice paced the floor with Teeg on the line.
“This Charley guy has a bunch of email accounts, all personal, each labeled by the company or industry he’s pushing legislation for,” Teeg said.
“Any associated with Kenton?”
“They’re listed under an umbrella account called Pharmaceutical. Want me to look into that folder and get the emails?”
“Absolutely. In his texts with Joel, he referred to ‘my guy’. I want to know who that is.” A sound in the back of the apartment caught Brice’s attention. Was it coming from the bedroom? He glanced down the hallway, saw the bedroom door was closed. “So I need Charley’s texts too.”
A heavy sigh. “That will take longer, but yeah, I can do it. The phone companies aren’t as easy to hack into as Outlook.”
Microsoft made hackers very happy on most occasions.
Brice heard another sound...a squeak? A hiccup? Maybe it was the noise of the salon downstairs or the storm outside. “Thanks, man. I owe you.”
“I’m sure Grey has plans for you to pay him back for my time.”
I’m sure he does. “Forget it. I’m not working for the Justice Team. Any more on the Deep Web stuff?”
“Nada. Maybe that bulls-eye thing was just a bluff.”
A bluff. Right. And moonbeams would shoot out his ass later. “When Caroline has a chance, I need her to pick up some stuff from Hope’s place.”
“Grey already sent her to grab clothes for you and for Hope. She should be by to see you after dark.”
“She doesn’t need a key for our places?”
“Would you?” Teeg snorted. “She’s a Fed, man, and she’s Caroline. She can look at a lock and it cowers in fear.”
For the first time that day, Brice smiled. “Roger that. Is she going to make me sign a contract with Grey before she releases our clothes?”
“In blood if Grey has any say in it.”
Brice owed the man for this, but he was not selling his soul. “Call me as soon as you get those emails and texts.”
They disconnected and Brice stood looking at the pile of papers on the coffee table. He needed a conspiracy board to lay everything out and...damn it. There was that muffled noise again.
“Hope?”
He started down the narrow hallway. The walls were covered with cheap paneling. He wasn’t too sure there was anything but a few studs underneath. He could probably punch the wall and go right through to the other side.
He heard a sniff as he stopped next to the bedroom door. “Everything okay?”
“What?” Another sniff and the sound of her blowing her nose. “You bet,” she said in a falsely cheery voice. “Peachy keen. Now go away.”
There was a hiccup in that cheery voice that kept him planted where he was. “Are you trying to sleep?”
“Haha. Yeah, sleep.” He heard another catch in her voice. “Like I could sleep right now.”
The doorknob was a brass number straight out of the 1980s. He tried it, found it locked. A niggle of worry set up shop in his gut. “Why is the door locked?”
“Because I need...I don’t know...space.”
For all her bluff and swagger, she was freaking out. He understood the feeling. When Wes and the ATF had pulled the rug out from under his feet, he’d been in the same situation.
“A part of me just wants to run, you know? To get out of town and clear my he
ad. Two days ago, I woke up and everything was perfectly normal. Now, everything is spinning out of control and I don’t know what to do to stop it.”
There was no way to stop it and that was the true crux of the matter for Hope. The young, naive girl she’d been two days ago had been bombarded with the ugly and unforgiving side of life in D.C. “We’re going to get through this,” Brice told her through the door. “I’ll get to the bottom of this, Hope, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll find the bastard that tried to run you down and I’ll hang him by his balls. I’ll also do everything in my power to clear your name and get you your job back.”
Silence. He snugged an ear against the door and listened. Sure enough, he heard a muffled crying, as if she were trying to silence it by shoving her face in a pillow.
That sound. Her trying to hide that she was scared, and angry, and devastated. He wanted to punch the wall.
Damn it all to hell. He jiggled the doorknob. “Unlock the door, Hope.”
“No. I’m…fine.”
Right. That’s why she was crying even harder now.
He rattled the doorknob harder. He wasn’t Caroline. Locks did not cower for him and he had no credit card this time. “Hope…”
“Go away! I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“I’m not going away. Open the damn door.”
“My life was normal.” Her breath hitched. “I had the White House in my sights, and then...and then...this happened. Now it’s ruined. Everything I believed in is...gone.”
“Nothing is gone. You’re just on suspension.” He jammed his shoulder into the door and felt it budge a little. “I told you, I’ll figure out how to clear your name.”
“But that won’t change the fact that Chief Justice Turner was assassinated and that certain people in my office are more worried about covering up a scandal than seeing justice done.” Another sob ripped from her throat. “Isn’t that the exact thing the Supreme Court stands for? Justice? Truth? Fair and equal treatment?”
He couldn’t stand the disappointment and sheer anguish in her voice. It wasn’t just her life being turned upside down that was killing her. It was the fact that all her pie-in-the-sky, Mary Sunshine ideals were being shredded.