Twin Targets

by Jessica Andersen

  “Do you blame yourself?” he asked, surprising himself with the question.

  “That would be silly.” They both knew that wasn’t really an answer. “Besides, that’s not the point, is it? The point is that Celeste does have it and I do feel guilty on some level. I also love my sister and want her alive and able to live her life to the fullest, so I went into Singer’s research. Then my funding dried up….” She paused. He had a feeling there was more to that story than she was letting on, but before he could ask, she continued, “Tiberius made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I convinced myself it was okay to let him use me as a legitimate front, as long as my work was going to help people.”

  “Only it wasn’t.”

  “Exactly.” She exhaled. “After about five months, once I’d designed the vector capable of suppressing the cell’s ability to transcribe the expanded region and tricking it into making a normal protein instead, Tiberius gave me twenty new repeats he wanted me to work on in parallel. The moment I saw they were dinucleotide repeats, I knew what he was actually after.”

  John sent her a sharp look. “Just like that?”

  She shifted uncomfortably and turned to look out the window, where the sky was starting to lighten with dawn. “Not exactly. I’d mentioned once or twice in passing that I thought repeat recognition technology could be used to block DNA fingerprinting.”

  He could tell from her body language she wasn’t talking about a passing conversation among colleagues. “Let me guess. Research conference?”

  She winced. “Worse. A review article.”

  He just shook his head. “Great.” Now that the thought was out there, Tiberius probably wasn’t the only one trying to develop the technology. Even once they took him down, they’d need some serious damage control, and probably a backup plan for CODIS.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  He said nothing, because right at that moment he didn’t have anything nice to say.

  WHEN THEY REACHED D.C., one of the newer field agents was waiting to lead them to a big black SUV of the type most field offices were buying these days. The younger agent slapped a bubble light on the roof of the vehicle, and that, combined with a few strategic horn blips, was enough to get them through the city traffic and over to Glen Hills, Maryland, in under an hour.

  Still mulling over what he’d learned from Sydney on the plane, John checked his messages and called for an update while they were en route.

  He got his team’s forensics expert, Drew Dietz. “There’s practically nothing for forensics to work with,” Drew reported. “And most of what we do have is probably going to trace back to the victims. Whoever was in here was good.”

  “Probably, but we’re better,” John said. “Keep at it.” He hung up, and when Sydney looked over in inquiry, he shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

  She looked fragile and lost, sitting huddled against the far door with what felt like a mile between them, and for a second he was tempted to tell her everything was going to be okay.

  But he didn’t.

  It was almost full light out when they pulled up in front of a stately old Victorian that easily dated back to the late 1800s but looked like it had been carefully updated in the years since, with modernizations that had maintained the historical charm. The shingles were painted some pale color he couldn’t distinguish in the false light of dawn, the shutters and trim were accented in a darker hue and the grounds were landscaped neatly, if simply.

  It might’ve looked like something out of a magazine, except for the police cruisers and black SUVs parked in the driveway and on the street in front of the house, in the typical hurried scatter that John knew indicated that violence had been done inside.

  “Nice house.” John decided he should just expect the unexpected when it came to Sydney Westlake. He would’ve pegged her for an ultramodern, superefficient condo. Instead, she lived in a painted lady.

  “Before she got sick, Celeste wrote some seriously groundbreaking security programs. They pretty much paid for this place,” Sydney said, answering his unspoken question. “The technology has moved on, though, and the residuals started drying up a couple of years ago. That was why—” She broke off, then correcting herself said, “That was partly why I took the job with Tiberius. We needed the money to keep this place up. I couldn’t ask her to move, though. She’s so happy here.”

  What about you? John wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead he said, “You ready to go in now, or would you rather wait until they’ve removed the bodies?”

  She shuddered, but visibly collected herself and reached for the door handle. “Let’s go. Maybe I’ll see something that’ll help us find Celeste.”

  As he followed her to the front door, John thought that was highly doubtful, given that she hadn’t been in the house for a year, but he also knew she needed to go inside, needed to prove to herself that her sister was gone. He’d seen it before with victims’ families, and would no doubt see it a thousand times more over the next couple of decades, because he was in this for life.

  Major crimes—and the apprehension of major criminals—were in his blood. He hadn’t gotten it from his globe-trotting musician parents, who lived for the next concert, the next party, and freely admitted they never should have reproduced. No, he’d gotten the cop gene from the uncle and great-uncle he’d visited during the short gaps between boarding school and sleep-away camp. Both of the older men had lived and died on the job, one as a cop, one as a Fed, neither married to anything but police work.

  John figured he’d learned most of what he needed to know from them, including the dangers of becoming too friendly with witnesses, victims or snitches.

  We’re cops, not social workers, his great-uncle used to say. Friendship doesn’t change the evidence, but it can sure as hell change your perception of it. Better to leave affection out of things.

  Now, as he watched Sydney hesitate before pushing open the front door, the cynical part of John hoped she’d break down and tell him everything without waiting for execution of the immunity deal, and without withholding the parts she thought might help her if things went south. Another, deeply buried part of him—the part his great-uncle would’ve warned against—wished he could shield her from walking through her front door and seeing a handprint-size smear of blood on the lowest tread of the center stairwell, right beside the mechanical track her sister must’ve used to move her wheelchair from one floor to the next.

  But he didn’t shield her and he didn’t stop her, and because he knew he wouldn’t be able to talk her out of walking through to the kitchen, where the aide’s body still lay where it had fallen, he didn’t try to prevent her from heading to the scene of the crime. He walked beside her instead.

  When she reached the threshold separating the kitchen and dining room, she stopped and swayed a little, but didn’t back away, and John dropped the hand he’d instinctively raised to catch her if she fell.

  The aide, a dark-haired twentysomething identified as Danielle Jones, lay on the tiled floor, sprawled where she’d fallen. She had two dime-size holes in her forehead, one centered, one off-center to the right and higher than the first. Both had leaked thin blood trails to the floor, where the droplets had fallen into the larger stain that spread from the exit wounds at the back of the victim’s skull.

  Two taps, John thought. Professional. According to Drew, it’d been the same with the other victim, the aide’s boyfriend, Jay Alphonse. His body was in the garage, as though he’d been nailed on his way out.

  There had been no passion to the kills. They had been pure practicality, a means to dispose of obstacles. Typical of Tiberius and his ilk.

  Sydney sucked in a breath that sounded like a sob, and turned to him. “Where is my sister?”

  He didn’t answer because he’d already told her that her sister wasn’t in the house, and telling her again was pointless.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “She’s really gone, isn’t she?”

  “I’m sorr
y,” he said.

  Her face crumpled and she seemed to collapse in on herself, her hands coming up to cover her face, her shoulders folding inward and shaking with silent sobs.

  When her knees buckled and she headed for the floor, he reached out and caught her.

  One piece of his brain said he was simply making sure she didn’t mess up the scene, but in reality the move was pure instinct, just as it was instinct that had him folding her into his arms and holding her tight as she wept.

  Just then, Drew strode in through the back. He stalled hard and his eyebrows hit his hairline when he saw his boss holding a sobbing woman in his arms.

  Feeling a low burn in his gut, John snapped, “Anything new?”

  “No—Ah, no. Sorry.” Drew gestured with the film camera he used to photograph scenes. “I was just getting started with the pictures.”

  “Do it.”

  Drew bolted and John stared over the top of Sydney’s head as she burrowed against him and sobbed into his chest. This was a good thing, he told himself. It was all about expediency. He’d wanted her to break so he could get the information he needed. None of this had anything to do with the feel of her in his arms, or the way she seemed to fit naturally against him, all soft curves and woman, urging his body to soften in some places, harden in others.

  Drew stuck his head back through the door and made a point of not staring at them. “I had another look at—”

  The phone rang, interrupting. John and Drew turned toward the cordless unit, which sat alone at the center of the butcher-block island.

  Sydney stiffened in his arms, as though suddenly realizing who she was clinging to, and maybe even wondering how that had come to be.

  She pulled away, took a couple of steps into the kitchen and then looked at him for permission.

  At Drew’s signal that the handset had been processed, and Grace and Jimmy Oliverra had the trace and tape setups jacked into the phone line from the other room, John nodded. “Go ahead. Answer it.”

  She picked up the handset and hit the button to connect. “Hello?”

  In the moment of silence that followed, John wished he had one of the headsets Grace and Jimmy were using to listen in. Seconds later, Sydney’s whole body stiffened and she hissed a breath through her teeth before she shrieked, “You bastard. Where is she? Where is my sister? What have you done with her?”

  John didn’t need to wonder anymore; he knew. Tiberius was on the line, looking to make a deal of his own.

  Chapter Five

  “She’s fine…for now.” Tiberius’s voice seemed to slither down the phone line, hissing into Sydney’s ear where it curled, waiting to strike as he continued. “She’ll stay that way, too, as long as you cooperate.”

  She didn’t bother asking what he wanted. “Before I give you the password, I’m going to need some assurance that she’s alive.”

  In her peripheral vision, she saw John surge forward a step and then stop himself, his expression dark and accusatory. He caught her eye and shook his head, mouthing, Don’t tell him the password.

  She frowned back at him. What did he think, she was stupid? If she gave up the password over the phone she’d never see her sister again.

  “You’re in no position to be making demands,” Tiberius said, the slither turning cold and chilling her blood in her veins. “The password. Now.”

  Wrapping her free arm around herself and hugging the borrowed sweatshirt tight around her body, she turned away from the bloodstained kitchen and wandered out into the hall with the cordless phone pressed to her ear. She was aware that Sharpe followed, his steps nearly silent, making her feel stalked and protected at the same time.

  Ignoring him, she moved into the sitting room, which contained a small television and three walls worth of books. Interspersed amongst the paperbacks and research books were photographs of her and Celeste, over and over, just the two of them, spanning from earliest childhood to the previous year, as they’d lived their lives out together.

  Tears misted Sydney’s vision, forcing her to pinch the bridge of her nose to hold them back.

  “I’m not giving you the password now,” she said with a faint quiver in her voice from nerves at what she was about to propose. “And I’m not doing it over the phone. It has to be in person. I’ll meet you—”

  She broke off as her eyes locked on one photo, a special picture that showed Celeste and her kayaking in Puget Sound. It had been the summer before Celeste had gotten sick. They’d had plenty of money from the sale of her computer programs, and Sydney’s new university job hadn’t started until fall, so they’d worked their way across the country. It’d been the best summer Sydney could remember.

  And the picture was upside down.

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Excuse me?” Tiberius said, in a tone that indicated she’d managed to surprise the master of surprises.

  “I’m not trading the password for a bluff, Tiberius. Sorry. You lose this round.”

  When she clicked the phone off, hanging up on the criminal mastermind, the two agents manning the phone tap gaped and squawked, and fiddled with their equipment in an effort to get the call back.

  Sharpe didn’t move, though. He watched her, face expressionless, as she dropped the phone and hurried to the bookcase.

  Heart pounding, she grabbed the framed picture and twisted it a hundred-eighty degrees on the hidden rod that went from the back of the old frame, through the wall and into a mechanism that the contractors she’d used for the renovations thought might date back to Prohibition. Metal grated against metal and a section of wall swung inward on heavy, hand-forged hinges, revealing a dark corridor that traveled inward a few feet and took an immediate ninety-degree turn. The small bolt hole in front of them was empty. Beyond the turn, no light penetrated farther into the hidden tunnel.

  But there were two parallel lines in the dust, exactly the width apart of a wheelchair’s wheels.

  Celeste. Afraid to say her sister’s name in case she’d been wrong, in case Tiberius wasn’t bluffing after all and he’d somehow gotten her after she’d made it to the bolt hole, Sydney surged forward toward the passageway.

  An iron-strong hand gripped her arm, pulling her back.

  “I go first,” Sharpe said, and did just that, heading into the passageway with his weapon drawn. Seconds later she heard him hiss a curse.

  Ignoring the others, she plunged into the darkness after him.

  Two steps in, she slammed into him where he’d stopped dead. Though she’d been going full tilt, he weathered the impact easily, holding out an arm to keep her from falling. “Easy there.”

  “Celeste?” she whispered, clinging to his arm for reassurance, though she knew damn well he was the last person she should be leaning on.

  “Yes,” he said. “And yes, she’s alive. She’s unconscious, but her pulse is steady and her breathing seems okay. The chair seems to be wedged or something. If you back up a little, I think I can get it free.”

  Sydney pretty much stopped processing his words after Yes, she’s alive. Relief shivered through her, followed by a wash of nausea and guilt. This was her fault, all of it. If she hadn’t taken that job—

  Stop, she told herself. Stop there. What was done was done. She couldn’t go back and undo it, so she was going to have to find a way to make the best while moving forward. She was going to have to find a way to fix what she’d messed up so badly.

  Still, she whispered, “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure whether she meant it for the man ahead of her in the secret passageway or for some celestial being looking down on her from up above, but she knew one thing for sure: she’d gotten lucky with Celeste.

  The aide and her boyfriend, however, hadn’t been lucky at all. Their blood would remain on Sydney’s hands.

  She heard the catch of metal on leather as Sharpe holstered his weapon and tried to work the heavy, mechanized chair free and drag it out into the main room.

  “You’ve got to put the transmission in Neutra
l,” she said, stepping forward and reaching past him to work the controls in the darkness.

  In the close quarters, she had to squeeze tightly against him to reach the mechanism. They wound up pressed together, with her shoulder and arm against his torso and her leg touching his from hip to ankle. It was impossible not to notice that they lined up perfectly in all the right spots, and that he was warm and strong and incredibly male.

  It might’ve been partly relief at finding Celeste, might’ve been the sensation of finally being home after so long, but the giddy rush of excitement seemed to come, not from the circumstances, but from the man. But when she found herself wanting to lean into him and stay there, she made herself pull away instead.

  “There.” Her voice came out high and breathy, and she forced it level before continuing, “You should be able to move it now.”

  She backed out of the passageway as Sharpe wheeled Celeste out of the darkness and into the light.

  As he did so, her eyelids flickered.

  “We’ll want the paramedics in here, Grace,” he said quietly to the short, dark-haired woman who’d been one of the two agents manning the phone trace.

  Grace nodded and headed outside, but Sydney couldn’t wait. She knelt down beside Celeste’s chair and took one of her sister’s cool hands, rubbing it between her own. “Celeste, hon? You in there? Knock, knock?”

  It was their sad little inside joke, because Celeste was always “in there.” Sometimes, though, she couldn’t get out past the shell of her own body.

  Singer’s syndrome was a progressive debilitating neuropathy, which as far as Sydney could tell was a fancy way of saying that Celeste’s mind was sharp as ever but her body was giving out on her day by day, as plaques of a faulty neural protein—the one containing the expanded trinucleotide repeat—built up along her nerve fibers. The more it accumulated, the harder it was for Celeste’s brain to get neural impulses to her extremities.