Best Laid Plans

by Allison Brennan

  Ryan did as Nate directed, then cut off the lights.

  The apartments were all dark.

  “Where is Elise?” Ryan asked.

  “Less than a mile.”

  “Let’s go in and wait. Rogan, stay. I’m not joking.” Ryan handed him an earpiece. “You be our eyes, let us know what she does when she gets here.”

  Sean bristled, but he stayed in the SUV.

  Ryan and Nate, both in black SWAT gear, left the SUV and ran across the street. They blended into the tall hedges that surrounded the dark property, then the building blocked them from Sean’s view.

  Sean waited for Elise. A Jeep drove up and slammed on the brakes in front of the apartment complex. Elise got out of the passenger seat and headed toward Mona Hill’s unit.

  “She’s coming your way,” Sean said over the com. “There’s someone else in the car.”

  “Stay put,” Ryan said over the com. “That’s an order.”

  Sean didn’t take orders from Ryan or anyone. But he waited.

  The driver got out. It was Mona Hill. She stood next to the Jeep waiting for Elise to return.

  This was fucked.

  Sean slipped out of the SUV and, using other parked cars as a shield, approached the Jeep. He muted the com so Ryan couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  “Mona.”

  She jumped. Fear flashed over her face, then anger. “Get the fuck out of here. You’re lucky they’re giving me a second chance.”

  “Run.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do they know about your sister?”

  Her eyes widened. “No! God, no.”

  “Then go. Disappear. You’re good at that.”

  “They’ll find me. You don’t know these people like I do.”

  “Mona, I’m not telling you again. Leave. I will stop them.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Don’t underestimate me.”

  There was a loud crash from the apartment and Mona jumped. Over the com, Ryan ordered Nate to go right.

  “Now,” Sean told her.

  Mona jumped back in the Jeep and sped off. Sean ran back to the SUV but stood to the side. He unmuted the com.

  “The Jeep just left without her,” he said. “Elise is cutting across the lawn running after it.” Elise had a bag over her shoulder that she hadn’t had before.

  Nate came from behind the building and tackled the girl. She went down on her bad arm with a scream. He got up and secured her.

  Ryan asked through the com, “Did you see who the driver was?”

  “No,” Sean lied. “He didn’t get out of the car.”

  “Plates?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Nate said, “Suspect is secured.”

  They approached the SUV. Sean handed Ryan back the earpiece.

  “Can you please drop me off at Everett’s house before you take her in? Kane isn’t responding to my messages, and neither is Crawford.”

  “It’s because your lover is dead, and no one wants to tell you,” Elise said with a bloodied-nose smirk. “Go ahead, check my phone.”

  Nate pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the history. He didn’t say anything.

  Sean grabbed the phone from Nate. Ten minutes ago, at 9:50 P.M., Elise had sent Peter a message.

  Kill them all and disappear.

  Ryan pushed Sean back before he could hit the girl. “Lucy is fine,” Ryan said.

  But he didn’t know that. No one did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The grandfather clock chimed 10:00 P.M.

  “There’s police everywhere,” Joyce said.

  “Get away from the fucking windows,” Peter ordered.

  Joyce cowered and sat on the floor, her back against the wall.

  When the police cars and unmarked vehicles began to arrive, Peter had told Joyce to handcuff Lucy. She should have expected it, but she’d hoped that she’d have more mobility.

  The phone had been ringing on and off for the last twenty minutes.

  “You need to answer the phone,” Lucy said when it started ringing again.

  “So they can stall? I know how this works.” But he was worried. He hadn’t planned on being caught. What criminal did?

  Elise Hansen. She’d planned on being caught. It was a game to her.

  But she’d also planned on escaping. Perhaps the shooting at the hospital this morning had been the first escape attempt. Or maybe Kane and Sean were right, and it had been an attempt on Lucy’s life.

  Or both.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Peter had barely moved. The boy, still bound and gagged, sagged in the chair. He might have fallen asleep, or just felt defeated. There had been no more sounds from upstairs. Lucy wished she could find out if the mother and daughter were okay.

  Peter kept looking at his phone. A message had come in a few minutes before, and Peter seemed to be waiting for something else.

  “Joyce, go upstairs and get the mom and girl. We’ll kill these two, then take the kids hostage. They won’t shoot us with kids.”

  “We can’t go out there!” Joyce exclaimed. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. You said there was a plan.”

  “Elise had a plan,” Lucy said. “Her plan was to leave you here holding the bag. She has the money, and she didn’t come for you.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Go, Joyce! Get them!”

  Joyce ran up the stairs. The phone rang again.

  “Answer it, Peter,” Lucy said, her voice calm and reasonable. “You need to tell them that everyone is fine.”

  He shook his head.

  “Elise is a sociopath,” Lucy said. “She only cares about herself. You know that, don’t you? How long have you known her? A few weeks?”

  “You have no idea who Elise is.”

  “Tell me. Tell me how you see her.”

  “She’s fucking smart. She’s not scared of anything.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “I worked for—” He stopped as Joyce ran back down the stairs.

  “They’re gone.”

  “What the hell?”

  “They’re not where I left them!”

  “Did you let them go? I tied them up, I know they were secure.”

  “No! I swear—”

  “You had a soft spot for the girls. You bitch—”

  “I didn’t touch them!”

  SWAT must have found a way in through the attic or a second-floor window. She caught Brad’s eye and he gave her a little nod. He thought the same thing. Good. Two safe, one to go.

  “They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill us!” Joyce screamed.

  Peter shot Joyce in the head. Lucy jerked involuntarily and almost caused the chair to tip over. Joyce crumpled to the tile floor, blood pooling around her head. Lucy stared at the body. She hadn’t expected him to kill his partner. She shook her head to clear it.

  Focus, Lucy. Focus on Peter. Get him to lower his guard. Just for a minute.

  The phone rang again.

  “Answer it,” Lucy said, “or they’ll swarm in and you’ll be dead.” She glanced at Brad again. He caught Lucy’s eye, then blinked once and refocused his gaze toward the ceiling.

  She discreetly looked upstairs. There was the curving staircase, a landing, and then the hall disappeared to the right and left. She saw the tip of a sniper rifle aimed in the direction of Peter. But there was no clear shot from that angle.

  “I need to think! How can I think with all that noise?” He pulled the boy up from his seat and held the gun on his neck. The boy sagged, his eyes on the dead body. Peter held him up.

  “Don’t look at her,” Lucy told the kid. “Look at me.”

  The boy averted his eyes from the body to Lucy. They were glassy with terror and resignation that he was going to die. No child should witness murder.

  She wanted to offer a trade, her for the boy, but the way Peter was acting, he would think it was a trick. He wouldn’t do anything she said. Lucy loo
ked at Brad. He’d been hit a couple of times, but the injuries were minor. Fortunately, he’d kept his mouth shut for the most part. Peter definitely had an issue with male authority, which was probably why he responded so strongly to Elise’s powerful female presence.

  “You’ll walk in front of us, Agent Kincaid,” Peter said. “Open the doors for me. Stay close. But make no mistake about it, I will shoot this kid if you do anything different from what I say. We’re going to walk out, get into the closest car, and drive.”

  “I can’t drive cuffed.”

  “You’ll manage.”

  He pushed the kid forward. Lucy backed away toward the front door and gauged the angle of the sniper to Peter.

  Two more feet. Two more feet.

  “Peter, think this through,” she said.

  “What do you think I am, stupid? I’m not stupid!” He aimed his gun at Brad. “One down, one to go,” he said.

  A shot came from the stairway above, taking off the top of Peter Rabb’s head. He collapsed and the boy fell down, covered in Peter’s blood.

  Lucy rushed over to the boy, and even though she was cuffed, she shielded him with her body. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said over and over. She looked over at Brad. He was unharmed. Peter hadn’t gotten a shot off.

  SWAT swarmed in from upstairs, the front, and the back. Someone helped Lucy up and took the boy outside. She felt the cuffs being released from her wrists, and another officer uncuffed Brad.

  Sean ran in, followed by Kane. Sean pulled Lucy into his arms and held her. “Elise told him to kill you. I thought he had.”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she repeated.

  They stood there for a moment. When Lucy opened her eyes again, Kane was gone.

  Maybe he hadn’t even been there.

  * * *

  Lucy bolted upright in bed.

  The clock said it was 6:10 A.M., but she’d been sound asleep. Something had jolted her awake, and it wasn’t a nightmare.

  Sean sat up. “Luce—what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know. I thought I felt something, like an earthquake.”

  “There’s not many earthquakes in Texas.” He kissed her, and gently pushed her back down on the bed. “You got my heart racing.” He kissed her again, then he frowned. “You’re shaking. Are you sure you didn’t have a nightmare? Lucy?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  Sirens rang throughout the city. They were far away, but there were a lot of them. They both got out of bed and quickly dressed in the clothes that were lying around. Sean turned on the television to the local news and Lucy picked up her phone. She was about to call FBI headquarters when her cell phone rang.

  “It’s Brad,” she said and put him on speaker. “Brad?”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yes, what happened?”

  “I know why they left the drugs at the shooting. There was a bomb inside. Tobias just blew up the DEA evidence locker. I don’t know how many guards were inside. At least two, but it’s shift change. Not to mention the desk sergeant. Do you know how many cases are still pending? It’s a total clusterfuck.”

  “How’d you know? It just happened.”

  “I’m in the office—as soon as I heard the explosion, I knew. I had to make sure you and Sean were okay. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault, Brad.”

  “There was a specific reason for them to plant the bomb,” Sean said. “It couldn’t have been just to cause havoc.”

  “Why not?” Lucy said. “Tobias seems to live to cause problems for the DEA. Wait—I thought SAPD had the case.”

  “They did, until ATF took it over. We share office space with ATF’s field office, and—”

  “And an evidence locker,” Sean said. “Maybe SAPD was the target.”

  “No. It was us—most drug cases fall under the DEA. With that much heroin on scene we would have normally been the lead. And even if we weren’t, we work closely with SAPD on all major drug busts.”

  “I’m sorry, Brad. Don’t blame yourself,” Lucy said. “You couldn’t have known.”

  Brad didn’t seem to hear her. “I have to go,” he said. “Sam’s talking to Juan now, they’re going to sweep all evidence lockers, police stations, the FBI office, you name it. It was a fucking Trojan horse. There could be more.”

  “Call us later,” Sean said.

  “Tell your brother. He needs to be extra careful.” Brad hung up.

  Lucy said, “I need to talk to Elise.”

  Sean looked pained. “No.”

  “Sean, I can do this.”

  “But that girl—”

  “I know exactly what she is. I’ll be okay.” She kissed him. “I have you to come home to.”

  * * *

  Elise was in solitary and it took Lucy two hours of waiting before they brought her to the interview room. Without her makeup, she looked younger than her sixteen years. But her eyes were old. Old and calculating.

  Elise hadn’t talked, and they knew nothing about her that they hadn’t already known. Elise had called Tobias her “big brother” but Lucy was skeptical. Tobias was at least forty. Elise was sixteen. More likely that he was her father—if they were related at all.

  “I knew you’d come and see me,” Elise said.

  “Tell me why your brother set a bomb in the DEA evidence locker.”

  Elise’s eyes sparkled. “I thought I heard the big boom. Toby is so fucking smart.”

  “What case did he want to destroy?”

  Elise smiled and bit her lip. She stared at Lucy and raised an eyebrow. “All of them,” she whispered. She tilted her chin up, as if daring Lucy to question her.

  “He’s too smart for that.” Lucy’s heart was pounding, but she kept her voice flat and even. She hadn’t been trained to deal with sociopaths like Elise Hansen. Lucy had faced many killers, some as cold and confident as Elise. But none of them had been sixteen. None of them had been so elusive. Without knowing who Elise was in the past made it twice as difficult to understand her now.

  “You think you’re smarter than we are?” Elise grinned. “We had you going all week.”

  “Did your brother have those eight gang members killed—and a child—just to disguise the C-4 as heroin?”

  Elise didn’t answer. She attempted to look bored, but it was clear she was enjoying this conversation. She certainly wasn’t scared. While intellectually Lucy knew that Elise had lied to them and manipulated them throughout the entire investigation, this moment was the first time she believed it.

  The revelation chilled her all the way to her soul.

  She said, “There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have been discovered before he set it off.”

  “But. It. Wasn’t.” Elise leaned forward as if she were going to share a secret. “I know what you want. You want to fix me.”

  Lucy raised an eyebrow. “No, actually, I don’t. Some people are permanently broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one can put you back together.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you’re smarter than I gave you credit for. But I’m not broken. I’m exactly the way I want to be. I won’t be in here long.”

  One of the more philosophical arguments in criminal psychology was whether psychopaths were born or created through their environment. Most experts believed that sociopaths were born—individuals with no innate ability to form attachments or feel empathy toward others—but not all sociopaths turned into psychopaths. Were psychopaths—those with a predisposition to cruelty—curable? Were psychopaths created because of chemical imbalances in the brain? Were they created by their environment? Or were they mistakes of nature?

  Lucy and her brother Dillon had argued about the subject many times. Dillon believed that some people were born cruel. Lucy believed that environment played a bigger role in the formation of a psychopath. Maybe they were both right, and both wrong.

  Two things were clear to Lucy as she and Elise stared, each of them assessing the other. Elise was most certainly a sociopath. And
there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that Elise had been cold, cunning, and cruel from the moment she had her first complex thought. Her environment might have expedited her journey from sociopath to psychopath, but it was a road Elise Hansen had always traveled.

  Lucy said, “The evidence in your case wasn’t in DEA storage, if you were wondering.”

  “I’m sure it’s not,” Elise said with a fake yawn. “I get a trial by jury. Never underestimate me. Or Toby. We always win.”

  Lucy leaned forward. “Not this time. We have most of his money. We caught on to your game early enough to trick you, and we diverted the money into an FBI account. If you think your brother is going to be able to buy or bribe you out of jail, think again.”

  Elise seemed amused. “We’ll see about that.”

  Lucy said, “I will be testifying against you. If you think you’re good on the stand? You’ve never seen me.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Don’t count on it. I’m looking forward to the day I can tell the court exactly what you are.”

  “You won’t, because you’ll be dead.”

  A chill ran down Lucy’s spine at Elise’s matter-of-fact tone, but she kept her expression impassive as she rose from the chair. “You don’t scare me. You’re a calculating, street-smart, manipulative sociopath. You talk a good game, but I won. And I will find Tobias. He will pay for his crimes. You can count on that.”

  She turned and walked out. Before she closed the door, Elise said, “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

  Lucy shut the door firmly. Stood there, took a deep breath. She was shaking. Damn, had Elise seen it? She hoped not. She hoped she’d kept her fear locked down while facing that monster.

  Brad was waiting for her in the observation room. “I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

  “I got your message late. Hoped I could talk you out of it.” He rubbed her arm. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Fine.” But her voice was clipped and tense.

  “You shouldn’t have gone in there. Just like me facing Nicole might not have been the smartest move. Nicole knows how I’ll react and pushes all my buttons. Elise is … different. She’s intuitive, and not in a good way. She wanted to scare you.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “I had to face her and show I wasn’t intimidated.”