“Can you look into it, and we’ll hook up later?” he asked. “Gotta go see Martin about something at the lab.”
Sam nodded. “I’m on it.”
“Call me with any updates,” Linc said, watching Sam turn and walk away, waiting until she was well down the hallway before looking at Veda, who’d been patiently waiting her turn for his attention. “I gotta go.” He waved the papers she’d just given him. “Thank you for this. Strong find, Veda.”
“Thanks,” she whispered, smiling gently as he retreated, coming to her toes and giving him a soft wave.
He didn’t realize that his eyes were glued to her until he ran into someone in front of him, making them stumble. His eyes shot forward, and he claimed the doctor’s arms seconds before she fell to her feet at the run-in. He waited until she was steady, returned her bashful smile, and apologized.
He walked off in the midst of her acceptance of his apology, doing everything in his power not to look back at Veda again. Apparently looking into her eyes wasn’t just a danger to himself, but to everyone around him as well.
——
Linc almost felt guilty as he entered the bright forensics lab later that day, passing dozens of gleaming steel tables, all swarming with busy lab techs who bid him hello. As his nostrils flared and his stomach rumbled, he couldn’t bring himself to return the greetings.
He couldn’t shake the guilt.
Guilt over the grape sucker Martin Zhang held up in the air as Linc approached his lab table. The grape sucker that held the DNA of the very woman who’d just given him a mind-blowing lead on his wife. The woman who’d put her job on the line by printing out those medical records without a warrant. The guilt nearly ate Linc alive—because the grape sucker in that Ziploc bag belonged to Veda Vandyke.
During her short stay in his apartment, after her kidnapping, she’d had a habit of leaving her suckers lying around all over his place. Unable to ignore a nagging in his gut, Linc had tracked down one of those abandoned suckers, put it in a Ziploc bag, and handed it over to Martin, asking him to run it against the DNA of the nail clippings they’d found on the cliffs Jax Murphy had been thrown from.
Linc tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t, as he came to a stop at the lab table, meeting Martin’s eyes across it.
Martin donned a white lab coat and goggles that glared under the bright LED lights overhead. “So nice of you to finally come down, Linc.” He removed his glasses. “Listen, I ran the sucker’s DNA and got a match.”
Linc’s heart ground to a halt for the second time that day. It wasn’t the words Linc had been hoping to hear from Martin, and it left him speechless.
“How could it be a match?” Linc finally asked. If the DNA on the sucker really was a match with the nails on the cliffs, then that meant Veda had found some way to switch out the samples of the DNA that had been taken at the hospital. Linc cringed. Was the luminous woman who’d just been chasing him at the hospital earlier that morning… really a criminal mastermind?
Martin continued, lifting up the sucker once more. “As it turns out, the man who the sucker belonged to—”
“Woman,” Linc interjected.
Martin blinked rapidly. “Excuse me?”
“The DNA on that sucker belongs to a woman. She’s hooked. Not a single day has gone by when I haven’t seen one in her mouth. She leaves them lying everywhere, which was why I was able to swap one without her noticing.”
Martin shook the bag. “This is male DNA.”
“Definitely a woman’s.”
“Then I suggest you take a nice long look at that woman because she is definitely a man.” Martin snatched up the results paper lying on the table and shook it wildly through the air, along with the sucker, before slamming them both back down.
Linc sputtered.
Taking his confusion for sheepishness, Martin lowered his voice. “Hey, listen. Transsexuals these days… they’ve gotten pretty damned inventive, Linc. If you rolled around with one by accident, hey, we’ve all been there—”
Linc’s voice became vacant as he looked off, trying to think. “There hasn’t been a man in my apartment since…” His faraway voice petered even farther as he recalled the night he’d grabbed Veda’s grape sucker from the balcony. The same night Gage had come to Linc’s apartment to beg for Veda’s forgiveness. The same night Gage and Veda had gone out onto the balcony to talk in private.
Realization washed over Linc, and then he slammed his eyes shut.
Gage.
The one and only man who’d ever stepped foot in his apartment.
Linc’s eyes flew open. “But you said the sucker was a match for the nail clippings, right? Those clippings belonged to a woman.”
“I never said it was a match for the nail clippings—if you’d let me finish.” Martin leaned on the table. “Yes, the sucker came back a match, but not with the nail clippings. It came back a match with you.” Martin jammed a finger across the table at him.
Linc cringed. “Me?”
“Remember when internal affairs were investigating SVU after finding evidence that there were crooked cops in your unit? How they took everyone’s DNA in an attempt to nail their man? Well, that DNA is still on file.” Martin snatched up the sucker again. “The DNA on this sucker and the DNA logged under your name in the database was a match, Linc!”
Linc’s head began to pound—officially overloaded. For the first time in his career, he felt like he had way too much on his plate. The Chopper, who he’d set free. The dead girl at the trashcans, whose identity he still didn’t know. His missing wife, who’d he’d just learned was once the patient of the pimp who’d been charged with exploiting pregnant women. On top of it all, Martin was now holding a Ziploc bag—a bag with Gage Blackwater’s DNA, not Veda’s, as Linc had originally imagined—telling him it was a match for his own?
It was quickly becoming too much, and Linc found himself stammering for words that wouldn’t come.
Martin’s voice grew excited. “You never told me you had a brother, man. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Linc’s skin tingled from head to toe, and he drew in a breath through flared nostrils, his nails digging into the steel table as the veins under his arms began to pulse out of control. He could almost feel his blood heating up inside of them, trying to melt his skin like hot lava.
“Brother?” he croaked, the pink veins in his eyes going red.
Martin tilted his head back and forth like a pendulum. “Well, it’s a match—but a partial match. About a 30% overlap.”
“30% does not a brother make.”
“No, but it certainly does not a stranger make, either. 30% is too close a match to ignore. Only kin would cause that kind of overlap. Plus, both samples have an allelic dropout rate on the Y chromosome, at the same loci.”
“English, man. English.” Linc could hear the panic in his voice and knew Martin didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of his frustration, but he couldn’t help it.
“Okay… English…” Martin took a moment, clearly finding it difficult to dumb himself down. “A 30% overlap could be just a coincidence, right? But a 30% overlap and the same loci? Together? No way. Too close. Close enough to leave me guessing that the DNA on this sucker is a very close male relative of yours. So close, it even surpasses an uncle or a distant cousin.” Martin shook the bag again. “If I had to guess? I’d say… half brother.”
Linc’s mouth fell slowly open, eyes wide and dazed. He took a small step away from the table.
Silence.
Martin nodded, looking excitedly back and forth between the bag and Linc, a small grin remaining on his face even as the man across the table began to softly heave.
“I told you that you wanted to hear this.” Martin chuckled.
Linc reached out and snatched the bag, so quickly it caused Martin to jolt, and turned on his heel, leaving the lab without a word.
“You’re welcome!” Martin called after him, a smile still lacing his voice as it rose. “Hey,
whose sucker is it?”
Linc barreled out of the door without answering, letting it slam shut behind him.
11
“Armed guards…” Gage said, freshly showered with only a terry cloth towel around his waist. His abs clenched as he ran his trembling fingers through his damp hair, feet bouncing, sitting on the edge of the violet sofa in his suite’s living area. The two-story room had panoramic views, inviting in wisps of the rising sun as it peeked over the skyline, still low enough to paint the ocean horizon a fire orange. Similar to the inferno in Gage’s racing heart. He clutched the phone to his ear—unmoved by the astronomical roaming charges piling up by the second—every bone in his body stiff. “And not just pistols, but assault rifles. Decked out in combat gear like they’re on their way to Syria. There’s a guard at every spot, twenty-four-seven. They don’t even take bathroom breaks without someone to stand in their place. One of them put a gun to my neck. Had to pay him off to keep him quiet.”
Linc’s grumbling voice floated in, grainy thanks to the at-sea provider’s shoddy reception. “Find out what’s inside.”
Gage laughed through clenched teeth, making the sound come out strained, tightening his fingers around the burner phone he’d purchased at the ship’s first stop in Southern California. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me when I said there are armed guards, at every door, twenty-four hours a day, and that one of them nearly shot me.”
“I heard you. I also heard that you paid him off, which means his loyalty is for sale. I doubt he’s the only one. Find a way in.”
Gage chuckled, dropping his head into his hand.
A long silence lingered before Linc’s softened voice floated in. “Look. Gage…”
Gage’s eyes widened, not missing the fact that Linc had called him Gage, not Blackwater. A part of him wondered at the change, but another part couldn’t leave room for anything but the tightness in his chest and the migraine setting up camp in his head. His brown eyes darted across the two bedroomed, two bathroom suite, large enough to sleep six people. They rose to the master bedroom, its glass enclosure open to the main level, where he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. The whirlpool tub on the expansive private balcony, where the warm bubbles had done nothing to ease the blood in his ice-cold veins. His father had given him the best living quarters on the boat, and Gage couldn’t even enjoy it.
He couldn’t enjoy it now that he was tortured by the idea of how it had all come to fruition. How his family was really subsidizing the largest cruise line in the world.
“Gage…” Linc’s voice came even softer. “Like I told you the first time, you’ve got a month. No reason to rush. You’re smart. I’m sure you’ll figure out a way inside without compromising yourself.”
Gage pulled the phone away and frowned at it.
Had Linc just… complimented him?
“How did you find out about this?” Gage asked after returning the phone to his ear. “About the hotspots?”
“Let’s just say I’ve had five long years to figure it out.”
Gage swallowed thickly as Linc alluded to his missing wife, who he’d always suspected had disappeared on that very cruise ship when she’d gone on vacation alone five years earlier, and who Linc had been obsessed with finding ever since. An obsession Gage and many others had mocked and ridiculed relentlessly.
“I’m so sorry,” Gage whispered, drawing in a sharp breath. “You were right all along.”
Another long silence. “Your family didn’t build an empire by being reckless. They’re calculating. Vigilant. Everyone got had. Not just you.”
Gage went to respond.
But Linc jumped in. “I gotta go. When you can, I need the financials of all the higher ups. Can you do that?”
“You mean the people who are paid millions to keep their mouths shut about whatever the fuck is going on here?” Gage spat. “Yeah, I can do that. You’ll have it by the end of the day.”
“Good.”
Gage jumped in before he could hang up. “How is she?”
Linc sighed. “She’s safe. I gotta go. Get rid of the phone.”
This time, Linc didn’t wait, ending the call without a goodbye. Gage pulled the flip phone away from his face and stared at it. If he weren’t crazy, he’d say that phone call had been almost… pleasant. That Linc had been almost… patient.
Gage found himself staring at the phone, dumbfounded, for nearly a minute.
Snapping himself out of his haze, he tossed the burner phone and picked up his real one, the pad of his thumb dancing over the touchscreen, searching desperately for the only thing in the world that could calm him down.
He opened his camera roll, hungry for pictures of her big brown eyes, her mocha latte skin, and the smile that had the power to bring him to his knees. After opening his pictures, however, instead of his beautiful girlfriend, he was met with a photo of Scarlett’s enraged face.
He couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up his throat. The first genuine laugh he’d had all day. In the picture, Scarlett seethed into the camera, cheeks hot, teeth bared, blue eyes savage. The caption at the bottom of the photo read: WHY?!
Shaking his head, having no idea how Scarlett had managed to break into his phone just to plant that photo, Gage swiped left to the pictures he was really after. He went all the way back to one of the first photos he’d ever taken of Veda. A photo of her in her plaid pj’s, ready for bed, with dozens of bright yellow flexi rod rollers in her hair. The long rollers shot out of her head in every direction, like Hellraiser had traded in his needles for rubber rods. Gage could still remember the first time he’d seen those rollers in her head. How the laughter had left him breathless. He could remember playfully nicknaming her Medusa, a nickname he never failed to bring up whenever the rollers re-emerged.
He couldn’t deny, however, what a beautiful job those rollers did as he came upon a photo of her and her gorgeous curls on a lunch date the following afternoon. How the deep waves made her look like an African princess. How they made her beauty so captivating, so unique, that there wasn’t a single soul alive who could even dream of imitating it.
She was truly one of a kind.
“Fuck, I miss you,” Gage whispered, eyes soft and yearning as he perused one photo after the other. He had no idea how he was going to make it through that cruise without her presence, her comfort, or her touch. When he came upon a photo of her at work, and his dick stood at attention under his towel, he realized just how much he actually missed her.
Only with Veda Vandyke could he maintain a boner while looking at a picture of her in the hospital’s disinfection chamber, getting sprayed down by a nurse in a hazard suit after a patient had accidentally puked in her face.
Gage reached down and covered the head of his aching dick while swiping to a more jack-off worthy photo. A photo of them, lying in his bed, just minutes after making love. A quick but passionate session that would always rank as one of his favorites. One that had left them both with lazy smiles and sleepy gazes. Veda had her head cradled on his chest, smiling into the camera from the corners of her eyes.
Gage’s grip on his rock hard column tightened, and then he was stroking. But even as tiny prickles of pleasure came to life under his skin, even as they grew more fervent with each stroke—until they were shooting through his body like fireworks—and even when it drove his breathing to short, frantic gasps, it wasn’t enough.
He knew it never would be.
Not until she was in his arms again.
12
Moments after ending the call with Gage, a soft frown remained on Linc’s face, his fingers lingering over his touchscreen phone. Sucking in a breath, he opened a text conversation with Gage and typed a message.
Linc: I think you’re my brother.
His thumb lingered over the ‘send’ button, trembling. He didn’t send it, instead switching to a text conversation with his mother, typing the five words that had kept him up all night.
Linc: Is David Blackwater my father?
Again, his thumb shook over the ‘send’ button, stomach sick.
Just like Gage was getting annihilated by his family’s secrets, Linc was getting pummeled in much the same way. The news Martin had blasted him with couldn’t stay idle for long. It was already working overtime to drive him crazy. But he turned off the phone without sending either text, just as the elevator doors slid open before him.
He stepped off on the top floor of Shadow Rock’s tallest residential building and immediately caught sight of Sam. She nodded at him from the end of a long hallway that was lined with black apartment doors, pushing off the wall she’d been leaning on. Five minutes earlier, she’d called him with a lead on the dead girl by the trashcans, and Linc had raced over.
Once he made it to her, they moved down the hallway side by side, the chains holding their gold police badges singing into the quiet space.
“Just happened to see this on the wall at a restaurant in Little Mexico.” Sam spoke as they walked, showing him a picture of a woman in a white wedding dress, dancing with her groom. The woman’s back was turned to the camera, but she had a hot pink haircut and a black Aztec bird tattooed on her shoulder. The groom’s face, however, was in full view. Overweight and breathtakingly unattractive, with bifocals that made his blue eyes look three times bigger than they actually were, as he smiled adoringly down at his bride.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Linc said, noting that the Aztec tattoo, the pink hair, and even the large birthmark on the back of the woman’s neck matched the victim at the trashcans to the letter.
Sam let Linc take the picture from her. “Restaurant manager said they had a wedding reception there, few months back. Her name was Kathy Richardson. Husband, Gregory Richardson. He owns a tech company downtown. Estimated net worth, 10 million. Pulled up the credit card used to pay for the reception, and this was the address on the account.”
Raw (Revenge Book 6) Page 8