“Come on, Fred,” she said softly as she put her windblown dog back into the large bag.
Gemma felt as if she were in a nightmare as she made her way to the elevator and pressed the eleventh floor. It didn’t seem real. The walls blurred and she couldn’t focus on anything but the red elevator numbers as they ticked off the passing floors. When the doors opened, she pulled out her keys and headed to the end of the hall to her sister’s apartment. She heard every clink of the key as she pushed it into the lock.
“What the hell?” Gemma turned the handle. The door was unlocked. Suddenly she remembered that Gia was mugged and her purse taken. The killers would have her address and her keys. What if they were still here? Anger like she had never felt filled her as she shoved the door open. “Come out, you bastards!” she yelled into the apartment as her pulse throbbed in expectation.
Her breathing quickened as she hurried through the apartment, turning on lights and flinging open doors, but luckily, there was no one there. She set her bag down on her sister’s couch and Fred popped his head out and looked around as Gemma sat next to him on the white couch. She grabbed the dark blue decorative pillow and pulled it to her, hugging it while rocking as tears flooded her eyes once again. When she smelled her sister’s flowery lotion on the pillow, it felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. Fred jumped out of the bag and rested his head on her leg in silent support.
“It’ll be okay, buddy,” she choked out. She wiped her eyes and held on tight to the pillow as she looked around the room. It was then she noticed that her sister’s usually spotless place was a complete mess.
“Looks like those assholes were already here.” She shook her head, feeling violated at the thought of those killers pawing through her sister’s things.
Gemma pulled out her cell phone and dug around the back pocket of her jeans for Detective Greene’s number.
“This is Greene,” his gruff voice rang out over the phone.
“Detective, this is Gemma Perry. I'm at my sister’s apartment and it’s been ransacked. It’s a mess. My sister would've been so upset,” she trailed off.
“I thought that might be the case. I've already sent an officer over to secure the premises. Try not to touch anything. Use a tissue or a glove. We want to be able to get fingerprints,” Detective Greene instructed. “Can you tell me what was taken?”
“Um, her computer is gone.” Gemma walked around growing more and more confused. “But that’s all.”
“That’s all? TV and jewelry still there?” he asked, perplexed.
Gemma walked into the bedroom and opened the jewelry case sitting on the dresser. “That's all I can tell is missing. Jewelry and other valuables are still here.”
“Your sister was an investigative reporter; did she ever investigate dangerous people?”
“All the time . . . do you think this was planned?” Gemma asked as her heart stilled. She instinctively went to the door and looked into the empty hall as if the killers might be there waiting to be caught. She shut and locked the door and set the security chain before going back into her sister’s bedroom.
“I’m beginning to think that. The crime scene screams professionals. Who would want your sister dead?”
“I don’t know. She was working on something, but she didn’t tell me what. Hold on. She has a drawer filled with flash drives for storing her research and notes.” Gemma hurried from the bedroom, down the narrow hall, and back into the living room. Gia’s desk was on the far side near the kitchen, overlooking the fire escape.
Using a tissue, Gemma opened the top right drawer and looked in. “Empty. All her flash drives are gone.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Detective Greene said as Gemma heard the sound of a car being started.
“Okay. I’ll sit tight.”
The boss watched his right-hand man, Sergei Klimov, look up from the reporter’s computer and curse in what had to be Russian. “That suka had nothing on her computer,” Sergei yelled as he threw the laptop into the wall. The screen cracked and broke when it fell onto the floor.
“Tell me you've found something on those flash drives,” he growled. He felt his anger radiating from his thin frame. This was why he hired help like Sergei and all the other little minions. They were supposed to take care of these things for him. That’s why he was the boss.
He knew a man like Sergei held power simply because of his physical strength—and the fact he was a psychopath. While he himself stood only five-feet-eight inches or so and probably weighed half of what Sergei did, there was no way Sergei would ever cross him. While he may not look physically intimidating, he was quite possibly the most powerful man on the planet.
He could overthrow a dictator, a president, or even an entire royal family with a flick of his manicured hand. With one press of the button on his phone, a country could be bombed or a satellite shot down. Of course, people had to pay heavily for him to issue those orders.
At any given time, he was orchestrating arms deals with rebels, pirates, and warlords while running a highly profitable sex-trafficking ring. His men ran the black market for guns, weapons, and stolen goods. He had just sold The Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael on the black market for $100,000,000 to a private art collector in France. The portrait, rumored to be a self-portrait of Raphael dating back to the sixteenth century, had been stolen from Poland by the Nazis during World War II. While the Polish ministry had been on a wild goose chase for decades all through Europe trying to locate it, he had broken into an old bank vault in Austria and had stolen it for himself.
He had more money than many nations and more people of power in his pocket than all of the lobbyists in D.C. He had done it all by himself, too. The idea started when he was just a child, sitting in his room thinking, while his mother worked.
His mother had been a prostitute. He realized it by the time he was five. Men had come in and out of their small row house in New Jersey day after day. She was beautiful and they gave her things. They even gave him things. Later his mother had told him her body was marketable and she was going to use that to her advantage. She had her eyes set on the governor of New Jersey and a better life for her family.
She wasn’t shy about the fact that his father was her high school sweetheart who had died in Vietnam along with so many other men. She later told him that her heart had died that day and the only way to put food on the table was to use her body. She started off small, with city council members and influential merchants. They received free groceries and a bus pass that month.
By the end of the year, she was the mistress to the governor and her son was starting first grade in the best private school in the state. But, she hadn’t stopped there. She moved on to senators and eventually the vice president of the United States. All the while, the boy had listened and learned. These men had real power and he learned by listening to them talk on the phone when they visited his mother. Sometimes they held meetings at his mother’s new condo, and he’d be able to stealthily observe, study, and discover the secrets of the game. For his eighth birthday, his mother gave him a camera and he had realized a new way to get the power he had been dreaming of.
But soon it was over. By the time he finished his freshman year of high school, his mother had grown older and had been tossed aside. At the end of that year, the principal had approached him in the private school’s library and told him he wouldn't be able to continue in the fall. His scholarship was no longer being funded.
His classmates had laughed as he ran out of the school that day. They all knew who he was and why he was there. But now that he no longer had the governor’s protection, he was fair game. They had cursed him and called his mother names as he packed up his locker.
His mother had saved money for his college, which he thought he could use to finish high school. But before the next school year started, she became depressed. She felt weak and helpless. Her youth and beauty had been her identity and now it was gone. She slowly turned to drugs and by
August, the money was gone and his mother was lost to heroin.
He had begged the school for a scholarship, but they said no. They had admitted him as a favor in the first place, and now no money would be coming his way. It was then he decided to take the power away from those who had hurt his mother. He had hurried home and had opened the small suitcase he’d hidden under his bed. Opening it up, he’d stared at the pictures he had taken over the years. The first had been his most powerful—his mother and the vice president having sex.
They hadn’t even known he was there. He was supposed to have been at chess practice but had skipped it. He knew it had been wrong to take the pictures, but he had been compelled. He had sneaked past Secret Service agents sitting in the lobby of the condo building while he pretended to be a Russian spy. He was on a mission to get the evidence to prove the Russians were building nuclear weapons. As part of his game, he quietly turned the large round knob and pushed open the front door to his condo. All he could see was his mother’s hair hanging down her back as she moaned from the top of the dining room table. The vice president’s face was looking right at the camera, except his eyes had been closed in ecstasy.
Looking at it now he felt the power in it. The vice president was running for the presidency, and this photo would destroy him. With a smile, he put the picture in his backpack and hopped on the bus for the nation's capital.
That had been the beginning of his career. It had only grown since then. Every time he brought one more person of power down to their knees, he thought about those boys who had bullied him when he had been told to leave school.
When he was sixteen, his mother had died from a drug overdose. While he had tried to save her, she was too far lost in the haze of drugs. Instead of going to live with some aunt he had never met, he used his skills to follow street dealers until he identified mid-level management in the local drug trade. He used them to track down the head of the area’s cartel. He gathered evidence and turned it all over to the police. When the ring began to collapse, he stepped in and quickly took over.
The street thugs vying for the head job were just too stupid to run it so he made a deal with the toughest thug. The thug would use the physical force necessary for the takeover, just like Sergei was doing for him now. When college started two years later, he handed over power to the thug for a steady twenty percent of all profit.
In college, he fell in love with art and discovered the very profitable side of the black market. After graduating, he’d mastered theft, forgery, weapons, and more. He used his connections to gather evidence and then blackmailed his way to the top. He’d been untouched, unthwarted, and unscathed for all this time—until his dog-fighting ring in Keeneston, Kentucky, was busted last year.
Now he couldn’t sleep. He could hear those boys from high school taunting him when he closed his eyes at night. He feared losing the power and control he’d worked so hard to gain. He cursed and realized he’d zoned out again. He’d been doing that a lot since he stopped sleeping. His men had just botched an assignment and that meant they were in trouble, he thought as he unbuttoned his suit coat to expose the .38 at his waist.
“The flash drives appear to be full of notes, but nothing of importance to you. Research on a corrupt Washington senator taking bribes from lobbyists, some coverage from the Iraq war, a bunch of notes on the political upheaval and human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo . . . nothing about guns or sex or anyone associated with you,” the young man told him as he held his breath and tried to keep his eyes on the boss. But, his fear was visible every time he glanced away from him.
“Are you sure this woman has anything to do with us?”
The boss felt his heart squeeze as his man questioned him. It was hard to breathe as the mocking voices of his classmates filled his head. He whipped around, shot the man who dared question him, and then breathed as the voices quieted. “I know she has info on us. Go back to her apartment and search again,” he yelled. The room cleared and he was left alone with a dead man and his thoughts, once again.
Gemma sat back down on the sofa to wait. She closed her eyes as images of Gia and herself as kids floated into view. She smiled as she remembered their secret hiding place in the attic where they'd go to play and speak in twin. It was their special world.
“Look, Gemma. I made this box in art class. We can put all our treasures in it and keep it forever,” Gia said excitedly after school in the third grade as she showed off a pink wooden box with a bright purple flower on the top.
Gemma’s eyes popped open and she sat up so fast Fred almost fell off her lap. “The box!” Frantically Gemma started looking around. Had she seen it when she walked through the apartment? No, she hadn’t.
“It’s got to be here,” she mumbled excitedly as she started pushing aside books and looking in drawers. She felt her blood rushing through her body, suddenly knowing she had to find that box.
She stopped in the middle of the apartment and looked around desperately. It was here, but where? Gemma wandered around again with her head held back, looking at the ceiling and into every nook and cranny. She screamed for joy when she found what she was looking for in the hallway coat closet.
An unseen force urged her to hurry as Gemma grabbed coats and threw them to the ground. She scrambled into the back of the tight closet and ran her hand along the wall. Hidden in the far back corner behind the coats was a small panel painted the same color as the rest of the closet. She pried it open with her nails, not caring when they broke off in her quest.
She tossed the panel to the ground, reached inside the dark space, and pulled out the faded box with Gia and Gemma written on each side of the purple flower. Under the box were three notebooks with a symbol on the bottom of them that she recognized.
Carrying them quickly to the couch, Gemma set everything down on the coffee table and stared at the box. She reached a shaky hand toward the flimsy clasp but froze when she heard a key being inserted into the door. Fred began to growl and she scooped him up along with the box and notebooks, shoving them both into the bag. Police officers didn’t have a key to the apartment, but the person who killed her sister did and she wasn't going to be next.
Her eyes were frantically searching for a way out when they landed on the window behind the desk. The doorknob turned and the door opened a couple of inches before the security chain engaged.
“What the . . .” she heard a man’s voice curse.
Gemma leaped onto the desk, turned the bolt, and threw open the window as the man put his shoulder to the door. She heard the chain pop as she clambered onto the fire escape. She didn’t wait to see who came through the door. In her mind she knew she should get a description for the police, but her fight-or-flight instincts took over and screamed at her to run.
She heard the men yell and jump onto her sister’s desk as she gripped the rails and raced down the tiny metal stairs. Windows started opening as she beat her way downward. The men were gaining and when she glanced up, she saw they were able to take the stairs two at a time.
Neighbors yelled and threatened to call the police. Gemma was concentrating so much on the steep stairs she couldn’t yell for help. In actuality, she was so scared she didn’t think she could form words to call for help. Her only hope was that the police were nearby.
She rounded the third floor and looked frantically around for more stairs. She glanced behind her and saw the feet of two men above her. The stairs ended but she saw the sign to pull the lever for the emergency ladder. With a loud creak, the sound of metal grating against metal reverberated off the surrounding buildings and the ladder slid to the ground.
Hiking her bag further up her shoulder, she turned around and looked into the eyes of the scariest man she’d ever seen. His head was shaved and the lights from the apartments gleamed off his dome. But it was his eyes that scared her the most. They were a menacing black that sent shivers down her spine. A small scar ran the length of his cheek, adding to his dangerous appearanc
e.
Gemma panicked as she felt her foot slip off the step below her. She gripped the side of the ladder with her sweaty hands as she painfully plummeted to the pavement. Her feet hit with a resounding force, felt through her entire body, and caused her to let go of the ladder. She stumbled backward and straight into a solid wall of muscle.
CHAPTER THREE
Cy Davies felt his feet pounding the stairs in the darkened stairwell. He controlled his breathing as the sound of gunfire bounced off the cement walls around him. Straight ahead, the locked door to the roof stood in his way. He just needed to get through it.
His expensive Italian leather shoes slid across the floor as he skidded to a stop in front of the door. He looked behind him as a new round of gunfire erupted. Not wasting any more time, he brought his knee up, lashed out with his foot, and was rewarded with the sound of wood splintering as the door flew open.
He chanced a quick glance behind even though it cost him precious seconds. The shadowed form of a man burst forth from the shadows. Cy grabbed the gun hidden beneath his suit coat and fired a shot down the stairwell before sprinting through the door and into the late afternoon sunlight.
His eyes adjusted quickly as he ran across the graveled rooftop. The crack of a gunshot made him duck his head and dive behind the air conditioning unit before returning fire. He looked around the rooftop and saw the tall buildings of downtown L.A. surrounding him on all sides but one. There was his escape—the shorter bank building across the alley from the business center. He had to make the jump.
He stuck his arm around the side of the air conditioner and fired blindly before shoving the gun back into his holster and sprinting toward the edge of the building. He breathed in deep through his nose to control his heart rate and the adrenaline surging through his body.
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