by Justine Davis, Amy J. Fetzer, Katherine Garbera, Meredith Fletcher, Catherine Mann
“It’s not my mess.”
Her gaze snapped back to his face. “What?”
“It was like this when I got here the first time. Why do you think I had my gun out? I didn’t know if whoever it was was still here.”
Her gaze darted quickly around the room. The only thing out of place was the pile of tossed folders, apparently patient files, that covered the mahogany desk and spilled over onto the floor. Instinctively her mind shifted into crime-scene mode, and she found herself thinking it would take light fingerprint powder and dark cards to lift anything off the very dark wood of that desk.
As for the folders and papers, she’d be looking at DFO and then maybe ninhydrin, the reagents that reacted with the amino acids in the sweat that caused fingerprints to be left. She grimaced at the thought. The chemical was hazardous, irritated the eyes, skin, respiratory system, and since it meant using the fume hood, it was one of her least favorite processes.
And lifting prints without destroying any writing on the documents was tricky. Not that she would expect, considering these people seemed to be pros, to find any prints.
Except perhaps those of Special Agent Justin Cohen.
“And here I thought it was just for my benefit.”
“If it was, it failed miserably, didn’t it?”
“Meaning?”
“You’re FBI, too.”
She blinked. He’d obviously done some checking of his own.
“A buddy of mine in the office said somebody from D.C. had called, asking about me,” he explained as if she had actually asked. “Tried to pass it off as a woman with a personal interest, but I haven’t met a woman in years I haven’t managed to piss off.”
“Obsession will do that to a woman,” she said easily.
“Obsession?”
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You still have some crazy idea that someone at Athena is involved in your sister’s death.”
He seemed surprised at her knowledge. And this time she answered him as if he’d asked.
“You became rather a legend at Athena, after the first time you broke in. Everybody knew the story.”
“Everybody,” he said, as if through gritted teeth although his jaw didn’t seem to clench, “knows nothing.”
“Apparently you think you know something.”
“I do. I always have.”
“Funny, and here I thought the FBI beat fantasy out of its agents.”
“It’s not a fantasy. Look, I’ll tell you the whole story. Then you decide.”
She raised one brow. “And why am I any different than that ‘everybody’ who knows nothing?”
He hesitated. “I saw you that night. The second time I broke into Athena, seventeen years ago.”
It was her turn to be surprised. She grimaced. “I was a kid then.”
“Your hair hasn’t changed much. When I saw you again it didn’t take me long to connect you to the girl with that mass of red-gold hair.”
“When?”
“What?”
“When did you see me this time? How long have you been watching us?”
“Since I read about the crash, and who the victim was, in the paper.” He shrugged. “I’ll tell you the whole thing, but we’d better get out of here. I’m not sure I can talk my way out of getting caught here again.”
She hesitated just a moment longer, looking at him assessingly.
“Want me to give you my service weapon?” he asked, lifting one dark brown eyebrow.
“Not a bad idea,” she said easily. “But I’ll just keep mine handy.”
“An armed truce, then?”
“Peace is best maintained between those evenly matched, someone once said.”
“Lady, you’ve run me ragged since you got to Arizona, not to mention putting me on the floor just now,” he said, his tone dry. “I’d say we were even, with or without sidearms.”
She didn’t miss the compliment, but chose not to respond. “What about whatever you were looking for here?”
“I told you, it was like this when I got here. These files are all Cs. But,” he added, “there’s no file here for Lorraine Carrington.”
It didn’t surprise her, she’d expected something of the sort. She highly doubted this was just some filing that hadn’t been done. Judging from Cohen’s tone, he doubted it, too.
“I saw a coffee shop across the street,” she said suddenly, not certain what had sparked the suggestion.
“That’ll do, if we can find a quiet table away from everyone.”
As it turned out that wasn’t difficult; even iced-coffee drinks weren’t selling briskly on this meltingly hot day. They left their cars in the cooler garage and walked across the street.
“I’ve gotten out of the desert heat habit,” she muttered as the welcome blast of air-conditioned air hit her as they stepped inside.
“It’s tough if you weren’t born here.”
She studied him as they sat down, him with a frappuccino and she with a lemonade iced tea.
“And you were?”
“Yes.”
“And your sister?”
His fingers tightened around the plastic cup that held his chilled drink. “Let me tell you about her.”
Alex opened her mouth to say she only wanted to know what his business was here and now, so she could decide if he was a threat to Athena, but just as quickly she closed it again. She did want to know what had driven the Dark Angel.
“All right,” she said instead. It was what she’d come after him for, after all.
For a long moment he fiddled with the stir stick in his drink. “Crazy,” he muttered. “I’ve thought about telling you this for days, but now I can’t seem to figure out where to start.”
“Tell me about your sister,” she said quietly. “What was her name?”
“Kelly.” He looked up at Alex then. “She was…incredible. Our parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen. I was only thirteen. They stuck me in foster care. But she worked like a dog, sometimes two jobs, trying to save enough money to convince the state she could take care of me.”
“She must have loved you very much.”
“She did. She was the only one who did.”
“What happened?”
“She found a way to get enough money. More than enough. She didn’t tell me that at first, though. She only told me she couldn’t see me for a few months, but after that, we’d be back together for good.”
“A few months? What did she have to do?”
He looked at her steadily, as if trying to calculate how she would react. Finally he said bluntly, “Be a surrogate mother.”
Alex sucked in a harsh breath. Her mind began to race, and she had to rein it in.
“She took money for it, to help me, and it killed her.”
“You mean…she died giving birth to someone else’s child?”
“Yes.”
A surrogate mother. Rainy’s eggs. A shiver ran through her and she was glad when he began to speak again, because she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“She saw it as a way to get the money she needed to get me out of foster care.”
No wonder he was so obsessed with his sister, Alex thought. She’d essentially died for his sake.
“They paid her fifty thousand dollars,” he said.
“That’s a lot,” Alex said neutrally. “And it was even more then.”
He nodded, staring down at his cup as if the answer to life was floating by. When he didn’t go on, Alex prodded slightly.
“Why couldn’t she see you?”
His head came up. He looked at her intently. One corner of his mouth lifted in what could have been smile or grimace. “Bingo,” he said softly.
“What?”
“That’s what was fishy about the whole thing. She said they couldn’t know about me. That it was crucial they never find out I even existed.”
“They?”
“The people who set it all up, and who wou
ld take care of her when the baby came.”
Alex frowned. “What difference could it make if they knew she had a brother?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. She couldn’t tell me, she just said that they insisted she had to be single, with no ties.”
Alex pondered that for a moment. “Maybe they just thought there would be less chance that she would change her mind and want the baby herself.”
“That’s what I thought, at first. But after she died…”
He stopped. He stared down at his drink. She looked at him, at the dark semicircles of thick lashes, in the unfair way of nature more beautiful than most women’s.
“After she died,” he went on, his voice low and taut, “I got to thinking that maybe they had wanted her not to have any ties for another reason. That maybe they just hadn’t wanted her to have anyone who might come looking for her, or ask questions.”
Disposable, Alex thought, the first word that popped into her mind.
She realized she’d become caught up in his story, and to be honest, a tiny bit fascinated with the idea of sitting here across from the Dark Angel as if it were normal. He was still every bit as intense and dramatically handsome as he’d been then, and after all those years of hearing the legend repeated it was difficult to believe he was really here.
A flash of heat shot through her, startling her. It was a moment before she realized that the attraction it had taken her a long time to admit to had morphed into something else, something hotter, stronger, deeper. She stared at him, the one part of her mind she could still call sane at this instant hoping fiercely he wouldn’t look up and see her gaping at him like a landed fish.
What was happening? She was going to marry Emerson, she had no business going into heat over another man. Especially this one. She tried to quash the burgeoning feelings, told herself she was indulging in some adolescent fantasy gone amok, but she knew better. She’d been attracted to him before, yes, but it had only changed to this after she’d come to know him, admire him.
She knew then she was in big trouble. It was a tremendous effort for her to refocus on his story.
What he’d told her so far was so awful that it was with a great effort that Alex brought the conversation back to her main concern.
“What,” she said, “does all this about your sister have to do with Athena?”
“I’m getting to that.” He ran a finger through the condensation on the side of his plastic glass. “When the time came, Kelly called me from her apartment. Said the baby was coming, fast, and she’d be on her way to the hospital as soon as they came to get her. She sounded scared.”
“They? Not medics or an ambulance?”
He gave her a sideways look. “No. Another fishy part of the deal.” He paused, took a breath like a rider about to start a cross-country run, then plunged ahead. “The next day I hadn’t heard from her. I called the hospital and they wouldn’t tell me anything on the phone. So I went down there. Raised a ruckus, but they wouldn’t let me see her.”
Alex could picture it all too well. The young, desperate boy, helpless against an adult system that decided for him what he should know, where he should be, what he should do. It made her own gripes about her childhood and her mother seem pretty shallow and pointless. And that helped her wait quietly for him to continue when he could.
“Finally a doctor came, and he told me she and the baby hadn’t made it. That there had been complications, bleeding….”
He stopped, and Alex stayed silent again; the memories were piling up on him, she could sense it, and knew this was not the time to prod him to hurry, even though she was impatient to find out what on earth all this had to do with Athena. Or at least, what it had to do with Athena in his mind.
Besides, she was feeling a bit of a pang herself, at the thought of a scared young girl, dying alone, in pain, surely feeling the whole world had turned against her when all she’d been trying to do was keep what was left of her little family together.
After a couple of moments he continued. “The hospital called the authorities, to take me back to the foster home.”
“You just find out the only family you have died and they couldn’t wait to turn you back over to foster care?” she asked softly.
He shrugged. “Oh, the nurses were really nice, and were worried about me, but what else could they do with an angry teen? Anyway, while I was sitting at the nurses’ station—so they could keep an eye on me, I guess—before the child welfare people came to take me back, I heard them talking.”
“The nurses?”
He nodded. “About the private nurse who had been taking care of her, and what a…a pain she was, ordering everybody to stay away from her patient.”
Alex couldn’t even begin to imagine what his feelings had been, a fifteen-year-old boy left alone in the world like that. No wonder he’d been looking for someone to blame, someone to hate. Life had not been kind to the young Justin Cohen. First his parents, then his sister. It really was amazing that he’d pulled himself together enough to end up where he was now. And perhaps not so amazing that she’d gotten all tangled up over him.
“And then, later, I found out about the fifty thousand in her bank account, which she’d instructed was to be mine if anything happened to her. Even after she was dead, she was still taking care of her little brother.”
And suddenly Alex wished she hadn’t called the cops on him yesterday. She didn’t want him to lose what he’d managed to gain despite such a rocky start.
But there was still one question he hadn’t answered.
“I understand, Justin,” she said gently. “But I still don’t know what all this has to do with Athena.”
He looked up, met her gaze levelly. And answered. “That nurse I mentioned? The private one taking care of Kelly, and ordering everyone else to stay away from her?”
An idea leaped into her mind in the moment before he spoke and confirmed it.
“It was Betsy Stone.”
Chapter 16
The cool air in the coffee shop, which had been so welcome when they’d come in, seemed icy cold to Alex now. It crept over her like the cold of the morgue. She rubbed at her bare arms, barely managing to suppress a shiver. She welcomed the distraction when her cell phone rang. She had planned to ignore it until she saw it was Kayla.
“Excuse me,” she said, a mechanical expression of manners drilled into her from childhood.
Justin nodded, and she picked it up, wondering what Kayla would say if she mentioned who she was with right now, and what he had just told her.
“Nothing,” Kayla said, before Alex could ask. “I saw the guy, and whatever kind of arrogant jerk he was before, the Arizona State Prison system has taken it out of him. A real reality check. He’s just humbled enough that I believe him.”
“Good enough for me. Can I call you later?” She would need to let Kayla know as soon as possible that she knew now who the Athena connection was.
“Sure. I’m heading back to the department.”
“I’ll reconnect with you there,” she said.
After she’d hung up and set the phone down on the table, it took her a moment to bring herself back to the reality sitting across the table from her. Justin was looking at her as if he knew perfectly well that the call she’d just received had something to do with what they were sitting here talking about. But to his credit, he didn’t demand that she tell him. He was apparently smart enough to realize she didn’t trust him yet and wasn’t about to tell him anything until and unless she did.
Instead he merely looked at her, a glint in his eyes she couldn’t quite decipher, except that it held a hint of challenge.
“Afraid somebody might realize you’re with me?”
She shoved her phone back into her purse with more force than necessary. “Hardly,” she said, more vehemently than she’d wanted to.
He arched one dark brow at her. “Afraid of yourself with me, then?”
She just stopped her jaw from dropping.
“Oh, please,” she said. But behind the effort at sarcasm was a niggling doubt, and the fear that maybe he was right.
She forced herself to focus once more. She had no business wondering if she was falling for this man when there were far more important things for her to be concentrating on.
Betsy Stone, his dead sister’s nurse. It all seemed so incredible, but really, was the story of Kelly Cohen’s horrible death really any more unimaginable than Rainy’s death was to them? Weren’t the Athenans and this man dealing with the same kind of horrible nightmare, two decades apart?
“Go on,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse from her tangled emotions.
After a moment Justin nodded and picked up his story. “I could never prove Athena had anything to do with what was done to Kelly or her death. But I knew Stone worked there. It was all I had to go on.”
“You were only fifteen,” Alex said, because she felt as if she needed to say something.
His mouth quirked. “Believe me, I know. I was never allowed to forget that fact. Nobody wanted to take me seriously. No one even wanted to talk to a kid about it, especially a wildly angry one.”
Something in his tone got through her chill. She remembered the young man she’d seen that night, a few years after the first time he’d gone to Athena, could imagine how much angrier and fiercer he must have been the first time, immediately after his beloved sister, his only relative, had died.
“And a scared one?” she suggested softly.
“Oh, very,” he admitted easily. And she liked him for that. Among other things, some of which she hadn’t admitted even to herself. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.”
“Did they send you back to your foster home?”
He nodded. “It’s not that they were that bad, my foster family, they really weren’t. I’ve heard of much worse. But after all this had happened, they kept me on a pretty tight rein. They were ordered to, I think.”
“I’m sure they were worried about you.”
“About being responsible for what I did, anyway,” he said. Then he shook his head as if at his own words. “No, that’s not fair. They did the best they could, and they were genuinely trying to help.”