Mortal Sin

by Allison Brennan

  “Sloppy? One bullet and he’s dead.”

  “Yeah—but Yuran is better than that. Still,” Noah said, turning onto the freeway, “Morton was into something that got him killed, and that means someone even more dangerous is involved in whatever plan Morton had up his sleeve.”

  “Where to now?”

  “Yuran. I have to call it in, I’m sure one of our people is watching him closely. I don’t want to risk any existing undercover op, but he knows something or Shuman wouldn’t have seemed so nervous.”

  Driving back to D.C., Noah called Hans Vigo to learn the status of any investigation involving Sergey Yuran. By the time Hans returned his call, he was pulling into FBI headquarters.

  “You were right to call,” Hans said. “Immigration has had him under surveillance for months, and they don’t want us involved at this point. I did, however, get some information out of them. Good news, bad news. Or good news, neutral news, depending on your point of view.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Yuran and his key men are all alibied for last weekend—they were in New York City.”

  “Doing what? A human trafficking convention?” Noah added sarcastically.

  “They didn’t say, I didn’t ask. Immigration is touchy these days.”

  Noah said, “He could have put a hit out on Morton.”

  “True, but there’s no whisper of that. According to my source, Morton and Ralston aren’t even on their radar. There are no signs that Yuran is even looking into the online sex trade; he prefers to deal with live people.”

  Noah didn’t think that Shuman was blowing smoke up his ass. “My source says Yuran was a possible source of capital to launch the venture.”

  “That may be possible, but only from a money perspective. Yuran has been known to loan money, at huge cost. You think that’s why Morton and Ralston were killed? They didn’t pay up?”

  “No,” Noah admitted. “That doesn’t feel right—there’s no sign that either of them had any cash, even for a short time. Yuran isn’t an idiot; he wouldn’t kill them without a reason.”

  “I agree. I think Yuran is a dead end, but I did ask my ICE contact to research the matter. How many emails were exchanged between Yuran and Morton?”

  “One.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a good bet. Does Kate have the content yet?”

  “No. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the neutral-to-bad news.”

  “I thought you gave me the bad news.”

  “Because you didn’t close your case? That’d be too easy. But you should know that Sean Rogan paid a visit to Sergey Yuran yesterday.”

  Noah tensed. “Rogan?”

  “Stayed for twenty-seven minutes. Went to his bar before it opened. The timing suggests it was right before he found Ralston’s body.”

  “Yuran sent him there?”

  “Doubtful—Ralston was an associate of Morton’s, Sean was working the case like you were.”

  “Obstructing justice.”

  “I’m saying, you might want to use Sean and RCK where you can. They have a little more freedom than we do.”

  Hans wasn’t explicitly giving him an order, but it felt like one. Noah didn’t want to cross that line. Bringing in a private consultant was one thing, but a gray-area firm like Rogan-Caruso-Kincaid? “I think I’ll just ask Rogan what he and Yuran talked about, and then tell him to stay the hell out of my case.”

  “I understand; I’m just giving options,” Hans said.

  It wasn’t an option Noah cared to exercise—except as a last resort.

  TWENTY

  Cody confronted Lucy outside the Medical Examiner’s Office on Monday morning. “You lied to me.”

  Lucy blinked rapidly, at a complete loss. Her head ached from lack of sleep, the wind had picked up, making her colder than she already was, and that awful pinprick sensation of being watched had returned.

  He shoved a piece of paper into her gloved hand. It was a printout of a message from Prenter’s social networking account—the deleted account—forwarded to Prenter’s personal email.

  The original message was from Lucy’s “Tanya” account:

  change of plans—i have an errand in dc can we meet at club 10? can’t wait!! xoxo Tanya.

  Lucy read it five times before Cody yanked it out of her hands. “I didn’t send it,” she said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She stared at him, heartbroken that he thought she was lying. A curdle of fear twisted in her stomach as she realized someone had used her account to send Prenter to Club 10. Where he’d been murdered. “You’ve known me for over three years. You don’t trust me?”

  “Are you denying this is your account?” He waved the paper in her face.

  “No, but—”

  “Your secure WCF account?”

  “Cody! Stop interrogating me like I’m a suspect.”

  He didn’t say anything, but glared at her.

  “I didn’t send that message,” she repeated.

  “Then who?” He shot out the question as if she were a hostile witness.

  “I don’t know!”

  Lucy’s mind ran through every possible scenario she could think of. “It’s not impossible for someone to have hacked my account.”

  “Someone would have to have known who you were.”

  “No—not necessarily. If someone got hold of Prenter’s emails—hell, Cody, he had them forwarded to his personal email, anyone could see my log-in name! Maybe one of his ex-girlfriends was pissed off and didn’t want him seeing someone else. Maybe—”

  “Listen to yourself!”

  “I’m trying to figure out how someone used my account—or masked their account to look like mine—to send him to the bar where he died. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.” As she said it, she realized this was no coincidence. The decision to send Prenter to Club 10 was deliberate and calculating. Less than two hours later, he was murdered in the alley. Quietly, she asked, “What do you think, Cody?”

  He ran a hand over his face. “I don’t know what to think, Lucy.”

  “The murder was purposeful. Did you read the autopsy report? Four bullets, remember? Three in the stomach, one in the back of the head. That sounds professional, right? Not a drug dispute gone bad.”

  Lucy began to shake from more than the cold.

  Cody grabbed her hand. “If you’re in trouble, tell me. I will do everything in my power to help you, but you have to tell me the truth.”

  “Trouble? I’m not in any trouble!”

  “Did someone ask you to send that message? Or maybe you gave someone access to your account? Who are you trying to protect? Tell me!”

  “No! Cody, what are you thinking about me?”

  “Then you told someone.”

  “I told no one! I’m the one who told you that I thought something was odd about Prenter’s murder. I came to you, remember?”

  “Maybe to see if you’d screwed up.”

  Lucy stepped back, pulling her hand from Cody’s tight grasp. It became clear that Cody thought she had conspired to kill Brad Prenter.

  “Please,” Cody pleaded. “Let me help you.”

  “You don’t believe me.” She bit back the bile of betrayal that burned her throat and said in a shockingly calm voice, “If I were going to set Prenter up, I wouldn’t send you to another bar. I wouldn’t have let you know that I had him on the hook. I wouldn’t have him killed in your jurisdiction, since you knew I was working him online. And I certainly would never have come to you to look into the odd circumstance of his murder.”

  Cody slumped, the truth of her words hitting him, but as far as Lucy was concerned she could never trust Cody again. “I—I’m sorry,” he stammered.

  “How could you think I am capable of doing such a thing?”

  He didn’t say anything, and Lucy knew exactly why he’d believed the worst of her. Her hands came up to her mouth and she swallowed a sob.

  It was because she had killed before. Six y
ears ago she’d shot Adam Scott at point-blank range. Few people knew the whole story, but Cody did. When she and Cody had been dating she had told him about her past.

  She turned and walked away, as fast as she dared on the icy sidewalk. Cody called after her, but she ignored him. She called her boss on the way back to the Metro station, told him she was ill, and headed home. Tired, cold, and sick at the loss of a friend.

  But under it all was a simmering anger that someone had used her to kill Brad Prenter. She had to get home and look through all her records and accounts and figure this out before whoever killed him realized she was suspicious.

  Unfortunately, with Cody looking into Prenter’s death, it might be too late.

  In the back of her mind, Lucy knew that if not her, someone else at WCF would have worked on Prenter. WCF had dozens of volunteers, but only a handful of paid staff. Fran ran background checks on everyone. Some of the volunteers had tragedy in their own lives; others were retired law enforcement; others were active in public safety and used their free time to help. All had to pass a security check, but they weren’t foolproof.

  Lucy couldn’t tell Fran unless she was certain. It would devastate the director to think that her organization had been used to kill a rapist. Their donors, their funding would dry up. All the good work they’d done in the past would be scrutinized. The active cops associated with them could be in jeopardy. Like Cody.

  The people Lucy worked with didn’t kill predators, they put them in prison. It sickened her to think that their work might be tainted because one person wanted Prenter dead.

  When Lucy arrived home, she smelled the roses before she saw the bouquet on the table next to the stairs. Red roses in a clear glass vase. She saw the card on the table next to it with her name. On the notepad next to the phone, Kate had scrawled, “These were delivered as I was leaving. Gorgeous! I want the scoop when I get home.”

  The tension from her contemplative Metro ride and walk home began to fade. She opened the card.

  I had a terrific time at the ice rink yesterday. I’ll see you soon.

  He hadn’t signed it, just added a scrawl of something illegible. She smiled and smelled the flowers. Roses had never been her favorite, but today they were. Sean had quickly become important to her. She’d liked him when Patrick first introduced them but thought Sean wasn’t at all serious. His car, his plane, his computer toys—he seemed to be all about his stuff. But the last few days spending time with him, getting to know him better, kissing him … she felt a peace and comfort she hadn’t felt for a long time, and a deep attraction that surprised her. Sean might appear frivolous on the surface, but Lucy saw a depth of character and raw intelligence that was as captivating as his Irish charm and good looks.

  She reluctantly put the card down. She hadn’t ditched work to sit around, but needed to find out exactly what had happened to Brad Prenter.

  His killer knew how WCF tracked paroled sex offenders and sent them back to prison to complete their original sentence. Did someone in WCF have a vendetta against Prenter?

  The most logical explanation was that one of his victims had gone after him.

  Lucy went to her room and logged onto her computer. She could access WCF files from home, though she rarely did. She pulled down Prenter’s criminal records, though she knew them by heart, just to reread and make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

  He’d been convicted of raping Sara Tyson. Two other women came forward to testify against him, and Lucy didn’t know why they hadn’t filed charges. Lack of evidence? The judge had allowed the testimony, but as Lucy reviewed the transcripts she realized that their testimony had been limited. They spoke only to facts that could be corroborated by a witness—both of them had appeared intoxicated at a public place and Prenter had taken them home. Prenter never denied having sex with them, but said it was consensual. They had likely been drugged—hence the appearance of drunkenness—but there was no proof; however, it looked bad to the jury that Prenter on two occasions had taken advantage of a drunk college student. Coupled with the proof that he’d drugged Sara Tyson, the jury had convicted him.

  Lucy further researched Sara and the other two women. All had graduated from college. None of them lived within a hundred-mile radius. One was engaged to be married, and Sara attended law school in Texas.

  Not in Prenter’s file, but in Lucy’s personal notes, was the information about his high school girlfriend in Rhode Island.

  Evelyn Oldenburg had come home late on Saturday night from a house party. Her parents were asleep and didn’t hear her come in, but her younger brother said he’d heard the garage door close at 1:40, over an hour past her curfew. He didn’t want to get her in trouble, so he didn’t say anything. The next morning, her mother went to wake her and Evelyn was unresponsive. The girl had vomited on the floor next to her bed, indicating that she’d likely been conscious when she came home. The parents and paramedics believed it was alcohol poisoning, and her best friend, Sheila, tearfully confirmed that she’d driven Evelyn home in Evelyn’s car, then Sheila had walked to her own house.

  It was what happened between 11:45 and one a.m.—when Sheila couldn’t find Evelyn—that was suspicious. No one, not even the police or hospital staff, had thought that Evelyn had anything but alcohol poisoning. Drug tests came back inconclusive. Further tests confirmed that she had ingested an unknown anabolic steroid—similar but not identical to GHB.

  Evelyn had no signs of violent rape but did have signs of recent sexual intercourse. No DNA had been found on her person, but the rapist could have worn a condom. In addition, Sheila had found Evelyn naked in a backyard hot tub. The water and heat easily could have destroyed evidence.

  Prenter had been at the party, and Sheila gave a statement that he’d been with Evelyn the entire night—until they disappeared at 11:45. He was nowhere to be found when Evelyn turned up in the hot tub. Other witnesses corroborated the fact. He said they’d had consensual sex, and Evelyn’s own diary confirmed that she was considering having sex with Prenter. But he said he left at midnight.

  While the police suspected Prenter of drugging her, they had no evidence, and Prenter graduated from high school and went off to college.

  Homemade Liquid X coupled with alcohol most likely sent Evelyn’s system into shock, but it couldn’t be proven. She slipped into a coma, where she remains today—eight years later.

  Lucy did a deep search of Evelyn’s family. Her brother, Kyle, was a freshman in college on the West Coast. Her parents still lived in Providence, and Evelyn was living in hospice care. Her father was a bank manager, her mother a teacher. They lived modestly. The mom had a Facebook page, and Lucy read the archives, heartbroken and uplifted at the same time. Most of the time, Mrs. Oldenburg was positive, but last year on Evelyn’s twenty-fifth birthday she’d written:

  Happy Birthday Evelyn: We had so many hopes for you and your future. You were bright and smart and beautiful and a dreamer. I will never stop hoping for a medical solution, or praying for a miracle.

  Lucy didn’t notice the tears running down her face until they dropped onto her desk. She felt the mother’s pain. Her brother Patrick had been in a coma for nearly two years, all because of an explosion that Adam Scott had rigged. He’d been alert after the explosion, but pressure on his brain had necessitated emergency surgery, and he hadn’t woken up for twenty-two months.

  She wiped away the tears, furious with Brad Prenter and angry with Evelyn’s peers who hadn’t told the complete truth. Someone knew what happened at the party. If Brad Prenter was innocent of drugging her, he’d still slept with a girl who was obviously intoxicated and unable to give informed consent.

  She couldn’t see the Oldenburgs going after Prenter using such an elaborate ruse as WCF’s parolee project, but she certainly understood how ordinary people could kill.

  She pulled the binder where she kept every sheet on every predator she’d worked on at WCF. Not all of them were part of the parolee project—some were predators lurin
g kids on the Internet whom she’d identified and referred to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution. But the bulk of her work was on the parolee project.

  There were twenty-seven special cases in which she chatted with paroled sex offenders. They’d been identified through a variety of means, but most were creatures of habit and walked in the same cyber-circles. Once a sex offender’s preferences were identified, he rarely deviated from his preferred victim type. Lucy’s computer program helped identify those types and where on the Internet the predator was most likely to lurk. WCF monitored numerous message boards and chat rooms looking for keywords and phrases. If someone sparked the interest of WCF staff or volunteers, they’d track the screen name and, if possible, the email. They’d compare that data with known parolees, and if there was a match, that sex offender was targeted.

  Most of these guys had already broken their parole by returning to chat rooms, but most judges would not put them back in prison for that. Overcrowding and cost controls in the criminal justice system were a huge problem, and law enforcement didn’t have the time or manpower to follow up on every paroled sex offender who logged into a chat room. WCF selected only high-risk repeat offenders, sexual predators who should never have been let out of prison.

  Of the twenty-seven Lucy had worked on, nine hadn’t taken the bait. Predators were notoriously good at sniffing out police activity. Seventeen were arrested and returned to prison. There was no trial, since they were all in violation of their parole. And when it came to sexual predators, most judges simply revoked their parole when they crossed the line. However, two parolees had a judge who felt the violation wasn’t severe enough to warrant reincarceration. They were still on the streets.

  Frustrated that she didn’t have an answer, and not wanting to go to Fran without something tangible, Lucy wondered whether there was another connection to Prenter. Perhaps he’d pissed off someone in prison. But she needed greater access to information.

  Her sister-in-law wasn’t home, which was good because Lucy needed to use her computer.