A Brutal Tenderness

by Marata Eros

  We race to the nearest vehicle.

  Toward death.

  Toward vengeance.

  1

  I let the binoculars drop against my thigh as the memories of that horrific day slide away. I see Jewell cross the sodden grass of the cemetery, her skirt flying behind her as she jogs gracefully on dancer’s legs, and for just a moment, I remember the hours of surveillance video of her I’ve forced myself to watch.

  Luke clears his throat, and I give him another look. “Let’s go,” I say in a short voice. My eyes go back to the casket, the mourners gone now, escaping the reminder of their mortality.

  My eyes swing back to the limo. It’s no longer there. Jewell has fled.

  I will find her wherever she goes. Jewell will be missing for her family but will be hiding in plain sight for us feds.

  We turn to leave, and Luke holds me back as I see Thaddeus approach and greet the press, my dead cousin’s broken and violated body just paces away in an uncaring grave.

  I’ve never believed it’s possible to feel hate that acutely. I can taste his death on my tongue.

  My arm bites with a band of pins and needles from Luke’s fingers clamping onto my biceps, pulling me in the other direction.

  I’m the wrong agent for this job. I know this. My personal stake is high: Faith is more to me than just another statistic, another case file.

  But I’m also the perfect choice, a study of the classic oxymoron. It’s my relative who has been murdered. That should get me a pass. But that very fact makes me the classic dog with a bone. The Bureau needs me, and justice will be served on my terms.

  I will stop at nothing until Faith is vindicated.

  Two Years Later It’s my scene and has been mine from the beginning, though the higher-ups have fought tooth and nail against it. I’m too close and all that shit, they said. But in the end, they can’t deny that it’s my baby. I’ve let us suck at the proverbial teat, fed it, swaddled its shitty ass, and now the go’s in place to make contact with the object of our protection.

  Jewell MacLeod.

  Jewell’s cleverer than anyone has given her credit for. Aside from changing her identity twice—causing us briefly to lose the bead on her—she’s altered her hair color and eye color and kept a low profile. Smart. However, it always comes down to time. People are creatures of habit, and those who are talented are compelled to do that which they’ve been blessed with. As is the case with Jewell, now Jess Mackey. Jewell has inserted herself into a new environment, blending in like every other twenty-year-old University of Washington sophomore.

  She gave herself away with what to anyone else would seem an inconsequential act: a ballet audition. But that’s what cinched it. Now we know she’s our bird—the bait we need to capture a psychopath.

  Jewell may have proved a useless witness, unable to give us anything we could use to pin Faith’s death on Thaddeus given her cowardly decision to hide away in a closet while Faith lay dying, but at least she’ll make a decent pawn. DNA evidence had already proved inconclusive, and a convenient knot on Thaddeus’s head, combined with a weak story about a loss of consciousness—and mountains of Daddy’s money—saved him from immediate scrutiny.

  But I know better.

  Jewell heard from the closet what was happening to Faith and did nothing. And ultimately she hadn’t seen who was responsible.

  A few weeks before, Faith had confided to me what Jewell had told her—that Thad has all the markers of a psychopath: time in psych wards, torture of animals, a deep loathing of his parents, and a decidedly unstable family life. Senator MacLeod, domineering and displaying episodes of antisocial behavior, is clearly not running on all cylinders himself. He’s also brilliant at hiding his true nature.

  And now Thad is missing. All our careful data collection and obsessive observation of the family as they cocooned themselves from scrutiny and distance from Faith’s murder is hanging in precarious balance. Thad needs to come to justice. For the victims. For Faith.

  Our research and his combined history suggest he’s hunting again. It doesn’t matter to me that the crime scenes here reveal no physical evidence that Thad is the murderer. My gut never lies. I know it’s him.

  The bodies piling up in the region where Jewell MacLeod now lives is a giveaway: Her brother is coming to visit. And I plan to be here when he does. Son of a hopeful presidential candidate or not, he’s going down for Faith’s murder. As for and that stepsister of his . . . her stay of liberty is coming to an end. Jewell won’t be able to escape from her part in all of this that easily.

  All this runs through my head in a familiar beat of torture I put myself through almost daily as I’ve seen Jewell now transformed into Jess. Her shy act and modest, gentle demeanor seem to be fooling all who meet her. I can’t believe they don’t see the entitled debutante she was, and still is, with her professional ballet lessons, private school education, and deeply ingrained snobbery lurking just below the surface. I know enough from proximity to Faith to have learned about the comings and goings of that family. Faith’s gregarious nature had been unintentionally forthcoming. She painted a picture of the MacLeod family in unflattering detail. FBI intel fills in whatever holes remain.

  But all that distant surveillance is coming to an end now.

  I watch her as she heads into the auditorium of the University of Washington. Obviously succumbing to the need to stroke her own ego, she lets a guy cop a feel while he pins a number on her thin T-shirt once she is inside. Her braids, now gold, are secured on her head like a woven crown, the band of her yoga pants a riot of color at her hips.

  I lean back against the wall, allowing myself for the first time to be seen by her if she chances a glance in my direction.

  My eyes bore holes into her back. Turn around, I command inside my head.

  She doesn’t. Her wide blue eyes, which disguise a shade of brilliant green, scan the auditorium. Her full lips are slightly parted . . . in what? Surprise? No. The little brat is up to something. Why else would she decide to do this audition after disguising herself so carefully?

  Fucking stupid.

  I cross my arms, and a two point five nods my way, his campus security badge winking under the huge hanging fluorescent lights that wash everything an icy blue. They buzz slightly above my head, and I sweep my hand in an agitated scrub over my buzzed hair. It’s been itching like fucking crazy since I got it shaved. But I have to admit that in my new role, I’m allowed to look like me again, and it’s a relief not to cover my tats anymore with that pancake crap. I feel like I’m starting to find my way back to myself. My former persona is no longer necessary, as first contact is right around the corner. I’m no longer blending in but playing the ghost of myself.

  I work out seven days a week now. It’s as necessary as breathing—an outlet for my aggression, which keeps me from going rogue and chasing after Thad on my own. Not that I’ve given up preparing for one day coming face-to-face with the bastard. I’ve taken my hand-to-hand combat to a new level, my sparring partners in the FBI down to the insane, stupid, or both.

  My muscles are tense as I suffer through watching two lackluster dancers before Jewell takes the stage. They’re shit, I think with an internal sneer.

  She’ll be shit too. Why Faith loved her is beyond me. Just sheer loyalty, I figure.

  I crack my knuckles, shift my weight, scuff a worn black combat boot against the highly polished gym floor.

  When the music fills the auditorium, I know it’s for Jewell.

  I can see the change come over her face as she hears the first notes of Moonlight Sonata. It transforms her, and for the first time since I’ve been watching her, Jess Mackey’s careful cover slips, and Jewell bursts her skin.

  I stand up straighter, the crowd in the packed auditorium becoming still, silent, and watchful. I could hear a pin drop, with just the minor notes of the classic Beethoven piece filling the space as it echoes and comes back to her. It feeds her energy and mastery over the music, over her body
. I watch like everyone else, mesmerized, my heart speeding, her talent a raw and wild thing, captured by the music.

  Her hair winks like linked gold as her leg snaps parallel to her face. Jewell drives it against herself as she spins across the stage, her moves at once as fierce as they are graceful. For that moment, she robs me of my seething anger, my need to avenge Faith. All I see is Jewell as she comes nearer, like a mirage I can’t shake. The urge to close my eyes takes hold and I force them to stay open, to watch Jewell dance.

  Her arms flutter by her sides as she floats across the stage. The judges’ are eyes glued to a dancer whose steps are whisper soft as the final notes of the music swell into a crescendo and then halt abruptly.

  There’s a beat of silence, and then the notes swell once again as Jewell holds her leg beside her face, her toe pointed at the ceiling.

  She spins once more, landing in spiral of whirling color. Her hands fall to cup slightly at her sides as her face stays turned and away, the long column of her neck like a swan’s.

  For a moment after the music has died, there is no sound, like a vacuum has stolen the breath from everyone, the very air. Then like a bubble that pops, people stand, clapping and cheering.

  Jewell scans the crowd. Unnervingly, she looks straight at me and I feel a jolt. I remember why I’m here and return her dead-on stare, holding her gaze captive for a moment.

  Her face is an open book, and I’m pleased to see she takes a half step backward, as if slapped by the intensity of my stare. The reaction I’d hoped for. She won’t forget me now.

  Just then her, fellow sophomore Carlie Stanton crashes into her with a congratulatory squeal, blocking me from her line of sight.

  Jewell never sees me leave.

  We’ll meet again now that the introductions are out of the way.

  Thaddeus MacLeod Thad enjoys the hunt almost as much as he delights in the kill. In this case, he certainly relishes choosing handy clones of his stepsister; it helps him bide his time until he can satiate his reckoning against her. After all, practice makes perfect. A chilling smile sweeps across his GQ features, then vanishes like a cloud covering the sun. The manifestation of real emotion is as fleeting as the authenticity of its appearance.

  Thad GI crawls, his elbows propelling him forward on the needle-covered ground. Branches claw at his camouflage jacket as he adjusts his night-vision binoculars, peering out from the greenbelt whose forest neatly hides him They are light, foldable, and so accurate they can spot a tick on a deer at a hundred yards. But Thad is not in need of quite that level of observation this night. Instead, he watches his subject giggle and twitter as she executes the slut walk of shame.

  Amanda Miller. Exquisite. He’s seen her in daylight: ginger hair a sweep of silk between shoulder blades that flank the ponytail she usually favors. It’s her eyes that finally convince Thad she is enough like Jewell to dispose of.

  It is Jewell who is responsible for his frosty upbringing. It is she who makes his existence less than it is destined to be. When she ends, Thad will begin.

  He tightens the magnification on the lens and bears down on his conquest. He watches her walk to the girls’ dorm and listens to the rat-tat-tat of her fuck-me pumps echoing on the cement.

  Thad has the same image he’s always had. He sees the many girls who’ve died so his timing can be perfect now, as it needs to be. Closing his eyes, he imagines standing in an octagon-shaped room with nothing but mirrors, Jewell standing in the middle. When he opens them, there’s an infinity of Jewells.

  Every one of them needs killing.

  Thad, never good with idle time, will be very busy. “You look like a razor blade went crazy on your skull, Steel,” Luke tells me, taking a bite of his apple. The sound cracks across the lunchroom of our temp FBI headquarters in nearby Normandy Park, Seattle only a scant fifteen minutes away.

  I roll my eyes, dumping my legs out in front of me. I’ve been beating the shit out of my body lately, running, lifting, and riding the hog in a blur like a mechanical routine that’s supposed to relieve stress. Instead, it just seems to reinforce my loneliness, my alienation from everyone, everything—except my anger. Not that I bother with introspective bullshit.

  “Yeah,” I reply, stifling a yawn.

  “So you made initial contact?” Luke asks.

  I nod. Hell, yeah, I did, remembering Jewell’s face. It haunts

  me by day and hunts me by night. That innocent shock at my hostility in the moment in the auditorium is etched in my memory.

  He smirks. “Y’know, I think you’re getting the dumb jock shit down.”

  I nod, smoothly changing the subject, and Luke scowls. Adams’s undercover persona sometimes slips when he’s not playing student at the U Dub.

  “Did you make first contact?” I ask with a knowing smile. “Yeah, fucking Brad . . . the ass clown.” He sighs.

  As if on cue, Agent Decatur Clearwater breezes in. He’s playing the role of Brad, the guitar-playing, motorcycling leather fan club member and fellow student in Jewell’s biology class.

  “I heard that,” he says as he gives Luke the middle-finger salute and rustles around in the community fridge, whipping out a Chinese take-out box. He sniffs it and says, “I guess it won’t kill me.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Luke says dryly as he folds his arms across his chest.

  “Nice today, Dec,” Luke adds. “You’re putting it on, not too thick, not too thin. Nice job on the cover.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got to make it seem authentic.”

  “You two done swapping spit and taking long showers?” I ask after their self-congratulatory fest winds down.

  “Who pissed in your Wheaties?” Dec leans back in his chair as he shovels noodles into his mouth with near-expert use of his chopsticks.

  He’s traveled extensively across the globe and speaks fluent Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese. This current assignment is a real departure for him. Gangland is usually his turf; at least, his one assignment before this had required a completely different persona.

  I sigh, scrubbing a hand over my head for the second time, frustration gaining a head of steam.

  “He made contact with the lovely Jewell today, Dec,” Luke relays significantly.

  The chair legs drop down with a loud thunk on the linoleum, and Dec gives a low whistle. “That’s why your boxers are in a twist?”

  I open my mouth, then close it against the scathing rebuttal on the tip of my tongue. “I didn’t actually make verbal contact.”

  Adams stares at me. “You? Stalling? I don’t think so. What’s going on, Steel?”

  I shrug. Leaning forward, I let my hands dangle between thighs barely contained inside the denim, my workouts pushing the limits of my clothes fitting. “I don’t know, she was at this dance audition thing.”

  “Shit, that’ll get our bird noticed,” Dec says around a mouthful of soggy noodles. Actually it did.

  I nod. It’s what we want: to flush that turd of a brother out of the toilet he’s been floating in.

  “Well,” Luke says, standing, “I’ve established myself as Brock the asshole jock.” He spins and takes a shallow bow.

  “I think the asshole part has already been established,” I say with a small smile, and Luke gives his second middle finger of the day. I know it won’t be his last. Seems to be a helluva lot of that going around.

  “And I have established my superiority over your mouthbreathing status.” Dec smirks.

  “I hate playing the idiot,” Luke mutters.

  “Is it really a stretch?” Dec asks, and Luke takes a swing at him, noodles scattering like limp worms over the floor.

  “Hey!” Dec says. “I’m the one doing biology for the fifth time. I hate the goddamned college assignments. If I have to”—he ducks out of Adams’s hold—“do one more Fucking. Punnett. Square . . . I swear I’ll go batshit!”

  As Dec and Luke scrabble on the floor, I walk over to them and grab a handful of shirt just as Marshal O’Rourke walks in the
door.

  Comic relief.

  Not so much, I think, seeing our superior’s face as he takes in our bullshit shenanigans.

  “Cut the bullshit.” I bite the inside of my mouth to stifle the guffaw. I know it won’t go over well. His next words suck the oxygen out of the room, along with my captured laugh: “There’s another missing girl.”

  That gets our attention and our asses off the floor.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Another college girl. Amanda.”

  I feel my gut knot. Unbidden, Jewell’s face floats to the top of my brain, and I beat at it until her image breaks apart like spun glass.

  Dec’s face falls, his eyes bulging in their sockets and interrupts, “Miller?”

  O’Rourke nods.

  “What?” Luke asks.

  “Our boy’s active again,” I intuit immediately. That girl was in Jewell’s class, my mind whispers. Like I need the reminder.

  I have a running tally of the enormous student body of the University of Washington and a more intimate catalog of everyone in every class that Jewell attends and has attended, every acquaintance old and new. Amanda Miller is on my radar.

  Was on my radar.

  O’Rourke’s chest heaves, twin spots of bright color flaring on his face. “So while you guys are in her playing grab ass, our suspect is plucking fruit from the campus like his own personal orchard.”

  His inflamed face turns to me. “Steel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Amp up this shit. Make contact; flush this fuck out of the sewer system. Get him out in the open where he belongs.” His eyes search mine, seeing something he doesn’t like, and adds, “Are we clear? Because I’m itching to hand this whole fucking mess over to some other agent who’s not compromised by his connection to one of the vics. I let you take the lead on this because you promised me you were the guy for the job. Don’t fumble this.”

  My stomach knots some more, squeezing the speed lunch I’d consumed back up the old food pipe. I can’t lose this assignment when I’m this fucking close.