“Go home, Ethan,” she said quietly, lifting her briefcase and holding it next to her. “You’ve never taken the time to mourn your wife. Take it now and go home.”
“Right now, my home’s here in this suite.”
He could tell she didn’t think he was serious.
His cell phone rang, and she jumped a foot in the air, landing sideways on her right ankle. She let out a yelp that sounded like a swearword to Ethan, although he was sure it couldn’t have been. Not the swearing type, Dr. O’Farrell.
He’d turned off his phone at breakfast and left it off, but had deliberately turned it back on when she’d arrived. There was no number on the readout. “Brooker.”
“I was beginning to think you were dead in a ditch.” It was Juliet, and she wasn’t happy. “Where are you?”
“D.C. You?”
“My apartment. I’m flushing dead fish down the toilet.”
“Something’s happened—”
Juliet didn’t seem to hear him. “Unless you’ve got the secretary of defense or a four-star general sitting on you, I want you on the next flight to New York.”
Mia reported directly to the president. Ethan wondered if she’d do.
But he could hear the tension in Juliet’s voice.
“Or,” she went on, not breathless but not in the mood to listen, either, “I can get someone to find you and bring you up here.”
“I don’t need more marshals on my case. Think I killed your fish?”
She let out a breath. “Bobby Tatro had my niece pinned in my bedroom. He killed Juan, our doorman. Tatro was—” She paused a fraction of a second. “He said awful things to Wendy. He enjoys scaring the hell out of people.”
“Is she—”
“I got here before he could break into the bedroom. Wendy bashed in a couple of my fish tanks to distract him. Her father’s on his way now. He’ll take her back to Vermont tonight.”
Mia held her briefcase against her chest with both arms. “Major?”
He didn’t get a chance to respond before Juliet spoke again. “Next flight to New York, Brooker. I mean it. Be here before nightfall.”
After she hung up in his ear, Ethan tossed his phone onto his chair, the elegant surroundings suddenly seeming phony to him, incongruous to the life he led, the man he was.
Mia looked at him with the incisiveness he’d noticed about her during their first meeting in D.C. three weeks ago. John Wesley Poe had been there. The president and O’Farrell had presented the outlines of the mission. Ethan had been aware that Poe’s personal involvement was unusual, unexpected, if not improper. Once Ethan accepted the mission, it’d gone through normal channels for clearance and preparation. But he’d accepted before he knew Ham Carhill was the unnamed American contractor in the hands—ostensibly—of American and Colombian mercenaries.
Ham wasn’t the driving force behind Ethan’s willingness to put his life on the line. Ethan wasn’t all that sure what was. He’d been charging into the unknown since Char’s death, not giving a damn what happened to himself, just pushing for answers to who’d killed her and why, making sure whoever it was faced justice.
For all he knew, Mia O’Farrell was as out of control as he’d been for most of the past year. She was just quieter about it, pushing computer buttons and using a pen instead of going after her enemies herself. He wondered what demons she was facing.
“Tatro?” she asked, her voice tight but composed.
In terse language, Ethan repeated what Juliet had told him. Then he picked up his phone and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket, which hung over a chair, and said without looking at Mia, “If there’s anything else I should know, now’s the time. Anything you haven’t told me, I want it.”
She was silent, her lower lip pulled in under her top teeth.
He didn’t relent. “If you’ve got something to hide, I’ll find out.”
“I resent your implication.”
“The thing about covering your ass is that once you start, you can’t stop. At first you rationalize the lies, the omissions, as the right thing to do. Then the cover-up is the only thing to do. You keep thinking there’s an end, but there never is. Exposure’s always the next breath away. You start to sweat. You get where you can’t sleep. You look in the mirror one day and realize you’re rationalizing hurting people before they can hurt you.”
Mia stayed with her cool and unruffled act, but her fingers were white, pressed fiercely against her briefcase. “I have to go.”
“I’m not stopping until I know what’s going on.”
She walked steadily to the door. “I’m sorry about Tatro and what he did to that girl in New York,” she said. “I wish he’d never made it out of Colombia. But he’s not my responsibility. He never was.”
“You know Tatro didn’t pull off this kidnapping by himself. He’s being manipulated by the same person who’s manipulating you.”
“No one’s manipulating me.” Then she added, the barest whisper, “Not anymore.”
“Mia. Trust me.”
She glanced back at him. “I used to trust everyone.”
“The marshals are going to want to talk to me. The FBI. It won’t just be Juliet.”
“You know what you can and can’t say.” Her green eyes were as hard as emeralds now. “If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be talking to the marshals at all.”
“You’re not scaring me, Mia.”
“I’m not trying to. I’ve already given you my advice. You don’t need to find another fire to put out. Go home, Major Brooker. Visit your family. Mourn your wife. It’s time.”
After she left, Ethan stood in the middle of his fancy suite and tried to conjure up Char. The feel of her, the taste of her. The bubble of her laughter.
He could see her dark eyes, filled with regret and a sense of inevitability.
“I’m losing you, Ethan.”
Had she actually spoken those words, or did he just imagine them?
Her death wasn’t his fault. Everyone had said so.
He hadn’t found Bobby Tatro in Colombia, and now Tatro had killed a doorman and traumatized a teenager.
Not your fault.
“Bullshit.”
Ethan tossed his things into his suitcase, then headed down to the lobby and checked out, assuring the desk clerk that he had, indeed, enjoyed his stay. It’d just been premature to think he was due for any kind of a break.
Nobody congratulated Juliet for taking Bobby Tatro into custody. She’d have punched anyone who did. He’d barged into her building and killed a man. He’d pushed his way into her apartment and scared the hell out of a teenage girl. Her niece.
It was too much. Too damn much.
But she tried to keep herself from pacing and looking as horrified and livid as she was. What Wendy needed right now was a calm, controlled aunt, not a wild woman who wanted to put her fist through the wall.
Wendy had crawled onto the double bed in the small bedroom and had tucked her knees under her chin and wrapped her hands tightly around her shins. At least, Juliet thought, the bedroom was free of dead fish, sopping plants, FBI agents, NYPD detectives, marshals and crime-scene types.
She’d have taken her niece out of the building altogether, but she didn’t want to risk Wendy seeing Juan’s body. The crime-scene workers would be upsetting enough. Passing through the lobby after everyone was gone and everything was cleaned up—Juan’s body safely at the medical examiner’s office—would be traumatic enough.
Let Joshua be the one with her when she had to face that reality.
“Do you want some tea?” Juliet asked, her jaw tight with unreleased tension.
Wendy shook her head, her eyes downcast, as if she were counting the squares in Juliet’s quilt.
“Water?”
Another shake of the head.
Because a federal agent was involved, the FBI was on the scene—Special Agent Joe Collins. He’d investigated the shooting of the two marshals in Central Park in May, and Julie
t had ended up on the wrong side of his suspicions, which had brought him to her apartment to question her. He obviously didn’t like being back under similar circumstances. Collins was an experienced agent, a red-faced man in his midforties. People sometimes assumed he was laid-back, coasting toward retirement, but that was a mistake.
He’d grimaced when Juliet had told him about Ethan and Tatro and the picture of her. “Brooker again? What is it with you two?”
She’d had no good answer.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Right now, she needed to concentrate on her niece. Brooker, Collins, Rivera—they all could wait until Joshua arrived and took over care of his only child. “Your dad should be here any minute.”
Wendy shrugged her small shoulders.
“It’ll be okay—”
“I saw him yesterday.”
Juliet felt a sudden chill but took a mental step back from her own emotions. “Saw who, Wendy?”
She raised dark, tearless eyes and managed to settle her gaze on her aunt. “He sat next to me at the diner where I had lunch right after I got here.”
“Wendy, who…?”
“The man who—who was in here.” Sniffling, she pressed her chin into her knees, her eyes glazing over again. “He knew my name. At the diner. I didn’t tell him. He must have overheard me talking to Juan when he had me show him my ID.”
“Did you see him here?” Juliet asked. “In the building? Out on the street?”
She shook her head, her chin still mashed into her knees. “I didn’t notice him until he sat next to me in the diner. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t here. I just—New York’s full of people. I just didn’t notice.”
“It’s okay.” But Juliet had stiffened, realizing that Bobby Tatro had been in the neighborhood yesterday, twenty-four hours before he’d killed Juan, broke into her apartment and terrorized her niece. “Wendy, did you tell Special Agent Collins or one of the NYPD detectives about the diner?”
“No. I didn’t think of it until now.” She averted her eyes, her lips chapped and swollen from biting down on them. “I should have told you about him sooner. I knew it wasn’t right that he knew my name.”
“Do you remember what he said to you?”
Wendy repeated their conversation at the diner in a toneless voice, as if she were reading lines for a part she had in a play just to get them memorized and would add the emotion later.
“He didn’t use your last name?” Juliet asked.
“No.”
“When you talked to Juan, you clearly stated that you were my niece?”
“I had to.”
“Of course, you had to, honey. That’s not what I meant. Bobby Tatro and I have a history. He’s the guy I told you about last night. I arrested him when I was working in Syracuse. He just got out of prison. He was a free man. He had a chance to pull his life together. Instead, he decided to come after me.” Juliet tried to sound comforting, but she could hear the tension and regret in her voice—the anger that this man would traumatize a seventeen-year-old girl to exact his revenge. “You got caught in the cross fire, Wendy. I’m sorry.”
“Juan…” She couldn’t seem to say more than that.
Juliet could see him slumped in his tiny office, smell his blood. “It looks as if he got caught in the cross fire, too.”
“I should have told you,” she whispered. “I should have told you about the diner yesterday.”
“That might not have changed anything. We don’t know.”
Rivera rapped a knuckle on the open door. “Your brother’s here, Juliet. The girl’s father.”
But Joshua was already pushing past the chief deputy, ignoring him and his sister as he went straight for his daughter, grabbing her into his arms. She crumpled, sobbing into his wool shirt. He was a big man, and he filled up Juliet’s small bedroom.
“Thank God you’re okay,” he kept repeating, his voice hoarse.
“I shouldn’t have come back here,” Wendy sobbed. “That man might have seen me get off the subway and followed me here.” She raised her head, her face splotchy, tears and snot running down her cheeks, into her mouth. “Juan might still be alive if I’d stayed on the train.”
“Tatro wasn’t after you,” Juliet said. “He’d have—”
Joshua glared at her. “Stay out of this, Juliet.”
“Dad—stop. Juliet saved my life.”
But Juliet understood her brother. If she’d taken up landscaping the way everyone had expected—if she’d stayed home in Vermont—his daughter wouldn’t be in New York in the first place. She wouldn’t have had to use her wits to get out of a bad situation with a sadistic ex-con. She wouldn’t have to deal with murder.
Never mind that Joshua was a state trooper who faced similar risks—then, he was in control. For the past twenty-four hours, he’d had no control whatsoever. He was powerless, and Juliet knew he hated that feeling as much as she did. At the moment, with his frightened daughter in his arms, maybe more.
Rivera motioned to her with one hand. “Come out here with me.”
Juliet left her brother to console Wendy in his way and joined the chief deputy out in the hall.
“Joe Collins found a fish under the couch,” Rivera said, leading her back to the kitchen. “It ended up in this little puddle, just one of those things. He’s proud of himself for saving it.”
“Good for him,” Juliet said dully.
“And he found this.” Rivera pointed to a small tin on the counter. “It looks likes somebody’s ashes.”
“What? Mike, for God’s sake—”
“You look. You’ll see what I mean.”
Juliet frowned at him, but he reached past her and lifted the loosened lid off the tin.
Ashes, indeed.
She moaned, sinking against the counter.
Teddy.
“Ah, hell, Mike.” She fought a surge of unwanted tears. “The ashes have got to be Wendy’s dog. He died a few weeks ago. Sixteen-year-old golden retriever. They had him cremated.”
“Must be what she came back here for.” Rivera rubbed the back of his neck, looking pained. “Kid’s been carrying around her dog’s ashes. I’ve got five daughters, Longstreet. Trust me. The father’s not going to understand.”
“About the ashes or about my work putting Wendy in this situation?”
“Take your pick.”
“If she’d been a boy maybe he wouldn’t freak out.”
“You see a seventeen-year-old boy taking off to New York with his dead dog’s ashes in a cracker tin?”
Juliet sniffed back any tears. Damned if she’d cry in front of Rivera. “Wendy’s a gentle soul.”
“Well, she handled herself admirably today. She got through this thing alive. That’s all that matters.” He sighed at the tin. “She’ll want to know the ashes are intact. Her father’s your older brother, right?”
“All my brothers are older.”
Rivera squinted at her, as if he was suddenly seeing her for the first time since arriving at her apartment. “Do you need to see a doctor? That bastard twist your arm or anything? Sometimes you don’t feel it until later.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s what you said in May when you had a couple of cracked ribs and a road rash from hell.”
She didn’t want to remember. “I’ve never liked ambulances and stretchers.”
“It was hell, listening to you with that son of a bitch through the phone. Knowing he had your niece scared for her life. That you had no backup. I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”
“It helped knowing you were listening in.” She mustered a small grin. “Kept me on my toes. Don’t want to mess up with the chief eavesdropping.”
He shook his head in mock despair. “Where the hell did we ever find you?”
“Mike—” Juliet took a breath, the momentary injection of humor helping her to stay focused, keep her bearings on what she needed to do. “Wendy ran into Tatro yesterday.”
Rivera listened without co
mment as Juliet relayed Wendy’s story about the diner. Then he sighed heavily, nodding almost as if in response to something he was thinking.
“Collins will want to talk to her again,” he said. “We don’t know enough about what happened with the doorman. Don’t go hanging that one on yourself just yet, okay?”
“Too late.”
“Your friend the theater lady won’t be thrilled when she finds out about today.”
“I’m supposed to move out soon, anyway. Freda’s due back from L.A. before Thanksgiving. I should begin looking for a new place.”
As he started down the hall, Rivera’s wet shoes squeaked on the floor. He glanced back at her. “Your neighbors’ll breathe a collective sigh of relief when you pack up. The fish tanks flooded the place underneath you. The couple who owns it already tried to get past the NYPD to talk to you.”
“They’re ticked off?”
“Upset.”
For now, Juliet thought. When the full impact of what had gone on in their building today hit them, they’d be questioning how a federal agent had ended up house-sitting for an apartment in their building. There were rules, after all. They’d figure out a way that she and Freda had broken them.
“In all my years on the job,” Rivera said, “I’ve never had anyone break into my home and scare the hell out of my family. It wouldn’t hurt for you to take some time off.”
Juliet bristled, automatically defensive, but she told herself he was just trying to be helpful. She grabbed Teddy’s ashes off the counter and remembered him as a cuddly puppy galloping after Wendy wherever she went.
“Vermont must be beautiful this time of year,” Rivera said.
“I get your point, Mike.”
She went back down the hall and stood in the bedroom doorway. Joshua turned to her, but he hadn’t eased up even a notch. He raked a hand over his fair, close-cropped hair, his eyes as haunted and tired as she’d ever seen them, even when they were kids and a trooper had arrived at the door to tell them their father had been shot.
Wendy leaped off the bed and snatched the cracker tin from Juliet and held it tight, sobbing.
Joshua looked as if he, too, wanted to put his fist through the wall.
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