The sound of childish laughter in the backyard caught his ear. He hurried to the kitchen door and peered through the glass.
The Bennett children were tromping through the yard. The tallest two were in the front, carrying a cooler between them. Behind them, the middle two wrestled with three fishing rods apiece. And the little two brought up the rear, shouting and hooting.
He raced outside and skidded to a stop just outside the door.
The two oldest kids froze mid-step at the sight of a police officer running out of their home. They let the cooler fall to the ground with a thud.
The other four children eyed him with varying degrees of curiosity and fear.
He cleared his throat and tried to think of something reassuring to say.
Lilah, bless the old bat, saved him.
She opened her door and called over the fence, “I just made a batch of brownies. I don’t suppose anyone over there wants to help me eat them?”
The little ones squealed and headed for the gate.
“Wait,” the girl with the fishing rods yelled after them. “We have to check with Mom first!”
Vince found his voice.
“It’s okay. You kids go on over to Mrs. Stokes’ place. Go on, now. Get.”
The middle two, hesitated, but placed the rods on the ground.”
“Go ahead,” the oldest girl told them. “We’ll be over in a minute.”
After they walked away and closed the gate behind them, the remaining two children stared at Vince expectantly.
He tried to keep his expression neutral, devoid of any hint of the horror that waited inside the house.
“What’s going on?” the boy demanded.
Vince shuffled his feet and tried to decide whether they were old enough that he could just tell them a sanitized version of the truth. But he was a terrible judge of kids’ ages. They could have been anywhere between twelve and eighteen. He eyed them again. He was pretty sure the boy was the older of the two.
“How old are you and your sister, son?”
“I’m sixteen and a half, officer. She’s almost fifteen.”
The kid answered right away, in a serious voice, like he knew what Vince was thinking and wanted to convince him they were adult enough to handle whatever he had to say.
Vince wasn’t so sure about that. His stomach was still turning from the sight of their beaten mother.
The girl squinted at him hard and twirled a strand of hair around her finger, wrapping it tighter and tighter as she stared at him.
“So, uh, you guys catch anything?” He gestured toward the fishing poles and cooler.
“No. A couple small mouths and a sunny. Too small. We threw them back,” the boy answered in a clipped, but polite, tone.
He threw his sister a meaningful look. “Hey, Brianna, why don’t you put the fishing gear up in the shed?”
She glared back at him for a long moment.
Vince couldn’t read the look that passed between them, but it was clear they were having an entire, possibly heated, conversation without saying a word.
“Fine.” She forced the word out from between clenched teeth and stomped off toward the abandoned rods.
The boy waited until she hoisted the poles over her shoulder and disappeared into the small white shed. Then he fixed Vince with a grim look.
He dug through a duct-tape wallet with shaking fingers and pulled out a dog-eared business card.
“Here. Call this Hank Richardson guy,” the kid said in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Why?” Vince asked, turning the card over in his fingers and puzzling over the lack of a title or business name on the card. It simply read Hank Richardson and listed a telephone number.
The kid choked out the words. “He said to call him if anything ever happened to my mom. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Leo was cooling his heels at Sasha’s office, waiting to see if she could join him for lunch when Hank’s text hit his phone:
Need to see you. Just you. Urgent. @ Babs’ in 10.
Luckily, Babs’ Place, the newest, hip cocktail bar to join the urban revitalization effort, was a short walk from the office, just across the pedestrian bridge to East Liberty.
Hank was already there, camped out in a booth near the back. It was the ideal spot, with a clear line of sight to the front and far enough away from the bar’s only other midday occupants—a couple nuzzling one another in the corner, and a guy who looked like a refugee from the set of Mad Men relishing a martini at the end of the bar.
Leo slid into the booth beside Hank. He didn’t care how it looked, he had no intention of sitting with his back to the door either.
“I took the liberty of ordering for you.” Hank nodded to the short glass of scotch on the table, then lifted his own whisky glass in a salute.
It really wasn’t Leo’s style to have drinks in the middle of a weekday, but Hank knew as much, so if he figured an exception was in order, an exception was probably in order.
Leo let the amber liquid coat his throat with a satisfying burn before he spoke.
“Johnny Walker Blue? Are we celebrating something?”
Hank examined his glass. “We’re paying our respects. Seems like that calls for the good stuff.”
“Who died?”
“Enjoy your drink. I’ll tell you in a minute.”
Leo frowned. “Why the cloak and dagger routine?”
Hank barked out a humorless laugh. “We’re federal agents, son. If we don’t do the cloak and dagger stuff, who will?”
“You’re a federal agent,” he reminded his boss. “I’m a …”
What was he? A former air marshal. A former security chief. A current operator for a nameless section of the federal government, so secret that it operated without protection of law.
“Consultant,” Hank supplied.
“Fine. I’m a government consultant. So tell me who’s dead. Is it Bricker?”
“No such luck. It’s Allison Bennett.” Hank sighed heavily.
Allison Bennett? Leo searched his memory, but came up blank.
“Do I know her?”
“Allison Bennett, formerly known as Anna Bricker, was brutally murdered in her North Carolina home.”
Leo’s blood turned to ice in his veins as a chill shot through him.
“Anna Bricker? He found her? Are the kids okay? How did he find her?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. We don’t know that Bricker killed her.” Hank held up his hand like a crossing guard.
“Come on.”
“I’m serious. Don’t jump to conclusions.”
Leo decided to let that go for now, even though he didn’t think it was a huge leap of logic to assume as a starting point that the murdered estranged wife of a vengeful murderer had been killed by her husband. Thinking about husbands and wives led to another line of questioning.
Why are you cutting Sasha and Will out of the loop?”
“They don’t have the security clearance needed to be privy to this conversation.”
“It affects them, too, Hank.”
“I’m serious, Leo. You do not have permission to share any of the details of this conversation with Sasha.”
Leo sipped his drink and bit back his response. Hank didn’t stand on ceremony. If he didn’t want Sasha and Will to know something, there was probably a good reason. That didn’t mean he had to like it, though.
Hank pressed on. “You need to understand the gravity of this situation.”
“I think we all understand the situation, Hank. Jeffrey Bricker’s wife’s been murdered, and we have no idea how he got to her or where he is. Assuming he did it, of course,” he added as an afterthought for the sake of appearance.
“It’s much bigger than that,” Hank said.
Leo waited.
“You realize that WITSEC takes security extremely seriously, right?”
“Sure.”
That was an understatement. Even though he had bee
n a highly-placed federal marshal before his retirement, he’d never set foot in the building devoted to WITSEC until he and Hank had accompanied Anna Bricker and her children there for their intake evaluations.
WITSEC—known to the general public as the federal Witness Protection Program—was, by design, a black box. He doubted there were a hundred people in the entire government who knew the precise location of the orientation center. He wasn’t one of them.
He, Hank, Anna, and her six children had been whisked to the center in van with blackout windows. The driver parked in an underground garage and ushered the nine of them into a windowless building. The set up reminded him either of going to a conference at the world’s bleakest resort hotel or being confined in a very posh prison. It was a toss-up.
During their time there, the Brickers never encountered another witness in a hallway or conference room. They slept in a two-room suite and spent their days meeting with counselors, agents, psychologists, and prosecutors—all of whom were charged with transitioning the family members to their new identities and helping them establish their new lives. Every aspect of the program was devoted to preserving the witnesses’ anonymity. Only the WITSEC inspector assigned to relocate them would know where they would be placed.
In fact, Leo was never told the Brickers’ new names or where they’d been relocated. As far as he knew, Hank hadn’t been told either.
“Are you even sure it’s Anna?”
Hank nodded glumly. “It’s not yet confirmed. I’m flying down there this afternoon.”
“Down where? Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“Here’s what I know. Anna and her six children were relocated in January 2013. A woman named Allison Bennett was found beaten to death in Sunnyvale, North Carolina, earlier today. The police officer who discovered her body called me directly because the dead woman’s oldest son handed him my business card and told him to call me.”
“And you think Bennett is Anna Bricker?”
“I do. Same initials—which is standard operating procedure for WITSEC. They want to make it easy for the witnesses to remember their new names. Also, this woman moved to Sunnyvale in January 2013, according to the officer. And she has six kids. No husband.”
Leo pulled a face. “That’s still pretty thin, Hank.”
“Maybe. But this kid got my card somewhere, and I don’t make a habit of handing it out. But I did give it to Anna’s oldest boy, Clay, before we left them at the center.”
“You did?”
“I told him that he was the man of the family now. I said his mom would have a number to call at WITSEC if she ever felt that they were in danger, but he should feel free to call me if anything ever happened to her.”
Leo’s heart sank. “The kid’s the right age?”
“Officer Fornier said he’s sixteen and a half. That’s the right age. And his name’s Cole. Same initial.”
“Coincidences happen,” he said even though he didn’t believe it.
“They do,” Hank agreed. He drained his glass. “But we both know this is no coincidence. And Fornier said the beating was brutal, like it was personal.”
There was no doubt Bricker was capable of it. This was a man who’d shot a sheriff’s deputy in the face. A man who hired armed bandits to storm a wedding. A man who’d carried the deadliest virus on the planet around in a vial in his duffel bag. A little bludgeoning, face-bashing, and mayhem were right up his alley.
“So what now?”
“I’m going to go down there and sit on those kids.”
“What?”
Hank spoke slowly. “In more than forty years, no one has ever successfully tracked down a witness in WITSEC. It simply doesn’t happen. They pride themselves on that—a witness who enters the program and follows the rules is perfectly safe. For life. Well, that perfect record’s just been shattered into a million pieces, and it’s enough to make a cynic wonder if Bricker had inside help.”
“You’re not serious.”
Hank spread his big palms wide. “Is it really so crazy?”
Leo didn’t know how to answer that. On the one hand, yes, it was insane to think that a WITSEC inspector would dime out the very people he was sworn to protect. On the other hand, how else could Bricker have gotten to his wife?
He dodged the question. “What does WITSEC say?”
“I haven’t spoken to anyone at WITSEC yet. As far as I know, they don’t even know she’s dead yet.”
“What?” Leo yelped.
Hank glared at him, and he lowered his voice. “Sorry. What?”
“Well, standard operating procedure would be for the inspector who placed them to get a call from either the family or local law enforcement—if they even know who she was. Some of these marshals can be pretty sloppy about the details—it’s not unheard of for them to fail to notify the locals when they relocate a witness, especially one like Anna Bricker, who wasn’t a criminal herself. The kid didn’t call WITSEC, and I highly doubt Fornier did.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on the fact that he spoke to me. WITSEC would have told him not to.”
Leo nodded. He had a point there. WITSEC, with its great love for secrecy, never would have let some local cop call up Hank and discuss the murder of a witness.”
“Okay, well, why haven’t you called them? Isn’t it also SOP to move the kids once a threat’s been identified?”
Leo was stunned that Hank was playing so loose with the rules. Sure, that’s what they did, but these were kids.
“I don’t know whether that procedure would apply. Those kids weren’t witnesses. They were only in the program because their mom testified. She’s gone. Six minors? What’s their legal status? Who’s supposed to take over as guardian? Some WITSEC inspector back in D.C.? It’s going to be a mess. It’ll take ages to get it all ironed out. And in the meantime, Bricker’s out there, and there’s a chance he got to Allison through either the negligence or the malfeasance of a marshal assigned to WITSEC.”
“So, what? You’re an army of one?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming with you,”
“No, you’re not. Don’t worry, I’m not going to let anything happen to those kids.”
Leo gave Hank a long look.
“You know if Bricker wanted those kids dead, they’d already be dead, right? He’s probably trying to lure us into a trap.”
“I know. That’s why you’re staying put. For now, you need to keep Sasha and Will as far away from this as you can.”
“Sure, give me the hard job.”
Hank cracked a weak smile and signaled the bartender for another round.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Mac, truthfully, I have no idea what Leo’s up to.” Naya looked up from her Contracts outline and eyed Sasha with visible exasperation.
Usually, Naya prided herself on being the heartbeat of McCandless & Volmer, Attorneys at Law—a status that extended to its attorneys’ business and personal lives. She knew the names of all their clients, could rattle off who was behind on invoices and who just moved to new office space. She had friends all over town, at other firms, within the court system, at private investigators’ offices. She also knew their birthdays, their secret fears, and what they wanted for their birthdays. Under ordinary circumstances, yes, if Connelly was keeping secrets from Sasha, Naya would have known about it.
But these were not ordinary circumstances. It was May. Final exam time at Duquesne University School of Law. And Naya was not only the firm’s legal assistant, administrator, and jack of all trades. She was a first-year law student. And, by definition, currently a crazy person.
Sasha and Will had taken to calling her the ‘lawbie’ behind her back, because she’d become a dead-eyed legal-element-spouting zombie.
They could both remember their first year exams, so they weren’t overly worried about her hair-trigger temper, lack of attention to personal appearance, or the mumbling of doctrines of law under her breath
. It was a temporary condition. They treated her like a caged lion, only instead of feeding her raw steaks, they tossed takeout containers and mugs of coffee into her office and then retreated.
In fact, as she recalled her own first year exams, a wave of guilt crashed over Sasha.
“You’re right. I’m sorry to bother you during exams.”
Naya waved her hand in a don’t worry about it gesture. As she did so, the pink highlighter she was holding hit her cheek and left a thick line down the side of her face.
“You have—” Sasha stopped herself mid-sentence. There was no point in mentioning it. Naya’s Contracts final was in three hours. She was unlikely to stop studying long enough to go to the bathroom let alone to scrub the bright pink mark off her face.
Naya stared up at her, waiting.
“Anyway, good luck. Let me know if you need a refill.” Sasha pointed toward the coffee teetering precariously on a stack of horn books.
“Thanks.”
Naya turned back to her review of offer and acceptance and shut out all distractions, namely Sasha.
Sasha tiptoed out of the office and pulled the door shut silently.
She’d just have to use her powers of persuasion to convince Connelly to open up to her. That approach didn’t sound all bad. She grinned to herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cole Bennett narrowed his eyes at Mrs. Stokes, who was hovering uncertainly, half on the front porch, half in the doorway. She was nervous. He could tell by the way she kept twirling her wiry gray hair around her finger. All of his sisters did that same thing when they were anxious. Funny thing was, his mom had never done that.
Mom.
His heart squeezed in his chest.
“We’re not leaving.” He planted his feet in a wide stance and puffed out his chest.
She tried to peer around him to get a glimpse of Calla and Hal, the youngest of his siblings and the only two who didn’t have the sense to make themselves scarce when the doorbell rang. Instead they were peeking out from the hallway and giggling.
Irrevocable Trust (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller Book 6) Page 2