Dr. Zacher had had his doubts but, over time, he became a believer. However, there were hiccups. The people above Zacher’s pay grade terminated Avery when test subjects kept dying. However, Zacher encouraged and aided Avery in continuing his experiments off the books and off the grid. Their new problem was acquiring new test subjects. Avery had solved the problem by snatching teenagers off the street. The kind of teenagers who wouldn’t be missed when they disappeared.
Avery’s subjects continued to die excruciating deaths and at an accelerated rate during his home experiments—all except three teenage girls, now two. Turned out there were people searching for the missing girls, including a determined police lieutenant, Gizella Castillo. She and her police team had rescued the girl’s from Avery’s basement. Avery was killed in the process.
For a few years, Zacher had believed Avery died a failure, until Shalisa Young killed her mother. In the trial, the young woman pleaded not guilty and insisted that she’d never laid a hand on her mother, but only thought about stabbing her mother. She claimed that she was shocked when a knife from the kitchen’s butcher block flew across the room with deadly accuracy. The court found Shalisa Young insane, and she was transferred to St. Elizabeth Hospital, a federal mental institution, where Zacher and his new team studied and experimented on the girl, until she leaped off the roof.
Another one of Avery’s survivors, or test subjects, Tomi Lehane now worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. Zacher kept an eye on her, but he hadn’t been able to confirm any abnormalities. The only thing that had blipped on his radar was a 911 call from Lehane’s live-in boyfriend a few years ago. Apparently, he thought Ms. Lehane had died in her sleep, only to wake once the paramedics arrived to haul off the body. Zacher didn’t know what that was about, but it freaked the boyfriend out enough to move out.
The last test subject, Abrianna Parker, was someone Dr. Zacher was well familiar with, and was in frequent contact with, at least he was until recently. Bree, as her friends called her, believed him to be a kind, old, homeless man named Charlie that she’d met years ago in Stanton Park. She had no clue about his part in her abduction or that he monitored her abilities without her knowledge. She hadn’t noticed the times he had spoken to her telepathically. The first time he thought of a question and she answered threw him for a loop. She didn’t do it all the time, but most.
The buzzing in Dr. Zacher’s head persisted. He opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a vial and syringe. Quickly, he moved to fill the syringe with a T4S experimental drug, but by the time he placed the needle into a well-used vein in his left arm, the buzzing was deafening. His hands trembled. The first stab, the vein rolled. Hissing, he tried again. The moment the drug hit his bloodstream, the buzzing vanished and the throbbing between his eyes ceased.
“Here you go, sir,” Ned announced, smiling with a steaming cup of coffee. “Just like you like it: black, no sugar.” He set the cup down in front of Zacher.
“Thanks,” the doctor grumbled, tossing the syringe and empty vial into the wastebasket. As he rolled his sleeve back down, the phone trilled from the corner of his desk. He read the caller ID, and a knot of nerves sank to his gut.
Ned cleared his throat. “Would you like for me to get that for you, sir?”
Dr. Z speared him with a look before he snatched up the hand unit. “Spalding, you’re in the office early,” he greeted, injecting a long, well-rehearsed pleasantness into his voice.
Pierce Spalding, president of T4S, wasted no time laying in to the doctor. “Your and Dr. Avery’s screw-up is still all over the news this morning.”
“Yes, sir. I caught a snippet a few minutes ago,” Dr. Z admitted.
“I was told that Avery’s freak science experiments would never come back to bite us in the ass.”
“Yes, sir. You were.”
“Is your word no good?” Spalding asked.
“Yes, sir. I mean, no. Uh . . .” Zacher shook his head. “This is a minor blip. I promise you. Abrianna Parker will not be a problem.”
A long pause expanded over the line, making Zacher uncomfortable. He tightened his grip on the hand unit.
“I like you, Zacher.” Spalding shifted the subject. “I’ve always spoken highly of you. I believe in your vision. That’s the only reason why I’ve followed you and Dr. Avery down this rabbit hole for better or worse. But if we have a test subject running AWOL, then—”
“That’s not the case, Pierce. I’m on top of this.”
Silence.
Spalding had a good bullshit detector, and Zacher was certain that his boss didn’t believe a damn thing that he’d said. It was more likely that Spalding was evaluating how much rope to allot Zacher to hang himself.
“All right, Charlie,” Spalding said. “I’ll let you handle this, but if I get the slightest hint that Ms. Parker is about to blow up in our faces, I’ll take care of her myself. Am I making myself clear?”
Zacher nodded. “Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Good. And try not to get busted in another drug raid while you’re at it. I have better things to do with my time than erasing police records.”
“Yes—”
Click.
“Sir?”
Dial tone.
Sighing, Dr. Z returned the handset back to its cradle.
Ned hovered at the door, waiting for orders. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“What do you think?” he asked without looking up. Zacher still couldn’t gather his thoughts for a cohesive plan.
“Sir, your nose is bleeding.”
“What?”
“Your nose.” Ned pointed.
The doctor touched under his nose and, sure enough, it was bleeding. From the other corner of his desk, Zacher snatched two Kleenexes from a box and dabbed under his nose. “How about now?”
“Good, sir.” Ned gave him two thumbs up.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Ned asked.
“Yeah.” Zacher swiveled his chair and faced Ned. “Find Abrianna Parker before Spalding sends out a hit squad . . . if he hasn’t done it already.”
6
Gizella Castillo knew better than to fuck police chief Dennis Holder, but after witnessing the boys in blue bringing down Zeke “Teflon Don” Jeffreys, her emotions got the best of her. It was more than a year since they’d slept together, and the sex was mind-blowing. But by morning, regret had settled in her chest, and she was at a loss about how to disentangle her emotions again.
While lying in bed with Dennis’s heavy arm draped across her body, she watched sunlight pry through the blinds and wondered how much longer she would have to stay like that. She hated cuddling. It wasn’t her thing. It made her hot and uncomfortable.
Riiiinng.
Dennis groaned and then stretched for the phone. “Yeah?”
Thankful for the diversion, Castillo wormed from underneath him and got up.
“Hey, where are you going?” he whispered.
She shook her head and strolled naked to the adjoining bathroom.
“What?” Holder barked into the phone. “Say that shit again.”
Gizella closed the door on his conversation and marched across the cold linoleum to the even colder porcelain throne to empty her bladder. The whole time, she cursed herself for staying the night. It would have been fine if Dennis could accept it for what it was: sex. But somehow Dennis had convinced himself that he was in love with her, and he would view last night as a sign of her succumbing to him and his still standing proposal.
She wasn’t. “Are you sure?”
She flushed and then went over to turn on the shower. A minute later, Dennis barged in uninvited.
“Hey,” she snapped when the cool air hit her.
“Hey, yourself.” He reached around her. “You’re going to have to share the water this morning. I got to get down to the precinct. They cut Jeffreys loose.”
Gizella dropped the bottle of body wash. “What?”
Dennis knelt and re
trieved the bottle. “Yep. He wasn’t even arraigned.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“That’s why I got to get down there and find out.” He rushed to lather up.
“I’m coming with you.”
Dennis opened his mouth to argue back, but he saw in her eyes that it would be useless. After a seven-minute dance, trying to share the single showerhead, they left Dennis’s place. However, by the time they got downtown, it was too late. The Teflon Don had lived up to his name and had been released without so much as a mug shot taken of him.
* * *
“I need my head examined,” Kadir told his reflection in the bathroom’s mirror. For the second time, he was flushing his life down the toilet. And for what? A woman?
Of course, Abrianna Parker was no ordinary woman. She was, hands down, one of the most gorgeous natural beauties that he’d ever laid eyes on. The first time he’d ever seen her, she was stripping at the Stallion’s Gentlemen’s Club. The vision of her long legs and dangerous curves swirling around that golden pole remained on instant replay in his mind.
As he now stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he cut the bullshit and leveled with himself. He had lost his mind, allowing himself to get caught up with the sexy stripper-slash-part-time-female-escort’s fugitive madness, despite having his own FBI-slash–Homeland Security issues. As his bad luck would have it, one of his last Uber fares had been a pair of suicide bomber brothers who blew up the Reagan Airport. The airport security cameras captured his image when he helped the men unload their luggage. Unfortunately, Kadir being an American Muslim and ex-felon shot him to the top of the Most Wanted list as a suspected terrorist. He would have turned himself in to clear up the misunderstanding, had Abrianna not dove into the backseat of his car while a pair of psychotic assholes were spraying bullets. Abrianna took a solid hit to her shoulder and for a couple of days he feared that she wasn’t going to pull through. Praise Allah, she did.
The right thing to have done was to turn themselves in to the authorities and then work to clear their names, but neither trusted nor believed in the justice system. Kadir, fresh off a six-year bid for political hacktivism, swore that he was going to keep his nose clean, especially with FBI agent Quincy Bell on his ass, hell-bent on putting Kadir back behind bars. Even if Kadir could clear his name in the airport bombing, he was now actively aiding and abetting a wanted woman. He would be subjected to the same time for murder as the actual perpetrator.
Now he had these new claims about Judge Sanders to deal with? Was he sure the seductress was innocent, or was his dick doing all the thinking lately?
“You need your head examined,” he repeated. Kadir knew Judge Katherine Sanders too well. She was the ball-busting, no-nonsense judge who had sentenced him to seventy-two months behind bars. No matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine the pale and almost handsome-looking woman slinking around in five-star hotels, performing threesomes with members of Congress.
The idea was crazy.
Never put anything past anyone. Ever.
But wouldn’t that include Abrianna Parker, too? Can I trust her?
After seeing that big security guard slam up against the side of that house, common sense should have had him racing for the door—but he couldn’t have seen that, could he?
Maybe Draya had hit the guard with the van door harder than he thought. Maybe the guard was reeling back as he fired the gun. That made more sense, didn’t it?
Kadir turned on the faucet, scooped up water, and splashed his face, but the cold failed to jolt sense into him. After drying his face, he left the bathroom and returned to the bedroom he and Abrianna shared. However, when he entered, she jumped nearly ten feet and spun around, putting her hands behind her back.
“What are you doing?”
“What? Nothing.”
While the lie hung in the air, Kadir’s eyes narrowed. “What’s behind your back?”
“Nothing,” Abrianna lied again.
Kadir stormed forward. “What’s in your hands?”
Abrianna backed against the wall.
He attempted to reach around her.
“I said nothing.” She twisted to block his hands.
But Kadir had speed and latched onto one of her wrists and jerked it forward.
An empty packet fell at his feet.
Kadir stared. “What the fuck?” He knelt and picked it up.
“It’s not a big deal,” Abrianna explained.
Hurt and disappointment stabbed him in his back. “Not a big deal?” he questioned. “Only a junkie would say that.”
She flinched. “Fuck you! I don’t owe you an explanation. If I need to take something to . . . to settle my nerves, then that’s my business.”
“Your business? Look around. For the moment your business is my business, especially when it plays into your credibility in accusing a Supreme Court judge of murder.”
“Fuck you! One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other!”
“You can’t honestly believe that.”
“I told you the truth!”
“Truth?” he challenged. “Before the truth was that Madam Nevaeh was behind all of this.”
“I never said that Madam Nevaeh was in that hotel room—only that I believed that she set me up to take the fall—which is still a possibility.”
“So now the judge is chummy with a D.C. madam?” He stepped back, shaking his head. “This is like listening to Ghost tell one of his long-ass conspiracy theories when the truth is usually simple and staring you in the face.”
Abrianna processed his words—twice. “Are you saying that you think I killed him?”
“C’mon, Bree. You said yourself that you blacked out! Isn’t it possible that during your blackout you could’ve done it? I mean, why the hell not? You can throw a four-hundred-pound man across a yard. How hard could it be to pull a simple trigger?”
“What?”
“C’mon. I’m not fucking blind. That guard who shot Draya practically flew in the air.”
Abrianna looked lost.
“Fine.” He threw up his hands. “I’m imagining things—but you can’t say that I’m wrong. You could have done it, couldn’t you?”
The word no sat on her tongue, but she couldn’t spit it out.
“See?” He waved a finger in her face. “You can’t say it.”
Abrianna crossed her arms.
“I’m out here risking my life—my friends’ lives—for someone who, Ghost keeps reminding my dumb ass, I barely know.”
“Oh. Well, let me help you out. I’ll leave.” She bolted around him and grabbed her clothes.
Kadir huffed. “That’s not . . . where are you going?”
“Why the fuck do you care? All that matters is that your neck is no longer on the line.” Abrianna crammed one leg after the other into her jeans and then snatched them up over her curves.
“Your leaving changes nothing. The genie is out of the bottle.”
“Yeah? Well, I can take care of the rest from here.”
“Oh, really? How? By getting more of your friends shot?”
“You don’t give a damn about my friends. At least I can count on them to have my back.” She jammed on her Timberlands. All that mattered was that she got out of this room before she suffocated. She’d be damned if she had to explain herself to this man. He was right about one thing. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know what she dealt with on a daily basis. Fuck him and the horse he rode on into her life. She didn’t need a knight in shining armor to save her.
After lacing up her boots, she sprung up from the bed and stormed toward the door. “Fuck you. I’m out of here.” She opened the door an inch before Kadir caught up and slammed it shut.
“You’re not going anywhere. Calm the hell down.”
Abrianna spun and shoved him. “Fuck you!”
Kadir flew backward and slammed into the wall, knocking out a chunk of pl
aster. “The hell?” He stared as if she’d sprouted a second head.
“I said that I didn’t need your help,” she seethed.
Kadir pushed away from the wall, his back aching. “Yeah? How long do you think you’re going to make it out there with the entire federal government searching for you?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“Stop saying that! It is my concern. Whether you like it or not, I’m involved now. I don’t give a shit that you’re pissed off because I’m asking you real questions.” He rotated his throbbing shoulders. “Damn. You’re strong.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“What is it?” they barked.
“Is everything okay in there?” Ghost asked.
Kadir lifted a brow at Abrianna.
“Yeah. Everything is fine,” she answered.
“Are you sure?” Draya double-checked.
Abrianna knew that they were still clustered behind the closed door. She exhaled and said more calmly, “I’m sure. We’ll be right out.”
Silence.
“I mean it guys. Everything is cool. Give us a few minutes.”
“Okay,” Draya said.
She heard them walk away and forced herself to meet Kadir’s gaze. “Look. I can’t prove I’m telling you the truth. And yes . . . I took drugs that night. I even know that I have a problem.” She took a deep breath. “But believe me when I say that I need them to function. I’ve been through a lot of shit. And . . . I’m gonna get help—soon. But I’m not lying about that judge. She was there at the hotel. Somehow, I have to prove it. It’s the only way that I’m going to get my life back. And . . . I’m going to need your help to do it.”
7
Office of the Washington Post
Hunkered down at her desk, reporter Tomi Lehane had been going back and forth with the Department of Motor Vehicles for nearly an hour, feeling her patience wind to an end. “There’s got to be a record of the license plate. I know that I copied it down right. Do you have another database for government plates?” She huffed and rolled her eyes as the woman on the other end of the line told her again how sorry she was that there was no record for the plate number that Tomi had given her. “All right. Thanks for your help.” She dropped the handset back into its cradle and swore under her breath.
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