Cold as Ice

by Allison Brennan

  No, her father. Her father has the contacts in Mexico. They’re in this together, it’s the only explanation.

  By the time she got home, it was after eight. She was exhausted and her headache had gone from bad to worse. Her stomach was all twisted and she couldn’t stop thinking about Sean. Where was he now? What was he doing? Was he safe?

  Please, God, please keep him safe.

  She didn’t see Aggie’s truck out front, and Leo was still there. He and Jesse were playing video games.

  “There’s pizza in the kitchen,” Leo said. “We were hungry, but I got plenty.”

  “Thank you. Have you heard from Nate?”

  “No,” he said.

  Jesse frowned and looked concerned. “Was he supposed to be back?”

  “No,” she said, not wanting him to worry. “I haven’t talked to him since he left, but he has Aggie with him. Thanks for coming over, Leo. I really appreciate it.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “I’m free all weekend if you need me—I’m not even on call. Mind if Jess and I finish up this battle?”

  “Stay as long as you want.”

  She left them and went to the kitchen, where Garrett was drinking a water bottle. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Are you okay here?” Garrett asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Leo’s still here and Nate will be back soon.”

  “You’re not going to leave the house tonight, are you?”

  “I don’t plan to.”

  “I guess that’s good enough. I’ll be back in the morning to take you to Houston. Felicity sent me a message—Sean is at the Houston Administrative Jail. This is a good thing. It’s a federal facility, but they often keep local prisoners there before their court date, so the city uses it as well. It’s the safest place he can be.”

  The best place he could be right now would be home, but Lucy didn’t say that.

  Garrett continued. “Visiting hours are from ten until four tomorrow. It’s a three-hour drive—I’ll be here at six thirty?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Lucy, I understand what you’re going through.”

  She doubted that.

  “And I know you’re a trained agent. But you have to back away from this investigation. I didn’t hear the entire conversation, but that girl clearly wanted the witness to hear what she said, and you didn’t come off looking good.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “She barely looks eighteen. You are an armed federal agent. You approached her and made demands—she’s not a wanted criminal. If you get a call about it, anything—call me. Don’t talk to anyone, just call me and we’ll work through it. I was there, I can testify to exactly what I heard and saw, but it felt like a setup.”

  She knew Garrett was right. “It’s her MO. She convinced her shrink that I had threatened her, and because she spoke so quietly on tape, the tape didn’t catch what she said. She’s an actress. She set me up and I walked right into it. Dammit!”

  “Tread carefully, Lucy.”

  Leo came out of the video game room shortly after Garrett left. Lucy was trying to force a slice of pizza down, but her stomach was so twisted she was afraid she was going to throw up.

  Leo gave her a hug. “Jess is fine, he’s a great kid. Worried about his dad, but he’s doing good, okay? Do you want me to hang out until Nate comes back?”

  “No, I’m okay. I need a shower; I have an early day tomorrow.”

  “You need me, just call. Anytime, I mean that.”

  “I really appreciate it.”

  “Oh—someone named Duke called Jess, he’s talking to him now.”

  “Sean’s brother.”

  “Jess seemed glad that he called. You have a great family, Lucy, you’re going to get through his. Sean is going to clear his name. He’s a good man.”

  “Thank you.” She was on the verge of tears and she didn’t want to cry.

  She walked Leo to the door, then reset the alarm and went up to Jesse’s room.

  He was just hanging up his phone. “That was Uncle Duke.”

  She sat on the edge of his bed, scratched Bandit behind the ears. Sean didn’t like Bandit being on the furniture, but the dog seemed to know that Jesse’s bed was the exception.

  “Duke doing okay?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to make sure we were okay. Said that everyone is fighting for Dad and he knows he didn’t kill anyone. That the truth will come out.”

  “It will.”

  Jesse scratched Bandit, too. “I fed him. He misses Dad.”

  They all did. Sean was the life of the house. Without him … no, she wasn’t going to go there.

  Jesse asked, “Did you learn anything?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Where’s Nate?”

  “He and Aggie aren’t back yet. Are you hungry?”

  He shook his head. “Leo got pizza, but I wasn’t hungry. It just didn’t taste good.” He looked at her, serious, worried, a young version of Sean. Her heart was breaking.

  “I’m scared, Lucy.”

  She leaned back into Jesse’s bed and hugged him. “I’m scared, too.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nate didn’t like working with Aggie in the field.

  They were staking out an apartment building in a sketchy area and Aggie was certain that if Mitts Vasquez was in town, this was where he was staying. She was positive that “Aunt Rita” was Marguerita Fernandez de Garcia. The DEA had a file on her. She’d never been arrested, but she’d been questioned in several investigations that involved her late husband, who was suspected of running a meth lab ten years ago. He’d been killed in an explosion in his lab that he may have intentionally set when he was alerted that the sheriffs were on their way to arrest him.

  She owned this eight-unit apartment building, and lived in a unit on the top floor. She wasn’t home—at least, the car registered in her name wasn’t on the street or in the carport behind the building.

  Nate wasn’t confident that Aggie was right that Aunt Rita would give Mitts refuge, but she’d made a compelling argument, so he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She’d taken the information she knew about the Saints, what Marie Ynez told her, and information she’d pulled from Mitts’ extensive rap sheet.

  Nate wasn’t sure why he had a problem with Aggie. He’d been thinking about it all afternoon and into the evening—it was after nine—ever since she’d picked him up at SAPD.

  It wasn’t that she was young or female. Aggie was Lucy’s age, and Nate didn’t have a problem working with Lucy. He preferred it, because she was smart and focused and well-trained. Plus, he liked her.

  Aggie was smart, but in a different way. She was tech-savvy and analytical. But she was chatty and couldn’t stay still.

  And Nate had never worked with her.

  There was a trust that he’d built up with Lucy and even Brad. A trust he’d built with Sean and Jack and Kane. When he was in the Army, he learned to trust his squad. He knew them, inside and out. It was so deeply ingrained he knew when one was in pain, or his commander had doubts, or when they looked at each other and knew they were going back to save a civilian even in the face of danger.

  Trust took time. It took working together and learning the other person. How they would respond to any situation. How they thought and processed intel.

  He’d never worked with Aggie. He’d met her a handful of times—the talkative geek analyst at the DEA.

  Agent. She’s a DEA agent and you’d better remember that.

  But agent or not, he’d never worked with her. He felt protective because that was his background. Protect the weak, the innocent, the civilians. He didn’t know her skill set or how she would react in the face of adversity. Which meant that he was on edge; tense and watchful.

  And Aggie fidgeted constantly.

  It was annoying. And a little endearing, if they weren’t on a long stake-out. She’d taken her long white blonde hai
r down from a messy bun and braided it down her back. Then ten minutes later she’d undone the braid and wrapped her hair on the top of her head. He’d threatened to cut it off if she couldn’t keep still.

  “He’s not coming,” Nate said after more than two hours.

  “He will. I should have bought more food. I’m starving.”

  He couldn’t imagine she had any more room in her stomach. They’d had hamburgers and fries from Whataburger, then she’d stopped at a mini-mart for water, chips, sunflower seeds, and bananas. Everything was gone.

  “You don’t know that he will. It’s a guess.”

  “An educated guess.”

  “What about the Merides brothers?” he said. “Earlier you said they would be more apt to talk, and I concurred.”

  “I don’t know where they are. I have some ideas, but we don’t have the manpower to check them all out. Mitts will be here. He doesn’t have many places he can go.”

  “Unless he left San Antonio all together.”

  “Possible. Unlikely.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is all he knows. He doesn’t have contacts all over the state or country. He’s American through and through, he’d be eaten for lunch in Mexico if he tried to work something with the cartels. He’s going to stay in his comfort zone.”

  She sounded positive, not one doubt. Nate wasn’t so certain, but this was her job. He had to try to find a way to trust her. Lucy had brought her in. Brad trusted her.

  Aggie continued, her mind clearly working through all the possibilities. “Mitts stole the drugs and planted them in your truck because he was hired to do so—not because he was in a gang, but because he was one of the few left. Meaning, whoever hired him only knows the Saints.” She was nodding to herself.

  She made a lot of sense, especially if Elise Hunt was behind this.

  But a stakeout could take all night. Days. They’d been here for three hours now and hadn’t seen anything but two drug deals.

  “We need more information and a better plan,” Nate said.

  “He’ll be here. It’s the only place he can go that is off the radar of the Merides brothers and law enforcement. He’s probably been going in and out for the last few days, he’ll get cocky because no one has found him. He’ll show.”

  So he sat and waited. He didn’t move. Stakeouts were like being in the Army. You had to sit and wait and ninety-nine times out of a hundred nothing happened when you were on your post. But when the shit hit the fan, you had to be ready to act.

  A car drove up to the decrepit apartment. The building was one long unit on a narrow lot, two stories, four units top and bottom, sagging stairs, and broken railings. An empty fenced lot to the right, a larger but equally broken apartment structure to the left.

  The unit they were watching was in the front upstairs corner.

  He kept an eye on the car. At first, nothing happened. That made Nate nervous. Drug deal? Drive-by? Had they been spotted?

  A minute later, the passenger door opened. Mitts Vasquez got out of the car and before he could walk up the stairs, the driver left.

  “It’s him,” Aggie said, excited.

  Her hand was on the door.

  “Wait.”

  “We need to get to him before he gets inside. We don’t know who’s in there, what kind of weapons they might have. We don’t have a team for the back.”

  She was right. “Follow my lead.”

  She didn’t argue.

  Nate had already disabled the dome light, so it remained dark when they simultaneously opened their doors.

  Before Mitts even stepped on to the bottom stair, the downstairs apartment door opened.

  Nate didn’t hear anything before the gunfire. Mitts went down fast, three bullets ripping into his body. Nate had his gun out and was behind the truck. Aggie dropped to her knees and had her gun out as well.

  The shooter hadn’t seen Nate or Aggie—at least Nate didn’t think that he had. He left the dark apartment, fired one more bullet into Mitts’s head, then turned and walked briskly down the street toward the main road.

  “Call it in!” Nate ordered Aggie. He went after the shooter.

  “Freeze! FBI!” Nate shouted.

  The shooter didn’t look back. He went from fast walk to sprint. He was young—early to mid-twenties—and looked scared. A tattoo on his neck stood out, but at this distance Nate couldn’t tell what it depicted.

  Nate was an excellent shot, but he couldn’t risk collateral damage in the residential neighborhood. If he missed, his bullet could go through a wall or window, injuring an innocent inside.

  The shooter rounded the corner onto a busy street. A stoplight ahead was red and before the runner even registered his plans, Nate knew what he was going to do.

  Damn damn damn!

  “Freeze!” Nate shouted as he ran.

  The shooter ran to the driver’s side of the first car at the light and pointed his gun at the driver’s face. “Out or I shoot!” Nate heard as he ran toward the intersection.

  A slow-moving car clipped Nate as he ran diagonally into the street to cut the guy off.

  The driver opened her door. The shooter pulled her out of the car and threw her to the ground, then jumped in, driving through the red light before Nate reached the intersection. Two cars screeched to a stop to avoid hitting him.

  Nate helped the middle-aged woman stand. He wanted to berate her—why’d she open her door? She’d been safe inside the locked car, she could have driven off, but he didn’t say anything. People not trained for situations like this didn’t always know the smartest move.

  She was shaking and he walked her over to the sidewalk, where he sat her on a bus bench.

  “Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?”

  “I—I—I’m okay.”

  She began to silently cry. Nate called Aggie. She answered immediately.

  “He carjacked a woman at the corner of Blythe and Mission.”

  “I’m on the phone with SAPD dispatch. Do you have a description?”

  “Blue Honda Accord, license BH8-G. I missed the last three digits.” He turned to the woman. “Do you know your license plate number?”

  She shook her head. “My insurance cards are in the car … they say to keep them in the car … I need to call my husband.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Holly Johns.”

  He gave Aggie her name. “Have them run the name, get the plates. He was going south on Mission Road. Hispanic male, five foot ten to eleven, one sixty, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Wearing dark jeans, a white T-shirt with a logo on the front, and dark gray hoodie. No facial hair. Neck tattoo, indistinct.”

  “Got it. I’ll call you back.”

  Nate didn’t want to leave Aggie alone, but he also couldn’t leave the witness. A minute later, he heard sirens. Aggie called him. “Mitts is dead. SAPD is on their way. Nate, you can’t be around here.”

  “Like hell.”

  “You don’t have a badge right now. You’re suspended.”

  “I’ll deal with it. I have a witness; I’ve talked to her. I have another driver approaching me now, he saw what happened. I’ll get his statement, send an officer here to make it official. And no way in hell am I leaving you here in the middle of this.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  It wasn’t that he disagreed with her, and if he didn’t have this woman who had seen him, who he’d talked to, he might slip away undetected. He didn’t want to talk to anyone at SAPD, and he didn’t know how his working with Aggie was going to impact his situation—or her job. But dammit, he didn’t run from trouble. He never had, he never would.

  Aggie was talking.

  “What?” he said.

  “Will you follow my lead this time?”

  “What?”

  “I asked you to help me. You were just on a ride-along. This is my case, assigned by my boss Brad Donnelly. Understand?”

  “Understood.”
/>   “They were waiting for him,” she said. “They knew he would come here. Rita set him up.”

  “So she’s working with the Merides brothers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If someone stole sixteen kilos of coke from me, I wouldn’t kill them until after I got my drugs back.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Whoever hired Mitts Vasquez to steal the drugs in the first place didn’t want him fingering them to the cops.”

  Aggie concurred. “I think you might be right.”

  “I know I am.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  By the time Sean was transferred to the administrative jail Friday night, it was late. All prisoners were in their cells. He had been taken to the jail alone in a police van, in cuffs.

  He’d gone through the booking process at Houston PD—turning over all his personal items, mug shot, prints, orange jumpsuit. He complied without mouthing off or disrupting the process. He was so weary … so frustrated … so humiliated.

  His attorney told him to keep his head down and she would do everything in her power to get him out on Monday. He knew that creating problems wasn’t going to help him and he would try to keep a low profile, while still being on high alert all night, all weekend.

  There are a lot easier ways to kill you than to set you up to go to prison.

  In reality, the frame job was solid, but the police shouldn’t be able to prove he killed Mona because he hadn’t. He’d been there, he’d argued with her, but he hadn’t killed her. They had to prove he did it—he didn’t have to prove he didn’t. At least, that was how the system was supposed to work.

  Whoever killed her knew you were there—and when.

  Someone had been watching Mona, knew when Sean arrived, knew when he left, killed her. She’d been expecting her bodyguard … just how clean was he? Had he killed her?

  That doesn’t explain the pizza guy getting no answer at Mona’s door.

  He had to take that testimony at face value at this point. He could have been bribed, but that would likely not hold up in court, especially since there were security cameras that could confirm the time line.

  So the killer either avoided the cameras, hacked into the cameras, or had a legitimate reason for being in the building. Sean trusted Lucy to work the case, but she was out of her jurisdiction and wouldn’t have access to all the information Houston PD had. If it were him, he would want to interview the pizza delivery guy. Maybe he had been bribed—maybe he had gang affiliations—maybe he’d been threatened. Or maybe he’d seen something and didn’t realize the import.