Always Look Twice (7 page)

She’d witnessed and respected his detachment during the years they’d worked together, and she’d strived to maintain a similar state herself. With their occupation, a degree of detachment had been necessary to survive. But when they married, they no longer worked in the unit. They had the freedom to want, to care. To love.

But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Wasn’t capable.

It had taken Annabelle time and a late period to figure that out. That weekend in New York before it all fell apart, she had come to understand that she wasn’t just ready for emotional involvement—she was already there. She’d cared about Mark Callahan. She had been in love with Mark Callahan.

When he’d celebrated the negative test and rejected even the idea of making a family with her, he’d shown her that his walls were still firmly in place.

But Annabelle never had been one to give up easy. Once she got past the hurt, she had reassessed. The man’s walls were higher than hers, thicker than hers. She had thought that maybe he simply needed more time for those walls to come tumbling down.

So she’d waited. One month. Two. Twelve. Somewhere along in there, she had told herself she didn’t love him anymore. Didn’t want him anymore. If he was too blind, stubborn, and hard-hearted to take what she had offered him, then it was his loss.

Nevertheless, she had continued to wait. He was still her husband, and she was loyal to that.

Until now.

Annabelle took a business card from her desk and handed it to him. ‘‘Have your lawyer send the papers here. Now, I have an appointment I need to get to.’’

His eyes widened ever so slightly. His jaw hardened. ‘‘You’re awfully calm about this.’’

She arched a single eyebrow. ‘‘You would prefer histrionics?’’

‘‘No . . . no . . . of course not. I just thought . . .’’ He blew out a heavy breath. ‘‘It’s better this way, Belle. I can’t give you what you need.’’

‘‘That’s right.’’ She smiled coldly. ‘‘You can’t. And I can’t give you what you need.’’

‘‘I don’t need anything,’’ he protested.

‘‘Exactly. And I didn’t do anything wrong, which makes this whole thing easier. I’m clear, you’re clear, and we walk away. Clean and easy. Just like that Texas expression you used to say when we finished an operation—calf rope. It’s done.’’

She picked up her purse and waited expectantly. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked to the door and stepped outside.

Annabelle called upon years of training to conceal her emotions, to hide her breaking heart. This could well be the last time she ever saw him. He was leaving for good this time and she had to let go. She had to let
him
go.

Calf rope.

He stopped, turned around. His gaze locked on the blooming plants in her flowerpots, and his voice came soft and low and troubled. ‘‘Annabelle . . .’’

‘‘Have a nice trip home, Callahan. Have a nice life.’’ With that, she closed the door.

Chapter Four

‘‘Got ’em.’’ Mark switched off his computer and rose from his desk, satisfaction washing through him. Days like today were the reason he continued to work rather than spend all his time salmon fishing. The cyber-sting operation he’d developed at the request of an old friend who was now the police chief of a Denver suburb had gone off without a hitch. Tonight, a ring of child pornographers faced spending a big chunk of their lives in prison due in part to his efforts. Made a man feel good.

He grabbed a beer from the fridge, then wandered into the living room of his downtown condo, where floor-to-ceiling windows provided a multimillion-dollar view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Outside, the sun was shining and the breeze was gentle, so he stepped out onto the small balcony to enjoy the afternoon.

He’d bought this condo, which occupied half of the thirty-second floor of the high-rise, after his dot-com investments had made him rich, but before he had separated from the army. He’d wanted a place far away from Texas and his father, and the Pacific North-west had felt right. Since he did the majority of his work on a computer, he could work from anywhere. His only real regret was living so far from his brothers.

He sipped his beer and gazed out across the sound at the pleasure boats skidding across the water. If the weather held, maybe tomorrow he’d take the
Sea Breeze
out, catch a few fish, and call Matt to brag. Ordinarily this time of year, Matt and Torie would be traveling the world on one of their so-called Great Adventures, but this year they’d nested down in Brazos Bend to await the birth of their baby. Matt had been downright obnoxious about the good striper fishing at Possum Kingdom Lake of late when he and Mark had last spoken. He deserved to be score-boarded over pounds of fish caught.

The landline in his office rang and he decided to let the answering machine pick up. Moments later, a woman’s tearful voice said, ‘‘Hello, Mr. Callahan. This is Frances Russo.’’

Mark’s radar went on full alert. Russo called him from time to time, but never his wife. He set his bottle down on the patio table, then moved back inside and over to his desk. He picked up the receiver as she continued. ‘‘I’m Jeremy’s wife. You came to our wedding. I need to speak with you—’’

‘‘Hello, Frances. It’s Mark. It’s nice to hear from you. What can I do for you?’’

At that, she burst into tears.
Ah, hell
. Mark propped a hip on the corner of his desk and tried to catch the words she managed through her sobs. He picked up a few that he wished he’d misunderstood.

‘‘Jeremy . . .
mumble, mumble
. . . dead . . . explosion.
Mumble mumble mumble
. . . accident. They’re wrong.’’ She let out a long, hard sob. ‘‘Wrong!’’

Mark closed his eyes and took a few seconds to mourn. Jeremy Russo had been a good man and a fine soldier, and he knew his way around explosives like nobody else. For Russo to have made a fatal mistake, he would have needed to be seriously distracted.

Or seriously unhappy. Mark stared out the window at the spectacular view without really seeing it. He could picture Russo committing suicide by bomb easier than he could see him killing himself by mistake. But the Russo Mark knew wouldn’t take the coward’s way out and do himself in. No, something was very, very wrong here.

He walked around to his black leather desk chair and took a seat. ‘‘Frances, what exactly happened? Can you tell me?’’

‘‘It
wasn’t
an accident!’’

‘‘I tend to agree with you. Jeremy wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.’’

She settled down a bit then and told him about Russo’s backyard workshop and the wood-carving hobby he’d taken up. Mark recalled Russo sitting beside a campfire on a mountain in Serbia, whittling a stick. Yeah, he could see him with a workshop. Frances Russo next described how she and her husband had sat down for supper and talked about the trip to Vegas they had planned for the following month.

‘‘He was excited about going, Mark. He’d won the Super Bowl pool at work and had stuck the money away for gambling. He wasn’t depressed or anything. He was happy. We were happy. We had decided to start a family.’’

Mark blew out a heavy breath. ‘‘Where has Jeremy been working?’’

‘‘At Martindale Junior High. He earned his teaching certificate and he’s the shop teacher. He loves it. Loved it.’’

She broke down again then, and while Mark waited her out, he wondered just what was going on. Why would a woodshop teacher have explosives in his work shed? When he judged she’d collected herself, he asked again, ‘‘What can I do to help you, Frances?’’

‘‘I want you to show the police. Prove it to them. Someone did this. Someone murdered my Jeremy and I want you to find him and make him pay. You’re a private investigator—Jeremy told me. I want to hire you. He had some life insurance, so I’ll be able to pay you—’’

‘‘Wait. Hold on, honey. Jeremy was my friend, part of my unit. I will look into it, but I won’t take your money. You hear?’’

‘‘But you will find out who did this?’’

‘‘Yes, Frances, I will. You have my word.’’ He grabbed a notepad and a pen from his desk. ‘‘I need a few details. First, have you scheduled services yet? If so, when and where?’’

They spoke for another few minutes; then Mark disconnected the call. Immediately, he punched in another number. The phone rang twice and a man’s voice said, ‘‘NetJet.’’

‘‘Hi, Jim, it’s Mark Callahan. I’m gonna need the Citation at six a.m. tomorrow for a flight to Philly.’’

‘‘Sure thing, Mr. Callahan. She’ll be ready and waiting for you.’’

He hung up, retrieved his beer, and briefly debated the idea of getting something stronger.
Damn, Jeremy. What the hell happened?
His thoughts drifted back to the three years when he had lived and breathed the unit.

God, he’d loved it. Russo had been the one to tag them as the Fixers. They’d been a team of a dozen, nine men and three women, from different services, agencies, and departments in the government, each with unique talents, assigned to special duty beneath the direction of Colonel Greg Warren. Special covert duty. Warren had an office at the Pentagon and an official title, but they had little to do with his real job. Colonel Warren and his team functioned as freelance troubleshooters for everyone from the army to the CIA.

The Fixers worked all over the world representing Uncle Sam’s interests through espionage efforts aimed primarily at criminal organizations involved in the drug trade and arms smuggling. Upon occasion they coordinated with the Company and spooks like Matt if foreign governments figured into the equation. The unit had done good work, provided vital information, and survived some hairy scrapes to boot. He’d never forget that time in Colombia when Annabelle—

‘‘Annabelle.’’ Mark stiffened. If Frances Russo contacted the rest of the Fixers, then Annabelle would be there. She would come to Russo’s funeral. He would see her again.

His ex-wife.

Maybe she’d bring her new boyfriend with her.

‘‘Well, shit.’’ Mark drained the rest of his beer.

Sitting in her car in the parking lot of Devlin’s Funeral Home on a blustery spring day, Annabelle flipped her cell phone shut with a trembling hand. The conversation had confirmed the fear that had been growing inside her since she’d begun making the calls for Frances Russo yesterday. Four members of the unit were dead, three of those recently. She couldn’t reach four others. What was going on?

Had somebody targeted the Fixers?

It was an incredible thought, but nothing else made sense. Dennis Nelson had died in a car wreck almost two months ago in Europe, so that one might well be unrelated. But in addition to Russo’s implausible death, for Terry Hart to die in a rock-climbing accident, and most unbelievable of all, for Melanie Anderson to commit suicide, all within a span of three weeks?

No. Uh-uh. Too much coincidence to be believable.

Add in the fact that she couldn’t reach Rocky Stanhope, Jordan Sundine, Rhonda Parsons, and Vince Holloway, and she knew without a doubt that the unit had trouble.

Annabelle was heartsick over the deaths. The years they’d worked together had created a real bond between teammates. She regretted that they had drifted apart in the years since the Fixers disbanded, but that fact didn’t negate her sense of loss. Or her concern for the surviving members of the unit.

She suppressed a shudder. Had Frances Russo not informed her that she’d spoken to Mark before calling Annabelle, she would have been frantic. She might have divorced the man, but she had yet to figure a way to evict him from her heart.

Though she had made a real effort to do so. She’d stayed busy and tended to her social life. She’d dated. Annabelle
wanted
to fall in love.

Despite a real and concerted effort, she had yet to find a man to replace Callahan. When Paulo Giambelli spent two weeks in Hawaii for the stated purpose of winning her heart, she’d tried to accommodate him. Paulo had opined that she’d never move forward until she took another man into her bed, and of course, he’d volunteered for the job. But Annabelle’s core values hadn’t changed, and in spite of his charm, his wit, his drop-dead-gorgeous features, he couldn’t convince her to make that leap. When he announced his intention to woo her for a third week, she’d gently sent him home, telling him she simply wasn’t ready for serious romance. Since then they had settled into a habit of twice-weekly flirtatious calls, which she admittedly enjoyed.

Maybe if she’d jumped into romance with Paulo, the prospect of seeing Mark again wouldn’t bother her so much. But now she not only had to see him—she would have to talk to him. Maybe work with him again. They could not ignore these deaths and disappearances.

‘‘Lord, help us all.’’ She tucked her cell phone in her purse and exited her rental car. Checking her watch, she saw that the viewing had begun forty minutes ago. A chilly wind whipped up the hem on her new navy coat and she scanned the area with a watchful gaze as she crossed the street to Devlin’s. She kept her hand perched on the opening of her shoulder bag, ready to plunge inside and grasp her SIG if need be.

Devlin’s Funeral Home was a converted Victorian mansion. Under other circumstances, Annabelle might have taken time to study the architecture. She had a thing for that era, from the style of the buildings with their gingerbread and dormer windows to the crocheted doilies on parlor chairs. It was a side of herself she kept hidden—soft and girly—but someday when the time was right, she’d have her Victorian on the hill with a picket fence and a dog and a swing set in the backyard.

Unless whoever was finishing off the Fixers got to her first.

Oh, jeez. She walked up the sidewalk and stepped onto the porch. At the door, she paused and drew a bracing breath. As much as she dreaded facing Mark, she couldn’t deny her gratitude that his broad shoulders could help carry some of this burden.