Flash Point (30 page)

‘I know what you mean,' Yancy muttered.

‘Huh?'

‘I just mean I can imagine, from what little I've seen on the gossip sites that ran it.'

But Jenna hadn't latched on to his flub, because she already had her phone in hand, texting. ‘Asking Irv to send over the initial M.E. report. They won't finalize and publish official findings for a while, but in active cases they'll usually let us take a peek at their first reactions if it could help find an active perp.'

She set her phone down and hopped up. ‘I'll be right back. Irv'll send reports to my tablet and I left it in the kitchen last night.'

Yancy's eyes followed Jenna out of the room, admiring how her pink-striped pajama that seemed to cover her ass
just
enough that he couldn't see anything but seemed like they might give him a peek at any instant. When she turned the corner, he hung his head then stared pointedly at his crotch. ‘I have to be a good listener right now. You have to let me be good boyfriend right now!'

‘Did you say something?' Jenna asked, bustling back into the bedroom.

Yancy coughed. ‘Did you hear back from Irv?'

Jenna nodded, sitting down next to Yancy on the bed cross-legged. She hit a few buttons on the tablet to open a file, then swiped across it a few times searching for the page Irv had pointed out to her.

She leaned closer, reading the scrawled words of the ME, then swiped again to look at the photos of the bodies. ‘Well I'll be damned,' she mumbled.

It didn't surprise Yancy, though. Not after what he'd seen on the video and the theory starting to form in his head. The dad's gut wound was definitely inflicted by Marius's briquet sabre. It entered low in the gut, but the exit wound was higher, indicative of the way the blade curved upward. The son's wound, however, was different in multiple ways. Not only did the pictorial evidence show that the entrance and exit wounds were directly across from each other with no diversion to suggest a curved blade, but the son's stab wounds also reflected two points of gashed flesh on either side of the entrance point of the sword tip. The father's wound only had one, of course, since a Napoleonic briquet sabre featured only one sharp edge. The sword the boy was stabbed with had two.

And Yancy thought he had a good idea why.

‘I'm starting to get a crazy theory here,' Yancy said, his mind working overtime to figure out how to give Jenna the info she needed and keep his promise to Irv that their dealings stay between them at the same time. ‘So I might be grasping at straws, but hear me out.'

Jenna nodded. ‘Sure.'

‘You said that at some point right around Exam Six this Atticus guy
killed
Marius before hauling his body away, right?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, I know we all are wondering why they'd kill him. I mean, if they're in the middle of an assault on the ER and some nurse happens to be a jiu jitsu master knocks him out cold, sure. You grab him and run, because if you leave him, he gets identified, and inevitably, his identity will trace back to everybody in the group. But that's not what happened. He didn't get hurt or killed by one of the victims.
They
killed him. In the middle of their own planned attack. Why?'

Jenna blinked rapidly. ‘I don't know. He did something wrong. He made a mistake. He didn't stab the kid, obviously. Maybe that somehow screwed up the way the rest of the attack was supposed to go down.'

Yancy stared at the tablet, at the photo of the kid, replaying the grainy footage over and over in his mind. The guy with the long sword storms into Six. Storms out. Another attacker turns the corner and they almost bump into each other. The attacker who turned the corner turns and goes into Six. And suddenly Atticus appears and kills Marius.

‘I think he made a mistake. I think he broke a rule,' Yancy said. ‘Let's get Irv on the footage, but I think Atticus offed Marius because Marius walked
away
from that kid. Killed the dad, turned to do the kid but couldn't, so he left.'

Jenna nodded slowly. ‘It would explain why the kid was on his way out of the room and the attacker stabbed him from the front.'

‘A different attacker.'

Jenna shifted, leaned back into the pillows, stunned.

‘This puts a whole new spin on the group profile, huh?' Yancy said.

She nodded. ‘And honestly, I don't even know what it means. Not yet, anyway.'

From the table across the room next to the antique chair, Jenna's phone skittered across the glass until it reached the wood rim, which caught it on its side. Jenna jumped up and crossed the room, snatched it up, and read the text Irv had sent to the team:

THE M.E. GOT A HIT ON A MATCHING SCAR. MISSING PERSON RECORD. NAMES JAMES ASNER. SENDING BRIEFING ON ASNER TO YOUR TABLETS NOW.

She hopped back on to the bed and picked up the tablet, scrolled through the menu to find the briefings folder. Sure enough, it was already in the file.

Jenna read the brief out loud. ‘James Asner, would be thirty-three today. Harvard law student, went missing during his third year without a trace. Known during his undergraduate studies there for being a standout debate champion but also for his
many first place fencing trophies.
Now isn't that interesting?'

‘Mr Sword has a sword past. That part fits.'

‘But here's the problem, according to the brief, as soon as Asner was reported missing, the trail went cold. No leads, no sightings, no digital footprint. Not so much as a toe print. It was like he fell off the earth.'

‘Perfect candidate for a radical terrorist group,' Yancy said.

Jenna nodded, trying hard to latch on to the color that kept sneaking in but drifting away before she could grab hold of it. She was missing something. Something important.

Wisps of thoughts she couldn't quite grasp taunted her as she paced the bedroom floor.
Why? Why did they kill him? They killed him for not killing someone. But that's off! They killed him for not killing someone.

A shade of yellow flashed in. The thought slowly flooded Jenna's mind. ‘But this wasn't the first time he didn't kill someone. That's what's bothering me. He was the person to lead Ashlee Haynie, the bank survivor, down to the vault and give her the message for us.' Still, something didn't fit, but that was part of it. ‘So,' she ventured, hoping she could talk it out of the recesses of her mind, ‘the kid obviously wasn't the one survivor left. Margeaux East was. But Marius was killed, and he didn't take her to safety. So that wasn't his job anymore. We need to look back at the footage, see who did …'

Maybe if she could figure out how the hierarchy of the lone survivor worked, who dealt with them and why, it would help the profile even without Margeaux East being able to deliver the message they left.

Then, before she could stop herself, Jenna confessed to Yancy about making the tape of Margeaux East's ramblings. He insisted they listen to it, but unfortunately, they couldn't make out any real
words
, much less literary quotes.

And while Yancy had tried to relieve her disappointment with jokes about the lines she'd crossed to make the damned thing, she couldn't believe she'd done something so drastic for something so worthless.

The yellow hue flashed in again, the same as when they'd viewed the surveillance tape.

‘Ugh! But even that's still off!' Jenna vented, wringing her hands.
Come on, brain!

Yancy sat forward, lightly wrapped his hand around her wrist. ‘I can't read minds here, love. What's going on in there? Maybe I can help.'

She recounted her thinking to him about needing to see on the footage who had given a message to Margeaux East – since they knew it wasn't Marius – about how she thought the process of deciding who led the survivor might tell her more about the inner workings of the group. She collapsed on the bed in a heap. ‘But the tape! That's what I just keep coming back to. The tape and the scissors. They closed Ashlee Haynie in a
bank vault,
but this girl got a cabinet? She's clearly still vulnerable to the point of being ready to attack with the only weapon she had available to her, so whoever put her there obviously didn't quite get the message across to her that the plan was for her to
live—
'

‘That's because it wasn't, Jen,' Yancy cut in. He stood, pacing, gesturing wildly as he talked. ‘No one put her in the cabinet. When she saw they were under attack, she ran, and when there was nowhere to run, she hid. She climbed in on her own.'

Jenna stared at him. ‘How do you know that?'

Yancy looked stunned a second, but then shook his head. ‘Because like you said. The tape. She taped herself in there, trying to make sure they couldn't find her, and she had the scissors ready if they did. Message Irv and have him look for it on the video, but it's the way it makes sense.'

Jenna whipped out her phone and texted Irv, but as she did, she already knew Yancy was right. It was why the colors hadn't made sense. The tape, the scissors.

She stilled, the thought so strong she couldn't fathom what it meant yet.

‘Then they didn't leave a survivor at the hospital,' she said slowly, dark yellow flashing in.

Every cop learned it as Homicide 101. Assailants evolve, get better at what they do. But if you can get to the core of the early ones, the first crimes, those will give you traces of where to look. They'll always somehow connect to something the killer sees every day, does every day, knows.

She grabbed her slacks from the dresser, pulled them on as she fumbled around the room, gathering her things. ‘I have to go now. I don't know what it all means, but I need to talk to Ashlee Haynie. Marius took her to that bank vault. And whether she realizes it or not, I think she knows him.'

Jenna pulled up outside a ritzy-looking apartment complex called The Ivory at Castle Pines. As soon as she'd shared her hunch with Saleda and the Special Agent in Charge had confirmed, via Irv, that Ashlee Haynie seemed to have gone missing in action, the team had met at Quantico for a quick briefing and strategizing session before splitting up to start an unofficial search to locate her.

Given what she'd been through, her not showing up for her shift at another branch of Weisman Bank and Trust normally wouldn't be shocking. But the fact that the bank branch manager called to check on her and learned her phone number had been disconnected, coupled with a few more checks of Irv's, confirmed what Jenna already suspected: this wasn't Ashlee needing some down time to recuperate. She hadn't checked her email for the past twenty-four hours, despite the fact that she had regularly used her work account for personal e-mail before, too. There had been no activity on any of her credit cards, either. With the revelations in play and what Jenna was starting to piece together, the team agreed finding her was vital both to the case
and
to Ashlee's safety. They copped a plan to split up. Porter and Teva would track down James Asner's former associates at Harvard and maybe shed some more light on their one known Black Shadow member in hopes of drawing out some more angles. And while Saleda and Dodd made the rounds to speak to Ashlee's friends and family members, Jenna would swing by her apartment. Considering the signs Irv's had dug up, it was likely Ashlee wasn't there. But Jenna still wanted to take a look around her place. Ashlee being gone wasn't a coincidence, but what had happened to cause the disappearance was a bit more of a mystery. Best case scenario, she was staying with friends somewhere, depressed on their couch, or had checked herself into a mental health facility if she was suicidal and was in a hospital ward, safe and sound under suicide watch.

Disturbing hunter green flashed in. Jenna's gut said the circumstances were more alarming. Maybe Ashlee had remembered something and, realizing she
did
know Marius, fled, afraid he'd come back for her. Or maybe Black Shadow got spooked by what happened at the hospital with Marius and decided to do away with the living liability. Even if the other members weren't aware of Marius's connection to Ashlee and it most likely being the reason he had chosen to spare her and put her in the vault to deliver the message, they knew there was a living witness, and it was likely at least that the masterminds knew of the connection because Jenna's gut
also
told her it had somehow played into their choice of what bank to attack.

Jenna and Grey climbed the staircase that led to the unit on the second level. It had only taken one carefully worded phone call to the leasing office informing them they would be dropping by to look around the apartment. Funny how even if it technically hadn't been long enough to file a missing person's case, if you said the right things, you could have the landlord agree to an unofficial visit because they thought it
was official
.

The shade of raw umber brown that Jenna associated with wealth flashed in. This apartment complex was nicer than most five-star hotels Jenna had been to and reminded her more of a resort than any apartment she'd ever set foot in.

When they reached the second floor landing, a smartly dressed African American woman in a pair of perfectly tailored gray slacks and a textured navy blazer woven with whites and grays left open to show the pretty, periwinkle silk blouse greeted them. The polite smile on her puce-painted lips was warm as she made eye contact with Jenna, offered her hand. ‘Hi, there. I'm Nanette Viselli, property owner of the Ivory. So lovely to meet you, though I wish it were under less urgent circumstances.'

‘Yes,' Jenna said, shaking her hand. ‘I'm Dr Jenna Ramey. You actually spoke to my Special Agent in Charge, Saleda Ovarez, and she sends her appreciation for your cooperation in letting us into Ms Haynie's apartment to take a look around.'

Nanette Viselli pulled a silver key from her trouser pocket and turned to the door. As she worked the lock, she shook her head, a smile breaking across her face. ‘I told my husband, knowing those two, they probably up and decided on whim to take some sort of second honeymoon. Maybe go to Scotland or somewhere to see all those medieval castles and things, as interested as they are in that … oh, what is that they do …'