Kill Fee (24 page)

W
indermere stared at Stevens. “Home,” she said.

Stevens nodded. “For the weekend. Maybe longer. Gotta check in with Lesley at headquarters.” He gestured around Mathers’s cramped little office. “You guys can spread out a little. You don’t need me here.”

Windermere studied Stevens’s face. The BCA agent looked worn out. Discouraged. He’d announced his plans shortly after they’d met back in the FBI office in Philadelphia, after taking down Johnny Thorsson’s spurned lover in Manhattan.

He’s right,
she thought,
probably.
She and Mathers could handle the paperwork and whatever other half-cocked leads came through the pipeline. Still, it seemed sacrilege to walk away in the middle of the case.

“What about a trap?” she said. “We’ll use the code Comm gave us and ask Killswitch to set up a hit. Worm our way inside that way.”

“Too soon,” Stevens said. “He’ll be suspicious after Comm broke into the system. Especially if he finds out Morgan went down.”

“The DoD lead, then. Maybe we get lucky and they come through with the access.”

Stevens shook his head. “It’s Friday night, Carla,” he said. “They’re not going to let us into their computers before Monday at the earliest. And even then it’s not likely they’ll give us anything.”

Right again,
Windermere thought. The DoD hadn’t exactly been positive when she’d outlined the situation. A department spokesman had given her a stern lecture about Homeland Security and threat levels for
fifteen minutes before she’d hung up on him. They probably weren’t about to call back with the keys to the kingdom.

“So you’re just going to go,” she said. “Leave us behind.”

Stevens sighed. “My wife needs a break,” he said. “She’s swamped with work. It’s been a week. I owe her a weekend, at least.”

Windermere looked at him. “Fine,” she said.

“There’s a flight out tomorrow morning. I’ll spend the night here and take off first thing.”

Windermere glanced at Mathers. Her young colleague was snoozing into a stack of addresses. “This is about the other night, huh?”

Stevens stiffened. Looked at Mathers. Then pulled her out into the hall. “No,” he said when they were alone. “I don’t know. Maybe it is. Even if it’s not, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” She looked at him. “For what?”

“I don’t want to be the asshole,” he said. “I thought we were joking around, flirting a little. I wasn’t trying to, you know, make a move or anything.”

She felt her heart soften. “I know you weren’t, Stevens. You don’t need to be sorry.”

“Sure feels like it.”

“Well, it shouldn’t.” She took a deep breath. “I wasn’t angry with you, Kirk. I was mad at myself for flirting with you. It’s not right.”

Stevens stared at her. She felt like he must be reading her mind. “I love my wife,” he said finally.

“I know you do,” she replied. “This is just—”

“Infatuation. It’s transient.”

“An illusion.”

He looked at her. “You believe that?”

She shook her head. “I don’t fucking know, Stevens.”

Stevens said nothing. He was close to her in that tiny hallway. She could sense his body near hers. Feel his warmth. For a brief, panicked
moment, she half believed he was going to kiss her. She caught herself hoping he did.

Instead, he shook his head and stepped away. “I’m going home,” he told her. “Call me if anything turns up.”

T
he asset stared at Parkerson with that slack expression of his. “Go on,” Parkerson told him. “Do it.”

Friday night. The asset had been at the lake house for five days. He’d responded well to the training so far. It was time to advance the regimen.

“Do it,” Parkerson told him. “You don’t want the visions to continue, do you?”

The asset looked exhausted. He’d been locked in the room with the visions for five days and four nights. Probably hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch.

He’d stopped trashing the room, though. The bed remained fully made. The waste bucket stayed upright. He seemed to calm down when Parkerson came in the room. He seemed to trust Parkerson, seemed grateful for the food, for the reprieve.

“Do it,” Parkerson told him. “Do it for me.”

Slowly, the asset turned to the cardboard box beside the bed. Parkerson had picked it up on his way to the lake house. A gift for the asset. A test.

The asset reached inside the box and pulled out an orange cat. The cat purred and nuzzled the asset. The asset held it. Looked at it.

“Do it now,” Parkerson told him.

The asset gripped the cat tighter. The cat struggled. Yowled and clawed at the asset. The asset clenched hard and twisted the cat’s neck. Bones snapped and the cat spasmed once. Then it dropped, lifeless, into the cardboard box.

Parkerson nodded. “Good work,” he said. The asset seemed to relax a little. Parkerson kicked the box away. Held up the McDonald’s bag. “Let’s eat.”

I
t was nearly midnight when the plane landed in Las Vegas. Lind spent the flight alongside a rowdy bachelorette party. They drank, swore, and laughed so much there was no danger he’d fall asleep.

He walked off the plane and through McCarran International Airport, dodging slot machines and more wild crowds of partiers. The airport was a zoo, even so late at night. He waited forty-five minutes in a stifling taxi line before it was finally his turn to leave.

No more rental cars. Lind hardly registered the change in procedure. He’d listened to the man’s instructions, and now he followed them. That was that.

The taxi driver was an old man with a patchy beard and a smoker’s cough. He studied Lind in the rearview. “Where you headed, man?”

“The Flamingo,” Lind told him. “The Strip.”

THE HOTEL WAS EVEN LOUDER
than the airport. There was a twenty-minute wait at the check-in desks. Lind watched the crowds mill around him,
everyone smiling, squealing, hysterical, drunk. He suddenly felt very tired.

The desk clerk was young, his face pockmarked with acne scars. He checked Lind in and then squinted at his computer. “Says here we have a couple packages for you.” He grinned at Lind. “You forget your bathing suit?”

Lind shook his head. “No.”

The man shrugged. He disappeared through a swinging door and came out with the packages: a parcel, shipped by courier, and an envelope with Andrew Kessler’s name on it. Handed them to Lind, then glanced around the lobby and leaned in. “You need anything, brother?” he said. “Looking to party tonight? Want a girl?”

Lind thought about Caity Sherman and shook his head. Picked up the packages and his room key and rode up to his room in an elevator jam-packed with German tourists. Found his suite and walked in and sat on the bed. He wanted so badly to sleep. He couldn’t. As soon as he closed his eyes, he was back in that desert Humvee.

He switched on the TV and turned up the volume. Turned on all the lights and pumped up the air-conditioning. Walked to the window and stared out at the Strip, the vast crowds, the chaos. He stood at the window for a while, and then picked up the parcel and tore it open.

Another weapon. Another photograph. Inside the envelope was a Bellagio room key. Lind put the handgun and the key card in a drawer. He memorized the photograph and burned it in the bathroom wastebasket. Then he walked back to the window and stared down at the Strip, watching the partiers come and go until dawn.

S
tevens caught the morning flight direct from Philadelphia to Minneapolis. Arrived at eleven and made it home five minutes before noon. He paid the cabbie and stood outside and surveyed his house for a moment, enjoying the sunshine, breathing the fresh air. Then he walked up the front stairs to the door.

Andrea was in the kitchen when he walked in from the hall. She looked up from her sandwich and blinked. “You’re home,” she said, chewing. “You catch the bad guys?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Where’s your mother?”

“Work.” Andrea frowned. Paged through her magazine. “You didn’t solve the case? How come you’re home?”

“Guess I needed a break,” he said. “Couldn’t leave your mom high and dry for too long. Anyway, I missed you guys.”

He mussed her hair. Andrea swatted him away.
“Dad.”
She looked up at him. “So you just took a break? Is Agent Windermere still working?”

Stevens nodded. “She has a partner. This kid Mathers.”

“So she doesn’t need you. That’s why you came home.”

“We’re kind of stuck,” he said, sighing. “We reached a dead end. I figured maybe I should step back for a while.”

Andrea shook her head. “I don’t get it. The bad guy’s still out there?”

Stevens nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“So why aren’t you chasing him?”

“I told you, Andrea. Your mom—”

“Who cares about Mom?” Her eyes flashed. “This guy’s a killer, isn’t he?”

Stevens stepped back. “Andrea—”

“Well?” She looked at him. “There’s a murderer out there, Dad. You and Windermere need to catch him. You need to catch him before he comes after
us
.”

“Honey, he’s not going to come after us.”

“Coach Tomlin did.” Andrea was breathing shallow now, fast. She looked down at her magazine and bit her lip. “What if it happens again?”

Stevens looked at his daughter and felt his heart melt. “It won’t, honey. This guy doesn’t even know who we are.”

“Do you know who he is? Maybe he lives next door, Daddy. Maybe you work with him.” Andrea stood. “Catch him, Daddy,” she said. “Don’t just give up.”

She hurried out of the room, leaving Stevens alone in the kitchen. He lingered there, listening to his daughter stalk through the hall and upstairs. Heard her door slam, and sighed. “Damn it, kiddo,” he said. “I’m trying.”

L
ind woke up breathless, on top of the bed. The TV blared beside him. Harsh sunlight glared in through the dusty window. It was daytime, midmorning. He’d been dreaming again.

He sat up and breathed deep, trying to calm his racing heart. Stared down at the carpet until the panic disappeared. Until he could hear the sounds of the TV over the roar of his pulse in his ears.

He brewed a pot of coffee and drank it all. Showered in ice-cold water. Didn’t look at himself in the mirror as he dressed. When he was ready, he stuffed the pistol in the back of his pants. Pulled his shirt over top and slipped the Bellagio room key in his pocket as he walked from the room.

The lobby was quieter this morning. The partiers were gone. It was still early for Las Vegas. There was plenty of time left to kill.

Lind found a Denny’s and ate a greasy breakfast. Then he walked, aimless, up and down the long boulevard. Wandered in and out of casinos until a few hours had passed. Then he turned and headed north, toward the Bellagio. Passed its majestic fountains without stopping to look, walked up the long driveway and into the lobby. He lingered there a moment, anonymous in the crowd, and then followed a sign toward the hotel elevators. The gun pressed into his back; the crowd ebbed and flowed, and the slot machines clamored. Lind pictured the man’s face. Imagined a life without the visions. He hurried his pace. It was time to complete the assignment.

W
indermere spent the day cooped up in that tiny office with Mathers. Despite the stall in their case, Mathers was in good spirits; he laughed and teased Windermere, attempting to prod her out of her funk.

It was Stevens’s fault. The BCA agent had turned tail and ditched her, headed back to his family and left her with a case that suddenly seemed unsolvable. Not that she could blame him. Rats off a sinking ship. Or maybe he just missed his wife.

Yeah, or maybe she’d scared him away. He’d scared himself away. They’d come close to something, she knew, closer than they’d ever come before. On the street outside the hotel, earlier in the week, she’d nearly . . . what, kissed him? Expressed her true love? Who the hell knew what she was doing. Or what he was doing, for that matter. That was why he’d
recused himself. He was scared he’d do something wrong. And, really, who could blame him? It was good he was gone.

Except Windermere missed him. That was a fact, annoying as it was. She was a goddamn FBI agent, and a good one. No way she should be pinning her emotional well-being on any man, least of all Stevens, god damn him.

Windermere struggled to push Stevens from her mind. It would have been easier if the damn case was going anywhere. If they had any momentum whatsoever. Right now, they had a name and a city and a hired killer’s website. They had cops watching a P.O. box in Richmond, Virginia, though apparently Killswitch never, ever checked his mail. They had a string of shell companies and Internet IP addresses hidden behind a Department of Defense security wall that, from what Windermere could ascertain, they could never breach.

This whole case hinges on what the DoD’s hiding,
she thought.
Give me ten minutes of server access and we put our killer away.

It wasn’t happening. So, what, she and Mathers were just going to keep working through phone books, trying to find O’Brien? That was what passed for police work these days?

Fuck it.

Windermere looked up from her laptop. Stared across the cluttered desk at Mathers. The kid was hunched over his own computer, comically oversized for his tiny chair. Windermere stifled a smile. “Mathers,” she said, “I’m dying over here.”

Mathers looked up at her. “Thank God,” he said, stretching. “Thought I was the only one.”

“We can’t keep doing this,” she said. “We’re treading water. Somewhere, our guy’s out there, probably ready to kill again, and this bullshit is driving me insane.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Windermere looked around the tiny office. The reams of paperwork, the maps, the names crossed off lists. One giant haystack with one tiny
needle. A goddamn treadmill of monotony. She ran her hands through her hair. Rubbed her eyes.

“Toss me Sebastian Morgan’s statement,” she told Mathers. “Let me have a look through it one more time.”

Mathers searched through a mound of papers and came out with a file. Slid it across the desk. “What are you thinking?”

“Not thinking, Mathers,” Windermere said. “Fishing.” She paged through the file. Then she looked up. “I guess they never found the murder weapon, huh?”

“Nope. NYPD figured our guy ditched it somewhere.”

Windermere thought for a moment. “What about the bullets?” she said. “They run any ballistic analysis?”

“Not sure,” Mathers said. “You want I should check?”

Windermere settled back in her chair. If the FBI, by some miracle, had the murder weapon fingerprinted in its ballistics database, it might be possible to trace the gun to another crime. And maybe that crime would produce the loose thread that would unravel Killswitch, once and for all.

“Please,” Windermere told Mathers. “Give New York a call. Maybe this time our Hail Mary works.”