Kindred Intentions
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Authors: Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli
Kindred Intentions
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli
Copyright 2016 Rita
Carla Francesca Monticelli
Kindle Edition
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More books by Rita
Carla Francesca Monticelli
KINDRED INTENTIONS
Original title: Affinità d’intenti
© 2015 Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli
Translation by
: Rita Carla Francesca
Monticelli (© 2016)
Translation revised by: Autumn Barlow and
Julia Gibbs
Cover: © 2016 Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli
Important note to the reader
: This book is written in British English.
1
She saw Mike’s head turn, before hearing the
muffled sound of a gunshot. A moment later his hand had already grabbed her arm
and was dragging her onto the floor, while a bullet was brushing against her
head and lodging in the couch where she had sat down just five minutes earlier.
Yet that day should’ve been a pretty calm one.
Amelia had gone to Goldberg & Associates
to have a job interview. The position as investigator at the law firm was
already hers; it was just a formality. That was what she had been told by the
person in charge from the Human Resources office who had selected her. Only the
approval of their chief was missing. But she’d had the feeling that things wouldn’t
go exactly as she had expected, when she’d found a rival in front of her: Mike
Connor.
He was seated on that couch in the waiting
room where Amelia herself had been addressed by the assistant of Mr Goldberg.
At first, she supposed he was a client, but as his gaze rose to meet hers, in a
moment ice seemed to form in the room. He was there for that position, too. It
was just intuition, little more than an impression, yet she immediately
understood that her simple plan was doomed to failure. She didn’t fear being
outclassed by that man. It was his very presence, so unforeseen, which made her
nervous. And Amelia Jennings knew that in such situations any variation could
be a bad omen.
She took a seat on the other side of the
couch, offering him a polite smile and an equally polite, “Hello.”
Mike gestured with his head. Perhaps he said
something, nothing more than an inarticulate sound. His eyes lent him an
attitude halfway between annoyance and indifference, as if she was a tiny
insect to shoo away, not a real person.
“Are you here for the investigator position,
too?” she asked, trying to appear cordial. She smiled, tense. She was thinking
that in little more than an hour her team would find itself back to the drawing
board, looking for a new strategy. Meanwhile, however, she had no intention of
giving in. She thought hard about studying her adversary. Maybe he was there
for another reason and she was fussing over nothing.
Mike nodded.
Okay, never mind, he was there for the job
interview, but that didn’t imply he was on the ball like her or that his CV was
better than the one she had submitted, or that he would give a better
impression to Goldberg.
For a split second she started wondering
whether the latter would hire him because he was a man. No, the lawyer would
never show a gender bias. Or perhaps he would?
She grumbled under her breath. They should’ve
spoken openly to him, without all those subterfuges. After all it was in his
best interest. But the truth was that the law firm was bound to safeguard the
interests of its clients, including their not so crystal clear business, and
the associates would never willingly have agreed to be subjected to such an
intrusion in the scope of their work.
Amelia reached out, offering her hand. “I’m
Amelia Jennings.”
The man gazed at the gesture with scant
interest, then focused his attention on her face. And for a moment she had the
impression that something had clicked inside him, that he had understood
everything about the situation.
“Mike Connor.” His voice was still pronouncing
the last syllable, when his eyes darted to the side. He turned, as if he’d
heard a noise.
Two seconds later he was lying on Amelia, on
the floor, while a bullet had missed her head by a hair. Her heart still
bouncing in her chest, she shook him off, searching for the origin of the shot.
Isabel Jordan, Goldberg’s assistant, stood up.
She was brandishing something with her right hand. A gun? There was another pop
and, pushed by an invisible force, she was hurled backward.
Someone was shooting with a silencer.
Another shot collided with a decorative metal
plate fastened to the wall in the waiting room and changed direction, then
scored a direct hit on a flower bowl resting on a piece of furniture to the
right of Amelia. It exploded, projecting ceramic splinters, water, and
colourful petals in all directions.
Following a well-rooted instinct, her hand
reached the grip of her gun inserted in the holster under her left armpit,
while Mike, apparently not terrified at all by the situation, jumped to his
feet and rotated the couch one hundred and eighty degrees, putting it between
the two of them and whatever menace that might leap out again, any moment, from
behind the corner.
Amelia crouched down ready to shoot, with her
armed hand leaning on the armrest, her head peeking out and the remainder of
her body hidden behind the couch. With the left hand, she took her mobile phone
from a pocket and turned on the transceiver installed on the device. “Gunshots
at the twentieth floor. The suspect is coming towards me,” she murmured,
agitated.
A security guard appeared from behind the wall
and for a split second Amelia felt a sense of relief. Then she noticed that the
weapon the man was holding had a silencer.
Fuck.
Amelia pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed
in the wide room. A woman, who was exiting from the office beside Goldberg’s,
shouted. The shot missed its target, but it was enough to allow the assassin to
locate its origin.
Amelia shot again. She was in an advantageous
position, because she had taken him by surprise, but if she had let him react,
a silly stuffed couch surely wouldn’t save her. Maybe a bulletproof jacket
would’ve come in handy. But who would expect to be involved in a shooting? It
was just a banal job interview. Well, yes, one should have considered that the
lawyers at Goldberg & Associates had been dying over the past few months.
And not of natural causes.
It was the third law firm in the City to find
itself involved in a series of murders that looked so much like executions.
Only that their involvement, for once, wasn’t connected to the representation
of the murderer, but rather to the killing of the senior partners. Amelia and
her team knew full well that there had to be something greater at stake there,
because the surviving lawyers, rather than co-operate with the police
investigation, had barricaded themselves behind professional confidentiality
and had refused to utter a word on the possible enemy who was commissioning
their elimination. At that point, Detective Monroe had opted for a different
strategy, by sending
Jennings
under cover to conduct an investigation inside Goldberg’s firm. He’d hoped to
unveil something about the business that could be the cause of such carnage,
and maybe stop it, before there was nothing more to
unveil
.
But in that very moment Amelia had the clear
feeling that once more her team had come too late. Or maybe not; perhaps she
could stop that man before the worst happened, perhaps she had come just in
time.
She pulled the trigger over and over again.
The rain of gunshot reached where her target had been, but just a moment after
the latter had backed off, behind the wall.
“We see him in the video,”
Monroe
’s voice squawked aloud from the
transceiver. “I’m sending up the backup squad.”
A distant patter.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Amelia shouted
into the device. Being silent didn’t matter anymore.
“He’s escaping.
Jennings
, don’t you dare follow him!” her chief’s voice thundered. “We’re
going to catch him.”
But Amelia had already put her mobile phone
back in her pocket, climbed over the couch, toppling it, and flung herself
towards the killer. The building was huge and the man was shrewd. She couldn’t
allow him to escape. Based on what she knew, they had never been so close to
him. What the heck, they hadn’t ever met him before.
She walked round the corner, finding only an
empty corridor. “Where are you?” she murmured, holding the gun firmly in front
of her with both hands.
Curled up on his knees, a man was whining,
arms over his head.
Amelia placed her left index finger to her
mouth, gesturing him to shut up. Her gaze moved from the employee to a stain on
the floor. A red, gravitational drop. She reached it and lowered to have a
closer look at it. Blood. So she had hit him. She raised her chin and glimpsed
another one a few metres away.
She felt her lips stretch in a smile. Her prey
was leaving her a trail of breadcrumbs and, at each step, he was becoming
weaker.
She advanced, following the traces and at the
same time stayed alert, ready to react at any movement.
About ten metres in front of her, an arrow lit
up over the lift doors, pointing upwards; the latter opened, revealing a man
and a woman. They were chatting, unaware of what had just happened on that
floor, but as soon as they caught sight of Amelia, they halted.
“Go away!” She stressed the meaning with a
gesture of her arm holding the weapon.
They remained speechless, while the doors
closed again and the lift left for a higher floor.
An air current moved a lock of the
policewoman’s brown hair, causing it to brush her eyes. She turned, fast.
A door, ajar, with an emergency exit symbol.
He had gone down by foot. She was supposed to warn the others, but perhaps they
were watching him on the video surveillance. She couldn’t waste any time.
She opened the door and swooped in on the
landing. It was empty.
She leant out on the stairwell, trying to keep
the noise down. An irregular shuffle of footsteps was coming from below. From
time to time she could see a hand covered by a black glove slipping along the
banister.
She made a move to go down as well, but then
halted her own momentum. Her gaze turned to her feet. Damned high heels. She
had worn them to give a good impression during the job interview, but walking
on them now was like going around with a bell at her neck.
She took off her shoes, setting them down on
the floor one by one. Through the nylon of her tights, the surface was cold and
slippery. She took off the latter, too. If she fell and broke her neck, she
certainly wouldn’t catch the man.
Nervous, she sighed and started down the
stairs with swift, wary steps.
She looked out again. The hand kept
descending, but it was a lot lower now. She had to go faster. She quickened her
pace, while she felt her shortness of breath increasing. What was she going to
do, if she reached him? She put that thought aside. She would think about that
later. Maybe at the end of the descent the killer would be exhausted. The blood
drops he was leaving behind had become bigger and closer.
She climbed down the stairs, as silent as a
cat. She could hear him limping two floors below. She sped up. One flight, two,
three. She risked looking down again. A dark motion, a pop. She backed off with
her head just before a bullet hit the banister a few inches from her hand.
The shuffling became swifter. Any prudence was
now useless. He knew she was there. Amelia started running, leaping over two or
three stairs at a time. Once she reached the umpteenth landing, she looked down
again. An arm and a shoulder was all she could glimpse.
She shot.
She saw him pulling away. She had missed him.
She resumed moving, as she mentally counted the remaining bullets. She had no
spare magazine. Fuck, it was supposed to be an easy job interview!
When only the last two flights remained, she
heard a squeaking caused by the opening of a door. The killer was leaving the
stairs to reach the exit. However, the rest of her team was watching the main
entrance. The guys had no doubt seen them on the surveillance system. He had no
way out. But there was an unusual calmness in the attitude of the man. He had
entered the building with ease, disguised as a security guard and he’d
certainly arranged his escape.
She arrived at the ground floor, panting. She
reached out to open the door. What if he was there, waiting for her? She
lowered the handle slowly, pushing aside the fire break panel just enough to
allow her to look out. She could see nothing but a wall and a floor. An unusual
silence lingered in the air. A beam of light was flooding all the surfaces. The
contrast to the semi-darkness of the stairwell was almost blinding. She
inserted a foot between the jamb and the shutter, and aimed her weapon in front
of her.
She allowed herself a deep breath. She
couldn’t wait any longer or she would lose him.
Monroe
would give her a harsh scolding for taking the initiative. Fuck
off, she would think about it later. She had to nail that son of a bitch.
She pushed the door aside decisively, using
the back of her foot. She checked to the right, then the left. Nobody.
And now where the fuck had he ended up?
The lifts were on one side. The displays
reported that all four of them were moving. On the other side, beyond the edge
of the corridor, was the entrance watched by the reception counter. He couldn’t
have gone that way, could he? But what about the backup squad?
She reached to her pocket to reactivate the
transceiver. Then she heard a noise. A thousand voices in her head were telling
her not to go towards it; her feet seemed to have a different view.
