Where Evil Waits (14 page)

“You need to eat,” Varón said. “You haven’t had anything since yesterday afternoon.”

She frowned, and her nerves rippled. She should have known. “You watched me before we met?”

“Only for a few hours. I’d only been back in the States that long.” He slanted her a look. “You can’t be surprised that getting a message from you raised an eyebrow.”

“
You
, suspicious of
me
,” she mused aloud. “There’s a reversal of roles.”

“I’m versatile that way.”

He took an exit ramp just north of Atlanta and Kara was just about to ask him where he was going when the new phone bleeped. Her heart jumped and Varón frowned, then pulled off the road and stopped the car along a curb. It wasn’t the phone Aidan would use. It was
the iPhone like hers they had used to keep the lines of communication open with the killer.

“Look at it,” Varón said, and Kara touched the screen to life. There was a text message.

“Oh, no,” she said. Her heart dropped to her stomach. “God, no.”

He took the phone from her hands, holding it above the console between them so she could see. He touched the keys.

A picture came up: his house, flames. And a message:
Nice move, Kara. But now look what you’ve done.

P
OLICE WERE ALL OVER.
Sasha cursed. Emergency vehicles began to pile up, including tankers filled with water, and the firefighters struggled to get hooked up and save what they could of the house. Soon, though, their strategy turned to wetting down the surrounding area—a sign of defeat in a secluded forest with no fire hydrants.

The destruction pleased Sasha. He ducked back into the woods so he could watch from out of sight and something caught his eye on the ground. He snatched it up—an iPhone. The kid’s, he realized.

He smiled. Wasn’t sure how he might use the boy’s phone but disabled iCloud and all the location services, just in case. Pulled out the battery, too, then pocketed the phone and moved deeper into the forest. From there, the view was pretty good and he watched the commotion with almost giddy delight. The forest was full of the sounds of his doing. Flames and waterfalls and sirens and shouts. Even more people arriving.

Among them, a couple of men in suits. That was strange. Sasha couldn’t see what vehicle they had driven; most were parked a good distance away. But they walked
around talking to the police and any firefighter who would spare a moment, then started circling the still-smoking house.

Investigators of some sort. Arson specialists? Plainclothes detectives? Insurance guys? They’d sure gotten here in a hurry.

They split up, one of them heading in Sasha’s direction. Shit. This guy was scouring the ground, looking for something, widening his path.

Getting too close.

The lizard part of Sasha’s brain kicked in.
Go.
But careful.

Moving slowly, he shifted, trying not to rustle the bushes. He extracted himself from his hideout, looked down at his shirt, and cursed. Light gray. He hadn’t realized when he followed the GPS that he was coming to a forest; he hadn’t dressed for camouflage.

Still, he was pretty far away and the man was nearer to the house, which had quickly become a skeleton of soaked black char. If Sasha made a run for it, he could get deep into the trees and over the ridge before they caught sight of him. Plus, these were suits, while Sasha was an athlete. And he knew right where he was going.

He inched backward, eyeing the suit, then eyeing his path, and back and forth so he didn’t trip, moving like molasses. If he just made another twenty yards, he could drop down over a ridge, then into the creek bed, and he’d be out of sight until the suit crested the same ridge. By then, he’d be too far away to be seen.

The man in the suit began moving in the opposite direction, eyes downcast, and Sasha breathed relief. He turned—still a good idea to get the hell out of here—and just as he took his first full step, a nearer voice rang out.

“Freeze. FBI.”

Sasha lunged, sprinting through the forest.
FBI?
The voice came again, repeating the same command, and as he ran out of earshot from the hoses, he began to hear the rustle of pine straw and sticks. Shit. The guy was coming. The second suit? Sasha cursed himself for that carelessness even as he ran, twigs clawing at his shirt and fallen trees rising like hurdles. His heart raced as if he were running the Triple Crown, his lungs dragging in air.

“FBI. Freeze.”

The voice again, but it was more distant now. The man had lost ground. Sasha made it over the ridge and ran low on his haunches; here he could run and not be seen, depending on how far back the pursuer was.

FBI. What the fuck?

He tried not to think about it, concentrating instead on getting to the copse where he’d hidden his car. He used every ounce of athleticism dodging limbs and hurdling fallen trees, and after six or eight minutes of a sprint, he slowed to a jog, sucking in air. He chanced a look behind himself, and relief came in a deluge of laughter. The suit was long gone. He’d made it.

Beautiful.

He hustled anyway—alternately jogging or hiking fast—until he got to the nest he’d made for his car. He pulled off the limbs and branches that would have concealed it from a passing eye, thinking hard about what he’d heard.

FBI. Really? Incredible.

His lungs worked overtime, his pulse pounding a spot in both temples like a hammer, but he barely noticed the discomfort. FBI. That’s who the man was. A barely lived-in house. Computers and equipment. Encoded files.
A Porsche? He wasn’t so sure of that, but why else would Federal agents in suits be dispatched to some isolated house fire in the woods within an hour of the flames starting? And the boat explosion, the news reports that body parts had been found. That wasn’t something just any two-bit criminal could make happen, even for Kara. That was the kind of thing that required strings. Resources.

Oh, Kara. Surprise heated his cheeks, and the sprint, and yes, anger. She’d found an FBI agent to take her under wing. Every time he turned around, the bitch pulled one over on him again. He’d have to think about this. Had he been careful enough about DNA? Yes, he was scrupulous about rubber gloves or wiping away prints. His hair was shaved almost to his scalp. He always wore long sleeves just in case someone might notice the tattoo of barbed wire that climbed up his arm, and when the rage-beast had hold of him, he covered his face. He knew he might end up with a nosebleed because even with all that prison therapy, he never had managed to learn to keep that beast at bay.

That was okay. He was saving it to unleash on Kara.

It was that thought that brought sanity back within his grasp. No way would he let some jackass FBI agent ruin a party he’d spent years planning. He
would
have a second crack at Kara Chandler. He
would
bring her to her knees. And he
would
kill her in the end.

This just made the challenge a little greater. A game requiring more cunning than any logic game his father had ever tried to press him into playing.

Fuck you and your puzzles, Dad. I’m going to best the FBI. And take Kara as my prize
.

The gnawing anger fell off to a nibble, his heart rate easing back to normal. Sasha sat back against the driver’s
seat. Think,
think.
First, get this car out of here. If the house he’d just torched belonged to an FBI agent, they wouldn’t be satisfied poking around within a small radius of the fire. An agent was among The Important Ones. They’d search until they found the car’s nest, even if it took them a week of scouring this mountain. And depending on how soon he’d shaken the agent following him just now, it might not take them much time at all. They’d call in twenty people, maybe a team of dogs. Choppers and infrareds. They’d
hunt.

He drove the car about fifty feet out of its nest, then remembered the phone he’d used to send the picture of the burning house, just moments ago. Now, the FBI was involved. They had offices filled with techno-geeks who could find anything from a phone. It was the perfect time to get rid of it, and he would do so with a flourish. One last message, but this one he wouldn’t send. He’d let the fuckers
find
it.

He threw the car into park and accessed a notepad on the phone, typed in a message to Kara’s new friend and set the message up as wallpaper. He got out, smiling at his own cunning. Using his shirttail, he wiped all traces of fingerprints from the phone, then carefully scooped out a trench of dirt and stood the phone vertical in it.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a lock of Kara’s blond hair, rubbed it between his thumb and fingers, and let it rain down onto the phone.

Come on, then, Mister Federal Agent. Game on
.

L
UKE STARED AT THE
photo of his house—flames lapping at the very window where Kara had stood. He ground his jaw. It wasn’t enough for the motherfucker to kill the people she came in contact with or to drive her into hiding, or even to shoot at her son. He had to use Luke to terrorize her even more. Luke didn’t really care about the property; he didn’t even care if some asshole wanted to jerk
him
around.

But he did care that this bastard had killed Elisa and Andrew Chandler. And against his better judgment, he cared about the woman sitting next to him, a woman whose slender frame had just turned to blown glass. She looked as if she might shatter.

Luke pulled the phone from her hands, forwarded the text to Knutson, and took a call back from him two minutes later.

“Can I talk?” Knutson asked, sounding harried.

Luke glanced at Kara. She would hear only one end of the conversation. “Yes,” he said.

“I just got a call from one of the agents at your house.
This asshole is still there, somewhere. At least, someone is.”

Luke felt something shift inside. His hands fisted.
Careful.
Don’t react.

“The agent chased him into the woods but never got a good look. They’re widening the search now. Gonna take that mountain apart.”

Luke let out a slow breath. He wanted to be there. Wanted to be the one to hunt the bastard down himself.

But that wasn’t going to happen. The shooter was gone. Those woods were dense enough to hide a bear, especially if you’d come through them once on foot and knew where you were going. If the agent on foot had already lost him, he wasn’t going to find him again now.

They’d find
evidence
of him, though. One thing the FBI was good at: analyzing trails.

“Go on,” Luke said, trying to clear out the emotion so he could focus on facts.

“The bad news is this: The agent issued a halt command.
‘Freeze. FBI.’
Twice, he said.”

“Ah, Christ.”

“Would he have found anything to ID you in the house?” Knutson asked.

“No,” Luke said. He was careful, even there. But still,
Freeze, FBI.
Damn it. The FBI didn’t get called to house fires.

“Look, it may be time to bring you out. Your part with Collado is done, anyway. You can’t risk being seen by him. He thinks you’re dead.”

“I was looking forward to correcting him,” Luke said darkly. And it was the understatement of the decade. Luke
lived
for the moment Collado learned the truth.

“Your cover is compromised, Luke. Say your farewells
to Collado’s men now. Get out of the way and let the rest of the team pick up those pieces.”

Luke rubbed a hand over his head. “What else?” he asked.

“It’s going to take a while to have a formal report about the fire, but unofficially, it smelled of gasoline and you were right that it started in the garage. They found his perch. A tree about sixty-five yards into the woods.”

“At two o’clock from the south-facing window in the loft,” Luke said.

“Right. After they processed it, one of our guys climbed up. Found one narrow alley of unobstructed view, right into the clearing around the back deck Aidan went over. But in any other direction—toward the creek, for example—he couldn’t see shit for the trees.”

“So he wasn’t trying to kill anyone. Not this time.”

“Maybe.”

Luke cursed. “The shooter made Louie Guilford with a single shot in a crowd. This time, he had a direct shot at Aidan and me in close range, but missed? No way. It’s a game. The fucker’s playing with us.”

“Did you have a seven-millimeter rifle in the house?”

“No. Why?”

“Because they found one, pretty burnt up.”

A souvenir. Luke wondered what else they would find.

“He must’ve stashed a vehicle somewhere,” Knutson said. “Maybe we’ll get a tire track. Something that matches the one Penny Wolff was leaning against.”

A waiting game, then. Waiting to find a trail, waiting for the killer to make a mistake. Luke wasn’t good at waiting.

“Listen,” Knutson said. “From Kara’s phone we found that a tracking system was installed last Memorial Day. More than a year ago.”

Luke ran a hand over the back of his neck. He wasn’t a man who was easily spooked but thinking about that—imagining someone following Kara’s every move for that long, keeping tabs on her any time he wanted to—that gave even Luke the creeps.

He told kara, then asked Knutson, “Where’s it coming from?”

“All over the damn place. It looks like he never accessed the tracking system from the same location. With time, the techs might be able to triangulate a probable vicinity, but it’s gonna take an investigator with some mathematical savvy and a lot of time on his hands.”

“Then find one.”

“That’s the plan,” Knutson said.

“All right,” Luke said. “We’re gonna stop and get some food, put out some feelers. Let me know when you find something.”

Luke disconnected and Kara looked at him. “So, do you have another ten-year-old who can trace phone trackers backward?”

“Sure,” Luke said. “But your stalker accounted for that. He made sure not to access it from any one location.”

She turned away, her features hard as marble. She’d just been shot at and her son whisked away, and a killer who had created some twisted, deadly game had just demonstrated a disturbing willingness to be flexible. Her desperate ploy to disappear hadn’t helped at all.

Except now she had Luke on her side. He gave in to impulse and laid a hand over hers. Mistake. Even in the heat she was clammy and cool, and the undercurrent of a tremor vibrated deep in her bones. Adrenaline was like that. After the rush wore off, it could be a real bitch.

An unexpected urge rose up. Luke wanted to tell her it
was okay, that he was one of the good guys. He wanted to tell her he was sorry about her husband, even if his death turned out to be the result of some freak with a vendetta instead of an error on Luke’s part. He wanted to tell her that she was in safe hands—his—and that she didn’t need to be afraid of him.

But those weren’t things Luke Varón would do. Lukas Mann, maybe, but not Luke Varón. And while Luke Varón might well be the kind of man to use encouraging words and comfort for the purpose of getting in her pants, he wasn’t a man who would let emotion make him lose sight of the prize while he did. He had to keep his head. He still wanted Collado. A fuck with Kara Chandler along the way would be a distraction he couldn’t afford.

Besides, Kara Chandler wouldn’t be the kind of woman who fucked. She would make love, passionately and ardently, with a hundred deep emotions wrapped up in the act.

Luke fucked.

He lifted his hand from hers, allowing his head to clear. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll find him. I have—”

“Eight and a half tons of cocaine at stake.” She scoffed, but it lacked edge. After a minute, she looked up. “Aidan told me you put yourself between him and the bullets.”

Luke winced. His oversight with Aidan’s phone might just as easily have gotten the kid killed. “I ducked just like him, that’s all.”

“That’s not how he saw it.”

“Whatever,” Luke snarled. Luke Varón was no hero. Just ask Elisa.

“Well,” Kara said, her voice almost a whisper, “thank you.”

Luke blew that off and pulled back onto the street, events of the past eighteen hours running through his
mind like a hamster on a wheel, getting him nowhere. He tried not to spare energy on the matter of losing the house. It belonged to the U.S. government and even the clothes and few personal belongings he’d had there weren’t particularly valuable to him. Everything on the computer was stored in digital safes. He only used that house occasionally. His Luke Varón persona owned a condo in midtown Atlanta, in one of Montiel’s buildings.

So, the house was no great loss. No reason at all for any emotion.

Except there
was
emotion, and Luke didn’t know what to do with it. A flashback hit him… Standing outside his brother’s home, the emergency vehicles all lined up and the living room a charred, drenched mess. Nick had a home. A meaningful one, with loved ones inside and his own handiwork in the design and labor. Luke had nothing so valuable.

But still: The fucker had burned up his house.

He got back into Atlanta and swung into a paved driveway that disappeared behind a twelve-foot stone wall. For a hundred yards, he rolled between two columns of gnarled pecan trees that stood along the lane like sentries, then slowed at the wrought iron gate.

“Mr. Varón,” a uniformed guard said. Luke glanced at the badge for his name.

“Rodgers. How are you?”

“Happy to see you back.” Rodgers leaned forward and saw Kara in the passenger seat, gave Luke an approving salute, and opened the gate. Luke pulled through, wove another couple hundred yards through more pecan tree soldiers, and slowed in front of an enormous plantation house that had somehow survived Sherman’s march through Atlanta a hundred and fifty years ago. It wasn’t
alone; there were a few dozen such relics in the area. But to Luke’s knowledge, this was the only one that was now an exclusive gentlemen’s club.

A valet came forward.

“No thanks,” Luke said, waving him off. “I’ll put it away.”

He drove to a parking area off to the side.

“What is this place?” Kara asked.

“It’s called The Parthenon,” Luke said. He pointed out the high plantation pillars across the front and sides. They held up a twenty-foot deep porch. “It’s a club.”

“The Parthenon. I’ve heard of it. But I never knew where it was.”

“They don’t advertise.”

“And you’re a member?” She gave a little snort. “I was under the impression they were exclusive about their clientele.”

“Very exclusive. And yes, I am.”

Kara narrowed her eyes at him. “You weren’t a member a month ago, when I was pulling together a case against you.”

Luke formed his most innocent half grin. “Yes, I was.”

She stared, then rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she’d felt a chill. Starting to realize just how ineffectual her office had been in taking him to court.

“It’s not your investigator’s fault for not finding out,” he said. “There’s a code of ethics here: What goes on in The Parthenon stays in The Parthenon. How would Atlanta’s elite conduct the shadier side of business and politics if places like this went around giving out names every time some Federal judge got curious? Of course, a fair number of Federal judges are members.”

Her cheeks went white. “Then I can’t go in there. I’ll be recognized.”

“Probably. I’d almost take a bet you’ll see someone in there you know. Time to take your disguise seriously,
Krista
.”

He got out of the car, then came around and opened the passenger side door. She climbed out and stood in the vee between the open door and the seat, primping, and he ran his gaze down her new look. She was nervous about the disguise, but a man would be hard-pressed to associate the businesslike Kara Chandler with the hot little number on Luke’s arm tonight. The dress was sexy as hell and the soft, spiky hairstyle was far removed from the DA’s office. She certainly didn’t look like a woman with a teenage son. Her breasts, sans bra, were cupped perfectly by the fitted bodice of the dress. Her legs were long and slender, the hem just short enough to assure that every man inside would lock eyes on her ass and pray for her to bend over. And her eyes, well, they were startling green windows to a soul divided: half on a rampage to find the son of a bitch who had killed her husband and terrorized her and her son. The other half-petrified.

“It’s been a while since I’ve brought a woman here,” he said, and she looked up at him.

“So now I’m your hooker.”

“I don’t pay for sex. You’re my girlfriend.”

“I can’t be your cousin?”

An unexpected grin rose to his lips. Part of this, he just might enjoy. The part that made it acceptable to put his hands on her. He stepped in and bent his head, smoothing his left hand down the side of her rib cage. “It would be a little awkward to touch my cousin like this.”

Kara stiffened. “You don’t need to touch me at all.”

He locked his elbow just enough that she couldn’t slip out. “There are only two reasons women are permitted
inside this place. One is if they work here. You don’t. The other is if they are the special guest of a member.”

The look on her face was one of pure disgust.

“Play it,” Luke said. “Be timid, but not coy. Don’t flirt or give anyone a reason to think you’re up for grabs. Sharing is common here—almost expected—and I’m not in the mood. Don’t show confidence. Be quiet and be subservient.”

“Just the way you like your women?” she sniped.

Not at all. I like them smart and strong and passionate, and dressed in power suits I can peel off one layer at a time.
“Yes,” Luke said. “Just the way I like my women.”

He walked her through the parking lot. When they got closer to the entrance, Luke released her arm and laid his hand on the small of her back. Wanted to make sure everyone understood. He felt her reaction to his touch and bent his head. “Women here are accessories and nothing more,” he murmured. “But it makes you useful. Play your cards right and they’ll talk around you as if you aren’t there.”