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But Ricardo had not asked for his opinion. And so Smith resigned himself to doing his best to mitigate the consequences when his boss's poor decision came back to explode in his face.

#

The tall, rangy, silver-haired man in the blue silk pajamas didn't look all that unhealthy—or worried—to Sam Barnard, the young FBI agent who'd been assigned to watch his apartment. But questioning the intelligence he had received from agent Bledsoe was above his pay grade.

“I'm sorry to wake you, sir.”

Donny Alvarez rubbed his face, trying to wake up. “May I see your identification again?”

Sam obliged, holding his badge steady so Alvarez could examine it. Finally, he shrugged. “Okay, looks legit, and you haven't tried to rob me, so let's say you really are FBI. But what could you possibly want from me?”

“First, let me reassure you that Chelsea Ryder is safe and in our custody.”

The change in Alvarez was instantaneous. All the fatigue left his face and he snapped to attention. “In your custody? What the hell does that mean? Surely you don't think she's done anything wrong?”

“No, sir. But Roy Huber…that is to say…” Sam, momentarily caught off guard by Alvarez's anxious questioning, tried to backpedal. He wasn't sure he ought to be saying anything at all about the botched operation. “He is still at large.”

“What are you trying to tell me, young man? That monster is trying to find her?”

“We, uh, there was an unsuccessful, that is to say, he was not apprehended today as we had hoped. In light of that, Ms. Ryder wanted to reassure you that she is fine. She will remain under twenty-four-hour-a-day protection until Huber is found.”

“That bastard,” Alvarez growled, pacing the small foyer. “How the hell did you finally find him? Chelsea says you people have been searching for years.”

Sam felt his face heat up. He'd read the case file. When Roy Huber first disappeared, he'd been in grade school. “I'm not really at liberty to say.”

“And what do you mean, he wasn't apprehended? You had him but then he escaped? Or you didn't even find him in the first place? This isn't some Boy Scout leader we're talking about here, young man. He's dangerous.”

“No, sir. I know that, sir.” Alvarez was glaring at Sam like it was his fault that Huber was still on the loose. “He had a concealed…that is to say, there was a scuffle, and—”

“Come on, out with it! How the heck did you people lose him?”

Sam was increasingly tongue-tied, unsure how much he was allowed to divulge. For all he knew, the story would be in the morning news. An attempted murder in a bad part of Las Vegas might not draw the same attention it would in downtown Los Angeles, but once the media learned that an FBI agent's life lay in the balance, they would be all over the story. “The agent in charge didn't
lose
anyone,” Sam protested. “He was…incapacitated.”

“Incapacitated? What the hell does that mean?”

Too late, Sam realized he'd said too much. The commander had specifically ordered him just to reassure Alvarez of Chelsea's safety—nothing more.

“I'm afraid I can't elaborate,” he said, backing toward the door. Best to leave now before he said anything else he would regret. “All you need to know is that everything is under control. I'm sure Ms. Ryder will call as soon as things are resolved.”

He managed to slip out the door and pull it shut behind him without answering any more questions. He walked quickly to his car, wondering if he ought to let the commander know he'd slipped up. On the other hand, the nice older gentleman didn't seem like he was going to stir up trouble. With any luck, he'd been satisfied with Sam's reassurances.

Sam got back into his car and locked the doors. Yes, that was the way to go. Say nothing, and pretend the notification had gone off without a hitch. After all, it had been just the two of them in there—there were no witnesses to Sam's embarrassing mishandling of the notification. Hopefully, Huber would soon be apprehended, poor Agent Everson would pull through—and no one would bother to assess Sam's role in the way things played out.

#

But in an anonymous hotel suite near a business park twenty miles away, Ricardo de Santos put down his earphones. They were of excellent quality, customized by the same manufacturers who built the state of the art recording devices Ricardo had installed in Alvarez's apartment several weeks ago.

This news was most unwelcome. When Chelsea disappeared after their night together, it hadn't taken much guesswork to arrive at the conclusion that the FBI had gotten to her. They'd been circling closer and closer in recent months, as Ricardo's transactions had unavoidably been focused on his contacts in Los Angeles.

In a strange twist, learning that they were protecting her almost made up for the fact that they were trying to bring him down. He'd known for a while now that a showdown with the Art Crimes unit was imminent. He had been gambling for a little extra time, just enough to see a last deal through—and convince Chelsea to come with him when he left Los Angeles for good.

That had all changed when he heard the young agent say Huber's name.

Chelsea had told him little about the man who'd abused her throughout her childhood, but Ricardo had made a point of filling in the blanks on his own. He had learned a lot more in the space of days than Agent Stone Everson had been able to learn in decades, but then again, Ricardo had access to certain sources that Everson could never tap.

He'd assumed that the Art Crimes team would already have Chelsea's surrogate fathers under surveillance, as well as her apartment and gallery, on the chance that Ricardo would show up in any of those places. But he hadn't anticipated the hunt for
Huber coming to a head at the very same time they were turning up the heat on him. The timing was terrible—but nowhere near as worrisome as the fact that they'd let Huber slip through their fingers.

The first time Chelsea had told Ricardo about the things Huber had forced her to endure, Ricardo had experienced the kind of rage he hadn't felt since the local crime bosses tried to profit from his father's death decades earlier in Segovia. Now, he wished he'd gone after the man as soon as Chelsea told him about the abuse. By waiting, he had ensured that Huber would be on alert, trying to evade the FBI. And that would make him a lot harder to find—and to crush.

Luckily, Ricardo had a few advantages. For one thing, he had Smith, his right-hand man, who could move undetected in areas where Ricardo could not.

For another, he had the resources to pay for the kind of background investigation that even the FBI couldn't commission.

He called up the secure file storage on his phone, entering a complex series of passwords and bypassing firewalls until he reached the file he'd started on Roy Huber.

There he found a list of aliases and addresses. The FBI had managed to find the first one on the list, the one that had led them to the failed operation in Las Vegas.

But Ricardo was confident that the FBI didn't know about the other one. Huber was extremely careful to conceal his tracks whenever he checked on the trailer marooned on that godforsaken piece of land.

Ricardo removed a ceiling tile from the cramped kitchen and lifted down a heavy, flat black case that was stored there. From inside he removed several pieces of specialized equipment. His heart was beating faster than normal, which was understandable given the blinding rage that was threatening to overtake him.

But this was not the time to release the fury. This was the time for caution. So Ricardo forced himself to work slowly and methodically.

By dawn, everything was in order. Ricardo would leave in the afternoon, so as to arrive when night was falling.

That left several hours to get some rest. Ricardo had trained himself to sleep in the harshest conditions on earth; it was sometimes necessary in his job.

But as he lay down and tried to empty his mind so sleep could come, for the first time in his life he found he was not master of his own thoughts.

Chelsea had taken up residence in his mind. And Ricardo was surprised to discover that he lacked the ability to send her away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Peter Hightower, as the driver's license in his wallet identified him, congratulated himself on maintaining the trappings of his life in the dusty desert crossroads that barely passed for a town. He hadn't been back here for the better part of a year, but he'd kept up the rent on his trailer—all cash—and the payments on his post office box. No one raised an eyebrow when he rolled into town late last night. It helped that the people who lived in the desert shithole tended to have a great deal of respect for privacy—he wasn't the only one with something to hide.

Sipping a beer at the counter in the dark back room of the service station that passed for a tavern, Peter replayed yesterday's excitement in his mind over and over, looking for anything that he had missed. It wasn't the first time he'd killed a man, and experience had taught him that the devil was in the details. Carelessness could mean leaving a trail for the feds to follow right to his door. Hightower wasn't taking any chances: he'd left Agent Stone Everson in a culvert bleeding to death, before driving like a bat out of hell into downtown Las Vegas, where he left his old junker in a vacant lot and walked to the bus station.

With any luck, Everson would be rotting in the ditch right now.

Hightower didn't take any pleasure from imagining the man dead. Violence per se didn't excite him; it was an unpleasant chore that had to be dealt with on occasion, one with potentially catastrophic consequences. Luckily, Everson had come alone, so there were no witnesses.

Hightower chuckled as he thought about the look on Everson's face when he pulled out the hidden blade. It had to be covered in Bad Guys 101, or whatever they taught at the academy—don't take your eye off a man until you were sure you'd taken away his ability to fight back. Still, he had to give Everson credit: he'd fought valiantly. For a moment there, Hightower wasn't even sure he was going to win the scuffle even after he'd gotten Everson's gun away from him, but the only evidence of the punch Everson had managed to land was hidden under his shirt, a bruise on his chest that was going to be pretty colorful before all was said and done.

He'd left Everson face down in the culvert in an inch of stagnant water, bleeding all over the muck. Then he'd gone back to his apartment and scoured every surface in the place. Not that the landlord would ever be able to track him down: he thought he'd been renting the place to a convenience store clerk named Derek Elsworth.

Now, his biggest problem was going to be trying not to die of boredom until it was safe for him to get back to business. Hightower paged through the mail that had come to his post office box in the months since he'd been here. Nothing but junk. He'd have to look elsewhere for something to keep him entertained.

Ordinarily, he only stayed in the dilapidated trailer he rented in this tiny desert town when things got too hot with the various online concerns from which he made his living. Still, he counted himself lucky; none of the FBI sweeps that had taken out other guys like him—guys who were too stupid or impatient or crazy or greedy to be cautious—had ever come close to pinpointing his location. Meanwhile, his empire grew
and grew; the images he distributed were uploaded to servers in every continent and over forty countries. He wasn't rich, but he was plenty comfortable. And thanks to him, some of the little girls in his photographs were international superstars—even though most of them were now grown women in real life.

Hightower didn't like thinking about that. Grown women didn't interest him all that much unless they were a means to an end.

Which gave him an idea…he scrolled through the contacts on his phone until he came to a woman he'd been friendly with the last time he'd been forced to hide out in the desert. She lived in a dusty little town nearly an hour away. That was a long drive to get laid, for sure, but the woman had two little girls and an asshole ex-husband who didn't come around anymore, meaning that the little girls were always in the house when Peter visited. They had often been asleep by the time Peter showed up for an evening of Hungry Man meals and a twelve-pack in front of the television followed by a desultory fuck before the lady of the house passed out, but he didn't mind. In the past, he'd contented himself with merely looking, drawing back the cheap nylon comforters in the room the girls shared to better admire their sleeping, prepubescent forms.

Now that he was back, if he played his cards right, he might be able to broach a new subject with their mother. It would have to be handled carefully, but Hightower had smooth-talked his way through this process many times in his life.

Just a test, to see how they photograph
, he'd say.

They could pick up catalog work, no problem.

I know some producers, it wouldn't hurt to send a few shots their way…

This could be their ticket out.

Trust. It was all about building trust. And what Peter Hightower knew that most men did not was that you start building trust the minute you lay eyes on a woman (and, in his case, their pretty little daughters) and keep building it with every word, every casual glance, every call, every text.

He took his time crafting the perfect text, letting the woman know that he was back in town, that he hadn't stopped thinking about her the entire time that he'd been away. Wondering if she ever thought about him…if she missed having a man to keep her warm on the cold desert nights. It wasn't long before she texted back, but he let her reply sit for a while. It didn't pay to seem too eager.

After he drained a second beer, he texted her that he'd pick up some Fanta and frozen pizza for the girls and some wine for the two of them. He asked if she'd mind wearing the green blouse tonight because she looked so pretty in it.