Xtraordinary (11 page)

Two more blocks. She considered screaming, wondered who in this neighborhood would bother to come to her aid. She knew it was likely that no one would: in this part of town, people were conditioned not to get involved.

She was almost to the intersection of the second to last street before the drugstore when her foot caught on a crack in the sidewalk. She staggered, attempting with every last bit of her energy to stay on both feet, but one ankle twisted and she went down, putting her hands out at the last minute to try to brace her fall. She landed hard on the curb, her hip bone jarring painfully, and rolled onto her knees. She was struggling to stand again when a figure dressed in dark clothes slammed into her, rolling efficiently sideways and standing up into a crouch. A gloved hand was pressed over her mouth and a strong forearm encircled her neck, cutting off her air.

Chelsea clawed at her attacker's arm, attempting to dislodge it. She tried to scream, but nothing came out other than a choked gasp, the last of her breath leaving her throat as he began to drag her. She kicked and fought, but he was bigger and stronger. What had she been thinking, that a few self-defense classes would teach her to protect herself from someone out to hurt her?

Her feet dragged helplessly on the street. Up ahead, the drug store parking lot was like an oasis disappearing from view. He was taking her into the alley between two shuttered storefronts; glass glittered among the trash accumulated on the broken pavement.

Chelsea had made her last stupid mistake, and now she was going to die, alone and abandoned, in this stinking alley.

CHAPTER TWELVE

But she wasn't going to die without a fight. She fought as hard as she could, kicking at the pavement and pounding at the man's thick forearm, but she made no headway on dislodging his grip as they went deeper and deeper into the alley.

He spoke into her ear, keeping his voice low and tight. “Chelsea, please—” No trace of an accent, confusingly, and Chelsea stopped fighting for a moment. “I'm not going to hurt you.”

There was something vaguely familiar about the voice, and it took Chelsea a second to resume fighting him. He could be anyone. A Russian who spoke excellent English—someone working with the Russians—or someone else entirely who had a grudge against Ricardo. She had been right to hire Jade to look into him—just too late.

A black van pulled up on the street, the tires squealing at the abrupt stop. A door opened and a man jumped out, also dressed in black, most of his face obscured under his black cap.

“That's our ride,” Chelsea's attacker said and started dragging her back in the other direction.

“No!” she shouted, but his hand was still over her mouth and all that came out was a muffled scream.

“Look, it's your tax dollars at work here,” the man said, half dragging and half carrying her to the waiting van. “Might as well let us do our job.”

Chelsea suddenly realized why the voice sounded familiar. She quit resisting as the man pushed her into the back of the van and then jumped in after her. She looked around, seeing electronic equipment mounted on the walls, and the man who'd opened the door sitting in the passenger seat. Neither he nor the driver said anything.

“Does this mean…” she asked, swallowing down the painful knot of dread and hope, trying to voice the question she wasn't sure she wanted the answer to.

“We haven't found Roy,” the man who'd attacked her said quickly. “I'm sorry, Chelsea. This is about something different.”

Chelsea nodded, then turned away, not wanting him to see the complicated mixture of emotions she wasn't sure she could conceal.

But if the FBI hadn't found her stepfather, then why would Stone Everson want to talk to her? And why had he come after her like this, in the middle of the night and in disguise?

“This is going to hurt tomorrow.” Stone rubbed his forearm ruefully. His chin was beginning to swell where she must have landed a blow.

“I'd say I'm sorry,” Chelsea sighed. “But it isn't my fault you blindsided me in a bad neighborhood and failed to identify yourself and probably took a decade off my life. Is there any reason why you didn't just call?”

Stone rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “Tell you the truth, we didn't feel like inviting anyone else to the party.”

Chelsea looked at the other occupants of the van again. The front-seat passenger was talking in a low voice on the radio; the driver was navigating traffic in the direction of downtown. So they were taking her to the FBI headquarters. It wouldn't be the first time.

“Um, well, how about just telling me to come in alone?” she asked. “It's not like I ever stood you up before.”

“No,” Stone said, his expression finally relaxing into a fond, if rueful, grin. “That's true. Not since the first time, anyway.”

“I was just a kid!” Chelsea protested. “And the only men in my life I trusted were Donny and Rufus. Plus you have to admit you came on pretty strong.”

Stone shrugged. “I was a newbie. Speaking of which, let me introduce Baxter and Ling. Two and four years on the force respectively, so they're still a little green.”

“Nice to meet you, ma'am,” Baxter said, twisting in his seat while Ling drove.

“Yeah…you too.”

“Cheer up,” Stone said. “We've got better vending machine snacks since the last time you visited.”

#

After her father had died, when Chelsea was only six, her mother got involved with Roy Huber and moved him into the tiny bungalow in a degenerating part of town where they lived.

What followed were seven years of hell. Roy was a photographer, and he dabbled in portraiture and event photography from time to time. But most of his income came from the photographs he took in the studio he rigged in the back room of the little house.

Photos of children, posed for roles no child should ever be forced to play. Before long, Chelsea was his primary model. While she guessed she should count herself lucky that Roy never laid a hand on her and limited his abuse to the sexually explicit poses, she would never be able to forget the nightmarish hours, and she would never be able to get the photos off the Internet.

At fourteen, she ran away. Four years later, after she'd been living with Rufus and Donny for a while, she got the courage to contact the FBI. Stone Everson, only three years on the job, caught the case.

And put his heart into solving it, especially after his investigation showed that photos of Chelsea were among the most widely-circulated and downloaded on the Internet. He didn't let the daunting challenge of tracking down the photos stop him, and he kept it up even after Chelsea got spooked and tried to back out. He picked her up off the street ever few months and brought her to his office for an update and made sure she was still getting by.

But Roy had grown more elusive in the intervening years. Stone speculated that he had joined forces with other pornographers to sell and distribute his work, while hiding behind a variety of online aliases. Despite a few near misses, Stone was never able to hunt down the man who had destroyed Chelsea's childhood, and eventually, the case was shelved as his unit pursued other, hotter cases.

But Stone never forgot about Chelsea. He married and had a daughter, then another. Once or twice a year he called to tell her that he would never stop pursuing Roy, that he would dedicate his life to making sure that the things that had happened to Chelsea would never happen to other little girls.

Now, sitting in his office, it was bittersweet to see the family photos on his desk, the crayon drawings made by little hands displayed proudly on the walls.

“They're growing up so fast,” Chelsea said, looking at a snapshot of Stone and his wife and kids at a theme park. “How is Jenny?”

“Fantastic,” Stone said without hesitation. “She's taken a few students on now that Alyssa is in preschool, but she loves being able to be home when the girls are home from school.”

Stone's wife had been a promising violinist with the Los Angeles Symphony before she quit to stay home with their children. She was as pretty as she was talented, and the tug at Chelsea's heart whenever she saw photos of the happy family wasn't envy so much as recognition that the perfect life her friend enjoyed would never happen for her. But she was genuinely happy to see that the man who'd tried to avenge her was doing well.

“So,” Chelsea said, crossing her arms and ignoring the cup of machine coffee that Stone had insisted on buying for her, “why am I here?”

If it had seemed to her that Stone was being evasive, his next move confirmed it. He picked up a little container of paper clips and began playing with them, avoiding her gaze.

“Well, the thing is…you've come up on the radar recently in an entirely different context.”

“Not…Roy?”

“No. And I, uh…let me just say that I
volunteered
to talk to you. As a courtesy, I guess you might say.”

A warning bell went off in Chelsea's brain. “Go on.”

Stone scratched the back of his neck and glanced up at her. “Are you aware that the Bureau's got an Art Crime Team here in Los Angeles?”

“Yes,” Chelsea said carefully. “Only peripherally; I've never had any direct contact with them. I believe they work with other national and international agencies to track stolen art.”

“That's right. I'm not involved—hell, what I know about art is pretty much what you see right here.” He pointed to his daughters' drawings, and Chelsea couldn't help but smile. “But recently your name came up in one of their investigations. I've got a friend over there, actually—Marco Vega, we were at Quantico together. Marco asked me if I'd talk to you before they did anything in an official capacity.”

The uncomfortable feeling in Chelsea's gut grew stronger. Maybe this had nothing to do with Ricardo, however. It could be any of her clients or buyers. She kept her face neutral.

“Wow, I can't imagine…is one of the artists I represent involved in something they are investigating?”

Now Stone did make eye contact. His gaze was steady and concerned. “Listen, Chelsea, before we go any further I want to remind you that I'm on your side. Always have been. I think of you…well, kind of like a little sister. And if you've gotten yourself into something here, some sort of trouble, I will do anything I can to help. But you've got to be honest with me, okay?”

Chelsea's heart sped up. This was sounding bad. All her fears about Ricardo, the Russians, the threat on her life, coalesced into an ache behind her eyes.

Could she make that promise? Stone was among the only people in the world she trusted. He'd tried hard to help her. He'd always been honest with her. He'd made good on his promise, all those years ago, not to let her case fall through the cracks. For that, she would always be grateful.

And Ricardo—what about him? Despite the heat between them, could she really believe that he
cared
for her? Had he given her any reason to trust him?

The wise thing would be to show all her cards, to tell Stone whatever he wanted to know. She didn't owe Ricardo anything. If he
was
involved in criminal pursuits, wouldn't she want to know?

“I—I'll try.”

It wasn't the answer he wanted, obviously. Stone frowned and reached for a file folder. “Does the name Ricardo de Santos mean anything to you?”

“I know him,” Chelsea said carefully, hiding her dismay.

Stone nodded. “Good. That was the right answer. Let me show you something.”

He opened the folder and pushed it across the desk. On top of a stack of photographs was an image of her and Ricardo the night they met, at her friend Meredith Tipton's gallery opening. She was seated at a table in animated conversation with Ricardo, a glass of champagne in front of her.

Memories of that first meeting flooded her mind with sensory details: the intoxicating scent he had worn, the bubbles in the champagne, the live music in the background. She turned the photo over and looked at the next one.

Chelsea and Ricardo emerging from a party at a luxurious downtown hotel. The blue dress she was wearing had been a gift from Ricardo. Even in the grainy photograph it was clear that it fit her perfectly. His hand on her arm, his head bent close as he whispered in her ear, would be hard to interpret as anything but what it was: two lovers engaged in a dance of intimacy.

The last photograph was not of her. Ricardo was getting out of a sleek sedan with tinted windows. Two men stood on the sidewalk in front of him. They wore heavy coats and hats pulled low.

“That last one was taken just last week, in St. Petersburg. Were you aware that Ricardo had traveled there?”

Chelsea shook her head. “We're not—it isn't that kind of relationship,” she said, stumbling over her words.

“Maybe that's a good place to start. Just what
is
the nature of your relationship?”

How could she tell him the things they'd done, or even more incredibly, the things they hadn't? That she had been more intimate with someone who wouldn't even give her a phone number than with anyone else in her life? Chelsea's face warmed as she mentally reviewed the few occasions that she had been with Ricardo. Each time, with the exception of the night they met, they had crossed lines that Chelsea never would have imagined crossing.

She would never tell Stone that. But she also wasn't about to admit that Ricardo was on her mind all day, every day, even during the long weeks of his absence when she had no way to know if she meant anything to him at all.

“He's a hookup,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “We've spent a few nights together. It's not really a big deal, I don't even have his phone number.”

Stone's frown deepened. “How do you contact him?”

“I…don't. He calls when he's in town. If it's convenient, we get together.” Now she was edging toward half-truths. The last time she saw him, he had been summoned by Alexander and Boris, who had risked their own safety to protect her.