Cold Light of Day (19 page)

What was really going on? What had Scarlett stirred up with the stunt she pulled last night?

He bet Richard Stone wasn’t half the man she thought he was. He doubted the guy deserved anyone as devoted or loyal as this young woman who was sacrificing her own life in a quest to prove his innocence.

“Why did your father confess?” He wanted to push her, make her view this from his perspective. Wanted to open her eyes so it didn’t hurt quite so much when she was finally forced to confront the truth.

She turned to face him. Young, sweet, pretty. Hair tousled, dark eyes wide, skin pale. “What do you mean?”

“Your dad. One minute he denies everything, then he just admits it. Why?”

“I thought about it,”—he bet she had—“when they told him he failed the polygraph he knew the chances were he was going to prison. I think someone must have threatened me and my mother if he didn’t go quietly. He knew he couldn’t protect us from inside jail and I assume he didn’t know who he could trust. Also thinking about that confession he wrote…if anyone
had
checked the details even a little they’d know all the information he gave was false—”

“What is a spy except a professional liar?”

Her mouth pinched in anger. Her brows rose and her tone turned sarcastic. “Silly me. I just assumed they taught basic law enforcement procedures at the FBI and verified information.”

Some asshole in a yellow sports car zipped by him and got blasted by horns of oncoming traffic. Insanity. The weather was as grim and oppressive as he felt. Christmas felt about a billion light-years away. “Did your father have any pressure points? Any deep, dark secrets?”

She shook her head and bit her lip. Damn, he wished she’d stop doing that because even though he was trying to drive a wedge between them, her white teeth on those lips made him hard as a horny seventeen-year-old.

“Could he have been having an affair?” he asked.

“No.”

“Gay?”

“No.”

“Pedophile?”

“
No
.”

“Bestiality?”

She shot him a look filled with venom, but her voice was cool and placid as a northern lake. “He liked dogs and children the same way any good, healthy man does.”

“Were your mom and dad into partner swapping or kinky swinger parties?”

Her eyes became huge. “Obsessed with sex much? Where do you even get these ideas?”

“From the case-files of other spy cases in the eighties and nineties,” Matt said evenly. “CIA mole Karl Koecher and his wife attended sex orgies to try and gather information. Hanssen set up a close-circuit TV camera so his buddy could watch him having sex with his wife—the wife didn’t know.”

“Ewww on both those counts.” She scrunched up her shoulders. “I’m beginning to think most federal employees are closet perverts.”

Matt had been trying to dig deeper into the type of person her father was, but her disgust was so genuine he grinned. “Most of us are deprived rather than depraved.”

“Deprived?” Her eyes ran over his torso and down his legs. “I doubt it.” Embarrassment burned her cheeks, and she looked away, but there was also a shimmer of interest, of heat. Shit. He kept his eyes on the car ahead of them and refused to think about the fact she was attracted to him. Frazer’s words came back to him in a rush.
Women like that…they can bring you to your knees.

He was beginning to think the guy knew what he was talking about, because the idea of being on his knees in front of Scarlett didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Shit.

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” she said.

Really
? Because he had no fucking clue.

“You’re demonstrating how worldly and experienced most people are compared to me.”

Maybe at some point that might have been his intention, but it had backfired on him big time. Now he was just thinking about sex. She’d told him she hadn’t dated in school. Was she a virgin? The heat, the
interest
he saw in her eyes might be simple curiosity rather than lust. He was an asshole for pushing it. The fact he had pushed it told him he was playing with fire. He wanted her, and flirting with her was not a good way to keep her at arm’s length. Time to back off. Keep it professional.

“Not a lot surprises me anymore, from sexual preferences to
Modus Operandi
for murder.” He caught her eye. “If I made you uncomfortable, I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional.”

“You don’t make me uncomfortable.” The tinge of pink in her cheeks looked good on her, but she managed to hold his gaze. “Talking about my parents’ sex life does. My dad and mom were devoted to each other and not in some weird, creepy way. He worked hard, and she was a kindergarten teacher until she had to stay home with me after his arrest. It’s not impossible he was doing something on the side with someone, but it didn’t fit the perception of my childhood. I never picked up any vibes that they were anything except madly in love with one another. They still are.”

Her words made him question himself. Was he letting his own bias influence him? Not everyone’s father was an asshole. Apparently, even convicted spies were better fathers than his had been. “Could he have had a gambling problem?”

She shook her head. “He had no interest in slots or poker that I know of. I used to make him play Old Maid, but he hated it. I know everyone wants to believe he’s guilty, but I don’t see it. My mom visits him as often as possible; she’s with him now. She still wears her wedding band and kept his name. Financially we struggled but I managed to get scholarships through college—”

“
That’s
why you worked so hard.”

The line of her throat rippled as she swallowed and looked away. “Maybe.”

No
maybe
about it. Her choices suddenly made a lot more sense.

He was aware how fine-boned she was, next to his six-two, two hundred pound frame. He still didn’t understand why she attracted him so damn much. He hadn’t been interested in a woman for a while—even the blonde from the Christmas party had gone home alone despite an invitation for a playdate. He’d told himself he was too busy with work and his mom to get involved, but as soon as a woman turned up that his body paid attention to he was on a fricking road-trip.

It’s work.

Sure.

“Look.” Scarlett geared up to give him a lecture, and he quashed a grin. “Back in the year two-thousand, no one considered the Russians a threat. Their economy had tanked and they were supposedly our ‘friends’. But Dad didn’t trust them and was certain former KGB elements were trying to penetrate all aspects of American society from the ground up.”

“Why was he so sure?”

“He knew some of the players involved from his earlier years in the Bureau and didn’t think they’d changed their ways.” Her voice was gruff, as if holding back emotion. Or secrets. He maneuvered around a minivan and got honked at for his audacity even though he never even broke the speed limit.
Merry fricking Christmas
.

“He said they were crooks at best, spies at worst, and most were probably both. No one at the Bureau wanted to listen, so they shifted him over to a counterfeit case where thousands of designer handbags and soccer shirts were being sold across the country. Trouble was when he fingered an organized crime figure as the major culprit, it was another Russian. He lost credibility. The powers-that-be thought he had a beef with the Russians. When they later turned around and arrested him for spying, they said he’d used his previous accusations as a smokescreen for his real allegiance.”

“Maybe he did.”

Her face was perfectly expressionless, but he knew what she was thinking. She was thinking he was a moron. “Maybe he did. Or maybe he was set up to take the fall for the real Russian spy, which effectively punished one of their biggest critics, removed his voice from the arena, while protecting their real asset. Pretty neat solution.” She turned to stare woodenly out the window.

If it were true, it would be a hell of a coup. He didn’t believe it. The FBI was better than that.

They’d driven through historic Leesburg and now they were in Thornton.

On the edge of the commuter belt, it was surprisingly small and unspoiled. A short main street with coffee shop, antique shop and hardware store all next to each other. The street was decorated for the festive season. A thirty-foot pine stood in the town square draped in multi-colored lights. Santas waved overhead from their plastic sleighs. Kids skipped beside their parents, bundled up within an inch of heat exhaustion. Middle class America was alive and well here. He’d grown up in a town like this. Missed it some days. Barely thought about it most of the time. He’d been a fatherless brat and yet he’d had a fantastic childhood. It made him miss his mother—not the woman in the bedroom at the nursing home, but the woman who’d dragged him up hills and through woods just to appreciate the beauty of the countryside.

Beauty in nature had always been her solace and she’d passed that appreciation on to him.

The sky was leaden and seemed to be waiting to cut loose with either rain or snow. Damn. He hated getting cold and wet. Ask any frogman who’d endured BUD/s and they’d tell you the same thing. None of that cold shower shit, thank you very much.

He turned up a side street into a residential zone, drove along slowly, not wanting to bring any attention to them, up a hill, then right again into some new houses. Every house was slightly different, but they all somehow managed to look the same.

“Number seventy-three.” Scarlett pointed. “Up on the left.”

Matt drove past and around the block.

“You missed it.”

“A little discretion, Dr. Stone, goes a long way—a bit like checking to see if the hallway you access to break into the Russian Ambassador’s office has a surveillance camera.”

She blew out a breath and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’d like to see you build a processor using nano-electro-mechanical relays.”

“What? No flux capacitor?”

“Trust me, if I could do time travel I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.”

“You stick to your expertise. I’ll stick to mine.” Which should be looking at linkage between serial killer victims and creating profiles. He had sixteen active cases on his desk in various stages of analysis. More than forty victims waiting for justice. Unfortunately, there was only so much he could do when he was supposed to be dead.

He parked. “Stay here.” He held her gaze with an unspoken “or else” as she huddled down into her seat. Her cheeks tinged pink. Maybe she was remembering what he’d said to her earlier about spanking her if she didn’t do as she was told? The empty threat had backfired on him big time.

He got out of the car, put on some aviator sunglasses, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. One way or another, Scarlett Stone was going to be the death of him.

*     *     *

It was lunchtime,
Christmas Eve, and he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Lincoln Frazer wasn’t used to being kept waiting. Rather than being in the office, tracking down serial killers the way he was supposed to, he was inside one of the most secure prisons in the world, hoping to talk to the most notorious spy in FBI history. ADX housed foreign and domestic terrorists, cartel leaders, white supremacists, serial killers—some of whom he’d had a hand in sending here—as well as several spies. Frazer was only interested in Stone who, on paper, had seemed like such a damn good agent before his arrest. Maybe that’s why the rest of the FBI were still pissed. Richard Stone’s record had been exemplary, which didn’t fit the profile of the usual resentful egotistical underachievers who gravitated toward selling out their countries for cash.

Less than twenty-four hours ago he’d been in a private meeting with the President of the United States discussing issues of national security, and vainly hoping for a quiet Christmas. The president had assigned him and his team another task that would have to wait until this mess Scarlett Stone had instigated was diffused. So far, Miss LeMay was nowhere to be found. No ransom demand had been made. Her parents were on the edge of going to the press and plunging the US into a diplomatic crisis with Russia, that, combined with the tensions simmering in the old Soviet Block countries and the Middle East, might be the impetus for all-out world war.

So far the FBI had urged patience to the LeMays and managed to keep a lid on the kidnapping story. He didn’t know how much longer that would last.

Had Richard Stone sent his daughter to spy on Dorokhov? If so, why? He needed to find out so he could limit the damage. He’d spoken to Parker when he’d gotten off the flight and heard about Lazlo’s narrow escape. Being willing to take out one of his agents in pursuit of this woman pissed him off. Diplomatic immunity or not, Frazer intended to find a way to make Dorokhov back off before any real damage was done. Hopefully Richard Stone held the key because he had better things to do than wear out the carpet of another federal facility.

He checked his watch. He’d been in the visitor area outside the warden’s office for eighty-six minutes. The secretary sent him another pained smile, but his usual charm wasn’t working and the woman remained tight-lipped. Must be losing his touch.

A harried man with stooped, narrow shoulders strode in, followed by a correctional officer who looked like Muhammad Ali in his prime. The man in the cheap suit stopped short when he saw Frazer. His hand went to his forehead and a look of obvious irritation crossed his features. Bureau of Prisons didn’t always play nice with other feebs, especially feebs who had used all their contacts to strong-arm their way inside a supermax prison on Christmas Eve.

Happy Holidays.

Obviously, the guy had forgotten Frazer had an appointment, which was better news than deliberately being kept waiting.

Frazer held out his hand. “ASAC Lincoln Frazer. Thank you for seeing me at such short notice, Warden Baumann.” He hadn’t told the man who he wanted to talk to because he hadn’t wanted to tip his hand. “I realize Christmas Eve is not the best time to request an interview with one of your inmates, but I can assure you this won’t take long. It’s imperative I speak with the prisoner ASAP.”