Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (18 page)

It was all easy, smooth. Until it wasn’t. Then something happened. The conversation turned, a demand was made? A threat?

Leanne begins gripping the pen tightly. Her knuckles whiten with the effort. The pen’s tip digs into the paper, gouging it. The fingers of her other hand clench into a fist on the desk. The phone slams down. 

“Yeah. I think this is it. The people who saw her outside the White House said she seemed annoyed. Whoever just called her said something that made her think she had to go over there and she is not happy about it.”

“The tone definitely shifted,” he agreed. “She’d been having a great day, until that call.”

Ronnie grabbed her handheld and dashed a note to Daniels, asking him to check with the Phoenix Group switchboard and find out who had called Leanne’s office at approximately 1:19 p.m. on the 4
th
. God, did she hope he could find out.

Back to the images. Another few minutes of Leanne putting her things away, tidying her desk—quickly. There was a quick sequence of odd head movements. She scanned the office, one side, then a wide, sweeping plane toward the other. Then she did it again.

She’s shaking her head. Angry or disgusted.

Oh, yes. That was it. That phone call had changed her mood and driven her away from her desk, and she hadn’t expected to come back that day.

When Leanne grabs her purse and leaves her office, yanking the door shut and smashing a key into the lock, it becomes obvious she’s begun her unwanted mission.

They continue to watch. They see her avoid the pedestrian traffic below by taking a high tunnel-bridge through three office buildings. All owned by Phoenix, Ronnie assumed; she hadn’t even realized it when she’d driven past them.

At the last building, she rides an elevator all the way down to a garage. Though she’s close enough to walk, she heads for her car, through an abandoned lot—filled with cars, but utterly devoid of people—never once even looking around to double-check security. As if she’s so accustomed to this that she doesn’t even consider the possibility that she could ever be in danger.

She gets into her postage-stamp sized vehicle and exits the garage, driving a few blocks through massive crowds to a marked employees checkpoint. It is not the one Ronnie had used to access the White House, but a smaller, though just as heavily guarded, one.

Leanne parks, gets out, jogs over. The guards apparently know and trust her far more than they did a lowly uniformed D.C. cop, because they relax as she approaches. The soldier who searches her is smiling at first, but his smile fades. Apparently Leanne isn’t her chatty self—more evidence of her mood—and he lets her pass through pretty quickly.

So far, everything matches all the evidence they have gathered, from time stamps to witness statements. They’re getting to the critical point.

Leanne parks in a deserted, graveled construction parking lot on what will one day again be the White House lawn. She makes her way to the building, rushing, staring at the ground, occasionally shaking her head in annoyance. She reaches the highly secure entrance, punches in some numbers and presses her upper arm against a screen. The scanner read her implanted I.D. chip and the door clicks open.

Ronnie leaned forward in her seat, realizing that, beside her, Sykes was, too.

It’s after two. Inside, Leanne doesn’t hesitate, she walks quickly down the main floor corridor, heading for… “The stairs. She went down by herself,” Ronnie mused.

“All the way?”

They watched. The victim paused at the landing only long enough to flip a breaker—turning on the lights that wouldn’t work for Ronnie the other night. Then she continued down.

“Yes, all the way.”

At the bottom, Leanne turns on the lights, walks out into the center of the corridor, and stops. She looks one way, then the other. There is nothing to see, nothing but the construction tools left behind by the workers who’ve been locked out on this day. She’s entirely alone.

She checks her watch.

Suddenly, the lights go out.

Blackness. This must be where her heart-rate sped up. She’s got to be nervous now, even if she hasn’t realized she’s in danger. What’s she thinking—power surge? Faulty wiring?

But she keeps her cool. Pulling her phone out of her purse, she turns it on, holding it up so the lit screen provides illumination.

Then it happens.

One second she’s looking at the stairs, toward which she has turned. The next she’s staring at the ceiling, her eyes having jerked hard, rolling up into their sockets.

It is 2:09. He’d just hit her with the stun gun or some other debilitating device that sent her electrical impulses into a frenzy and put her right down on the floor.

“He killed the lights, snuck up on her and stunned her from behind. She never even heard him coming,” Sykes said.

Yes, that’s exactly what he did. He’d hugged the shadows, stayed out of her line of sight. They didn’t see the tiniest glimpse of him. Ronnie even scrolled back to see if there might be the faintest reflection in the phone screen, but was disappointed.

She watched the slideshow, staring at the roughed-in ceiling of the sub-basement for several frames. Leanne was down, immobile. But the picture changed the tiniest bit every second, as if she’d been jerking uncontrollably.

Finally, after a solid minute of it, Ronnie paused the image. She got out of her chair and went into the hallway to the water cooler, refilling her paper cup. Draining it in a few gulps, she bent and filled it again, needing not only the icy chill of reality but also the brief break from what they were doing.

Because they hadn’t found anything to help them in the prequel to the attack.

That meant they had to slog forward.

They’d seen the horrible last ten minutes of Leanne’s life when she’d been a mutilated wreck.

Now they had to watch every brutal thing that had been done to her in the
sixty minutes leading up to it.

Jeremy Sykes wasn’t a sexist.

In the six years he’d been with the FBI, he’d never treated a female colleague any differently than a male one. Respect, cooperation and courtesy were standard, no matter who he was dealing with. He would sooner have slit his wrists than make any woman he worked with think he didn’t believe her capable of doing her job, merely because of her sex. 

But now…this…Jesus Christ.

He was having a hard time holding himself together. Because a part of him—a big part—wanted to pick-up Detective Veronica Sloan out of her chair, carry her out of this stuffy little computer lab, and take her home to bed.

Well, he’d wanted to take her home to bed for a long time. Since the first time they’d met.  But today’s impulse had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to have sex with her. Right now, he simply wanted to hide her away, to put her in a comfortable, secure place, pull the covers up to her chin, and urge her to rest and recover. He didn’t want her to spend one more minute thinking about the gruesome, horrible things that had been done to an innocent woman named Leanne Carr. And oh, God, did he not want her to see them.

He’d never seen anything like it.

He never wanted to again.

He definitely never wanted to sit there while someone else—someone who’d recently been attacked by this same sick psychopath and was still weak and in pain from that attack—had to watch it as well.

“Stop. We can stop now,” he muttered through a dry mouth. They were sixty-eight minutes into the attack. Leanne was already on the ground, already alone, and had been for several minutes, her attacker having disappeared somewhere. They knew how this story ended and how the rest of this scene played out. The monster with the black shoes and the black pants and the miner’s light on his helmet would be back in two minutes to finish the job.

“I can’t,” she said, sounding as though she was biting the words out from between teeth that had been glued together.

He reached for the remote, which she held in a death grip. She jerked her hand away, not looking at him, not taking her eyes off the three-dimensional projection. “Don’t,” she snapped.

“Please, Veronica….Ronnie.”

“We owe…her…this,” she insisted, the words coming out almost as tiny exclamations. Or sobs. “She endured it. We have to watch every single second because we owe it to her to do everything we can to catch him.”

All right. Maybe someone did. But did it really have to be her? Did Ronnie, so bruised and battered and weary after her own brush with this psychotic animal, really have to be slapped in the face with what might have happened to her had she not been smart enough to pretend her partner was with her during the search of that basement?

The possibilities of what could have happened made him shudder.

No, Ronnie wasn’t an innocent young administrative assistant. She was hard and tough and strong. He’d seen her kick-box the shit out of every opponent stupid enough to take her on in the ring during their weeks in Texas, and he knew she could handle a weapon better than any other professional he knew—save himself. But she’d still taken a two-by-four to the head. Had still been knocked to unconsciousness. She would have been utterly helpless if that monster had decided to play his sick games with her the way he had with Leanne.

Thinking about it—letting his mind go there—he found himself gripping the armrests of his chair so hard one of them snapped off in his hand. The crack of it startled Ronnie and she flinched, jerking her attention off the projection and toward him.

He stared at her, knowing his face had to be revealing exactly what he’d been thinking, imagining, feeling. But he didn’t look away, not ashamed of it, not embarrassed by it.

He cared about her. He didn’t know her well enough to make that claim, certainly had no right to make any kinds of demands on her. He’d never even kissed the woman.

But he cared about her enough that he wanted to go out, find the man who’d hurt her and rip him apart with his bare hands.

“Okay,” she eventually said, not even looking back at the images, which would soon descend into the blackness of Leanne’s final minutes. “I guess there’s nothing else to see.”

“I’ve seen enough to last me my entire lifetime,” he snapped.

There was only one thing he was grateful for: That Leanne Carr had drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the attack. She’d seen—watched—some of what had been done to her. But other things had, mercifully, remained out of her vision. So while they’d borne witness to the aftereffects, they hadn’t had to sit through every slice of the blade.

Ronnie flicked a switch on the remote and shut down the slideshow. The final, dark image disappeared in a snap, and the lights went up, that innocent white square on the floor bearing no evidence of the horrors that had been visited upon it during the last hour.

“Nothing,” she whispered. “He left us absolutely nothing.”

“We know what he was wearing. We will know his shoe size. We can probably figure out how big his hands were, too, and I am certain we’ll get his height off one of the shadows.”

The prick hadn’t worn his lighted helmet the whole time. There were several moments when he’d put it down on the floor, and the light it cast had sent his shadow tumbling behind him into the darkness of the basement. He’d lay money Dr. Tate and his people would be able to use that.

Unfortunately, even when he wasn’t wearing the helmet, the unsub had been very careful to conceal himself, his bloody, gloved hands constantly checking to ensure his hood remained in place. Jeremy had absolutely no doubt—none—that the unsub had known about the optical chip and had taken every precaution to hide his identity. Not only with his obscuring clothes, but also with the simple black hood he wore over his head. Why would a killer do that if he was sure the only witness would soon be dead?

If he had any deep-set remorse, or felt any guilt about what he was feeling, he might have wanted to hide his face from his own victim. But there’d been absolutely no sign of remorse. He’d relished his crime, enjoyed every second of it. No inner ghost of shame would have made him hide his identity from Leanne. He’d have wanted her to know who he was, knowing that would fuel her terror. No, he hadn’t been hiding from his victim, he’d been hiding from the spy buried inside her head.

“Tell me it was enough. Tell me it was worth it,” she pleaded, sounding weak and unsure, as unlike her as he’d ever heard.

He couldn’t tell her that right away. He honestly wasn’t sure anything would be worth what they’d gone through, unless it was the chance to see this monster fry in the electric chair for what he’d done. But with the clues so minor, honestly, he didn’t know.

Finally, though, knowing what she needed to hear, he replied, “Yeah. It was worth it. It’ll help us nail him, Ronnie.”

Her ragged, audible breaths began to even out. “Good.”

He waited, letting her gather her thoughts, trying to regain control over his own.

Ronnie cracked her knuckles, one after the other, as if needing to do something with her hands. Beating somebody was out of the question right now, so she apparently settled for abusing her own fingers. “I have to admit I’m having my first doubts about this program. I don’t know many people we trained with who’d be able to sit through that.”

He’d thought the same thing. “Same here. And as for stepping inside that house of horrors and living it up close and personal? Forget it.”

She nodded her agreement.

“Fortunately, I don’t think many will have to,” he added. “There are only five-thousand test subjects nationwide, all healthy, young adults. All highly screened, with background checks and security clearances, so they’re not out there doing drugs or engaging in risky behavior.”

“Except when they’re being hacked to death.”

“I wasn’t finished,” he said, giving her a reproving glance. “Once we catch this guy, and stop these murders, things should go back to normal. Statistically, those five-thousand shouldn’t be dying anytime soon. The program will be able to focus on them as witnesses to robberies or potential terrorist acts.”

“Or state secrets. We both know the government wants its spies to be implanted next.”

“Sitting through a straight month of boring political speeches at functions all over the world would be better than another hour of that,” he said with a nod toward the empty projection space.

“Yeah. It would.” She ran a weary hand over her face, then said, “Okay, let’s go over what we know.”

She’d put away the horror. He did the same. Time to get back to work, to be investigators rather than merely witnesses.

They began to compare notes on what they’d seen, both of them careful to avoid talking about the atrocities in anything but the most clinical terms. If they went down that road, if they let the emotion back in, it would swamp their little boat of calm and he just couldn’t allow her to sink. Not on his watch.

He’d seen Veronica Sloan vulnerable before—though never as vulnerable as she was right now—but he’d never seen her weak. So he wasn’t surprised that she was able to push past everything she’d been feeling and focus on just the case for the next two hours. They made notes, made plans, made calls, identified specific images, batted ideas. But eventually, her weariness couldn’t be kept at bay. 

“Sykes…Jeremy…would you please get me some more water?”

He immediately did as she’d asked. Ronnie wasn’t the type to ask for anything and he had to assume she was completely worn out, not just mentally, but physically.

He came back and handed her the cup, seeing the way her hand shook as she lifted it. She dipped her fingers in it and lifted the cold droplets to her face, smoothing them on her temple. The headache must have returned with a vengeance.

“Do you have any pain medicine?”

“I can’t take anything except over-the-counter. They said they couldn’t give me anything stronger because of the concussion.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a small, sample-sized packet of Ibuprofen. When she tried to tear it open with her teeth, she couldn’t manage it.

His heart twisting, he pulled it away from her and opened it himself. Then he lifted the small pills to her mouth. She didn’t even argue. She merely parted her lips and accepted them gratefully.

That was when he decided she’d had enough. They were done for today. Ronnie might kick up a fuss and argue about it, but she was going home to get comfortable and put this day behind her, whether she liked it or not.

He told her. And she kicked up a fuss and argued. In the end, though, probably because she was a professional and was smart enough to know the difference between being brave and being stubborn, she finally agreed. “Dr. Tate offered to have his car…”

“I’m taking you home,” he insisted.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Look, it’s on my way. My hotel’s down in the city.”

“How do you know it’s on the way? You don’t know where I live.”

“Sure I do. I’m an FBI agent.”

To his surprise, that actually startled a rusty laugh out of her mouth. She lifted her hand to her head and winced, as if laughing hurt her, but the amusement in her eyes went a long way toward convincing him she was going to be okay.

“Creepy stalker dude,” she mumbled.

“Hard-headed cop chick.”

“What a pair we are.”

Oh, they could be. Someday, he suspected, they
would
be. But not today.

“You’re going to go home, go to bed, and not think about this case at all until tomorrow morning, all right?”

“You’re pretty good, Sykes, but you can’t keep me from thinking all night long.”

He suspected he could. He definitely suspected he could come up with ways to occupy her for an entire night so thinking about a murder case would be the very last thing she’d want to do. He couldn’t do it now, though, not when she was injured and emotionally cracked.

When she was well and healthy, and this case was over, he was going to finally do something about this strange relationship they had, namely climbing over the protective, aloof wall she kept erected around herself. But that was for later, when life could again resemble normal. In this room, in the shadow of that projection unit, with the agonized screams his brain had inserted as a soundtrack to the slideshow, normalcy seemed like a forgotten dream.

“I might not be able to, but I bet I bet your mother could,” he threatened.

She groaned, obviously knowing the threat wasn’t serious, but lightly slapping his arm anyway. “Don’t you dare call my mother.”

“I think she liked me,” he said, wagging his brows, knowing he sounded smug.

“She likes anyone she thinks might slow me down and make me push out a few grandbabies for her.”

Her face reddened and she lifted a hand to her temple again, though this time, he suspected it was to block her embarrassed eyes from his sight. She hadn’t meant to say that. Ronnie had a habit of forgetting to be careful around him sometimes and he knew it drove her nuts.

“You’d think she’d have figured out by now that I am
not
mother material,” she snapped, sounding angry at herself.