Fatal Deception (13 page)

“It does make a statement.”

Sam couldn’t help the gurgle of laughter that escaped despite her intention to remain aloof where he was concerned.

“Since you asked my humble opinion, I’d suggest we start with the people whose identities were ripped off. Hopefully Cruz and the others can get us some leads from the phone logs. And then there’s the investigator who handled the background check. We’ve actually got quite a lot to go on.”

“Yes, I guess we do.” Watching the world whiz by through the passenger-side window, she said, “This is going to turn out to be a big deal, isn’t it?”

“I fear you may be right, but it won’t be your first time with big-deal investigations. In the last year alone, you’ve investigated murdered senators and Supreme Court nominees, brought down the speaker of the House, the chair of the DNC and a long-standing senator. I’d think this stuff would be old hat for you by now.”

“How is it that you know everything about me, but I don’t know the first thing about you?”

His smile was sexy and suggestive at the same time, making Sam instantly regret the question.

“What do you want to know?”

“Nothing. Forget I asked.” Exchanging confidences with this particular man felt like cheating for some reason.

“I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Attended the Citadel. Did a stint as an Army Ranger and later in special ops. Got out after ten years and have been with the FBI ever since. That’s pretty much the extent of the Special Agent Avery Hill story.”

Something about the way he said that told Sam there was much more to the story, not that she’d ever take the time to dig deeper. That would bring her perilously close to a line she wouldn’t cross with a gun to her head.

After a long period of silence, Hill navigated the exit for Herndon. “What’s the plan with Kavanaugh?”

“I guess I’ll tell it to him straight. In my experience, that’s always the best way to handle these things.”

“Agreed.” Clearing his throat, he said, “So you’ll be the one to tell it to him straight, correct?”

Sam snickered. “I got it, Hill. Don’t worry yourself.”

“I was thinking it might go down easier coming from a friend.”

“I can’t imagine there’s any way this goes down easy.”

“Yeah, I guess not. I feel sorry for the guy.”

“So do I.”

Chapter Nine

A short time later, they pulled into a subdivision of neatly kept colonials, the kind of place where regular people raised their kids and grew old sitting on the front porch with their spouses. After a couple of turns, Hill parked behind a black BMW that Sam would recognize anywhere as her husband’s car. “Perfect,” she muttered to herself.

In addition to a predictable reaction to her injured face, Sam could only imagine what Nick would have to say about her showing up there with Hill. Bracing herself for the fireworks as well as the grim task she had ahead of her with Derek, Sam got out of the car and preceded Hill up the sidewalk.

Nick answered the door. “Fancy meeting you here.” His expression softened at the sight of her battered face and then hardened when he got a look at her companion.

“Chief’s orders,” she said under her breath as he stepped aside to admit them. “What’re you doing here anyway? I thought you had a town hall meeting.”

“Not until four. Let me see your face.” He took her by the hand and led her into a formal living room.

“I’ll give you a minute,” Hill said before he disappeared into the kitchen.

Nick brought her closer to the picture window and took a long, hard look at her face. “Nothing major, huh?”

“It looks worse than it feels,” she said, playing it down as she always did.

“Somehow I doubt that.” He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. “Did they give you something for the pain?”

“I haven’t picked it up yet.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

“I took some other pills. I’m fine. Really.”

“Come here.” He held out his arms to her, and she pressed her uninjured cheek to her favorite chest. She was determined to take one minute of the comfort only he could provide before she went in the other room and crushed Derek Kavanaugh into a thousand tiny pieces.

“Did you see the video?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

Sam would’ve cringed, but her face fought back. “Sorry. I hate that you had to see it.”

“You were quite something, babe. Very impressive.” In her ear, he added, “Very sexy.”

Sam laughed out loud. “Only you.”

“It’d better be only me.”

“Oh, come on, Nick. Farnsworth made me bring him here. You know I don’t want him around.”

“I wish you could see the way he looks at you.”

She had seen it but would never admit as much to her husband, because it would only upset him. “That’s his problem. Let’s not make it ours. Please? We’ve got enough on our plates without looking for trouble where there is none, okay?”

Grudgingly, or so it seemed to her, he nodded.

“I’ve got to go in there and talk to Derek. What I have to tell him is going to upset him greatly.”

“More so than having his wife murdered and his daughter kidnapped?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s way, way out of regs for me to let you be in there for this, but if Hill agrees, I want you to hear it, because Derek will need the support of someone who knows what’s going on.”

“Okay,” Nick said hesitantly.

Sam didn’t blame him for the hesitance. She’d rather be anywhere but in the midst of Derek Kavanaugh’s worst nightmare. “Give me a second to talk to Hill, and quit looking like you want to kill someone whenever his name is mentioned.”

“If he steps one foot out of line with you, I want to know about it. Do you understand me?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Nick! We’re colleagues. Professionals.”

“I don’t care. I want your word, Samantha.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, a tiny bit ashamed that his jealousy was a huge turn-on. “I promise. There. Are you satisfied?”

“I’ll be satisfied when this case is closed and we’re looking at his taillights as he heads out of town.”

She poked him in the belly. “You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?”

“You’re a much bigger pain in mine.”

“True,” Sam said. Why deny it? She went up on tiptoes to kiss him, which proved difficult and painful. “Stay here and behave. I mean it. I won’t appreciate you acting like an alpha man in front of him. You got me?”

“Yes! Go. Talk to your
colleague
.”

Sam stalked into the kitchen, where Hill was speaking with an older woman who Sam assumed was Derek’s mother.

“Lieutenant Holland, this is Mrs. Kavanaugh,” Hill said.

She was trim with short gray hair. Her eyes were ringed with red, and an aura of exhaustion and sadness clung to her. Sam could see the resemblance to her son.

“You’re Nick’s Samantha,” she said as she rose to hug Sam.

“Yes,” Sam said, awkwardly returning the embrace. Affection from strangers was another on the long list of things that made her uncomfortable. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, honey. I assume you need to speak to Agent Hill, so I’ll leave you.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Sam assured her.

“I have no doubt,” Mrs. Kavanaugh said, patting Sam on the arm on her way out of the room.

“Nice lady,” Hill said when they were alone. “They so don’t deserve any of this.”

“None of them ever do.” She stopped, considered. “Well, some of them probably do, but not these people.”

Hill replied with a small smile that made his striking face more so. “Ready to talk to Derek?”

“Before we do, I wanted to ask you what you’d think of letting Nick sit in. He has a clearance, and I was thinking it would be good for Derek to have someone close to him hear—”

“Sam,” he said, using her given name for the first time. “Stop. It’s fine. I agree with you.”

Rattled by the familiarity and easy capitulation, Sam nodded and went into the next room. She gestured for Nick to follow them into the family room, where Derek was asleep on the sofa. Wearing a Cherry Blossom Festival 5-K T-shirt and ratty sweat pants that might’ve dated back to when he lived in this house, he hardly resembled the polished professional he’d been only two days ago.

As much as she hated to disturb what was probably the first sleep he’d had since his world imploded the day before, she turned to Nick, knowing he would understand what she needed him to do.

Sure enough, her husband went over to the sofa and gently shook Derek awake. “Derek, wake up. Sam is here, and she needs to talk to you.”

Sam watched Derek’s eyes open and bore witness to the moment when the awful reality came rushing back to remind him that life as he knew it was over. When his eyes locked on her, he sat right up. “Is it Maeve? Did you find her?”

Sam ached as she shook her head and dashed his hopes. What would it be like, she wondered, not to know where her child was? Unimaginable.

Out of wild-looking eyes, Derek glanced from Sam to Nick to Hill and then back to her. “What? What’s happened?”

Sam sat next to him on the sofa, wishing she could spare him what he was about to hear. “In the course of our investigation, we’ve discovered some...inconsistencies...regarding Victoria.”

“What kind of inconsistencies?”

“For one thing, we couldn’t find any record of her online before she worked at Calahan Rice.”

“So what? That doesn’t mean anything.”

“There’s more.” Sam took a deep, fortifying breath. “As a routine part of the autopsy, the medical examiner ran Victoria’s fingerprints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Her prints were registered to a thirty-six-year-old woman named Denise Desposito, who died in a prison fight six years ago.”

Looking totally stunned by what he was hearing, Nick stared at her without blinking.

Derek stood and rested his hands on his hips. “Wait a minute... So what you’re saying...”

“She wasn’t who you thought she was.” Sam tore off the bandage as quickly as she could.

That didn’t stop the pain from registering on Derek’s face. “What do you mean?”

“The Social Security number on file at the DMV was registered to a William Eldridge, who died eight years ago at the age of fifty-six.”

Derek began to pace the small room. All at once, he stopped and turned to them. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do we,” Hill said.

“There was a background check done, after we were married,” Derek said. “If she was lying about who she was, wouldn’t they have discovered it then?”

“If the investigation was done by someone who wasn’t involved in whatever this was,” Hill said.

“What does that mean? ‘Involved in whatever this was’?”

“Exactly what I said,” Hill replied. “We suspect she was part of some sort of scheme. Whether she was a willing or unwilling participant remains to be seen.”

“Are you implying that she...that we... It was all a lie?”

“We don’t know that for sure, Derek,” Sam said, touched by the agony she heard in his voice. “You shouldn’t jump to any conclusions until we know more. It’s clear that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to set her up with a false identity that seems to have begun the day she arrived in Washington, which was about thirty days before she met you.”

“So you’re trying to tell me that someone orchestrated our meeting? Our entire relationship, our marriage, our family... It’s all a lie? How could it be a lie? She loves me. Nick! Come on, you know that. You saw it!”

“Yes, I did,” Nick said.

“Tell them! It wasn’t a lie! She couldn’t have faked that kind of love!” Derek’s voice broke on the last word. He covered his mouth with a shaking hand. “It can’t be true,” he whispered. “She loved me. I know she did.”

Sam stood and went to him, resting a hand on his arm. “We’re working really hard to figure this out. I promise you, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“It wasn’t all a lie. You’ll never convince me of that.”

“We need to know anything you can tell us about her past. Anything she might’ve mentioned about people from home, memories of school or friends or cousins, places she lived or worked.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “She didn’t talk about the past a lot. I got the sense that her childhood was painful, so I left it alone.”

“When you say you got the sense it was painful, what do you mean?” Hill asked.

Derek returned to the sofa and dropped down to the cushions, expelling a weary sigh. “From time to time, she’d get an almost haunted look to her, as if it was unbearable to go back in time. I didn’t push her. I never wanted to cause her that kind of pain. And besides, it didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was who she was now. That was who I loved.” He stopped himself, thought for a moment and then looked up at them beseechingly. “Was I a total fool?”

“I don’t believe it’s ever foolish to care about someone,” Sam said.

“Sometimes it is,” Hill muttered.

Sam turned to him. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.” He waved his hand at her. “Proceed.”

Sam studied the agent for a moment before she turned back to Derek. “What about when you were planning your wedding? Did it strike you as odd that she had no one to invite?”

“She had friends here in D.C. by then, so she had people to invite. Besides, it was a small wedding.”

“If you could think about it and let us know if you remember anyone she spoke of from her past, that would help.”

“Was she really from Ohio?” Derek asked.

“We don’t know,” Sam said.

“I’ll think about it,” Derek said.

Sam wondered how he’d think about anything else. “Thank you. We need to get back to the city, but you have my number.”

Derek nodded.

“I’m so sorry to have had to tell you this.”

He shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry that everything about my life with her was built on lies.”

Nick went to sit next to Derek. “It wasn’t all lies, Derek. I saw you two together. She loved you. No one will ever convince me otherwise.”

“Thanks. That helps.”

“Unfortunately, I have to get back to the Hill for a town hall meeting,” Nick said. “I’ll check on you later, and Harry will be back shortly.”