Dangerous Read online

  She should have realized how single-minded he was about the past. She didn’t.

  KILRAVEN HAD BARELY noticed Christmas Day. Jon came by and brought him a diamond tie tack. He returned the gift with one of his own, a rare print of running horses that Jon had been looking for. Kilraven had found it on the Internet months ago and bought it, then had it framed and kept it in a closet for the big day.

  “Don’t you even put up a tree in your apartment?” Jon had exclaimed, looking around at the bare apartment. There wasn’t even a photograph on display, no paintings, nothing personal at all. Just gym equipment in one bedroom, job-related computers and monitors in another, gaming consoles, and the bare necessities of furniture in the living room and dining room, with a fully-equipped kitchen where Jon sometimes whipped up gourmet dishes for both men.

  “It’s just a place to sleep. I’ve been busy trying to run down leads.”

  Jon’s eyes had narrowed. “What I hear is that you’ve been driving people nuts trying to get them to work your cold case above pressing new murders.”

  “Hey, it’s the first break we’ve had in seven years,” he said defensively, and his face hardened. “It should have been worked until it was solved when it was fresh!”

  “I won’t argue that, but you know what it’s like, trying to give your best to two dozen cases at a time, all with grieving relatives who want blood and tears from the perps.”

  “I know that,” Kilraven said tightly. “But this is personal.”

  Jon moved closer. “Don’t start obsessing again,” he said quietly. “It took over your life for three years after it happened. I don’t want to see you falling back into that abyss.”

  “I’m going to solve it,” he told his brother. “No matter what the cost. Whoever killed my little girl is going to pay for it with his blood!”

  Jon understood how he felt. He didn’t know what to say. It was such a personal matter.

  “They’ve had weeks!” he burst out. “They know the guy’s name, where he lived, that he was involved with a woman who worked for Senator Fowler, that he went to a church nearby…for God’s sake, there are church members, other employees who worked for the senator, people who lived at the motel he stayed at…!”

  “I heard about the resident who was, shall we say, compensated for information,” Jon said curtly. “That’s not good police work.”

  “Hey, whatever works,” he shot back. “He was the only man my detective could find who was willing to say anything at all and he was scared to death even to whisper certain names.”

  “Like the name of the junior senator’s brother?” Jon queried.

  “Exactly.”

  Jon stuck his hands in his pockets. “Mac, I’m not saying it’s a bad lead, but if the case ever comes to trial, that paid informer is going to come back to haunt you. One broken link in a chain of evidence can let a murderer walk.”

  Kilraven’s silver eyes were lawless. “Who says he’ll ever get to trial?” he asked in a tone so soft with menace that it made the hair on the back of Jon’s neck stand up.

  “If you act outside the law, you’ll go to prison,” Jon said quietly. “Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. We have the rule of law, and it works.”

  “Not all the time.”

  “Vigilante law has been known to kill innocents,” Jon reminded him. “You don’t want to run off half-cocked and finger the wrong person. Do you?”

  Kilraven’s face was like stone. “I want justice.”

  “Good. So do I. Stop talking like some Old West desperado.”

  Kilraven lifted an eyebrow.

  “Have you ever read a real history of the old Texas lawmen on the border in the early 1800s?” Jon asked.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “One Texan with a badge could walk into a town across the border and residents would run away screaming when they saw just the badge,” he replied.

  “Those old-timers had to be tough to stay alive,” Kilraven defended them.

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “You can carry a threat so far that instead of respect for the law, you create panic and fear.”

  “Whatever works,” the older man repeated.

  Jon sighed irritably. “I can talk to you about a dozen other subjects and you’re the soul of rationality. On this one, you aren’t even coherent.”

  “Look at the autopsy photos. I’ll give you coherent.”

  Jon had moved closer and laid a big hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Nobody knows better what you went through than I do,” he said quietly. “I’ll help you, any way I can. But if you step outside the law, nobody will be able to. You understand?”

  Kilraven softened, just for a minute. Jon was a hard case, but he really cared about his sibling, and Kilraven knew it. He managed a smile. “I could have done worse for a brother than you,” he said.

  Jon chuckled. “Yes. Me, too.”

  It was the closest they came to expressing the real affection they had for each other. Neither man was known for public displays of private emotions.

  NOW IT WAS JANUARY, cold and barren and dry. Kilraven glared at the flat horizon with its gray skies and stark trees lifting bare limbs over frosty ground. It felt dead, as Kilraven felt dead inside. He was sorry he hadn’t at least phoned Winnie over the holidays, but every new lead in the case kept him pacing the floor and waiting for phone calls. Not that he waited long. Every homicide detective in San Antonio recognized his cell phone number by now and they hung up the minute it flashed on their screens.

  “Damn it!” he muttered, throwing the phone at his leather sofa after his latest attempt at communication got him a quick click followed by a busy signal.

  No sooner had it hit than it started ringing.

  He grabbed it up. Maybe one of the detectives was psychic.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “I have news,” Jon said smugly. “Remember I told you that I had Ms. Perry researching Dan Jones’s known associates?”

  “Yes. You found something!”

  “I did, indeed. The junior senator’s brother engaged Mr. Jones as a gofer,” he replied.

  “The connection. Finally!”

  “Okay, hold it right there,” Jon said firmly. “You can’t jump in and blow the whole investigation. We have to go slow, to gather evidence, to—”

  “Damn!”

  “I know how impatient you are,” Jon told him quietly. “But you don’t want us to blow a murder case by intimidation and threats, do you?”

  Kilraven was silent.

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not,” he said on a heavy sigh.

  “Good. Now take a deep breath and promise me you won’t go rushing over to the evil brother’s lair and start knocking him through walls trying to pin the murders on him.”

  Kilraven let out the breath. “I promise.”

  “We have to go at him sideways. First we pin down exactly what tasks Dan Jones was known to do for him, whether any of them involved intimidation or worse. Then we have to find witnesses who saw it and are willing to talk.”

  “The informant at the motel might know more.”

  “Anything you get with bribes will be a banquet for the perp’s defense team,” Jon said sternly.

  Kilraven quieted down. “I guess so,” he said irritably.

  “You know so. What you can do is find a way to talk to the senator’s wife,” Jon added. “We know that she’s afraid of her husband’s brother. We don’t know why. We need some way to dig information out of her without making her suspicious.”

  “They have vacation property in the Bahamas,” Kilraven said. His eyes narrowed. “I could fly down there…”

  “She won’t talk to you,” Jon said. “I know, because I’ve tried. It’s going to take a woman.”

  Kilraven’s heart jumped. “The Sinclairs own property in Nassau.”

  “Yes, they do,” Jon said. “In fact, their property sits just down the
beach from the senator’s. I had Ms. Perry dig that out for me.”

  “And we have a ranch in Lawton, near the senator’s home-place, where his grandfather was born. They vacation there sometimes, as well. Winnie Sinclair might be willing to help. We could go down there together.”

  Jon’s voice chilled. “If you take her down to Nassau and share her beach house, gossip would get back to Jacobsville. Her reputation is spotless. It would be a shame to put a blemish on it.”

  Kilraven was thinking, not quite rationally. “We could get a nice ceremony at city hall the day before we left for the Bahamas, followed by a nice annulment the day we came home.”

  Jon glared at him. “The woman’s crazy about you from what I hear. Even you couldn’t be that cold-hearted, to think of marrying her temporarily just to help in a murder investigation!”

  “I was kidding,” Kilraven lied. “Look, I might ask her to fly down there and accidentally run into the senator’s wife and have lunch or something. She might be able to find out something we can’t.”

  “It might put her in the line of fire, too,” Jon argued.

  Kilraven pursed his lips. “More reason that I should be on hand, just in case.”

  Jon threw up his hands. “I can’t talk to you!”

  “Sure you can. It’s a great idea. I’ll go work on it.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Jon said. “Mac, you can’t use people who care about you.”

  “Why not? Everybody else does.” His face hardened. “My daughter is dead. Somebody killed her and walked away, like it never happened. I want somebody to pay for it. Somebody is going to pay for it, no matter what I have to do to get an arrest in the case!”

  “No matter who you have to sacrifice to do it?” Jon asked softly.

  “You’re twisting what I said.”

  “Not really.”

  Kilraven squared his shoulders. “Winnie’s got a crush on me. She’s too young to feel anything stronger than that,” he said, dismissing her feelings. “She’d be thrilled to have a marriage license in her hands, even if it was for only a couple of weeks. We’d solve the case, get an annulment and go back to our own lives.”

  “Mac…!”

  “Like a date, only we’d live together, briefly.”

  “She has a brother who eats live snakes,” Jon shot back. “I know Boone Sinclair. You do not want him on your neck. He was spec ops in Iraq, and he has skills that could match yours. He’s very protective of his sister.”

  “I’m not going to hurt Winnie,” Kilraven raged. “For God’s sake, we’ll have a vacation together. What’s sinister about that?”

  “A vacation where you’ll troll her as bait to catch the senator’s wife.”

  “You said we can’t get her to talk because we’re men. Okay. Winnie’s a female.”

  “You don’t even know if she’ll do it,” Jon said. “But if you ask her, for God’s sake, tell her the truth. And tell her it’s risky. Because it is. You could be putting her life on the line.”

  “Just for talking to a senator’s wife?” he scoffed. “Don’t be so alarmist.”

  “I have to be. You’re not thinking straight. You’re too bull-headed about this case to be logical.”

  “And you’re too logical to feel revenge.”

  Jon shook his head. “No, I’m not. I saw them, too,” he added quietly. “Melly was a very special child. I may not have liked her mother, but I loved her. Just as you did. I don’t want somebody to get away with killing her, either.”

  Kilraven relaxed, but only a little. “I’ll talk to Winnie.”

  “Do that. But be honest. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  ALL THE WAY TO JACOBSVILLE, he was thinking of ways to sell Winnie on the idea without telling her too much. Jon was all business, but Kilraven’s heart was bleeding all over again from the memory of what he’d seen that long-ago rainy night when he intercepted a homicide call and found his family dead. He’d had nightmares for years. He heard Melly call for him, scream for him to save her, and he tried to get up, but he was held down by ropes and he couldn’t get loose. The same dream, night after night, with her screams in his ears.

  He’d dived headfirst into a whiskey bottle for several weeks afterward. Jon had saved him from going even further downhill by getting him into a treatment facility. Fortunately, his bosses had understood his behavior. Counseling and time off had given him the opportunity to pretend to the world that he was over the deaths, well-adjusted and ready to go back to work. Nothing was further from the truth, but he learned to hide his feelings. He was good at it by now.

  He’d taken some of the most dangerous jobs he could find in a futile effort to get the horrible pictures out of his mind. The CIA had taken him on with reservations, but discovered that he was an asset with his knowledge of foreign languages. Like his brother, Jon, he spoke Farsi and several Arabic dialects, in addition to Spanish, French, Russian, German and even Lakota Sioux. If he wore colored contacts, he was olive-skinned and dark-eyed enough to pass for someone Middle Eastern, and he had, working covertly and sometimes with foreign governments to ferret out information vital to national security.

  His specialty had become kidnapping cases, which was why he’d gone undercover in Jacobsville about the time General Emilio Machado went missing and showed up in Mexico. The general had nabbed first Gracie Marsh and then Jason Pendleton in an effort to regain his government in South America. He was friendly to the U.S. and not the same sort of tyrant who held power there, now. Kilraven had been looking for him, but hadn’t realized where he was until he got involved with Rodrigo Ramirez and the DEA on a drug case. And voilà, there was Machado. He’d solved that case.

  Now he had something much more personal to pursue during his leave of absence. All he needed were the tools to solve it. One of them was Winnie Sinclair. And he was going to get her to help him. No matter what he had to do—even if it meant using her own feelings for him in the process. The only thing that mattered was bringing his daughter’s killer to justice any way he could.

  He could still see her, the last day of her little life. She’d started toward the car where her mother was waiting impatiently to take her to day care. But she’d turned suddenly. She ran back to Kilraven with her black hair flying, laughing, her arms outstretched. He’d picked her up, swung her around and kissed her.

  “I love you, Daddy,” she’d whispered, and kissed him back. “Always remember.”

  He could barely see the road for the film in his eyes. “Always remember.” They were the most painful words of all now because he remembered what had happened just a few hours later. He would never see those black eyes sparkle, or hear that musical little laugh, or open his arms for Melly to run into. He drew in a harsh breath and swallowed down the hard lump in his throat. His hands went white where they gripped the steering wheel. Three years old, and some heartless intruder had killed her. Somehow, he swore, someday, someone was going to pay the price for that murder. And he was going to make it happen. He didn’t care if it cost him his job, or even his life. The killer was going to be brought to justice.

  6

  Winnie was having a quick lunch at Barbara’s Café on her way home from work. She’d been on a split shift, working five hours of her ten-hour shift before midnight and going back in at 3:00 a.m. to pick up the rest of it. The EOC was organized so that each operator worked a ten-hour shift, and because someone was arriving as someone else was leaving, there was overlap. It allowed the incoming operators to know what was going on and saved long explanations of existing or developing situations.

  She loved her job. There were times when she was so stressed that she had to take breaks in the EOC “quiet room,” a place set aside for people who needed a brief moment of solitude after hectic periods of time to come down off the ceiling. It was a high-pressure job, with lives in the balance. The training had been intensive, but after her internship she felt capable of handling most any situation that arose. And if she needed hel
p, it was all around her. These dedicated, good-hearted people made her proud to be a part of their group.

  “You look worn out,” Barbara mentioned as she put a plate of salad and a grilled cheese sandwich in front of Winnie, along with a cup of hot coffee. Winnie put cream and sugar in the coffee, something she only did when she had grilled cheese.

  “Bad night,” she replied with a wan smile. “I worked a split shift to accommodate one of our other operators who had a death in the family. It was hectic. Much more than usual.”

  Barbara sat down with her for a minute. “The Tate boy?” she asked gently.

  Winnie hesitated, and then nodded. It was useless to deny her involvement. In Jacobsville, everybody knew what was going on. Besides, it would be in the newspaper the next day. Operators never talked about incidents at work otherwise. “Tragic,” she said heavily. “His poor mother.”

  “She has friends. She’ll cope.”

  “Yes, but it was so senseless,” Winnie said.

  Barbara put a gentle hand on hers. “Nothing is really senseless. Sometimes we just don’t understand the reasons things happen. Like Rick getting beat up.” She shook her head. “Thank God he has such a hard head.”

  Winnie nodded. “He was lucky. But this boy was only fifteen years old,” Winnie said. “He thought it would be funny to steal a car and go for a joyride. He allegedly ran over a ten-year-old child and crippled her for life, and then couldn’t avoid a power pole and killed himself.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand anything.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Barbara said. “I don’t think we’re meant to understand, sometimes.” She looked up. “You need cheering up.”

  “That would take more than a salad and coffee, I’m afraid.”

  “How about something six feet tall and very good-looking?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How about bringing me what she’s having?” Kilraven asked as he pulled up a chair and sat down beside Winnie, whose heart leaped up into her throat even as tired as she was. “Except I want my coffee black.”