Chapter 2
Two
Hands clasped behind his back, Nic stood in his war room, ignoring the long conference table littered with legal pads and file folders, and stared at their suspect board instead.
His and Aidan’s scribbled notes covered half the whiteboard: timelines, bank accounts, travel itineraries.
On the other half, they’d hung suspect photos in pecking order.
Scott was at the top. Directly below him, Becca, his second-in-command who’d turned on him and escaped with the rip-off crew.
On the next line down, below Becca, was the crew’s “talent.” Mike, the B&E guy, who was also keeping mum in a cell, and Abby, Nic’s confidential informant and now star witness.
As Becca’s girlfriend and the key to the operation, she’d had a front row seat to everything.
And a little sister she was trying to protect.
That had been what led Abby to the courthouse to find Nic, sent to him by another contact he’d worked a deal for.
She’d been the break in the case they’d sorely needed.
Bowers apparently thought she was the key to today’s mishap as well. “Why aren’t you interrogating Monroe already?” he blustered from over the threshold.
Nic forced his lip not to curl. “Abby just got here from holding an hour ago. It took some time for the legal paperwork to process on a Saturday. I checked on her. She’s understandably upset after this morning. I’ll question her when she’s calmed down and able to focus.”
“She’s not a witness, Price. She’s a suspect. Take off the kid gloves.”
Nic rubbed a hand over his mouth, trapping his retort.
“Maybe I should question her,” Bowers said, misreading Nic’s restraint as hesitation. “Maybe that scene today shook you up too.”
It had, not that Nic would ever admit it to another soul, especially Bowers, and especially when Bowers was wrong about why the botched raid had thrown him for a loop.
For fuck’s sake, he was former Special Forces and a fifteen-year prosecutor, first with the JAG Corps and then the US Attorney’s Office.
He’d unfortunately seen worse—more blood and guts and foul play in his lifetime than anyone should ever witness.
Anica Kristi? bleeding out, Becca turning on her crew, even the shots fired on the surveillance van, were not why his mouth had gone dry and his skin still felt like it had baked in the desert sun.
No, the source of Nic’s earlier distress was now safe two floors above in the FBI’s offices.
Thanks to that, the scene earlier today no longer affected him, and he’d have no trouble questioning Abby.
His only trouble now was his goddamn boss.
Bowers wanted him to go in there swinging, which was Bowers’s style, and it worked for him most of the time.
For Nic too, when he needed to go on the attack.
But this wasn’t that situation. Abby was his CI.
He knew her and Bowers didn’t. Bowers thought she was just another suspect, another lead to work, and that would be Bowers’s primary focus with DOJ breathing down his neck.
He didn’t see Abby as a victim too. Blaming Abby and strong-arming her was not the best way to the answers Bowers wanted.
“We need this one, Price.”
“Understand that, sir,” Nic said. “Scott’s in custody, as is their B&E guy. With Abby’s testimony, Mike will flip and Scott will plead out too.”
“And Rebecca Wright? The new crew she’s working with?”
“No activity, according to the Bureau. We’re aiming to extract possible locations, among other things, from Scott and Mike in exchange for pleas.”
“We could use Kristi? and those artifacts as bait. Or your CI.”
Swinging was one thing, sacrificing another. No stopping Nic’s lip curl this time.
Do whatever and sacrifice whomever to make the case. There had to be a line, and he and Bowers disagreed frequently where that line was.
But at least he generally knew where it would land with Bowers.
As ready as he was to be rid of Bowers, who would Justice appoint next?
It sure as fuck would never be him in the boss’s chair, not that he wanted it.
He had more flexibility and more court time as an AUSA, picking and trying cases and putting away criminals, versus admin bullshit and political ass-kissing.
Besides, he’d ruffled too many feathers, had had too many lovers, and had too many skeletons in his and his family’s closets to clear full-blown hearings.
More than that, he was gay, very out about it, and that wouldn’t fly with the current administration, even at a post in San Francisco.
Maybe if he were bisexual, like Cam, he could pull it off, but he wasn’t.
He liked men, period. He’d never wavered, even when his sexual orientation had gotten him disowned.
“I don’t think that’s the right move yet,” Nic answered, a hedge without being in open rebellion. There’d been enough of that last year. He was lucky to still have his job, even if the chain of command had soured.
“Monroe thinks she’s bait regardless,” Bowers said. “Why not use her?”
“Doesn’t mean she should be. Let’s try the less dangerous route first. Avoid any more deaths if we can help it. Abby will come around and give us what we need. She’s just a little rattled still.”
Bowers’s glowering visage indicated he wanted to argue more, but he deferred for now. “Fine. So long as you get her unrattled and ready for the arraignment.”
“Working on it, sir.”
Following his boss out, Nic closed the war room door behind them.
At the elevator bank, Bowers boarded a cab down, probably back to finish his round of golf.
Good, less chance of him interfering. Nic walked on across the main floor, empty on a Saturday afternoon, to the small conference rooms at the far end.
“How’s she doing?” he asked Tony, the guard posted outside the room where Abby was waiting.
“Gave her the tablet with an audiobook on it, like you suggested.” The big man smiled, shaking his head. “Peeked in a few times. Never seen anyone take notes like that except in class.”
Nic opened the door and sure enough, Abby had both earbuds in, listening intently, while filling a yellow legal pad with barely legible script. Spotting him, she breathed out a relieved sigh, then held up a single finger, signaling him to wait.
He gestured for her to continue and slid into the chair across from her.
With her free hand, she absently twirled a ringlet of hair around her finger, the purple streaks complementing her brown skin and olive eyes. A minute later, she paused the playback and popped out the earbuds, looking up at him.
“What’d you detect?” Nic asked.
“Narrator’s from California. When she does the British accent, there’s no underlying lilt or drawl like the little extra twang when an American from Texas or the South tries to pull off the Queen’s English.”
“Can you mimic it?”
Tucking one earbud back in, she offered him the other and pressed Play.
Nic only needed to listen for a second, a smile stretching across his face. “I know it well.”
“Fantasy fan?”
“That, and I have a traffic-filled commute to work every day.”
She grinned, tired but true, then started repeating the couple of sentences she’d played for him, the accent getting closer each try until, on the fourth, it was an exact replica of the narrator’s put-on British.
And that was why Scott’s crew needed her.
A military brat who’d been dragged all over as a child, Abby had grown up to be a languages and accents savant who could speak and understand multiple languages and who could mimic nearly any accent, including Anica Kristi?’s unique Romani-Slavic dialect.
He’d never heard anything like it nor met anyone with Abby’s skill.
“Nice work,” he said with a smile.
She wrapped the cord for the earbuds around the device. “Thanks for this. It helped, a lot.”
“Knew a guy in the Navy. He was younger so I wasn’t in with him long, but he hummed aloud on flights and in his head when he lined up a shot. Centered him.”
“That’s exactly it.” She relaxed back in the chair, player in her lap.
With Abby finally wound down, Nic approached the topic that had brought them there. “Tell me what happened today.”
“There was so much blood.” She wrung her hands, staring down at them as if they were still covered in it. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Take it from the top. We’ll get to where it went wrong.”
She clasped her hands on the table, fingers laced to still their movement. “We were in the vacant condo across the hall. Where I’d called you from.”
She’d called in the wee hours of the morning once she’d had a second alone. They’d had less than an hour to clear the area and move into position. Cam’s operation prep had been solid, ready to move at a second’s notice.
“The portable safe was in the living room,” Abby continued. “We were supposed to go in quiet and take the safe if we could. If we couldn’t, Scott had been practicing the husband’s part. I had the wife’s down. They should have never heard us.”
Cam’s team had tried to warn the Kristi?s, but there’d been no answer to their calls, texts, or emails, and they couldn’t approach to warn in person without tipping off Scott’s crew.
It had been a calculated risk based on Abby’s intel that the op would go down quiet as she described.
Cam’s team would be waiting to pounce in the hallway once they’d exited.
Except gunfire had erupted inside the apartment first. “Someone did hear?” Nic asked.
“The husband opened the bedroom door, and Becca . . .” Abby closed her eyes, face turned away. She started again after another hard swallow. “Becca shot him, Scott shouted, and the next thing I knew, they were shooting at each other.”
“The gunfight that drew the tactical team?”
Abby nodded. “They stormed in after Scott and Mike first, and Becca rushed us into the bedroom.”
“That’s when she shot Anica?”