Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) (4 page)

We’d given them a chance to do their thing in the fortnight since my husband died, but they hadn’t made a whole lot of progress. In fact, they hadn’t come up with a single line of enquiry other than to question me, and I knew I didn’t kill him, so I was already one step ahead of them there.

I also had access to my husband’s files, which the cops didn’t, and with his line of work, there might be a link in those to whoever murdered him. My investigators were better than the police anyway, of that I was sure. If the killer was going to be found, it would be by us, not them.

Nick closed the car door and I started the engine. As I pulled forward, my foot on the throttle giving a warning growl, an explosion of flashbulbs lit up the grey sky. Thanks to my illegally tinted windows they weren’t going to get much, but I still wanted to jam their cameras into their mouths and force them to chew on the jagged remains. Death by telephoto lens.

Teeth clenched, I showered the rabble with gravel as I pulled out the parking lot, and floored it towards the highway that would take me home.

Chapter 4

MY HOUSE WAS a half hour drive from the church. Once, I would have enjoyed the drive, but today I barely saw the road. My thoughts kept coming back to how I was going to get through the rest of my life without the man who’d been a constant in my life for the last fourteen years. We may not have been together all the time, but barely a day passed without us speaking. He was the one person who truly understood me.

He saw my frustrations and failures when they got me down, but made me get back up and try again until I succeeded. He had confidence in me when I had none in myself. He was the one I let off steam to when I got home at night, and he took my grumpiness with a good humour, most of the time at least. He wasn’t only my husband, he was my best friend.

For all that, our marriage wasn’t what people thought. Our relationship had evolved over the years, but it never became a traditional husband and wife arrangement, that was for sure. I may have worn his ring, but there was no sex and plenty of disagreements. At the end the trust between us was absolute, but it took us a while to get there.

For three months after we met I hated him, then that turned into a grudging respect and over the next year, friendship. Fast forward two years, and I’d found out just how awkward it was to get permanent residency in America. I needed to stay and work at the company I’d helped my beloved tormentor build, so going home wasn’t an option. Then one drunken night in Vegas when I was moaning about all the paperwork and interviews to get a green card, a friend jokingly suggested we get married and bypass most of it.

We’d both had enough alcohol in us that it seemed like a reasonable idea, and two hours later we left the Little White Wedding Chapel as Mr. and Mrs. The agreement was that if one of us met somebody else we were serious about, we’d get a divorce. Somehow that never happened, and nearly twelve years later we were still hitched. 

Except now he’d gone, and I missed him more than I’d ever imagined I could when we tied the knot all those years ago.

I’d driven a couple of miles down the road when my phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. It was standard procedure for me to have three phones, and the same for the other key people I worked alongside. Each of these phones was designated as green, amber or red.

The green phone had a number that was given out to anyone. That number appeared on my business cards, so lots of people had it. My green phone spent most of its life diverted to Sloane. She was pretty busy.

Employees, friends and a few clients had the number of the amber phone. Mostly I answered that one, but not today. I had no interest in speaking to anybody, let alone someone unimportant. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could summon up the energy to deal with that type of call for the foreseeable future.

The red phone was different. It was for emergencies only and never, ever, turned off or diverted. Not a lot of people had the number, and most who did were at the funeral with me.

And it was the red phone ringing.

As I pushed the button on the steering wheel to answer the call, my palms broke into a sweat. What could possibly have happened in the five minutes since I’d left?

“Speak to me.”

An unfamiliar voice came back at me from the speakers, distorted electronically but definitely male. The line crackled, making him sound even more sinister as he barked orders at me.

“Stop investigating your husband’s death. No more questions, and don’t cooperate with the police. If you carry on your path, everyone close to you will die as he did.”

“Who the hell is this?” I asked, though I wasn’t expecting to get an answer. Not when the caller had gone to so much trouble to disguise his voice in the first place.

“That doesn’t concern you. The only thing you need to worry about is keeping out of my business. Of course, if you insist on continuing, I’ll be forced to demonstrate more of my toys.”

Even disguised, his voice had a jovial lilt at odds with his words. He was playing a game with me. A deadly game, but I didn’t understand the rules.

“What do you want?”

“Nothing. I want you to do absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”

Bile rose in my throat as I forced out an answer. “I understand.” What else could I say?

The line went dead as the bastard hung up, leaving me with only the demons in my head for company.

Fuck, I was a mess. I had been since he died. My husband kept me grounded and thinking straight, but with him gone the monsters that were normally locked up deep inside me went for a jailbreak.

I saw a side road coming up and took it, barely slowing. The back end of the car kicked out on loose gravel as I slewed round the corner before snapping back into line. I changed down a gear to get some acceleration and the engine screamed in protest.

A couple of miles along the lane, I pulled over, leaving a trail of rubber behind me. The old ranch house I’d parked in front of looked fittingly desolate for the situation, the front door hanging off its hinges and the porch sagging under years of neglect.

My legs shook as I climbed out of the car and started pacing, desperately trying to gather my thoughts together. They rebelled against order, a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fitted.

I’d very much suspected my husband’s death was arranged by someone who bore a grudge against him, or maybe me, and now that had been confirmed. The men who pulled the trigger were dead, but they were only hired help. The fucker who ordered the hit was still out there, toasting his success and racking up his phone bill.

I should have been furious, I knew that, but the anger wouldn’t come. The place where it should be was numb, like the rest of me. I wished it was different. I’d rather have felt anything but nothing.

Now I had a decision to make. Did I carry on with a search that had proved fruitless so far, or back off? My friends’ lives were at stake, and I couldn’t face another funeral. Not when it might be Nick or Dan, or someone else I was close to.

Dammit, why couldn’t I concentrate? Every thought I tried to think got sucked into a black hole of oblivion before it was fully formed.

If I told the team, I knew they’d want to carry on regardless. I could hear Nick’s voice now.

“We’re trained professionals. We’ll be okay.”

That’s what he’d say. And Dan, all of them. But what if they weren’t?

We may have hit a nerve with our questions so far, but whose was far from clear. We’d put out so many feelers, who knew which one caused the killer to react? Narrowing it down would take time, more questions, and possibly more deaths. The bastard had already proven he didn’t mess around.

Short of locking everyone I cared about into a nuclear bunker for the foreseeable future while I tripped around chasing leads on my own, I had no way of keeping them safe. I didn’t even have a nuclear bunker so that option was out anyway.

In the end, I gave up and let my heart make the decision. I couldn’t risk anybody else getting hurt. I’d already lost my soul mate, and the thought of the others getting picked off one by one was something I couldn’t entertain.

I had to shut this down, but how?

My head pounded and I rubbed at my temples, trying to relieve the pressure. The events of the last fortnight were sucking me down like quicksand. I hadn’t felt so out of control of my own mind and body since I was a teenager. Back then, my husband taught me to take the anger and fear and channel it into whatever was necessary to fix the problem, but this time I couldn’t see a solution. I made myself take deep breaths, counting to five on each inhale and exhale, but the weight on my chest only got heavier.

My husband’s voice echoed in my head, deep and gravelly, always so calm. He’d know what to do. He always did.

“It’s like a fire, Diamond. First you get it under control, then you put it out.” That was something he’d told me more than once.

I couldn’t extinguish it, not yet. To do that, I’d have to take out the source, and I didn’t have it in me to do it. But I could stop fanning the flames.

How? By stopping the investigation, at least until I got my head straight and came up with a game plan that gave us a reasonable shot at winning.

I thought of what waited for me at home—the cops, the pity, and worst of all, the constant reminders of my husband. He was everywhere in that place. I wasn’t going to get the space I needed to think things through there.

Soaked through from the rain, which was no longer a drizzle but a steady downpour, I got back into the car. Out of habit I had my iPad in my handbag, and it only took a few minutes to log onto the server at work and use my administrator privileges to clear out the files relating to the investigation. That would put the brakes on things. They could stay in my personal cloud storage until my sanity returned.

As guilt ate away at me, I replaced them with a single document:

I have to leave. All this—I can’t deal with it right now. And I need you to put a hold on the investigation. I can’t tell you the reasons why, but I’m safe and I’ll be back to explain. I just need some time. Please. Look after each other, okay?

It was a shitty thing to do, but at that time, I couldn’t see a better option. That’s what happens when your brain’s fucked. My friends would be upset, even more so when they couldn’t find me, but I preferred them upset to dead. I was making the best decision for them. At least that was how I saw it.

With my heart a cold lump of lead, I turned off my red phone, started the engine and set the navigation system for the airport.

It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.

Chapter 5

THE FLIGHT TO England was one of the more unpleasant ones I’ve been on. Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been spoiled over the past few years, first with business class and then my own jet, but only so I could deal with my never-ending stream of calls and emails. On the other hand, I’ve also taken military transport in some of the shittiest countries in the world, and some of those planes didn’t even have seats, let alone trolley service.

So when I say it was bad that meant the flight sucked.

When I booked my ticket, the only seat left was in the middle of a row of three, near the back. I spent the eight hour flight wedged between a snoring salesman with a body odour problem and a stomach the size of the national debt, and a teenager who only stopped playing computer games long enough to throw up into a paper bag.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, after he’d puked for the third time. “It happens every time I fly.”

Well if it always happens, I’ve got a suggestion—don’t eat a super-sized McDonald’s in the departure lounge just before you get on the bloody plane. I saw him doing exactly that.

Between that pair, the toddler behind me who reckoned he was the new David Beckham and the bachelor party in front that managed to drink the plane dry of vodka before we got halfway over the Atlantic, I’d had enough. I was seriously regretting not having stuffed my gun into a diplomatic pouch and brought it along.

By the time we landed, the entire cast of
Riverdance
was having a rehearsal in my head. As I only had hand luggage, I avoided the crush at the baggage carousel and half crawled, half sleepwalked over to the railway station to catch the Heathrow Express into West London. Morning or not, all I wanted to do was sleep, so I checked into some dive of a hotel on a back street in Bayswater.

I slept for most of the day, but not well. Six times, the headboard in the next room banging against the adjoining wall woke me, accompanied by the wild cries of a woman faking an orgasm. Yes, all through the morning and early afternoon. It takes a special kind of desperate to pop out for a quick fuck along with your coffee and McMuffin, but I guess there’s a market for everything.

Finding a hotel that didn’t rent its rooms out by the hour jumped to the top of my to-do list.

By evening, I’d found a room smaller than my closet at home, having forked out an obscene amount of money for the privilege. At least I’d had lunch and stocked up on painkillers for my headache, as well as shopping for a few essentials.

I spent the evening dying my hair, and also my eyebrows, careful not to use so much dye I ended up looking like Bert from Sesame Street. Once I was nice and mousey, I chopped the front bit into a fringe and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked bloody awful. Perfect.

Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought about my options. Staying in London long term wasn’t one of them—I knew too many people, plus there was CCTV everywhere. It would only be a matter of time before I ran into someone who recognised me.

I’d spent my life cultivating a long list of contacts. There was a standing joke among my friends that I could be out walking in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and a local tribesman would appear from behind a tree saying, “Hey, how are you? Long time no see!” Usually my number of acquaintances was useful, but now I found it a hindrance.

So, if not London, where should I go?

Europe brought the risk of another border crossing, and there would be too many people looking for me—my own team and fuck knew who else? That left the rest of the UK.