Run From Fear (7 page)

Jack’s head gave a quick jerk to the side. “The lock was picked. Someone tried to break into your house.”

Y
ou can go ahead and file a report,” the officer, who was not nearly as nice as Officer Roberts, said in a voice that managed to convey the emptiness of that gesture. “But your landlord admitted the lock is old and the house had been previously burglarized. There’s no proof those scratches are from the other night—”

“They look fresh,” Jack interrupted. “Had they been from the previous burglary, they would have been smoothed out—”

“So being a high-priced rent-a-cop makes you an expert in forensics?” the cop said, adjusting his belt under his hefty gut as he puffed his chest out.

Ben rolled his eyes and went back into the house. Talia was pretty sure that crunching sound was Jack biting on his tongue. “What else do you suggest I do, Officer?”

“Keep your doors locked and your alarm on,” he said with a smirk, and left.

Jack muttered something under his breath.

“Tal, do you want me to stay with you for a little while?” Rosario asked, her hand on Talia’s arm the only warm spot on her body.

Talia shook her head. “I’ll be fine.” Rosario loved
living on campus, and Talia would never take that away from her. And maybe she was being paranoid, but if someone was specifically targeting her, she wanted Rosie well away, safe in her dorm, protected by the university’s own rigorous security protocols. “Just do me a favor—no missing any curfew calls this week. Deal?” When Talia had agreed to let Rosario live on campus, they’d agreed Rosario would call her every single night, no matter what, at eleven p.m. to let her know where she was. In the eight months since school started, Rosario had gotten a little lax. And try as she did not to overreact, nothing sent Talia into a tailspin faster than not being able to get ahold of Rosie. There had even been one humiliating—according to Rosario—incident involving her dorm RAs and the campus police.

“Deal,” Rosario replied with a smile. “Eleven o’clock, on the dot, unless I go to bed early, and if I can’t call, I promise to text.” She gave Jack a quick hug good-bye and ran inside to get her stuff together.

“Talia—” Jack got cut off as his phone beeped. He let out a low curse. “I’m sorry, but we have to go.” He nodded at Ben, who emerged from her house with his bag of gear. “We need to move it if we’re going to make it on time,” he called over Talia’s head, then focused back on her. “I’m on a personal security detail over in Atherton—our client has been receiving death threats, so they’re temporarily relocating from London. It’s going to be twenty-four-seven, so the next few weeks—”

Talia held up her hand. “Jack, you don’t have to explain to me that you have a job to do. I know you didn’t come down from Seattle to see me. You don’t have to babysit me. I’ll be fine.”

He cocked an eyebrow and looked meaningfully in the direction of her garage door.

Talia shrugged and said, “Like Officer Friendly said, that probably happened ages ago.”

“You don’t buy that bullshit any more than I do.”

“Let’s move,” Ben said. “And I’m driving. You drive like a grandma.”

Jack didn’t budge. “The system is wired now to call Gemini headquarters and my cell phone if the alarm trips. I’ll get here as fast as I can, but if I can’t someone else will. And if anything else happens, you call me immediately. I’ll have my phone on and with me at all times.”

Talia rolled her eyes. “It was probably just some dumb kid looking to steal beer—”

“Immediately,” Jack bit out. “And if I don’t answer, you call Danny, Derek, or Ethan directly.”

“Or me!” Ben interjected.

“Not Ben,” Jack said with a smile so slight she wondered if she was imagining it. “He’s an asshole.”

Did the iceman just make a joke? “I promise,” she conceded. “But don’t expect to hear from me. And I won’t expect to hear from you,” she said. But she couldn’t ignore the hollow feeling that washed over her as she watched Jack and Ben climb into the car and drive away.

It was stupid, she told herself as she walked back into the house, the way seeing him left her with that strange, hollow ache. A faint yearning for him to stick around, for her to unglue her tongue and figure out what to say instead of her halfhearted efforts to push him away. A wish that maybe they could have… something.

Right, like that was possible, she thought, and gave herself a mental kick. What she and Jack had, so oddly
intimate yet so excruciatingly uncomfortable, could never be untangled enough to go anywhere good.

She drove Rosario back to campus and contemplated what to do for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe she should see if Susie was up for a movie, she thought, then quickly dismissed the idea. Talia was in a weird, melancholy mood and had no business inflicting herself on anyone.

Besides, she had only a few hours to kill before she had to work. Maybe she’d do some laundry. The house phone rang, cutting off her mental meanderings. She started to ignore it—anyone she knew would have called her cell. She picked up the handset to turn the ringer off, hesitating when she saw the number on the caller ID display.

Wireless caller.
Her brow furrowed as she recognized the Washington State area code and Seattle exchange.

Without thought, her thumb pressed the
TALK
button. “Hello?”

“Talia Vega?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Talia Vega?” he repeated.

Her grip on the phone tightened. “Who wants to know?”

The phone went dead.

Cold sweat filmed her forehead.
They’d found her.
Just like that, she was back down in that black hole of panic and fear, leaving the safe house only when necessary. Breath held, constantly looking over her shoulder, dreading the moment when he or one of his lackeys would snatch her from her bed or, worse, take Rosario and use her as bait to flush Talia out.

No, stop.
She took a deep breath, reminded herself that David was dead, his organization blown to smithereens.
There was no more “they.” No one had bothered to come after her in nearly two years. Why would they now?

But whoever called knew her name, knew her phone number.

It wasn’t like she was in hiding, the rational, calming part of her brain argued. She’d kept her information unlisted, but she knew there were ways to find out that sort of thing if someone was motivated enough.

That last thought wasn’t at all comforting. She picked up the phone and brought the number up on the caller ID. She knew it was overkill, but she could call someone back at Gemini’s office and have them trace it. She didn’t want to bother Jack—

The phone rang in her hand. It was him again.

“What do you want?” she asked sharply.

“Talia Vega?”

She didn’t answer.

“Sorry about before. I went through a canyon and my cell dropped the call. I’m trying to get in touch with Talia Vega. Can you at least tell me if I have the right number?”

“And I’ll ask you again,” she said, irritation doing its part to chase away some of the fear, “who wants to know?”

“My name is Greg Fitzhugh,” he said. “I’m working on a book for
Seattle Magazine
about the fallout from the Grayson-Maxwell scandal—”

“I have nothing to say on the matter.”

“Please,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for you, no one would have ever connected him to Karev’s operation,” he said.

Talia wasn’t sure if he was genuinely impressed or just kissing her ass.

“If it weren’t for you helping Deputy PA Slater, the corruption would have gone unchecked, and none of those people would have been arrested.”

Her fingers started to go numb at the tips. The last thing she wanted to do was remind all of those people of her existence and, worse, make it seem like she was bragging about her part in bringing them down. Hell, at one time she’d been as knee-deep in the shit as the rest of them. She had nothing to brag about.

“I know you took a bit of a beating in the press before,” he said at her continued silence, “but you don’t have to worry about how you’ll be portrayed.”

What, like they could somehow turn the mistress of a notorious criminal—who, among other things, had twisted her testimony to help send an innocent man to death row and stood numbly by while half a dozen women were butchered—into a heroine for justice? “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

She hung up and immediately unplugged the phone in case Greg Fitzhugh decided to call back, then realized she’d forgotten to ask him where he’d gotten the number.

You should have changed your name.
Not for the first time, Talia questioned her decision not to change her identity. Jack assured her that as long as they held up their cover stories, he could create a cover for them that was all but bulletproof.

Everything in her had rebelled at the idea. David Maxwell had nearly taken everything from them. She wasn’t going to let him take their identities. Most importantly, it wasn’t fair to force Rosie to live this lie with her.

And deep in her heart, Talia didn’t feel like she deserved to disappear into anonymity. Her own bad
choices had gotten her into trouble, and part of her penance was living with that truth. For better or worse.

This, she supposed, was the worse part.

Nothing to do but move past it. What was done was done, and unless she wanted to turn her and Rosie’s lives upside down all over again, she had to accept reality: If a person was motivated to find Talia Vega, there wasn’t much to keep them from tracking her down.

He’d failed.

He hurried into the house, ignoring his mother’s demands to know where he’d been as he raced to his room. He slammed the door behind him and threw the bolt lock, the roaring in his head drowning out the sound of Mother pounding on the door.

He couldn’t think over the twisting sickness in his stomach. He was a loser, an imposter, too weak to do what needed to be done.

Too weak to kill.

He’d hoped number three would be his first. He’d done everything right; everything went exactly according to plan.

Up until the very end, when he messed it up.

Like he always did.

He stripped off his clothes and jumped into the shower, scrubbing away the stink of abject failure. He dressed quickly, tried to quiet his mind. He needed to get a grip on himself—there was still so much to do tonight.

He’d left the experiment running at the campus lab, and he needed to get back in time to analyze the samples
before they were ruined. But he couldn’t go yet, not with his brain a scattered roar as he faced the reality of this latest failure.

He wasn’t worried about getting caught. He was too careful for that. But it ate at him like acid that once the drugs wore off and she recovered from her wounds, the bitch would be walking around this earth, a living reminder of his weakness.

He gulped down a glass of cold water and flipped on his computer. He checked his e-mail, and the knot in his stomach twisted tighter when he saw he’d received a Google alert about a new article mentioning Nate Brewster.

He didn’t want to read it, didn’t want another reminder of how unworthy he was a successor. But he couldn’t stop himself from clicking on the link that directed him to the article.

It was a long-form article for a Seattle-based magazine, focusing more on Margaret Grayson-Maxwell and her family’s fall from grace; there was very little about Nate at all. He was about to close the window when another name caught his eye. He zeroed in on the single sentence that would change his life.

Talia Vega, who declined to be interviewed for this article, left Seattle after David Maxwell’s death and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but he could feel it, blazing through him.

Of course.

She was to be his first. Why had he never realized it before? All along he’d been copying the master but never thought to look for the lone survivor. The woman whose image was burned into his brain, inspiring him all along.

A sense of peace settled over him, washing away the bitter taste of failure. He hadn’t failed, he realized. The others were practice, necessary for him to get every last step correct before he moved to the next level.

Though her address and phone were unlisted, it took him less than an hour to find both.

She lived in Palo Alto. For the last eight months, she’d lived less than five miles from the Stanford campus where he spent 90 percent of his waking hours.

To find out she lived so close… it was like the hand of God steering him in the right direction.

A voice screamed in his head for him to go to her, tonight. He stifled it. He wasn’t ready for her yet. He hadn’t achieved perfection yet. And for her, he needed to be perfect.