Sins of the Father (10 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Zoey pushed the bell again, then shuffled her feet, irritated and frustrated. Cindy had stopped answering her phone, after sending more stressed out texts as Zoey crossed the city, and now she wasn
’t answering her door. As cranky as Zoey was—the length of the day was starting to set in, leaving her ready to sleep more than anything else—she was also worried about the woman. This morning, she’d been stressed, but ready to go to bat for herself and the twins she’d talked about; the woman tonight seemed like a completely different person. Tangled up in fear and who knew what else, she was vastly different from the cool, confident woman who’d traded words with Alex in that prim and proper living room.

She pulled out her phone one more time—the battery was down to just 5% now.
Cindy, are you there? I’m sorry, but I’ve been standing out here for fifteen minutes. If you don’t let me in, I’m going home.

Alex hadn’t texted her back, either. She checked her messages, made sure that everything seemed to be sending, and didn’t see anything wrong with the phone. Well, other than the fact that it was now informing her that it was shutting itself down due to its critically low battery.

She stared up at the tall building. It was nowhere near as elegantly imposing as Alex’s, but it was still head and shoulders above her own awkward studio. She would have given anything for a doorman right now, and maybe even her own personal elevator button pusher. If Alex decided to keep her around, she’d have to ask him about that. Someone just to follow around and push buttons for her. She cracked herself up.

As she gave up and turned on her heel to go, the door behind her buzzed. She pulled it open before the buzzing stopped, and walked through the lavish lobby to the elevator. Alas, no button pusher, but she managed to do the deed without even breaking a nail.

Zoey giggled at herself. She’d apparently gotten very very tired standing out on the doorstep, and now, she was going to have to seriously tone down her weirdness in order to not freak Cindy out even more than she was apparently already freaked.

She rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, then knocked on the door of apartment 12. Cindy answered the door immediately, pulling Zoey into the apartment and quickly closing the door behind her.

The woman looked like a caricature of a wealthy woman trying to disguise herself. She wore sunglasses that must have cost $200, and that Audrey Hepburn would have thought were too big and ostentatious. Her clothes were common enough, in that she wore jeans and a jersey top, but they were clearly cut for her specifically, and she wore black pumps that had to cost half a fortune. Zoey managed not to laugh.

“I’m going to give you the information on the twins,” Cindy said, her voice tight. “Where to find them. Who their adoptive parents are. And then I’m going to disappear. I’m done. I have enough money to just—be gone, and that’s all I want. I’ll never come after anything of that bastard’s, and you tell Alex never to even look for me.”

“If that’s what you want, okay,” Zoey said, reaching out to the other woman, who flinched away from her touch. “But you need to realize that you may be hurting everyone, including the twins, by doing this. Their best chance may very well be for Alex to get what he wants. If AEGIS moves in the direction that he wants, then you’re no longer a threat. Do you see?”

“No,” Cindy said. “Arturo and Thalia are dead. That shit on the phone made it very clear that I’m next. I am gone, just as soon as you take this off my hands.” She shoved a flash drive at Zoey. Zoey almost bobbled it, but then managed to keep her grip. It was a cutesy one, a little Hello Kitty with a USB port coming out of her butt. Not remotely the kind of device that one would associate with corporate espionage and death plots.

“What is this?” Zoey asked.

“It’s everything we knew,” Cindy said. “The three of us. About the twins, but about Philip as well. Proof to substantiate our claims as his bastard children, the lawyers we each spoke to about the interpretations of the will. Everything that you could possibly want to know.”

“Cindy,” Zoey tried again. “This doesn’t do us any good if you’re dead.”

“You aren’t—” the woman went completely still, a statuesque look that Zoey had seen before on her half-brother’s face, and then her eyes widened in panic. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered, like they were in a horror movie.

“I don’t hear—”

“Run. Bedroom’s that way. Go!” She gave Zoey a not gentle shove to the back, and Zoey stumbled. As she did, she heard the front door rattle in its frame. It was steady, and it held, but the pictures on the wall shook, and she had the feeling it wouldn’t hold for long.

She ran.

Behind her, Cindy ran too, but only a few steps. And then those spike heels slipped out from under her, and she crashed to the floor.

In her imagination, Zoey was brave enough to turn around, to help the other woman up, and to get them both to safety. Just down the hall, she could see a bathroom. She would grab Cindy, steady the woman and get her to her feet, then dial 911 from the bathroom. That’s what would happen in a movie.

This wasn’t a movie.

Zoey ran down the hallway by herself, skidding into the bathroom. Cindy had flipped herself over, but instead of standing up, she was crab-walking on her hands and feet, too frightened by the continuing blows on the door to stand.

The door burst open, and Zoey pushed the bathroom door as close to shut as she could get it without making noise. She saw a man, a tall man in dark clothes, with a ruddy complexion and light brown hair, walk purposefully down the hallway. He carried a pistol in his hand, the barrel lengthened by a silencer.

The gun made two little hissing sounds, and then Cindy wasn’t trying to crab walk away anymore. Her hands clawed feebly at her chest for a moment, then lapsed into stillness. She hadn’t made a sound.

Zoey pressed her palm to her mouth and bit her flesh as viciously as she could to keep the noises she wanted to make silent. She backed away from the door, bumped up against the sink, and felt her stomach twist, a sudden violent nausea rippling through her. She choked back the burning sickness, wanting to die as the taste and smell of salty sickness flooded her sinuses.

There was a nearly silent, careful footstep outside of the bathroom. He was coming closer.

There was a closet, and there was a bathtub. The bathtub was surrounded by a cloth shower curtain, but it was on wire hooks, and she bet money it would make noise if it was jostled. The closet—even odds it was a linen closet, and then she wouldn’t be able to hide there. Plus, the hinges might squeak.

She had to decide, and hope for the best. If he opened the bathroom door, and she was standing there, she probably wouldn’t even hear the hissing pops. She would just be gone.

The closet. The closet was the better chance.

Gods, random chance, or dumb luck; the closet door opened smoothly, and instead of shelves of towels, it was a regular closet, with robes hung on hooks inside. She darted in, and again, she pulled the door as close to closed as she thought she could manage without making a sound. She pulled herself down into a tiny ball in the corner of the closet, and did her very best to stop breathing.

She listened to the footsteps. She listened to them as they came down the hallway, push open the bathroom door, and walk in. She tried to keep her thoughts as small and silent as she could. And then the footsteps, bless them, went the fuck away.

Zoey didn’t know how long she sat in that closest, her stomach twisting. It could have been seconds. It could have been hours. She thought of Cindy again, clawing at her shattered chest, and the nausea rose again. It was somehow crucial that she not befoul the woman’s house any more than her murdered had already been done. She shoved the closet door open and skidded across the floor on her hands and knees, barely getting her head over the toilet bowl before she retched horribly, emptying everything in her body out.

And then she had to face what was in the hallway.

Cindy lay in a pool of blood, her eyes glazed and far away. Zoey didn’t have to touch her to know she was dead. She pulled out her phone, but her battery was dead now, and the phone wouldn’t turn back on. But thankfully, the neighbors had turned up now, and one of them was screaming while another spoke to a 911 operator, and there was a nice policeman here, too, and it seemed like a very good time to lie down on the floor and let everything drift for a little bit.

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CHAPTER ONE

Everything felt vague and strange. Sounds echoed. Sensations were either too close and far too sharp or too far away to register other than minor irritations. Someone got her up to her feet and had her sit down on a chair. It was away from what remained of Cindy Walden, which was kind, but the stench of blood and fear was so thick on the air that she couldn
’t really get away from it. She found herself twisting her hands over and over, until the skin was sore, but when she stopped, she saw it all happen again. Two little hiss-pops, followed by Cindy falling, clawing at her chest like she could somehow pull out the bullets and knit herself back together.

Zoey retched again and again, until there wasn’t really anything left in her to throw up.

After a stretch of time, a police officer stood over her, asking questions. They were polite questions, and she tried to find the words to answer them, but she wasn’t sure if she was making sense. They wanted to know why she was at Cindy Walden’s apartment so late, if she knew if Ms. Walden had any enemies, and who the man was that she thought she’d seen. She noticed that, thought she’d seen. It was a hell of a story, wasn’t it? She found herself grinning without any humor. It was the plot to every bad detective story that ever happened. The pretty lady found standing over the body absolutely swears that she didn’t do it.

She heard Alex’s voice echoing outside in the hallway, and another man with him. Alex was roaring something, so tense as to be almost incomprehensible, and the other voice was trying to calm him down. She found her mouth stretching into a grin again, and almost laughed this time. She had a feeling that calming Alex down didn’t usually do much good, and it sure as hell wasn’t making a difference now.

He burst through the blue wall of uniforms, and was kneeling before her in a second, his hands clutching hers. “Luke, what the hell are your officers doing to her? She’s ice cold.”

There was a short man standing behind Alex, model handsome, but only about 5’5”. He had a dark Mediterranean tan to his skin, hair that was almost black, and stubble that made her think he’d been dragged out of bed to deal with his old friend’s girlfriend, and was not in a particularly good mood about it.

The man, Luke, turned away from the officer he’d been speaking with quietly. “They found her standing over the body, Alex, and they followed protocol. They’ve been trying to interview her, but she’s not making a lot of sense.”

“She’s clearly in shock,” Alex snarled. She found her eyes combing over him, looking for proof that he was there, really there, and going to stay there. “You had no right to ask her a damn thing without legal counsel present, or without her being examined by a medical professional first.” Luke started to sputter, but Alex turned all his attention back to Zoey. She liked that, she liked his eyes on her. It gave her something to focus on, something to see other than Cindy’s hands clawing at her flesh.

“Are you okay, princess?” His voice was quiet and low, incredibly intimate, even though they were surrounded by cops. But there was something dark in his eyes, now that she was looking at him closely. Something angry. At her? She couldn’t quite tell.

“He shot her,” she managed to say. “Right in front of me.”

“Do you know who he was?” Alex asked. There was a question he wasn’t asking. Whether or not it was something they already suspected, she thought.

“No. I saw his face, but I didn’t know who he was.”

Alex glanced back at Luke, who nodded. “Sketch artist is already on the way.”

“Are you okay to wait a little while, and then describe who you saw to someone?” Alex asked her.

Zoey closed her eyes for a minute, and tried to will the numbness away for long enough to draw a clean breath. “I need to,” she muttered. “They need to find him, Alex. What they did to her—” her gorge rose again, and she fought to control herself. He stroked her back lightly, and surreptitiously grabbed a trashcan from somewhere and slid it between her feet. She spat out the little bit of bile she’d managed to raise, and then tried to focus on her breathing. “I can do this.”

Alex settled on the couch next to her and pulled her into his lap. She could feel him vibrating with stress, and something more, and she had a feeling that letting him comfort her would mean as much to him as it did to her.

Luke—the police commissioner friend, she realized—sat down across from her. “Alex, are you going to introduce me to your new friend?”

She felt her cheeks redden just a little, and stuck out her hand. “Sorry. I’m Zoey Gardener.”

Alex gave her shoulder a squeeze as she grasped the smaller man’s hand. “He knows that,” he said. “He’s harassing me about my poor manners.”

“As seems only fair when I got dragged out of my house to come and let you into an active investigation scene where you shouldn’t have been in the first place,” Luke replied. His tone was completely mild and conversational, but there was more to his words, as evidenced by his tone. That was perfectly clear.

Alex’s hand squeezed tighter on her shoulder, tight enough that Zoey winced a little bit. With the hand that Luke wouldn’t be able to see, she gave him a light jab in the ribs to tell him to loosen up. His grip lightened, but she was fairly sure she’d see a bruise there in the morning. “I gave you a choice,” Alex said, the same conversational steel tone in his speech. “Me, or my lawyers.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “If you’d let me bring her down to 1PP, everything would be a lot easier, and we’d all be more comfortable. She’s not a suspect at this time, there’s no powder residue on her hands, there’s no consequence to her coming with us to talk in a comfortable office.”

“Absolutely not,” Alex replied, and Zoey had the feeling that they’d been having this argument for a while already tonight. “You will keep her name out of the media, for my sake if not for hers, and what the hell do you mean that there’s no gun powder residue on her hands? Did you swab her?”

The rage in his voice had crested, and was dropping down into low, cold tones that made Zoey shiver. Luke didn’t have a shred of shame in his eyes when he replied, “We asked her if she would like to decline the test, and she did not decline.”

“Did she respond at all?” Luke’s eyes remained firm, and she could feel that same rage burning through Alex, feel it ready to burst. “We’re leaving,” he said then, his voice as cold and quiet as when he’d ended the interview with Zoey in his office. He stood up abruptly, his hand around Zoey’s arm. “Ms. Gardener will be represented by Rodriguez, Rodriguez, and Martin. You know them, I’m sure. They pulled your ass out of the fire more than once.”

“Alex, come on,” Luke said, standing up quickly. Alex stepped away, hauling Zoey with him. She let him, because it was too much work to fight back, and all she really wanted right now was to sleep until everything had stopped.

“Not another word, Luke. Not one.”

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