Tactical Advantage (18 page)

Nell launched herself into her big brother’s arms and hugged him tight around the neck. “I’m sorry, Nick. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted Jordan to go away—I didn’t want him to get hurt. But he’s such a tool.”

Nick hugged her just as tight, teasing her the way a proper big brother should. “Yeah, you could have been with that.”

Nell smacked him in the shoulder and pulled away as Spencer Montgomery walked up. “One mystery solved,” he said. “I’ll bet my next paycheck that parts, if not all, of that SUV have been stolen. Plus, we can book them on harassment charges and evading arrest.” He glanced at Annie and then at Nick. “You two ready to go back to work?”

Annie’s teeth were chattering. “Yes, sir.”

Nick took off his jacket and draped it around Nell’s shoulders before wrapping his arm around Annie and snugging her close to his side, warming them both. He glanced up to the four women standing in the upstairs window, their faces now wreathed in smiles. “You’ll take care of the situation here?”

Spencer leaned in. “Did Connie cook?”

Nick grinned. “Homemade bread and minestrone soup.”

“Oh, yeah.” Annie had never seen the task force leader smile like that before. “For the price of one dinner, I’ll make sure your family gets safely home.”

“Thanks, buddy.” Nick turned Annie toward the building’s front door. “Change your clothes and let’s get over to the lab. I want to find out who The Cleaner is. I’m running out of patience trying to ID the guy who’s doing all he can to keep us from solving this case.”

“You? Running out of patience?” Annie laughed when Spencer and Nell both echoed the same thing she’d been thinking.

The laughter stopped abruptly when she remembered that she’d run down the stairs without stopping to get her coat, her purse or a key card. “I can’t get back in. We’ll have to ring the buzzer and hope your mom or—”

But the door opened for them and Roy Carvello stepped out on the porch. How long had he been standing there watching them? “Good evening, Officers. Annie, I see we’ve had a little trouble. Is there anything I can do to help?” He reached for Nell’s hand and winked. “How about you, miss? Can I help you inside where it’s toasty warm?”

Nick stepped up to hold the door, and nudged Roy back onto the landing. “Dude, hitting on my sister? Seriously?”

For a moment, Annie thought she saw something blaze hotly in Roy’s brown eyes. But it was gone as quickly as she’d imagined it. He smiled and moved aside, letting them move up the stairs ahead of them.

There was something about brown eyes Annie needed to remember.

But right now, Nick’s arm was around her. She was surrounded by friends and joining a family she was growing fonder of by the minute.

For the first time in forever, it seemed, she didn’t feel alone.

* * *

S
ATISFIED
THAT
THE
FIRST
-
FLOOR
locker rooms were as deserted as the rest of the crime lab building was at this time of night, Nick turned out the lights and headed to the last place he hadn’t checked, the staff cafeteria. Wide-open and empty, save for tables and chairs. Kitchen door locked. Adjoining restrooms empty. From the morgue in the basement to the executive offices on the fifth floor, every passageway and door in the lab building was either empty or locked up tight.

He should be able to relax his vigil, right? But his warning instincts were creeping up the chart of
too good to be true.

As much as he hated to leave Annie on her own in the third-floor lab, he’d made the sweep to try to settle that niggling twist in his gut that the building, and Annie, weren’t as secure as he’d like them to be. She’d insisted the whole place would be empty this time of night, especially with the holidays. And other than the guard who’d checked them in at the front security desk, he hadn’t run across another soul inside.

Of course, he’d been off his game for a few days now. But Jordan Garza was in a jail cell, out of his sister’s life—eliminating one giant distraction. He and Annie had made a breakthrough on the task force’s investigation, determining that there were two perps—the Rose Red Rapist and The Cleaner—and that the accomplice who’d done such a thorough job of compromising the task force’s evidence thus far, along with some hired help, knew the rapist’s identity. There’d been too many similarities between that break-in at Brian Elliott’s textile warehouse and the surviving victim accounts of the crime scene where they’d been assaulted to attribute them to coincidence. Knowing that doubled their opportunity to catch this guy—there might not be a living witness who could identify the rapist, but there was an accomplice out there who could. Thanks to Annie’s tenacity and eye for detail, they were finally moving forward again in their investigation.

And then there was Annie herself. Sweet, tempting Annie Hermann—a thorn in his side, an itch he couldn’t quite reach. She was unlike any woman he’d ever known. Complicated. Klutzy. Sometimes so unsure of herself and sometimes so brave. A touch from her could center his world or tilt it on its axis. She was smart. Funny. Unpredictable. Passionate about her work, about finding the truth, about making the people and the world around her better.

But were those glimpses of passion she’d shared with him a sign of what could be between them? Did he have the patience to wait for her to learn to trust in what they could be together? Was he being too impulsive and foolish and eager to think that together they could be pretty damn good?

He should stick to the instincts that had served him so well up until that night in the alley. He should stick to his job the way Annie was so devoted to hers, and stop letting all those jumbled-up thoughts distract him from that crawling sense of unease that told him there was danger lurking in the shadows.

Something was off with this setup tonight. Empty building. Alarms activated. The parking lot was empty except for Nick’s Jeep, a pair of vehicles belonging to the security guards at the parking lot entrance and inside the building, and a couple more cars that looked like they’d been parked there for some time, judging by the snow piled around their tires.

Maybe it was that run-in with Garza that had put him on edge like this. He’d seen the gun on the seat between Garza and Sanchez. He’d heard his sister running out across open ground, had watched Annie charge right out of the building after her. He could have lost so much tonight.

It didn’t matter what Annie might or might not feel for him. He wasn’t going to risk losing anyone else.

That left one last place to secure.

Nick shrugged into his jacket and pulled out his cell phone and punched in Annie’s number. Exchanging a nod with the security guard who’d checked them in a half hour earlier, Nick strolled through the lobby to the ultramodern glass-and-steel wall that created the building’s two-story facade.

“Good night,” the guard called to him. “Have a good one.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Nick promised him. “Miss Hermann’s still here.”

“The doors lock automatically after hours. You’ll need a key card to get back in, Detective.”

“I’ll knock.”

Annie picked up on the second ring and Nick grinned on his way out the door. “Yes, I’m still here. You know, if you keep calling me every five minutes, I’ll never get this done and we’ll be here all night.”

“Just wanted to make sure you still have your phone on you, and it’s not twenty-feet away in your purse where it does you no good if you can’t get to it.”

“I’m keeping it right here in the pocket of my lab coat.”

“Don’t set it down on the table and forget about it when I hang up.”

She laughed, and Nick wondered if he’d ever get tired of hearing that rare sound. “I won’t. Where are you now?”

“Walking around the perimeter outside. I want to double check that all the access points are secure. I’ll chat with the guard in the parking lot, too, to see if anyone else has shown up since we went in.” He tipped his face up toward the starry sky and inhaled a calming breath when he saw the bright light from the third-story window bank pouring through the glass into the night. “I can see you from here.” Besides the guard’s desk in the center of the lobby, every other floor was dark, reassuring Nick that she was safe up in her lab, sorting through the evidence she’d gathered from Brian Elliott’s textile warehouse while she waited for the results of a computer search through AEFIS to find a match for the thumbprint she’d found on the swapped-out memory card in her camera. “Well, I can at least see the lights from your lab.”

“Is this better?” She came to the window and waved.

Nick flipped her a salute. “If I was a sniper, it’d be perfect. Now keep your door locked and get back to work. Don’t go anywhere else without telling me. I’ll be back up there in ten.”

She moved away from the window, disappearing from sight. “I’ll be here.”

He was counting on it.

Clipping his phone back on his belt, Nick zipped his jacket, pulled his scarf more tightly around his neck and stepped off into the snow. Just like the guard had indicated, every door Nick tried was locked up for the night, from the emergency exits to the service entrance in the back to the three garage doors where the M.E.’s wagon pulls in to drop off a body or entire vehicles that needed to be processed were stored.

Everything was perfectly secure, inside and out.

Too perfect.

The blast of damp, single-digit air revived his senses after another long day. Why couldn’t he see what was wrong here? The lights were still on in Annie’s lab. The two guards were on duty. The number of vehicles in the lot was still the same. He scrubbed his gloved hand over the scruff of his beard and surveyed the parking lot itself, scanning every landscape bush, every inch of asphalt, every lamppost and car.

And then the hazy dysfunction he’d been stuck in for nearly three days now cleared away and he saw it.

That
was the thing that didn’t fit.

The guard sitting in the parking lot kiosk had changed the color of his hair.

Trusting his instincts in a way he hadn’t for seventy-two hours, Nick put in a call to Spencer, requesting backup for the second time that night.

“Based on what?” his partner asked.

“My gut is twisted in a knot.”

“I’m on my way.”

Nick jogged across the lot, approaching the guard’s kiosk from the guy’s blind side. Pasting a friendly grin on his face, Nick rapped on the glass, startling the guard to his feet.

With a cautionary hand on his sidearm, the guard slid open the kiosk door. His gaze dropped to the badge hanging around Nick’s neck. “Yes, Officer?”

“Where’s the other guy?” Nick asked. “The one who checked me in earlier?”

The guard’s posture relaxed a fraction. “Shift changed at ten.”

“Let me see your ID.” Nick turned away, nodding to the cars in the lot. None of them had moved. “Is the guard you relieved still here?”

“He went inside to change into his civvies.”

Nick was ready when he caught the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. The guard had pulled his weapon and raised it above Nick’s head, swinging it down like a club.

Nick lurched to the side, letting the man’s momentum throw him off balance, giving Nick the opportunity to get behind him and knock him to the pavement. He stomped on the man’s hand and kicked the gun away. In a matter of seconds, Nick had a choke hold around the fake guard’s neck. He squeezed tighter and tighter until the man passed out and went limp in his arms. Nick dropped him to the ground and stepped over him to retrieve the gun and stuff it into the back of his belt.

“It’s a gun, idiot,” he chided his unconscious attacker. “Not a baseball bat. You shoot it.”

After a glance around to make sure no one had seen that little scuffle and sounded the alarm, Nick dragged him back inside the kiosk where he discovered the original guard lying on the floor. Bleeding from a gash at his temple, he, too, was unconscious, and had been bound and gagged with duct tape.

Nick immediately bent down to check his pulse. Weak but steady. He cut the injured guard loose, then checked his pockets. His key card and ID badge were gone, but he had a pair of handcuffs on him that Nick used to secure his attacker. He pulled the tape off the guard’s mouth and put it on his attacker. Then Nick pushed to his feet, pulled out his phone and called Spencer right back, warning him to include an ambulance and all the friends he wanted to invite to the party.

If the armed men guarding the place had been taken out, then there was probably a team of intruders trying to get into the lab. No. Probably already in the lab because there’d been no visible signs of forced entry. With the fallen guard’s key card, they’d have free access to most of the building.

Nick was damn well going to make his own access now.

Instead of wasting his time on locked doors, and unsure whether the guard inside had been compromised, as well, Nick ran straight to his Jeep. He cranked the engine, released the brake, shifted into gear and jammed the pedal to the floor. Taking a cue from the gangbangers who’d torn up Annie’s neighborhood earlier, he barreled toward the front entrance, taking aim at all that glass. The Jeep jumped the curb and rammed the front doors, shattering glass and steel and screeching to a stop in the middle of the lobby.

Glass rained down. Security lights flashed. Alarms blared.

Nick shed his coat and pulled it over his head, protecting himself from the falling debris as he kicked open the door and climbed out.

His first check was the front desk. Empty.

Had the guard there been taken out, too? Had he, like Nick, sensed the danger inside the walls and left his post to check it out? Unlike the guard out front, the man he’d talked to inside was the same man he and Annie had talked to earlier. She seemed to know him. His ID had checked out.

Nick’s phone rang right on cue. “Annie?”

“What the hell is going on? Are you all right?”

He dropped his jacket, shed his gloves and pulled his Glock. “Where are you?” he asked, heading for the stairwell, heading for her.