But ultimately, Hans was selfish and he wanted to train Lucy to be the agent he knew she could be. He’d been watching her these last four weeks through the one person he trusted to keep his interest confidential. She’d been doing fine, and she’d passed the tests he’d set up for her, confirming that he’d been right to ask Rick Stockton to overrule the hiring panel.
Tony had been drinking prior to going into cardiac arrest. He had his heart pills on his desk, telling Hans that he’d been experiencing chest pains but chose self-medication over the doctor.
A murder at Quantico would be bold, brazen, and extremely difficult. Poison to induce cardiac arrest would take medical knowledge and opportunity.
Why would someone kill Tony? He wasn’t involved in the politics of the Bureau, had never aspired to be anything but a field agent. He could be grumpy and he rode his students hard, but he was always fair.
It all came back to the Rachel McMahon investigation and the missing file. Tony had figured something out about the case, and either the file was stolen after he died as a crime of opportunity or he was murdered because of his knowledge of the file.
Hans had read over all the official records this afternoon, but there was nothing that jumped out at him. Nothing that would warrant anyone wanting Tony, Stokes, Theissen, and the reporter all dead.
But while Hans had been involved in the original investigation, he hadn’t been as involved as Tony.
Hans pulled the security log from Thursday afternoon to see which card keys accessed the basement. There were no unauthorized accesses, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t. Yet circumstantial evidence indicated that if Tony had been murdered, someone he worked with had killed him.
If Tony was murdered.
Hans called his friend from the lab, Trisha Morrison.
“Hans, it’s nearly midnight,” Trisha said.
“I’m sorry. And you’re not going to like what I’m calling about.”
“You want results.”
“Yes. I know it’s early, but-”
“They’re being run, Hans. That’s the best I can do. I’ll be at the lab tomorrow and will check on the tests personally. But it’s going to take at least another day, and if we don’t find anything, I’ll need to run a broader test.”
“I appreciate it.”
Hans hung up. There was nothing more he could do tonight. He locked up, checked out at the desk, and walked the quarter mile to the small bungalow he was living in for the duration.
The cool, fresh air cleared his head, and he realized how exhausted he was. It had been a long forty-eight hours.
He followed the trail around a fenced construction area, where the new hostage rescue facility was being built. The security lighting was weak and flickered. A scaffolding to his right seemed out of place. He sidestepped it, then tripped over a toolbox and fell hard on his knees.
Pain shot up to his pelvis and he feared he’d broken his leg. He rolled over to catch his breath when a crashing sound startled him.
He couldn’t get away from the scaffolding before it came falling down and pinned him to the ground. The weight of the wood and pipe and equipment was stifling. Blood dripped into his eye from a deep cut on his forehead.
He sensed more than saw movement to his left. He tried to turn his head but couldn’t. A sharp pain exploded his temple, then he felt nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Six Years Ago
Soon after I became an emancipated minor on my sixteenth birthday, I got my GED and was accepted into SU. It was far enough from my crazy mom and dad that I didn’t think about them much. The first year I kept to myself. I was younger than everyone, the classes weren’t as easy as I’d thought, and I focused on studying. I just wanted to blend in while I figured out what to do with my life.
The doctor had been wrong-I wasn’t going to be six feet like my dad. By the time I was seventeen, I was six foot one with more to grow. I think I always thought of myself as short because my height felt funny on me. I didn’t really know what to do with it. I tried to disappear in crowds like I used to, but I couldn’t. Too tall, too skinny, and I think people were kind of scared of me because I was so quiet.
Even though I was free, I felt oddly trapped. Like I was waiting. Waiting for someone to tell me my life had purpose. Waiting for someone to tell me what I should be doing. Waiting for answers to all the questions I’d had as a kid-answers that would never come.
Then I met Cami.
Cami was a year older than me. Beautiful. Sweet and shy, maybe a little skittish. We met in the library the beginning of my second year at SU and I think, for me at least, it was love at first sight. Even though we didn’t have any classes together and she lived with her aunt in town, we studied together nearly every afternoon. I looked forward to seeing her, and on the days I couldn’t or she didn’t make it I was sad.
Cami left for the summer, and when she returned in the fall I wanted to marry her. She was everything bright in my life. My past was finally buried; my mother had remarried and moved to Texas, my father was still in Seattle, but I hadn’t spoken to either of them in over two years, not since the day I became an emancipated minor. The time, and college, and Cami all healed me.
For the first time since Rachel died, I was at peace.
The peace didn’t last.
The sensation that someone was watching me again started at the beginning of my third year. I started to feel the pricks in the back of my neck, just like in high school. The mysterious and cryptic notes began again, only instead of being put in my locker they were left in my dorm room. Or in my car. Or as a bookmark in whatever I was reading.
I became jittery and nervous and all I wanted to do was disappear again. I kept it all from Cami because I wanted to protect her. I filed police report after police report, but after the third time, they just stopped caring. I’d become an annoyance, and one of the cops clearly thought I was lying for the attention.
He certainly didn’t know me. I would gladly be invisible if I could.
But I should have realized that whoever hated me, whoever had followed me from Newark to New York, would try to hurt someone I loved.
My junior year, I moved off campus and gave Cami a key to my apartment. I wanted her to move in with me, because she was having problems with her family. But she was a bit old-fashioned, and I liked that about her. She’d often stay until late but always left in the middle of the night. I wished she would take me to visit her aunt, but she said it was “complicated.”
I knew all about complicated families.
It was the morning before Halloween when I had coffee with Cami and asked if she wanted to see a movie that night. She said she’d meet me at my apartment. And she sounded happy for the first time in weeks, and that made me happy. I’d been afraid she wanted to break it off because of my questions about her aunt, and my moodiness.
I got hung up after my last class because the professor wanted to talk to me about a story I’d written. He wanted me to submit it to the campus magazine. I said sure, whatever, but he wanted to talk. Talking wasn’t my strength. So I listened to him, about how talented I was, about how I should be majoring in communication or journalism or the creative arts instead of early childhood education. I listened until he wanted me to give him answers; then I told him I was late for a date.
I had a beat-up old car, but I rarely drove since my apartment was only a half mile from campus. But it was days like this, when I was late, that I wished I had it. I called Cami to tell her I was late, but my call went to her voice mail.