Chapter 6                 

Skye

 

Why did I say that aloud? Maybe it was just for show. I was a little scared but there was no way they would drop the ball with me. Deep cover meant that we were going to spend all the time in character and we'd live next to a killer's house, but we'd still be in contact with the others.

I had just lied to Nicholas Woods. I didn't trust him with my life. I respected the guy as a detective but I knew nothing about him as a person. Having a partner while undercover was a burden. I learned that lesson the hard way. I did fine for the first two and a half months of my mission and as soon as they sent me someone else, the whole operation blew up. Undercover work and team work didn't go hand in hand in my book. Then again, my book was still short and it had many pages to be written.

I wondered what they thought about my involvement. Woods and Robinson kicked ass since before I even thought about a career in law enforcement. Having me around might feel like babysitting for them. Well, tough cookies! I was the new generation of kick-ass-ers.

Whatever doubts each of us had, we tried to make it work. The clock was ticking and we didn't want to give this monster the chance to make another victim. Maybe sweet innocent Anna Dvorak herself was in danger.

Four hours and more boxes of doughnuts than I cared to count later, we had worked out the saline details of our cover. Woods summarized it aloud, his voice low and rough.

"The baseline is that you're my daughter. You went to college in California and stayed there but when your mother died I didn't take it well and you came back to look after me."

He sounded exhausted. Broken. I wanted to help him win against this monster. My heart reached out to him. I didn't want to embarrass myself by giving him a hug. Even in LA, it took them a while to get used to my hugging ways. When he went on, I congratulated myself for that because he had clearly gone into character. I had studied his interrogations and I guessed that he was using one of his techniques.

"We sold our flat downtown and got a condo in Gracenote because it's a gated community and I'm obsessed with safety. I manipulated you into giving up your life in California to have you here where I can keep you safe. I'm overly controlling and I constantly check on you. This is how we'll make sure he knows that he can't make a move on you, in case he's tempted."

I swallowed dryly at the sound of that. At least they were treating me with enough respect to talk openly about the risks. I was everything that monster was hunting for. Of course he'd be tempted to do to me what he did to the others.

Woods didn't lie to me, but I was lying to them. The shiver that went through me was only partially caused by fear. The other reason was to hear Nicholas Woods say that he was overly controlling in my regards. All my life I wanted nothing more than light vanilla sex and within a few hours of meeting my idol, I was reacting to words like control and obsession. My skin still tingled where he had touched me. I looked down at my hand and I saw that was tracing with my fingers the shape of his hand on my skin.

Captain Jackson walked in.

"We got green light from the DA's office. Give your requirements to officer Mayers and get your stuff in order. You'll have everything you need to move in."

 

*

Twenty-four hours after accepting the mission, I was in a car with Nicholas Woods, heading into the killer's lair.  We were Mark and Sophia Doyle.

"You sure you don't want to drive?" he asked again.

"Nah," I said. I was in character already and Woods trying to treat me as his equal was taking me out of the zone.

They had talked me into pretending I was nineteen-year-old Sophia Doyle, and she would not want to drive the car if she had her Dad to chauffeur her around. Sophia was a spoiled daddy's princess and the only redeeming feature about her was that she cared enough about her father to give up her volunteer work in LA to be with him. Sophia may have been a pampered Berkeley student, but she was also helping in an animal shelter and living on what her parents sent her every month.

Mark Doyle was an architect and he was taking advantage of the many wonders of the technological era to work from home. So essentially, we would have nothing better to do than spend the whole day inside the complex.

"We'll settle in tonight, and tomorrow we go by their gym to sign up. They have an Olympic size swimming pool," he said.

"I go jogging every morning. Not sure if going to the pool is a good idea," I said hoping he wasn't going to ask why.

"Why?"

I had done my best not to get to this point.

"Because my scar might be visible."

He almost asked where it was, but didn't. Either because he had read the report or he sensed my discomfort, he didn't press.

"It's on my butt," I said abruptly.

He just looked at me inquiringly. I sighed. I had to tell the story.

"A small-time drug dealer got too nosy about my involvement. He was sampling his own product and he got paranoid. I hadn't done anything to make him suspicious but he started accusing me of working for the government and that I wanted to implant him with a chip to track his movements. It didn't help that for the first time in our dealings, I brought a new guy. My initial investigation was Vice related, but when I got involved with a drug Cartel, they sent me someone from Narcotics. The idea was that I'd stick with the human trafficking ring and he'd move into the Cartel. Anyway, the paranoid bastard came at me with a gun and instead of disarming him efficiently… I fought him off like a girl. We got into a tussle and the gun went off. Long story short, now I have the scar from a gunshot on my left cheek."

"Why didn't you disarm him?"

The same question my handler had asked, when I was still in hospital on my stomach in the hospital bed. That was one of the basic moves we were taught at the Academy. Not to mention that I had a martial arts background that came in handy in every combat situation I've ever been.

"Mecause I didm't wamt to break covr," I mumbled the words.

This didn't work with my parents when I was a kid and it didn't work for Sophia either.

"You got shot because you didn't want to blow your cover?" he asked incredulous.

"To be fair, he probably would have shot me anyway."

"Not if you had disarmed him previously."

"I guess. Can we not talk about it? At least until we're out of here. Sophia is a nice girl who hasn't even seen a gun in her life, let alone get shot."

"If Sophia ever got shot, Mark would probably tie her down and never let her leave the house," he said.

He had meant it as a joke, but I got another frisson when his words conjured up the image of him tying me down. Maybe there was something in the water or in the East Coast air to make me react like that. I'm a vanilla girl who is perfectly content to have robust vanilla sex. I knew myself not to have daddy issues or any inhibitions that I needed to act out. One of the perks of undercover jobs was the amount of therapy and de-programming you get once you're out and you have to go back into a police environment.

At least, I thought I knew myself.