Chapter 2

“I thought we were going to Fredericksburg?” Alina asked as they passed straight through the town and kept going until they hit Highway 2 and headed south.

After leaving Dick Coleman’s office, Trevor had told her he’d meet her in front of the admin building, then disappeared. When he showed up fifteen minutes later in a black Suburban, she’d noticed he’d changed out of the black tactical uniform he’d been wearing and into cargo pants and a button-down.

Trevor glanced at his rearview mirror before giving her a smile. “We did go to Fredericksburg—and now we’re leaving. I figured since it’s such a nice day, why not enjoy ourselves with a leisurely drive through the country?”

She lifted a brow. “That’s what this is all about…a nice drive in the country?”

“Yup.”

“Yeah right,” she muttered as he checked the mirror again.

Sighing, Alina turned her attention back to the fat file folder on her lap. It was stuffed full of reports related to all the places Ivy, Landon, and the rest of the rogue shifters had supposedly been sighted. Dick had told her they were a slippery bunch, but she found it difficult to believe they could move from location to location as fast as the DCO agents trying to track them down claimed. It was like they’d put a map up on a wall somewhere and thrown darts at it.

She flipped the page, frowning as she read over the various performance records of the operatives Dick had called “shifters.” To say it read like something out of a movie was putting it mildly.

“Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it,” she told her new partner. “I’m not so sure I buy all this shifter crap. Dick made it seem like it was the real deal, but I gotta tell you, it sounds like BS to me.”

“It’s real,” Trevor said.

Alina waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “Show me.”

He slanted her a look. “Excuse me?”

She closed the folder and tossed it in the backseat. “You’re supposed to be a shifter, right? So show me what the heck the big fuss is all about.”

Trevor’s jaw flexed. “I’m not a trained monkey at the circus. I don’t do tricks.”

Okay, maybe demanding he perform for her had been uncalled for. She would have said as much when she caught him checking the rearview mirror again. She wanted to ask him who he thought was following them but decided that would be a waste of time. Trevor obviously didn’t trust her enough to tell her what time of day it was, much less who might be following them.

That was okay, because she wasn’t sure she could trust him much either.

It was one more thing that had her once again questioning her decision to leave the CIA. Taking a job in a classified department of Homeland Security she’d never heard of was bad enough, but chasing rogue government agents with a partner she didn’t know the first thing about and couldn’t trust was completely insane.

But then she remembered how much she’d hated her job at the Agency. She’d gotten so burned out on the crappy work they’d had her doing lately it was a miracle she hadn’t gotten herself—or someone else—killed. That’s when she took a breath and told herself that while her first day at the DCO was going a little rocky, she’d made the right choice leaving the CIA. She probably should have done it a long time ago, right after Jodi and the rest of her team had been killed.

“You okay?” Trevor asked suddenly as he drove down the tree-lined rural road.

Alina looked at him, not sure where his question had come from. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, but your heart rate just shot through the roof, so I figured I should ask.”

All she could do was stare at him in confusion, not sure what the hell he was talking about. “How do you know how fast my heart is beating?”

“It’s a shifter thing,” he said casually, as if he were talking about the weather. “My hearing is good enough to pick up the beating of your heart, and it’s going a little crazy about now.”

She eyed him skeptically, wondering if he was messing with her. Dick had tried to explain the basics of the shifter genetics, but he’d made it sound like they were part animal. None of it made any sense to her. Now she wished she’d asked more questions.

She and Dick had talked for quite a while about Trevor before he’d shown up for the meeting. While Dick hadn’t gone into great detail about what a shifter was, he’d told her repeatedly that she couldn’t trust Trevor and that there was a good chance her new partner was in league with the rogue DCO agents who’d murdered the previous director. After hearing that, she’d expected Wade’s double to walk through the door.

But Trevor wasn’t anything like her old teammate—at least not physically. Wade had been average in every way possible. Trevor was anything but. He was tall and athletic with a wiry build and short, black hair that seemed to be in a permanent state of casual bedhead. Alina had met men who spent a lot of money to get their hair to look like that, but Trevor’s seemed to be completely natural. With lips that quirked constantly, a little scruff covering his jaw, and mischievous, hazel eyes, he seemed like a man who rarely took things very seriously. He’d definitely vexed the crap out of Dick, and even if he was supposed to have been part of a conspiracy to kill the former director, Alina had had a hard time keeping the smile off her face as he’d poked and prodded his boss.

By the time the meeting was over, she was ready to admit that Trevor was an attractive man with a nice body, an infectious grin, and a razor-sharp, wry sense of humor. While she had no idea what the shifter was about, she’d had a hard time seeing him as a traitorous, cold-blooded killer. Then again, she’d never seen a traitorous, cold-blooded killer when she used to look at Wade either, and he’d betrayed the entire team and killed Jodi in the most vicious manner he could. All in all, she was a crappy judge of character.

“Your heart’s beating faster again,” Trevor murmured as he drove past the same gas station they’d passed twice already. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” she snapped.

Dammit, he was right. Her heart was thumping harder than normal. It always did when she thought about Wade.

“I’m just going to toss this out there,” Trevor said. “But can I assume you’re nervous about being in a vehicle with someone like me?”

Alina did a double take. “No, that’s not it at all. I don’t have a problem with you.”

He arched a brow and gave her a look that said she was full of crap. “So you’re telling me your heart starts racing at random moments for the heck of it?”

She opened her mouth to tell him it was none of his damn business, but closed it again. There was a good chance they could be walking into a dangerous situation when they got to wherever they were going. She’d rather not do that while in the middle of an argument. But she also wasn’t in the habit of giving up personal info without getting anything in return.

“Why should I tell you anything?” she demanded. “It’s not like you’ve been exactly forthcoming with me. You still haven’t told me where we’re going or what a shifter is. For all I know, you could be making up this stuff about being able to hear how fast my heart is beating.”

Alina expected Trevor to say something suitably snarky, but he surprised her.

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “We’re going to talk to a guy who lives in Bowling Green. He worked in IT at the DCO training complex and went into work two hours before his normal duty time on the day of the explosion.”

“You think he was working with the rogue DCO agents who killed John Loughlin?”

While the idea made sense, it wasn’t exactly in line with what he’d told Dick.

“I think it’s possible the guy might have brought the bomb onto the complex,” Trevor said.

Alina waited for him to say something else about the man, but he fell silent. That left her with a lot of questions, the first one being why no one had already talked to this guy. Surely, the people investigating the bombing would have done that right off the bat. More importantly, why had Trevor lied to his boss about where they were going and what they’d be doing?

“You told the director you wanted to talk to some people who’d gotten into a scuffle with two men you thought might be the rogue agents,” she reminded him.

He glanced at the side mirror this time. “Yeah, I did.”

There was a lot of stuff he wasn’t telling her, including who he thought was following them. She decided not to push on those two subjects…yet. He was talking, and she wanted to keep that going. Time to move on to a different topic and see what else he’d tell her.

“Back to the shifter thing for a minute,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Dick said something about you having animal DNA, but that’s just an expression, right? Like when someone says a person is as mean as a junkyard dog or strong as an ox.”

Trevor didn’t say anything for a long time, and Alina thought she’d pushed too far.

“I’m a coyote shifter,” he finally said. “I have canine DNA mixed with my own. When I shift, I take on certain physical characteristics of a coyote.”

All Alina could do was stare. What could she say to a man who’d just claimed to be part coyote?

“Are you serious, or are you just messing with me?” she demanded.

In answer, Trevor took one hand off the wheel and placed it on the center console between them. As she watched, his fingernails extended until they turned into five sharp claws almost an inch long and deadly looking as hell.

Alina stared. It had to be a trick.

She opened her mouth to ask how a human could possibly have claws but stopped cold as he turned to look at her with eyes that were glowing yellow and a pair of elongated canines protruding out over his lower lip.

Crap on a stick.

She jerked back so hard, she almost snapped her neck, then immediately regretted her reaction at the flicker of disappointment that crossed his handsome face. Before she could say anything, the claws, fangs, and glowing eyes disappeared.

Trevor put his hand back on the wheel and focused once again on the twisting, turning country road. “Enough about me,” he said casually, as if having long claws poking out from under his fingernails was an everyday occurrence for him. Hell, maybe it was. “Now that I’ve told you where we’re going and demonstrated the shifter stuff isn’t BS, let’s get back to you. Why was your heart beating so fast before?”

Alina didn’t answer. She didn’t like confiding in a stranger, even if he was supposed to be her partner. But he’d answered her questions, so she supposed she owed him something.

“A mission went wrong a couple of years ago in the CIA. I try hard not to think about it, because when I do, I get upset. That’s probably why you heard my heart racing.”

She tried not thinking about the fact that her heart was probably racing all over again simply from making that confession, and she prayed he wouldn’t push for more details.

“Are you wondering if you made a mistake getting out of the CIA?” he asked.

Her first instinct was to say no. Then again, that was always her first instinct. But instead, she nodded.

“Yeah. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wondering that. But then I realize I did the right thing. It was time for me to leave,” she said.

She looked out the passenger window, waiting with a slight sense of dread for his next question, the one where he asked her exactly why she’d left the Agency.

Nothing had been the same after the operation in Turkey. In the immediate aftermath of the ambush that had killed her entire team, she’d been so furious that all she could do was think about spending the rest of her life hunting Wade down and making him pay. The need for revenge was like a fever that raged day and night.

The Agency had done everything they could to help her find Wade at first. But after about a year of scouring the globe, the search had started to lose steam as other events took priority. The Agency moved Wade’s cold-blooded betrayal to the back burner, he was placed on a watch list with thousands of other high-value targets, and Alina was told to let it go. She hadn’t, and it had cost her.

Initially, the Agency had allowed her to stay in the field, but over time, her fixation with finding the man who’d killed her team had made her coworkers and supervisors uncomfortable. They began to think she was unstable, obsessive, and a risk to other agents. To some degree, maybe she was. Because for a long time, all she cared about was getting revenge.

Finally, the big shots at Langley had decided to put her zeal for catching traitors to good use and transferred her to the CIA’s version of Internal Affairs. Instead of chasing after bad guys, she’d been chasing dirty agents. It wasn’t something an agent should ever be asked to do, and Alina had hated it. So when the director of the DCO had approached her out of the blue about a new job—one that included a promise to jump-start her search for Wade—she’d hadn’t even had to think about it. That brilliant move had gotten her a partner who had claws and glowing yellow eyes.

Well, she’d wanted a chance to get out and do something different. From now on, maybe she should be more careful what she asked for.

“You going to be able to focus on what we’re doing here?” Trevor asked, pulling her out of her reveries.

Alina gave herself a shake and realized they were in the parking lot of a nice little apartment complex with well-trimmed hedges and perfectly manicured lawns. Around them, the other spaces were filled with electric cars. It wasn’t exactly a place that screamed “cold-blooded killer hideout.”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured Trevor, then added, “assuming you’re actually planning to tell me what we’re doing here. Who’s this guy we’re looking for, and do you have anything linking him to the bombing besides the fact that he happened to come into work early that day?”

If Trevor was involved with the people who’d murdered John Loughlin, why act like he was hunting down the killer? And if he wasn’t involved with the rogue agents and honestly wanted to find who’d done it, why was he so reluctant to talk to her?

“His name is Seth Larson,” Trevor said and shut off the engine. “The DCO brought him in to specialize in cybersecurity and data protection. Like I said before, he was hired three weeks before the bombing and quit two days later.”

As if that explained it, Trevor opened his door and stepped out of the vehicle. Alina quickly unbuckled her seat belt and jumped out, practically running to catch up with him as he headed for the apartment building.

“You do realize that when he started working at the DCO could easily be a coincidence, right?” she asked as she fell into step beside him. “And as far as quitting right after the bombing, I’m betting a lot of people bailed after that.”

Alina took his silence as confirmation as they entered the building and climbed the stairs.

“Do you have anything else on this guy?” she asked. “Some indication of a payment, a personal beef with Loughlin, a connection with the rogue agents who went on the run?”

Trevor shook his head as he stopped in front of apartment 231. “Nothing like that. But Larson was previously employed by a man John had been trying to apprehend for years.”

“What man?”

“An extremely powerful man who has used other people to do his dirty work for years. As it happens, he’s also the same man who got Seth Larson the job at the DCO.”

That didn’t tell her much. And while Trevor appeared to be searching for the bomber, he didn’t seem to be trying to find any of the rogue agents.

She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but before she got a chance, he reached out and pushed the doorbell. He immediately followed that up with a few knocks that were louder than the bell.

The door was jerked open so fast, Alina automatically reached for the sidearm on her hip but stopped at the last second at the sight of a young guy in jeans and a T-shirt with wire-rimmed glasses and at least three days of stubble on his face, a little blond boy standing behind him.

“I heard the bell,” the man said, clearly pissed off. “You didn’t have to knock, too.”

Trevor frowned and opened his month to say something no doubt abrupt and snark filled, but his words were cut off by a soft, frightened voice.

“Daddy, do you have to go away again?”

Larson glanced over his shoulder at his son. The little boy, who couldn’t have been more than eight, was close to tears.

“No, Cody. Daddy’s not going anywhere. I’m just talking to some old friends.”

Cody moved closer, studying her and Trevor, his blue eyes curious. “Friends?”

Larson looked at them, a pleading expression on his face. “You two are friends, right?”

Alina smiled at Cody. “Yes, we’re friends of your dad. We worked with him a little while ago.”

That seemed to satisfy the little boy, who turned without another word and headed back into the living room. When he was out of earshot, Seth Larson frowned at them.

“I don’t remember seeing either of you from the time I was at the DCO, but I’m guessing that’s where you know me from,” he said.

“Yes,” Trevor said, his tone softer than Alina would have expected. “I’m Trevor Maxwell, and this is my partner, Alina Bosch. We’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the morning the bombing happened.”

Larson threw a quick glance at his son, as if he was afraid Cody might have heard, but Cody was lying on the floor coloring and didn’t even look up. “Sure, I can talk. Just…don’t use that word—bomb. I don’t think Cody knows what it means, and I really don’t want him to. He’s autistic, and sometimes he gets upset easily.”

Alina nodded. Beside her, Trevor did the same.

Larson led them into the small, tidy apartment, past an eat-in kitchen, and into the living room. There was a couch against one wall, with a TV and bookshelves opposite it. A fancy computer sat on the coffee table, some kind of accounting spreadsheet showing on the screen, but Alina barely took notice of any of it. Cody was far more fascinating.

Spread out on the floor around him must have been nearly a hundred completed pictures torn out of coloring books. Every one of them was absolutely amazing. While the colors were unusual—trees in blues and purples, people in every shade of the rainbow, skies in yellow with orange clouds—there wasn’t a single crayon mark out of place or outside the lines. In a word, they were breathtaking.

Seemingly oblivious to them, Cody finished the picture he was working on, then carefully pulled it out of the book and set it aside before starting the next one.

Larson motioned them toward the couch. “You two want a soda…or water? Sorry, but that’s all I have in the house.”

Alina shook her head as she sat. “No, I’m good.”

Trevor declined the offer as well, moving carefully around the pictures on the floor as he grabbed a place beside her on the couch and pulled out a pen and spiral notepad from a cargo pocket. Larson sat down on the floor with Cody, making sure to move his son’s artwork aside first.

“To be honest, I’m kind of surprised no one stopped by before this,” he said.

That confirmed what Alina had thought. It shocked the heck out of her at the same time. She was an agent, not a cop, but talking to every single person who’d been in the complex at the time of the bombing seemed like common sense.

“On the day of the…incident…you showed up for work two and a half hours before your normal duty time,” Trevor said. “Mind if I ask why?”

Larson’s gaze went to his son, a smile curving his mouth. “I went in early so I could grab a few hours before Cody got out of bed. He loves his grandma—she watches him for me when I’m at work—but he can be a handful sometimes.” He frowned at them. “My boss—Lisa Marino—said it was okay. I’m sure she’ll confirm that if you ask her.”

Beside her, Trevor visibly relaxed. “Lisa left the DCO two weeks ago. I’ll try to get in contact with her, but that could take a while.”

“How about Karl Thomas? Is he still there?” Larson asked. “He knew about me going in early.”

Trevor nodded. “I think he’s still there. I’ll check.”

Larson looked at Cody again, his expression thoughtful this time. “I guess a lot of people left after what happened.”

“Is that why you quit when you did?” Alina asked. “Because of the…incident?”

Larson was silent for a moment as he watched his son color. Tears formed in his eyes, and he blinked.

“I had to,” he said, turning back to them. “I loved the work, and the people there were amazing, but the hours were already getting tough on Cody…and his grandma. Trying to go to work early might have helped a little, but a full day at work was still too long to be away from him. When the other stuff happened, I realized that if I’d walked past the admin building forty-five minutes later to get that cup of coffee from the cafeteria, I could have been caught up in…in everything that happened. Then Cody wouldn’t have anyone. I couldn’t take that risk.”

“How long have you been taking care of Cody on your own?” Trevor asked.

“About a year,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I guess Kristy just couldn’t deal anymore. She bailed one day while I was at work. I was mad at her for a long time, but I finally gave up on that. I know now that she did the best she could.”

Alina glanced at Cody to see if he’d react to the mention of his mother, but he continued to color like he hadn’t heard a thing.

“Do you stay home with him full-time?” she asked Larson.

Larson nodded. “Pretty much. Like I said, my mom comes over to take care of him now and then, but he doesn’t like me to be out of his sight for long.” He gestured to the laptop on the coffee table. “I do a little consulting work long distance to help pay the bills, but it’s tough. I really thought I’d struck gold landing that job with the DCO.”

Alina remembered thinking something very similar when Dick had offered her a job there. That reminded her of what Trevor had said before they’d knocked on the door, about there being an extremely powerful man involved in getting Larson hired at the DCO.

“Can I ask how you heard about the job at the DCO?” she asked Larson.

“I’d done some work for a subsidiary of Chadwick-Thorn back before Kristy left, then some consulting work in April for the main corporate office over near Anacostia-Bolling, installing and networking a fancy security system,” Larson said. “While I was there, I got the opportunity to meet with Thomas Thorn, and after the security gig was done, he offered me an IT job at the DCO. It had everything I was looking for—good hours, great pay, amazing medical benefits, challenging work. It was mostly internal security stuff like monitoring DCO employees to make sure none of them were inadvertently sending classified material over unclassified computer systems. Things like that.”

Interesting. Was Thomas Thorn the man Trevor had been talking about? The one John Loughlin had been trying to put in jail for years? If so, no wonder Trevor hadn’t wanted to say anything. The previous director of the DCO had been chasing a man who was not only the CEO of one of the biggest and most politically connected defense contractors in the world, but also a former senator? There was something scary big going on here.

She was still thinking about that interesting tidbit of information when she realized Trevor was asking something else. Alina forced herself to focus on what her partner was saying.

“You mentioned that you were near the admin building forty-five minutes before the…incident…getting coffee. Did you see anyone else around at that time?”

Larson thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it was still dark at that time, but I saw three or four people around the main building.”

“Did you recognize them?” Trevor asked.

“I hadn’t worked there long enough to learn almost anyone’s name outside the IT section,” the man said. “Sorry.”

Trevor frowned, but Alina wasn’t ready to walk away from the potential clue just yet. “Do you think you could ID the people you saw if we gave you some photos to look through?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Larson said. “But do you think you can bring the photos here or email them to me so I don’t have to leave Cody with my mom?”

“Of course,” she agreed.

While Alina added his name and email to the contact list in her phone, Trevor scribbled something in his notepad. She thought he was writing down notes on what they’d talked about, but then he tore the paper out of the pad and held it out to Larson.

“Give this guy a call in a few days,” Trevor said. “I think he can set you up with some IT work you can do from home. Tell him I sent you. I put my number on there, too, just in case you need anything.”

Alina glanced at Larson’s little boy as she stood. “Bye, Cody.”

Since Cody didn’t look up from his coloring book, she thought he hadn’t heard her, but just as she and Trevor followed Larson to the front door, the boy jumped up and ran over with one of the pictures he’d made. When he held it out to her, she saw it was the one he’d been working on when she and Trevor had first gotten there, the one with the yellow sky and the orange clouds. She took it very carefully.

“Is this for me?” she asked.

Cody didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and went back to his coloring book, starting another page.

“Thank you,” she said, but he was already lost in his work.

She glanced at Trevor as they headed outside to their SUV. “What was that all about?”

He pushed the button on the key fob to unlock the doors. “What was what all about?”

“That number you gave Larson. Do you always give suspects the name and number of prospective employers?”

Trevor shrugged. “I think it’s obvious that guy isn’t a suspect. He’s just someone who might have seen something. Besides, he could use a little help.”

Alina couldn’t argue with any of those things. “It was a nice thing to do.”

He only grunted in answer.

They didn’t talk much as they headed north on Highway 2 back toward Fredericksburg and the interstate. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was low on the horizon. It would be nightfall by the time they got back to the DCO complex.

As the last few beams of the sun’s light slipped through the trees lining the road, Alina replayed the day’s events. To say she was confused about everything she’d seen and learned was an understatement. Her new partner wasn’t anything like Dick had described. Other than the fact that he was very closed-mouth when it came to sharing information, Trevor seemed like an okay guy. Well, there were the fangs, claws, and glowing gold eyes. Those were going to take a while to get used to. Even so, she wasn’t ready to brand him the traitor the director of the DCO claimed him to be—yet.