Chapter Ten
“You want me to provide an alibi?” The glow drained from her cheeks.
Tension sizzled through the air as Mac watched her body language to see if it matched her words. “You know I have to ask.”
She crossed her arms, every line of her body defensive and resentful. “I don’t remember exactly where I was on Monday morning.” Her eyes moved up and right.
Shit. She was lying. People lied to cops and FBI agents all the time. The question was, what did she have to hide?
“But this morning, when the DJ was shot”—She’d already put together what the cops were officially refusing to admit—“I was in a coffee shop and then on the Metro.”
“Got people who can verify that?”
She gave him the name of a coffee shop near Tenleytown and the metro stop where she’d got off the train.
“Don’t tell them why you’re asking,” she said. “Please.”
He grimaced.
She cradled her forehead in her hand and looked like she suddenly felt ill. Because, really, what were they going to think when the FBI started asking questions about her movements? He made himself push on. She wasn’t his friend or his date. He had a job to do.
“Any idea who might be committing these murders?”
“I told you. I’m not in touch with anyone from that life anymore.”
“What about your brother?”
“Eddie?” An ugly laugh escaped. “I don’t have anything to do with that wacko.”
Eddie Hines was still incarcerated in the Idaho State Correctional Center. They’d pulled a bullet matched to his gun out of a SWAT officer’s vertebrae. The policeman had been lucky to not be paralyzed. To prove that point the officer turned up in a borrowed wheelchair and a “here but for the grace of God” sign every time Eddie came up for parole.
“I meant your other brother.”
She reached out to hold on to the back of the couch. “He doesn’t know about any of this.”
Mac frowned. “You mean the murders?”
“No,” she bit out sharply. “Any of it. Not the Pioneers. Not Kodiak Compound. Not who our family really is. Nothing.” Her fists clenched and unclenched. “And I want it to stay that way.”
What the hell? “Where does he think he comes from?”
“I told him we were the children of Trudy’s second-cousin on her mom’s side. I told him our parents died up in Oregon and Trudy took us in.”
“You lied to him about his parents?” Holy shit.
She put her hand on her hip. “Don’t use that judgmental tone with me, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Steve McKenzie.”
“Sorry, Tess.” He strode toward her until they were only a foot apart. “I didn’t realize you had the monopoly on changing your identity.”
She flinched and blinked rapidly as if fighting tears. “If anyone should understand why I wanted to leave that ugliness behind it should be you. You need to leave. Now.”
When he didn’t move she went to the front door and opened it, waiting for him to take the hint. Damn. He’d blown it. When he stood in front of her again he opened his mouth to speak.
She beat him to it. “Don’t leave town, right?” Bitterness was rife in the lines around her mouth. In the bite of her tone.
“I was going to say that if anyone from Kodiak gets in touch—”
“They won’t.”
“But if they do—”
“They won’t!” She appeared on the verge of crying, but fighting it.
He’d seen all sorts of tears during his time on the job. It was always the ones that didn’t fall that affected him most.
He pulled a business card out of his pocket, took her hand and folded her fingers over it. The skin on skin contact made something unexpected spread through his body. Despite her anger she felt it too—he could tell by the way her pupils widened and her lips parted on a gasp. She tried to pull away but he didn’t let go and he didn’t back down.
Instead he pulled her toward him into a stiff embrace. His breath brushed her hair as he kissed the top of her head—like she was still that little girl he’d known all those years ago.
“I’m not the bad guy here, Tess,” he murmured against her hair.
She kept her head bowed, and eyes closed, hand pressed like a fiery brand against his heart.
“Neither am I, but no one seems to care.”
She pulled away, and he let her go. Then he walked away just like he had nearly twenty years ago.
He sat in his car, staring at the house, knowing she was inside watching him right back.
The unexpected attraction had caught him off guard. He’d forgotten what it felt like to actually want someone. But he couldn’t afford to start something with the daughter of one of the most notorious white supremacist leaders in history. That would not look great on his résumé.
That stupid hug had knocked him off balance and made him sit here like a damn stalker. He’d hoped to neutralize some of the antagonism his turning up out of the blue had created and keep her onside should he need her help in the future.
But now the fresh scent of her shampoo invaded his nostrils, and the feel of her soft skin tantalized his senses. The sight of her in that damp robe—knowing that she was naked underneath—had distracted the hell out of him. And damned if that embrace hadn’t felt like coming home.
Chances were she wasn’t involved in the current murders. It didn’t seem likely that an accountant, raised by a woman of color, would turn around and start killing people based on her daddy’s evil doctrine. But who knew? He’d seen crazier things in his career. Tomorrow he’d check out her alibi and cross her off his to-do list.
More’s the pity.
And so what if his mind turned dirty. It wasn’t going to lead anywhere. She was off limits. And he was in control of his wants and needs.
He started the engine. What he undoubtedly needed was to find out more about the kid brother. His records were sealed but Mac had a friend in the DOJ working to get them unsealed. It might take some time, not to mention a warrant, but he would track the kid down if only to rule him out.
He could come back and talk to Tess again, but this wasn’t his case. Plus, the idea of spending more time with her appealed a little too much, and he wasn’t about to blow his chance of getting his dream job for a woman he barely knew.
Twenty years ago, Federal and State law enforcement in Idaho had been growing increasingly worried about the activities of David Hines’s expanding group of white nationalists who hid under the cloak of a fervent whites-only Christian church.
Apparently, Jesus Christ was the only person in the Middle East to be born white.
Go figure.
He’d never blamed Tess for being part of something she had no control over. He didn’t want her dragged into the public eye if she was innocent. That’s why he’d come alone in an unofficial capacity. But she was definitely hiding something and he intended to find out what it was.
The Pioneers had been able to spot most informants before they ever got near the compound. Mac had been new to Idaho, fresh out of the police academy, and had grown up on ranches.
Cowboy Kenny Travers had started working on a cattle ranch near the town of Kodiak, Idaho, hanging out in a local bar in his spare time. He’d become friendly with Eddie Hines. Shooting pool, talking racist bullshit, chatting up girls. It had taken a few months to gain Eddie’s trust, then the guy had invited Kenny out to the compound and into the fold.
The rest was history.
Did Eddie still have connections on the outside? Did white nationalists visit their buddies in prison? Did Eddie-the-asshole know who was involved in this new string of murders? And might he swap that information for his freedom?
Or was this killer a whole new ball of wax?
As far as Mac knew there was no evidence the Pioneers were involved in these new murders. So as appealing as the idea was to turn up and see Eddie’s ugly face contort with rage when he found out Kenny Travers had in reality been an undercover cop, Mac was needed here. He’d send a lead to the office in Boise and ask for an agent to go question Eddie. Find out who he’d been communicating with.
Mac pressed his lips together. He remembered every detail of the year he’d spent undercover in that cesspit. Every flat handed salute, every racial slur his lips had been forced to utter.
It might have proven that a poor boy from Montana could make a difference, but it had stained his soul. He’d been forced to stand by and do nothing when he’d witnessed things that made him physically ill—like a girl forced into an early marriage with a man old enough to have been Mac’s father.
His stomach knotted when he thought about the children. Theresa Jane—Tess—and the others had been treated like indentured servants, or worse. Most of them had been brainwashed minions, but she’d always had spunk and had laughed more than anyone else in that whole damned place.
He flashed to her standing in her kitchen in that white bathrobe. It didn’t look like she laughed much anymore.
To this day he didn’t know if Theresa Jane—Tess, dammit—had been sexually abused or not. He hadn’t been privy to her psychological assessment although he’d contributed to the reports. The fact Walt had died during the shootout was not something that had troubled Mac’s conscience one little bit, but Ellie…
He still woke up in a cold sweat some nights hearing Ellie scream. If Mac had married her like David Hines wanted, she would have survived. He needn’t have slept with her. She’d be living her life somewhere, maybe doing people’s taxes like her sister.
He’d begged his boss to go in when he found out she’d been married to Trimble, but they weren’t ready and underage marriage wasn’t illegal as long as the parents gave permission—it still wasn’t in more states than most people in America realized. The evidence they’d had at that point wasn’t enough to arrest the ring leaders and permanently shut down the compound. Two months after thirteen-year-old Ellie had been married off, dumber-than-a-rock Kenny Travers had come across the cache of stolen guns stored in a horse trailer in one of the barns. That had been the beginning of the end for the Pioneers. But it had been too late for poor sweet Ellie.
He put his car in drive and rolled slowly past Tess’s house. Her silhouette was outlined by his headlights in the window, as she watched him leave. It was time to say goodbye to this part of his life. There was no going back.
A few seconds later his cell rang. Work—not Tess asking him to come back and start something they shouldn’t.
“McKenzie,” he answered impatiently.
“There’s been another murder. A rabbi on Munroe Street,” ASC Gerald told him brusquely.
Shit. “When?” Mac asked.
“Twenty minutes ago.”
He blew out a big breath. Well, at least he knew for sure Tess had an alibi for this murder.
“The director wants a task force assembled ASAP.”
Mac’s attention laser-focused on what the guy was saying.
“I mentioned your concerns about the judge and the DJ being victims of hate crimes to my boss yesterday.”
He held his breath.
“They want you to head the task force and run it from HQ.”
He fist pumped the air.
“McKenzie? You there?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Excitement shimmered through him. Like the Minnesota mall attack, this was the sort of case that made careers and might leapfrog him straight to SAC. “Do I get to pick my own team?”
“Some of them,” Gerald allowed. “Send me a list of agents you want. I’ll start reaching out to DHS, the Capitol Police and WFO. I’ll get everything they have on the murders so far.”
“Ask the officers and agents involved in those investigations to join the task force. It’ll give us additional boots on the ground and fast-track the information they’ve already gathered. Tell the ME not to move the rabbi’s body until I get there.” He checked his watch. Wrote down the address. “I’m thirty minutes out.”
“Roger that.” Gerald hung up.
Mac’s heart pounded in anticipation and he started driving like he meant it.
Four murders in thirty-six hours. Someone was killing people of this fine city based on their beliefs and the color of their skin. That wasn’t the kind of America he wanted to live in. He’d waged this war before but now they’d brought the battle to his turf and this time they were the ones cloaked in shadows. But he appreciated how these guys thought; he understood how they hated. They’d make a mistake at some point. Unfortunately, until they did there were thousands if not millions of potential targets in the DC area alone.
And every last one of them was at risk.
* * *
Tess closed the door and locked it, leaning her forehead against the cool wood. She was never going to outrun her childhood, but she would not let it destroy the one person in the world she loved. She turned off the lights and went into the living room, stared into her quiet street long after Steve McKenzie had driven away.
Did he really suspect she was involved?
Well, why not? Her family had been a bunch of freaking lunatics.
She stared down at the card in her hand. The fancy embossed foil FBI symbol seemed to mock her attempts at making a new life for herself and her brother.
ASAC Steve McKenzie. She rubbed her thumb over his name.
Her ten-year-old self had loved him more than she’d loved her own parents but that did not make him her friend. Twenty years ago, McKenzie and his fellow officers had abandoned her to her fate. She’d saved herself and her brother and she wasn’t about to rely on the cops for anything now she was an adult.
She closed her eyes at the realization she sounded just as paranoid as her parents had been. Trust no one must be the family motto.
McKenzie’s visit brought it all back. The suffocating environment she’d grown up in. The gunfight that had ended her childhood. Her mother’s poisonous last words.
The bullets had finally stopped pounding her childhood home in the hour before dawn. The silence had been more unnerving than the gunfight. Incredibly, at some point she must have fallen asleep. Only to be woken by a huge bang as the cops stormed the cabin. She hadn’t cried out when two masked men had opened her closet door, leading with their big black guns, though she’d been terrified. They’d found her clutching Cole to her chest and hanging on to Sampson’s neck when he growled at them.
She’d screamed when they’d eased her brother out of her arms. Another man came in and removed Sampson from her grasp. They’d searched her, gently but firmly. She’d thought the black masked men were going to kill her. Instead one of them had wrapped her in his arms, pushed her face against his chest and told her to keep her eyes closed as he carried her out of there.
She still remembered the smell of his uniform—smoke and sweat and gunpowder. She’d tried to keep her eyes closed, she truly had. He’d even placed a hand half over her face, but in her peripheral vision she’d spotted the body of her mother as the man had stepped over her outside the bedroom door. Francis Hines’s eyes had been wide open. Tess still saw those dead eyes—the exact same color and shape as her own—in her nightmares. In the kitchen, the dawn’s rays had reflected off the mother-of-pearl buttons on her daddy’s favorite chambray shirt as he lay dead on the kitchen floor. A dark stain of blood had mottled the pale blue fabric.
Her stomach had churned and she’d pressed her nose tighter against the stranger’s chest. He’d cupped the back of her head and squeezed, trying to give her comfort.
He was the enemy, but in that moment, he’d tried to soothe the pain and terror that ripped through her in a way her family never had. Instead of hurting her, the stranger had taken her to safety and made sure she was uninjured. It was then she’d realized her family had lied to her all those years. She’d started sobbing uncontrollably and he’d taken her in his arms and rocked her until she’d fallen asleep.
Looking back, she wondered why she’d cried at all. Her family had been monsters who’d tried to instill their twisted beliefs into her psyche. They’d belittled and mistreated her when she’d questioned them or disobeyed their rules. Walt had tried to sexually assault her and she was sure he would have succeeded eventually. At thirteen she’d probably have been married off to one of the many losers who came in a constant stream to her daddy’s isolated compound. If she’d rebelled they would have killed her for spite and called it justice.
It wasn’t justice. It was abuse.
The only person she missed was Ellie.
A knot formed in Tess’s throat at the thought of her sister’s death.
No, Kenny Travers had never really fit in. She wondered how he’d managed to hide his true essence for so long when surrounded by such all-encompassing hate.
The coffee she’d drunk churned in her stomach as the memories swirled. Part of her wished she could forget that time and where she came from, but another part was proud. She’d been strong enough to retain her compassion and humanity despite everything she’d endured. She’d been resilient enough to move on, to grow and thrive and blossom into a respectable and worthwhile human being.
Tess stared across the darkened room to the photograph of her mom. What would she have done?
Trudy Fallon had been the first genuinely good person she’d ever met. The daughter of a rich, white mother and poor, black father who’d met in college and fallen in love, gotten married against their families’ wishes. The marriage hadn’t lasted more than a couple of years and a young Trudy had been shuffled between two worlds never fitting into either. That’s what had made her so perfect for Tess and Cole. She understood what it was like to be unloved and unwanted. She’d appreciated that where they came from didn’t define who they were, it was what was inside that mattered. The three of them had made their own little family, one blessed with a deep abiding love. Losing her adoptive mother last year had hurt more than losing her entire family at Kodiak Compound.
She shook herself out of her melancholy and ran upstairs to throw on warm pjs.
She came back downstairs and decided to work. But the silence was oppressive so she switched on the TV and immediately wished she hadn’t.
The news headlines proclaimed a rabbi had been murdered.
Cold washed over her.
She’d been able to retain a small degree of hope that the murder of the judge and his wife, and that of the transgender DJ, were unfortunate coincidences. This was a big city. They led prominent lives, which attracted the haters no matter your creed, politics, or sexuality.
But the rabbi…
He wasn’t a celebrity. He wasn’t high profile. According to the news anchor he was just some sweet old guy, beloved by his family and the community, renowned for acts of inclusion and kindness.
Dread spread through her veins.
She called Cole, but he didn’t pick up.
Was he honestly pissed with her, or was he hiding something?
Then she remembered something that made her knees give way. Monday—the day the judge and his wife had been gunned down in cold blood—had been February twenty-third.
If he’d lived, it would have been her father’s sixty-fifth birthday.
She swallowed repeatedly as her stomach threatened to crawl up her throat.
Had one of his followers decided to make some sort of statement for the twentieth anniversary of the raid on the compound? Anniversaries were a big deal with these antigovernment types. Just ask Timothy McVeigh.
Or was it one of those horrible coincidences that cropped up sporadically to mess up the world like a cosmic joke?
She paced the room. This was so like the plan her daddy had preached over and over again. The language so heinous it had been seared into her mind with the indelible ink—like the tattoo they’d branded her with as a child. Even the memory of his voice in her head made her want to gag. How he could have preached that twisted message and thought it was okay? How could all the people she’d known back then have been so deviant and misguided?
She wasn’t surprised at her mother.
Francis Hines had been a hard woman who’d only balked at the constraints of being female in a white nationalist enclave, not at their ideology. If anything, she’d taken a harder line.
Occasionally she saw her mother’s face reflected back at her in the mirror, or in a photograph taken from the wrong angle.
It scared her.
To think she shared her mother’s DNA made her want to scrape the skin off her bones.
There were others on the lunatic fringe who shared similar beliefs to the Pioneers. They weren’t the only crazies out there, but the link to her father’s birthday… The fact it was twenty years since the raid…
She contemplated Steve McKenzie’s fancy business card. Should she call him with the information about her father’s birthday? But he was FBI. Surely, he’d figured it out? Maybe that was why he’d turned up tonight.
More importantly she needed to know why Cole had a photograph of that judge in his file cabinet? And why had he removed it?
She sat on the edge of her sofa and watched the same TV footage repeat, over and over. A row of parked cars along a dark street with yellow tape strung across both ends to prevent reporters getting any closer. A tent had been constructed over the body. Police cruisers with their lights flashing created a weird futuristic atmosphere. Small pockets of uniformed cops stood around, looking angry and nervous.
A man in an FBI raid jacket entered the tent covering the body. Tess rewound the footage. McKenzie.
At least she had an alibi for this murder.
Did Cole? Damn.
Police weren’t saying how the rabbi died, but the reporter suggested a witness had heard muted gunshots—same as the other murders.
Tess looked at the photograph of her adoptive mother on the fireplace. What should she do?
“There are growing fears that a series of hate crimes have been occurring in metro-DC area,” the reporter said. “We’ve just been informed the FBI is forming a joint task force to investigate. Spokesmen for the FBI have so far refused to comment, except to urge everyone to remain calm but vigilant, and for anyone with information to please come forward.”
Tess walked into the kitchen, her gaze pulled toward her purse where she’d stashed the jump drive.
If she found evidence that Cole was involved in these murders would she give him up to the police? Would she give up the baby brother she’d vowed to love and protect with her own life when they were still both children? The idea stabbed like a serrated knife right through her chest.
He was sweet and kind and she loved him more than she’d ever loved anyone, but was it possible he was involved in a conspiracy to commit murder? What if there were other people targeted for death? People who could be saved? Her mouth went dry. It was an impossible choice, but it was really no choice at all. If Cole was guilty she’d tell McKenzie in a heartbeat to save innocents.
She snagged the small plastic stick from her purse. Sweat beaded on her brow as she slid the drive into the USB port.
The files took time to populate and she stood there nervously clenching her fists. Movie files. She clicked on one of the icons, her heart pounding in trepidation.
The sound of heavy breathing filled the room. She blinked and stared wide-eyed at the thrusting buttocks that filled the screen. Her mouth opened. Whoa. She didn’t know people could even do that standing up.
She tried another file. A girl in a tight-fitting outfit filled the screen, bent over, washing a car. Tess knew where that was going so she turned it off. She raised her face to the ceiling, and blew out a big sigh of relief.
This was her brother’s porn collection.
She ran her hands over her face and laughed. How the hell was she going to sneak this back into his desk without him knowing about it?
Who cared? She yanked it out of the slot and shut down the computer.
She still didn’t understand the connection between her brother and the judge’s picture, but at least this data stick didn’t contain a murder list.
A heavy feeling settled inside her chest. No matter how badly she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore the unanswered questions hanging over her head. There was only one person she knew who might have answers, but to get them she needed to do something she’d sworn she’d never do. She needed to confront her brother.