DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (2 page)

“So now, the action you can choose, is to help me. You see what I mean?”

“Help you . . .”

Grimm’s face twitched, the upper lip curling ever so slightly into a sneer, as if the word
help
created more bad taste in his mouth. “Shut up,” he said, “and listen.”

Brendan was quiet. He listened. If anything, it was good just to be out of Motchan Center for a little while.

“We’re the second largest jail system in America,” Grimm said, “and we’re being investigated.”

Brendan raised his eyebrows, but stayed quiet.

“Let’s just say the New York City Department of Investigation has been looking into us for matters of violence and other illegal conduct. It’s shaping up to be a massive probe, an unprecedented joint, tactical search and operation. I’ve got so much pressure on me from the Commissioner and Corrections Commissioner right now, it makes Laruso look like your girlfriend lying on top of you in the park. I’m talking serious pressure. And I’m not going to go out like this. I’ve got two years until retirement on full pension. My wife and I are moving far, far away from here. I’ve been looking out over this island for too many years. Decades. And I can’t have it all come down around my ears at the last second, just before I get free. Because one thing about those of us who work in the jail system, Brendan; we’re in here, too. We’re caged, just like you.”

Brendan cleared his throat. “What can I do for you?”

CHAPTER ONE / TUESDAY, 8:58 AM

Jennifer Aiken took the stage in the Robert F. Kennedy building and everybody clapped. The auditorium seated over a thousand people with a main floor and the mezzanine. There were just about fifty people present but their enthusiasm made it feel like a stadium. She walked to the center of the stage and stood at the glass podium. She smiled at the group and felt generally good that she was at last back in DC, but it was hard to feel like a whole person. She’d lost something, and she knew it, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get it back. Innocence wasn’t exactly the right word, she thought, but it was close.

Three weeks in a hospital in New York. Three months of convalescing and physical therapy followed by a month of preparation and then two months in courtrooms and in offices with walls of glass overlooking the city. It was uncomfortable, at times, being that high up, and she wondered if she’d be forever scared of heights.

Back in the offices of the Justice Department — which smelled perpetually of new carpet, ink toner and perfume, washing her in nostalgia — Jennifer had prepared her presentation. She felt like she’d had to rebuild the XList case from near scratch. For two weeks, she’d had a small entourage with her, a gathering of assistants buzzing around. When she went somewhere it was in a veritable motorcade, with her own driver, bodyguards, lead and follow cars. The Attorney General was taking no chances with her; they said she was to be prized and protected.

Not for their lack of trying, Jennifer didn’t feel prized. She felt older, she often felt tired, and part of her dreamed of faraway places. Places like Cotuit Bay in the summer, with its ivory stucco buildings and crushed shell walkways spread out beneath the overturned bowl of blue sky.

It seemed hopelessly beyond reach.

“Hello everybody, I’m Jennifer Aiken, special prosecutor with the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit.”

They had gathered near the front, an even split of men and women, all wearing sterling but conservative ensembles, average age about forty-five. As Jennifer surveyed them, a man in a dark suit stepped into the room through the back door, and leaned against the wall and watched her from beneath the mezzanine. She looked away from him, momentarily flustered.

“Let’s get started.” She used the clicker to call up the first slide. Jennifer’s laptop was wirelessly linked to a projector hanging in the middle of the room. When she pressed the button a face appeared on the screen: pretty, with strawberry blonde hair, and a light constellation of freckles.

Rebecca Heilshorn loomed over them, her eyes filled with pain, her lips forming a sham smile. Standing on the stage, Jennifer’s body was about the size of Rebecca’s nose. The image had been cropped from a professional photograph, the kind still taken at a few department stores in rural areas. It had once stood proudly framed in Rebecca’s house in the country. Jennifer had pulled it from the files.

“This is Rebecca Heilshorn, murdered at age twenty-seven.”

She clicked the button and the image changed to a different young woman: dirty-blonde hair, sharp cheekbones and a square jaw. Beautiful, but tough.

“This is Sloane Dewan, twenty-eight, and quite the survival story.”

Another click.

“And this is a woman named Lana Mazursky. Whereabouts unknown.”

A third pretty face commanded the screen. Mazursky had an equally square shape to her features, while still feminine. Large eyes, dark hair pulled back with strands twirling around her ears. The more Jennifer looked at them, the more she saw how much Mazursky looked like her daughter.

She advanced to a slide which paired the faces of Sloane Dewan and Lana Mazursky side by side. “Lana is Sloane’s mother.”

Mother was the operative word. She imagined the scene as she’d pieced it together: a young Mazursky writhing in an alleyway as the rain poured down, giving birth. Seamus Argon later darkening the mouth of the alley when he heard the abandoned infant’s cries coming from a storm drain.

She gripped the podium with both hands again and gazed out over the expectant faces of the crowd. “These three woman have something in common. In unique ways, they’re each a part of the black market prostitution ring called XList. Lana there at the beginning, Rebecca in the middle of it, and Sloane a product of it. In my investigation, which started over a year ago, and which I recently resumed, I traced the evolution of XList from its origins to what it is now, a massive black market in the United States and into Canada and Mexico.”

Jennifer observed the man standing at the back. He pointed a finger at the door, and then turned and let himself out.

* * *

She studied him as he sat across from her in the back of the large SUV. The driver whisked them away down Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving behind the squat, gray Justice Department headquarters.

“I thought we were meeting later today,” she said. “You stalking me? Checking up?”

“Been a long time,” Rascher said. “That was a good presentation. Sorry I couldn’t stay to the end.”

She looked out the window as they sped down Ninth Street.

He tilted his head to the side, sympathy working its way into his eyes. “How are you feeling?”

She looked at him, perhaps too quickly, her gaze too sharp. She realized some part of her would have loved to boot him out the door and watch his body bounce down the road. Maybe get run over by one of the huge tourist buses circling the Smithsonian.

“I’m fine,” she said, debating on whether to say any more. If she should tell him how hard it had been since that day in Manhattan. That despite everyone’s sympathetic smiles, three different specialists and a physical therapist, she still dreamed of Jeremy Staryles at night. Or Agent Apollo, taking his own life in front of her.

No, she concluded that the simple
I’m fine
was sufficient.

“Jen, you’ve really pulled it together. And after all you’ve been through. It’s remarkable.”

“What I’ve been through? What about what they’ve been through? Sloane Dewan. Lana Mazursky. Heilshorn’s daughter. Brendan Healy.” She raised her eyebrows on the last name. “He’s the main reason I’m even alive right now.” She wanted to say more but held off.
Why wasn’t I protected? Why wasn’t I told the FBI was going to play possum while the Justice Department sent me into the lion’s den?

Rascher looked at her like he was reading her thoughts. She felt irritated, as if it somehow made her a transparent person. She decided instead it was because she and John had spent three years together in law school. And that, like it or not, people didn’t really change. She thought she’d bring that up if the situation called for it. Surely John thought he’d come a long way and had changed since those days. Didn’t everyone think that?

“Hey listen,” he said in a voice she recognized. It was the same voice he would use after his temper flared and he’d yell and berate her, all the while telling her he was challenging her to become a more astute observer, a more critical thinker. A better person. She rested in the idea that men like him were a dying breed. That was harsh, she knew it was harsh — probably harsher than imagining him kicked out of a moving vehicle — but she couldn’t help it.

“Listen,” he said again, and shifted his weight.
Dear God, he’s going to put a hand on my knee
. But he didn’t. He said, “I stepped in because I had to. You have been in no condition. No one faults you for that. But there’s no sense in . . . I just don’t want you to think that way, that you’re always on approval now.”

“Of course I think that. It’s true.”

“Can we bury this thing between us?”

“That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

“If this is a conflict, us working together on this, we need to address that now.”

“It’s not a conflict.”

The problem is that in seven months you’ve done nothing with my task force except tell me to hold tight
, she thought.

He raised his eyebrows at her. His irises sparkled a royal blue. His hair had thinned out, though, and this gave her some small satisfaction.

She wondered if she was being irrational. Overly negative. She chalked it up to the morning’s talk. She never much cared for getting up in front of people to speak. It had a way of desiccating her, her throat scraping through the words. And her headache had teeth in it. She needed to take one of her pills.

“Let’s forget it,” she said of their personal history.

He sat back and looked out the window, as if disappointed. Ninth Street became the expressway and cut past the Department of Homeland Security. It was all here. One building after the other in mostly off-white, tombstone gray, or pale, ecru colors. The curved architecture of the Housing and Development building in L’Enfant Plaza, the red brick of the Smithsonian Castle against the bright morning sky. And then they shot beneath the 750 Building, amber lights of the short tunnel flashing past like a strobe. Was he expecting something else from her? Some gushing about how great it was to have him back in her life? If so, it pissed her off. She couldn’t hold back any longer.

“What I want to know,” she said, “is how much you knew, how much anyone knew, of what was going on when I got sent up to New York to look into Alexander Heilshorn.”

His eyelids flew back in a
Who, me?
expression. “Jen, you know that my hands were completely tied. I was only dialed-in to a small part of what was going on, and that was what I’d been doing for five years, and that was human trafficking, on my own cases. We’d barely shared a phone call in ten years until this happened. Anyway, what did we even have that would’ve suggested a link between Heilshorn and XList?”

“What did we have? We had the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department murder investigation. If we didn’t think there was any connection, then how — or why — was I privy to personnel files on ex-special forces like Ewon Parnell and Ursula Galloway?” She could see Parnell as he stood in front of her, the 9mm in her face, nothing in his eyes but her own ragged self, reflecting back at her. Agent Apollo.
Apollo Helios, God of plagues.
He’d turned the gun on himself.
Boom.
The shot echoed in her mind.

“That was a mistake,” Rascher said. “Wyn Weston was all over the place with his research . . .”

“I was working a whole other case and I didn’t even know it. I knew
something
, John, I knew that Heilshorn was into something even dirtier than money laundering, and that it has to do with where Titan’s money is going. But every question I’ve asked since then has been shut down.”

The mention of Titan seemed to suck the posturing right out of John Rascher. It would have been enjoyable to see, if she hadn’t felt the awful presence of it, too. Suddenly the roomy SUV felt claustrophobic, and she reached over and opened the window beside her as the tunnel flushed them out and back into the bright day.

They were both silent until she spoke. “I feel like I got hung out as bait.”

“No,” he said immediately, as if he’d been anticipating the remark. And he leaned forward and this time he did put his hand on her knee. She could smell the cologne he wore —
Christian Dior
— same as he’d worn in college. She glanced at his hand and he took it away. She dipped her head toward him and bared her teeth. “Hung out as bait to see what would come crawling out. And now that we’ve seen what came out, what are you doing about it?”

He sat back, the leather seat squeaking under his legs. “That’s not true, Jennifer, and you know it.” For a moment, he couldn’t meet her gaze. “But you’re right; we did learn some things,” he said.

“And it almost cost me my life,” she said.

“Well now, come on . . .”

Fuck you
, she wanted to shout, but she bit her tongue.

Jennifer leaned over and got her bag. She took out her pills and a bottle of water. She hated the idea of taking them in front of Rascher, even if that was irrational, too, but she couldn’t wait any longer. The heat was rising within her, and her hands were starting to shake. As she swallowed she avoided his eyes by looking out the window. They were nearing the townhouse where she’d been staying for the past few years, recently standing at her window and staring out towards the construction of Gangplank Marina which seemed interminable, cranes forever scraping the sky, fences and gates surrounding everything. It felt like an apt metaphor for her life.

She tipped the bottle back and drank some more water. She felt more settled.

The SUV had driven past several blocks of townhouses and now stopped out in front of the ones closest to the Washington Channel, the waterway partially hidden beyond the concrete roadblocks and piles of steel girders.

She put her bottle away in her bag and reached for the door handle. Rascher grabbed her wrist.

She opened her mouth to tell him to let go, but she stopped when she saw the dark look in his eyes. Rascher was all-business now, pleasantries — such as they were — dispensed with. “Jen, there’s a chance for you to find out what happened. And it might reveal where Titan’s money is going, which is what you seem most interested in—”

“What I’m most interested in, what I have been most interested in, is my
job.
To find out the role Alexander Heilshorn played in XList. To find out who is running it now. How to shut it down.”