Devil's Due (16 page)

The apartment was at the top of two flights of stairs that creaked as Lucia and Jazz jogged up. Even had they wanted to be stealthy, it wouldn’t have been possible.

They slowed as they got to the landing, and Jazz unceremoniously pushed Lucia behind her and pulled her gun as she stepped forward. Two apartments, both with closed curtains. There was a faded welcome mat in front of 318, nothing but dried leaves in front of the other.

Jazz raised her hand to knock, but the door swung open, and Ben McCarthy was there. He opened his mouth to speak, and then his eyes focused past Jazz, on Lucia.

The look stopped her breath. His lips shaped a word—not her name. It took her a second to realize that it was
God
. A prayer, of a kind.

“Delivered to the door. Want me to wait in the car?” Jazz asked.

Ben tore his gaze away from Lucia to her. “No,” he said. “I’ll get her home. I don’t want you hanging out in a goddamn Hummer in this parking lot. Kind of draws attention.”

“Ah, hell, half a dozen guys in this complex drive Hummers.”

“Drug dealers.”

“Exactly.”

McCarthy stilled her with a hand on her arm. “Jazz. I’ll get her home safe. Count on it.”

She shut up and looked at him for long seconds, then nodded.

“Now get the damn truck out of here. Go.”

Jazz glanced at Lucia as she turned toward the stairs. “I’ll kill you if you up and die on me,” she said, and descended quickly, two steps at a time.

“Inside,” McCarthy said, and tugged Lucia over the threshold before she could react. He stayed at the door for a long moment, and she watched him, reading the tension in his body. He had his gun out, ready at his side, and she could tell the precise moment when Jazz was safely in the Hummer, because he let out a held breath and shut the door. The place smelled faintly of old cats and stale cigarettes. She blinked, and her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Except for the welcome sight of McCarthy, she wished they hadn’t. The furniture was garage sale, most of it broken, and the carpet was an unattractive green shag that she thought at first was stained, but then decided must have been meant to have a mottled effect. Plain white walls had plenty of damage to give the place that special designer touch.

A giant glow-in-the-dark poster of a marijuana leaf decorated the wall over the sagging couch, and another of a long-dead singer looking the worse for wear. Heroin chic, the entire apartment.

McCarthy finished the last of the dead bolts and turned toward her. She met his eyes and smiled slightly. “Jazz said you were worried.”

“Worried?” Something flashed in his eyes. “Worried doesn’t quite cover it, Lucia. Where the hell were you?”

“I don’t know.” It hurt to say it, and a bubble of panic formed somewhere just below her stomach. “All I remem
ber is going to sleep in my apartment and waking up in the hospital.”

“Nothing else?” He took her arm and guided her to the couch. “You’re sure?”

“Dreams,” she said. “Impressions. Nothing—” She remembered a quick flash. Bright lights, a smothering feeling of panic, her limbs heavy with sedatives. Smeared voices.

Violations.

“I’ll find out,” she said flatly. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll know what happened to me.”

He helped her to the couch, assistance she didn’t need but didn’t resist. Unlike Jazz, she knew when to control her independent impulses. Instead, she reached up and covered his hand with her own—not to remove it, more a confirmation that she was really touching him. The heat of his skin against her palm, the caress of his fingers…the longing in his eyes.

The care with which he touched her made her shiver. “Jazz said wherever you were, you had medical care. The…”

“Anthrax,” she supplied, with a flash of a smile. “You can say it. And it’s gone. I don’t think Dr. Kirkland would have allowed me out of bed if I hadn’t been healthy.”

Ben slid his hand from her arm, to fold her fingers in his. “Anything else?”

“What?”

“Did they find anything else?”

She frowned.
Violations
. “No. No, nothing.”

He let out a slow breath. “Good.” He smiled, heavy on the irony. “Good as it is to see you, I hope you didn’t risk your life to come out here to visit me.”

She had, mostly. But it wouldn’t sound precisely smart to admit it. “I need to talk to Susannah,” she said.

He nodded and, without a word, turned around and walked into the bedroom.

Lucia got up from the couch and moved to sit on a battered wooden chair. It looked less likely to harbor fleas than the grimy plaid cushions. It took a few minutes, but McCarthy reappeared, bringing with him a sleep-creased woman whom Lucia barely recognized as Susannah Davis. She looked considerably better. The swelling in her face had gone down, and the bruises were fading to blotches. She’d be pretty when she recovered, if not beautiful.

The scared expression in her eyes had faded, too. She looked different now. Desperation had made her seem honest, but the truth was emerging, and it wasn’t entirely reassuring.

“Susannah,” Lucia said. “How have you been?”

“All right,” she answered, and slid into the chair opposite, across the battered kitchen table. She yawned and pushed her sleep-disordered hair back from her face. “I heard you were missing or something.”

“Or something.” Lucia let that sit for a few seconds to close the topic. “Someone tried to kill you, I hear.”

Susannah looked down at her hands. She was picking at her cuticles. “Well, it damn sure wasn’t Leonard.” Cold, Lucia thought. Very cold.

“Maybe Leonard’s business associates,” Lucia said. “Right? You told us in the beginning that you knew things about his business dealings. Maybe they don’t want you telling anyone what you know?”

She didn’t reply. Her nervous picking continued. She’d had a good manicure once, but it had grown out, and the polish was halfway up her nails. Seashell-pink. When she’d had that manicure done—three weeks ago, at a guess—she’d also had a haircut. The shape was still there, even if
she’d done nothing to style it. The clothes Susannah had on weren’t her own, but the shoes were, and they were good ones. Not a woman who did her shopping at discount stores, but one who’d taken pride in herself, up until recently.

“Susannah,” Lucia said, and drew her eyes in a direct gaze. “You know something. You knew Leonard would come after you, and you were afraid he’d kill you. He or his associates.”

Susannah nodded and looked down again, picking furiously at the offending cuticle. She tore off a strip of skin. A bright bead of red appeared in the corner, next to the nail bed.

“You need to tell someone,” Lucia repeated softly. “Why not McCarthy?”

The woman gave a mute shake of her head. Lucia made an intuitive leap, and didn’t like where it took her. McCarthy was in the other room, but she couldn’t tell if he could hear. She had to assume he could. “Maybe you just don’t like him,” she said. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

Susannah’s head shake this time was almost a shiver. She knew something about McCarthy. Nothing that would require her to scream bloody murder over being left alone with him, but something. Maybe she’d picked it up at KCPD; plenty of cops might have said things there. A detective willing to take bribes might be the last person she could trust.

“Will you tell me?”

Susannah’s fingers stopped moving. Lucia didn’t speak; she knew Susannah was arguing with herself, and adding her voice would only hurt.

“He—” Susannah’s voice failed, briefly, then came back stronger. “Leonard was working for these people. They had some kind of plan or something—I don’t know what it was all about. But he would get these messages, and he would
do things for them. The last one…he bought a lot of chemicals. A
lot
. He rented a building somewhere. He said he was starting up a lab.”

Ah. “A meth lab,” Lucia said.

Susannah gave her an irritated look. “No, it wasn’t a meth lab. I know the chemicals for a meth lab, and this wasn’t—look, it was different. There were two things they were delivering there. Sodium cyanide and hydrochloric acid.”

The skin tightened on the back of Lucia’s neck. “Were they opening an electroplating lab? Those are chemicals used—”

“Electroplating? You’ve got to be kidding! When I say I know what chemicals you use for a meth lab, how do you think I know that? I’m not a damn saint, and he wasn’t opening any damn legitimate business. This was something else. Maybe the paperwork says electroplating, I don’t know, but it’s a lie. Can’t you use that crap for something else, too?”

“Possibly.” Noncommittal was the best strategy. If Susannah got frightened—more frightened—there was no telling what she might do. “I can check it out if you want. Where’s the lab?”

“In SubTropolis,” Susannah said.

Lucia frowned. “I don’t—”

McCarthy, sure enough, was within earshot. He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned against the frame and said, “Underground business complex. It’s huge. You’re going to need more than that. A business name, a unit number…”

“I don’t know, okay? He didn’t tell me anything. When I asked, he got mad.” Susannah pointed at her face. “I didn’t ask any more questions.”

Lucia looked from her to Ben. “We could track suppliers. That could give us the unit number.”

“Or we could just give the FBI the information.” He nodded at Susannah. “And her.”

“I can make the phone call, but without some proof, I don’t think Agent Rawlins is going to be giving it much priority. He’s overworked. He barely responded when we had anthrax in an envelope.” She paused, thinking about it. “I know somebody to talk to, but he’s undercover. I’ll have to arrange a drive-by meeting. Shouldn’t take long.”

McCarthy didn’t look happy about it.

“How are you going to get there?” he asked. “To your meeting? I can’t leave her alone here.”

“That’s the wonderful thing,” Lucia said, and pulled the cell phone from her purse. “If you have a phone and a credit card, you can get just about anything delivered.”

“Get pizza while you’re at it.”

She called FBI Special Agent Roger Cole ten minutes later. Cell phone, not office phone. Two minutes of idle chatting, a simple thirty-second request, and silence from him on the other end.

“Is this going to bite me in the ass?” he asked her. He was in his car. The road noise nearly overwhelmed his voice. “Because I’d like to know how, so I can get my will ready.”

“It might make your day, Roger. If I’m right.”

“Then you should give me everything you have so I can get to work on it. Or better yet, somebody else can. I’m a little busy. Maybe you’ve heard, somebody’s been playing with funny little white powder in envelopes.”

“I’ve heard,” she said blandly; he knew perfectly well who’d gotten the envelope. “This could be connected.” A lie, but a nebulous one.

“Yeah?” The road noise lessened; he was pulling over.
“Okay, give. What do you have, and why aren’t you talking to your red-haired boy?”

“My red-haired boy isn’t exactly jumping through hoops for me at the moment.”

“Don’t be that way. He had four guys on the street looking for you, you know. He was distressed.”

“So distressed he hasn’t bothered to make a phone call to say hello and interrogate me about what I know? He’s got bigger and juicier fish to catch just now. Look, all you have to do is track the shipments of chemicals to a specific address in SubTropolis, and I’ll do the rest. If it checks out, it’s yours. You get to be the hero.” She read out the names of the specific chemicals as Susannah had given them. “Sound like anything to you?”

“Electroplating,” he said. “And gas chambers. Fuck. You’ve done it again, haven’t you?”

“Are you going to get me the information?”

His sigh rattled in the speaker. “No. I’ll get the info, but I go with you.”

“I don’t want a full team for reconnaissance.”

“Relax. I’ll make some calls, pick you up in…” he paused to check the time “…about an hour, okay?”

“Thank you.”

The pizza arrived in forty-five minutes, and the driver looked nervous when Lucia met him at the door to hand him cash. She didn’t doubt the apartment complex had a bad rep among deliverymen. She added on a considerable tip for his trouble, and hoped he wasn’t mugged on his way back to his car.

Two slices later, her cell phone rang. Cole had a unit number in SubTropolis, including an entrance address. He’d even secured a Bureau van labeled as an electrical contractor; it would draw less attention in the SubTropo
lis tunnels than a private vehicle, especially since so much of the place was fitted out for industrial use.

“Where should I meet you?”

“You shouldn’t,” he said, amused. “I’ll pick you up. Curb service and all that crap. Address?” She gave it. “Right, I’m close. Five minutes. I’ll honk twice.”

As she hung up, she realized that both McCarthy and Susannah were staring at her. “He’s a decorated FBI special agent,” she said. “I can vouch for him. He’s the last person you need to worry about.”

“Lucia, I don’t like this,” McCarthy said. He leaned back in his chair, frowning. “You just got out of the hospital, for Christ’s sake. Let Jazz check it out.”

“Jazz is looking into where I was taken while I was unconscious. That’s not something I can put on the back burner. I need to know.”

“Jazz hasn’t slept in a week,” he said softly. “You know that, right? She’s catnapped a couple of times, when she fell down from exhaustion, but she’s been living on coffee and Vivarin. Give her a break. Hell, give both of you a break.”

“Hydrochloric acid and sodium cyanide?” Lucia asked, and raised her eyebrows. “What if they release it on a bus, Ben? In a shopping mall? You remember the Tokyo subway attack, right?”

He said nothing, just shook his head.

“I’m going,” she stated. “We’re just going to check it out. If it’s a legitimate operation, then no harm done. If not, the FBI will have a leg up. It’s the best way to handle it. If it does turn out to be hinky, Susannah, you’ll be in witness protection so fast the carpet will smoke on your way out the door.”

She didn’t look happy. “I don’t like it here. Wouldn’t it
be better if I was someplace safer now? Someplace more—I don’t know—fortified?”