Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs (13 page)

“But you think it could go higher than your handler?” she realized.

“It went higher in Blackwoods than the few prison guards the DEA initially thought were involved.”

“It went all the way to the warden. So how far could the corruption in the DEA go?”

“Far enough to put you in serious danger. I know a place that’s safe,” he said, “that no one else knows about. I’ll take you there.”

“And go off alone?” She shook her head.

“I have the gun now,” he reminded her.

“
I
don’t have a gun,” she pointed out. And after what had just happened with the guy running her off the road and abducting her, she didn’t trust that the scalpel was enough protection anymore. But even with a gun, she wasn’t sure she would feel safe. She wasn’t sure she’d feel safe with anyone but Rowe. “You would leave me alone in the city?”

“You went to U of M,” he said, which was something else Jed must have told him about her. “You probably spent some time hanging out in Detroit. You know it, and you probably have friends close enough to call. Should I leave you with one of them?”

“You shouldn’t leave me at all,” she argued, and not just because she was scared but also because she believed he needed her for backup as much as she needed him. “I’m going with you. No matter how far this corruption goes, no one’s going to shoot you in the middle of a federal building.”

Rowe sighed wearily. “You still haven’t accepted that I’m telling you the truth about myself. You don’t trust me.”

Even though he had saved her life, she couldn’t completely trust him because she couldn’t completely trust anyone. But that wasn’t why she wanted to go along with him. She was scared but not just for herself. She couldn’t share all her fears for Jed, and now for him. Somehow, in a very short while, she had begun to care about Rowe. And she didn’t want to lose him, too.

D
AMN HER.
M
ACY HAD TALKED
him into bringing her along to the office. It hadn’t been so much what she’d said, though, as it had been the fear and vulnerability in her dark gaze that had compelled him to change his mind. As she’d said, even his betrayer was unlikely to open fire in a federal building. She might be safer here than in his
safe
house.

He turned off the car and reached for the door handle. But she clutched at his arm. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”

“You changed your mind about coming inside?” Relief shuddered through him.

Her fingers tightened on his arm, squeezing. “I changed my mind about your going inside.”

He turned to her, confused by her admission. “I have to. It’s the fastest way to figure out who blew my cover—when I see how damn surprised they are that I’m still alive.”

“But the minute this person knows you’re alive, they’ll have their proof that Jed lied to the warden and helped you escape. And then they’ll kill him.”

If they hadn’t already…

But she didn’t seem willing to confront that possibility yet. He didn’t want to push her and risk hurting her even worse than her attacker had. But he had to be truthful with her.

“I can’t stay in hiding the rest of my life,” he said. “That would be no kind of life for me. And while it might keep Jed alive, it won’t get him out of prison.”

And after having spent some time in Blackwoods Penitentiary himself, he suspected that Jed would prefer death to prison. Maybe that—more than his professed innocence—was why the inmate hadn’t killed Rowe. Maybe it had been his version of death by cop, only the “cop” was Warden James and was crooked as hell.

“You still don’t entirely believe he was framed,” she said, the warmth of her brown eyes dimming with disappointment.

He wanted to believe, for her sake. “I have to keep an open mind.”

“To his guilt as well as his innocence?”

He nodded. “I can’t have my mind already made up or I might miss something when I look over his case files.”

She offered him a small smile of appreciation. “But you won’t be able to look at his case files unless you go inside your office.”

He reached for the door again, and this time she didn’t stop him. She just opened her own. “You should stay here,” he said.

She shook her head, rejecting his suggestion. “I’m not staying here. Alone.”

“You would have the gun,” he said, reminding her that he’d put it in the glove box. Since it wasn’t registered to him, he wouldn’t have gotten the weapon past security. Hell, he would be lucky if
he
made it past security.

Macy met him at the rear of the car and caught his arm, holding tight as if afraid that someone else might try to grab her. Even though he took no pleasure in killing someone, Rowe felt a brief flash of satisfaction that the man who had hurt her would never be able to hurt her again.

“I’d rather have you than the gun,” she said.

He met her gaze and something shifted in his chest, his heart clutching in reaction to her words. But she was just scared, for herself and her brother. Once she was safe again, she would forget all about Rowe if she ever forgave him for the pain she had endured because he had caught her up in the danger that was his life.

“Stick close,” he said, worried about what would greet them when they walked through the glass doors of the brick federal building. “And keep your head down.”

He wore the knit hat, pulled down low over his face. Stubble shadowed his jaw, too, but it was hardly a disguise. As an undercover DEA agent, he looked this way most of the time. So, as he’d feared, he was immediately recognized.

“Hey, Rowe!” one of the guards called out. His old partner at Detroit P.D. greeted him with a grin as he stepped away from the security monitors. “I heard you quit.”

“Quit?” Rowe kept his arm around Macy’s shoulders, turning her away from the cameras in the corners of the foyer. He should have left her in the car instead of risking someone getting a hold of security footage and being able to ID her.

“Yeah, I thought your quitting was crazy seeing how you got me this job after Detroit P.D. retired me,” the gray-haired former cop replied with a flash of bitterness for his old employer. “The rookie I trained all those years ago would have never left law enforcement. And growing up like you did, the DEA was always your dream job. I didn’t think you would ever quit.”

Macy glanced up at Rowe, her brow slightly furrowed with a question. With her inquisitive mind, she would want to know exactly how he had grown up. His childhood, or lack thereof, was something Rowe had shared with few people. Donald Jackson had been one of them. Chuck Brennan the other.

The old man chuckled. “I figured the only way you would ever leave this job was in a body bag.”

Macy gasped, her eyes sparkling with irony.

Rowe turned back to Chuck. But his old training officer wasn’t looking at him; he was looking at Macy. “But then maybe you had a special reason for quitting.” The old flirt winked at Macy. “About damn time you got a personal life, Cusack.”

Rowe skipped introductions. He didn’t want anyone to know who Macy really was; it was bad enough that he had brought her inside where one of the security cameras might have picked up her image.

“Who told you I quit?” he asked, his temper flaring at the lie. His handler would have been the one to concoct and claim the lie as truth. Ostensibly that would have been the only person he could have contacted when he was undercover at Blackwoods. “Agent Jackson?”

“No, he quit, too,” Brennan replied, “or at least I think he did since I haven’t seen him around here in a while.”

“Jackson quit?” His handler had gotten older, but like Brennan, he had never seemed ready to retire. And if he’d quit…

Was it because he had come into a sudden windfall of money? Maybe from the warden…

“Are you going up to the office?” Brennan asked, gesturing toward a break in the line for the security screeners.

Rowe shook his head. “No. I have somewhere else I need to go first.”

“But you’ll be back, right?” the security guard asked hopefully. “You didn’t really quit?”

“Yeah, I’ll be back,” Rowe promised, and then leaned closer to his old training officer. Pitching his voice low, he added, “But please, do me a favor and don’t tell anyone that you saw me today.”

“You want them to work to get you back on the job, huh? You’re playing hard to get.” Brennan chuckled.

“That’s the idea.” Hard to get and harder to kill.

Brennan slapped Rowe’s back. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away, and that all those people around here acting like you’d be gone forever were crazy.”

Rowe clenched his jaw and nodded before turning Macy back toward the outside door.

“They acted like you’d be gone forever because they thought you were dead,” she murmured as they walked out to the parking lot.

“Yeah, the reports of my demise were greatly exaggerated,” he replied, using humor to calm his rising temper.

“If you’re going where I think you’re headed, those reports may not be exaggerated at all,” she warned him. “If this Agent Jackson told the warden to kill you, he won’t hesitate to finish the job himself.”

That was why Rowe had to drop Macy at the safe house and confront Jackson alone. So that she wouldn’t be caught in the cross fire.

R
OWE HAD BEEN GONE
so long that Macy’s heart beat furiously with fear. Something must have happened to him. She was glad that she hadn’t let him drop her off wherever he’d been determined to leave her for her
safety.
If he hadn’t come back to her at his safe house, she would have had no idea where to look for him. She didn’t even know this Agent Jackson’s first name or gender let alone where the person lived.

If
he or she lived…

And what about Rowe?

But Macy had heard no shots. And she sat in her car, which was parked in the alley behind Jackson’s apartment building. She had watched as Rowe had broken into the place. He’d climbed the fire escape and jimmied open a window, keeping watch over her in the alley even more than he had whoever might have been waiting for him in the apartment.

Was that why she’d been able to talk him into letting her come along? Because, after what had happened last time, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight. She hadn’t wanted him out of her sight either, but she hadn’t been able to see him since he had slipped through the open window.

It had been too long.

With trembling fingers, she fumbled the handle and opened the passenger door. Rowe had pulled down the fire escape ladder, but she still had to jump up to reach the bottom rung. Her purse thumped against her side and slipped from her shoulder. She couldn’t lose it, not when the only weapon she had was stashed inside the leather bag.

While the alley was empty now, it was strewn with trash that overflowed the Dumpsters. If she hadn’t been used to the smells of the morgue, she might have gagged over the stench that hung in the cold spring air. The building was not in the safest area of the city, for sure. But she was less worried about what she might encounter outside than what she would meet up with inside. Her legs shook, with nerves and adrenaline, as she climbed the ladder and then the metal stairs to the fourth-floor apartment.

She had insisted that Rowe bring the gun with him. But if he hadn’t had a chance to use it…

Then his betrayer had Rowe’s gun and probably at least one of his own.

One with a silencer? Was that why she’d heard no gunshots?

Rowe wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. One glance through the window confirmed that there had been a hell of a one. Broken furniture littered the floor. The dining room table and chairs had been smashed. The living room couch was tipped over onto the scarred hardwood. But it was the rug in front of the couch that drew Macy’s attention and a gasp from her lips.

A thick, wide pool of blood stained the rug and overflowed onto the hardwood floor. Even if she hadn’t had a premed degree, she would know that nobody could have lost that much blood and lived.

Someone had died in this apartment.

Chapter Nine

“I told you to stay in the car,” Rowe said, anger bubbling inside him that she hadn’t stayed put.

But he was actually angry with himself for not watching over her more closely, so that he had noticed what she was doing before she’d made it up the fire escape to the apartment. While he had been distracted, someone could have pulled her out of the vehicle and driven off with her, just as the guy who had forced her off the road had abducted her. If he hadn’t been certain he could keep her safe, he never should have brought her along.

“What happened here?” she asked, as she stepped over the windowsill and joined him inside Donald Jackson’s ransacked apartment.

It was bad enough that his prints were going to be all over the place. Now so were hers. “Don’t touch anything,” he advised.

But she was already kneeling on the floor, dipping her finger into the blood pool. “I thought this was yours,” she murmured, her voice shaking with fear. She skimmed her gaze over him, as if checking for injuries. “Whose is it?”