Master (An Impossible Novel) (Impossible #6) (23 page)

“Yes, I’m okay with that.  It’s what I want.  You’ve already done so much for me.”  I planted a soft kiss of gratitude on his lips.

“Good.”  His brilliant smile returned.  “Now that’s settled, we can get back to the fucking part.”

My eyes widened. 
“Again?  Don’t you need sleep?  You were shot today.”

“Almost shot,” he corrected.  He pulled me closer and nipped my lower lip.  “And why would I sleep when I have you in my bed?”

A knock rapped against the door, and I jumped away from him.

“Just a-” the latch clicked back, “minute.”  The last word was a terrified squeak as the door eased open.  I jerked the covers all the way up to my chin, as though hiding my body would hide the fact that I was naked in bed with Reed. 
Shit shit shit!

All my frantic embarrassment turned to pure, numbing horror when the intruder was fully revealed.

“Frank,” my lips formed his name, but no sound came out.  His features twisted to something dark and terrifying, and his eyes were hot enough to consume Reed with fire if he glared for two seconds longer.  Usually so implacable, Reed tensed beside me.  He knew we were in deep shit.

“Get your hands off her
,” my father figure’s voice was low and controlled, but his hands were clenched to fists at his sides.  “You have one minute to get dressed and get out of here, Miller.”

“You can’t do that!”  I cried, even as Reed started grabbing up his clothes.  He might be an alpha male, but he wasn’t stupid enough to stay naked in bed with a woman while her dad was staring him down.  “The Mentor will kill him if he leaves the safe house!”

Frank didn’t look at me.  “Not if he’s in New York.  I’m shipping you back to Kennedy tonight, Miller.  I’ll let him deal with you.”

“Frank, wait!”  I couldn’t allow him to take Reed away from me.  “We aren’t breaking any rules.”

His furious gaze turned squarely on me for the first time.  The force of it ripped the air from my chest.  “You’re breaking
my
rules.”

Reed was fully dressed.  He was going to leave me.  He leaned down and dared to brush a kiss across my lips.

“This doesn’t change anything,” he told me firmly.  “You stay at the safe house.  I’ll keep working the case remotely.”  The tension in his face told me it was killing him to leave me alone in Chicago, but he couldn’t defy Frank.  Not if he wanted to keep his job.  And without his job, he wouldn’t have access to the information he needed to hunt The Mentor.  “Dex will help out here,” he assured me.

“Dex will do what I tell him to do,” Frank snapped.  “I’m not le
tting either of you near her.  You think I don’t know what Dex wants from her?  I’ll work with her personally until this case is over.”

Reed squared his shoulders.  “Katie is a woman.  She can make her own
decisions.”

“Get out!”  It was the first time Frank had raised his voice.  He collected himself immediately, but rage still boiled through his words.  “If you’re not out of Chicago within the hour, you’ll find there’s not a position waiting for you at the New York field office by the time you get back.”

“Frank!  Stop it!  You’re not being fair!”  I sounded like an angry teenager who was being told she couldn’t go to prom.

His attention returned to me.  His eyes were hard, forbidding.  The light in them told me he knew what was best for me.  “I’m doing this for you, even if you don’t see it.  You can’t have relations with your partner.  It clouds your judgment.  You could have been shot today trying to protect him.  I won’t allow that kind of reckless behavior to get you killed.”

“But he would have died if I hadn’t pushed him out of the way!”

“If he cares about you so much, then he should have died to keep you safe.  He’s not good enough for you.”  His glare returned to Reed, who stood stiffly at my side.  “Leave. 
Now.”

Reed’s eyes were pained when they turned to mine.  “I have to go, Katie.  But I meant what I said.  This doesn’t change anything between us.”  He gave my shoulder a light squeeze.  “I’ll call you when I get to New York.”

With that, he strode away from me.  His shoulder brushed Frank’s as he stepped past him, not in a show of overt aggression, but he was clearly asserting himself by not skirting around my dad.

When he was gone, Frank turned away from me.  “Stay here tonight.  I’ll come by to pick you up in the morning.”  He didn’t look back at me, but his voice softened.  “You’ll thank me for this one day.  He’s not right for you.”

You don’t think anyone’s right for me. 
I kept the petulant words locked behind my lips.  I knew if I released them, they would heave out on a sob, and I didn’t want to cry in front of Frank.  Especially not when I was naked beneath the sheets.  Naked and alone.  Mortification and grief and anger all swirled within me, a rising tide that came leaking out from the corners of my eyes.

The next morning, my eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but Kathy didn’t comment on it when I stepped into the interrogation room.  I didn’t like having her in here, holding her like she was a criminal, but Frank wanted to watch through the one-way mirror.  He wanted to see her reactions to the photos I was about to show her.

After Kathy had told us about The Mentor killing a man, Frank had compiled a list of men who had been reported as missing in and around Chicago in 1978.  Now he wanted me to see if Kathy could ID any of them as the man who had tried to rape her before The Mentor had murdered him.

I found it sick that she thought of The Mentor as “saving” her from her attacker, when he was the one who raped her repeatedly and broke her mind.  But I had to work with what I had, and Kathy was our one solid link to The Mentor.

“Thanks for coming in, Kathy,” I said as I settled down across the table from her.  “I’d like you to look at a few photographs for me.  We’re trying to identify the man who assaulted you.  The man who your captor killed.”

Kathy leaned forward, her eyes sparking with new life as they honed in on the file I placed on the table.  Her tongue darted out to wet her lips.  It was a nervous gesture, but there was something eager about her posture.  “I’ll do anything I can to help you find Him.”

I suppressed a shudder at the emphasis she placed on
Him
.  Even after all these years, she couldn’t see him as an ordinary man.  He was a twisted, sadistic man, but a man nonetheless.  The way she spoke about him made him seem like some kind of god.

I flipped open the file and pushed it toward her.  “Are any of these men familiar?”  The photographs had that slightly faded look of the era, and some of them were grainy images, cropped and blown up from family photos.  Her green eyes skated over the faces, pausing at some to consider more carefully.  There weren’t many to study.  After a minute, she stopped and pointed to the face staring back up at her from the CPD mug shot.  The man had been arrested in 1976 for domestic violence.

“Richard Kimbrell,” I identified the man.  “Does that name sound familiar?”

Kathy shook her head.  “I never heard his name.  He was only with me for a few minutes when Master came back and pulled him off me.”  Her eyes glassed over at the memory.

Master. 
This time, I did shudder.  The movement brought her out of her reverie, and she blinked.  She leaned away from me and crossed her arms over her chest, her stance becoming almost defensive.

“That’s the man He killed.  That’s all I know about him.”

Crap. 
I had messed up by letting my own feelings show.  Reed had helped me see that I didn’t have to live the life of a cold hunter, and now I couldn’t keep up the act.  My heart ached at his distance.  He was back in New York now, and I wasn’t sure when I would next feel his embrace.

I forced out what I hoped was a neutral, professional smile.  “Thank you, Kathy.  This is very helpful.”

Her lips pursed, and her only response was a stiff nod.  There was nothing more for me to do but walk her out of the building and thank her for her time.  IDing Kimbrell was a big win, even if I had messed up by offending Kathy.

Frank was gone by the time we stepped out of interrogation, likely off to do more research on Kimbrell.  Or he had left so he wouldn’t have to face me.  Things had been tense and silent between us all morning, both of us full of righteous anger.  Just as thoroughly as I thought he had made the wrong call in sending Reed away, Frank was sure he had done what was best for me.  It made it that much harder for me to be angry with him.  When all this was over, I was going to have a long talk with Frank about not chasing off every man in my life. 
Especially not Reed.  I wanted him to be
the
man in my life.

Once we got to the elevator, I thanked Kathy again and passed her off to a junior agent to see her safely to her car.  She had refused a protective detail, but we would at least watch her every step while she was in our field office. 
After the shooting the day before, all my illusions that I was safe here had evaporated.  I wouldn’t feel safe anywhere until The Mentor was behind bars for life.

“Sparrow.
  I need to talk to you and Frank.”  Dex’s hand closed around my elbow, and he ushered me toward Frank’s office before I could come up with an excuse to escape him.  With Frank on the warpath against the men in my life, it would have been best to keep Dex at a distance.

“Come in,” Frank called when Dex knocked on his door.  Wisely, he released his hold on my arm before he opened it.  Once I was clear of the threshold, he shut it firmly behind us.

Frank didn’t even look at me, and his eyes were less than friendly when they met Dex’s.  “What is it, Scott?”

“I looked into the text Katie received just before the shooting yesterday,” Dex said in a thoroughly professional tone, as though Frank wasn’t staring him down.  “It came from another burner phone.  He knows how to cover his tracks.”

My shoulders slumped.  “He always knows everything.”  I hated the thought, but it had to be said.  “Do we still think it’s one of us?”  I asked in a low voice.

Dex’s jaw clenched, but he kept his attention on Frank rather than me.  “I’m almost positive it is.  I went over the transcript of Katie’s first conversation with Kathleen Parker.  She said The Mentor drugged her and she woke up in his basement.  If she was abducted from Notre Dame, that means he can’t have taken her far for her to have not woken up along the way.”

Frank nodded, following his line of thinking.  “Kathy just IDed Richard Kimbrell as the man who was killed by The Mentor.  He owned farmland close to the university.”

“Well, I went back and looked over Lydia Chase’s statement.  She also reports waking up in Martel’s basement, and not remembering anything between then and when she was abducted. 
He used
Acepromazine Maleate
on her rather than something like chloroform that seems to have been used on Kathy, but he still couldn’t have given Lydia enough to keep her out for a drive from Chicago to New York.  Not without risking killing her.”

“But he had the van,” I interjected.  “We found hair and blood in it.”

“I think he used the van to transport his victims from Teterboro Airport.  It would only be a half hour drive from there to Martel’s house.  There’s a small airport, DeKalb Taylor Municipal, which is an hour’s drive from Dusk.  There was a flight from DeKalb Taylor to Teterboro Airport the night Lydia Chase was abducted, in the right timeframe.  The aircraft was a private jet.  It belongs to Kennedy Carver.”

I sucked in a breath. 
Reed’s boss. 
Smith had sworn that Kennedy wasn’t capable of being The Mentor, but his name was on the client list at Dusk, and now there was a record of his private jet on a flight path from Chicago to New York on the night Lydia Chase was taken.

It could be coincidence.  Maybe he had flown into Chicago to visit Dusk that night.  But if that was the case, why wouldn’t he have told us he was there when she was kidnapped?

“But Kennedy’s in New York,” I said.  “How could he have sent me the notes?  How could he have been the one to attack me?  And what about the sniper?  He’s running the New York unit.  There’s no way he could leave that many times to come terrorize me in Chicago.”

“I thought about that too,” Dex said.  “If it is Kennedy, he must have an accomplice.  The Mentor worked with Martel.  He might have another mentee.”

I paled.  There could be more than one sadistic psycho still out there hurting women.  What if it didn’t end with The Mentor?  How many others had he taught?

“I think
it’s Parnell,” Dex continued.  “The shooter left a shell casing in the hotel.  It had Parnell’s print on it.”

“This is good work, Dex,” Frank praised.  He looked from my former partner to me, his eyes taking in my sickened expression.  “I need to talk to Katie for a few minutes.”

“Of course.  Just tell me what you need me to do next.”

“I’m not ready to move on Kennedy just yet.  Katie and I are going to discuss our next move, and then I’ll let you know the plan.”  It was a clear dismissal.

I longed to follow Dex out of the office.  Things were so tense between Frank and me, and all I wanted to do was escape.  But where would I run?  Not to Reed.  Frank had sent him away.  And the further I went from other agents, the closer I got to danger.  Frank’s office was probably the safest place I could be right now.