Best Laid Plans (51 page)

Sean sat up. “Luce—what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know. I thought I felt something, like an earthquake.”

“There’s not many earthquakes in Texas.” He kissed her, and gently pushed her back down on the bed. “You got my heart racing.” He kissed her again, then he frowned. “You’re shaking. Are you sure you didn’t have a nightmare? Lucy?”

“No, it’s just—”

Sirens rang throughout the city. They were far away, but there were a lot of them. They both got out of bed and quickly dressed in the clothes that were lying around. Sean turned on the television to the local news and Lucy picked up her phone. She was about to call FBI headquarters when her cell phone rang.

“It’s Brad,” she said and put him on speaker. “Brad?”

“You’re okay?”

“Yes, what happened?”

“I know why they left the drugs at the shooting. There was a bomb inside. Tobias just blew up the DEA evidence locker. I don’t know how many guards were inside. At least two, but it’s shift change. Not to mention the desk sergeant. Do you know how many cases are still pending? It’s a total clusterfuck.”

“How’d you know? It just happened.”

“I’m in the office—as soon as I heard the explosion, I knew. I had to make sure you and Sean were okay. It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault, Brad.”

“There was a specific reason for them to plant the bomb,” Sean said. “It couldn’t have been just to cause havoc.”

“Why not?” Lucy said. “Tobias seems to live to cause problems for the DEA. Wait—I thought SAPD had the case.”

“They did, until ATF took it over. We share office space with ATF’s field office, and—”

“And an evidence locker,” Sean said. “Maybe SAPD was the target.”

“No. It was us—most drug cases fall under the DEA. With that much heroin on scene we would have normally been the lead. And even if we weren’t, we work closely with SAPD on all major drug busts.”

“I’m sorry, Brad. Don’t blame yourself,” Lucy said. “You couldn’t have known.”

Brad didn’t seem to hear her. “I have to go,” he said. “Sam’s talking to Juan now, they’re going to sweep all evidence lockers, police stations, the FBI office, you name it. It was a fucking Trojan horse. There could be more.”

“Call us later,” Sean said.

“Tell your brother. He needs to be extra careful.” Brad hung up.

Lucy said, “I need to talk to Elise.”

Sean looked pained. “No.”

“Sean, I can do this.”

“But that girl—”

“I know exactly what she is. I’ll be okay.” She kissed him. “I have you to come home to.”

*   *   *

Elise was in solitary and it took Lucy two hours of waiting before they brought her to the interview room. Without her makeup, she looked younger than her sixteen years. But her eyes were old. Old and calculating.

Elise hadn’t talked, and they knew nothing about her that they hadn’t already known. Elise had called Tobias her “big brother” but Lucy was skeptical. Tobias was at least forty. Elise was sixteen. More likely that he was her father—if they were related at all.

“I knew you’d come and see me,” Elise said.

“Tell me why your brother set a bomb in the DEA evidence locker.”

Elise’s eyes sparkled. “I thought I heard the big boom. Toby is so fucking smart.”

“What case did he want to destroy?”

Elise smiled and bit her lip. She stared at Lucy and raised an eyebrow. “All of them,” she whispered. She tilted her chin up, as if daring Lucy to question her.

“He’s too smart for that.” Lucy’s heart was pounding, but she kept her voice flat and even. She hadn’t been trained to deal with sociopaths like Elise Hansen. Lucy had faced many killers, some as cold and confident as Elise. But none of them had been sixteen. None of them had been so elusive. Without knowing who Elise was in the past made it twice as difficult to understand her now.

“You think you’re smarter than we are?” Elise grinned. “We had you going all week.”

“Did your brother have those eight gang members killed—and a child—just to disguise the C-4 as heroin?”

Elise didn’t answer. She attempted to look bored, but it was clear she was enjoying this conversation. She certainly wasn’t scared. While intellectually Lucy knew that Elise had lied to them and manipulated them throughout the entire investigation, this moment was the first time she believed it.

The revelation chilled her all the way to her soul.

She said, “There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have been discovered before he set it off.”

“But. It. Wasn’t.”
Elise leaned forward as if she were going to share a secret. “I know what you want. You want to fix me.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “No, actually, I don’t. Some people are permanently broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one can put you back together.”

“Hmm. Maybe you’re smarter than I gave you credit for. But I’m not broken. I’m exactly the way I want to be. I won’t be in here long.”

One of the more philosophical arguments in criminal psychology was whether psychopaths were born or created through their environment. Most experts believed that sociopaths were born—individuals with no innate ability to form attachments or feel empathy toward others—but not all sociopaths turned into psychopaths. Were psychopaths—those with a predisposition to cruelty—curable? Were psychopaths created because of chemical imbalances in the brain? Were they created by their environment? Or were they mistakes of nature?

Lucy and her brother Dillon had argued about the subject many times. Dillon believed that some people were born cruel. Lucy believed that environment played a bigger role in the formation of a psychopath. Maybe they were both right, and both wrong.

Two things were clear to Lucy as she and Elise stared, each of them assessing the other. Elise was most certainly a sociopath. And there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that Elise had been cold, cunning, and cruel from the moment she had her first complex thought. Her environment might have expedited her journey from sociopath to psychopath, but it was a road Elise Hansen had always traveled.

Lucy said, “The evidence in your case wasn’t in DEA storage, if you were wondering.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Elise said with a fake yawn. “I get a trial by jury. Never underestimate me. Or Toby. We always win.”

Lucy leaned forward. “Not this time. We have most of his money. We caught on to your game early enough to trick you, and we diverted the money into an FBI account. If you think your brother is going to be able to buy or bribe you out of jail, think again.”

Elise seemed amused. “We’ll see about that.”

Lucy said, “I will be testifying against you. If you think you’re good on the stand? You’ve never seen me.”

“You won’t.”

“Don’t count on it. I’m looking forward to the day I can tell the court exactly what you are.”

“You won’t, because you’ll be dead.”

A chill ran down Lucy’s spine at Elise’s matter-of-fact tone, but she kept her expression impassive as she rose from the chair. “You don’t scare me. You’re a calculating, street-smart, manipulative sociopath. You talk a good game, but I won. And I will find Tobias. He will pay for his crimes. You
can
count on that.”

She turned and walked out. Before she closed the door, Elise said, “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

Lucy shut the door firmly. Stood there, took a deep breath. She was shaking. Damn, had Elise seen it? She hoped not. She hoped she’d kept her fear locked down while facing that monster.

Brad was waiting for her in the observation room. “I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

“I got your message late. Hoped I could talk you out of it.” He rubbed her arm. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Fine.” But her voice was clipped and tense.

“You shouldn’t have gone in there. Just like me facing Nicole might not have been the smartest move. Nicole knows how I’ll react and pushes all my buttons. Elise is … different. She’s intuitive, and not in a good way. She wanted to scare you.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “I had to face her and show I wasn’t intimidated.”

“I think you did.”

“I don’t think she cares. She has a hundred little plans she’s working on, and we need to warn the warden that she’s dangerous. We need a psych evaluation immediately, and not just any court-appointed shrink. I’m going to talk to the AUSA about getting my brother Dillon appointed. He’s an expert witness, consults with the FBI all the time, and he won’t be snowed by her.”

And she wanted to see her brother. All of them. She wanted her family. For years she’d detached from her family because when they looked at her, they saw her as a victim. It hurt, and she couldn’t explain it to them or to herself. She’d brought them back into her life one by one. First Jack, then Dillon, then Patrick … and with Sean by her side, she realized she could face anything. Family made her stronger.

What kind of family had created Elise Hansen?

Brad and Lucy walked out of the observation room and through the maze of security in order to retrieve their weapons from the desk sergeant.

“What’s going on with Worthington’s estate?” Brad asked. “Between the congresswoman’s money laundering and Harper’s murder, I figure it’s a mess.”

“Logan Dunbar, the agent from D.C., is staying for a week or two to process the evidence found in her house and office. There was a file in her safe that is coded, but Dunbar thinks it’s proof of her money laundering, and once they figure it out, it will lead to Tobias. Barry is working with Dunbar and the AUSA on the case and any other indictments.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“I’m angry, Brad. Harper Worthington is dead because he tried to do the right thing. First he came to us—the FBI—and we turned him away. So he investigated his own wife. Mona Hill, part of this conspiracy from the beginning, has disappeared. Maybe she’s dead, but the way Tobias works he would have left her to be found—not just for us, but to keep his own people in line. Nicole Rollins is still working on a plea agreement and I really believe she could have stopped all of this—but we’ll never know. A little boy was shot to death because his parents were gangbangers, and that just doesn’t seem right. As if just because of his birth, he was condemned. And that girl—” Lucy stopped and took a deep breath. “I promised myself I wouldn’t let her get under my skin.”

“What we do isn’t easy,” Brad said.

“No one promised it would be. Thanks for letting me vent.” Lucy wanted to go home and disappear in the pool house with Sean. No phones. No computers. Just the two of them. While she was still angry with Barry for talking to people about her behind her back, she owed him big for reminding her that she had a life outside of the job.

“We have one thing we didn’t have before,” Brad said.

“What?” She thought back on her conversation with Elise but didn’t know what Brad was referring to.

“She admitted to knowing about the bomb, about the entire plan. Conspiracy. Every crime we can charge to Tobias, we can charge to her.”

“You think she can sway a jury?”

“No. We’ll both see to that.”

She hoped he was right. But she was never going to underestimate Elise Hansen.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

One Week Later

Lucy stared at the tiny baby through the glass. Her nephew, John Patrick Thomas.

He was beautiful. Perfect. John Patrick was the future, the hope of the current generation.

She and Sean had flown in Sean’s Cessna and landed in San Diego only an hour ago. Now, John Patrick was twelve hours old and had already made a huge impact on the Kincaid family. He wasn’t the first grandchild—or nephew. That had been Justin, twenty-six years ago. Lucy’s nephew who had been her best friend for the first seven years of her life … until he’d been murdered.

Nelia had been young when she had had Justin—only twenty—but with the seven Kincaid children, Lucy was surprised—and sad—that there hadn’t been another grandchild born for twenty-six years. She looked at the newborn and couldn’t help but wonder if he would be the only one.

But it wouldn’t matter. He would be well loved.

Her hand went to her hollow stomach. She wondered how it would feel to grow a little human inside her. But she would never know. The emptiness filled her, overwhelming her with a grief she didn’t understand.

“Lucy.” Sean came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Why are you crying? Is everything okay with Johnny?”

“Yes,” she managed to say. “It’s just me.”

She turned to face him. He needed to know what she was thinking, how she felt. She’d kept this pain locked up for so long … she didn’t know what to say. “I can’t have one.”

“I know that, sweetheart.” He touched her face. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

That made the tears fall faster. “It’s … hard. I didn’t realize I’ve been in mourning for so long. When I saw Molly two months ago, saw you rock her, when you smiled down at that beautiful baby … my heart swelled because you will make an amazing dad. You glowed with her, Sean. I’d never seen you like that before. And I … I can’t give you that. We can’t have a half Lucy, half Sean. It … it hurts so much. M-m-more than I ever thought it would.”