Force of Attraction (7 page)

“You never know.” His mother smiled at him. “I did so hope you two might, well, talk things out after a while.”

“If he hasn't heard from her by now it's because she has nothing more to say to him. He screwed up and made certain of that.”

“Thanks for the benefit of the doubt, Dad.” Scott held back the sharper words that came to mind. His father didn't even know exactly what had happened between them, yet he'd come to the conclusion that it was Scott's fault, and it was unforgivable.

“John, that's not fair. When two people love each other the way they do … did…” She glanced at Scott for help.

Scott retreated to the safety of professional detachment. “Leave it, Mom. Please.”

He sat on the family room sofa opposite his father's well-worn leather recliner. He looked around, hoping desperately for some topic of interest to appear. Not sports. His father was a Giants and Yankees fan while he had long ago moved to the Redskins and Orioles camp.

“Just to spite the old man,” Gabe had once declared in front of them. Not true, but Scott saved his breath. Gabe had said it, it was now fact.

“So, sixty years.” Scott nodded slowly. “That's some achievement, Dad. Anything left on your bucket list?”

“I thought I'd be a grandfather by now.” John's voice rose in challenge. “You were supposed to make me a grandfather.”

The jab hurt. It was supposed to. Scott, even knowing better, shot back. “What made you think that was going to happen?”

“Nicole promised us.”

“John!” His mother looked thoroughly put out by her husband's disclosure.

Scott felt his stomach drop into his shoes. “When did Nikki say that?”

His father merely hunched a shoulder and looked away.

His mother frowned, biting her lip. “The last time we were all together for Thanksgiving. At your little apartment in D.C. At first we thought Nicole was teasing us. But she looked so pleased with herself. So then, well, we decided you two were waiting to make the big announcement official when you came up here at Christmas. But then, things didn't … work out.”

Scott was still waiting to reach bottom as his thoughts were in freefall. “There was no baby. You misunderstood.”

“Wishful thinking, I guess.”

His mother glanced at her husband, and Scott caught the disappointment in her eyes. They had hoped to be grandparents and once again he had let them down. The cold queasy feeling of failure slithered through him.

He quashed it, replacing that emotion with annoyance with Cole for leading them on. He raked a hand through his hair. “I don't understand why she would make that promise, even in jest.”

His mother's face filled with sympathy. “Maybe, Scott, because she wanted it to become the truth. She was ready to start thinking about a family.”

“Maybe she would have told you what she was thinking if you'd been around long enough to listen.” His father looked on with a fault-finding gaze. “Nothing was more important than what you wanted. You didn't even make it through carving the Christmas turkey. One text and you're out the door, leaving your wife to serve the meal by herself. Typical of you in those days. So self-absorbed you couldn't see past your nose.”

“I was working twenty-four-seven. Nikki understood that.”

“So you say.”

“John, please.” Cathy laid a hand on her husband's thigh.

“Fine. But the truth is you left that girl on her own too damned much while you rode around on that damned bike, pretending to be, what? What was it that was so damned important?”

“I was SWAT, Dad. I had people whose lives depended upon me showing up, ready, at a moment's notice.”

“That's right. Your father just means that we loved Nicole. She was just naturally part of the family from the beginning.”

“Best thing that ever happened to you was her. You should have held on to her.”

“I know, Dad. You've said so before. I got the message. You would rather have divorced me and kept her.”

His father started. “That's not what I said.”

Scott didn't bother to respond. Sometimes what wasn't said was a helluva lot clearer than what was. He'd ruined his life, Nikki's life, and now he knew he'd ruined his parents' hopes for the future, too, by losing her. Fine. Fucking great!

Scott got up and headed for the kitchen. “Need some water. I'll be back.” He tossed words over his shoulder so his mother wouldn't come after him.

But once in the kitchen he just stared at the refrigerator without opening it. There was a small color photo attached at eye level by one of those magnetic frames a little smaller than a Post-it note. It was of Gabe in full battle gear with a thousand-watt chick-magnet smile that outshone the reflective surface of his silvered sunshades. Gabe could live off the land with only a knife and two days of water in a two-week wilderness training. Gabe could do anything, and everything.

“Except come home safe, you bastard!”

Scott snatched the picture off the silver face of the refrigerator and looked around for somewhere to toss it. Instead, his fist closed around the frame and he squeezed until the metal rim digging into his palm and fingers threatened to draw blood. He missed his brother so damned much. He could really use some advice.

After a few moments, he carefully replaced the photo, adjusting it to his mother's eye level. Gabe wasn't here. The world inside his own head was all he had left. Piss poor as that might be.

He braced an arm on the fridge and lowered his head against it as he tried to think his way logically through the revelations of the last few minutes.

Nikki had thrown their history and his failings in his face when he went to see her the other day. He didn't think she'd held anything back. If she had been pregnant, she would have told him then. She was too honest to do otherwise.

She hadn't mentioned wanting to start a family, not in any concrete way, the last few months of their marriage, either. Of course, even before the wedding, they'd agreed that one day, in the future, they wanted children. Later. After things settled. When they were financially stable and their careers established.

Yet some long-neglected memory was wriggling its way to the surface of his thoughts. Their last Christmas Eve, she'd placed something on the tree. What was it? Something about Christmas wishes. A tiny red stocking with a white fur trim. She'd said …

Scott sighed and shook his head. He couldn't remember. After he left that Christmas afternoon, he'd been gone for three straight days. She wasn't talking to him by the time he returned. And not much after that. By spring it was over.

Emotion welled up inside him, a longing for so many things he was afraid he might never have and knew he didn't deserve. What was a man supposed to do with this huge wad of longing? He'd chased down armed felons, run with one percenters, even squared off with hopped-up addicts who didn't know they'd been shot. But the emotions coursing through him now scared him more than anything ever in his life. It felt as if the only answer was that deep abyss he'd crawled out of just last year. He could feel it, just beyond the edge of his consciousness. Waiting, in case he got tired.

Get in touch again with who you really are
. Department counselor's advice. Great advice. If he'd had any idea who he was in the first place.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. The background photo was blurry because Cole almost caught him taking it in her kitchen. But the sight of Nicole's face gave him a jolt of life. He knew he could go on living without her. He'd done that. But the sight of her, after all this time, made him want to find out if there was a way back to having her in his life again.

His involuntary smile at that thought surprised him almost as much as the relief that coursed through him with that decision. He was about to make an all-out assault on Nicole Jamieson's heart. And this time, nothing was going to screw it up.

The doorbell rang as he came back into the living room.

His mother sprang up. “Right on time. Thank goodness. I was getting worried about all that food getting cold or overcooked.”

As she moved to open the door to their guests the scream of a motorcycle engine disrupted the quiet.

Scott looked up, every nerve alert. “What the fu—heck is that?”

“New neighbors.” His mother pressed her lips together in disapproval. “The son comes and goes at all hours. The neighborhood association has filed a noise complaint with the city. But what are you going to do? He says it's his only mode of transportation to and from work.”

“He can buy a muffler, for starters.”

“I'm sure he'll do something after the next town hall meeting. Your father's on the agenda to speak on the subject.”

Scott was only half listening. That motorcycle didn't belong to a kid, not unless he'd joined a biker gang. This was a serious machine. “I'll be right back. Left Izzy in the truck.”

He was through the back door and across the neighbors' backyard in seconds. He only caught sight of the back end of the rider and bike. It was enough. Denim-clad sleeveless jacket and a patch he knew so well he didn't need to be close enough to read. Pagans.

Every hair on his arms lifted. His parents had some disturbing new neighbors, or the rider was not passing by by accident.

He stood several minutes listening as the noise from the bike faded like a fire engine's siren once it's passed by. He noticed the rider didn't stop in the neighborhood.

He supposed he needed to think about why this was the second time in a month he'd seen a Pagan biker. First outside his apartment in D.C. and now outside his parents' home. Was it coincidence, or something more?

“Scott?” His mother had poked her head out of the back door. “We're waiting for you.”

Scott held his breath. Nothing stirred in the air. He went deeper, sensing through whatever extra survival instincts being undercover had honed in him to the point that sometimes that edgy energy kept him awake for twenty-hour hours at a time. He felt … nothing.

And yet, he didn't buy it. Something had just occurred. Instinct told him that was no random biker passing. And yet he had not a single shred of proof to the contrary. Maybe being at home was messing with his head.

“Scott?”

“Yes, Mom. Coming.”

He wrenched up the driver's side door and let Izzy out. He'd be happier knowing she was safe inside.

 

CHAPTER SIX

“Our target is Shajuanna Collier, the wife of the D.C.-based hip-hop mogul Eye-C.”

“Didn't he do time for racketeering in connection with illegal dogfights?”

“That's the one.”

“Jeez. What's with these guys? Getting sent up for running illegal gambling isn't enough. Now he wants to breed these killers.”

“Dogs aren't killers by nature.” Cole sat up straighter as the room of task force people glanced her way for the first time during the morning overview. “Even volatile breeds are often subjected to mistreatment, like starvation and abuse, in order to make them vicious killers, sir.”

Lattimore, standing before his PowerPoint presentation, nodded vaguely in her general direction. “Officer Jamieson has a valid point. Her expertise in the matter of canine behavior should be useful in the field.”

“I'm no expert.” Cole's voice was lower this time.

“All the same, every person here has a part to play.”

Cole didn't doubt that hers was a small part. This was the first meeting of the task force team. It consisted of a joint investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration—Baltimore District Office, DEA's Wilmington, Delaware, Resident Office, the District of Columbia Division, the Philadelphia Field Division, an FBI advisor, and a Montgomery County, Maryland, police K-9 officer. The men gathered in the room knew more than she ever would about drug trafficking and interdiction. The fact that they were all male and shared previous experience with the DEA didn't improve her standing.

As Lattimore continued his overview, Cole reminded herself of the chain of command. As the newest, least experienced member of the team she was supposed to keep her head down, mouth shut, and learn.

She bent her head to study the proposal that had been handed out to the team, and to give herself a moment to think. Despite programs like Dropbox, shared files, and so on, they were using good old-fashioned paper documents as reference materials.

Cole followed her notes as Lattimore recited them. “Our prime target is Shajuanna Collier, wife of hip-hop artist Eye-C, real name Isaac Collier. Three years ago Collier was arrested for gambling on illegal dogfights and sentenced to prison for two years. While he served twelve months of that sentence, his wife Shajuanna began breeding dogs, specifically the Argentine mastiff and the Japanese Tosa. These expensive and rare imported breeds are banned in many European countries because they were most often brought in for illegal fights.

“Shortly after Eye-C was released on probation, Shajuanna announced that she intended to redeem these ‘precious loving animals' from their undeserved reputations as vicious brutes by showing them off at companion dog sports competitions sanctioned by the AKC. She has stated repeatedly since that by doing so, she would prove to the public that her husband has learned his lesson and become a passionate advocate for these maligned dogs.”

The FBI and DEA agents around the table snorted their opinion of Shajuanna's motives.

“Those carved-up pups were all Argentinean mastiffs.” The speaker, an FBI agent named Hadley who had headed up the FBI portion of a successful multistate dogfighting ring a year before, reared back in his chair. “If they are so damned valuable then why are they used to smuggle cocaine? I don't buy a word coming out of her mouth. This is a front. Pure and simple.”

Cole absorbed without comment the pointed look the FBI advisor sent her way. There was no point in challenging him. Everyone at the table was convinced that Shajuanna and Eye-C were using these sports dog activities as a cover for everything from illegal gambling to drug trafficking. They had, as Lattimore now reiterated, the means and opportunity. As for motive? Money.