Author: Allison Brennan
Category: Suspense
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/allison-brennan/page,18,536826-the_third_to_die.html
Matt wished he’d heard that story.
“Did you really catch a pickpocket at the press conference?” Ryder asked. “I heard Jim and Miles talking about it earlier. Someone pickpocketed a cop?”
“A punk, couldn’t have been more than fifteen,” she said. “I only saw him grab two wallets—but when they processed him, he had three on him. Of course, I was a bit busy determining that the killer wasn’t on-site watching your boss speak.” She winked at Matt.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or continue to be irritated with her.
“We’re starting early tomorrow,” Matt said. “Oh-six-hundred. It’s going to be a long weekend.”
“And that’s my cue to leave,” Kara said.
“I’ll walk you out,” Matt offered.
“I’m a big girl with a gun.”
“I want to pick your brain about something. Do you have ten minutes?”
“I have as much time as you need. I’m on vacation after all.”
Right, Matt thought. As if Kara Quinn would ever take a real vacation.
They took the stairs to the lobby. “I’m getting a drink,” Matt said. “Join me? After today—I can’t shut it off. I asked Andy to send me names, but he says they have it covered.”
“Then they do,” Kara said. “I know how you think, Matt—you want to do everything. A case like this, you have to trust your team.”
“Would you?”
“No, but that’s why I work undercover. I’m more like the I have to do everything myself kind of cop.” She paused. “Though, I have a good handler. Lex has never let me down when I’ve needed him, but he gives me enough room to do my job.”
They sat in the hotel bar, in a corner booth where they both had a visual on the entrance. Matt was still hungry and there was bar food, so he ordered an assortment of appetizers and a double Scotch for him; Kara ordered a tequila shot and beer. He watched her salt the rim, then down the shot.
“Better,” she said with a wink. She was going to have to stop winking at him—it was distracting. “So.” Kara leaned back into the booth and sipped her beer. “Pick my brain, Agent Costa.”
Suddenly, he didn’t want to talk shop. He wanted to find out what she’d told Michael Harris about her recruitment into the police academy. But he didn’t ask. Because that would be going down a path he desperately wanted to be on, a path he shouldn’t be on, a path that would lead directly to bed, a path that would cause numerous problems.
“I’ve always been good at delegating and using my team’s individual strengths. You have uncanny observation skills. And honestly? I was looking for you this afternoon, at the press briefing in the crowd and became angry that I didn’t see you. There were only forty-five people there, and I didn’t see you.”
“Because you were looking for me, not a unisex teenager. Put my hair up in a cap, take off makeup, wear a loose jacket, I can pass for a fifteen-year-old boy.”
He snorted. “Hardly.”
“You see what you expect to see. A young person carrying a skateboard doesn’t draw your attention. Just a kid trying to figure out what’s going on. Unless you’re that little punk who saw a crowd and thought it was time to make a quick buck.”
“The next potential victim—I want to do more, and I don’t know what, other than putting a cop outside every house.”
“And is that realistic?”
“They don’t have enough cops in the county to cover every teacher and administrator.”
“Look, Matt, you’ve done everything you could. Andy is doing everything he can. We thwart the killer this time, we win this battle.”
“I still can’t shake this feeling that it’s not going to be enough. That we won’t win the war.”
The appetizer platter came and they each ordered another round of drinks. Matt ate for a bit, then said, “We’ve done everything physically possible to warn teachers. But even if we save this victim for now, we still have to think about the cop who may be next. And whether he’ll strike again. This killer is smart and methodical. If he sees our presence, he might just back off. And if I’m wrong and he still gets to a teacher...”
His voice trailed off. He refocused on what he could control. “Either way, I can save the cop. I need your eyes, ears, instincts. Anything about the first two cops who were killed—anything in there that might tell us about who he’s going after now? One cop was white—Boyd in Missoula—and Nakamura in Portland was Japanese American, so race doesn’t help us.”
“Both were men.”
“And that might mean something—except that the first educator who was killed—a principal in Portland—was a Caucasian female named Rebecca Thomas. The college professor in Missoula was an African American male named John Marston. All three nurses were female, but nursing is still predominately a female profession. And while they were all trauma nurses, the educators were in completely different fields. A vice principal and a college professor.”
“Yet the first victim was a retired trauma nurse. No longer working. Maybe there is something else in common with the second victim in each set.”
“Ryder and our analysts in DC are running deep backgrounds on all seven victims. Catherine thinks there’s something connecting the victims to the killer, but until we can connect more than two victims together, I have no idea what. And do these locations even mean anything? I think it’s his way to fuck with us. Different states, different jurisdictions, almost impossible to put everything together into a cohesive investigation.”
“You’re worried about the cop.”
He hadn’t said it, but Kara was right. He was worried, really worried.
“March 9. This Tuesday. Probably early morning because this guy doesn’t want to wait anymore. He killed Victoria Manners early in the morning before dawn. Catherine concurs that he’s going to kill someone in the next few hours, before dawn tomorrow, if he can get to them. He’s antsy. Growing impatient. But he won’t deviate from the day. So even if we get everyone under wraps tonight, we’ll have to stay diligent until midnight tomorrow. And then worry that we missed something and there’s a dead teacher somewhere, while also trying to protect every damn cop in the area.”
“You feel helpless.”
“Don’t you?”
She didn’t say anything for a minute. “The cop is going to have a connection to Liberty Lake. Either he lives or works there—now or in the past. Maybe Andy’s fiancée has a right to be concerned.”
“I hated Chief Packard’s idea—logistically—of pairing up every cop and keeping track of their off-duty movements, but honestly, I think it might be the only way to keep these guys safe,” Matt said.
“And we take his prize off the table and he gets reckless. He’ll make a mistake. And he may get reckless sooner if we take his second victim away from him.”
“If we can protect all the cops—not just Spokane PD, but Liberty Lake and all the other communities in the Spokane Valley, plus the Sheriff’s department.” Matt pulled out his phone and made a note to write a memo first thing in the morning. “I’ll alert everyone in the area that a cop connected in some way to Liberty Lake is in danger and to be extra cautious this week.”
“Except Victoria Manners had no connection to Liberty Lake.”
“I’ll prioritize the risk. And we’re still running a background on her—maybe her boyfriend lived there, or she went to school there, or she summered at the lake. Or the killer is just fucking with us—or giving us a clue we’re too stupid to figure out.”
“Hardly stupid.”
“It feels that way.”
“I’ll observe. Talk to Maddox. He knows everyone—he worked out of Liberty Lake for years.” She frowned.
“You’re worried about him?”
She shrugged. “Him and Andy. And all the other cops in Liberty Lake. But Maddox is a friend.”
“
He recruited you.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What story did you tell Harris?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You really want to know?”
Hell yes. He shrugged and smiled. “If you want to tell me.”
“I was a junior in high school. I didn’t have a lot of friends—didn’t want them. I was in and out of different schools my entire life.”
“Army brat?”
She laughed, a real, honest-to-goodness laugh. “I wish. My parents were con artists. Common thieves. We moved a lot. Then my father got tossed in prison and my mother started hanging out with similar losers. I swear, if my mother and her steady stream of boyfriends had spent their energy actually working for a living rather than thinking up get-rich-quick scams, they would be rich. Half the time I didn’t even go to school. Transcripts? What are those? And pickpocketing? I learned those skills when I was still young and cute.”
Kara was still young and cute, Matt thought, then tried to push the thought out of his head.
“So,” she continued, “my mother and her boyfriend of the month came up with some new scam on tourists in...where were we? Vegas, yeah. Anyway, I started fucking with their plan, and when they realized I wasn’t going to play along anymore, my mother dumped me on Em in Liberty Lake. My mother was a piece of work, and I never trusted that she wouldn’t show up one day and pack me up. Before I turned sixteen, I’d become an expert on emancipation. She did show her face once and said she had a job that I was perfect for, and I told her to go to hell, I was filing for emancipation and would tell the court everything she had me do for her. She pouted and left. Of course, that didn’t stop her from calling me three years later when she needed to be bailed out of jail.”
Kara frowned at her beer.
“I don’t care about your criminal past. You obviously overcame it.”
“I just—well, I don’t usually talk about my parents or my personal life. You must be a monster in interrogations.”
“I hold my own. I suspect you do, too.”
She simply smiled.
“And?” Matt prompted. “Did you become emancipated?”
“No need to. She didn’t come back before I turned eighteen. So—all that goes into me not liking to take shit from anyone. I didn’t have a lot of friends—who could I trust with any of that crap? But there was another girl my age who had a rough life. Hell of a lot rougher than me—my parents were assholes, but they never hit me or starved me or pimped me out. Anyway, like me, Jamie was living with her grandparents. We became friends. She went to a party. I told her not to go.” Kara paused for a long minute and Matt wondered what she was thinking. About the past or what to share with him? Then she shrugged and said, “She was drugged and raped. A common story. I didn’t take it well.”
“You—?”
“Not me. I mean, I wasn’t drugged or raped. But Jamie was so twisted up and I wanted to kill someone. Instead, I killed his car. Maddox didn’t so much arrest me, as detain me. I told him everything, and he told me I should be a cop, because if I continued down the path I was on I’d be in prison.” She paused. “I didn’t tell your friends upstairs all that. Just the end result. And described in detail what I did to the Corvette that prick owned.”
“You’ve led an interesting life. And you’re what? Thirty?”
“You’ve been checking on me.”
“Your boss gave the basics. I figured you went to the academy right after high school and since you’ve been a cop for twelve years, that makes you thirty.”
“Turned the big three-oh in January. Now your turn.”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“I meant, what’s your deep dark secret.”
The waitress came over and asked if they wanted a last call—it was eleven and they were shutting down the bar, even though it was a Friday night. So it was with cheap hotel bars in the middle of nowhere.
Matt shouldn’t, but he ordered another Scotch. Kara smiled at him—damn, she was sexy—and ordered another tequila shot.
“I have no deep dark secrets,” he said. He had some dark stories, and he didn’t want to talk about Beth. “And I doubt that’s your deepest or darkest.”
Why had he said that? What was he asking for?
“I tell you my parents are petty criminals and you led a perfectly normal life?”
“My dad was career military—he came over from Cuba when he was a kid. My mom is first generation. My dad was so proud to be an American. He enlisted when he was eighteen, planned on serving for six years then going to college. But he loved the Navy, stuck with it.”
“So you were the Army brat. Or, rather, Navy brat.”
“In a manner of speaking—though my dad wasn’t moved around. He was stationed most of his career in Florida. He was killed in action, according to the official files, but it was an accident on base. Training accident. His CO really liked him and marked it KIA so his family could get better benefits. I was fifteen, my brother was sixteen.”
“Did either of you serve?”
He shook his head. “I wanted to, but my mom would have been crushed. She worried all the time about Dad, but knew he loved what he did. She was also wise—she knew I would be going into the military only as a tribute to my father, not because it was in my heart. She was a big believer of following dreams.”
“Is she around?”
“She died five years ago. Cancer. My brother is a big shot doctor with a gorgeous, smart wife, two kids, and another on the way. Still lives in Miami.”
“And you decided to become an FBI agent.”
“It was roundabout, but basically, I’d planned on being a cop. Ended up being recruited into the FBI out of college. No deep dark secrets.”
“We all have secrets, Matt,” she said.
He almost told her about Beth and what happened last summer. And worse, he could tell that she knew he had something he was holding back, as if she could read his mind. When he told her she had uncanny observation skills, he’d meant it—but it went way beyond that. Maybe that’s why she was so good as an undercover agent, why she had made detective at twenty-five, why she was on mandatory “vacation.”
“Maybe we do,” he said quietly. “Some things are harder to talk about than others.” Because he wanted to tell her about Beth, he deflected. “Why undercover work?”
She shrugged.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m good at it.”
“I’m a good scuba diver, but you don’t see me diving for treasure.”
“That sounds like fun, though.”
“You dive?” he asked, surprised.
“Never learned, but I’m a wicked swimmer. Always wanted to take a class, but I don’t really like rules.”
She’d totally changed the subject. Smoothly, expertly. But he wouldn’t let her. He really wanted to know what made her tick. “Hence, undercover work.”
She raised an eyebrow. When she did that, it was so damn sexy. Did she know? Did she know that she was exactly his type? Hell, he didn’t know he had a type, but if he had to pick a woman now, it would be Kara Quinn. It was the contradictions. Young, but not young. Petite, but strong. Sassy, but smart. But mostly, she was mysterious. The more he learned, the more he realized how much there was to learn.
“Maybe, in part. Maybe I just like being a different person.” Kara jerked her head toward the bartender who’d just finished closing down the bar. “They’re closing up. I’m going to call a taxi. One tequila too many.”
“You can stay with me.”
Don’t go there, Matt.
She gave him a sly smile, leaned forward, and said quietly, “If I go to your room, we’re going to have sex.”
Too late.
“Are we?”
He wanted to. He couldn’t explain why he was drawn to Kara. Maybe
because they were both outsiders. Maybe because she was sexy in an oddly wholesome way. Maybe because he hadn’t been in a relationship—short or long—in months. Maybe because it was temporary—they both had careers in different states.
She smiled and for the first time since he’d met her, the smile reached her eyes. They sparkled and he went from simmer to boil.
Hell, Mathias, you’ve been turned on since the minute you saw her.
She leaned forward and said, “Or we can just...cuddle.”
He barely resisted kissing her right there in the bar. He whispered, “Como el infierno, cariño.”
Matt took her hand and led her to the elevator. It was late; they were alone. Before the doors even closed, his mouth devoured hers.
He was about to ask her if she was really okay with this when her arms went around his waist and she pulled his body against hers.
The door opened way too fast, but he was only on the third floor. He jumped back, not wanting anyone on his team to see him like this. Kara was a witness as well as a temporary team member. Taking her to bed... He shouldn’t.
“Stop thinking,” she said.
How the hell did she know what he was thinking?
“Are you sure?”
“Are you?”
Matt was normally confident in everything he did—at work and at play—but Kara’s confidence had him hesitating, as if she knew something he didn’t.
His room was at the end of the hall next to the staircase. Jim and Michael were across the hallway. His room adjoined the war room, but he doubted anyone else was up at midnight. He hoped.
Still, he entered quietly. He made sure the door was locked to the adjoining room so no one could surprise him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kara slip the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and close it.
“Where were we?” she said.
Here he thought he was seducing her, but the tables had turned, and she walked over to him and kissed him. He hesitated again because this was happening too fast. His head was in a whirl, his body was primed, but his duty kept getting in the way.
Kara stepped back, but still had her hands on his arms. “Matt,” she said, “we’re attracted to each other. We’re both single. And if you make love half as well as you kiss, we’re going to have a lot of fun. Stop thinking about the case—it’s midnight, and unless you have some psychic connection about what the killer is going to do and when, you can’t do anything right now. Stop thinking about your people finding out that we’re going to get naked and have some fun. I don’t care, but you do, and I respect that. I don’t kiss and tell. I like you, Matt. I want to be here. And I know you want me here.”