Her own cell phone had rung incessantly, and she’d finally turned it off after a while. Driving north on Meridian Avenue from the airport, she finally turned it on again to check the messages. There were calls from her friends Alex Bridge and Nina Reeves, from Chief Deputy Raines, from her old college friend Jennifer Ghezzi in St. Louis, from her father, and from Scott Hendler.
“Faith, what’s this all about?” her father said on the message. “You call me and tell me what this means.”
Hendler’s message was from a little more than an hour ago. She listened to it twice. He was being her friend, her lover, and an investigator, all at once.
“Oh, Scott,” she said.
She knew she would have to check into a hotel as Kimberly Diamond, sit and do nothing. But that could wait, at least for a while.
And Faith realized, with increasing clarity, that she needed him as well. Needed him to just be there, to be normal and sane and even-tempered, even needed his silly word games.
She headed toward Edmond.
Half an hour later, she turned off Danforth Road onto a side street and parked in front of the condominium fourplex where Hendler lived. It was less than a mile from the Edmond safe house. Hendler’s Toyota was the only vehicle in the lot. He’d told her that the other three units were all occupied by either young single professionals or couples with no kids, who all worked during the day. There were times when he was working a big case that he would escape here in the afternoon to organize data, write reports, and such. It was much quieter than his desk at the FBI field office. Faith smiled. They’d spent a couple of afternoons here engaged in other, less formal activities as well.
All of the condos were split-level, and Hendler’s faced away from the street. Faith walked through a wide breezeway, turned the corner, and rang his doorbell.
She waited a long moment, then knocked.
The condo had two bedrooms, and Hendler had set up the second one as his computer room. It was farthest from the door, and sometimes when he was working back there he wouldn’t hear the knock or the bell the first time, especially if he was wrapped up in whatever he was doing.
Faith waited another minute, then pounded the door with her fist. Even when he was wrapped up in work, it wasn’t like him to not answer the door for this long.
Faith walked very quickly back to the Suburban, where she’d left it in the parking lot beside Hendler’s Toyota. She pulled Kimberly Diamond’s new Glock out of the glove compartment and, holding it close to her body, jogged through the breezeway and back to the condo.
She and Hendler had given each other keys to their respective homes a few months ago, when they began spending more and more nights together. She found her key ring and put the key in the lock.
Turning it, the key met no resistance. There was no click.
It was already unlocked.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered. Hendler
She pushed the door open and stepped into the room, the gun coming up in her hand.
Nothing in the corners.
Everything looked perfectly normal, the same as it had looked the last time she saw it, the morning after Daryn McDermott died. She and Hendler had left hastily after Rob Cain’s call, and she hadn’t been back here since.
The living room was done in deep blues and browns, the furniture tasteful but not expensive. Hendler wasn’t a neat freak like her brother, but he was certainly a better housekeeper than Faith was. Things were well organized, put away. There was no dust. There were several pictures of windmills and train depots, Hendler’s two artistic passions. He’d developed into a fairly talented photographer and had taken several of the photos himself in various places he’d traveled.
Faith took a deep breath and closed the door behind her. “Scott?”
She heard nothing.
“Scott, it’s me! Hello!”
The kitchen was empty. The bathroom and Hendler’s bedroom-the room they’d made love in so many times-empty. The bed was neatly made.
She found him in the computer room.
His desk chair had been spun around and was facing the wrong direction, away from the desk. The computer monitor was still on, a screen saver of three-dimensional pipes scrawling across it.
Hendler was a couple of steps in front of the chair, toppled toward the far wall. He’d fallen straight to the side, as if he had been kneeling and simply fell over. Blood had pooled under his head, and there were a few splatters on the floor and the wall.
Her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She moved forward tentatively, like a child taking its first halting steps.
Then something broke inside her and she rushed to him. He was on his side, his feet pointing toward her.
“Scott!” she shouted. “Scott, no! Dammit, no,
The first thing she touched was his arm; then she ran her hand up to his shoulder. There was drying blood on his neck. She saw the wound, one fairly small entry at his temple.
More blood and tissue. Red, white, gray. She picked his head up. No exit wound on the other side. A small-caliber gun, most likely, the round still lodged in Scott Hendler’s brain. Some of his blood had gotten on her hand, a little more on her shirt.
From the angle of his body, he’d been on his knees when he was shot. They’d forced him to his knees.
She tried to think, but no thoughts would come. Hendler couldn’t be dead. That was all, that was the extent of her mental processes.
She needed him, after all.
She held his head for a long time. She wasn’t sure how long. Faith blinked over and over, but felt no tears. There was nothing in her, not even grief. Not even anger. There was nothing to feel.
She finally lay his head down and touched his face with her fingertips. He was already starting to cool.
She gently backed away and just stared for a long moment. She’d seen death before, and had even taken a life herself, but this…there were no words, no thoughts, that could process it.
Faith tried to think analytically. She moved around the body and touched the office chair. It was still warm. She sat in it, swiveled to face the desk.
She leaned forward and was about to touch the computer keyboard’s space bar when she thought,
She knew this had to be connected to everything else that had happened. Daryn McDermott, Kat Hall, Sanborn…her brother. There was no other explanation.
His yellow legal pad sat just to the left of the computer. She recognized Hendler’s neat printing. She read the notes he’d written himself, and her stomach turned.
SK.
Sean Kelly.
The “new evidence” he’d mentioned-they must have found Sean’s Jeep and his gun, with some evidence to suggest that Daryn had actually been murdered there.
“Oh God,” Faith said.
She’d defended her brother to Hendler, saying she knew Sean wasn’t capable of murder.
Or was he?
Had he committed two murders? Had he been so obsessed with Daryn McDermott that he’d had to kill her, and then murdered Hendler when he began to have suspicions of Sean, with a growing amount of evidence against him?
She turned around and faced Hendler’s body. Her throat tightened.
Why would Sean kill Hendler, then leave evidence right here, the evidence that implicated Sean in Daryn’s murder?
The phone rang.
Faith jumped. It was the phone on Hendler’s desk, right beside the computer. She looked at the caller ID and recognized the number at the FBI field office.
She listened to it ring four times, then stop as the call went to voice mail. The ringing seemed to jolt her into reality. Faith considered her options. She could call 911 and wait, be a good citizen. But how would Kimberly Diamond of Independence, Missouri, explain that she had a key to FBI Special Agent Scott Hendler’s condo? Plus, the odds were that at least someone who responded to the call might know her. Wouldn’t work-Faith Kelly had to be out of sight.
She could leave and place an anonymous call. But they would want to know how she knew there was a dead man in the condo. And she couldn’t answer questions.
Or she could leave him.
Faith folded her hands together, squeezing them until they hurt. To the extent that she had allowed him to be, Scott Hendler had been there for her whenever she’d needed him, no questions asked. He’d trusted her even when she gave him no reason to do so. He’d gone against his own better judgment at times in order to give her the benefit of the doubt.
She may have loved him, though Faith wasn’t sure she knew what that meant. She was certain that he had loved her, and it may have cost him his life.
She squeezed her hands tighter. She bowed her head until her lips touched one of her knuckles. She closed her eyes.
It wouldn’t be long before someone found him. One of his FBI colleagues, perhaps. Maybe his parents or his brother would call and be concerned when they couldn’t reach him. He’d grown up right here in Edmond, and his parents lived barely two miles away. He had dinner with them every week. Faith had met them-they were good people. They would be utterly devastated. In a very real way, they might never recover from their son’s murder.
Yes, he would be found.
And she would be gone. She would pick up her brother’s trail. Finding Sean was no longer an exercise in family dynamics.
She bent down and touched Scott’s cheek again. “I’m sorry, Sleepy Scott,” she said. She felt like she should cry, but she had no tears. She couldn’t feel anything at all, not yet. It frightened her to
