Cutting Edge

“Quin is lovely. She’ll like you. Someday you can meet her.”

“When?”

“She has to be very careful. Quin said Nora would be furious if she found out, and I don’t want her to find a way to stop the visits. She’s an FBI agent now. She can probably stop me from having any visitors.”

Maggie’s stomach felt sick. Lorraine was the only person she could really talk to. Her mom was the only person who talked to Maggie about her father, about all the incredible things he had done to save the earth, to save animals, to change things.

And Nora had killed him. She had sent their mother to prison, and had stolen Quin away.

“I hate Nora.” Inside, Maggie felt her emotions raging.

“Don’t say that. Hate is a negative emotion. It turns us inside out and we make mistakes. Nora doesn’t know better. I don’t know what I did wrong, I don’t know why she set your father up to be killed by the police. They must have lied to her, brainwashed her. She’s even so misguided she’s become part of the Establishment. But not Quin. Quin still has me in her heart, and I know we’ll be great friends, the three of us.”

Maggie wasn’t so sure. But her mother was happy, and Maggie liked it when her mother was happy.

Maggie frowned as she stared at Quin’s office building. Quin had gone off with friends to lunch. Laughing, living a normal life with a normal job, Maggie’s sister never called her anymore. The last time Maggie had seen her was two years ago, when Maggie had decided to go to Rose College. Maggie had shown up at Quin’s town house to surprise her. Quin wasn’t happy. She said that Maggie and Lorraine were another part of her life, separate from her job and friends here in Sacramento.

Maggie had hated her then, had very much wanted to hurt her. But then Quin had apologized, said she was sorry, but Nora couldn’t know.

Nora stood in Maggie’s way.

She’d always been in Maggie’s way. Basically, from Day One, Nora had ruined her life. After killing her father, imprisoning her mother, and stealing her sister, Nora became one of them, the Establishment. Maggie had learned a lot about Nora English, and was determined to find the very best way to make her pay. To make her suffer. To hurt her more than she’d hurt Maggie. She could kill her the way she’d killed Scott and the others; she could kill Nora the same way. Watch her get sick and fall over paralyzed and in pain and lie there for hours suffering until she croaked.

But then she’d be dead and out of pain. There had to be something worse than death, and Maggie had spent months figuring out what that was.

Now she knew.

She rose from the bench and walked down Eleventh Street until she hit O Street, then turned west. She’d been to Quin’s town house before. Quin was now at lunch. Maggie would break in and make herself at home while waiting for her sister.

Nora would kill Quin. It would be her fault. And how she would suffer! She’d feel so guilty. So angry. Full of revenge. And then, Maggie could make her suffer even more. Push in the knife and twist, twist, twist it.

Nora would pay with her own life for killing Maggie’s father. But not until she was emotionally and physically devastated.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“She’s at lunch!” Nora got in the passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

“It is twelve-thirty,” Duke said.

“I can’t tell her in front of her friends and colleagues. But I have to warn her. And try to figure out why she lied to me.”

“Email her, ask her to come by Rogan-Caruso right after lunch. We’ll wait for her.”

“I have to get back to headquarters. I should have called her first, I was just so mad I thought she’d hear it in my voice.”

“You can work from my office for an hour. Make your calls, I’ll help go through the background information with a fresh set of eyes, see if we missed anything. Any connection between Maggie and Jonah, Maggie and Russ, anything. And Jayne, my computer expert, said she wanted me to look at something in the video files.”

“I thought you were the computer expert.”

“I’m the security expert,” Duke said with a half smile as he pulled onto the street. “I break into computers and security systems. Jayne works on keeping me, and people like me, from doing that.”

By the time they arrived at the sleek office building where Rogan-Caruso occupied the eighteenth floor, Quin had emailed Nora back. “She said she’d be here in forty-five minutes. Wants to know why.”

Duke offered an oblique response for her. “It’s about the case, isn’t it?”

“Gotcha.” She typed a vague message to Quin into her BlackBerry.

Duke was worried about Nora and how she was going to handle Quin. He kept thinking about Sean and how close he’d been to chasing him away-away to Kane and far more dangerous situations than he’d face working here at Rogan-Caruso.

They went up to his office, and Nora admired the layout. “Wow. This is really nice.”

“Thanks.” He glanced at his email. “Jayne’s with a client, but she’ll buzz me when she’s done.”

Nora stood looking out the window, but Duke doubted she saw the downtown view, particularly impressive on this sunny day.

“I warned her,” she said. “I told her Lorraine was a pathological liar, she couldn’t believe her, and she’d make Quin crazy and confused. I thought she understood. I mean, it wasn’t always easy with the two of us, but it’s better now. Quin has a great job, we don’t argue much, we’re friends. Maybe-maybe I could understand why she wanted to see her again. But to continue to visit? A couple times a year? I just don’t get it.”

“She was young when all that happened. She didn’t have your experience. Nora, you practically raised yourself. You took responsibility for a young girl, not just after Lorraine went to prison, but before that. You raised Quin more than your mother.”

Nora spun around and faced Duke. “Then why didn’t she listen to me? Why didn’t she do what I said? Why did she have to lie to me?”

Nora didn’t have a traditional upbringing. She didn’t understand how teenagers rebelled and did what they wanted. Duke said, “I had a great relationship with my parents, but I didn’t do everything they told me to. I did what I wanted.”

“But this was serious-not sneaking out of the house to go joyriding.”

Duke ignored her sarcasm and said, “My father told me not to work for Kane, my brother. Told me I wasn’t ready, and he didn’t know if I ever would be. I took that to mean I wasn’t good enough, or at least as good as Kane. I resented my dad for saying it, and went and joined Kane’s mercenary group. I had been a United States Marine, I could do anything. I said that to him, too.

“I knew third day in that I was in over my head. I could do the physical work, no problem. Even emotionally, until I left, I could handle any situation. I became the unit’s go-to guy for fixing the unfixable. But it was the seriousness of the day-to-day job. There was no downtime. Downtime was relaxing in the jungle where you never really relaxed because someone could be sneaking up on you. Your senses always on overdrive. I was miserable. I could do it, but I wasn’t happy doing it. And Dad knew that. But it was something I had to find out myself.”

Nora rubbed her temples and sat down on a chair at the large round table in the corner. “I appreciate that, and I understand where you’re coming from, but you got out of the bad situation. You learned your lesson and moved on. Why is Quin still seeing her? What lies is Lorraine feeding her?”

“Maybe Quin just wants to see her mother. Maybe she feels sorry for her. Maybe she doesn’t want her to be so alone. Lorraine’s locked away for the rest of her life. Quin has a lot of compassion, just like you.”

“I have no compassion when it comes to Lorraine.”