Silenced

Marti came over and put her large, narrow hands on Ivy’s shoulders. “You are no longer safe here. The FBI will be back.”

“I know.” She breathed deeply. “You’ll find Mina a home?”

“I have an old friend in Fort Hood. We went to theology school together. She’ll love Mina like we do. I’m already getting the papers in order. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Mina is her niece from upstate New York. No one will question it. You’ve done the best you can, Ivy. You saved Mina, protected her all this time. Now let me. Let me help.”

Ivy nodded. “Thank you.”

“Your identities will be here in the morning. Take Sara, do not tell me where. I am not a good liar.”

“And I’m too good.”

“God has forgiven you. Now forgive yourself.”

Ivy chest heaved in silent sobs. Marti pulled her into a tight, bony hug, and Ivy had never felt so loved since the night her mother tried to save her from the monster.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sean did not take well to being threatened.

He considered calling his brother Duke about Paxton’s bombshell, but decided to keep it to himself for now. He didn’t want to tell Duke what he’d done. Not because he regretted it, but because he’d learned the hard way to keep his not-quite-legal activities a secret.

It was nearly eleven years ago while at Stanford University that Sean hacked into a tenured professor’s computer and exposed him as a child pornographer. It was a brilliant plan. When the FBI got involved over the illegal hacking, he came forward, admitted what he’d done, expecting a medal for getting the pervert thrown off campus and under indictment.

Instead, he’d been arrested.

Duke had fixed it, but Sean had never trusted the FBI after that. Duke got him into MIT, even though Sean wanted nothing to do with any educational or government institution. But of course he went. He’d always done what Duke wanted, at least on the surface.

Sean knew exactly what Paxton was referring to, because there was only one felony Sean had committed that had a statute of limitation of ten years. The ten years was up next March. Eight months, one week from yesterday.

He had to put the situation on hold because right now, there were far more important things to worry about than his freedom. As soon as he solved Paxton’s blackmail problem, he’d find the answer he needed.

He pushed the thoughts aside and got to work. Paxton had e-mailed Sean his appointment schedule from the week he said the note Lucy wrote had been stolen.

He hated being put in the position of keeping something this important from Lucy. His stomach ached, a sure sign that he was torn. And there was no one he could talk to about it. Patrick was out of town, and Sean didn’t know how he would react if he knew Lucy had kept such an important piece of information secret. Her sister-in-law Kate would understand, and Sean trusted her more than any other fed, but Kate was still a fed and Sean would be putting her in a compromising position.

Sean wasn’t as conflicted about keeping the information about Lucy’s acceptance into the FBI a secret. It would destroy her, and Sean wasn’t going to be party to that. If she quit because he told her, it would taint their relationship forever. Worse, she’d give up on her dream. She would say she understood, but he remembered how upset she’d been when she failed her first personal interview.

She not only deserved this assignment, she would make an amazing cop. Better than most cops out there. Sean would much rather she work for RCK. Her instincts were sharp and she certainly had the brains for private security work, but that’s not what Lucy wanted.

Paxton’s schedule had been full the last week of June. He had meetings with locally elected officials, lobbyists, nonprofit groups, other congressmen-more than a dozen meetings on Monday alone. How could someone work like that? Sean kept meetings to a minimum. Sitting around doing nothing, in Sean’s mind. He knew part of it was his kinetic personality-he had to be doing something, physically or mentally.

Normally, Sean would forward the list to RCK West and have their support staff do the grunt work, but he didn’t trust anyone else with this job, and he didn’t want to explain it to his brother. This kind of work, though simple, needed to be thorough. At least it kept his mind going, and he ran multiple searches simultaneously.

He put the out-of-town visitors at the bottom of his list. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be guilty, but the chances were minimal. He wrote a quick program to run basic background checks on those people, as well as Paxton’s staff, and forced it to work on another server, to keep his at peak performance. When it was done, the program would e-mail him a report.

There was a national law enforcement group, a national victims’ rights group, multiple congressmen and staff, and several lobbyists representing a variety of clients.

If he were going to steal something, he would prefer to be alone in the room. He made a list of all meetings where there were only one or two other people. That eliminated half the meetings. Two people would work-either a conspiracy, or one of them stepped out.

Paxton wouldn’t have been in the room.

What made Paxton think that someone hadn’t accessed his office after hours? Capitol security was extensive, and Sean bet the first thing Paxton had done was look at the security feeds outside his office for any intruders. But there were no security cameras in the individual legislative offices. So he’d deduced that someone who had access to his inner office had taken the note. Paxton had dismissed his staff as viable suspects, and Sean supposed a man as wily as Paxton would be able to assess his employees accurately.

Then there was his pet PI, Sergio Russo.

Sean knew very little about the PI. How had Paxton found him? Was he from DC or the New York district that Paxton represented?

Running a background on Russo would be a little more difficult. A good PI would have alerts when certain databases were accessed. Sean would have to go into each database through a back door. It wasn’t legal, but at this point, if Russo was not who he appeared to be, Sean didn’t want him knowing that he was digging.

Paxton said that the note and locket had been kept in a box in his bottom right-hand drawer. Close to him, where he could look at it anytime he wanted, but hidden from public view.

There had to be something more than the theft of the locket and note. There was no evidence at all that Paxton had killed Roger Morton. Someone else confessed, the gun had been recovered, no one was even looking at Paxton as a coconspirator, let alone the man who pulled the trigger.

Why not call their bluff?

Because Paxton’s lying to you.

He wasn’t lying about killing Roger Morton-why would he confess that to Sean when someone else was in prison for the crime? But he was lying about something else.

Mick Mallory had pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and gave a detailed rundown on every predator he’d killed.

What’s one more in the big picture?

But if Paxton killed Morton, Mallory knew. Which meant Mallory might know why the locket was so important to Paxton.

Why would someone take the fall for Paxton’s crimes?

Someone like Mick Mallory, the bastard, was so broken he’d take the truth to his grave. But there were others. Lucy’s former boss, Fran Buckley, had made a plea agreement. Did she know about Paxton’s involvement? Sean couldn’t see how she didn’t. She took his money, he had headlined a fundraiser for her, they had been friends.

Except … that didn’t fit the rest of the scenario. It didn’t fit why two call girls were dead, a congressional mistress, or a social worker and her husband who were helping them. There was a big gaping hole of information, and in that missing information was motive.