Dead End Read online

  Nina glanced around, still sitting on the sidewalk. Wyatt moved to help her up, but Parker beat him to it. Held out his hand and hauled Nina to her feet while Wyatt just stood there looking inconsiderate.

  She gifted Parker a small smile. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” His eyes were dark, but he had that undercurrent of a happily married man that had for a long time been absent in his partner. “Wyatt is going to take you home, okay? Watch your six.”

  Finally Parker said something right. Wyatt nodded to his partner, since Nina couldn’t see him. She snapped a salute with her good hand. “Yes, sir.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “Where’s your car?”

  She turned from Parker as he walked away and said, “I walked here.”

  “You did?”

  She shrugged. “I only live around the corner.”

  Parker, already ten feet away, spun back. “I’m headed to the office. When you see her home, make sure she eats some lunch.”

  Nina rolled her eyes.

  “My car is this way.”

  He held out his hand, but she didn’t take it. She walked gingerly, and he wished he’d parked closer. She’d hit the sidewalk pretty hard, and she was leaning toward the opposite side. Wyatt put his hand on the small of her back like he was leading her, when the reality was he needed to give her support and comfort even if it was in that small measure.

  He’d done the same a million times with witnesses, or women he’d dated, but he’d never felt like this. It was as though a spark of electricity had arced from her to his hand. She probably wasn’t even aware of the action, whereas all of his senses had lit up. The lingering rush of adrenaline at watching her almost die wasn’t helping. She’d nearly been flattened on the concrete by that car.

  She needed support and protection, but from what? The police could track the car, but it was likely stolen. Maybe they would never find out who had been driving. Nina would live the rest of her life under a cloud of impending danger.

  Nina’s cell phone chimed from inside her purse. She pulled it out and looked at the screen, but he couldn’t read the tiny text. What he could read was her reaction.

  The flinch.

  The quick intake of breath that meant the danger was far from over.

  Maybe it was just beginning.

  TWO

  “Everything okay?”

  Nina looked up from her phone. “Yes.” She cleared her throat. The text had come from a contact saved in her phone as Baltimore Public Library. How was that even possible? Had someone hacked her phone just to send a message?

  Next time I won’t miss.

  She had to talk to Sienna. She’d know what to do. This man whom Nina knew as a friend only, despite the unwanted feelings she had for him, didn’t want all of her baggage. No one actually wanted to know what another person’s damage was. Every time she’d tried to tell a man she was attracted to about her past, he’d run away in response. She didn’t need that all over again. But Sienna was different, best girlfriends were always different.

  So Nina kept the text message to herself. Meanwhile Wyatt didn’t look like he believed her that it was nothing, but thankfully didn’t say anything.

  The drive to her building took two minutes, but it was full of awkward silence nonetheless. Nina waved to the doorman and Wyatt did the leading thing again, with his hand on her back. It probably meant nothing. He probably did it with suspects and witnesses all the time. He probably didn’t feel the same awareness she did.

  They took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. He’d never been to her condo. And why would he have? They’d only hung out at Parker and Sienna’s house. What was he going to think? Nina sighed, trying to dispel her ridiculous thoughts. Why did she even care what Wyatt thought? It wasn’t like she was looking for a relationship. He was only here because Parker had told him to bring her home.

  Nina unlocked her front door. The steady beep of her security system chimed, and she entered the code to silence the alarm. Wyatt was still by her door, eyes wide as he stared at the expanse of her foyer.

  “Come in.” There were a few boxes she still hadn’t unpacked. But the place wasn’t unlivable.

  Wyatt shook off whatever had stalled him and shut the front door. “Nice place.”

  “Doesn’t have a lot of character, but it’ll do for now.”

  “You’re not staying?” He stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, which pulled his shirt taut over his arm muscles.

  Nina looked away. “I thought about buying a house, but who wants to mow a yard? If I want to have a country experience I’ll go to Sienna and Parker’s house in the sticks.”

  Wyatt eyed her. “Some people like that kind of thing.” He glanced around. “So this is home?”

  Home. There was a concept Nina didn’t know all that much about, unless he was talking about her friendship with Sienna. They’d been each other’s family for years. Instead of answering, Nina went to the kitchen and pressed the button on the side of her coffeepot, where it heated water. After the morning she’d had, she needed hot chocolate, stat. Maybe even marshmallows.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  He was looking at her like she was a puzzle he hadn’t realized was five thousand pieces and not six simple ones easily slotted together. “Sure. Parker said something about lunch.” He sauntered to her fridge and pulled it open. “How about eggs?”

  “Sure.”

  She made the drinks while he pulled ingredients from the fridge. “Where’s the sausage?” His eyes narrowed. “The fancy cheese I get, but you eat meat, right?”

  Nina smiled. “Bottom drawer.”

  Wyatt muttered “thank you” and stuck his head back in the fridge. Nina chuckled as she circled the center island, where the burners were. Her side was a counter on which he set a chopping board, an onion and a handful of mushrooms, then slid over a knife.

  “You’re on chopping duty.”

  Nina smiled. “I’ll make you proud.”

  She got to work cutting veggies as best she could with her right hand while Wyatt’s strong hands cracked each egg with ease—though who would eat all of this food was anyone’s guess. But even with the easiness of their friendship, the weight of the day washed back like the incoming tide. It always did, and Nina wasn’t sure she’d know what to do if one day she no longer had to worry about it.

  “Tell me what all this is about.”

  The knife slipped across her finger, and Nina cried out.

  Wyatt rushed around the island and pulled her to the sink. He ran the cold water gently over her right hand and held her finger there. The liquid washed away the drops of blood and helped numb the pain. Too bad something so simple didn’t work on everything.

  He ran his thumb over the tiny cut. “It doesn’t look too bad, but you should put a bandage on it.”

  Nina got one from the end cupboard and sat so he’d know she didn’t need his help. She finished the rest of the chopping without speaking, and then pushed the cutting board to his side of the island. He looked up from stirring, evidently content to wait for her to be ready to answer his request.

  “My mother was killed, you know that. Parker said it. Her name was Congresswoman Clarissa Holmes.” Nina sucked in a breath. “When I was five years old my parents separated for a while. My mother began having an affair with another man.”

  Nina clenched her fingers together in her lap, but it hurt so she let go. “I would see him when the nanny brought me home from the park. His name was Mr. Thomas, and he was very handsome. He would have tea with my mother and me every day, and he would tell me stories about pirates, and fair maidens, about spies and bad guys. I think he was one of them. A spy, I mean.

  “Maybe he’s part of the reason I said yes when the CIA wanted to recruit Sienna and me. I l
ooked for him in their databases as much as I could, but never found a single trace of anyone with the first or last name of Thomas who looked like him. Maybe I was wrong about him being a real spy, but that’s what I thought for a long time. Anyway, one day—I was six and a half, I think—we came home from the park and the front door was open.”

  Wyatt slid the eggs into two bowls and came over. He sat on the stool beside her, but didn’t say anything.

  “She was in the bedroom. There was blood everywhere. The nanny started screaming, so I ran to the study and called 911 from the phone. She fled out the front door and left me there. The police found me, on the stairs. Alone in the house with my dead mother.”

  “And the police thought your father did it?”

  “It was his letter opener. He’d left it when he moved out, but he hadn’t been there in months. I was sent to live with my grandparents, and they shipped me off to boarding school. I don’t think they were too interested in another child, especially one who had gone through a trauma.

  “I went to see my father after I turned eighteen. He said it wasn’t him, and he wasn’t lying. It never seemed right to me that he had just shown up that day and killed her. But the police never believed me about Mr. Thomas.” Nina blew out a breath. “I’ve been thinking it through ever since.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “When I told the police about Mr. Thomas they thought I had invented him to cover for my father. They never found the nanny—she just disappeared. No one else knew anything about the man who’d been spending all that time with my mother. They thought he didn’t exist because she hadn’t told anyone—not her friends, or employees—about him. They even tried to get this counselor to say I was making the whole thing up, like I was hysterical or delusional or something. Like I’d made up the idea of another suspect just so they wouldn’t send my father to jail.”

  Nina squeezed her eyes shut. “I was the kid in school whose father killed her mother and who made up a story. The crazy child no one wanted their kid to hang around with because my delusion might get them killed, too.”

  “Except Sienna.”

  “She was as alone as I was, and she didn’t care what anyone else thought.”

  Nina had worked for years with her best friend, Sienna. Playing bad guys off against each other, rehashing missions that had gone bad. They had been friends since that first day of third grade at boarding school, and they’d been inseparable ever since.

  Except that Sienna had married Parker a couple of months back. Nina didn’t begrudge the happiness Sienna had found with the marshal. Sienna certainly deserved it after she was attacked on a mission and got amnesia. Nina had tried to help her remember where she’d hidden the sensitive information, which had presented a significant breach of national security. Sienna and her husband had cleared all that up, though, and fallen in love in the process.

  But Nina couldn’t help feeling like maybe she’d been left behind.

  Wyatt returned her smile. “And...now you’re trying to find this Mr. Thomas guy? To prove that your father is innocent and get him out of prison?”

  “My father is dead.”

  * * *

  Wyatt swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I see.”

  An innocent man had died in prison? There wasn’t much that Nina would achieve by unearthing something everyone else involved probably considered over and done with. He didn’t like it, but things were what they were. Still, the look on her face pricked his heart.

  “I could...make some calls.” He took a breath. “Find the original investigating FBI agent, see if I can maybe get you a copy of the file.”

  If she saw the evidence against her father for herself then she would know why he’d been put away. Maybe after that she could be convinced she didn’t need to continue on this fruitless search. Wyatt wasn’t discounting her memories, but she had been a child. Whether her mother had been having an affair or not, her father had been convicted for a reason. The evidence had to have been conclusive, or there would never have been a guilty verdict.

  He believed in the justice system, despite its flaws. Wyatt believed if the evidence hadn’t been there, then the wrong person would not have been sent to prison.

  “You would do that?” Nina’s look was full of hope, of wonder, that he might be able to help her. “Could you get the file?”

  Wyatt nodded. “It’s worth a try.” He had a cousin who was an FBI agent that he could ask. If only to put to rest her questions, and this search she was on, to find a truth that was likely anything but. It’d be worth a call to help her do what he’d had to.

  Move on.

  Have you, really?

  “Thank you.” She jumped up and put her arms around him.

  Wyatt was taken aback for a moment, but remembered himself fast enough that he could return the hug before she got embarrassed over what she’d done. When was the last time someone had hugged him to say thank you? He wasn’t sure he could remember.

  When they’d eaten, he set the dirty dishes in the sink and wiped his hands on a towel. “I should head back to the office, but I’ll make some calls this afternoon.”

  Nina looked up at him from her perch on the stool. Her big blue eyes were full of sadness, and possibilities. It was enough to convince him she was onto something, despite the evidence to the contrary. Her need to prove that things had been the way she remembered them was strong, he got that. He understood why someone would want to preserve their memory of what had been—to prove what she knew to be true. But she was talking about events that happened when she was a young child, and since then she could easily have distorted things in her head.

  Children were notoriously bad witnesses when any time had passed. Often they only wanted to tell adults what they wanted to hear—or what they themselves wanted to believe had happened. Was that the case here?

  “Thank you, Wyatt.”

  He nodded. The wall he could see in the living room caught his eye, so he trailed toward it. Nina jumped up and intercepted him. “Didn’t you just say you had to get back to work?”

  Wyatt looked at her.

  “There’s nothing interesting in there.”

  Except that he thought there were printed pages or even newspaper articles tacked to the portion of the wall he could see. Why didn’t she want him to go in there and look? Nina wasn’t exactly hiding what she was doing. Parker and Sienna obviously knew about her looking into her mother’s murder, and she’d told him without too many qualms.

  “If you say so.” But he didn’t believe her.

  If she’d tacked pictures and news releases on the wall in her living room, this was clearly worse than he’d thought. It had consumed her daytime hours, which meant it also consumed her nights, too. Parker seemed to think she had to be reminded to eat. The signs were all there.

  Nina was obsessed.

  He understood why well enough. He’d been there himself even, but he knew what the end would be. If Nina kept going, either she would destroy herself trying to find the answers, or she would reach the end and find not even an ounce of the satisfaction she’d been looking for. She was going to wind up empty and exhausted with no answers.

  “I guess I’ll be going then.” He stepped back. “Have a nice rest of your day.”

  Wyatt walked to the door. That hadn’t been a great thing to say. Nina didn’t need the brush-off. What she needed was someone who could be compassionate to her situation—and that just wasn’t Wyatt. Sympathy, yes. But he didn’t know how much more he could give her when it would probably be unhelpful.

  He turned back to her. “Be careful, and let me know if you need anything.”

  But it couldn’t be denied she also needed someone who was going to tell her the truth—her father likely was her mother’s murderer. That the man she thought had done it didn’t have any reason to
have killed her mom, not if they were in a relationship. She’d said herself that they had been happy, her mother and this “Mr. Thomas.”

  “Goodbye, Wyatt.” Her voice was small, damaged. She didn’t sound anything like the self-assured former CIA agent he’d come to know.

  A woman who had nearly died today.

  Wyatt pulled out his phone before he hit the elevator. It rang twice and Sergeant Zane answered. “Hey, I need a favor.”

  He felt better after he’d ordered regular drive-bys of her building to check for suspicious activity that could be another attack. There wasn’t much else he could do aside from 24-7 protection, but Wyatt still drove away racking his brain for other things that might help. Whoever had tried to kill her with that car would most likely try again.

  And Wyatt was going to be there when he did.

  THREE

  The click of the front door echoed through the foyer. Nina’s socks whispered on the floor as she trailed to the living room. The walls were covered with sketches she’d done from memory after she’d learned how to properly execute a suspect drawing, but weren’t useful at all in identifying Mr. Thomas. Articles she’d printed from archived newspapers detailed her mother’s murder all the way through the investigation to the sentencing...and then finally her father’s death in prison.

  It was a play-by-play of the worst days of Nina’s life.

  She kept them up as a reminder and as a memorial. She couldn’t let anyone in, not without knowing their true motives. Nor was she prepared to open herself up—except to people like Sienna who convinced her otherwise. Not when there were people in the world who would slit a woman’s throat even knowing the woman’s child was on her way home.

  Nina turned a full circle to look at the sum of her life now. Her search for the truth would enable her to move on, and the teaching job would begin the next chapter of her life. She just had to find Mr. Thomas before fall semester started.