Cameron took a seat in front of Davis’s desk, in the chair closer to Jack. Wilkins sat on her other side. Davis folded his hands as he sat down. Like the other time she’d been in his office, three years ago, he wore a serious expression.

“Ms. Lynde, as the special agent in charge of this office, I would like to give you my most sincere apologies. For what it’s worth, I’ve put a call into the CPD superintendent. I plan to see that the officers who had been handling your surveillance this afternoon are disciplined appropriately. I’m furious about what happened. I promise you that it will not happen again.”

“Thank you. Luckily Agent Pallas was there. He deserves to be commended for his actions today. I can’t imagine what might’ve happened if he hadn’t shown up when he did,” Cameron said.

“Jack and I have spoken. I agree with him that the FBI needs to take over your protective surveillance. In light of today’s attack, we’re going to assign an agent who will be with you at all times. He’ll move into your house, follow you to work, go everywhere you go. I’ve asked Jack, as the lead investigator in this case, to take on this assignment. He has agreed.”

Cameron was careful not to show any reaction to this. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see Jack. His expression remained neutral as well. It was weird, sitting next to him in Davis’s office, pretending as though everything was business as usual despite what had happened between them on Saturday night.

“I’m afraid this is going to be a much more intrusive level of protective surveillance,” Davis continued, “but unfortunately, we don’t have much choice in the matter.”

“Trust me—no one wants to make sure we don’t have a repeat of today’s incident more than I do,” Cameron said. “In this case, I’m happy to be inconvenienced.”

“With Jack handling the surveillance, we’ll need someone else to manage the day-to-day responsibilities of the investigation.” Davis turned to Wilkins. “Sam—Jack has recommended that you replace him in this capacity. He assures me that you’re ready for the responsibility.”

Uncharacteristically speechless, Wilkins paused before addressing his boss. “I appreciate the confidence that Jack—and you—have in me, sir. But Jack and I are partners, and I would like to stick with him on this assignment.”

Davis chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry—you’re not getting rid of him that easily. You’ll still be partners, but with different responsibilities. Jack will remain with Ms. Lynde, and you’ll lead the team here in our office.”

Wilkins grinned. “In that case, I wholeheartedly accept.”

“I thought you might,” Davis said. “Now—we need to start thinking about what happened today. How the hell did Mandy Robards’s killer find out about Cameron? On the FBI side of things, there are the three of us, and the director, who are aware of her involvement in the investigation. Wilkins—I think the first thing you need to do is come up with a list of everyone in the Chicago Police Department who knows. Today’s attack tells us one thing: we’ve got a leak. But we might be able to use that to our advantage. Once we find the leak, we can use him to get to the killer.”

“Be careful how you handle CPD on this,” Jack warned Wilkins. “These cops are not going to like the implication that one of them may have leaked confidential information either purposefully or inadvertently. So tread lightly.”

“Don’t worry—finessing is my forte,” Wilkins said. “And we need to think beyond CPD. Twenty women at the bachelorette party on Saturday saw that Cameron was under my and Jack’s surveillance. Any one of them could’ve spread that information to the wrong person.”

“I can get you their names, but I doubt any of those girls are the leak,” Cameron said. “None of them had any clue why you and Jack were watching me.”

Jack addressed Cameron. “What about your friends and family? Have you told them anything?”

“Collin and Amy know a little, but nothing specific. And they know to keep quiet. I haven’t talked to anyone else about it.”

Davis rocked back in his chair. “So we’ve got CPD to focus on, and, as an outside chance, the women who were with Cameron on Saturday night. By the way, Jack, I don’t recall seeing anything in your last report about you and Agent Wilkins attending a bachelorette party over the weekend. Strange how that got left out.”

“It was a last-minute determination made based upon the security parameters of the nightclub Ms. Lynde planned to attend.”

“Nice answer,” Davis said.

“No kidding,” Wilkins agreed, looking impressed.

“As long as we’re listing everyone who is aware of my involvement in the Robards’s investigation, I should mention that Silas knows. He found out through Godfrey,” Cameron said, referring to the FBI director. “Apparently, he called Silas last week to thank me for my cooperation in the investigation.”

Davis paused at the mention of Silas’s name. “Do you think it’s possible Silas told someone about your involvement in the case?”

“As the U.S. attorney, he certainly should know better,” Cameron said.

“I would hope so,” Davis agreed.

The conversation turned to the subject of Jack and Wilkins’s recent trip to New York. As Cameron listened while Jack filled in Davis, her eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the cut above his cheek. In the emergency room, after she’d gotten five stitches for her “point two”-level gunshot wound, the doctor had offered to have a nurse take care of the scrapes on Jack’s cheek and hands. He’d waved this off, not budging from Cameron’s side.

So much had transpired between them over the last few days—first The Thing That Never Happened on her front doorstep, and then Those Things She’d Never Admit on Saturday night. Cameron had no idea what was going on with her and Jack lately, but as she looked at the cut on his face, she did know one thing.

She trusted him.

And since he now would be the one covering her twenty-four /seven, she knew that trust had to go both ways. Which meant she needed to tell him about everything that had happened three years ago.

Tonight.


WHEN GRANT LET himself into his apartment that night, he paused in the doorway, bracing himself to be shoved up against the wall and handcuffed.

It didn’t happen.

He exhaled, finding comfort in the fact that, at a minimum, Pallas hadn’t yet identified him as the masked man. How long that fact would remain undiscovered, however, was less certain.

To say that the afternoon had not gone as planned would be an understatement.

Grant crept through his apartment with the lights off, checking the view from every window. From his third-story perch, he looked down onto the street below for anything remotely suspicious—strange cars parked out front, a dog walker who just “happened” to be out at that time of night, a homeless person conveniently passed out in the alley behind his building.

He saw nothing.

For the second time in the two weeks since Mandy Robards had tried to blackmail him, he was furious. And now paranoid, too. Not a good combination.

Cameron Lynde wasn’t supposed to have come home from work so early. She also wasn’t supposed to have brought a friend home with her—not that he’d had any trouble getting him out of the picture.

He could’ve handled the police officers in the car out front. He had not, however, been ready for a standoff with Jack Pallas. The rage he’d seen in the federal agent’s eyes as he burst through the glass door was not something he’d expected. Nor had he been expecting the woman—who’d been relatively well-behaved up until that point—to try grabbing the gun out of his hand.

He’d been lucky, he knew, to have escaped when everything had gone so far awry from his plans. Thankfully, however, he didn’t need to count on luck in the future.

Satisfied that his apartment wasn’t under surveillance, Grant headed back to his bedroom and undressed. As he’d done a hundred times already that evening, he ran through the events of the attack and after, looking for the areas where he was most vulnerable.

No one had seen his face. Nor had anyone heard his voice, since he hadn’t so much as coughed during the entire attack. No prints left behind, thanks to the gloves. His getaway had been clean enough—he’d had to outrun those two worthless cops, one of whom had seen leaner days and the other of whom looked barely old enough to drive a squad car. Chicago’s finest. He’d lost them in an alley three blocks from the woman’s house and then high-tailed it a half mile in the opposite direction to the parking lot where he’d stashed his car. He’d swooped up the backpack he had left in a garbage bin along the way. By the time he got to the parking lot he’d shed the mask, the gloves, and the jacket, and was simply a man wearing black nylon pants and a long sleeve T-shirt while carrying his gym bag after a late-afternoon workout. Once he’d gotten back to his car and driven off, he’d pulled into another alley a couple miles away and changed into the suit he’d left in the car. The backpack, with the remainder of the black clothes and with the addition of a couple heavy bricks, was now sitting on the bottom of the Chicago River.

Grant walked naked into his bathroom and turned on the water to the shower. He studied himself in the mirror as steam filled the air.

There was one weakness.

He had no alibi. He wasn’t supposed to have needed one.

Sure, as soon as he’d dumped the backpack in the river he’d driven straight to his evening appointment—he’d met an old friend who worked at the Tribune at a bar in River West. Word had gotten out that a high-priced call girl had been murdered in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and the unconfirmed rumor was that Senator Hodges’s name had shown up on her client list. The friend, who owed Grant several favors for all the times he’d given him early access to many of the senator’s political dealings, called to give him a heads-up and had asked to meet for drinks. Grant had been curious to know whether the senator’s name was being tossed around as a potential suspect, and how much his friend knew about the FBI’s investigation. As it turned out, his friend knew very little, and Grant got the feeling he was the one being pumped for information.

After drinks, he had returned to the senator’s offices and attended a series of meetings with the higher-level staff members and two of Hodges’s attorneys. The senator originally had planned to be back in D.C. by the following week, but given the FBI’s warning that he not leave the state, alternate plans needed to be discussed. First and foremost on everyone’s mind was how to explain the changes to the senator’s schedule without tipping the press off about his connection to Mandy Robards’s murder.

Secretly, Grant got a kick out of these conversations. The hushed tones, the tension-filled rooms, the worried glances over what the press and—gasp—even the killer might possibly know about the senator’s involvement with Mandy. They had absolutely no idea that the man they were talking about was sitting right at that table.

And he knew everything.

After the meetings finally ended, Grant had driven home, taking a few detours along the way to make sure nobody was following him. All in all, his day would seem like any other to anyone who might ask—except for that one missing hour. He’d have to come up with something to fill the void, just to be ready.

Grant thought back to the moment inside Cameron Lynde’s house when she’d first seen him on the stairs—the way she’d taken a step back and whispered, What do you want?

He wanted to stop looking over his fucking shoulder when he walked into his apartment, that’s what he wanted.

She said she didn’t know who he was. Although he liked to think people tended to tell the truth when feeling the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against their heads, he wasn’t sure he trusted her. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

For her sake, he hoped she was telling the truth. Mandy’s murder had been near perfect, almost artfully so. The best FBI agent in the city had been assigned the case, and still they had nothing on him. And they wouldn’t ever have anything on him as long as Cameron Lynde didn’t step out of line.

Of course, he’d taken precautions to know if she did.

They were so stupid. Pallas, the cops, all of them. It was right under their noses, and they didn’t even realize it.

If he’d known it was this much fun getting away with murder, he’d have done it years ago.