Beth Kery Read online

  Laura hit the disconnect button. Her hands shook uncontrollably as she placed the phone back in her purse and wrapped the afghan tightly around her. She started to curl up in the corner of the couch once again but veered off in the opposite direction.

  The last thing she needed at a time like this was a reminder of how completely she had melted beneath Shane’s touch.

  Still. After all these years.

  A cold sweat broke out on her forehead and upper lip when she recalled how Shane had asked about Joey there at the end. Remorse flooded through her, bringing another wave of dizziness with it.

  She paused on the stairwell, her hand going out to the banister to brace her suddenly limp, ineffective muscles. It terrified her to think of how easily she’d succumbed to him . . . how much control he had over her.

  She needed to avoid Shane Dominic at all costs.

  He thought since she’d surrendered her body to him he had a right to her mind . . . her spirit. But Shane Dominic had another think coming. She hadn’t done what she’d done for the past thirteen and a half years only to have him spit in the face of her efforts now.

  John McNamara cast a doubtful look out the windows of the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago field office. A lethal-looking lake wind whipped up the recently fallen snow on Roosevelt Road and rattled the panes of glass.

  “Why do we let him talk us into this?” John mumbled under his breath to the woman standing beside him, who was in the process of pulling a ski mask down over her smooth, brown face.

  “Because he’s not only our boss, he’s our boss’s boss. And what he says is true—”

  “I do think better when I’m running outside. Treadmill just doesn’t do it for me,” Shane finished for Mavis Bertram, the supervising agent on the FBI’s Organized Crime Squad. He grinned when he saw McNamara’s sheepish expression at being overheard.

  “Come on, Mac, it’ll put hair on your chest,” Shane said as he unceremoniously shoved a Georgetown Hoyas knit hat onto his head. The temperature was a bitter sixteen degrees this morning, and that didn’t include the chilling effect of the brutal wind.

  “If I’m lucky it’ll freeze the hair off my legs permanently and I won’t have to shave anymore,” Mavis said wryly as she did some quick stretches. “How far are we going this morning, Dom?” she asked when she stood again and the three of them headed for the revolving doors.

  Shane shrugged. “Just around the block.”

  He caught Mavis giving Mac a long-suffering glance and laughed. Mavis shivered noticeably once they stepped outside.

  “Why couldn’t we have gotten ourselves a normal, paper-pushing SAC, the administrative kind who does his best work in an office?” Mavis joked as they started jogging.

  “You guys are in charge of Operation Serve and Protect. But a case like this requires just as much administration and diplomacy as it does investigation,” Shane muttered wryly. “Makes the people of Chicago uneasy . . . and angry to consider so much corruption in their police department.”

  “Yeah, and not just at the CPD, either. At us for exposing them,” Mavis muttered under her breath.

  Neither he nor the other two special agents spoke for the first ten minutes as they jogged, allowing their bodies to become accustomed to the paradoxical stresses of heat-producing exercise and bitter cold exterior temperatures. Which was fine with Shane, because he wasn’t in the mood for jocular camaraderie.

  What he was in the mood for was regaining some footing on the CPD theft ring case. For regaining some much-needed perspective after what had happened with Laura three nights ago.

  He’d found it increasingly difficult to separate that charged episode from any aspect of his life over the weekend—whether it was personal or professional. Clarissa was currently refusing to talk to him because of his aloofness since returning home on Friday night.

  Her fury at him served his purpose. He needed time to think, to clear his head. Because he knew he was going to have to talk to Clarissa about their future,

  Or their lack of a future, to be more precise.

  He wasn’t just going to postpone their wedding this time, but call if off for good.

  Best to admit the truth. What he’d done thirteen years ago said it all. There was never any real doubt where his heart lay. Cold, hard logic suggested that he was behaving irrationally; but something else—Shane suspected it was pure stubbornness on his part—argued loudly that he should resist the smug security of cold, hard logic at all costs when it came to Laura.

  Clarissa deserved better than to be married to a man who couldn’t forget another woman, even if that other woman didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Something else had been preoccupying him all weekend long. In the shadowy background of his methodical brain, he’d been planning something. Something outlandish.

  A desperate plan for a desperate man.

  “Aren’t you going to ask us if we have any good news for you, like you usually do?” Mavis asked eventually.

  “Not if you’re going to tell me ‘no’ like you usually do.”

  “We’re gonna break the precedent on all sides on this lovely Chicago Monday morning,” Mavis assured him. “Go on, Mac.”

  “Okay, get this, Dom—you’re never gonna guess who Vince Lazar’s first cousin is,” Mac said, referring to one of the four cops that had been arrested along with Huey Mays last week.

  “The mayor?”

  Mavis snorted, sending a jet of white vapor through her ski mask. “Even better. Vince Lazar’s cousin is Eddie Mercado.”

  Shane broke stride slightly at that, one shoe nearly losing its grip on the pavement. Eddie Mercado used to be Alvie Castaneda’s first lieutenant before he was found shot in the alley of a high-class strip joint on the North Side several years ago.

  Alvie Castaneda was the head of the Chicago mob.

  Mac smiled, clearly pleased by Shane’s surprise. He nodded. “We need to firm it up some, but we have reason to believe that Lazar was involved in extorting money from bookies and small-time thieves for Mercado and Castaneda back in the early nineties.”

  “That wasn’t in our file,” Shane said. “How’d something like that get by Lazar’s pre-employment screening at the CPD?”

  Mac shrugged. “Huey Mays was a sergeant in the Organized Crime Division when Lazar came on board. He could have easily covered up that little detail.”

  “He could have,” Shane said as he stared down the plowed, quiet urban street, his mind churning. “So could have Randall Moody. Moody would have been a captain of the division at that time.”

  When neither agent said anything, he glanced over at them in time to see Mac meeting Mavis’s gaze.

  “What?” Shane asked. “You think I’m just saying that because I’m gunning for Moody now that Mays has gone and ruined our case by taking the low road?”

  “Dom, we’ve got nothing on Moody but Deangelo Stout’s confession that he believed there was someone in the CPD above Huey Mays who masterminded all the plans—which jewelry exhibition to target next, which fur shows, which salesman they’d hit, what supplies they’d steal from the stores of the CPD. Stout said he suspected it was Randall Moody. What makes you so positive we can nail a respected, thirty-five-year veteran of the CPD? Stout’s a worm—you know that. Shit, for all we know, he’s got a grudge because Moody disciplined him at some point while Stout was under his command.”

  Shane didn’t respond for a moment as he jogged, letting Mavis’s words filter through the rest of the morass of thoughts in his brain. Yeah, Deangelo Stout—the ex-cop turned jewel and fur thief who had given evidence on Huey Mays and several other cops from the safety of a witness protection program—was no choir-boy. Mavis was right. It wasn’t uncommon for those who finally decided to roll on past crime buddies to throw in one or two personal vendettas to sweeten the sour taste left over from squealing.

  Still, Shane was convinced Randall Moody was their man. And when he became this su
re about something, he was usually right.

  His mind whirred as they jogged along at a brisk pace and sleet stung his face. It felt great. Shane felt better than he had in days. Warm, sharp, and hyperalert.

  Nothing like a good run in a Chicago sleet storm to rid oneself of the mental fog.

  “Mays had a charisma that mixed with his ruthlessness. It made the guys beneath him look up to him like a hero. And he may have had the brains to carry out something as vast as this operation,” Shane mused. “But he didn’t have the patience.

  “Mays was an addict—booze, drugs, money, gambling, women—and he had the personality of an addict,” Shane continued. “He needed his fix and he got nervous and irritable when he couldn’t get it. He would have cut corners if he had the chance, been sloppy in order to get the high an addict lives for, pulled jobs in too quick of a succession or in locations that were convenient versus wise.”

  “But they didn’t,” Mac agreed as they turned east, their pounding feet making a hollow thumping sound on the frozen pavement. “Those thefts were spread out over eighteen states and fifteen years. We didn’t start to connect the dots until eighteen months ago.”

  Shane grunted.

  “What?” Mavis asked, her brown eyes sharp and curious behind the ski mask.

  “Fifteen years?” Shane muttered. “That’s one of the reasons I think Moody’s involved in this. There’s good reason to believe that he’s been pulling off these jobs for nearly twice that time.”

  There was another reason he suspected Moody and it was too vague, unformed, and illogical for Shane to speak out loud to Mavis and Mac.

  Shane recalled all too clearly seeing a younger, leaner Moody sitting in a booth at Derrick Vasquez’s restaurant Sunny Days, shooting the shit with Derrick and two other uniformed cops. Shane had come to meet Laura after her shift waitressing during the all-too-brief six-month period when they’d been involved.

  They’d kept the fact that they were dating a secret, which Shane had reason to be thankful about presently with news reporters nosing around and talking about his past connections and friendship to Laura’s brother Joey. Laura’s uncle was very protective of her, and even though Laura had been twenty years old and a college student at the Art Institute at the time, she still lived in Derrick’s house.

  At the time, Laura and he had been crazed, couldn’t-keep-their-hands-off-each-other, barking mad in love.

  Or at least that’s what Shane had thought. He had second-guessed that assumption when she’d eloped with Huey Mays while Laura and he were supposedly in the ecstatic midst of that love affair.

  But Shane hadn’t had a hint of future calamity almost fourteen years ago on that brilliant fall afternoon as he’d walked into the crowded restaurant. Laura was an angel, as far as he was concerned, and he’d only wanted to glory in her existence like a man who’d come upon a treasure and reveled in unexpected riches.

  As Shane had searched the crowded restaurant for a glimpse of Laura, Derrick had called out a greeting to him from a booth. Randall Moody had turned to look at Shane. Their eyes had met for all of two seconds, but a singular sensation had gone through Shane at that moment . . . something he’d never forgotten in almost fourteen years.

  Moody had still worn the shadow of his winning smile around his lips, but it was his pale blue eyes that told the true story. Shane had seen something primitive and feral in that gaze . . . something that called to mind a calculating, deadly viper.

  Maybe it had just been his imagination. But the thought had struck Shane more than once over the intervening years that it was precisely in that moment, when he’d unintentionally caught Moody with his mask down, that everything had started to go wrong with Laura and him.

  He yanked his thoughts away from the past.

  “Maybe you’re right about me being off base about Randall Moody,” Shane told Mavis and McNamara several minutes later. “But I don’t think so. We may have lost Mays, but we have solid cases against the four cops working for him. And now we find out that Vince Lazar had connections to Eddie Mercado . . . and possibly to Alvie Castaneda, the biggest crime boss in the city.”

  “You really think it’s possible that Moody could be working with the mob?” McNamara asked doubtfully.

  Shane shrugged. “We’re talking about the largest organized theft ring in known history, Mac. A hundred and three million dollars. That’s the amount of money we think this operation has amassed in the past fifteen years—and that’s just from the theft ring. These cops were a law unto themselves. Stout has testified that they regularly shook down drug dealers and other hoods. They’d had plenty of time to expand and perfect a racketeering operation that’s gone unchecked now for at least fifteen years. How many operations of that caliber do you know of that the mob hasn’t been involved with?”

  Shane didn’t wait for Mac to answer before he plunged ahead. “Personally I don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not we ever pin mob connections on Moody. I want to nail him any way I can, and maybe this’ll help us. I want you two to dig into this mob angle further. We’ve got an airtight case against Lazar. If he does have ties to Castaneda, he’ll do whatever he can to protect them. He knows damn well Castaneda can reach him behind bars. He’ll be more willing to sing about a higher-up in the Chicago Police Department than he would about any connections to the mob.”

  “You think he wouldn’t be worried in the lockup if he gave evidence against Moody?”

  “He’s not in the county jail, Mac. He’s in federal. Besides, I see Dom’s point. If I were Lazar, I’d risk Moody’s wrath before I did Castaneda’s.”

  Mac raised frost-coated eyebrows. “Too true.”

  “Problem is, Lazar couldn’t make bail like Mays did. He must be on both Castaneda’s and Moody’s shit list for some reason if they’re letting him rot. Or worse, he doesn’t know anything. If the higher-ups aren’t concerned, there’s a good chance they think Lazar’s got nothing of consequence to spill,” Shane muttered grimly.

  Several hours later Shane looked up from a paper-strewn desk when his administrative assistant buzzed him.

  “Mavis Bertram to see you, Dom.”

  “Send her in.”

  Mavis poked her head in the door a second later. “You feel like taking a ride?”

  “It depends on where we’re going. I’m up to my ass in paperwork,” he said distractedly.

  “How about to Laura Mays’s house?”

  He glanced up sharply.

  “She placed a nine-one-one call to the police not fifteen minutes ago from her home phone. She said there was an intruder in her house. There was a click on the line and Laura Mays told the operator that whoever was in the house was on the line with them. Then the phone went dead.”

  Shane stood and grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Laura parked on the street near Joey’s house. She turned off the car, her eyes trained on the rearview mirror.

  The driver of the silver Camry turned right down a side street. It’d been five days now since her house had been broken into, but she was still nervous and jumpy. Nothing had been taken from the house. The police had assumed that Laura had interrupted a burglary by unexpectedly being home from work that day.

  Shane Dominic had suspected otherwise. She’d been shocked to see him pull up to her house next to the cop car. He’d listened while the police questioned her about the break-in, then pulled her aside and questioned her privately.

  “Your car is parked out front, Laura. Unless the burglar was brain-dead, he would have assumed you were here, not at work.”

  “So?” she’d asked.

  “Whoever broke into this house knew you were here, dammit. They only ran because they heard you on the phone with the police. They weren’t on a burglary mission. It was you they were after. Now . . . are you going to tell me what’s going on, or are you going to wait until some asshole hurts you?” he’d asked her, his blue eyes blazing f
iercely.

  Of course Laura had denied his allegations. She’d also refused to talk to him the three other times Shane had called her during the week. She couldn’t afford to have Shane interfering now. The anonymous caller who’d promised evidence against Moody had never called back, but Laura somehow equated the elusive caller with the break-in.

  In other words, she suspected Shane had been right in his allegations. But surely if the anonymous caller and the intruder were one and the same man, he didn’t want to hurt her, only talk to her.

  So why was she so jumpy and nervous?

  She glanced outside warily but nothing looked unusual on the dark, cold January night except the large number of cars lining the street—guests for the party Joey and Shelly were throwing for Carlotta and her volleyball teammates.

  The heels of her boots hitting the frozen pavement echoed around the still neighborhood, the hollow sound making her feel prickly and vulnerable—like a deer in a clearing with a bull’s-eye trained on it.

  She grinned hugely several moments later as she hugged her niece, all anxieties momentarily forgotten.

  “Thank you so much for coming, Aunt Laura. I told Dad that maybe we shouldn’t have a party, with everything you’re going through and all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You win the state volleyball finals once in a lifetime,” Laura reassured her.

  “There’s always next year, you know,” Joey Vasquez said as he approached. He kissed his sister’s cheek. Despite his friendly, cheerful façade, Laura sensed the tension in her older brother’s rigid posture.

  “Dad’s a little overconfident,” Carlotta commented ruefully.

  “It’s a father’s prerogative,” Laura said before she handed Carlotta a small wrapped gift. “Congratulations. I wish my showing at the gallery hadn’t fallen on the same date and that I could have seen the championship game.”