Читать книгу Undercover Twin - Lena Diaz - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Heather stood at the counter, rubbing her wrists, before taking the pen the policeman offered her. She could still feel the metal rubbing against her skin, even though the handcuffs had been removed. How long before she could forget that terrible night at the dance club, and being locked up for an entire weekend?

She scrawled her name across the form and handed it to the policeman in exchange for the belongings that had been taken from her when she was arrested. She deliberately checked her credit cards and cash in front of him. If the police didn’t trust her and thought she was so dangerous that they had to lock her up, she wasn’t going to trust them, either.

Satisfied nothing had been taken, she grabbed her keys. Wait. What good would that do? She plopped the keys back on the counter.

“Sir, officer, my car—”

“Is in the parking lot outside the station.”

Relief had her smiling back at him in spite of her intentions. “Thank you.” Darn it. She nearly bit her tongue. Why was she thanking him for moving her car from the club where she’d been falsely arrested? Bringing back her car was the least the police could do. Then again, it wasn’t this police officer’s fault. It was the DEA’s fault.

One particular DEA agent’s fault.

“Don’t thank me,” the officer replied. “Thank Special Agent Nick Morgan. He dropped your car off this morning, right after you arranged bail.” He turned away to help someone else standing beside her.

Why would Nick bring her car back for her? She certainly didn’t think it was because he cared about her. If he cared about her, he wouldn’t have arrested her. Or at the very least he would have come to see her, maybe even helped her arrange bail. As expected, the bail bondsman had rejected her car as collateral. She’d had to max out almost all of her credit cards to get out of jail. Having already emptied her savings to help Lily when she’d shown up a few weeks ago, Heather now was down to a paltry three hundred dollars in her checking account, and about five hundred dollars of available credit on her last credit card. No, Nick hadn’t dropped her car off because he cared. He’d dropped it off because it was his job.

She grabbed her keys and hurried toward the exit. When she stepped outside, she was tempted to drop to her knees and kiss the ground. But she’d already suffered enough humiliation this past weekend. She didn’t want to add to it by having someone see her on her hands and knees. Instead, she settled for pausing long enough to take several deep breaths of fresh air, reveling in the pine scent from the nearby trees that was worlds different from the air in the holding cell.

Going home to a hot shower was at the top of her list of priorities. After that, she’d call the client she was originally supposed to meet Saturday morning and try to convince him, without telling him any details, that she’d had an emergency and still wanted his business. She couldn’t afford to lose a client right now, not when her business was just beginning to make a profit and she had no more credit cards to fall back on to pay her bills.

Other than groveling to her client, she had no plans to work today, even though it was Monday. She hadn’t taken a day off in nearly a year. And there was no way she could work right now. She needed some time to recover from her ordeal, and she needed to talk some sense into her sister. They also both needed to speak to the pro bono lawyer the court had appointed to defend Heather, and figure out what they were going to do about the drug charges.

The police had told Heather that Lily had been bailed out by the slimy lawyer who’d spoken to Heather about their “mutual friend.” Heather would talk Lily into firing Greary. Lily would have to somehow pay the man back for the money he’d spent on her and use the pro bono lawyer Heather had been assigned. If Lily was going to survive this fiasco, owing money to a drug dealer’s attorney was not the way to start.

When a couple stepped out of the police station, Heather moved away from the door and stood off to the side with her cell phone. She called her apartment three times, but Lily didn’t pick up. Sighing, Heather shoved her phone back in her purse and shaded her eyes to look for her car. She spotted her gray Ford sitting in one of the spots right up front.

She headed to her car, but when she unlocked the door and pitched her purse into the passenger seat, she had the oddest feeling someone was watching her. She paused and looked around.

There, at the end of the parking lot, was Nick’s massive black four-wheel-drive pickup. It was too far away for her to see details, but she could tell someone was inside. Was Nick watching her? Was he witnessing her humiliation as she left the police station in dirty, wrinkled clothes, her hair a mess, her makeup washed away long ago courtesy of a coarse rag and a filthy bar of soap she’d had to share with five other women? Was he waiting to see how broken she’d be after spending the weekend in jail?

She straightened her spine and got into her car with as much dignity as possible. It took every ounce of control she had not to slam the car door.

* * *

NICK TIGHTENED HIS hands on the steering wheel. The passenger door of his truck opened and his police detective brother climbed inside.

Rafe plopped down beside him. “Is that Heather, in the gray compact?”

“That’s her.”

“You could have come inside and talked to her. That would have been far less creepy than sitting here in the parking lot, like a stalker.”

“She wouldn’t want to see me.”

“How do you know that?”

Nick scrubbed his face and blew out a deep breath. “Because I’m the one who arrested her.”

“Yeah, there is that. But you also made me cash in my only chip with Judge Thompson to convince him to reduce her bail so she could get out of jail. Does she know you arranged that for her?”

“No.” He glanced at his brother. “And she never will.”

Rafe raised his hands. “I’m certainly not telling her, especially since you owe me, big time. You do realize I interrupted Thompson’s weekly golf game?”

Nick winced. “What’s that going to cost me?”

“Babysitting. For a month.”

The dark cloud that had fallen over Nick since the night he’d arrested Heather lifted, if only a little, and he knew he was probably grinning like an idiot. Being an uncle to his oldest sister’s two boys was one of the true pleasures in his life, especially since they loved football as much as he did. If Rafe’s new wife was going to have a baby, Nick would gladly welcome another nephew into the family, or even a niece. Hopefully if the baby was a girl, she’d love sports, because the thought of having to sit through a tea party or playing with dolls had him breaking out in a cold sweat.

“Darby’s pregnant?” he asked.

“Not yet, but we’re working on it.” Rafe grinned. “We’re practicing. A lot. So I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“TMI, brother. Way too much information.”

Rafe laughed but quickly sobered. “You didn’t call me out of a meeting to talk about my new bride. What’s up?”

“Operation Key West.”

“The task force that asked you to raid the club and promptly dumped you when Heather came under suspicion?”

“One and the same.”

“I thought you were suspended. You can’t be involved with a task force if you’re suspended.”

“Still suspended, pending an Internal Affairs investigation. But Waverly told me to come here to talk to the head of the task force.”

“Here? Why would he want you to meet him at the police station? Why not meet you at the DEA office?”

“I asked the same thing, but Waverly just told me to get my butt over here for a ten o’clock meeting.” He shrugged. “I was hoping you might have heard something. Captain Buresh didn’t say anything about the DEA dropping by?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Nick stared through the windshield at the vacant spot where Heather’s car had been a few minutes ago. Even now, several days later, he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that Heather had been at that club the night of the raid.

“Maybe the head of the task force is here to discuss another local operation,” Nick said. “Maybe Waverly wanted to make sure I met him before he left.”

“Why would he want that?”

“Waverly’s ticked at me. He might want to make me grovel and apologize for shaming our unit by having a drug-dealing girlfriend.”

Rafe cocked his head and studied him. “From what you’ve told me about her, she doesn’t sound the type to be dealing, just the opposite. She’s been trying to build a private investigation business for years. She works all the time, putting everything she can into growing her client list. Do you really think she’s going to risk throwing that away to deal drugs on the side? Her sister is—”

“Her identical twin.”

“Okay. Not what I was going to say, but I’ll go with that. Being a twin doesn’t make two people the same and you know it.”

“Yeah. Maybe. It did surprise me that she didn’t let her sister’s drug-dealer lawyer bail her out. If Heather had let him help her she could have been out of jail Saturday morning, like her sister. But she didn’t, and she ended up staying in jail the entire weekend because of it.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”

“You could always talk to her, give her a chance to tell her side.”

Nick absently studied the rows of cars in front of the police station. Rafe was right. Heather did deserve a chance to explain. And he hadn’t given her that chance. He’d been too angry, thinking she’d betrayed his trust in her. Now that he was thinking more clearly, he knew he’d made a mistake in judging her so quickly. But it didn’t matter now. There was no way to fix this.

“I’m not allowed to talk to her now anyway, not with IA all over me. If I’m seen anywhere near her, I can kiss my career goodbye.”

“You sure know how to pick ’em.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying your judgment in women could use some work. You wasted nearly a year of your life with your on-again, off-again engagement to psycho-girlfriend.”

“She wasn’t a psycho. She was...conflicted.”

Rafe let out a shout of laughter. “Conflicted? Now I know you’ve been talking to my therapist wife way too much.”

Nick grinned. “Maybe. But psycho-girlfriend did have a lot going for her.”

“Like what?”

“She was hot.”

“Everyone you date is hot.”

“She was a professional cheerleader. And very...limber.”

Rafe smiled. “You’ve got me there. All I’m saying is that after everything you went through with her, I figured the next time you got serious about a woman you’d pick someone who—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said we were serious? We only dated a couple of months. That’s way short of serious territory.”

“Darby and I only dated a couple of weeks before we got engaged.”

“That’s because her old-fashioned father knew you two had gotten ‘friendly’ and he shamed you into it. Besides, you two knew each other for years before you started dating.”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “Her father had nothing to do with us getting married. And being on opposite sides in the courtroom doesn’t count as a relationship. Look, all I’m saying is that you need to take a long hard look at your feelings for her before you do something you might regret.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, if she didn’t really matter to you, on a personal level, do you honestly think you would have twisted my arm to get the judge to reduce her bail? And how many DEA agents would have paid to get a car out of the impound lot and would have driven it to the police station for a woman they don’t care about?”

Nick ground his teeth together. “I never told you about that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Rafe gave him a smug look. “I have eyes and ears all over this town. That’s part of what makes me a great detective.”

“Humble, too.”

Rafe shrugged, obviously not caring about Nick’s insult. “As I was saying, you obviously care more about Heather than you’re willing to admit, even to yourself.”

“Since when did you become so touchy-feely?”

“I guess since I married a hot therapist.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Not that I ever did.”

“But—”

“Drop it.”

Rafe held his hands up in a placating gesture. “All right, all right. I’ll drop it. You said Waverly wants you to meet with the task force. You have to have some idea of why he’d want you to do that. And don’t give me the line about apologizing for your girlfriend. That’s weak.”

Nick let out a deep sigh. Rafe always could read him, like a Jedi knight using the Force to probe his mind. Or was that Spock on Star Trek? Either way, it was damned aggravating.

“My DEA buddies tell me the task force still has Heather and her sister in its crosshairs,” Nick said. “They think Heather’s sister is running drugs for a dealer operating out of Key West. They think Heather’s been helping her sister move the drugs, and that Heather flushed that kilo to try to avoid the sting. They believe she would have flushed all of the drugs if she’d had enough time.”

His brother’s eyes narrowed. “She couldn’t have purposely tried to avoid the sting unless she knew about it ahead of time.”

“Bingo.”

Rafe swore. “That’s the real reason they suspended you. Not because you’re a terrible judge of character and got mixed up with a girlfriend who may or may not be dealing drugs. They think you tipped her off about the raid.”

“If I were them, I’d probably think the same thing,” Nick said. “I’ve been practically living in Key West this past year, building my cover to gather intelligence on the drug activity down there. Maybe they figured I’ve gone in a little too deep, that the past few months I spent up here were more than an extended vacation. Maybe they thought I was helping move drugs up the pipeline, and that Heather and Lily were in on it with me.”

His brother cursed again, impressing Nick. With language like that, Rafe could go undercover as a DEA agent and blend right in with the dealers as if he were one of them. Too bad he’d wasted his talents as a detective and part-time bomb-squad technician in the Saint Augustine Police Department.

“How can I help?” Rafe asked.

“Answer me a question. If you were heading up a task force whose sole goal was to catch a drug dealer with ties to Heather and Lily, what would you do right now?”

“If I was dumb enough to waste my talents as a DEA agent, you mean?”

Nick grinned. “Yeah. That’s what I mean.”

“If I believed the girls were a lead to a major drug dealer, I’d keep my distance. I’d wait for the dealer or some of his lackeys to show up.” His gaze shot to Nick. “I’d use the girls as bait.”

“Exactly.”

Rafe groaned. “Ah, hell. You want me to keep an eye on your girlfriend for you.”

“Ex-girlfriend. And I want more than that. I need you to keep her alive.”

* * *

HEATHER FINISHED CLEANING the kitchen and stood with her hands braced on the edge of the sink. She stared through the cutout into the family room and shook her head. To say her apartment was a disaster was an understatement. Lily had always been incredibly messy, but this was the worst Heather had ever seen. Lily usually tried to confine her piles of dirty clothes and discarded items to her bedroom. This morning, Heather’s entire apartment looked as if a tornado had gone through it.

Probably Lily’s way of paying her back for flushing the cocaine.

Heather’s shoulders slumped. She slogged her way through the mess to the short hallway that led to the two bedrooms. She paused outside the guest bedroom door and tried the knob. Still locked, like when Heather had first gotten home. She hadn’t even seen Lily yet, because her sister was acting like a spoiled brat, hiding behind a locked door with classic rock blasting from the room. Heather banged her fist against the door. Still no answer.

“Come on, Lily. You can’t ignore me forever. Open up. We need to talk.”

Heather rested her forehead against the door. Maybe she should give up on her sister for now and get that shower she’d been longing for since she’d gotten home. The only reason she hadn’t taken a shower already was because when she’d walked into her apartment the smell of rotting garbage coming from the kitchen had nearly knocked her over. How Lily could have ignored that smell was beyond her. It had permeated the entire apartment.

After taking out the garbage, Heather had started setting the rest of the kitchen to rights and one thing had led to another until she’d ended up scrubbing the entire room. Now the thought of a hot shower sounded like heaven. She might even soak her aching, tired muscles in that bubble bath she’d been wanting since Friday. She hurried into her bedroom, shut the door and took off her clothes.

* * *

NICK PAUSED IN the opening to the conference room, surprised to see an assistant district attorney sitting at the table, along with another man Nick had never met. His boss, Zack Waverly, was at the head of the table and motioned for Nick to come in.

Nick shut the door and took a seat beside his boss.

“Nick,” Waverly said, “you already know ADA Tom Hicks. He only has an hour window before his next court appointment next door. That’s why we met over here instead of at the DEA office.”

Nick leaned over the table and shook Hicks’s hand.

“And this,” Waverly said, motioning to the man sitting at the other end of the table, “this is Special Agent Michael Rickloff. He works out of the Miami office and is heading up the Key West Task Force. He’s the one who called and asked us to perform the sting on the club Friday night.”

Nick shook Rickloff’s hand. “Miami? You’re not from Key West?”

“Miami native, born and raised. Key West is my current target, thus the name of the task force I put together. A major drug pipeline is coming up from the Keys into my city, and as you found out, even as far north as Saint Augustine. I want it stopped. And I need your help to do it.”

Nick turned to Waverly. “My help? Is my suspension lifted?”

“Assuming you agree to Rickloff’s plan, yes.”

“But the internal investigation will continue,” Hicks said. “And if we find anything that concerns us, you’ll be pulled from the operation.”

So that was why the ADA was here? To warn Nick to be a good boy? If it weren’t for the carrot of having his suspension lifted, he would have gotten up right then and walked out.

Ignoring Hicks, he focused on Rickloff. “What plan? What operation?”

“When you raided the club for us, we were obviously hoping you’d find more than a knapsack with four kilos of cocaine. We were hoping you’d catch Lily Bannon meeting her contact here in north Florida. I wanted a bigger fish than Miss Bannon, to ultimately lead me to the head of the pipeline. Since that didn’t happen, I need another way to bring my target down. That’s where you come in.”

Nick crossed his arms and sat back. “I’m listening.”

* * *

AFTER PAMPERING HERSELF with a shower and a long soak in the tub, Heather was finally starting to feel normal again. She’d clipped her nails short the way she liked them and filed them smooth. She’d styled her hair into long curly waves that hung down her back, and she was wearing one of her favorite pairs of slacks—the soft, copper-colored chinos, with an exquisite pair of Italian leather sandals cushioning her feet—clothes she rarely got to wear because she was usually working.

Her typical work clothes consisted of T-shirts and jeans, things she didn’t mind getting dirty or torn if she had to duck behind a Dumpster to avoid her mark catching her with her camera.

Thinking about work reminded her of the disastrous phone call with her client she’d made a few minutes ago—correction, former client. He’d been furious that she hadn’t called him Saturday, and no amount of apologizing or telling him there was an emergency had soothed him. Now she’d have to work extra hard to be even more frugal until she could get another big case lined up.

Determined not to think about her business and financial woes for now, she straightened the bathroom and went to work on her bedroom. Lily must have searched through all of Heather’s drawers hoping to find some hidden money, because every single one of them was hanging open. Heather sighed and straightened the mess, then headed into the living room to tackle the mess in there.

She stood in indecision, not sure where to start. Not only were there piles of laundry, papers and DVDs lying around wherever Lily had chosen to drop them, but some of the drawers and doors in the entertainment center on the far wall were hanging open.

She blinked and studied the room more carefully. Was it a coincidence that her apartment was so horribly trashed, after everything that had happened? This wasn’t a typical “Lily mess.” It was far worse. The apartment looked like it had been...searched. She’d worried about Greary and his “employer” finding out about the fate of the drugs. Had they broken into her apartment and searched it? She gasped as an even worse thought occurred to her. What if Lily had been home when they broke in?

Her entire body started shaking. She whirled around and rushed back into the hall. She twisted the knob on Lily’s door. Still locked. She pounded on the door, praying the awful, sinking feeling inside of her was because she was overtired and overreacting.

“Open up, Lily! Please. I need to know you’re okay.” She pounded on the door again. No answer. “Are...are you in there?”

Nothing except for the beat of the music, the same music that had been playing earlier, as if it was on a constant loop playing over and over.

Oh, no.

She ran to the kitchen, her gaze darting to every corner, as if someone might be hiding, ready to pounce on her. She yanked the junk drawer open beside the stove and grabbed the skeleton key before running back to her sister’s room. She shoved the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

Shock had her frozen, pressing her hand against her throat. Everything in the room was shredded, as if someone had taken a razor-sharp knife and gone on a rampage. Nothing was spared. Not the drapes on the windows, the clothes in the closet that was standing wide open or even the comforter on top of the bed. Everything had been destroyed with a violence that sent a wave of fear crashing through her. And there, on the bed, was a small white piece of paper. A note.

When Heather read what it said, she whirled around and fled from the apartment.