The Cipher Read online

  Where was Zippo? A small part of his mind still able to function understood he needed help taking down a woman less than half his size. What the hell had he gotten himself into? Darting a glance to the left, he saw the back of Zippo’s gray T-shirt flapping behind him as he ran away. He would murder the little weasel first chance he got. The throbbing along his nerves eased a fraction, and he became aware the woman underneath him was speaking.

  Her enormous brown eyes had narrowed to slits. “What’s your name?”

  Intense pain had reduced his thought processes to their most primal level. His synapses only fired on one overriding subject. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Am I?” She pressed in harder, blurring his vision around the edges. “I’m all choked up about that. Here’s a thought. Don’t jump women in the park.”

  He could only muster a feeble protest. “I didn’t . . . it was just a prank. Wasn’t serious.”

  “Save it.” Her lip curled. “You’re under arrest.”

  Everything crashed in on him as her words sent his once-bright future spiraling into darkness. Less than five minutes ago, he’d been headed for college on a full-ride football scholarship. Now he’d be playing hoops in a prison yard.

  His watering eyes met her steady gaze. “C-cop?”

  “Special Agent Nina Guerrera.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “FBI.”

  Chapter 3

  The next day

  FBI Washington, DC, field office

  Nina sat on the edge of a stiff vinyl chair in the waiting area outside Special Agent in Charge Tom Ingersoll’s office. He had been holed up inside with Supervisory Special Agent Alex Conner, her immediate boss, for the past half hour.

  Conner had left a message with the front desk directing her to the SAC’s office as soon as she arrived for work this morning. In two years at the Washington field office, her first assignment after joining the FBI, she had never been summoned to see Ingersoll. Certain this had something to do with her off-duty jog in the park yesterday, she replayed the events in her mind for the hundredth time, unable to figure out what—if anything—she had done wrong.

  She gingerly touched her side and winced. Had the oaf cracked one of her ribs when he landed on her? Every muscle ached from his crushing weight slamming down on her small frame. The local PD had called an ambulance, but she’d waved off the paramedics, who then made sure her attacker hadn’t sustained lasting injuries. She’d refused transport to the hospital and spent the rest of the evening giving her statement to her former Fairfax County police colleagues. Now she wondered if an X-ray at the ER might have been a smarter move.

  Conner opened the door, interrupting her ruminations. “We’re ready to see you now.”

  She stood and strode into the office, confident facade in place. Once inside, she greeted Ingersoll with a curt nod before easing herself into one of the two seats positioned in front of his desk.

  “I was concerned to hear about what happened in the park yesterday,” Ingersoll began. “Glad to see you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine, sir. Thank you.”

  Conner took the seat next to her. “According to the police report, you used a tactical pen on your attacker.”

  Agents could carry weapons off duty and were encouraged to do so, but jogging presented a challenge. She couldn’t run through the park holding a handgun without someone calling the police, and there was nowhere to stash it in her spandex running outfit. Given her limited choices, a small device she could hide in her hand was the best option.

  She slid the pen from her inside jacket pocket and held it out. “I always carry something for personal defense when I go for a run.”

  Conner took the proffered instrument, twisting the cylinder to extend the writing tip. “I agree that a lone . . . person in a heavily wooded park should take reasonable precautions.”

  She was sure Conner had almost said lone woman but managed to stop himself before his size 11 wing tip ended up in his mouth.

  Ingersoll took the pen from Conner’s outstretched hand to inspect it. “These aren’t standard issue.”

  “I used to carry it as a beat cop before I came to the Bureau. Used the carbide tip on the back end to break out the window of a burning car once. Managed to get the driver out in time.” She shrugged. “Handy little tool.”

  The black aluminum-alloy casing, slightly thicker than a normal ballpoint pen, seemed innocent enough. In trained hands, however, the gadget could be formidable.

  “The police report says you used the mandibular-angle technique,” Ingersoll said, handing it back to her.

  The maneuver generated compliance without unnecessary force. She had pressed the tip of the pen on a specific point behind the jawline near the base of the ear, causing excruciating pain to fork like an electric current along his inferior alveolar nerve. After she’d done it, she kept her commands short and simple. His brain, overloaded by stimuli from pain receptors, wouldn’t process complex instructions. When he complied, she’d used a control hold to detain him while a passerby called the police. Her cell phone had been crushed during the attack.

  Ingersoll picked up a file from his desk, effectively changing the subject. “This is a copy of the Fairfax County police incident report.” He opened the folder. “Have you been following the story in the news or online?”

  She looked from Ingersoll to Conner and back again. “My mobile phone was pulverized, and I haven’t watched television this morning. What’s going on?”

  Ingersoll glanced down at the papers in his hand. “Ryan Schaeffer wasn’t working alone when he attacked you.”

  “Local PD told me he had an accomplice,” she said. “They tracked him down after Schaeffer turned on him.”

  Ingersoll flipped to another page in the file. “Are you aware the accomplice livestreamed the entire incident before he ran away?”

  She felt her jaw slacken. “No.”

  Ingersoll gave her a wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “As my daughter would say, you’re trending.”

  She had the odd sensation of walking into a theater after intermission and trying to figure out the plot. “Wait. What?”

  Conner spoke up. “Someone edited the video and set it to the soundtrack for Wonder Woman.” He gave his head a small shake. “That’s when it went viral.”

  “You haven’t seen it?” Ingersoll looked surprised.

  “You ordered me straight here this morning.” She spread her hands, palms up. “Never had a chance to replace my cell or go to my office and sign on.”

  “The guy who did the soundtrack ran a contest to see who could ID the woman in the video,” Ingersoll said. “Took until early this morning, but somebody finally got it right. Public Affairs has been fielding requests from reporters asking the Director for a comment.”

  Her mind reeled. The Director of the FBI, a man in charge of over thirty-eight thousand federal employees, was being hounded for a statement about her. “Holy mother.”

  Ingersoll continued, “But that’s not why we asked you to come here.”

  She gazed back at him, unable to fathom what else could possibly have happened.

  “A killer left a note at a crime scene in an alley behind M Street last night. We have reason to believe it refers to you.”

  A chill swept through her. “What crime scene?”

  Ingersoll forestalled her question with a raised hand. “I’d like to verify a few things first.” His brow furrowed. “Did you legally change your name from Nina Esperanza to Nina Guerrera ten years ago?”

  The tilt-a-whirl in her head spun off in a new direction. “It was part of my emancipation process. I was seventeen.”

  Ingersoll and Conner exchanged a meaningful glance. Apparently, she had just confirmed something. Beyond frustrated, she looked from one man to the other, her brows arched in a tacit demand for answers.

  “I appreciate that this is highly personal,” Ingersoll said. “But it has a direct bearing on what we are about to discuss.”

&n
bsp; “The juvenile court records are sealed,” Conner added. “We’re in the process of obtaining a subpoena, but we’d rather hear the story from you first. Did you petition the court for emancipation after you ran away from foster care?”

  “I did.” She licked dry lips.

  “Was that after you were . . . abducted?” Ingersoll wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Which meant he knew. Her hands clenched in her lap. They both knew what had happened to her.

  “I was sixteen.” She kept her response clinical, devoid of emotion, as she recounted the most harrowing events of her life. “I had run away from a group home and was living on the street. A man drove by in the middle of the night. He stopped and . . . grabbed me. Tied me up in the back of his van.”

  She didn’t say what happened next. The unspoken details of the hours she’d spent with her captor hung in the air between them.

  “I managed to escape in the morning.” She ended the story abruptly, then directed a question at Ingersoll. “Why is this important now?”

  “A sixteen-year-old girl was murdered last night in Georgetown,” Ingersoll said in a low voice. “She had run away from her foster family.” His final words were barely audible. “Her body was left in a dumpster.”

  Conner took over. “Metropolitan PD has the case. Their crime scene techs found a note stuffed into her mouth, sealed in a plastic baggie.”

  She pictured the scene, and the long-buried pain inside her bubbled close to the surface. A young life snuffed out. A monster prowling the street, searching for his next victim.

  Ingersoll slid a sheet of paper from a folder. “The note contained a message printed on standard copy paper.” He tugged a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, shook them open, and slid them on. Glancing down at the paper, he cleared his throat.

  Heart pounding, she listened as he read the killer’s message.

  “After years of seeking, I thought I would never have Hope again. But today, everything changed. She calls herself a Warrior now. But to me, she will always be . . . The One That Got Away.”

  Ingersoll looked up, his eyes finally meeting hers. “He spaces down three times, then adds two more words in all caps.”

  She waited for Ingersoll to read the end of the message.

  “Until now.”

  Chapter 4

  Numbly, Nina took the paper Ingersoll held out for her. The page trembled slightly as her eyes drifted down over the message she knew was meant for her.

  In an instant, she was back in the dark, suffocating space inside the van, duct tape covering her lips, stifling her screams.

  Aware her bosses were watching her closely, she worked her jaw as if loosening it from the sticky tape and forced out the only question that mattered.

  “Did they catch him last night?”

  “No suspect in custody,” Conner said. “No leads either.”

  She’d dreaded this moment for years. Had tried to convince herself the monster was dead. She couldn’t deceive herself any longer. He had slithered from her nightmares into her waking life.

  Still reeling, she addressed Ingersoll. “How did you figure out the note was about me? It doesn’t mention my name. Not exactly, anyway.”

  “Your name came up from BAU Three.”

  She held her tongue while she processed the information. The Behavioral Analysis Unit housed the FBI’s famous profilers. Mind hunters. Within that unit, BAU 3 was specifically tasked with crimes against children.

  “One of the special agents working there has . . . prior knowledge of your case,” Ingersoll said, seeming to choose his words carefully.

  “How would anyone put it together?” she said, trying to figure out which agent they were talking about. “It’s an unsolved abduction from eleven years ago.” The year before her emancipation hearing.

  Glancing away, Ingersoll rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s Jeff Wade.”

  Her eyes closed for a moment as she tried to block out the images gathering in her mind. Special Agent Dr. Jeffrey Wade, a name she had hoped never to hear again. “I thought he left the BAU for good.”

  Wade had been reassigned to the training academy after he’d bungled a profile so badly that a girl died—at least, that’s what the lawsuit filed by Chandra Brown’s family claimed. Chandra had reported a man stalking her to the local police, who sent the information to the FBI since the circumstances were similar to an unsolved homicide that had occurred a few months earlier in a neighboring jurisdiction. A murder Wade was working on as part of a series of killings involving teenage girls. Wade had looked into Chandra’s stalking complaint, decided it had no bearing on his investigation, and punted it back to the locals. Twenty-four hours later Chandra was dead, her murder subsequently linked to the series Wade had been working on.

  Because Wade had such notoriety as the FBI’s premier profiler, the Bureau took a drubbing. Chandra’s estranged family had appeared on camera—attorney in tow—numerous times to point the blame squarely at law enforcement. Wade took a leave of absence, turning his ongoing investigations over to another BAU member, and requested a reassignment when he returned to duty. Rumor had it the legendary Dr. Wade had finally cracked under the strain of two decades spent chasing down child predators. Apparently rumors had it wrong, because he was back.

  “His transfer to the academy only lasted six months,” Conner said.

  Ingersoll continued with the current case after a brief pause as if he, too, was remembering Wade’s very public fall from grace. “Due to the bizarre wording of the note, MPD Homicide entered the info into ViCAP to see if any other agency had a similar murder. That’s how Wade ran across the report.”

  “Like everyone else in the Bureau, he’d seen the viral video, so you were on his mind,” Conner added.

  Of course Wade would be the one to snap the pieces into place. To say he was familiar with her background was an understatement. The man had nearly prevented her from becoming an agent because of what he knew about her.

  To her knowledge, no one else had ever undergone the level of scrutiny she had during her application process. After Nina’s polygraph had indicated possible deception on a question about her past, Executive Assistant Director Shawna Jackson had intervened, calling in Dr. Wade to perform an assessment. The EAD was one of a handful of people who reported directly to the FBI Director. Someone in such rarified air wouldn’t normally get involved in the applicant-screening process, but Shawna had a personal stake in the outcome since she had recruited Nina into the Bureau.

  After reviewing the polygraph exam results and her background investigator’s report, Wade had summoned Nina to an interview room, where he demanded to know why she’d become emancipated and the significance of the new surname she’d chosen, and he wasn’t satisfied until he’d demolished her carefully constructed walls.

  He’d forced her to relive beatings from older kids in the system who had figured her for easy prey due to her small stature. He’d made her recount the night of her abduction in excruciating detail, ripping off the protective scab that had formed in her mind so the whole story bled freely from her. Through it all, he’d stared at her, scribbling on his notepad, while she described the feel of a glowing cigarette tip against her skin.

  While she had spoken in halting jerks and spasms, he’d listened in rapt silence, betrayed no emotion, judged her. Since he’d been assigned to determine whether she was trying to hide something from the polygraph examiner, she sensed him waiting for her to break down. To cry or scream or lash out at him. He laid open her soul and peered inside to scrutinize her innermost secrets.

  In the end, Wade told her he had concluded she wasn’t being deceptive but that the polygraph had revealed her willful repression of certain details of her trauma. There were dark voids in her recollection that he believed made her a liability, a ticking time bomb sure to detonate under the right circumstances. Only EAD Jackson’s intervention had prevented his report from keeping her out of the academy. From the day Nina was h
ired, she had worked harder than everyone else, determined to prove that Dr. Jeffrey Wade had made the wrong call for the second time in his career. And that he was a sanctimonious ass.

  “We’re detailing you to work directly with Wade,” Ingersoll said.

  She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to leave the office, go home to bed, and hope like hell she woke up from this nightmare.

  “Deep in the background,” Conner was saying. “As in, so deep no one sees you. Wade drove to Georgetown from Quantico. He arrived at the crime scene about half an hour ago. You can catch up with him there.”

  They expected her to work with a man who had dissected her with the ruthless efficiency of a pathologist conducting an autopsy, a man who didn’t believe she should be an agent. Part of her wanted to refuse. No one would blame her if she did.

  She willed her expression to remain impassive. No way would she let her superiors know what this assignment would cost her. “I’ll get a bu-car and head to the scene now.”

  Chapter 5

  Nina flashed her creds at the uniform on the perimeter.

  He gave her official ID a cursory inspection. “You’re late to the party.”

  Only the remnants of a crime scene active since dawn remained in place.

  “Batting cleanup today.” She ducked under the yellow tape strung across the alley.

  One of MPD’s forensic tech vans hunkered next to a curb, its grille pointed toward a graffiti-covered dumpster. She focused on a cluster of men standing behind a four-foot-high portable privacy screen. Some wore MPD uniforms, some had on white Tyvek suits, others were in business attire.

  She had no trouble spotting Special Agent Wade. The bright gold FBI lettering stood out against the dark blue raid jacket draped over his tall frame. When he turned to her, his gaze reflected the bleakness of a man who had seen too much. His steel-gray eyes trapped her, performing an assessment that felt eerily similar to their last meeting two years earlier.

  She strode to him and stuck out a hand in greeting. He controlled her access to the case, but she would not let him control her. “Good morning, Dr. Wade.”