Betrayed Read online

  He’d been a newspaper reporter back home, and he’d been able to write some articles for a local Spanish language paper here. But he’d supported the family by taking on janitorial duties for the local school system and had worked his way up to supervisor before retiring.

  “You were on television,” he said in Spanish as Elena walked into the living room. “Local and national, too.”

  He had been careful to learn English when he came here, but he was always more comfortable with his native language.

  “No mucho,” she answered, speaking in Spanish for his benefit.

  “I taught you to keep your head down. Now everybody knows you were in that office where the man shot that girl. Then he was killed.”

  She wished she could simply turn around and walk out of her parents’ house. Instead, she crossed to one of the worn easy chairs and lowered herself to the seat.

  It was tempting to ask, “Would you have been happier if I’d gotten killed?” but she kept the question locked behind her lips as she said, “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Unable to drop his original theme, her father said, “Everybody knows who you are.”

  “Papa, this isn’t San Marcos. Nobody’s coming after me.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “I had no choice. I was in the office. I had to help the man who came to rescue us.”

  “Shane Gallagher?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was on the TV, too. What does he do for the company?”

  “He’s head of security.”

  Her father sucked in a sharp breath before speaking. “Like the secret police.”

  “No.” She looked toward her mother. “I came straight here. Could you get me a glass of water?”

  Her mother looked toward Papa. When he nodded, she went into the kitchen and came back with the water.

  Elena took several sips, then cradled the glass in her hand, grateful for something to hold on to. “I’m all right. I came by to tell you.”

  “You stay away too much.”

  She struggled not to make a cutting remark. She stayed away because coming here was never pleasant.

  “Alesandro was here,” her mother said.

  “How is he?”

  “Bien,” Momma answered, but there was something in her voice that made Elena wonder if her brother was truly fine. As a boy, Alesandro had been happy to come to America. He’d liked the freedom and the standard of living here, but he hadn’t been able to make the most of his life in his new country.

  He’d had trouble learning English, and his grades in school had been poor—not good enough for college. He’d worked a bunch of low-paying jobs. The best one was at the service desk of a rental car company. Usually he was short of money, and sometimes he tried to borrow from Elena. After she had lent him cash a few times, and he had never paid it back, she’d vowed never to do it again. That was something else her parents held against her. She should be willing to help her brother.

  “Do you want to stay to dinner?” Momma asked.

  “Gracias, pero no. I want to go home and lie down. I just stopped by to reassure you.”

  Her father jumped into the conversation with the kind of comment she’d grown to expect from him.

  “That gunman could have been politically motivated, and the government could be watching you now.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security. You remember I thought we were okay. Then I got a tip that government agents were coming for us, and we had to get out of the house. We had to leave almost everything behind.”

  Elena nodded. She’d heard this story many times.

  Her father began to ramble on about how they’d traveled north by car, then crossed the border.

  She’d been young, but she still remembered the soldiers inspecting their documents, and her father lying and saying that they were going to visit relatives in Mexico. She didn’t want to listen to the story again, but he was her father. He had saved her by getting her out of San Marcos, so she settled into her chair to hear the tale one more time.

  If anyone had a right to be paranoid, it was Eduardo Reyes. But listening to him was exhausting, and by the time she left, she was almost too tired to think. Her father had gone on about government spies. She was more worried about the press. Had some reporter dug into her background and figured out that her parents also lived in the area? Was someone from a local television station or newspaper outside waiting to ambush her? Pausing just inside the door, she looked out into the darkness. There seemed to be no activity on the street. Perhaps the reporters had finished with her. Or they hadn’t tracked down her family.

  With a little sigh of relief, she crossed quickly to her car and got in. When she pulled away from the curb, she thought she saw another car pull into the street behind her, but the driver had left the lights off.

  A car with its lights off at night? A reporter following her? Or what? She sped up, thinking maybe whoever was back there would let her go. Or was she seeing things because she was too tired to think straight? If she felt more comfortable in her parents’ home, she might have gone back and asked to spend the night. But then she’d have to tell them why she was nervous, and she certainly didn’t want to explain about the car.

  ***

  After taking off his bulletproof vest, Shane made a show of relaxing with the other guys, but he probably wasn’t fooling them. He knew he was too keyed up to unwind, and he was sure they did, too.

  He left after an hour and headed home, his mind replaying the events of the hostage takedown. He was willing to bet that Duckworth was just a sideshow and had nothing to do with the reason Lincoln Kinkead had hired Rockfort Security. But he kept coming back to Elena Reyes. She might have saved his life when Duckworth had whirled around, but that didn’t mean he could trust her.

  He felt his chest tighten as he tried to sort through his feelings about her. She’d been in the perfect position to help him out. At the very least, that was interesting, although he wasn’t sure there were any sinister implications.

  He lived in one of the high-rise apartments that had been built in the first flurry of modernization in Rockville. The red-brick building was showing its age now, which was why he’d gotten a good deal on the sublet.

  He parked in the garage and stopped in the lobby to get a bunch of circulars from his mailbox. Then he proceeded to the fifth floor where he unlocked his apartment and stepped inside. He’d rented the furniture—a standard sofa and a couple of chairs, plus a flat-screen TV on a stand in the living room, a small table and chairs in the dining room, and a dresser and king-size bed in the bedroom. All of it sat on oatmeal-colored carpet that had seen better days.

  He usually paid no attention to the furnishings. Maybe because he’d almost gotten killed today, he stopped in the living room and looked around, trying to see the place from the point of view of a stranger. It looked like the abode of a man who didn’t give a shit where he lived. Which was an accurate summation of the situation.

  His previous apartment had been an entirely different matter—filled with trendy furniture, sheets, towels, and knickknacks carefully chosen by his ex-wife. If he’d wanted to take any of them, he supposed he could have. Instead, he’d let her have all the booty and all the wedding presents because he didn’t need any of it around to remind him of past mistakes.

  He cursed under his breath as he flashed back to the day a year and a half ago when he’d told Glenda that he knew she was cheating on him and their marriage was over. He’d been deployed to Afghanistan when the affair with Larry MacMillan started. And she hadn’t even had the sense to break it off when he got back.

  She’d claimed that MacMillan didn’t mean anything to her. Shane had said that the cheating meant something to him. He’d walked out the door and never saw her agai
n except for some mandatory appearances at lawyers’ offices.

  More than that, he’d changed his life around. He could have volunteered for a war zone. But he wasn’t going to give Glenda the satisfaction of sending him into harm’s way. He’d been up for reenlistment, but he’d mustered out. Then he’d taken some time to figure out his next move.

  Annoyed that he was thinking about her now, he stomped into the bedroom, pulled off the running suit he’d worn for the surprise attack, and dropped the jacket and pants into the hamper. He took a quick shower, then put on jeans and a dark T-shirt, and wandered into the kitchen where he opened the freezer and examined his stash of frozen dinners. It wasn’t home cooking, but it was convenient, he thought, as he pulled out a chicken and pasta dish, stripped off the wrapper, and put it into the microwave. While he drank another beer, he booted up the computer in the spare bedroom he used as an office, then brought the food to the desk.

  He was tired, but he was too wound up to relax, and he might as well get some work done.

  He’d told the other Rockfort agents that he couldn’t help suspecting Elena Reyes. He had no proof that she’d done anything illegal, but with her access to the whole company’s operations, she was in a perfect position to steal information from S&D. Not only that, but she had the skills to cover her tracks.

  Or was he digging into her background so relentlessly because he was obsessed with her—and investigating her gave him the perfect excuse to get to know her better, at least in the abstract?

  For a moment, he let his mind zing back to the scene in the ladies’ room when he’d held her in his arms. He’d felt protective and at the same time vulnerable. Maybe crashing through that window and getting shot at had affected him more than he wanted to admit.

  With a rough sound, he stopped thinking about his reactions after the takedown and went to the file he’d compiled on Elena, skimming back through the notations he’d made. Her father was a political refugee from San Marcos. He’d come here legitimately, but did Dad still have ties to his country of origin? What if he was involved in something illegal and had dragged his daughter into it?

  And what about the brother, Alesandro Reyes? Elena had a well-paying job at S&D. Her brother had had the same opportunities in his adopted country, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He worked for a rental car company where the pay couldn’t be anywhere near what his sister was making. But he did have unexpected luxuries like a top-of-the-line Buick and an apartment in a high-priced building. Did he have other sources of income? Or was he forcing his sister or his parents to subsidize his lifestyle? And if so, how?

  Even as Shane made a note to dig further into Alesandro’s background, his thoughts went back to Elena.

  Did she have a secret life that she was keeping hidden from everyone at S&D? A relationship she was hiding? And what would be the significance if she was? Could she be seeing someone who was influencing her behavior?

  Was she under stress—with signs he could pick up, like moodiness and paranoia? Was she hiding financial transactions or extreme views?

  He laughed. Maybe if he’d investigated Joe Duckworth for those tendencies, today’s hostage situation could have been avoided. But Duckworth hadn’t even been on his radar screen. He hadn’t been investigating former employees.

  Once again, he went back to Elena because he’d rather investigate her than Joe Duckworth. And it was too late to do anything about that bastard, anyway, besides bury him.

  Shane had several pictures of Elena. One must have been from her high school yearbook. And some were snapshots that he’d gotten off the Web, like the one that went with her S&D employee bio.

  He studied one of the head shots, admiring the waves in her long, shiny dark hair and the thick lashes that framed her dark eyes. She was a beauty, even though she didn’t do much to enhance her looks.

  Not like Glenda, who had always spent a good deal of time at the makeup table.

  He clenched his teeth, wondering why he had dragged his ex-wife into the evening again.

  Chapter 4

  In a mansion in the tony acres of Potomac horse country, Jerome Weller picked up the remote and turned off the news.

  The hostage situation and shoot-out at S&D had made CNN and Fox. But after hours of breathless reporting, the anchors had run out of anything new to say. The talking heads were just rehashing old details, which was good, from his point of view. Just the same old pictures of the S&D building. Then the news that the guy who’d held the hostages in the HR department was dead—taken down by the chief of security, Shane Gallagher.

  Again Weller saw the interview with the hero of the day. Shane Gallagher. He could be a problem. He’d been very effective in the takedown. And he’d also been reckless. Not a good combination for an enemy. And he knew that was what Gallagher was going to be—unless he killed him first.

  Jerome reached into the bowl on the table beside the couch, took out a butter mint, and unwrapped the candy. It was a green one, and he popped it into his mouth, sucking as he enjoyed the flavor. He’d liked the candy since he was a kid. Of course, he’d never gotten to eat them at home. His dad had been a health-food nut who’d kept sweets away from his kids. The only time Jerome had gotten sugary treats was when he was playing at a friend’s house.

  He’d done a lot of that as a kid. He’d never liked bringing friends home. Not only because Dad was weird. They’d also been the shabby family in the neighborhood, and he’d been ashamed to have the other kids see the way they lived.

  He’d remedied that as an adult. Now his home was a showplace, with all the comforts he’d lacked as a child—including all the candy he wanted. Which hadn’t done his teeth any good. But today you didn’t have to worry too much about that. You could get implants—which were better than the real thing.

  As he sucked on the candy, he thought about Shane Gallagher and decided that bumping the guy off might not be such a great idea right now. It would be suspicious if the head of S&D security bought the farm just after he’d done that heroic hostage rescue.

  Heaving his considerable bulk out of the custom-made leather chair in his den, Jerome crossed to the bar at the side of the room and poured some schnapps into a glass. The peppermint liqueur was just the thing to go with the mint candy—with a bit more punch.

  He took an appreciative swallow. It was imported from Germany. An indulgence he’d only enjoyed as an adult. In addition to banning candy from the house, Dad had also lectured extensively on the evils of alcohol.

  After taking a few sips, Jerome set the glass down and paced the room, his expensive alligator shoes making no sound on the thick carpet. He was a short, stout man wearing top-of-the-line Gucci jeans and a five-hundred-dollar cashmere sweater over a soft white dress shirt, all in plus sizes. And the outsized heavy gold chain at his neck winked in the illumination from the overhead lights as he walked to the window, then back to the chair.

  He glanced toward the door. He’d given his staff the night off because he wanted to be alone. Now he was thinking that he should have kept Mario around to give him a massage. That would have relaxed his tense muscles.

  There was a new product in development that he had vowed to get from S&D. And he wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of him acquiring it.

  He’d tried and failed once, and maybe he’d even thought about giving up. But now the newscast was like a sign winking on and off in the darkness—pointing him in the right direction. He’d set up a couple of options. Finally, he knew which one he was going to take.

  Or was that plan too risky?

  He picked up the glass of schnapps and took another swallow while he considered his options.

  ***

  Elena lived in what was called a garden apartment. Not one of the sexy new developments north of Rockville, but an older yellow-brick complex in the less fashionable part of the city. Still, living there meant she cou
ld afford to be on her own, which was important to her.

  She drove past her building and circled the parking lot, checking to see if the car she’d spotted was still behind her. Although it seemed to have disappeared, she wished she could have gotten a space closer to her door.

  The lot was full of older model cars, pickup trucks, and vehicles like delivery trucks and service vans that were owned by local businesses but driven home by workers.

  She parked between a van from a rug cleaning company and a pickup with a padlocked toolbox under the back window. And before she got out of her car, she took the canister of Mace out of her bag and held it in her left hand. Her keys were in her right hand as she walked rapidly up the sidewalk to the front entrance of her building. Grateful that the light wasn’t out at the mailboxes as it had been the week before, she got her mail, then climbed the steps to her second-floor apartment. Once she was inside, she slid the security chain into place and breathed out a little sigh.

  She stopped in the living room to straighten the brightly colored accent pillow on the discount easy chair, then turned on the kitchen light and shuffled through the mail, separating the bills from the advertisements. The bills went into a drawer in the heavy, carved sideboard she’d picked up at a garage sale. The ads went into the trash. That was the way she liked it. Everything in its place.

  She listened to several messages from friends and coworkers who had heard the news and wanted to make sure she was okay.

  She returned most of the calls, keeping her voice bright and cheerful even though she’d had an exhausting and frightening day.

  Finally, she went into the kitchen, glad she didn’t have to cook. As was her habit, on Saturday she’d gone to the grocery store and bought the ingredients for several of her favorite dishes—some from home and some popular American entrées. She’d spent a couple of hours cooking and stored the food in the refrigerator. Now she got out a casserole of chicken and vegetable stew and some of the rice and beans she’d always liked. San Marcos comfort food, she guessed you’d call it.