Kill List (Special Ops #8) Read online

  His mother released him. “I fear for her. She…if she’s alive…” she shook her head unable to continue as she walked to the soft beige leather couch in the far corner of the room. He had bought her that couch as a present. She had wanted new furniture and he had wanted to give it to her so he bought the living room set she had been eyeing in the paper. Getting that beast up the stairs of the front porch and through the narrow doorway had taken more than a few good men. Thanks to his friends he had been able to do it.

  He had to put his mind back on something other than imagining the hell Olivia was going through if she was still alive. “Who called the police?”

  His father shrugged. “They say the call came in from within the hotel. They say it was a female, but not much more than that.”

  “Could it have been her?”

  His father shrugged again. “Doubtful because they say there was a hint of southern twang in the voice. We all know she doesn’t have that at all.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. She was a Midwest girl born and mostly raised until her family moved to Manhattan. Then she had gone off to college in Arizona from what he had been told. Amber had said she was trying to get scheduled to do her residency requirements in Montana since she thought she had a better chance of working with the kind of animals she wanted to work with. He had talked to Olivia and he hadn’t heard a hint of southern in her voice ever. If it wasn’t her then who had put in the call? And why hadn’t they come forward to identify the guy who did this?

  From what his father had told him the guy who had the room for the week hadn’t been seen coming back into the hotel, but apparently the front desk clerk was swamped with the mid morning rush of checkouts and he wouldn’t have seen much of anything beyond the line of people at the front desk. Apparently front desk clerk number two had called in sick last minute so they were understaffed and extremely busy.

  Since the temporary resident of the room his sister was murdered in hadn’t been seen since the murder he was high on the list of suspects in Chogan’s mind. In fact, he was the number one suspect because who pays over a grand a night for a room and then just walk out without checking out or ever returning?

  “Have the cops even bothered to look for him? Have they even bothered to get a description of the guy out there?”

  “First,” his father tossed up his hands. “They say nobody is really sure what he looks like. Apparently he checked in during a rush and never made much of a fuss at the front desk. The clerk who checked him in is gone on an extended vacation so they can’t question her—as if she would really remember unless he was just one of those guys who had looks you don’t forget. Second,” he slumped in the recliner. “They don’t seem to know who they’re looking for. The room was booked under a corporate account to a company that apparently doesn’t even exist. The only reason I know this is because one of the detectives let it slip before the other one could shut him up. Now they’re not telling us much of anything.”

  “I see,” he mumbled. “I have friends in high places. I’m going to contact somebody and see if I can get somebody to force some answers out of these cops.” He was going to reach out to Autumn Kitsap, head of the Special Conditions Witness Protection program and see if she could use her pull to help him out. He had helped her out on a mission once before and she had said if he needed anything to let her know…well, now he was going to have to call in that open invitation favor because he needed full access, and he needed it now. If he couldn’t get help from her end then he would reach higher up. He had done a lot of things for a lot of people during his military career and maybe now he was going to see if those people would keep their word or if they were just blowing smoke out of their mouth when they promised to never forget, and to help him if he needed anything.

  “Would you all mind if I shower?”

  “Have we ever minded if you showered?” His father’s curt response told Chogan just how exhausted and near volcanic his father was. “Go on,” he tried to steady his voice. “Your mother cooked earlier. It seems to be the only thing keeping her from losing her mind right now.”

  He nodded. She and Amber were closer than mother and daughter. They were like best friends who seemed to grow closer to each other with each passing day. The older Amber got the deeper their friendship grew. To lose a daughter and a friend could drive anybody with a heart to madness. He knew losing his sister and not knowing where the hell Olivia was seemed to be driving him to near madness. Only his madness wasn’t threatening to make him fall apart. He was on the edge of raising the war flag and forgetting the law, forgetting what might be deemed right. Life for a life is what those Christians had said their God had once dictated and he was ready to exact vengeance of his own right now. Life for a life—the death of his sister, and the possible death of Olivia was a tragedy he wanted justice for and he couldn’t say that with each passing minute that he wasn’t thinking outside the legal realm of getting that justice.

  What were the cops doing other than shoving doughnuts down their throat and sitting on their behind all day? Were they even out looking for witnesses, trying to find the man who murdered his sister, or even looking for Olivia? No, probably not. It would seem all they wanted was a sound bite and a fifteen minute walk of fame in the media frenzy on the most “shocking” murder in the city. Shocking, that’s what they had called it. It was shocking in their mind only because it happened in such a five star upscale hotel that had everything from celebrities to royalty and political figures sleeping in one of their many upscale rooms. They didn’t care about the life lost and the woman still missing. They only cared about what fame it could bring them, for the few minutes that the story would dominate the airwaves. Once something else hit they would all go back to their usual routine of careless blasé living. No, he didn’t trust cops. He didn’t trust them at all and he was trusting them even less now that the entire case was in their hands and yet none of them seemed to be doing much about solving his sister’s murder and finding Olivia and bringing her home alive.

  Olivia felt the hunger pains starting to set in by the third day of being stuck in the basement. God she needed food and she knew there was nothing in the refrigerator. She was going to go up and rummage around the cabinets again just in case she had missed something in the empty spaces before, which she knew she hadn’t but she was getting desperate now, but before she could even get the basement door open she heard a siren and freaked out. She didn’t know she could descend stairs so swiftly without falling, and she certainly didn’t know why she thought hiding under the Native blanket was going to make her safe.

  She was getting cold. The weather outside wasn’t exactly summerlike, nor was it spring inclined either. She couldn’t turn on the heat so she had started to use his Native blankets to stay warm at night. She would have to pay him for this later as she knew they were all authentic because Amber had told her that when she showed her this section of the house before. It was just so cold in the basement that she needed to keep warm some kind of way. She hadn’t been able to get her coat. It wasn’t like she could have gone back to the employee lockers and put in her code, grabbed her coat and still exited the building unseen. She had to use these blankets, one underneath her body on the couch and the other warming her on top since it was draped over her body. She would apologize to him later. These blankets were important to him and as far as she knew he didn’t even sleep on them or in them. Great, one more thing to feel guilty about, she thought as the hunger pains assaulted her once again.

  She needed food. Water wasn’t so hard because Chogan had a purified water dispenser in the corner. It wasn’t a full five gallons now because he hadn’t been home to buy more, but there was still some since he hadn’t been home to drink it either. She was drinking it, using the small bowl that had clearly housed peanuts at some point, to drink the water from. She had rinsed it only at first, but drinking moderately salted peanut water wasn’t her thing so she used the hand soap in the bathroom to clean it out. After that
she tried to use water sparingly. She didn’t know how long she would have to stay here. For all she knew Chogan might have been out on a mission and maybe he hadn’t even been notified of Amber’s death yet. She was fine with the idea of waiting until hunger pains felt like they were going to rip her apart from the inside out. By the fourth day she started opening cabinets in the basement. She had gone for the cabinet he had against the corner wall but it was locked. What did she think she was going to find in a file cabinet anyway?

  She curled up on the couch, tears streaming from her eyes. What did she think she was going to do? What did she think hiding out in a deserted house basement was going to get her? And how long could a human go without food before they died?

  Her eyes tilted toward the water container. Maybe she had a day of water left, maybe if she were lucky that was. Sure, she could fill the bowl with the tap water. She believed he had some type of water softening purification system installed anyway, at least Amber had said he was going to do it—but had he done it yet?

  “Oh God,” she sniffled as tears roared down her cheeks. She didn’t think she could cry like this anymore than she had already done, but now she was shattering what little strength was left in her body crying just as hard as before. This time she wasn’t just crying for Amber and her family. This time she was crying for herself, for her physical pain and discomfort. Starving was one hellish way to die. Sure there were worse ways to go, but this, starving, isolated and cold was just the fifth circle of Dante’s hell. Maybe it was the sixth circle, she wouldn’t know because they hadn’t gotten to the second book in her undergrad humanities class. The book freaked her out so much that she didn’t run out to buy the final two books to see how his journey through hell ended. Maybe it ended the way hers was going to end—totality of death.

  She drifted off to sleep. Sleep was more calming than her waking thoughts and if she were going to die then in her sleep would be a far better way to go than on her knees with a bullet drilling a hole through her cranial mass. The nightmares hadn’t stopped, but they had been shorter with the occasional showing of happier times in the dream playing in her head. She remembered her family, the times ice skating in the park with her sister as her mother pulled them along and her father took the video camera and filmed every laugh filled fall, every perfectly executed spin that she had done, and every attempted jump that she hadn’t quite mastered but hadn’t fully tanked either. Those memories were welcomed before the darkness of death encroached on her happy place and she saw it again—Amber being murdered right before her eyes. Blood, she remembered the red, the hole, all of it. She would never be able to forget it in her waking hours and clearly not in her sleeping ones either.

  Chogan had spent more time at his parents than he planned, but he had felt the need to be there for them. He had gone to talk to the cop who had nothing to share that he hadn’t already shared. No, they still didn’t know about Olivia but they believed her to be dead and were now looking for her body. The news had pissed him off even more than he already was when he walked into the Midtown South Precinct.

  Chogan picked up some fresh fruits and vegetables to last him for the night and morning. He could go do full grocery shopping some other time. Right now he needed to get home and start doing the work the police weren’t doing.

  He was ready to kick that off until he got home, put his key in the lock and opened the door. He immediately realized something wrong. First, his alarm should have been doing the fast countdown that it always did when he was away and refrained from putting in the code from the outside entry pad. Instead, it was doing a subtle long beep that it did when it was in stay-mode and he opened a door to test out if anything had happened to throw the alarm off while he was away. He had installed this system himself. He had designed it too. He had made sure the entry could be keyless or with key because he wasn’t a man to put a spare key in the flower pot or anything like that. Being out of the city didn’t mean he felt some false sense of complete safety.

  Since he had both designed and installed the system he knew something wasn’t right. What he didn’t know was how anybody could have gotten past his device without setting off the alarm that he had Will Black, a retired Marine turned security management company owner, monitor for him. Will had turned a dream into a major reality and now had his men, former military some of them, and just stand up men for the others, helping get major companies and sporting complexes, banks and businesses that could afford his cost, anchored with top art security systems and heavy duty locks. Chogan hadn’t needed that part, but he had struck a deal with Will to have him monitor his system. If the alarms went off it was his men who would do the checking. Since Chogan’s parents hadn’t received a call on a disturbance that told Chogan that somebody had gotten in, but hadn’t set off the alarm and he wanted to know how, but first he wanted to neutralize the threat. His mother and father would not be putting both of their children in the ground this month.

  Something else he noticed as he punched in the code on the keypad and pulled the gun out of the waistband of his pants was that the basement door had a soft line of light coming from under it. Something was wrong. Either Amber had done the leaving setup wrong or somebody had entered his home. Amber never got it wrong. Somebody was here. Somebody was down there. And somebody better hope they didn’t do something that would cost them their life.

  He quietly opened the door and took the steps quietly just as well. The light coming from under the door was coming from the bathroom light spilling into the main room area. He held his gun outstretched, slowly and cautiously checking his surroundings to make sure there wasn’t somebody hiding behind something somewhere getting ready to come out at him. He could see the body on the couch underneath his blanket that he had bought at a high price the last time he was on the reservation six years ago.

  A squatter, he thought as he approached and stood in front of this squatter. He pulled his flashlight from his jacket pocket and shot the beam on this squatter. The head jolted to the side and a woman bolted upright trying to seek refuge against the back corner of the couch.

  “Olivia?” He looked at her. It was definitely Olivia. Disheveled, scared, and looking malnourished. Her eyes were puffy and stark red. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Her hand tried to shield her from the light. He moved the flash out of her eyes, but didn’t turn off the high beam.

  “Chogan,” she sighed with relief.

  “What are you doing here?” He asked with more anger in his tone. “The cops are looking for you. People think you’re dead. Do you know that? Do you care about that? We had Amber’s funeral and you didn’t even show up.”

  “Chogan,” she sobbed. “I was hiding from him, from them, from all of them.”

  He heard the shaking in her voice.

  “I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go home. I figured it was only a matter of time before they realized I was in the room. I figured it was only a matter of time before he found out where I lived. I didn’t know what to do.” She cried so hard that he couldn’t hold on to his anger. He shut off the flashlight and allowed the ray from the bathroom to cast a soft light on them. He put the safety back on his weapon and secured it out of her sight before sitting down beside her.

  “You should have gone to the police.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not? Did you do something wrong?” Was she in anyway involved in this? No, she couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t believe that.

  “I saw him, Chogan. I walked back toward the room and I saw him just before he pulled the trigger and I went and I hid. While I was hiding and he was searching the room, he even opened the closet where I was hiding but because I’m small I was able to take refuge behind the bigger safe and he didn’t see me. But even though he closed the door I could hear him on his call. He said to whomever he was talking to to send two officers and get rid of it—the body. If officers are disposing of dead bodies for him then I don’t know if I can trust
the cops. So I didn’t go to them. I just—I hid.”

  He could understand her fear now. She had seen the man murder his sister. She could have been killed herself, and then to hear him talking to a law officer about covering it up, yeah, he wouldn’t know who to trust either. Difference was, he didn’t trust many people at all and he certainly wasn’t in trust of any cop at this point in the game. He also could take care of his own defense while she couldn’t.

  He pulled her into his arms and onto his lap. He held her while she sobbed against his chest and clung to his shirt. He was ready to attack the details of the murder when he heard the constant grumble of her stomach.

  “You’re hungry.”

  She sniffled and nodded. “You didn’t have any food here.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Since the day Amber was murdered. I didn’t know where to go and I thought it best if I stayed out of sight so I thought of your place. I figured you would come back here…at least I hoped you would.”

  He ran one hand through his loose flowing hair just thinking of how long that had been. “I have food upstairs. You’re going to eat, and then we’re going to talk.” He stood, holding her in his arms and taking the stairs one at a time until he reached the top. He walked over to the kitchen and sat her in a chair. He pulled the blinds closed completely to keep any possible roving eyes out of the equation. The last thing he needed was for somebody to call the cops and report Olivia’s whereabouts.

  He riffled through the bags he brought home with him, pulled out an apple, washed it and handed it to her. She could eat that while he got dinner together.

  He watched her take bites so fast she was barely chewing one before taking the next. He put his hand on her wrist. “Slow down, honey.”

  Tears shone in her eyes and she nodded. He understood her hunger. She had been living on water about a week now. Amber had been killed, but it was already the next day where he was located when he received word. Even though the call had came in swiftly, and he had gotten the message since they weren’t out on a mission he still had to leave his local, land in Germany and exit commercially from there back to New York. Then he had spent more time at his parents’ house than he planned to. God, it had been over a week now. She was starving. But perhaps what hit him in the core of his gut was the fact that starving or not she was too afraid to leave the safety of his basement. She would have let herself die there rather than go out to find food. Something about that told him more than what he had already discerned from the limited information he had on the situation. Something about that told him this murder was deeper than a man with a gun and a need to kill innocent chamber maids.