Agent-in-Charge

Chapter Three

“Tell me again. Everything that’s happened since you went to my office.”

Graham paced in front of Casey’s living room sofa where she sat with Willy at her feet. Every step Graham took carried his scent to her nostrils, made her pulse rise another notch.

“If we kick this around enough,” Graham insisted, “we may find a reason for the attacks on you.”

As he spoke, she tried even harder not to recall her last sight of his long, lean body, his dark hair and eyes, his high cheekbones. She didn’t need her eyesight to know he wasn’t wearing that surprising grin now.

Casey rested a hand on Willy’s warm shoulder and went through her story one more time. Her drive to Graham’s office—her last drive on her own—the elevator ride upstairs, then leaving for the garage, hearing the speeding car too late. The sketchy details never seemed to satisfy Graham. He insisted they were missing something that could tell them why she had become someone’s target.

“Again,” he said when she finished for the third time. “You were at Hearthline in the first place because…?”

“I know you told me never to go there.” Casey sensed he was not only frustrated by the lack of information she could supply but also irritated. So was she. “Too bad. It wasn’t enough that you spent the bulk of your time there after our move from New York to Washington.” For her, an unwanted move that had forced Casey to sell her art gallery—and become, since then, unemployed. “Before the accident, I’d been in the neighborhood after searching for another business site not far from Dupont Circle. I had an appointment near the Mall. And Hearthline.” But the question remained: even before the divorce, why didn’t her then-husband want her to see his new office?

Now they were divorced and she had to protect herself from a possible killer. She also needed to safeguard her heart from Graham.

If he walked past her once more with that woodsy aroma intermingled with the pheromone-laden scent of man, she might lose her mind. Better to tell him what she could, even when that meant exposing herself.

Casey cleared her throat. “I wanted to drop off the rest of your belongings.” She told him about the carton. “You’d left them behind.”

His tone sharpened. “Where’s the box now?”

“Why, I—” She frowned. To be honest, if she had thought about it during her painful recovery, she’d repressed the memory, like that face in the elevator. “I have no idea,” she said lamely, as puzzled as he was.

Graham cruised by the sofa and Casey bit back a moan. “When you woke up, the box was gone?”

“At the hospital, yes. I assumed one of the nurses or someone in Emergency had put it aside for me, but when I was released no one seemed to know anything about the carton. I’m sorry,” she added. “Things were chaotic. I hope nothing inside was valuable, sentimental….”

“That’s not the point.” Graham was clearly losing his patience. “This may be important. What exactly was in that box?”

She tried to relax. Graham too believed that her “accidents” were deliberate, a step forward since yesterday in learning who wanted her dead. She had to do what she could with her now-limited abilities to help catch that killer. Which, right now, meant cooperating with Graham.

“There was a trophy or two—bowling or golf—a few pieces of jewelry you never wore, some toiletries, that kind of thing.” Irish Spring. Aramis. She paused, wondering if her loss of sight would mean a lifetime of frustrated fantasy. “Are you saying someone ran me down, stole the box—or if not, then entered my apartment to find it? Tried to scare me in the revolving door when he didn’t? Why would someone want your stuff?”

“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath that only seemed, paradoxically, to emit more testosterone into the air. “It’s a long shot but we have to consider everything. Maybe this guy is writing a book—Most Boring Man in the World. And you had his research.”

Casey half laughed but could have groaned. “I wouldn’t say that.” Graham might be the too-dedicated civil servant with no time for his now-ex-wife, but he’d never bored Casey. All he had to do was walk into a room, and despite her resolve not to, she reacted to his presence.

Like a knife blade of desire, she could sense him with every fiber of her being, hear his familiar footsteps, touch his skin without intending to and feel the heat. But, most especially, she could smell him, his male scent, that tangy aftershave. And almost taste him on her tongue again. Hyperaware, Casey absorbed every shift of his body when he moved. She needed to distract herself.

“There’s nothing about your life or mine—the life we shared once—that would appeal to a killer. I sold pretty pictures, Graham.” Past tense. “You push papers around on a desk at Hearthline.”

She heard him pace some more. “There must be something else that triggered those attacks.”

When he stopped in front of her, Casey gazed up at him, wishing she could see even a hint of shadow. She saw nothing, yet she didn’t have to. That same, slow burn flared low inside.

Graham had his mind on other things. Real things. Murder, she thought. Concentrate.

“If someone wasn’t after the box, then what?”

Not long ago, Graham would have soothed her, brushed his finger across her mouth, kissed her until she couldn’t breathe. She imagined it now. Hot, dark, compelling…as if he were someone else, that dangerous someone she’d first assumed him to be.

“Come on, Casey. Think. From what happened recently, it doesn’t seem likely that you went to Hearthline to return my stuff and out of the blue someone decided to whack you. This guy has been tracking you. He pushed you into that revolving door yesterday after letting himself into this apartment. With very few traces left behind, I might add. There’s something you haven’t told me, or perhaps even remembered….”

That quickly, another memory resurfaced. Casey wanted to send it scurrying back into the far recesses of her mind along with the pain she’d suffered. But that wouldn’t help find a potential killer. The words tumbled out.

“I saw a man.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know. But he may have been coming from Hearthline that day. I watched the indicator drop down from seventeen.” Graham’s floor. “I was waiting in the lobby with that box for the same elevator to go up. When he stepped out, our gazes met. And locked.”

“You knew him. And vice versa.”

Casey shook her head. “I’m not sure. I had the odd feeling that I’d met, or seen, him somewhere…maybe some time ago. But I couldn’t put a name with his face.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Casey bristled. “Well, for one thing, in the last months of our marriage, you never took that much interest in what I did. You were gone so much that I finally stopped telling you about my days. Why would you care now about my chance meeting with some guy in an elevator?”

“You know why.”

She grabbed at straws. “There were other people on the elevator. It stopped at other floors on the way down. Maybe he didn’t even get on at Hearthline. He probably has no connection to this whole mess….”

Graham disagreed. “Let me be the judge of that. What did he look like?”

Casey struggled for the image. “Tall, but probably an inch or two less than you. He had blond hair. He wasn’t that remarkable, Graham.” When she finished her vague description of him and the two men she thought he’d been with, she added, “At least I assumed they were together.”

Graham expelled a breath, as if he’d been holding it while she spoke.

“It’s not enough. Is it?” she asked when he didn’t say a word.

He paced some more. “His face, his clothes, his manner. Nothing stands out.” Which seemed to bother Graham.

It didn’t trouble Casey. Please, don’t let that stubborn, mind-sticking encounter be significant. Because if it was, she had looked into the face of the man who might kill her.

“Casey, there must be more.”

She briefly shut her eyes, as if to conjure the image again on the blank screen of her lids. Even now, the only picture she could summon of the man remained shadowy. Unlike Graham.

“If he was coming from Hearthline, he could be anyone,” she said. “A senator, a journalist, an employee with a job like yours.”

“But then, I might recognize him.”

Or not, Casey thought. “He could be nobody at all.”

“Which is exactly what he may have wanted you to think,” Graham murmured in a taut tone.

“You mean, he might hope I would forget him?”

“Right.” She heard him rap his knuckles against a tabletop, clearly agitated by her story. “Keep trying to remember where you may have seen him in the past. He could be involved. He could be our man.”

Casey worried her lip.

“No, he couldn’t be. The time between seeing him at the elevator and my being hit by that car in the garage couldn’t have been more than ten minutes.”

“Time enough for him to reach the car—and lie in wait for you. Or maybe he called someone else to do the job.”

“But why?” They kept coming back to that. “Why would someone want to harm me? It doesn’t make sense, Graham.”

His tone darkened. “Sure it does. If he didn’t want you to identify him. He couldn’t take the chance on your forgetting him.”

“And that reason would be…?”

“I don’t know.” He crossed the room again and Casey felt him hunker down in front of her. He caught her still-raw hands before she could pull back, and another zing of awareness shot along her veins and nerve endings. “But we’ll find out.”

We? Casey definitely wouldn’t think about that.

She freed her hands. Yet she couldn’t hide behind her blindness from reality. Leaning to avoid touching Graham, Casey trailed her hand over Willy’s warm, silken fur. He was resting against her leg as if Casey would hold him up. Thanks to Graham, she had the dog now to protect her. Yet he wasn’t all she would need to find a killer, no matter what the reason for the attacks might be.

Whether or not she liked the fact, Casey also needed Graham. Willy would be her guide. But Graham would have to be her eyes.

AN HOUR LATER, from his car in the same parking garage where Casey had been hit, Graham punched in numbers on his cell phone, then waited for his contact at the D.C. police department to answer. The job was relatively new for Holt Kincade, but he had a lot of other experience.

Not long ago, he’d been deep-cover like Graham.

“Hey, Holt. How’s life back in the world?”

A soft Southern drawl came over the line. “Not bad. You still building that government pension?”

Graham didn’t need to answer. From Holt, the question would be rhetorical. Quickly, he explained about Casey’s initial accident. “I need to get my hands on the police report.”

After supplying the necessary details that would access Casey’s file, he waited, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. He didn’t like what Casey had told him, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He’d already looked around the parking garage himself without finding any clues.

“She mentioned three men in the elevator, possibly coming from the seventeenth floor at Hearthline,” he said to Holt. “One of whom may have recognized her. But from where, when? And why were those men there at all?” Graham felt in his gut that they didn’t belong.

“Something’s not right,” Holt agreed.

“I’ll have to check the visitors’ log.” Because of the need for tight security at the agency, it was kept religiously. Would three names show up on that log after normal business hours? Graham couldn’t shake the feeling that Casey’s first accident and at least one of those men were connected.

“Here we go,” Holt said. “I’ve pulled it up on my computer screen. The report is pretty cut and dried. No eye witnesses at the scene except your ex, and she was either out cold on the floor of that garage or she was drifting in and out of consciousness until the next day,” Holt said. “There’s not even a good description here of the car that hit her.”

“It would help if we had a license plate number or at least the make and model of the car, its color.”

“A few paint chips wouldn’t hurt,” Holt agreed. “From the impact of the accident, we might be able to link them to a fiber from the clothes she was wearing at the time, or maybe a strand of her hair caught in the paint. All she could tell the cops who interviewed her was that the car was a sedan—she thought—and dark.”

Graham sighed. “That covers a lot of territory. Probably half the cars in D.C.” The nation’s capital had no shortage of plain dark sedans, not to mention town cars and limos.

Knowing, too, that they were a dime a dozen, Holt made a sound of frustration that matched Graham’s mood. “Well, the car did come at her from behind.” Another computer key clicked, probably to scroll down on his screen. “She apparently didn’t see the driver, male or female. Neither did anyone else, as far as I know.”

“All of that jibes with the scant details Casey gave me.” Graham asked about the missing box she had carried. He couldn’t discount any possibility. Had her attacker really been after Graham?

“Nope. Nothing here on any box. You might double-check with the hospital. They’d have any belongings left behind except for the clothes she was wearing at the time of the accident. We kept those for evidence.”

“The ambulance guys might know something.” The box might prove nothing, but Casey had been run down near his office building, and Graham didn’t believe in coincidences. Either the box was part of the problem, or Casey had indeed seen something—or someone—she shouldn’t have seen.

“Want me to fax you a copy of the report?”

“Yeah. At home. Thanks, Holt. I owe you one.”

“Don’t mention it. I’ll never be able to repay my debt to you.” Graham winced. On one dark-as-hell night in Beirut, he had saved Holt’s life, but Graham shrugged that off. He knew Holt would do the same for him. “Wish I could be more help,” he added.

“Wait. Maybe you can.” Graham straightened in his seat. He told Holt about Casey’s second mishap in the revolving door the day before. He tapped the steering wheel again while Holt scrambled through the most recent police write-ups—and found nothing.

Graham cursed himself. “I should have gotten the name of the guy who was almost hit when Casey’s assailant tore out of that parking space. His SUV did get bumped pretty hard. Maybe he didn’t file a report to keep his insurance rate from rising. I guess I was too concerned about Casey to think straight at the time.”

“No wonder.” Holt paused. His voice deepened and his Tennessee accent intensified, a sure sign he was troubled. “By the way, I was real sorry to hear about Casey’s eyes. That’s a tough one, Graham. How’s she dealin’ with it?”

“Better than could be expected.”

Holt hesitated again. “You two getting back together?”

“Not as far as I know,” Graham repeated Holt’s earlier phrase. Graham had a job to do. That was all.

At least that’s what he kept trying to tell himself. For her own safety, Casey had to keep thinking, like almost everyone else at Hearthline, that he was some dull civil servant in a dead-end job. A guy who hadn’t cared enough about her to stay home at night. Until this was over, he’d keep quiet—if it killed him.

Casey was already at risk.

The less she knew about Graham’s real work, the better. For now. As an ex-operative, Holt would understand.

“I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for, partner.”

The term was more than a throwaway word. Holt Kincade had been on the twelve-member team with Graham when the original antiterrorism task force began. He and Graham and Tom Dallas.

“So do I.”

Graham wondered whether Holt meant the rest of the story, the possible killer or Casey herself.

CASEY’S HEART pounded. All around her, horns blew. Five o’clock traffic rushed past. “We can do this,” she told herself and Willy.

Graham, who had late meetings to attend, had dropped them off at the Guide Dog Institute on his way back to work, saying his colleague, Jackie Miles, would pick her up. She was not to leave until Jackie got there.

Like the memory of Graham’s face and body, their earlier conversation still hummed in Casey’s mind. But she couldn’t afford second thoughts. Casey had been unable to sit home and do nothing—as Graham might prefer. This little trip had seemed harmless, even necessary at the time, in order to maintain her independence. Now they had to get home—their first solo trip—and Willy waited patiently beside her on the corner near the institute.

Why hadn’t Jackie Miles kept her promise to meet Casey? She had waited in the reception office for over an hour. But still no Jackie. Weeks ago the woman had kindly spent time with Casey at the hospital whenever Graham couldn’t be there, sitting by her bed, chatting with Casey when she woke. Why hadn’t she shown up this time?

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