In Absentia Page 14

  “The AUSA was explaining to me that your client is likely to amend his statement.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. I will be shocked if he chooses to let his current plea statement stand.”

  “And he’s aware that he’ll spend several decades in federal prison if he does enter a plea to the conduct the AUSA has mentioned?”

  “Yes. He’s also aware that he’ll be dead before sunset if he walks out of here a free man.”

  The judge covered his microphone with one hand and beckoned for her to come closer with the other.

  She tipped forward, balancing on the very tops of her shoes.

  He leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Well done, young lady. Really well done.”

  She stared at him in amazement, savoring the moment. “Th-th-thank you, Your Honor.”

  “Step back,” he snapped. The moment was over.

  31

  Tuesday morning

  Sasha sprinted the last fifty yards of her pre-dawn, five-mile run. She stopped in front of the doors to Daniel’s Krav Maga studio and checked her pulse rate. Then she stretched, took a sip of water, and bounded into the building.

  Daniel was already there, doing one-armed pull-ups at the bar over the doorway. He finished his set and dropped to the floor like a jungle cat.

  “Morning.”

  “Good morning. How was Chris’ performance?”

  Daniel’s husband was a pianist. Sasha loved to hear him play, but she’d had to miss last night’s show. She was still catching up on work, what with all the being abducted and crime-solving.

  “He played like an absolute angel. Sorry you missed it.”

  “So am I. What are we doing today? Take downs? Ground fighting?”

  “Actually, I want to talk to you. I’ll make it up to you with a private class over the weekend.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Okay?”

  He opened the door to his cramped office. “Let’s sit.”

  She dropped into the chair across from him. “So, what’s this about?”

  “Leo told me what happened in West Virginia.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “Are you okay? I mean emotionally?”

  “Daniel, no offense, but you’re my Krav Maga instructor, not my therapist.”

  “I’m also your friend. And I’m waiting for an answer.”

  She was going to strangle Connelly when she saw him. “I’m fine—now. During everything, sure, I was plenty concerned. Worried. Scared, even. But we both know that panic clouds the mind, and I knew I had to keep my mind clear. I was going to see my kids and my husband again. My client and I were getting out of that horrific shack come hell or high water.” She gave him a little shrug. “And we did.”

  “And your client betrayed your trust.”

  “Sure, okay. So?”

  “So, the last time that happened, with Nick Costopolous, it threw you off your game for a while.”

  Anger flared in her belly. She tamped it down. Daniel was her friend, but he was also her instructor. She needed to remain respectful.

  At that moment, she knew why Connelly had gone through Daniel. Weasel. He knew she wouldn’t lose her temper with Daniel. Clever weasel.

  “Clive didn’t get over on me. I boxed him in. He’ll be in his sixties when he gets out of prison—if he’s lucky.”

  “And you trust yourself now? You’re not questioning your instincts?” Something in her face must’ve given her away because he held up a hand like a crossing guard. “Hear me out. You’re one of the most accomplished practitioners of Krav Maga I know. You’re certainly my most talented student. But.”

  “But?”

  “But if you are in your own head, worrying about whether you read someone’s signals properly, you’re not going to be effective when you need to be. And given the life you insist on leading, that’s liable to get you killed.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What are you proposing? Just spit it out.”

  “Maybe, just maybe—your history notwithstanding—it’s time to think about taking shooting lessons.”

  She stared at him. He was, she knew, waiting for her to object. Loudly, angrily, and insistently.

  But what neither he nor Connelly knew—what nobody knew—was that she had experienced one moment of sheer panic in Tannerville.

  Right after she’d buried Donny’s gun in the rubble for safekeeping—when she was hiding in the shed—there was a point when she truly believed Youssef was going to kill her. And, in that moment of abject fear, she found herself wishing the gun were in her hands instead. She found the spade, reminded herself that she didn’t know how to shoot, and the moment passed.

  But what if the next time, there wasn’t a shovel in the shed?

  Was it time she finally faced her deepest fear and learned how to shoot a gun?

  She examined that thought the way Bodhi would. Considered how it felt to hold that thought.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt. It didn’t feel right, but it didn’t feel wrong.

  She tucked it away for now, and turned her attention back to her instructor and her old friend.

  “Maybe.”

  He blinked.

  “I said maybe, not yes.”

  “I heard you.”

  They looked at each other for a long, tense moment.

  Finally, she broke the thick silence. “I can’t believe you’re carrying Connelly’s water now.”

  He smirked. “Right, it’s so out of line. Says the woman who tag-teamed with Chris when he wanted to paint the sitting room celadon over my fervent objection.”

  “It’s gorgeous, and you know it.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah. It is. So we’re good?”

  She stood. “We’re good. But only because you can kick my butt. Connelly, on the other hand, is in a world of trouble.”

  He laughed uncertainly.

  “No, we’re good, and my husband and I are good. I understand why he hid behind you on this one. I don’t even blame him.” Much.

  32

  Wednesday afternoon

  Three days after Leo busted A-I-C Dill’s jaw, he came home from an afternoon visit to the park with Finn, Fiona, and Mocha to find Agent Omar Khan sitting on his top porch step.

  Leo glanced up at the house. The blind in the big bay window in the master bedroom was still raised, which meant Sasha wasn’t home from work yet. She raised it before she left for work in the morning so Java could enjoy his cat naps on the window seat in full sun, and she lowered it when she returned home because she didn’t like feeling as if she were on display when evening fell.

  Mocha made a warning noise, low in her belly, not quite a growl, but the promise that one was imminent.

  He wrapped the leash around his hand twice, tightening the slack. “I know the feeling, girl,” he said under his breath.

  “Fiona, Finn, why don’t you two head into the backyard. You can play in the sandbox for a bit.”

  Fiona cocked her head. “Daddy, we were just at the park. There’s a really big sandbox there, remember?”

  Finn grabbed her hand. “Fi, I think Daddy wants to talk to the man on the porch.”

  “Ooh, secrets,” she said knowingly. “We can kick the soccer ball instead.”

  “Okay,” Finn agreed affably as he almost always did.

  “Hi, Mister! Bye, Mister!” the twins chorused as they raced up the driveway.

  Mocha sprang as if she were going to follow them, and Leo brought her to heel beside his foot. She plopped her butt on the ground and sat, ears straight and alert. He stood on the sidewalk and looked up at Khan.

  “Cute kids,” Khan said, standing and shading his eyes.

  “What can I do for you, Agent Khan?”

  Khan spread his hands wide in an unmistakable gesture of goodwill. “I come in peace, Agent Connelly.”

  Leo didn’t laugh.

  “Officially, I’m here to thank your wife for her valorous assistance in helping dismantle a drug network that funded te
rrorist activities and for nailing a dirty cop.”

  “She’s not here. I’ll give her the message.”

  “Unofficially, I’m here to apologize to both of you and to ask you a question.”

  Leo felt his attitude toward the DEA agent softening. “What’s the question?”

  “Did you really clock Dill in the kisser?”

  Leo pressed his lips together and cleared his throat. “It was the jaw area, actually.”

  Khan nodded. “The jaw area. So, the reason his mouth is wired shut is not to correct a bad bite, is what you’re saying. I had my doubts, you know, when I found him writhing on Clive Bloch’s deck in pain on Sunday afternoon. Then he showed up with the wired jaw on Monday. It seemed like an odd coincidence.”

  Leo raised one eyebrow. “A bad bite? You’d have to ask his dentist.”

  Khan grinned and started down the steps. “Did you get chewed out?”

  Leo answered with a one-shouldered shrug. “My supervisor had to put something in the file, so, sure, let’s go with I got chewed out.”

  “You work for Hank Richardson, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s a legend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, look. I just wanted to shake the hand of the man who lived out my fantasy. Believe me when I say Dill earned it. And if you don’t want me to hang around until your wife gets home, I get it. I’ll be on my way.”

  Leo looked at Omar’s outstretched hand. A smile worked its way across his mouth. He shook the DEA agent’s hand. “You want a beer?”

  Sasha didn’t know what she expected to find when she walked through her front door at the end of the day. But it wasn’t a silent house.

  She dropped her laptop bag by the stairs and slipped out of her heels. Java eyed her from the rocking chair.

  “Where is everybody, kitty cat?”

  In response, Java closed his eyes and flicked his tail over his nose.

  She padded barefoot out to the kitchen and noted the door to the deck hanging open. The sound of the twins’ laughter floated in through the open window over the sink. She peeked outside. Connelly and Omar Khan were waving giant bubble wands while Finn, Fiona, and Mocha chased after the resultant giant bubbles, trying to catch them and, in Mocha’s case (and possibly Fiona’s), bite them.

  She poured herself a glass of Syrah and went out to the deck to join the party.

  “Mommy!” Finn chortled as soon as she stepped outside.

  After a round of hugs from the twins and a kiss from her husband, she perched on the built-in bench and studied the DEA agent. Any tension that he and Connelly may have had when he showed up—and she’d bet a month’s partnership draw that there’d been plenty of it—had melted away. Or had floated off on a giant, rainbow-hued bubble.

  “Hi, Agent Khan.”

  He tipped his beer bottle in salute. “Ms. McCandless-Connelly.”

  “Sasha’s fine.”

  “So is Omar.”

  “I have a question.” Connelly leaned forward. “If your real name is Omar Khan, why did you use it during an undercover operation?”

  Omar nodded. “Fair question. It was the nature of my cover. In the Muslim world, being named Omar Khan is the functional equivalent of John Smith or Maria Garcia. It’s so common, it’s basically anonymous. So there was no danger of exposure. And, you know, it was cleaner than adjusting to a new name and getting all the supporting documents.”

  “Sure. Makes sense.”

  Omar’s laid-back manner gave way to crackling intensity. He returned his bubble wand to the bottle and came to sit on the bench. He rested his elbows on his knees and pitched his voice lower. “I want you to know I regret how everything went down. I never imagined I’d be in a position where I’d risk harming a civilian during criminal activity. That operation was mishandled, if not outright bungled.”

  Sasha winced at the self-recrimination in his eyes. “Listen, you should disabuse yourself of the notion that I’m a civilian. I mean, I am. But I’ve been involved in some … stuff.”

  He managed a chuckle at that. “Yeah, I’ve heard a few things the past couple days. You two sure like to keep it interesting. I’ll tell you, I had my doubts about you from the beginning. In fact, the reason I dug up the gun was to see if I could get your prints off it. Not to frame you for Donny’s murder, of course. I thought you might be undercover for another agency and I was terrified we were going to end up killing each other in a friendly fire situation.”

  For the first time, it was clear to her how working as an undercover operative must turn a person’s ability to trust anything at all on its head.

  “I can see now, with the benefit of a little time and distance, that you tried to protect me and Clive to the extent you could without blowing your cover. But I still strongly disagree with Dill’s decision not to tell me—or at least Connelly—that you were undercover DEA after the fact.”

  “I don’t blame you. At the time, I was told that you, Sasha, lacked the necessary clearances, which made some amount of sense. But knowing that Leo has the highest level of clearance … someone should have told him.”

  “I also know that it wasn’t your call to make. A-I-C Dill had the final say. So ….” She shrugged. “What’s done is done.”

  “And he’s eating through a straw for the rest of the summer.”

  “There’s that, too.” She laughed.

  Connelly caught her eye, and her laughter died away. “That doesn’t mean I’m okay with violence as a problem-solving strategy, Leo Connelly.”

  Connelly nodded, straight-faced. But Omar cracked up and slapped his thigh.

  “You’re kidding, right? Is this the same woman who beat the tar out of the third-highest ranking member of a terror cell with a shovel?”

  She cleared her throat. “It was a spade, actually. And that guy was number three? He was kind of sloppy, don’t you think?”

  Omar made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I had the same thought, to be honest. He didn’t have much of a plan for killing Donny and Jamie. If I had to guess, his disdain for women and the fact that he had to take orders from Aliviyah Amini clouded his judgment.”

  “In that case, serves the sexist pig right.”

  Connelly shook his head. “Nice. So, before you came out Omar was telling me that the teenager you terrorized at the train station—”

  “Carlie.”

  “Right. Carlie’s cooperating. Here’s how it went: Chelsea started the flow of pills. Jamie and Donny delivered them to Zayed Al Sharqi’s compound, where Liv Amini sewed them into the stuffed animals that were carried to Shelbyville on the steam train.”

  Omar chimed in, “Then, while we all—the TDS, the state troopers, and the HIDTA Task Force—wasted our time patrolling the highways and major corridors of the Ohio Valley Region, Al Sharqi’s network of couriers picked up the drug-stuffed animals either on the train or at the Shelbyville gift shop and fanned out on regional puddle jumpers to sell the pills. Millions and millions of pills each year.”

  “It’s brilliant,” Sasha admitted.

  “Foolproof, even. Until Al Sharqi decided to try the same tactic to smuggle the ill-gotten money out of the country and into the hands of terrorists,” Omar added.

  “Luckily our greedy accountant friend didn’t realize how heavy two million dollars in twenties would be.”

  “You know, what he really needed was more bears. Because ten million in hundreds is as heavy as two million in twenties, right?” She waited for someone to check her math.

  “That’s right.”

  “So the freight forwarder still would have noticed. They needed to spread the weight over more stuffed animals.”

  The men stared at her.

  “Please never go into a life of crime. Detail-oriented criminals are the worst.” Connelly grinned at her.

  Omar drained his bottle and rose to his feet. “Isn’t that the truth? I should go. I’m staying with an old college buddy while I’m in town,
and he’s going to think something happened to me.”

  After the kids said their goodbyes to their new favorite playmate, Connelly walked him out.

  He returned to the deck and looped an arm around Sasha’s shoulder. She leaned into his side, and they watched the twins chase Mocha in a circle in the evening twilight. That appeared to be the entire game: running in a circle.

  She inhaled, content and at ease.

  “Turns out he’s an okay guy,” Connelly commented.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Connelly said, “You know I don’t regret decking Dill, right?”

  “I know.”

  “But you think I should?”

  “I think you could have lost your job or been charged with battery.”

  “And you could have lost your life. He was wrong and reckless, and I hope I run into him again after his jaw heals so I can re-break it.”

  She arched a brow. “Yet I’m the one who had to complete a court-ordered anger management class. It’s an upside-down world we’re living in.”

  He grinned and pulled her closer. “No. It was, while you were missing. But, now that you’re back, everything’s right-side up again.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist, rested her head on his chest, and closed her eyes.

  This. This is what home feels like.

  33

  One week later

  * * *

  “Water bottles?” Connelly called from the mudroom.

  “Check, check,” Sasha responded as she dropped the last handful of ice into the bottles, careful to split it evenly between Finn’s bottle and Fiona’s, and screwed the caps onto the bottles.

  “Orange slices?”

  “Not our week to bring them. Mouth guards?”

  “Check, check.”

  “What about shin guards?”

  “Check … and half a check.” Connelly appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “I’ve got three.” As if to prove his point, he was waving three small shin guards.