Only the devil, p.5
Only the Devil, page 5
“Here, my office is this way.” I lead him through the maze of temporary walls, arriving at my office, which is, by all accounts, impressive. The view might be meh, but the size of the office and the enormous glass wall is, well, let’s say, it’s so nice it would almost make coming into the office preferable over work from home. Almost.
The space just needs some art or something to warm up the blah beige walls and the dark gray carpet.
I lift my headphones and hang them around my neck so I don’t forget them, while Jake unzips his backpack and takes out a small cylindrical device. He’s going to wire my office. Which is a waste because I know what goes on in my office.
“You should really do that upstairs, where the executives are.”
The glare he shoots at me is all reprimand.
Fine. If he wants to listen to the nothing burger that goes down in my office, I have nothing to hide.
“I’m going to go upstairs. Skim the filing cabinets.” It always blows my mind that people keep paper files in this day and age, but they do. While it protects folks from hackers, it doesn’t protect them from snoops.
“Cool. I’ll be up in a sec.”
“K. If you run across anyone, tell them you’re searching for me.”
“You think anyone’s here?”
“No.”
I expect him to stare me down again, but he stays focused on the surveillance devices.
He’s once again wearing a tight-fitting tee that shows off a firemen-calendar-worthy physique, and with his longish, jaw-length hair tucked behind his ears and his beard, it’s a good thing he went with the unemployed story earlier. I imagine Sterling bought that he’s unemployed. And Ms. Weaver understands, if that’s the case, why I keep him around.
Of course, in reality, he’s way too good-looking for me to date. Not because I couldn’t, but I’m not stupid. Who wants to date a guy that’s so hot every single woman he comes across is going to hit on him? Not me. One night maybe, but not date.
With that last thought, I head out of my office and toward the stairwell, since Jake thinks there could be surveillance in the elevator.
Two minutes later, I’m on the executive floor. Once again I listen, but on this floor, not only is it quiet, it’s dark. Offices cover every inch of exterior facing space, and all the office doors are closed, leaving the floor awash in shadows. Light finds its way below the door cracks, but it’s dark enough to need light.
Up ahead is Ms. Weaver’s office, so I flick the hallway light on and head there first. I twist the knob, but it doesn’t turn. It’s locked.
This could be a wasted effort unless Jake knows how to break locks. I move down the line of offices, checking doorknobs.
Someone has to have a key ring that opens these offices. A master key. We don’t have keys on our floor for the offices. It’s interesting that these offices have this extra layer of security. I didn’t think about it until now, but the locks on the offices on the third floor are more of the bathroom variety that can be locked from the inside, but not once you step outside.
I round the corner, at this point twisting knobs for the hell of it. I’ve almost made an entire loop around the rectangular fourth floor when I see a door cracked open.
Unused office?
The door stands slightly ajar. A sliver of light cuts across the hallway carpet. I push the door wider, expecting an empty office.
Black heels.
Toes pointing skyward.
No one lies down in heels like that.
Time slows.
As I round the desk, it’s like I’m caught in a game, watching on a screen, but there’s no controller in my hand.
A woman lies on the floor, her lifeless eyes gazing at the ceiling. There’s no blood. One arm rests over her stomach, her fingers bent as if she were gripping her middle.
Even without touching her, somehow, I know. This woman is dead. The color of her skin is off. Pasty. Lifeless. I scan the carpet, her hairline.
My hands shake as I reach for my phone. This isn’t a video game where bodies are just obstacles to navigate around. This is someone’s daughter, mother, wife. Someone who got dressed this morning not knowing it was the last time. The room tilts.
Get out. The thought pounds with my heartbeat. Get-out-get-out-get-out.
CHAPTER 6
JAKE
The AC hums overhead. A light flickers in the ceiling panel. The carpet underfoot quiets my steps.
I shake knobs as I pass down the corridor, confirming they’re locked. This isn’t a project I’ll finish this afternoon. We’re going to need to come back tomorrow.
Movement catches my eye. Daisy steps out of an office, leaving the door open. She doesn’t look my way. Doesn’t move toward me.
Just stands there, still.
Even from twenty feet away, I can see something’s shifted in her posture. The feisty tech queen has been replaced by someone who looks like she’s seen a ghost.
“Daisy?” I keep my voice low, but it still echoes along the empty corridor.
She turns toward me then, and Christ—her face is white as paper. Those dark eyes that usually spark with wit are wide and unfocused, like she’s looking through me instead of at me.
Experience kicks my senses into gear.
Threat assessment. Scan for immediate danger.
No sounds except the AC humming overhead and that flickering fluorescent casting weird shadows on the carpet.
All clear.
But every instinct I’ve honed over fifteen years of military service is screaming that something’s very, very wrong.
I close the distance between us in three quick strides, noting how she doesn’t step back or acknowledge my approach. She’s locked in place.
“What is it?” The question comes out sharper than intended. That won’t calm her down. I breathe in, forcing a calmness I’m not feeling. “What’d you find?”
Her lips part slightly, but no words come out. Just this shallow breathing that makes me think she might be going into shock.
Surely they weren’t dumb enough to leave photo evidence just lying around. But whatever she saw in there has shaken her to her core.
“Daisy.” I reach for her arm—not to shake her, but to ground her. “Talk to me.”
The fluorescent light above us flickers again, casting her pale face in and out of shadow. I can see her pulse hammering in her throat, and when she finally speaks, her voice comes out in a whisper I have to strain to hear.
“There’s a...” She swallows hard, like the words are physically difficult to get out. “There’s a dead person.”
The words detonate with the force of a bomb.
Dead person.
My senses ring like there’s a five-alarm fire. Where’s the threat? Exits?
First, confirm what we’re dealing with.
Check the scene. Clear it.
I keep my voice calm, authoritative. “Touch nothing.”
Stumbling backward like she’s been holding herself upright through sheer willpower, I catch her elbow, steadying her while my eyes scan the corridor again. Still empty. Still quiet except for that damn AC and the flickering light that’s starting to feel ominous instead of just annoying.
I don’t have a gun, didn’t think I needed one. Figured having one might cause more issues if we got busted, but damn if my fingers don’t ache to wrap around my Glock.
I guide her a few steps away from the door, then move toward it myself. Every step feels deliberate, careful. In hostile territory, you never know if the first body is bait for an ambush.
I pause at the threshold of the door, cracked open about eighteen inches, listening. Nothing. No movement, no breathing, no sounds of life.
Then I push the door wider with my foot—same way she did, I’m guessing—and step inside.
And then I see her, toes up, a suit sprawled on the floor.
Dead bodies aren’t new to me, but the instinct to check for a pulse runs strong.
“We gotta call 911,” I say, stating the obvious.
My phone’s in my backpack, but I don’t immediately dig it out, as I can’t stop studying the scene. There’s no blood. Fingers curled over her abdomen, as if maybe she’d been in pain. I step forward to better see her head.
“We should go,” Daisy says.
“What?”
“She’s dead. We shouldn’t be here.”
“What?”
“Every office is locked. How do I explain finding her? I don’t work on this floor. What was I looking for? We need to go.”
Her voice strengthens with every word, and I see her point, but damn if leaving this woman on the floor doesn’t feel wrong. “Did you touch anything?”
“No.”
“What about the doorknob?”
“The door was cracked open. I pushed the door wider with my foot. Let’s go.”
She steps backward, gaze glued to the corpse sprawled before us. A touch of panic laces her words.
“Have you ever seen a dead person before?”
She’s out the door. I don’t repeat my question. I’m pretty damn sure I know the answer.
There’s no evidence of foul play. Whoever’s expecting this woman home tonight will call, looking for her. By tomorrow, someone will come by checking for her. There’s nothing to be gained by calling this in.
So I carefully back out of the office, careful not to touch a thing.
We wordlessly make our way back to the elevator, retracing my steps. So much for breaking into offices and planting surveillance devices. We’ll need to stay clear this weekend.
Even after the medics arrive, it’ll be smart to stay clear. There’s no telling who might be coming by over the weekend.
The elevator ride down feels endless. Daisy stares at the numbers above the door like they hold the secrets of the universe. I keep my hand near the small of her back, not quite touching, but ready to steady her if her knees give out.
We head out of the lobby. There’s no one at the reception desk. If there were, I’d say something like “She got her headphones. Have a great weekend,” but there’s no one here.
Come to think of it, no one was there when we went in, either. Maybe they get summer Fridays too.
“We did the right thing,” I say, though I’m not entirely sure I believe it.
She nods without looking at me. “I know.” But she doesn’t sound like she knows. She sounds like someone trying to convince herself.
Back at the condo, Daisy immediately slips on her headphones and pulls up something on her phone.
I call Quinn and give her a complete report. She says she’ll keep an eye out for emergency calls in the area and for any reports she can access. Quinn’s the one who asks if it could be poison.
There was an empty plastic water bottle in the circular trash can. But poison’s a stretch. No, I imagine it’s just bad luck. Death from natural causes.
We’ll aim for a different day to plant surveillance. It’ll give me more time to ensure I have the equipment needed to break in without scratching the office door locks.
After the sun sets, I nudge Daisy. She pushes a singular headphone above her ear.
“Hungry? Sushi?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay. Fair. I can see where raw fish might not be appetizing after the day’s events.”
“Any movement over there?”
While she’s been in a zone on the sofa, I’ve been sitting in the armchair that’s positioned to look across the street.
“None that I’ve seen.”
She plants a palm over her forehead like she’s checking her temperature.
“You hungry at all? I’m gonna gnaw my arm off if I don’t get something soon.”
“Burger and fries.”
“In or out?”
“In.” She’s clearly still in a bit of shock and not up for going out, which is fine by me.
While I’ve seen dead people before and a stranger who died of what’s most likely natural causes lying on the floor doesn’t disturb me much; death doesn’t put me in a social mood.
We order food and eat mostly in silence.
My thoughts go back to the office. The desk space was clean. She didn’t have a bag or anything nearby.
“We should’ve taken photos,” I say, realizing that if her death wasn’t due to natural causes, we exited a crime scene.
“The police will do that. Or the EMT or whoever they call.”
She’s right. “I didn’t see a briefcase or backpack or anything like that. Did you?”
Her jaw slows mid-chew, like she’s envisioning the office. She swallows and takes a swig of water. “I didn’t look. I remember the vacant desk. No papers. Her desk chair pushed aside.”
“Don’t women sometimes store their pocketbook and that kind of thing in a file drawer?”
Daisy blinks and picks up a fry. “Yeah. That’s probably where it was.”
“Did you know her?”
Daisy shakes her head. “She wasn’t introduced to me.”
“I sent her name to Quinn. Or at least, the name on the office plaque. She’s looking into her.”
“You think—”
Immediately, I throw up a hand. “No idea. Just standard practice.” I rap my knuckles against the table. “Why don’t you go up? Get a shower? I’ll let you know if I see lights across the way. We can say we live across the street, saw the lights and came over to see what’s up.”
An hour passes with no emergency lights across the street, no sirens, no sign that anyone’s discovered what we found. Which means that woman’s going to lie there all night. The thought bothers me more than it should. But what bothers me more is watching Daisy on the sofa, dark hair still damp from her shower, staring at her phone like it holds all the answers. She’s been too quiet. Too still. In my experience, that’s when the shock really starts to set in.
Something’s different about her face, and it takes me a moment to figure out what. The sharp edges are gone—whatever she normally does to make her eyes look so intense has been washed away. Without it, she looks younger. Vulnerable in a way that makes my chest tight.
The urge to pull her close, to somehow shield her from what she saw today, hits me harder than it should. This isn’t what I signed up for—protecting her if her investigation put her in danger, sure. But I can’t protect her from death. Not from the kind of images that stick in your head and replay when you’re trying to sleep.
“Why don’t you get some shut eye?”
She looks past me, or maybe through me, to the window beyond.
“I don’t think anything’s happening tonight.”
Wordlessly, she drops her headphones on the sofa and climbs the stairs. At the top of the stairs, she asks, “That sofa isn’t comfortable, is it?”
I’ve been here several days, and she’s yet to ask, but my momma taught me right, so all I say is, “It’s good.”
“You keep rubbing your shoulder.”
“Old injury.” It’s the truth. More than one injury, but it’s the shrapnel that really did it in.
“I’m… Would you do me a favor? Would you maybe sleep in the bedroom tonight? It’s a king bed. We don’t have to touch, it’s just—”
“Not a problem.”
She’s frozen at the top of the stairs, watching me with an expression I can’t quite read. But I’ve seen that look before—on the faces of civilians caught in crossfire, people who’ve witnessed something their minds aren’t equipped to process. She’s not just scared. She’s questioning if she’s safe. If the world still makes sense. If she can trust me to keep the nightmares at bay.
I jump up from the sofa. “Let me turn off the lights and I’ll be up.”
Out of habit drilled into me since god knows when, I secure the perimeter. Double check the lock and deadbolt. Flick off the lights. When I’m back at the stairs, she’s still standing, watching.
Damn. She’s more shaken than I realized.
I climb the stairs two at a time and guide her into the bedroom, flicking on all the lights so I can go into the bathroom without her getting scared.
I’m not one to get messed up in the head about what I see. I’ve known others, though—good men—who didn’t compartmentalize so well. And she’s not a soldier. She’s not a cop. She’s a coder who set off on a personal mission to catch some scammers targeting the gullible and vulnerable. If she’s shaken, I don’t hold it against her.
Death doesn’t keep me awake. Fifteen years of military service beat that sensitivity out of me, mostly. But watching Daisy try to process what she saw today reminds me that not everyone’s wiring got rewired by combat. She’s brilliant with code, fearless when it comes to taking on shady crooks, but she’s never had to step over an innocent person to complete a mission. Never had to make peace with the fact that people die, sometimes for no good reason, sometimes right in front of you. The protective instinct that’s been simmering since we started this operation cranks up another notch. She shouldn’t have to carry this alone.
I crawl beneath the sheet, T-shirt and boxers on, my attempt to stay respectful.
I fall asleep somewhat easily, but I’m awoken by a cry. I’m not sure she’s awake, even though her eyes are open. I pull her into my arms and lie there awake until her muscles relax. The bedroom door’s open. If emergency lights filled the street outside, they’d reflect on the walls in the condo. But I drift asleep in the darkness.
CHAPTER 7
DAISY
A stream of sunshine lights the room through the one-inch gap below the closed bedroom door. Waking slowly, I stretch in my cocoon—and go still when my back presses into a firm body. That body rolls, and one arm falls over me, the weight heavy, the skin warm.
The events of yesterday flash by in lightning form: the cracked door, the body, our hushed departure. Me asking Jake to sleep with me. As if I was injured.
Why did seeing a stranger’s body rattle me? I don’t rattle. When my mom unraveled, I kept everything running. When gunfire snapped during my rescue, I stayed steady. I don’t crack. I’m better than that.
