CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Chloe Fine was listening to her deceased father’s voice as a late-summer thunderstorm rumbled outside. She sat on her couch in her quiet apartment, holding her sister’s voice recorder in her hand. She’d press play, listen for a bit, and then rewind it to hear it back again. She was dressed in an old T-shirt and a pair of comfortable pajama pants, her knees curled to her chest as if she were a little girl listening to some sort of morbid bedtime story.

She had listened to the single line where he admitted to the planned murder of her mother over and over again. It had become almost like a mantra, like the chorus to a song that got stuck in her head.

With the thunder softly booming outside, Chloe listened to it one last time. She held the recorder with both hands, almost as if she were expecting it to come to life and she’d be ready to strangle it when it did. She played the same sixteen seconds over again, trying to imagine what Danielle had been going through in that old abandoned warehouse.

She was oddly proud of her sister, but also a little frightened by the lengths she had gone to get this confession.

Chloe stopped the recorder and set it down on her coffee table. She sat in the silence for a moment, trying to grow acclimated to the current state of her life. It was not the first time she’d done this. It was a lot to take in, a lot to digest.

It had been five days since she and Danielle had buried their father in that unremarkable little stretch of forest in Texas. They’d buried him deep enough, and though she was sure his body might eventually be discovered by some form of wildlife, that would be many years down the road. She supposed if someone wanted to really go looking for the recently missing Aiden Fine, they could potentially find his body out there. But it would take a lot of looking.

That was the beauty of it, though. No one was going to look for him. He had no one to give a damn that he was gone. No one.

Besides, as far as any form of law enforcement knew, Aiden Fine was on the run, probably somewhere in Mexico by now.

The lie had been simple yet complex. And because the sisters had the same tale—not to mention the fact that one of the sisters was an FBI agent who had, on at least one occasion, been vocal about her estranged father—no one had really questioned it. Instead, there was currently a statewide manhunt for Aiden Fine.

That was the only part Chloe felt truly guilty about. She knew the bureau was using resources to find him. But she also knew that when the trail proved to be cold in about two weeks, the case would lose steam until it eventually became nothing more than a distant and hopeless case pushed back into reams and gigabytes of files.

Aiden Fine had kidnapped his daughter. It had started when he invited her over to his place for dinner. Things had gotten heated, a brief fight had ensued, and then Aiden used Danielle’s car to cart her off to some shithole town in Texas. He had taken her there because he knew it was a place she had once tried to escape from. According to Danielle, he’d claimed it had been a way to break her spirit, to let her know that even when she had been running from her demons, he had known where she was.

Even though the bureau had eaten the story up, Chloe had still been reprimanded. She had, after all, gone to save her sister and knowingly stepped into a dangerous situation. As far as they knew, though, Aiden had managed to escape her and Danielle, making a run for it.

Looking at the tape recorder, Chloe couldn’t help but wonder if they had gone about it wrong. The cops and the bureau had not seen the recorder, of course. No, Chloe had taken that, as there had been a few little remarks made here and there from Danielle that told the real story—that it had been

she

who had kidnapped

him

.

Still, they had a confession. It would have been enough to put him away. And then they could have skewed the story about how he had then attempted to kill Danielle, so she had been forced to kill him in self-defense. Sure, there may have been a few more loose ends that way, but it would have meant far less lying to the very same bureau she was working for.

In the end, she supposed it didn’t matter. Regardless of what story they had gone with, the most important question of all would not have been answered.

Her sister had killed their father. And if it had come down to it, Chloe would have killed him as well, if it meant saving Danielle. So that raised the question: did they both possess that same darkness their father had?

And now that they had worked together to hide such a sin, would that darkness have more of a hold on them?

---

Chloe fell asleep to the thunderstorm, sprawled on her couch. When her alarm clock shrieked from the bedroom the following morning, she sat up with a pain in her back, the result of so awkwardly sleeping on the couch. She walked to the bedroom, stretching her back out, and slapped the alarm button to shut it up.

She looked around her bedroom and realized that she had spent the last five days in something of a stupor. She needed to clean up. She needed to do laundry. She needed to eat a decent meal rather than something straight out of the microwave.

She wondered if she could call in and take a sick day. She was sure Director Johnson would see through it, but given what she and her sister had just endured, she thought he might be okay with it. She took a quick hot shower to loosen her back, hoping it might help her to come around and get out of the funk she’d been in. It helped a bit, though when she dried off and got dressed, she still liked the idea of taking a day or two off.

She was about to grab her phone to place the call, but it rang before she could pick it up. When she saw that it was coming from FBI headquarters, she cringed.

So much for a day off, I guess…

She answered the call and listened to Johnson’s secretary give a quick

Good morning,

before transferring her through to Johnson’s office line.

“Agent Fine, did I catch you before you left for work?” Johnson asked.

“Yes sir.”

“Good. I need you in my office as soon as possible. There’s a briefing we need to go over if you’re up to it.”

Honestly, she wasn’t sure if she was up to it or not. What she did know was that if she did nothing but sit around her apartment for another few days second-guessing everything she and Danielle had done and fabricated, she might just start to go a little crazy. She toyed with the idea of passing on the debrief and feigning sick again but only for a moment. There was a potential new case out there. Of course she was going to take it.

“Sounds good,” she said, still not having decided if this was true or not. “See you in half an hour.”

She rushed through getting dressed and then wolfed down a quick breakfast of cereal and toast before leaving. Even doing that was a welcome change. Routine was a great way to get back into the swing of things. Even though she had only been feeling dreary for the last five days, it was five days that had set her back mentally and emotionally. Yes, she had reported in to work but once she got there, she’d felt like nothing more than a mindless drone, her mind on about a million other things.

But now that she was reporting in to work to get the details on a potential case, it felt different. For the first time since leaving Texas, she felt like she might be able to start moving toward putting it all behind her.

When she arrived at work, she wasted no time. She headed straight for Johnson’s office, wondering what sort of case he’d have her on. For some reason, she had somehow gotten something of a reputation as the agent who cracked the seedy cases in suburbia, the ones involving rich and spoiled adults who spent far too much of their lives hiding secrets.

Seems like I’d fit right in some of those neighborhoods,

she thought.

Because as much as I want to deny it, I now have secrets that I’m never going to outrun.

When she got to Johnson’s office, she started for the seat she usually occupied on the front end of his desk. But then she saw that he wasn’t at his desk. Instead, he was sitting at the small conference room table at the back of his office. And he wasn’t alone. There was one other man and a woman sitting with him. She had seen the man before; his name was Beau Craddock and he was somewhere quite high up on the bureau’s ladder—above Director Johnson for sure. She had never seen the woman before, but if she was in the company of Craddock, Chloe assumed she was also from further up the food chain.

“Agent Fine,” Johnson said. “Please have a seat.”

“Okay…”

There was only one other seat at the table, right at the very end. She took it, giving polite little nods to those in attendance.

“Agent Fine, let me introduce you to Deputy Director Craddock and Special Council to the Director, Sarah Kirsch.”

Craddock and Kirsch said nothing. Kirsch did manage a rather fake-looking smile, though.

“We’d like to hear the timeline of events as they occurred when you were out in Texas to find your sister,” Craddock said.

A cold knot of dread wound its way through Chloe’s guts. She looked directly at Johnson, confused. “Sir, I’ve gone through this two different times—once with you and once with the police. Is this really necessary?”

“Honestly, probably not,” Kirsch said before Johnson could answer. “But as it stands, you showed up on the scene where a man who is currently wanted for kidnapping and abuse had his victim. So yes, your testimony is worth hearing.”

Johnson gave her a shrug and a little

what-are-you-gonna-do

look. “Sorry, Fine, but the fact that you happen to be closely related to the abductee and the abductor doesn’t let you slide. It has obviously attracted the attention of higher offices. But, as I told them, everything checks out. There’s nothing shady going on here. They’d just like to hear it themselves.”

Nothing shady, my ass,

Chloe thought.

If there was nothing shady, you would have told me this was happening when you called this morning. Instead, you blindsided me with it. You’re trying to trip me up, you bastard.

But what could she do?

She sat back in the chair, feeling like she had just willingly placed her foot into a bear trap.