CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Of the many life lessons her first full year of retirement had taught Kate Wise, the most important was this: without a solid plan, retirement could get boring very fast.
She’d heard stories of women who had retired and picked up different interests. Some opened up little Etsy shops online. Some dabbled in painting and crochet. Others tried their hand at writing a novel. Kate thought these were all fine ways to pass the time, but none of them appealed to her.
For someone who had spent more than thirty years of her life with a gun strapped to her side, finding ways to be happily preoccupied was difficult. Knitting was not going to replace the thrill of an on-foot pursuit of a killer. Gardening was not going to recreate the adrenaline high of storming into a residence, never knowing what waited on the other side of the door.
Because nothing she tried seemed to even come close to touching the joy she had felt as an FBI agent, she had stopped searching after a couple of months. The only thing that even came close were her trips to the gun range, which she made twice a week. She would have made more if she didn’t fear that the younger members at the range might start to think of her as nothing more than a retired agent who was trying to recapture a moment in time when she had been great.
It was a reasonable fear. After all, she supposed that’s exactly what she was doing.
It was a Tuesday, just after two in the afternoon, when this fact struck her like a bullet between the eyes. She had just come back from the range and was setting her M1911 pistol back in her bedside drawer when her heart seemed to break out of nowhere.
Thirty-one years. She’d spent thirty-one years with the bureau. She’d been a part of more than one hundred raids and had worked as part of a special enforcement unit for high-profile cases on twenty-six occasions. She’d been known for her speed, her quick and often razor-sharp thinking, and her overall don’t-give-a-damn attitude.
She’d also been known for her looks, something that still bothered her a bit even at the age of fifty-five. When she’d become an agent at the age of twenty-three, it had not taken her long to get crude nicknames like Legs and Barbie—names that would likely get men fired these days but which, back when she had been younger, had sadly been commonplace for female agents.
Kate had broken noses at the bureau because male agents would grab her ass. She had thrown one across a moving elevator when he’d whispered something obscene in her ear while behind her.
While the nicknames had stayed with her until well into her forties, the advances and leering looks had not. After word had gotten around, her male peers had learned to respect her and to look beyond her body—a body which, she knew with some degree of muted pride, had always been well-maintained and what most men would consider a ten.
But now at fifty-five she found herself missing even the nicknames. She had not thought retirement would be this hard. The gun range was fine, but it was just a whispering ghost of what her past had been. She had tried to shove the yearning for her past away by reading. She had decided she would read up on weapons in particular; she’d read countless books about the history of weapons use, how they were manufactured, the preference for certain weapons by military generals, and the like. It was why she now used an M1911, because of its rich history with being involved in a multitude of American wars, an early model of it being used as far back as World War I.
She’d tried her hand at reading fiction but could not get into it—though she did enjoy a lot of the cybercrime–related books. While she
had
revisited books she’d adored in her younger years, she could find nothing interesting in the lives of fake characters. And because she had not wanted to become the sad recently retired lady who spent all of her time at the local library, she’d ordered all of the books she’d read in the last year off of Amazon. She had more than one hundred of them stacked in boxes in her basement. She figured one day she’d build a few bookcases and turn the space into a proper study.
It wasn’t like she had much else to do.
Rocked by the idea that she had spent the last year of her life doing not much of anything, Kate Wise sat slowly down on her bed. She stayed there for several minutes without moving. She looked to the desk across the room and saw the photo albums there. There was only a single family picture there. In it, her late husband, Michael, had his arms around their daughter while Kate smiled at his side. A picture from the beach that was poorly taken but had always warmed her heart.
All of the other pictures in those albums, however, were from work: behind-the-scenes shots, pictures of inner-bureau birthday parties, her in her younger years swimming laps, at the gun range, running track, and so on.
She had lived the last year of her life the same way the small-town jock who never leaves his small town would. Always hanging around anyone who would pretend to listen about all of the touchdowns he’d scored thirty years ago playing high school football.
She was no better than that.
With a slight shudder, Kate got up and went to the photo albums on her desk. Slowly and almost methodically, she looked through all three of them. She saw pictures of her younger self, evolving through the years until every picture ever taken was on a phone. She saw herself and people she had known, people who had died right beside her on cases, and started to realize that while these moments had been instrumental in developing her, they had not defined her completely.
The articles she had clipped and saved in the back of the album further told the story. She was the featured story in all of them. SECOND-YEAR AGENT NABS KILLER ON THE LOOSE read one title; FEMALE AGENT LONE SURVIVOR IN SHOOTOUT THAT CLAIMED 11. And then the one that had really started spurring the legends on: AFTER 13 VICTIMS, MOONLIGHT KILLER FINALLY TAKEN DOWN BY AGENT KATE WISE.
By all reasonable health standards, she had at least twenty more years in her—forty if she could somehow manage to really buckle down and fight death away. Even if she averaged it out and said she had
thirty
years left, kicking the bucket at eighty-five…thirty years was a lot.
She could do a lot in thirty years, she supposed. For about ten of those years, she could maybe even have some very good years before old age really started to sneak in and start plucking away her good health.
The question, of course, was what she might find to do with those years.
And despite having a reputation as one of the sharpest agents to go through the bureau in the last decade, she had no idea where to start.
Aside from the gun range and her almost obsessive reading habits, Kate had also managed to make a weekly habit out of meeting with three other women for coffee. The four of them made fun of themselves, claiming they had formed the saddest club ever: four women early in retirement with no idea what to do with their newly freed up days.
The day following her revelation, Kate drove to their coffee house of choice. It was a little family-owned place where not only was the coffee better than the overpriced gruel at Starbucks, but the place wasn’t overrun with millennials and soccer moms. She walked inside and before she went to the counter to place her order, she saw their usual table in the back. Two of the three other women were already there, waving to her.
Kate grabbed her hazelnut brew and joined her friends at the table. She sat down beside Jane Patterson, a fifty-seven-year-old who was seven months retired from springing back and forth between companies as a proposal specialist for a government telecommunications firm. Across from her was Clarissa James, a little over a year into retirement ever since working part-time as a criminology instructor with the bureau. The fourth member of their sad little club, a fifty-five-year-old recently retired woman named Debbie Meade, had not yet shown up.
Odd,
Kate thought.
Deb is usually the first one here.
The moment she took her seat, Jane and Clarissa seemed to go tense. This was particularly weird because it was not like Clarissa to be anything other than bubbly. Unlike Kate, Clarissa had quickly grown to love retirement. Kate supposed it helped that Clarissa was married to a man nearly ten years younger than her who competed in swimming competitions in his free time.
“What’s with you guys?” Kate asked. “You know I come here to try to get motivated about retirement, right? You two look downright sad.”
Jane and Clarissa shared a look that Kate had seen countless times before. During her times as an agent, she’d seen it in living rooms, interrogation rooms, and hospital waiting rooms. It was a look that translated one simple question without a spoken word:
Who’s going to tell her?
“What is it?” she asked.
She was suddenly very aware of Deb’s absence.
“It’s Deb,” Jane said, confirming her fear.
“Well, not Deb exactly,” Clarissa added. “It’s her daughter, Julie. Did you ever meet her?”
“Once, I think,” Kate said. “What happened?”
“She’s dead,” Clarissa said. “Murder. So far, they have no idea who did it.”
“Oh my God,” Kate said, genuinely saddened for her friend. She’d known Deb for about fifteen years, having met her at Quantico. Kate had been working as an assistant instructor for a new crop of field agents and Deb had been working with some of the tech rats on some sort of new security system. They’d struck it off right away and had become fast friends.
The fact that Deb had not called or texted her with the news before anyone else showed just how quickly friendships could shift over the years.
“When did it happen?” Kate asked.
“Sometime yesterday,” Jane said. “She just texted me this morning about it.”
“They have
no
suspects?” Kate asked.
Jane shrugged. “She just said they don’t know who it is. No clues, no leads, nothing.”
Kate instantly felt herself go into agent mode. She figured it was the same way a trained athlete must feel after being away from their arena of choice for too long. She may not have turf or an adoring crowd to remind her of what her glory days had been like, but she
did
have her finely tuned mind for solving crimes.
“Don’t go there,” Clarissa said, trying on her best smile.
“Go where?”
“Don’t be Agent Wise right now,” Clarissa said. “Right now, just be her friend. I can see those wheels turning in your head. Jeez, lady. Don’t you have a pregnant daughter? Aren’t you about to be a grandmother?”
“What a way to kick me when I’m down,” Kate said with a smile. She let the comment go and then asked: “Deb’s daughter…did she have a boyfriend?”
“No idea,” Jane said.
An awkward silence sat over the table. In the year or so their little group of recently retired friends had been meeting, the conversation had always been mostly light. This was the first heavy topic and it did not fit with their routine. Kate, of course, was accustomed to it. Her time in the academy had taught her how to handle these situations.
But Clarissa was right. In hearing the news, Kate had so easily slipped into agent mode. She knew she should have thought like a friend first—thinking of Deb’s loss and emotional state. But the agent in her was too strong, the instincts still there at the forefront after having been on the shelf for a year.
“So what can we do to make her comfortable?” Jane asked.
“I was thinking a meal train,” Clarissa said. “I know a few other ladies that might get on board. Just making sure she doesn’t have to cook for her family in the next few weeks as she deals with all of this.”
For the next ten minutes, the three women planned out the most effective way to get a meal train going for their grief-stricken friend.
But for Kate, the conversation remained on the surface. Her mind was headed elsewhere, trying to dig up hidden facts and tidbits on Deb and her family, trying to find a case where there might not even be one.
Or there might,
Kate thought.
And I guess there’s only one way to find out.