He and Mike had trudged back to Allie McGee’s apartment, waiting on the identification of the men who’d broken in and killed her.
The place was a wreck. The flash bang had thankfully not caught anything on fire, but Nicholas and Mike’s mad scramble across the room to the window had resulted in an overturned table and chair, tampering with the initial crime scene.
But Allie McGee was the worst part of all.
Mike watched Louisa Barry carefully process Allie McGee’s body for evidence. It hurt too much to keep looking, so she turned to watch Nicholas typing. She was still shaking, only inside now, and it was understandable, she supposed, given that if Nicholas had shot just two inches to the left, her head would have splattered all over the wall of Allie McGee’s building. He’d seen the man was going to shoot her brains out and he’d acted, hadn’t hesitated. She’d seen determination, wild fear, and something else before he’d fired. It was certainty, that was it. She was very glad he was on her side.
Nicholas never looked up from the computer. Mike finally made herself go to Louisa, who met her eyes, read the unasked question. “Yes, before they shot her, they did a number on her.”
“They were trying to get information.”
“Looks that way. I don’t know if she helped or not. We’ll need the ME to give us a certain time of death, but she’s not in rigor yet. You interrupted them, Mike, you and Nicholas.”
“We may have gotten her killed, you mean.”
Louisa shook her head. “No, she was dead before you arrived. They’d already torn this place apart. Now it’s going to take the rest of the day for me to put this all together. Your shirt, Mike, you’re a mess. There’s a lot of blood.”
“Thankfully not mine. Keep me posted.” She turned to go, and Louisa said in a hard, flat voice, “She didn’t have a chance, Mike, you know that. She was only a kid, against very well-trained professionals. I’m very glad Nicholas killed one of them. As for the other, I hope he rots forever in Attica.”
“He will.”
“This has gotten to you, Mike, I can see that. You’ve got to try to keep some distance, some altitude. It will all come together. It always does.”
And with that, Louisa kneeled back down next to the body of a young girl who should have been at school when those men came looking for Adam, looking for something to show them where he was.
Don’t blame yourself. But she did, because she’d failed to get the information about this apartment and Allie McGee from Sophie Pearce in time. She felt a raw burst of anger toward Sophie Pearce, but remembered Lia telling her about all her phone calls, trying to locate him. So she didn’t know where her brother rested his head when he was in the city. Still, if she’d only told them sooner, they’d have been able to get here faster, and Allie McGee wouldn’t be dead.
There were pictures of Allie all around the apartment, some of her alone, some with her family—she had a younger sister and an older brother and two blond smiling parents whose lives were about to be ruined—but the majority were photographs of her with Adam Pearce.
She crossed the room to sit on the arm of Nicholas’s chair.
“How’s it coming?”
A few more clicks. “This computer is shot to hell,” Nicholas said. “The hard drive’s been wiped, and I can’t get it back. Maybe Gray can harvest something off the chip, but from everything I can see, there’s bugger all there.”
“Adam Pearce is a hacker, so he has backups, right?”
“Yes, but we need to get our hands on him first. Bloody hell, Mike.”
“My thought exactly. At least we know Adam is still alive.”
“We think he’s alive. We hope he’s alive. And all he’s left behind is his dead girlfriend and a broken computer.”
“And he didn’t kill her. I find that comforting.”
“Nor did he crash his hard drive. You’re right, he had nothing to do with this.”
Nicholas closed the lid on the ruined computer. “There is something, we’ve got one extra power cord here, to a Sony Vaio. That means there’s a laptop missing.”
She felt a spurt of energy, or hope. “It had to be Adam’s. He was here, but then he left.”
Nicholas’s cop eyes got cold and hard. “Whatever he knows, whatever happene
d, he’s now out in the cold, no friends, no father, no girlfriend. Only his sister, and we’re watching her, and he’s got to know that, and so she’s off-limits. Which means there’s no one to help him, and no way to predict exactly what he might do next.”
Nicholas’s mobile rang, and the screen showed Zachery’s number. And he knew what it was about. He’d left another dead body. On his first day.
It was Maryann, Zachery’s assistant, who was a longtime fixture in the New York Criminal Investigative Division. She’d seen it all, heard it all. And her voice said it all.