Already Trapped (Laura Frost FBI)

They’d beaten him up here.

How had they beaten him up here?

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Laura pulled the car up across the sidewalk so quickly the tires screamed, ramming the brakes on and jolting herself forward in the process. It was lucky that it was nighttime, and that the front of the apartment block was brightly lit. If it had been busy day, she’d have had to slow down for fear of hitting a pedestrian.

She was out of the car before the engine had even registered that it was turned off, reaching for her gun to check that it was secure in her holster and running for the front entrance to the building. She rushed to the intercom system, found the button marked “Adams,” and pressed it. She heard the tinny buzz of the bell connecting, knowing it must be ringing out somewhere above her head. She waited, but there was nothing. No response.

She could have tried again, tried some other way, been systematic. But there was no time. It was dark—darker than it had been when she’d seen the twins heading toward the building in her vision. They had to be inside already. They had to have made it up there.

Which meant she was behind, and the killer might already be up there with them.

He might have been and gone.

Laura didn’t want to think about that possibility.

She hammered every single button on the intercom panel one after the other, relentlessly hitting name after name. Thirty of them in all. The building looked bigger; Laura figured there was another entrance with another intercom maybe, a different side of the building which let out onto a different street so the address could be separate. She just needed one of them to answer. Just one.

The door made a buzzing noise and then clicked, and Laura shoved it.

It opened.

After this was all over, she was going to have to ask Captain Gausse to put out some kind of bulletin about community safety. But for now, she was grateful that someone up there didn’t have enough sense to check who was outside before letting them in.

For now, she just ran.

There was an elevator, but she ignored it. This wasn’t some high-speed luxury hotel elevator—it would take too long for it to arrive and take her up. Instead she ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. By the time she hit the second floor, she was pulling her gun o

ut, readying it in her hands. She needed to be ready. If he was already there, she might need to shoot.

Laura ran down the hall, conscious of how heavy her own footsteps sounded. She heard Nate’s voice in her ear, from the phone call earlier, telling her to wait. Not to go in alone. But it was better this way. He was the one who was in danger. The one who had the aura of death around him. The more she kept him away from this kind of situation, the better.

She’d never seen her own death. Never sensed it. She had no way of knowing if this would be it for her. But it was worth the risk.

There were two lives at stake here, and it was her duty to protect them.

Laura skidded to a halt at the doorway, the one she knew must lead to the right apartment. She didn’t even have to check the number. It was obvious. Obvious because the door was swinging open, and beyond that Laura could see a bit of splintered wood lying in the hall—

And an arm, a hand, lying prone across the floor.

Laura kept her gun drawn and pointed ahead of her as she entered the apartment, moving forward as swiftly and quietly as she could. There was one opening on the left side of the hall. She kept her back against the wall and stepped out, swung to face it. There was nothing there, only an empty room.

Laura moved down the hall, noting the prone body of the woman stretched out on the floor as she got close enough to see more. There was no blood that she could see, except a small smear near the woman’s temple. She was one of the twins. Laura couldn’t tell which. She cleared the rest of the small apartment quickly, checking each room. In one of them, full of boxes and looking more like storage than anything else, the window was open.

Laura glanced out and down. It led onto nothing—but to the side, she saw a fire escape. Grimly, she understood exactly what had happened here. Gregory Clifton—he’d beaten her to it.

But why only one of the women? And why wasn’t she dead?

Laura heard a groan in the hall and rushed back out, dropping to her knees beside the woman on the floor. She was coming around, her eyelids fluttering open.

“Miss Adams?” she said, since that was the only way she could satisfactorily identify the woman.

“What?” she murmured, still out of it, frowning up at Laura. “Who…?”

“I’m an FBI agent,” Laura said, wanting to get to the point. There was no time to get out her badge or ease this woman in slowly. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

“Uh,” the woman said, blinking and looking around slowly. She was dazed. Confused. “I was… there was someone at the window.”