Winter's Secret Read online

  With a groan, he reached to the nightstand and groped for the archaic flip phone. The screen of his smartphone was still dark, but the front-facing display of the prepaid phone glowed as another jingle sounded out. He didn’t recognize the number, but with them, he never did.

  “Hello?” he answered, his voice still thick with sleep.

  “Hello, Mr. Dalton,” a familiar voice replied.

  The greeting was laden with the man’s native Russian accent, and even though Eric had never met him in person, the same picture popped into his mind for each of their interactions.

  A tall, burly fellow dressed in a three-piece suit, cigar in one hand, cell phone in the other, reclined against an expensive leather chair. Maybe there was a tiger curled up at his feet, or maybe it was a lion. Either way, the tone of the man’s voice and the foreboding edge with which he spoke each word instilled an image of a figure that was only one step removed from a dictator.

  “I’m in Richmond,” Eric blurted. “I told you, I’m going to keep up my end of this thing. But my…” he licked his lips, “my son, we aren’t exactly close. I still have a week, don’t I?”

  “You have only six days.” The response was equal parts icy and amused. God, Eric hoped he never had to meet this man in person. Moreover, he hoped his daughter never had to meet the man in person.

  “I’ll get it done. I’ll get you that address.”

  “Yes, you will. If you fail, your daughter will die just as your son-in-law will die.”

  “What?” The word burst from Eric on a rush of surprise. The night that Natalie had been kidnapped, he had received a call from a different Russian to advise that she would be held until he completed his end of their agreement. But they hadn’t mentioned Jonathan. “That wasn’t part of this! He wasn’t supposed to be involved in any of this!”

  “Maybe,” the Russian replied. “But that has now changed. He was shot in the stomach, Mr. Dalton. You were in the military, were you not? You know what happens when a person receives a wound such as this and does not make it to the hospital, yes?”

  “Oh my god,” was all Eric could manage.

  “Maybe, just maybe,” the Russian went on. “If you prove to be fast enough, you can save his life too. You should hurry, though. It was a low caliber shot, but he has lost much blood. I do not imagine he has much time left.”

  With a light click, the line went silent.

  Eric snapped a long string of words he once used on a daily basis during his military days. He flipped the cheap phone closed and dropped it to the carpeted floor with a thud. Squeezing his eyes closed, he covered his face with both hands.

  How had he let all this happen?

  He told Special Agent Stafford the truth the day before. He did owe the Russians money because he and Kelly had been saddled with a mountain of debt after her accident.

  What he hadn’t fully shared, what he hadn’t told even Kelly, was that the bill should have been much, much lower. The intensive surgeries were expensive enough, but after Kelly lost her leg, she’d been devastated.

  His interest in the outdoors and in sports had come from his wife. Ever since they were first introduced during a layover in Baltimore, she had been an active woman. Her passion for physical activity, fitness, and helping others had been the driving force behind her decision to open a yoga studio. After she quit her job as a tax accountant, she rented out a cramped section of a strip mall, and the rest was history.

  Their bottom tier insurance had covered a portion of the treatment in the intensive care unit, but the minimal plan didn’t extend to the physical therapy, the prosthetic leg, and prosthetic adjustments that came after the amputation of a major appendage.

  So, he had lied to his wife.

  He’d told Kelly that the more extensive physical therapy was covered, and he’d changed the address on all the statements to direct them to a P.O. box so she wouldn’t stumble across a past due notification.

  If he hadn’t, if she had been forced to return home in a wheelchair or a pair of crutches, Eric wasn’t so sure she would still be alive today. Being active was as much a part of Kelly as flying was to Eric. If she couldn’t do what she loved, her outlook for the future would have been bleak.

  Physical therapy was a new form of activity for Kelly, and a new challenge. A challenge she had risen to accept with no second thought. The doctors routinely praised her tenacity, and the physical therapist told Eric that she admired Kelly’s persistence and discipline.

  None of those interactions would have been possible if he hadn’t made a deal with the Russians. Maybe he could have sold their house, emptied their retirement savings accounts, or taken on a lower paying job to make the hefty payments, but he had earned his place in the world. He’d been born into abject poverty, and he had seen the toll that financial stress could take on a human being.

  He had been there once, and he intended never to go back. For his entire life, he’d worked to provide his family with the finer things. They might not have been upper-class, but they could afford the nice things—designer clothes, name-brand electronics, expensive jewelry—that Eric’s parents had never had. He was here now, and he wouldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back. He didn’t like to think of himself as materialistic, but maybe, on some level, he was.

  With Liv, Noah, and Lucy, he hadn’t been able to envision the same type of future for himself that he’d found with Kelly. When he met her on a layover in Baltimore, he had realized almost immediately that he wanted a different lifestyle for himself. He wasn’t proud of his infidelity, but in the end, he was glad for the decision.

  In fact, he was pleased with most of the decisions in his life.

  Except one. And this one happened to be the mother of all bad decisions.

  Eric knew there was no way in hell he would be able to pay back the five hundred thousand dollars he had borrowed from the Russians, but the plan had never been to repay them in money.

  They wanted something else. And he needed to deliver.

  The Russian operation in Baltimore was up against a RICO case that had been brought on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation some six months earlier. From what they had gleaned from their lawyers, the entire Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations case hinged on the testimony of one key witness, who was now in protective custody.

  Since the Russians hadn’t been in Baltimore for long, they didn’t have the same types of law enforcement connections as the Italian crime families or the other organized criminal enterprises that occupied the city.

  To them, Eric was their connection.

  More specifically, Noah was their connection.

  A week. Eric had been granted a week to convince his estranged son to locate a witness in a federal RICO case. The Russians hadn’t elaborated on what would happen once they found the witness, but Eric had seen enough crime shows to use his imagination. Chances were good, their first interaction with Noah wouldn’t be their last, either. They would have dirt on him, and without a doubt, they would leverage that blackmail for all it was worth.

  But if Eric didn’t follow through with his end of the arrangement, Natalie would die a slow, painful death.

  He had to believe that he’d made the right choice. Noah’s career might be forfeited, but Natalie’s life would be spared. That had to be right.

  7

  Winter had managed a couple hours of shut-eye on the drive to her hometown, but as soon as they crossed the city limits, she was awake. The drone of the road and the radio were the only sounds. She couldn’t remember the name of the band that played over the speakers of Autumn’s sporty car, but the singer’s eerie voice was fitting.

  As they pulled away from a stop sign, Winter glanced down to watch Autumn shift gears. “I think—”

  With a sharp intake of breath, Autumn jumped in her seat. “Jesus, Winter. You scared the shit out of me!”

  Winter held her hands up in surrender. “Sorry! I was just going to say that you’re the only person I know who
drives a manual.”

  The green glow from the dashboard caught her silver hoop earrings as Autumn shook her head. “It’s all right. I’ve just been jumpy since we left.”

  Winter took in her surroundings and rubbed her tired eyes. “We’re really close.” They rode for another ten minutes or so in relative silence before she gestured to an upcoming intersection. “Take a right at this stop sign, and then it’s just up that hill a little bit.”

  A silence enveloped them as they made the final leg of the journey. The sense of unease in the air between them was palpable. Autumn’s clenched jaw and stiff posture were curious, but Winter didn’t have a chance to give voice to her concern before her eyes settled on it.

  It was exactly the same as when she’d last seen it.

  The same dusty for-sale sign in the front yard, the same peeling paint, the same boards nailed over the living room window. Claw-like branches of an old maple swayed with the night breeze like a collection of bony fingers grasping at the ruined shingles. Though the light at the end of the street had been fixed, the two-story house still seemed to be cloaked in inky black shadows.

  Try as she might, Winter couldn’t pry her stare away from her childhood home. If it was any other house, the sight would be unremarkable. Hell, it could have passed for just another residence that had been foreclosed during the housing market crash of 2008. The timeframe matched.

  But Winter knew all too well what had happened behind the nondescript beige walls of that house. She knew the bloodshed, the heartache, and the fear that permeated each and every inch of the two-thousand square feet. Unless the flooring and the drywall had been replaced, the master bedroom would likely still light up like a Christmas tree with a blacklight and a little Luminol.

  She’d thought she was past this. She thought she had conquered the unrelenting sense of loss when she watched the back of Douglas Kilroy’s head spatter the dusty floor of an abandoned church.

  The man—if he could even be called a man—had been less than two feet from her when he met his untimely end. Winter had personally watched the life vanish from his eyes as the shot from an M4 Carbine ripped through his head. To this day, she still replayed the moment in her head when she woke up from a nightmare about the night her parents were killed, or the night Bree was kidnapped, or any other number of her brushes with the madman the press liked to call The Preacher.

  She thought she had moved past the sense of loss, but here she was.

  Swallowing hard against the tightness in her throat, she finally pried her stare away from the shadow house to glance over to Autumn. The woman’s green eyes were narrowed, her attention fixed on the house. She looked like she was about to bear witness to her own death. Even in the low light, Autumn’s fair face was even paler, and her knuckles had turned white from her grip on the steering wheel.

  Before she spoke, Winter made sure to move enough so Autumn would catch the motion in her periphery. She didn’t want to scare her friend again, and it was obvious that Autumn was on guard.

  Winter cleared her throat for good measure. “You don’t have to go in there with me if you don’t want to.”

  All at once, the haunted look vanished from Autumn’s face. “No, I’ll go with you. I said I’d come with, and that includes going in the house. You said the last time you were here you got hit with a pretty intense vision, right?”

  Winter’s stomach churned at the memory. “Yeah. I passed out, and Noah and Bree found me in a pool of blood.” As Autumn’s eyes widened, Winter rush to clarify. “From a nasty nosebleed. No one attacked me or anything, and, well…I didn’t see any ghosts or anything. No vengeful spirits.”

  Though fleeting, a flicker of amusement passed over Autumn’s green eyes. “So, you’re telling me I brought all that salt and holy water in my trunk for nothing?”

  Her lighthearted words pushed away part of the heavy haze of grief that had settled in Winter’s mind. For most of her life, she’d been too paranoid, too afraid to share such a vulnerable part of herself with another person. When she had come to the house during the Kilroy investigation, she hadn’t even told anyone about her plan, much less asked them to accompany her.

  But tonight, she was grateful for Autumn’s presence.

  “Are you all right?” Autumn’s voice had softened.

  Tugging at the ends of her long hair, Winter nodded. “I’m okay. As well as I can be, anyway. You ready?”

  It was Autumn’s turn to nod. “Yeah, but I’ll be honest. This place gives me the creeps. You know how I can tell how people are feeling by touching them, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I haven’t really had much of a chance to confirm it one-hundred-percent, but the same thing sort of happens to me when I go to places where something stressful has happened. Not quite like your visions, but similar.” With a nervous chuckle, Autumn brushed the hair from her forehead. “Good lord, that makes me sound like some kind of crazy psychic or something, doesn’t it? I swear, I was joking about the rock salt and the holy water.”

  A little more of the melancholy lifted as Winter offered her friend a slight smile. “No. You don’t sound crazy. Besides, even if you did,” she paused to jab herself in the chest with a finger, “I’m the queen of crazy, okay?”

  Autumn let out a quiet snort of laughter before she turned to push open her door, Winter following suit in short order. As they approached the cracked sidewalk, they exchanged glances.

  Squaring her shoulders, Winter nodded. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  Without any further prompting, Autumn reached into her jacket to produce a black Maglite. “I don’t have a Glock like you, but this thing is solid.” For emphasis, she smacked the end into her open palm. “Pretty sure it could kill someone.”

  The corner of Winter’s mouth turned up in the start of a smile, but the moment of mirth was short-lived.

  As they made their way down the sidewalk, Winter glanced down to a familiar concrete square. Sure enough, there it was. The signature of five-year-old Winter Black effectively etched in stone like she had signed a contract with this damn house. A contract that bound a part of her there forever.

  Her steps were as slow as if she were walking through quicksand, and the temperate night air felt like it had dropped by at least ten degrees.

  The dilapidated wooden stairs groaned in protest as she and Autumn ascended to the porch. Beneath her feet, the planks shifted. If she stomped one booted foot down, she would be liable to fall through to the patch of dirt below.

  When she had come to the house during the Kilroy investigation, Winter had pulled a page from Chuck Norris’s playbook and kicked in the rickety front door. A dent still marred the splintering surface, but a padlock had been installed. The shining silver lock was a stark contrast from all the other worn surfaces of the exterior of the house.

  Winter glanced to Autumn. “Last time I was here, I just kicked down the door. I think I was actually wearing these same boots. But that was in the middle of the day, and right now, I can’t help but think it’ll draw attention to us.”

  Autumn nodded. “You’ve got your badge though, right?”

  Reaching into an interior pocket of her leather jacket, the ruddy orange streetlight glinted off the metallic FBI insignia as she flashed her badge at her friend.

  “Well, if you don’t mind, Bruce Lee.”

  When Autumn produced an item from her pocket, Winter’s eyes widened. “A lock pick?” she asked incredulously.

  With a nonchalant shrug, Autumn turned to the padlocked door and went to work. “You know, in case I get locked out of my house or something.”

  In the rush of curiosity, Winter almost forgot where they were. Almost. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

  “Well…” she paused, and Winter heard a light click, “I grew up on the bad side of town, remember? My mom was a junkie, and I’ll give you two guesses as to how she supported her habit.”

  “She was a thief?”

  “
A petty thief, and a burglar.” The next click was more pronounced. “She taught me to pick locks when I was nine. She figured I could help her out, I guess. Believe it or not, in my school district, picking locks made you one of the cool kids. Then, when Kim and Ron adopted me, I turned it into an entrepreneurial venture at my new school. It was a nicer district, and none of the kids there knew how to pick locks. But I did, and I charged those rich little bastards an arm and a leg every time they wanted me to break into something for them.”

  As if to punctuate the end of her story, Autumn gave the splintering door a shove. With a rusted creek, it swung inward. Though Winter wanted to hear more about her friend’s teenage years, the sight of the shadowed foyer stole the words from her tongue.

  Autumn brought the Maglite to life with a quiet click.

  The house was as quiet as a tomb.

  It was a tomb.

  No one would ever live here again. No one should ever live here again.

  “Shine the light on the floor.” Winter hardly recognized her own voice. She sounded so…calm. Composed. But within the confines of her mind, she was anything but.

  Autumn flicked the halo of light to the tarnished wooden floor, but the dust was undisturbed. There was the faint shape of footprints leading to the stairwell, but for all Winter knew, they might have been hers from the last time she was here. Aside from replacing the door handle with a padlock, she could already tell no one else had been inside, at least from this doorway.

  “We’re looking for signs that anyone was here, right?” Autumn’s voice cut through the fog of messy emotions that had started to bubble up in Winter’s thoughts.

  Winter nodded. “Right.”

  Pausing mid-step, Autumn’s green eyes flicked over to Winter’s. “Hey, you doing okay?”

  Winter swallowed, but as much as she wanted to say yes or even just offer a nod, she could bring herself to do neither.

  Her movement slow and deliberate, Autumn clasped Winter’s shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with feeling overwhelmed right now. This is a big deal to you, and that’s completely justified. Try to keep yourself here with me, okay? We’re looking for clues, remember? Try to focus on that. I know you’re good at it.”