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Blake Pierce

Blake Pierce is the USA Today bestselling author of the RILEY PAGE mystery series, which includes sixteen books (and counting). Blake Pierce is also the author of the MACKENZIE WHITE mystery series, comprising thirteen books (and counting); of the AVERY BLACK mystery series, comprising six books; of the KERI LOCKE mystery series, comprising five books; of the MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE mystery series, comprising five books (and counting); of the KATE WISE mystery series, comprising six books (and counting); of the CHLOE FINE psychological suspense mystery, comprising six books; of the JESSE HUNT psychological suspense thriller series, comprising five books (and counting); of the AU PAIR psychological suspense thriller series, comprising two books (and counting); of the ZOE PRIME mystery series, comprising two books (and counting); and of the new ADELE SHARP mystery series.

An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Blake loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.blakepierceauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.

Copyright © 2020 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright alliance images, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY BLAKE PIERCE

ADELE SHARP MYSTERY SERIES

LEFT TO DIE (Book #1)

LEFT TO RUN (Book #2)

LEFT TO HIDE (Book #3)

THE AU PAIR SERIES

ALMOST GONE (Book#1)

ALMOST LOST (Book #2)

ALMOST DEAD (Book #3)

ZOE PRIME MYSTERY SERIES

FACE OF DEATH (Book#1)

FACE OF MURDER (Book #2)

FACE OF FEAR (Book #3)

A JESSIE HUNT PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE SERIES

THE PERFECT WIFE (Book #1)

THE PERFECT BLOCK (Book #2)

THE PERFECT HOUSE (Book #3)

THE PERFECT SMILE (Book #4)

THE PERFECT LIE (Book #5)

THE PERFECT LOOK (Book #6)

CHLOE FINE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE SERIES

NEXT DOOR (Book #1)

A NEIGHBOR’S LIE (Book #2)

CUL DE SAC (Book #3)

SILENT NEIGHBOR (Book #4)

HOMECOMING (Book #5)

TINTED WINDOWS (Book #6)

KATE WISE MYSTERY SERIES

IF SHE KNEW (Book #1)

IF SHE SAW (Book #2)

IF SHE RAN (Book #3)

IF SHE HID (Book #4)

IF SHE FLED (Book #5)

IF SHE FEARED (Book #6)

IF SHE HEARD (Book #7)

THE MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE SERIES

WATCHING (Book #1)

WAITING (Book #2)

LURING (Book #3)

TAKING (Book #4)

STALKING (Book #5)

RILEY PAIGE MYSTERY SERIES

ONCE GONE (Book #1)

ONCE TAKEN (Book #2)

ONCE CRAVED (Book #3)

ONCE LURED (Book #4)

ONCE HUNTED (Book #5)

ONCE PINED (Book #6)

ONCE FORSAKEN (Book #7)

ONCE COLD (Book #8)

ONCE STALKED (Book #9)

ONCE LOST (Book #10)

ONCE BURIED (Book #11)

ONCE BOUND (Book #12)

ONCE TRAPPED (Book #13)

ONCE DORMANT (Book #14)

ONCE SHUNNED (Book #15)

ONCE MISSED (Book #16)

ONCE CHOSEN (Book #17)

MACKENZIE WHITE MYSTERY SERIES

BEFORE HE KILLS (Book #1)

BEFORE HE SEES (Book #2)

BEFORE HE COVETS (Book #3)

BEFORE HE TAKES (Book #4)

BEFORE HE NEEDS (Book #5)

BEFORE HE FEELS (Book #6)

BEFORE HE SINS (Book #7)

BEFORE HE HUNTS (Book #8)

BEFORE HE PREYS (Book #9)

BEFORE HE LONGS (Book #10)

BEFORE HE LAPSES (Book #11)

BEFORE HE ENVIES (Book #12)

BEFORE HE STALKS (Book #13)

BEFORE HE HARMS (Book #14)

AVERY BLACK MYSTERY SERIES

CAUSE TO KILL (Book #1)

CAUSE TO RUN (Book #2)

CAUSE TO HIDE (Book #3)

CAUSE TO FEAR (Book #4)

CAUSE TO SAVE (Book #5)

CAUSE TO DREAD (Book #6)

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

A TRACE OF MURDER (Book #2)

A TRACE OF VICE (Book #3)

A TRACE OF CRIME (Book #4)

A TRACE OF HOPE (Book #5)

PROLOGUE

Viktor Bjurman had heard the myths and stories about runner’s high. He had never experienced it himself—at least not by running. Though Viktor worked out more than the average man, running had not been something he’d ever really bought into. He did jog from time to time, but the full-out runs just weren’t his thing. He did not envy those who had experienced runner’s high, though. No, he had felt it himself many times without running. He knew, as a personal trainer, that the so-called runner’s high was an experience available to anyone who worked out in any capacity and did not mind stretching themselves to the limit.

He’d experienced it a few times with a kettlebell circuit he religiously adhered to, as well as during an intense weightlifting session a few months ago where he had pushed his arms to failure. That so-called high was nothing more than his body finding another gear that most people kept hidden—a gear that could only be accessed by breaking through the physical barriers and limitations most people built up for themselves.

As he stepped out of the house on Primrose Street, Viktor was on a totally different kind of high. He felt adventurous and at least twenty years younger than his actual age of thirty-eight. He’d just wrapped his last session of the day—a very busy day that had seen him visit five different homes for personal training sessions, and two in a local gym. He was worn out and exhausted…but was also experiencing something very akin to runner’s high.

He’d saved the best client for last. Theresa Diaz was a forty-seven-year-old woman whom he’d been working with for over a year. His workouts had caused her to lose more than thirty pounds within that year, getting her closer to the body she had been wanting. The significant weight loss had also increased her confidence.

Viktor assumed that was why she had been so aggressive in starting the affair. She was married, and had been for twenty-three years. She’d openly confessed that her husband cared nothing for her, only paying attention to her when he wanted her for his own physical needs. That very conversation had opened the door for Viktor. And although he, too, was married, he had taken the opportunity.

It had not been the first client he had slept with, so he had learned to push away any thoughts of guilt. He and Theresa had been having sex for the better part of three months now, after living through the tension of working out together for nearly fifteen months. Viktor had known she’d be good. A similar experience from a year or so ago had made him think as much; apparently, women who had been overlooked by their husbands and then rediscovered their confidence were typically eager, willing, and aggressive in bed.

Or, as it had been just five minutes ago with him and Theresa, on the living room floor.

He knew didn’t need to hurry; Theresa’s husband was out of town. He’d mentioned as much when he had FaceTimed her when they had actually been working out. Still, he jogged a little faster than usual when he left her house. His own home wasn’t too far away, just six blocks to the east. It would be a nice, brisk jog. Night had just fallen and the temperature was a chilly sixty degrees.

He was replaying the workout session (the later extracurricular part, not the actual workout that he was paid for) in his mind. It had been the stuff of fantasies, like something right out of a porn script. He’d had several conquests during his career as a personal trainer, but he thought Theresa Diaz was going to prove to be the best. When they were together physically, it was almost like she was taking out her aggressions of a loveless marriage and wasted twenty-three years on him. And he was more than happy to let her do so. He supposed, in an odd way, he should be thanking her sorry excuse for a husb—

The thought was brought to a screeching halt as he saw something come flying toward him.

He had no idea what it was. A car? Something someone had thrown at him? He did not know. All he knew was that it slammed into his stomach with tremendous force.

Viktor doubled over, dropping to a knee. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the object that had struck him. It was an aluminum baseball bat. And as he spied it, it was rising into the air. Viktor tried sucking air into his lungs, but he could not breathe. The blow had taken all of the wind out of him and caused a terrible pain along his right side. All of this came together in a sickening conclusion as he watched the bat fall again.

It struck his chest this time. The noise was strange—as if the person behind the bat had struck an empty cardboard box rather than his chest. There was an explosion of pain in his chest as something shattered inside of him. He tried to scream but could still not draw in a breath. He did, however, raise his arms up as he saw the bat already coming down for another blow.

He did stop the bat from striking his chest again, but his right wrist was shattered. A mewling sort of moan escaped his lips as he could finally draw in air.

He saw the shape behind the bat. It was masculine, but he could not see a face. Through the pain, he wondered if it was Theresa’s husband. It made sense, but—

Logic and reason went fleeing from him as the bat came down again. This time it struck his left side, breaking his ribs. He tried to scream again but it was too much—no wind, too much pain. He opened his mouth, hoping something would come out.

But there was nothing. Just the rise and fall of the bat. He was struck in the stomach again, then the chest, then another cataclysm of pain as he was caught in the right shoulder, pulverizing the bone.

Viktor lost count of how many times the bat rose and fell.

Somewhere around the ninth or tenth attack, something inside of him seemed to give way, snapping like an invisible thread. He watched the bat descend again but, mercifully, did not feel the pain of it as a sudden darkness came swooping in to steal him away.

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.