Don't Say a Word

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Shock registered on Antwaun’s face. He turned to his lawyer, leaned forward and hissed a denial. Dryer held up his hand in warning, then spoke. “Judge, Mr. Dubois has no idea where that money came from and denies receiving it.”

But Damon studied the judge, read his body language, sensed that the D.A. had even more evidence that hadn’t been shared with Antwaun’s attorney. Evidence that threw a red flag up to the judge and went against Antwaun’s favor.

Having picked up on the same vibe, Jean-Paul shot Damon an anxious glance.

Judge Mattehorn rolled his shoulders and pinned Antwaun in his seat with his gaze. “Due to the circumstances of the case, evidence before me, the recent change in Mr. Dubois’s financial status, and the viciousness of the crime, along with the D.A.’s words, I’m denying bail. Antwaun Dubois, you will remain in custody until such time that the grand jury has reviewed and ruled whether or not to move forward with a trial.”

Dryer cleared his throat. “Your Honor, we are seriously worried about Mr. Dubois’s safety—”

Judge Mattehorn cut him off. “I will order administrative segregation until the next court appearance.”

Judge Mattehorn pounded his gavel then stood, dismissing the proceedings and leaving Antwaun in shock. Even with administrative segregation, he faced the gruesome reality of spending more nights in jail, quartered near some of the very perps he had arrested.

The anger of injustice rolled through Damon. The judge’s ruling only cemented in his mind the fact that Kendra Yates might have been right about a dirty cop on the force. Someone who could have accessed Antwaun’s accounts and planted money to make it appear as if he’d accepted a bribe.

Or maybe someone who also had a judge in his pocket….

ALL NIGHT, CRYSTAL HAD struggled with nightmares about her face. She spent the morning with Maria, reading to her until her nana arrived.

Finally, she crawled back into bed and fell asleep, but images of another life taunted her. A beautiful family. A mother who loved her and was worried sick about her. A man who’d cared for her. No, she’d been wrong. He was bad. He didn’t love her. She was surrounded by small children, yet they were starving. They needed her.

She jerked awake, bathed in sweat. Dark storm clouds obliterated the sunlight outside and cast a threatening, dreary gray hue on the room that mirrored her mood.

“Crystal, you had a bad dream again.”

Lex. His husky voice reverberated through the shadows.

“Yes,” she whispered, reaching for his hand. The scaly skin should have made her withdraw, but she barely noticed. Oddly though, his hand felt colder. Almost icy to the touch. And he didn’t seem to react to her face at all. Maybe she wasn’t so hideous…

“I dreamt I had a child somewhere.” Her voice caught. “A baby crying for me.”

He squeezed her hand, brushed her hair from her cheek. “You will find your way, my sweetness.”

Tears clogged her throat. “But I’ve been gone for months. What if I have a child and he or she has forgotten me?” Panic seized her chest and turned her voice into a whimper.

“You will find your answers,” Lex said calmly.

“Dr. Pace says I need to heal more. I hear what he’s not telling me—I need more surgery. This latest treatment didn’t work.”

“Do not believe everything he tells you.” Lex’s brittle tone sent goose bumps down her spine. Footsteps sounded outside the door, then suddenly a cold wind blew through the room, rattling the windowpanes. “He has his own agenda.”

“What do you mean?” He had been everything to her these last few months: doctor, friend, savior.

“Don’t trust anyone, Crystal. Even Dr. Pace.”

Crystal shivered and turned to face Lex, but he was gone, and, once again, the room was empty.

THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON was a virtual nightmare. Damon and Jean-Paul met briefly with Antwaun and Dryer, but Antwaun was so volatile that they spent their short time together attempting to calm him. Jean-Paul gave him a good dressing-down about behaving inside, keeping a low profile and putting his ear to the wall. Sometimes, insiders talked, and Antwaun might possibly learn something helpful from one of the inmates.

Such as who had set him up. Which cops the prisoners liked to work with.

Antwaun finally agreed, and adopted his game face. The Chameleon—if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was to play a part. Lie.

Surely he wasn’t lying to them about his innocence.

Jean-Paul went to the station to look into the offshore account and see if he could find out who had planted the bribe money, while Damon drove to his parents’ to give them the bad news.

His heart wrenched at the pain on their faces. Even as he assured them he and Jean-Paul would clear Antwaun, the anguish of his family made him feel raw inside. Antwaun was innocent.

But he was not. If they knew what he had done, about the E-team and the missions they’d pulled off, about the woman who’d gotten caught in the middle and lost her life, it would kill them.

So many secrets…Tell and you die.

He wasn’t worried about dying himself, but he knew repercussions would spread to his family. Not just the pain of the truth about his last mission—their lives would also be endangered.

When he left, he drove straight to Kendra Yates’s apartment to meet Jean-Paul’s partner, Detective Carson Graves. Kendra lived in a modest older unit on the fringes of Bourbon Street. The place had already been thoroughly searched and, as the police had reported, they found no computer or files. Damn. He wanted her research on the dirty cops. The furniture was a hodgepodge of antiques and crafty items that she had obviously picked up in the market. A few photos adorned the built-in bookshelf; one of her receiving some kind of journalism award drew Damon’s eye. He stared at the face in the photo, trying to reconcile the beautiful brunette with a heart-shaped face and deep-set eyes with the mutilated hand they had found, and his stomach revolted.

“I can see why Antwaun was enthralled,” Jean-Paul commented.

Damon nodded. He took a newspaper photo from the desk to have a reference when he asked around. Carson searched her bedroom, and Jean-Paul the den, finding a book planner the police and the people who’d ransacked the place had missed.

“There are a couple of names of contacts in here that I want to check out,” Jean-Paul said. “They may be informants, may have talked to her before she disappeared.”

“The police confiscated a toothbrush and hairbrush for DNA,” Damon said. “Jean-Paul, can you access the results of the trace evidence the police found?”

Jean-Paul agreed and Damon thumbed through past issues of the papers stacked in the corner, searching for Kendra’s byline, hoping to find another story she’d written that might have landed her in trouble. But nothing jumped out at him. “I’m going to the newspaper office and pushing the publisher to tell us what he knows.”

They agreed to check in and left Carson to finish searching her apartment.

At the newspaper office where Kendra Yates had worked, Damon asked to speak with the head of the paper. Warren Allan, a middle-aged man with a bad comb-over, yellowed teeth from smoking and a jacket two sizes too small, gestured toward an orange vinyl chair. His desk overflowed with newspapers, clippings of various articles, bulging file folders, coffee cups, chewing-gum wrappers and an ashtray that looked as if it hadn’t been emptied in days.

“I’ve been expecting you, Special Agent Dubois.” A small smile stretched his thick lips into a rubbery line. “In fact, I expected an entire fort of you by now.”

Damon narrowed his eyes to slits. “Then I’ll cut to the chase, Mr. Allan. My brother is innocent. Someone is setting him up and I’m going to find out who it is.”

Allan’s chair squeaked as he leaned back and steepled his hands. “Are you sure about that? Maybe you don’t know your brother as well as you thought.”

“And you don’t know him at all.” Damon gritted his teeth. “Tell me what Kendra Yates had on Karl Swafford, and any tips she had on the possibility of corruption in the NOPD.”

“You really think I’m going to divulge that information?” His cheeks swelled with his chuckle. “I’m sitting on the hottest story to hit New Orleans since the Swamp Devil murders last Mardi Gras. And the murdered victim happened to be one of my own reporters.” He leaned forward, a menacing glint to his eyes. “I want the bastard who killed her to pay.”

“So do I,” Damon stated matter-of-factly. “And I can assure you that your cooperation will help us find the person responsible for her death.”

A long, tension-filled pause stretched between the two men.

“Just give me something,” Damon finally conceded. “Some hint as to where she was on the investigation. And I’ll be certain that you get the exclusive on anything I find out, when the time is right, of course.”

Allan hesitated, then nodded. He didn’t believe that Kendra had run off with Swafford and thought the man had faked his own death and might have killed her. “She traced him to a plastic surgeon who works for the government.”

Damon’s blood heated. “His name?”

“Dr. Reginald Pace.”

Damon gripped the edge of the chair with white knuckles. Reginald Pace…had assisted the E-team in secretive projects. He’d been known to alter appearances for the witness protection program. And he would also do the same for any criminal for the right price.

Unfortunately, extracting information from him was going to be nearly impossible.

LEX VAN WORMER RUBBED A HAND across his scaly skin, watching the dry particles float to the floor like dust. His skin grew drier, flakier every day as if death was slowly rusting away his flesh, tearing it from his brittle bones with jagged fingers. His body felt cold, too, chilled to the bone, as if ice had settled into his veins, or perhaps his blood had ceased to flow and had turned to stone. Sometimes darkness robbed him of precious seconds, minutes, hours, and the time he was able to drag himself from the depths grew shorter and less frequent as each day passed.

Only the thought of seeing Crystal spurred him to fight his way through the muck of quicksand trying to consume him.

He had waited all his life to find a woman like her. A woman to love. A woman who needed him. A woman to guide him into redemption.

For the devil had owned his soul most of his life.

Like an off-key song you couldn’t get out of your mind, his father’s vile descriptions of the devil’s wrath burned in his head. He would pay for his transgressions. Burn for his sins. Spend eternity being punished.

Despair made his chest ache, and he dropped to his knees beside the bed, lowered his head against the mattress and prayed to the heavens to help him last another day. To help him find his way into the light. To allow him to atone for his sins by watching over Crystal.

For she was in grave danger.

Dr. Pace pretended to care, but Lex knew his lies. Lex had seen the man’s other side. He, too, had been possessed by the devil.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT TOOK DAMON ANOTHER week to get in touch with Dr. Pace, a week of anxious hell for Antwaun and the family.

“Dr. Pace, thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.” Damon settled into the leather wing chair across the plastic surgeon’s desk. Although Pace consulted and sometimes took on patients not associated with government projects, many were of a confidential nature. He also worked with universities on the latest research techniques involving plastic surgery and had assisted in cutting-edge work with facial reconstruction on severely injured patients, including infants with birth defects.

“Yes, well, we do have a history, Special Agent Dubois.” Pace stared at him over his reading glasses. “So, to what do I owe this visit? Your team have another problem you want me to take care of?”

Damon swallowed at the reminder of his secret military missions. The E-team, the Erasers, had been a special-ops elite squad, carefully chosen for their individual skills. Damon, a tactical leader as well as an explosives expert; Max Levine, helicopter pilot and computer genius; Calvin Norris, sniper and search-and-rescue leader; and Lex Van Wormer, security specialist.

If there was any problem the government wanted taken care of, sanctioned or not, the E-team was called in to erase it. No one was to know of their existence. Even Pace didn’t know the details of their work. And no member would ever tell.

Tell and you die.

“I’m with the bureau now,” Damon responded.

Pace nodded, a small grin splitting his face. “Yes, that’s right. FBI.”

Damon almost laughed. Pace didn’t believe him. The team was tight-knit and was virtually impossible to escape. But when he’d left, the three guys on the original E-team had formed a private business after they’d left the military, conducting government missions as well as taking on private cases. Max had said some of the new members were even needlessly violent, and had asked about his defection.

Damon had opted out and left, although the others hadn’t liked it one damn bit.

“I need to know any information you may have on a man named Karl Swafford.” Damon watched Pace for signs of recognition. But not so much as a blink of an eye or a twitch. Of course, the man was trained in scrutinizing body gestures and hiding them as well.

“I’ve heard of him, as most of the people in New Orleans have.”

Damon grunted. “I have reason to believe that he faked his death and disappeared. And that you helped him.”

Pace’s eyebrow arched upward. “And where did you get this information?”

“Let’s just say that the death of a certain reporter brought it to light.”

“You mean Kendra Yates, the woman your brother is accused of murdering.”

“Antwaun is innocent,” Damon said. “And I need your help, Reginald. If Swafford is alive, he may have killed Miss Yates. I also think he has someone on the inside who helped frame my brother for her death.”

“Interesting theory. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”

“Did Kendra Yates question you about Swafford?”

“No. And I did not perform plastic surgery on him either.”

Damon silently cursed, then withdrew the photo of Kendra and placed it on the desk. “Look at this carefully, Reginald. Are you sure this woman didn’t approach you? She might have worn a disguise.”

Dr. Pace made a token show of examining the photo, then exhaled and leaned back nonchalantly. “No, I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Damon understood the reason for Dr. Pace’s secrecy. His silence protected not only himself, but the members of the E-team, government VIPs, witnesses in the WITSEC program and current patients. Hell, his secrecy had kept Damon alive.

But the tiny tremor in the doctor’s eyelid gave him away this time. He had seen Kendra Yates, but he didn’t want to admit to it.

Possibilities floated through Damon’s head. What if Kendra had threatened to write about Dr. Pace in the paper?

Perhaps he’d panicked and killed her. Or he might have reported her snooping to the military or another fed who’d decided she needed to be diposed of.

His gut tightened. What if the insider who’d killed her and set up Antwaun wasn’t with the local police department but was one of his coworkers at the agency?

CRYSTAL FELT AS IF she were crawling out of her skin. She had to get out of the room.

The sidewalk was dimly lit, the woods creating shadowy nooks that offered privacy. Surely the garden would be empty, and she wouldn’t have to worry about being seen or the pitying gossip.