Deadly Grace

Jillian wrapped an arm around one of the porch’s upright beams and drank a greedy gulp of fresh air, but it was too cold, too rich, and her lungs seized. Doubling over again, she coughed and hacked, gasping for air between each painful spasm that felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass slicing her lungs. Snow was falling around the house in great, feathery flakes, spinning and brilliant white against the black night. As Jillian struggled dizzily for air, the entire world seemed to be swirling.

Then, over the raspy sound of her own breathing, she thought she heard the faint wail of sirens. She pulled herself, hand-over-hand, along the freezing porch rail and looked out into the night through wind-whipped snow, ears straining. The half-acre lot on which the house sat was mostly wooded. At the far edge of the wood, as she searched for any sign of the fire trucks, she thought she saw something move—something or someone. But her eyes, smoke-stung and running with tears, couldn’t make anything out. One of the Newkirks, maybe? Was it the neighbors who’d called in the alarm?

A bang sounded from behind her and she spun on her heel. The storm door was swinging on its hinges, buffeted by the pressurized air from inside the house, slamming against the stucco siding. She reached out and grabbed it on the next swing, peering into the kitchen, blinking as smoke and hot air poured out from the inside.

“Nils! Can you see her?”

The only answer was the splintering of glass as the window over the sink just a few feet away on her left shattered and sent glass shards tinkling across the wooden decking. She ignored the sting on her feet as the smoke inside cleared briefly in the newly formed vortex of air. Nils was standing at the framed archway that led to the front hall, but no sooner had she spotted him than he dropped, disappearing from her sight line behind the kitchen table.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“I found her!”

Jillian held on to the storm door while she waited for him to bring her mother out, ducking her head briefly once or twice for a gulp of fresh air. The sirens were unmistakable now, a panicky caterwaul that pierced the cold winter night. She glanced over her shoulder. Through the spruce trees at the bottom of the drive she spotted red lights winking as the trucks rounded the corner at the end of Lakeshore Road and turned up the street toward her mother’s drive. Feeling was coming back into her legs, and the wooden planks were icy under her bare feet. She shivered, her jeans and black turtleneck sweater scant protection against the wicked night air.

Shifting her weight from one freezing foot to the other, she stuck her head around the door frame again. “Come on, Nils! Get out! The trucks are here!”

Silence.

“Nils?”

The smoke swirling under the ceiling was thick as soup now and dropping fast. Jillian hesitated for a moment, then drew a deep breath and ducked low, trying to stay under the worst of it as she headed into the kitchen, across to where she’d last seen him. Rounding the oval oak table, she saw his back, POLICE stenciled on his jacket in large, reflective yellow letters. He was crouched on the floor, and to one side of him a pair of stockinged legs lay akimbo, splayed feet shod in familiar, tiny black pumps. The pose was uncharacteristically awkward, but Jillian would have recognized those legs anywhere—veinless, smooth and remarkably girlish for a woman of sixty. A source of great pride to her mother.

“Oh, God, Nils! Is she—”

His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. “Jill, no!” His arm shot out to hold her back.

Too late.

Jillian froze as his body shifted and she saw what it had been hiding. She dropped to the floor. “Oh, my God! No! Mother!”

Her mother lay on the tile floor, head tilted strangely to one side, intense blue eyes staring dully into space, half-hidden under heavy lids. Her silver-blond hair was tucked up as always into a chignon at the nape of her neck, virtually unruffled except for a single strand that had come loose and lay across her slack jaw. Her mouth was open, as if she’d been struck dumb in midprotest. Jillian’s gaze dropped to the dark stain that had seeped across the front of her mother’s pale cashmere sweater. All color was obscured by the strange tinge to the light flickering from the hall, but she knew the sweater set was robin’s-egg blue, just like her mother’s eyes. Grace had been wearing this sweater as she sat in her favorite wing chair in the front room…. When? Only moments ago, it seemed, sitting there, large as life, her spine ramrod straight, held away from the chair back, her hands clasped delicately in her lap, knees together, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. Always the picture of a lady. Now, the sweater was ruined. Her mother was lying sprawled on the floor, and the irrational thought crossed Jillian’s mind that Grace Meade would be appalled to know she’d been found in such an ungraceful state.

“Let’s get out of here!” Nils yelled over the roar of the fire and the wail of sirens that were right outside now. He coughed, drawing in air that was rapidly becoming completely un-breathable as he gathered the small, limp body into his arms.

Jillian stood and pressed herself against the wall, repelled by the burden in his arms, yet unable to look away. Her gaze rose with him as he struggled to his feet. He was huge, her mother’s tiny form almost lost in the bulk of him.

He cocked his head toward the back door. “Get going! I’ll follow you!”

He shifted the weight in his arms for a better grip, and as he did, her mother’s head turned, those pale, dead eyes fixing Jillian with an accusatory glare. She recoiled, and as her knees buckled, she slid down the wall, landing with a thud on her backside.

“For Christ sake, get up!” Nils bellowed. “The fire’s spreading! The whole place is going to go!”

She wanted to run but she was nailed in place by the judgment she saw in her mother’s eyes. Nils hefted the body over one shoulder, freeing up a hand, and he used it to grip Jillian’s upper arm. She shook him off and turned away, squeezing her eyes shut. Anything but to look at the stare of that monstrous thing that was—but couldn’t be—her mother.

Mummy, no, please!

He grabbed her again, but she fought him off and scuttled down the hall, deeper into the house, moving toward the dull roar and the flickering light of flames that had now fully engulfed the living room.

“Jill! Get back here, dammit!”

Instead, she lay down on the threshold of the dining room, opposite the fire, pressing her cheek into its waxed and buffed cherry planks. The fire crackled in her ears, but beyond that sensation, which was more pressure than sound, she was aware of nothing. Her eyelids closed, and she gave herself over gratefully to whatever void she could find.

It wasn’t to be. Something clamped on to her arms, and she was lifted in two sharp yanks, first to a sitting position, then to her feet. She opened her eyes. Nils held her by the elbows, both of his hands free now of that other load. He shook her once, then again, all will had drained out of her. Her head flopped, her body limp, joints unstrung.

“Dammit, Jill, come on! Do you want to die in here?”

A sweet lassitude overtook her. Yes. Leave me alone.

He caught her face and cupped it in his hands, his wide, worried face filling her field of vision.

“Jill, please!”

He leaned toward her until their foreheads were touching, and he held her close, thumbs stroking her face. Then his head tilted and he kissed her, hard. She felt his lips on hers, and for a moment, she was seventeen all over again. The intervening years faded away, and they were Nils and Jill, inseparable, deeply, obsessively in love, the way it only happens the first time, when every experience is new, every touch a revelation. It all came back to her—the smell of him, the taste of him, the safe refuge of him.

When he pulled back and looked at her again, his expression tortured, she nodded. He got to his feet and extended a hand, and she reached out, ready to take it, until she spotted the dark stain on the left shoulder of his jacket. Blood, she realized, soaked deep into the padding. Her mother’s blood. She tried to push him away—push the blood away—only to realize that her own hands, too, were sticky and wet with it. She stared at them, horrified, and she screamed.

He grabbed her roughly. She fought him, scratching and kicking, but it was a hopeless mismatch. He was huge, well over six feet and even heavier now than he’d been in his high school linebacker days. He lifted her easily and was about to sling her over that same bloody shoulder when a lucky kick from her right foot connected with his groin. His grip weakened momentarily, and as he crumpled, Jillian pushed herself off his brawny frame and started to run. But before she’d gone more than a couple of steps, her bare heel hit a wet patch and skidded out from under her. She landed flat on her back on the hardwood floor, the wind knocked out of her.

She lay there for a moment, then rolled over—only to find herself right where Nils had laid down his bloody burden, face-to-face with her mother’s dull, half-lidded stare. Unblinking, it cut through her like a judgment.

She was, indeed, in hell, Jillian thought. Exactly where she belonged.

CHAPTER 2

Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, January 10, 1979

Much later, when it was all over—and yet not really over because, as Alex Cruz knew, there were some events you never truly got over but only locked away in that dark recess of the mind where nightmares live—afterward, he did the calculations, backtracking, trying to figure out the exact sequence of events. Where he’d been the first time he’d heard the names Jillian and Grace Meade. Whether he’d had any premonition he was about to encounter a face of evil unlike anything he’d seen before in either his professional or personal life. Whether there’d been any warning sign that this would be the case to finally push him over the razor-thin line between the letter of the law he’d sworn to uphold and the rough justice of the vigilante; the line between his troubled past and the uncertain fate that lay ahead of him.

Even before he’d heard of these two women, Cruz had already witnessed more than his share of the horrors that human beings could unleash upon one another. He’d been a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam, then spent more than a decade as a U.S. Army criminal investigator, specializing in homicide, rape and other crimes of violence. Now, as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he spent his days tracking the worst of the worst—terrorists, kidnappers and serial killers who claimed the entire planet as their personal hunting ground.

At this point, there wasn’t much he hadn’t come across in the way of human depravity, but the events at the root of Grace Meade’s murder and the others connected to it would forever stand alone in his mind, unequaled in terms of sheer cruelty. Did he have the slightest inkling of that the day the case first landed on his desk? One thing was reasonably certain: On the night Jillian Meade was trying to die in Minnesota, Cruz would have been eighteen hundred miles away and, taking into account time zone differences, already in bed. While the fire in Minnesota blazed, trapping mother and daughter, Cruz was struggling with the restless insomnia that had plagued him for almost as long as he could remember, part of the price he paid for past mistakes. If Jillian Meade was trying to die that night, Alex Cruz had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that he was condemned for his own sins to live.

The day after the fire, Cruz arrived at the office early. If he hadn’t been trying to dodge Sean Finney, who worked in the next cubicle, he might have overlooked the notice regarding Jillian Meade, only one of at least a half-dozen pending cases sitting in his “In” basket. Given his already heavy caseload, he might have passed this one on to someone else, or at least delayed following up on it for a few days. But that morning, Cruz was determined to find a reason to get out of the office and avoid the loaded questions and broad hints Finney had been lobbing his way with increasing frequency of late. He needed a case that would take him on the road where he could slip back into comfortable anonymity.

Eleven months into a new job with the FBI, he was close to violating one of his cardinal rules: never blur the boundaries between the job and his private life. Maryanne Finney was Sean’s cousin, and Cruz had met her at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by his co-worker. An attractive redhead with hair that corkscrewed halfway down her back, Maryanne had an infectious smile that didn’t take no for an answer, even from a taciturn newcomer who tried to telegraph he wasn’t looking for romantic entanglements. Within hours of meeting her, Cruz had found himself accepting an invitation to a Sunday dinner at her parents’ home in Bethesda, seduced by Maryanne’s sweet Irish blarney when she’d assured him that it wouldn’t be a formal date but that he’d be doing her a favor by going.

“They’re a fine bunch, my family, but forever nagging me to settle down and produce a gaggle of little Finneys. They can’t help themselves. It’s a genetic defect—the Irish Catholic thing, you know. Last thing I’m interested in, believe me, after spending my days in a classroom riding herd on other people’s rambunctious monsters. If a stranger’s around, though, they’ll be on their best behavior. Might actually stifle themselves about my pitiful life, at least for one day.”

Like he himself wasn’t the pitiful one, Cruz thought, an old stray taken in by a kindhearted woman. And so it had started, light and friendly, but in the usual way of these matters, one thing had led to another. Maryanne’s enthusiasm in the bedroom, he’d discovered later that evening, was as cheerful and energetic as everything else about her. When she finally fell into sleep, it was deep and undisturbed, leaving him awake in the dark with only his guilty conscience for company. As he’d watched the pale luminous curve of her shoulder and neck in the soft glow of the candles she’d lit before they made love, he’d seen a Botticelli painting of uncomplicated virtues, a woman who, despite her protestations to the contrary, did seem to hanker after a man who’d stick around for the long haul.

He wasn’t what a nice woman like that needed or wanted. After all these years, he was too wedded to his solitude and too addicted to the job. Sooner or later, every woman with whom he got involved came to the same conclusion, and the endings were always the same—tears, angry words and self-recrimination. So Cruz had done what seemed like the kindest thing—he called Maryanne the next day to apologize for letting things go further than they should have.

He’d been avoiding Sean Finney ever since. Like every matchmaker since the beginning of time, Finney took bumptious delight in the thought that his introduction of cousin and co-worker might bear fruit. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sean was evidently plugged into some mysterious Finney family tom-tom network that seemed to have been vibrating since the moment Cruz’s path had crossed Maryanne’s, so that Sean spent half his time haunting Cruz’s cubicle, fishing for details on what was transpiring between them. She deserved better than the both of them, Cruz thought guiltily, flipping through the papers on his desk.

He was assigned to the FBI’s International Liaison Division, investigating a wide array of cross-border offenses—organized crime, kidnapping, terrorism, outlaw motorcycle gang activity, child abduction, art theft and violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery—sifting through evidence, following up leads and liaising with law enforcement agencies domestically and internationally. During his Army career, Cruz had worked homicide cases all over the world, and the Bureau, desperate for experienced agents to help deal with the burgeoning of cross-border crime syndicates and international terrorism, had snapped him up as soon as he’d resigned his commission and his résumé had hit the street.