and she had no right to wonder about his life, yet she did. He’d obviously remained in Colorado and hadn’t returned to England after their breakup. Had he taken a date to the wedding, and if so, were they serious? She wondered who Roman had married and if Katarina had thrown a bridal shower—it seemed like something Kat would do. Petra glanced at the picture once more, a voyeur into the life she would never live, and shoved the phone into her bag.
* * *
As she drove through Denver’s more exclusive neighborhoods, Petra’s headache returned with a vengeance. She’d been rash to ignore the pain when it first began at the radio station, and now it was a full-blown migraine. Each throb of her pulse exploded like a bomb inside her skull.
The sun beat down, surrounding everything in a brilliant and blinding halo. She gripped the steering wheel with knuckles gone white and rounded the corner. Joe Owens’s home came into view.
Made of golden brick, with a set of double doors and a side room that resembled a turret, the three-story home was impressive and immense, even on a street of impressive and immense homes. The wrought iron gate was open—unusual, but then he had told her to come. Since she was expected, Petra didn’t bother with the call box. She followed the winding drive to a circular courtyard, where Joe’s cobalt blue SUV sat.
Petra parked her car next to his and turned off the engine. She closed her eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. Again and again. The pain remained, lurking just beneath the surface, like wisps of fog over a river on a sultry night.
After tucking her keys into her handbag, Petra walked to the front door and rang the bell. Far-off chimes announced her arrival.
Nothing.
She gripped the door handle and pulled down. It held fast. She hit the doorbell three times in a row, the chimes playing and replaying, the echo rolling across the courtyard and down the wide lawn.
Her head throbbed with each chime of the bell, and her frustration grew. There was no way Joe hadn’t heard her, unless he wasn’t home. His car was here, but really, that meant next to nothing. He could have easily been picked up by someone else, or left with the person who’d stopped by earlier, while they’d been on the phone.
Whatever the excuse, her client owed her an explanation. She called his cell phone. It went directly to voice mail.
“Joe.” Petra didn’t bother to keep the irritation from her voice. “Where the hell are you? I’m here.”
She ended the call and rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.
Petra made a second call to Joe. Again, voice mail picked up. “Just so you know, your behavior is costing me my job. If I get fired because of you, I’ll kill you.”
Shoving the phone back into her handbag, she followed the brick walkway to the back of the house. A pool, complete with a slide and whirlpool, was empty. Two tumblers filled with amber liquid and ice sat on a table. Sweat trickled down the side of the glasses. Joe hadn’t been gone from his drink for long. But where was he? And who had been drinking with him?
Sunlight glinted off the water’s surface. The glare left Petra blind, and the pain in her head was now a thunderous roar. She fumbled in her bag for a set of sunglasses and slipped them on. They did little for the pain, but at least she could see.
Beyond the patio, a set of French doors stood open.
None of what she’d found made sense. Joe valued security even more than privacy. It was unlike him to leave the front gate open and his house seemingly unattended.
Maybe he was home, but doing what? And why ignore Petra, when he had insisted that she stop by? Certainly, visiting a client while sick with a migraine was the worst thing to do. Yet if she could get out of the sun, the worst of her headache might abate.
She approached the threshold and took a tentative step into the family room. Sheer curtains hung from ceiling to floor and billowed in the breeze.
“Knock, knock,” she called. “Joe? It’s Petra. Are you home?”
From somewhere, she heard a gurgling. Petra strained to listen. The noise was gone as quickly as it came.
She took another step.
There it was again—a sound like water struggling down a blocked drain.
“Joe?”
Nothing. Not even the sound. With one hand on the wall, she ventured down a darkened hallway. Her heart thudded against her rib cage. With the thunderous pulse, the pain in her head multiplied tenfold. She staggered, almost stumbling, but pushed herself upright and took another step, her fingers trailing along the wall.
Around the edges of her consciousness, she sensed the lurking nothingness that came with a blackout. Then a burst of pain exploded in the back of Petra’s skull. She pitched forward, slamming into the tile floor. And then all she knew was darkness.
Once Ian Wallace decided that Nikolai Mateev had to die, it became easy to bend rules and break laws. He sneaked the computer out of the Comrades’ safe house and worked on the laptop in the relative privacy of his black SUV with darkened windows, which was parked two blocks away.
All that ended as he spotted Special Agent Marcus Jones striding purposefully up the street. He wore the obligatory Fed uniform of a dark suit and red tie. In the moment, Ian wondered if the uptight special agent had anything else in his wardrobe.
Ian hit the keys rapidly, then slid the flash drive from the port. He was shutting the laptop’s lid as Jones rapped his knuckles on the side window. “What the hell are you doing, Wallace?” the agent asked through the glass. “I’m pretty sure that’s my evidence in your hands.”
Ian rolled the window down. “This laptop was found—”
“Hidden behind the wall,” Jones interrupted. His nostrils flared and the cords in his neck stood out. “I heard. I am with the FBI, you know. My question is why in the hell did you take a laptop from my raid?”
“Technically,” said Ian, “I’m the one in charge of the raid.”
“I want Mateev as bad as you do, but you’re playing with the FBI now and everything—and I mean everything—has to be done by the book,” said Jones. “I don’t want loopholes that can be exploited during a trial. So just tell me that you didn’t try to get into that laptop. If you did, a judge will consider it tainted and we’ll never get a search warrant for whatever you found.”
Ian’s work here was done. He’d hoped to quietly turn the computer in to evidence and leave without seeing Special Agent Jones, much less have a confrontation. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Ian only wanted to leave. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with you, but I am the team leader. This computer was found and I wanted to see what was on the hard drive.”
Jones paused a beat. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” said Ian. “There’s too much encryption to break through.”
The FBI agent dragged his hands down his face, giving him a hangdog look. “No offense,
