Chapter One
Cooper Marshall burst into the apartment, gun ready as his gaze swept the dim interior of the room that waited for him. “Lockwood!”
There was no response to his call, but the stench in the air—that unmistakable odor of death and blood—told Cooper that he’d arrived too late.
Again.
Damn it.
Cooper rushed deeper into that darkened apartment. He’d gotten his orders from the top. He’d been assigned to track down Keith Lockwood, an ex–Elite Operations Division agent. Cooper was supposed to confirm that the other man was alive and well. He’d fallen off the EOD’s radar, and that had sure raised a red flag in the mind of Cooper’s boss.
Especially since other EOD agents had recently turned up dead.
Cooper rounded a corner in the narrow hallway. The scent of blood was stronger. He headed toward what he suspected was the bedroom. His eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, so it was easy for him to see the body slumped on the floor just a few feet from him.
He knelt, and his gloved fingers turned the body just slightly. Cooper pulled out his penlight and shone it on the dead man’s face.
Keith Lockwood. Cooper had never worked with the man on a mission, but he’d seen Lockwood’s photos.
Lockwood’s throat had been slit. An up-close kill.
Considering that Lockwood was a former navy SEAL, the man shouldn’t have been caught off guard.
But he had been.
Because the killer isn’t your average thug off the streets.
The killer was also an agent with the EOD, and the killer was trained just as well as Lockwood had been.
No, trained better.
Because the killer had been able to get the drop on the SEAL.
Cooper’s breath eased out in a rough sigh just as a knock sounded on the front door.
The front door that Cooper had just smashed open moments before.
He leapt to his feet.
“Mr. Lockwood?” A feminine voice called out. “Mr. Lockwood...i-is everything all right?”
No, things were far from all right. The broken door should have been a dead giveaway on that point.
“It’s Gabrielle Harper!” The voice called out. “We were supposed to meet...”
His back teeth clenched. Talk about extremely bad timing. He knew Gabrielle Harper, and the trouble that the woman was about to bring his way was just going to make the situation even more of a tangled mess.
Cooper holstered his weapon. He had to get out of that apartment. Before Gabrielle saw him and asked questions that he couldn’t answer for her.
He rose and stalked toward the bedroom window. His footsteps were silent. After all of his training, they should have been.
Gabrielle’s steps—and her high heels—tapped across the hardwood floor as she came inside the apartment.
Of course, Gabrielle wasn’t just going to wait outside. She was a reporter, no doubt on the scent of a story.
And she must have scented the blood.
She was following that scent, and if he didn’t move, fast, she’d follow it straight to him.
Cooper opened the window then glanced down below. Three floors up. But there were bricks on the side of the building, with crevices in between them. If he held on just right, he could spider-crawl his way down.
The floor in the hallway creaked as Gabrielle paused.
She should have called for help by now. At the first sign of that smashed door, Gabrielle should have dialed 911. But, with Gabrielle what she should do and what she actually did—well, those could be very different things.
If she wasn’t careful, the woman was going to walk into real trouble one day—the kind that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from.
He slid through the window. Since it was after midnight, Cooper knew he’d virtually disappear into the darkness when he climbed down the back side of the building.
He’d make it out of there, undetected, provided he didn’t fall and break his neck.
He eased to the side, his feet resting against the window’s narrow ledge. He pulled the window back down and took a deep breath.
“Mr. Lockwood!” Gabrielle’s horror-filled scream broke loud and clear through the night.
She’d found the body.
Jaw locking, Cooper made his way down that building.