It was what he thought he could see inside.

  “Frank? What the hell are you doing?”

  The voice of one of his co-workers startled him so badly that he jumped a bit. Standing up now, Frank found it hard to look away from that broken piece of wood. “I think I found something,” he said. “I thought it was just a piece of wood, but it looks like there might be something else under it.”

  The co-worker, a guy named Daryl that he’d had more than a few drinks with over the last few months, dropped down to his knees to have a look. “Nah, man,” he said after a few seconds. “Just looks like a busted piece of scrap wood to me. Why are you wasting yo…wait. Hold on…is that…is that a hand?”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Frank said. “You think the wood is part of a makeshift coffin or something?”

  “No clue,” Daryl said. He stood back up with a gleam of excitement in his eyes and looked over to one of their other co-workers who was sitting on the edge of a small dozer, eating his lunch. Daryl waved at him frantically, yelling, “Hey! Bring that over here!”

  Neither of them waited for the dozer driver, though. They dropped back down to the ground and started digging with their bare hands. Frank found that the wood wasn’t as old as he’d imagined—which made sense because the hand, though slightly decomposed, wasn’t all that shriveled and worn down. He doubted it had been there for very long. And as morbid as it seemed, the more of the wood he and Daryl uncovered, the more he hoped to see. But, as it was, the only peek they had of what was beneath the wood was where the slab of concrete had busted it open.

  Even before the dozer engine started up and headed their way, both Frank and Daryl seemed to know what they had found. By that time, they’d uncovered another foot and a half of the wood—enough to tell that it was some sort of wooden crate. And if they could see a slightly shriveled hand inside of it, it didn’t take a genius to know what the rest of the crate might be hiding as well.

  Frank and Daryl stepped back as the guy with the dozer came over and began to carefully tear up the earth around the wood.

  Fifteen minutes later, the three of them cracked the top of the crate open. Daryl turned away and puked, but Frank stared down, eyes glued to the slightly decayed body of the woman that had been covered up by the wooden box.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Rachel opened her eyes, it took her a moment to remember where she was and why she was there. She was staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. The room was dark, and someone was sleeping beside her…someone small.

  Paige, she thought. I’m at my dad’s house in Paducah. We’ve been here for three days, and it still feels weird.

  And that made sense, she supposed. When she and Paige had come by three days ago, she’d never intended to stay more than a day. But things had gone well—far better than she could have ever hoped. There was still a lot of healing to be done and Rachel was nowhere near forgiving him yet, but she’d been shocked by just how strong the family bonds were between them. She had also been amazed at how quickly Paige had warmed to him.

  As Rachel slowly sat up in bed, she recalled the moment she knew there might be hope for her and her father. They’d been at his house for a little over an hour on that first evening and he’d excused himself quickly from the living room. Rachel had assumed he was on the way to the restroom but made it no farther than the kitchen before he’d started crying. The next hour had been spent with him begging her forgiveness and doting over Paige—telling them both how smart and beautiful she was.

  After that, on the following day, Rachel called Paige’s school to let them know she’d be missing a few days. She’d also called Grandma Tate to let her know what was going on, too. They’d planned to spend three days—making tomorrow the last one.

  Tomorrow, Rachel thought groggily. She touched her phone, sitting on the bedside table, and saw that it was 1:12 in the morning. She tilted her head slightly, wondering why she’d woken up. She didn’t think Paige had kicked her, and she didn’t have to go the toilet. Maybe her dad was up late, wandering about the house. He’d done it a bit the first night they’d stayed there and when she’d asked him about it the following day, Douglas Gift had told his daughter about how he’d never been much of a sleeper. He was usually content with just five hours or so a night, though he did catch a solid nine or ten almost every Saturday night, sleeping in on Sunday.

  She lay back down, looking over at Paige. Paige had been very happy these last few days, getting to know her grandfather and hearing stories about her mother’s childhood. It had all unnerved Rachel a bit because she had very few good memories of her childhood. She usually only thought of the trauma of her mother’s death and the troubles and pains of her father and all he’d gone through before walking out.

  Rachel felt her thoughts trying to circle that particular drain as she tried to get back to sleep. But before she had time to focus on either, she heard a noise from elsewhere in the house. It wasn’t necessarily a thud, but it was noticeable enough to not be the subtle noise of someone trying to move quietly through the house.

  Curious and slightly concerned, Rachel sat back up and slid quietly out of bed. Paige slept on, turned on her right side and facing the wall. Making her way to the closed bedroom door, Rachel felt very much out of place. It was one thing to walk through her estranged father’s house in the light of day—it was quite another to tiptoe through it in the early hours of the morning.

  She opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway. It was a small house, and the guest bedroom was located at the end of a small hall. The main bedroom was on the other side of the house, just off of the living room. The kitchen sat between it all and if her father was out and moving around, that’s where she figured he would be. But as she neared the kitchen, she saw that the only light shining was the dim one from underneath the oven vent. Her father was nowhere to be seen.

  Still, as she came into the living room, she heard that very same noise again. It hadn’t sounded like a thud before because it was muted—sort of cushioned. She recognized it as the sound of someone moving on a bed. If her father had been living with a woman, she might have mistaken the noise for two people moving around on a bed in a sort of energetic fashion. She stood in the kitchen, unsure of what to do.

  She made her way to the living room and saw that her father’s bedroom door was opened just a bit. And at the same time, there was another sound…a strangled sort of gasp.

  That made the decision for her. She no longer cared that she was in a strange place or that things with her father might be awkward if she happened to walk in on him in some half-asleep state. She ran to his room and pushed the door open.

  “Dad? Are you—”

  The word okay froze in her throat. The room was dark, lit only by the bit of light coming in from behind Rachel, but she knew what she was seeing. Someone was in the bed with her father, and they were attacking him.

  She reached out for the light switch and the moment the lights came on, she saw the face of the second figure, despite the glare. It made no sense. In fact, it was so crazy that Rachel wondered if she might still be in the guestroom, sleeping beside Paige and having a very strange, very vivid dream.

  Alex Lynch was on her father’s bed. There was a very large knife in his right hand. He was using his left to strangle her father, keeping him on the bed. The blue sheets were stained with blood that looked impossibly dark in the sudden burst of light.

  There’s no way this is real, she tried to tell herself. You have to be dreaming, trapped in some sort of nightmare or—

  “Oh, hello, Rachel,” Lynch said. “Did I wake you?”

  Any illusions that this was a dream were shattered when he spoke to her. He released her father’s neck but remained on the bed. Behind him, her father was gasping for breath. She tried to see where he was wounded but Lynch was suddenly moving away from him, coming to the edge of the bed on his knees.

  Rachel knew this made her very prone to an attack, but she was so stunned by his presence that she literally couldn’t move for a moment.

  “I’d really hoped to get this done without waking you,” he said. “Because your daughter was going to be next. You, too, I suppose if you got in the way. But I was really hoping to save you for last…to really draw it out.”

  The mention of Paige broke her out of the frightened, frozen state. Rachel moved instantly, rushing toward him and fully ready for him to make a lashing or stabbing gesture. In fact, she hoped for it.

  He did exactly as she’d expected. He slashed for her throat, grinning maniacally at her. She didn’t know if he was crazy or cocky (or maybe a bit of both) but she reacted instantly. When he finished off his slashing motion, she reached out and grabbed his arm. She wrenched it, causing him to drop the knife right away. She then screamed, letting out months of pent-up anger and frustration. With his arm in her grasp, she flipped him hard to the right, nearly lifting his entire body from the bed and over her shoulder. The result was Alex Lynch sailing through the air and slamming hard into her father’s wall. He left a huge dent, breaking through the drywall as he collapsed to the floor.

  Yet somehow, he was laughing the entire time. This was all fun to him, a game and nothing more. That’s how it seemed, anyway.

  Fuming and shaking a bit, Rachel followed up. She took one lunging step toward Lynch and all she could think about was killing him. But at the same time, as she drew back her right hand to demolish his face, her eyes took in the amount of blood on her father’s sheets. He was still gasping, still bleeding and trying to breathe.

  She allowed herself to dole out the punch. It slammed unto the cheek on the left side of Lynch’s face, and it felt good. It was almost scary to understand just how badly she wanted to inflict harm on the man. But she left him there for the time being, kicking the knife to the other side of the room, skirting it under the bed.

  She went to the bed, careful not to jostle her father too much. His eyes were still very much alert but filled with pain and stark confusion. She could tell that he was at least registering who she was. He was coherent but in a world of pain. She looked back down at the sheets and saw that they continued to soak up blood. She yanked them back, seeing that Lynch had stabbed him in the gut, directly through the sheet.

  “Dad, I—”

  Lynch moved behind her, making a large stride toward the bedroom door. Rachel could feel the fury filling her as she charged in his direction, intending to block him from leaving. He had a bit of a lead on her, though, and the best she was able to do was to deliver a stiff shoulder block from behind. It hit him hard, sending him crashing into the doorframe. He cried out as he rebounded from the wall, stumbling into the living room. Rachel went out after him, realizing right away that he was heading for the door, preparing to escape. She was about to give chase, fully prepared to break an arm or a leg or even his damned neck to get him to remain immobile, when Paige’s voice spoke out into the dark living room. In the presence of Alex Lynch, it was absolutely paralyzing.

  “Mom? Is everything okay?”

  She turned in Paige’s direction and saw her tiny shape in the gloom, standing frozen at the mouth of the hallway that led into the kitchen. Rachel’s first instinct was to race to her, to protect her and do anything necessary to keep Lynch from her—hell, to keep even his rotten, evil gaze off of her.

  And it was that instinct that gave Lynch the few seconds he needed. While Rachel wrestled with her maternal instinct, Lynch dashed for the front door. It wasn’t until he opened it and hauled himself through that Rachel noticed the door frame was cracked and splintered near the top and along the center. The maniac had broken in. He’d somehow found where her father had lived and came to kill him, to put another notch in his belt.

  Horror, sadness, and an indescribable grief washed through her as her agent instincts finally took over again. Tearing her eyes away from Paige, she raced to the door, already knowing that she was too late. She couldn’t give chase because she needed to go back to check on her father, and she couldn’t leave Paige alone with him.

  She stopped at the door and watched the shape of Lynch hurry across the yard. He seemed to still be stumbling, trying to regain some sort of normal posture as he ran along. With her mind stretched in a dozen different directions, Rachel ran as hard as she could back to the bedroom where she’d awakened less than three minutes ago.

  “Mom? Is everything okay? Who was that m—”

  “No, baby,” she said as she grabbed her phone up from the nightstand, cutting on the lamp as she did so. “We might be in some trouble. So I need you to come with me and sit in the kitchen, okay?”

  “Are we—”

  “Paige, please…I hate to sound mean, but I just need you to listen to me, okay?” Rachel was walking into the kitchen now, ushering Paige along as she did so. “Sit here, at the table and just wait a bit, okay? I’m going in the bedroom with Grandpa Douglas. You are not to come in under any circumstances, okay?”

  Paige nodded, her little eyes filling with fear and uncertainty.

  “You’re okay for now,” Rachel said, already dialing 9-11. “Just sit tight, okay?”

  Again, the girl only managed a nod. Rachel walked quickly to the front door, checking to make sure Lynch hadn’t hung around, hoping to sneak back in. When she found the yard empty, Rachel closed the door, which didn’t sit properly in the cracked frame. She then hurried back to her father’s bedroom as the 9-1-1 operator picked up the line in her ear and asked about her emergency.

  “An intruder in my father’s house,” she said. “I’m an FBI agent—Rachel Gift, badge number 48-418806. The attacker was Alex Lynch and he escaped on foot no more than thirty seconds ago. My father has been stabbed in the stomach and is losing a lot of blood.”

  “Yes ma’am, have you applied a—”

  “Just get out here! The address is…Jesus, I don’t even know. Berkin Road is all I know.”

  “That’s fine Just stay on the phone with me and we’ll have someone there as quickly as we can.”

  “Thank you. But I also need you to push that information about Alex Lynch through the police—to the FBI, even, if you can. It’s urgent.”

  “I’m already on it, ma’am.”

  Rachel heard the words from the operator as she balled up the top sheet from her father’s bed and applied it to the wound. It was still gushing blood and she honestly had no idea if he was going to make it or not. It all depended on how quickly the ambulance arrived.

  “Rachel…”

  Her dad’s voice was soft and ragged, the voice of a man on the verge of sleep. When he reached for her and she took his hand, she was surprised at just how natural and comforting it felt. But what surprised her more was the flood of tears that came, along with the gasping, shuddering cry she let out as the operator asked over and over again in her ear if she was okay.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The entire ordeal was, of course, terrible. But strangely enough, the part Rachel felt the most pain over was having Paige hang out with her in a hospital waiting room in the early hours of the morning. She did manage to nod off again around 3:45, her head in Rachel’s lap and her blanket pulled over her, but it was still a distressing situation.

  The doctors were quick to let her know her father’s status. Within fifteen minutes of transferring him from the ambulance to an operating room, one of the surgeons had come out to let her know that he was quite certain her father would come through, but there would be some significant recovery time.

  The most recent update she’d gotten was that the surgery had been successful; part of his bowel had been nicked during the stabbing, but the repair had gone flawlessly. Her father was currently under sedation and being moved to an ICU room. That had been forty minutes ago—though, now at 5:07 in the morning, it felt like it had been hours instead.

  Rachel was tired, but in the strange, jittery way adrenaline caused. It was because of this that she wasn’t too sure if she should trust her eyes when she saw a familiar face hurry into the waiting room. She blinked her eyes and shifted a bit, trying not to wake Paige up as her head still rested on her lap.

  “Jack?”

  Agent Jack Rivers smiled at her in a sleepy fashion as he approached. He sat down beside her as if he’d only had to take a quick bus ride rather than make a three-hour drive in the middle of the night. “How is he?”

  “He’s…they say he’s going to be fine. Surgery went well and he’s been moved to a room. But…Jack, what are you even doing here?”

  “Well, I got pinged about a Lynch sighting…it was Director Anderson, calling at two or so in the morning. He told me what happened…that Lynch was in the same house as you?”

  She nodded, aware of how absolutely insane it sounded. “Yeah,” she said and then, in a whispered voice she told him the story of what had happened. And as she shared it, she felt fury in her heart—a cold and barbed feeling of failure and anger that came from the fact that she’d had Lynch in the same room as her and he’d managed to get away.

  “Ah, so that’s why you seem so down,” he said when she was done.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re beating yourself up over him getting away. But, Rachel…I think anyone would have reacted the way you did. Your father was seriously injured, and your heart was automatically more concerned with your daughter than beating the hell out of Alex Lynch. That makes you a good mother…not a bad agent.”

  “I think I can be both.”

  The silence that followed made her think of the moment they’d shared outside of a gas station not too long ago—a moment of rare vulnerability and freedom in which she’d allowed herself to act on impulse and kiss Jack. She didn’t feel that urge now, but the ease in which it had happened helped her to understand why she felt so comfortable and at peace now that he was here.

 

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