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7

FBI Field Office, Lexington, South Carolina

Special Agent JD Maddox took another look through the crime scene photos.

He was used to seeing death. It was never pretty, but it was part of his job, and so…yeah, he’d learned to live with it. Although it was particularly obscene when that death came by way of a lead round traveling at over a thousand miles per hour.

Cooper Greenlee’s sightless eyes stared out at him from the picture. The man had fallen against a wall. Or rather, he’d died sitting propped against the wall, his legs sticking out straight and his hands lying palm-up at his sides as if he’d been a ragdoll arranged on a shelf by a child.

The photo might’ve looked uninteresting, mundane even, if the contents of Greenlee’s skull hadn’t been painted across the wood paneling behind his head.

“I’m having a hard time believing Rollins would do this.” He shook his head as he continued to examine the photos fanned out across his desktop.

“Is this your first day as an agent?” Keplar snorted his derision from his spot at the desk to JD’s right. “You don’t think a hardened criminal would take out another hardened criminal?”

Ryan Keplar had been JD’s partner for the last six months. Ever since JD had joined the most considerable joint task force the state of South Carolina had ever put together.

It hadn’t been an easy partnership. Keplar was old school. A guy who believed the badge made him bulletproof. The kind of fed who preferred tough talk over tactical negotiations.

The first time JD met Keplar, the older man had crossed his arms and looked down his nose at JD like JD was a teenager offering him a shady-looking ID, and Keplar was the bouncer deciding whether to let him into the club.

Not much has changed since then , JD mused and stuffed the photos back into the file folder they’d been delivered in.

“They just seemed so close, you know?” He watched his partner closely. “More like friends than former cellmates. I can’t picture Rollins pulling the trigger.”

“Rollins and Greenlee were both felons,” Keplar insisted. “Neither one of them got the title by being an upstanding individual. A nine-millimeter slug made chunky salsa out of Greenlee’s gray matter, and now Knox Rollins is on the run. You do the math.”

“But why?” JD shook his head. “Why murder his friend and partner?”

“Why else?” Keplar waved a dismissive hand. “He probably cut a deal with the cartel. Probably told them he wouldn’t take the witness stand if they agreed to give him a big payout and a chance to make his way to a non-extradition country.”

Keplar had been reviewing the CCTV footage he’d asked their counterparts in Chicago to provide. But he glanced away from his computer screen to pin JD with an irritated look. “Maybe they both cut the deal, but Rollins decided to kill Greenlee and keep all the cash for himself. Or hell, maybe Greenlee refused to go along with the plan, so Rollins removed Greenlee’s piece from the board.”

“You really believe that?” JD watched Keplar’s eyes. “You really believe it was that simple?”

“Occam’s razor, kid,” Keplar said with an arrogant snort a second before his cell phone jangled to life. He snagged it out of his suit jacket on the second ring. “Special Agent Keplar.” His south-Georgia drawl sounded soft and round to JD’s Lowcountry ears.

JD couldn’t hear whoever was on the other end of the call, but he surmised from Keplar’s side of the conversation that it was the agents in the Windy City.

“Damn,” Keplar continued. “Well, thanks for checking. And thanks for sending over the footage. I’ll keep going through it. Just in case.”

“I take it Rollins’s brother hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him?” JD said once Keplar thumbed off his phone and stuffed it back into his jacket pocket.

“Agent O’Toole gets the impression Knox and his brother aren’t close. So maybe we were wrong to assume that’s where Knox was headed.”

“Then what the hell was he doing in Indiana?”

After discovering Greenlee’s body, they’d spent nearly thirty-six hours trying to pick up Knox Rollins’s trail. They’d about run out of ideas when a state trooper who’d seen their APB caught sight of Knox exiting a Flying J Travel Center. The trooper hadn’t been able to follow Knox. He’d gotten distracted when the semi-truck trailer waiting in the diesel line had been T-boned by a sixteen-year-old in a souped-up Dodge Charger. But luckily, the trooper had been able to call in the sighting while simultaneously going to help with the wreck.

Knox had been long gone by the time JD and Keplar got their people to the travel center to check out the trooper’s tip. But they’d pulled the security footage and confirmed Knox Rollins had, indeed, been there.

The camera angle had been bad. And Knox had only appeared on the screen for a few seconds. But there was no mistaking the man’s eerily light eyes or the large cowlick that made the hair on his right temple stick up straight.

“Maybe he’s trying for Canada?” Keplar mused now, going back to the footage. “That border is porous as hell, especially around the Great Lakes and…” He trailed off as he eagerly leaned toward his monitor. “Well, shit on my biscuit and tell me it’s butter. Would you look at that?” He pointed a stubby, blunt-nailed finger at his screen.

JD scooted his rolling chair across the three feet separating their desks. Planting his duty shoes on the polished floor brought him to a sudden stop.

“Where’s this from?” He squinted at the grainy, freeze-framed image of Knox Rollins outside a set of high, wrought iron gates.

“The CCTV camera mounted to the light pole across the street from Black Knights Inc.”

JD glanced toward the bottom of the screen, where the pixilated time stamp glowed in bright white. “So Britt Rollins lied to our friends up there in Chi-Town.” He sat back in his chair, vindicated he’d been right when he’d floated the idea that Knox was spotted in Indiana because he was running up to see his brother.

“Seems so.” Keplar used his mouse to restart the video and frowned when another figure entered the frame. “But who the hell is that?”

JD leaned forward once again. The strong, chemical smell of Keplar’s cheap aftershave tunneled up his nose. He breathed through his mouth as he looked at the second figure.

It was clear it was a woman. She had long dark hair and wore a shiny blue raincoat. But beyond that…nada. The footage was too blurry. Even still, he pointed at the image and asked Keplar, “Does she look familiar to you?”

Keplar barely spared her grainy photo a glance before declaring, “Never seen her before. Probably some transient Rollins picked up on the trip.”

JD studied the face on the screen while shooting a side-long look at his partner. He was surprised Keplar wasn’t more curious about this second player. “If I was on the lam for murder and double-crossing the government, the last thing I’d do is stop for nookie.”

“When you’ve been on the job as long as I have, you learn not to apply logic or reason to felons and conmen. They don’t think like we do.”

JD let the subject die a quick death since it was clear Keplar had no stomach to pursue it further. “So, we’re headed to Chicago, I take it? You want me to call Agents O’Toole and Douglas and let them know we’re on our way?”

“Hold off on that.” Keplar shook his head. “I don’t want them jumping the gun and going back to that motorcycle shop. Knox Rollins is our Frankenstein’s monster. I want to be the one to bring him in.” Something moved in Keplar’s eyes that made the hair on the back of JD’s neck lift. “Or bring him down.”