Page 12 of Echo, the Sniper (Men of PSI #2)

Dangerous Game

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Echo

S ETTING UP A ZOOM CALL in a hotel bathroom was a first for me.

Opening my laptop, I got online, made sure my PSI-exclusive VPN was solid, then typed in the password for the Zoom app.

In less than a minute, the laptop’s screen showed the familiar earth tones of the PSI conference room.

A few seconds later my boss and founder of PSI, Cap Fogelmann, came into view.

His salt-and-pepper hair was cut military-short, his horn-rimmed glasses no-nonsense and framed solemn hazel eyes.

Hollow vertical lines bracketed a mouth that rarely smiled, though when he did those brackets turned into boyish dimples that always struck me as frigging weird on such a serious face.

“Glad to see you and your protectee have landed someplace safe enough for you to report in,” Cap said by way of greeting, then frowned at the background behind me. “Are you sitting on the toilet?”

I sighed. “While we’re waiting for Mary Jane to find a B and B that matches my personal specs, I needed a place to hole up.

Like an idiot, I allowed Aurora Grant to decide where she wanted to stay, and she chose the Hyatt Regency downtown, across from the Denver convention center.

Standard procedure for hotel stays with a protectee is one common room, one bathroom.

That means the bathroom’s now my conference room until further notice. ”

Cap went still, his sharp eyes watchful. “Across from the convention center?”

“That’s right.”

“Coincidence?”

“No. She has questions, and after reading about me on PSI’s website—specifically that I was trained by the military as a sniper—she wants my expert opinion on what went down with Dane Grant six months ago.”

His still-dark brows quirked. “Dangerous game.”

“I’m handling it.”

“You still have your military clearance. If anything bothers you, just tell her that most of your training is classified. It won’t be a lie.”

I nodded. I’d already planned to do that, but it was nice to have confirmation. “Any news on the security footage harvested from Vigilance Security?”

“Yeah, and it’s pretty wild.”

I tensed. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Cap seesawed his hand. “It’s more like schizophrenic.

Two weeks ago, a white man wearing a hooded jacket disabled the alarm, which explains why Aurora Grant didn’t hear it go off.

However, the intruder didn’t do anything to the two security cameras in the garage, moving about freely as he first searched through every paper in the car’s glove compartment.

Then, after he apparently didn’t find what he was looking for, he kicked the tires a couple of times before tearing the entire car apart from the inside out.

Whether he did that because he was in search of something, or simply throwing a tantrum is still up for debate.

But all who’ve viewed that footage agree—it was a damn sad thing to see a Bentley get trashed. ”

I managed not to roll my eyes. “As long as everyone’s keeping their priorities straight.”

“Oh, we are. Our tech guys went over that footage with a fine-toothed comb, and they found a few points of identification. One, the guy is big—like nearing three hundred pounds and well over six feet tall. Not exactly a common build.”

“And muscular, if he tore a Bentley apart.” That took some doing.

Cap nodded. “Exactly. Also, he wore latex gloves, but a guy that big clearly didn’t find any XXL-sized gloves at his local pharmacy.

The gloves he had on were pulled so tight over his hands the two pinky rings he wore were discernable.

And lastly, every now and again glimpses of his chin and hawklike nose became visible as he butchered the Bentley.

Facial recognition software has given us an eighty-percent match. ”

Good enough for me. “Who is he?”

“Dane Grant’s business partner, Edward Terwilliger.

” Cap looked down and clicked a couple of times.

A typical corporate photo appeared on my screen on a smiling, beefy middle-aged man with a blondish-gray receding hairline, close-set eyes, a thin beard, and his most prominent feature, a large, hooked nose that any vulture would have been proud of.

Terwilliger sat on what had probably been a stool, one hand folded neatly on top of the other, with one chunky pinky ring visible.

Who the hell wore pinky rings in the 21 st century? He looked like an escapee from an 80s mafia movie.

“Where’s this guy now?” I asked, frowning at the photo until it was clicked away, and Cap was once again onscreen.

“On the run. Like Dane Grant, Edward Terwilliger was charged with several counts of fraud. The case dragged on and on through the courts, with his lawyer throwing out every obstacle known to mankind, but eventually Terwilliger was convicted in late November. Unlike Dane Grant, this guy had obviously been too slow to make any sort of deal. He’s looking at ten to fifteen years of hard time in a federal penitentiary, and there’s no way out of it.

When the day came for Edward to turn himself in and begin his sentence, he was a no-show.

A few weeks later he’s tearing up Aurora Grant’s Bentley. ”

Fucker . “To what end? She has no power over Terwilliger’s sentence. Shit, she’s a Barbie-lookalike housewife.”

“It was obvious he was looking for something,” came the thoughtful reply.

“Everyone agrees it has something to do with Dane Grant. After watching Terwilliger throw a tire-kicking tantrum, Luke also believes this guy is desperate to find whatever it is he’s looking for because the thing he’s after will somehow keep his ass out of prison. ”

I nodded, agreeing with PSI’s freakishly brilliant profiler. “Terwilliger’s a frigging moron if he thinks anything can save him now. He’s already been convicted. That’s a bell you can’t unring. It’s just a matter of time before his ass is nabbed by the authorities.”

“True. Unless he can somehow get out of the country and set up a new life in a place with no extradition treaty with the US. I hear Costa Rica is lovely this time of year.”

“That takes a crap-ton of money, Cap. As far as I know, all the company’s assets were frozen, yeah? Rory basically has nothing to her name, thanks to all of Dane Grant’s personal funds being confiscated by the authorities. The government barely left her anything to live on.”

“Rory?”

“Aurora Grant. Her friends call her Rory.”

Cap nodded once and made a note. “How is she?”

“Exhausted. Second-degree burns on her right hand, sprained ankle, bump on the head. Could’ve been worse.”

“And that, I suppose, is an excellent segue into my earlier comment about the schizophrenic aspect of what we’ve uncovered via the security footage from last night.

” Cap clicked a couple times and one half of the screen showed a black and white still shot of a hooded, ski-masked figure with a gas can in one hand right outside of what I instinctively knew was Rory’s now-destroyed bedroom door.

The figure’s other hand rested on the knob, and the sight of it froze me from the inside out.

“This guy here? He’s much smaller than Terwilliger.

See the doorframe? Most standard indoor doorframes in the US are eighty inches tall—six-point-six-seven feet tall.

This masked intruder is well under six feet—no more than five-ten, is the best estimate.

Also, thanks to the indoor cams dotted throughout the house, we were able to track his progress.

Once he got a fire going in the kitchen, he went straight upstairs to Aurora Grant’s bedroom without missing a single turn. ”

That internal icing-over got worse. “He knew where it was.”

“He knew where she was,” Cap corrected. “I grabbed this screen cap mainly because this is what the guy looked like for nearly a minute.”

“What do you mean?”

“For fifty-four seconds the intruder just stood there, hand on the knob, head down, gas can in hand, while the fire in the kitchen downstairs grew to a level where a neighbor could have noticed it and called for help, and he could’ve gotten caught. But he just... stood there.”

“What the hell was he waiting for?”

“Luke believes he was caught on the horns of some internal moral dilemma, rather than actually waiting for anything. In the full video you can see he starts to turn the knob, shakes his head, then closes the door and freezes for almost a minute before spilling the accelerant outside the bedroom door in the hallway.”

“Shit,” I muttered, trying to picture the scene, and what my imagination produced made my blood boil. “He went up to the second floor to start a fire in Rory’s bedroom.”

“Possibly even on the bed itself where she slept.”

Cap’s words rang in my ears, kicking off a mental nightmare that twisted my gut into knots.

Through long practice, I pushed that sick horror of an image into a box and shut the lid tight.

“Taking a life is harder than most people imagine, so most of us balk when it comes time to that actual moment of truth. That seems to be what happened here. This fucker came to Rory’s house for one reason only—to kill her. ”

“We came to the same conclusion.” Cap nodded, his brows knitting solemnly. “The first guy, Terwilliger, was obviously looking for something. The second guy’s first instinct seemed to be a need to kill her via fire, one of the most sadistic ways to kill someone, according to Luke.”

Goddamn it . “Rory said something like that, though she didn’t think it was two people attacking her. She thought at first someone was looking for something, and then they decided it was best just to burn everything down. A mentality of if I can’t have it, no one can , is how she put it.”

“She’s got good instincts,” Cap said, sounding both surprised and approving. That was something. It took a lot to impress Cap, so I couldn’t help but feel that win on Rory’s behalf. “Does she have any clue what Terwilliger might be looking for?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll ask her specifically about Terwilliger as soon as she wakes up. She didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I can imagine that jumping out of an inferno someone created just to kill you in the middle of the night would probably have that effect,” Cap drawled.

“As of now, you have the entirety of Private Security International behind you and this investigation, Echo. You were right to think Aurora Grant was in trouble. Whatever you need, it’s yours. ”

I blinked. “That sounds great, but uh... how much is that going to cost?”

He shook his head. “We’re all volunteering our time on this, so no worries.”

That hit me hard, and it took a moment for me to find my voice. “Thanks, Cap. And in time I’m sure Rory will thank you too, though for now I’m keeping her in the dark. She’s been through enough already.”

“Agreed. Everyone involved needs to wrap up this damn case once and for all and put it in the rearview mirror.” He gave me a long look. “Think you can do that, Echo?”

“Working on it.” Neither one of us was comfortable talking about personal things like feelings, so I looked to change the subject. “Before I let you go, I just have one other question regarding the second break-in at the Grant house.”

“Go ahead.”

“Were you able to discover why the alarms didn’t go off the second time around?”

Cap grimaced. “Our firebug disabled them. Not by cutting it like Terwilliger did, but by typing in the security code.”

Now there was a surprise. “He knew the code?”

“Yep.”

“And disabling the alarms didn’t disable the cameras?”

Cap shook his head. “Most offsite private security companies have cameras that are programmed to roll twenty-four seven, if only to protect the security company from charges of failing to fulfill their contractual obligations. Most people don’t know that when they sign a security company’s contract, they’re agreeing to keep those cameras rolling, since that info is buried in the fine print.

Or at least,” he added dryly, “that’s how we have our private security contracts drawn up.

Since we opened for business, not a year has gone by without someone suing us for a so-called failed security system.

Those cameras have saved PSI time and again by showing that it’s always human error—or worse, human duplicity—that makes a security system fail. ”

“But in this case it didn’t fail, it was shut off.” I turned that problem over in my mind. “Who would have access to that security code?”

“That’s another thing you need to ask Aurora Grant when she wakes up.”

I opened my mouth to ask a question about whether or not the authorities were going to get off their asses and do something about Terwilliger and the firebug, only to hear a muffled scream from the other room.

Without another word, I slammed the laptop shut and jetted out the door, pulling the gun from my belt holster as I went.