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Chapter Three

D EA Agent Kira Waters was about to meet her half-sisters for the first time. She was nervous, which was weird, because she didn’t get nervous anymore.

She passed a boutique, and couldn’t help checking her reflection in the glass.

Maybe she should’ve toned it down, just for today, she thought.

Maybe she should’ve worn one of those stupid pantsuits her mother had bought her instead of leggings, over-the-knee-boots, and her signature biker jacket.

But that would’ve clashed with the scarlet highlights in her short, dark auburn hair.

The coffee shop was just ahead. She told herself there was nothing to be nervous about as she tapped over the sidewalk, and finally through the doors out of the winter cold and into the café.

She scanned the tables and spotted the women.

Had to be them. Two blondes, one butterscotch, the other platinum, and a curly brunette.

All three had long hair, making her self-conscious about her short cut.

The brunette glanced her way, saw her looking back, and nudged the others. They all smiled and got to their feet to greet her with awkward hugs.

“Toni Rio,” said the brunette.

Her face would’ve been familiar even if Kira hadn’t seen her picture. She was a bestselling author of true crime novels.

“You’re pretty well known around the DEA, Toni. I’m gonna get a lot of mileage out of being your sister.”

“And maybe I’ll get a little research out of being yours?” she said, lifting her brows, making it a question.

Kira laughed it off, and turned to the platinum blonde in the pretty yellow sundress, who had the tiniest baby bump ever. “You’re Cait,” she said.

“I am. So good to meet you, Kira.”

“You, too,” she said. Toni had told her on the phone that Cait was expecting. “When are you due?”

“Not until June,” Cait replied with a quick, raised-eyebrow look at the third woman, who had to be Joey.

Joey shook her head and said, “My intuition says mid-May.” Then, “Great to meet you, Kira.”

“You too, Joey.” Kira knew about this one.

In addition to talking to Toni by phone, she’d researched all of them before coming to meet them.

Of course she had. She was a cop, it’s what she did.

Joey was a self-proclaimed psychic, and by all accounts, a pretty good one, though Kira didn’t believe in that sort of thing.

They all sat down, half-sisters with the same father, who’d only recently learned of each other’s existence.

Kira ordered a coffee, and then there was a lot of getting-to-know-each-other chit-chat.

Toni was the only one who’d been raised by the man who’d fathered them all, and Kira was full of questions about him, but about halfway through, she sensed there was something else on their minds, so she stopped talking, sipped her coffee, and looked at each of them, waiting.

Toni said, “There’s one more of us. And even with my resources, we haven’t been able to find her. We’re hoping you might be able to help.”

Kira frowned as Toni tapped her phone and handed it to her.

“She’s in danger,” Joey said. “I feel it right to my bones.”

Kira was looking at the photo of another half-sister. She’d inherited a little more of their father’s Latin blood, like Toni had, naturally brown skin and huge brown eyes. “She’s beautiful,” she said. “What’s her name?”

“Lexia Stoltz,” Toni said.

Kira’s head came up fast. “ Doctor Lexia Stoltz?”

The other three nodded.

Kira looked across at Joey. “You’re right. She is in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” Toni asked. She looked like she’d jump into the middle of it without much provocation, whatever it was.

“The kind I can’t tell you about,” Kira said.

The other three looked at her expectantly, almost willing her to say more, and she looked away, then back again, and felt compelled to tell them something.

“She hasn’t done anything illegal or anything like that.

But … the DEA is looking for her, too. And we’re not the only ones. ”

The genius Dr. Elliot Stoltz had died in his sleep only three weeks after they’d arrived at the massive, Adirondack log cabin.

Six months after that, Lexi was still there.

She’d driven the U-Haul back to pick up her car, put the house on the market, and wrapped herself up in the cabin like a big warm blanket.

Her mother had loved the place, from what she remembered. It was odd how her most vivid memories of her mom were set there. And they were happy memories; blurry, sketchy, happy memories. But they comforted her.

Lexi had only been five when her mom had died. And her father had grown steadily colder and more hateful toward her every day since. Maybe he had been before, and her mother’s love had protected her from realizing it. Maybe she’d just been too young to remember.

“He’s a great man, Lexi,” her mother had told her. “He’ll save a lot of lives. But in some ways, he’s helpless too. Our job is to take care of him so he can take care of the world. In that way, we save lives, too.”

She remembered that. Those words of her mother’s had been repeated to her over and over.

Always she’d emphasized how different her dad was, how brilliant men didn’t feel emotions the way others did, and how she must never take that personally, and never let it sway her from caring for him, enabling him to do his great work.

She still didn’t know what had killed her father.

He’d left explicit instructions for his remains, forbidding autopsy or obituary, and requesting immediate cremation.

There was nothing all that mysterious about a man of eighty-two suffering dementia or dying in his sleep.

And since he’d have hated the notion of her interfering with his final wishes, she hadn’t.

She’d been surprised to learn that everything he’d owned had been quietly transferred into her name a month before his death.

She wondered if he’d known, somehow, that he was out of time.

And she wondered why he’d given everything to her when he’d always seemed to hate her, and why he’d always seemed to hate her.

Her mother had insisted he was just emotionally crippled, but it sure felt like hate to Lexi.

She wondered if coming up here to die had somehow made him feel closer to her mother, the way it did her. She wished she’d asked her questions while he was still alive.

“Who am I kidding?” she asked aloud. “He wouldn’t have told me anyway.”

Jax looked up at her from his spot on the rug, as close to the fireplace as he could get without singeing his yellow fur.

Lexi sat in a rocker only a little bit further from the warm, yellow flames.

It was good up here. Quiet. Comfortable.

Serene. It was the perfect place for her to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

Odd how hard that was. Caring for her father had been her prime directive for so long, she hardly knew what to do now that he was gone.

The wind outside moaned a little louder than before, compelling her to get up and wander to the nearest window.

The place had lots of windows, tall, broad ones that followed the lines of the steeply peaked cathedral ceilings in the great room.

They provided a panoramic view of the snow-covered pines and the mountains all around the place.

An eighteen-foot spruce tree stood in front of the tallest of them, decked in soft white lights and nothing else.

The tree farmer had sent his teenage sons up with it a week ago, lights already attached. She hadn’t put another thing on the tree, and she rarely even bothered to plug it in. She kind of liked the serenity of the darkness with nothing but the orange and yellow fireplace flames to break it.

Nighttime was different up here, she thought, gazing outside. Star-spangled and natural. Alive and real. Nothing like night had been downstate. The night up here spoke in whispers, but at least it spoke.

The house tended to creak in response to the wind outside. It was as if the night moaned a question and then the house creaked an answer.

She paced away from the window, bending to stroke Jax’s head when he twisted around her calves. There was nothing out there. Just forests and lakes and the speck-on-the-map town of Pine Lake a few miles down the mountain, where old men still sat around a checkerboard in the general store.

She ought to go back to bed, try to sleep, she supposed. She turned toward the curving staircase and started up it.

Then she stopped dead in her tracks and listened to what sounded absurdly like an upstairs window scraping open.

A heartbeat later, the doorbell chimed, and she almost jumped out of her skin. No one visited her up here. Especially not in the middle of the night.

Her stomach turned queasy as she tried to decide which to investigate first. She turned toward the door, because a doorbell was certainly real, while a weird noise her brain interpreted as an upstairs window scraping open, was probably not.

Maybe it was a hunter who’d got himself lost. Or maybe one of the locals needed something. Still, there was a tingling along her nape, and her hand on the doorknob trembled a little as she turned it and pulled the door open.

The man who stood on the other side of it looked … desolate. A face of harsh angles, and eyes that held no light. Dark hair that had gone too long without a trim, and a face in need of a shave. Thick, expressive brows. Black jacket, jeans, boots.

He was looking her over just as carefully, and she shivered a little in her white flannel nightgown and bare feet.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I hope so.” There was something about his deep, rough voice that made her nerve endings go alert and tense. “I’m looking for Dr. Elliot Stoltz.”