Allison Brennan - Stalked

She’d looked at Reva’s personnel files earlier and sent Noah points to reverify-such as her legal name, her hometown, her parents and sibling information. She was so chatty Lucy knew a lot about her, and nothing in her file contradicted anything that she’d said.

Margo was from New York City, which gave her a connection with the location. She was quiet, smart, wasn’t friendly with most of the new agents. It didn’t surprise Lucy that she and Margo had become friends, but that Margo and Reva had seemingly bonded was odd.

Jason Aragon was older and mature, a lawyer, and according to his personnel file he took on cases and causes that most would shy away from. He’d never been married, but according to his file he had been engaged once, right out of law school. His fiancee was killed in front of him during a gang-related shooting in Los Angeles-wrong place, wrong time. He’d become an anti-gang crusader, and his personal statement indicated he wanted to work the anti-gang task force as a special agent. He had extensive knowledge of gang activity and warfare, plus an acute understanding of the law. He’d made a name for himself as a prosecutor going after the most violent offenders, at great personal risk.

Lucy had known him four weeks and he’d never talked about his past. He wasn’t chatty like Reva, but why hadn’t any of this come up?

What was she thinking? She knew why-because he didn’t want to talk about it. Just like she didn’t want to talk about her past. Some things were better left unsaid.

Jason had no connection to the East Coast in any way, but an event like what had happened to his fiancee would change him.

She switched databases and using Noah’s log-in checked to see if there was a case file on the nine-year-old shooting. Nothing federal.

She made a note to look into that case deeper, then went on to Alexis Sanchez.

She’d been recruited out of the Denver FBI office after she applied for a special agent position. She was highly desirable because of her accounting background.

Marital status: Divorced, Carl Sanchez.

Lucy frowned and made a note. She thought Alexis was still married. Didn’t she mention a husband? Or did she say “ex-husband”? Lucy couldn’t remember the specific verbiage, but she definitely believed from their conversations that Alexis was married.

She had a four-year-old daughter, Melissa Camille Sanchez, born in Denver.

Lucy relaxed a bit. Husband or ex-husband, Alexis still had family issues to deal with, and it couldn’t be easy being two thousand miles away from her daughter. She’d mentioned that her mother-in-law was watching the child and that she didn’t like Alexis, which would make it doubly difficult.

But it was one small discrepancy between what Alexis had said and the truth.

Noah came in. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “Have you found anything?”

“Nothing major, but I’m looking. I’m halfway done.”

“Good.” He sat down, not behind the desk but on the couch. “I talked to Stockton about Rich Laughlin.”

“I wish you hadn’t. I didn’t intend to use our friendship.”

“You’re not. Your instincts were dead-on. Last year, in the middle of Laughlin’s joint undercover operation with DEA to take down a major international drug operation centered in Detroit, he lost his partner. She was DEA, but what Laughlin didn’t know at the time was that she had a personal vendetta. She’d grown up on the streets of Detroit, lost friends and family to the drug war. She came back to fight it. From what Stockton said, she was extremely good at her job, extremely bold. In undercover work bold is good-but it can also make you reckless.

“Just before she was killed, Laughlin told her to back down or their cover would be blown. She pushed-sacrificing herself to save Laughlin. Her actions saved a lot of people, and ultimately gave the FBI and DEA the information we needed to take down the largest and most violent gang working drugs between Detroit and Canada.”

All the pieces of the puzzle slipped into place. “She died and Laughlin believes it was because her past made her reckless.”

“Maybe it did.”

“And maybe it made her better at her job. She succeeded.”

“She died. She bled out after multiple gunshot wounds.”

“We all risk dying. The question is, was there any other way? If she hadn’t pushed, would more people have died?” No one could know, especially since they hadn’t been there.

Noah handed her a thick file. “Eyes only, Lucy. It doesn’t leave this office.”

“Thank you.” She put it in the drawer of the desk she was using and looked back at her computer screen. Noah sat at Tony’s desk. “I’m not reckless, Noah.”

“I never said you were.”

Lucy viewed Laughlin in a completely different way. His anger and rage, focused on Kate-who had been part of a clandestine operation that ended up with both her fiance and partner dying and Kate going off the grid for revenge-and Lucy, who had suffered at the hands of a brutal rapist and killer before taking his life. She could see how Laughlin thought they were risky as agents.

But Kate had proved herself over and over, and Lucy didn’t have a death wish. She wanted to be an agent to affect change and make a difference in the lives of innocent people and victims, not simply to take out as many sexual predators as she could before she died in the process.

Her past definitely shaped her present, but it also made her smarter and sharper, not more violent or reckless.

She put Laughlin out of her mind and focused again on digging into the background of Alexis Sanchez.

She’d graduated from Penn State in Scranton with a major in accounting. She’d had jobs in Scranton and Syracuse before moving to Denver six years ago.

Syracuse.

Sean was following a lead on Peter McMahon in Syracuse.

Alexis was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and moved to Newark after her parents divorced, when she was twelve.

New Jersey.

Rosemary Weber had lived in Newark and was the crime reporter for the major paper.

It was a connection. Tenuous, but the only connection in all these files to McMahon or Weber. Alexis had worked in Syracuse during the year Peter McMahon had fallen off the grid. She’d lived in Newark when Rachel was killed. Had they been friends? Lucy checked birthdates. Doubtful-Alexis had been seventeen at the time.

Alexis’s maiden name was Todd-that name sounded very familiar. Lucy looked over all the personnel notes and couldn’t find a “Todd”-first name or last-anywhere. But she’d seen the name recently. In a newspaper article?

In Tony’s notes.

The name Todd had been in Tony’s original file, the one that had been stolen from his office.

Lucy carefully read Alexis’s entire file, focusing on the background check from her childhood. And there it was:

Camille Todd.

When Alexis was seventeen, her twelve-year-old sister, Camille, was abducted-one week before Rachel McMahon. But Camille’s body wasn’t found for nearly a year.

There was nothing else in Alexis’s file about her sister’s murder. Alexis went to college, moved to Denver, and seemed to have no contact with New Jersey after. Her father remained in Trenton, retired career military, and her mother remained in Newark, where she’d died of breast cancer three years ago. Alexis had a brother, Kip, who lived in New York-

— Kip Todd. Weber’s research assistant.

Suzanne had mentioned him when Lucy and Sean were in New York Saturday. He was a grad student at Columbia and would know how to make Weber’s files disappear in archives.

“I got it, Noah,” Lucy said. “Can you check if there’s a federal case on the abduction and murder of Camille Todd? Same year as Rachel McMahon.”