Allison Brennan: Love me to death

She leaned forward and hugged him. “Thank you.” She swallowed back tears that had sprung to her throat. “This means a lot.” She frowned.

“What? I hope those are tears of happiness.”

She squeezed her fingers against her eyes to dry them. “Maybe I’m having doubts.”

“Don’t. You’re smarter than most of the agents I went to Quantico with. And you have common sense and compassion.”

“I panicked-”

“I didn’t see you panic. No one did, which means you handled your fear. We’re all scared sometimes. The Air Force prepared me to control the fear, because that’s what soldiers have to do to survive. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and fear, when we control it, makes us smarter.”

Noah hesitated, then said, “I was skeptical about you when we first met. I knew about your past, and I didn’t think you should be in the FBI. Abigail told me not to judge you until I met you, but I did anyway. A hazard in this profession, snap judgments. But you’re nothing like I expected, and I realized we need more like you in the Bureau.”

Lucy took a deep breath, Noah’s support filling her with a deep joy that surprised her. She smiled widely. “Thank you.”

Inside the bank ten minutes later, Lucy was alone in a small room, Mick Mallory’s safe deposit box open in front of her. Inside was an antique pewter box, dirt caked in the cracks of the intricate, stamped design.

She didn’t want to touch it. She stared at it for so long that the bank manager came in to make sure she was okay. Lucy nodded, and after the manager left, she held her breath and lifted the lid from the box.

No care had been taken with the jewelry. It was thrown in together, the chains of necklaces tangled. Except for one small white box.

She took out that box and put it aside, releasing her pent-up breath. Nothing here could hurt her. She saw her ring, the one Adam Scott had pulled from her finger. Bile rose from her throat and she knew she was right-she didn’t want it.

But if she were dead, would her parents want it? Would it remind them of her life, or of her death? She couldn’t make that decision. She wasn’t going to make it for others.

She was about to put the white box back inside and close everything, planning to tell Noah to let the Bureau contact the families and ask them if they wanted the items. But her curiosity about what was inside the smaller box compelled her to open it. Scott thought this was important. Special. Why?

Inside was a gold locket. She didn’t know much about jewelry, but this looked real.

She took the locket from the box and held it up. It was tarnished and needed cleaning, but it was solid. Engraved on the front were the initials MEP.

Her blood ran cold.

She opened the locket to see if she was right, even though she knew she was.

She now knew the truth. Worse, Mallory knew she would know what this was. He’d put an impossible choice in her hands.

She wished she’d never opened the box.

Sean didn’t ask Lucy why she needed to go to the U.S. Senate Chambers late Monday afternoon. He drove her there. He didn’t even balk when she told him she needed to go into the building alone, though she accepted his help in walking inside.

“Do you mind waiting down here?” she asked after they went through security.

“I’m not moving until you get back. You do whatever you have to do, and I’ll be right here.”

She kissed him lightly, then turned and walked on her single crutch to the elevator bank.

She entered Senator Jonathon Paxton’s office and the receptionist, Ann Lincoln, said, “Lucy! What happened?”

“I’m a klutz,” she said, refusing to explain to anyone what happened last week. “The senator is expecting me.”

“He’s still on the floor-”

“He said he’d come up when I arrived. Can I wait in his office?”

“Just a minute,” Ann said and called the senator.

Lucy looked at the pictures on the wall. Senator Paxton signing Jessie’s Law, with Jessie’s mother standing at his shoulder. The senator at a rally to support legislation to put child molesters in prison longer. The senator at his daughter’s memorial service, her senior portrait in the background of the picture.

Monique Paxton looked an awful lot like Lucy. She’d always known she had a resemblance to the senator’s dead daughter, and she suspected that was the reason he’d bonded with her and helped her over the years.

But now … maybe there were other reasons.

Ann called from her desk, “Jonathon said you can wait in his office. He’ll be right up.”

“Thank you.”

She walked into his office and closed the door. Her heart raced. Maybe she didn’t deserve to be an FBI agent.

But then again she would never be able to prove that Senator Jonathon Paxton was behind the vigilante group.

When she saw the locket, everything had become crystal clear. The senator’s involvement in WCF. His close relationship with Fran Buckley. His personal wealth and how he used it.

Senator Paxton’s daughter Monique was Adam Scott’s first victim. It was no coincidence that Mallory wanted this box that happened to contain Monique’s locket, the locket that her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday. Mallory had known it was in Adam Scott’s box.

But it was circumstantial evidence, and Buckley and Mallory hadn’t said a word about Paxton. Unless one of them turned-and Lucy didn’t think either of them would-Paxton’s involvement would simply be an unsubstantiated rumor.

One thing Mallory had said when she spoke with him earlier in the week had been bothering Lucy.

I don’t regret the killing of Morton .

An odd way of speaking. Her subconscious had picked up on it, but she hadn’t realized the importance of the phrasing until now. Mallory had said “I killed” in relation to the other victims, but not Morton. There was no doubt Mallory had been there-the evidence proved it, as well as his own statement-and Noah said he’d signed a statement identifying each man he killed. It included Morton.

But he’d been speaking deliberately. For her benefit.

I don’t regret the killing of Morton .

Mallory hadn’t pulled the trigger. The reason Morton had been lured to D.C. was so the senator could kill him.

Lucy realized suddenly that she didn’t want to see Senator Paxton. What he’d done was wrong, but she couldn’t confront him, nor could she tell anyone what she believed in her heart. That he was guilty of murder.

She couldn’t even hate him for it.

She scribbled a note and put the box on his chair, then left out the escape door, the exit that led directly to the hall from the senator’s office. She didn’t look back.

Senator Paxton stepped into his office.

“Lucy, it’s-”

He heard the click of his side door and frowned. He almost went after her, but saw something on his chair.

Heart racing, he picked up the small white box. It couldn’t be … He removed the lid and stared at the gold locket, tears rolling down his cheeks. Monique .

Monique’s mother had died of cancer when she was still young, and Paxton had raised Monique on his own. Not very well, however. He loved her more than anything, but he’d been so wrapped up in his career that he hadn’t paid enough attention to her. He hadn’t been involved in her day-to-day life. He’d been a distant father, so distant he hadn’t known that she was traveling a hundred miles nearly every weekend to visit her boyfriend-Adam Scott.

He’d loved her, but didn’t realize how important she was to him until she disappeared.

For years he’d believed she ran away, and he blamed her, then himself. He wanted her back so he could beg her forgiveness for his substantial failings as a dad. Until six years ago when he learned what really happened to her. Roger Morton had leveraged that information, as well as the financial information, in exchange for leniency. Senator Paxton had supported the plea agreement because he had to know the truth.