Allison Brennan - Cutting Edge

“You said something inside-that maybe Maggie O’Dell grew up off the grid.”

“It explains why we’re having a hard time getting any information on her. No license, no-”

He interrupted. “You grew up the same way.”

Nora shifted uneasily on her feet. “Your point?”

“What if she’s targeting you because she sees you as a traitor?”

“Our analysts are going through all my cases, looking for a possible connection. Maybe a relative or friend-”

“She doesn’t seem to need much of a reason to kill,” Duke said hotly. “It could be as simple as you being raised the ‘right’ way in her mind-fighting the ‘Establishment’-and then doing a complete one-eighty and becoming a cop.”

“That was my mother’s fight, not mine,” Nora snapped. She didn’t want to talk about her upbringing here.

“Maggie doesn’t know that. She could think that you’d infiltrated the anarchy movement because you had personal knowledge of them and could pass for one, then you had them all arrested. Maybe she’s targeting you because of your job, and she doesn’t even know you from Adam.”

“I’m a hypocrite,” Nora said.

“No!” Duke said emphatically. He reached for her, glanced at the cops all over the place, and barely grazed her arm before running his hand over his head. “I didn’t mean that, I don’t think-”

“Not you, but Maggie. Hypocrite or traitor, they’re one and the same to people like her. But you’re right about one thing. She is deranged, and if she can set her sites on Dr. Payne, Professor Cole, her best friend, and an FBI agent because of perceived slights against her personally, or a political cause, she can justify killing anyone. We have to find her damn quick or anyone who gets on her bad side is at risk.”

They didn’t have to wait an hour. Thirty minutes later, Duke and Nora were back at FBI headquarters, and Rachel followed five minutes later, breathless.

“I got Maggie O’Dell’s file!”

They brought the surprisingly thin college transcript file to the conference room. Nora opened it.

There was no photograph; there were just admissions records, grades, and a disciplinary report. There was an emergency card.

Margaret Love O’Dell. Nora had to look twice at her middle name, but it was clearly “Love.” Her birthplace was Paso Robles, a little town near San Luis Obispo on the central coast.

Nora had lived in SLO during the year before she turned FBI informant against her mother. It was where Lorraine had met Cameron Lovitz. A chill ran through her, as if her life was coming full circle. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in nearly twenty years, since the trial. She was in prison, and because a federal agent died during Lorraine’s terrorist act, she would be in prison the rest of her life.

Nora rarely thought about it, but these last few days she couldn’t avoid it.

Establishment .

It was a word her mother used regularly. Along with Industrial Complex , which had sounded so out of place in Maggie’s letter. And the questions. Don’t you care?

“Paso Robles,” Duke muttered.

Nora swallowed uneasily. “That mean something to you?”

“Russ lived there for most of his childhood.”

One more connection to the area. “Which would give him a good reason to meet with her and not think that something was unusual,” Nora said.

She looked back at the forms. “Father, David O’Dell, sixty-four. Mother, April Plummer, fifty-nine.”

April Plummer . It had to be a coincidence.

But even as Nora thought that there was no way in hell that Maggie O’Dell’s mother was the same April Plummer that Nora had known most of her childhood, Nora knew that it was.

Paso Robles, so close to where April had lived for years in SLO. Same age as April would be.

She remembered April at her mother’s trial. She wasn’t pregnant. She’d always been rail-thin. Nora would have noticed if she were pregnant, the hearings and trial went on for months and months … maybe April got pregnant after the trial. Though that would make Maggie a little young for college.

But there had been one pregnant woman at the trial.

“When was she born?” Nora cried out, a bit too loudly. “Dammit, where do they put the birthdays on these stupid forms?” She sounded panicked.

Duke pointed to a box near the top of the form.

December 12. Maggie would be twenty in December.

The timing was right.

Nora dropped the file, a hand to her stomach. She swallowed bile as she realized the unthinkable. This couldn’t be, but there wasn’t any other explanation.

She shoved the file toward Rachel. “Call the SLO field office and have them send a pair of agents to talk to David O’Dell and April Plummer about Maggie. And find out where her sister is-the one she mentioned in the letter she wrote to Anya Ballard.”

Rachel took it, looking at Nora as if her head was about to spin around. “Anything else?’

“Just that. For now.”

With Rachel gone, she breathed marginally easier.

What if she was wrong? They could be going down the wrong path. They could be wasting time. Only, she didn’t think she was wrong. She knew she wasn’t wrong.

Her mother had lied. Lying sounded exactly like something her mother would do.

Nora hated Lorraine. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing away the waves of pain and anger that washed over her like the ocean hitting rocks during a storm.

For seventeen years Nora had lived without a home, without a place to belong. For seventeen years Nora had tried to understand her mother, had wanted to please her, had done things she knew were wrong but didn’t know how to say no to the woman who’d raised her.

Until Quin was in trouble; then Nora turned. When it was Quin in danger, Nora put herself on the line. And Lorraine went to prison. But that didn’t make the pain go away. It took years before Nora was able to truly make her own path. Quin never understood why Nora refused to let her visit Lorraine in prison, why Nora didn’t visit her. They’d often argued about it, but Nora had always won.

Nora was determined that Quin would not be corrupted by their pathological liar mother.

Duke put his hands on her shoulders and made her look at him. “Nora, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath and the truth spilled out. “When my mother went to trial, she asked for leniency because she was pregnant. I didn’t even know until the pretrial motions, but it was confirmed-she was five months pregnant by that time. She had the baby right before the trial, in December, and the judge told me that the baby was put up for adoption.

“I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t want to feel any connection to the baby. I asked for no details, because as long as my mother didn’t raise the baby, he’d have a decent life.”

“He?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know if the baby was a boy or girl. I didn’t ask. I never told Quin because there was no reason to. She didn’t have to testify at the trial, why should she be dragged into everything? She was a little kid. I didn’t want that for her. I didn’t want her to live with the pain and guilt I did for so many years.”

Nora didn’t realize tears were running down her face. She was so angry-furious! — and emotionally wrung-out. Remembering the trial, what she said on the stand, the way her mother had looked at her. As if she’d cut her heart out. Betrayed her.

“April Plummer was a friend of my mom’s. Single then, as far as I knew. April was truly a flower child. She took way too many drugs in her youth and ended up kind of simple, but very sweet. We lived with her for a while-a few weeks here, a month or two there. I always thought my mother used her, manipulated her. April would do anything you wanted her to, especially for my mom.”