Allison Brennan - Cutting Edge

Emboldened, getting a sense of Maggie O’Dell, the killer, Nora continued. “She’s different. She likely has his charisma in order to convince people to help her, but she has less control of her temper. She’s both organized and disorganized. She’s ruthless. And it’s all personal.”

Nora paced, putting herself in Maggie’s shoes. What would it be like growing up knowing your mother was in prison for trying to blow up a nuclear reactor? Visiting her every month. Hearing the stories about saving these animals and those trees and stopping a developer from building on a pristine meadow practically single-handed. And the exaggerations …

The stories .

“Lorraine romanticized everything, exaggerated the good and the bad,” Nora said. “We’d be involved in some demonstration and she’d be pushed by a cop. That night the story turned into she was beaten with a billy club and she was lucky to be alive. Or if she freed research animals, it was fifty and she found homes for all of them, rather than twenty animals she’d released into the wild. All bait for larger predators.”

And Cameron. Nora remembered exactly what Lorraine said on the stand.

“Cameron didn’t have a gun. He despised guns, just like I did. Nora brought it with her, and Cameron took it.”

A flat-out lie, but Lorraine likely believed it because she wanted to. She was a pathological liar, which had been proven during her trial. What had Lorraine told Maggie about her father? About what they’d done and how they’d lived? What had their mother said about Nora?

“You think that Lorraine convinced Maggie that before the arrest, your family had an idyllic life?”

Nora nodded. “And I stole that life from her. That’s why Maggie wrote that letter highlighting the cases where I was undercover. I had ‘betrayed’ the cause and the good people who’d trusted me. That’s also why Maggie killed her cohorts. Because they betrayed her. They wanted out, and she wouldn’t let them go. Couldn’t. If they didn’t do what she wanted, they deserved to die.”

“And what about Professor Cole?”

“He had turned Anya against her. Anya turned the others. Or at least Chris. Scott Edwards, I’m not so sure. Maybe Maggie felt if she killed the other two she had to kill him as well. Or he did something that irritated her.” She squeezed her temples.

“Headache?” He crossed the room and massaged the sides of her head.

His fingers felt incredible and she relaxed. “I’m out of my area of expertise here. I don’t understand psychopathic killers any more than I understand-” She searched her brain. “-how to launder money. Hooper gave us all a crash course when he got here, but I was completely lost.”

“You understand more than you think.”

Duke kissed her temple as if his lips could cure her pain. Maybe, with a little time and privacy, they could. Nora leaned into him, giving in to his affection just for a moment.

A rap on the conference room door had Nora jumping a foot away from Duke, blushing to the roots of her hair. The receptionist walked in without waiting for an invite and handed Nora a thick stack of paper. She mumbled a thanks and looked at the information to hide her embarrassment as the woman left. But Nora pushed her personal thoughts aside: The fax was from Victorville Federal Penitentiary.

Each page had one line entry per visit. The name, date, relationship, time entering and time ending. The print was small and there were fifty or so entries per page.

April Plummer and Margaret O’Dell. Over and over. Occasionally another name Nora recognized, a few she didn’t. Theresa Lovitz visited five or six times in the first two years. Nora didn’t know who she was, but she was likely related to Cameron. A few other people visited Lorraine in the early years: Glenda Chastain. Mina Ro. Roger Nelson. As time passed, the visits from revolutionaries diminished. April still came by, sometimes with David O’Dell. And always Maggie. By the time Maggie was ten, she was visiting on her own, sometimes more than once a month. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie …

Quin Teagan. Daughter .

Nora had to go back and look again. She couldn’t be reading the logs right.

Quin Teagan. Daughter .

Nora flipped rapidly through the pages in disbelief. She went back, counted. Counted again. Twenty-three visits in the last eleven years. Twice a year Quin visited Lorraine. The first time the month she turned eighteen.

Nora wanted to believe it was a mistake. But of course it wasn’t. It was here in black and white. Quin had lied to Nora. She’d been seeing their mother all these years and had never said anything.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Duke asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Quin,” she mumbled. She shoved the papers at him, hitting the stack with her fist as he took them. Nora was shaking, her knuckles white. “My sister. All these years. Going down there to see her.”

“You mean Lorraine?” He put the papers down. “You didn’t know?”

“Damn straight I didn’t know! I told her never to talk to her.”

Duke didn’t say anything, and Nora whirled around, willing herself to stop shaking. She didn’t know if she was more angry or scared. Duke looked closely at her, uncertainty in his eyes. He still didn’t say anything. “What?” she snapped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You told Quin not to have contact with her mother.”

“Mother? That’s rich. What mother has her nine-year-old daughter making bombs? What mother has her daughters playing decoy on the docks of San Francisco at midnight while she and her friends spray-paint graffiti on the storefront of a furrier? What mother tells her daughters to throw red paint on women wearing fur coats?”

“Nora-Quin was nine when Lorraine went to prison.”

“What difference does that make?”

“She wasn’t old enough to understand.”

“Cameron left her alone in the middle of nowhere at night and my mother went along with it. Quin was always terrified of the dark.” Duke didn’t understand. Maybe he never could. Suddenly, Nora was alone again. Deeply, irrevocably, alone. She’d been lonely most of her life, and she knew better than to think that would ever change.

She turned away from Duke. She had to protect her sister. Quin was all she had. “I need to talk to her.”

“Nora, you’re not in this alone. I told you earlier-I’m not walking away.”

Duke tried to pull Nora to him, to hold her, just for a minute, to prove to her that he meant what he said. She pulled away, took several steps back. From the look on her face, she didn’t believe him. Righteous anger began to creep up within him, but dissipated when Duke realized that Nora was scared. She’d taken so very long to let him inside, even just a little, because she was terrified. She’d been alone for thirty-seven years, practically since she was born, raising herself and then Quin and never having anyone to count on.

She’d even said that the FBI agent who’d been her handler had lied to her. That must have hurt her almost as much as her mother’s selfish behavior. Maybe more, because she must have deeply trusted him in order to be his informant.

Duke watched Nora storm out of the room. His heart twisted with her pain. But there was no way he was letting her leave alone. He followed.

She needed him, whether she acknowledged it or not.

Maggie sat at the bus stop and ate an apple as she watched Quin leave her downtown Sacramento office building and walk down the street with three people from the state fire inspector’s office. Even if Quin happened to glance her way, she wouldn’t recognize Maggie. She’d put her long hair up in a baseball cap and wore sunglasses. Hardly incognito, but the disguise didn’t stand out. The sun was bright and a lot of people wore sunglasses and caps.