Rachel Dylan - Picture Perfect Murder

Her blue eyes were bright as she fixed her gaze on him. “My missions were classified. As a special agent with the FBI, I’m sure you can very well appreciate the sensitivity here. But I worked in the field.”

“How could you not think your career as a CIA agent was relevant to this investigation?”

“The guy clearly isn’t going after me because of my CIA background. My CIA life is over. It’s been over.”

“I didn’t say that the killer was someone in the CIA, but that expands the circle of connections you have in a unique way that we have to consider. How long have you been out?”

“Nine months.”

“That’s not that long, Lily. Why did you leave?”

“I’ve already said enough for now. I really don’t want to talk about the past anymore. I want to figure out how to catch this guy. If we can leverage my skills to do it, then I’m all for it. But what I’m not going to do is give you a play-by-play of my career at the CIA, not to mention the fact that I can’t.”

Lily was hiding even more than he had imagined. And he noticed something else. For the first time he saw pain in her eyes. Something bad had happened to her while she was at the CIA, and she didn’t want to talk about it or perhaps couldn’t. “Can you at least tell me what geographic regions of the world you worked?”

“Primarily Europe. I’m fluent in both French and German.”

He was impressed. This woman was not only smart, beautiful and tenacious—she was dangerous. He’d heard many stories about field operatives with the CIA. They were tough and even deadly when they had to be. “We can’t rule out that the killer is somehow connected to someone you knew while at the CIA, or that there’s a possible link between someone in your CIA past and the other victims.”

“Do you realize how many people I came into contact with at the Agency? That would be quite an expansive list spanning the entire world. I realize you want to be thorough, but I doubt that anyone I dealt with knows any of the victims.” She let out a breath.

“You’re probably right about that point, but we can’t discount the possibility that there could be a common link between the victims. So I’m still going to need names of people you associated with.”

“All right. I’ll make a list.”

“And you aren’t going to like my next question, either, but I have to ask it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you currently seeing anyone?”

“You mean like a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” he replied.

She looked down at her coffee cup. “No. There’s no one.”

“What about your exes? I’ll need to run them down, starting with the most recent.”

“The list is pretty short.”

“Still, I’ll need it.”

“Well, there’s only been one boyfriend of any significance.”

He nodded. “And what’s his name?”

“James Dexter.” She stood up, poured more coffee and handed him back his cup.

“I’ll run him down just to make sure he’s in the clear and isn’t connected in any way to the other victims.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“He’s dead,” she said quietly.

He wasn’t expecting that answer. He reached out and touched her hand. “I’m so sorry, Lily. What happened?”

Lily looked up at him as a single tear fell down her cheek. “I killed him.”

FOUR

“Did you just say that you killed him? As in literally?” Rex looked into the big blue eyes of the woman in front of him. And even though she said she’d worked for the CIA, she definitely didn’t seem like a cold-blooded killer to him.

“I had no choice but to take action against James,” she said, barely audible.

“Tell me what happened.” His heart pounded as he waited to hear her explain.

“It’s a long story.” She looked away and then took a sip of coffee. She wiped the single large tear from her cheek, and thankfully, no more tears fell.

It killed him to watch a woman cry. He hated to push her to talk, but he had to explore every avenue when it came to his investigation. “I’ve got the time. I think I need to hear this.”

She nodded. “On my last mission with the Agency, I found out that James was working both sides. Basically, a double agent.”

This was only getting worse. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She’d obviously gone through a lot. “So James was a traitor.”

“Exactly. And if you would’ve asked me to pick out someone on our team who was capable of selling this country out, he would’ve been the last one on my list. He was always so loyal, or so I thought. A real team player who would go the extra mile to help anyone who needed it. Now I can see that his attentiveness was really just opportunism, which allowed him to gain information that he could exchange for money.”

“That’s the way people like that work, Lily. They are master manipulators. That’s how they can get away with it for so long. The FBI also has its fair share of traitors. It makes me sick.”

“Well, imagine how it made me feel,” she said in a raspy voice. “This was my boyfriend. Someone I thought I was potentially going to marry. The man I saw myself spending my entire life with. I don’t think I have to spell out how much that hurt me.”

“What did the Agency think about your relationship?”

She shrugged. “We tried to keep it quiet. But I think they knew and didn’t care. There are a lot of romantic relationships that occur within the CIA, especially among field agents. We were both highly effective operatives. The most important thing from the Agency’s perspective was that we were getting the job done. We both had stellar reviews and were climbing up the ladder. There was even talk about one of us being promoted to the third in command at one of the embassy hot spots. Which would’ve been a feat for someone our age. James was only two years older than me.”

“So what happened on this last mission?”

“James wasn’t even supposed to be there. Not from the CIA side anyway. I was working by myself. I can’t go into the operational details of the mission because that’s still classified.”

“I understand.”

“But I was meeting with one of my assets, and James showed up. He killed the person right there on the spot before I could get the critical information that I needed from them. It was in that moment that I knew he was working both sides. The realization hit me like a sledgehammer. I’ll never forget that exact moment as long as I live. Talk about life changing.”

“So you killed him in self-defense,” he said softly.

She nodded. “I could say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but honestly in that moment it was a pure survival reflex. I knew he was about to pull the trigger. He’d just killed my asset, and then he turned and pointed the gun at me. So I did the only thing I could do. I got the shot off before he could shoot me first.”

He reached out and grabbed her hand. “Lily, no one should have to go through something like that.”

“It was the lowest point of my life. Then I had to go back to the Agency and explain the entire situation. Literally over and over again. I was polygraphed three times by three different examiners. I was put on leave during the internal investigation. All of James’s subterfuge came out, but it was a long and difficult process. And because of our relationship and the way things ended, I was also considered a security risk. So they had to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t a double agent, too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“At the end of the day, my name was completely cleared. But the damage was already done as far as I was concerned. I never went back to work, even after they told me I could. I left the Agency and moved here to my hometown. Started my photography business. A totally new and fresh start doing something radically different.”