Hard Evidence
"Who's the DB?"
"I was hoping you could make him. Looks like she lit him up with her little twenty-two—a couple slugs to the chest. The son of a bitch didn't make it three steps inside the house before she popped him."
A vicious sense of satisfaction surged through Julian.
Good for you, Tess.
But the feeling was quickly washed away by his certainty that Tessa had been terrified when she'd pulled that trigger. She'd been fighting for her life and had killed a man—and he hadn't been here.
"The question is, how'd he get in?" Irving walked to the back door, checked the lock, then turned to face Julian. "Either she let them in, or they had a key."
"She wouldn't have unlocked the door—not unless it was someone she felt certain she could trust." Julian forced his mind to think through it. "The guy in the bag is proof that she didn't trust them. She doesn't usually carry the pistol. She would have had to run and get it. She must have known something was wrong before they got in."
That probably meant they'd had a key.
Two people knew where he lived, but only one of them had a key to the house.
Dyson.
The realization left him feeling hollow, sick, utterly betrayed. He had known it had to be someone close to Dyson, but he'd hoped to God it wasn't Dyson himself.
That's when Julian saw it—a small silver disk sitting in the middle of the table. It looked like the disk from a high-end digital camera. Dread knotted in his gut, the images from the e-mail Burien had sent Tessa flashing through his mind.
"That doesn't belong to you?" Irving asked.
Julian shook his head, held out his hand for a pair of nitrile gloves.
Irving slapped the gloves into his palm. "You don't have to look at it."
"Yeah, I do." Julian pulled on the gloves, picked up the disk by its edges, and carried it back to his office, surprised to see it that the door was still closed and intact. He unlocked it, saw that his files were still there, his computer untouched. Clearly, they'd come for Tessa and weren't concerned about his evidence. Or perhaps the shots Tessa had fired had made them jumpy, forced them to hurry.
Almost unable to breathe, he booted up his computer, placed the disk in a plastic adapter case, and loaded it, watching as his multimedia program launched, the seconds ticking by like hours.
A blurry image opened on his screen. Tessa her head down, golden curls hiding her face, her hair swaying back and forth as if she were walking or being carried. And then a man's voice.
"A bit of Mexican tar, and there's no fight left in her."
Heroin.
They'd drugged her.
Julian felt his teeth grind.
The camera pulled back enough to show Tessa being led toward the front door, a man's arms beneath hers, holding her up. She looked dangerously close to a fatal overdose, her body almost limp, her head nodding as if she were barely conscious.
But she was alive. At least she was alive.
"No!" She gave a weak cry, made a helpless effort to twist away.
Julian's gut burned with helpless rage.
Then the man's hand grabbed Tessa's hair and jerked her head back.
"Say hi to the camera! Say hi to Darcangelo!"
"Julian?" She searched for him as if she expected to find him standing there, hope slowly fading from her eyes, tears spilling onto her cheeks. Then she seemed to focus on the camera, her words slurred. "The camera crew… let the lion kill… the cheetah cubs. That's okay. They did… their job."
Pain ripped through Julian's chest as he realized what she was trying to say.
Despite the drug, despite her fear, she was trying to send him a message. She was trying to tell him to stick to his assignment—even if it meant letting Burien brutalize and kill her.
Julian swallowed the rock in his throat, forced himself to keep watching.
"Whatever, sweetheart." The man who held her up laughed, clearly mistaking her words for drug-induced babble. 'Take a good look, Darcangelo, because we're going to make a star out of her. Next time you see her, she'll be on DVD!"
Not a fucking chance, asshole!