CHAPTER TWENTY

Mia Ripley”s gut clenched like a fist as she screeched to a halt at the ass-end of Oakwood. The 3400 block, a wasteland of weeds, broken bottles, and shattered dreams. The kind of place even the rats had the good sense to abandon.

And there, squatting like a mortally wounded beast amidst the urban decay, was Martin”s pride and joy. His baby, his Excalibur, his magnum opus on four wheels.

And it was smoking like an ancient furnace.

The fire crew had the blaze mostly licked, but smoke still twisted into the sky like a python on the make. The acrid stench sucker-punched Ripley right in the sinuses while the heat-blasted her face like Satan”s sauna.

She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat, a lump that tasted suspiciously like her heart trying to climb out of her mouth. What the hell was Martin”s car doing here, abandoned and burning like a funeral pyre in this godforsaken corner of urban hell? Her mind spun dizzying scenarios – kidnapping, carjacking, a simple malfunction turned inferno. But in her marrow, she knew this was no accident, no coincidence. This had all the hallmarks of a deliberate act; a statement written in fire and ash.

Ripley stumbled out of her car on legs that barely seemed capable of holding her weight. The ground felt unsteady beneath her boots, the world tilting on its axis as she tried to process this display of vehicular carnage. She zeroed in on a uniform, some baby-faced beat cop standing around with his thumb up his ass.

‘Hey,’ she barked. ‘Agent Ripley with the FBI. What happened here?’

The cop blinked at her, looking about as bright as a sack of wet mice. He glanced from her shield to her face and back again, the hamster wheel in his head practically smoking.

‘Fed?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This is just a car fire.’

Ripley”s smile felt like a razor blade on her face. ‘It”s personal, not professional. I know the owner of this car.’

That got the gears turning behind the cop”s bovine eyes. He looked from her to the smoldering wreck of Martin”s beloved ride and back again. ‘My condolences,’ he said.

‘Save your Hallmark moment,’ Ripley snapped. ‘Just give me the facts.’

Baby-face shrugged, hooking his thumbs in his utility belt like a cut-rate John Wayne. ‘Not much to tell, really. Looks like a pretty standard torch job. Fire department says it was doused in kerosene, lit up like the Fourth. No one inside, far as we can tell, but we haven”t had a chance to really poke around yet.’

Kerosene, Ripley thought. ‘Mind if I take a peek?’ She jerked her chin towards the car, already moving past the yellow tape before the cop could respond. ‘Seeing as I”m here and all.’

The uniform scrambled to keep up, puffing like a two-pack-a-day asthmatic. ‘Hey, you can”t just... I mean, this is still an active crime scene, you can”t go contaminatin” evidence.’

Ripley spun on her heel, fixing him with a glare that could un-erupt a volcano. ‘You got about a fifty percent chance of me figuring out what happened here, and that’s fifty percent more than you had before I arrived.’

She could practically see the kid”s testicles shrivel. He held up his hands in a placating gesture, taking a smart step back. ‘Alright, alright. No need to get hostile. You can take a look, just let me witness it. There could be explosives in there.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

She”d walk through the fires of hell in gasoline panties if it meant getting to the bottom of this mess. A little soot and sweat was a small price to pay for answers.

She stalked over to the car, every step feeling like her feet were encased in cement. Up close, the damage was even worse. The once cherry-red paint job bubbled and blistered, tires melted into unrecognizable lumps of rubber, windows blown out to leave gaping, jagged holes like empty eye sockets. And the stench, Christ. Like a chemical spill in a crematorium.

Ripley steeled herself and reached through the shattered passenger side window. The door handle was still hot enough to sear her fingertips, but she gritted her teeth against the pain and wrenched it open with a tortured creak of hinges.

The interior was a nightmarish ruin, like she”d just stepped into Satan”s rumpus room. The upholstery was nothing but scorched springs and melted foam, the dashboard warped and sagging like a Dali painting. Every surface was coated in a thick layer of greasy soot, clinging to her skin and clothes as she levered herself into the back seat. Shards of glass and jagged metal bit into her ass and thighs through her jeans, but Ripley barely registered the discomfort. She was a woman possessed, tearing through the burnt-out wreckage as though the Shroud of Turin might be in here. Flinging aside charred hunks of god-knows-what, heedless of the way they crumbled to ashen smears on her hands and clothes. Ripping, clawing, searching for anything, any tiny scrap that might point her in the direction of Martin.

Her gaze snagged on the underside of the front seats, on the small gap between the charred upholstery and the car”s floor. Something about that narrow crevice, that tiny slice of shadow amidst the fiery devastation, set her senses tingling.

With desperate, clawing fingers, Ripley ripped and tore at the scorched fabric until it hung in blackened tatters. She thrust her hands into that cramped space, heedless of the jagged metal and searing heat that bit into her flesh. Groping blindly, frantically, until her questing fingertips brushed against something solid. Something that crinkled beneath her touch like ancient parchment.

She seized hold of it and wrenched it free from its sooty cocoon. Then she tumbled out of the vehicle, coughing and spitting black phlegm. She staggered around to the rear of the car on legs that wobbled like a newborn foal”s, adrenaline and panic buzzing through her veins in equal measure.

A thick bundle of files.

The edges were curled and blackened, the manila folders stained with soot and God knows what else, but still blessedly, miraculously intact.

With shaking hands, Mia reached into the cubby and lifted out the precious cargo. She cradled the files to her chest like a mother would a babe, staring down at them with a mix of trepidation and wild, desperate hope. Her ticket to the truth, scorched and tattered but still legible.

The same ones.

The godforsaken files that Martin had been poring over like a man possessed the night before he vanished into the ether. The same ones that had been conspicuously absent from his office when Mia had torn it apart in the wake of his disappearance. She”d ransacked every drawer, upended every pile of junk and detritus, combed through every scrap of his life that he”d left behind in search of those innocuous little folders. Coming up empty again and again until she was half-convinced, she”d hallucinated the whole thing.

But no. They”d been real. As solid and damning as the charred bundles clutched white-knuckled in her hands. Why had Martin taken these particular files with him on his little midnight ride into oblivion? Why had he hidden them in his trunk and tried to torch them? These files were supposed to be embers right now, but it was only because of Jacobs at HQ that they weren”t. If not for keeping track of Martin”s license plate, Martin”s secrets would be a pile of ashes.

What unforgivable skeletons had her lover been keeping in his closet for God knows how long?

And did she really want to know?

This was it. The edge of the map, the point of no return. The moment when the comforting lies and blissful ignorance she”d wrapped around herself like a security blanket finally crumbled away.

Mia Ripley was many things – a ball-buster, a raging bitch with an acid tongue and the itchiest trigger finger in the business.

But a coward had never been one of them.