Wildfire (Hidden Legacy #3)(76)

“I had a client like that once,” I told him. “The only way to win his respect was to meet him on his playing field and give as good as you got.”

I stared at my grandmother’s number. Some sort of response had to be made. She attacked us for the second time. Do I call and issue an ultimatum? Do I call the Office of Records and complain? Would this make us look weak or would we look weaker by not complaining and just letting her continue to terrorize us?

Leon huddled next to me. Rivera studied him for a moment and spoke into his headset. “Kurt? Find me.”

A moment later a gruff-looking man walked up to us. He had a dense red beard and shoulders that wouldn’t fit through the door. He glanced at Leon and nodded. “Come with me.”

Leon got up and followed him.

“What’s going on?”

“Kurt is our PTSD specialist,” Rivera said. “He’s an ex–Navy SEAL, highly decorated.”

“And with a high kill count?” I guessed.

Rivera nodded. “Leon needs help, and Kurt will be able to help him. He knows the right things to say.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“He’s a talented kid,” Rivera said, and walked away.

I looked at my phone. I needed some advice. If Rogan was here, I might have gone to him, but even if I did, he could decide to go and have a personal chat with Victoria Tremaine. So far he had been almost painfully careful about not stepping on my toes, but he nearly lost it when I came to him to ask about how to handle Augustine. He came close to killing his friend—probably his only friend—for my sake.

No, I needed a neutral third party. Someone who had no trouble navigating House waters, but had no personal stake in the matter. I scrolled through my contacts. There it was, Linus Duncan. Once the most powerful man in Texas. He said to call if I needed any advice. Cornelius thought the world of him, and Rogan respected him.

I dialed the number.

“Hello, Ms. Baylor,” Linus Duncan said into the phone in his rich, slightly amused baritone. “How may I help?”

“I need some advice.”

“Is the matter urgent?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Houston Memorial.”

“Are you injured?”

“No. But I just survived a second attack by Victoria Tremaine.”

There was a small pause.

“You’re right,” Linus said, a note of concern slipping into his voice. “The matter is urgent. As I recall, Houston Memorial has a quiet coffee shop. I will be there in forty minutes.”



Sergeant Munoz peered at me. A stocky dark-haired man about twice my age, he looked like a cop, which is exactly what he was. Career cops had that odd air of ingrained authority and jaded world-weariness. They’d seen it all, they expected the worst-case scenario and crazy crap, and nothing surprised them anymore. If an alien landed in the parking lot and leveled a blaster at us, Sergeant Munoz wouldn’t bat an eye. He’d order it to raise its limbs and lie down on the ground, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

The parking lot had rapidly filled with cops. Sergeant Munoz took charge, and he clearly didn’t like what he saw.

“I know you. Longhorn Hotel, enerkinetic cheating on his wife.”

“Yes, sir.” It was a routine cheating spouse case until the wife showed up at the hotel to confront her husband against my explicit instructions. I had a strong feeling that if the cheating husband got his wife into the car, nobody would ever see her again, so I stepped in and got thrown into the wall for my trouble, before I managed to tase him.

“And now we have this.” He turned to the eight bodies laid out in a row. Each of them showed a single shot in the same exact spot.

“This is what we call a T-box kill. Do you know what a T-box is?”

“Yes.”

If you drew a vertical rectangle around the nose and a horizontal rectangle over the nose bridge that ended at the center of each pupil, you would get a T-shaped area. People thought that head shots were always lethal. They weren’t. Sometimes bullets bounced off a skull, or caused some brain damage but failed to kill the target. Sometimes they penetrated the skull but caused only a minor injury. But a shot to the T-box was always lethal. A bullet to the T-box scrambled the lower brain and brain stem, which control the automatic organ processes we require to live, such as breathing. Death was immediate. It was the surest and most merciful way to drop your target. The victim would never realize they were dying. Their last memory would be of a gun and then their brain would explode.

Leon had put one bullet into each of the eight people exactly between their eyes. Eight shots, eight instant kills.

A Harley-Davidson pulled into the adjacent parking lot. Its rider, in a black leather jacket and jeans, jumped off, pulled the helmet off her head, revealing a halo of black curly hair, and sprinted toward us. A black woman with medium brown skin, about thirty-five or so. A patrolman got in her way and she barked something at him and kept going.

“Did you line them up?” Sergeant Munoz asked. “Was this an execution?”

“No. This was self-defense. They were shot while running at us with their weapons out.”

Munoz looked at the corpses and back at me. “From how far away?”

“Don’t answer that!” the woman in leather snapped.