Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(10)

We had watched the news coverage of the attacks into the night, and there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to dull the pain and heartache as some of the victims became known.

There was the story of a mother and her twin nine-year-old sons visiting from Lincoln, Nebraska. The father had stayed behind at their midtown hotel for a work call while they toured the wax statues at Madame Tussauds New York, a Times Square favorite. In the blink of an eye, the man was now a widower and childless.

There was the drama club from a high school in Flushing that was on a field trip to see a musical at the Lyric Theatre. Every student except two was killed by the explosions. One of the four chaperones, the vice principal of the school, survived only because she went back to the bus to get her sweater. She’s the one who spoke to the media, or at least tried to. The poor woman couldn’t stop crying.

It was too soon for any official list of the dead to be released. The police were neither confirming nor denying any particular name. Eventually they would all be known, and all I could do was breathe in deeply and exhale at the thought of how close Tracy and Annabelle had come to being among them.

“Are you okay?” asked Elizabeth.

I was staring out the living room window early the next morning. I’d just changed Annabelle’s diaper, and Tracy was now dressing her.

The sun had come up and life—no matter how cruel at times—would indeed go on.

“I’m okay,” I said. “More importantly, how are you?”

“I still feel like s-h-i-t, but I’ll be fine,” she said. She couldn’t shower because of all her bandages, but she was dressed and ready to go. “Thanks again for the change of clothes.”

She had on one of my old gray hoodies and a pair of “mom” jeans left behind by Tracy’s sister when she last visited from Providence. While it ranked among the top ten of unflattering ensembles, leave it to Elizabeth to somehow look good in it.

“Are you heading straight to work?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

I knew how anxious she was to get to her office and see what she could learn about that mysterious white glow obscuring the face of the woman in the hotel with the nuclear physicist. Elizabeth assumed either there was a technical glitch with the footage or someone had tampered with it. She had asked me what I thought, and I had told her I didn’t know.

I hated lying to her.

The glow was neither a glitch nor the result of tampering. Something else had caused it, but I couldn’t tell her what it was. Not yet.

Or maybe not ever.

What’s done is done, wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth. Were that only true for me.

My past won’t leave me alone.

In fact, it was about to come after me in more ways than I could’ve ever imagined.





CHAPTER 12


“YOU’RE GOING to be late,” I told Tracy after Elizabeth left.

“So I’m a little late,” he said, continuing to shower kisses on Annabelle, who was playing with her Baby Stella doll in his lap on the living room couch. “I’m jealous. You get to be with our beautiful girl all day. And I have to …” His voice trailed off into a sigh.

Sometimes the only thing worse than not booking an acting gig for a while is booking one that you dread. In Tracy’s case, it was a 3-D motion capture shoot. He was half doing a favor for a friend, Doug Chadwick, a programming engineer with a gaming company based in Hell’s Kitchen. It wasn’t a full favor for one simple reason. The gig paid pretty well. At least as well as one can imagine for jumping around all day wearing a green leotard covered with ping-pong balls.

Doug had already called to apologize. He wanted to cancel the session in light of the attacks, but the studio was already paid for. He couldn’t postpone or get a refund.

Tracy finally handed Annabelle to me and headed for the door. “Okay,” he said with a wave, “I’m off to win an Oscar.”

Two minutes later, he was back. Or so I assumed when I heard the knock on the door. Tracy had a habit of forgetting his keys.

I lifted Annabelle and carried her to the door with me. The previous owners of our apartment had been a little fanatical about security. In addition to motion-activated sensors in every room, they had installed a self-locking front door. It wasn’t the worst feature to have in a big Manhattan apartment building, so we didn’t change it.

“Let me guess,” I said as I opened the door.

Guess again, Dylan …

The man standing in front of me seemed as startled as I was. “I’m sorry—”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.”

“Are you Dylan Reinhart?” he asked.

The average adult brain has anywhere from 100 to 500 trillion synapses. All of mine, no matter what the count, were firing at once. Something wasn’t right.

A well-dressed Arab with a British accent had just shown up out of the blue on my doorstep. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I was fairly certain his question was a formality. He knew damn well that I was Dylan Reinhart.

No point in my being coy. “That’s me,” I said. “I’m Dylan. And this here is Annabelle.”

“She’s beautiful,” he said. His somewhat stoic demeanor softened. “Hello, Annabelle.”