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He knocked on Morgan’s front door before Holland could put in her two cents. He was fairly certain he would get an earful about her job with NCIS and that New Orleans was her home. Screw that. Dax intended to be ruthless this time. He would use the whole presidential-task-force thing to keep her by his side. Just because one part of the case was over didn’t mean she got to quit. Uncovering all the pieces and players could take a while. They needed to go to London. He would use that, too. He would keep her close and before she knew it she would find herself with a ring on her finger.
Maybe he should get her a little drunk. Hell, it had worked on him.
A quiet fell around them as they waited. Not silence. There was never silence on the bayou, but he could still hear the floorboards creak as the man inside the house moved.
The door opened and a weary face looked out from behind the screen. Peter Morgan was dressed in his pajamas and a robe, glasses sitting on his face. He’d aged ten years in the three since Dax had seen him last. He’d lost weight. That kind of gauntness bespoke disease.
“I always wondered if you would find me, Captain.”
He didn’t need to kill Peter Morgan. It looked like life was doing a good job of that. “I have some questions.”
Morgan hesitated but then finally nodded. “Of course. Come in. You’ll have to excuse the place. It’s not what you’re used to, of course. Mr. Sparks, I presume. And Ms. Kirk.” He looked Lara’s way. “I’m sorry, dear, I don’t know what part you play in this game.”
Connor’s bride smiled as though she was being invited in for tea. “Lara Sparks. I’m married to the big guy who will not be torturing you this evening. Consider me an investigative journalist.”
“Ah, they brought a weak link. I was hoping for one.” Morgan shut the door behind them.
“Lara’s not weak,” Dax shot back. He glanced around the room. Despite its dilapidated nature, it was neat and tidy. Austere. Morgan wasn’t one for knickknacks. There was a sofa and lounge chair, two bookshelves, and a few lamps. He didn’t see a television, but a neat stack of newspapers and magazines took up a corner of the small dining room table.
“I didn’t mean that in a moral or physical sense,” Morgan clarified, gesturing for them to sit. “I meant I can appeal to her softer sensibilities in a way I cannot with you. You blame me for what happened to your father. Ms. Kirk is law enforcement. She won’t see past justice to compassion, and Sparks . . . well, from what I know, you have no compassion.”
“None.” Connor’s smile would have made anyone squirm.
Lara frowned as she sat down on the couch. “He does. But we’re not here to hurt you. We simply have a few questions.”
Connor walked around the room, his eyes seeking the corners. “Many questions.”
“I’m not a threat, Mr. Sparks,” Morgan said wearily, sinking onto the lounge chair. “There are no traps. I never was a violent man. I always thought it amusing I ended up in the Navy. After I left Admiral Spencer’s command, I found work in intelligence. I was much happier there. It was a good fit for me. I was safe there, too.”
It didn’t look like anyone nefarious would jump out and murder them, but Dax was on guard anyway. He didn’t like the slow way Connor was prowling around the cabin. Something had his friend on high alert, and he trusted Connor’s gut.
The faster they got what they needed, the better.
“Why do you need to be safe?” Dax asked.
Morgan sat back. “Because of what I did. I assume you’re here because you’ve finally figured out what I did to your father.”
Holland had her cop face on. She pressed a button on her phone and set it down on the coffee table. “I’m going to tape this interview, if you don’t mind.”
Morgan waved a hand. “Only if the sweet one promises to look in on my mother from time to time. The nursing home is all right, but they don’t always change her sheets regularly. I pay extra to ensure her comfort.”
Lara’s eyes had gone a little misty. “I promise. Do you think you’re going to jail?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. I’m going to die. If not tonight, then soon. The cancer is everywhere. So it doesn’t matter anymore if I talk or not. I’m miserable. Judith is miserable. I fought all these years to live and now I don’t really care if I die, because there are worse things than death.”
“Like betrayal?” Dax snarled. He didn’t like the fact that this man had even mentioned his mother’s name. “My father helped you.”
“But he also cheated on your mother. She’s an amazing woman. He was never worthy of her. When they offered me a way to show her the man he truly was, I took it.”
Dax tried to reconcile Morgan’s words. “Are you telling me you set him up to expose him? Or for revenge?”
“It wasn’t really revenge. I meant to scare him. Your father always had everything so easy. He got away with murder half the time because he was rich and connected.” Bitterness poured from Morgan’s mouth. “I was smarter than him. I got better grades. I was well behaved. Life still handed him everything on a silver platter. He got promoted up the ranks. He had your mother. Even when she learned what sort of man he was, she still picked him over me.”
Morgan had utterly ruined his family over jealousy? “I remember you through most of my adolescence. You came to the house for dinner. You were my father’s friend. How could you do this to him? To us? You called the Navy and sent in the fake video.”
His head shook vigorously. “I did not. Like I said, to me the scheme was merely blackmail. I wanted my cut. I was hidden in your father’s shadow for decades. Most of my life had been about making his easier. How do you think I felt when I should have been in a place of power and all your father offered me was the position of a glorified secretary? He owed me.”
Dax thought seriously about throttling the man, but he was so pathetic Dax simply sat beside Holland and stared. She took his hand in hers, grounding him. “I don’t understand how you thought blackmailing my father would teach him a lesson.”
Morgan coughed, a rattling sound in his chest. “I knew the minute Hayes won the election that Hal would crow to everyone about the fact that he knew the president.”
“Zack is one of my best friends. A loyal friend,” Dax shot back.
“Your dad talked about all you boys over the years. It’s one reason Constance Hayes’s death concerned him.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “He took a trip a few weeks before he died. He said he was going to a conference.”
Morgan’s head shook. “Yes, but he went to the UK because he thought the president’s mother had been murdered. After Joy Hayes was killed, he said Constance had told him years ago that anyone who knew would die.”
“Knew what?” Holland asked.
“I don’t know. I guess that’s why I’m still alive.” He rocked back in his lounger. “Originally, I assumed he was flying to London to meet one of his sluts and he didn’t want me to know because he thought I would tell Judith.”
“Would you?” Lara asked.
“No. She already knew,” Morgan replied. “She was too much of a lady to divorce Hal. We’re not like young people today. We have morals. But I finally saw my opportunity to ensure he never became one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—his dream job. He was so close and he knew it. I wish I could have seen the look on his face when he realized he would never be appointed.”
Holland squeezed Dax’s hand as though she knew he was close to losing control.
Morgan never noticed. He just smiled, his lips curling in a nasty snarl. “God, he wanted that position. He told me I could come with him to D.C. After holding me back all these years, he acted as if he was doing me a favor. You don’t know what it’s like to always be in someone’s shadow, to never get to step into the light.”
Dax thanked god for the friends he had. They would never bow to petty jealousy or betray him the way this piece of shit had betrayed his father. “Who appr
oached you about blackmailing my father?”
“I guess there’s no point in concealing the truth now, is there? I can tell you because I’m already dead. You know the funny thing? I hated Hal and I loved him. I still miss him. It was never supposed to end this way. I just wanted to win at least once.” Morgan coughed again.
“Who contacted you?” Dax asked, his words clipped.
“A man. I didn’t really understand who he was until later, and then it was far too late to back out. The man who initially contacted me was American, but I found out later he worked for a Russian. Weird name. Kuilly-something.”
Connor went still. “Kuilikov?”
Morgan pointed while fighting off another coughing fit. “That’s it. That’s him. He was a big, scary fellow.”
This was the closest they’d gotten. “Sergei? Was that his first name? How old was he?”
“No, his name was Boris. He was an old guy. Probably a couple years older than me.”
Lara leaned over. “Boris Kuilikov is a name we’ve heard before. We don’t know exactly who he is. Natalia’s brother maybe. We’ve suspected he had something to do with the Russian mob, but we don’t know how he’s connected to the people who killed Natalia.”
“I didn’t understand right away that Boris was with the Russian mob. I thought he wanted to make some money, like I did. They called me for help setting up the blackmail scheme and I agreed. But I didn’t send that tape to the Navy, Dax.” Morgan leaned forward. “I know I’m a bitter old fuck, but I wouldn’t have done that. I didn’t want Hal publicly humiliated or dead. He was my friend.”
The man sitting in front of him didn’t know a thing about friendship. “So you agreed to do what?”
“I agreed to work with the girl they had hired. I snatched your father’s uniform, set myself up as him, and allowed the cameras at a motel to film what appeared to be your father walking in with the teen prostitute. Once they’d successfully blackmailed him, I was just supposed to get a cut of the money. But I knew your father. He would have paid the money the first time, then turned down the Joint Chiefs position so he couldn’t be blackmailed again. That’s it. I celebrated that he wouldn’t have been able to achieve his damn dream and he would finally know how it felt to be like the rest of us.”
Again, Holland squeezed Dax’s hand as though she knew he needed it, reminding him that now wasn’t the time or place to lose it. He would deal with Morgan later, after they had the truth.
“When did you realize they meant to kill him?” Dax demanded.
Morgan fell quiet for a moment. “They called the night before the story broke. They told me I had sent a letter to the secretary of the Navy, exposing my boss as a pedophile. They told me if I denied that I’d written the letter, they would kill my mother. I believed them. That was my first inkling of just how ruthless they were and their true intentions.”
“That man in the prison parking lot told me they had no intention of killing the admiral,” Holland said. “He told me Morgan here screwed it up. Why would that man have lied? Why did they want me to break up with you so badly?”
“To refocus Dax and derail the investigation. They wanted to avoid killing a second member of the admiral’s family,” Connor explained. “One could be ruled a suicide. Dax’s death would have been more difficult to explain away. He was close to the president. His death would have incurred even more media attention than his father’s. They wanted to stay in the shadows. I would have done the same thing in their shoes.”
So they believed Morgan’s version. After all, a dying man had nothing to lose and no reason to lie. “Why would Boris Kuilikov kill Natalia, one of his own relatives? It’s not like the guy found out forty years later that she’d been screwing the ambassador. He must have known.”
“That’s conjecture,” Lara reminded.
“But it makes sense. Hell, he probably set her up to have a fling with Frank Hayes. Maybe she was a spy,” Holland mused.
“The Russians seem to avoid killing anyone they don’t have to, so why wait decades to kill Natalia?” Lara asked, her voice tight. “Connor? Did I hear a car coming up the road?”
Connor looked out the window. “I can’t tell. If someone’s driving out there, they’ve killed the lights, because it’s too dark to see anything.”
A minute later, a banging on the door resounded through the room. Everyone stopped, turning toward the intrusion. No one made a sound.
Connor put up his left hand, pulling his gun out with his right. “Don’t move. Kirk, get my six.”
Dax stared at his friend. “Are you serious?”
Connor shrugged. “She’s logged way more time on the gun range than you and she wasn’t recently shot.”
Holland stood, moving in behind Connor. She winked Dax’s way. “I got this, babe.”
Okay, the “babe” part made him feel a tiny bit less emasculated. “I’m going to remember this the next time I’m called on to play limo driver or to be the dipshit who has to invade Freddy’s home.”
Lara patted his knee. “It’ll all work out.”
He wished he were as optimistic as Lara.
Connor opened the door and immediately shoved his SIG in the newcomer’s face. Gemma White was ready, with a stony expression and her gun pointed right at Connor.
NINETEEN
Holland felt her eyes widen as her partner stood in the doorway, gripping her SIG Sauer and aiming it at Connor Sparks.
“Stand down, Special Agent,” Connor growled.
Her warrior-queen partner didn’t look like she wanted to comply. Her arms never wavered as she stared at him. “You stand down, whoever you are. Holland, I need to talk to you.”
“When you put the fucking gun down, maybe we can chat,” Connor spat back.
“Maybe after we chat, I’ll put the fucking gun down,” Gemma replied.
Holland knew Gemma could argue all day. “What are you doing here?”
Her partner’s intent stare never wavered from Connor. “I’ve been following you and I’m not the only one. You have incoming. NOLA PD is about to surround the place. I think you can use an extra gun.”
“Why would you follow me?” Holland moved behind Connor.
“I took this assignment because Augustine Spencer asked me to. I’m Secret Service, but she wanted someone to watch over you. She told me if we were ever in this position to tell you something that would prove who I work for.”
“What’s that?”
“She said to tell you that she doesn’t give up on her friends. Even when her friends are being call-dodging assholes.”
Connor lowered his gun. “Yeah, that’s Gus.”
“You were the one who shouted out the warning before the shooting started at my apartment.” It must have been Gemma.
She strode through the door and slammed it shut. “Yes. Since Captain Awesome came back, I stepped up my surveillance, and you’re lucky I did. Nice job on the balcony there, Romeo.”
Dax stood up. “My sister sent you?”
“Your sister is smarter than the rest of you. She figured out something was wrong the minute blondie here decided to turn twelve kinds of bitch.” Gemma moved, looking out the blinds. “We need to get out of here.”
“So you moved your whole family here because Gus asked you to?” Her brain was still reeling.
“My husband and kids are actually my brother, my niece, and two nephews. They’re good cover. Their mom walked out and I stepped up to help. Now let’s go. The NOLA PD is coming. I think they’ve had this place staked out for weeks.”
Holland frowned. “Why would they come here? We’re out of their jurisdiction.”
And why did her uncle care enough to have Morgan’s cabin watched?
A few items that hadn’t made sense previously slid into place.
Her uncle had called and told her the bullet casing matched another crime. He’d known within hours when that kind of thing could take days. He’d al
so known the assassin was Russian. Again, something that could take much longer to confirm. But he hadn’t known a name? Bullshit.
“Why were you trying to pull up the police reports on Natalia
