Prologue
Look What Wandered In
GIDEON CHADWICKsaid goodbye to his last guest and closed the door to his midtown Manhattan apartment with a soft sigh of relief.His days of academia were as far behind him as his days in the military, and sometimes he wasn’t sure which group of people made him the most uncomfortable.While it was true the doctors and lawyers and forensics specialists—who were often both—liked to talk about books and theories and the root of all political problems and had read Pynchon and Goethe, there was almost always a moment in the middle of the flowing conversation when Gideon found it absolutely, positively necessary to leave the room.
He’d excuse himself to the bathroom, check his watch, the security feeds on his phone, look to see if his alphabet division of the justice department, the Special Crimes Task Force, had caught any cases, and stare longingly out his third-floor window and down the fire escape as he remembered his covert ops days under Jason Constance when he would have thought nothing about spider-climbing out the window and ghosting into the misty September night.
Then he’d remember that he liked these people and had kept in touch with them on purpose after school, and his breathing would grow normal again, and he’d be able to return to the erudite, purposeless discussion of people who had achieved importance—but not enough.Certainly not enough importance to change the world in such a way as to lessen the uphill battle they all fought every day to fix the horrors they saw.
Tonight he’d grabbed an extra bottle of wine as he passed through the open-area kitchen and topped everybody’s glass off before he settled himself around the coffee table.No dining table—unlike some of his friends, his apartment was small, with two rooms and a counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and just a big enough living room to put a couch, a love seat, and a stuffed chair.
His dinner parties always ended up with somebody, usually himself, on the floor, sitting cross-legged, trying hard not to fall asleep.
Of course that was because most of the people from his special ops unit were someplace in the desert in California, hunting serial killers.Dammit, he’d left that unit too soon.
Except he liked where he was.Lovedthe SCTF.He worked with an incredible group of people.He couldn’t make them his life, though, could he?
The question was tickling his forebrain as he surveyed his apartment after the guests had left—the comfortable leather couches, the Persian rug he’d had shipped from Fallujah, the hardwood floors he’d buffed up after he’d bought the lease.
He’d always been an odd duck—too smart for his peers, too active for academics, too dry for people to get his jokes, secretly laughing at the dark, the macabre, with nobody to smirk with.
Suddenly the hackles on his neck lifted like a porcupine’s spines, and he found himself breathing very softly through his nose, scenting the air.
Silently, he glided by the table, picking up a cheese knife from the charcuterie board as he passed.Useless fucking thing, he pondered grimly, flipping it from hand to hand.Good thing he’d taken special classes in useless objects and how to make them kill.He paused for a moment, to the side of his bedroom door, still tasting the currents that swept in through the now open window near the fire escape.
Worn, well-oiled leather.The hint of an organic bourbon-scented soap, the faint hint of wine from a glass Gideon himself had set on the end table near his bed when he’d excused himself from the room.
The wine had been disturbed—and consumed.
Gideon’s heart rate, which had never climbed above sixty when he’d thought there was an assailant in his bedroom, suddenly skyrocketed.
“God, they were boring,” Joey Carlyle said from his cross-legged perch on Gideon’s bed.“I thought they’d never leave.”
Gideon tucked the charcuterie knife up his sleeve.“Well, if you’d knocked on the door and started talking about ripping out deer hearts, you could have sped them up.”
Joey grinned, the expression feral, like a wolf’s, in his strong-boned, insanely beautiful face.His skin—a pale gold—showed traces of his Native ancestry, but Joey Carlyle’s granite cheekbones and oval eyes really gave away the whole package.
Or at least the physically attractive package.
“That Elaine girl,” Joey said as Gideon sat down.“You nailed her yet?”
“Dr.Aiello?”Gideon asked.“Chief Forensic Pathologist to New York State?No.I’m a peon, Joey.She only dates stallions.The fuck are you doing here?”
He thought he might know, but that could only be wishful thinking.He and Carlyle had worked together for a while.Gideon’s contact with Constance had gotten him put on special assignment with Clint Harding for a year when he’d been in the service.Harding had been impressed enough to make him one of the first recruits for Harding’s task force.Natalia Denison had been the actual first—she’d been Harding’s partner in the FBI, then Kylie the texpert (as Carlyle called her) and wily, deadly Gail Pearson.A year and a half ago, Harding—operating on intel Chadwick couldn’t fathom—had recruited big, beefy Judson Crosby, who was an astoundingly good operative for all he’d started his life as a flatfoot.Carlyle, fresh out of the service and still twitchy, had come along about the same time.
For some reason Gideon had never understood—maybe it was his stillness in the wake of Carlyle’s constant motion—Joey Carlyle had gravitated to Gideon like a feral cat gravitated to a favorite yard.
He sought out Gideon’s company for assignments.Asked for his opinion.Hopped in his department issue SUV without being asked or ordered.
Opened his mouth and showed the edges of his pointy teeth when Gideon told a joke, which was a thing Gideon would love about him forever.
Gideon had always thought wistfully that would be brotherly love, right up until he’d smelled Joey Carlyle and the petrichor of September rain in the city.
“You’re a peon?”Carlyle asked, eyes darkening in the shadows.“You’re a… what?”
Gideon blew out a breath, not wanting to dwell on the melancholy of his own insecurities tonight.“It’s not important,” he said.And then, because he knew Joey after all this time—knewhe’d never tell Gideon when asked straight out—he asked a sideways question.“What’d you think about the new guy?”
Carlyle’s eyes flickered, from the dim lamp to the open window and back.“Garcia?”he asked.
