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CHAPTER 1
Samantha
I steppedup to the crime scene wearing my new navy-blue cocktail dress and my favorite black Louboutin heels. My outfit wasn’t so out of place in the hotel itself, Chicago’s four-star Grand Plaza, but I did catch a skeptical look from the uniformed cop who blocked the entrance to the fourth floor room where a dead body had been discovered. Chad Waters, my old med school friend-with-benefits, who was supposed to have been my date for the night, waved to me from inside the room.
“She’s with me,” said Chad, a Chicago medical examiner, to the cop.
I held up my large purse that doubled as my medical bag, further proof that I belonged there.
“Sure thing, Dr. Waters,” the cop said.
He handed me a pair of plastic shoe covers, and I slipped them over my 4-inch heels. I pulled out a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from my bag and snapped them on, then crossed the threshold into room 419.
As I approached Chad, the assistant who had been standing beside him stepped away and joined another assistant on the other side of the room, where the lifeless body lay.
Chad peered at me over his reading glasses and smiled. How could he need readers already, given that he was only five years older than me? Doing the math, that put him at 40. Yes, old enough for age-related hyperopia, and I was right behind him.
As a team doctor for the covert spy agency Headquarters for the Elimination of Advanced Threats, known as HEAT to the few who were aware of its existence, I was surrounded by youth. Most of my colleagues were under thirty, extremely fit, and lethally proficient at hand-to-hand combat. I kept up with my own rigorous workout schedule, as required by the job, but I was by far the oddest woman out on my team, by virtue of both age and skill set.
“You look amazing,” Chad said quietly. He winked. “Hot date?”
“It was going to be.” I glanced at the body on the other side of the room. “Now it’s more of an unusual one. Which brings me to the question of the night...”
“Why you’re here,” Chad finished for me.
“Doesn’t look like my field surgery skills will do much good for this poor guy,” I said. “And you hardly need my help to do your job.”
“You’re here because you’re one of my oldest friends.” He pulled a small plastic baggie out of his pants pocket. Inside the bag was a business card. “I know better than to ask questions about your time as an army surgeon and whether you’re still involved in anything, say”—he shrugged—“surreptitious. I assume you don’t want my homicide detectives asking any uncomfortable questions, either. We found this clutched in our vic’s left hand.”
I slowly took the baggie from him and flipped it over to read the front of the card. It was mine, complete with my fake concierge physician’s practice contact information. I couldn’t deny Chad’s implied suspicions. He was too good a friend for that. But I couldn’t confirm any part of them, either. When you’re part of an off-the-books spy agency tracking down international drug smugglers, weapons dealers, and enemy espionage operatives on a daily basis, you can’t exactly talk about your real job, not even to the people closest to you. Chad wasn’t the only man I dated, which helped me keep my emotional distance, which in turn helped me keep my secrets. Whenever I could, with Chad and with the other men in my life, I stuck to the one kernel of truth in my story: that I was still a practicing doctor.
“I had a whole stack of these at the conference,” I said about the business card. The medical conference was the reason I’d been in town. Although, not the only reason. “I must have passed out dozens of business cards after my presentation on TBI triage.”
Chad nodded. “Of course. But we ran the dead kid’s ID. He not a doctor or a medic.”
My stomach knotted and I winced. “Who is he?”
“Patrick O’Dell. He’s an active-duty soldier, stationed at Fort Meade.”
The knot turned into a lead ball in my gut. Fort Meade in Maryland was right next door to an NSA facility. Given what I did for a living, the odds that a dead soldier clutching my business card had coincidentally worked in the vicinity of an intel agency were pretty much nil.
“I wanted you to get that out of here before I call this in as a homicide,” Chad said. “Which I have to do in the next two minutes if I want to keep my job.”
I looked at the soldier again. Gunshot wound to the right side of his head. Blood and tissue splatter consistent with a close-range shot. Pistol a couple of inches away from his outstretched right hand.
“Staged to look like a suicide?” That lead ball turned to molten lava and forced its way into my esophagus. I swallowed down the bile and my fear. “How can you tell?”
“For starters, he’s a lefty,” Chad said. “Which led us to take a closer look at the wound. The barrel didn’t make contact...”
He continued talking, but his voice faded as I stared at the young man, trying to place him, trying to remember if I’d ever seen him before.
“Can I look at the body?” I interrupted.
Chad furrowed his brow. “What? Listen, Samantha, I’ve gone as far out on a limb as I can, and I have to call this in pronto.”
I nodded. “Do it. I’ll just take a minute and I won’t touch anything. I’ll be out of here before the detectives arrive.”
He pressed his lips together and sighed. “Anything for you. But one minute, not a second more.” He motioned to his two assistants, who receded to the far wall to compare notes.
