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Ben stood up and cracked his neck, probably taking a lump of frustration out. “I think someone wants you,” he said.
Ella wanted nothing more than to ignore the call, to actually take enough time to soothe her wounds from her last case for once. She never got time to heal, which is why her body was a smorgasbord of cuts and burns and bruises. One day, she told herself. One day she’d find time to rest.
“It might be nothing,” Ella said.
“Better check it.”
Ella grabbed her gym bag, scrambled for her phone. She wiped off some of the residue from her spilled water and saw one missed call, one new message from the director’s secretary.
Hi Miss Dark, please check in with Mr. Edis within the hour. This is of the utmost urgency.
Ella slammed the phone against her hip as she received another message, this one from her partner Ripley.
No rest for the wicked. Serial case in Iowa. Get to HQ, double-quick.
Ben perched himself on the ropes, a look of defeat weighing him down. “Is it important?”
“Yeah, it’s important,” Ella said. “Sucks, this was the weirdest date ever. In a good way.”
Ben dropped down from the ropes, grabbed his own bag. “Guess you’ve been disqualified. The champ retains the belt. Too bad.”
Ella packed her things, zipped up her bag. “Rematch? When I get back?” Reality suddenly came hurtling back. The constant threat of the Diamonds on her back, her research into her father’s assassin, the strange call from Robert Reed, and now a new serial killer case over in the Midwest.
“You read my mind,” Ben said. “Come on, I’ll drop you at work.”
“Will you stay safe while I’m gone?” asked Ella. “You still have the gun I gave you?”
Ben nodded. “Yeah, it’s still in my drawer.”
Ella didn’t know if the Diamonds were still hunting her now that she had two of them in custody, but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances. If her pursuers couldn’t find her, there was a chance they’d come for the next best thing – the people she loved.
“Keep it close,” she said. “And I promise that pretty soon, you won’t need it.”
The truth was that once she’d taken down her father’s killer, she had no plans of stopping there. She wouldn’t rest until every member of his little underground group was locked up for life. She didn’t care if there were an army of them; she’d take them down one by one.
One day she’d find time to rest, but today wasn’t that day.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ella arrived at the top floor of the FBI building just before eleven a.m. She found Mia Ripley, her longstanding partner and soon-to-be retiree, loitering outside the door to the director’s office. Ella apparently didn’t have time to go home and change according to the tone of the messages, so it was gym gear or nothing.
“Scared to go in?” Ella asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” Ripley eyed her partner from top to bottom. “You know yoga pants with no ass is like a wallet with no money.”
Ella rolled her eyes and said, “Alright, so I’ve neglected the squats. Been too busy looking after you.”
Ella and Ripley had only been partners for around fourteen months, and they’d gone from a teacher-student deal to something that Ella considered close friends, perhaps the closest you could get to a person without sharing a bed. Ripley was an FBI lifer, a field agent for thirty years who’d established herself as the crème de la crème of FBI special agents. She’d taken down some of America’s most heinous, pioneered some of the most commonly used profiling techniques of the modern age, and secured herself a six-figure pension for the rest of her days. Ella had nothing but envy and love for her, and now that the woman was in the twilight of her career, Ella felt a duty to keep her safe and send her off to greener pastures in the most painless way possible. After all, without Ripley, Ella would still be sitting at a desk in the Intelligence Unit.
Ripley moved closer, lowered her voice to a whisper. “You find anything? On Logan Nash?”
Ella felt uneasy hearing his name in a place with so much surveillance, so many ears. “No. Well, yeah, but it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?”
“I found… something. But I couldn’t see all the details.”
Ripley’s face scrunched, but then the director’s door swung open with force. The stocky profile of William Edis filled the space: black suit, white shirt, blue tie, thin brown hair parted to one side.
