Once clear, he raced toward the darkened doorway where he typically entered for a day’s work after being buzzed in by security.
With the code he’d stolen from Leo’s secretary earlier in the day, he let himself inside.
He remained on his guard. Who knew who might be there despite the tomblike silence all around?
The front lobby and adjoining administrative wing lay empty. No desks or filing cabinets. No papers or computers anywhere. Not even any storage boxes.
Impossible. Surveillance would have seen this and reported it in.
The entire organization had vanished. What the hell?
Screw it.
He texted Jane.At warehouse. Empty. Something wrong.
His finger hovered over the send icon. The DEA had been surveilling the Mazzucas for the eight months before they’d expanded the team to include the FBI’s task force, while the syndicate had been steadily scaling up. Why would they leave now? There’d been no warning of a withdrawal.
An even worse idea surfaced. Were the rumors true? Had the Mazzucas infiltrated the FBI after all?
Uneasy, he sent off the message to Jane and crept down the hallway toward the main office. Leo’s private space, off limits to everyone unless the big man invited you.
Case in point, the secretary and cleaning guy who’d interrupted an important phone call two weeks ago had already disappeared. Rumor had it they’d annoyed the boss with all their “sneaking around.” They’d vanished. No one had seen or heard from them since.
Simmons paused and cocked his head, listening hard to the silence.
He doubted Leo would be in the office this late at night. And Junior typically spent his nights down at the strip club with the bruisers on staff. A safe bet Leo’s office would be empty too, though it was likely locked.
Simmons found the door cracked open.
Wary, he palmed his pistol, an undercover “spare” he’d taken from the armory.
Easing inside the dimly lit office, he found it, too, empty. No furniture and no bodies. Overheating, he rolled up the ski mask to serve as a hat again and slowly lowered his weapon, not sure what to think.
Until he turned around and saw a dark figure step out of the shadowy corner pointing a gun at his face. He hadn’t expected this, but it made so much sense.
“Drop it.”
Simmons had no chance of getting off a shot before being killed. He slowly knelt and put the gun down, then shoved it away. His heart raced, and dread filled his throat.
The person watching him smiled. “I’m glad you’re here. We have so much to talk about.”
It took him a long time to die. He just wished he could have given Jane a little bit more to work with before a bullet eventually shattered his skull and tore through his brain.
CHAPTER ONE
One week later
“So it’s really him?”The twisted feeling in Jane’s gut settled, satisfied despite such a disheartening validation. She wanted to shove her smug sense of I-told-you-so in her supervisor’s face.
She’d told him the text they’d received from Dan Simmons hadn’t been real.
Over the past couple of months, as she sat with the others in the downtown Seattle field office, she’d spent her time splitting her focus between the Mazzuca case and the other fifteen cases she currently managed. Considering some of her investigations had been ongoing for months and even years, she couldn’t just drop one because the task force took most of her attention.
But this news about Simmons…
The last time she’d seen him, he’d laughed at her workload, calling her a lightweight. Then he’d shared some unsettling information he’d learned at the warehouse, news that Leo Mazzuca might be leaning more heavily into the weapons trade than they’d thought.
Simmons had wanted to look harder at some of Leo Mazzuca’s files. Like her, he knew the pieces of their case didn’t fit. Mazzuca had grown too careful lately. Too paranoid. Both she and Simmons wanted to know why, especially with the spate of recent activity on the waterfront.
