Chapter 14

Taylor’s big exit did mean he couldn’t turn around and ask for her address but he’d worked with Whitaker long enough to know how to navigate the databases she used to track people down. It took about ten minutes for him to pull her address, with precious time ticking down.

It occurred to him that there were still ways that Dayoub could put up roadblocks, the most obvious being calling down and telling them to not assign him a vehicle when he requested it. Taylor could have gotten around that, but it would have required calling Solomon, having Solomon call Dayoub’s boss, who would then call Dayoub and have him pull the block. That would have taken at least twenty minutes and maybe more if people were hard to get a hold of. Dayoub might not have been able to stop him for the full hour, but he could have probably gotten close.

Thankfully, he wasn’t as petty as some of the mid-level agents Taylor had met in the Bureau, and didn’t do anything to impede Taylor any further. A few minutes later, Taylor was tearing out of the underground garage with sirens on, weaving in and out of traffic, rocketing north to the suburb with the house owned by Nadine Sutton.

Taylor’s phone rang.

“Are you out of your mind?” Whitaker asked when he answered.

Taylor shook his head and resisted the urge to laugh. Dayoub was craftier than Taylor gave him credit for. He hadn’t called Solomon, he’d called Whitaker.

“Don’t act like this is out of character for me.”

“This woman is good. As good as anyone you’ve gone up against. She might be better than you.”

“So what? I should let her get away?”

“You know I’m not suggesting that. What you need to do is wait for backup. Haven’t we run into this before? You’ve almost gotten killed multiple times running in without backup, and none of them were as good as Chelsea.”

“Which is why I can’t wait. Getting her current ID was luck. Hell, getting her real name that got us her current ID was luck. We’re not going to get another shot at her, not before she gets Finney.”

“I know the case is important, but we’ll get the Amato’s. They are cocky and can’t stop incriminating themselves and alienating their associates. I don’t want a witness killed any more than the next person, but not at the cost of your life. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got a child on the way. Do you want this baby born without a father?”

“Of course not. And this isn’t just about Finney. She’s killed a lot of people. Mostly all scumbags, yes, but a lot of those scumbags were on the verge of testifying and the families they worked for killed a lot of innocent people before you guys finally got them, or they got themselves. You’re the one who got me into the crime-fighting business, and you did it by convincing me that we were helping people ... shit,” Taylor said, barely missing smashing into the back of a semi.

“Don’t kill yourself getting there,” Whitaker said, knowing how Taylor drove when he was worked up. “So what are you going to do?”

“No idea. I’m making this up as I go.”

“I hate it when you do that.”

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

“See that you do.”

Taylor hung up and kicked the SUV into high gear. As he pulled off the highway, he shut off the sirens, although he kept the lights on. The house was still half a mile away, but he didn’t want to announce his presence. At least not right away.

The neighborhood was nice. Not, rich nice, but solidly middle-class nice. For a moment, Taylor wondered about the choice of homes. He’d been involved in a bunch of cases over the last few years, working with Whitaker, and one of the things he’d learned was that neighborhoods were terrible places for someone to try to escape from. Fences everywhere, lots of people who notice when you show up in their yard, security cameras and RING doorbells recording every time movement happens in front of them. You can’t just disappear.

If you’re forced to live anywhere, an industrial area would be your best bet. It’s easy to get lost in factories and warehouses. People come in and out of industrial businesses all the time. Customers, vendors, salespeople, and all kinds of people come through industrial businesses, and employees generally couldn’t care less.

Second best would be a wooded area. Wilderness has a lot of places for people to disappear into, although that worked better in mountainous areas than coastal ones like this.

Knowing how good she was, Taylor was perplexed. Both in the army and in investigations, intelligence was the key. Going in when you didn’t understand the situation was always a danger, and this was a question that didn’t sit right with Taylor. At least not until he pulled into the subdivision. It was literally on the other side of the tracks, with a single rail line separating the gentrified sprawl of neighborhoods and strip malls from a manufacturing area filled with warehouses, small factories, and fenced-in areas filled with pipes and shipping containers.

Her house was at the back of the neighborhood closest to the manufacturing area in a cul-de-sac, butting right up against what looked to Taylor like an abandoned factory of some kind. He stopped halfway down the street so it was hard to make out the building behind the houses and fences, but he could see the building had broken windows and a generally dilapidated look that went beyond just worn down.

Taylor stayed in his vehicle for a moment, looking down the quiet suburban street towards the house listed as being owned by Nadine Sutton, marveling at the juxtaposition of someone like her; a woman who murdered people for money and someone who seemed to have few qualms about shooting bystanders if they got in her way, living in a place that, broken down factory in the background aside, could have been on a postcard advertising the simple American life. Of course, this wasn’t the first time he’d been struck by someone like her living in a place like this, but it was still a reminder of how evil could always be lurking just around the corner.

The house was quiet. It was late afternoon and the sun was low in the sky, but it wouldn’t be dark for another hour, which meant if she was watching, it wouldn’t be hard for her to see him coming. There had been some kids playing in their yard near the front of the neighborhood, but this area was quiet, with no one on the street or in front of their homes. If Taylor had to guess, most of her neighbors would be older. She wouldn’t have wanted to live somewhere with people who might notice her coming and going, if she could help it. The empty streets meant there wasn’t a crowd for him to hide behind and the few trees in yards weren’t enough to make it hard to see him walking down the sidewalk towards her home.

There wasn’t much for it, however. The same reasons that kept him from waiting for backup also meant he couldn’t wait for the sun to go down to do this in the dark. He either had to risk it now or let her get away. Nothing in her history suggested she held a grudge, so Taylor didn’t think she’d come for him if she got away, but he still didn’t want to let her go without giving it his best shot, which meant he had to go in now.

Taylor got out of the car and circled around behind it, pulling his weapon from its holster, and holding it close in case he needed it. He’d put on a vest before leaving, but he didn’t expect that to help him if it came down to it. She would assume he was wearing some kind of armor and she was a good enough shot to kill him in spite of that. His only real hope was that she wasn’t sitting, looking out the window, waiting for someone to come for her.

If she was running, which he thought she was, and she was sentimental enough to come back for the things she’d accumulated over the last twenty years living in this identity, then she’d be busy packing. She also wouldn’t be expecting just Taylor. There were other agents around when he’d sprung his trap, so she knew he had resources, which made it likely she would assume he’d be coming in with a full assault team. Sitting with a rifle, staring out the window, waiting to shoot it out with the Feds wasn’t her style.

If she was still here, she was going to be doing her best to get out as quickly as possible. Of course, she’d still have precautions in place.

That was going through Taylor’s head as he made his way down the street. If he was wrong, at least he wouldn’t be around to hear about it. Thankfully, he wasn’t. Or at least he made it to the front door safely. The windows on either side of the door were opaque. It was dark inside and there wasn’t a window or anything that could backlight someone standing on the other side of the door, so Taylor was going in blind.

He’d just started to reach for the door handle when he heard a sound unmistakable for anything else, the racking of a shotgun slide. He threw himself away from the door, landing hard on the concrete front steps, as a fist-sized hole blasted through the hardwood, followed by a second and then a third. She might not have been sitting in the window with a rifle, but she’d definitely been waiting on him. It was only because Whitaker had taught him never to stand directly in front of the door when approaching a house, for this very reason, that kept the same size holes from punching through him as well.

Still lying on his side, Taylor brought up his weapon and fired back, shooting through the opaque glass, able to see into the house for the first time. The front entryway led into a larger open room and looked to have another room on the right that Taylor couldn’t see into. As the glass shards started to rain down on him, he thought for a second he could see the back of a leg disappearing to the right into the larger room at the end of the entryway.

Pushing himself up, he kicked in the already broken front door and went into the house gun first. The room to his immediate right was more of an alcove than a full room, with a small couch and chair laid out like some kind of lounge. Thankfully, it didn’t have any doors into it, so at least he didn’t have to worry about her circling around behind him as we went further into the house.