Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One Page 4

  An hour after he’d gotten settled, Campbell had stepped out of a black Land Rover driven by Greg Novak, Campbell’s body man and all-around fixer, and had immediately gone into the house.

  According to the background they’d done on Campbell ahead of the meeting with John Taylor, Novak had served two tours with Special Forces in Afghanistan and had spent three years on sketchy overseas detail with Academi, the private military group that had once been known as Blackwater.

  In a physical altercation, Ronan wouldn’t be worried about Campbell, but Novak was someone to keep an eye on. According to the dossier they’d compiled, Greg Novak was six-four and two-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds, a black belt who’d been training to be an MMA fighter in the years before he’d joined the Army.

  Ronan took the dossier at its word, although the Rover’s tinted windows had prevented him from getting a good look at the guy when he’d dropped off Campbell. Their data said he had a house paid for by Campbell less than five minutes away, presumably so he could get to Campbell quickly in an emergency, something that would only be necessary if the worst happened and the two guards stationed inside the house fell down on the job.

  Ronan scanned the area with the binoculars. Brownstones flanked either side of Campbell’s place, marching both directions down the street. Light shone gold from a few of the windows, including the front window of Campbell’s house, but other than two kids bouncing around on a sofa in front of one uncovered window and a couple shadows behind the curtains or shades of the others, there was nothing to see.

  Campbell’s windows were covered, no surprise given his celebrity.

  Ronan reached for the thermos of coffee and took a swig of the still-hot liquid, his mind turning to the meeting with John Taylor. Ronan had been impressed by the man, by the inner strength that still shone from his eyes and his obvious love for his granddaughters, by the fact that he’d risked contacting MIS for help, a move that was, in itself, illegal.

  The recon Ronan was doing now was designed to find Elise Berenger, but there was no sugarcoating the job Taylor was hiring MIS to do: kill the people who had taken her.

  It took guts to make that kind of move at Taylor’s age, not to mention the money, which must have been the old man’s life savings.

  Ronan cursed himself as he scanned the street below. His admiration for John Taylor was no excuse for taking a job they shouldn’t have taken. The fact that he’d eventually secured the agreement of Nick and Declan did nothing to make him feel better — they’d taken the job because he’d wanted to take it.

  Nick had taken more convincing than Declan, who almost always went with the flow, whatever it might be, but Ronan knew they would have been happier if Ronan had said no at the outset.

  He thought about the picture of the young woman in the dossier. Elise Berenger. Not much more than a kid. Not much older than Erin had been when that dirtbag Dooley got his claws in her.

  He’d only met the asshole once, when he’d been home on leave. He’d known then the guy was trouble, but he’d suspected it was the kind of trouble everyone got into when they were young — the kind of bad match they’d all had a time or two when thinking with their hearts or hormones instead of their heads.

  He’d been wrong.

  Dooley had been the kind of trouble you didn’t survive, and Erin hadn’t. Ronan had been in a hurry, his head still half in the desert, still reeling from the death of their mother when he was nineteen, secure in the fact that tragedy wouldn’t visit their family twice.

  He should have looked more closely. Should have asked their father to get someone on the force to run background on Dooley, even if it meant violating the rules.

  His jaw tightened at the thought of his father. There were two kinds of cops in the BPD — the kind that thought rules were just guidelines, and the kind who believed it was their duty to follow them to the letter.

  The patriarch of the Murphy clan was the latter. He hadn’t liked Matt Dooley any more than Ronan and the rest of Erin’s brothers, but it would never have occurred to him to use his resources on the force to look into the guy.

  That would have been a violation of his privacy and a violation of Thomas Murphy’s oath to protect and serve the public.

  Too bad his morals meant he couldn’t protect and serve his family.

  Ronan sighed. He loved his father, and Ronan was glad they’d come to an uneasy truce in the years since Erin’s death, but they weren’t cut from the same cloth. Even as he acknowledged its weaknesses, Thomas Murphy had faith in their broken, corrupt legal system. Doing the right thing meant following the letter of the law and looking the other way when it failed him.

  Ronan couldn’t do it. Had never been able to do it. It was why he’d joined the SEALs, happy to be part of a unit that worked under cover of secrecy, the classified nature of their missions allowing for a certain kind of flexibility when it came to the rules. It wasn’t their job to debate the morality of their tasks. His was a unit that performed necessary evils.

  The work he’d done in the desert had made easy his decision to make a business out of justice — real justice, not the kind his father talked about, the kind that let Matt Dooley walk because there was no proof he was anything but a garden-variety addict.

  Ronan knew it was a lie, and he knew it was a lie because he’d done his own background on Dooley after Erin’s death, tailing him to meetings with one of Boston’s biggest drug lords, to four pickups of new merchandise, which had then been delivered to pushers all over the city, pushers who targeted kids like Erin, still in high school when she’d started using.

  Dooley hadn’t been some innocent kid, lost like Erin and pulling other people into his death spiral. He’d been the worst kind of pusher, the kind who aims to get kids like Erin hooked, making them customers for life — which wasn’t usually very long once they started using.

  And guys like Dooley had a special place in their hearts for girls like Erin Murphy, beautiful girls who would eventually become so desperate for a fix they’d use their bodies to get it.

  Ronan’s stomach turned the way it always did when he thought too long about Erin. He turned his thoughts to Nora instead, alive and well in Southern California in a multimillion-dollar mansion perched on a cliff over the ocean. He was relieved she’d found someone like Braden Kane, someone who’d defected from the FBI ahead of Nora’s own retirement from the Bureau, someone who would never let what had happened to Erin happen to her.

  Braden was like Ronan, like his brothers. He’d worked inside the system, knew how fucked it was, had eventually decided to mete out his own justice in an organization less structured than MIS but no less effective.

  Ronan caught movement in the left hand frame of the binoculars. He retraced his line of sight past Campbell’s front door, over the brownstones next to it, and down to a boutique, closed for the night. At first everything was still, and Ronan thought he’d imagined it. Then he saw it again, a shift in the shadows under the awning of the storefront two doors down.

  It disappeared again a moment later and he trained the binoculars on the spot, letting his eyes settle into the darkness. Something moved again, and a figure came into view for a split second before it melted back into the shadows.

  “What the fuck…?”

  6

  Julia shifted on her feet, stretching to work out the kinks in her back. She’d left her gramps’ house after dinner and was back at her post down the street from Seth’s house before everything had gone quiet for the night. She’d spent the last two hours replaying her conversation with her gramps, trying to reconcile his willingness to take a breather from their more aggressive tactics with his earlier insistence that they do everything possible to find Elise.

  It didn’t make sense. Then again, maybe he was just worn out, exhausted from worry — not just since Elise had been gone but from the years before that, when it had always seemed Elise was on the brink of some fresh catastrophe, when she was struggling to pull herself out o
f another job termination or breakup.

  And that didn’t even account for all the years he’d done it with their mother. If the last thirty years were any indication, she hadn’t exactly made it easy on Julia’s gramps and gran.

  Julia was tired too. Tired of putting her own life on hold every time something bad happened to Elise. Tired of watching Elise make bad decision after bad decision and then fall apart when the inevitable consequences hit.

  Tired of caring so damn much.

  She leaned forward out of the shadows, daring a closer look at Seth’s front door. The porch lights were on, but she hadn’t seen any sign of Seth. He’d either already been home when she arrived at her spot or he was making it a late night.

  The latter possibility gave her an idea, one that set her heart thumping wildly in her chest: it was the perfect opportunity to explore the house.

  During the week she’d staked out the brownstone, she’d seen several people come and go — a woman with graying hair and a limp, a younger woman with dark skin and long hair in braids, two men with builds that screamed military and hair shaved close to the scalp, an elderly man who walked barely above a shuffle and always wore a bow tie.

  Only Bow Tie seemed to live in the house. Julia had wondered if he was some sort of butler or valet. Everyone else came and went, leaving the house just before or after the porch lights came on, but Bow Tie often returned with a shopping bag or two, and she’d never seen him leave the house after dark.

  She chewed her lip. She wasn’t worried about the old man — he was probably asleep, and she would be quiet.

  But the house was likely secured with some kind of alarm system, and that was a problem she wasn’t prepared to address. If she could get information on the system there was a possibility she could find someone to hack into it later, give her the codes or provide her cover while she got into the house.

  Except that would take time, and she was sick of waiting.

  She eased out of the shadows. She didn’t have to break in tonight. Maybe there was a sticker on one of the doors from the alarm company that would help her narrow down the system. Or maybe someone had left a window open or something.

  Okay, that last one was doubtful, but Seth wasn’t home, and this was her last night staking out the place. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

  She made sure her hood was up, stepped onto the sidewalk, and headed for the corner. The alley that ran behind the row of brownstones would provide less exposure than the front.

  7

  Ronan stayed in the shadows as he moved behind the hooded figure. He catalogued what he could see: black jeans and a black hoodie, about five-foot-seven with narrow shoulders, light on his feet, a purposeful stride that told Ronan the man knew exactly where he was going.

  The figure turned the corner and Ronan picked up his pace, not wanting to lose him. He disappeared into the alley behind the brownstones just as Ronan rounded the same corner.

  Ronan hurried to the alley, grateful for the weight of the weapon holstered to his side, and flattened himself against the back of the corner brownstone.

  A Beacon Hill alley wasn’t like any other alley. There was no cracked pavement, no broken street lights or dumpsters to provide cover. The alley was more of a side street, clean and lined with cobblestones, lit with a line of old-fashioned street lamps and matching lanterns near the back doors of the brownstones.

  He registered it all in a split second, right before the dark clad figure, now about thirty paces in front of him, glanced over his shoulder.

  Ronan didn’t have time to make out any of the man’s features inside the hoodie, but he knew he’d been made by the way the figure slowed his steps, the beat before he took off running.

  “Wait!” Ronan was running before he registered the pounding of cobblestones under his feet.

  The other man was fast, but Ronan had the advantage of longer legs, and he quickly closed the distance between them. They were almost to the other end of the alley when he reached out, his hand closing around a handful of fleece, and somewhere under it, a forearm.

  The person in his grasp tried to shake him off, but Ronan held tight right up until the other man went down on the cobblestones, crashing onto the stone.

  “Ow! Fuck!”

  He was still processing the voice as he hung onto the other person’s leg, using it to climb his way on top of the figure thrashing under him, the hood having fallen away to reveal not a man, but a woman.

  “Stop it! I just want to talk to you,” he said.

  The woman’s struggle was futile. He had her pinned under his body, her thrashing doing nothing but tiring her out, something he heard in the rasp of her breath.

  She beat at him with her arms, kicked her feet. “Get the fuck off me!”

  He reached down and grabbed her wrists in his hands, stretched them over her head until she had no choice but to be still, her torso made immobile by his thighs on either side.

  There was something vaguely familiar about her face, but that’s not what stopped him cold, what made his heart beat faster against the cage of his chest.

  Her face was pink with exertion, cheeks flushed, lips full around the breath escaping her body in short gasps. A perfect mole marked the space near the right side of her mouth. Her brown eyes shot fire at him through the dark.

  “Just… calm down,” he said through his teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Then get off!”

  “I’ll get off when you calm down long enough that we can talk about what you were doing just now,” he said.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  She twisted in his grip, her hips coming up off the cobblestones, and his body responded against his will. His cock lurched in his jeans, a bolt of lightning zipping through his body at the intimate contact of her body against his.

  The physical response was enough to shake him and he leapt off of her in one smooth motion.

  She jumped off the pavement and backed away from him, her eyes narrowed like she expected him to come after her again. Her hood had fallen in the scuffle to reveal hair that was a mix of brown and gold under the lights, the ends choppy and swinging near her collarbone.

  She bent down to look at her right calf and he saw blood seeping through a tear in her jeans. She gazed at it dispassionately before straightening, glaring at him as if daring him to follow her again. When he made no move to do so, she turned to leave.

  “I’m not going to chase you again,” he called after her, “but you might want to ask yourself why we’re both watching the same guy.”

  She froze and turned slowly around. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Really? Because I was on the roof of the building across the street when you decided to leave your hidey-hole under that awning and make a beeline for the alley.”

  She crossed her hands over her chest. “You couldn’t have seen me from there.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to,” he agreed, “except for the binoculars.”

  “Binoculars?”

  He nodded. “Good ones, too. Spotted you as soon as you leaned out of the shadows.”

  Her eyes flashed again. “What were you doing watching me from the roof with binoculars?”

  “It’s an interesting story,” he said.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Oh… I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not without something in exchange.”

  “Like what?”

  “You were watching Seth Campbell’s residence. So was I. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said.

  He had no idea what she would be doing staking out Campbell’s place, but finding out was a matter of professional integrity.

  That’s what he told himself anyway.

  She hesitated and he saw the internal struggle playing across her features. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he quoted.

 
She seemed to consider the words. “Fine, but no promises. And you go first.”

  A flash of annoyance shot through him along with a surprising dose of lust. “You don’t make the rules.”

  She didn’t blink. “I make the ones I’m going to follow.”

  He tried to gauge her resolve, caught the flinty shine in her eyes, and decided he didn’t want to risk it.

  He started slowly toward her. “Fine, but you’re buying the coffee.”

  8

  What was she thinking?

  It was the only question she had for herself as she walked beside the tall man who’d brought her down in the alley behind Seth’s brownstone. He was probably a serial killer. Either that or one of Seth’s bodyguards trying to figure out how much she knew about Elise’s disappearance.

  And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she could trust him. It was more than the steadiness in his eyes when he looked at her, more even than the surprisingly gentle grip — steely but somehow careful not to hurt her too — he’d employed on the pavement.

  She had a flash of his thighs straddling her body, the heat that had coursed through her belly when she’d bucked under him only to come in contact with the significant bulge in his jeans.

  She’d recoiled as if she’d been burned, but only because she was mortified by the lust that had coursed through her veins.

  “On the corner,” the man said when they were halfway down the second block.

  They turned into a diner named Randy’s, the word spelled out in bright red cursive over windows that revealed standard diner decor — maroon pleather booths, Formica tables, posters designed to look vintage.

  He held the door for her and she stepped gratefully into the warmth, the smell of fried meat and coffee hitting her like a wrecking ball. She was cold and hungry and hadn’t realized it until that minute.

  “Take a seat wherever,” a young woman in black khakis, a white T-shirt, and a red apron said from behind the counter.