In The Lawman's Protection. Janie Crouch

      So she didn’t trust her gut to tell her what to do now. Especially when she knew exhaustion was playing such a large factor in everything happening inside her head.

      She hoped.

      But she stood up and began checking the locks on all the windows and doors once more, despite the sticky notes. Trusting her gut or not, she knew sleep would not be coming. Not tonight. She couldn’t shake the feeling.

       Someone was watching out in the dark.

      * * *

      REN MCCLEMENT STRETCHED his long legs out in front of him in an attempt to get comfortable inside the Dodge Stratus. He was forty-one years old and one of the highest ranked members of Omega Sector, arguably one of the most prestigious law enforcement groups in the world. Hell, he’d created Omega Sector.

      He should not be on a damned stakeout.

      Any one of his colleagues would tell him the same thing: that there was other important work he could be doing. Although Ren didn’t have an office at either the Critical Response Division HQ in Colorado or in Washington, DC, where the Covert Operations Division was located, at any given time he was a part of a dozen different operations, almost all of them clandestine. He’d advised two separate presidents on operational strategies in both foreign and domestic events.

      And he’d been undercover for months at a time in some of the ugliest hellholes on earth—both geographically and situationally. He’d taken the ops nobody else wanted or could do. Stepped up to and over lines no one else was willing to cross in order to get the job done. Deep-cover operations where the line between who you were and the psychopath you pretended to be got pretty blurred.

      He had to be able to live with that.

      Ren McClement lived in darkness. Not only lived, embraced it. The dark was home for him. The dark was what allowed him to become whoever he needed to be in order to get the job done. To trick the worst of the worst into trusting him so he could make sure they could never harm anyone else again.

      And if he sometimes forgot who he really was—the boy who grew up on a ranch in Montana with loving parents and a fierce need to be outdoors—he just considered that an occupational hazard.

      If losing the real Ren meant that the world was a safer place, then so be it. He would sacrifice his past childhood so that future childhoods would endure.

      But normally stakeouts weren’t part of his world-saving undertakings. Some grunt with much less experience and responsibility would be tasked to watch the very quiet beach house in Santa Barbara and could report back.

      Not that there would be much to report.

      This was night number five of watching Natalie Freihof inside this damn almost-mansion. Every night she came home late from the bar she’d been partying at, went inside and didn’t come out until the dawn hours.

      He had to admit, she was smart. Conscious of keeping a low profile. She kept her head down as she came in and out, always wearing nondescript jeans and a T-shirt, and caught a bus to get wherever she was going so it was much more difficult to follow her.

      She went into one office building just after dawn on Mondays through Thursdays, and an entirely different one Fridays through Sundays. Both offices were in the process of being thoroughly investigated by Omega. He imagined at least one of the businesses in them was being used as a shell company of some kind. A front so Natalie could provide resources for her husband. It was just a matter of time before Omega found out exactly what she was doing with which business.

      Then some nights she would go to a bar a few miles away. Once more dressed in the jeans and shirt to go from place to place, which proved again how smart she was. If she needed to run, the clothing would allow her to blend in quickly and easily to almost any crowd. The comfortable athletic shoes would allow her to run.

      He had no doubts she changed clothes once she was inside the bar for whatever it was she was doing. Meeting other clients or contacts? Or maybe just having a good time. She tended to stay until well after midnight on the nights she was there.

      Evidently the dead Mrs. Freihof didn’t require much sleep. Or partying, wining and dining were more important to her than rest. Either way, every time she left the bar, she was again changed into her nondescript clothes, her head was down and she was back on the bus.

      The multi-million-dollar beach-front house was more along the lines of what Ren expected of Damien Freihof’s wife. The deed wasn’t in her name, of course, and the owners were also being investigated, although on the surface even Ren had to admit they looked clean.

      The entire thing was smart. Savvy. Natalie had the weary bus commuter look down to a science. If Ren hadn’t known it was all fake—that she lived in the lap of luxury while assisting a monster who had made it his mission in life to kill innocent people—he might have felt sorry for her. Something about the tall, willowy blonde brought out his protective instincts.

      But Ren viciously tamped that down. What brought out his protective instincts more? The need to stop a killer before he struck again.

      They didn’t have a warrant to get inside the house, but that hadn’t stopped Ren from going in while others were following Natalie to work. He’d been disappointed in what he’d found in the house.

      Nothing.

      But what had he been expecting? Natalie had successfully convinced the world she was dead for six years. Omega Sector had only discovered she was alive by sheer accident. Their photo-recognition software—part of it programmed to run 24/7 searching for any known associates of Damien Freihof—had tagged her in the background of a newspaper photo. She’d happened to be walking out of a building when a photographer snapped a picture of a group of teenagers receiving a science award.

      Ren hardly expected to find anything now that was going to provide irrefutable evidence that she was working with Freihof or providing him assistance. The only thing he’d seen that provided any evidence she’d been there at all had been the small indentation on the very edge of the king-size bed.

      Natalie definitely wasn’t rolling toward the middle of the bed, reaching for her husband. Of course, Damien would have to be called her ex-husband since he remarried after Natalie’s “death.”

      That poor woman had died in a car accident just a year later. Dead wife number two. When Omega had found out that Natalie was in fact alive, they had exhumed two grave sites. One coffin had contained a body. Natalie’s had not.

      Legally, Natalie was no longer officially married to Freihof, due to his second marriage. Omega lawyers had already checked into that to make sure laws about testifying against one’s spouse wouldn’t come into play.

      But married to him or not, if Natalie Freihof was helping Damien—which Ren had very little doubt she was—he would take her down.

      Five days he’d been watching her, hoping she would slip up or get complacent and lead them to Freihof. The phones at the house were tapped, but she never used them. And if she had a cell phone, it was a burner that she didn’t use at the house. No cell signals ever came from there.

      So they were basically at a dead end. A place Ren didn’t like to be and didn’t find himself at very often.

      It was time to shake things up. If they didn’t put pressure on ex–Mrs. Freihof, she was never going to do anything reckless. It was time to force her hand.

      Ren grabbed his phone and dialed a number. It wasn’t even dawn here yet, and Colorado was only an hour ahead, but Steve Drackett still answered and sounded like he’d been awake for hours. Given that the man had a new baby it was entirely possible.

      “Ren. Any change?” The head of the Omega Sector Critical Response Division skipped all formal greetings.

      “Nothing. And no sign that she’s going to do anything anytime soon. We need to prod her into action. Watching just isn’t cutting it.”

      “I’ve had Brandon Han and Andrea Gordon-Han