Dead End. Lisa Phillips

a quick-dial setting while Wyatt was cooking lunch.

      “Nina?”

      A hand grabbed her hair and yanked.

      Nina dropped the phone and screamed as she was dragged backward. The phone cracked on the tile floor as he pulled her across the threshold into the hall.

      * * *

      Wyatt pushed open the door of Nina’s building to the sound of sirens from approaching police cars. He hit the button for the elevator and tapped his foot as the car ascended to the twenty-second floor. “I’m sure she’s okay.” He muttered the words into the empty car, not because he was actually convinced. More like trying to fool himself into believing it.

      Wyatt just wanted to get up there. He’d called Nina back after she screamed, and then he’d called Parker. Neither he nor his partner had gotten through on either her landline or her cell phone during the ten minutes since her call, until now.

      He drew his weapon as the elevator slid open to reveal the building’s security guard outside the door to Nina’s condo. “She isn’t answering, but there’s thumping. Like I said on the phone, sounds like someone is in there with her,” the guard reported.

      Wyatt nodded. “You did good, waiting for me.”

      The couple of minutes had probably felt like a lifetime. Still, Wyatt didn’t want an old security guard getting hurt. Wyatt turned away, lifted his foot, and kicked the door open. He swung around, gun up, and started a room-by-room search.

      “Nina?”

      Kitchen was clear. Her phone was broken on the floor, a path through the debris like something had been swept through it. The hall looked exactly the same as when he’d left not long ago.

      A dark figure crossed the hall at a dead run.

      Wyatt raced after him into the bedroom. He’d clearly spooked the man, but was it in time to save Nina? The balcony door was open. Air blew back the long curtain with the night breeze. The man glanced over his shoulder, half out of the window.

      “US Marshals.”

      The man just stared. Long enough for Wyatt to get a good look at his face. Silver hair. Regal nose. The man shoved at the screen and jumped out. Wyatt raced to the window, where he rappelled from a rope attached to the balcony down to the ground floor. Who was this guy?

      He called in what had happened to the police and requested roadblocks and a sweep starting where he landed. “Nina?”

      “In here,” Sienna yelled.

      He ran to the living room, where nearly the whole team had arrived. “You’re here.”

      Parker nodded, on his phone.

      A socked foot was visible at the far end of the couch, and a broken lamp lay discarded on the floor. Sienna huddled over Nina. Wyatt rounded the couch, stowed his weapon and crouched. Nina was facedown on the floor. New raw red scratches covered her right hand and forearm. He brushed back hair from the side of her face and winced.

      “Nina. Can you hear me? Nina?”

      She didn’t move.

      Sienna grabbed his hand. “Parker’s calling an ambulance.”

      * * *

      Nina’s head felt like an elephant had sat on it. She blinked against the fluorescent lights of the room and looked around. Not her bed. Not her clothes, a hospital gown.

      Beside her, on a chair, Wyatt Ames sat with his head in his hands.

      “Hey,” she managed to say.

      “You’re awake.” He shot up from the chair and perched on the side of her bed. “How are you feeling?”

      Nina tried to swallow against the arid desert in her mouth. Wyatt reached for a cup and held the straw to her. Nina pushed up on the bed. “I can sit up.”

      “Okay, but take it easy.”

      She took a drink. There was a knock on the door, and two cops entered. Wyatt nodded to them, and then asked, “Want to tell me what happened?”

      Nina pushed back the hair that hung over her eyes, the ends tickling her cheek. “Sure.”

      One of the officers pulled out a little notepad and a pencil. How could they arrest Mr. Thomas when she—or they—didn’t even know the man’s whole name?

      “But I don’t know how much good it’s going to do.”

      Wyatt replaced the cup on the table. “Let us worry about that. I gave a statement myself. I saw his face, and I’m going to head to the office after this to look at mug shots and see if I can identify him.”

      Nina nodded. It hurt enough to breathe that she wondered if Thomas might have cracked a rib or two. “He was in my condo after you left. He was mad because I wasn’t prepared to go with him. He was going to drug me, but the needle end broke off. I called you and it connected, and I yelled, and it was like he...snapped.”

      “He?”

      Nina shut her eyes. She could see his enraged face as he stood over her. Fine, if Wyatt needed her to identify the man aloud, she would do it. Nina steeled herself and opened her eyes. “It was Mr. Thomas.”

      She caught Wyatt’s surprise before he could cover it. “The man in your condo was the man you believe killed your mother?”

      He thought it was someone else? “I know he killed her. He as much as admitted it.”

      Wyatt swallowed what he’d been about to say. Had he thought the suited, silver-haired man in her apartment was some kind of thug?

      Nina sighed. “I know you don’t believe me. I know you think that I just want to believe it wasn’t my father and that I’m making up a story.”

      Wyatt started to shake his head. “That’s not—”

      “I’m not asking you to believe something you don’t know, Wyatt. You weren’t there that day, but I was. My father didn’t do it. It had to have been Mr. Thomas. There’s no other explanation.”

      She sucked in a breath to control the riot of emotions. Tired and beat-up, she probably wasn’t in any frame of mind to do this. But if Mr. Thomas thought she was going to leave things alone now, he was delirious. There was no way Nina would let this lie. Not after he’d attacked her.

      She gritted her teeth. “He found out I’ve been asking questions about my mother’s death, and he came after me because of it. That means he’s guilty.”

      She turned to the officers and gave them her mother’s name. The date. If she’d had the file already she’d have given them the FBI’s case number.

      Nina turned to Wyatt. “Did you call the FBI and ask them about the file?”

      He shook his head. “Not yet, but I will.”

      It hadn’t been long since he’d made lunch in her kitchen. She hoped he really would do that. She had a serious problem with anyone who said they were going to do something and then didn’t, and she had ever since her life had been consumed with warring parents who made outlandish promises to her just to one-up each other. They had never found it necessary to keep their promises. Then one day both of them were gone.

      Wyatt frowned. “We should let you rest. Not that they think any of the tranquilizer in that needle got into you. It’s being tested for fingerprints. But still...”

      Nina lay back in bed. Her shoulder was sore where the needle had broken off inside her. But fingerprints? She didn’t think he’d been that careless. Had he been wearing gloves? “It was Mr. Thomas who tried to run me over this morning. It was him who pretended to be a clerk at the federal courthouse in Baltimore to keep me from getting the file.”

      What else was she forgetting to tell him?

      Wyatt shook his head.