Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

nose to the body.

      The Texan came to a halt, seeing the outline of the body on the floor.

      In life, her name had been Veronica Moone. At least, that was the name given to her nonofficial cover. She’d been there in the guise of a young college graduate traveling abroad, living in Japan, sometimes working as a translator and sometimes teaching American English to local students. The ruse had given her plenty of room to move around, allowing her to travel to different Japanese cities for schools or businesses needing English translators. Invariably she’d had an inside edge for identifying potential threats to those global corporations.

      In her role, either speaking to the parents of grade-school students or conversing with young businessmen looking to make it easier for themselves internationally, she could pick up details and information with far greater precision than the most advanced satellite imagery.

      Moone wasn’t the name she’d been born with, Hawkins doubted, any more than their cover names were real.

      Seven hours and her body was still in rigor. Kneeling beside her, he used what little ambient light was available to look for signs of injury. Barring that, he cupped his fingers over the lens of the flashlight and the glow between his fingers and a gleam he let loose to splash over her body. Shielding the light from being visible through the windows gave him immediate illumination, both figuratively and literally.

      A line of bruising on her throat, marked by a large knot of blackness over her windpipe, revealed the tool of her death as being a garrote.

      Manning took a glance, then frowned. “Silk scarf with a coin knotted into the middle.”

      “Or para-cord around a large chain link,” Hawkins said, though he didn’t really believe that. “Why in hell would someone kill her along the lines of a Thuggee killer?”

      Manning’s shrug didn’t give Hawkins any good vibes. Unfortunately, Manning’s familiarity with the cultlike murder/assassination was only too much of an indicator of how often different killers resorted to techniques such as these. Hawkins hadn’t been on the team in one instance where the masterminds behind a new Thuggee cult had gone so far as to create an animatronic statue of the Thuggee’s deadly goddess Kali, complete with a compact microwave laser unit installed in her elaborate headdress that could kill with a single robotic glance.

      “The Thuggee, the Assassins, the Ninja, they’re all effective, and the more they appear as something either cultlike or outré, the more layers of obfuscation fall between the murderer and the victim,” Manning said. “We’re likely the only two people in this city, or even Japan, who could have figured out that Veronica here was murdered because she was a CIA operative instead of just a poor unlucky victim of a death goddess fetishist.”

      “Striker ran into some Thuggee like this a while back, too, only operating in the Middle East,” Hawkins returned. “And let’s not forget England and the so-called Ripper killer.”

      “Makes you wonder if fifty to a hundred years from now, some hush-hush group disguises their disposal of witnesses as the work of a fiend with a machete and a hockey mask,” Manning mused.

      Moone, her mousy-brown hair cut short, but not boyishly so, might have been more attractive if all the blood had not drained from the right side of her face, leaving it gaunt, and settled into the left side, rendering it bloated and discolored. Her hazel eyes glinted in the shielded light, her having died with them open.

      “Not a real Thuggee. They always close the eyes of their victims,” Hawkins noted.

      “Obfuscation, obfuscation,” Manning repeated grimly. He turned away from the scene and moved toward the back of the house. The front door was locked, and there might have been another exit.

      Hawkins knew that the death she suffered would not have been easy or gentle. The coin in the center of the garrote would have crushed her windpipe, so even if the pressure had been released, she would have had no chance of getting another breath. The strangling cord had been pulled tight, but there were no signs of fists balled up against the underside of her mandibles, meaning that while she’d suffocated, her brain had received blood. Moone wouldn’t have passed out.

      A crust of dried tears pooled at the corners of her eyelids. Her end had been slow. Cruel. Meticulous.

      All to cover up a conspiracy. This woman, who genuinely had taught people a language they’d wanted to learn, had been murdered. She’d gained information about what might have been a clue as to why shiploads of Japanese whalers died in a salvo of ship-busting missiles. Hawkins normally had a low opinion of those who engaged in wanton murder, but so far the logic of these brutal deaths escaped him.

      Certainly, Hawkins had more than a little passing concern for the smart, almost relatable giant mammals of the ocean. Even as a good-ol’-boy hunter, he believed in conservation, not sloblike slaughter. He couldn’t fathom the slaughter of an endangered animal just to make a rug or to simply get a piece of rhinoceros horn to enhance the strength of their own horn. Be that as it may, the Japanese sailors killed on the factory ships were not killers. They’d simply been working jobs to feed their families.

      However, many in the world saw the deaths of “evil Japanese hunters” as a cause to rejoice. Those who simply wanted to protect an endangered species, and the lawmen who sought to protect their freedom of speech, had also been slaughtered.

      Dead was dead, so it shouldn’t matter, but Hawkins was offended. He was raised with strong values of what was right and what was wrong. Being murdered for doing your job was in the wrong column, so he sympathized with the Japanese sailors, and even more for the widows, orphans, surviving siblings and parents of those who’d died at sea.

      Moone was a covert operative; she’d known that any one of her investigations could have brought her to a violent death. But seeing her lying there, murdered in this manner, Hawkins felt a pang of guilt for her. She looked innocent. She’d tried to do right by her country. She was a sister in arms. A face to which he could attach the statistics of those murdered.

      Movement out in front of the house brought Hawkins’s attention back to the present and he rose from beside the dead girl. The light had instantly been smothered by his hand and he made certain the toggle switch was turned off. “Gary?”

      “I’m out in the alley,” Manning answered over his hands-free com.

      Hawkins padded in the direction his friend had gone. “Movement through the front door.”

      “I’ll circle around,” the Canadian returned. “Stay put unless it’s a badge.”

      “Yes, sir,” the Texan replied. He perched in the shadows by the back door, making certain that his presence was unseen in the frame of the partially open entrance.

      Tense, he waited to see who would show up on the doorstep of a murdered girl. And just in case, he had both knives out and ready, hoping to greet the assassin.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      The door swung clumsily on its hinges, the shattered lock giving no resistance as it was pushed open and reached the apex of its usual swing with a slam. No flashlights sprayed their glare, no echo beyond the entrance to Moone’s kitchenette. T. J. Hawkins was familiar enough with police procedure to know that cops would not enter a darkened house without lights. Sure, the glare would make them an obvious focus, but in dim conditions as in Moone’s almost empty home, the blaze of LED bulbs would actually do more to blind an ambusher than anything else.

      As well, police officers would also call out to inquire if anyone was in trouble within.

      The bastard or bastards at the door were most likely not cops.

      That meant that he and Manning had made contact with an enemy. Hawkins subvocalized confirmation to his partner. “Close them off.”

      “On it,” Manning returned.

      Two syllables and Hawkins knew there was nothing that would stop the big Canadian from coming to his aid short