“Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” Madrid’s heart began to pound. “I want to know what the hell is going on.”
Cutter leaned back in his chair. Within the depths of his eyes Madrid saw knowledge. He saw regret. Caution. Worst of all he saw a damnable amount of sympathy. “We lost an agent last night.”
“Who?” But even before Cutter answered, he knew.
“Angela Matheson.”
The name struck him like a brass-knuckle punch. Disbelief and grief tangled inside him, but Madrid didn’t let himself react. A master at schooling his expression and body language, he stood perfectly still, his face carefully blank, his eyes level on his superior.
“You sure?” he asked after a moment, surprised his voice sounded so normal when he was coming apart inside.
“Yeah.”
“How did it happen?”
“She was on assignment in Northern California. Deep undercover work.”
“Are you being vague on purpose?”
“You know how it works.”
A deep-cover operative himself, Madrid knew all too well that the fewer people who knew about an operation, the better the chance that the agent’s cover would remain intact. He shouldn’t take Cutter’s silence personally, but he did.
“Did someone make her?” he asked. “Blow her cover? What?”
“We don’t know the details.”
“I’m not in the mood to be stonewalled.”
“Then stop asking questions I can’t answer.” Cutter sighed tiredly, and Madrid realized the other man had been up all night. “Look, I didn’t want you to hear about this secondhand. That’s why I called you in.”
Madrid didn’t want this to be about emotions. It was about the loss of an agent. But he could feel the emotions burgeoning inside him. “You put someone on it?”
“I did.”
“Who?”
Cutter frowned.
Madrid smiled, but the stretching of his lips belied the emotions slashing his insides to bits. “You know better than to try to lock me out of this.”
“I know better than to assign an agent something when he’s too personally involved.”
“I’m not some damn rookie, Sean. I can handle it.”
“No dice, Mike.”
Fury joined the chorus of emotions singing through him. “What about the boy?” Nicolas, he remembered. A sweet kid with special needs.
“Missing.”
The word hit him like a punch. Angela had loved that kid more than anything in the world. He wiped his wet palms on his slacks. “Why would someone take her kid? Was it a kidnapping? What?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Liar. “Do you have a suspect?”
Cutter’s jaw flexed. The silence that followed spoke more than a thousand words.
“Witnesses? Anything at all to go on?”
“We think the boy witnessed her murder.”
The knot in Madrid’s chest tightened. Poor kid. “Aw, man.”
“I’m sorry,” Cutter said after a moment.
The last thing Madrid wanted was sympathy. “If you want to make me feel better, give me this assignment.”
Cutter grimaced, softened. “Mike, I know you and Angela were…close.”
“It was a long time ago. She was a friend. That’s all.”
Judging from the look on his face, the other man wasn’t buying it.
Madrid didn’t waste his time asking any more questions. Cutter wasn’t going to tell him what he needed to know, and time was of the essence if he was going to bring that boy home. There were multitudes of ways to glean information, a task Madrid had always been very good at.
Reaching into his jacket, he removed his MIDNIGHT identification badge from his wallet. Next he tugged the Beretta .380 from his shoulder holster and set both on the conference-room table.
Cutter shook his head. “Don’t do this, Mike.”
“Then give me this case. Tell me what I need to know.”
“You know I can’t do that. Damn it, this isn’t about revenge.”
Another smile twisted Madrid’s mouth. “It’s always about revenge,” he said, and walked out the door without looking back.
MIKE MADRID WAS LIKE a bloodhound when it came to tracking killers. Once he had the scent, there was no stopping him. After speaking with Cutter, he went back to his place and began calling in favors. He put his not-so-aboveboard computer skills to work and hacked a secure database the feds had deemed unhackable. Within hours he had a name.
Jessica Atwood.
Twenty-eight years old. Waitress. Recent messy divorce. From Phoenix. No children. No immediate family. She and Angela had gone to college together some ten years ago. Atwood didn’t have a record, but Madrid knew that didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of murder. Under the right circumstances everyone was capable of murder. The burning question now was what did she want with the kid?