Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan)
Read Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) Online
Authors: Leslie A. Kelly
DON’T LOOK AWAY
by
Leslie A. Kelly
Book 1 of the Veronica Sloan Series
Copyright 2013 Leslie A. Kelly
Table of Contents
Washington, D.C.
July 4, 2022
Leanne Carr tried to keep her eyes open throughout her murder.
She didn’t scream—that was pointless. This part of the sub-basement was completely deserted, dark and cavernous. Security teams had swept the area clean twenty-four hours ago in preparation for today’s event, not even allowing the round-the-clock construction workers access. Then they’d locked down the whole site.
Just her misfortune that she had a high enough security clearance to get around the lockdown. Because the measures used to keep unauthorized people out had done a magnificent job of trapping her in. With a psychopath.
She would have fought if she could. But that had been impossible once her attacker, dressed all in black, had stuck a metal device on her upper arm, sending a million frissons of electric pain rocketing through her. After that, Leanne had been able to do nothing more than lie on the cold concrete floor, every muscle in her body still twitching. Helpless. Useless. Watching groggily as he began to cut her clothes away, piece by piece, not seeming to care if he occasionally took chunks of her skin along with them.
Strange, the cutting didn’t hurt as much as she would have expected. Maybe because she was still feeling the reverberations of shock from the weapon he’d used to stun her. Maybe because her mind had begun to remove itself from this situation.
Maybe because she was already dead.
No, not dead
. She wasn’t experiencing the expected agony of the knife, and the images before her eyes weren’t making sense in her brain.
Darkness, just darkness
. But her other senses hadn’t completely failed her. She could smell something peculiar. Medicinal. Metallic. Probably blood, which she could also taste on her lips from the first, shocking blow to her face.
Leanne could also still hear enough to know the world continued to turn outside this private corner of hell. Above the hiss of his deep, even breathing, which was driving her mad with its absolute normalcy, came the faint whomp-whomp of powerful rotor blades passing far overhead.
Helicopter
.
In her mind, she heard the rest of what must be going on. The voices of carefully-screened, hand-picked reporters calling out pre-approved questions. The college marching band chosen from among thousands of applicants for the honor of playing the national anthem. The patriotic onlookers cheering through their tears, just as each song and every speech was scripted to make them do.
The moment had arrived, the big event she’d been helping to coordinate for the past several months. Funny how little it mattered now, in the last moments of her life.
There was also one more sound slowly building in Leanne’s head which finally drove all other thoughts away. With every nerve ending that came limping back to life, only to experience another kind of pain, the noise grew louder.
It was the sound of her moans. Which, she had no doubt, would eventually become screams.
But not dead yet
,
she reminded herself, though she knew she soon would be. Probably not as soon as she’d like given the way her attacker, so silent but for his breathing, so deliberate in his movements, looked beneath his mask. She could just make out the curve of his mouth behind a draping of black fabric that covered his entire head. He—possibly she?—was smiling.
No. Death would not come soon enough.
“Please.”
That was all she could manage. Leanne herself, however, wasn’t sure what she was asking. Please let her go? Please let her die? Please let this not be happening?
He ignored her. She tried to focus on anything that could be used to identify him—the shade of his skin, any identifying marks, just as she had been trained to do. But he was well-covered. Hopefully there would be something. Maybe the darkness wouldn’t prevent the investigators from finding some clue she didn’t even recognize
He began to scrape the tip of the knife over her body in long, deliberate sweeps. Slow. Almost erotic, as though he were caressing her.
The sensations built in intensity as her nerve endings limped back to life and transmitted the messages of pain to her weary brain. A thin trail of fire traced the blade’s route across her shoulder, around her neck, between her breasts, down her stomach. Until it reached her bloody thighs and moved between them.
It was tempting to let go. To shut her eyes and wait for it to be over. But the certainty of her impending murder kept her eyelids from falling, even though her mind wasn’t fully processing everything she saw. She couldn’t, as a matter of fact, process much of anything except the glittering silver of the weapon, tightly clenched in a black-gloved hand.
Suddenly, a brilliant light came on, shining right in her face, blinding her. She groaned, clenching her eyes shut.
It didn’t matter. Even if she could no longer see what was happening, after this was all over, someone else would examine the pictures in her mind.
And would catch her murderer.
“This is gonna take forever.”
Detective Veronica Sloan glared out the windshield of her car, mentally cursing the heat, and the crowd. Though traffic in the nation’s capital was always a bitch, the lines to get through the Pennsylvania Avenue checkpoints were longer than usual on this wickedly hot summer morning.
A queue of pedestrians wound from each of the heavily-guarded entrances, through Lafayette Park, all the way to H Street. Throngs of other people milled around them, selling cold drinks, packaged food or souvenirs. Some held protest signs, some formed prayer circles.
A bunch of them blocked the damn road.
On any day there would be discontent. On this particularly sweltering July one, tempers were flaring. Hers not the least of them.
In the time it had taken to crawl two blocks in the unmarked sedan, she’d seen one woman faint, two fights break out, and a group of children sprawl on the sidewalk in exhaustion. Flag-draped rednecks glared at Japanese tourists—the slanty-eyed foreigners just as unwelcome as the burqa-wearing ones in their minds. Everyone sweated and cursed and bitched and shouted.
But they didn’t leave. Morbid curiosity always ensured they wouldn’t leave once they’d made it this far.
She could have roared in on full emergency response, dispersing the crowd spilling into the street with her siren and her horn. She didn’t. Because if the people heard about the murder, they might get a little itchy. Might start stampeding, in fact. Washington was quick to panic these days. And she didn’t particularly want to add any boot-crushed grandmas from the Midwest to her already backbreaking caseload.
“Christ, I think there are as many people in line now as there were yesterday for the rededication.”
Ronnie glanced over at her partner, Mark Daniels, who looked as impatient as she felt. The cynic in her couldn’t help saying, “Yeah, but this is nothing compared to the crowds who lined up to gawk at the rubble that first year.”
No, it definitely wasn’t. As soon as the military had begun to allow visitors to view the destruction wrought in October of 2017, D.C. had become the hottest tourist destination in the world. People had clamored for the chance to say they had seen the site of the worst terrorist attack in history.
Goddamn ghouls.
“I guess you’re right.” He leaned back in the seat, crossing his arms over his brawny chest and closing his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”
She laughed softly. “Who was she?”
Her partner didn’t bother looking up. “A stripper from the Shake And Bake. I always thought it would be fun to be the pole for a walking pair of jugs, but I think I’m gettin’ too old for that stuff.”
He wasn’t even forty. Nowhere near old, in brain or brawn, though his weary tone hinted at his recent late nights. Daniels had been edgy lately, pushing limits, taking risks. She couldn’t say why. Nor could she say she wasn’t worried about him.
“Hard living. You’d better slow down.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Hey, my ass isn’t hanging off a bar stool seven nights a week. And the only poles I see are the ones holding up the lights in the park where I run.”
Mark’s lips twitched a little, though his position never changed. “I keep telling you Ron, a body’s only got so much runnin’ in it. You better save it for our visits to the East Side. One of these days when you’re chasing some banger, you’re gonna run out of run.”
Ahh, Daniels wisdom. What would she do without her daily dose of it?
Ronnie didn’t have time to wonder, because they’d finally reached the turn-off for heavily barricaded 17
th
Street. Ignoring the glares of the pedestrians who grudgingly got out of the way, she turned and drove past a picket line of armed soldiers dressed in urban fatigues.
This was the only vehicular route into or out of the north quadrant of the area once called the National Mall. An area that had, just yesterday, in a ceremony full of as much pomp and ceremony as could be accomplished behind a wall of bulletproof glass, been rededicated by the president as Patriot Square.
The place had another name on the street. Just as most New Yorkers still called the 9/11 site Ground Zero, most people around here called this The Trainyard.
“Stop the car,” a stern voice ordered as she slowly cruised toward the iron-and-barbed-wire fence. The voice had come out of one of the dozen body-armor wearing troops fronting the gate, every one of whom had a weapon aimed directly at her face. Talk about a welcoming committee.
Eight years ago, when she’d been just a rookie cop and the U.S.—more than a decade after 9/11—had seemed relatively safe, a flashed badge would have gotten her past any roadblock. Times were different now. Much different. So without a word, she threw the car into park, killed the engine, and put her hands up.
“Let’s go,” she told her partner.
Daniels put his hands up, too, and opened his eyes. The bags under them spotlighted his weariness, not to mention his hangover. Ronnie was seriously going kick his butt later for showing up on the job in such a pathetic state, especially on a day like today, which was shaping up to be a really shitty one. Bad enough on any normal day when they were rounding up the latest gang-enforcer or Pure V dealer, Pure V being the hottest new street drug, a cheap variation of Vicodin. But it was much worse now, when they had to come to this side of town and undergo a thorough inspection.
After they had been given the nod by the sergeant in charge, they stepped out into the bright sunshine, and were each immediately approached by different security teams.
“Sloan, D.C. Police,” she said as soon as one of the men reached her, his weapon still trained on her head. Another soldier stood directly behind his left shoulder, and a third was holding the leash of a thick-chested, sharp-toothed K-9.
Never lowering his semi-automatic, the first soldier held out his other hand. She passed over her badge and photo I.D., then moved away from the car for a thorough search. Both of the vehicle, and of her.
He examined her badge. The gun came down. But he didn’t holster it.
His mouth barely moving, and his face expressionless, he asked, “Weapon?”
She nodded. “Glock. Rear holster.” Ronnie knew better than to reach back and offer it up herself, which was why she hadn’t made any proactive move toward it before exiting the car. Her head would have been a slushy pile of brain and bone on the sidewalk the second these hard-nosed troops had seen a weapon in her hand.
“Take off your jacket.”
She did, glad to lose the extra weight of the dark, city-issued clothing. Ronnie missed the way she had dressed during her early years as a detective—the pre-2017 days of wearing street clothes on the job. But the way the whole country demanded confirmation and re-confirmation of every person’s identity, she figured it wasn’t surprising that every cop now had to be in uniform. All the way up to the Chief of the National Department of Law Enforcement.
“Spread.”
Assuming a customary position, she went completely still, arms extended at her sides, legs apart. Without saying a word, the men got to work. One of the soldiers removed the 9 mm and spare clip off her back and stepped away to examine them. Another appeared out of nowhere with a digital scanner. He passed it over her upper arm like it was a can of beans at the grocery store, looking for the microchip that was implanted in the arm of every law-abiding American citizen.
The non-law-abiding ones didn’t like them so much.
Neither did the civil rights fanatics who had been among the loudest screaming against the idea several years ago when the government had first tried to get its citizens to voluntarily submit to implantation.
Glancing at the data on the tiny screen, the soldier nodded toward the sergeant. “Identity confirmed. Sloan, Veronica Marie, born Arlington, Virginia, January 5, 1993.”
One step closer. But still not done.
Clipping a state-of-the-art, super-powerful sensor to his hand, the sergeant moved in beside her. He was so close she could feel his breath on the side of her face and smell the sausage he’d had for breakfast.
“Don’t move.” He bit the words out from a jaw so tight it could have been used to crack a walnut.
She was tempted to promise she wouldn’t, but that would constitute moving her mouth and she really didn’t want to get shot or clubbed today. So she just stood there waiting for him to finish.
Showing no emotion, he ran the miniscule device over her entire body, his hand less than a centimeter away from her clothes. If he got any kind of thrill off of scraping his palm across her nipples, he at least had the courtesy not to show it.
The metal detector trilled as it passed over her holster, the button of her pants, the microchip implanted in her arm, the hook of her bra, even the metal eyelets of her shoes. It also gave a soft beep as it moved near her right temple, which made him pause for a moment, double-check the reading, and tug her hair out of the way to study the side of her head. He obviously saw nothing...the incision had been tiny and right up against her hairline.
“If you check my records, you’ll see a code for that,” she explained, risking the mouth move.
The soldier stared at her, then stepped away to glance at his scanner screen. He might be curious about why she was authorized to proceed into highly secure areas when she obviously had some kind of unexplained metal in her head, but he was professional enough to not ask.
After a moment, he stepped back. His stare shifted to her face. A beat. Then he moved on.
“Clear,” he said as he stepped back for the next part of the inspection.
The K-9 had just finished in the car. He now made quick work of sniffing her crotch, her ass, and anywhere else he could stick his nose to make sure she wasn’t wired to blow herself up with some kind of bomb stuck into a body orifice.
It’d happened.
When the dog was done, another soldier finished the job the old-fashioned way, feeling her up so thoroughly, she wished he had at least bought her a cup of coffee first. She didn’t suspect he’d appreciate the smart-ass comment, so she kept her mouth shut. These guys had a tough job to do, and she, for one, wasn’t going to say anything to make their lives any harder. Or to piss them off.
“You’re authorized to proceed, Detective Sloan,” the sergeant said, returning her I.D. as the other guard returned her weapon. “You know the way?”
Tucking the I.D. in her pocket and her 9mm into its holster, she thought about his question.
Did she know the way?
Why was that such a difficult one to answer? She had been born and raised right across the Potomac, just a few miles from here. She’d attended Georgetown University and currently lived a block away from Rock Creek Park. This was her town.
But the answer to his question was no. She hadn’t been on these streets in a long time. Most Washingtonians stayed clear of this quadrant, the wounds still too raw, even after nearly five years.
Not that she was about to admit that. So she took a guess. “The old security entrance off State?”
He replied with a brief nod, then stepped away, watching every move she made as she re-entered the car. Daniels got in on the other side, buckled up and muttered, “Jesus, I think that private just squeezed my dick harder than the stripper did last night.”
She had to grin. “Yeah. Join the club.”
Driving through the slowly opening gates, still under the watchful eye of the troops, she barely noticed Mark’s evil chuckle. “Join the club, huh? So, you telling me some of the guys at the precinct are right about what you’ve really got in your pants?”
“Screw you,” she shot back, her voice holding no heat.
She wasn’t really offended by her partner’s jab. Ronnie knew better than anyone that a lot of the men she worked with hated her guts. First, because she’d turned a lot of them down. Second because she had made detective when some of the guys she’d gone to the academy with were still writing tickets. Third because most of them knew she could not be intimidated.
Fourth, most recently, because Ronnie had made it onto the Optical Evidence Program Investigative Squad—O.E.P.I.S.. If testing went well, members of the newly formed, national-level unit would someday be in place in every law enforcement agency in America. For now, however, it was virgin territory. Only five-hundred investigators had been chosen from the entire country—a one-to-ten ratio to the five-thousand test subjects who’d had devices implanted in their brains as part of the Optical Evidence Program. So it was a highly sought-after assignment, even though few people actually knew the full scope of the experiment. Ronnie getting in hadn’t earned her a lot of friendly thoughts back at the squad. Or in the whole D.C.P.D. Not that she cared. And not that it seemed to matter a bit, since she had yet to actively work on that kind of case.
Maybe today.
The thought flashed through her mind, like it did every time she was personally called out on a case. So far, it hadn’t happened. But today could be different. Considering she and her partner were heading out of their jurisdiction, by special request, and given where the victim had been found, this really could be the day. As a rush of nervous excitement shot through her, Ronnie took a deep breath to disguise it from Daniels.