Invincible (4 page)

“Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”

Kristin put her arm around Flick's narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where's your luggage, Flick?”

“She didn't check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I'll leave you two to sort this out.”

Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn't you bring anything with you?”

“The headmistress is packing everything up. She's going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn't trust me in the dormitory.”

Good lord! She'd wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn't mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick's white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let's go home.”

Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don't want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”

Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”

“I'm not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs.
Fortin. But he didn't call me back. So I knew something was wrong.

“Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn't call me back and you said—”

“I said he wasn't feeling well. But that doesn't mean he's in the hospital, Flick.”

“But he is, isn't he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn't, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What's wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”

Kristin felt trapped. She'd hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn't possible now. “He's had a stroke, Flick.”

“A stroke? What's that?”

“A blood vessel broke in his brain.”

“Is he dying?” Flick cried.

“No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That's why Gramps hasn't called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can't talk very well yet.”

“Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.

“With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”

Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter's anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can't walk or write—”

“Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn't email me back.”

“That's right.”

“Then it's a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”

Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.

It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter's vocabulary had grown in the four months since she'd seen her at Christmas. It wasn't always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.

Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where she'd left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she'd last seen her mother.

Kristin heard a word—
superfluous
—that she didn't know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She'd spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She'd been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.

It was only after Flick was born that she'd realized she was going to need a college degree. She'd gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in
Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.

Flick, on the other hand, had started reading at four. By the time she was seven, Kristin had resorted to parenting books to try and figure out how to manage her brilliant daughter. One night, she'd caught Flick reading her most recent parenting book under the covers. It was a toss-up who was learning to manage whom.

But despite her intelligence, Flick was still a child. Kristin had kept her daughter in the dark about her grandfather's stroke early last week, the day after Max's visit, in fact, in an attempt to shield Flick from the worst of it. She'd hoped her father would be well on the road to physical recovery before Flick saw him again.

Her father's face—eye, cheek and mouth—sagged on the right side, giving him a frightening appearance, which worsened when he tried to speak. Her nine-year-old daughter might be intellectually ready to help her grandfather. But Kristin wondered how she would react when she saw him in his hospital bed.

“Please, Mom,” Flick pleaded. “Let's go see Gramps.”

Kristin was torn. “Flick, I'm not sure—”

“Please, Mom!”

Kristin realized that if she didn't take Flick to see her grandfather, her creative daughter would find some way to get to the hospital on her own. “He's very sick, honey. I'm afraid seeing you will upset him.”
And you.

“I won't upset him, Mom,” the girl promised. “I just want to talk to him.”

Talk to him? He can't talk!
Kristin knew her daughter didn't comprehend the seriousness of her grandfather's illness. But there was no keeping the two of them apart.

Harry Lassiter had been a part of Flick's life from the day she was born, a surrogate father. No wonder her daughter was so desperate to see him. And Flick's appearance might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Kristin's father, a man who'd kept himself in excellent physical condition his entire life, was infuriated by his helplessness after the unexpected stroke. Harry had resisted the idea of physical therapy that could only promise improvement, rather than perfect health. Maybe Flick's presence would encourage him to try harder to get back on his feet, even if he needed help walking from now on.

Kristin studied her daughter's eager face. The bright blue eyes, strong chin and straight black hair from her father. The high cheekbones and uptilted nose from her mother. When she set her mind to something, the nine-year-old was a force to be reckoned with.

Harry Lassiter was as helpless to deny this extraordinary child whatever she wanted as Kristin was herself.

Hopefully, her father would be swept up by the whirl wind that was her daughter. By the time he came down again, he'd be standing on his own two feet.

For the first time in a very long time, Kristin smiled. Maybe things were finally going to turn around. “Come on, Flick. Let's go see Gramps.”

K
ristin perched on the edge of her father's bed at Jackson Memorial Hospital and said, “Dad, I have a surprise for you. You have a visitor.”

“On ahn un,” her father replied.

Don't want one.

Kristin knew what he'd said only because she knew how her proud father felt about anyone seeing him like he was now. “I know you don't want to see anyone. You don't have a choice.”

His gray eyes blazed with anger, and one cheek lifted as the side of his mouth turned down in a snarl. “No!”

That was clear enough. But Flick was waiting in the visitors' lounge down the hall. God knew how long the inquisitive nine-year-old could last in a hospital waiting room without getting into trouble. Kristin had warned Flick to behave herself and hurried to her father's room to prepare him for seeing his granddaughter. She didn't have a lot of time to argue with him.

Her stomach knotted as she watched the once-
invincible Harry Lassiter visibly struggle to say, “I ih e ere?”

Why is she here?

Kristin had debated whether to tell her father that Flick had gotten herself thrown out of school. It was one more thing he didn't need to worry about. But she didn't want to set a bad example by asking Flick to lie, and Flick would likely blurt it out anyway.

“Flick was worried when you stopped emailing. She got herself thrown out of school so she could come find out what happened to you.”

Kristin thought she saw the flicker of a smile cross half her father's face. If so, it was the first since his stroke.

He sighed audibly. “Aw igh.”

“Well, all right,” Kristin said with a smile of her own, relieved that he'd given in so easily. “I'll be right back. I left her—”

“Gramps!”

Kristin turned to find Flick poised in the doorway, a look of horror on her face.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” her father howled, creating a gar-goyle face that caused Flick to whimper, before he turned away with a sound of anguish, flailing with his one good hand under the sheet.

Out! Out! Out!

Kristin fought the urge to grab Flick and run—from her father, from her job, from her self-destructing life.

But she stood her ground. Because in her head she
heard:
Never run from a challenge. Remember, you're invincible.

“You're scaring Flick, Dad,” Kristin said in a firm voice. “Flick, come here,” she said in an equally firm voice.

Flick tore fearful eyes from her grandfather's supine body and stared dazed at her mother.

“Come here,” Kristin repeated, holding out her hand to her daughter. “I know Gramps looks different. I would have prepared you, if you'd waited in the lounge. Because of his stroke, the right side of his face droops. That's why he looks so…funny. So…weird. So…odd,” Kristin finished, after searching for the right word and never finding it.

“Dad, look at us,” she commanded her father. “I want Flick to see your face in repose.” His face would still look strange, but not so horrible as it had when he'd howled. Kristin kept a reassuring hand on Flick's shoulder, to stop her in case she was tempted to run.

Kristin caught the stab of betrayal in her father's eyes as he slowly turned back to face his granddaughter.

Grandfather and granddaughter stared at each other somberly for a full thirty seconds before her father said, “Iz oo, ik.”

“I missed you, too, Gramps,” Flick said.

“Air oo, uh?”

“Yeah,” Flick agreed. “You scared me pretty bad.”

Kristin barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Trust Flick to be totally honest.

“I'm okay now,” Flick continued. She left the security
of Kristin's side and crossed to her grandfather, bracing her hands on the bed to lift herself up and plop her rump down next to his hips. “But your face does look bizarre.”

Bizarre: Strikingly out of the ordinary.
That was the word Kristin had been seeking. Trust Flick to root it out of her enormous vocabulary.

Kristin glanced at her watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex with a brown leather band that Flick had given her for Christmas, which lit in the dark and kept perfect time. If she didn't leave soon she was going to be late for her meeting with SIRT. “Dad, I've got a meeting. We have to leave, but—”

“Ik an ay ere.”

Flick can stay here.

“I don't know, Dad,” Kristin said, staring worriedly at her daughter.

“I'll be fine, Mom,” Flick said. “Visiting hours aren't over till four. I checked.”

“You're sure it won't be too much for you, Dad?”

“Gramps, you need to comb your hair,” Flick said, eyeing his tousled blond hair with her head tilted. “It's a mess. Where's your comb?”

“No om. Us.”

No comb. Brush.

Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

Go. I'm fine.

Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn't miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he'd reconsider the speech therapy he'd been refusing.

Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn't driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She'd given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at
work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she'd been thrown out of school.

Kristin felt like she'd hit her limit of bad news for one week. Except she now had to face the Shooting Incident Review Team, which held her fate in its hands. What if the board decided to suspend her? Or fire her? She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

Breathe, Kristin. This, too, shall pass.

But where would she be when it did?

It took fifteen minutes before she passed a two-car accident, which wasn't even blocking the lane, but which motorists had slowed down to ogle. She made fast time the rest of the way to the exit for North Miami Beach, but she could almost feel the minutes ticking away.

The concrete-and-glass MFO building took up an entire city block and more. The FBI had set up shop in Miami as far back as 1924, and there were still enough criminals—and violations of the rights of American citizens in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America—to keep the MFO hopping.

Kristin heard a clap of thunder and eyed the dark clouds overhead. “Do not rain,” she muttered. “Do not rain.” It had been unseasonably hot the entire month of April and unseasonably rainy, as well. She drove as fast as she dared around the enormous MFO parking lot searching for a spot, anxious to get inside before the downpour started.

She started jogging when the first large raindrops hit her cheeks and eyelashes, but before she reached the
door, the heavens let go. Kristin was breathing hard by the time she got inside and stood dripping—and swearing under her breath—at the security checkpoint.

“You look like a drowned rat, Lassiter.”

Kristin turned and saw her boss, Special Agent in Charge Rudy Rodriguez, ready to exit the building, umbrella in hand. In the four years since she'd come to Miami from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Kristin had never seen the Miami SAC caught unprepared.

Rudy was several inches under six feet, big-chested, with a thick waist and dark, sharp eyes. The SAC brushed his receding black hairline straight back from his brow with a palm and said, “I thought your meeting with SIRT was at 3:00.”

“It is.” Kristin had never gotten used to the SAC's gravelly voice, the result of being nearly strangled to death in an undercover drug operation gone bad.

Rudy glanced at his watch, then reached into his suit coat pocket and came out with a neatly ironed white handkerchief, which he handed to her. “You might want to dry off a little before you head upstairs.”

She took the monogrammed cotton cloth, dabbed at her forehead, cheeks and chin, brushed off the shoulders and lapels of her suit jacket, and handed it back. “Thanks.”

She noticed Rudy didn't offer advice about what she should say at the hearing. Or console her for having to go through the process of being questioned by SIRT again.

“Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone.

Kristin cleared security as quickly as she could, then took the elevator up to the office of Supervisory Special Agent Roberta Harrison, who was in charge of the MFO's Office of Professional Responsibility. The OPR was charged with ensuring that agents conducted themselves with the highest level of integrity and professionalism. SSA Harrison did everything by the book, which made her good at her job.

But Harrison had never worked in the field, so she had very little idea how quickly decisions had to be made in moments of extreme duress. And therefore little—make that
no
—tolerance for honest mistakes.

Which was what the shooting incident Kristin had been involved in four months ago had been. Kristin was aware of how much it had irked SSA Harrison that no disciplinary action had been mandated by the Shooting Incident Review Team in that instance.

Unfortunately, there was no way to excuse what Kristin had done four days ago as an honest mistake. It was dereliction of duty, at the very least. Agent Harrison was finally going to get her pound of flesh. And maybe Kristin's badge and gun.

Kristin's crisply ironed shirt had been wilted by the rain, but she squared her shoulders anyway as she was ushered into the hearing room by a civil service secretary. Because she'd so recently been examined—interrogated—by SIRT, she knew what was coming.

Her heartbeat ratcheted up another notch and she took a calming breath to try to slow it down. Her stomach made a rumbling sound and she realized she hadn't eaten
lunch. Maybe that was the reason she felt so nauseous. Or maybe it was the result of a life rocketing out of her control.

“Sit down, please, Agent Lassiter,” SSA Harrison said. Technically, Agent Harrison wasn't part of SIRT, but she'd apparently decided to attend the meeting.

Kristin seated herself and looked from one sober face on the SIRT panel to the next seated across from her. Three of the four FBI special agents on the Shooting Incident Review Team identified themselves as being from the Criminal Investigative Division, Training Division (Ballistics) and the Office of General Counsel.

“We've met,” the fourth special agent reminded her. “I'm Todd Akers, Inspector in Charge of this investigation.” Akers reminded her he was from the Inspection Division.

Kristin surreptitiously wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her trousers under the conference table as she eyed her inquisitors. No one on the Shooting Incident Review Team looked sympathetic.

She didn't blame them. The charges against her were serious. She and her partner had been ambushed inside a home in Liberty City while they were questioning the occupants about an armed bank robbery. Because she'd hesitated before drawing her weapon—and then hesitated too long before firing it—her partner had been shot and seriously wounded. And because she'd fallen apart after her partner was wounded, the suspected bank robbers had escaped.

“I wondered whether SIRT was letting you off too
lightly the last time, Agent Lassiter,” Roberta Harrison said. “I thought at the time you were acting with reckless disregard for human life when you shot that sixteen-year-old boy. You were lucky the local authorities decided not to prosecute.”

“I believed he had a gun.” Kristin felt her face flushing with the heat of anger. She'd been cleared of any wrongdoing in the previous shooting incident by SIRT, and here was Roberta Harrison, who wasn't even part of the review team, trying her all over again.

“That poor boy didn't even have a gun, did he?” Harrison said. “It was a cell phone. You shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old.”

“He matched the description of a suspect in an armed bank robbery. I identified myself as FBI. I told him to keep his hands where I could see them. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket.”

“You didn't wait to see whether he had a weapon. You just shot him.”

“If I'd waited, I might have been killed. Or seriously wounded, as my partner was when I failed to shoot quickly enough four days ago.”

“So, you admit you failed to back up your partner?” Harrison said triumphantly.

Kristin let out a shaky breath. How easily she'd fallen into the trap Harrison had laid for her. She looked toward the Agent in Charge of the review team, who wouldn't meet her gaze.

The truth was, her failure to draw her weapon—and to shoot it—was almost predictable. She'd been warned
by the psychiatrist she'd been required to see after the shooting four months ago that she might hesitate to shoot in the future.