Kindred Intentions Read online

  Kindred Intentions

  Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

  Copyright 2016 Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

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  Table of Contents

  Kindred Intentions

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

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  KINDRED INTENTIONS

  Original title: Affinità d’intenti

  © 2015 Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

  Translation by: Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli (© 2016)

  Translation revised by: Autumn Barlow and Julia Gibbs

  Cover: © 2016 Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

  Important note to the reader: This book is written in British English.

  1

  She saw Mike’s head turn, before hearing the muffled sound of a gunshot. A moment later his hand had already grabbed her arm and was dragging her onto the floor, while a bullet was brushing against her head and lodging in the couch where she had sat down just five minutes earlier.

  Yet that day should’ve been a pretty calm one.

  Amelia had gone to Goldberg & Associates to have a job interview. The position as investigator at the law firm was already hers; it was just a formality. That was what she had been told by the person in charge from the Human Resources office who had selected her. Only the approval of their chief was missing. But she’d had the feeling that things wouldn’t go exactly as she had expected, when she’d found a rival in front of her: Mike Connor.

  He was seated on that couch in the waiting room where Amelia herself had been addressed by the assistant of Mr Goldberg. At first, she supposed he was a client, but as his gaze rose to meet hers, in a moment ice seemed to form in the room. He was there for that position, too. It was just intuition, little more than an impression, yet she immediately understood that her simple plan was doomed to failure. She didn’t fear being outclassed by that man. It was his very presence, so unforeseen, which made her nervous. And Amelia Jennings knew that in such situations any variation could be a bad omen.

  She took a seat on the other side of the couch, offering him a polite smile and an equally polite, “Hello.”

  Mike gestured with his head. Perhaps he said something, nothing more than an inarticulate sound. His eyes lent him an attitude halfway between annoyance and indifference, as if she was a tiny insect to shoo away, not a real person.

  “Are you here for the investigator position, too?” she asked, trying to appear cordial. She smiled, tense. She was thinking that in little more than an hour her team would find itself back to the drawing board, looking for a new strategy. Meanwhile, however, she had no intention of giving in. She thought hard about studying her adversary. Maybe he was there for another reason and she was fussing over nothing.

  Mike nodded.

  Okay, never mind, he was there for the job interview, but that didn’t imply he was on the ball like her or that his CV was better than the one she had submitted, or that he would give a better impression to Goldberg.

  For a split second she started wondering whether the latter would hire him because he was a man. No, the lawyer would never show a gender bias. Or perhaps he would?

  She grumbled under her breath. They should’ve spoken openly to him, without all those subterfuges. After all it was in his best interest. But the truth was that the law firm was bound to safeguard the interests of its clients, including their not so crystal clear business, and the associates would never willingly have agreed to be subjected to such an intrusion in the scope of their work.

  Amelia reached out, offering her hand. “I’m Amelia Jennings.”

  The man gazed at the gesture with scant interest, then focused his attention on her face. And for a moment she had the impression that something had clicked inside him, that he had understood everything about the situation.

  “Mike Connor.” His voice was still pronouncing the last syllable, when his eyes darted to the side. He turned, as if he’d heard a noise.

  Two seconds later he was lying on Amelia, on the floor, while a bullet had missed her head by a hair. Her heart still bouncing in her chest, she shook him off, searching for the origin of the shot.

  Isabel Jordan, Goldberg’s assistant, stood up. She was brandishing something with her right hand. A gun? There was another pop and, pushed by an invisible force, she was hurled backward.

  Someone was shooting with a silencer.

  Another shot collided with a decorative metal plate fastened to the wall in the waiting room and changed direction, then scored a direct hit on a flower bowl resting on a piece of furniture to the right of Amelia. It exploded, projecting ceramic splinters, water, and colourful petals in all directions.

  Following a well-rooted instinct, her hand reached the grip of her gun inserted in the holster under her left armpit, while Mike, apparently not terrified at all by the situation, jumped to his feet and rotated the couch one hundred and eighty degrees, putting it between the two of them and whatever menace that might leap out again, any moment, from behind the corner.

  Amelia crouched down ready to shoot, with her armed hand leaning on the armrest, her head peeking out and the remainder of her body hidden behind the couch. With the left hand, she took her mobile phone from a pocket and turned on the transceiver installed on the device. “Gunshots at the twentieth floor. The suspect is coming towards me,” she murmured, agitated.

  A security guard appeared from behind the wall and for a split second Amelia felt a sense of relief. Then she noticed that the weapon the man was holding had a silencer.

  Fuck.

  Amelia pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed in the wide room. A woman, who was exiting from the office beside Goldberg’s, shouted. The shot missed its target, but it was enough to allow the assassin to locate its origin.

  Amelia shot again. She was in an advantageous position, because she had taken him by surprise, but if she had let him react, a silly stuffed couch surely wouldn’t save her. Maybe a bulletproof jacket would’ve come in handy. But who would expect to be involved in a shooting? It was just a banal job interview. Well, yes, one should have considered that the lawyers at Goldberg & Associates had been dying over the past few months. And not of natural causes.

  It was the third law firm in the City to find itself involved in a series of murders that looked so much like executions. Only that their involvement, for once, wasn’t connected to the representation of the murderer, but rather to the killing of the senior partners. Amelia and her team knew full well that there had to be something greater at stake there, because the surviving lawyers, rather than co-operate with the police investigation, had barricaded themselves behind professional confidentiality and had refused to utter a word on the possible enemy who was commissioning their elimination. At that point, Detective Monroe had opted for a different strategy, by sending Jennings under cover to conduct an investigation inside Goldberg’s firm. He’d hoped to unveil something about the business that could be the cause of such carnage, and maybe stop it, before there was nothing more to unveil.

  But in that very moment Amelia had the clear feeling that once more her team had come too late. Or maybe not; perhaps she could stop that man before the worst happened, perhaps she had come just in time.

  She pulled the trigger over and over again. The rain of gunshot reached where her target had been, but just a moment after the latter had backed o
ff, behind the wall.

  “We see him in the video,” Monroe’s voice squawked aloud from the transceiver. “I’m sending up the backup squad.”

  A distant patter.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Amelia shouted into the device. Being silent didn’t matter anymore.

  “He’s escaping. Jennings, don’t you dare follow him!” her chief’s voice thundered. “We’re going to catch him.”

  But Amelia had already put her mobile phone back in her pocket, climbed over the couch, toppling it, and flung herself towards the killer. The building was huge and the man was shrewd. She couldn’t allow him to escape. Based on what she knew, they had never been so close to him. What the heck, they hadn’t ever met him before.

  She walked round the corner, finding only an empty corridor. “Where are you?” she murmured, holding the gun firmly in front of her with both hands.

  Curled up on his knees, a man was whining, arms over his head.

  Amelia placed her left index finger to her mouth, gesturing him to shut up. Her gaze moved from the employee to a stain on the floor. A red, gravitational drop. She reached it and lowered to have a closer look at it. Blood. So she had hit him. She raised her chin and glimpsed another one a few metres away.

  She felt her lips stretch in a smile. Her prey was leaving her a trail of breadcrumbs and, at each step, he was becoming weaker.

  She advanced, following the traces and at the same time stayed alert, ready to react at any movement.

  About ten metres in front of her, an arrow lit up over the lift doors, pointing upwards; the latter opened, revealing a man and a woman. They were chatting, unaware of what had just happened on that floor, but as soon as they caught sight of Amelia, they halted.

  “Go away!” She stressed the meaning with a gesture of her arm holding the weapon.

  They remained speechless, while the doors closed again and the lift left for a higher floor.

  An air current moved a lock of the policewoman’s brown hair, causing it to brush her eyes. She turned, fast.

  A door, ajar, with an emergency exit symbol. He had gone down by foot. She was supposed to warn the others, but perhaps they were watching him on the video surveillance. She couldn’t waste any time.

  She opened the door and swooped in on the landing. It was empty.

  She leant out on the stairwell, trying to keep the noise down. An irregular shuffle of footsteps was coming from below. From time to time she could see a hand covered by a black glove slipping along the banister.

  She made a move to go down as well, but then halted her own momentum. Her gaze turned to her feet. Damned high heels. She had worn them to give a good impression during the job interview, but walking on them now was like going around with a bell at her neck.

  She took off her shoes, setting them down on the floor one by one. Through the nylon of her tights, the surface was cold and slippery. She took off the latter, too. If she fell and broke her neck, she certainly wouldn’t catch the man.

  Nervous, she sighed and started down the stairs with swift, wary steps.

  She looked out again. The hand kept descending, but it was a lot lower now. She had to go faster. She quickened her pace, while she felt her shortness of breath increasing. What was she going to do, if she reached him? She put that thought aside. She would think about that later. Maybe at the end of the descent the killer would be exhausted. The blood drops he was leaving behind had become bigger and closer.

  She climbed down the stairs, as silent as a cat. She could hear him limping two floors below. She sped up. One flight, two, three. She risked looking down again. A dark motion, a pop. She backed off with her head just before a bullet hit the banister a few inches from her hand.

  The shuffling became swifter. Any prudence was now useless. He knew she was there. Amelia started running, leaping over two or three stairs at a time. Once she reached the umpteenth landing, she looked down again. An arm and a shoulder was all she could glimpse.

  She shot.

  She saw him pulling away. She had missed him. She resumed moving, as she mentally counted the remaining bullets. She had no spare magazine. Fuck, it was supposed to be an easy job interview!

  When only the last two flights remained, she heard a squeaking caused by the opening of a door. The killer was leaving the stairs to reach the exit. However, the rest of her team was watching the main entrance. The guys had no doubt seen them on the surveillance system. He had no way out. But there was an unusual calmness in the attitude of the man. He had entered the building with ease, disguised as a security guard and he’d certainly arranged his escape.

  She arrived at the ground floor, panting. She reached out to open the door. What if he was there, waiting for her? She lowered the handle slowly, pushing aside the fire break panel just enough to allow her to look out. She could see nothing but a wall and a floor. An unusual silence lingered in the air. A beam of light was flooding all the surfaces. The contrast to the semi-darkness of the stairwell was almost blinding. She inserted a foot between the jamb and the shutter, and aimed her weapon in front of her.

  She allowed herself a deep breath. She couldn’t wait any longer or she would lose him. Monroe would give her a harsh scolding for taking the initiative. Fuck off, she would think about it later. She had to nail that son of a bitch.

  She pushed the door aside decisively, using the back of her foot. She checked to the right, then the left. Nobody.

  And now where the fuck had he ended up?

  The lifts were on one side. The displays reported that all four of them were moving. On the other side, beyond the edge of the corridor, was the entrance watched by the reception counter. He couldn’t have gone that way, could he? But what about the backup squad?

  She reached to her pocket to reactivate the transceiver. Then she heard a noise. A thousand voices in her head were telling her not to go towards it; her feet seemed to have a different view.

  She advanced to the end of the corridor, where it opened out to the entrance hall. If he were there, he would have no place to hide. But that applied to her, too.

  She turned the corner.

  There was nobody. The reception was unattended. She could see the police cars parked in front of the entrance, made up by two sliding doors fitted in a glass wall, but no trace of her colleagues. There was something utterly wrong with that situation.

  Another noise, this time from the opposite direction.

  She turned around. A lift at the bottom of the corridor jingled, the doors opened. But it was empty.

  She turned around again and her gaze was captured by the mouth of a silencer a few inches from her eyes. The dark, mighty shape of the killer stood out against the dazzling sunlight coming from the glass. She should have looked at his face. Nobody had seen it before. Even if she was going to die shortly thereafter, she had a duty to see it. But she couldn’t. She was irresistibly attracted by that dark hole, from which a bullet would soon come, thus putting an end to her life.

  She thought about her son Joseph. Dying wouldn’t be so bad. She would see him again.

  She lowered her weapon, resting her arm on her hip, and dared to raise her eyes to meet his. They were gloomy, but veiled. His face was beaded with sweat. She couldn’t see the determination she’d expected. They were hesitant. She wasn’t his target, just collateral damage, an obstacle to his escape. Maybe he would spare her.

  “Drop your weapon!”

  She spread her fingers and the gun fell to the floor with a metal sound. That was the moment she thought to catch sight of a movement, but she forced herself not to shift her eyes from those of her adversary.

  Another body shape pounced on his shoulders. Amelia moved aside and the two of them ended up on the floor at her feet. The killer struggled, while another man wearing a smart suit kept a hand on his head and, with the other one, tried to block his arm still bearing a gun.

  Astounded, she winced at each jerk of the two opponents. Her saviour wasn’t one of her colleagues. Sh
e searched around for her weapon, but couldn’t see it anywhere. It had to have ended up under the killer. She slipped her hand into a pocket and pulled out the mobile phone. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “Jennings, damn it, where the fuck are you?”

  What? How was it possible that they didn’t see her on the surveillance system? “In the entrance hall, I need backup!”

  The killer let out an enraged shriek and charged his left elbow backward, hitting his assailant’s ribcage and forcing him to loosen his grip. Then he started to crawl forward, kicking back. With a groan, the other man bent over on one side, revealing his face.

  Mike Connor?

  “Jennings?” Monroe’s voice was coming from afar, while a perplexed Amelia watched the scene occurring in front of her. Yes, there was something damned wrong.

  Blood stains on the floor were mingling with prints. The killer was standing again and turning around. Mike had risen with difficulty, leaning against the wall. The killer’s arm went up resolutely, but he wasn’t aiming the gun against her. His eyes and his weapon were turned to Mike, who in spite of the bad situation didn’t betray the slightest fear.

  “Police! Drop the gun!” Monroe’s shout burst into the entrance hall. Frenzied footsteps from the policemen travelled the distance to their target.

  The killer straightened his back, gnashed his teeth. He looked away from Mike and gave a rapid glance to Amelia, then he started running in the opposite direction with renewed strength, in spite of all the blood he had lost.

  Three officers reached her and Mike, and moved past them, rushing in pursuit.

  “What have I said to you, Jennings?” Monroe’s reproach shook Amelia out of her astonishment. Her chief was now standing beside her.

  “No hero stuff,” she replied, laconic, but she didn’t even strive to look sorry. Instead, she kept staring at Mike.

  The latter glanced back at her, while massaging his chest. “You’re welcome,” he said.