“Who do you work for?” she demanded.
The guy’s only answer was a nifty back-bend-and-jump-to-his-feet move. Damn. She should’ve stood on his head while she had him down. He launched at her with a flurry of kicks and punches that forced her to give ground. She banged into the coffee table. Knocked it over. Stumbled over it and righted herself barely in time to get a hand up as his foot came flying at her face with lethal intent. She grabbed his ankle and yanked, using the momentum of his kick to propel him into the sofa. But she was off balance herself and crashed to the floor flat on her back. She rolled, pulled her feet under her and shoved vertical. And felt faintly nauseous as the room spun around her. She saw double images of her assailant bouncing off the cushions and spinning to face her. She huffed hard a couple times to clear her head and focus.
His gaze flicked over her shoulder for an instant. Toward the front door. Either he had a partner who’d just walked in and she was hosed, or the jerk was contemplating getting out of Dodge. With a wordless shout, he charged her. But at the last second, he veered left. She dived for him as he ran past and wrapped her arms around his legs. They fell hard, his heels jamming into her gut until she nearly barfed. He kicked furiously, twisting and wriggling frantically. She hung on as best she could, but he slipped through her grasp. He jumped up and took off for the door. She pushed up and gave chase, bursting out onto her front porch. There! To the left. A sprinting figure.
She charged after him, the concrete sidewalk rough and cold beneath her bare feet in Maryland’s January chill. He screeched to a stop by the door of a car. Ripped it open and jumped in. The car peeled away from the curb. She dived between two parked cars as the getaway car sped past, both to take cover and to get a closer look at the vehicle. Silver, midsize foreign sedan. The license plate was covered with something black. Maybe a plastic garbage bag. It rippled as the car accelerated away from her into the night. Helplessly, she watched the vehicle turn onto River Road. Her Bethesda home had ready access to major highways in several directions, no telling where her assailant had gone. The bastards had gotten away.
And she was standing in the middle of the street on a freezing January night, with snow on the ground for God’s sake, in nothing but a cropped T-shirt and soft cotton short-shorts.
In the two more minutes it took the police to arrive, she hurried back inside and threw on a pair of slim black jeans, a bra and a slightly longer and less tight T-shirt that nonetheless hugged the slender curves of her body. She pulled her wavy, shoulder-length blond hair back into a ponytail and checked the spot on the back of her head where she’d hit the floor. No goose egg forming. She examined her eyes in the bathroom mirror, and the aqua-blue rings of her irises were identical in diameter. No concussion, then. Her nose was a little red, but that could be as much from the cold as the glancing blow it had taken.
A chiming noise sounded. The doorbell. She moved carefully through the living room so as not to destroy evidence and opened the front door.
“You reported an intruder in your house, ma’am?” the officer asked tersely.
She nodded and stepped aside to let the pair of policemen inside. Quickly, she relayed what had happened.
“And you fought him off?” the guy asked, sounding surprised.
“That’s right.”
“Are you injured, ma’am?”
She shook her head in the negative and flinched as her nose twinged. She’d been clocked worse than that by her big sister in a boxing ring more times than she could count.
“I’m Officer Grady and this is my partner, Officer Fratiano.” The pair of big men stepped into the room. “Tell us exactly what happened again, and this time include every detail you can remember.”
The poor cops scribbled busily until she was done with her trained observations, and no doubt they had a good case of writer’s cramp. Grady moved around the room, notepad in hand, walking through the events she’d described. And then he looked up at her, skeptical. “I’ve never seen a victim of an attack who could describe it in such perfect detail. Your account jives exactly with the evidence. Almost too exactly.” He paused and then added slyly, “That usually indicates the crime scene was a setup.”
The guy thought she was lying about the intruder? She frowned and looked around the living room. It did look shockingly undisturbed given how violent a fight had just taken place in it. The upended coffee table and a few sofa pillows on the floor were the extent of the damage. She explained carefully, “I’m an Army Intelligence officer. I’m trained to notice details, even under duress.”
“Mind if we have a look around, ma’am?” Grady asked dryly.
“Not at all,” she answered coolly. Jerk.
Grady wandered down the hall toward her bedroom while the second officer checked her computer for fingerprints with a special flashlight. Fratiano looked up at her regretfully. “Do you have long fingernails?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered cautiously.
He nodded. “That explains why there are no complete fingerprints on your keyboard. You don’t leave full prints when you type, and your intruder didn’t leave any, either.”
“I told you he was wearing gloves. Of course he didn’t leave any prints,” she retorted. The beginnings of desperation tickled the back of her neck.
“What kind of gloves did he have on? It’s not like you can type in most gloves.”
She thought back to the sight of his hands coming up to fight. “They looked like driving gloves. Thin material. Maybe Lycra or very fine leather. Can’t you check the keyboard for fibers or something?”
The cop nodded reluctantly. “But we usually don’t call out a full-blown evidence collection team for a simple B and E when nothing was taken and nobody was hurt.”
“Look,” she explained patiently. “I’m not your usual random victim. I work for the government. I uncover conspiracies and predict terrorist activity. I have enemies. No break-in to my home, particularly when my computer is the target, is a simple B and E.”
“Then I’d suggest you call the Army Criminal Investigation Division—”
“Hey Vinny!” Officer Grady shouted from her bedroom. “Come have a look at this!”
Cripes. She winced. He found her wall of pictures. She hastened after Officer Fratiano to explain herself before they hauled her in as a stalker. She rounded the corner into her bedroom and sure enough, the two cops were gaping at her massive collection of pictures of Gabe Monihan, President-elect of the United States. She had literally hundreds of pictures of him pinned up on the wall of her bedroom opposite her bed, the entire space wallpapered with images of him. They were taken mostly in the final months of last year’s Presidential campaign—the months leading up to and immediately after a thwarted terrorist attack at Chicago O’Hare airport that he’d nearly been caught in the middle of. The planned attack, a suicide bombing, had occurred just a couple weeks before the Presidential election, and many pundits credited sympathy votes for Monihan’s election. Monihan and the incumbent, now-outgoing President James Whitlow. Had both been in the area to campaign. Reports had it that Monihan’s presence there had been a bonus for the terrorists, but his death was not their goal. She had other theories on the incident, however.
“Are you some kind of sicko, lady?” Grady demanded.
She schooled her voice to patience. “I told you. I’m a conspiracy theorist for the government. I’m investigating the attack on Monihan last October. These pictures are part of my research.”
“Research. Right,” Grady growled. “Then you won’t mind if we photograph all…this?”
“Go right ahead,” she replied evenly. But her gut churned at the way they were blowing her off. They thought she was a kook who staged an attack on herself to…what? Get attention? Get caught? She supposed it fit the