Margo responded with two jabs to the body, one that connected with Kate’s ribs. The wind went rushing out of her for a moment and by the time she had caught it again, she saw the heavy right hook coming from her left. She tried moving but hadn’t caught it in time. It slammed into the side of her padded head and shook her backward.
She was dizzy for a moment. Her vision blurred and her knees felt a little weak. She thought about falling, just to catch a break.
Yeah…too old for this.
But then the counter to that was: You know any other women over fifty who could take this punch and remain standing?
Kate responded with two jabs and then a blow to the body. Only one of the jabs landed but the body blow struck its target. Margo went back into the ropes, staggering a bit. She then came back off of the ropes and threw an impatient uppercut. It was not designed to land. It was just meant to cause Kate to bring her arms up to block it so Margo could then deliver jabs to her exposed core. But Kate saw the slight hesitation in the delivery, knowing the purpose behind it. Instead of blocking the punch, she stepped hard to the right, waited for the full delivery to swing through, and then threw a hard right-handed jab that connected with the side of Margo’s head.
Margo went down right away. She fell on her stomach and rolled over quickly. She slid back to her corner and popped out her mouth guard. She smiled at Kate and shook her head in disbelief.
“I’m sorry,” Kate said, kneeling down in front of Margo.
“Don’t be,” Margo said. “It honestly makes no sense how you manage to be that fast. I feel like I need to apologize. Because of your age, I assumed you’d be…slower.”
Kate’s trainer—a grizzled sixty-something man with a long white beard—climbed between the ropes, chuckling. “I made that same mistake,” he said. “Had a black eye for about a week because of it. Caught the exact same punch that just knocked you down.”
“Don’t feel so apologetic,” Kate said. “That one to my head was huge. It almost got me.”
“It should have gotten you,” the trainer said. “Honestly, it was a little harder than I like to see in these simple sparring matches.” He then looked to Margo. “Up to you. You want to keep going?”
Margo nodded and pulled herself up. Again, her trainer put her mouthpiece in. Both women returned to their respective corners and waited for the bell.
But it was not the bell that Kate heard. Instead, she heard the ringing of her phone. And it was the assigned ringer she used for all calls that came from the bureau.
She pushed her mouthpiece out of her mouth and held her gloved hands out to her trainer. “Sorry,” she said. “I have to take that.”
Her trainer knew about her part-time job as a special agent. He thought it was hard-ass (his word, not hers) that she refused to entirely retire from such a job. So when he untied her gloves for her, he did so as quickly as possible.
Kate slid between the ropes and ran to her gym bag, which was sitting by the wall. She always kept it out and not in the locker room just in case she got such a call. She grabbed the phone and her heart surged with excitement and despair all at once when she saw Deputy Director Duran’s name on the display.
“This is Agent Wise,” she said.
“Wise, it’s Duran. You got a second?”
“I do,” she said, glancing back at the ring with longing. Margo’s trainer was working with her on how to avoid fake-outs. “What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping you could come in on a case. It’s effective immediately, and I’d need you and DeMarco to fly out tonight.”
“I don’t know,” she said. And that was the truth. It was very sudden and she had spoken to Melissa, her daughter, several times in the last few weeks about not being so readily available for the last-minute jobs. She had been spending much more time with Melissa and Michelle, her granddaughter, over the last month or so and they finally had a good thing going—something like a routine. Something like a family.
“I appreciate you thinking of me,” Kate said. “But I don’t know if I can come in for this one. It’s very last minute. And flying out…that makes it seem like it’s pretty far away. I don’t know that I’m prepared for a long trip. Where is it, anyway?”
“New York. Kate…I’m pretty sure it has ties to the Nobilini case.”
The name sent a chill through her. Her head started ringing, and it wasn’t from the blow Margo had delivered moments ago. Flashes of a case from nearly eight years ago cascaded through her head—leering, taunting.
“Kate?”
“I’m here,” she said. She then looked back to the ring. Margo was stretching and lightly jogging in place, ready for their next bout.
It was a shame she wouldn’t get it. Because as soon as Kate heard the name, she knew she’d take the case. She had to.
The Nobilini case had gotten away from her eight years ago—one of the true defeats she’d ever had in her career.
This was her chance to close it—to bolt shut the one case that had truly bested her.
“When’s the flight?” she asked Duran.
“Dulles to JFK, leaves in four hours.”
She thought of Melissa and Michelle, her heart sinking. Melissa wouldn’t understand, but Kate could not turn this opportunity down.
“I’ll be on it,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
Kate managed to pack and make it out of Richmond in less than an hour and a half. When she met her partner, Kristen DeMarco, outside of one of the many Starbucks in Dulles International Airport, they had only ten minutes remaining before takeoff; most of the plane’s passengers had already boarded.
As DeMarco started power-walking toward Kate with her coffee in hand, she smiled and shook her head. “If you’d just go ahead and move to DC, you wouldn’t be rushing and borderline late all the time.”
“No can do,” Kate said as they joined together and starting hurrying for the gate. “It’s enough that this so-called part-time job is keeping me away from my family more than I’d like. If it was a requirement that I live in DC, I wouldn’t be doing it at all.”
“How are Melissa and little Michelle?” DeMarco asked.
“They’re doing well. I spoke with Melissa on my way here. She said she understood and wished me luck. And for the first time, I think she actually meant it.”
“Good. I told you she’d come around. I assume it would be cool as hell to have a bad-ass for a mother.”
“I’m far from a bad-ass,” Kate said as they reached the gate. Still, she thought of what she had been doing when she received the call and thought it might be okay to accept that moniker…at least a little.
“Last I heard,” Kate said, “you were working a triple murder case out in Maine.”
“Yeah, I was. We wrapped it about a week ago—about six agents in all on that thing. When I got the call from Duran about this case, he told me he planned to send you out and asked if I wanted to partner with you. I, of course, jumped at the chance. I told him I’d like to be partnered with you whenever possible in the future.”
“Thanks,” Kate said. She left it at that, though. It actually meant a lot to her but she didn’t want to get sappy on DeMarco.
They boarded the plane together and took their seats, right beside one another. When they were settled, DeMarco reached into her carry-on and pulled out a thick folder crammed with papers and documents.
“This is everything on the Nobilini file,” she said. “Based on your history with it, I assume you know it inside and out?”
“Probably,”