Shadow of Death Read online

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author

  Heather Graham

  “This thriller [is] a steamy one.... Will keep you turning the pages.”

  —Florida Times-Union on Danger in Numbers

  “Danger in Numbers is a captivating cop fiction with an extra serving of gruesome crime and grit, layered onto a unique setting described in such detail that it transports you right to the middle of it all.... Loaded with gripping detail... A well-developed and twisted read!”

  —Mystery and Suspense

  “Fast-paced...twists and turns...steamy... This book doesn’t disappoint.”

  —MysterySequels.com on The Final Deception

  “Heather Graham delivers a harrowing journey as she always does: perfectly.... Intelligent, fast-paced and frightening at all times, and the team of characters still keep[s] the reader’s attention to the very end.”

  —Suspense Magazine on The Final Deception

  “Taut, complex, and leavened with humor...[a] riveting thriller.”

  —Library Journal on A Dangerous Game

  “Immediately entertaining and engrossing.”

  —Publishers Weekly on A Dangerous Game

  “Intricate, fast-paced, and intense, this riveting thriller blends romance and suspense in perfect combination and keeps readers guessing and the tension taut until the very end.”

  —Library Journal on Flawless

  New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than two hundred novels. She is pleased to have been published in over twenty-five languages, with sixty million books in print. Heather is a proud recipient of the Silver Bullet from Thriller Writers and was awarded the prestigious Thriller Master Award in 2016. She is also a recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from RWA and The Strand and is the founder of The Slush Pile Players, an author band and theatrical group. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and mother of five, she still enjoys her South Florida home but also loves to travel. Heather is grateful every day for a career she loves so very much.

  For more information, check out her website, theoriginalheathergraham.com, or find Heather on Facebook.

  Shadow of Death

  Heather Graham

  For Daniel Palmer, Lisa Gardner, Kathy Antrim, Gregg Hurwitz, Kathleen Miller and Karen McManus, and the wonderful little family we formed during our days in Sharjah. For Kim Howe and all that she does for so many. And very especially for the Sharjah International Book Fair team, Qurratulain Yahya, Abdul, Mohammed and all their wonderful people. Their graciousness created one of the most amazing experiences for us all. And to the UAE, an incredible country where diversity and kindness can be found throughout.

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM WHISPERS AT DUSK BY HEATHER GRAHAM

  A Stygian Darkness

  And when he had opened the third seal,

  I heard the third beast say,

  Come and see.

  And I beheld

  And lo, a black horse,

  And he that sat on him had a pair

  Of balances in his hand.

  And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say,

  A measure of wheat for a penny,

  And three measures of barley for a penny;

  And see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

  PROLOGUE

  Caves

  Carey Allen paused, looked around, and breathed in deeply. She loved this area of Colorado just outside of the bustling city of Denver. The sky on a day like today was amazing. Blue just touched with delicate white puffs of clouds here and there. And the air! It was fresh, clean, delicious, and the scent of nature was wonderful.

  Of course, she shouldn’t have been where she was without permission and a guide, but she was an experienced hiker. She had climbed all manner of mountains, and she had received her diver’s certificate at Lake Mead and gone on to cave dive! Hey, it was America. She was an adult, she knew what she was doing, and she had every right to be here.

  She closed her eyes for a minute, listening to the sound of the nearby waterfall. Then she dove into the freshwater lake, shuddered slightly at the chill that seized her, then let it fall off. Surfacing, she looked back to the shore.

  Don Blake was watching her with admiration, she hoped. She’d had a crush on the man for the longest time, and she’d enticed him out by telling him she knew the caves here and had explored them on her own before. He waved to her.

  “Come on in! The water is great!” she told him.

  “Freezing!” he countered.

  “Wimp!”

  He laughed. Don was anything but a wimp. He’d served two tours in the Middle East and was still in the reserve. Tall, not dark but red-headed, and very handsome. Working with him at Barrington Advertising, she’d fallen a bit in love the minute they had met—something, she hoped, she’d kept to herself. She had tried very hard to always be casual, fun, and flirty, not like a puppy with a wildly wagging tail.

  But when they had talked about the caves, he’d shown a real interest in her.

  “Wimp?” he returned and, as she knew he would, shed his hiking boots and socks, dropped his backpack and dove into the water.

  Carey swam toward the waterfalls and the entry to the caves she knew she would find behind them. She hadn’t slipped in here in months, but nature had created the phenomena of the falls and the caves over hundreds of thousands of years. They couldn’t have changed much in a few months.

  She crawled up the rocks that rose behind the falls and waited for Don. He arrived shortly, dripping as he joined her on the rocks. They’d both worn tank tops that would dry quickly, but the hiking pants would take longer. In the crisp air Carey had loved so much, it was cold.

  “Follow me!” she said.

  There was a winding path that led into a slew of caves, some deeper than others. And, of course, as they progressed, it grew darker within.

  She stopped, turning to Don and smiling. “Well, I guess this is as far as we go—”

  He was frowning. “What’s that light?” he asked.

  She turned. He was right. There was a strange glow coming from deeper within the earth.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Shall we?”

  “Well, of course!”

  They headed in the direction of the light. Nearing it, Carey suddenly felt the earth slipping beneath her feet. She’d hit an odd angle in the earth and it...

  Led to nothing.

  She fell and fell, landed hard, hurt everywhere, and wondered if she had broken bones.

  She tried to move and cried out to Don.

  “Careful! There’s a slope and...nothing.”

  He didn’t answer her. The dim light they had seen was pale here, barely alleviating the darkness. She turned, trying to see if her limbs would work and to assess her position.

  That’s when she saw him.

  The dead man.

  His face was skeletal. His eyes were open. No. He didn’t have eyes. He just had eye sockets. But they seemed to be...

&
nbsp; Staring. Staring into her eyes.

  She screamed. She forgot her pain as she tried to inch away. And as she did, she saw the dead man wasn’t alone. There were other bodies there and all of them...

  Down to bone. Not all were completely decomposed, just...

  Down to nothing but mostly bone. Flesh remained on some limbs. Decaying fabric clung to other forms. Some of them had eyes that were still partially there and remained open, just catching the glint of pale light that seeped into the deep hole.

  The scent of death rose around her, so she used her hands to push back. As she did so, she touched something small and hard, dark and plastic. She barely registered she had touched something as she started to scream and scream as she cried out for Don.

  There was no answer. Her cries grew hoarse. She managed to drag herself to her feet to seek a way out...

  There was nothing but dirt; no holds, nothing. No way out of the deep hole in the earth into which she had fallen.

  She looked at the thing in her hand and then she looked around at the starved and rotting corpses around her. There were no children, she thought thankfully, not that she could see. She was losing her mind; she could die here, too. She didn’t know what had happened to Don. He wasn’t answering her, so he must have also fallen...

  Into a pile of dead.

  No, no, no, no, he had to be okay. He had to be out there...going for help, she thought. And then she looked at the thing in her hand at last.

  She held...

  A horse. A tiny little black plastic horse.

  Confused, breathing in death, she felt terror sweeping into her like something liquid and icy cold.

  And she started to scream again.

  1

  The sun was just rising. Amy Larson emerged from the water, dripping, feeling the rays of brilliant heat fall on her. The day was beautiful, perfect and warm. It was wonderful. There were few places on earth she loved as much as she loved the Florida Keys and Key West. In all honesty, the best beaches could be found on the state’s west coast but to her, the Keys were a little bit of heaven. Key Largo was an escape from the massive metropolises of Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. And moving southward, the smaller islands were a taste of a purer time. Marathon offered the incredible Dolphin Research Center, and on down to Key West one could look out for the tiny Key deer. Then at the tail end, Key West itself is the island of rich history, bizarre stories, music, and water sports.

  It had been good to come here. Hunter had needed to be here after taking a bullet; even with a vest on, he’d needed a bit of convalescence. Yet, while trying to shake off the last two cases they’d worked along with the salt water, memories still plagued them of the murders in the Everglades that had begun the bizarre Four Horsemen case and those that had followed when she’d received the little red plastic horse in the mail.

  Because it wasn’t over. Someone wanted to play God, and they were using the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Revelations to do it.

  She smiled and slid down on a towel next to Hunter Forrest. He turned to her and ran a finger along her cheek. “This is the life,” he said softly. “I almost feel guilty. Days in the sun, diving this afternoon, nights with the sunset and the music. I could do this forever.”

  “No, you couldn’t,” she said, amused. “You became an FBI agent because you were a child stuck in a horrible cult, and an FBI agent saved you and your parents. You need to be out there. You saw how your mom and dad got suckered into it. They saw people needed help, and those with a lot of money liked to keep it and weren’t always generous. Some people—some rich people—are great. But what your mom saw made her want a better way, and she thought she had found it. You saw evil could masquerade in many forms.” Her smile faded slightly. “You grew up and became an FBI agent because you’re determined to slay the evil that man does to his fellow man.”

  “Sure. Right. Well, you know, second choice. Wrong era to be a knight in shining armor. And you’ve met my folks. They just wanted the best, and they were young and naive and looking for a better way. Anyway, we are what we are. But Clint Bullard is playing tonight. We’ll have some dinner, listen to him sing and play...maybe one of us will join him on a country music hit. We won’t stay too late, because we have a great room with those windows that open to the sunrise.”

  “Sounds good, especially since we only have a few days left before vacation and leave time are up,” Amy said. She sat up pensively. It had been weeks since the showdown that had left Hunter injured, and his bones had healed. And while they worked for two separate agencies—he was FBI and she was Florida Department of Law Enforcement—she was now on loan to the FBI because of the Four Horsemen case. And although they’d taken down some of the players in the deadly enterprise afoot, they knew another shoe would drop.

  Someone out there wanted the Apocalypse. Or they were in it for power or money or both and made use of the easily beguiled they could use in their quest. People who believed they would be the chosen when the world came to an end. And if murder was asked of someone, it was simply a means to an end.

  “What are you thinking?” Hunter asked, studying her face.

  She loved Hunter. Everything about him. Tall, dark, blue-eyed and fit not just because of his chosen vocation, but because he loved doing things. He loved the water, boats, and watching college and pro football games, along with basketball, baseball, and hockey. If he didn’t know about something, that was okay, he was eager to find out.

  And he cared about people.

  “I can’t help it. I mean, I have relaxed, I swear. But I was thinking of my old partner John Schultz and the first cases. I will miss him, but he will enjoy his retirement. I think back to the first case with the white horse, and finding the woman crucified in the Everglades. I think about putting away a bad guy, and then receiving the little red horse when we were vacationing before. And I think about the crazy lady we put away after that, and how she’s still convinced she’s a warrior and the lives she took don’t matter because she’ll be lifted up at the end. And I think—”

  “Hold on,” Hunter said quietly. He had reached for his phone; she hadn’t heard it ring. He’d kept it on vibrate.

  She watched his expression change as he listened. “All right. What time did you say? Thanks. Yep, we can do it.”

  When he hung up, she knew.

  “The black horse?” she asked.

  He nodded, still studying her face.

  “We have a plane to catch,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “First out of Key West. And then where?”

  “Denver. Via Miami. There has been a rash of disappearances, apparently.”

  “But why would that indicate anything to do with the Horsemen cases?”

  “A little black plastic horse. This time, it was received by a colleague of mine, a guy I worked with years ago. Andy Mason, Assistant Field Director out there. He has no idea where it came from. It wasn’t mailed to him—it was on his doorstep when he went home last night. The entire agency has been briefed on what did happen with the previous Horsemen cases and to be aware we’ve been warned it isn’t over. Andy talked to the brass, and we’re to join him and see if the horse and the missing people do align. Andy is a good guy and a good agent. He didn’t miss the little horse, and he’s the one with the theory the missing people may have something to do with the horse.”

  “No luck on getting our crazy incarcerated ‘red horse’ to talk, right?” Amy asked.

  “She has an attorney who has advised her to keep her mouth shut. Poor attorney. Our ‘red horse’ is so proud of herself for being in her position, she doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact she shouldn’t be saying she orchestrated life and death. I think she really is a true believer.”

  “She wanted to go into politics. That’s what I can’t wrap my head around,” Amy said lightly.

  “And God help us
all. She had it together until the end. Imagine if she had started in office in state government and moved on to national prominence.”

  “Terrifying. Anyway—”

  “Hey, vacation was ending. And they have a nice place for us in a hotel on the outskirts of Denver. I mean, it won’t be hot, and our days won’t be filled with diving and our nights with music and heat—”

  “Hey!” Amy teased. “Mr. G-man, it will be hot wherever you are.”

  “Thanks—I’ll take it,” Hunter said. “So, our plane out of here is in just three hours—”

  He paused, stopping to look at his phone before answering it again. He sat silent for a moment before saying, “Um, sure, thanks.”

  He hung up, grinning.

  “Never mind. Our plane is in two hours, direct to Denver.”

  “And we’re going to get to the airport and through security and—”

  “Private plane,” he told her. “The brass is sending us off right. We won’t even have to worry about lunch.”

  “Cool. Okay, so...”

  They still had to hurry. They had to forego the tour of Fort Zachary Taylor they had planned for later. They had to make good time—it was a six-hour flight at best. With the time change, they’d get a few hours back, but now that they were going...

  Amy wanted to move.

  Within two hours, they were in the air. It was one nice plane—Amy had to thank the powers that be who had provided for them.

  Amy looked out the window. She really did love Key West.

  Hunter was at her side. “I know. I’m sorry. Watching sun and sea and a bit of nirvana disappear into a tiny spec.”

  She turned to him. “I was thinking it was darned nice to be partnered with an FBI agent who draws this kind of attention from the bigwigs.”

  He smiled. “Depends on the case.”

  “Hunter, will this end?” she murmured. “There could be copycats out there. There were so many people involved, people who lost loved ones. This horse left on your Agent Mason’s doorstep...maybe it’s someone playing games. This is big and it could be endless—”