Page 38 of Fully Loaded

The cab slowed in front of a four-story apartment building. Brock paid the driver and they got out. The building was far from something Dani would expect to find in Paris. Chunks of stucco broke away from the wall and rust corroded the wrought-iron balconies. Several other four-story buildings lined the street, all lacking landscaping. Chairs, boxes, bicycles, and dead plants were scattered along some of the patios, making the neighborhood that much uglier.

“Tell me you’ve never been here before,” Brock whispered, as he opened the door to the vestibule. A young woman in jogging clothes breezed out the door leading to the lobby. Dani caught the handle and Brock followed her inside.

“No, I haven’t. When I met him a few years ago, I remember seeing pictures of his apartment overlooking the river. It looks like he’d come down in the world.” Her gaze landed on a tattered brown couch with questionable blotches on its cushions. Her stomach clenched. “I hate to think what brought him to this point.” She tilted her weight to one side and peeked down the hall. “I don’t think there’s an elevator, but that must be the stairwell,” she said, pointing to a steel door off the main area of the lobby.

He grunted. “Fuck, it stinks in here.”

She’d been breathing through her mouth since they entered the building. The stench of cigarettes, onions, and a bodily fluid she didn’t want to identify forced itself into her nose. She pressed her knuckles to her nose. “God, it’s awful.”

Once they reached the fireproof cement corridor, Brock climbed the stairs next to her. “I don’t like the sounds of this guy.”

She curled her fingers into her palm to avoid grabbing the handrail. “This isn’t like him at all. Sven was always high maintenance and liked the best of everything. This is . . . strange.”

“Is it the right place? How’d you get his address?”

“He gave it to me when I arrived in Geneva in case of emergency.”

“Hmm.”

She opened the door to the third floor and speed-walked down the hall. With every stomp of her foot dust kicked up from the threadbare carpet, which had probably never seen a vacuum. She stopped in front of the unit marked 304 and nodded at the door.

If she were a little more polite, she would have opened it herself, but if there were ever a moment to latch on to chivalry . . . She had no desire to touch that doorknob coated in god-knows-what germs.

Instead of grabbing the knob, Brock’s fingers hovered over the door’s wood casing. “This was kicked in.”

She narrowed her gaze to the tattered wood around where the door met the jamb at the lock. He pressed his forearm to the wood and she leaned into his side as the door buckled.

Brock’s hand hovered at the small of her back as they crossed the threshold together. Although it was midafternoon, the apartment was dim. Thick blankets hung over the only two windows in the living room, blocking out most of the light. The metallic click of Brock’s gun being removed from behind his back raised her hackles.

He closed the door. “Lock’s busted. Wait here while I do a sweep.”

She knotted her fingers at her stomach and studied his back as he moved into the kitchen and flicked on the light. The gun at her spine warmed her skin. A plate of half-eaten food sat by the sink and several flies buzzed around it. Empty takeout cartons sat on the kitchen table, but despite the trash, the area was free of clutter. A navy-blue coat hung over the back of a chair and a lone pair of men’s running shoes sat overturned at her feet. She had the impending sensation that someone was home.

Brock moved into the darkness of the living room. “Jesus Christ,” he moaned. His rigid shoulder blades bunched even more. “You need to see this, babe.”

Chapter

Fourteen

Brock stood in front of a partial map of Europe. It nearly covered the eight-by-ten-foot wall. Several red bull’s-eyes littered the paper.

What the fuck?

Dani’s footsteps shuffled cautiously behind him, but he didn’t tear his eyes away from the map. She stopped next to him, and her sharp intake of breath made him lower his stare to her face. She clamped her hand over her mouth and took a step forward. She turned, hit the light switch on the wall, and the bare bulb overhead flickered, sending eerie shadows over the wall.

She dragged her fingertips over the red blips. “He was going to release the first one in Paris,” she said. “It says February twenty-second.” She looked over her shoulder at Brock. “That’s soon. What’s the date today?”

He adjusted his watch and illuminated the screen. “February fifteenth.” His mind worked at warp speed as he studied the other dates. “He planned to hit Zurich on the twenty-fifth, Berlin on March first, and then Amsterdam.” He took out his phone and snapped half a dozen pictures of the map.

Dani backed away. “I can’t believe Sven was going to carry this out. Who the hell convinced him to do this?”

“That’s what we need to figure out. I’m going to bet he didn’t have a chemistry background? He wasn’t going to recreate the virus from the formula?”

She shook her head and gnawed the tip of her thumb. “No. He didn’t.” She rolled her lips back and forth. “But someone killed him for a reason. Maybe he backed out. When he called he said we were in danger.”

Brock nodded. “That’s possible. They wouldn’t let him live if he knew all these details,” he said, gesturing at the map. “Let’s look around. Be careful. If you find anything that could be used as evidence, don’t touch it.”

She nodded and moved around the living room. Crap cluttered the coffee table, including a phone book, a bong, and scattered bits of marijuana. Brock tucked the weapon into the back of his pants, squeezed her shoulder, and headed down the hallway past the kitchen. He stopped at the end of the hall, where it split into two bedrooms. He veered into the cleaner of the two, but both were equally disgusting. The stench of body odor and beer hit him, and he pressed his face into the crook of his arm. Damn, some people were nasty. He wasn’t the tidiest guy in the world, but he’d never wallow in this shit.