He lived the good life – hell, the great life. And the icing on the cake would be Jordan Rhodes. With her money, his knowledge of nightclubs and restaurants, and their mutual passion for wine, they could be an unstoppable team. She was perfect for him – she just needed to see it. Hopefully Mercks had some positive news on that front.

A few minutes later, Mercks finally showed up. “Sorry. Traffic on the Drive was worse than I’d expected.” He set a black leather shoulder bag on the chair next to him. “My usual,” he said to the waitress when she approached.

“You come here regularly?” Xander looked around, appalled. “Why?”

“Because nobody asks any questions here.”

“Of course they don’t. They’ve got about three working brain cells between them.” Xander pointed to a man slumped over the bar. “I don’t think that guy’s even alive.”

“Don’t worry about them. Focus, instead, on the question you should be asking,” Mercks said.

Xander scowled. He never liked games. “What question is that?”

Mercks said the words with emphasis. “Who is Nick Stanton?”

Xander sat forward, interested. “You found something? I knew it. No one’s that clean. He’s a con artist, right?”

“I suppose you could say that’s true, in a sense.” Mercks pulled a file out of his briefcase and set it on the table. “See for yourself.”

Xander opened up the folder and saw a photograph on top. As unexpected as the image was, it took him a moment to process what he was seeing: Nick Stanton wearing a bulletproof vest over a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, standing in front of a blue and white squad car as he spoke to two uniformed policemen. It appeared to be some kind of crime scene. The squad car had the letters NYPD blazoned prominently across the side.

He looked up at Mercks, confused. “I don’t get it. Stanton was a New York cop?”

“Nick Stanton doesn’t exist – that’s a fake identity,” Mercks said. “Nick McCall, on the other hand, used to be a member of the vice department of the NYPD. He spent five years there before leaving and going back to school. At a small academy in Quantico, Virginia.”

Xander’s body went cold.

“He’s FBI?” he hissed.

“Yes.”

Xander jabbed the picture with his finger. “This man, who was at my restaurant, drinking my wine, is a fucking Fed?”

“Yes. It was hard to find anything recent on him – I suspect he’s been working undercover for a while. But we do know that he graduated from the Academy six years ago before moving here.”

“So why was he at my party?” Xander asked.

Mercks leveled him with a look. “I think you can answer that better than I can.”

There was a moment during which neither man said anything, and Xander wondered how much Mercks knew about his dealings with Roberto Martino. He’d thought he’d taken enough precautions to keep Martino a silent, hidden partner in his businesses, but perhaps that information wasn’t as much on the down-low as he’d believed.

The fact that the FBI had sent an undercover man to crash his charity fund-raiser appeared to be confirmation of this.

“Whatever you’re involved in, Eckhart, the Feds know,” Mercks said quietly.

In a haze, Xander stood up from his chair. “I’ve got to go.” He pulled out his wallet and threw down a bill without looking at it. “Don’t speak to anyone about this.” He started to walk away from the table, then stopped and looked back, realizing something. “Jordan. Was she in on this?”

Mercks shook his head. “No clue. The guy I had following McCall caught the aftermath of some catfight she had with another woman. Jordan must have used the name Nick Stanton, because the other woman seemed confused by this. We overheard her say his real name when she left him a message. Sounds like the two of them don’t see eye to eye on who’s dating the real Nick. So it’s possible that Jordan has no idea what’s going on and that McCall has been playing her all along.”

Xander’s words dripped with ice. “Find out. I want to know if she’s the one who did this to me.”

Twenty-three

ON THE DRIVE to the hospital, Jordan caught a news report on a local radio station that informed her, in matter-of-fact terms, that Kyle Rhodes, son of billionaire computer software magnate Grey Rhodes and infamous cyber-terrorist – “It was Twitter, people!” – had been stabbed by another inmate and transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. According to the report, “unnamed sources” at Metropolitan Correctional Center had released a statement confirming only that the prison had taken certain measures deemed necessary to ensure the safety of one of its inmates who had been the target of violence on multiple occasions.

Hearing that, Jordan curled her fingers around the steering wheel. She reminded herself of Nick’s promise that her brother was fine.

When she arrived at the hospital, she stopped in front of the valet stand, not wasting time with the parking garage. The valet in his early twenties eyed the Maserati in awe as she stepped out of the driver’s seat.

“Nice,” he told her.

She quickly handed him the keys. “Just keep it under eighty.” She hurried through the sliding doors of the emergency room, trying not to think of the last time she’d rushed there after getting a frantic call from her father. That call had been about her mother’s car accident, and by the time she had arrived at the hospital, it had been too late.

Jordan pushed the memory from her mind. Not this time. She walked to the front desk, where a young receptionist greeted her with a polite smile.

“I’m here to see my brother, Kyle Rhodes. He was brought in about a half hour ago.”

The receptionist’s eyes widened. “Oh, yes – he passed right by here. He was kind of hard to miss, with the orange jumpsuit and the two prison guards following the stretcher.”

“Stretcher?” Jordan inhaled unsteadily. “Did he seem, you know, okay?”

The receptionist’s face brightened as she got That Look women often got around Kyle. “He seemed angry about the stretcher, but other than that, he looked fine. Although he did have the top part of his jumpsuit pushed down, with a bandage on his left arm. He was wearing only a T-shirt, but I didn’t see any blood on it or anything. Just that tight, white T-shirt. Very tight. Muscle-hugging, I’d say …”

Her voice trailed away as she stared off dreamily.

Jordan rolled her eyes. “He used to stick Skittles up his nose and shoot them into our mother’s flower pots. He called it ‘target practice.’” She snapped her fingers, trying to bring the woman back to reality. “So come on – where is he?”

The receptionist came out of her daze. “Right. Sorry.” She punched something into the computer. “They moved him up to room 360-A.” She pointed. “Elevators are down the hall and to the left.”


IT WOULD BE hard to miss Kyle’s room, considering it was the one with two armed prison guards standing out front. Jordan recognized one of them as her buddy from her visits to MCC, Mr. Cranky with all the rules.

He raised an eyebrow as she approached. “Girl-Sawyer … we were wondering when you were going to show up.”

Jordan stopped before him. “Does this mean we’re friends now?”

He gestured to their surroundings. “Different setting, different rules.”

“How’s my brother?”

“A little riled up. Mostly pissed about the stretcher.” He pointed to the door behind him. “The doctor is checking him out now. You can go in if you want,” he said with a kinder tone than usual.

“Thank you.” Jordan paused, thinking she saw a spark of knowing in Mr. Cranky’s eyes. She wondered how much the prison guard knew about her deal with the FBI, and if that had anything to do with his sudden change in attitude. She tabled that issue and pushed open the door to Kyle’s room.

Her brother was sitting upright on an examination bed, with the orange jumpsuit pushed down around his waist and a bandage on his forearm. His other hand was handcuffed to the side of the bed. He argued with the doctor who hovered over him with a needle.

“A tetanus shot? You guys carried me in here like an invalid for a tetanus shot?” He scowled.

“Ignore him. He’s always been a baby about shots,” Jordan said from the doorway.

Kyle looked over and grinned. “Jordo.”

The doctor seized on the distraction and promptly stuck him in the shoulder with the needle.

“Son of a – ” Kyle half shouted in surprise. “That hurt more than the damn fork.”

“You’ll probably have some soreness at the injection site for a couple days,” the doctor said, not looking sorry at all. He stuck a Band-Aid on Kyle’s shoulder. Jordan smiled when she saw that it had Elmo faces on it. Such a tough guy, her brother.

She walked over to the table, thinking she must’ve heard him wrong. “Did you just say that you were stabbed with a fork?”

“Yes, I was stabbed with a fork,” Kyle grumbled.

The corners of Jordan’s mouth twitched. “I see.”

Kyle beckoned with his hand. “All right. Let’s just get it over with.”

“Salad or regular?”

“You know, I didn’t stop to measure it as it was going into my arm,” Kyle said sarcastically. “Fucking Puchalski.”

Jordan’s mouth dropped open, and she barely noticed as the doctor left the room. “Puchalski? The harmless bald guy with the snake tattoo?” He was the undercover agent on the inside?

Inconceivable.

Kyle threw out his free hand in exasperation. “I know – he and I always got along fine. Then tonight during lock-down, we were in line heading back to our cells and he starts up again with the Sawyer crap. So I told him to drop it, like I’ve told him a hundred times before, and he just loses it. Grabs me by the collar, tackles me to the ground, and starts yelling that he can call me whatever the hell he wants. Then he pulls a fork out of his shoe and does this.”