The Girl Next Door (Shadow Agents #6)
Author: Cynthia Eden

Chapter One

Cooper Marshall burst into the apartment, gun ready as his gaze swept the dim interior of the room that waited for him. “Lockwood!”

There was no response to his call, but the stench in the air—that unmistakable odor of death and blood—told Cooper that he’d arrived too late.

Again.

Damn it.

Cooper rushed deeper into that darkened apartment. He’d gotten his orders from the top. He’d been assigned to track down Keith Lockwood, an ex–Elite Operations Division agent. Cooper was supposed to confirm that the other man was alive and well. He’d fallen off the EOD’s radar, and that had sure raised a red flag in the mind of Cooper’s boss.

Especially since other EOD agents had recently turned up dead.

Cooper rounded a corner in the narrow hallway. The scent of blood was stronger. He headed toward what he suspected was the bedroom. His eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, so it was easy for him to see the body slumped on the floor just a few feet from him.

He knelt, and his gloved fingers turned the body just slightly. Cooper pulled out his penlight and shone it on the dead man’s face.

Keith Lockwood. Cooper had never worked with the man on a mission, but he’d seen Lockwood’s photos.

Lockwood’s throat had been slit. An up-close kill.

Considering that Lockwood was a former navy SEAL, the man shouldn’t have been caught off guard.

But he had been.

Because the killer isn’t your average thug off the streets.

The killer was also an agent with the EOD, and the killer was trained just as well as Lockwood had been.

No, trained better.

Because the killer had been able to get the drop on the SEAL.

Cooper’s breath eased out in a rough sigh just as a knock sounded on the front door.

The front door that Cooper had just smashed open moments before.

He leapt to his feet.

“Mr. Lockwood?” A feminine voice called out. “Mr. Lockwood…i-is everything all right?”

No, things were far from all right. The broken door should have been a dead giveaway on that point.

“It’s Gabrielle Harper!” The voice called out. “We were supposed to meet…”

His back teeth clenched. Talk about extremely bad timing. He knew Gabrielle Harper, and the trouble that the woman was about to bring his way was just going to make the situation even more of a tangled mess.

Cooper holstered his weapon. He had to get out of that apartment. Before Gabrielle saw him and asked questions that he couldn’t answer for her.

He rose and stalked toward the bedroom window. His footsteps were silent. After all of his training, they should have been.

Gabrielle’s steps—and her high heels—tapped across the hardwood floor as she came inside the apartment.

Of course, Gabrielle wasn’t just going to wait outside. She was a reporter, no doubt on the scent of a story.

And she must have scented the blood.

She was following that scent, and if he didn’t move, fast, she’d follow it straight to him.

Cooper opened the window then glanced down below. Three floors up. But there were bricks on the side of the building, with crevices in between them. If he held on just right, he could spider-crawl his way down.

The floor in the hallway creaked as Gabrielle paused.

She should have called for help by now. At the first sign of that smashed door, Gabrielle should have dialed 911. But, with Gabrielle what she should do and what she actually did—well, those could be very different things.

If she wasn’t careful, the woman was going to walk into real trouble one day—the kind that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from.

He slid through the window. Since it was after midnight, Cooper knew he’d virtually disappear into the darkness when he climbed down the back side of the building.

He’d make it out of there, undetected, provided he didn’t fall and break his neck.

He eased to the side, his feet resting against the window’s narrow ledge. He pulled the window back down and took a deep breath.

“Mr. Lockwood!” Gabrielle’s horror-filled scream broke loud and clear through the night.

She’d found the body.

Jaw locking, Cooper made his way down that building.

Gabrielle had just stumbled into an extremely dangerous situation. Now he’d have to do some serious recon in order to keep her out of the cross fire.

* * *

IT WASN’T HER first dead body.

Gabrielle Harper stood behind the patrol car, her gaze on the apartment building. The cops had rolled in quickly after her call then they’d pushed her out.

They hadn’t needed to push her so far. She knew better than to contaminate the scene. They didn’t have to worry about her destroying evidence.

Not my first dead body. But the sight of Lockwood’s slit throat had still made nausea rise within her.

“Tell me again,” Detective Lane Carmichael said as he leaned back against the patrol car and studied her with an assessing gaze, “just why you were at Keith Lockwood’s house in the middle of the night?”

A crowd had already gathered.

Her gaze slid away from Lane’s and toward the apartment’s entrance. The body was being wheeled out through the double doors. Lockwood had been zipped up in a black bag. Bagged, tagged and taken away.

She swallowed.

“Gabrielle.”

The snap of her name jerked her attention back to Lane. His suit was wrinkled, his dark hair was tousled and his face was set in grim, I’m-sure-not-pleased-with-you lines.

That was typically the way Lane looked at her. Even when they’d been dating—briefly—he’d often given her that same look.

She worked the crime beat in Washington, D.C., covering stories for the Inquisitor—both the paper and its online subscriber base. Since Lane was a homicide detective, their paths crossed plenty.

That crossing had been good when they were dating.

Now that they weren’t—not so good.

“Lockwood called me,” she began.

“Dead men don’t make phone calls.” His arms were crossed over his chest—his interrogation stance. “The ME estimates that he’s been dead for over seven hours. Try again.”

Seven hours. She filed that helpful detail away for later. “He called me around eight a.m. The guy left a voice message for me, saying he had some info to share about a story I’d covered.”

Lane’s head tilted. “Just what story would that be?”

Gabrielle pushed back her hair. It was summer in D.C., and she was sweating. “The unsolved murder of Kylie Archer.” A woman whose body had been discovered in her apartment months ago. Kylie’s throat had been slit.