Free No Good Deed by Allison Brennan Page A

mean he wouldn’t believe. And though Noah didn’t know Kane well, if he had information that he felt was viable enough to share with Rick, there was at least a basis for the suspicion.
    Noah realized that Rick was assessing him. “You should tap Lucy to help weed out the traitor,” Noah said.
    Hans shook his head. “Lucy would not do well in that role.”
    “I’ve worked with her, Hans, I know what she’s capable of. Lying isn’t her strong suit, I grant you, but something like this—when agents are being threatened and killed—she’ll rise to the occasion.”
    “I don’t disagree that she could do it, but I don’t know the dynamics of the office. I don’t know what relationships she’s forged and with whom. I don’t want to put her in that position of spying on her colleagues, not unless it’s absolutely necessary. I would rather use Agent Dunning.”
    “Dunning?” Noah didn’t know him.
    “I’ll fill you in later,” Rick said to Noah. Then to Hans, “You have as much latitude as you need. You speak for me, and I don’t doubt that you’ll find out the truth. If someone in our house is corrupt, your presence will put the fear of God into them—and may force their hand. No paper trail on this—no email or cell phones. If either of you needs anything, call only though a secure line.”
    They watched as the coroner’s team wheeled Logan Dunbar’s body out of his townhouse. They collapsed and lifted the gurney to carry it down the stairs, then raised it and rolled the body to the van. Noah stared at the black bag, a cold anger washing over him. He’d been in the air force for ten years and had never lost a man in his unit. But he’d flown back the bodies of other good soldiers, men and women zipped into body bags, dead simply because they were doing their job.
    Noah said, “Dunbar was a good agent. He did his job. Now he’s dead. I want to know why and stop these bastards from hurting anyone else.”

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    Lucy scoured Nicole’s file, first skimming it, then going back and reading it in greater depth.
    Immediately two things became clear: First, Nicole had lied to Lucy about her background. During Operation Heatwave, when Lucy was alone with Nicole, the former fed had said she’d lived in Kansas until she was fourteen and mentioned she had “brothers”—the truth was, she had only one brother, two years older than Nicole and currently in the army. Nicole had only lived in Kansas for fourteen months, when her father had been stationed at Fort Riley, and she’d been five when they moved to Fort Benning in Georgia. When she was nine, her father had left the military after twelve years of service and moved cross-country, to Los Angeles, where he went through the police academy. He’d been killed in the line of duty when Nicole was fifteen.
    According to Nicole’s application to the DEA, under the question, “Why are you applying to be a federal agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration?” Nicole had written:
    My father was a veteran in the army and then served six years as a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. He was killed in the line of duty during a turf war battle. The only way to stop the violence is to stop these battles, and that starts at the top—which is why I want to be a DEA agent.
    Lucy made a note to find out more about the murder of Nicole’s father. Lucy couldn’t reconcile Nicole working for the same sort of people who killed her father. Maybe her betrayal of the DEA had started with avenging her father—if a drug dealer was responsible, she may have wanted access to records that she couldn’t get otherwise. But if that were the case, how did she turn away from revenge to working with the same type of people who’d killed her dad?
    The second truth Lucy learned was that Nicole had manipulated her way into the San Antonio DEA field office. She wanted to be here for some reason—why, Lucy had no idea. It took Lucy two passes