With Open Eyes Read Free Page A

your hands up.’”
    Janet threw open her car door. “What if it’s Dale?”
    Kendra tried to grab her arm, but Janet had already jumped out of the car. “Janet, no!”
    Kendra climbed out after her just in time to see a man in a dark shirt and trousers sliding out of the Explorer’s passenger-side door. Angling the door as he would a shield, he raised a handgun toward the police cars.
    The street exploded with half a dozen guns firing at once. The muzzles flashed white in the darkness.
    The man flew backwards and landed sprawled on the sidewalk.
    Janet screamed and lunged forward.
    Kendra held her back. “No, it’s not him, I promise.”
    The police emerged from their cars and cautiously stepped toward the lifeless figure on the pavement. One man turned to another and shook his head. “Deader than hell.”
    A thirtyish detective in a tan jacket left the other police and ran toward Kendra and Janet. “Are you all right?”
    Janet gazed at him in surprise. “Detective Sutker?”
    “Yes. You’re not hurt?”
    “No, who was that man?”
    “We’ll find out soon enough when we run the ID.” Sutker turned to Kendra. “Sorry for all this, Dr. Michaels. When you called, we had to make sure he was really tailing her.”
    “I guess I would have had an easier time convincing you if he had pulled his gun on Janet,” she said sarcastically.
    “You know that wasn’t going to happen. He was just waiting to see if she made contact.”
    Janet looked from Kendra to Sutker. “Contact with whom?”
    Sutker glanced away, obviously not wanting to answer the question.
    Kendra took her arm. “With Dale. He thought you might know where Dale was.”
    “Why would he think that?”
    “Because Dale was in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”
    “What?” Janet glanced at Sutker for confirmation, but his face was without expression. She turned back to Kendra. “Are you sure?”
    Kendra nodded. “I had a pretty good idea back at your apartment. You know I’m good with dialects, and I was positive Dale was lying about being born and bred in Dallas. I’m guessing he was raised somewhere along the Georgia or South Carolina coast, with his accent flattened by a Midwestern influence from one or both of his parents.”
    Sutker’s eyes widened. “How the hell did you—”
    “That doesn’t matter now.” Janet appeared stunned. “You’re saying he didn’t tell me the truth?”
    Kendra nodded. “He obviously lied to you about where he was from, he claims to have no family, and he has no contact with friends or anyone from his past. He is also unusually averse to having his face photographed. That suggests a man hiding from something, perhaps even the law, but the fact that the police would engage in some kind of cover-up and encourage you to stop asking questions led me to think in a different direction, maybe in terms of witness protection. So I had my friends at the FBI run the thumbprint.”
    “Why?” Janet asked.
    “I knew that if he was in Witness Protection the match request would be immediately flagged and an alert would go to the agency responsible for him. I hung around long enough for the FBI field office to get an urgent call from the U.S. Marshals Service, wondering what in the hell they were doing tracking their protected witness.”
    “I’m sure your FBI buddies loved that,” Sutker said. “Having to explain why they were running a fingerprint for a nonagent?”
    Kendra shrugged. “I have a history of annoying them.”
    Janet leaned back against Kendra’s car. “I just can’t believe it. So Dale…He’s okay?”
    Sutker nodded. “He’s fine. If it means anything, I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you earlier today. When you called us, we treated it like any other crime scene. But then we got a call from the Marshals Service, and they explained everything. Someone broke into your fiancé’s house and tried to kill him. Turns out he’s pretty handy with a kitchen knife and he killed his