The Sleepless Stars Read Online Free

he could from the uncooperative fed.
    “Ever seen anything like this?” he asked Grey.
    “Using caustic lye to cover up your tracks? Definitely not your typical meth lab.” The story the city had decided to go public with. “Or any other kind of drug-manufacturing process. But you already knew that, didn’t you, Detective? That’s why you’re here.”
    “Like I said. Just curious, is all.”
    “Curious. Good word.”
    Cagey was one thing, especially as Grey was right—Ryder had no authorization to be at this crime scene. But still, Grey was beginning to annoy him. Ryder wanted to know more specifics—and then he’d see if the Fed’s story held up. After all, if his own department could be bought, no reason why a federal agent couldn’t. “Which field office are you from? Harrisburg?”
    Grey shook his head, staring at the barge. “DC.”
    “WaFO?” Ryder used the shorthand for the FBI’s Washington Field Office in charge of Quantico and the labs there—including the evidence response teams.
    “No. Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Hoover Building. Which meant administrators and special investigations. Like domestic terrorism. Grey extended a business card embossed with the FBI’s seal. “Go ahead and call, if you like. The desk agent can verify my identity.”
    “Where’s your partner?” In Ryder’s experience, no Fed ever went anywhere alone—they were like women, even went to the bathroom in pairs. “Or your team?”
    Grey turned to him, his smile widening to reveal more perfectly aligned teeth. “Just me. And I was never even here. If you get my drift.”
    Ryder narrowed his eyes. If he couldn’t trust his own department, he was glad to have the Feds involved, but he hated cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Too easy to deny and walk away from—make that slither back into the shadows—after the shit hit the fan.
    Which it always did.
    What the hell had Rossi gotten involved in?
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 4
     
     
    FRANCESCA LAZARETTO’S PHONE rang. Ignoring her brother’s withering glare from the head of the table, she left the annual Christmas gathering of the family’s leadership and stepped outside to the Hotel Danieli’s private terrace. The lights of San Giorgio reflected in the rippling black waters of Venice’s Grand Canal. The city sparkled, jewel-toned holiday lights adding to its already magical ambience.
    “Report.”
    “No sign of Tommaso,” Tyrone told her. “But we’re following several leads.”
    She frowned, although no creases marred her exquisitely maintained facial musculature. At fifty-seven, her skin was as flawless as any fashion model’s. She insisted upon it. A perfect facade was necessary to disguise the ravages her flawed DNA wrought.
    “His cohort is missing as well.” Tommaso’s cohort was in Cambria City, Pennsylvania, where he followed two dozen school-age children.
    She glanced through the windows to the dining room, met Marco’s knife-edged glare. Her brother. Younger than Francesca by two years, yet chosen to act as the family’s leader after their father died last year. Not because she was a woman, but because she bore the family curse, while stupid, shortsighted, self-serving Marco’s DNA was pure.
    It should be her sitting at the head of the table, leading her family into the future, saving them from the Scourge. Tommaso’s research cohort was her chance to usurp Marco, take her rightful place, save them all. “You lost track of two dozen families?”
    “Not me. I was tying up the final loose ends on the subjects who escaped Roberto.”
    Beyond the terrace’s stone balustrade, she looked past San Giorgio to where a cruise ship sailed out of port, its lights bright against the Lido shoreline. Roberto’s body was at the bottom of that same shipping channel. What was left of him after he’d taken a shotgun to his own face. The price of failure, if you were a Lazaretto. “Yes. The Virginia subjects.”
    “West Virginia.”
    Below her on the