“Max asked you to come here?” I questioned.
Charged silence filled the space between the agents and me. Tension coiled in the back of my neck, making it feel as if all the muscles and nerves were wound tighter than a double-knotted shoestring.
Agent Collier cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to inform you Maxwell is dead.”
The words hit me hard. Shock rippled through my body as disbelief filled my head. There had to be some mistake. Max wasn’t dead. He was too young to die. He wasn’t even thirty. I snapped my stare back up to the men watching me with solemn expressions.
“Come again?” I asked, thinking I heard wrong.
The man cleared his throat and shifted in his polished black loafers. “It happened last night. It was a car accident.”
So I had heard right. An aching hollow feeling opened up in the center of my chest. It settled just beneath my ribs where the pain lodged and continued to hurt. It was the kind of pain no one ever described to me before; I wasn’t sure this feeling could be put into words. If it could, they were words no one should ever have to hear.
Suddenly I felt lighter, as if part of whatever held me to the ground was no longer there. I looked down at my feet, at the boots still anchored on the floor. It was strange because it seemed I should be floating.
Part of me was gone.
Ripped away.
Empty.
The hollowness within me flared, and I had to make an effort not to hunch over. I had to work not to let these men in bad suits see how much the death of my twin hurt.
“I’m thinking the FBI usually doesn’t make house calls to inform people about their relatives’ death.”
“Maxwell’s death was not an accident.”
“You came here to tell me that my brother was murdered?” I asked, deadly calm. I might not have been close to Max, but he was my brother, my family, and I loved him.
“Maxwell was assisting the FBI in a corporate espionage case. He was the inside man. The fact that he was working with us was kept under wraps.”
“Obviously not if someone killed him because of it.”
The silence that followed my statement filled the room. If these men thought they could come here, tell me that my brother died helping them, and not be met with some sort of angry animosity, they seriously did not know who they were dealing with.
The fact that Max had been doing this at all surprised me. Part of me wanted to ask if they were sure they had the right guy, but respect kept the question in. Respect for my brother. Just because it was out of character for Max to get involved in something like this didn’t mean he hadn’t. He was a hard-working guy, always on the straight and narrow path. He never strayed from his goals; he never had time for fun or anything he considered time wasters.
But he did have a strong sense of right and wrong.
That was likely the only personality quality we shared.
So yeah, it might be unlikely that Max would become involved in some sort of criminal case, but it wasn’t impossible. Especially if whatever was going on had been blocking the path he was traveling.
Respect for him rose up inside me like a bottle of shaken soda. That hollow feeling threatened to pull me under and grief was a pungent taste in the back of my throat.
He can’t be gone.
He’s too young to die.
The man across from me cleared his throat. “No one knows of Maxwell’s passing. You’re the only one who’s been told.”
I swallowed thickly, pushing down the bubbly emotion inside me. I thought about my mother, my father, my sister. I was going to shatter their world today. I swallowed again. “I’ll take care of it,” I told them.
They said nothing, but I felt the change in the room. I looked up, directly into the eyes of one of the agents. There was a reason I was being told first. There was a reason that no one else had been notified about his death.
“The accident scene?” I asked.
“Has been cleaned up.”
Yeah, there was definitely something more going on.
“Sergeant, right before your brother died, he spoke to us.”
“What did he say?” What were the last words my brother would ever speak?
“He told us to get you. To get Tucker.”
He asked for me. Max’s last thought, his last request was of me.
Suddenly I understood the man’s words. That’s him. Of course they knew it was me on sight. I looked exactly like Max. We shared the same face.
“We need you to step in where Maxwell left off. To assume the identity of your brother.”
It was crazy. It would never work. People would know the minute I opened my mouth that I wasn’t Max.
Perhaps the look on my face made the men think I was going to say no.
“This case has been ongoing for over a year. If you don’t help, all the work we’ve done will have been for nothing. These men will walk.”
“Those men killed my brother,” I said. A sense of revenge overcame me.
No one said anything.
No one but me.
“I’ll do it.”
4
Charlotte
If there was one stereotype that I hated above all others it was that all blondes were dumb. Born a natural blonde I fought against the stereotype my entire life. I even considered dying my hair brown, but that would be like admitting defeat or trying to hide who I really am to appease some people with large mouths that had tendencies to act like assholes.
Besides, I was a walking testament that blondes weren’t dumb.
Plus, brown hair would totally wash me out.
Once I was certain Garlic Breath and his friend were gone, I slipped out of my neighbor’s apartment (They needed a class in organization and hoarding) back into the hallway. I could hear the emergency responders clanking up the stairwell and I experienced a moment of panic.
Then I realized I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Well, except for fail to vacate a building that was potentially burning to the ground.
I rushed back into my place just as the door to the stairwell burst open and men filed into the hallway.
I knew what I had to do.
I removed the clip from my hair and shook out the blond strands so they appeared messy and slept on. I never walked around with bed head, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Opening the door to my apartment, I stumbled out into the hallway, faking a yawn and rubbing at my eyes like I was still half asleep.
The men in the hallway all stopped and stared at me.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound tired. In my opinion, I sounded like someone doing a poor imitation of a drunk person.