Members of crime families did not like to be brought down. She had acted as a mole for the government in its successful attempts to bring down several New York crime families back in the 1980s. He was the brother of Bruno, a mobster who had held a grudge against Pine’s mother, Julia. Pine had unearthed that her sister’s kidnapper was a man named Ito Vincenzo. His wife, Desiree, had disappeared at the same time. Joe Atkins, one of her captors, had been found murdered the day after Mercy had escaped. Now the trail was as cold as a morgue freezer. She had been given the name Rebecca Atkins and had been kept as a prisoner until she’d escaped many years ago. They had tracked Mercy’s whereabouts to a place near Crawfordville, Georgia, in Taliaferro County, the most rural and least populated county in the state. It was an incident that had destroyed the Pine family and stood as the one traumatically defining moment of her life. Pine had nearly been killed by the abductor, surviving by a combination of sheer luck and, Pine supposed, her absolute unwillingness to die. Pine and Blum were searching for Pine’s twin sister, Mercy Pine, who had been abducted from their shared bedroom in Andersonville, Georgia, when the girls were just six years old. Next to Pine was her administrative assistant at the Bureau, Carol Blum. This was her one shot to get things right in her life. She was currently in Virginia working on something personal. Certainly not with putting bad people away, which was really the whole point for her. She hated bureaucracies and the paper pushers who lived and died by their stifling mountain of rules that got you nowhere fast. It was a lot of ground to cover, and she was the only FBI agent out there. Her normal beat was in Arizona, near the Grand Canyon. Some agents spent careers mainly on their butts staring at computer screens or supervising agents on the streets.
Five eleven in bare feet, she possessed a muscular build from years of lifting massive amounts of weights, first for athletic glory, and currently to survive the rigorous demands of her occupation. Well, I’m thirty years impatient, Pine thought. The bird seemed to think its meal was being delivered up as a boxed lunch, and the creature was getting impatient. She gazed over at a black crow as it stridently cawed from its perch on the branch of a sickly pine overlooking the pierced grave. They were supposed to stay right where they were planted, at least until a dying sun lashed out across space and bid farewell to all on earth.īut, for Pine, it was just that kind of day. Coffins and bodies were not supposed to be retrieved. Inch by solid inch, Atlee Pine watched the battered coffin being lifted to the surface from where it had rested six feet down for nearly two decades.
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