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I’ve made up my mind—this is going to be my last assignment.”
    He shrugged. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
    An awkward silence hung between us as we entered my neighborhood. Lined with the greenery of summer, it was like an oasis in a concrete jungle.
    By the time we arrived at my place, the blue sky was just a memory. The wind had picked up and was whipping the tree limbs. It seemed like a symbol of something, but I just wasn’t sure what.
    We entered the pre-war building, escaping the volatile weather, and I sniffed the comforting fragrance of home. I smiled again—happy with the new life I was heading for, even if Carter wasn’t.
    “I don’t know why you’re pining for other chicks when you got a great girl like Lauren Bowden,” Carter said with a grin, breaking the tension. “And what’s with the John Peter stuff?”
    “It shows what type of reporter she is. JP actually stands for John Pierpont. My mother is head of the historical society in Rockfield, Connecticut and…”
    “Is that like one of those cults where they have those rituals with the strange masks and robes?”
    “No, that’s professional wrestling. She happens to be one of the leading history experts in the state and named my brothers and me after famous people who were born in Connecticut. I’m named after JP Morgan, whose full name was John Pierpont Morgan. My brother Ethan is named after Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero, and Noah is named after Noah Webster. He was the guy, you know, like Webster’s Dictionary … that would be a book that contains words, they are the things that…”
    Carter shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m getting my balls busted by a guy named Pierpont.” Then as quickly as the skies darkened outside, he changed the subject, “How’s Noah doing?”
    “Better,” was all I said. It wasn’t a place I wanted to go right now.
    We entered a mudroom on the garden floor. French doors led to a backyard that looked more rural Connecticut than Manhattan. It looked inviting, but we had business upstairs.
    As we began to climb the stairs, a sound stopped us in our tracks. Carter pulled his gun from the waistband of his jeans.
     
     

     

Chapter 8
     
    I put up the stop sign.
    “It’s Christina, the girl who house-sits while I’m away.”
    “Is she hot?” Carter asked, going quickly from gun-toting to horny.
    I cringed. “It’s not like that.”
    Carter’s sly smile fell off his face. “I rest my case—what have you done with JP Warner?”
    “First of all, you need to put both your guns away. Secondly, she is Dan Wilkins’ little sister—he used to be my contact within the FBI. She goes to Fordham and interned at GNZ. Most of her classes are at the Lincoln Center campus, so it’s convenient for her to stay here. And in return, she takes care of the place while I’m gone.”
    We climbed a spiral staircase to the spacious second floor. It featured a twenty-foot ceiling and walls covered with oversized windows that provided a view of the Manhattan skyline. On a normal summer day, light would saturate the room, but the impending storm had now painted the sky black. The room looked as if I didn’t spend much time there, which was accurate. It was furnished with just the essentials—a black leather couch, flat-screen plasma TV, and a large desk.
    Lauren once tried to decorate the place with what she called an “Old South antebellum motif.” When I rebuffed her, she returned with an interior decorator. That’s when I decided to have Christina move in to watch the place.
    Christina was seated behind my desk, furiously typing on a laptop. She looked up suspiciously. “Hey, JP,” she greeted me, her voice jumping three octaves. “They have the new GNZ website up. You should check it out.”
    It didn’t take me long to figure out the reason for her nervousness. Walking out of the bathroom was a college-age kid wearing my evergreen colored bathrobe with the letters JP