Best Laid Plans (Lucy Kincaid, #9)

Elise’s eyes sparkled. “I thought I heard the big boom. Toby is so fucking smart.”


“What case did he want to destroy?”

Elise smiled and bit her lip. She stared at Lucy and raised an eyebrow. “All of them,” she whispered. She tilted her chin up, as if daring Lucy to question her.

“He’s too smart for that.” Lucy’s heart was pounding, but she kept her voice flat and even. She hadn’t been trained to deal with sociopaths like Elise Hansen. Lucy had faced many killers, some as cold and confident as Elise. But none of them had been sixteen. None of them had been so elusive. Without knowing who Elise was in the past made it twice as difficult to understand her now.

“You think you’re smarter than we are?” Elise grinned. “We had you going all week.”

“Did your brother have those eight gang members killed—and a child—just to disguise the C-4 as heroin?”

Elise didn’t answer. She attempted to look bored, but it was clear she was enjoying this conversation. She certainly wasn’t scared. While intellectually Lucy knew that Elise had lied to them and manipulated them throughout the entire investigation, this moment was the first time she believed it.

The revelation chilled her all the way to her soul.

She said, “There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have been discovered before he set it off.”

“But. It. Wasn’t.” Elise leaned forward as if she were going to share a secret. “I know what you want. You want to fix me.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “No, actually, I don’t. Some people are permanently broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one can put you back together.”

“Hmm. Maybe you’re smarter than I gave you credit for. But I’m not broken. I’m exactly the way I want to be. I won’t be in here long.”

One of the more philosophical arguments in criminal psychology was whether psychopaths were born or created through their environment. Most experts believed that sociopaths were born—individuals with no innate ability to form attachments or feel empathy toward others—but not all sociopaths turned into psychopaths. Were psychopaths—those with a predisposition to cruelty—curable? Were psychopaths created because of chemical imbalances in the brain? Were they created by their environment? Or were they mistakes of nature?

Lucy and her brother Dillon had argued about the subject many times. Dillon believed that some people were born cruel. Lucy believed that environment played a bigger role in the formation of a psychopath. Maybe they were both right, and both wrong.

Two things were clear to Lucy as she and Elise stared, each of them assessing the other. Elise was most certainly a sociopath. And there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that Elise had been cold, cunning, and cruel from the moment she had her first complex thought. Her environment might have expedited her journey from sociopath to psychopath, but it was a road Elise Hansen had always traveled.

Lucy said, “The evidence in your case wasn’t in DEA storage, if you were wondering.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Elise said with a fake yawn. “I get a trial by jury. Never underestimate me. Or Toby. We always win.”

Lucy leaned forward. “Not this time. We have most of his money. We caught on to your game early enough to trick you, and we diverted the money into an FBI account. If you think your brother is going to be able to buy or bribe you out of jail, think again.”

Elise seemed amused. “We’ll see about that.”

Lucy said, “I will be testifying against you. If you think you’re good on the stand? You’ve never seen me.”

“You won’t.”

“Don’t count on it. I’m looking forward to the day I can tell the court exactly what you are.”

“You won’t, because you’ll be dead.”

A chill ran down Lucy’s spine at Elise’s matter-of-fact tone, but she kept her expression impassive as she rose from the chair. “You don’t scare me. You’re a calculating, street-smart, manipulative sociopath. You talk a good game, but I won. And I will find Tobias. He will pay for his crimes. You can count on that.”

She turned and walked out. Before she closed the door, Elise said, “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

Lucy shut the door firmly. Stood there, took a deep breath. She was shaking. Damn, had Elise seen it? She hoped not. She hoped she’d kept her fear locked down while facing that monster.

Brad was waiting for her in the observation room. “I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

“I got your message late. Hoped I could talk you out of it.” He rubbed her arm. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Fine.” But her voice was clipped and tense.

“You shouldn’t have gone in there. Just like me facing Nicole might not have been the smartest move. Nicole knows how I’ll react and pushes all my buttons. Elise is … different. She’s intuitive, and not in a good way. She wanted to scare you.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “I had to face her and show I wasn’t intimidated.”