In 2002, Mark Vincent, onetime senior special agent, ran into John, a troubled little boy, at a local McDonald’s. Concerned, although it wasn’t his business, he gave the kid his business card and left. Three years later, Mark is director of his department at the WBIS and married to Quinton Mann, the former CIA spook who now writes spy novels. They’ve settled into a life of quiet domesticity and are even considering adopting a cat. All this changes when John, now using another name, barrels into Mark’s life with a secret no one expects and on the run from an organization that wants him despite the collateral damage. What will Mark, the man known as “the best” in the intelligence community, do when he learns what this secret is? Will it affect his relationship with Quinn? And how complicated are things going to get when Mark decides to get involved?

Mann of My Dreams Book 5: Complications

It looked like she had something under her fingernails. Again, not professional. Whoever had done this had to know she’d scratched them. They should have removed her fingertips, thereby making identification more difficult as well. Instead, whoever had done this had stomped repeatedly on her hands, breaking every bone and leaving behind an impression of a sole, clear enough I could see the pattern.


I opened the WGES kit and took out a couple of brown paper bags. I’d use them to cover her hands to preserve the evidence. This wasn’t my area of expertise—usually my job was just seeing that after a person got dead, it wasn’t traced back to the WBIS—but I pretty much knew the drill.


Chapter 59