by Maggie Wells
“Forty-eight hours?” Jared sat up straighter. “So quick.”
“Looking back at the paperwork from the original sale, your clients moved fairly quickly when they decided to invest their money in the property.” She leaned in and dropped her voice to a more confidential level. “We’re working with an excess of cash on the balance sheet at the moment. Best to keep the money moving. Don’t you agree?”
They locked gazes, and a shiver ran down her spine. The look he gave her was speculative but admiring. But rather than feeling gratified by his appreciative stare, Marlee had to curl her toes in her smart black pumps in order to keep from squirming in her chair. She waited without moving a muscle until he picked up the sheet she’d slid across the slick table and took in the numbers. One corner of his mouth twitched upward. It was a tell, but she had no idea if it meant something good or bad.
“I’ll make a call today.”
“Wonderful.” Marlee flipped her portfolio closed and gripped the arms of the chair as she rose, trying to keep the tremors she was feeling on the inside. “We look forward to hearing from you.” She thrust her hand across the table, and Jared Baker shook it, an amused gleam in his eyes.
“You’ve got a go-getter, Henry. I’m sad I couldn’t take her on.”
Disgusted, Marlee strode from the conference room, leaving the men to their backslapping and self-congratulations. She couldn’t waste time on them now. She needed to get back to Pine Bluff. The trap had been set. Now they had to wait to see which creepy-crawly came out of the woods to take the bait.
* * *
“HELLO,” BEN SAID when she opened the door to the lake house to admit him.
“Hey.” She rose up onto her tiptoes to brush a kiss to his cheek. “Come in.”
Sweeping a hand in exaggerated welcome, she moved back to open the door wider. He took the opportunity to peer past her into the house. Part of him was surprised he didn’t find Wendell and Henry waiting with her. Another part of him was glad they’d finally be alone. He pulled off the broad-brimmed trooper’s hat and stepped through the door.
“I haven’t gotten any more text messages,” she told him.
“Kayla Abernathy confessed to sending the last few,” he informed her. “The tech found the program on Bo’s laptop, and, well, you can press charges if you want.”
Marlee shook her head. “I don’t want to add to her grief.”
An awkward silence stretched between them. Ben noted that it was the first time they’d encountered the phenomenon and did his level best to push through it. “I hear you and your father took a trip to Atlanta today,” he said, fidgeting with the brim of his hat in his hands as he strolled through the large open-concept living area.
“Yes.”
“I wish you would have waited,” he grumbled.
“Waited for what?” she pushed. “You can’t go there. Besides, what we did today might not even have a direct bearing on the cases you’re looking at.”
“We’re looking at,” he corrected. He stared directly into those electric-blue eyes. “You’re the one who dragged me into this whole thing,” he reminded her.
“I did.” Her tone was gentle. Conciliatory. He wasn’t buying it for a minute.
“So, what did you find out?”
“Nothing specific. I made an offer to buy back the land.”
He did a double take. “What?”
“I have no idea if whoever is behind this Crystal Forest land deal will go for it, but it seemed worth a try. If I can recover my family’s land... It was worth a try. And it worked. We had a signed agreement in my inbox by the time we got back.”
“Congratulations.”
“Mostly I wanted to see Jared Baker’s face when he saw who his visitors were. He’s had dealings with both my father and me. He has about ten fingers in our pie, and I need to figure out why.”
“I can tell you why,” he said, his voice flat.
“You can?”
“I spoke to one of my friends at the agency today.” He gestured toward the sofa. “I think we should sit down.”
“I don’t care for the sound of this.” They sat, their knees briefly touching as he angled toward her. “Why do I need to be sitting down?”
“The suggestion was more for me than for you.” He expelled a long breath. “I asked about Crystal Forest or if they had knowledge of any jokers using the Breaking Bad names as pseudonyms. The conversation came around to Ivan Jones—”
“The guy who’s been after you?” she asked, her voice kicking up an octave. “I thought he was in jail now.”
Ben gave a rough snort of laughter. “Jail doesn’t mean much to guys like Ivan.”
“You’re scaring me.”
He shook his head. “No need to be scared.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” He took the opportunity to give her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Crystal Forest is a shell company. They own a lot of smaller businesses they use to launder money. It belonged to Ivan.”
“What?” Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Oh, my God. Forget fingers. This guy is in up to his elbows.”
“That’s not all.”
“Of course not.”
He nodded, smiling at her ability to be snarky despite the gravity of their situation. “Ivan and his associates haven’t forgotten what the agency did to his business in this area.”
“I bet they haven’t.”
His mouth tightened, and he forced himself to breathe in through his nose before dropping the bigger bombshells on her. “According to my source, Jared Baker was Ivan Jones’s attorney of record.”
“Really?”
“There’s more.”
Marlee squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop saying that. I’m not sure how much more I can take.”
“Ivan Jones was jumped by some other prisoners about a month ago and beaten into a coma. He died three days ago.”
“He’s dead?”
He nodded and she bit her bottom lip, white teeth sinking into the tender flesh as she processed the information and the myriad implications.
At last, she released it with a gusty sigh. “Good.”
Her single word response to news with the power to alter the course of his whole life coaxed a laugh from him. “Yeah. Good.” He ran a hand over his face. “The man was pure evil. He used to do all sorts of messed-up stuff. Andre told me about this time he made a guy...” He stalled as the story his friend told him in a flophouse a lifetime ago played out in his head.
“What?”
“Why didn’t I think of it?”
Ben must have stared into space a minute too long, because Marlee waved a hand in front of his unseeing gaze to get his attention.
“Think of what? Ben? Speak. What are you thinking?”
But he was too busy fitting puzzle pieces into place to let his concentration be broken. “Ivan. Ivan owned Crystal Forest. Will worked for Ivan at Crystal Forest. It was Ivan.”
“What was Ivan? How can anything be Ivan?”
“Because everything circles back to that sadistic jackass,” he growled.
“But Ben—”
He cut her off before she tried to apply anything as useful as logic to the way Ivan Jones had operated. “Ivan didn’t like to get his hands dirty, but he liked to mess with people’s heads. One of his favorite things to do was to force people to play Russian roulette.”
“What? How?” she asked, her brow crinkling.
He was trying to formulate how to explain when the cabin door flew open and Henry Masters stumbled in.
“I got a voice message from Will Thomason. He’s over at his cabin now, but there’s something off.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when two nearly simultaneous gunshots rang out. Ben and Marlee leaped to their feet, and Henry swung toward the lake. A moment
later, the reverberation of a third shot echoed across the still water, but rather than taking cover, Henry Masters set out for his car.
Ben pushed past Marlee and took off after her father. “No, don’t!” he shouted as he ran out the door.
He was halfway down the steps when he heard footfalls slapping the deck behind him. “Get back inside,” he yelled over his shoulder, sprinting for the Suburban. The engine roared to life, but Henry hadn’t shut the driver’s door. “No,” he barked, reaching into the car and practically dragging the older man from the seat. He switched off the ignition. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“We can’t—” Henry’s voice broke as he struggled in Ben’s grip. “I can’t let him do it. No more. No more.”
The man spoke in a half rant, half sob, but Ben didn’t need a translator to understand what he was trying to say. “You think Thomason was planning to kill himself out here tonight?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Henry bellowed. “I can’t... Not another one.”
Still gripping Henry by the arms, he shoved him toward his county-issued SUV. Opening the rear door, he pushed the older man in. “We’re going. I’ll take you,” he promised. If he convinced the man to get in the back seat, he wouldn’t be able to get out without someone to open the door from the outside.
After closing Henry in, he reached for the driver’s door and swept the area for Marlee, praying she’d heeded his direction to go back into the house. The second he slid into the seat, he realized he’d given Marlee Masters too much credit when it came to common sense, because she was planted squarely in the passenger seat of his car.
“Marlee, we don’t have time—”
She strapped into her seatbelt, then fixed him with the same stubborn glare he’d gotten from her father. “Then maybe you should stop yapping and start driving, Sheriff.”
Less than a minute later, they were back on the lake road. Ben floored the accelerator. Marlee clung to the handle above the door as they sped down the rutted lane cutting through dense forest, but he didn’t dare let up. “Grab the mic. Call for backup. Shots fired at Thomason lake house. Officer en route, approaching destination.” Marlee dutifully repeated him verbatim. “I’ll wait for backup as long as I can, but I need to assess the situation. Request backup from any Prescott County patrols in the area.”
She’d hardly gotten the last part out when Ben stomped on the brakes and the SUV skidded to a halt outside the clearing where Will Thomason’s house sat. It was a prefabricated home but had the look of a traditional log cabin. One room, or possibly two smaller areas. It was situated in the center of a heavily wooded lot, away from the lakeshore.
Ben squinted through the windshield, trying to make out the details of any entrances and exits in the lowering gloom of the evening storm. The back door had nothing but four wooden steps leading to it, but the entire width of the front had a deck. A pair of camp chairs sat at one end. The rest was bare. Apparently, Thomason wasn’t big on homey touches. The second he reached for his door handle, Marlee went for hers. “No,” he barked.
“But you can’t go in there alone. It will take at least fifteen minutes for backup to get out here,” she argued.
“You aren’t going in there,” he growled.
Henry Masters cleared his throat but spoke in a voice barely louder than a whisper. “Keep it down. Sound carries out here.”
“I need you both to stay here,” Ben said, infusing his voice with command.
“Not going to happen.” Henry was clearly unimpressed. “I’ll take Marlee with me and slip around the back, see if we can catch anyone coming or going.”
“Whoever is in there is armed,” Ben reminded him, twisting in his seat to glare at the older man. “If anyone is even still in there. Whoever it was could be hiding in the woods, waiting to take potshots at us. Stay in the car.”
“You have to cover the back one way or another. We’ll keep low and close to the house. And we’ll arm ourselves,” he said, pointing to the firewood stacked in a rack along the side of the house. “We don’t have time to wait on anyone else. I promise we won’t do anything risky.” He slid across the seat and tugged on the handle. When nothing happened, he looked up, incredulous. “Are you kidding me?”
“For the record, either of you step foot out of this car, I’ll arrest you. Stay put,” he ordered, popping the snap on his gun belt. He opened the car door and stepped onto the forest floor as silently as a thick layer of needles and twigs would allow.
He closed the door and saw Marlee shaking her head, her eyes wide with fear. When the latch caught, she pressed her open palm to the glass. Sparing the cabin a quick glance, he pressed his palm to the exterior of the window. He hoped his gaze conveyed his unspoken promise to return to her and say all the things they needed to say, because he didn’t have time to say them now. Unholstering his weapon as he walked, he cautiously made his way toward the door.
He was about to peek through the edge of the first window he came to when he heard the unmistakable sound of a car door opening. He angled his head enough to see Marlee liberating her father from the rear seat of his patrol car and bit back a groan of despair. When she gestured toward the cord of firewood, he gave an impatient wave, trying to shoo them back to the car, but they kept coming.
“Two peas in a pod,” he muttered under his breath.
Fixing his attention to the window, he angled for a peek inside. The place looked to be one big room. The back of a leather sofa served as the dividing line between the living and sleeping areas. He could see the small kitchen in the far corner and a closed door he assumed must be a bathroom. Hoping to get a better look at the living room through the sidelight by the front door, he shuffled his feet along the planks of the wood decking fronting the cabin.
He peeked around the edge of the window and saw a man clad in camouflage hunting pants sprawled on the floor, foot lolling to the side. He blinked, willing his focus to sharpen as he cataloged the other features of the room. The body lay between the big leather sofa and a stone-fireplace hearth. He allowed his gaze to track over the long expanse of leather inch by inch until he found the spot again. Something shiny gleamed in the dull light. No, not shiny. Wet. And dark.
Blood.
The body lay too far away from the sofa for the blood to be his, if he was gauging the distance correctly. The blood had to have come from somewhere else. He was still searching for the source when a hand rose above the sofa. A hand covered in blood. There was someone on that sofa.
Gripping his weapon in both hands, Ben flattened himself against the log wall and shouted, “Masters County Sheriff!”
Thrumming heartbeats passed, then a thin, reedy voice called out, “Help... Help me.”
Weapon pointed at the wood deck, he reached out to test the door. Unlocked. The hinges creaked as it swung open. “Masters County Sheriff,” he called again. “If you’re armed, drop your weapon!”
“Help,” the man called, his voice slightly stronger. “Sheriff.”
Despite the warm evening, gooseflesh rose on his arms. Drawing closer, his grip on his gun tightened as he peered through the crack in the door. The man’s annoying drawl was all too familiar.
“Thomason, I’m coming in. If you have a weapon, I suggest you drop it.”
“Make sure he’s dead first,” the man said in a ragged whisper.
Galvanized by the response, Ben kicked the door in and burst into the room, his weapon sighted on the sofa. “Drop it now.”
Panic raised the other man’s voice an octave. “Make...sure.”
Ben placed one foot in front of the other, never taking his eyes off the spot where he’d located Will Thomason’s bloody hand. “Drop. It.”
“He’s dead. He has to be dead,” Will insisted.
Ben flicked a glance at the man crumpled face-first and bleeding profusely on a cowhide-print rug.
In two strides, he loomed over the back of the couch, his gun trained on Thomason. Bright red blood soaked the front of his shirt. He held his left hand to the side of his neck and gripped an old-fashioned revolver in his right. Judging by the man’s weakness and the amount of blood seeping through his fingers, Ben worried one of the bullets had at least nicked an artery.
“He’s dead,” Ben said, willing the injured man on the sofa to drop the damn gun so he could assess the situation better. “Drop it.”
Thomason blew out a breath and let the gun fall from his limp hand to the floor.
Then, and only then, did Ben give the other man more than a passing glance. “Who’s the corpse?” He eyed the prone body.
“Bake...he did it. He made ’em,” Will panted, his voice weakening to a whisper. “I tried to tell him to stop, but he said...”
His voice trailed off. Circling the end of the couch, he moved closer to Will. With a firm grip on his gun, he nudged his hand under Will’s and took over applying pressure to the wound. The blood flowed warm and steady, and the man’s breathing grew more and more rapid. “He said what?”
“Young, Aberna—” His voice slurred the last syllables together. “Too greedy. Cut.”
“Cut of what? Greedy for what?” Ben’s voice rose as Will’s weakened.
“Made ’em. He made ’em.”
“Made them what?” Ben persisted, moving to place himself directly in front of Thomason’s glassy eyes. “What did he make them do?”
“Roooo-let. Summone taugh him...win...every time,” he mumbled.
“Roolet? Roulette?” Ben’s heart lurched, then sank as the story came full circle. “Russian roulette?”
Ivan Jones had taught his minions his favorite game.