Paradise Crime Thrillers Box Set

by Toby Neal

  She shrugged him off. “Get away from me.”

  “I have news.” Jake moved back and she felt the loss of heat. “About Momi.”

  Sophie spun to face him, and the sudden movement made her dizzy. She grasped the windowsill to stabilize, meeting his silver-gray eyes. “I’m listening.”

  “The cops and Alika and I did a more thorough search early this morning after Hamilton came in and threw his weight around. We found a footprint outside the downstairs office window—too small to be a man’s. Also, evidence of a surveillance camp that had been checking out the house. A multi-passenger chopper was parked on the cliff and took off.”

  “My mother,” Sophie said. “I knew it.” She felt a strange kind of relief to have it confirmed; at least her mother probably wouldn’t harm Momi. The baby would be all right until Sophie could get her back—though Sophie had no idea how steep the price would be.

  “Hamilton thinks it was Pim Wat, too.” Jake slid a hand up her arm. “I’m so sorry. For what I implied.” He squeezed her bicep gently. “I was wrong. The cops were wrong.”

  “I don’t forgive you,” Sophie said. “You know my deepest fears and wounds and insecurities, and you judged me by them. Please don’t touch me.” Her voice sounded wooden and stilted. She felt frozen, a pillar of ice.

  Jake dropped his hand and stepped back. “We’re not done talking about this.”

  “I’m done talking about it.” She narrowed her eyes. “Where’s Hamilton? I need to speak with him.”

  “Funny. Hamilton was demanding to see you as well, but I told everyone you needed your rest.” Jake ran a hand through his hair. “I know I messed up. We have to get past this.”

  Sophie turned away and walked toward her closet, ignoring his comment. Jake went on. “Hamilton really shook things up and got the investigation headed in the right direction. We all owe him for that.”

  “At least he believed in me.” A spike of rage tightened Sophie’s belly. Connor was a white man, loaded with money and authority, arriving in a car with a driver, calm and collected—not a hysterical new mother with a history of depression. The sexism was blatant and repulsive. That she’d needed Connor to intervene made Sophie want to hit someone—Jake, specifically. “Give me some privacy, please. I’m changing.”

  “Seriously? I’ve seen it all, Sophie. Been with you as you delivered a baby, for God’s sake. Consider all we’ve been through before you just kick me out.” Jake’s voice vibrated with hurt and outrage.

  Sophie kept her back to him, standing stiffly. “I’m changing, Jake. Please leave.”

  He left.

  Sophie found a tight running bra and wedged herself into it, inserting pads to sop up leaks. She pulled on yoga pants and a black Security Solutions polo that hadn’t fit around her girth in five months. As she sat on the bed and bent over to tie on running shoes, her soft, squishy belly got in the way. She pushed at it and felt a gush of fluid from down below. “Bitch goddess in charge of hell.”

  She had to change her pads—again. Giving birth wasn’t, apparently, something you just got up and walked away from with no side effects.

  Sophie took care of the necessary things, and then packed the bag she’d arrived with a couple of weeks ago. She put her laptop and tablet in the backpack that had always served in lieu of a purse, and, carrying the loaded duffel, she stood in the doorway of the room, looking back at the place where she’d given birth and spent one beautiful night with her baby girl.

  What an incredible, unforgettable, intense experience. And it’s true, Jake had been with her every challenging minute of it. He’d never flinched or wavered. He’d been her rock.

  Sophie’s eyes teared up as she spotted the yellow flannel sheet from the bassinet tangled in the bedclothes. She hurried back and picked up the cloth, burying her face in the soft flannel for a moment. The baby’s smell caused her sensitive, sore breasts to tingle as milk let down. “Devilish female parts,” she swore. Fortunately, she had on the breast shields and the tight bra; the problem would go away within a week, the doctor had said.

  Sophie slipped the precious flannel into her backpack and zipped it up. She shut the door and walked quietly to the landing, hearing the murmur of unfamiliar voices down in the great room below.

  The cops were still here, and she hadn’t given her statement yesterday.

  Sophie hid the backpack and her duffel behind a large ceramic potted palm on the upper landing. She descended the stairs, proud of how steady she was on her feet. Ignoring the sound of talking coming from the great room, she went into the kitchen.

  She needed strong tea, and lots of it, to deal with what lay ahead.

  Esther was washing dishes at the sink and turned to Sophie with a smile. “My dear. You’re ready for action, I see.”

  “Yes. I’m getting Momi back.” Sophie approached the older woman, and embraced her from the side as Esther’s hands were still deep in suds. “Thank you for believing in me. You were the only one who didn’t think I did something to Momi.”

  Esther had bequeathed large, expressive brown eyes to her grandson Alika, and now those familiar eyes fixed on Sophie’s face. “You mustn’t blame the boys too much. They were in terrible shock, too.”

  Sophie pulled back. “But I do blame them, Esther. They judged me as unstable.”

  “Pause for a moment, ku`uipo. If Jake, or Alika for that matter, had fallen asleep with the baby and then woken to find her gone, wouldn’t there have been suspicion upon them? Especially Jake. Momi is not his,” Esther said gently. She turned back to the dishes. “There is tea beside the stove.”

  The woman always seemed to know what Sophie was thinking.

  Chapter Six

  Day Nine

  “You’re looking better, today, Ms. Smithson.” Detective Jack Jenkins had been home and had a shower and a change of clothes to judge by the comb tracks in his short gelled blond hair. The young man’s eyes were candid as he assessed Sophie.

  Hearing her maiden name still gave Sophie a tiny twinge of surprise. She’d gone through the necessary steps to change her name legally prior to Momi’s birth—it had been past time to close the chapter of her life that had involved her early and disastrous marriage to Assan Ang. “Thank you. I am ready to make a statement.”

  “Good. Your friend Lei called. She was my partner here on Kaua`i at one time, and she spoke of you highly.” He gestured toward Alika’s office, which he seemed to have taken over. Clearly, Lei’s call had made a difference in his attitude—he’d been respectful but suspicious before. Now he seemed almost solicitous.

  “Lei is a good friend.” Sophie avoided any eye contact with Jake, Alika, or the officers in the room, and preceded the man inside.

  Jenkins set a recorder on the edge of Alika’s drafting table, and Sophie took a seat across from him. He stated the date and time, people present and their location, then addressed Sophie. “State your name for the record.”

  “Sophie Malee Smithson.”

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, and you have the right to an attorney,” Jenkins said conversationally.

  Sophie frowned. “You’re still considering me a suspect?”

  “Just covering my bases.” Jenkins had the grace to look down and fiddle with his yellow legal pad.

  Sophie shook her head. “I would never do anything to hurt my daughter. Ever.” The perspective that Esther had given her in the kitchen had shifted the stone of anger sitting on her chest a little, though, and she breathed easier in spite of Jenkins’ words. The evidence would back her up. “I would like to tell you about my mother, Pim Wat.”

  “Go on.” Jenkins didn’t seem surprised at this seeming tangent. Good. Perhaps Jake or Connor had already told him something about her mysterious and deadly parent.

  “My mother and I were estranged for nine years. Out of the blue, as they say, Pim Wat contacted me close to a year ago, trying to recruit me to join an espionag
e agency called the Yām Khûmkạn. I have been negotiating with her ever since. Pim Wat has been trying to get me to go to the organization’s headquarters in Thailand from the beginning, and I have refused. Now I believe she’s taken my child to use as leverage to get me to go.”

  “Why don’t you want to go to this place?”

  “I’ve seen it.” Sophie rubbed the scar on her cheek, the site of a gunshot wound rebuilt with skin grafts and a prosthetic cheekbone. “The organization’s compound is located in an undeveloped jungle area in Thailand. It’s extremely remote, fortified, and filled with hostiles. I do not trust my mother not to have a . . . plan for me.” Pim Wat’s first arrangement for Sophie, marriage to Assan Ang, had almost killed her.

  “Really extreme for a grandma to kidnap her own grandchild.” Jenkins tipped his head to the side skeptically. “So far, all we know is that someone took your baby, and the snatch involved a helicopter and multiple perps.”

  “Pim Wat and I don’t have a . . . normal relationship.” Sophie rubbed the scar, grounded by the feel of the ridged line of it against the pads of her fingertips. “She married my ambassador father for political reasons. They divorced when I was old enough to attend boarding school. Throughout my childhood, Mother feigned a crippling depression.” Sophie could have sworn her mother really did suffer from depression, but the Pim Wat she’d reconnected with seemed symptom-free.

  “Really interesting information, Ms. Smithson. And though we’ve found evidence of an external break-in, there’s been absolutely nothing that gives any indication who might actually be involved,” Jenkins repeated.

  Sophie flicked her fingers. “I’d be surprised if you did find anything tying this directly to Pim Wat—she is cagey and well-versed in covering her tracks. If you’ve found anything, it’s because she didn’t care if you did.”

  “This all seems pretty out there. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Sophie crossed her arms over her breasts, but the pressure was too painful so she dropped them to her waist. Unfortunately, that hurt too. “I’m sure Mr. Hamilton told you that Security Solutions would be working on the situation.”

  “This is a police matter, Ms. Smithson.”

  “And kidnap rescue is a whole branch of the Security Solutions business,” Sophie retorted. “We are specialists, though I hope we won’t have to do much more than wait for a call from my mother. Once we have confirmation of a location where my baby is, the crisis is over from a police standpoint—it’s a family matter. Now, is there anything else you need from me at this time?”

  “Is there anyone else you can think of who might want to take your child?”

  Sophie shut her eyes for a moment, pausing to consider. She opened them and met Jenkins’s blue gaze. “All of those who have meant me harm are now dead.”

  The young detective looked spooked. “We’ll be in touch, Ms. Smithson. Stay available and in the area.”

  Sophie had no intention of doing any such thing.

  Chapter Seven

  Day Nine, Evening

  Standing in front of the mansion, Sophie faced Alika, her gaze meeting his warm brown eyes. “Are you sure you are okay with this arrangement?”

  Alika squeezed her shoulder with his remaining hand. “Do I have a choice? Someone has to hold down the fort and deal with the cops.”

  “I know. Thank you.” Sophie swayed toward him—normally she’d give him a hug, but she was still bitter about his supposition against her. “I will get our daughter back.”

  “You’d better.” Alika turned and walked back up the bluestone steps to stand beside Esther, watching from the porch.

  Sophie, Jake, and Connor hurried across the swath of open lawn to where Thom had the Security Solutions chopper waiting, rotors whirling as it warmed up. Sophie raised her hand in farewell, and the two waved back.

  Connor got in front with the pilot, while Sophie and Jake stowed their gear bags and sat in the rear jump seats. Jake handed her a helmet, and they both strapped in.

  Sophie avoided eye contact with Jake, turning away from him as much as possible to look out the window of the helicopter as it lifted off. The bird wheeled in place, then flew over the Hanalei Valley and out to sea, headed for Honolulu Airport on Oahu where the Security Solutions corporate jet awaited.

  As she always did, Sophie scanned the cobalt water for signs of whales, her mind ticking over the day’s events.

  The police had departed only an hour before. Jenkins handed out his card a second time, and the cruisers were finally gone. Connor had called the three of them into the mansion’s office for a quick planning meeting.

  “I have already tracked the chopper that flew out from the bluff. It didn’t file a flight plan, and that triggered an aviation alert that went out over the FAA airwaves that I was able to track. The chopper landed at Honolulu Airport, and I was able to find it using the surveillance cams.” Connor had their full attention, and his fingers flew on his tablet as he surfed the web while talking. “The passengers were gone, and the bird was a rental. I had a Security Solutions agent go and track down the pilot. The man said he had signed an NDA, but a little grease got him talking.” Connor looked up and met Sophie’s eyes. His gaze was intense, his handsome face set in cold lines—the Ghost in work mode. “The people who rented the chopper were Thai, and consisted of three men and two women. The pilot spotted a baby in a yellow blanket on the way back from Kaua`i.”

  “Then we have our confirmation that it was my mother,” Sophie said.

  “Most likely. The physical description that he gave matched her height and looks. The other woman was unknown, and she was the one carrying the baby.”

  “Probably Armita, my mother’s maid. She was my caregiver when I was a young child. Armita must have been the one to snatch Momi.” Sophie’s belly clenched at the thought of her beloved childhood nanny looking down at Sophie sleeping, then cold-bloodedly taking her child. “Armita climbs and moves like a ninja. That is why the dogs didn’t bark—they know her. And my mother.”

  Sophie told the men about the time Armita had mysteriously visited Sophie on the Big Island, climbing three balconies outside of Sophie’s building to do so. “Armita is controlled by Pim Wat, but she had come to warn me that my mother was planning something. I have to wonder if this was what Pim Wat was planning? But Mother hadn’t known I was pregnant at that time, so I’m not sure what it could have been.”

  They’d wrapped up the meeting with a plan to get closer to the Yām Khûmkạn and look for the baby and Pim Wat from Connor’s base of operations on his private island in Thailand. Hopefully, Pim Wat would make contact soon and be forthcoming with her demands for returning the baby.

  That brought Sophie to now: to the soreness of her full breasts, the emptiness of her arms, the betrayal of her beloved nanny and less beloved mother, and the uncertainty of the mission ahead. She blinked, looking at but not seeing the whitecaps scudding over the windswept ocean.

  Jake tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away without looking at him.

  Chapter Eight

  Day Ten

  Sophie, Jake, Connor, Thom, and Kiefer Rhinehart, commander of Security Solutions’ elite kidnap rescue squad, sat around a long polished teak table in the dining room of Connor’s house on Phi Ni. Anubis, Connor’s dignified Doberman, sat in watchful silence observing them as they organized everything for their meeting.

  Sophie had been to Connor’s cliffside aerie before, so she was used to the beauty of the custom-made home high on the bluffs. Seeing it fresh through Jake’s and Rhinehart’s eyes, she didn’t blame the men for the awed silence with which they’d first viewed the mansion, an exquisite rendering in native wood and stone, a perfect marriage of cultures.

  Nam, Connor’s houseman, had set up a projection screen on one wall of the dining room along with a whiteboard. Connor lowered burnished metal, bulletproof blinds to cut the sun streaming through floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that provided a brilliant and distracting view
of turquoise sea and tiny, fertile atolls far below the bluffs on which the house was perched.

  He projected a satellite photo of the Yām Khûmkạn’s elaborate stone temple stronghold onto the white screen. He flicked on a laser pointer and pointed out the main building, a pyramid-like structure of elaborately carved, lichen-covered stone. “I have been trying, since Pim Wat began attempting to recruit Sophie to go to this stronghold, to get eyes and ears inside this place—but it’s the most locked down fortress I’ve come across. Everyone who goes in or out has some loyalty or association with the Yām Khûmkạn, and they are feared. I can’t find anyone to take my bribes.” Connor glanced at Rhinehart. “Thoughts?”

  “We often don’t have much on the place where the target is being held, but that’s never stopped us before.” Rhinehart was a fireplug of a man, heavily muscled as if making up for lack of height with breadth. A low-slung jaw and cauliflower ears completed the visage of a thug, but Rhinehart’s small brown eyes glittered with intelligence. “We still haven’t heard what the takers want.”

  Sophie lifted a finger to get the table’s attention. “If by ‘takers’ you mean my mother, we may not hear from her at all. I gave this a lot of thought on the way over. Best case scenario: Pim Wat wants something specific from me, something she’s been trying to get since she contacted me. I’ll hear from her about that, and we’ll move forward with some kind of negotiation.”

  “You will not go into danger at that fortress,” Jake said through his teeth.

  Sophie ignored him, holding up her finger. “Or, Pim Wat won’t contact me. She has my daughter for herself for whatever reason. I may never hear from my mother.”

  Everyone stilled at these words. Sophie went on. “Pim Wat has been frustrated with me for years now. She has repeatedly told me I am not the biddable child I was, clay to be molded to her wishes. Perhaps she simply took my baby and means to raise her instead.”