“But there’s this device under my skin! I want it out!”
“We need to keep it in place,” Ox said.
“Why?”
Again they exchanged a look. I was beginning to think those little exchanges meant bad news—at least for me.
“We need the people behind this to think you’re still with their buddies.”
“But their buddies are dead. I saw them in that alley.”
“A crew went and recovered the bodies,” Ox informed me. “News of their untimely demise will not become public knowledge for at least another week. Maybe longer.”
“Valerie,” Oliver said, lifting my hand so that he could hold it between both of his, “we’ve been asked to take this through to its conclusion. We need to draw out the people who ordered your disappearance and allow them to incriminate themselves for the American law enforcement community.”
I shook my head, the idea so repulsive that I jumped away from the table, away from Oliver, pushing my hands into the front pockets of the jeans I was wearing as I began to pace in the area behind where Ox stood. I could feel all four sets of eyes on me, knew they were all waiting for me to have another nervous breakdown. But I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction.
“Who hired you?” I finally asked, turning to face Oliver and Ox.
Once more, they exchanged a look. Then Oliver stood and came toward me.
“Was it my father?”
He hesitated a heartbeat before shaking his head. “No.”
I couldn’t have been more shocked to hear that. I had assumed… He’d warned me not to come to Mexico and we’d had battles in the past when he’d hired security firms to follow me around, one specific fiasco in Chicago when a bodyguard stumbled into a corpse in my anatomy class the last straw. It made sense that he would be the one behind this, and that would make it easier to override the orders they’d been given. But if it wasn’t him…
“Who?”
“Leesa Powell,” Ox informed me.
I shook my head, understanding slicing through me with such suddenness that my knees lost their steel for a brief moment. Oliver caught me and pulled me back over to the table, forcing me to lean back against it. This time, I couldn’t hold in the tears that filled my eyes.
“Does she know?” I finally asked, rubbing at my cheeks, my nose.
Oliver drew a blank, looking at me with confusion in his eyes.
“Does she know that Scott’s the one behind this?”
I’d sufficiently shocked them. They both stared at me for a long moment, Oliver simply confused, Ox wary.
“The sleeve.” I brushed at my tears again, silently cursing my weakness. “The person who sprayed the chloroform in my face. He was wearing a bathing-suit cover, one of those things that look kind of like a bathrobe?” I glanced from one man to the other, registering the continuing confusion in their eyes. “I recognized it. It belongs to Scott. He had to have let the person who did it borrow it so that he wouldn’t get chloroform on his clothing.”
Understanding dawned and they both nodded, wariness leaving Ox’s face, replaced with a certain amount of respect.
“Ms. Powell is aware that her son is behind this. That is why she’s requested we take it all the way through to the end. She feels he deserves to be punished for what he’s done.”
It saddened me to hear that. Scott was my brother. He was also my friend. That gave me a unique perspective on his flaws. I’d always known he was horribly jealous of my father’s relationship with his mother. I also knew that he’d adopted the luxurious lifestyle my father’s money allowed him with a great deal of relish. He complained to me on many occasions that my father didn’t give him enough and that he was threatening to take away what little he did offer him. So this… I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.
Leesa must have been devastated.
“We’ve got something of a plan in place,” Ox assured me. “We need to put it into action as soon as possible.” He came over and took my hands, encouraging me to look up at him. “Will you help us?”
I wanted to ask if I had any choice. I wanted to tell him that he could go to hell, that I was going to do everything I could to protect my brother. But this fear that had blossomed and grown in my heart from the moment I’d remembered where I’d seen that white sleeve before spoke up, reminded me that there were more than just a few victims in all this. There was my father, too. If Scott didn’t get what he wanted now, he would try again and he would keep trying until he finally found a way, or he put my father in the ground. It had been my job from the time I was a little girl to look out for my dad. We promised each other. No matter what, it was the two of us against the world.
“I’m in.”
“Good.”
“In that case,” Oliver said, brushing his lips against my forehead, “I need to go work out a few details with Akker. You okay here?”
I nodded, forcing a smile as he slowly backed away, crossing the room with that same swagger I’d noticed when he was just a mechanic working in the shop across the street.
“He seems almost happy,” Ox said.
“I hope so.” I looked at him, feeling as though I knew him even though we’d only just been introduced. “Thank you for sending him to protect me.”
He rolled his shoulders. “I was trying to find my brother in that shell the penal system returned to us six months ago.”
I glanced toward Oliver, nodding slowly. “Would I be out of line asking what happened that night?”
Ox cleared his throat, moving a little closer so that our words wouldn’t carry across the wide room. “It was a car accident. A young boy died.”
“He told me that much, but wouldn’t elaborate.”
“The thing is, he wasn’t alone in his car.” Ox ran his hand over his head in the same nervous move his brother had, but he had enough hair that it stood up and fell in a chaotic pattern when he was done. “Our mother called him that night. She’d been drinking at this bar, thought it would be more responsible to call for a ride than to try to drive herself. If I’d known, if she’d called me, things would have turned out incredibly differently!”
“How’s that?”
Ox crossed his arms again, turning slightly to study his brother. “He’s the baby. They always had this special connection, him and my mother. He could never tell her no, even when he knew it was the right thing to do.” He turned back to me. “You see, our mother’s an alcoholic. She’s spent more time in the bottle than anywhere else the last twenty years. And that night… even the prosecutor suspected Oliver wasn’t the one behind the wheel when the accident happened. That’s why he only got two years on a manslaughter charge.”
I glanced sharply at Oliver. What Ox was telling me seemed to explain so much about this man of contradictions, about the tenderness and kindness I’d discovered inside of him these past few days. And the darkness that seemed to haunt him.
“Everything was going his way before that night. He’d served his time in the navy, won a few medals that he’ll never tell you about. Was working side by side with me, making something important out of our father’s dream. He’d even started dating this nice lady, a school teacher with a big family.” He shook his head. “Since he got out of jail, he’s refused to come back to work, refused to even see me or our mother. The first time I set eyes on him after he walked out of that prison was when he came to tell me what his cellmate had told him about you and this case.” He glanced at me. “I should be thanking you. This information, this case, brought a part of my brother back to me. I will never be able to express how grateful I am for that.”
I sighed, this little thread of self-pity refusing to be broken.
“You got your brother back. I’m about to lose mine.”
Chapter 22
Oliver
Another hotel, another city. I had to admit, though, that this hotel room was a million times better than that shithole back in Mexico City.
I stood at the
window and looked down on the great city of Houston, Texas, mentally naming the large buildings that had been built with oil money. There was Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, and, of course, Cole Oil. This was a much better view of the wealth of this area than the one I’d gotten up in Huntsville.
Her hands slipped around my waist, her palms pressing themselves to the center of my abdomen. I slid my own hands over hers, intertwining our fingers as I lifted her hands higher up on my chest.
“A moment alone. I didn’t think we were going to get many more of these,” she said, her lips brushing against the back of my arm.
I had to agree. It’d been a long twelve hours since we left Mexico. First the flight here, which was definitely more pleasant than the last time I’d been on a plane with Valerie because she was actually conscious this time. Then the careful trip from the airport, desperately trying to keep anyone from seeing or questioning Valerie’s identity. And the whole time having to keep the GPS marker from giving us away. Then there was the little game of charades with a local news reporter:
“Lindsay Patterson. I know. I watch Channel 13 all the time,” Valerie said as she shook the tall, slender woman’s hand.
“You must be Oliver.” Ms. Patterson, a friend of Ox’s, turned to me with a smile. “You look just like Ox.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, but I think he looks more like me.”
She laughed wholeheartedly, glancing back at Ox as she did. “You might be right about that.”
The pleasantries passed quickly. Ox stepped forward and focused on Valerie. “We’re going to have Lindsay take some video of you. We’re going to release it to the consulate down in Mexico where your family is headquartering the search for you. We want them to believe you’re in Houston so that they’ll come home.”
“I am in Houston.”
“This is the best way to let them know that without revealing that you’re no longer with the kidnappers.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Ms. Patterson slipped a camera from her shoulder bag and held it up where we could see it. “There’s a filter on this camera that we can play with, make the images seem a little grainy like they came from a security camera. We’ll take a few shots of you walking around the room, take them from angles and heights that will add to the sense that they’re from a mounted, low-quality camera. Then I’ll take the images back to the studio and Photoshop some images of the kidnappers in with you from some footage Ox was able to get from Mexico.”
“Impressive,” I said.
“We have a pretty good tech team at Caballo these days,” Ox told me. I just nodded.
“Will it work?” Valerie wanted to know.
That’s what I was thinking about now. The video had been shot, altered, and forwarded to the American Consulate in Guadalajara hours ago. We had yet to get confirmation that Scott Powell was back in Houston.
It was just a waiting game now. This was the part that I always struggled with when I was working at Caballo, when I was President of Operations. I’d planned and supervised the execution of operations in any location the client required. Sometimes I’d travel overseas, plan a raid on some tyrant’s compound because the American Government couldn’t do it, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hire freelancers to do it. The next day I might plan and execute an operation to catch some cheating husband in the act. A few days later, we might foil a kidnapping, or catch a stalker red-handed. It was a job that never got stale.
But it was a job that was part of another life.
“Ox will be by soon to give us an update.”
“Have they finished putting the devices in Scott’s house? What did you call them?”
“They have a lot of names. I’ve heard them called infinity devices; I’ve heard them called transmitters; I’ve heard them called bugs. It just depends on who you’re talking to.”
“Have they got them in his house?”
“Anything he does in that house will be heard by our people.”
She nodded against my back, her body transmitting stiffness against me from the tension that was running through her.
“I know this is hard, babe,” I said, “but it has to be done. It’s the only way we’ll be able to prove he was behind all this.”
“I know. I just… I wish it hadn’t happened in the first place.”
“That would be the best scenario, I suppose.”
She pulled away from me and walked over to the couch, sitting on the very front edge of the cushion, her hands locked between her knees. “This whole thing has been insane,” she said softly. “The kidnapping and waking up in that trailer with you, the things that happened between us.” She shook her head. “I’m still struggling to process it all.”
I’d kind of thought that was what was weighing on her mind. I turned back to the window and stared out at the buildings, remembering the days when the weather was so clear at Huntsville I could almost imagine I could see these very buildings in the distance. I couldn’t, of course. It was seventy miles from Huntsville to Houston, but all the trips we’d made to this city when I was a kid, all the times our father had told us the history of the city, of the man whose name it bore, made me feel like I could anyway. It had given me a measure of hope on those days, a measure of strength that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
I’d known the day they sentenced me to serve out my prison sentence that my life would never be the same. I don’t think I’d felt it quite so completely until this moment.
“You need time. I understand that.”
“I need to know why. I need to know how someone I loved so deeply could just toss me aside for a few million dollars, how it could be so easy for him.”
“I know.”
“And I need to figure out who I am now, in the aftermath of this mess.”
I nodded, pretending my heart wasn’t shattering. I don’t know what I’d expected. We’d spent twenty-four hours together. It wasn’t a lifetime commitment. But I was kind of hoping for a date, maybe, or drinks. A movie would be nice, too.
I turned, to let her off the hook, to tell her I wasn’t expecting anything, that I knew she was in a bad place right now, when the door burst open.
“We’ve got confirmation. They’re here in Houston.”
Chapter 23
Scott
My mother wouldn’t look at me. From the moment she’d arrived in Guadalajara, she’d refused to look me in the eye. Wouldn’t even speak two words to me.
The text messages had stopped coming in over eight hours ago. The last one I received said that they’d located her again, that she’d be back in their custody in a matter of minutes. Nothing more. I took that to mean they were right, that they had Valerie and she was on her way to oblivion with that monster whom Juan Carlos had promised me would work quickly and efficiently.
I whispered a silent prayer, the fourth or fifth just this hour alone. Despite the way it looked, I loved Valerie. I hated that this had become a necessity.
“You okay?” Taylor asked, coming up beside me, touching the back of my arm like we had the kind of relationship that allowed that.
“Holding up.”
I didn’t understand why she’d come with us to Jake’s house after the airport. There’d been a police escort and a detective chattering away with Jake since the moment we arrived back on American soil. I wasn’t even listening to what the cop was saying, not really interested in what was happening. I just wanted to know when they were going to allow him to pay the damn ransom!
The demand had come in yesterday, just after we all retired to the hotel. They didn’t bother to let me in on that little fact until much later, but I’d actually already known. The demand came from a burner phone that was at that moment in my pocket.
Everything was coming together, just like TJ had said it would. We just needed the money released.
Release the fucking money, Jake!
“This is FBI Agent Oxley Collins,” someone said, forcing me to tu
rn around and rejoin the conversations going on around me.
“Jacob Cole,” our fine patriarch said, offering his hand to the tall, slender man. “This is my wife, Leesa, her son, Scott—” it was always her son!—“and Valerie’s friend, Taylor.”
The fed walked around and shook everyone’s hand, offering small words of condolences as he did. Eventually, he took a proffered seat on the couch, refusing the cup of tea that my mother tried to force on him.
“As you know, we have reason to believe that Valerie is back in Houston, still in the company of her kidnappers.”
That confused me. I had made it quite clear to Juan Carlos that she was to remain in Mexico no matter what went down. The video we’d been shown at the hotel seemed off to me, almost like it had been Photoshopped. I mean, it had to have been. Juan Carlos’s people told me they were going to take her down, and I hadn’t heard from them since. That had to mean that she was a captive again and that she’d been handed over to the killer whom Juan Carlos had arranged. How could she be there and here at the same time?
“Are you sure it was her in the video?” I asked now. “The footage was pretty grainy.”
“We’ve had facial-recognition software verify it,” the fed said, looking me straight in the eye. “We’re positive it’s her. And we’ve identified the two men with her.” He took a couple of photographs out of a file folder he’d had tucked under his arm. As the pictures slid across the coffee table, my heart sank. I knew the faces, knew that he was right about his assumption these were the men who’d kidnapped my sister. “Pedro and Antonio Gomez,” he said. “Brothers who are well known to the federales in Mexico.”
I turned away. If it really was Valerie on that tape, then something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
“You believe these are the kidnappers?” Jake asked.
“We do. And we don’t believe there’s anyone else involved.” The fed cleared his throat as he reached for the photographs. “In fact, from what we know about these men, we believe that if you release the ransom as they asked, we might be able to trace their location and arrest them. They’ve greatly underestimated the technology of American banks.”
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