Toxin Alert

by Tyler Anne Snell

  Noah conceded to that.

  “Regardless of the motive and the partnership, we still have one problem.” Aria shook her head. “Dylan isn’t here and we can’t find him. Caroline froze all of his accounts still connected with hers so if he needs money to run then he’ll need that to be cash, which won’t make things easy.”

  Carly put her hands on her hips and bit at her bottom lip.

  “Why didn’t he run before?” she asked after a moment.

  “He wanted to see the suffering he’d inflicted?” Noah tried.

  “But he had a pretty decent alibi until Opaline took a look at it. Why not leave when things started heating up? Why—Oh my God!” Carly felt her eyes go as wide as quarters. Noah and Aria both went on the defensive, startled.

  Carly didn’t have time to apologize.

  Another piece of the puzzle fell in place.

  “At the barn, Willa seemed focused solely on doing Rodney’s bidding, but it was Dylan pulling the strings,” Carly continued. “Even if she knew that, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was her family’s safety.”

  Carly looked up at the massive house. Then around them at the land and trees. Noah picked up on her thoughts.

  “Willa wouldn’t forsake her beliefs unless she had proof that her family was in danger,” he said. “And she’d need more than one video on a phone, I’d think, to serve someone up to be killed.”

  Carly felt the same way.

  “We know that Dylan set up the chair in David’s basement... What if David never escaped from that chair? What if Dylan decided to use him as a way to gain leverage over a local? A mother who would be hesitant to talk to the cops, even under normal circumstances, would make a great lackey to help him stay ahead of us and out of the spotlight.”

  Aria understood where they were going, too, and chimed in.

  “Dylan punishes the town that he thinks ruined him. He gets Rodney’s help because of his connections, to poison it. Then he makes a plan to pin it all on Rodney by using David, the one person Rodney hates the most, as a way to control him.”

  “All while using the one person who loves David the most to play the other side,” Carly finished. They shared a look with one another.

  “It’s all conjecture still,” Aria said, playing the devil’s advocate.

  Carly agreed...with caveats.

  “But I can tell you with confidence that my gut is saying Dylan has to have David stashed somewhere. Have you searched all of the property?”

  Aria opened her mouth to answer, literally forming the word across her lips, when life decided to flex its muscles.

  Life was often about timing.

  And now was a great example of that.

  Selena hustled out of the house, catching their attention. Max was quick on her heels. Blanca was in front of both.

  Aria went on full alert. Carly did, too.

  Then Axel rounded the team out hurrying outside. His attention went to them and he didn’t stop moving as he spoke.

  “We were looking through the property’s security system and saw a woman crawling in the grass by the side gate.”

  No more needed to be said.

  Carly followed behind her team while Noah came after her as everyone converged on the area they’d seen from the footage.

  Selena and Blanca got there first, but it was Max who called out for an ambulance. Aria saw the woman and pivoted to make sure one was on its way, while Axel dropped down to start working on her. Carly lowered herself next to the woman and did a quick scan of her wounds.

  Her knuckles were busted and her dress was stained with dirt and blood. She had rolled over from her side to her back, giving them an easy view to the gunshot wound at her side.

  But she was alive and conscious.

  She was also Willa Lapp.

  When she saw Carly, relief as plain as day spread across her expression.

  “You’re okay.”

  Her voice was tired, weak. Carly looked back at the path the woman had crawled along. It led into the woods.

  “Where are you coming from?” Carly asked, diving right in. “And who did this to you?”

  Willa cried out as Axel put pressure on the gunshot wound. Tears sprang up at the corners of her eyes, but she answered.

  And what an answer it was.

  “There’s an old maintenance work building that way.” She pointed with a shaking hand toward the trees. “He—he tried to take him so I tried to stop him.”

  “Who did you try to stop? Who shot you?” Carly echoed the question that everyone was hoping they knew the answer to.

  “Dylan.”

  When Willa said his name, excitement surged through Carly. They were closer to their goal. Justice.

  Willa didn’t know it, but she’d found this case’s magic word for the team.

  “Spread out,” Carly ordered but everyone was already moving.

  Aria switched places with Axel, gun out, while the rest of the Tactical Crime Division team moved into and through the trees.

  Noah even tagged along but kept behind them, quiet and on alert.

  It wasn’t until they came up to a small building, run-down and looking like it had been forgotten by the world, that Carly asked him to stay put.

  He obliged with a whisper.

  “Be careful.”

  Carly nodded. Then it was all about the building.

  Small but sturdy. They took no chances as they entered and then methodically cleared the rooms.

  What they contained sickened her.

  One room made the hair on the back of Carly’s neck stand. Axel swore. Selena did, too.

  A long table housed a bank of monitors. Each of those monitors displayed a view into the Castle in the Trees Inn. More specifically, into their individual rooms.

  If that was all they had found, that would have been enough.

  Yet, the next room is what got to Carly the most.

  She met the young man, bloodied and bruised but alive, in the middle of the room, tied to a chair and gagged. They quickly untethered him, and he stood, swaying.

  “I sure am glad to finally meet you, David,” Carly said.

  David Lapp collapsed against Max, understandably exhausted.

  “We need to get him and his mother to hospital ASAP,” Carly started. “Then we—”

  She didn’t get to finish.

  Noah burst into the room with eyes that were crazed and his cell phone clutched in his hand.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was really wrong.

  Ice filled her veins before he could even get the words out.

  “Gina called. My dad and brother Thomas came by the house.” His nostrils flared in anger but his eyes yelled worry. “And Dylan just showed up there now.”

  He shook his head. It hurt him to say what he did next.

  “He took Thomas. He took my little brother.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was Christmas Eve and Noah was finally spending it with his family. Every member but one.

  Noah’s mother, Marta, hadn’t moved an inch since she’d come out to the blockade made up of SUVs and Noah’s and Gina’s trucks. Local PD was also there but had been told to make a perimeter around the Yoders’ property while they surveyed the barn.

  The barn where it had all started.

  The barn where Noah’s little brother was being held hostage by a desperate man with, according to him, nothing to lose.

  Noah’s father was less stationary than his mother. He paced a small lane between the vehicles while the Tactical Crime Division team did their recon and made their plan.

  Noah wanted to help, but trusted Carly and her team to do their job.

  Something he kept having to reiterate to his father.

  “She can do it. They can do
it,” he said again. “I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but I trust them.”

  That had finally gotten his mother moving. She turned around, dark hair and green eyes an identical match to his, and walked to his side.

  Noah didn’t know what to do for a moment. Or, more aptly, didn’t know how to feel.

  While his father had made the decision to label him as an outsider after he left, Noah’s mother hadn’t originally been happy with the decision. She’d been vocal about them still talking to and having him come over, yet that hadn’t lasted past the first month that he’d left.

  Now he was caught between them and worried for a brother he barely knew.

  “I don’t know them,” his father said, words dangerously close to sounding disgusted. “And I don’t know her.”

  That was it.

  That was enough.

  It wasn’t the time, certainly not the place, but an anger and hurt that Noah didn’t realize was still there came to the surface with startling speed.

  “You don’t know me, and yet I’m who you call when there’s trouble. Sometimes life isn’t fair like that and you just have to put your faith in someone other than yourself.”

  He hadn’t meant to say it, and not with the amount of bite he had, and yet he still wanted to say more.

  So he did.

  “I have known Carly for a week and she and her team have shown more compassion, caring and dedication to helping this town than most people who live here. They have risked their lives and almost paid with them to protect all of us and do you know what they get in return?” Noah pointed to himself. “A liaison, because you wouldn’t even talk to them.”

  Noah shook his head. Then motioned to the group a few yards ahead of them with a different barricade they’d created themselves. Carly had her bulletproof vest on and gun at her side. Noah hated that he couldn’t be next to her, that he couldn’t go inside that barn to rescue his brother with her, that he couldn’t guarantee her safety.

  So he let his feeling of helplessness pull out the rest of his hurt at his family forsaking him.

  “I just want you to remember that all of the people who you ignore with such disdain are the same people who you call in your darkest hours. So to stand here and look down at any of them, at me, doesn’t help anyone. Not an inch.”

  Noah’s father had stopped his pacing. His mother has gone still.

  Noah could have said more, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. At the end of the day, no matter his age, when he was around his parents he felt like a little kid who’d taken a left at the fork in the road instead of their right. A boy who had felt lost for years going along his path alone.

  That is, until he found a yellow house, a blue shed and a home along the way.

  The Tucketts.

  Gina, who had not only tried to fend off Dylan, narrowly missing getting shot herself, had also taken off in her truck to chase the man until he bailed out into the closest building he’d been near. She and her family had never been fans of people in general, but they’d given him the space to decide if he wanted to be one of the few they did consider to be good.

  And it was only now, standing there next to his flesh and blood, that Noah realized Gina’s father hadn’t given him the farm.

  Noah had inherited it like a son would from a father.

  Because he was family.

  And, even though it had taken him this long to realize he hadn’t been truly alone all of these years, he found the sudden clarity deflated the same anger that had brought it on.

  His parents were good people. People who had spent their lives dedicated to their beliefs. Just as he wanted them to not fault him for the path he’d taken away from them, Noah couldn’t fault them for staying on the path they’d been walking their whole lives.

  Noah let out a long breath.

  Then he looked between his parents and meant what he said next.

  “I’m sorry. I just miss you sometimes.”

  A hand, small and worn, took his. Noah’s mother wasn’t smiling, but she squeezed his hand.

  “And we miss you always. Don’t you ever think otherwise.”

  Noah didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say a thing. He held his mother’s hand while his father looked conflicted.

  Finally he let out his own breath before gazing out at the barn in the distance.

  “When this is over maybe it’s time we start to fix that.” He turned back to Noah. “I could always use an extra pair of hands to help mend fences.”

  It wasn’t what Noah had expected, but he took his father’s olive branch all the same.

  “I’ve gotten really good at those over the last few years.”

  They all shared a silence, the first one since he’d left as a teenager that wasn’t filled with confusion, disappointment and resentment.

  It felt nice.

  But it didn’t last long.

  Something was happening with the TCD team.

  They were splitting up. Axel went one way, Selena the other, while the rest spread out along their barricade, guns drawn.

  All except Carly.

  She gave her weapon over to Aria and then held her hands up in surrender.

  Then she walked out into the open field.

  And right into the barn.

  * * *

  THOMAS MILLER LOOKED like a younger version of Noah. So much so that, had they not known whom Dylan had taken, Carly would have figured it out the moment she saw him.

  Even afraid and held against a desperate man without an exit strategy, a solid strength emanated out of how he held himself. Never mind his forest green eyes.

  “I’m unarmed and alone,” Carly called out, hands still up for emphasis. “So let’s talk about this.”

  Dylan had seen better days.

  Unlike his mother, who had been the picture of cool elegance, it was obvious he was hanging on by a thread.

  The suit he wore was torn and covered in dirt. He had angry red marks with dried blood along the side of his face, courtesy of Willa Lapp she presumed, and he was sweating despite the cold.

  However, the hand that held the gun pressed into Thomas’s side was steady.

  So was his voice.

  “Stop right there,” he demanded.

  They were standing against the far wall of the barn. It was smaller than the abandoned one on the Kellogg property.

  Which was good, but also not so good.

  Carly could see all the exits as soon as she was inside. So could Dylan and, with his back against the only wall without one, that meant no surprises.

  For either of them.

  The main reason why the rest of the team was hanging back.

  That and their belief that Dylan had already snapped once, so every complication to his plan after was just that break splintering even more. If he felt like there was no way out, he’d shoot Thomas.

  And Carly wasn’t going to let that happen. He’d tried to kill her, using Rodney. It had been an easy choice for her, to be the one to step up to try to get Thomas back. She wanted to face this man.

  “Let’s just calm down here,” Carly said, stopping a few yards from him. “Your best option for this to turn out in your favor is to let him go and come with me.”

  Dylan didn’t waste any time.

  “Did you find David and Willa?”

  Carly struggled to keep her expression impassive on that one.

  “We did.”

  He didn’t seem upset, which put Carly further on edge.

  “Did you find Aaron?”

  This time she wasn’t able to hide her reaction. He actually grinned.

  “See, I’ve been to enough support groups to know the best motivation usually comes from wanting what’s best for your family. That’s why I didn’t just stop with Willa.”

&
nbsp; “You got her youngest son, too.”

  “Yep. And right now he’s in an undisclosed, yet very public place, with two bags of anthrax and a cell phone.” He nodded down to his jacket. “And, unless he gets a call from me in the next—” He glanced quickly at his watch. It, like the suit, looked expensive and yet wrong with his desperation. “—seven minutes, he’s going to release that powder into a ventilation system... One that feeds into a wing of, drumroll please, the hospital. Which, I don’t have to tell you, our resident biological weapons expert, anthrax plus hospital patients can’t be a good combination.”

  Carly was stunned.

  Absolutely stunned.

  “Aaron doesn’t know we found his mother and brother,” she realized. “You threatened them if he didn’t do this, didn’t you?”

  Dylan’s grin turned malicious.

  “You get the mother to help by threatening the son, and you get the other son to help by threatening the mother. It’s the circle of life.”

  Carly’s gears were spinning fast.

  She didn’t know Aaron Lapp, but his mother had almost gotten Carly killed to keep David safe. She had no doubt that Aaron would do the same for his mother.

  “This place is surrounded. You can’t get away,” she said, changing subjects. “But if you let Thomas go and call off Aaron I’ll make sure to let everyone know that you cooperated.”

  It was a shot in the dark, appealing to the rational side of the man holding a gun to a teenager’s side.

  Dylan didn’t bite.

  “I cooperated? Those are just words, Agent Welsh. We both know that if I get taken in that will be the end of me.”

  “You didn’t kill anyone,” she tried again. “That counts for something.”

  “But I orchestrated everything.”

  There it was.

  His own admission.

  Yet, she still didn’t know why.

  So she asked.

  “Why, though? Why go through all of this trouble in the first place? To punish the community?”

  Dylan’s expression went hard.

  Angry.

  “Because one day everything was fine and the next I was out of money, out of my house and being sent to another place ready to tell me I needed to stop what I loved doing.” He was seething. “Meeting Rodney just opened up a world of possibilities on how to finally have a win I could keep.”