Latent Danger (On The Line Romantic Thriller Series Book 2)

by Lori Ryan

  Chapter Forty

  Shauna’s head slammed into the floor of the basement as Zach shoved her then covered her legs with his body.

  Pain shot through her and her eyes didn’t want to focus for a minute, but someplace deep in her mind, she knew they needed to move.

  She tried to roll, but her legs were pinned. Zach lay across her, his body slumped, blood coming from a gash on the back of his head. All around him was the evidence of the cave in. Only, she realized, it must not have been the whole chimney that fell. There was only enough stone to account for a piece of it. She just prayed they could get out of there before the rest of it came down.

  “Zach, Shauna!” Ronan’s voice came to her from the stairs and she heard steps coming toward them.

  “Stop!” She didn’t try to turn to face them. “Don’t come closer. Part of the fireplace collapsed, but there’s a lot more of it that could come down.”

  She heard Ronan’s response from the stairs. “What do you need?”

  “Let’s start with something to stabilize his neck,” she said. “Then we can get him ready for transport and you guys can come in and do a grab and dash.”

  She heard orders being given and footsteps going back up the steps. Shauna willed her heart to stop pounding as she tried to run her hands over Zach. He’d been thrown over her legs, but his head had come to rest on her stomach. She could reach the top of his head and his shoulders but not much else.

  Carefully, she raised her head again, ignoring the pain and nausea that swirled through her. They would need to move the stones. Most had fallen to the sides when they’d come down on top of them, but a large one lay across his leg.

  She hoped that leg wasn’t broken. “They might need a leg brace.” She called this over to Ronan who shouted the information up the staircase. She knew they’d be bringing a backboard. That went without saying.

  Minutes later, Ronan crept carefully into the room and handed her a neck brace. Together, they got it onto Zach who still hadn’t so much as moaned or moved any one of those muscles she’d come to love so much.

  Hell, there was a lot about this man she’d come to love. He was nothing like the Zach she’d known years before and this man, the one who lay so frighteningly still atop her, she wanted to know. She wanted him in her life. And how she felt about him had nothing to do with friendship.

  “Okay,” Ronan called out. Within seconds, three other officers came forward. They removed the large piece of stone laying on Zach, then stepped back to let the EMTs in. Zach was braced, flipped, and strapped into the backboard and gone.

  And Shauna was left with such emptiness, she wanted to cry out, to scream. She needed him to survive this. She needed him.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Zach was loaded into an ambulance and gone by the time Shauna made it out the front door strapped to a backboard of her own. She didn’t feel like she’d needed it, but Ronan had pinned her down when she tried to get up, barking that Zach would have his head if he let her move and she damaged something by doing so.

  She closed her eyes and let herself float while she was put into her own ambulance and tried not to think about the blood that had soaked her shirt by the time they took Zach off her. Head wounds bleed a lot.

  Her head knew that. The only problem was, her heart and her head weren’t in agreement. Her heart wanted to panic.

  She felt wooden as she let the EMTs tend to her, answering their questions by rote. When she got to the hospital, she started asking her own questions, but wasn’t getting any answers. One nurse told her she thought he was being brought into surgery, and that kicked Shauna’s anxiety up into overdrive.

  “Shaun!” Her mother’s voice was echoed quickly by her father and her brothers.

  Shauna looked over to see her family squishing into the small room she’d been stuck in for the better part of an hour. She had already put her clothes back on and was sitting on top of the bed.

  “I’m okay,” she said, her throat still scratchy.

  “They said you were drugged and a house collapsed on you.” Her mother sat by her side, flanked by her father and brothers, all scowling at her like they might be able to look at her hard enough to get a prognosis to pop out of her at will.

  “Whoever they is, they exaggerated,” she said.

  Hutch walked in behind her family. “I heard it was two houses.”

  Shauna snorted at that, then winced in pain. Her head was splitting. “It’s true I was drugged. A suspect gave me Rohypnol then shot me full of Ketamine twice, when I was too loopy to fight her off.” The Ketamine was what had caused the severe pain in her stomach when she’d first come to in the chimney room.

  Her mother blanched and Shauna realized she shouldn’t be giving them details. The doctors had done a scan on her head and she was cleared to leave as soon as they finished her paperwork. She wanted out of the bed so she could find Zach.

  “Hutch, they won’t tell me anything about Zach. Can you see if you can find out what’s going on with him.”

  Zach’s deep voice answered her from the doorway. “You ready to get out of bed, woman? You’ve been laying around for over an hour.”

  If he thought he was funny, he probably didn’t for long. Five O’Rourkes, four of them large angry men, slowly turned to face Zach.

  The idiot grinned at them and moved through the crowd to reach her bed.

  “Hey,” he said, taking her hand.

  Shauna forgot the others were in the room. She took in the shaved spot at the back of his head where he had a neat row of stitches and would likely have a pretty crazy cowlick as a result.

  “You’re not in surgery,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he said, and she could hear the humor in his voice, as though he was surprised she thought he would be. “Was I supposed to be?”

  “No one would tell me anything, but one nurse finally said she thought you were in surgery.”

  Shauna looked over to see her partner, Hutch, and her whole family watching her with the attention they might usually pay a football game. She raised a brow.

  Not a damned one of them moved.

  She tried another tact. “Ma? Maybe you could clear the room?”

  That did it. Her brothers were groaning before her mother so much as spoke. They knew they couldn’t fight their mother.

  Hutch remained.

  “Really, Hutch?” She asked.

  “Hey, she’s not my mother.”

  Shauna’s mother stuck her head back in the room. “Get out here Jackson Peter Hutchison.”

  Zach laughed as Hutch threw him a look but did as Shauna’s mother told him to.

  “They let you go? Shouldn’t you be staying for observation? Is your leg okay? There was a really big piece of that fireplace on your leg,” Shauna had too many questions to let him answer any of them.

  He just grinned at her while she threw them all out there, then spoke when she paused. “Checked out AMA. No way am I missing this interrogation. Leg is fine. Bruised and going to be sore as hell for a while.” He held up his palms to her, showing her the scrapes and cuts. “I have some booboos you need to kiss later, though.”

  He was confident and cocksure and so damned good-looking sitting there, she wanted to wrap herself—arms and legs—around him and hold tight.

  He must have seen it in her eyes, because he grew serious. He took her hands and leaned in. “Please tell me you’re going to give me another chance after this. That you’ll let me show you I’m not the ass I used to be, because I gotta tell you, Shaun, I fell for you hard this time. And not in the sweaty, hot sex way from before. I mean, yeah the sex is going to be hot. Don’t get me wrong. It’s going to be epic.”

  Shauna had to bite down on her cheeks to keep from laughing. Or maybe crying. She wouldn’t cry.

  He went on. “This time, I want more. I want to prove to you that I can give you more. Because you’re worth it Shauna. You’re so damned worth it.”

  “I know,” she said, not a
t all bashful about the fact she was confident in her worth.

  He lifted her hand and kissed it. “Do I get another chance?”

  “We’ll see,” was all she said. “Now get me out of here. We need to get a confession.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  “Really? Are you serious with this shit?” Ronan asked over the applause that came when Shauna and Zach entered the squad room.

  Zach was back to business, and he could feel the same intensity thrumming through Shauna beside him.

  Hutch raised his hands, as if in surrender, behind them. “I tried but these two wouldn’t hear it. They were coming in whether the docs said they could or not.”

  Ronan rolled his eyes. He didn’t have time to answer before the captain called out. “Reynolds! O’Rourke, my office!”

  They followed Captain Calhoun into the office, but not before he yelled to Ronan that he owed a dollar for swearing in the building.

  “You want to tell me what you’re doing here?” The captain didn’t even bother to sit, which told Zach this was a courtesy chewing out. He had to bitch and moan about them being here when they should be in the hospital but he would make it quick and let them get back to work.

  “We still need a confession,” Shauna said and Zach was proud of the calm edge to her voice.

  “And if you pass out in the middle of that interrogation? What then?”

  Zach clamped down on the urge to jump to Shauna’s defense. She’d come up in the ranks dealing with the brass, same as him. In fact, she had more experience than he did. He wouldn’t try to cut in and defend her in front of the captain.

  “Then, I’m sure we’ll have backup,” Shauna said calmly.

  The captain snorted and went to sink into his seat behind his desk. “I’m going to suggest,” he said, carefully, with a long look at Shauna, “that you let Zach start the questioning and you stay out of sight. Let her wonder if you made it out of the chimney.”

  “Why do you say that?” Zach asked.

  “I saw them bring her in. She looked proud. My guess is she was still there when the chimney came down. She would have heard it. Let her think maybe she achieved more than she did. Shauna can come in and surprise her if she gives you trouble.”

  Shauna nodded and looked at Zach. “Works for me.”

  They had to give Liz time to talk to her lawyer, but they let her do that in the interrogation room where they could watch the exchange. This wasn’t the one with the sofa and chairs. She wouldn’t be treated to that one anytime soon.

  They didn’t get much out of the observation. Lawyers knew detectives watched through the glass and they did their best to cover what was being said. It looked like Liz Gordon didn’t have much to say to her lawyer. She turned to the glass and spoke, even though she couldn’t see Shauna, Zach, or Ronan from her side.

  “I’m ready to talk.” She didn’t look at all like the helpless girl they’d last seen in their station. There wasn’t a hint of vulnerability to her now.

  In fact, she was grinning at Zach when he walked in the door.

  Zach sat across from her and re-read the Miranda warning, getting it on video.

  “Ms. Gordon, I’m going to recommend, once again, that you don’t say anything right now until we’ve had a chance to speak with a doctor about your state of mind.” The lawyer was likely just making sure his performance was on the video in case she tried to say he didn’t do his job later. He also seemed to be setting the stage for an insanity plea. Zach would have a few things to say about that.

  Apparently, Liz didn’t plan to heed her lawyer’s advice. She leaned toward Zach across the table. “It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Connecting their bodies to the old killings? I debated for a while about posing them in just the same way, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They would have looked too peaceful. They didn’t deserve that.”

  Most likely, the lawyer was pissing in his pants at letting them talk to her without her parents present, but he didn’t have a choice. In this situation, she only had to be seventeen for them to question her without a parent. Since her parents had informed them they wouldn’t be back for several days, Zach wasn’t about to wait for them to wander their way back into the country.

  Zach cocked his head. “What did they deserve, Liz?”

  Her eyes blazed with what he had come to recognize as pure hatred. Pure unadulterated rage. But then she seemed to be able to cool the rage and put on the false face she showed the world.

  She was a hell of an actress. “They deserved to be taken down off the pedestal this world has put them on. To be shown that underneath it all, they’re just the same as every one of us.”

  She tipped her chin in pride. “I did that and more. They were humiliated in death. I did that. Me.”

  The lawyer cut in. “Liz, I really must stress that you should—”

  “No, thank you,” she said, almost sweetly to the man, whose jaw dropped in response. Maybe someone had forgotten to tell him his client was bat shit crazy.

  Zach had her. He had what he needed on video to convict her, but he wanted more. He wanted all the details, all the reasons. He was experienced enough to know you didn’t always get that. Sometimes, you didn’t get reasons and answers. But, damn, he wanted them this time.

  “Was Candice on a pedestal?” Zach wanted to understand what made her choose her victims. Was it simply that they were there in Sawyer’s clubhouse or was there something more to it?

  Liz shook her head. “No, Candice was just my way of making sure Sawyer didn’t get to take the credit for my work. I knew you were watching him, so you’d know he couldn’t be responsible for her. I couldn’t grab anyone at Elmhurst. There were too many people watching there.”

  “Why Candice?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time. She was walking home, there was no one around. I pulled my car over and pretended I needed help.”

  “You used Rohypnol on her.” Zach put the information out there and waited to see what she’d say.

  “Yeah, I had to buy something since Sawyer wasn’t around for that part of it. I found someone to sell me the drugs, but he could get Rohypnol and Ketamine, but not GHB.”

  Zach nodded. “Why did you beat her after you killed her?”

  Dead eyes flashed and she gave the smallest hint of a shrug. “Why not?”

  That was the thing about her, he realized. So much of what she was saying had a why not quality to it and he was struck by how little she seemed to care—or maybe even grasp—what she had done.

  He wanted to know why she’d gone after Shauna. What she’d planned to do with her.

  As if reading his mind, she switched gears. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

  Zach didn’t bat an eye. He’d worked like hell over the years to contain his anger in the interrogation room. He never let it come in here with him. If it showed up uninvited, he sent it packing, plain and simple. She wouldn’t get to him.

  He let her see a frown on his face. “Let’s talk about you. How long have you known your uncle was a killer?”

  Eyes dancing, she leaned in and pouted. “Oh no. Was she under that chimney when it came down? We could hear it outside, you know. Hell of a racket.” She laughed now. “I couldn’t have planned that better if I tried. What made it come down?”

  Zach calculated in his head. He’d give her a little information, play her game. “The pulley anchored in the top of it.”

  “Damn. That was handy.” She spoke like she might be going back to the house someday. She was evil. Pure and simple.

  “Tell me about your uncle.”

  She sat back with a sigh. “Uncle Herschel is legendary in my family. Although I didn’t know for a long time that he was a killer. I suspect my mother doesn’t know either.”

  Zach waited. He could tell she was warming up for a story.

  She didn’t disappoint. “He was always off. That’s how they put it. Off. I was never really sure what that meant. Then I heard my dad talking to my grandfather one day
about four years ago. My grandfather was dying.” She rolled her eyes. “God, how he smelled. They brought him home to stay with us for those last months instead of leaving him at the nursing home and the whole house stunk like that minty crap old people rub into their skin. That and shit. He couldn’t stop shitting his pants.”

  “You have a heart of gold,” Zach said.

  “Whatever.” Another eye roll. “The day before he died, my dad was talking to him and my grandfather told him everything. The whole family always knew there was something wrong with Herschel, but they didn’t realize how far it went until they found out he’d been the one killing those girls. His father found him in the chimney room.” Her eyes lit. “I’ve never been able to figure out that room. I know the tunnels were put in when the house was built to let servants travel from room to room quickly. There are others, you know, not just the chimney one. There’s another channel of tunnels on the west side of the house. But the room was added later, I think. It wasn’t really a room. It was a shaft of some sort that they just sealed off, I think. But I couldn’t figure out why. Turns out, they made that room for him.”

  “For Herschel?” Zach asked.

  She nodded. She was so excited to be talking about him. “My grandfather said he would go into rages, screaming and throwing things, even hitting him sometimes. So, they built that space. My uncle was sent there when he was acting out. Sometimes for days. It sounded like my grandmother wanted to make him disappear—she was like that. She cared more about appearances than about anyone or anything. She likely put him in there so no one could hear his ranting. Eventually, he began to seek it out. Made the chimney room into his own space.”

  “What did your grandfather find in the room?”

  She seemed pleased that Zach wanted to know. “The rope, the lipstick. I bet you guys never knew he kept trophies.”

  Zach kept his face blank. “Oh?”