by Karen Rose
“I appreciate it.” And he really did. But right now he needed her. So much it should have scared him. “But I don’t think I could ‘sleep’ knowing you were on the sofa.”
Joseph frowned. “When I say sleep, I mean sleep. You know, REM, out like a light?”
“Oh. I thought you were being discreet.” He turned back to the window. “When I get Paige alone, I have zero intention of wasting time doing REM.”
Joseph laughed, surprising him. “You’re an asshole to rub it in my face.”
“You’d do the same if our situations were reversed.”
“Damn straight.”
Grayson’s phone began buzzing in his pocket. “Stevie. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at the moment,” she said. “J.D.’s okay. Lucy’s with him and they moved him to a private room for observation overnight. He’ll come home tomorrow.”
“Good. I called Thorne’s office, but he wasn’t there. I left my cell and yours.”
“I talked to him already. Thorne was here with Lucy. I told him what we needed. He said to give him a few hours and he’d meet us at my place.”
“Why your place?”
“Because I haven’t had a full evening with Cordelia all week and Izzy has a date.”
“Good reasons. I assume it’s okay to bring Paige with me.”
“I didn’t think you’d be leaving her alone.”
“What about the dog?”
Stevie sighed. “If he chews up even one sofa leg, you’re replacing it.”
“Understood. I’ll pick up Paige and meet you at your place in two hours.”
Joseph wore a tiny smirk. “So much for no REM, out like a light.”
“I can do a lot with two hours.” Grayson looked around impatiently. “What is with this traffic? They’ll have left Reba’s before we get there.”
“Look on the bright side,” Joseph said cheerfully. “There are twelve two-hour blocks in every day. You’ll get another crack at it tomorrow.”
“Asshole,” Grayson muttered.
Thursday, April 7, 4:05 p.m.
“Louis versus Reba,” Clay said, driving away from the McCloud building. “Better than reality TV. Family drama unfolding before our very eyes.”
In Clay’s front seat, Daphne shook her head. “That’s an understatement.”
“He saw me,” Paige said, still a little disturbed. “Louis, I mean.”
“I know,” Clay said. “I saw that wink. I didn’t like him.”
“Neither did I,” Paige said. “He was at the estate that night Crystal was killed.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Daphne murmured. “He’s cutting Rex off, apparently.”
“With no lawyer to pull his ass out of the fire, Rex might be more forthcoming,” Paige said. “Might make him willing to dish a little more on that family drama.”
“So exactly what did you get in there?” Daphne asked.
“Everything I wanted. I can’t look at the pictures until I get back to Grayson’s.” In all the confusion after J.D.’s shooting, she’d left the laptop at the town house. “I should have picked up a spare laptop when I went back to my apartment.”
“You were a little preoccupied,” Daphne said, which was also an understatement.
Paige had found the bloodstained gi she’d worn the night Thea died in the box where she’d stored it. She’d tried to throw it away last summer, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. She’d put the old garment aside, donning the new gi she hadn’t been able to bring herself to wear. When she’d tied her belt for the first time in nine months, she’d cried. And then Daphne hugged her and they’d both cried. And then they’d had to fix their makeup.
“It was a very emotional moment,” she agreed quietly. “Clay, if you’ll take me back to Grayson’s, I can get to work.”
“And I can get my car,” Daphne said. “And go home and change back into myself.”
“Getting there could take a little while.” Clay drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “We haven’t even gone a block.”
“Paige, why don’t you try to sl—” Daphne’s word was abruptly changed to a tiny shriek by a knock at the back window.
Paige’s fists, already clenched and raised, lowered and relaxed when she saw Grayson outside. She unlocked the car. “You scared us to death.”
Grayson slid in and closed the door, waving to Joseph, who sat in his car going the other direction looking very unhappy. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw you drive away and didn’t want to lose you in traffic. I told Joseph to stop the car and I chased you.”
“Which explains why he looks so angry,” Paige said.
“Joseph was born angry,” Grayson said. “I’ll apologize to him later.” He leaned back, resting his head on the seat, and it was then that Paige saw how pale he was.
And that he had blood on his sleeve. “Are you hurt?” she asked, trying to stay calm.
“No. Not me. Anderson.”
Daphne turned around in the seat. “What did he do?”
“He ate his gun.”
“Oh my God.” Paige and Daphne said it together, horrified.
“Why?” Clay demanded tersely.
“He admitted to everything but paying for the hit last night. Said he worked with a broker on the case fixes, someone with Bond’s firm. Didn’t give a name, swore he didn’t know. I told him he was being filmed, that he was going down for what he’d done. Next thing I knew, he pulled the gun and shot himself. He was dead before he hit the floor.”
“He could have shot you,” Paige said. She held him, pressing her forehead into his shoulder. He was warm and solid and breathing. But he might not have been.
He put his arm around her, pulled her close. “He could have. But he didn’t.” He kissed the top of her head. “It’s all right. I’m all right.”
“Did you believe him?” Clay asked. “About not arranging the hit?”
“I don’t know. He seemed genuinely shocked. But I don’t know.”
“Meaning whoever really did it could still be out there,” Daphne said. “Fucking hell.”
“Out there and working in Bond’s old firm,” Grayson said. “We’re looking at everyone who works there. It’s a big firm. Six partners and about twenty junior partners.”
“Plus interns, paralegals, office admin.” Paige closed her eyes, overwhelmed.
“You can eat a whole elephant one bite at a time,” Daphne said determinedly. “We’ll keep chewing till we get to the bottom of this.”
Thursday, April 7, 4:30 p.m.
Stevie let herself in her front door, bone tired. In the grand scheme of bad days, this had been up there among the worst. Her current partner was in the hospital, put there by her old partner. Who’d been killing for more than five years.
And to top off the emotional roller coaster, Clay Maynard had covered her as she’d chased Silas, waiting silently as she collected herself, wiping her tears away. She’d wanted to walk into his arms. She got the impression he wouldn’t have minded.
The afternoon was waning and shadows filled her living room. The house was quiet. Too quiet. “Izzy!” she called. “I’m home.”
Stevie tossed her purse on the dining room table. It skidded to a stop next to the pile of the day’s mail. With a finger she spread it out, looking for anything not a bill.
I need to subscribe to a cheerful magazine. With flowers. Or, better yet, lingerie. She winced, not needing to be a shrink to know where that came from. She opened her gun safe and disarmed, storing both her service weapon and her backup. She didn’t leave guns lying around her house. Ever. She closed the safe and spun the combination dial.
“Izzy!” She heard a low murmur upstairs and jogged up. Cordelia’s room was empty. The low murmur came from the TV in Izzy’s room. No one was here.
Stevie’s heart began to pound. She ran down the stairs, barging through the swinging door into the kitchen. Izzy sat at the table, hands flat on the tablecloth.
Her
sister turned only her head, her eyes filled with raw panic, tears, and guilt. Then silently directed her gaze to the corner of the room.
Where Silas Dandridge sat in the shadows, a gun in his hand.
And Cordelia on his lap, her sobs muffled by the large male hand over her mouth.
The words came before Stevie could stop them. “You hurt my child and I swear I will tear your fucking head off,” she said. “Let her go.”
“I can’t,” Silas said. “You have to help me.”
“I’ll help you go straight to hell.”
“Sit down, Stevie.” He pressed the gun to Cordelia’s side and her baby’s eyes widened in new terror. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I need your help. He has Violet.”
“And I’m sorry to hear that,” Stevie said, forcing her voice to calm. Silas’s eyes were wild. Crazy. Desperate. She thought of her guns, locked up. She thought of Grayson and Paige and Thorne. They’d be here. But not soon enough.
“I said, sit down, Stevie,” Silas said. “Please.”
Needing to buy time, Stevie sat.
“Put your hands on the table where I can see them,” Silas said and Stevie complied.
“Who has Violet, Silas? I’ll help you get her back.”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I need from you.”
“What do you need?” she asked, mouth dry. Resolutely she forced her gaze to Silas’s face. If she looked at Cordelia, she’d fall apart. And then they’d all die.
“Put your phone on the table and slide it to me. I will text Grayson with an address. When he answers, you will drive me in your sister’s car. I will sit behind you, your child on my lap and your sister on the floorboard. You will bind and gag them both. If you don’t do it right or if anyone tries to call for help or run away, I’ll shoot. Izzy will be first.”
“You’re drawing Grayson and Paige out so you can kill them.”
His mouth twisted bitterly. “Your phone, Stevie.”
“Silas, this is wrong. You know this is wrong.”
“I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You’d sacrifice my child for your own? Really?”
His jaw squared. “In a heartbeat. Now, slide your phone over here.”
Thursday, April 7, 4:45 p.m.
Paige put Peabody in the back of the black Escalade and waved up at the guy on Grayson’s roof who held a high-powered rifle with a scope. “Be careful up there.”
The police had placed a visible sentry above the roofline. It was more to calm the neighbors, Grayson thought, than to do any real surveillance. Silas wasn’t coming back.
The house was cordoned off with yellow tape. A few CSU techs still lingered, along with the SWAT guy above and a uniformed officer below. The front door’s side window had not yet been boarded up, but the officer assured him they would take care of it.
Grayson had been asked to leave his own house. There would be no two hours of Paige in his bed. There wouldn’t even be a quickie against his bedroom door. Shit.
“You don’t have to be so cheerful,” he grumbled. “You’ll encourage them to stay.”
Paige gave him a sympathetic peck on the lips. “That they let us in so that you could change and I could get Peabody was as much as we should have expected.”
He got in the SUV and slammed his door hard. “I know. I don’t have to like it.”
“So where to?”
“Stevie’s. We’ll be early, but maybe we’ll catch Izzy before her date and she can make us some dinner. She’s a certified lunatic, but she can cook.”
“I want to thank her for the makeup.” Paige pulled the laptop from a new backpack.
“Where did you get the backpack?”
“From my apartment.”
“When you got your gi.” She still wore it over a vivid green T-shirt that came high enough to hide the Kevlar. “It looks damn good on you.”
“Thanks. It feels good to wear it again. I did pack a few other things to wear later, but I was grabbing kind of haphazardly at my place because we were going to be late for Reba. I doubt anything I got will even match.”
“Then just don’t wear anything,” he said and she chuckled, a welcome sound.
She plugged Joseph’s camera-pen into her USB port. “I’ve got names and addresses on every kid in the MAC program.”
“And the group photos?”
“Yep.” She was quiet as she worked. “Huh. Each one of these group photos has a blond girl with curly hair, just like Crystal Jones. How statistically probable is that?”
“A blonde every year isn’t so strange. That she’d have curly hair is less likely.”
“I’m going to work on locating these people as adults while you drive.”
“Talk me through it,” he said and she looked at him, puzzled.
“Why?”
“I’m dead tired and don’t want to fall asleep. And I like the sound of your voice.”
“Okay. I’ll check blond girls, then go back for the other kids. The 1984 blonde was Dawn Porter.” She tapped a few keys. “There are more than one hundred Dawn Porters nationally. Sorting by birth year… yields three. Only one born in Maryland.”
“Where is she now?”
“Checking.” Paige went still. “She’s dead.”
“Of what? She would have been pretty young. Not even forty.”
“I’m pulling the death certs statewide… Dawn Porter’s cause of death was listed as suicide.” She looked over at him. “Less than one month after Crystal Jones’s murder.”
A sick shiver raced down his spine. “Could be coincidence. How did she suicide?”
“Death cert doesn’t say. We have to request the autopsy report from the ME.”
“Run a few more MAC kids. Let’s see where this goes.”
“Nineteen eighty-five, Kit Beechum.” After a few minutes she sighed. “Suicide, three years ago.”
Grayson’s stomach twisted. “This isn’t good.”
“No, it’s not. Give me a second. I want to see if I can find any articles on her death. There weren’t any on Dawn Porter.” She typed, then was quiet for several minutes.
“What?” he asked impatiently.
“Kit struggled with drugs for years, but she’d gotten clean. One day she OD’d. Her family and friends mourned. They say how hard she worked to get free. And she was a volunteer. Like Betsy Malone. Except Kit worked with victims of sexual assault.”
“Doesn’t mean she was a victim herself,” he said.
“No, but it’s not good. We’re up to 1986. Justine Rains.” She was quiet longer this time. “Justine was harder to find. She married and moved to Texas. Give me a minute to check the death certificates.” She slowly exhaled. “Dammit.”
“She’s dead, too?”
“Yes, but there’s no cause listed. Usually that means a natural cause.”
“She was younger than the first two. What’s the death date?”
“Six months after Crystal’s death,” she said. “Let me check the newspaper archives for an obit. I feel terrible, but I hope it was cancer. Or she was struck by lightning. Anything that somebody else didn’t cause.”
He waited, his heart beating in his throat. “Well?”
“Justine died in a car accident.”
“That’s good, right? She didn’t commit suicide.”
“She was charged with DUI.”
“Please say booze,” he murmured.
“Barbiturates. This is a story on the investigation, not an obit. Her husband denied that she abused drugs.” Her voice faltered. “Especially since their child was in the car.”
“No. Not the kid, too.”
“Yes. He was only six. The investigators discovered that she’d abused narcotics in her late teens. Her friends said she’d been ‘plagued by personal demons,’ but never discussed it. Her death was ruled accidental, but the report says the wreck was caused by Justine’s drug use.” She made a distressed sound. “She hit another car, two teens
on their way to the mall. They died, too. Here’s a second article, following up.”
Again she made the distressed sound. “This gets worse. Justine’s husband was being sued by the families of the two dead teenagers. He shot himself. Fatally.”
The image of Charlie Anderson hit him hard. “Go on to year four—1987.”
Thursday, April 7, 5:30 p.m.
By the time Grayson stopped in front of Stevie’s house, Paige was numb. He turned off the ignition and they sat in silence.
“Eight women,” she whispered. “All dead. Six with the same drug.”
The other two had died of natural causes. One of cancer and one in a fatal car crash when she was fifteen, several years before Crystal’s death. The barbiturate deaths started with Crystal Jones’s murder.
“And we still have eight years to cover,” he said.
“Seven, actually. We already know Crystal Jones is dead. Why didn’t anyone see this?” she demanded, anger bubbling. “Make the damn connection?”
“They’re stretched over the last five years, honey. All over the state.”
“And two in other states. So?”
“They were MAC kids when they were twelve years old. I was a Boy Scout when I was twelve. Nobody would connect me with kids in my troop if something like this were to happen. And it doesn’t look like these kids even knew each other back then. That they’d connect with each other as adults… It was a perfect setup.”
“We need to finish this,” she said forcefully. “Find the others.”
“Not here.” He looked around them. “We can’t sit out in the open like this. Let’s get inside. You can finish searching and I’ll call Lucy Trask and ask for the autopsy reports.”
Paige swung her backpack over one shoulder. “Grayson, Rex McCloud may have been at the estate the night Crystal was killed, but he wasn’t even born when the MAC program started. Whatever happened to these girls, Rex wasn’t involved.”
“I know. I don’t know what to think about Rex anymore. We’ll worry about it inside.”
She got out, snapped Peabody’s leash to his collar, then frowned at the darkened house. “It looks like no one’s home. We are early. Maybe Stevie isn’t back yet.”
Grayson stopped, suddenly tensing. “Stevie’s car is here and so is the minivan, so Izzy’s still here, too. I want to check around the house before we go in.”