by Dani Pettrey
Tanner stood rooted in place, speechless. Her father viewed her so differently than she’d believed all these years, but why had he waited so long to say so?
“Everything okay?” Declan called, popping his head around the kitchen doorframe.
She smiled. “Just fine.”
Declan nodded and ducked back into the galley-style kitchen.
Her dad chuckled. “I see he takes very good care of you, and I’m sure you do the same for him.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Go to him, my Tania. We will have more time to talk.”
Tanner just stared as the dad she was beginning to realize she had never really known smiled warmly at her and walked away.
“How’d it go?” Declan asked as she moved into the kitchen.
“Very different than I anticipated.”
“Oh?” Declan’s brows arched as a smile curled on his lips. “He finally saw the beautiful, strong, passionate woman I get the honor of seeing every day?”
She loved this man with her whole heart.
“Sorry to interrupt”—Luke stood in the doorway—“but Malcolm’s here with some news.”
34
Luke watched Malcolm join the group, and particularly observed how Malcolm greeted David with reserved appraisal.
David’s cell rang. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need to take this.”
Luke nodded as David left the room.
Malcolm cleared his throat, directing his full attention at Luke. “Can we speak privately?”
Luke nodded. “Of course.”
The two moved into what had been Bedan’s living room.
“I understand David told you about Jennifer McLean.”
“Who? Oh, you mean Caroline Ladew? You knew?”
“Not until very recently.”
“And you didn’t feel I needed to be read into the situation?”
“The cause for Ebeid’s hatred of America isn’t pertinent to stopping him.”
“No, but the date of the attack sure is.”
“I don’t get to choose what I get read into or when.”
“What if David hadn’t come?”
“Then I assume we would have been notified before the time came, but the focus needs to remain on finding them before the attack date. You’re obviously close. You found this warehouse. You’re right on Ebeid’s heels, and Langley knows that. You’ve never failed to come through, and the higher-ups know that as w—” Malcolm stopped short, his penetrating gaze shifting just beyond Luke’s right shoulder.
Chanel No. 5.
Without hesitation, Luke spun around, low to the ground, kicking Lauren’s feet out from under her.
She fired but missed. Not like her, unless . . .
“Malcolm?”
No response, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Lauren until she was unarmed and subdued.
Heavy footfalls rushed toward them.
“Stay back!” Luke hollered as he wrestled with Lauren, both fighting for control of her gun.
Declan entered, gun drawn, followed closely by Kate.
Lauren kneed Luke below the belt and rolled over, firing an instant after Declan leapt behind a metal column.
The bullet pierced the aluminum, and Luke feared his friend had been shot through the slender column, but he took the small tactile advantage he had with Lauren on her stomach, momentarily faced away from him, and flung himself on her back, gun drawn, muzzle flush with the back of her head.
“Drop your weapon,” he ordered.
“Never!” Her fingers slid for the trigger, and a nanosecond into her squeeze, he did what he had to do and pulled his trigger.
Tanner, running in, gasped.
Luke moved off Lauren’s limp body, moving the gun now loose in her hand.
Concern flared through him. Malcolm.
He spun around to find him laid out on the floor, a bullet wound to his chest.
“He’s not breathing,” Tanner said, rushing forward and commencing CPR.
Luke called in the crisis code, and while Tanner worked from the right, he knelt by Malcolm’s left side, willing him to breathe.
The whoosh of a helicopter’s blades whirred overhead, growing louder as it came closer.
A specialized team moved in and, within a matter of minutes, Malcolm was onboard the helicopter en route to shock trauma.
Both FBI and CIA agents flooded the building in streams.
One of the medics checked Lauren’s vitals, but Luke had called it. The check was in vain. Lauren Graham was dead.
Griffin woke to a thunderclap of headache. He lifted his aching head but discovered his hands were cuffed behind his back, his legs duct-taped around the wooden rail-back chair he was restrained in.
He blinked, the space dim except for shafts of light flooding through the second-story window.
Panic ricocheted through him. Finley.
He scanned the space and attempted to shout her name, but duct tape covered his mouth too.
“Look who’s finally coming to.” Joel Hood moved in front of him and revealed Finley secured in a similar fashion to a chair thirty feet away at his ten.
Tears streamed down her face, and a thin bloody streak ran the length of the left side of her neck.
Griffin yanked against his restraints, trying to break free, but Joel only laughed.
“Don’t worry. I waited to start the real fun until you were awake to watch.”
He strode to a table with a black leather roll case laid out, displaying the knives, razors, and other tools of destruction it held. He fingered the instruments, his demented mind apparently carefully considering which to use.
“Outside your hotel room in Houston . . . that was me. The rose was placed by a man I utilize occasionally when I want to send a message, but I digress. When I stood watching you that night, contemplating what to do, I considered killing you quickly and then having my way with your wife. But I think it’s far more profound and painful this way, don’t you think?” He slid a serrated blade from the leather case.
Griffin would get out of this. He had to. He just needed to come up with a plan.
Joel stalked toward Finley, and horror riddled through Griffin’s veins.
“Now, it’s no fun if you can’t hear the punishing you’re inflicting.” He ripped the duct tape from Finley’s mouth, her lips and skin red and raw. “And trust me,” he said, moving for Griffin, “out here, it’s actually true—no one can hear you scream.” He chuckled.
Joel Hood was truly demented.
Following suit, he ripped Griffin’s duct tape from his mouth. It burned, but at least now he could wage a battle.
“Not even Albert, who should be back on the property soon?”
“Albert,” Joel said, twisting the blade back and forth, watching the light streaming through the upper loft windows and reflecting off the steel with a glint. “This barn is too far from the house for anyone to hear.” He smiled wickedly. “Trust me, both Stacey and your sister discovered that in the most exquisitely painful way.”
Griffin lunged forward so fast and hard he split the duct tape around his torso.
“Whoa!” Joel laughed, jumping back with a mocking grin. “Aren’t we the fierce one? No matter. You’ll never break those cuffs.”
Perhaps not, but he knew how to get out of them—a trick Parker had taught them all back in college while they were criminal justice majors. He just had to dislocate his thumb and his hand would slide right out. It took a bit of maneuvering and a fair amount of pain, but he’d done it before.
Joel circled Finley like a lion circling its prey and then leaned over her shoulder, holding the knife blade to the right side of her neck. “So you paid Mother a visit today. I should thank you. It turned out to be a highly valuable interaction. One in which I learned several things—such as the need to dispose of Albert. I took care of that, but with you two on the way, I was forced to rush my work, which I loathe doing. I mean, where’s the fun and craftsmanship in that? But no mat
ter, I’ll make up for that now.”
How did Joel know the details of their conversation with his mother? Did he have her place bugged? Had he been hidden somewhere in the room or nearby? It wasn’t worth asking, because after Griffin got loose, it wouldn’t matter. Joel Hood would finally be behind bars, where the monster belonged.
Joel rhythmically slid the flat face of the blade along Finley’s ivory neck.
Griffin’s fists tightened. He was going to kill him. He swallowed and refocused. He needed to mess with Joel’s head until he managed to dislocate his thumb or, better yet, thumbs. “Why’d you start killing? All because some girl cheated on you?” he asked, working to pop his thumb out of joint.
Joel’s face reddened as he moved toward Griffin. But Griffin’s moment was coming, and with one more pop of his thumb, he’d be ready.
Joel bent, his face so close to Griffin’s he could smell garlic and onion on the man’s vile breath. “Trust me, I shifted the power over that witch into my hands, where it still resides and forever will.”
Griffin shifted. “What do you mean still?” He wasn’t seriously suggesting Stacey was still alive?
“I mean she’s locked in a watery grave that I control. She’ll never be free—not even in death.”
The boathouse. He’d buried Stacey under the water and somehow restrained her there.
Joel stepped away before Griffin could lunge. “I’d put your wife there when I’m finished with her, but that spot is reserved for Stacey. The rest are simply trash to be dumped.”
“In water?”
Joel nodded. “Sometimes they wash up on shore like the refuse they are, and other times they remain below.”
“How many, Joel?”
He pointed the tip of the blade in Finley’s direction. “Your wife will be an even dozen. But don’t worry—she won’t be the last. There are so many women out there deserving punishment, and I track them down, making them pay for their actions.”
“Punishment for cheating on their boyfriends, or sneaking out to meet them, like Stacey did?” Griffin got his other thumb popped out of joint and silently slid out both hands, one after the other, then fisted the cuffs in his left hand, leaving them behind his back until the right moment. “Let me guess, you caught her sneaking out one night to rendezvous with her lover?”
Joel rushed at him, blade lifted. “Don’t ever call him that.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
Joel paced back and forth with marked agitation. “Stacey was a betrayer. They’re all betrayers.”
“Not Finley. She’s never betrayed anyone. She doesn’t deserve to be punished.” He watched his wife lean closer to the table of weapons—she was going to try to grab one, try to work her cuffs free.
“She’s just going to have to be for fun, for pleasure, plain and simple,” Joel said. “It’s not like I can let either of you go.”
“People know. My partner knows. My boss knows,” Griffin said.
“That was a mistake,” Joel said. “Perhaps you deserve to be punished too.” He stalked toward Griffin and bent over him, and Griffin took that opportune moment to swing a right hook with full force into Joel’s face, so hard he knocked Joel back onto the ground, dazed but not unconscious.
He unwound the duct tape around his legs and stood, slamming Joel with the chair as he attempted to scramble to his feet. The chair shattered, wood splintering around them. Joel still struggled, swiping at Griffin frantically with the blade.
Griffin punched him in his neck—not hard enough to break his windpipe and kill him, but enough that he was gasping for air.
Grabbing the knife from Joel’s shaking hand, Griffin moved to free Finley, who kept her gaze fixed on Joel to make sure he stayed down while Griffin freed her.
“He put our phones and your gun in the trough over there.” She indicated the wooden feedbox with a tilt of her head.
Anger surged as blood dripped on his hand from his wife’s neck. The desire to choke Joel was fierce, but vengeance was God’s.
“I’ll hold him with a knife,” he instructed Finley once she was free of her restraints, “while you get my gun.”
She nodded and retrieved his weapon, which he then held at the edge of Joel’s perspiring forehead while Finley dialed 9-1-1 and cuffed him.
Griffin read Joel his rights, and within fifteen minutes police swarmed the barn, hauling Joel to his feet.
Griffin wrapped his arms around his wife, kissing her quickly before the paramedics set to work.
He sat beside her on the back of the ambulance as a dive team arrived to search under the boathouse for Stacey’s remains. Not only did they find her remains fettered to the underwater portion of one of the pilings, but they found a rope leading to a metal, waterproof box that, when they lifted it from the water and busted it open, revealed eleven victims’ mementos.
Griffin swallowed, slid a pair of gloves on, and lifted Jenna’s heart-shaped locket, clutching it tightly in his hand.
We got him, honey. We finally got him.
35
The gang finally headed back to CCI in Declan’s Suburban—Lauren’s body having been removed from the scene by the ME while Malcolm was transported to shock trauma, and David surprisingly on his way back to Israel sooner than anticipated.
His boss called him home after a discussion with “a contact” in the Agency “looking to protect their asset from a possible terrorist attack on U.S. soil.” It had clearly been Malcolm’s, or possibly even Lauren’s, way of removing David from the picture before either arrived at the warehouse today. Whoever had made the call, it had worked, and David was on his way home.
A crew was still in place processing the warehouse, but their group needed to keep their focus on stopping Bedan and Ebeid. The weight of all that had occurred hung heavy and thick in the enclosed space of the car.
Luke glanced out the window, the sky overhead dim and gray. They passed warehouse grouping after grouping. He shifted in his seat. Could it be that simple? One way to find out. “There are a ton of warehouses in this area, and Ebeid and his crew had an awful lot to move before you raided the other warehouse. Something tells me they didn’t move far.”
“You really think Ebeid’s backup warehouse would be close?” Declan asked, clutching the wheel.
“It’s the last place we’d think to look.”
“True,” Declan said. “And they most certainly need to be using another warehouse just based on the space and storage they require. Most of the warehouses in this area are empty.”
“So let’s check the ones that aren’t,” Luke said, clasping the back of Declan’s seat. “Have a satellite pass over the area and note the warehouses in use.”
“Smart, Luke,” Declan said. “There can only be a handful.”
Declan called in the request, and well before they could make it back to CCI, they were rerouting back to three occupied warehouses in the same general vicinity as the first, just on the other side of the water.
Luke unfolded a copy of the page filled with scientific notations and Bedan’s shorthand they’d found at the first warehouse, smoothing it out to study it. Might as well do something useful while riding back to the warehouse district.
“Bedan was definitely working out the needed equations to stabilize anthrax into an aerosolized form,” Luke said. But the side notations—in a form of shorthand he’d matched to lecture notes of Bedan’s that were still available online via Hanover Medical School—frighteningly enough indicated that Bedan was dabbling with also mixing a few grams of plutonium dust in with the anthrax.
But to what purpose?
“Radiation,” he said suddenly.
“What?” Declan frowned in the rearview mirror.
Luke took a moment to explain his findings and went on to lay it out as he saw it happening. “Plutonium dust is heavier and wouldn’t travel as far as the anthrax spores, but think of the logistical nightmare it would cause when emergency response teams try to go in to treat the pe
ople exposed to anthrax. They would need proper radiation gear and it would delay response time and allow the anthrax to spread farther.” Luke went still. “We’ve got to find that warehouse.”
“Pulling up to the first one now,” Declan said.
“But wait,” Kate said. “How would emergency personnel know radiation was part of the equation? Radiation sickness takes time for its effects to become identifiable.”
A frightening thought crossed Luke’s mind. “Maybe this paper was left behind on purpose.”
Declan turned to look at him like he was crazy. “What?”
“If we figure out Bedan is mixing the anthrax with plutonium dust, then we’ll clearly warn emergency personnel.”
“So Bedan is using us to delay a response time and give his anthrax longer to spread and infect,” Declan said with shock resonating in his tone.
Luke exhaled. “I certainly fear that could be the case.”
The sun was midway down in the sky as they approached the third and final warehouse in the district. The first warehouse had been a drug bust, and DEA was now in charge of that raid. The second warehouse was home to a group of hackers. Not the good kind, like Kate, but rather the very dangerous kind—criminals extorting money from people, hacking bank accounts, stealing funds, and inputting viruses into mega corporations for a high fee from their competitors. Kate was currently working in conjunction with the cybersecurity unit of the FBI on that raid.
Vehicles were parked out front at the last possible warehouse, and the last SAT photo they received over Declan’s phone showed three white trucks like the ones Hank had lent out parked by the loading docks.
Hope filled Luke. This might finally be it and, if so, he was uber thankful Kate was surrounded by a unit of federal agents and happily occupied with busting the hackers, because he had zero doubt that if they were in fact at Bedan and Ebeid’s warehouse, the raid would not be without casualties.
Federal Agent Tim Barrows and Declan lay on either side of Luke on the rooftop of the warehouse next to the one in question.