Three Days to Forever (A Mac Faraday Mystery Book 9)

by Lauren Carr

  “She did.” Tad jumped to his feet and went to the window. He saw a tall, slender man with longish brown hair and dark-rimmed glasses on the porch. He was dressed in jeans and a military fatigue jacket. Cameron was nowhere in sight.

  Concerned, Tad raced his wife toward the stairs. “Go upstairs.”

  “What?” Jan laughed.

  “Something’s not right. Go check on T.J. and don’t come down until I call you.” Insistent, Tad waited for her to head up the stairs of their red-brick colonial before opening the door a crack to regard the young man on the porch.

  “Dr. Tad MacMillan?” the young man smiled politely at him.

  “Yes …”

  The young man gestured at the three-story stone home next door, on the corner of Rock Spring Boulevard. “You’re cousins with Joshua Thornton, who lives next door, and his wife, Detective Gates.”

  “That’s right,” Tad said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Ethan Bonner,” the young man said. “You’ll find there’s a warrant out for me on suspicion of murder, which is why I didn’t go to the hospital. I have Detective Cameron Gates in the backseat of her cruiser here. She needs your help.”

  “Did you come to tell us something, Tristan?” Jessica asked her brother about the reason for his interrupting a very pleasant conversation with Murphy.

  “Rehearsal dinner tonight,” Tristan replied. “We need to be at the church in two hours.”

  When Jessica looked at Murphy with hope in her eyes, he sighed. “I think I need to stay with Donny. We should be here when Dad wakes up.”

  Understanding, Jessica nodded her head. “But I’ll come back for you right after the rehearsal. I’ll even bring you some dinner from the Spencer Inn if you’d like.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Sensing the electricity between them, Tristan backed away. “I’m going to go check to see if Dad and Archie are ready to go. Dad is riding back with us. Chief O’Callaghan went home to shower and get dressed. He’ll be meeting us at the church.” He gestured at them. “Go back to what you were doing.”

  “What do you like?” she asked Murphy, who gazed into her face.

  “I like everything.”

  Blushing, she giggled. “I meant for dinner from the Spencer Inn.”

  “Just so long as it’s vegetarian, no meat—”

  “But you do eat fish.” She took yet another opportunity to touch his firm chest, allowing her fingers to slide down the center to his stomach.

  “You remembered that?”

  Locking her eyes on his, she said, “I remember everything.”

  He flashed her a grin that encompassed the dimples in both cheeks. “Surprise me.”

  She reached for his hand. “Don’t tempt me.”

  He brought her hand to his lips. She thought he was going to kiss the top of her hand. Instead, he turned her hand over and pressed his lips to the inside of her palm.

  The touch of his lips on her flesh sent a sensuous shockwave through her body. Her breath caught. Every muscle from her throat down through her stomach tightened. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, drowning out the sound of a crash and a scream from somewhere behind them.

  The shriek sounded strangely like Archie Monday.

  From a hallway across from the reception desk, Tristan came running out.

  Mac came rushing out of the waiting room at the sound of Archie’s scream. “What happened?”

  Speechless, Tristan pointed down the hallway. Mac and two orderlies ran in the direction he pointed.

  Jessica raced up to her brother. “What happened?”

  “She fell off her boots.”

  From down the hallway, Jessica could hear Archie Monday sobbing uncontrollably while Mac tried to comfort her. One of the orderlies came racing out into the reception area. “We need a gurney and a doctor. Get x-ray ready!”

  “Honey, it’s going to be okay,” Jessica, Tristan, and Murphy heard Mac say from down the hall.

  “Oh yeah, easy for you to say standing there on both feet, not a mark on you, and having a good hair day,” Archie spat out. “The only thing that’s happened to you this week was a bunch of hit men tried to kill you!”

  “They’re funny when they fight.” Chuckling, Tristan turned to Jessica and Murphy. He saw that Jessica and Murphy were not laughing.

  Murphy noticed a far-away look come to Jessica’s violet eyes. She was looking beyond her father, kneeling next to his bride-to-be, trying to soothe her growing distress. “Buttercup?”

  “Look at him,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Who?” Murphy asked.

  “Dad.” She nudged her brother with her elbow. “Look at Dad, Tristan.”

  “I see him.”

  The three of them peered down the hallway at the man dressed in slacks and a sweater. After two rough days without a shower or shave, he had a heavy five o’clock shadow across his lower face, and his hair was disheveled.

  “Clue me in,” Murphy said.

  “He doesn’t have a mark on him,” Jessica said forcefully. “Yet, his DNA and blood are all over a murder crime scene from two days ago.”

  “You mean he’s accused of murder?” Murphy shook his head. “I wonder …”

  “You’re not the only one.” Jessica grabbed Tristan by the elbow. “Bring up that case file on your tablet again.”

  “You said hacking into the sheriff’s department files was wrong,” Tristan said with mock innocence.

  “I want to see the autopsy report,” she ordered.

  Tristan dug his computer tablet out of his case.

  “Someone impersonated your father to leave a message for Archie’s mother,” Murphy said, “In order to lure her to his house to be killed. That takes some brains and planning.”

  Jessica said, “Like the kind of organizational skills needed to acquire my father’s DNA and blood in order to frame him for murder.”

  “Possibly,” Murphy asked. “Who’s the murder victim?”

  “Russell Dooley,” Jessica said. “Dad arrested his wife for murder. She recently killed herself in prison.”

  They all stepped aside while the hospital orderlies, Mac, and Bogie wheeled Archie past them and the reception area to go into an examination room.

  Murphy asked Jessica, “Did either this guy or his late wife have any ties to international terrorism?”

  “I don’t think so.” With a cringe, Jessica shook her head. “Tristan, haven’t you hacked into that database yet?” she snapped.

  Murphy was chuckling. “Feisty. I like feisty women.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet, honey buns.”

  Cameron could hear voices—fuzzy voices. Soft, tender, kind voices swirling around her.

  “Is she going to be okay?” asked a feminine voice that sounded vaguely familiar.

  “I think so,” another friendly voice answered. This one was male.

  “Josh …” Cameron fought to call out.

  “Shhh …” She felt a touch on hers. “It’s okay, Cameron,” the male voice said. “You’re safe. You’re going to be fine.”

  With effort, she opened her eyes to the blurry image of a man leaning over her.

  “Josh …” Her vision cleared. “Tad.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m here, too, Cam.” Jan eased down onto the bed on her other side. “You’re here … at our house … in our guest room. Your prime murder suspect, Ethan Bonner, brought you to us.”

  Suddenly, Cameron’s vision cleared as she focused in on the man standing at the foot of the bed with a cell phone to his ear. While she had never met or seen him before, he matched the description that had gone out on her notice to be on the look out for the suspect, who was tall with longish hair and dark-framed eyeglasses. A dozen questions came to her mind at once. “You …
”

  She tried to sit up, only to have Tad push her back down onto the bed. “Cameron, I suggest you don’t try to say or do anything right now. Someone filled you up with alcohol. Right now you have a blood alcohol level of point one-four. So you’re not thinking very clearly, hon.”

  “I’ve been sober—”

  “It’s not your fault, sweetie.” A recovering alcoholic himself, Tad sympathized with the grief that Cameron had to have felt at having been purposely dragged down off the wagon of sobriety. “You have an injection mark in your abdomen. Not only did they pour it down your throat, but they injected it directly into your stomach—”

  “Trying to stage your murder to look like a suicide after a binge,” Ethan Bonner interjected.

  “You killed him,” Cameron recalled. “That FBI agent—Elder. What’s this about? He said he was doing what he had to do for his nation.”

  “Why would they have to kill Cameron to protect our nation?” Jan twisted around on the bed to ask Bonner.

  “Not our nation,” Ethan corrected her. “His nation. The nation of Islam.”

  “But he was an FBI agent,” Cameron argued. “My boss said he checked him and Black out. They’ve been with the FBI for—”

  “Yes, they have,” Ethan said. “They were both born in the good old U S of A. But the background check for these types of organizations don’t check into people’s religious loyalties or worldviews. I’m sure you’ve heard of separation of church and state. Good guys who never even had a parking ticket. No one would suspect that they have both been spending their free time working for Islam extremists for I don’t know how many years.”

  “If they’re so clean, how’d they end up on your radar?” Tad asked.

  “And who are you?” Cameron wanted to know.

  “My boss, Reginald Crane, worked for the federal government for several years,” Ethan explained. “He retired with wonderful credentials. He was on the ground floor of cyber security when it was in its infancy. He taught me everything I know. After he retired, he offered his services to the private sector, and big corporations jumped into hiring him for consulting—especially when they had government contracts. We’re talking huge bucks.” Ethan rubbed his fingers together.

  “A ghost making huge bucks?” Cameron asked.

  “Huh?” Ethan replied.

  “When we did a background check on Reginald Crane and you, nothing came up,” Cameron explained. “Social security, driver’s license—someone made both of you disappear off the grid.”

  “That would be me,” Ethan said.

  “Why?” Jan asked.

  “I figured if they couldn’t find anything on Crane or me, they wouldn’t be able to find me,” Ethan said. “These are some really bad dudes.” He pointed at Cameron. “That guy was an FBI agent—he was supposed to be on her side!”

  Tad held up his hands. “Okay, so you wiped you and your boss off the grid in order to hide from the people who killed Crane. Who exactly are these people? Start at the beginning.”

  “Six weeks ago, Crane was hired by a medical firm that was working on a cure for Ebola.”

  “Why would a medical firm hire a computer security specialist?” Jan asked.

  “Because everything is computerized nowadays,” Ethan said. “Their internal technical services were picking up some suspicious activities. Security breaches that could have been just flukes within the system—or they could have been real breaches of security. Considering what they were dealing with, they didn’t want to take a chance, so they called us in. Crane and I narrowed down the security breach to one specific researcher. A background check on him revealed several trips over the last few years to Iraq and ties to an Islamic terrorist group.”

  “He was helping them make a dirty bomb,” Tad said.

  Ethan nodded his head. “In their research, the company, and this man was on the team, developed a man-made version of Ebola. This researcher had the recipe for it. Right before Christmas, our security team and the firm’s private group caught him just before he was able to send the formula to his people in Iraq. He committed jihad in a car bomb right outside an Internet cafe in Philadelphia.”

  Uttering a hollow laugh, Ethan said, “You may have seen it on the news. Homeland Security was notified about it, but the official government statement claims it was an accidental explosion caused by a faulty electrical system in an old car.” He winked at Jan, a newspaper journalist. “Have you ever heard of propaganda?”

  “Yes,” she said in a soft voice.

  “It’s alive and well,” Ethan said. “Two members of that medical company’s security division were injured with second- and third-degree burns in that ‘accidental blast.’”“Then why kill your boss and go after Cameron?” Tad gestured at Cameron, whose alcohol-fogged mind was still trying to keep track of what had happened. “Homeland Security was notified about this guy and the Ebola he was sending to Iraq to fuel a dirty bomb. You guys intercepted it before it went.”

  “Because they still want the man-made Ebola formula,” Ethan answered. “When this researcher realized we were on to him, he smuggled it out of the facility on a thumb drive to send through his own laptop. I shut off the Internet connection surrounding the cafe before it could go and intercepted the file he was sending before he blew himself up. Then, Crane was contacted by a couple of feds saying they were with Homeland Security and needed the copy of the file that we had intercepted. To Crane, that was fishy. The research facility had the file. Being an old fed, he decided to play them along to find out who they really were. He got enough to check them out and found out that they were really with the FBI—and they were also on annual leave.”

  “I’m sure my boss didn’t check that far,” Cameron said.

  “So then Crane dug even further,” Ethan said. “Whatever he found in their background convinced him that they were the last ones he wanted to turn over that flash drive to.”

  “Why didn’t he destroy it?” Jan asked.

  “Because he didn’t have time,” Ethan said. “The formula was already on our computers. Crane called me. I was out of town. He told me that they were on their way—and then he got spooked. He heard something on the line that told him that someone was listening. He told me that he was going to send the formula into the black hole.”

  “What’s the black hole?” Tad asked.

  Ethan laughed. “At first, I didn’t get it either. But then I remembered that right after he said that, he turned and said something to Agnes, his cleaning lady. He always referred to her hand bag as the ‘black hole’ because she kept everything in it.”

  “But Agnes left to go to her daughter’s wedding,” Cameron said, “and took the black hole with her. As luck would have it, her son-in-law-to-be is Mac Faraday. So they launched their attack on her at his place to cover up who the real target was.”

  “And you refused to back down in your investigation,” Bonner said. “So they cloned your phone.” He took a phone out of his pocket. “I found this on Elder. I’ve been following you to find Agnes, and I saw them following you.”

  “So they know exactly where Agnes and Josh are?” Cameron sprang upright, only for Tad to gently push her back down. “I led them to them!”

  “Did they get the thumb drive?” Jan asked.

  Ethan held his phone. “I managed to get ahold of one of Crane’s old colleagues. He had given me her business card before to call if he ever got into trouble. This has clearly been that time. Those two sleeper agents split up. One of them went on to meet up with a team to track down Agnes Douglas. Crane’s old friend has been trying to get one step ahead of them.”

  If it was any other day, or any other event, David would have begged out to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours. But this was the day before Mac and Archie’s wedding. It was their rehearsal, and he was honored that Mac had asked him to be one of his groomsmen.


  There was no way he was going to miss it.

  While driving back to Spencer Manor, David could smell the soot and sweat on his clothes. His coat was torn and covered with a mixture of blood from more than one person. Rubbing his aching shoulder, he could feel where the blood from one of the assassins had hardened when it dried into the fabric.

  A long hot shower will make me a new man—at least new enough to make it through the rehearsal and the dinner. Then I’ll take Chelsea up to her room, hold her soft body close to mine, and get a good long sleep.

  The crime scene tape was still stretched across the front of Spencer Manor. If he hadn’t been the chief of police, he would have been denied access to the property and the stone guest cottage where he lived. He would have stayed at the Spencer Inn, but the new suit he had bought for the rehearsal dinner was at the cottage. As long as he was there to get it, he’d take a shower and hopefully feel human again.

  David parked his cruiser outside of the stone pillars marking the entrance to Spencer Manor. Realizing Mac and Archie hadn’t been around to collect the mail, he went to the box at the end of the driveway and extracted a stack of cards, letters, bills, and advertisements. After tucking the stack under his arm, he ducked under the crime scene tape to jog up the icy driveway and travel the stone path between the garage and main house that would take him to the stone guest cottage where he lived.

  Tucked in the corner of the rose garden at the end of the wrap-around deck of the main house, the guest cottage was cozy with a view of the lake provided by floor-to-ceiling windows. Once he turned the corner of the stone path to come out on the other side of the manor, a stiff, chilling breeze blew in off the lake to hit David with full frigid force. Shaking it off, he picked up his pace to the cottage door and stuck his key into the lock. With a twist of his wrist, he unlocked the door and hurried inside.

  “Damn! It’s cold,” he said out loud with a shiver.

  Hurrying across the great room, he stole a glance at the big screen smart television acting as the focal point for the living area. He was still getting used to not only seeing it in his home, but learning how to work all the special features that Chelsea claimed it had—like syncing it with his smart phone and email.