Witness Protection Unraveled (Protected Identities Book 3)

by Maggie K. Black

  Liam stretched like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “As for the second case you were working, that’s been wrapped up, too,” Liam said. “Looks like Alvin Walker was indeed the man who tipped off the Chimera to where you were, but that’s the only connection between the two cases. Alvin has confessed to being the man behind the Shiny Man persona, after police found respirator masks, construction jumpsuits and chloroform in his car and apartment. Alvin had contacted Braden after hearing Cleo talk about him, figuring he needed a criminal to do the dirty work and give him an alibi. They both wore the masks at different times. Alvin claimed he accidentally killed Braden in an argument.”

  “After sedating him with chloroform,” Travis said and shook his head, “and before hanging him in the living room of an abandoned house. I suspect the timing of his crimes is down to the time of year. Just like the Chimera was gearing up his operation for the summer, Alvin was facing down the end of the school year before summer vacation. I would not be surprised if he wasn’t going to be returning to school in September, for whatever reason. Plus he was accepted to a master’s degree program at Queen’s.”

  “You’d be right about that,” Liam affirmed. He glanced at Jess, like they were sharing an inside joke Travis didn’t understand. “Apparently the school principal had warned him he’d probably be laid off over the summer when the government announced education budget cuts. That would mean moving back home with his parents in Guelph or taking a job elsewhere.”

  “So it was now or never,” Travis said.

  Liam nodded. “We still don’t have a motive. Any thoughts on that?”

  “Of course we do,” Travis said. “He wanted Willow’s picture book. I’m guessing it’s valuable.”

  A wry smile curled at the corner of Liam’s lips. He glanced at Jess. “You were right about him.”

  She laughed. “Of course I was.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to get back into police work?” he asked Travis. “Because the ability to close two mostly unrelated cases in less than forty-eight hours, while also dealing with major personal issues, is the kind of thing we look for in a cop.”

  “I’m sure.” Travis glanced at Jess and, for one long moment, was lost anew in the endless blue of her eyes. Then he felt her head drop gently against his shoulder. “I’m not saying I’ll never help out on a case again. I like your team and you can count me in if you ever need me. I just don’t want to ever wear a badge again, go back to the life I had, or be the man I was.”

  The helicopter touched down on the roof of the hospital. They got out and made their way through the door, down the staircase and along the hallway, until he saw Seth standing outside a hospital room.

  “I hear we got our man, both of them,” Seth said. Hope tinged the hacker’s tired smile. “The kids are in there.”

  Travis stopped and looked through the window, feeling Jess gently pull her hand from his.

  Patricia lay propped up on the hospital bed. Willow sat in a chair next to the bed, her head resting beside her Nan while Patricia ran her hand over the little girl’s head. Her other hand brushed Dominic’s tiny fingers, as a nurse held him by Patricia’s bedside.

  Travis waited a long moment as she delighted over her grandchildren. Then the nurse led Willow and Dominic out, and waved that he could come in.

  Travis glanced at Jess. “Come with me. I want her to meet you.”

  “No, you go,” she said quietly. She squeezed his hand. “You need to have an important conversation and I’ll be right here, waiting for you when you get back.”

  He let go of her hand, slipped inside the hospital room and crossed the floor toward Patricia’s bed.

  “Hey, Patricia,” he said softly. He dropped into a chair. Her face was pale and her skin seemed more translucent and fragile than ever, but her smile was one of the brightest he’d ever seen. “How are you feeling?”

  The words seemed so inadequate for the situation, but for now they were the only ones he had.

  “Alive,” Patricia said. “Also blessed and thankful. The doctor thinks I have a little while longer on this earth. Might be months. Might even be a year. But I’ll take whatever the Lord gives me.” The smile on her lips echoed in her eyes. “Did you think about my question? Will you raise my grandkids for me when I’m gone?”

  How could she still ask him that? Had no one filled her in? Hadn’t she heard about what had happened in the past few days?

  “Patricia,” he said. “I’m a cop. At least, I was. I was a detective with the RCMP for over a decade, taking down some pretty terrible people. I didn’t randomly move to Kilpatrick. I was placed there by Witness Protection. And see that woman outside the window?” He glanced at Jess. “She was my RCMP partner.”

  Patricia let out a long breath.

  His chest ached. “I’m so sorry, I wish I’d told you sooner,” he said. “But I couldn’t. I love Willow and Dominic more than anything and I’ll do everything in my power to protect them. But I’m not the man you think I am.”

  “It’s okay.” She patted his hand. “On some level, I always knew you were a cop. Not officially. But it showed in the way you talked about people and looked out for them. You were like Joe, Geoff and Amber, and that’s why we were so drawn to you, like you were one of us. Are you going to go back to being a cop?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Or if so, not the way I was. I might help on cases. What I’d like is to help raise the kids and run the bookstore.”

  “Then I’ll draw up the paperwork and make you their father,” Patricia said. “Just promise you’ll surround the kids with a lot of family who love them and who’ll help raise them.”

  He thought of Seth and the crowd of people who’d showed up at the bookstore. “I will, I promise.”

  “And the woman you care about, she’ll help love the kids, too?” Patricia asked.

  Oh, he had no doubt in his mind that Jess would be an amazing mother to Willow and Dominic, and an incredible wife, but...

  “I haven’t asked her to be with me,” he said.

  Patricia laughed softly. “Then what are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Because as he turned and looked through the window at the beautiful woman standing in the hospital hallway, he felt like he’d been waiting a lifetime for her already.

  “One minute,” he said. He noticed Patricia was smiling as he left the hospital room.

  Jess’s head rose. Travis took Jess’s hand without a word and lead her down the hall, until he found an empty room, with table and chairs and a large picture window overlooking the endless trees beyond.

  “How’d she take it?” Jess asked.

  “Well,” Travis said. “She still wants me to adopt the kids.”

  Even as he spoke the words, he still felt stunned. Willow and Dominic were going to be his children?

  “Patricia loves you,” Jess said. “When you love someone, you accept all the sides of them, even the hard ones.”

  He looked down at Jess’s hand linked through his. Had he really found a woman who was able to accept all the sides of him? Was he ready to step up and be the man she needed him to be?

  “I need to tell you something,” she added.

  He swallowed hard. “I need to ask you something first.”

  And yet, as he felt the words forming on his lips, she squeezed his hand tightly and spoke his name.

  “Travis... Don’t... Not now...”

  And somehow he knew that she needed him to stop talking.

  He pressed his lips together and nodded, even while he felt his own heart urging him to speak.

  “Liam’s found a new witness protection solution for you, Patricia and the kids,” Jess said. The sinking feeling inside his chest seemed to mirror the weight he could see in her eyes. “It’s going to take some time to access
when it will be safe for you all to return to Kilpatrick. Could be weeks. Could be months.”

  Could even be years, Travis thought.

  “He’s found you a cottage that’s part of a summer camp about an hour north of here,” Jess went on. “It’s a really nice place. There will be onsite nursing and medical staff to take care of Patricia, in a hospice situation. There’s a helicopter pad, so she can be flown there by air ambulance whenever she’s ready to be moved. There’s a lake and swimming for the kids, along with daycare for Dominic and summer programs Willow can take part in. As far as Willow will know, she’s at camp with her family for the summer. If the situation stretches into September, there’s a good school nearby. Most important, it’s off the grid and you’ll have around-the-clock protection.”

  “It sounds perfect,” he said. Except something about the way her lips curved down at the edges told him that it wouldn’t be, because she wouldn’t be there. “What about you?”

  “I have to go back to work,” she said. “There’s a lot to be done now that the Chimera’s been arrested, and I’m an expert on the case. Once that’s wrapped up, I have a whole stack of other very important cases on my desk to get to. There are people in trouble who’re counting on cops like me to help, protect and rescue them. As much as I’d love to just spend my summer hanging out with you and the kids at the lakeside, but I just put my job on hold...”

  Her words faded on her lips as her eyes look down to his hand holding hers. Then her eyes looked back up at his face and somehow he knew, without being told, she’d have followed him anywhere if only she’d been able to find a way. He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted to confess how much he’d missed her and ask her to stay by his side and never leave again.

  Instead, words failed him as he opened his mouth and all he could do was nod.

  For a long moment, neither of them said anything.

  “This is the right outcome,” Jess said. “We’ve wrapped up two cases in three days. We stopped criminals and we saved lives. We’ve always known that, regardless of anything else that we felt for each other, it was always going to end this way.”

  But what did this mean for his heart and hers? Would he ever see her again?

  Before he could find his voice, she stood on her tiptoes and brushed her lips across his. He kissed her back, briefly and sweetly.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I love you, too.”

  She rested her head against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her and held her there for one long moment. Then she pulled out of his arms and walked back out into the hallway. And he knew, no matter how many professional conversations they had in the next few hours or days as she helped them all relocate before she left, that this would always be their real goodbye.

  FIFTEEN

  Mid-July sun flitted over the lake, sending golden light dancing on the deep blue waters. Travis stood on the edge of the wooden dock, rolled a flat stone around in his fingers and then sent it skipping across the water. It bounced seven times before finally sinking and disappearing beneath the depths. His heart knew the feeling. He glanced back at the blissful scene behind him.

  The children—soon to be his son and his daughter, by the grace of God—sat on the small strip of beach by the water’s edge happily piling sand into either small castles or large mud pies, Travis wasn’t quite sure. Willow seemed to have grown an entire inch since school ended, while Dominic had been so excited to figure out how to stand and toddle, that Travis had to baby-proof every inch of space in the cottage. He imagined the little boy would be running by Thanksgiving.

  Patricia was curled up in a chair on the porch, reading lazily while she watched the children, the hospice nurse that witness protection had provided sitting beside her. The doctor’s last update had been hopeful that Patricia might make it to Christmas, although this might be her last summer.

  His eyes rose to the pale blue sky above, dotted with the small, puffy white clouds that he and Willow had been finding animal shapes in all summer.

  Lord, You’ve blessed me beyond my wildest dreams and given me so much more than I deserve. I’m so grateful.

  And yet, with every piece of good news, every moment of joy and every unexpected gift God had given him in the past two weeks, Travis hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that the one person he most wanted to share the moment with wasn’t there beside him. He and Jess had barely talked after the moment she’d kissed him goodbye. But the thought of her had always been there, like a phantom pain in his chest from the piece of his heart she’d taken with her when she’d left.

  Yet, he felt a foolish glimmer of hope still leap inside him, as it always did, when he heard the sound of tires crunching on the gravel road. He turned and saw a blue SUV pull up the long driveway to the cottage. How many times had he stood on this very dock, early in the morning, in the middle of the day and late at night, staring at the sky and missing her? How many times had he heard the phone ring or seen a vehicle pull up the drive and found himself hoping it was her?

  The SUV stopped. The scruffy, lanky shape of Seth stepped out of the passenger side and tossed a wave in Travis’s direction before the hacker barreled down to the beach, catching Willow and Dominic in a hug as they squealed with joy.

  Then the driver’s-side door opened.

  Jess stepped out and Travis felt his heart freeze as her eyes locked on his face. Somehow she was even more beautiful than he remembered. Her hair was tied back in a braid, with gentle wisps slipping down around her face. The fact that she was wearing tan slacks instead of shorts with her pale blue T-shirt meant this was probably a professional visit instead of a spontaneous vacation. But as he walked up the dock and across the ground toward her, he knew with every beat of his heart that this time he wasn’t about to let her go until he’d said what he needed to say.

  Their footsteps stopped, barely an arm’s length away from each other, and they stood there for a long moment without speaking.

  “I came to tell you that the Chimera case has been officially closed,” Jess said, skipping straight to the point without a “hello” like they always had back when they’d worked together. “His bank accounts were drained, his associates all turned on him, his mercenaries and employees took pleas, and when he realized just how bad things could be if it went to trial, he cut a deal. He’ll be spending the rest of his life behind bars, and no longer has either the means or the clout to get revenge on any of the very many people who put him there. It is now the official opinion of the RCMP that while we recommend you exercise caution, the danger and threat he caused to your life is over.”

  Relief flooded over him like a wave and yet there was still something he needed to know.

  “What do you think I should do now?” he asked.

  “Go back to Kilpatrick,” she said. “It’s your home and your children’s home. It’s where you belong. The RCMP will provide you any help you need to relocate your family and make sure you’re protected.”

  His family. The incredible and amazing family that God had given him and yet still seemed incomplete. He took another step toward her and she moved toward him. His fingertips gently brushed against hers and he found himself wishing for a perfect time, place and setting to say the three little words that had been there underneath it all for as long as he could remember.

  “Jess, I’m completely in love you,” Travis said. “As much as I can’t wait to move back to Kilpatrick, and spend the rest of my life being Willow and Dominic’s dad, I know my life won’t be complete without you.”

  The happiness that filled her eyes was warm, deep, and felt like home. The fingers on both of her hands looped through his, linking them together. But she didn’t answer. She just stood there, looking up at him, like she was waiting on him to say something more.

  But what? What else was there to possibly say?

  “I don’t think I’m
ever going to go back into police work,” he added, “but I’m happy to advise on cases wherever I can. I think you’re an incredible cop and more suited for this work than I’ve ever been. I think I’m cut out to be the one who has the kind of job that lets him be home with the kids, while you’re cut out to be the kind who’s out there saving lives and solving cases.”

  A smile curled the corners of her lips. It was gently teasing and the one he knew he wanted to see every day for the rest of his life.

  “What else do you want, Travis?” she asked. “Just come out right out and say it.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “I want to marry you,” Travis admitted. “I want you to be my wife, help me raise the kids and have a family with me.”

  And one day, at the right time and the right place, he hoped with all his heart he’d be in a position to ask her that.

  “Yes,” Jess said. She pulled her hands from his and slid them around his neck. “I love you, Travis, and I’ll marry you.”

  Something leaped in his heart.

  “Really?” he said. “You’ll marry me?”

  “Yes, really!” She laughed. “I’ve already been reassigned from my existing job with the RCMP to a more senior consulting-detective role that will allow me to work remotely from Kilpatrick while still doing some traveling to work cases. But I’ll no longer be out in the field like I was.”

  “You changed jobs...” He swallowed hard, lost for words. His arms wrapped around her. “Why?”

  “Because I want to marry you, Travis,” she said. “I want to raise the kids with you, have a family with you, and be your partner in your life, your family, and home forever. And if you hadn’t asked me, I’d have asked you.”

  Joy filled his heart. He leaned forward. His lips brushed hers gently.

  “Daddy Travis!” Willow’s voice came from behind him. He pulled back, still cradling Jess in his arms as Willow came running across the ground toward them, followed by a red-faced Seth, Dominic in his arms.

  Willow stopped short and crossed her arms. Her lips pursed quizzically. “Why are you cuddling Jess?”