He made a sound that conveyed a whole boatload of doubt.
“I was in a hospital in Mexico,” Caroline went on. “I’m not sure how I got there, but I think Eric took me across the border, and then I escaped. Or he could have left me for dead. Someone found me in a ditch and took me to the hospital. I had injuries other than just to my head. Broken bones, and I’d been beaten. There were lots of cuts and bruises on my face.”
Jack couldn’t dispute any of those injuries, because he had almost certainly seen the report of the medical exam that she’d been given after she returned to Longview Ridge three months ago.
“I didn’t see Eric or Kingston after that, and even if I had, I might not have recognized them because of the amnesia,” she admitted.
Which meant she’d be dead right now if Eric had seen her.
“After my condition improved in the Mexico hospital, they moved me to a convalescent home because I couldn’t use my right hand,” she explained. “Because of the head trauma, too. I stayed there until three months ago, when I started regaining pieces of my memory. I still didn’t know who I was, but the name Longview Ridge kept repeating in my head.”
So had Jack’s name. And what she’d said to him kept playing again and again, too. Caroline doubted he would appreciate her mentioning that now, though.
I love you, Jack.
Yes, she’d indeed told him that. After a lazy Sunday morning of sex, he’d gotten the call to go into work, and instead of saying a simple goodbye, she’d said those words aloud. They had just slipped out—as easily as the kiss he had given her only seconds earlier. She’d seen the surprise in his eyes. Maybe the “run for the hills” look. Whichever it was, he hadn’t said it back to her.
Everything that came after had happened so fast that Caroline hadn’t had time to think about what had been said or unsaid. Unlike the last three days. Plenty of time to think then, and she hadn’t liked the conclusion. She’d been wrong to tell him she loved him, even if it had been true.
“If you thought I was such a threat, why did you stay here?” he snapped. “Why didn’t you run again as soon as you remembered what had gone on?”
“I stayed so I could try to find out the truth. Like I said, I once had a life, and I want it back. I want to find out what happened that night of your father’s murder, and to do that, I have to stay alive.”
“And you don’t believe I want you alive.” It sounded as if that disgusted him. Maybe it did. If he was clean, and she had to pray that he was, then an accusation like that would cut him to the core. But it wasn’t Jack who was her biggest worry. It was any and all of the other cops and marshals who would get called into this investigation before this was over.
She opened her mouth just as something flashed through her head. Not a memory. But a really bad thought.
“Gemma,” she blurted out. “Oh, God. Kingston could go after Gemma. You have to warn her.”
“I already have. I sent Kellan a text to give him a heads-up that there might be a problem with Gemma’s safety. Might,” he emphasized.
Kellan was his brother, the sheriff of Longview Ridge, but he was also Gemma’s fiancé. Kellan would protect her, but it twisted at Caroline’s insides that she hadn’t thought of contacting Gemma the moment she’d seen Kingston’s face on the screen. To the best of her knowledge, Gemma hadn’t actually met Kingston, but that didn’t mean the man wouldn’t try to go after her or anyone else who’d been connected to his now dead idol, Eric.
“Just please make sure that no one hurts her,” she said.
“Funny that you’d show this much concern for Gemma now. She’s your friend and your former boss, but you lied to her, too. Lying by omission is still a lie,” he insisted. “Why didn’t you tell Gemma that you had regained your memory and suspected that a dirty cop could be part of this?”
“Because I knew she’d tell Kellan,” Caroline readily admitted.
“Damn straight Gemma would have, and it would have been the right thing to do.”
“Maybe,” Caroline muttered, not convinced that it would have indeed been the right thing. “But when I came back to town and saw her with Kellan, I knew they were in love. Once I had my memory back, I decided that Kellan must have been a good cop or Gemma wouldn’t have those feelings for him. I couldn’t take the chance, though, that Kellan would say something to someone whose feelings weren’t so loving.”
“Like me,” he snapped.
“No.” Frustrated and flustered, Caroline shook her head. “I just couldn’t risk anyone knowing—not then, anyway. I can’t protect myself. Heck, I can’t even shoot straight.” She held up her right hand. “Too much damage from the broken bones, and I lost what muscle strength I had.” She paused, pushed her hair from her face. “Lucille’s been giving me self-defense training. In another month or so, I would have been ready to tell you the truth.”
He wouldn’t understand the need she had to stay sheltered and protected until she could fend for herself. But then, Jack hadn’t been held hostage by a serial killer.
Caroline watched the debate Jack was having with himself, and she wasn’t sure if he would hold his ground and continue to stand here and press her for every detail of information in her head, or if he’d continue to be her protector.
The protector won out.
“Lucille,” he called out. “Go ahead and get Caroline’s and your things packed. Bring only some essentials, one bag each. I need to take you to a new location and will have someone come for the rest of your things later.”
Caroline released the breath that she didn’t even know she’d been holding. “Please don’t bring your brothers in on this,” she insisted. “Don’t bring anyone else in on it. Not yet.”
Jack certainly didn’t agree to that, but he did head in the direction of the bedrooms. There were only two of them, hers and Lucille’s, and Lucille was in Caroline’s room, shoving meds and the laptop into a small duffel bag. Caroline jumped right in to help her.
Jack stood in the doorway, continuing to view the footage from the cameras. “Caroline, did you contact anyone when you did those internet searches?” he asked. Lucille left the room, probably realizing this was a good time for her to get her own things ready.
Caroline supposed that was a necessary question, but it sent a coil of anger through her. “No. I didn’t have anyone I could completely trust to contact. Not even Gemma. Because, as I said, she would have told Kellan.”
She left it at that, but Jack probably knew that some of those searches would have brought up pictures of Eric’s victims. So many of them. Those images would haunt her, too.
“I couldn’t access anything about the investigation into your father’s murder.” Caroline added a change of clothes to the duffel. She was about to ask him if he had any new leads, but his phone dinged before she could.
“Kingston Morris,” he read aloud. Obviously, someone had run a background check for him. “Age twenty-four. Address in Dallas. No record. Trust fund baby. His folks own a successful export business.” Jack held up Kingston’s DMV photo for her to see.
“That’s him,” she verified. “But he’s not in Dallas. He was by the pond about a half hour ago. Maybe you can put out an APB on him—”
“I’ve already done that.” Jack’s attention landed on her again. “Still believe I’m trying to kill you?”
“I never believed that,” she snapped. “I just thought...” But she waved that off and zipped up the duffel with a hard jerk as if it’d been the cause for the fit of temper she was feeling.
And the frustration, doubt and fear.
“I hate being afraid,” she said under her breath. She hadn’t meant for Jack to hear that, but judging from the way he huffed and cursed, he had. Worse, he was probably analyzing her now as the shrinks had done after she’d tracked down her mother’s killer.
“Then you need to trust m
e.” He didn’t say it as a request or plea. It was an order, and he tipped his head to indicate he wanted her on the move.
Jack also drew his gun.
Her pulse hadn’t exactly been at a resting pace, but the sight of the weapon jacked it up even more, as it did the hit of adrenaline. It didn’t mesh well with that knot already in her stomach.
With a small suitcase gripped in her hand, Lucille joined them in the hall. “How close are you parked to the house?” she asked.
“Close,” Jack assured the nurse. “I’ll go out first. When I motion for you to leave the house, move fast and get in the truck. Understand?”
The moment Lucille and Caroline nodded, Jack disengaged the security system and went out onto the porch. As he’d done at that kitchen window, he glanced around. So did Caroline, and she wished she had a gun or some other weapon that she could actually use with her still-weak hand. There was no chance of Jack giving her anything like that.
Because he didn’t trust her.
She knew plenty about distrust and had spent every waking moment of the past year feeling the same thing. It’d been worse when she hadn’t even known who she was. Well, in some ways it had been. Once she’d remembered, the distrust had collided with the fear that someone out there could still want her dead.
Not Jack.
She knew that now. But while she could trust him, she couldn’t trust the others who were in his life. Part of her wanted to strike out on her own. But that would involve plenty of risks, too.
Still keeping watch, Jack went down the porch steps and started his truck. He motioned for them to move only after he threw open the passenger-side door.
“Now,” he called out.
She and Lucille hurried off the porch, and even though it hadn’t been Caroline’s intention, she ended up in the middle of the seat, right next to Jack. Since she’d arrived at the safe house she had avoided touching him, but that was impossible now. They were shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip.
Jack immediately hit the accelerator, and while he continued glancing around them, he made a call using the control on his steering wheel. A few seconds later, a woman answered.
“Teagan,” Jack said.
Caroline knew that was his partner, Marshal Teagan Randolph. She’d heard Jack give Lucille the marshal’s contact info in case there was an emergency and she couldn’t reach Jack. That meant he must trust the woman, but Caroline didn’t want anyone else brought into this just yet. She was about to tell him that, too, but he cursed before Teagan or she could say anything.
“What’s wrong?” Teagan immediately asked.
“We have a tail,” Jack spat out. “I’m on the east farm road about twelve miles from Longview Ridge. I need backup right now.”
Chapter Three
The moment Jack said someone was following them, Caroline jerked her body around to look out the back window of his truck. She groaned, no doubt seeing exactly what Jack had caught sight of.
A black four-door sedan with a heavily tinted windshield.
The fact that it was a car made it stand out in a place where most folks drove trucks. Maybe a crazed groupie/killer wannabe hadn’t gotten the memo on that, and had failed to blend in.
Jack hadn’t had a choice about requesting backup. He’d noticed the sedan pulling out of a ranch trail just moments after he had driven past it. Of course, it was possible this wasn’t someone after Caroline, that it was just a driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe even someone who’d gotten lost, but Jack couldn’t risk not having an extra gun if something bad went down. Or rather, if something worse was going down.
The bad had already happened.
There was no scenario Jack could come up with that made Kingston Morris showing up just yards from the safe house a good thing. Which was why he should have called for backup even sooner. Unfortunately, Jack had let himself get distracted with Caroline’s bombshell. Now that he’d remembered he was a lawman and not her former lover—or the son of a murdered sheriff—he would press her more on why she’d lied. Press her more, too, on the bits of so-called evidence from the night his dad had been killed. For now, Jack just kept an eye on the car behind them.
“Are Caroline and Lucille okay?” Teagan asked. “Are you okay?”
“So far.” Jack wanted it to stay that way.
“Do you think it’s that guy, Kingston Morris, who you asked me to run?” Teagan added.
“Possibly.” But the more honest answer would be “Yes.” It would be hard to believe it was a coincidence that an Eric groupie to appeared on a security camera and then someone else showed up on this remote stretch of the road.
“There’s no immediate threat,” Jack added to his partner, “but I want backup in place.”
“Understood.”
Jack opened his mouth to give Teagan some instructions as to what he needed her to do, but Caroline tugged on his arm to get his attention. At first he thought that was because she’d seen the person behind that dark windshield, but she merely stared at him. No one had ever accused him of having ESP or even being tuned in to nonverbal cues, but he got this one all right.
Caroline didn’t want him to mention that she’d gotten her memory back. Since he couldn’t see why Teagan would need to know that right at this exact moment, Jack nodded. Obviously Caroline was good with the nonverbal, too, because she blew out a breath of relief.
“I need you to run the plates on a black sedan for me,” Jack continued with Teagan. He could hear his partner typing away on her keyboard. No doubt arranging for the backup he’d requested. But she could multitask, too, so he rattled off the license plate number to her.
“It’s a rental car,” Teagan said just moments later. “I’ll find out who rented it.”
Jack was betting the person who’d done that had used an alias. Well, unless Kingston or the person in the sedan was truly an idiot. That wouldn’t make this situation less dangerous, because Jack knew from experience that idiots could kill just as well as smart people. The idiots just didn’t tend to get away with it, but that didn’t make their victims less dead or instances like this any less lethal.
The seconds seemed to drag before Teagan came back on the line. “Lee Zeller’s in the field about twenty miles from you. He’s the closest marshal for backup.”
Jack kept his speed at a steady pace and considered his options. Zeller wasn’t one of them, and he glanced at Caroline to see if she agreed. Judging from the way her forehead creased, she did. Which meant she’d been doing some investigating and had likely hacked her way through the filters in multiple files.
He was getting better at picking up the unspoken stuff.
“Bad choice for backup?” Teagan asked Jack when he didn’t respond.
Teagan could read him. She’d been Jack’s partner for two years and had read all the files on his father’s murder.
Zeller had been involved in an investigation that Jack’s father was running at the time he was gunned down. Sex trafficking. Zeller hadn’t been a suspect in that case. Heck, there’d been no hints of any wrongdoing on his part, but Jack didn’t like the way these particular lines had intersected. Because it would only rattle Caroline even more, he didn’t want anyone from his father’s investigations playing backup for him.
Well, no one who wasn’t family.
That was going to tighten Caroline’s forehead, too, and break some rules, but that car behind them certainly wasn’t putting her at ease, either. Ditto for Lucille. Both women had turned to watch it again.
“I need to make another call,” he told Teagan. “Get me the name on the rental car.” Jack hung up and hit the button on his steering wheel.
“Call Kellan,” he instructed his phone.
As expected, Caroline whirled back around while shaking her head. Frantically shaking it. There was no need for her to repeat her warning that while
she thought she could trust Jack, she didn’t feel that way about other cops. Or anyone else with a badge and a police radio who could maybe listen in on their conversation. So, while he waited for the call to his brother to connect, he gave her proof for why she should want Kellan in on this.
Jack sped up.
So did the car behind them.
When he slowed, the sedan followed suit. It let Caroline know that there could be a real threat behind them. Maybe it was Kingston. Maybe hired guns paid for with Kingston’s trust fund. It could be someone who wasn’t even on their radar, who’d used Kingston as a dupe.
Whatever this was, this situation could get ugly. In fact, the only reason it probably hadn’t already was because the driver was waiting until they reached the road leading to Longview Ridge. It was wider and didn’t coil around like a rattlesnake. It would be easier to make a move there. Jack was guessing the guy might try to run them off the road or else shoot at them.
Caroline’s eyes were already wide, and only grew bigger when she saw how closely the sedan was mirroring their moves. Lucille saw it, too, and she threw her small suitcase on the floor of the truck, no doubt to free up her hands. She drew her gun just as Kellan answered the phone.
“You’re on speaker,” Jack warned his brother right off. “And I have Caroline and Lucille in the truck with me.”
“What happened?” Kellan snapped.
“Kingston Morris, a possible groupie connected to Eric, showed up at the safe house, and now I think he could be following us. And no, you won’t find his name in our files. That’s because Caroline only told me about him less than a half hour ago. Apparently, Kingston visited Caroline’s office while Eric was there, and Kingston made a strong enough impression for her to remember him.”
Jack paused to give his brother a second to let that sink in. It sank in quickly.
“She got her memory back,” Kellan concluded, and without even taking a breath, he added, “Dad’s killer?”
His Brand of Justice (Longview Ridge Ranch Book 4) Page 3