Nanny 911

by Julie Miller

  “I’ll make the arrangements.” Quinn picked up the phone to call David again. “I’d like you back here by seven. Fiona’s bedtime is at eight, and that’s strictly observed—even on holidays. Maybe especially on holidays with all the excitement. It’s important to maintain her routine.”

  Miranda nodded, then pulled her black cap on, camouflaging the femininity of her beautiful hair. “I’ll see myself out. Make sure security locks up after me.”

  She paused to look at Fiona, lying on her belly with a water marker and drawing mat, with something like disbelief or even dread on her face. Then she shook it off and hurried into the hallway toward the front door.

  “Michael…” Quinn’s heart squeezed in his chest as he watched Fiona arrange her doll beside her and tuck another marker beneath the stuffed hand so that they could draw together. There’d be a hell of a price to pay once he found out who had threatened to take that precious life away from him. “You’re certain Officer Murdock is capable of being a nanny to Fiona?”

  Michael was a wise man who knew how to choose his words well. “She’ll keep your daughter safe.”

  Chapter Four

  Something wasn’t right.

  Miranda doused her headlights and climbed out of her truck as soon as she was through the front gates of the Gallagher estate. Pulling her stocking cap low around her ears, she tucked her ponytail into the back of her navy blue coat so that there was nothing to reflect in the lights from the flood lamps mounted over the security cameras there. With a bit of nimble timing, she slipped through the gates before they clanged shut and locked behind her, and she slipped into the shadows of the moonless night.

  She stopped behind a towering pin oak to peer up and down the line of walls and ivy. The car was back. Well, a black sedan was parked against the sidewalk about an eighth of a mile from the gate. Without proper streetlamps out here, it was impossible to make out if it was the same car from this afternoon.

  And where was the guard? Hadn’t Quinn Gallagher ordered his security chief to place a man at the front entrance?

  If so, where was he? She’d come in exactly the same way she had that afternoon, punching a button and being cleared over the intercom system. Even though she was now technically a member of the household staff, someone should have stopped her.

  She inhaled deeply, then slowly released her breath so that she didn’t create a telltale cloud in the cold air that might reveal her presence. Calming her pulse rate the way she had at the shooting range last night, Miranda reached up beneath her coat and pulled her gun from the holster clipped inside the back of her dark jeans.

  Rule 1 of SWAT was reconnaissance. Know your enemy. Know his location. Know his intention. Action was pointless unless you had a plan.

  Of course, she’d been checking out a similar hunch about suspicious activity that day the Rich Girl Killer had clocked her in the head and left her for dead so that he could go after his real target. She’d been so intent on proving her worth and saving the day that she hadn’t seen him coming until it was too late to use her weapon, too late to get the jump on him. She’d fought him off, but she was so woozy from the initial blow that she passed out before she could stop him. She’d failed.

  Tonight there were some niggling doubts that she could handle this similar situation on her own. But without Captain Cutler, Sergeant Delgado and the others, she was a team of one. She didn’t have the luxury of second-guessing herself. Michael Cutler and Quinn Gallagher were counting on her to do this job. Time to get some answers.

  Sticking close to the trees, she crept several yards through the snow, past the parked car. Crouching low, she raised her Glock between two steady hands and approached the car from the rear blind spot. Jeans or not, she still wore her service boots. The composite soles had picked up some melt-away salt and now she was crunching across the cleared pavement.

  But she could hear the radio music rocking out from here. No way could they hear her approach. She could make out two silhouettes inside—the driver and a passenger in the front seat. Not the same setup as before. But if one of them had silver hair, then they had a lot of questions to answer.

  “KCPD! Open up! Get out of the car. Get out of the car now!” She slipped her fingers beneath the passenger-side handle and lifted, quickly returning her grip to the Glock. “Hands on your head. Get out!”

  The sudden blare of music faded into background noise in her head. “What the hell…?”

  Both men were wearing GSS Security uniform jackets. And both were slumped in their seats.

  Miranda quickly shucked a glove and pressed her fingers against the side of the passenger’s neck. He had a pulse, faint but steady.

  She leaned in to turn off the radio and shut down the engine. As she reached across, she took note of the coffee spilled across the driver’s lap, and of the cup tipped over in the passenger’s lax fingers and dripping onto the floor mat at his feet.

  Surging adrenaline sparked through Miranda’s senses. The guards had been drugged. Why? She glanced up at the gates. The man in the command center had spoken to her before unlocking the gates. Was the danger already inside? Were the Gallaghers under attack?

  Ah, hell. Her team of one suddenly seemed awfully small and outnumbered. She needed to get help. She needed to sound the alarm.

  “Hey!” She shook the man closest to her. Dark hair. The driver was a blond. Neither had been the man watching the estate earlier today. She lightly smacked his cheek. “Wake up!”

  He groaned and leaned back, his head lolling against the headrest. But he didn’t wake up. Glancing up and down the street, she saw no sign of anything. No vehicle. No pedestrians. No lights beyond the holiday decorations adorning a couple of the neighboring driveways. Isolated. Alone. Again.

  Her breath came hard and fast in her chest. She hadn’t seen anyone when the RGK had blindsided her, either. No, no, no. She couldn’t let those self-doubts get inside her head.

  Miranda’s toes danced inside her boots. Treat this like she was on the firing range. Take control. “Think, Murdock. Think.”

  She tried to wake the driver, but both men were out for the count. Her instinct was to reach for the radio on her shoulder and call in backup. Only, her hand tapped nothing but wool. She was in her civvies now. She had her cell phone in her pocket. But did she call 911 or Captain Cutler? She had no clue about Quinn Gallagher’s number or his chief of security or…

  Her gaze alighted on the dashboard radio. Of course. They’d be connected to the estate’s security office.

  But as she pushed the snoozing driver aside to get to the radio, something tumbled from the inside of his coat and landed at her feet. “What’s this?”

  She picked it up.

  The damp wind whipped at her cheeks, but she was turning cold from the inside out.

  It was a little doll. A roughly made, voodoolike miniature of the rag doll Fiona Gallagher always had with her. Only this one was covered in something red and sticky. And instead of beautifully embroidered eyes, this one had two tiny slashes drawn across its face.

  A dead doll.

  Miranda pulled out a piece of paper that had been tucked inside the doll’s dress. She unrolled the stained note and read the message typed inside.

  And then the anger kicked in, casting out self-doubts and second-guessing.

  See how easily I can get to you? Make it right,

  Gallagher, or this is your little girl.

  Uh-uh. Not on Miranda Murdock’s watch.

  She put the note back where she’d found it and pushed the drugged driver aside to grab the radio. She had no idea about GSS procedures, so as soon as she had a clear channel and a stern “Who is this?” she went with the whole get-your-butt-out-here-now protocol.

  “Hey, whoever’s in the command center, this is Randy Murdock, KCPD. I’m one of you now, and I need backup. You’ve got a situation with your guards here at the front gate. Someone in charge will want to see this. Oh, and you may want to call an ambulance.” />
  “WHATEVER THEY SPIKED the coffee with will have to wait until we can get it to a lab,” Quinn declared. “But this is gelatin. Red gelatin and food coloring.” He tossed his plastic gloves into the trash can beside his desk—resisting the urge to toss the gruesome doll in there, as well. “Probably made with corn syrup instead of water to keep it from setting completely. It’s an old kid’s trick to make fake blood.”

  “This isn’t any kid’s joke.” Miranda stopped her pacing on the far side of his desk and came up between his security chief, David Damiani, and her own boss, Michael Cutler. “It’s a very calculated, very sick way to make you feel threatened.”

  “It’s working.” Quinn’s gaze skipped from her slender curves to David’s bulk and steaming temper, to Michael’s lanky height and piercingly intelligent eyes, and back to the unblinking intensity of Miranda’s mossy gaze. Was that concern he saw written there? Temper? Fear?

  Beyond his own intellect and drive to succeed, one of the things that had aided Quinn in his rise to the top of his field was his ability to read people. David was ticked off that his men had gotten hurt and that all his preventive measures and training hadn’t been able to stop the attack. Michael was thinking, evaluating possible plans of action, trying to come up with a scenario where everyone came out unharmed.

  But Miranda? She was a complete mystery to him.

  With her gun and plain talk, she was as tough as any man in the room. Yet there was something curiously vulnerable about that tumble of emotions alternately darkening and brightening her eyes. Her blue jeans and plain brown sweater did little to highlight her femininity, yet his body had hummed with a distinctly masculine energy from the moment she’d entered the room—peeling off her stocking cap and shaking that golden ponytail down her back, removing her coat and tossing it onto a chair with that effortlessly sinuous grace of hers.

  Miranda Murdock was a baffling conundrum he wanted to figure out.

  But analyzing that fascination was a distraction he didn’t need right now.

  The clock is ticking. The text he’d received while watching Fiona open up her gifts this morning had been perfectly clear.

  “The only way an enemy could get under my skin is to threaten my daughter.” Quinn took his eyes off the distraction in the room and paced off the walls of books surrounding them. “The question is why? Who did I step on? What offense did I commit? I paid the money he wanted.”

  “Into a Swiss account we’re working on tracing,” David reported. “Thus far, we’ve dead-ended at a dummy corporation called United Lithographers of Southern Europe.”

  “U LOSE?” Miranda’s eyes went dark again as she pieced together the acronym that was a mocking message in itself. “That’s cold.”

  David’s expression was almost a sneer as he glanced down at her. “We’re still investigating.”

  “Have you found out where the text messages are coming from?”

  The follow-up question didn’t improve David’s mood. “Disposable cell phones. A different one each time. Impossible to trace.”

  “Apparently, I’ve really ticked someone off.” Quinn didn’t need bickering children in the room right now, each trying to prove he or she was the better security expert. “I spent today updating that old patent of mine, which is still practically worthless on the market, and I sent it to the generic email account specified. Now I have to run a simulation to prove that it works by noon tomorrow. I’ve got a couple of techs in the GSS lab working to trace it in the meantime.” He sank onto a black leather sofa, then shot to his feet again. He wasn’t used to being a man without answers. He didn’t like it. “What is it I have to ‘make right’ by the start of the New Year?”

  “That could be a long list,” Michael suggested. Add guilt to the list of problems Quinn needed to fix. He’d taken his friend from his new wife and baby, and teenage son, on their first Christmas together as a family. But Michael hadn’t complained. “You don’t become as rich as you are without someone else being jealous of what you have. A competitor might think he got the short end of a business deal. You fired an employee who feels he or she didn’t deserve it. Someone thinks you took credit for an invention he or she worked on.”

  “I didn’t,” Quinn argued. “I came from nothing. I worked hard and used my brains to earn every last penny I have.”

  Michael shrugged. “This perp we’re looking for doesn’t have to think logically, the way you do, Quinn. He may be fueled by emotions and misconceptions. What matters is that, in his mind—or hers—you’ve done him wrong.”

  “So this guy could just be some lunatic?” Nobody in the room argued the possibility. Quinn raked his fingers through his hair. “Ah, hell.”

  “Could it be something personal?” David asked.

  Quinn stopped at the mantel over the empty fireplace and studied the collection of family pictures there. Growing up, he and his mother had had so little. Now he had so much. But none of it mattered. Only one thing mattered. “I have no personal life beyond Fiona.”

  “What about Valeska?”

  Quinn’s gaze snapped across the room to David’s dark eyes at the mention of his late wife. “Val worked her way up through my company. She earned her vice presidency before I ever married her. If somebody resents that…”

  David averted his gaze for a moment, knowing he’d hit a hot button. But Quinn hadn’t hired the former military man because he shied away from a potential confrontation. The GSS security chief crossed the study to meet him at the fireplace. “What about Valeska’s father? Vasily Gordeeva? He spent a lot of years in that political prison. Supposedly, the U.S. was supposed to be a safe place for his family. Does he blame you for Valeska’s murder?”

  “Three years after the fact?” Tilting his head to the ceiling, Quinn vented his frustration on a sigh before answering. “The Rich Girl Killer murdered my wife in the backyard of our own house that day—leaving my infant daughter in the stroller right beside her. And this bastard thinks I need to pay a higher price than that?”

  Miranda’s soft gasp reminded him that not everyone knew the story as well as he did. She turned away when he tried to meet her stricken stare and apologize for his bluntness. But he could flush the anger and grief from his voice. That was a skill he’d learned long ago, back with the bullies in the Shoemaker Trailer Court. “I’ve never even met my father-in-law. Val grew up here in the States without him. Even when I did business in St. Feodor, she never went there. It wasn’t safe for her to return to the country. How could Vasily hold me responsible for her murder if the two of them never had a relationship? And now the plant in St. Feodor is closed. Other than a few investors there—who made a tidy profit through GSS, I might add—I have no ties.”

  He was surprisingly relieved to see Miranda face him again. “Your father-in-law is in prison?”

  “In the Eastern European country of Lukinburg.” Quinn scratched his fingers through his hair and moved back toward his desk. “He’s a political dissident, accused of financing a failed rebellion there. I don’t know much more of the story than that. For their own protection, he severed his relationship to Valeska and her mother, and they emigrated to the U.S. She never talked about him.”

  “That sounds like heavy stuff.”

  “We’re talking about my enemies here, Miranda. Not Vasily Gordeeva’s. This enemy is right here at home.”

  “With all due respect, sir, we don’t know where your enemy is.”

  Why was she arguing this? “This isn’t about politics in a foreign country. This is about greed or payback or both.” Quinn stopped and turned right in front of her. “I’m guessing I’ll receive another task to complete tomorrow—something every day until the end of the year. Let’s try to get some answers sooner rather than later, shall we?”

  She propped her hands at her hips and tilted her eyes up to his. “Well, I think you’re asking the wrong question.”

  He opened his mouth to reply to the provocative taunt, but for once in his life, the ri
ght words wouldn’t come to him. He had to move away before he could speak again. “Michael, isn’t there some chain of command you teach your people to follow?”

  “I also teach them to think on their feet.” Not a yes man in the room tonight. “What is it, Randy?”

  Her cheeks heated with color and her expression animated at her captain’s encouragement to share her opinion. “Why drug the guards? Why not kill them outright? They didn’t hesitate to kill those men at the plant overseas. If you’re going to take the risk of them being able to identify you, why give them the chance to wake up and point a finger?”

  Sound reasoning. Hell, why hadn’t he thought of that? More irritatingly, Quinn wondered why he hadn’t expected that from her. Why couldn’t he get a read on Miranda Murdock? She was antagonistic yet insecure. She was a physical woman, yet she also showed a keen intellect.

  Michael, fortunately, wasn’t wasting any time of the puzzle of Miranda Murdock. “So whoever served them that coffee is either someone they know and trust, or it was done by someone they never saw at all.”

  David thundered back across the room. “If you’re suggesting that one of my men is behind this—”

  “Check them out,” Quinn ordered.

  “—after I’ve personally and thoroughly screened every last one of them.”

  Damn it, this was his company, his family that was being threatened. He paid Damiani a lot of money to follow his commands. “Screen them again.”

  Michael was a little more diplomatic. “It’d narrow down our list of suspects. Your men were drugged outside the gate because the perp couldn’t get inside. Security’s still good here.”

  No wonder he was one of KCPD’s top negotiators. A deep breath heaved through David’s barrel chest and his burst of defensive temper dissipated. “But if they can figure out how to get to them out there, it’s only a matter of time before they figure out how to get past my men and the protocols here. I’d better not have a mole on my team.”