Duplicate Daughter
Page 16
“I’m going to carry her,” he shouted, turning to look over his shoulder. “You swine mistreated her. She’s too weak to walk!”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea, you do that,” Benito shouted back.
Nick picked her up effortlessly. This was where he had to make a leap of faith and trust other people to do what they’d promised they would do. The meeting earlier that day with the FBI had been awkward, though, full of half-truths and dangling sentences as Nick tried to keep Katie’s involvement out of it. Had he succeeded? Had they staked out this place hours before Benito and his boys arrived? The head agent had said they would, and Nick had no choice now but to believe she had. Taking a deep breath, clutching Caroline close, he broke into a run.
He heard shouts as gunfire erupted behind him.
Sure enough, Katie had responded to the shots by running to meet him, reacting as she always did, leading with her heart. He put her mother down and turned to find Kenny in the middle of a flying dive. Nick launched himself in a counterattack, hitting Kenny in the stomach. The big man fell with a thud and Nick hit him over the head with his gun for good measure. Twice.
He didn’t want to get caught with a gun last registered to a dead cop, so he stuck it back in his pocket and, crouching low with Katie and her mother, waited for the air to clear.
There were several new sources of lights as the gunfire petered out. The FBI had done their job. Benito was in handcuffs, one man was down, the computer was in custody. Nick helped Katie get her mother to her feet. “I’ll be right back,” he told Katie. “Stay covered.”
She nodded, the smiling plastic mask covering everything but the glittering of her eyes.
Nick approached the agent he’d met with when he and Katie first arrived back in Seattle after that fateful ferry ride. He’d known their only chance was to involve the law. “There’s another one on the ground a few yards back there. He should be coming to any moment.”
Agent Loni Boone smiled as she directed the medics to Kenny’s position. “Is the woman okay?”
“She’s okay.”
“Good. I know we have the ledger, but like I told you when we met, it won’t mean much without your father’s testimony. I did hear Benito mention there was a picture of himself with Ciddici on that drive. That needs context. We need your father to come forward.”
“He will.”
“You said he was injured?”
“Yes, but expected to recover. I’ll call his doctor later and check up on him.”
“Tell me where he is and we’ll go get him.”
He smiled coldly, trying to imagine Doc’s reaction to a plane full of FBI agents landing in his field. He said, “No. My father will come to you.”
“I want Benito for more than kidnapping. I want him for extortion and racketeering.”
“I know.”
How was Nick going to explain his father’s gunshot wound? Without Carson to blame it on, what could he say? He’d have to come up with a story—
“Benito and Ciddici have some very creepy associates,” Agent Boone said firmly. “This project, for instance,” she said, with a sweeping motion taking in the abandoned construction site, “is mob controlled, closed down in a legal battle with the former owners. One of them has disappeared and the other one is suddenly very quiet. Your father doesn’t stand a chance on his own.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Well, Mr. Pierce, when you came in today and told me about all this, I thought you were nuts. I guess you weren’t.”
“Not so as you could tell,” he said. “Okay with you if we take my stepmother to the hospital? She’s in pretty rough shape and, well, she and her daughter need a little time to…reconnect.”
“That’s fine. We’ll question all of you tomorrow, especially her, though from the look of that hole they had her in, I doubt she saw anything.”
“Lucky for her,” Nick said, shaking Boone’s hand.
He walked away, stopping only when Boone called out. “We’ll try and keep both your names out of this,” she said.
“Much obliged,” Nick said, tipping his cowboy hat. He kind of liked the thing.
As he approached the car, he slowed down. He could see two dark shapes in the back seat but heard no voices coming from the open door. Maybe he should give Katie and her mother a little time alone. He turned to look at the now-well-lit crime scene. Couldn’t go back there. Police cars and ambulances had shown up and the area was a zoo. Professionals were busy gathering information and flashing pictures.
And Katie? It struck him suddenly that she now had what she wanted, what she needed: a family. She would be leaving now. He knew how anxious she was to grab every possible moment with her mother before her mother was whisked away into obscurity.
And her sister. She’d barely had a chance to introduce herself before they had to separate.
Katie was safe, Caroline was free.
Well, so was he.
KATIE TOOK OFF her coat and draped it over her mother’s shoulders. It wasn’t until Nick reached in and screwed back in the car light that she finally got a good look at her mother.
Her face was streaked with dirt. Her clothes were damp and moldy smelling, her breathing labored, her washed-out blond hair dirty and matted. A rattling cough suggested a bronchial infection. She sat very still beside Katie, looking down at her filthy hands until she suddenly began shaking, looking from Katie to Nick, who sat in the front seat staring back at her. Finally, she said, “Who are you people? What do you want with me? Where’s Bill? Where’s my daughter?”
Her questions came rapid fire, her gravelly voice threaded with fear.
Nick said, “Calm down. Everything is okay. You’re safe. Bill is in good hands.” Addressing Katie, he added, “Honey, you’re still wearing your mask. It’s safe now, you can take it off.”
“Of course.” Katie whipped off the mask.
Caroline’s eyes flew wide-open. She said, “Tess?” but then she shook her head and said, “You’re not Tess.”
“No.”
Tears filled Caroline’s eyes. “Katie? Is it you? Am I still dreaming?”
“You’re not dreaming,” Katie said softly. She’d been waiting for this instant since the first moment she read her father’s letter, given to her after his death, the first time she’d learned her mother hadn’t really died during childbirth. And in the heartbeat it took her mother to assimilate the startling news, it dawned on Katie that she might be too late, that her mother might have preferred having only a single child to love and didn’t need or want a duplicate daughter.
In the next heartbeat, Caroline threw her arms around Katie’s neck and pulled her to her chest, pressing her so close it was hard for Katie to breathe. Then she pushed her away and searched her face, fingered her red hair, looking, it seemed, for some sign of the child she’d abandoned, looking for ways Katie resembled Tess, looking for who knows what. Over and over again, she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was wrong, Katie, forgive me.”
Katie was only vaguely aware of Nick driving the car away from the construction site. She, too, was crying. There were still so many questions to be answered.
Katie dug her cell phone out of her pocket. She’d put it there hours before in the hope she would soon use it to call Tess with good news. She punched in the hospital number and Tess picked up almost immediately.
“Guess who I’m sitting next to?” Katie said.
Tess screamed. “Our mother?”
“Yes.” Looking at Caroline, who still gripped Katie’s free hand, she said, “Yes. Our mother.”
Chapter Seventeen
It took some doing to find a shortwave radio with which to contact Doc, but someone at the hospital knew someone else with a brother-in-law who had a rig and, eventually, Nick drove to a stranger’s house in the middle of the night to call his old friend.
“He’s doing okay,” Doc said. He sounded as though Nick had woken him up. “You got the bullet out, but it looks like
you did the operation with your feet.”
“Don’t you remember, Doc? My job in the war was to get shot at. Your job was to patch me up.”
“Yeah, I remember. Okay, what about his heart?”
“You were right. His wife says he has a mitral valve problem. He’s scheduled for surgery in a few weeks.” Nick read off a list of medications his father was supposed to take.
“Common stuff, I have it on hand,” Doc said.
“When can he travel?”
“Not for at least a week. Maybe more. I need to go to Seattle to see wife number three, what’s her name, Elaine. I’ll fly down with him. You send money.”
Nick smiled. “I’ll cover your trip, too, Doc. Least I can do. The FBI is anxious to see him. I’ve stalled on his whereabouts, but you’d better get him here as soon as it’s safe.”
Nick said the last “over and out.” His next call was from the car, using the disposable cell phone he’d bought to call Benito. He woke Helen up, as well.
“I suppose she’s asleep,” he said, with a sudden sweeping desire to hear his daughter’s voice.
“Of course she’s asleep. And you? You’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” he told her.
“What about that man?”
“You mean my father?”
“Yes. Is he out of our life for good?”
“Do you mean did he die? No, looks like he’ll make it. I stashed him at Doc’s place. I’ll be on my way home soon. I got myself a motel room so I can catch some shut-eye.” Reading off his receipt, he gave her the number of his room. “My plan is to catch a plane up to Juneau in the morning. I left the DeHavilland there. I’ll call you from the airport.”
“Sounds fine,” Helen said. “There’s another storm predicted—”
“There’s always another storm predicted.” It didn’t matter to him. A storm wasn’t going to keep him from Lily.
By the time he drove across town to the hospital, the sun was rising, and the fog had cleared. Seemed like an omen. Good weather for flying.
He found Katie asleep in a chair next to her mother’s bed. Caroline’s eyes were wide-open and she smiled anxiously when she saw Nick.
“Did you talk to Bill?” she whispered.
“I talked to his doctor. Told him about the heart situation. Everything is under control.”
She nodded.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“No. I can’t bear to close my eyes. I can’t bear the thought of dreaming.”
He sat down in the free chair on the opposite side of the bed from Katie. “Dreaming?”
“More than dreaming,” she said, pausing to cough into a tissue. “More like remembering. There’s just too much I want to forget.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Nick said.
“I know it doesn’t. But I’ve done some terrible things, Nick. It’s okay if I call you that, right? Katie has filled my head with stories about you.”
“Sorry about that,” he said, glancing over at Katie. She looked so young and so peaceful.
“I can never tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me and your father. Maybe now we can all be a family—
“That can’t happen,” he said quickly, interrupting her fairy tale. “I’m not my father’s son, Caroline. It’s too late for all that. Didn’t Katie tell you the Justice Department is willing to offer you and my father new identities in trade for his testifying at Benito’s trial? It’s his only chance for long-term survival. You’ll have to make the choice of going with him or staying here with your girls.”
She looked stricken. Her attention wandered over to Katie and she sighed. “How can I leave her again?”
He wanted to ask her how she could have left her in the first place, left her with a man addicted to gambling, left her with no mother. But the pain in Caroline’s eyes was so acute he didn’t dare, and besides, Katie said she’d had a pretty good childhood, despite her father’s problems. Maybe it had worked out the best it could.
He said, “It will take time for you to get better and for my father to mend. Time to arrange a trial. You’ll have time, I think, for figuring out what’s best to do, what you need to do, and time for getting reacquainted with Katie.”
“And you?”
“I’m flying home tomorrow morning. I have a little girl who needs me.”
“Lily,” Caroline said.
“Yes.”
“Katie couldn’t stop talking about her, either.”
Nick’s throat closed. He tried clearing it and was horrified to find his eyes burning. Well, he hadn’t slept in a long time. “When she wakes up, tell her I got a room in the motel across the street and that I’ll look in one last time before I take the car back to the rental place and fly home,” he said. “I need to get some sleep and you two have a lot of catching up to do.”
Caroline looked slightly panicky. “What do I tell her?” she pleaded. “How do I explain myself?”
He stood up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess you try to make her see how it looked through your eyes all those years ago. Don’t worry. Katie has the biggest heart in the world. She’ll meet you halfway.”
KATIE COULDN’T remember ever crying this much. Not even after her father died, not even when she awoke in the hospital to discover her twin sister injured. Never.
It was just all so sad. Her mother’s brutal honesty left Katie gasping for breath, her heart aching. For herself. For Tess. For her father. And for her mother, most of all.
The woman had made some awful decisions, but so had her father, and his hormones hadn’t been acting up, his body hadn’t been tortured by postpartum depression. He’d also been older. He should have known better. It was amazing to Katie how arbitrary her parents had been to deny Tess and her their birthrights as twins—to grow up together, to be there for one another.
But it was over and there was nothing to be served by withholding understanding and forgiveness.
On the heels of this emotional maelstrom, the FBI and the police showed up. She held her mother’s hand during their interrogation. They informed her they’d already spoken with Nick, that they’d caught him as he left the hospital. Katie gave her own version of the hostage exchange, claiming truthfully that she’d been too far away to hear or see much. She knew there would be more questions to come.
It didn’t matter. Nick had said to tell the truth with the exception of talking about Carson. Pretend he didn’t exist in all this, Nick told her. If her name was ever connected to his death, the mob would come after her. As she had no desire to relive Carson’s death, and her role in it, she found this incredibly easy to do.
But wouldn’t his body eventually float to the surface, complete with bullet wounds? Wouldn’t his identity be linked to Benito? Had anyone on the ferry seen what happened; would they come forward someday? The gun’s silencer and the noise of the engines had muffled the gunshot, had the fog adequately obscured the view? Did Katie have to live the rest of her life with this hanging over her head?
After everyone had left, Katie and her mother called Tess again and discovered she was in the process of checking herself out of the hospital. She and Ryan were driving up to Seattle the next day.
Time for a big reunion.
“Too bad Bill’s son is leaving tomorrow morning,” her mother said once they were off the phone. “He told me to tell you he’d stop by the hospital one more time to say goodbye. He’s got himself a room across the street to catch up on his sleep.”
Katie produced a wooden smile.
Of course Nick was leaving. What would possibly keep him here?
She swallowed back a burst of regret. Nick was leaving.
NICK WOKE UP the moment the motel room door opened. He sat up abruptly, blinking at the infusion of outside light that backlit his guest.
Katie. He’d have known her size and shape anywhere.
“How’d you get in here?” he asked, glancing at the clock. It was almost evening. He’d been asleep f
or seven hours.
“I told the motel clerk I was your wife and she let me in.”
He rubbed his head with one hand. “Some security.”
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” she said, as she closed the door and threw the room back into twilight.
He switched on the bedside lamp. “I would have come by to say so long.”
She took off her coat. “Mind if I use your shower?”
“Of course not.”
She disappeared into the bathroom with her suitcase while he lay back down and tried to close his eyes again, but of course, that was impossible with her so close by. Naked and wet. Standing in his shower.
She took her time in there. At last the water stopped running and then he waited.
He was sitting up in bed when she opened the bathroom door. She was holding a white towel around her body. Damp tendrils of red hair curved around her cheeks, curved around her throat.
He said, “Katie—”
But she stopped him with one finger held in front of her lips. “Don’t,” she said softly.
“Don’t what? I was just going—”
“To tell me you’re too old or too burned-out or too something or the other. To tell me I’m too precious to waste on a man with no room in his heart. Something like that, right?”
She’d been advancing as she spoke. He ran a hand through his hair as he looked at her glistening skin, her full lips, her long, bare legs.
She let go of the towel. It fell to her feet in slow motion and she stood before him stark naked, more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen, despite the lingering bruises.
More beautiful than Patricia?
Patricia. She was gone and suddenly it struck him how disappointed she’d be in what he’d become. Why had he forgotten how full of life she’d always been?
Katie was beautiful, just as Patricia had been, both in their unique way. And like Patricia, Katie set him afire.
“Katie,” he said again.
“You don’t want me,” she said.
“I don’t want you? Are you crazy?”