Baby Breakout

by Childs, Lisa

  Jed approached, either to comfort his sister or explain. But the DEA agent intercepted him and led him off into another section of the hangar.

  As if she had silently communicated with the blond man, Macy carried Isobel off toward an open door and stepped inside a room. Unwilling to be separated from her daughter again, Erica followed closely.

  She gasped at the room in which they stood; it wasn’t an office, as she would have expected. It was a studio apartment complete with kitchenette, skylights, queen-size bed and wall-unit furnace. “This is so nice.”

  “Not what you expected?” Macy asked.

  “Nothing has been,” Erica replied, “since Jed showed up at my door.”

  So many questions widened Macy’s dark eyes, but she only remarked, “I can relate.” She settled the little girl onto her hip as she reached into a cupboard and pulled down a box of crackers. “Are you hungry, sweetheart? What about you…?”

  “Erica.”

  Macy’s breath caught again. “Erica Towsley?”

  “You know who I am?”

  “I know Jed wanted Marcus to find you for the trial,” she replied. “He never really told me why, though.”

  “He was with me the night of the murders,” Erica admitted. “That was actually the night your niece was conceived.”

  Macy let out a whoop of excitement that had Isobel giggling. “That’s it—the evidence we need to overturn his conviction.”

  Erica shook her head and, with regret, replied, “No. My memories of that night aren’t very clear. They wouldn’t hold up in court.”

  “But Isobel…”

  “Is not proof that he never left—that he didn’t do what he was convicted of.”

  Isobel hadn’t asked about her daddy yet. Maybe she was too young and too sheltered in Miller’s Valley to even realize that she didn’t have one. But she actually did have one, and when she was old enough to ask about him—how ever would Erica explain why he hadn’t been part of her life?

  He couldn’t go back to prison; he couldn’t lose any more time with his daughter. The little girl deserved a father.

  But, regrettably, Erica knew that life wasn’t fair. And a child didn’t always get what she deserved.

  “He was framed,” Macy maintained, as she resolutely had throughout his trial. “There has to be some way to prove that.”

  “Find out who framed him,” Rowe said as he stepped inside the room with Jed.

  Erica suspected Jed already knew. He had evaded that car that had been so determined to run them off the road. He had driven with the skill and composure that had had him surviving Afghanistan and probably prison, too.

  But for just one moment he had lost it—when the car window had lowered. His broad shoulders and body had blocked her view, so Erica hadn’t caught a glimpse of the driver. But Jed had.

  She hadn’t been able to question him about it yet, not with Isobel in the van with them. But confident Macy would care for her newly discovered niece, Erica stormed over to Jed and pulled him out into the hangar with her.

  “You already know,” she accused him. “You saw who was driving that car and you recognized him!”

  He shook his head in denial, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

  She grasped his arm, and his muscles bunched beneath her fingers. She couldn’t shake the truth out of him; he was too big. She could only demand he tell her. “Who was it? That monster tried to kill my daughter. I have a right to know who he is!”

  Jed’s dark eyes filled with torment and regret. “Erica…”

  “Mommy?” The little girl must have wriggled free of her aunt, who stood in the doorway behind her, as Isobel ran to them. She squeezed between her father and mother and clung to Erica’s legs. “I’m scared…”

  Regret had nausea rising in Erica’s throat as she realized that her daughter must have overheard her outburst. “You’re safe, honey.”

  Jed’s big hand cupped the back of their daughter’s head. “You’re safe, sweetheart,” he assured the child. “I will protect you.”

  Because he knew what the threat was. Because he knew who it was…

  * * *

  JED HOPED HE HADN’T just made a promise he wouldn’t be able to keep. He had seen the skepticism on Erica’s lovely face. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t trust him. He didn’t blame her. He stared after her as she carried their daughter back inside the studio apartment with his sister.

  Rowe stayed behind, standing at Jed’s side. Probably ready to slap the cuffs on him.

  If he tried…

  Well, Jed already knew he could take the Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Even though he didn’t want to fight a man he now considered a friend, he would in order to keep his promise to Isobel. To protect her…and her mother.

  “She seems to know you well,” Rowe remarked, almost idly.

  “If she knew me well, she wouldn’t have spent the past three years thinking I’m a killer,” Jed said, wondering if he would ever get over his bitterness and mistrust.

  “But she was right that you did recognize the driver.”

  Jed shook his head, unable to believe what he’d seen hadn’t been just his exhausted mind playing tricks on him. If he shared his suspicion with anyone, they’d lock him up for certain—in a sanatorium, though, instead of a prison. “No, she’s wrong. I haven’t slept in days. I could barely see the road, let alone his face.”

  Rowe uttered a heavy sigh of frustration and weariness. Dark circles rimmed the DEA agent’s eyes. He had already tried talking to Jed once.

  But he’d evaded Rowe’s questions and insisted on checking on Erica and Isobel instead. After the harrowing trip away from Miller’s Valley, he had wanted to make certain they were really all right.

  He hadn’t been convinced that Erica had allayed their daughter’s fears despite her valiant attempts. She was an amazing mother. But Isobel was an intuitive child and had figured out that more was going on than a pretend game of bumper cars.

  “Jedidiah,” Rowe said, commanding his attention again, “I can’t help you unless you tell me everything that you know.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” Yet. “What about you? You got anything to tell me?”

  “About the money?” Rowe asked. “I checked all her financial records. Erica Towsley doesn’t have it.”

  Jed released a breath of relief. For three years he had believed she had betrayed him, and he’d hated her for it. And he’d hated himself for being a fool for her. It was good to know that he had been wrong about that. About her…

  “A couple of years ago she inherited some money,” Rowe continued, “a building and a bookkeeping business in a trust from an aunt, but there’s no other money. She barely has enough to cover her expenses.”

  He had seen the building and the bookkeeping business on the main floor of it. It was nothing like the building Marcus Leighton had owned. As dilapidated as it was, she hadn’t inherited much—more a money pit than a source of income.

  “What about Leighton? Did you check his financials, too?”

  “He got a chunk of change before your trial began and some mysterious deposits over the past three years,” Rowe said, confirming his suspicions, “but not the amount that was embezzled from your clients and your firm before the murders.”

  “That money had to go somewhere…”

  “I can’t find it,” Rowe said, frustration making his voice even raspier. “I’ve brought the records along with me, so you can go over them. That’s your area of expertise, not mine.”

  “You track down drug money all the time, following it up the ladder to whoever’s in charge.” That was partially how the man had busted the warden of Blackwoods Penitentiary. The other part involved the hit the warden had put out on the DEA agent, ordering Jed to carry out that murder.

  Rowe nodded in acceptance, not arrogance. “But this person’s skills exceed mine. By far. Whoever hid those embezzled funds knows how to hide money where it won’t ever be found.”

>   Oh, God, it had to be…even though it made no sense, even though it wasn’t possible…

  “She’s right and you’re a damn liar,” Rowe accused him, his eyes narrowed as he studied Jed’s face. “You definitely know who the hell set you—”

  Sirens saved Jed from uttering another lie. They echoed inside the hangar, bouncing off the tin walls and ceiling. Then the thump, thump, thump of helicopter blades drowned out the sirens.

  Had Jed been a fool to trust this lawman? Had he been set up? And now, even before a voice announced it, he was surrounded with no means of escape.

  * * *

  JED PROBABLY THOUGHT he’d lost him. He ignored the quick sting to his pride. It didn’t matter what Jed believed. It didn’t even matter if he believed what he’d seen…

  Nobody else would believe him if he shared his suspicions. It sounded crazy and would make Jed sound crazy. And the escaped convict would have no way of proving his suspicions.

  He would make certain of that. He twisted a silencer onto the end of his gun. All he had to do was wait for the perfect moment.

  It would all be over soon.

  No one else would know who was really responsible for Jedidiah Kleyn’s tragic fall from hero to desperate convict but him.

  And Jed…

  Chapter Eleven

  Was this how prison had felt for Jed?

  Enclosed?

  Tight?

  Airless?

  Erica had never realized she had issues with claustrophobia…until now. Thank God Isobel was safe with her aunt, and even though Erica had just met Macy, she knew the woman would protect her niece. While Erica worried about her child, she wouldn’t have wanted her with her mother.

  Erica was trapped beneath a grate in the cement floor, in a shallow drainage tunnel through which oil, gas and water ran from overhauled planes into holding tanks under the hangar.

  But was it the small space in which she was confined or was it the man with whom she was confined that had her feeling panicked and overwhelmed?

  Jed lay half-sprawled across her, as if shielding her with his body in case someone opened fire on them. But no one knew they were here…

  “I know he’s here,” a deep male voice declared with absolute certainty.

  “Sheriff York, you wasted your time coming all the way here from Blackwoods County,” Rowe Cusack told the man. “And you wasted the time of all of these local officers you brought in as backup.”

  Fortunately the sheriff had already dismissed those officers after they had thoroughly searched the hangar. Or maybe not so thoroughly…

  York pitched his voice lower when he replied, “I’m out of my jurisdiction, so I had to notify the local authorities that they potentially had one of the escaped convicts in their area.”

  “You should have let me handle this,” a woman remarked with little respect for the sheriff’s efforts. “Since I wouldn’t have had to notify anyone. They overreacted and scared off the escapee before I had a chance to apprehend him.”

  “Ms. Franklin is a bounty hunter,” Sheriff York explained to Rowe, his voice gruff with disdain. “She is the one that used some questionable measures to determine that you’re helping Kleyn.”

  Rowe snorted loudly. “And you believed a bounty hunter?”

  “On national television and to me personally, you admitted yourself that you think he’s innocent,” York said.

  Erica had seen the DEA agent’s interview replayed that morning when Jed had been in her room, watching their daughter sleep. Until then she hadn’t seen the whole interview, just a few terse responses from the DEA agent to the reporters’ incessant questions. He had been much more loquacious during his interview and had shared his opinion of Jed with the reporters.

  “I do believe he’s innocent,” Rowe told the sheriff and the bounty hunter. “And I intend to prove his innocence so that his conviction gets overturned and he’s released from prison.”

  “But first he has to go back to prison in order to be released,” the sheriff pointed out, “so tell us where he is.”

  “Why do you think that Jedidiah Kleyn would come to me?” Rowe asked.

  “Because you’re dating his sister,” the bounty hunter answered. Apparently it was no lie that she had some sources.

  “I’m engaged to his sister,” Rowe corrected her with obvious pride in his fiancée. “But I’m still a lawman. If Jed comes to me, I will bring him in to authorities myself.”

  Ms. Franklin snorted now as loudly—and unladylike—as Rowe had. “Like your fiancée is going to allow that.”

  “My fiancée respects the law,” Rowe replied, his voice deepening with the implication that the bounty hunter did not.

  “Who’s the kid she’s hanging on to?” Ms. Franklin asked, prying for even more information. “I pulled up some information on Kleyn’s sister and nothing ever mentioned her having a baby.”

  Over Jed’s shoulder and through the thin slats of the grate, Erica discerned the shadow of the woman’s arm pointing toward the room where Macy had stayed with Isobel while Mommy and her friend Jed “played hide-and-seek” with the police officers.

  “But she looks just like your fiancée,” the woman continued, “so she must be a relative.”

  Erica opened her lips, but before so much as even a gasp of fear could slip out, a big hand closed over her mouth. And Jed’s face blocked her view of the grate, his eyes staring down into hers. With no words, he was asking her to trust him—that somehow, he would protect their daughter.

  “She’s proof that Jed’s not here,” Rowe said. “No one would want a child anywhere near a wanted man with a shoot-on-sight order out on him.”

  “That’s not true,” the sheriff said, quick to deny the claim.

  “It may not be official, but it’s true,” Rowe insisted. “The governor put out the bounty on his head and someone else put out the shoot-on-sight order with a substantial reward offered for his death.”

  The sheriff sucked in a breath as if in acknowledgment of what the DEA agent claimed.

  “He’s right,” the bounty hunter agreed. “There actually is a shoot-on-sight order out on this escaped convict. He killed a cop, man—”

  “He didn’t kill anyone.” Rowe defended him, his voice rising in anger.

  “He was convicted,” Ms. Franklin stubbornly maintained, “so in everyone else’s mind, that makes him guilty.”

  Jed’s stare intensified, as if he was looking in Erica’s eyes to see if she also found him guilty. While she had completely accepted his innocence of the crimes for which he’d been convicted, she couldn’t trust that he hadn’t changed in prison. That being sent there despite his innocence hadn’t so embittered him that he wasn’t an entirely different man from the one she’d fallen in love with so long ago.

  “And a lot of people don’t think that two lifetimes was a sufficient sentence for what he’d done,” the bounty hunter said. “They think he deserved death.”

  “Michigan doesn’t have the death penalty,” Rowe reminded her.

  She snorted again—even louder than before. “That’s too bad.”

  Erica shivered at the woman’s coldness. No doubt she would comply with the shoot-on-sight order if she actually caught sight of Jed. If Erica were stronger, she would have shifted them around, so that she was on top. But she wasn’t big enough to hide Jed. She could only hope that the bounty hunter didn’t look into the grate and discover them.

  “Cusack’s also right about not wanting the kid around,” Ms. Franklin continued. “Kleyn might be monster enough to use a child as a shield…”

  Jed’s body had already been tense as he lay atop Erica, but now his muscles tightened more, as if he were struggling for control.

  Was that why he had insisted that she and Isobel come along with him? Not to protect them but to protect himself?

  To use his daughter as a shield…

  A muscle twitched along his jaw, as if his control was slipping. Or as if he had read her reaction and kn
ew that her doubts were back.

  She had been a fool to trust him, though. A fool to come along with him. While it might not have been a good idea for her to wait for the police to show up at her apartment, especially given the way they had stormed the hangar, she could have taken Isobel someplace else. She had enough money in her account to hole up in hotels for a few nights.