Hunted

by Karen Robards

  Whatever, from the smell she knew there was stagnant water somewhere nearby.

  She waited until Reed had closed the shed doors before saying, way more politely than he deserved, “Handcuffs?”

  He turned to look at her. His face was impossible to read in the uncertain moonlight, but she thought she saw weariness in the set of his shoulders before he squared them.

  “Yeah. No. I remember how you tried to escape earlier. I don’t feel like chancing a repeat.”

  “Oh my God, I told you I wasn’t trying to escape.”

  “You told me,” he agreed.

  “They’re uncomfortable. My arms are aching.”

  His lips tightened. His eyes swept her face.

  “Come on, Reed, take the damned cuffs off me. Please.”

  He made an indecipherable sound of disgust. She recognized it for the surrender it was.

  “Don’t make me chase you,” he warned.

  She huffed with indignation. “Like I’m going to take off running here? Give me a break.”

  He looked her over again. Then he said grudgingly, “Turn around.”

  She did. A moment later his hand gripped her wrist to steady it and she heard the faint snick of metal on metal as he inserted the key into the handcuffs. Looking across the clearing at the impenetrable darkness of the woods in front of her, she realized that if she seized the moment, if the instant the cuffs were removed she did indeed take off running, she would have a fair shot at getting away. All she would have to do was make it into the trees—it wasn’t far—and hide there in the pitch darkness until morning, when she could head for the road and wait for a car and flag it down. Of course, it was possible that he would catch her, but she had always been a fast runner—she figured her chances were pretty good, actually. If the man holding her had been anyone other than Reed, she realized, she wouldn’t have hesitated.

  That’s when she knew for sure that she had no intention of leaving him on his own to face whatever fate awaited him.

  She was going to do her best to make sense of what the hell was actually going on. She was going to do her best to help him to survive it, and even if it came down to it, get away. She was going to do her best to do her job, which was be a cop. Which meant protecting the innocent, bringing punishment to the guilty, and solving crime. This crime. Bottom line was, she was going to stay.

  A second after she made peace with the truth of that, her wrists were free.

  At last.

  “That feels—” better, she started to say as her arms dropped and swung and the dull ache of the stiffness in her shoulders eased. Then she realized that the cuff on her right wrist was still in place.

  “Hey.” She turned toward him, lifting her shackled right wrist to show him what he’d missed, then broke off as she watched him take the open cuff and lock it around his own left wrist, shackling them together.

  Lips parting in surprise, she stared at him.

  Then she looked at their connected wrists. Then she got it. Then she got mad. All over again.

  “Seriously?” she said.

  “You better believe it.” He tucked the key into his right pants pocket; she was careful to note where it went.

  Her brows snapped together dangerously. “I am not going to run away. I’m going to stay, and try to solve whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into, and do my best to help you live through this, which, incidentally and for your information, is not looking all that likely to happen. Regardless, you have my word I’m not going anywhere. So quit being a jerk and get this thing off me.”

  “Cher, you ever hear the phrase, ‘Trust in God, but lock your car’? That applies here.” Infuriatingly, he tugged the end of her ponytail before turning away from her. “Come on, we’re walking. I’m going to call your father while I can still get a signal. A little farther in, and it starts to be a problem. You need to stay quiet while I’m on the phone.”

  “You are a total douche bag,” she hissed wrathfully, but he was already moving, which meant that she was, too. Captured hand leading the way, feeling like a dog on a very short leash, she found herself trailing after him whether she wanted to or not. She was dragged even closer as he moved his cuffed wrist so he could fish something out of the plastic bag over his elbow. A phone, she saw as he turned it on and it lit up, one of the cheap, prepaid ones that were impossible to trace. Because he had pulled it out of the bag he had acquired when he’d lost Holly, she assumed it had been purchased from the convenience store or truck stop or one of the other businesses near the dirt hill.

  Phone in hand, he cocked an eyebrow at her and said, “What’s your father’s phone number?”

  She snorted. “Try 9-1-1.”

  “Look, I know the superintendent has a personal, private number for family, but I don’t know what it is.” His reply held a touch of impatience. “I mean, I can fart around going through the switchboard, but there’s a thirteen-year-old’s life at stake here and I’d rather there wasn’t any miscommunication.”

  “You know, that’s so touching I can feel myself getting all teary-eyed, but I still don’t know the number. It’s not like I ever call him.” She matched him narrow-eyed stare for narrow-eyed stare, then added, “You’ve got my cell phone. His number’s in my contacts.” His expression made her frown. “You do have my cell phone, right?”

  It was new. It was expensive. It had pictures she didn’t want to lose.

  “I pitched it behind some furniture right before we ran out of the house. Those things are like a locator beacon.”

  Caroline thought about that. It could have been worse, she decided: he could have pitched it into the lake. “They would have searched the house, maybe even have tried to call me on it as a way to find me. The ringer was on. I’m sure somebody’s found it by now. I wouldn’t be surprised if my father has it.”

  “Good thought.” Reed looked a question at her. “Number?”

  She told him.

  “Shh,” he warned, and kept walking as he punched in the number with his thumb. She could quite clearly hear the phone connecting and then starting to ring on the other end as they reached the woods. With the phone held to his ear, he ducked beneath a curtain of vines, which meant Caroline did, too. Straightening, she found herself wrapped in a cocoon of darkness even as she was tugged willy-nilly forward. If it hadn’t been for the glow of the phone, she wouldn’t have been able to see Reed’s tall form in front of her, or separate the towering black walls on either side of her into the trunks of huge oaks and honey locusts and sweet gums that crowded close to the path, or check that the spongy matter underfoot was—as she had devoutly hoped—no more than layers of decomposing leaves laid down like a carpet over marshy ground. Insects buzzed everywhere. Moths, gnats, mosquitoes, you name it. She felt something land on her arm, slapped at it, then felt something tickling her ankle, and brushed the toe of her sneaker over the spot. But the bugs were relentless, and there wasn’t a lot she could do except resign herself to the ministrations of the bayou nightlife.

  Caroline was trying not to freak out at the dozens of pairs of tiny glowing eyes that seemed to be looking at her from everywhere when she tripped over a root and, chain rattling, grabbed Reed’s hand for balance. Glancing around at her, he closed his fingers around her hand. She was just registering how warm, strong, and really absurdly comforting his big hand wrapped around hers felt when the ringing stopped and, very faintly, she heard her father say, “Who is this?”

  Just hearing his voice made her stomach twist. She was truly afraid that he was involved in the big bad, she realized, and the thought made her stomach tighten. Whatever his faults as a husband to her mother and a father to her and her sisters might have been—and they were many—she had always felt a grudging respect for his professional integrity. Despite everything, to have to question that made her feel—odd.

  Issues, she told herself. You have issues.

  Her father sounded wary, and she guessed that whatever had come up on her phone’s digital
display must have been something weird, like the number 000-000-0000. At this time of night, on this holiday, she shouldn’t be getting any calls, so her phone would have been silent until now, with Reed’s call. Even if the news of her kidnapping was all over TV, which it might or might not be, no one would be awake to see it.

  “Superintendent.” Reed’s voice was hard. “I have your daughter.”

  “Goddamn it, Ware, what the hell are you doing?” Martin growled. His voice sounded small and distant, but she was surprised to discover that she could hear him perfectly well. Because the path was narrow, Reed was ahead of her; joined by their linked hands, she trailed him closely. She wasn’t sure he realized that she could hear both sides of the conversation.

  “What I have to. You should know by now that I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

  “Let Caroline go.” Martin said it like any concerned father would. Like her safety was his first priority.

  Reed replied, “I will—when I get what I want.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want to make a trade—Caroline for Anton Bayard.”

  “The little brother of that punk-ass kid you just threw your life away for?”

  “I see you know who I’m talking about,” Reed said with a touch of menace.

  “By now I know everything there is to know about you. I made it my business to. When one of my cops loses his mind and pulls a stunt like this, it’s a reflection on me, and on the department.” Martin’s voice, which had been rough, gentled. “Ware, you need to come on in. I’ve been talking to some doctors here and they think that the loss of your family may have triggered some kind of mental breakdown. Come in and let us help you.”

  A mental breakdown triggered by the deaths of his son and ex-wife? The explanation seemed breathtakingly plausible, and for the briefest of moments Caroline was staggered by it. Could the big bad that Reed was reacting to really be all in his mind? Then she recalled Holly’s fierce insistence that “the cops” had done him and Reed wrong, and did a lightning review of every interaction she’d had with Reed since she’d arrived on scene at the Winfield mansion. Conclusion: the man was absolutely sane.

  Which meant that her father was full of shit. Or maybe, the tiny little voice of that part of her that still seemed to be the superintendent’s loyal daughter suggested, maybe he was just wrong.

  She found herself fiercely hoping that he was just wrong.

  “Leave my family out of it.” Reed’s voice was ugly.

  Martin continued without responding: “All that stuff you were talking about—those murders you thought were suspicious—I had somebody review them after you punched your way out of my office. They’re no more than ordinary street crime, Ware, and that’s the truth. I’m at headquarters. You come on in here, and bring Caroline with you, and I’ll prove it to you.”

  Reed said, “Only way I’m bringing Caroline anywhere near you is to trade her for Anton Bayard.”

  Martin gave a short laugh. “Thing is, Ware, you may be having mental issues, but Dr. Cook—you remember him, he’s the psychiatrist the department had you talk to after the accident and he’s here right now, at headquarters, in fact—Dr. Cook doesn’t see you as a murderer, and I agree with him. You held me hostage, and a whole bunch of others, too, and not one of us is dead. I don’t see you killing Caroline. Worst you’re going to do is keep her somewhere until we find you. Which we will. So I don’t see that you have much leverage to make a deal. Why don’t you just come on in?”

  Caroline grimaced. Her father had zeroed in on the same thing she had: the issue of Reed’s credibility as a dangerous kidnapper-turned-potential-murderer. If Reed hadn’t killed any-one yet, what were the chances that he was going to start with her?

  Reed said silkily, “You’re right, I’m not a murderer. But then, I don’t have to be. All I have to do is tell Caroline everything I know. Every little detail, Superintendent, just like I told it to you. What do you think about that?”

  There was a short silence.

  “You son of a bitch.” Martin’s volume dropped so that the words were barely audible, at least to Caroline, but the animosity in his voice iced the air. It told Caroline that Reed’s threat had surprised him, that it had teeth, that it was something her father feared. It also signified capitulation.

  Plus, she realized, it made it plain that what Reed was referring to was something that her father really, truly wanted kept secret. About suspicious murders, Martin had said.

  One more piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow—no, I guess that’d be tonight—at 8 p.m. on that phone you’re holding to make arrangements for the trade. In the meantime, you want to make sure Anton Bayard is just as fine and dandy when you pass him off to me as when you picked him up,” Reed said. “We understand each other, Superintendent?”

  “Yes.” The single clipped syllable was like nothing Caroline had ever heard come out of her father’s mouth.

  It made her throat tighten.

  It signified that he was beaten. Martin Wallace was never beaten.

  “Good,” Reed replied, and clicked off.

  Caroline had been listening so intently that when he stopped without warning she almost walked into his broad back.

  “Hell,” he said. “Looks like we’re going to get wet.”

  As she edged closer than she would have liked to a trailing vine in order to stand beside him, she saw that he was staring out at the oil-black waters of an inlet sliding past only a few dozen yards away. It wasn’t wide: maybe twenty feet. His hand held hers firmly, but she got the impression that at the moment he could have been gripping anything: the fact that it was her hand was incidental. His chiseled face was hard and set, and he appeared to be preoccupied with his thoughts. Just beyond where they stood the trees thinned out, and dense thickets of needlegrass clogged the marshy bank that led out to the water. A few stray beams of moonlight streaked through the canopy, gleaming darkly on fat drops of rain that had just begun to fall. Their ominous plop-plop warned of a downpour to come.

  Before she could reply he glanced at her and added, “So. How much of that did you overhear?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHAT WAS THE SAYING? You can’t go home again? Now that he was pretty much over reeling from the shock-and-awe onslaught of the past forty-eight hours, Reed was acquiring a bleak acceptance of the fact that it was true: his house, his job, most everyone he’d known, and everything he’d worked for his entire life were lost to him. Getting himself and Holly and Ant out of this alive was looking like the best he could hope for, and even that was a long shot.

  The only way he was ever going home again was to prove that his suspicions were correct about the involvement of members of the NOPD in the murders of the four victims in the cemetery (those four would be enough, he judged; proving police involvement in the murders of Magnolia and the others would be gravy, but not essential to getting his life back), and that his actions in taking hostages at the Winfield mansion and in kidnapping Caroline were justified.

  He had to stay alive long enough to do that. He had to figure out which cops were involved and thus actively wanted him dead in order to silence him, and which were merely out to kill him because they genuinely thought that he was now a dangerous criminal run amok. Then he had to be able to prove to the satisfaction of a judge or a prosecutor or a grand jury or a cabal of honest cops, depending on the scenario, that the results of his investigation were in fact accurate.

  Yeah, and learning to leap tall buildings with a single bound would be a nice trick, too.

  But because that seemed like the only path that did not involve him either dying or spending the rest of his life as a fugitive, he was going to try, to see what he could do, with the understanding that if things got too dicey he could cut and run at any time as long as he got Holly and Ant out along with him.

  Caroline was a problem. The sweet seventeen-year-old that he remembered had turned
into a beautiful, smart, resilient wiseass, and he flat-out liked her. She was also sexy as all hell. Kissing her had been a total error, an impulse of the moment that had been too urgent and unexpected to resist, and the best thing he could do for both of them was put it out of his mind. Unfortunately, that was way easier resolved than done: thoughts of taking her to bed were staking out an ever enlarging territory in the back of his mind.

  But he wasn’t going to do it. At this point, Caroline could still go home. Her life was still there waiting for her. She hadn’t tripped and fallen down the rabbit hole like he had, and for her sake he was going to do his best to keep it that way. Add to that the fact that she was a cop, the damned superintendent’s daughter to boot, with all kinds of loyalties and allegiances that he had no way of knowing about or understanding but that might ultimately come back to bite him, and that he had kidnapped her, for God’s sake, and he would be a fool if he wasn’t still having some trust issues where she was concerned.

  And never mind the fact that every time he looked into her eyes he could see just how sexually aware of him she was.

  Okay, sex was the last thing he needed to be thinking about right now. To have any chance at all of pulling this off, he needed to keep a clear head.

  So he was putting bedding Caroline out of his mind, chalking it up as something to be followed up on later, maybe, as a lagniappe, a little special reward he would allow himself to explore if he could fix this, if he got his life back, if they had a chance for anything beyond a one-night stand. Which was a whole lot of “if.” In the meantime, he was mentally consigning her strictly to the purpose he’d acquired her for: saving Ant.

  It didn’t help that thanks to their clasped hands, she was walking so close beside him that he kept feeling the soft curve of her right breast brushing up against his arm with every step she took.