I jumped right in.
“Your biological mother was married to Mahoney?”
He visibly stiffened, clearly not comfortable with this line of inquiry. “I explained that to Ash and the others last year.”
“I know. I’m just curious how much you know about his family.”
“Family?”
“His nieces and nephews, his sisters?”
Bodhi tilted his head a little as he thought over my question. “I met the one nephew who was in the FBI a couple of times. Grant Kennedy. He always seemed to have an excuse to go to the house while I was there. But I never met the others.”
“What about his sisters?”
“The one sister was always around. Lilith. I got the impression she and Jack were close.”
“What about the other? Kennedy’s mother?”
Bodhi shook his head. “They never talked about her.”
“What was Lilith like?”
He sat forward and rested his arms on his knees. “She was controlling. Bitchy. She pissed off my mother whenever she was around because Jack would sort of cower around her. It was the only time I ever saw Jack act less than in control.”
“Why do you think she had that sort of effect over him?”
“Because she was his sister, his older sister. He had respect for her.”
“They were close?”
“Very. Sometimes they’d lock themselves in his office for hours at a time. My biological mother, she told me they were discussing family business in there. I guess his father ran the organization before he took over and expanded it. But there were some legal aspects to their father’s business that still existed and she took control of those when she left her marriage in Illinois.”
I nodded. “What about your mother? What happened to her?”
He tilted his head to one side. “They divorced four years ago when she found out he’d brought me into the business.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “She and I were never close. It was probably the most selfless thing she’d ever done for me. And it didn’t even help me, to be honest.”
“Did your mom and Mahoney have children?”
“She said he wasn’t capable of having children.”
“Why would she say that?”
Bodhi smoothed his hands over his legs. “She said he was shot when he was young and it made him incapable of fathering children.” He shrugged again, but there was amusement in his eyes. “Seems like karma to me.”
“But you never met the niece?”
“No. Never.”
“Okay. I guess that’s all I needed.”
“Why did you want to know about his family?”
He seemed genuinely curious. I tilted my head to one side, lies dancing in my head. I decided to go with something like the truth.
“We’re trying to figure out where he would go if he managed to get free from federal custody. Family seemed like a logical place to start.”
“Jack was something of a recluse. There aren’t many places he would go other than the house back in Connecticut.”
“They why did he come to Wyoming?”
Bodhi hesitated a second. “That always confused me, too. But I guess his determination to get at Becky Kay was just that strong. Strong enough to overcome his overwhelming fear of germs.”
“Germs?”
“Jack nearly died in the hospital after that shooting I told you about, the one that left him infertile. The wound itself wasn’t that bad, but he contracted one of those antibiotic resistant infections while he was recovering that left him in a medically induced coma for fifteen days. After that, he became something of a severe obsessive compulsive when it came to germs. He wouldn’t let anyone in the house unless they’d gone through a chemical wash and he wouldn’t shake hands. It drove my mother crazy.”
“Yet he came to Wyoming and to a hospital room where Becky was recovering from burns.”
“Yeah. Confusing, huh? Jail must be driving him insane!”
After Bodhi got up to drive his stepdaughter to school, I wandered over to the bunkhouse and borrowed David’s computer while he was occupied with Ash. He’d left it on a spare desk, open to the desktop that was a picture of his wife and kids. I located the file I wanted and pulled it up, smiling a little when I saw what I was hoping for.
“What’s that shit eating grin for?” Kirkland said, throwing himself into the chair beside me.
“This is definitely Mahoney’s bunker and I think I know what he was building it for.”
“What?”
I glanced at Kirkland, my smile growing wider. “The man was running away from home.”
“What?”
“He was building a bunker with special air filters and chemical baths. It even has an emergency quarantine feature built in.” I turned the computer around so that Kirkland could see it. “You see these specs. It confused me a little when David first showed it to me. But now I understand. Mahoney has severe OCD.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. That’s why he rarely left his home. It wasn’t to avoid implicating himself in any crimes. It was to avoid germs.”
Kirkland laughed. “That’s fucking insane!” He studied the permits a moment longer, then sat back and regarded me. “But why Wyoming? Why not build onto the property he already owned in Connecticut?”
“I think he was escaping.”
“But why?”
Before I could formulate an answer, Ash came to the door of the conference room that he’d turned into his personal office.
“Listen up! We just word that Mahoney escaped the convoy that was tasked with taking him to Denver this morning. Turns out the prison had delayed his move, leaving the prison a little after dawn this morning. They were hit outside Laramie. Four US Marshals were killed.”
A ripple moved through the room. My heart hurt for the marshals who’d been killed, but I wasn’t incredibly surprised. I was expecting this.
“He’s on the loose, likely preparing to return to Connecticut. The FBI are searching the area, but they’ve had no luck thus far.” Ash looked around the room, his eyes falling on me. “The local FBI field office is asking us to help in the search, so if there are any volunteers, please come see me. However, Joss, I’d like you and Kirkland and Donovan to remain here on the ranch in order to protect the family we’ve got here.”
I inclined my head, aware he’d made these personnel choices based more on the danger Mahoney posed to me than the help I could be to Sutherland and Mabel and the rest of the mothers and children on the ranch.
Everything was coming together just as I’d expected. It was time to put the plan in action.
***
Becky Kay was a pretty girl, a brunette with blue eyes. She looked different than she had the first time we met, allowing her hair to outgrow the dye she’d used to disguise her identity. There were scars visible on her arms from the fire that had burned her a little more than a year ago. But it hadn’t done anything to mar her beauty.
“Donovan told me that Mahoney’s on the run.”
I nodded. “They want you up at the main house with Sutherland.”
“Okay.” She sighed, the weight of the situation clearly pushing down on her shoulders. “I don’t think this is ever going to end.”
“It will. We’ll find him and take care of him.”
“You’ll kill him?”
There was no judgment in her eyes. In fact, she looked more like she was pleading with me.
“We’ll stop him, Becky. I promise you that.”
She almost looked disappointed. I wished I could tell her everything, but the fewer people who knew, the better.
“Can I ask you something?”
She glanced at me. “Anything. I’ll try to answer honestly.”
“Did your husband—did Grant Kennedy—have any birthmarks?”
Becky frowned, tilting her head as she regarded me. “He had a port wine stain on his thigh. Why?”
“What theory?”
“You will be the first to know if I prove it’s accurate.” I gestured toward the main house. “You should go inside now.”
She frowned at me, but she did as I asked.
David was in the barn working furiously on his laptop.
“Ready?”
He nodded. “Are we sure we want to do this without the reconnaissance we were going to do first?”
“Ash’s announcement pushes up our schedule a little.”
“What about the others?”
“Already waiting at the Spraberry motel.”
David closed the lid of his computer and gathered the bag he had sitting to one side that had various electronics in it. “Let’s go.”
We climbed into the rental car Carrington had kindly gone to the airport to rent for us this morning. I snuggled low in the passenger seat while David drove, careful to steer wide of areas where people might spot us. We couldn’t have Ash sending someone out to stop us. Not that he was in much of a position to notice. He was still in the bunkhouse organizing the groups of volunteers ready to go out on the hunt in Laramie.
Too bad they’d be miles off their target.
The town was a surprisingly busy little place, people walking the narrow streets to check out the shops and the single restaurant. Even though the influx of the rich and famous had pretty much stopped, ordinary tourists still came to town in the vague hope of spotting Bodhi Archer among the townspeople. I’d heard that he was more than happy to offer autographs to those who respected his and his family’s privacy, but often had few qualms to call the local sheriff if someone got too close. He was, after all, just a man enjoying the fruit of his labor when he was in Wyoming.
We drove down the center of town and out into the countryside, moving through a highway cut into pastureland. I watched on the GPS for the moment we reached the coordinates just outside the area where we believed the bunker had been built. It was a good twenty-minute drive outside the town, but the little dot finally began to creep closer to our location.
“Should stop here.”
David pulled to the side of the road in an area that appeared to be nothing more than an abandoned ranch. There were trees clumped about a hundred yards in front of us, otherwise it was all flat grazing land. Nothing truly remarkable about the location. But when David opened his laptop and began tapping furiously at his keyboard once again, something happened.
“It’s here,” he said, his fingers moving faster and faster. When they stopped, he turned the computer to face me and I found myself looking at the feed from almost a dozen security cameras—quite sophisticated cameras, really—inside what looked like someone’s spartanly decorated home.
“This is it?”
“That’s it. The signals coming from right over there.” He gestured to the trees. “I’d bet the entrance is inside there, in something that’s probably disguised to look like a rundown shed or something.”
I watched the cameras, waiting for some sort of sign of life. But there didn’t appear to be any human inhabitants.
“Where are they?”
“Laramie is little over two hours from here. Maybe they just haven’t arrived yet.”
I nodded, contemplating our next move. “How far away will we still get the feeds?”
“As far as you need to go.”
“Let’s go to the motel. We’ll keep an eye out from there and decide when to hit.”
David put the car in gear and we pulled out, driving the ten minutes or so back to the motel. Donovan, Carrington, and Kirkland were parked in an SUV in the motel parking lot, laughing at something when I walked up to the window.
“How’s it going, boys?”
“Hello, Momma!” Kirkland said, leaning across Donovan to hand me a french fry from the bag he’d been munching on. “Did you find it?”
“Of course.”
“When do we get to work?”
His eyes were bright with excitement. Donovan joined in, smiling brightly as he asked the same question. “Are we ready to go?”
“Soon, boys. Soon. We just have to wait for the rat to fall into the trap.”
And that was exactly what was going to happen. Then we’d be one step closer to ending this nightmare.
Chapter 23
Carrington
Joss leaned into my chest as she curled up in the backseat, her head on my shoulder. David crawled in and took a seat in the third row, his computer open on the seat beside him. Kirkland turned so that he could see Joss, that goofy smile that always seemed to be on his face when he was near my wife fully present today.
“Ash is going to shit bricks when he figures out what we’re up to.”
“I’m hoping he won’t figure it out until it’s done.”
Donovan shook his head. “I still think we should have clued him in.”
“If we had, he might have told his contact at the governor’s office and that person would have tipped off Mahoney. I couldn’t risk that.”
“If you told him his contact was compromised—”
“He’d want to know how I knew it and that would be complicated.”
“How did you know?” Kirkland asked.
“I set a trap.”
“What kind of trap?”
They reminded me of children who were never fully satisfied with a single answer. I squeezed Joss’s shoulders, reminding her I was there to put an end to it if she wanted me to. She leaned back and kissed the bottom of my chin, making it clear that she was fine on her own.
She’d always been fine on her own.
“I feel like you’re not telling us everything, Joss,” Kirkland said. “And it makes me a little nervous going into an operation without knowing everything.”
“You do know everything.” She raised her hand and started ticking off details. “Mahoney bought out hundreds of acres of land here in Wyoming for the purpose of building himself a bunker that would remain isolated as long as he owned all the land around it. There was a real possibility that the original plan included a resort that would be built over the bunker, but that idea went out the window when he was arrested during the attempted murder of Becky Kay.”
She paused for a second. “Mahoney went to prison in Rawlins until a court date and a location for that court date could be chosen. The feds who are in charge of all this have finally decided to move Mahoney to Denver where he can be held in a federal pen rather than the state one here, easily accessible while the trials of his co-conspirators are conducted, as well as his own trial which is due to start very soon. Today he escaped federal custody while in transit to Laramie to fly to Denver.”
Joss touched a new finger as she continued. “Mahoney still wants to kill Becky Kay for the death of his nephew, Grant Kennedy. Mahoney is also suffering from severe OCD, therefore he’s going to want to go to a place where he can feel safe in his neurosis. That would be the bunker he continued to build here over the past year or so. There is no reason to believe he would travel elsewhere under such circumstances.”
“That’s all good and dandy,” Donovan said, “but what do we do if we’re wrong?”
“We join Ash’s search party.”
“And if we’re right?” David asked, speaking for the first time since arriving at the motel.
I shifted so that I could see him. Joss remained relaxed in my arms.
“Once we have confirmation that he’s in the bunker, we infiltrate it and find him. And then we take him out and return him to federal custody.”
“Just like that? What about the whole murder scenario we were talking before?”
That was my question. I was still convinced that killing Mahoney was the only way at this point. We had to protect our family.
Joss leaned back and looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Her eyes were saying that I’d heard the same things she had. How could I ask such a question?
But had I? I’d heard t
he words that came out of Rush’s mouth, but not the conclusions Joss made upon hearing them.
“We’re going to end this, Carrington. We just have to be careful the way we go about it.”
“We better figure out what that is pretty soon,” David said. “We have movement at the bunker.”
He set the computer up on the back of the seat so that we could see what he saw. Sure enough, there were three men walking through the corridors of the bunker, headed to what appeared to be some sort of control room. As we watched, lights came on in rooms the cameras were scanning through, revealing a library, a kitchen, and a living room. The damn place looked a lot like an ordinary family home, minus the windows.
Silence fell in the van as we continued to watch. Kirkland started counting aloud, marking how many people were moving among the corridors of the bunker. Donovan noted the weapons he could see on the belts of the men, his eyes constantly searching as though he expected to find a cache of weapons somewhere. Joss had a blueprint she’d somehow gotten her hands on, making notations in each of the rooms so that they could tell what was what and where it was located.
I’d seen this side of an operation before, but it’d never been quite like this. There was tension, but not as much as I’d expected. It was like the actual work had calmed them down, brought them to some sort of focus. It was almost as if they got off on this part of things.
“There’s Mahoney,” Donovan suddenly said. “They’re walking him down the main corridor.”
Joss sat up a little straighter and watched. She didn’t seem angry, just curious.
“He doesn’t look well,” she said to no one in particular.
“He’s lost weight,” Kirkland observed.
When I looked at him, all I saw was the hateful man who’d tortured our family these past months. I saw red when I looked at him.
“That could be to our advantage,” Joss said. “He’ll be weaker.”
“Did he look like this when you visited him?”
Joss shook her head. “This is new. He was robust when I saw him.”
“How could he lose so much weight in such a short time?”
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