by Janie Crouch
“I’m on my way to get her now. Call me if you have any more news.”
“I will.”
He turned to Kendrick, but the other man held up a hand. “I heard. I’ll keep working. I’m glad they’re releasing Quinn, but something’s wrong with this whole scenario. We’ve got to figure out what.”
Baby ran out the door.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Quinn had no idea what was going on. She had spent the past four hours sitting inside some sort of police interview room.
She’d been in there by herself for most of that time. At one point, a detective in her mid-fifties had come in to confirm Quinn’s identity and that she worked at Teton State College. But then she’d left, and Quinn had been alone once more.
She had no idea why that state trooper had brought her in, and besides being read her Miranda rights, nobody else had seemed very interested in talking to her.
And then that same middle-aged detective had come in a few minutes ago and told Quinn she was free to go before she walked her out to the main lobby.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Quinn said before the woman turned to leave. “If no one was going to ask me any questions, why was I brought here?”
The woman shrugged. “Our computer system is having issues. There was an APB out for you, not a warrant for your arrest—no judge signed off on that. There might be some questions about what happened at Teton State College, but right now you’re free to go.”
“What happened at TSC?”
The woman shrugged. “I’m not at liberty to say. Someone will be in touch if they have questions for you.”
Before Quinn could figure out what other questions to ask, the woman had gone back down the hallway.
Quinn rubbed her forehead. It really was one disaster after another with her. She needed to call Baby so she could get a ride home, but when she pulled her phone out and put in her password, the screen froze.
“Seriously?” she muttered. This was not the time for her phone to stop working.
She walked outside and sat on the top step of the wide stairs in front of the police building. She completely powered off her phone then turned it back on, but once she put in her password, it froze again.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her head against them. It was like she was a magnet for difficulty. No matter what she did, it seemed to follow her.
She felt the tears gather and breathed through her nose to force them back. She needed to take a minute to pull herself together—and not cry. Damn it, she was not going to sit out in front of a police station and cry.
“Excuse me, ma’am? Are you Quinn Harrison–Pritchard?”
Quinn sucked in a shaky breath, forcing herself to pull it together and looked over at the young, uniformed police officer looking at her with some concern.
“Yes. Please tell me I’m not about to be arrested again.” That would be the last straw.
“No, ma’am. They sent me out here to check if you needed a ride. Someone was concerned that you’d been brought in by mistake, on a holiday weekend no less. I’m heading toward Oak Creek, and I don’t mind giving you a lift if you’re comfortable with that.”
“Oh, well...” She was big city enough not to want to get into a car with a stranger.
The officer nodded, looking too young to be a cop. She would’ve almost said he was a teenager. “I understand. I would tell my mother to do the same thing you’re doing—call a friend or get an Uber or something, rather than take a ride from a stranger. Although, I guess an Uber’s a stranger, too. And more expensive.”
Quinn rubbed her eyes. She reminded him of his mother? This day couldn’t get any worse.
She stood. “You know what, if you’re sure it’s not out of your way, I’ll take the ride home.”
Even if he dropped her off anywhere in Oak Creek, she’d be able to get a lift from there.
He gave her a smile. “Good. We’d hate to think that after all the screw ups today with the computer that you’d be stranded here or have to wait for a ride. That’s not the Wyoming way.”
He led her around to the side parking lot to a gray sedan. He was even polite enough to open the door for her.
“I’m Trent. At least we’re not riding in a squad car, right?”
“At least I’m not in handcuffs this time.” She didn’t want to think about what everyone must be saying about her. That state trooper couldn’t have found a more conspicuous place to decide to make his arrest.
God, it was like everything was happening all over again. A movie playing on repeat that she couldn’t stop.
Officer Trent chatted about various things, most of which she wasn’t paying much attention to. Did she like the weather here in Wyoming? Was it different than Cambridge? Did she like teaching at Teton State College? Evidently, whatever that detective had confirmed about Quinn’s identity, she had passed on to everyone in the department because Trent seemed to know a lot about her. Maybe all of Wyoming had that small-town mentality where information was passed from person to person without regards to privacy.
“Do you have memory issues by any chance?” he asked as they got closer to Oak Creek, not far from the TSC campus.
Oh God, was he about to start comparing her with his mother again?
“Not particularly, as far as I know. Why?”
“I was just wondering if you remembered me.”
Quinn got perfectly still. “Remember you? Have we met before?”
“Not face-to-face. But I would’ve thought you’d know who I was.”
Oh God. Quinn’s eyes grew wide as she stared at Trent harder. There was something slightly off about this uniform—like it was a little bit too big. Like he was playing pretend.
“Who are you?”
“Trenton Ramford, at your service.”
She recognized the name at once, of course.
She’d never actually seen his face before. The scholarship deliberations had been carefully blind to eliminate discrimination. But the name was one she would never forget.
No wonder he looked so young to her. He was young, barely twenty years old.
“It’s all coming back to you now, is it?”
“What are you doing here?” He wasn’t a cop, that was obvious. Why was he in Wyoming?
“I’m here because of you, of course.”
“Why?”
He shot her a smile that held no warmth or humor whatsoever. “To finally finish what I started. Actually, to finish what you started.”
“I don’t understand.” But she was afraid she did understand.
“It’s really very simple. You destroyed my life, now I’m almost finished destroying yours.”
She didn’t want to stay in this car with him. Her hand inched toward the door handle. When he slowed down, maybe she could make a jump for it. Every vibe he sent off suggested he was a lunatic.
“The door handle won’t work from the inside. I reprogrammed the automatic lock so it’s child-proof in the front as well as the back, or escape-proof is probably a better word for it.”
Escape-proof. That wasn’t good.
“I studied cars when I was learning the easiest ways to cause brake and steering malfunctions.”
Oh God.
When she glanced back at him, she saw he now had a gun resting in his lap. He wasn’t actively pointing it at her, but she had no doubt he would if he deemed it necessary. That wasn’t good, either.
“You ruined everything for me. You stole my entire future. By the time you were done, not only did I not get that scholarship, but no other school wanted me either.” He glanced over at her. “You know a little about how that feels now, don’t you? It didn’t take too much effort to get you blacklisted from the academic world. A few computer problems here, a couple of break-ins there... Made you look a little unstable. Unsuitable for shaping young minds.”
“It was you.”
Now his grin was downright evil. “Every single bit of it. The b
reak-in at your office, all those grades you lost, the bank card problems for both you and your ex to make him more suspicious, fucking up your house. I thought it was an especially nice touch when I transferred your fingerprints to the paint can with a piece of tape so they’d think it was you. Hell, I manipulated your phone outside the station just now so you couldn’t make any calls.”
He was beaming with pride. “It was me. All of it was me.”
She should be upset. She should be horrified that someone would hate her enough to do all of that. But all she could truly feel was relief that it hadn’t been her sabotaging herself at all.
She had an enemy, but she wasn’t that enemy.
Within a few seconds, her relief turned to panic. She knew it was him now. He’d shown his face. That meant he planned to take this a lot further than just destroying her career.
“What I did wasn’t personal, Trenton. I didn’t know who you were. I saw a discrepancy and brought it to the attention of the scholarship committee.”
He shook his head. “Do you know the good I would’ve done? The research I had planned? If you had kept your mouth shut, everything would’ve been fine. You didn’t just destroy my future; you cost the entire world the good I would have done. Hurt the people that I would’ve helped.”
Quinn didn’t need Baby’s skill at reading people to recognize Trenton’s superhero complex. Whatever revenge he wanted to extract on her, he felt perfectly justified in it.
Maybe she should try tough love.
“Is that what you believe? Well, I think you’re a liar whose delusions of grandeur are pretty much unparalleled. I didn’t do this to you; you did this to yourself. You were smart enough to have gotten the scholarship without cheating. That was a choice you made, and you paid the price for it.”
Trent picked up the gun off his lap and pointed straight at her head.
So much for tough love.
“You destroyed my future. The good I would’ve done justified the decisions I’ve made.”
Quinn struggled not to show the fear that was threatening to swamp her. She locked her muscles in place to try to stop her tremors.
“Let me go, Trenton. You’re smart enough to completely reinvent yourself. Our feud can be over right now. You’ve gotten your revenge—my career is in shambles; my financial life is barely tolerable. You got what you wanted. It’s time to end this.”
He turned down the road leading to the TSC campus. Maybe he was starting to see reason and would let her go. She’d walk all the way home from campus if she had to. She just wanted out of this car.
“That was originally my plan. An eye for an eye and all that. I’d never been happier when I learned you’d left Cambridge.”
He shook his head. “But then you came here, and instead of everything falling apart for you, it seemed to fall into place. I’ve been watching you, you know. I used to watch you from inside your house, but then that damn dog started to bark every time I was nearby. Did you like my fire the other night?”
She bit back a sob. He was going to kill her. She had no doubt about it now. He’d been in my house. All those times she’d thought she was being overly paranoid from living in a big city, when really, her instincts had been right all along.
“If you came all the way out here,” he continued, “and had been miserable—no job, no friends—maybe that would’ve been enough for me. But that wasn’t what happened.”
He slammed his hand without the gun against the steering wheel as he pulled into the faculty parking lot. “You got a job you actually seem to like, somehow scored the town’s hottest stud, and a bunch of new friends. People here who’d only known you a few weeks believed you were innocent faster and more thoroughly than people who’d known you for years back in Cambridge.”
He parked the car in the empty lot, turned off the engine, and swung the gun in her direction, his face red with rage. “It was unbelievable. You should’ve been suffering, but you were thriving.”
“I’d hardly call it thriving.” He had no idea how much his manipulation had caused her to question her own judgement, even her own sanity.
But on the other hand, she did think of Oak Creek as home now and the people here as her friends.
Baby and the Linear Tactical guys could—and would—rescue her, not because she was Riley’s sister, but because she was their friend too.
They would if they knew she was in trouble. How could they? She’d never dreamed anything like this was the reason for her problems. There was no reason to think anyone else would.
“You were going to go to jail today. I was going to make sure of it.”
He opened the car door and, keeping the gun pointed at her through the windshield as he walked around the car so he could unlock the door and yank her out. “Scream and I’ll kill you right here. Not that there’s anyone around to hear you.”
He was right. The campus was empty for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. “How had you made sure I was going to go to jail?”
He shrugged as he pulled her with him past the offices and toward the building where she taught one of her classes.
“You and I are about the same build; did you notice that?”
She hadn’t. She’d only noticed the police officer uniform when he’d first been talking to her, but now that he’d pointed it out, she realized it was true. She was probably average for a woman, five-foot-six, one hundred and twenty pounds. He was the same, but for a man, he seemed smaller.
“I used to get teased about it in high school—how I was closer to a girl’s size than a boy’s. But it came in handy when I was making it look like you broke into the computer lab here then made sure the police got the footage.”
She stopped walking for a second but started forward when he yanked her. “You pretended to be me?”
“With a little CGI help. It’s pretty convincing. Even better than the one I did back at Harvard. I would’ve taken quite a bit of delight seeing you go to jail, but I always knew that was never going to be enough. Plans changed, so I had to get you out earlier.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Someone from Oak Creek was running information about me a couple of hours ago. I think we can safely say it wasn’t your stupid, illiterate boyfriend, but it was someone. Upped my timeline, but I’m able to adjust to change.”
She still didn’t understand.
He made it to a door that should’ve been locked but wasn’t. He pulled it open to push her inside, but she dug in her heels. Whatever Trenton had planned, it didn’t involve her walking back out of this building of her own accord.
Maybe he’d shoot her, or maybe he wouldn’t, but there was no one coming to rescue her—nobody knew she was in trouble—so she had to make a move now. She yanked her arm from his hand and began to run and scream at the same time.
She didn’t get far. Trenton might be small, but he was quick.
She felt a shock of agony down her spine and her legs crumpled from under her.
“Wrong choice, Dr. Pritchard. Once again, wrong choice.”
She fought to draw in breath as he stood over her, a stun gun in his hand. When he shoved it against her shoulder, there was nowhere for her to go.
He smiled as he clicked the trigger again, and pain ripped through her system. He was still smiling as the blackness closed around her.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Baby couldn’t find Quinn anywhere at the Reddington City police station. He’d tried to call her several times on his drive, but the call had repeatedly gone to voicemail.
Once at the station, he’d asked around, talking to multiple officers, but no one seemed to know where she was. Everyone was discombobulated because the computer system wasn’t working correctly.
Baby had just finished talking to a detective who’d been the last person to see Quinn but didn’t know where Quinn had gone when Kendrick’s call came through on his phone.
“Have you heard from Quinn?” Baby answered without greeting. He walked ou
tside so he could talk without bothering anyone.
“No. She’s not with you?”
“As best as I can find out, she left here about forty-five minutes ago, but no one has any idea with who. I haven’t been able to get her on her phone.”
“Hang on a second and let me see if she took an Uber. That’s pretty easy to hack.”
If Quinn had taken an Uber rather than call him to come get her, they were going to have words.
Right after the words where he explained to her that her fears about self-sabotaging were false and they were going to find out who was behind this.
“No record of her calling for an Uber. I guess she could’ve taken a taxi, but that would be even more expensive. I can’t imagine she wouldn’t have called someone, and by someone, I mean you, to come get her.”
Baby didn’t like this. Something was off.
“I’ll keep looking for her. Did you find something, is that why you called?”
“Hell, yeah I found something. I started thinking about who had both the skill to do all this computer stuff and the desire to make Quinn miserable. And I came up with one person who ticks all the boxes. Trenton Ramford.”
“Should I know who that is?”
“He’s the guy she discovered had cheated on his scholarship application. He definitely has the skills to hack everything she’s had issues with over the past year. I’ve already got ties linking him to it, it’s only a matter of me finding the details. He’s good, but I’m better.”
Baby’s stomach dropped as he began to pace. Suddenly, his body wouldn’t hold still, like he had to run to wherever Quinn was.
“Is the guy dangerous?” Someone who would be willing to put that much effort into making Quinn look bad was definitely not stable.
“Honestly, I don’t know. I’ll email you his file. And you can see what you think.”
There was a moment of silence and then Kendrick said, “Shit. I’m sorry, man, I forgot. I wasn’t trying to—”
“Send it anyway. I have some apps on my phone that can read out loud. It’s not anywhere near perfect, but I can get the gist. But right now, I want to find Quinn. I don’t like her being out if Ramford is around.”