“How far is it to St. Augustine?” I’d heard of it only in passing. It was on the east coast of Florida. Some kind of historical site, a vacation destination. Not exactly the place you ran when your billionaire boss and the FBI were looking for you.
“Three and a half hours,” he said. “We’ll get there faster.”
I buckled up.
“What’s she doing there?” I asked.
“No idea. He hasn’t made contact with her yet. He’s waiting for me.”
Alec ripped out of the parking lot, and the car jostled as he drove onto the connector road that would take us to the highway. Unopened mail from the side compartment on the door spilled out over my feet. He must have forgotten it was here. I reached for the various envelopes, sorting them into a pile on my lap. While we climbed the on-ramp, I flattened the crinkled and bent edges, trying to distract myself from the anxiety spiking in my chest.
Jessica Rowe could change everything. She could vouch for Alec, verify his story. Two witnesses testifying that they had firsthand knowledge of Maxim Stein participating in white-collar crimes would put him away for certain.
“She’s the missing woman my dad was looking for in the Keys, isn’t she?”
Alec nodded grimly. “He had a pretty solid lead on her. I guess she tried to take a ship to the Caribbean but got caught with a fake passport. She disappeared after that.”
It didn’t surprise me that my dad could find someone the FBI couldn’t. They had bureaucracy to deal with, the red tape. He didn’t need anyone’s permission to follow a lead, and as I’d heard numerous times from his colleagues growing up, he was a bloodhound when it came to solving a case.
I snorted. “Nice of you both to fill me in.”
“You had enough on your mind.”
“Nice of you both to make that executive decision.”
“You’re pissed.” He smirked. “You know what that does to me.”
I glanced down as he adjusted himself.
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
He chuckled, gaze never straying from the road.
“What did you mean back there?” I asked, shifting gears. “You’ve talked to him about me, haven’t you?”
“You’re all we ever talk about.”
“You know what I mean. About you and me.”
Alec slouched into the seat. “About my intentions with his daughter?”
That sounded suspiciously like a quote from my dad.
“I told him I wanted to marry you when we flew to Cincinnati,” he said. “He’d already shown me his gun collection. I figured lying about things wasn’t going to help the situation. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best introduction.”
I stared at him. Blinked.
“You just said it. I’m going to marry Anna. Just like that.”
He scoffed. “Give me a little credit. I asked his permission.” He changed lanes. “And then in so many words he told me where I could shove my question.”
I smirked. I couldn’t help it.
“That sounds like him.”
“I’m not who he had in mind for you.”
It moved me that he cared. He knew my father’s blessing was important to me, and so it became important for him, too.
I know good men can make mistakes, my dad had said. What matters is how they fix them.
“I think you might be just what he hoped for,” I said.
A tense silence descended over us. The wheels whirred on the road. We passed a few cars on the bridge over the Bay, but nothing that made him take his foot off the gas. Soon we passed downtown, and I could make out the high-rise of his apartment where we’d lived both together and alone. Those months there without him had been painfully lonely and I hated the prospect of facing them again.
But I would do it. For him.
Needing something to busy my hands, I began looking through the envelopes. They were all for him, dating from as far back as a month ago. Junk mostly, but there was one letter with a return address for a hospital in Orlando.
The hospital where I’d been taken after I’d been missing.
Glancing over at him, I ripped open the top, and pulled out a bill for nearly thirty thousand dollars. Cue mass hysteria. My name was listed under “Patient,” but Alec Flynn was the “Responsible Party.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
He glanced at the letter, then back to the road.
“That’s better than I thought,” he said.
Thank God for insurance, I thought. I double-checked to make sure they hadn’t been billed yet.
“Alec, why is this addressed to you?”
He took the letter, folded it, and stuck it in the center console.
“Let me take care of you, Anna,” he said, in a way that made my annoyance melt just a little.
“You don’t have to do that.” He didn’t even have an income right now.
He patted my knee.
“I want to,” he said. “And you’re going to let me.”
“Bossy,” I muttered, trying not to smile. A few days ago I would have thought it was guilt that had moved him to pay for my care, but now I knew better. He loved me. I doubt he’d even thought twice before directing the bills into his name. Had our positions been reversed, I wouldn’t have done any differently. We’d handle it together, just like everything else.
The next letter was from the department of corrections. Probably something regarding his completed parole.
“Maybe you should open your mail more often.” I flashed him the letter, and when he nodded, I ripped it open.
The first page was a letter. Short and sweet, it informed “Mr. Alec Flynn” that the State of Pennsylvania, where Alec had been imprisoned, had a duty to warn him of the release of a convict who had at one time made a threat against him. Someone named Jeremiah Barlow, who was now out on parole.
I remembered the death threats Amy had told me about. Was this someone who had tried to come after Alec? The State of Pennsylvania could keep him if that was the case.
Chewing on my bottom lip, I turned to the second page, a printout, not unlike the documents I’d seen my father bring home when he was working on a case. There was a picture at the top. A man in his twenties, a little younger than me, though the hard look in his eyes aged him. He stared down the camera, lips in a thin straight line.
On his neck was a tattoo.
A black star.
I saw my nightmare, even with my eyes open. A white sky with black stars. A man’s pale neck, marked by a black tattoo as he carried me in his arms. If there had been any air left in my lungs, I would have screamed.
Thirty
Alec swerved off the road onto the edge of the highway and slammed the car into park. Outside, cars whooshed past, but though I heard them, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the letter from the department of corrections, now on the floor mat below my seat. I’d brought my knees to my chest, and was hugging them tightly, as if that letter was a rabid dog that might bite me.
“What is it?” Alec’s hand closed on my biceps, then rose up into my hair. He turned my face to look at him. “Anna. Talk to me.”
“I’ll carry her. She keeps falling.”
“How much of that stuff did you give her? She’s not going to die, is she?”
Maxim’s voice. Maxim talking to the man with the tattoo. The man from the bar, who lifted me in his arms and carried me down the hallway with the silver snake candleholders. My legs hit the doorway as he tried to edge us through.
“What are you doing?” My voice, slurred, strange sounding, even in my own memory.
“Just relax,” Maxim said. “It’s nothing personal.”
I blinked. The bar. I could hear the music, piped in. A band was setting up onstage. I was overdressed, people were looking at me. Men were looking. Good, le
t them look. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?
One of them sat beside me. He bought me a drink. He touched my leg.
It felt wrong. I was a failure. I couldn’t save myself even when I was drowning.
I still had some dignity left.
“I need to go,” I said.
“My bad. Sometimes I can come on too strong.”
I was too drunk. I needed a cab. He said he’d take me home. I missed Alec. I missed him so much. I couldn’t even remember why we weren’t together.
I was too drunk to disagree when he set me in the backseat of his car. Too drunk to notice we were going the wrong way until it was too late. I just wanted to sleep. I just wanted to forget.
“Come on, Anna,” Alec begged, pulling me home with the sound of his voice. “Come back. Talk to me.”
I blinked. And the memories dimmed in the background, into their rightful places rather than the shadows where they’d formerly been hiding.
“Alec?”
He looked horrified. How much time had passed? I glanced at the clock. Not even a minute. It had felt closer to a week.
He exhaled sharply, and then pulled my face to his. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and the sudden burden that had fallen over me lightened, as if he’d physically taken it on himself.
I grasped his hands on my cheeks.
“It’s him,” I said. “That’s him. Why do you have his picture?”
Keeping one hand on my shoulder, Alec reached down to the floor and grabbed the letter I’d dropped. A muscle beneath his eye twitched as he looked over it.
“You know him?” he asked.
“He’s the one from the bar. He took me. I remember the tattoo. A black star.”
Alec’s hand jerked as he looked back up at me. “Jeremiah Barlow.”
“I guess.” I couldn’t recall him giving a name. “How do you know him?”
“He’s the one who stabbed me in prison.” Alec looked at the front page, and then muttered something I couldn’t make out. “Looks like he’s out. When the accident happened, Janelle made them put a notification of parole alert in his file. I didn’t know he’d be out so soon.”
He checked the postmark on the envelope. “This letter came four days ago. He’s been out a month.”
“Nice heads-up,” I said weakly.
They were connected. Maxim Stein and Jeremiah Barlow. They’d worked together before I’d been taken, maybe just to hurt Alec. Maybe to hurt others.
“Maxim never hired him before that you know of?”
Alec shook his head. “Prison was the first time I saw him, but . . .” He hesitated. “There were a lot of Maxim’s more private affairs that Jessica handled. Things he purposefully kept Bobby and I out of. I never knew why. For a while I thought they had a thing going, but if they did, it never amounted to anything.”
The urgency to find Maxim Stein’s secretary increased tenfold.
Alec faced me again. “What can I do? What do you need?”
I took a deep breath, and then another. If I’d transferred my fear to Alec, he’d transferred his anger to me. I could feel it now, biting at my nerves, fisting my hands.
“I need someone to arrest this asshole,” I said.
* * *
It took some convincing, but Alec finally agreed to keep driving. While he did, I called Marcos, and filled him in on what I’d discovered.
“You’re sure it’s him?” Marcos asked, and I could hear the anger lacing through his voice.
“Positive. He stabbed Alec in prison, and it went down as an accident. He came after me in a bar. This guy knows us, Marcos.”
It was one thing that he’d come after me, but the fact that he’d gotten to both of us felt like an even bigger violation.
“All right,” Marcos said. “I’ll talk to Detective Benitez and get a BOLO put out.” He paused, and I could hear him typing in the background. “Good news for us, he already skipped parole in Pennsylvania.”
A cold validation snaked down my neck. Jeremiah Barlow was already in trouble, we just needed to catch him.
“Why did he do time?”
“Check fraud,” answered Marcos. “But that’s just what they wrung him up for. He’s got a dozen violations before that he’s somehow slipped out of. Must have had a nice lawyer.”
Like maybe one of Maxim Stein’s lawyers. I didn’t say this to Marcos—he still didn’t know that Maxim had been behind my abduction, or anything about the pictures.
“Huh,” said Marcos. “Looks like he used to be a pilot.”
Maybe he’d flown one of Maxim’s planes. That could have been how they met.
“I want to know everything you find out about this guy,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We have to find him, Marcos.”
Beside me, Alec flinched.
“Believe me,” said my friend. “We’re going to find him.”
* * *
For the rest of the trip, Alec kept one hand on me—either on my thigh, or holding tight to my hand. He didn’t let go, and I was grateful for that. I needed the steady reassurance that he was there, and he needed the same thing.
I told him what I remembered, though it wasn’t much more than fragments. He told me the FBI had looked a little into Jeremiah Barlow’s past after he’d been attacked in prison. There wasn’t much. He’d been raised by an aunt in Pennsylvania, sent to boarding school in the seventh grade. Apart from a smattering of arrests, he hadn’t ever done time before he was caught for check fraud six months ago. His pilot’s license had been revoked after that.
“His aunt probably knew he was a psychopath. That’s why she sent him to boarding school,” I said.
Alec squeezed my hand.
“Schools like that are expensive. Maybe she’s the one who taught him to forge checks.”
He was right. Boarding schools weren’t cheap. He must have been unbearable.
“We’ll find him,” Alec said. But though his words were calm, there was a danger brewing just under the surface. I loosened my seat belt and leaned closer, resting my head on his shoulder and wrapping my arms around his.
“I know,” I said.
We stayed that way until we reached St. Augustine.
* * *
The beachside town on the eastern coast was different than most of the vacation places I’d seen in Florida. Grounded in history, whole areas had been preserved or re-created from the Spanish settlements that had been raised in the fifteen hundreds. Clashing alongside it were hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and souvenir shops boasting guided tours. It was enough stimulation to immediately brew a headache at the base of my skull.
Alec called my father, and we met at a Denny’s connected to a cheap motel near an old jailhouse. He wasn’t inside, he was out in his car in the back of the parking lot, AC blasting, vents turned toward the enormous Great Dane spread over the reclined passenger seat. When my father saw us, he stepped outside, and we gathered in the shadow of a sprawling oak tree blanketed by hanging moss.
“She’s been in there about twenty minutes,” said my dad, after giving me a kiss. “Must have been going stir-crazy. She’s barely left the motel room since I got here.”
Alec brushed his hands on his thighs. “I’ll go.”
“I’ve been thinking that might not be such a good idea,” said my dad. “Her statement won’t be much good if she says you two talked it out beforehand.”
Alec’s jaw flexed. “It won’t be much good if she disappears again either.”
“Can’t we just arrest her?” I asked. “The FBI has a search out on her for God’s sake.”
“We could call it in,” my dad offered. “But that’s not going to build much trust. I’ll make contact. Convince her to talk to the feds. I can keep her from running.”
I glanced to Alec, and the
look on his face told me he was thinking the same thing. If Jessica Rowe hadn’t wanted to talk to the police yet, she wasn’t going to start now. My dad may not have technically been on the force anymore, but he was a cop through and through.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Let me talk to her. I’m not part of the trial. I’m not a threat.”
Both men looked down on me, worry in their eyes.
“I’ve got this,” I said.
My dad crossed his arms. “You’re just getting your feet back under you.”
He was still worried I was going to crack, which, based on the way things had gone on the car ride here, wasn’t totally off the mark.
“I’m all right,” I assured him. “She’s not scared of me. I’ll start slow, and if I need backup, I’ll wave through the window.”
Alec looked at me for several long seconds, as if trying to see the truth behind my eyes. I squeezed his hand.
“I’ve got this,” I said again, determination making me strong.
“All right,” he said. “I guess we’ll just . . . wait out here.”
I gave him a devious smile that reflected none of my apprehension. “I’m sure you can think of something to talk about.”
With that I walked toward the Denny’s, and the woman who held the key to keeping Alec in my arms.
Thirty-one
Jessica Rowe, once secretary to one of the most famous men in the country, looked like hell. The jeans she wore didn’t match her normally flawless business attire, and her peach sleeveless button-up hung loosely on her shoulders. Even her hair, usually shaped into a perfect bob, was stuffed back in a ragged ponytail.
She was sitting in a booth in the corner, the only spot in the restaurant that had a full view of the entire seating area. Despite this position, she didn’t look up as I crossed the floor to her. Her eyes were downcast, staring at the fork she turned over and over in her fingers.
“Mind if I sit here?” I didn’t wait for her to respond. I plopped down on one side of the booth, keeping close enough to the edge that I could stand if she tried to scoot out the other side.
Her eyes shot up to mine, and her face went even paler. Without makeup she looked a little older than I remembered. Maybe in her midforties.
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