Take the Key and Lock Her Up

by LENA DIAZ,

She opened her e-mail again and typed her request for Tuck to get everything he could from the prison records for Robinson and the other ex-cons, focusing on visitor logs. Since IDs could be faked, especially by someone who worked for EXIT and probably did that kind of thing routinely, she added a request for pictures of the visitors if possible. Years ago, that might have been a difficult request, but she knew prison records were digitized now. Pulling a picture of the visitors who’d signed in to see each of her target ex-cons shouldn’t be that difficult. She was about to click SEND but hesitated. Ex-cons. There were a lot of them involved in this case—the one Devlin had killed after they saved Hawley, Robinson, his three partners in crime. What about the men who’d broken into the bunker? Devlin hadn’t recognized any of them. Could they be ex-cons too?

  Why would an enforcer—a trained assassin—use so many far less trained and less competent people to help him? Devlin had said they’d been sent to “soften them up,” which she supposed would make sense if the enforcer pulling their strings was busy or not close enough to go after the target. Or maybe the appeal was that the convicts couldn’t easily be traced back to the person who’d given them orders. Someone at EXIT was obviously very comfortable using criminals as their personal thugs.

  As if they’d been doing it for a long time.

  Her fingers hovered over the keys. Devlin wouldn’t want her to do this. He wouldn’t want her to reopen old wounds. But, as often happened while she worked a case, little things began to dig at her and dig at her until they were flashing inside her mind like big neon signs. Which usually meant she was on to something.

  She glanced over her shoulder toward the doorway. It was clear. Devlin must still be in the kitchen. She turned back to the computer and added one more name to her e-mail. Click. For better or worse, the e-mail had been sent.

  “Emily.”

  She jumped in her chair, blinking in surprise to see Devlin right behind her.

  He grinned and set a plate of sandwiches on the computer desk. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” He set two bottles of water on the desk and crossed the room to grab the dining-room chair he’d brought in earlier.

  By the time he was back, Emily had composed herself again. But guilt still ate at her. Had she done the right thing? Was she prying into something that would hurt Devlin if he ever found out? Or was she actually on to something big, something that could change everything?

  “You okay?” Devlin took a bite of one of the ham-and-cheese sandwiches.

  “Um, yeah. Just a bit frazzled, I guess.” She gave him a weak smile and grabbed a sandwich for herself, taking a big bite to discourage any further questions.

  Devlin looked past her at the computer screen, his brow furrowing.

  Emily turned to see what he was looking at. The autopsy photos, zoomed in on the odd cross-shaped bruises on Nancy and Hawley.

  “Sorry.” She quickly minimized the picture of Nancy.

  Devlin didn’t say anything, but the rest of the time they ate he seemed preoccupied.

  Once they were finished eating, Devlin crossed to the whiteboard again to study the lists they’d made.

  Emily clicked her e-mail, unsurprised that Tuck had already responded. He was a good detective, really good, and retrieving information from the prison’s records would be easy-peasy for him, especially if he called in a favor or two. She opened the e-mail and started to scroll down to see what he’d sent her, but the e-mail was long, with lots of pictures pasted below. She scrolled back up to read what he’d written.

  “Dev?” She looked over her shoulder.

  “Hmm?” He was standing on the other side of the room, hands on hips, looking at the whiteboard, as if the answers would come to him if he just stared hard enough.

  “Does the name Joe Harper mean anything to you?”

  He stiffened and slowly turned around to face her. “Why?”

  Just one word, short, clipped, uttered in a voice so quiet she’d barely heard him, with a lethal undertone that sent shivers skittering down her spine.

  She swallowed nervously and reminded herself she wasn’t his mark or his enemy. Thank God. “It’s in Tuck’s e-mail. Joe Harper is the one name on the prison visitor logs that’s common to all of our convicts.”

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. He began pacing the room, every muscle tight and wound like a spring ready to explode.

  “Devlin? Is Joe Harper an alias? What does it mean?”

  He stopped a few feet away from her, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “Years ago, Gage bought some land north of town that Nancy nicknamed Jackson’s Island because it’s surrounded by woods and perched in the middle of a sea of grass, reminding her of an island.”

  “Jackson’s Island. Like in Huckleberry Finn?”

  “Exactly. Nancy was fascinated by that story and took to calling Gage by one of the character’s names—Joe Harper.”

  Emily listened to the whole story, including the part about how Kelly and Ace had teased Gage mercilessly about his new nickname.

  “By the time Nancy grew tired of calling him that,” Devlin said, “Gage had gotten used to it and even thought it was funny. The few times we were on missions together, he used it as his alias, as a joke.” He shook his head. “I never thought he would hurt Nancy.”

  “What about the others on the list? Could they know about this Joe Harper thing?”

  “No. They never knew that story.” He looked past her at the computer screen, then froze. “What the hell is that?”

  Emily turned around to see what he was talking about. Beneath the body of Tuck’s e-mail was a picture of a black stretch limousine. The rear door was open. Inside, a man with a beard and mustache appeared to be making room for another man who was getting into the vehicle.

  “I’m not sure. I asked Tuck to send me pictures—”

  “Of the man who killed Arianna?” The bitterness in his voice whipped against her like icy needles.

  She sucked in a breath and turned around. “I’m so sorry, I—”

  “Why did you do it? To satisfy your morbid curiosity? To see if I was telling the truth about what happened to her?”

  The accusation in his eyes did little to mask the pain underneath.

  “Devlin, please. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, or check up on you, or anything like that. I had a hunch about the case. I know it sounds lame, but someone connected to you in this current case uses ex-cons as helpers, and then I got to thinking that an ex-con was connected to you in another way, through Arianna. It just seemed . . . I don’t know, like too many coincidences, so I asked Tuck—”

  “To look into my past?”

  “What? No, no. I just asked him to pull any information he could find on the man who . . . killed her. Not out of morbid curiosity. I had a . . .” She flushed hot beneath his scrutiny, words failing her.

  “You might as well tell me all of it,” he said. “There’s no point in stopping now. You had a what?”

  She cleared her throat. “A theory,” she whispered. “I’m sure there’s nothing to it. It’s stupid, really, I just . . .” She laughed awkwardly. “I thought it was odd that you’d refused to join EXIT so you could be with Arianna, and then an ex-con came along and killed her. More or less removing any obstacles. And then you . . . signed up.”

  The silence stretched between them, like an invisible barrier driving them farther and farther apart.

  “Scroll down,” he said. “Tell me where that picture was taken. And when.”

  Relieved to have something to do that didn’t involve him glaring at her, she clicked the mouse and scrolled a little farther down to see what Tuck said about the picture.

  “It’s a prison photo, showing him leaving the day he was paroled.” According to the date of the photograph, three days later the man getting into the limousine would rape and murder Devlin’s fiancée.

  Suddenly, he leaned past her and grabbed the mouse. He clicked the zoom button and enlarged the photo until it took up almost the
entire screen.

  “Why are you . . .” She stared at the image of the man inside the car, the one smiling at Arianna’s future killer. “My God, isn’t that—”

  “Gage,” he spat, his voice dripping venom. He whirled around and strode out of the room.

  Emily collapsed back in her chair. Usually, she felt a sense of victory and pride when her hunches panned out. Today, she felt none of that. It nearly killed her not to go to him. But she sensed he needed a few moments alone to deal with the feelings of anger, grief, and betrayal he must be going through. His best friend had arranged for his fiancée’s murder, all so he could use the carrot of killing her murderer to convince Devlin to join EXIT. And now, for reasons known only to himself, Gage had constructed an elaborate plan to frame Devlin for his own crimes. Why?

  There should have been a feeling of closure once she’d solved the case. But instead, she felt only . . . confusion. As if there was more to this that they hadn’t considered.

  A loud squeak sounded from the garage. The garage door was opening. It was too early for their homeowner to return. Wasn’t it? Then what—

  Devlin! She jumped up from her chair and ran from the room through the family room to the garage. She shoved the door open just in time to see the back of their stolen SUV barreling down the street. With Devlin at the wheel.

  He’d left her.

  The blood drained from her face. She didn’t have to ask what he was doing. She knew. He was going after Gage to save Kelly and avenge the woman he’d loved, the woman he obviously still loved. He’d left her behind because . . . why? He was angry with her? No, he was too noble when it came to people he considered “innocents.” He’d left her here to protect her, so she wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire between him and Gage. Well, who was supposed to protect him, to watch his back? She stomped her foot in frustration and headed back inside the house to the office.

  She sat down in the computer chair, not sure what to do next. Stay here and wait for Devlin to return? What if the owner of the house came home before Devlin got back? If he was coming back.

  The phone on the computer desk suddenly rang, making her jump. She pressed her hand against her chest, half-convinced her heart was about to burst through her ribs. It rang two more times before the answering machine clicked on and an unfamiliar voice told the caller to leave a message at the beep.

  “Emily, pick up.”

  Devlin? How had he known what number to call? Had he written it down while he was in the office, before she’d woken up? For that matter, how had he even gotten a phone to make the call? No, she didn’t want to know the answer to that. He’d probably lifted it from some unsuspecting teen walking down the sidewalk.

  “Emily?”

  She grabbed the phone. “Devlin, what are you doing? Come back and take me with you.”

  “Not a chance. I want you there, safe, while I . . . take care of what needs to be taken care of. Don’t leave and don’t call anyone.” The line clicked.

  “Devlin? Devlin!” She pulled the phone away and looked at the display on the machine. He’d hung up. She tried the callback feature on the phone, but he didn’t answer. He’d probably already destroyed the phone.

  She shook her head while she erased the caller ID information before she even stopped to think about it. What was happening to her that the first thing she thought of was to destroy evidence and cover her tracks?

  She sat at the computer again to finish reading Tuck’s e-mail. When she scrolled down to the bottom, she saw another picture Tuck had sent—the one used in the visitor badge by Joe Harper. Except that the first name was spelled differently than Tuck had typed it. The name on the badge read Jo Harper.

  Emily’s eyes widened. She jumped up and ran to the stack of dossiers. She tore through them, looking for one in particular. In the back of her mind, she realized Arianna’s picture wasn’t with the dossiers anymore. Devlin must have pocketed it after making love to her and going into the office. She shook off her resentment and fanned the dossiers out more until she found the one she was looking for, the picture that matched the one on the prison ID badge.

  And it wasn’t Gage Thomas.

  She looked up at the whiteboard and read through the clues again. It was all coming together, all making sense now.

  Victims beaten, bruised, no bones broken.

  No sexual assault.

  She held the dossier up and read the stats—six feet tall—the height Hawley had used to describe her attacker, an attacker who stayed in the shadows, covered their face, wore a hat.

  And now she knew why.

  It wasn’t that hard to find the rest of the information she needed. A simple Internet search gave her the address where she was 99 percent convinced the killer would be waiting. It just made sense. If Devlin didn’t come back soon, she’d be forced to call Tuck and tell him everything so he wouldn’t turn her in or try to stop her. She hoped his partner loyalty would extend to helping her find and save Devlin.

  She sat back and stared at the board again. The one last thing bugging her was motive. Why, after all these years, would Devlin suddenly be targeted in such an elaborate plot that had, based on the coroner’s findings about the date of death of one of the skeletons in the basement, taken over a year to set up?

  Wait. Was it really that long? Or a much shorter time frame? She shoved out of the chair and hurried over to the board. Using one of the markers, she drew a circle around Shannon Fisher’s name in the victim column and around Carolyn Buchanan’s jewelry in the clue column. Then she added two more entries onto the board—Montana and EXIT’s newly enhanced security system. What did they all have in common?

  Each event had happened four months ago.

  She tossed the marker down and crossed her arms. It all made sense. The killer wasn’t suddenly abducting and torturing people just to frame Devlin. Or at least Emily didn’t think so. The pattern of behavior had probably been going on for years, meaning there were other victims out there no one had linked to the case yet. The killer was just using the same old established pattern as a tool to frame Devlin. And now Emily knew why.

  Devlin thought his hacking into the EXIT databases had gone unnoticed, but Emily believed just the opposite. Someone inside the company had discovered that Devlin had broken into sensitive files, and they immediately closed the security loophole to prevent him from getting in again. At the same time, they sent him on a domestic mission—instead of out of the country—so he could still reasonably have had the opportunity to kill Shannon. As for Carolyn Buchanan’s jewelry, that theft had also occurred four months ago, probably to continue to paint the picture of an out-of-control enforcer. Or perhaps just to taunt Devlin and let him know someone was after him, even if he didn’t know who or why.

  She wished Devlin hadn’t left so fast, or that she had a way to contact him and run her newest theories by him. With nothing left to do, she straightened the house, removing all signs that she and Devlin had been there, including cleaning out the coffeemaker. After discarding the trash bag of evidence in a big, green garbage can in the garage, she went back to wait in the office. She erased the search history on the computer and powered it down.

  A few minutes later, someone knocked on the front door. It couldn’t be Devlin. Not this fast. Could it?

  Moving as quietly as she could, she hurried to the door and looked out the peephole. She blinked in surprise and pulled the door open. “Mr. Buchanan. Pierce. This is a surprise.”

  “Detective O’Malley. Imagine my surprise when Devil called me during a task force meeting—with your boss, I might add—and said he needed me to pick you up. But that I couldn’t tell anyone. Because the two of you had broken into someone’s house.”

  He crossed his arms and stared down at her. “How in the world did my crazy brother talk a detective into committing a B and E?”

  “Trust me, it wasn’t as hard the second time,” she grumbled.

  His eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

  �
�Uh, maybe we should discuss this somewhere else. I assume that’s your GTO parked out front? Give me a second. I have to grab something.”

  She left him standing with his mouth open as she ran back into the office. After grabbing the stack of dossiers, she gave the room one last look to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then ran back to the door.

  Once they were on their way down the street, she asked, “So what exactly did Devlin tell you when he called?”

  “Not much, other than admitting he broke into that house. He wants me to take you somewhere safe until he can call me again to explain.”

  She shook her head. “Change of plans. You’re taking me to Devlin, or at least where I think he is.”

  He shot her a sharp glance. “Why?”

  “Because he’s in danger.” She shuffled through the dossiers and pulled out two of them. “He thinks he knows who killed Shannon Fisher, among others.”

  Pierce shot her a stunned look. “He knows the killer’s identity? And didn’t tell me? I’m on the task force.”

  “I know.” She held up one of the pages. “He’s going after this man, Gage Thomas.” She put the page down and held up the second one she’d picked out.

  He frowned. “How did you get that picture? That matches the sketch of one of the missing women, one of the victims.”

  She shook her head. “No. Kelly Parker isn’t a victim. She’s the killer.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  * * *

  EMILY CHECKED THE loading of the backup pistol Pierce had grudgingly given her after she gave him a brief explanation of what was going on. He steered the GTO around a slow-moving car on the highway and then punched the gas.

  “So why would this Kelly person use the Jo Harper alias? She had to know someone could pull the badge picture and would know it was a woman who’d visited those convicts.”

  “The badges are cheap throwaways you turn in when you leave and are destroyed. She might not have realized the prison keeps digital records of the pictures. I’m betting she thought only about the log and wanted to ensure she used an alias that wouldn’t point back to her. And since she was framing Devlin, why not use an alias that one of his friends regularly used, just to trip him up?”