Araneae and I shared a glance.
“Tell me,” I said, “about your brother’s name.”
“You know that Edward is Dad’s middle name.”
Araneae and I looked at one another and both shrugged.
“You didn’t know that?” Ruby asked, a bit more excitement to her tone. “How? You’ve known him longer than I have.” She sat taller and smiled. “Well, it is. When Mom first mentioned it, I thought it was because she liked Edward” —Ruby looked at us for recognition— “from Twilight.”
“Oh,” Araneae and I said together.
“I guess I thought someone like your mom,” Araneae said, “being in the Ivanov bratva, wouldn’t have time for pop culture.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “In a lot of ways, it’s like being here. Time was one thing we had in abundance. I think Mom was late to the party. She read them after she saw the movies on television. Then she went on and on about how much better the books were than the movies and wanted me to read them. Of course, since I’d already seen the movies, the characters in my head when I read the books were the actors and actresses.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “It would have been neat to imagine them with just the descriptions in the book.”
Araneae grinned. “So Madeline is Team Edward. I can’t wait to bring that up in conversation.”
“Don’t bother doing it around the men,” I said. “I’m confident Reid has no idea what Team Edward versus Team Jacob is even about.”
I noticed the way Ruby was smiling. “What?”
“Dad does.”
“No way,” Araneae said. “Your dad is clueless on things like that.”
She slowly shook her head. “He surprises me with all the stuff he knows. You’d think doing whatever he does for Uncle Sterling would take up most of his time and headspace. He’s good at seeing people—everyone. He always knows what to say or do.” Her smile faded. “I should have told him where I was going.”
“You’re right about your dad,” I said, trying to deflect the conversation’s direction. Standing, I asked, “Now, is there anything I can get for you? Dr. Dixon said you need to drink plenty of fluids.” I tipped my chin at the barely touched water bottle on her bedside stand.
Ruby turned to Araneae. “Would it do any good for me to talk to my dad to overrule Uncle Sterling?”
“About?” Araneae asked.
“Going back to the hospital?”
We both shook our heads.
“I don’t know if the original decision came from your uncle,” I said, “or your dad, but I’ll place money on the fact that the two of them agree on keeping you as safe as possible.”
Ruby sighed. “Will they catch these people?” When neither of us responded immediately, Ruby went on, “It’s been almost a month since you two were taken. And now me.” She laid her chin on her knees. “It was scary when Mr. Hillman did all those things, but I knew it was over.”
“They’re working very hard to find out who is behind this,” Araneae said.
“I don’t remember anything except the text message,” Ruby said. “I went to the nurses’ station. I thought it would be flowers or something.” Her eyes grew wide. “I remember now. There was a guy with flowers. He was wearing scrubs like he worked at the hospital. I went to him, and he asked me if I was Ruby Kelly. I said yes and he had a clipboard with a paper for me to sign. When I reached for it” —she lifted her hand— “something poked me. He apologized and said he’d get me a Band-Aid.” Ruby shook her head. “I started following him. The next thing I remember, I was here.”
“If you remember more...” I began.
“...And I want to talk, I have plenty of people to talk to.”
“I think you should tell Sterling, Reid, and Mason what you remember,” Araneae said.
“That’s about it.”
“Okay, Ruby, if you won’t tell me what to bring you, I’ll be back up with six glasses of various beverages and five different sandwiches.”
She lifted her chin and grinned. “I’m good with water.” Turning toward the gray Chicago sky, visible through the windows, she added, “Hot chocolate would be nice. I promise I’ll drink water too.”
“And to eat?” I prompted.
“Pizza sounds good.”
I nodded. “It does. I’ll be glad to make all of us pizza for dinner. How about something for a snack?”
A few minutes later, I left Ruby and Araneae alone. As I was walking down the stairs, I sent a text to Reid.
* * *
“RUBY REMEMBERS A MAN DELIVERING FLOWERS AND A PRICK WHEN SHE REACHED FOR A CLIPBOARD. YOU SHOULD TALK TO HER.”
* * *
I put my phone back in my pocket, uncertain my text would get a reply as my thoughts went to the salad Ruby had decided upon for a snack. In my head I was going through the list of ingredients. We were due for a grocery delivery; even so, I was certain I had everything I needed.
When I entered the kitchen, Laurel was there, sitting at the long table with a cup of coffee before her.
“Hey, have you had lunch?” I asked as she looked my way. “Ruby’s awake.”
“I went up, but you were all talking. I came back down.”
Her voice seemed flat, not like herself.
Bypassing the salad-making for a minute, I went to the table and pulling out a chair, I sat with one leg beneath me and leaned over the cool granite. “What’s the matter?”
She looked over to me with a faraway expression. “This is all my fault. You and Araneae and now Ruby.”
“It is not.”
“I never should have started recreating my formula. They told me not to.”
Instead of replying to what she should or shouldn’t do, I asked the question that has been bugging me. “What does my mother have to do with your research?”
“What?” She looked my direction.
“My mother. Whoever took us had her at that bunker. How does she fit into the equation?”
Laurel wrapped her fingers around the warm cup. “I don’t think that she does. She’s an outlier.”
“What if she isn’t?” A new thought occurred to me. “Could she have been in one of your trials?”
Laurel shrugged. “I doubt it. I know she hasn’t been to the institute, and my original trials were in Indiana.”
“We’re in Chicago. Indianapolis isn’t that far away.”
“All of my participants were vetted. Remember me telling you that we had to ask questions to determine where in the brain the traumatic memories were centered?”
“Did you personally talk to each participant?”
“No,” Laurel said, looking down into her cup. “My partner Russ did some and so did my assistant.” She looked up, her eyes wide. “Shit.”
“What?”
“My assistant was the one who was after my formula. She killed Russ, but she died, so it can’t be her.” Laurel’s head shook from side to side. “What traumatic memories would your mother have had?”
Scoffing, I stood and went to the refrigerator to find the fixings for Ruby’s salad. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. I would assume if she had any, it would be a relationship gone bad.”
“A breakup?”
“You know she was a prostitute? Those weren’t usually long-term relationships.”
Laurel stood, coming to the edge of the breakfast bar. “Did she have a pimp? Maybe a customer or boss who was abusive? We had multiple victims of domestic violence and rape.”
I pulled the bag of romaine lettuce hearts from the crisper. “That would be karma.”
“Prostitutes sell themselves consensually for money or product. That doesn’t mean they’re immune from sexual assault.”
“Her name was Nancy Pierce. I don’t believe she was ever married.”
Laurel’s lips pursed as she exhaled. “I have my old data, but participants were assigned numbers. We didn’t use names.”
“Did you have some consent form? They would’ve
needed to sign their names then, right?”
“This feels farfetched.”
Tearing the freshly washed pieces of lettuce, I laid them to dry on a paper towel before looking up. “Ruby asked if the men will catch the people who took us.” I shrugged. “I have total faith in all of our men. I also know Araneae and I were taken from your home. Ruby was taken in the daylight from a busy hospital that not only has its own security but also was and is crawling with Sparrows. Someone is showing us that they can get us anywhere anytime.”
“Is she frightened?”
“She is. Honestly, so am I.”
Laurel tapped her fingernails on the granite breakfast bar and hummed. “You think there’s a connection to your mother and all of this?”
“I didn’t, but if there wasn’t, why was she there?”
Laurel slapped the top of the breakfast bar. “You know what?”
“What?”
“When I went upstairs, I heard Ruby say something about living in a cage. If we’re being honest, I’ve felt the same way. That’s why I went to 2, to do something. I think what you’re proposing is a wild goose chase, but after I go see Ruby, I’ll go downstairs and look for the old flash drives with the data from my original research. It will be a needle in a haystack.”
“I guess that will give you something to do.”
Her smile grew. “It will. Did I ever tell you what Reid said about your cooking when you first married?”
“What?” I asked, thinking it was an odd change of subject.
Laurel smiled. “He said you have always made a great parmesan chicken and I agree.”
For a millisecond, my thoughts went back to when we were first married. “It was all I knew how to make back then. My grandma taught me.”
Reid
“Why?” I asked, staring across our dining room table at my wife and lifting a piece of homemade pizza from my plate.
“Because I want to ask Anna what she knows about my mother.”
Taking a bite of the pizza, I stalled, trying to come up with the words to tell Lorna that we were all working overtime on everything happening. We didn’t have time for a field trip or a family reunion with the daughter of the man I gutted and the sister of the woman Mason tortured.
Tilting her head, Lorna pursed her lips, her green gaze simmering. “Are you going to answer me?”
“Didn’t you say something about Anna being estranged from her father and sister?”
“Reid, I don’t know. The last time I saw her was the morning after that ball in New York. Mason came to the motel, and hell, he already had my stuff packed. I never went back to my apartment, much less the motel. That was almost ten years ago. Things change in ten years.”
Things had begun to change today, for the better. While Ruby’s abduction was inexcusable, it gave us insight we’d been lacking. The kid in the Camaro—Jimmy Dole—wasn’t a paramedic. He was the son of one. He’d borrowed his father’s uniform and somehow managed to steal the ambulance. If we’d left him for the authorities to find, we might know more about the family. As it stands now, the ambulance has been found, explosive free and cleaned by our crew. The Camaro was still sitting along the side of I-90, tagged for impound. However, Jimmy Dole won’t be found. His family will never know how he died, or when. He will forever be missing.
Before Jimmy had passed, he’d run his race through the cornfield, only to be tackled by Mason and immediately threatened by Romero. According to Mason, Jimmy began singing as soon as his body hit the ground.
His explanation to Mason and Romero was too twisted to have been made up on the spot.
The young man admitted that he was in debt to a loan shark, one we knew and one who had Sparrow’s permission to operate in Chicago. Being Sparrow-approved meant we received our cut, so in fact, Jimmy was in debt to us.
When he was approached by a tall black-haired man for a one-time job, Jimmy saw it as his ticket out of debt. He had no idea the girl would be put into the ambulance unconscious, or so he claimed. He was told he’d be helping someone—a hospital patient—escape from an abusive relationship.
Once Ruby—he didn’t know her name—was brought out of the hospital and he was instructed to put her in a body bag, Jimmy said he sensed that something wasn’t right. Yet the payoff was too enticing. With the promise of cash, Jimmy drove away from the hospital as he’d been instructed. Stopping at an abandoned shopping mall, he moved Ruby into the body bag, taking her shoes and phone.
His next task was to stop on I-90 at a certain mile marker. When he did, the dark-haired man was waiting in a black Ford truck. He expected the man to take the girl. Instead, the man checked on her. He then put something under the ambulance and drove Jimmy to a nearby rest stop where Jimmy’s car was waiting.
Jimmy claimed to repeatedly ask the man what was happening and who would get the girl. He was told she would be taken care of. The only other task was for Jimmy to drive the shoes and phone to a preset destination as fast as he could without attracting the attention of cops.
When Mason asked him about the box in his back seat, Jimmy claimed he didn’t know its purpose and feared it was something that could harm him or his car. His suspicion of the dark-haired man was growing. Jimmy swore the man never told him to put the shoes and phone in the box.
That was the part of Jimmy’s story that caused Mason to believe the drop-off point was a trap. If the dark-haired man had wanted the shoes and phone, he’d have kept them. If he didn’t want them traced, he’d have told Jimmy to put them in the polymer-lined box. The dark-haired man wanted Jimmy to get caught and for Mason or another Sparrow to follow the breadcrumbs.
I did a quick search of Jimmy’s family. His father currently worked for an ambulance service, one that serviced the greater Chicago area. He wasn’t a direct employee of the hospital.
That meant that Jimmy couldn’t have accessed the restricted unit. The man Ruby recalled with the flowers was someone else. When we showed her a picture of Andrew Jettison, she shook her head and said the man was younger.
Studying the hospital footage, we found the man with the flowers. He was good at avoiding cameras with a direct frontal image of his face. Nevertheless, I had a facial recognition program running.
Granted, we weren’t ready to apprehend Andrew Jettison yet, but we were closer than we’d been twenty-four hours earlier. In confiscating Jimmy’s phone, we had the contact number he’d called.
Much like the number that texted Ruby, this one went to a disposable phone purchased at the same convenience store as the one that sent the text to her. We didn’t have the full picture, but we were connecting dots. Mason also confiscated Jimmy’s wallet and his one-thousand-dollar cash payoff.
“Reid,” Lorna said as she stood, taking her glass into the kitchen.
I shook the thoughts of Jimmy soaking in acid away as I feigned a smile to my wife. “I don’t think visiting Anna is a good idea. It’s not common practice to introduce ourselves to family members of recent murder victims.”
“Is it really introducing when we know one another, or we did?”
My eyes closed as I savored the pizza. We may live in Chicago, but Lorna’s specialty pizza was New York style. “This is great. You don’t make pizza often.”
“Ruby requested it.”
“I didn’t talk to her for long,” I admitted. “We just showed her a few pictures, like Patrick and Laurel did you and Araneae. How is she faring?”
With her water glass refilled, Lorna placed one fist on her hip. “She’s scared, Reid. This has been going on too long and whoever these people are aren’t scared of the Sparrows. It’s like they’re purposely poking the wasp nest.”
I let out a long sigh. “We made some progress today.”
“Did you, or did you make the progress they wanted you to make?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Laurel said that Mason was on a wild goose chase and then some kid shot himself.” Her head shook. “Ruby doesn’t want
a head at her feet either.”
My teeth clenched. There was a reason we kept our discussions private. Thankfully, Laurel hadn’t heard everything. I smiled. “Really, sweetheart, no one is laying a head at her feet.” I didn’t say that the reason was because there wouldn’t be much of one left.
Lorna shook her head. “We want this to end.”
“Everyone does.” I pushed my chair back from the table. “Don’t you get it? You’re right, someone is purposely going after our people—not our people, our women.” I lifted my hands. “And don’t give me some bullshit about not being made of glass. Damn it, Lorna, I know you’re strong. Hell, Ruby is and so are Araneae, Laurel, and Madeline. We all know that you are the strongest, most beautiful, and intelligent women in the whole damn world.” I reached for her shoulders. “There is only one reason why you’re being targeted.”
She looked up with her bright emerald eyes. “Tell me.”
“To get to us. We don’t know if it is to get to Sparrow or to Mason, or to bring down the whole fucking outfit. Is this about you?” My voice rose. “Fuck yeah. It’s about all of us and we’re not stopping until it’s safe for you to go out when you want to.” I nodded. “Yes, bodyguards will be necessary, but damn, you all deserve more freedom than you have while this Andrew Jettison and some partner of his are out there.”
Lorna’s brow furrowed. “Partner? Do you mean the blonde woman?”
It was my turn to be surprised. “You haven’t mentioned her before.”
“I did. I just hadn’t remembered what she looked like. That just came to me recently. Araneae and I both recall her. She was petite but in charge. Araneae recalled her wearing gloves. I remember one of her hands was...” Lorna searched for the right words. “...different. The skin reminded me of Mason’s, what it would look like without the tattoos.”
My gut twisted. “Are you saying it looked burnt?”
“Scarred.”
Fuck.
“I need to go back down to 2.” I turned to the table. It had been the first meal we’d eaten with just the two of us in a while. It’s not like there were candles lit and a bottle of wine opened, but nevertheless a pang of guilt came over me. “I’m sorry, Lorna.”
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