Abandoned

by Rhonda Pollero

  “Could you recognize the eyes again?”

  Amelia shrugged. “Maybe. But I’d know his voice anywhere. He kept asking me the same stuff over and over.”

  “What stuff?” Emma asked.

  “Mostly about you. How much you knew about the assassination. Why you were in Purdue. If anyone was helping you. That sort of stuff. I tried to tell him you were genuinely working for the Public Defender and that we had come to terms with our dad being a killer years ago.”

  “But he didn’t buy it?”

  She shook her head and Emma watched as she visibly shivered. “He was one sadistic bastard. He really seemed to like punishing me. Even after the other guy told him to lay off.”

  “‘Other guy?’” Emma and Conner said in unison.

  “Someone was here last night. They spoke outside the trailer, so I had to strain to listen.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Not that I could make out.”

  The sound of approaching sirens cut through the serenity of the location. “I’m going to send a deputy to the hospital with you,” Conner said.

  Amelia turned to Emma. “Will you be with me?”

  Emma shook her head. “I have an errand to run and then I’ll be there.”

  “What kind of errand is more important than me?” Amelia asked.

  “I have to go talk to my boss,” she answered.

  “Not alone,” Conner warned.

  “Elgin doesn’t fit the physical description of her kidnapper.”

  “But he could have been the second guy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s the only other person in Purdue who knows who you really are.”

  “Point.”

  The paramedics came in then and began transferring a battered and bruised Amelia to a stretcher. Seeing her sister like that shook her to the core. And it made little sense. Even if someone knew that Emma and Amelia were the daughters of the assassin, Emma couldn’t understand why that information would inspire this sort of reaction or violence. What had pushed the kidnapper over the edge? Or even warranted kidnapping in the first place? She was missing something.

  Something important.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This is something I have to do alone,” Emma insisted when he drove her back to her house to pick up her car.

  Conner blocked her with his body. “Not smart. You don’t know how involved Elgin is in all of this. Let me come with you.”

  She felt the heat emanating off his body and inhaled the clean, woodsy scent of soap on his skin. How tempting to know that all she had to do was reach out and pull him to her. Great minds—because the next thing she knew, she was in his arms and his mouth claimed hers.

  His large hands ran up and down her body, every so often just brushing the sides of her breasts. Weak in the knees, head swimming, Emma sank into the kiss. It felt so good, so right to be wrapped in his embrace. The kiss was incredible, too. He nibbled her lower lip, then ran his tongue against the sensitive place on her mouth. Pressed against him, she felt the power of his arousal against her belly. All she had to do was lead him the few feet into her bedroom and let everything else happen naturally.

  She started to do that, but met resistance. Conner reached up, ended the kiss and cradled her face between his palms. She looked into his blue eyes and saw raw passion, which further confused her.

  “What?”

  “Your sister’s in the hospital. Your mother’s in poor health and at least two people are trying to run you out of town. The last thing you need is another complication.”

  “Having sex with you is not a complication,” Emma said seductively.

  Conner released her to step back. “It is for me. I don’t want to be just a distraction while things in your life are in turmoil.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” He gave her a steady look and tucked his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans. “I just know that until we figure out why you’ve been receiving threats and your sister was kidnapped and tortured, the sex stops. And don’t think for a minute this is easy for me. I want you, Emma. You know that.”

  A shiver of desire ran down her spine. “I want you, too.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to deal with that later.”

  “Right. Now I go see Elgin.”

  “No. We go see Elgin. Until we can rule him out as Bad Guy Number Two, you’re not going anywhere without me glued to your side.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “I’m going to the office. Do you really think there’s anything he can do to me in a public place?”

  He stubbornly stood his ground. “I’m not willing to take that chance.”

  “Fine,” she sighed. Conner shifted to let her pass.

  It didn’t take them long to reach her building. With Conner on her heels, she walked directly to Elgin’s office. He looked up at her with surprise. “Emma? I thought you were taking the day.”

  “I was,” she said, standing behind one of the visitor chairs.

  Conner closed the office door, then stood beside her.

  “Sheriff,” Elgin acknowledged.

  “I know you were the one who sent me the news clippings. I want to know why,” Emma said without preamble.

  Elgin’s neck reddened above his shirt collar. “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t even try that,” Emma insisted. “Your prints are all over them.”

  Elgin leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingertips. After a long pause he said, “Okay. It was me.”

  “Why?”

  “When the president was assassinated I was a new public defender. I thought then, and I think now, that there are too many unanswered questions. I just thought if you got curious…”

  “Curious about what?” Emma frowned and dug her fingers into the chair back. Elgin’s response wasn’t what she’d expected at all. She wanted answers and now she had more damned questions. “My father was killed on the scene and the rifle recovered next to his body was the murder weapon.”

  “But why?” Elgin pressed. “Why did your father fly from D.C. to Florida to kill a president, when it was later discovered that your father had no interest in politics and didn’t even vote?”

  “That wasn’t in any clipping,” Emma stated.

  “Your mother told me,” Elgin said.

  Emma blinked. “My mother?”

  “I tracked her down a few years back and after some begging and groveling on my part, she agreed to talk to me.”

  “My mother accepts the historical accuracy of the events.”

  “Not completely,” Elgin countered. “Like me, she couldn’t understand the why of it.”

  “So once my mother got sick you decided to track me down and lure me to Purdue?”

  He shrugged. “I thought being here might inspire your interest.”

  “So far it’s just nearly gotten my sister killed, and I’ve been shot at, and had bloody-looking flowers delivered to my house three times. Who else knows who I am?”

  Elgin fervently shook his head. “No one. I haven’t told a soul.”

  “At least two other people know,” Emma said, then she recounted her sister’s kidnapping and torture. “So, whatever you’ve put into place has backfired bigtime.”

  “I never meant for you or your sister to come to any harm. And I never thought anyone would put the pieces together.”

  “How did you?” Emma asked.

  “A Lexus-Nexus search on your names. I found the court filings for change of name and then it was just a matter of searching DMV records. The fact that you had Larry Grisom as a law professor was pure coincidence. When I called him about you he assumed it was to offer you a job. That’s the truth.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me all this from the start?” Emma asked.

  “That whole debacle in New York,” Elgin replied. “I figured that situation might have left a bad taste in your mouth about the assassination, so I thought better of it.�
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  “I know this town. Everyone here knew about the flowers and the fact that someone took a shot at my house. But when weird things started happening,” Emma prompted. “You didn’t think to give me a heads up?”

  “You didn’t think they were things,” he said. “I was taking my cue from you.”

  Conner took a seat, indicating for Emma to do the same. “So what do they gain by kidnapping Amelia?”

  “‘They’?” Elgin asked.

  “My sister said a second man came in the night,” Emma replied.

  Elgin’s face grew animated. “That means there is a conspiracy.”

  “A conspiracy to do what?” Conner asked.

  “To run Emma and Amelia out of town, I guess. At any rate, it tends to prove my theory that more was going on the night of the assassination than just the act of a lone, crazed gunman.”

  Emma folded her hands and rested them on the seatback. She kept her head down as she said, “But he was there and he was shot and the gun that killed the president and the governor was right next to him. I’ve seen the evidence photos.”

  “You have?” Conner asked.

  She nodded. “They’ve been on television.”

  “That’s cold,” Conner muttered.

  Emma turned her attention to Elgin. “Are you sure you haven’t told anyone about me?”

  * * *

  “It’s dusty in here,” Emma groused as she used her shirt sleeve to wipe the dust off another box. Wrong year. “And I have to have tea with Renae Burke in a little while.”

  “You don’t have to be here,” Conner said. “In fact, I’m not sure what’s in the file on the assassination, so it’s probably best that you not look at it until after I’ve had a chance to go through it.”

  “You obviously don’t get the History channel,” she returned. “They do a retrospective almost every year. One year they used gel dummies with pig flesh to prove my father was the only possible killer since he was the only person in the balcony of the theater.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “I thought about writing them a strongly worded letter the first time I saw it, but I was only sixteen and I figured they’d think I was biased.”

  Conner stopped walking down the row of the evidence warehouse they were in and pulled her against him. It was nice to smell his cologne instead of the musty, dank scent of moldy paper. The rows were lit by bare lights hanging from the ceiling, swaying softly on the breeze made by large fans mounted along the walls.

  “Maybe you should go to the hospital to be with your sister,” he said as he placed a soft kiss against her brow.

  “I’ve already talked to her twice. They’re keeping her overnight because she’s dehydrated. I promised to stop by later. Amelia told me she doesn’t need me there to watch her IV drip.”

  He rubbed his hand up and down her back, sending little shivers through her system. “Maybe she needs moral support. Besides, I can go through the file without you.”

  “No way,” Emma said emphatically.

  “Well, at least let me edit it. There’s probably some stuff in there you won’t want to see.”

  “Fair enough,” she relented, but she didn’t step out of his embrace. Instead she got up on tiptoes and tried to kiss him.

  Conner gently set her away from him.

  She was still looking in his eyes. “Still pissed?”

  “Almost over it,” he said. “I understand why you guarded your privacy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you should hide from the guy you’re sleeping with.”

  “That makes me sound like the town slut,” she said with annoyance. “For whatever reason, things between us moved fast but that doesn’t make me—”

  “I never said it did. Don’t take it that way.” Conner moved farther down the corridor. “Jackpot.”

  * * *

  Emma sneezed four times as she carried two of the five boxes from the evidence storage unit to Conner’s car. It felt good to get out of that building and back into the sunshine. She and Conner piled the boxes into the back of the SUV and drove them to the sheriff’s office.

  They carried everything into a large conference room. Emma was keenly aware of people staring. “What is that about?” she asked Conner.

  “Probably J.T.,” he said.

  “J.T.?” she repeated.

  “He was the paramedic who responded to the scene this morning. He’s a good friend of Sally’s. Sally works the lunch shift at Stella’s, so…”

  “Everyone in town knows about Amelia and me?”

  Conner shook his head. “Probably they just know that your sister was tortured. That’s news enough. Unless you think Amelia would tell a total stranger why she’d been taken hostage?”

  “God no,” Emma insisted. “She’d rather gnaw off her own tongue. I hate being stared at.”

  “Then you chose an interesting line of work.”

  “You think the courtroom is a theater?”

  “I think sometimes the most articulate attorney wins. That isn’t always justice.”

  She glanced at him and discovered his features were taut and fixed. “Does that have anything to do with your brother being in prison?”

  Conner nodded. “And Hayden Blackwell keeping him there all these years. He promised to show up at every parole hearing and makes it sound as if Michael went on a major shooting rampage that night instead of what really happened.”

  “When is his parole hearing?”

  “Three weeks. My brothers and I will all be there. Hopefully that will help.”

  “I’m sure it will. Are your brothers all upstanding members of the community?”

  Conner nodded. “Declan is a private detective and Jack is like you. He’s an attorney.”

  “Criminal defense?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much anything. He just got married a few months ago, and they have a little girl named Mia.”

  “Is Declan married?”

  Conner half-snorted, half-grunted. “I don’t think there’s a woman on the planet who would want to take him on.”

  “Why?”

  “He always has to be right. Even when he’s wrong. Everything has to be done his way.”

  Emma whistled. “I know the type.”

  Conner lifted the corner of one box and asked, “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said as she opened her box.

  Carefully, she laid the evidence out on the table in groups—physical evidence, written reports, expert consultations. She wasn’t sure what to do with the videotape she found so she placed it in its own pile.

  Conner did the same. Which worked out well until he opened the box with all the photographs, some of which were very graphic. “I’ll save these for later,” he said, gathering up the pictures of her dead father.

  “It’s okay,” she insisted, touching his sleeve. Her eyes were immediately drawn to a photograph of the president and the governor taken just after the gunshots had sounded. The president was on the ground and Rossner was half on top of him. “What did witnesses say about the shots?” she asked as she went back to the pile of witness statements. She randomly checked about twenty of them. “They all claim three shots were fired.”

  “One hit the president and one hit the governor,” Conner confirmed. “The first one hit the president. The second one hit the governor’s campaign manager—Renae Burke’s husband—and the final shot killed Governor Rossner.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Emma argued.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “If the president was the target, then why fire the two additional shots?” she mused aloud. “Unless the president wasn’t the primary target.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Find any ballistics reports?” Conner asked. “This is just the local stuff, remember. The official reports are in Washington with the Department of Justice.”

  Emma rifled through three boxes before she found
a schematic of the shooting. Attached to the crude drawing was a report. “They did a triangulation but it doesn’t match the drawing,” she said. “See”—she placed both pages on the table in front of him—“based on the shells recovered, this shows a shooter moving left to right, but if you look at the witness statements, the people were shot in a right-to-left pattern.”

  “So the local ballistics guys got it wrong?” Conner asked.

  She looked at the report. “Do any of these people still work here?” she asked.

  Conner shook his head. “No. One’s dead and the other one is retired.”

  “Do you think he’d talk to us?”

  “I’ll call him and set it up.” Conner glanced at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be going home to gussy up for your tea with Renae Burke?”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “I’d love to cancel.”

  “Remember, she was there that night. Maybe you can get her to open up.”

  “Which is the only reason I’m going,” Emma told him. “Call me on my cell if you find anything else interesting.”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  Emma raced home and was right on schedule until she stopped to collect the mail. Once again, and for the second time this week, she found a flower—this time a camellia—dipped in blood or paint or whatever, tucked in with her mail. As expected, neither Janine, David, nor Sam had noticed anything suspicious.

  She tossed the flower in the garbage and allowed fear to follow her to her bedroom. The bloody flowers weren’t part of a prank. Neither were the gunshots into her den. No, she’d been kidding herself. Someone knew who she was and obviously realized she was there to look into the assassination.

  The irony was that she probably would have taken only a cursory glance at the records if it hadn’t been for the flowers, the gunshots, and Amelia’s kidnapping.

  Sam and David were in the living room, working on his laptop. Jeanine was wherever the strong scent of pine was coming from. Emma went into her room, showered, and changed into a pale green shift dress and some strappy sandals. She added a long strand of pearls and carried a white sweater just in case it got cooler as the sun set. She made a quick call to the hospital before placing her gun and phone in her purse. She wasn’t about to go flitting around without some protection.