The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  She had a contingency plan of her own. A new identity—a new life—waiting for her.

  All she had to do was get out of the goddamn house before she collapsed of smoke inhalation.

  Star seemed to materialize in front of her.

  What?

  Her arms were flapping at her sides, and she was screaming incoherently. Libby managed to make out “my house” and “Andrew.”

  Libby shoved her back out onto the porch. “Go,” she said. “Get to the barn. Call 911. Hurry. I’ll find Andrew.”

  With any luck, he was dead in the wine cellar with Rob Dunnemore.

  “I can’t—”

  But Libby kept moving forward, all but pushing Star, in a panic, sputtering, down the porch steps to the stone path, repeating her instructions. Barn. 911. Barn. 911. She’d be out of the way. She wouldn’t suspect Libby of any involvement in the fire—which would further delay the police from looking in her direction.

  When they reached the barn, Libby promised again to find Andrew. Star nodded, white-faced, in shock.

  Libby left her.

  And she ran, heading for Ravenkill Creek and freedom.

  Ethan charged up a narrow path toward the apple orchard and the Old Stone Hollow Inn, Deputy Longstreet a step behind him with her Glock in hand. Not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, he wished he hadn’t been so scrupulous about getting her into trouble and had scored a couple of guns for himself.

  They’d been on their way down to Ravenkill Creek when they’d heard something in the distance—a crack, a rumble. Whatever it was, it wasn’t normal.

  Then they’d seen the black smoke rising above the trees.

  “Christ,” Juliet had breathed next to him. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Now they were on their way to find out.

  Ethan wasn’t accustomed to sneaking around places that were as posh as Ravenkill. His old haunts at West Point were just across the Hudson, but he hadn’t been back there in years.

  He wasn’t law enforcement. He was military.

  Or he had been. He didn’t know what the hell he was now. Wanted by the marshals, probably. Juliet had made calls on the way up to Ravenkill, explaining what she was up to.

  A cloud of mosquitoes followed them into the orchard. Juliet didn’t seem to notice. She went at a loping run, finally overtaking him. Ethan’s head was pounding. Given his injuries, he supposed he might not be moving as fast as he thought he was.

  He could smell the smoke now. The ground was soft, the grass wet against his lower legs. Up ahead, the Old Stone Hollow Inn was on fire.

  With her free hand Juliet pulled out her cell phone and, as she and Ethan ran toward the burning house, called for reinforcement.

  Star ran around in circles in front of the barn like a two-year-old having a tantrum, her arms flapping at her sides as she screamed. She had her portable phone clutched in one hand. Maggie caught the frightened woman by both arms and held them still. “Star. Get hold of yourself and listen to me.”

  “Andrew—”

  “He’s safe. He’s with Rob. I just saw them.” And Raleigh, half-dead, she thought; she’d waved to Rob that she was okay and had gone to grab Star, in hysterics by the barn. “Did you call 911?”

  “No. I can’t. My phone—” She squeezed her eyes shut, then flung the phone to the ground. “It’s dead.”

  If he could get through, Rob would have called for help by now, but Maggie wasn’t sure how much he knew—if he’d figured out for himself or if Raleigh had managed to tell him that Libby was their killer. She squeezed gently on Star’s arms. “Listen to me, Star. Libby—”

  “She’s gone.” Crying, Star withdrew one hand from Maggie’s grasp and waved toward the cornfield and the apple orchard. “Running—she’s scared—”

  No, Maggie thought. She’s getting away.

  “I need to go after her,” Maggie said, dropping Star’s other hand, trying to penetrate the woman’s fear and panic. “I want you to go stay with Rob. He’s getting your husband and another man away from the fire. He’ll see you coming—you’ll be fine. You can help him.”

  The frenetic pacing and flapping stopped, and Star stared at Maggie, expressionless. “The marshal?” She seemed to struggle to stay focused on what she was saying. “He has Andrew?”

  “Yes.” Maggie touched Star gently on the shoulder. “Tell Rob I’ve gone after Libby Smith. Tell him she’s our assassin.”

  “What?”

  But Maggie knew Star had understood her. “Can you do that for me?”

  She nodded.

  “Libby’s going to try to kill more people. She has a long list. Tell Rob he needs to get his family into protective custody.” Maggie paused a moment, but Star didn’t switch back into panic mode. “I’ve got to go before Libby gets too far ahead of me.”

  “I can do this,” she said.

  Maggie tried to smile. “I know you can.”

  She waited as long as she could to make sure Star was okay as she staggered down the stone path toward her burning inn. Then, staying within the cover of the trees as best she could, Maggie went after Libby Smith.

  Nate was at home preparing for a noon meeting when Mike Rivera called with the news from Ravenkill, giving it in an efficient staccato that nonetheless relayed his urgency in no uncertain terms.

  “Libby Smith hasn’t had time to get to New York, never mind D.C.,” Rivera said. “We’ll catch her. But I thought you’d want to know.”

  That he and his future wife and her family were targets of a hired killer? Yeah. He wanted to know. “Rob?”

  “Alive, last we heard.”

  After Rivera hung up, Nate walked across the lawn in the hot sunshine to the small dump that Sarah had carefully marked off for her archaeological dig. Some days she worked with college and high school students, showing them how it was done, teaching them about the history found in mundane objects—but, thankfully, not today.

  When she looked up at him from her pile of dirt, her face transformed from eager welcome to concern and dread. “Where’s Rob?”

  In hell, Nate thought.

  But it wasn’t what he told Rob’s twin sister. “He’s fine right now, but you need to come inside.”

  “I’ve got work—”

  “It can wait.”

  She remained calm, brushing off her overalls as she stood up, but Nate knew the realization that her brother was in danger—that she, potentially, was in danger—had hit her.

  “My parents?” she asked.

  “Mike Rivera just told me that two deputies from the Nashville office are on the way to Night’s Landing.”

  “Nick Janssen? He wants us all dead?”

  Nate nodded, and she took his hand and walked back across the lawn with him.

  Rob grabbed Star before she collapsed and got her to the shade of a huge maple, where he’d managed to drag both injured men, well clear of the burning house. The roof was engulfed now. It would be a total loss.

  Star was shaking badly, her skin cold to the touch, but she clawed at Rob. “My husband—”

  “He’s hurt, but I think he’ll be all right. Ambulance is on the way.”

  Rob released her, and she sank beside Andrew, lowering her head to his chest and sobbing. He tried to stroke her hair, but he didn’t have the energy, his arm falling to his side.

  Star looked up at Rob, her eyes wide and sunken with shock and fear. “Agent Spencer’s gone after Libby. Toward Ravenkill Creek.”

  Rob acknowledged Star’s words with a nod.

  “You’re not going after her?”

  “I can’t leave you all here alone.”

  Raleigh stirred. “Give me a goddamn gun,” he mumbled. “Or a kitchen knife. I can do a lot of damage with a kitchen knife.”

  Rob had to give the old guy credit. “Maggie can handle herself.”

  “I should have known it was Libby. Crazy bitch.” He moaned softly, his color better than it was. “In my younger days—”

  �
��You managed to keep her from beating Andrew to death with her baseball bat.”

  “Then she turned her damn bat on me,” Raleigh said with a bit more energy. “Beat the living daylights out of me.”

  From what Rob had pieced together from the mutterings of the two semiconscious men, Andrew had realized Libby hadn’t been around over the weekend and had checked the cellar, where she spent a lot of time, discovering a treasure trove of incriminating evidence. He and Star had prided themselves on respecting Libby’s privacy and the fact that the inn had been in her family for so long.

  Rob heard the blare of sirens. Star jumped, startled, shaking hard.

  Raleigh sat up, blood on the side of his mouth from a cut lip, not, Rob thought, internal injuries. “Go after Maggie,” he told Rob. “Don’t leave her to that woman. Libby would kill Maggie the same way she’d kill a cockroach. Without hesitation, without remorse. You know she would. It’s how she killed Tom Kopac.”

  Rob was tempted, but he knew he wasn’t leaving Raleigh and the Franconias until help got there. Then he spotted Juliet and Brooker on the stone path and signaled to them. They waved, picking up their pace as they pounded through a flower bed and ducked under a low-hanging branch, then joined him in the shade.

  Rob quickly filled them in.

  “It’s your call, Dunnemore,” Juliet said. “Do you want to go after your DS agent and assassin or shall I?”

  “I’ll go.”

  She managed a wink. “Thought so.”

  But first he turned to Brooker. “Talk to Raleigh. Your wife stayed here a month before she was killed.”

  Brooker had no visible reaction. “I’m going with you.”

  “Uh-uh,” Juliet said. “You’ve got a concussion, Brooker, and Dunnemore here’s a triathlete. You’ll just slow him down.”

  But Rob was already on his way.

  Maggie ran through tall ferns and brush in the woods below the orchard and cornfield. There was no path. She could hear the creek just below her, tumbling over rocks, almost drowning out the sounds of the sirens of the onslaught of fire trucks, ambulances and police cars.

  The riverbank was steep, covered in slippery pine mulch and exposed tree roots, but she made sure she didn’t trip. She couldn’t risk giving Libby any advantage.

  When she reached the river, Maggie stayed within the cover of a white pine as she scanned the banks.

  The water, deeper here, was high from last night’s rain, crashing over a mix of rounded and jagged gray boulders, forming a stretch of whitewater rapids.

  Libby stood on a rock, maybe a yard into the river.

  “Drop your weapon,” Maggie called from behind her tree, her Glock trained on the assassin. Tom’s killer. Her father’s killer. “Do it now.”

  Without a word, Libby released her Beretta and let it fall into the water.

  What the hell was she up to? Maggie stayed where she was. “Keep your hands up where I can see them.”

  Libby smiled in her direction. “You won’t kill me. You want your answers.”

  And she stepped off her rock into the river, as if she were walking over a threshold. When she hit the water feetfirst, she went under, her arms flailing, but the current was too strong and dragged her downstream, smashing her against a boulder.

  Maggie ran down to the water’s edge, Libby a couple of yards into the river. Blood flowed down the right side of her face. She tried to hold on to the rock, but lost her grip and fell back into the water, going under again. She managed to lurch up and wrap both arms around another rock, only her head above the rapids.

  “Hang on,” Maggie called to her. “You’ll drown if you try anything else.”

  She heard a thrashing sound behind her. Rob identified himself as he emerged from the woods and joined her on the riverbank, nodding toward the struggling killer. “She was trying to get to the other side of the river?”

  “Apparently. She hit her head on a rock. I don’t know how long she can hold on—”

  “I’ll get her.”

  Maggie shook her head. “She gets money for killing you. She doesn’t get a dime for me. Motivation.”

  “Shoot her if she tries anything.” Rob jumped onto a boulder that jutted above water a yard into the creek. “That’ll take care of her motivation.”

  “I don’t know if she has another weapon on her—”

  “Well, if she lets go of her rock to get it, she’ll drown. Then we won’t have to worry about her trying to shoot me.”

  And Maggie would use deadly force if it was called for.

  But when he got to Libby, she tried to scoot away from him. Rob gave her a chop to the carotid artery with the side of his hand, a move that would render her unconscious for five or ten seconds—enough time for him to pull her out of the water and toss her over his shoulder.

  By the time he made his way back to the riverbank with her, she was conscious. He dumped her onto the ground just in time for her to vomit into a bed of brown pine needles.

  She looked so small and helpless, Maggie thought. Yet Libby Smith was a woman who killed people for money.

  Rob got Libby’s arms behind her back, cuffed her and checked her for any other weapons, but there were none. She sat up, blood pouring from the gash on her right temple.

  Maggie still hadn’t lowered her own weapon.

  Rob eyed her. “It’s okay, Maggie. We’re good.”

  But she stared at the woman who’d killed her father and couldn’t make herself move. “Did my father know what you were before you shot him?”

  “Yes,” Libby said calmly. “I was in the nick of time. He’d have told Raleigh. He’d have betrayed me.”

  “Maggie,” Rob said.

  She ignored him. “You weren’t lovers.”

  Libby smiled, blood from her head wound seeping into her mouth, between her teeth. “Almost.”

  “And Tom—”

  “I saw him before the Dutch police arrested Janssen and recognized him the next day when he showed up in Den Bosch.”

  “You were in Den Bosch to get your list of victims from Janssen?”

  “Not victims,” she said. “Targets.”

  Rob took a step toward Maggie, his clothes soaked with river water, stained with Libby Smith’s blood, perhaps William Raleigh’s blood. “Maggie, she wants you to kill her. She knows the party’s over. Maggie—”

  She lowered her Glock. “I’m okay. I’m not like her. I don’t kill for pleasure.”

  Libby glared at her. “Neither do I. I kill for money.”

  “You didn’t get paid for my father. Or for Tom.”

  “That was self-defense.”

  In a few minutes the police descended. Rob, relaxing now, gave a mock shiver. “The water’s a hell of a lot colder up here than it is down home,” he said, laying on his Southern accent.

  Maggie stared at Libby as the local cops took her away. “She didn’t get to kill you. We stopped her. Finally.”

  “Yeah. We stopped her.” When Maggie made a move to start back up the riverbank, Rob touched her cheek. “I didn’t like it when I thought you were dead.”

  She tried to smile. “I didn’t like it when I thought I was dead, either.”

  Chief Deputy Mike Rivera arrived at the Old Stone Hollow Inn not long after the ambulances had left. The local police had cordoned off the entire property as a crime scene—including the car, complete with a ticket to Washington, D.C., and a New York license in a new name, that Libby had stashed on the other side of Ravenkill Creek. She’d lived in Ravenkill all her life—she knew all the places to hide things.

  “Smith wouldn’t have succeeded in killing your sister,” Rivera said, plopping down next to Rob on a bench in front of the blunt-nosed fairy statue. “Nate would have stopped her.”

  “Nate was on Libby’s target list, too.”

  “Then Sarah would have stopped her. You Dunnemores are a resourceful lot.”

  “Vengeance. That’s the only reason Nick Janssen put our names on his damn list.”


  “He’s not one to let bygones be bygones,” Rivera acknowledged. “But we’ve got him now. He’ll stand trial for murder.”

  The acrid smell of the burned house hung in the summer air. Incongruously, Rob’s gaze landed on a sunflower, untouched by the violence that had gone on around it that morning.

  Firefighters were still inside, making sure they’d gotten out the last of the flames.

  “House is a goner,” Rivera said.

  “Libby wanted it that way, more than she even realized. It was still burning when the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance. She started laughing.”

  “Creepy.” Rivera feigned a shudder, as if he hadn’t heard it all before—the excuses, the reasons, for killing and maiming and setting houses on fire. “The Franconias can rebuild. They’re a mess, those two. Clinging to each other, sobbing like a couple of teenagers about how much they love each other. I guess they got their priorities screwed up for a while.” Rivera shrugged. “Happens.”

  “Where’s Maggie?” Rob asked.

  Rivera let the barest smile escape. “Bitching out Brooker for letting Raleigh sneak out of here.”

  “Longstreet was the one with the gun.”

  “She says he got away when Andrew Franconia started coughing up blood and she went to help him.”

  It was bullshit, and both men knew it. If Juliet Longstreet hadn’t decided to let William Raleigh go, he’d still be there.

  “She’s a pain in the ass lately,” Rivera said. “PTSD. But you’re all right? You look cold to me.”

  “I had a change of clothes. It’s gone up in flames.”

  Rivera grunted. “Whose room? Yours or the DS agent’s?”

  For the first time in hours, Rob let himself laugh. But he didn’t answer Rivera’s question, just walked with the chief deputy out past the sunflowers and the herbs, to where Maggie Spencer was standing with the sun on her hair. She was all alone, which wasn’t, Rob decided, really the way she liked it. But it was what she was used to.