Sophie came back into the lounge. She looked tired. He held out his arm and she came over to him willingly, sliding her arms around him and resting her head against his chest.
“I’m scared, Jack,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“If I only knew what to do,” she said. “This is all so totally outside my experience—most people’s experience. I know what I’d like to do but don’t know how to do it.” She stood straight, looking up at him. “I’m so angry with these people, this Silent Knight, for what they’ve done to your life. For what they’re putting you through right now. You’ve only ever done what you felt was right and good and you’ve paid for those decisions in ways I can’t even begin to imagine. You’re still paying for them.”
Sophie is paying for it, too, but she doesn’t see that.
“At least I can sleep at night, knowing why I did it,” he said gently.
“How the hell do you sleep at night knowing someone wants you dead?” she flared. Then she pursed her lips tightly together and held up her hands. Control. Always, control. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I don’t know how to beat them, playing it their way. But if you pointed to a lever and told me that if I pulled the damn thing, it would blow up everyone who is looking for you, I’d dislocate my wrist yanking the lever.”
He smiled a little. “It seems to me that you did a pretty good job playing by their rules, eight years ago.”
She frowned a little. “Was I playing by their rules? I was just doing what had to be done.”
“Exactly. That’s all you can do when you haven’t got the controls.” He pushed her hair back, the thick lock that always curled around her throat. “You saved my life that day and I never did thank you for it.”
“Was it worth it, Jack?” she asked softly.
“It put Callahan behind bars. It gave me these last few weeks. It was worth it.”
She considered that for a long time. “Okay,” she said at last. “If that’s the price, then okay.”
She had accepted what was coming and was braced and prepared for whatever the outcome might be. Seeing her acceptance brought him to a point of calmness. The churning in his mind ceased, the dilemma he had been facing now became simply a set of possible alternatives. One way or the other. Time would give him an answer.
“I’m glad it was you on the ledge that day,” he told her. He tried a smile and found it came easily.
She pushed his shoulder a little. Playfully. “Don’t talk about me in the past tense. It’s not over yet.”
The phone rang. They both stood for a second, looking at each other. He could read her mind almost perfectly. Was this it?
She hurried to answer the phone before it woke the children and he followed her out into the hall.
“Isobel,” she acknowledged and listened. “They were searching Jack’s name?” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “You were watching Jack’s records too?” she said into the phone.
The balance, the calm he’d found, let him reach out to take the phone from her. Sophie bit her lip and let him take it.
“Isobel, it’s Jack.”
The silence was profound.
“Oh god, Jack, I wasn’t sure but I hoped….” Again, the silence. She would be sliding into professional role now, embarrassed by the display of emotion. “She plays a good game,” Isobel went on. “She didn’t give away anything.”
“I know. The search on my name, Isobel. I know who’s searching. That isn’t the concern. It’s who it tips off that has me worried.”
“Then nothing’s changed except they’ve got an area to work in.”
“No. It’s all changed. Sophie’s part of it now.”
“If that is true, then what on earth were you thinking when you went and found her again? You had to know it would get her involved.”
He considered and discarded a dozen answers and settled for the truth. “Too late. It was too late, even in Boulder, Izz.”
Isobel wouldn’t understand it, not in her bones but it was a fact she could grip and deal with. “Okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then let me bring you in.”
“And go through witness protection again? It’s let me down once. The system hasn’t got a leak, Izz. A whole pipeline of information has been tapped into and diverted to the wrong people. I won’t come in until I know that pipe has been shut down.”
“Then what, Jack? What’s next?”
He frowned. “Do you have any idea at all who else is watching my records? How did you do it?”
She gave a little laugh. “A sweet young boy who was caught hacking into the system. I let him off the hook and he wrote me a subroutine that sits passively in the national database until certain keywords trigger it. It sends out a signal every time it’s activated. Up until five days ago, it hadn’t twitched.”
“I see you’re still trading favours and bending the legal system to suit yourself,” Jack said dryly.
“It beats the hell out of rubber and whips, let me tell you,” she shot back. “But I don’t know how Silent Knight would be—”
Jack didn’t hear the rest. There was a dull roaring in his ears and his heart seemed to seize. He reached out for the base of the phone, fumbling, until he dropped the phone back onto it. His breath was short.
“Jack, what on earth…” Sophie began.
It was all shifting. Moving. Everything he knew had to be reconsidered. He walked back into the lounge, his legs feeling like stiff tin man stilts. He dropped onto the sofa and held his head in his hands, trying to work it out.
“Jack.” She was next to him, fear big in her eyes.
He sat back, drawing a deep breath, trying to calm his heart.
“Jack,” she said again. “What is it? Tell me.”
He gave a laugh. “I don’t know where to start. This changes everything. How about I just tell you my life all over again?”
“What changes everything?”
He gripped her hand where it lay along the back of the sofa and realized that he was shaking.
“When I moved to Chicago, it took me a while to get close to Callahan. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“There was one thing that changed it. One night. I was just a driver in the organization—fringe stuff, nothing useful. I hadn’t even met Patrick Callahan. I was bringing some of the boys back to the warehouse after a meeting downtown. They’d all gone home and I was leaving and I took a call on the shipping manager’s phone. It was Michael Callahan, Patrick’s son. He was barely eighteen, then. He’d been steadily ringing around the building, looking for someone, anyone. His father was out of reach. I could tell by his voice he was in serious trouble. So I calmed him down, told him I’d help. He gave me an address.”
Jack shook his head. “It was down on the Southside, really sleazy, not a place you’d expect to find a privileged kid like Michael Callahan. He was in a woman’s apartment. She’d picked him up in a bar and brought him home. Their entertainment must have been too much for her. She was lying on the bed, dead. There was a leather cord around her throat and she was wearing a bizarre rubber suit, cut away in all the interesting places. Michael had been throttling her as they, um.” He stopped, suddenly aware of just how alien this might sound to Sophie.
She was a little pale but nodding. “It’s not something I’ll ever understand but I know it happens.”
“Anyway, he’d held on too long, or maybe she just wasn’t healthy enough for that sort of stuff and her heart gave out. She was a part-time hooker when she wasn’t ripped on smack and she’d pretty much been on the streets since she was ten. Malnutrition was the least of her health concerns. I found out all this later.” He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the edginess of that night, the adrenaline overdrive it had imparted rushing through him all over again.
“Why did Michael call for help?” Sophie asked. “Couldn’t he have taken care of it?”
“He was chained to the wall, too far away from the keys that undid the padlock
on the leather collar around his neck. He’d managed to hook the heel of his boot around the cord of the bedroom phone and drag it to him. He wasn’t part of his dad’s business. He was just a kid. He had no idea how to clean up the mess and get out of it without repercussions.”
“So you did it.”
“Yeah. Michael begged me not to tell his father or anyone else in the organization, so I did it all myself. The hooker was found ten blocks away the next day, wearing her suit, so the police figured out for themselves what had happened. I got Michael out of the apartment, cleaned up any evidence—fingerprints, semen, blood—”
“Blood?”
“Bondage,” he answered. “She was a dominatrix and Michael got his jollies from being in the submissive role, being ordered to do anything, being whipped. The harder the better.”
“Ugh,” Sophie breathed.
“Anyway, I got him home, took the car back to the warehouse and never said a word to another soul. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to.”
“Why?” Sophie asked. “Why give him the break? The whole family was into crime, you said.”
“Because he was a kid. Because I screwed up when I was a kid and a cop who thought I had potential gave me a second chance.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“A few days after, I got called into Patrick Callahan’s office. He introduced himself, said he had a job that needed doing he thought I’d be perfect for. That was it. That was the break. I worked right next to Callahan up until they pulled him in. He never once mentioned Michael or that night.”
“But he knew,” Sophie said.
“Yeah, I think he did. I don’t know if Michael told him or if he kept close tabs on his kids and found out another way. He was a smart guy. Street smart. Maybe he heard about the hooker, knew about Michael’s predilections and put it all together that way.”
“You liked him,” Sophie said.
“Yeah, I did. He had a sense of honour, a code of ethics, if you like, that he abided by regardless of the cost and sometimes it cost him millions in lost deals. He played fair as much as he could. The only thing wrong with him was the game he was playing in.”
“Why are you telling me this now? What has it to do with Isobel? Why did you hang up on her?”
Jack blew out his breath, feeling again the disorienting shock. “I said something about currying favours to her—”
“You said, ‘I see you’re still trading favours and bending the legal system to suit yourself’, or something like that.”
“Right. And her response was, ‘It beats the hell out of rubber and whips’.”
Sophie put a finger to her lips, suddenly thoughtful. Her eyes focused inward. He could see her mind was turning it over, considering it. Her eyes suddenly widened and her mouth opened. “Oh lord! Jack, oh my…” She licked her lips. “The last time Isobel phoned. Not just now. She was interrupted. Someone spoke to her just before she hung up. It was muffled but I heard her say ‘Just a minute, Mike,’ and then she told me she had to go.”
His heart was hurting, beating too hard. “There’s lots of Michaels in the world,” he said.
“And her joke about rubber and whips might just be a joke,” Sophie agreed. “But she didn’t strike me as the sort to make jokes that way. She’s the type of person who uses the truth for irony. New York cynicism—she had it in spades. Speak the shocking truth in such a way that most people think you’re joking.”
“And now she’s the governor of Indiana.” He shook his head. “Except, if she is the Silent Knight, then why did she let Callahan get nailed in court? Why let me get to the trial?” He felt a little shiver of shock run through him. “Even before that, in Colorado, she set me up. She sneaked us onto that plane and she knew it was going to crash. She knew we were all going to die. My god…”
“Us?” Sophie asked.
“I had two bodyguards. They were on board with me.”
“She deliberately killed seven people just to get to you? What sort of human being can contemplate something like that?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Yes, she’s in a position where she would have access to all the information Silent Knight would need to get Callahan off the hook every time the law got close but she was never associated with him.”
“How did she end up being your lawyer?” Sophie asked.
“Public defender appointment, although there was a switch right at the beginning. The first lawyer assigned to me was in a car accident…” He looked at Sophie.
“But Jack, if you’re right, then why didn’t she kill you in the hospital? She had every chance.”
Jack felt his lips curl down. “She doesn’t do her own dirty work.”
“Arranged something then. You were helpless.”
He rubbed the spot between his brows that was throbbing. “I think, I don’t know for sure but I think that because I came through the crash, I was suddenly an asset to her. If you look at how she has manipulated things over the years you can see the pattern. Put two pieces on the board and let them sort it out and use the winner to further her own purposes. Besides, she was in Colorado and possibly couldn’t find the sort of hired hand she needed.”
“If anything had happened to you there, then they would have known it was her,” Sophie added. “But how were you an asset?”
“I think,” Jack said, feeling his way through the labyrinth pathways of Isobel’s actions over the years, re-examining them, “I think she wanted to use me to bring Callahan down. She had to try to kill me before. Callahan had ordered it. But with that attempt failed and Callahan not aware that I’d lived through it, she could produce me in court, have him put away and take over his empire.”
“I feel a little sick,” Sophie whispered.
“Ditto.” He stood up. “If it’s her, if she is the Silent Knight, then she’s got a five-day start on me. Christ! They could already be in town.”
“Where are you going?” Sophie demanded.
He held out his hands, mystified by her question. “To pack.”
“No.” She got to her feet. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Sophie…”
“No. This changes everything. You said it yourself. This is not something you can run from anymore.”
“If we’re right, if it’s Isobel, then she’s controlling the Callahan organization through Michael—” He stopped, hearing himself. “That’s why she let Patrick swing. She couldn’t control him but Michael, he was the willing slave. Literally.”
“There has to be someone who will consider this enough to investigate her. There has to be someone you trust. If you’re right, if she’s the Silent Knight, then you know who to avoid. Who do you know, Jack?”
“Dempsey,” he said immediately.
She frowned.
“The deputy DA who got me into this in the first place,” Jack explained. “Except I have no idea where he is now.”
“Probably in Chicago.”
“Oh, he’s probably still in the DA’s office. He was a career man. But Sophie, I can’t just phone him and get straight through like that, not even with my real name. There are layers and levels that will filter me off, because I’ll have to use the public gateways.”
“Public gateways?”
“The public switchboard, with secretaries and assistants and highly paid clerks, who have the power to decide if you get passed up or not. I’m not going to tell them who I am and I can’t reach through the phone and make them do it.”
“You could fly to Chicago.”
“No. That’s what she’ll expect me to do and the airlines are a natural bottleneck. And I don’t have time, Sophie. We’ve got hours, I think. That’s all. She’s been playing with us via the phone, making sure we stay put.” He rubbed his temple. “If I was on the job it would be different.”
“Why?” Sophie said sharply.
“I’d have access to the backdoors.”
She nodded. “I can arrange that,” she told
him.
Chapter Nineteen
Peter’s office window had a corner view, so when the black Mustang pulled up outside the station just after ten thirty, he was able to watch the occupants go through the complicated process of getting out.
He knew it was Sophie. It was the only black Mustang in town, one of the few things the deadbeat Ryerson had left her. But because of the lateness of the night and the opinion-twisting reading he had been doing, he was able to watch her like one would watch a stranger.
She and Martin emerged first, muffled to the noses, for the thermometer had been plunging all night and it was probably close to ten or fifteen below zero out there. Then they pulled their seats forward, reached into the back and emerged with a child each, a bed quilt dropped over each of them. Then the one-handed door slam and test of the lock. Peter had seen dozens of families go through the same routine.
Families.
He sat back in his chair, considering that, while they trudged up the station steps and pressed the buzzer that alerted the on-duty officer that someone wanted to come in. As he was the only one in the building, that would be him.
He stirred himself and went through to the outer office and over to the counter where the door release switch was located and let them in.
They came through the double glass doors of the entryway. Sophie saw him. “Peter, I need to talk to you. But first—” She looked around. “Can I use a couple of desks?”
“Sure,” he said, curious.
They put each child on one of the desks and tucked the quilts around them. There was a sleepy stirring and murmur from one and by the golden hair emerging from the top of the cocoon, he figured it was Georgia.
“Jinni’s out,” Sophie explained, straightening up.
He leaned against his office doorframe and crossed his arms. “How can I help you?” he asked.
She came over to him, pulling off her gloves and hat, undoing the jacket. Martin was doing the same. She indicated him. “Peter, I want you to meet Jack Laubreaux.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed a little and he shot a glance at Sophie. Then he looked back at him, the direct gaze a challenge. Daring him to make something of it.
Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller Page 23