Matthias turned around just in time to see the kid move into the doorway. Same hate and same look of trying to hide in plain sight.
Paul’s eyes widened. “Shit.”
He pushed off the doorjamb and ran. Took off with his sneakers thudding on the pier.
On instinct, Matthias sprinted after him. With each step the pain in his arm intensified and the sling wrapped around his throat. He tore at it and threw it off. Not having it strapped to him made it hurt more. It thumped and ached until he thought it would fall off.
Still, he ran, dodging around the people walking along the docks. Several called out and he could hear yelling behind him. His men shifted in their positions. Two took off, following them.
Matthias got close but couldn’t close the gap enough to reach out and grab him. Hell, this Paul—or whatever his name was—should have a track scholarship. He jumped over a bench and nearly knocked an older man over. He swung around, heading toward the boat slips. Matthias knew he’d have him if the kid proved to be reckless enough to go there. But at the last second, Paul turned and ran up the small grassy hill, scrambling almost on his hands and knees as he flew.
“Fucking kid.” Matthias was one arm down for that sort of crawl.
Between the meds, the lack of sleep and the gunshot wound, he was not at his best. He still outran men younger than him and Garrett hadn’t appeared. But the hill slowed him down. Hearing Kayla call out his name also wrecked his concentration. But he could not lose sight of this kid.
He finally reached the top, but he’d lost ground. The space between them grew. They raced between buildings, down the steps and into the parking lot. Brakes squealed and a new round of shouting started.
Paul looked over his shoulder as the three of them on his tail closed in. Matthias saw the blur. A black car. He called out for Paul to watch out. At the last second, Paul shifted to the left as the car pulled in front of him. He slammed into the side and bounced off.
It turned out to be enough of a distraction for Matthias to grab him. He used his good arm, and his fingers clamped down on Paul’s shoulder. Matthias spun Paul around. Just as he started kicking, Garrett got out and trapped the kid against the car.
“Enough with the damn running.” Matthias coughed out the warning through harsh breaths.
“You okay, grandpa?” Garrett asked.
“Tough talk from the guy who drove here.” Still, Matthias fought the need to double over and suck in as much oxygen as possible.
The pain in his shoulder almost knocked him down. Blood pumped through him and the wound burned. Probably not the activity the doctor had in mind when he said to keep the shoulder still for a few days.
Kayla and Lauren raced in. A few of the team wandered close by.
With her red face and wide eyes, Kayla looked ready to kill him. She didn’t throw herself in his arms, but she did rush up to his side and grab his good arm.
She shoved his sling at him. Pinned it against his chest. “What were you thinking? You’re injured.”
He didn’t hate that she cared. “I’m fine.”
Paul picked that moment to throw his body around. “Get off me.”
Matthias stepped in and held him still with a hand to his upper back and Garrett’s help. Even if the kid did manage to get away, three guys with guns waited right there. He might not know it, but Matthias both sensed and saw his team’s presence. They were ready to grab the kid.
He’d settle for something calmer for now. “No one goes anywhere until we talk.”
“I don’t need to—”
Matthias leaned in closer. “And figure out why you’re trying to be Paul when you’re really someone else.”
The kid shook his head. “What?”
Matthias turned to Lauren and Kayla. “Meet Ben Weston.”
Chapter 25
Paul sat at a table in the café and fiddled with the water bottle Kayla had gotten them. They were all there—Matthias, Lauren and Garrett. Kayla had closed the café, so no one else was around. Most people were too busy talking about all the action on the pier.
Matthias stalled the calls to the police. He told the people standing around that he had the situation handled and wanted to keep it private to avoid giving the kid a criminal record, but he knew that excuse would only last so long. He had Wren monitoring calls to the police and ready to step in if they needed more time.
What Matthias really needed was medication. Every time he moved pain screamed down his arm. He wasn’t sure what damage he’d done, but he’d done something. He couldn’t even touch the bandage without wanting to yell a stream of profanities. He just hoped he didn’t need surgery. If he did, he’d blame Paul . . . or whatever his name was.
The kid kept shifting in his seat. Matthias couldn’t blame him. Lauren looked ready to strangle him. Garrett was stationed at the door, with more men just outside. And Matthias had planted his body in the chair right in front of Paul. Kayla stood behind him. That amounted to a lot of people cheering on the showdown.
Paul spun the water bottle on the table. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, but this will go faster if you drop the attitude.” Matthias was running out of both time and patience.
“He’s scared.” Lauren paced back and forth in front of Garrett. Her mood bounced from angry to concerned almost every other minute.
She was trying to protect the kid. Matthias got that. Something about the way his shoulders curled in and he refused to look at them made Matthias feel something for him, too. He didn’t think the kid was being a jerk. He thought he was terrified.
Smart choice.
But Matthias didn’t need someone questioning him while he searched for answers. “Lauren, you’re not helping.”
Paul looked over his head, likely at Lauren. “I want to leave.”
As if that was going to happen. “Why are you in town?”
Paul’s gaze touched Matthias’s face for a second then bounced away again. “I’m going to school here.”
“Stop.” He’d said that three times already. Matthias couldn’t figure out what the kid’s class schedule had to do with Kayla or this situation. Maybe Paul was stalling, but if he thought someone was coming to save him he was wrong. “The truth this time. Not just the pieces you feel like telling us.”
When he continued to sit there not talking, Matthias pushed forward. Enough with the soft sell. He wanted this over and he was pretty sure he needed to see another doctor. “Your name is Ben Weston. Your brother is Doug Weston, the guy Kayla dated in college.”
“What?” The shock was clear in Lauren’s voice.
“I had a different name back then. Carrie Gleason.” Kayla pulled out a chair and sat down next to Matthias.
He didn’t love that she was right there for the questioning. He trusted her but that didn’t mean he wanted her to hear anything more about that night so long ago. And if this guy was the one who broke into her apartment, Matthias didn’t want her near him period.
Paul or Ben or whatever he was going by shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“I have your driver’s license. That’s you with your real name, dumbass.” Matthias reached into his back pocket and took out the copy. Threw the paper on the table. “Now, wanna try again?”
Kayla sighed. “Ben, I know—”
“Where is he?” Paul focused all of his attention on Kayla.
“Who?”
“My brother.”
“You’re here looking for Doug?” She shook her head and her voice lost all of its edge. “I haven’t seen him in years.”
“No one has.” Paul leaned forward. The hate was right there in his eyes. He looked ready to come over the table and grab her. “That’s the point.”
Matthias put his good arm in front of her like he might if he put on the car brakes too fast. “Let’s be careful.”
But she was already off and talking. “You broke into my place. Doug’s not there. There’s nothing from my time with your brot
her there or anywhere in my life.”
“I’m not saying anything else to you until you tell me where he is.” Paul crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. The front two legs left the floor.
The belligerent act didn’t make Matthias happy. It would only prolong the inevitable, so he tried to rush them there. “She doesn’t know and we’re not talking about her. We’re talking about you and the break-in and why we shouldn’t turn you over to the police.”
“We should. We’re not talking about picking a lock here. This was serious mastermind stuff,” Garrett said from across the room.
“That’s not me.” Paul pointed to Lauren. “Tell them.”
“But you’re my tech guy.”
Paul’s mouth dropped open. “That’s computers, not what they’re talking about.”
Matthias thought about Paul being the guy in the office and Kayla’s extra set of keys. Finding out about that days ago put a target on Lauren. Matthias shifted it now to the guy who literally had access to the keys to the kingdom.
Without turning around, Matthias called out to Lauren. “Did you keep the extra keys to Kayla’s place in your office?”
“In the safe.” She stepped forward and her face fell. “I didn’t give him access to that.”
“But how hard would it be for him to see you open it?” Garrett asked.
Lauren’s mouth dropped open as the color rushed from her face. “You stole the keys and the code? You used me to get to Kayla?”
“And destroy my apartment,” Kayla added.
“None of this matters. My brother is missing and that should be a bigger deal than some tossed furniture and a note on the wall.” Paul ignored the rest and talked directly to her.
Now Matthias had his confirmation. The twisting in his gut eased. He could at least resolve this part of the threat against Kayla. “Who told you about the note?”
Paul looked wild now. His gaze bounced around the room as he shifted in his chair. “Lauren . . . you guys. Everyone knows.”
“No one does. We leaked the information about the break-in but left out the threat.” It was a simple investigative trick but it was amazing how often it worked. That fact never ceased to surprise Matthias. Some people did not know when to stop talking.
Garrett laughed. “Oops.”
Paul shook his head as he stared at Kayla. “Where is he?”
“He’s not with me. We stopped dating long ago. We weren’t even a couple when the murders happened.” Instead of anger at his admission, her voice carried a note of sadness. She kept repeating the same lines. The ones that really didn’t answer what Paul was asking.
Matthias cataloged each fact, each statement Kayla offered, and stored it away for later. He’d learned more about Doug in the last ten minutes than she’d shared in all the time before then, but he still didn’t know much. The puzzle was coming together in his head and he hated the picture he saw, so he blocked it out and concentrated on the Weston brother in front of him. He’d deal with the other one later.
Paul didn’t blink. Energy pounded off him. He was wound up and pulled tight and it showed in every line of his body and in the strain in his voice. “Did he do it? That was the accusation, and what everyone said, right? He did it for you or with you. He killed them and ran.”
Kayla shook her head. “I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t have anything to do with the murders. Not one thing other than being unlucky enough to find the bodies.”
Matthias mentally winced. She was answering questions no one asked. Jumped right over the easy response and the obvious issue. All that ducking only made her story about Doug harder to believe. Matthias wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew it didn’t roll out like she said, and now his brain wouldn’t let it go until he had an answer.
But the immediate problem was no matter what she said, Paul wasn’t biting. He stayed right on track. “You’re telling me Doug did? My brother killed his friends.”
“They weren’t his friends.” She bit her bottom lip. “Not really.”
“How can you say that?”
“You’ve been hunting me, shooting at me. You hit Matthias.” Kayla touched his shoulder. “You did this.”
“Wait.” Paul sat back. He made a face like he’d tasted something sour. Looked much more like the scared kid than the tough-guy image he tried to project. “I don’t have a gun. I have no idea how to shoot. You can’t pin that on me.”
Lauren stood behind Kayla now. “We’re supposed to believe you did one horrible thing and not the other?”
“I trashed her place. I wrote the note.” Paul grabbed his water bottle again. Tapped the side against the desk. “This was a onetime thing. The rest? Not me.”
There was a full admission of something in there somewhere. Matthias thought they’d get one, but not like this. Not by him explaining what he didn’t do. But Matthias still had questions and one very big one. “Why? Why, after all these years, did you come at Kayla? Instead of living your life, you tracked her down. Her and not any other suspect in this case.”
Paul shifted the bottle from hand to hand. “She’s the suspect.”
The rest of the intel was in there. Matthias knew he could pull it out. “So was your brother and you’re not looking for him. Not directly. You’re looking for her.”
“Because I believed what she said.” Paul made the comment as if they all knew who he was talking about.
Matthias feared he did. “Who?”
“Mary Patterson.” Someone in the room groaned and Kayla sat back hard in her chair. Over the noise and the sudden discomfort wrapping around them, Paul kept talking, as if willing them all to believe and understand. “She’s the only one who would talk to me. I got old enough to ask questions and no one had any answers. She showed me police records and newspaper articles. She has all of the information to support her theory.”
Matthias didn’t have to work hard to imagine how this all spun out. Paul . . . Ben missed his brother but everyone tried to protect him. In the end, they created a young man in search of answers, filled with energy and no idea how to control it.
Hell, Matthias had been that guy. Different facts but the end result was the same. So much undirected anger led to stupid choices.
“She told you I did it.” Kayla didn’t ask it as a question.
“And you were with my brother and now he’s missing, too.”
The facts did sound damning. Matthias could see how someone could twist them around, especially with a grown-up like Mary sitting right there, pushing her theory. “Did she send you here to find Kayla?”
“No. That’s all me.” Paul nodded toward Kayla. “I tracked her using college records.” He snorted. “It’s pretty easy to get those online.”
One more question answered. Whether he meant to or not, Paul explained the keys and access to Kayla’s address. He didn’t need to be a mastermind for those two pieces because so many people were willing to dig around and find the information he needed and hand it to him. “You hacked the university computers.”
“I asked the right questions. I knew from her old school that she’d registered at St. John’s. It was easy to trace her information from there.” Paul barely spared Kayla a glance as he talked about her.
“But you did it because Mary told you to.” Matthias would have been impressed with Mary’s tenacity if it didn’t keep fucking up his investigation. If her goal wasn’t to destroy Kayla.
“She’d spent all this time following her and . . .” Paul’s words cut off. “Look, I only did it once then I stopped.”
“Aren’t you a fucking Boy Scout?” But Matthias believed him. The kid’s skill set didn’t match the shooting. His actions lined up with everything else, but not that.
His men had performed an initial search of the room he rented and didn’t find anything except a few photos of Kayla. No gun. They might find something on his computer. Matthias would reserve final judgment on the shooting part until then, but he didn’t see
it.
“Then I came here.” Paul’s voice had gone low, almost to a whisper.
Matthias wasn’t sure why. “And?”
“Everyone I talked to here liked her. None of what Mary said matched with what I saw. Lauren liked her. So did the guys at the boat rental place and the marina security.” He didn’t look at Kayla or use her name, but then he suddenly did. “Hell, you kept trying to feed me.”
Matthias had heard enough. All the facts jammed together in his head. He thought he understood Paul. He now knew more about Doug. But that was a conversation he needed to have with Kayla—alone.
“Okay, we’re going to go over everything Mary told you and all you think you know and everything you’ve done.” But without him. Matthias didn’t think he could sit there for one more second. This kid was going to have to own up to what he did in some way. Matthias hoped that didn’t include the police because that wouldn’t do anything to lessen Paul’s anger.
Paul held up a finger. “Just the one time.”
He acted like that mattered. Matthias would disagree. “That was enough.”
“I had no idea.” Lauren whispered the comment but they all heard it.
Kayla spun around in her chair. “Of course not.”
“But I hired him.”
Kayla reached out and grabbed Lauren’s hand. “You didn’t know. There was no way you could.”
Matthias wasn’t sure he agreed with that. Lauren’s background checks failed. He’d talk to her about that later. Never mind that he was starting to have a lot of things he needed to do later. “We’ll need whatever paperwork he gave you.”
Lauren nodded. “Sure.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Kayla asked Matthias.
“Do you really think he shot up your apartment?” It wasn’t a real answer, but it was all he had right now.
Matthias’s mind had started to wander. It zipped to Doug and to Mary. He thought about Lauren and her access to information. Then there was Gerald and all the other people who came in and out of the marina. So many suspects but it was all starting to gel in his head. This was how he worked at home, when he didn’t have a personal stake. And he did this time.
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