“Look! Here are their tracks!”
Her stomach clenched. Her pulse raced. Clutching Kate’s hand, she flew over the snow.
“Are they going to catch us, Aunt Mick?” Kate gasped.
“No, honey, no!”
“There they are!”
A quick glance over her shoulder told Mick that six men were charging up the hill behind them. Jenny and Lauren were to her left and had fallen a few paces back. Mick’s heart leaped into her throat as she saw that one of the thugs was only a few paces behind them.
“Jenny, look out!” Mick screamed. But it was too late. The thug lunged and grabbed the back of Jenny’s sweater. Jenny fell face-first in the snow.
Lauren screamed and stumbled as her mother went down.
“Lauren! Run!” Jenny cried, even as her captor straddled her.
But Lauren stopped and turned back to help her mother.
Kate screamed. Mick kept on going, dragging the child with her, even though her heart was exploding with terror and grief and her legs felt all rubbery. But if she could, she had to save at least one child.
Then she heard footsteps pounding behind her. Glancing wildly around, she saw another of the thugs only a few yards away. He was going to catch them. There was no way he was not, with Kate slowing her down.
“Kate, keep going! Run, run, run!” Mick shrieked, releasing her niece’s hand and whirling to face the man plunging toward her. At least Kate did what she was told, her little legs churning up the slope.
Mick’s throat closed up as she saw that the thug was leveling a gun …
Then a trio of helicopters rose up over the top of the house. Searchlights shone down on the hill, catching Rossi, the farthest down the slope, and then Iacono and the thugs and Jenny and Lauren and herself in their brilliant white beams.
A loudspeaker boomed the most beautiful words she had ever heard in her life.
“Freeze! FBI!”
Chapter
29
“Mick!”
Jason came running up the hill, along with a ground wave of FBI agents as the helicopters hovered overhead, keeping the hill as brightly lit as a football stadium. The snow glittered, the trees threw deep shadows, and the sky was black and low. The thump-thump of helicopter blades filled the air. While Iacono and Rossi and the others were being handcuffed and read their rights, Mick helped Jenny, who was insisting she was fine, to her feet. Lauren and Kate converged on their mother.
“Who’s that?” Jenny asked as Mick responded to Jason’s shout with an uplifted hand. Jenny had an arm around both girls, who were clinging to her on either side. Mick knew her sister had been traumatized, knew that she had just had the most terrifying experience of her life, but Mick felt safe in assuming, based on the amount of interest Jenny was displaying in Jason’s arrival, that she was going to be fine.
“A friend.” Mick described him to Jenny just as she had to their father, only in an even more repressive tone.
“Cute friend,” Jenny observed a breath before Jason reached them.
Of course, the first thing he did was sweep Mick up in his arms.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me to death,” he said in her ear, hugging her close. “When we heard that the tracking signal was lost, I think I aged about a hundred years.”
After that, what could she do? She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. And, despite everything, there it was, the electricity, the passion, the sense that in his arms she had found her true home.
When she let go, it was to find that her sister and nieces were regarding the pair of them with identical fascinated gazes.
“Uh-huh,” was what Jenny said, sliding Mick a look.
“Is he your boyfriend, Aunt Mick?” was Lauren’s contribution.
“Aunt Mick saved us!” Kate told Jason with enthusiasm.
“Aunt Mick is wonderful beyond words,” Jason said solemnly to Kate.
Jenny raised her brows at Mick. “I like him,” she said.
Mick sighed. “Jenny, Lauren and Kate, meet Jason Davis.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Lauren asked again.
Mick’s eyes met Jason’s. He smiled at her, his eyes dancing. And she realized that this man had suddenly become just about the most important person in her life.
“Yes, I guess he is,” she told Lauren, and Jason’s smile widened.
“How are my girls?” Her dad came puffing up. Mick’s heart did a weird little stutter when she saw him. The evidence that he had been there at the scene of the Lightfoots’ murder was right there in her pocket, in the form of those pictures on his cell phone. It was overwhelming, impossible to deny. She wished with all her heart she had never looked at the damn phone. But having looked, she could not erase the knowledge from her mind.
My God, what was she going to do?
He had already gathered Jenny and her girls into a big hug, and even as she had the thought he pulled Mick into it, too. Heart bleeding, she hugged him back.
Then, with everyone talking over everyone else, she and Jenny and the girls related everything each one of them had been through.
“Charlie’s the one responsible for finding you,” Jason said. Mick would have found it kind of sweet that Jason and her dad had apparently bonded over their shared ordeal, except she was too disturbed about her new knowledge. “He’s the one who remembered that Marino had a safe house up here in the hills.”
“I’ve been up here a couple of times. Long time ago, though,” her dad said. “It was Jason who really saved the day. Once I had an idea where you were, he’s the one who had a fit at that FBI agent to call out the choppers. If we’d tried to drive it, we’d still be on the road. For a minute there, I thought he was going to take that guy apart.”
Mick looked at Jason, who shrugged. “At that point, I was a little concerned.”
“I don’t mind saying I was a whole lot concerned. But I should have known.” Charlie playfully punched Mick in the shoulder. “That’s my girl. I knew you’d get your sister.”
“What happened to Jelly and Tina?” Mick asked.
Jason grinned. “Far as I know, they’re still in the FBI van. I lost track of them in all the excitement.”
“Can we go home now? I’m cold. And I’m hungry,” Kate said. Her words reminded all of them that they were standing in the snow in the middle of a freezing winter’s night.
“Sure we can,” Charlie, the doting grandpa, answered, and they all started down the hill.
“Here.” Something warm and bulky dropped around Mick’s shoulders. She was a little startled until she realized that it was Jason’s coat. Remembering when he had given her his coat on the Playtime, Mick marveled at how far they had come. He was the one thing out of this whole nightmare she didn’t want to just make disappear.
“Thanks.” Smiling at him, she pulled his coat closer.
An FBI agent came up to them. “You the ladies who were kidnapped? We suggest you go to the hospital to get checked out. There’s an ambulance out front waiting for you.”
“It’s probably a good idea,” Mick told Jenny. “For the girls.”
Jenny nodded. They were rounding the house by that time—an ordinary brick ranch house, just as Mick had thought, set all by itself on a wooded hill with a winding drive leading up to it. The house was ablaze with light now, and a dozen different vehicles were parked in the driveway. An ambulance, strobe lights flashing, was among them. A black van had edged around the others and was backing up to the front door. Mick recognized it as being from the coroner’s office. For Curci, of course.
Grief slowed her step. Then she remembered she was a cop, and professionalism took over.
“You guys go on to the hospital. I need to go inside, see if I can help with the investigation,” she said, already starting to move away toward the front door, where an army of official types was going in and out.
“Wait a minute.” Jason caught her wrist. Mick, surprised by the sudden stab of pain, yelped. Until that instan
t she had forgotten all about being burned.
“What the …?” Jason let go when she cried out. Now he caught her hand, lifted it into the light. The outside of her left wrist was raw and red, with a black char mark along the top edge. “Jesus.”
“It’s a burn,” Mick said.
“Aunt Mick stuck her hands in the furnace,” Kate told him.
Jason’s face was suddenly grim. “Forget the investigation. You’re going to the hospital, too.”
Mick might have argued, except the entire crew chimed in. And now that she remembered the injury, her wrist really did hurt. She piled in the ambulance with Jenny and the girls. Because there wasn’t room, Jason and her dad caught a ride in a separate car.
Treating and bandaging her wrist didn’t take long. Jenny and the girls were still in the examining rooms by the time she was finished. She walked out into the waiting room to look for Jason and her dad, but they were nowhere in sight. A few tired-looking people slumped in the plastic chairs waiting to be seen, and there was activity behind the nurses’ station as the hospital personnel worked to get patients in and out. Beyond the glass doors stretched the shadowy reaches of the parking lot, its darkness alleviated by the occasional tall streetlight. Mick stepped outside to look around for any sign of them.
Instead, she found Wheeler and another FBI agent—Rice, she thought his name was—getting out of a car. They nodded at her when they saw her, and, huddling deep inside Jason’s coat against the cold, she waited for them to come up to her.
“Everybody make it here okay?” Wheeler asked when they reached her.
“My sister and nieces are inside.”
“How about Lange? And Davis?”
“I’m still waiting for them to show up.”
“Glad everything worked out,” he said. “Well, just checking on things.”
When he would have left her and walked on inside with Rice, Mick thought of something she really needed to know.
“Nicco Marino—what’s happening with him?”
Wheeler turned back to her. “He’s already been picked up. Charged with racketeering, running a criminal enterprise, and eight murders so far. And the investigation is still ongoing. The Bureau’s actually had its eye on Marino for a number of years, but this is the first time we’ve been able to get anything solid on him. Or any of the guys around him, for that matter.”
Her father’s cell phone suddenly seemed to be burning a hole in her pocket. This was the perfect opportunity to pull it out and hand it over. She didn’t.
“The guy’s going down,” Rice added. Mick was glad, although she felt a pang for the family, for Angie. They didn’t deserve this. But then, how many people actually ever deserved what life dished up?
They went on inside. Mick was just getting ready to join them when she saw her father walking toward her through the parking lot. He saw her, too, and lifted a hand to wave just as he stepped into the white spill of light from one of the halogen lamps. It washed over him, illuminating his bright hair, his beloved features.
Mick looked and went dizzy.
It was his face. The face she saw when she went sleepwalking. The pale oval that all these years had remained blurry in her mind’s eye. This was the terrible knowledge she had hidden from herself for so long. Now she realized why that was: her father was the man she had seen standing by that apartment building in the moments before her mother was shot. The man who had haunted her nightmares. The man who, she had long suspected, had fired the shots that had killed her mother.
Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Her blood thundered in her ears. Her stomach cramped so hard that she thought she might vomit.
There was a black iron bench just steps away. Somebody, hospital maintenance, who knew, kept it cleared of snow. Mick took an unsteady sideways step and sank down on it.
“Something wrong?” her father asked, reaching her. He was frowning, concerned. Meeting his gaze, she felt as if her heart might break.
“I saw you.” The words came spilling out, stark and cold and full of pain. “The night Mom was shot, Jenny and I were running through the field to get to her and I looked over at that apartment building and saw you standing there. You were holding a rifle. I saw your face just as clearly as I’m looking at it now.”
His face went utterly white. His eyes looked stricken. He opened his mouth, closed it again, then sank down on the bench beside her as if suddenly unsure if his knees would continue to support him.
What he didn’t do was deny it.
“Did you shoot Mom?” Dry-mouthed, Mick asked it point-blank.
“No. God, no.”
She knew what she had seen. The mists of time had lifted. That night now lived in her memory, clear as a bell. But at his denial, a tiny bit of hope struggled for life inside her, like a crocus butting its head against a crust of snow.
“You were there by the building.” Her tone carried absolute certainty.
He sighed heavily. “Yes. I was. I saw you girls, but I didn’t know you saw me.”
Mick was barely breathing. “So tell me.”
“Wendy worked in a bank. Nicco—we were like brothers growing up—we got into some stuff together, you know how kids are. I didn’t think what he was doing was so bad, just trying to make money for his family like everybody else. When I became a cop, and he kept on doing what he was doing, I helped him out with some things here and there, when I could. We were close, our two families, even though he kept getting richer and richer and, well, I was a cop. Then Nicco got into some trouble. He needed a way to launder a lot of cash, fast. He came to us, Wendy and me, and wanted her to run some money through her bank for him. Up until that point, she hadn’t had any idea he was a crook. She just thought he had a lot of businesses that did really well. But once she knew, she didn’t want anything to do with it. She said we had to go to the cops. I said I was a cop, that wasn’t going to work. Next thing I knew, she left me over it. Left me, and started talking to the feds. Somebody tipped me off that Nicco was going to have her whacked. That very night, when she got off work. I rushed over there as fast as I could, took my rifle. I was going to take whoever showed up to hit her out.” He took a deep breath, and Mick could feel a shudder pass through him. She saw the glint of sudden tears in his eyes. “Like you know, I was just a couple of seconds too late.” He reached out, took both her hands in his, clumsily, because she didn’t make it easy. She was busy searching his face. “We had some ups and downs, but I loved Wendy. I would never have hurt her, much less killed her. If for no other reason, I never would have done that to you girls.”
Mick felt a rush of remembered anguish for her mother, along with a corresponding easing of the terrible current pain that had been holding her heart in a vise. In his eyes, in his grip, in his voice, she recognized truth. She felt tears start to build in her own eyes and let go of his hands to brush them angrily away.
“Oh my God, Dad, why didn’t you have him arrested? Uncle Nicco? If you knew …” She broke off because he was shaking his head at her.
“I had done some things. Helped Nicco out. Hell, Mick, I’m not a perfect man. He had things on me. Plus if he’d had any hint I was going to turn him in, he would have hit all of us, not just me but you and Jenny, too. I had to wait, bide my time, continue to be his friend. And he tried to make up for what he’d done as best he could, making a big to-do over you and Jenny. But I never forgot, and I never forgave. I’ve been waiting, all these years, until you girls were grown, until I thought the time was right. I’ve been waiting to pay that son of a bitch back.”
Needing to hear it all, Mick reached into her pocket and pulled out his phone.
“I saw the pictures of the Lightfoot murders on this,” she said and gave it to him. She already knew that there was nothing else she could do. He had said he wasn’t a perfect man. Well, she wasn’t a perfect woman, either. Or a perfect cop. He was her father. Come what may, she wasn’t turning him in.
He dropped the phone in his coat pocket.
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“I was there. I took them,” he admitted. “Nicco had a beef with Lightfoot for taking a bribe then not doing what he promised. I heard through the grapevine that he was going in person to the Lightfoots’ that night. I figured he was going to threaten, maybe have some guys rough Lightfoot up, so I went on over there thinking maybe I could keep things from getting out of hand. When I got there, the house was dark, but two cars were in the driveway, including Nicco’s. I went up to the door, and it was unlocked. So I went in. It was a big house, nobody around, but I heard some noise in the basement. I figured Nicco had Lightfoot down there. I went down the stairs, but the basement was divided into rooms, and the first two rooms after the stairs were empty, dark. I didn’t see anybody. But I sure as hell heard commotion in the basement’s far end. When I got there, got where I could see, it was too late to stop anything. I was just in time to watch Marty Camino put his gun up to Lightfoot’s head. If I’d said a word, if they’d known I was there, if they’d seen me, I would have been dead, too. I had my phone, and I took some pictures, as quick and quiet as I could. Then I got the hell out of there. And I realized I’d just found the weapon I’d been looking for all these years. With those pictures, I could destroy Nicco.”
Mick stared at her father. All her life, they’d been close. She’d thought she’d known him. Now she realized she had had no idea. “The printouts of the pictures that were in the suitcases full of money in Nicco’s safe—how did they get there?”
“I overnighted the pictures to him from Florida, along with a note telling him I’d be in touch later about what I wanted in exchange for keeping those pictures out of circulation. Of course, he didn’t know the package came from me. He would have gotten it on New Year’s Eve, right before he left for his Palm Beach vacation.” He smiled. “He must have collected the money the same day and stuck the pictures in there with it to keep them safe until he could figure out what to do about them. He must have been in a cold sweat. Probably ruined his trip.”
“Your plan was to blackmail him?” Mick asked.
Her father shook his head. “My plan was to torture him. Just a little payback. Make him worry. Then I was going to take those pictures and go to the feds.”
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