by Karen Young
“Don’t hurt her,” she said, struggling to sound reasonable, although her heart was beating so fast she was almost light-headed. She put her hands out and walked toward them. “You can do whatever you want, but just don’t hurt her.”
“If she makes a sound—”
“Jesse! Don’t scream, okay? He’s not going to hurt you.”
“Why the hell didn’t you stay in the goddamn store!” Austin bit off the words, infuriated by the necessity of altering his plan. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll be all over us like flies on shit as soon as they realize she’s gone.” Still holding Jesse with a brutal grip, he chewed his lower lip. “Okay, get in with her. I’ll decide what to do—” He broke off as if just realizing he was wasting time talking to two children.
Jennifer climbed in beside Jesse, who threw herself into Jennifer’s arms and buried her face in her midriff. Cursing, Austin reached over and closed the passenger door, then started the SUV with a roar. They were almost out of the alley when, through the side mirror, Jennifer saw the emergency exit fly open. Rick! But it was too late.
Austin eased into traffic on Kirby, driving much more sedately than he wanted, to avoid drawing any attention to the car just in case the kid was missed a lot sooner than he expected and they started looking right away. The risks in a kidnapping were substantial and he’d taken as many precautions to reduce the chances of being caught before he’d accomplished what he set out to do. Still, you never knew.
He wasn’t in the Porsche. Freakin’ car had brought him enough grief. This time, he’d rented an SUV. Half the male population in Houston owned one. Nothing conspicuous about it. And to delay anybody missing him as long as possible, he’d called in sick at the office and told them he wouldn’t be at his condo, but at his father’s place instead. Curtiss still employed the housekeeper who’d raised him. She’d vouch for him—that he was there until they actually checked—which would kill a few hours if he was lucky. Consuelo was the closest thing to a mother he’d had during his rotten childhood. If he told her to say he had gone through a sex change, she would. For this job, he didn’t need a sex change. He just needed three days.
But, goddamn it, the Paxton kid could screw up the whole plan. Another minute and he would have had Jesse in the car and been out of there. Then the girl had to come running out, hell-bent for leather to save her. He couldn’t just leave her after she’d seen him and taking her would jeopardize his plan. He felt himself breaking out into a cold sweat. Ryan Paxton wasn’t the kind to overlook a threat to his kid without retaliating. He had to come up with some way to get rid of her.
Beside him, Jesse now sat buckled securely in the seat belt, sharing it with Jennifer as she sat on her lap. With her knees together and her feet in the cute little pink sneakers dangling, they looked almost like a normal family traveling. At least, that’s what he hoped anyone looking would think. Face turned, she was intent on the scenery from the passenger window, as prim-looking and distant as…as…that stuffy Liz Walker. Give her another few months in that house and Liz would have cloned herself in Jesse.
“Not in my lifetime,” he muttered darkly and gave in to a deep rage by accelerating up the ramp onto the Southwest Freeway.
“Where are we going?” Jennifer asked.
“Shut up.”
He’d made it clear to Jesse when he’d grabbed her in the bookstore that he’d take his hand off her face only if she promised not to scream. Then, he’d told her with his mouth at her ear that if she did scream, he’d break her freakin’ neck right then and there and he’d hurt the Paxton teenager as well. His threat worked. Pale and big-eyed, she’d walked as nice as you please out of the kids’ section of the store into the stockroom in back and on out the emergency exit. He’d never have made it that far if Jennifer hadn’t been more interested in her boyfriend than Jesse.
Rotten luck that she’d missed Jesse before he got her in the SUV and drove off.
“I don’t know how you can treat your own little girl like this,” Jennifer said.
“I’m telling you to shut up, kid.”
Hell, he didn’t hate Jesse, but having her around was now a definite risk. It was the damnedest stroke of good luck that she’d been struck dumb over the whole thing. When he told her after the wreck that she was to keep her little mouth shut or he’d see that she paid a price, he hadn’t realized she would literally take him at his word. In fact, he didn’t believe her version of the accident would have carried much weight in the beginning. It was only after she started freaking out whenever she saw him that people began to get suspicious.
The plan might still work out, but he needed both kids in a more cooperative frame of mind. “C’mon, Jesse, quit acting like a baby. You’re not gonna be hurt now. You were a good girl back there in the bookstore. See, I’m keeping my word. I didn’t hurt your friend. You’re in the car and we’re going on a nice trip.”
Jesse picked at the laces on one sneaker, tying a knot and then untying it. Over and over. Jennifer had a hand on one small shoulder, gently stroking.
“You can talk now. You were a good girl about that, too, but now it’s just you and me, so you don’t have to stay quiet.”
Jesse reached for the scrunch that held her hair in a ponytail and pulled it off. A curtain of dark, silky hair instantly fell forward shielding her face.
Austin reached out to touch her and she flinched, huddling against the door, still not looking at him. “Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you. Daddies don’t hurt their little girls.”
Now her skinny little legs were drawn up and she rested her face on her knees, her body turned away.
In spite of himself, Austin felt…something. The kid wouldn’t look at him, hadn’t actually looked in his face one time since he’d grabbed her. Maybe she thought if she didn’t look at him, he wouldn’t be there, he thought with a certain wry self-derision. And why would she want to look at him? He’d been a shitty daddy. No denying that to himself. But he didn’t bear all the guilt for the unlucky hand the kid had drawn. Gina had been a pretty shitty mother, too. She might try to convince the judge and anybody else who’d listen that she’d always put the kid’s best interests first, but he knew stuff about Gina that nobody else would believe. And if it ever came down to the nut-cutting, he’d tell that stuff.
But first he had to get her out of Houston and over to Arizona to his mother. Time enough afterward to figure out what to do with Jennifer.
Louie hated being confined to a bed in the hospital. He suffered through another check of his blood pressure by a male nurse who made bad jokes about the effect of hypertension on his sex life. He had rarely been in a hospital, but mostly, as he recalled, nurses had been women. Grumbling, he took the new pill in the silly little paper cup—what happened to just handing a man a pill?—and settled back to wait and wonder if they’d let his family in to see him.
Lizzie would have told them by now, of course. He turned to stare morosely out the window. Maybe they wouldn’t show up to see him at all. Maybe they’d wash their hands of a father who’d seemed to wash his hands of them, as babies yet. He wouldn’t blame them. In truth, he didn’t deserve to have them acknowledge him as father at all.
It was Ryan who came into his room when they finally said he could have visitors. “I’m afraid Liz will need a little time to adjust to the news, Louie. After they told her there was nothing seriously wrong and that you would be released within twenty-four hours, she decided to go home.” He stood with his back to the window. It was midday and bright, the glare throwing his face into shadow so that Louie couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“What about Lindsay and Megan?”
“I think they felt bound to honor Liz’s feelings.”
“I guess they were pretty shocked.”
“Liz, definitely. Lindsay and Megan seemed startled, but you have to remember they’ve both had a very stable childhood and the emotional impact wasn’t as significant as it was for Liz. At least, that was my reading of
the situation. It meant dire consequences to her when you disappeared.” He ran a palm around the back of his neck. “She’ll come around, Louie. As I said, it may take some time.”
Louie lifted his arm and rested it on his forehead. The few years he’d had living near Lizzie might very well be at an end. She’d be within her rights to cut him out of her life, now that she knew the depth of his deception. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. “I should never have done it, but it was too late when I realized they hadn’t honored their promise,” he said quietly.
“You’ll need to explain everything to her, Louie. To all three of your daughters. Nothing makes any sense.”
Louie released an empty, hopeless laugh. “It’s gonna sound pretty sick when I explain that I traded their lives to save my own worthless, criminal ass.”
“I’m not following you, Louie.”
He brought his arm down and looked Ryan in the eye. “I went into the Witness Protection Plan twenty-five years ago.”
Ryan gave just one single nod of understanding. “Ah…”
“Yeah, it was the Cayman Islands thing.” He studied the IV taped to his left arm. “I guess the reason I didn’t tell Lizzie who I was when I first showed up after all those years was that I was too ashamed. I felt too much guilt. But I swear to God, I didn’t know it would turn into such a disaster.”
“The Feds staged your death in the fire,” Ryan guessed.
“Yeah. In exchange for my testimony. It was that or prison. But they didn’t have to apply much pressure. In fact, I didn’t expect any leniency. I knew I was going to serve time, me and a whole slew of judges. But John Paxton, your dad, had stayed clean, resisted the lure of all that money. The night he died, I was in his office. He told me he was going to the Feds and tell them what he knew. A case that was on his docket had been pulled abruptly and reassigned to me. You have the file in that stack I gave you. He’d had his suspicions all along. He told me that night that he intended to blow the whistle on the whole lot of us.”
Ryan was on his feet now. “Did you kill him, Louie?”
“No, no, son.” He moved restlessly, got up on one elbow and added earnestly, “I didn’t try to talk him out of it, either. I was pretty sick of the whole thing. Like other judges at the time, I’d started out taking just a little here and a little there. I don’t have an excuse that will hold water. My wife had died giving birth to our last baby girl, Lindsay, and I was depressed and sort of overwhelmed with the care of three small children, but I wasn’t the only man in the world who’d been in that fix before. Look at your dad. John had a wife with an incurable disease. Medical bills were piling up, he said as much to me once. But he was steadfast in his devotion to her and in his duties as a judge.” He reached for a cup of water on the bed stand and raised it with an unsteady hand to drink. “And even if I were overwhelmed, it didn’t justify compromising the integrity of the bench or dishonoring the oath I took to uphold the law. No, anyway I looked at myself over the years, I was a pretty miserable human being.”
Ryan sat with his hands clasped loosely between his knees. “I won’t lie to you, Louie. It’ll be difficult for Lizzie to hear this.”
The old man nodded solemnly. “I’m prepared for the worst.”
“You said you were in the office with my father the night he died. Do you have any idea, then, who murdered him?”
“No, not at the time. I was as shocked as everyone else. But later I heard what I think is probably the truth from one of my contacts once I took up my new life. John was killed by the same assassin who would have done the same to me had I not been hustled off to a safe house after I agreed to testify. His name was Josef Reiner. He was later linked to a money-laundering scheme in Florida, tried and convicted. He died in prison of AIDS about five years ago.”
“Was that when you decided to come out of the program?”
“I’d been thinking about it long before that. I actually made the break when Lizzie was finishing college and getting ready to go into law school.”
He frowned. “Liz is a lawyer?”
“No, she dropped out.” He pushed the button that brought the bed up to a near-sitting position. “You might ask her about that one of these days. She’s had a lot of pain in her life and a lot of it’s my fault. If she’ll forgive me—and I include Lindsay and Megan in that, too—I’ll spend the rest of my life being the best man I have it in me to be.” He sat up and pushed the sheet down over his bony knees, then swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“What’re you doing?” Ryan asked as Louie studied the IV apparatus taped to the back of his hand. “You need to go to the john?”
“What do you know about taking this thing out?” Louie lifted his hand with the IV apparatus taped to it.
“Your IV?” Ryan stepped to the bed to take a closer look, then glanced up at the bag of fluids suspended from a metal pole. “Is it uncomfortable? Looks to me as if it’s working all right, but I can call somebody if you think it needs to be reinserted.”
“I don’t want the damn thing reinserted,” Louie growled. “I want it removed. And for God’s sake, don’t ring for the nurse. He’s a dumb son of a bitch who thinks he’s a comedian.”
“You can’t just remove it, Louie. It’s dispensing medication. They’re trying to stabilize your blood pressure. You want to pass out again?”
“I’m stabilized. No medication in that sack for that, just fluid ’cause they said I was a little dehydrated. I’ve been peeing every few minutes since I got here, dang it. The blood pressure pill is just that, a pill. It’ll work fine. If it doesn’t, I’ll know next time not to wait ’til I pass out before I tell somebody and they can give me a new one.”
“Liz will be upset,” Ryan warned.
“Lizzie isn’t even speaking to me, so that’s a pretty weak argument. I gotta get home and try to find a way to fix what I screwed up twenty-five years ago. Besides, that baby girl, Jesse, needs me. Lizzie won’t admit that now, but it’s the truth.” He gestured toward the wall cabinet with his white head. “Hand me my pants, son. No telling what they did with my shorts, but I’ll make do without ’em if I have to.”
Fighting a grin, Ryan did as ordered. Judge Matthew Walker was probably a force to be reckoned with in his heyday. And it was now clear where Liz got that streak of stubborn independence.
“You’re in luck,” he told the old man, handing over underwear, shirt and pants. His cell phone rang as Louie was dressing. He’d forgotten to turn it off, as requested by the hospital. Now, glancing at the number, he saw that it was Rick Sanchez.
“What’s up, Rick?”
“It’s Jen and Jesse, sir. They’re gone.”
“Gone? What d’you mean, they’re gone?”
“We were at the bookstore on Kirby letting Jesse pick out a book and Jen went to check on her in the children’s department and she never came back. Sir, I think they’ve been kidnapped.”
Twenty-Six
One look at Ryan’s face and the receptionist at LJ and B leaped to her feet. “Mr. Paxton, what’s wrong?”
“Is Austin in his office?”
Patti Gardner hesitated, taken aback. It was unlike Ryan Paxton to be abrupt. He was known in the firm as an all-around nice guy, one who was invariably courteous to employees, no matter how far down the food chain they were. She glanced down at a notation in the sign-out book. “Uh, no, sir. He never came in at all today. He called in sick.”
“Did you make a note of the time when he called?”
She traced the entry with a finger. “Ten-fifteen.”
“How about Curtiss? Is he in?”
“Yes, sir. Shall I buzz Marta?” Nobody got in to see Curtiss Leggett without going through his longtime secretary and bodyguard.
“Yeah.” He headed toward the executive suites, passing his own without a glance. “Thanks, Patti,” he added, clearly an afterthought.
The receptionist watched him stalk down the hall—there was no other word for it—then quickly dialed
the number for the old dragon who guarded Curtiss Leggett’s inner sanctuary. She’d never seen Ryan Paxton looking so severe. He was different in the courtroom, of course. His tactics there were legendary. This must be the Ryan Paxton he morphed into before a judge and jury, she thought.
“Look out, Mr. Leggett,” she murmured with a wicked smile, then reverted to professional receptionist mode in response to Marta’s clipped, “May I help you?”
Curtiss Leggett was standing when Ryan strode through the door of his office. “I wasn’t expecting you, Ryan.” He took a closer look and frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“I’ll get right to the point, Curtiss. Two nights ago, Austin violated the restraining order Liz filed to keep him away from Jesse. He actually got into the house, but bungled the attempt to kidnap his daughter as she was sleeping in the bedroom with Liz, and not where he thought she would be. An hour ago, he finally succeeded. He abducted Jesse and my daughter, Jennifer, from a bookstore on Kirby. Tell me that you know where the sneaky little creep may be headed.”
“Now see here—”
Ryan cut him off with a slice of his hand. “Don’t fuck with me, Curtiss. My daughter’s more precious to me than anybody or anything on this planet. If he harms a hair on her head, I’ll personally see him on death row.”
“This is preposterous. Austin’s judgment may be faulty at times, but he wouldn’t stoop to kidnapping.” Curtiss fiddled with a paperweight on his desk, anchoring a sheaf of papers he’d been reading. “How do you know he was involved? Was there an eyewitness?”
“He’s involved, all right. And yeah, we’ve got an eyewitness, someone who got a glimpse of them as Austin left the alley behind the bookstore in an SUV. Rick got the license number.”
Leggett lowered himself to his chair, looking shaken. “You must be mistaken. You know Austin drives a Porsche.”
“He probably considered it too risky to pull a caper like this in his car, knowing he’d be recognized. He’s driving a rental. The license number is being released to all units. And just so you’ll know this is serious, Shepherd Steele at Homicide is all over his case, Curtiss, and has been since Gina’s accident. He’s running scared.”