Jonathan began to go through a few of the papers, trying to discern what Kate had been after, but without knowing Jake or Greg—whom the files mostly seemed to be about—he couldn’t glean whatever Kate had. He slammed the drawer shut and was turning to leave when he spotted a picture lying upside down on the floor near the desk. Without much thought other than to put it back, he picked it up. Broken pieces of glass remained on the carpet. Curiosity piqued, he looked at the picture inside.
It wasn’t a picture at all.
It was a letter.
A different kind of coldness came back.
Jonathan reached for his phone and scrolled through his pictures, stopping on the bloody letter left on Kate’s hotel door. By the time he’d taken the picture, the words had been smeared by the blood. He opened his email and found Kate’s Orion file. He pulled up the photocopies of every letter she’d received before she’d left Florida and scrolled through each. Halfway through he stopped. He didn’t need to look any further to know the handwriting was a perfect match with the framed note in his hand.
“How could we have missed this?”
Anger seared through him as he quickly recalled the last three days with his new revelation. The one, he had no doubt, Kate had come to when she’d seen the note. How she must have felt, how she must have reacted, tore at a part of him he didn’t even realize had been reserved just for thoughts of her. He put the frame down and was about to dial his boss’s number. It was past time to loop her in. He needed help. However, his phone came to life instead. The number was unknown but he answered, cautious.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Carmichael?” Even though the man’s voice was lowered, Jonathan was able to pick out who it belonged to easily enough.
“Jett?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I thought you should know that man is back.”
“Back? In the hotel?”
“I may have kept your and Miss Spears’s reservations open in the computers,” Jett quickly said. “I thought that it might help to keep you two hidden if they thought you were still here.”
Jonathan could have kicked himself for not thinking of that before, just as he could have given the front desk attendant a huge bear hug right about then. This was exactly the break he needed.
“Jett, I need you to do me a huge favor,” Jonathan said, already running into the living area to grab his keys. “Kate’s gone and right now that man is the only lead I have to finding her. I need you to follow him, but don’t say anything to him, and tell me where he’s going. Can you do that?”
Jonathan shut the door behind him, not caring that he no longer had a way to get back inside. Kate had a key, and when he had Kate back it would all be okay.
“Jett?” he prodded after hesitation on the other end of the line continued.
“Yes, I can. I’ll call you from the car.”
* * *
KATE LOOKED OUT the window and down into the construction. The building next door was a few stories shorter and currently being built to match the one she was standing in. Though at a much slower pace.
“Progress isn’t always as fast as we’d like it to be.”
Kate turned in her leather chair and eyed the man who had been pulling the strings all along. A part of Kate withered at the sight of him. The other part flourished in anger.
“It all makes sense now,” she said. “I guess the analytical part of me should be happy about that, at least.” Kate laughed, a dry, quick sound. “From knowing what hotel I was staying at to knowing my plans while in New York.” She laughed again, still as bitter as dark chocolate. “You knew everything, because we disclosed the information to you willingly.”
Greg stood at the head of the table but didn’t sit down. He wore a dark brown suit with a spotted blue tie she’d actually bought him for his birthday a few years back. A bandage covered his right brow while cuts and swelling could be seen across the same side. He placed his hands on the top of the chair and squeezed the leather. He wasn’t smiling, but he sure wasn’t frowning, either. Either expression would have incited more anger on her part, but the blank look he was giving her was almost too much to bear. She fought the urge to look down at her hands.
“But how far down does the rabbit hole go, Greg? When did you become this? I don’t even know how to describe you.” Kate felt her eyes begin to water. She hoped she could keep it together long enough to at least understand something. “Why have you been terrorizing me—trying to kill me?” Her voice broke on the question and then nearly shattered on the next. “And where is Jake?”
Greg flexed his grip on the chair as if the motions helped him sort his thoughts. But Kate knew the man well enough—or at least she thought she had—to know it was a show. If Greg really had planned everything that happened so far, then he knew every reason why he’d done it without pausing.
“Do you remember when we first met, Kate? I believe you were eight. I asked you what you wanted to be when you were all grown up. Do you remember what you told me?”
Despite her desire to not play his game—whatever it was—Kate nodded.
“A dancer,” she said.
Greg snapped his fingers.
“A dancer,” he repeated. “Now, I have nothing against the performing arts or those who seek careers in its purview, but when I looked at you, saw how your mind worked, saw you talk and react to the world around you, I saw exactly what your mother did. I saw untapped potential coupled with an unquenchable curiosity. You didn’t just question how the world worked, you tried to understand it. Seeing that raw innocence created within me a feeling of hope for the future so profound that I told you something I’d never told any other soul. Do you remember what that was?”
This time Kate didn’t nod. She didn’t have to sit there and tell him she remembered anything. They both knew she had never forgotten the words of a man her mother had once proclaimed was the smartest man she knew. Still, Greg waited a moment before continuing. He smiled as the words left his mouth.
“I told you that you were going to change the world.” He let go of the chair top and clapped. “And by God, when you told me you’d had a breakthrough in your research, you proved that I was absolutely right!” His excitement began to ebb away, his smile falling slowly. He put his hands on the top of the chair again. Suddenly he looked tired. “I was so proud of you that, at first, I didn’t realize what it meant. You, not even thirty, had found answers I hadn’t yet been able to obtain despite my vast resources. In fact, your surprising achievements began to highlight my lack of them, showing my superiors that while I had the full force of the FBI behind me, all you had were two part-time lab techs who did menial work on something they had no idea was so important.” One of his hands fisted. There was no trace of emotion besides a deep weariness that projected through the slight sagging of his face.
“Talk began to circulate about your achievement, about your work ethic, about your potential. For a while they praised me for finding you—for believing in you enough to challenge the Bureau to wait you out, to let you try to work out the solutions and not simply take them from you. That is, until their praise turned to anything but. Maybe I’d convinced them to wait for you because I didn’t know how to do it myself. Maybe I had worked so hard to keep you associated with the project, without your knowledge, because I knew you wouldn’t ask me to leave when you finally came on and took over. Maybe I was getting too old and a newer, brighter, younger face was needed.” Kate watched as his expression burned white-hot with a flash of anger. It went out as fast as it had ignited. The extreme change in emotion seemed to leave him speechless for a moment. Kate capitalized on it.
“If I was out of the way, then you’d be able to keep your position, your lab and your reputation,” she guessed. Even as he nodded, the child that had grown up looking to Greg as her role model tried to reason the admission away. He h
adn’t done anything. He couldn’t have done anything. He was Greg.
But as his chin dipped down and then back up, the grown-up within Kate felt sick.
“I tried to warn you at first,” he said. “And then scare you away.”
“The notes,” she said. It was the connection she’d made in Jake’s room once she saw the handwritten letter Jake had received and framed when he graduated from the academy. It was handwriting she’d seen all her life and yet never thought about when staring at the same writing on the letters she’d received.
“I wanted to scare you away, make you realize that the spotlight should be put on someone more experienced.”
“Like you.”
“Yes, like me.”
“But I didn’t scare, did I?” she asked.
Greg’s expression cracked again, showing another glimpse of anger she’d never seen from the man before.
“No, you didn’t. Not even when a note found its way to your hotel-room door with real blood. You didn’t even mention it to me the next day. So I had to escalate.”
Kate didn’t know what to do or say. The world she was currently sitting in didn’t make sense. It was like she was back in her dream world. But this time Jonathan wasn’t there to save her.
“You got that woman to try to run me over on the street,” she breathed. “To just mow me down right in front of you. It was never about getting the case. It was about killing me.”
“They don’t call it an escalation for nothing,” he said, almost teasing.
“But you were almost killed, too.”
“That was truly an accident. One variable I didn’t count on when we planned it was that Candice was harboring some fierce anger due to Donnie’s impromptu knife show when he cut her arm to supply the blood found on the letter on your door.” He dragged his finger up the inside of one of his arms. Finally she made the connection with the woman and the bandage. “I guess good help is hard to find sometimes, even from professionals. Her stress caused sloppiness that ended up working well for me in the end. Who would suspect me when I was so clearly a victim? Thankfully, I look much worse than I feel, and, luckily, not only did I have a backup plan, but Donnie was quick to employ it using a contact of his.” The paramedic. He had been the backup plan. “But it still didn’t work. No, there was another variable I hadn’t accounted for.”
“Jonathan.” Just saying his name made a darkening world momentarily seem to lighten.
“I never thought you’d accept the help of a bodyguard, to be honest. Especially not one who would go above and beyond the scope of his job.” He shook his head as if he was scolding her. “Breaking into the lab with Jake to save you was a big risk for him to take for someone he barely knew. Who really could have foreseen that happening?” He shook his head. “And just think, if Jonathan hadn’t listened to you and saved you then, none of us would be in this situation we are in now.”
Kate twisted her hands together in her lap.
“What have you done with Jake?” she whispered. Her trust in Greg was nothing compared to Jake’s. While he’d become a mentor to her, Greg had become a father figure to her friend.
“Getting rid of Jake wouldn’t benefit me or my plan. Being responsible for the death of an FBI agent—more specifically, my handler—would bring me unwanted attention. Not to mention, his affection for me keeps him from seeing exactly what I’ve done.”
“He doesn’t know you’re behind all of this?” she asked, surprised.
Greg shook his head.
“His passion to avenge my pain and to keep you safe was getting him too close,” he explained. “I sent Donnie to retrieve him yesterday. Once this is all over, Jake will be let go. No harm, no foul.”
Kate was once again split between two emotions. Relief that Jake was okay and would be okay. Anger that Jake might never know the truth because of his love for the man standing near her.
“You betrayed us,” Kate said. Adrenaline and tears made her voice tremble.
Greg nodded solemnly.
“I know your family has already felt this particular sting before, but just know it wasn’t always part of the plan.” He shrugged. “You simply forced my hand.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kate’s hands fisted. Was this what her mother had felt when she’d realized her team—the people she thought she knew better than anyone—had turned their backs on her?
“What now?” she asked instead. “If you wanted to simply kill me, why bring me here?”
Up until this point, Kate had almost been certain that Greg had needed to share his narrative with her. To explain why he was doing what he was doing. Whether it was cathartic or just a way for him to brag to someone, Kate didn’t know. Either way, he answered her.
“I remembered your notebook. That intrepid little thing where you kept all of your notes written down, afraid that the world might take the ideas if they left the paper and ink of its pages. Knowing you, there’s something in it that you’ve left out of the research you shared with me. Something I need to continue. And before you say you don’t have it in New York, remember that I know you, Kate. I know you hid it in the hotel room just like I knew you would come here willingly to save Jake.” Greg stepped up to the table. He lowered himself until he was pressing down on the glass top, a stance that showed he wanted her absolute full attention now. Not that he didn’t already have it. “And once Donnie brings it to me, then I’ll say goodbye.”
Kate’s mouth went dry.
“When they say never meet your idols, they weren’t kidding,” she whispered. Greg’s lips pulled up at the corners.
“And when they said children were our future, how true that was, as well.”
Kate watched as the man she had once loved like family turned his back on her. He walked to the door and knocked once before it opened, giving her a glimpse of the woman named Candice.
“No one comes in or out,” he ordered. “And if she starts making too much noise, silence her.”
Candice cast Kate a quick smirk.
“My pleasure.”
Kate held her gaze, not wanting to back down until the door shut, leaving her alone inside. What had started out as a theory was now a full-blown walking nightmare. Not bringing the notebook had saved her life, at least temporarily, but now what if leaving it with Jonathan had endangered his?
Just because you’re scared doesn’t mean you’re not strong.
Kate recalled her mother’s words but, for once, found no comfort in them.
In that moment she felt nothing but weakness.
* * *
JONATHAN WAS STANDING across from yet another hotel, still in Manhattan but worlds different from where Jett worked.
“He went in there,” Jett said, jogging up to Jonathan. He was still dressed in uniform but had taken his blazer off, draping it over his arm to look more casual. However, Jonathan looked up at the fifteen-story hotel and its glass-walled front and felt that maybe he was the one that looked too casual.
“Of course it is,” he said. “This is where the convention is taking place in a few hours.”
Jett joined his gaze and whistled.
“I applied for a job here once. It’s a pretty fancy place. They have a glass atrium that makes you feel like you’re not in a hotel at all.”
“So, you’ve been in there before.”
Jett nodded.
“Apparently I didn’t have the right look, something about being too shaggy.” He shrugged. “I’ve only seen the lobby, though, and not even for that long. They’re pretty diligent about keeping nonguests out.”
As soon as he’d been given the address of where Donnie had exited the cab, Jonathan had guessed simply walking in and asking if they’d seen Greg would have been frowned upon.
“So what’s the plan?�
� Jett asked, gaze still turned to the hotel.
“You want to help us?” Jonathan asked, surprised. “Even though you have no idea what’s going on?”
Jett shrugged again.
“If I did know, would that make Miss Spears in any less danger?”
Jonathan couldn’t help but snort.
“No.”
“Then, what’s the plan?”
Jett followed along as Jonathan started for the nearest crosswalk and crossed the street. When they were near the double front doors, Jonathan spoke.
“Put this number in your cell phone.” He recited the number when Jett’s phone was out and made sure the man saved it. “I want you to call that number and tell the woman who answers that I told you to tell her something. Okay?” Jett nodded. “Tell her everything that has happened so far is because of Greg Calhoun. That he’s trying to kill Kate and has been since we arrived. He’s the one who sent her the letters, too.” Jett’s eyes widened, but he nodded again. “Tell her where we are and tell her I’m sorry I didn’t tell her everything beforehand. Got that?”
“Yeah, when do you want me to do that?”
“Wait out here and give me five minutes and then call. I don’t want to tip them off that I’m coming yet.”
“And what are you going to do?”
Jonathan pulled out his wallet and counted out two hundred dollars in fifties and twenties.
“I’m going to go lie.”
Like the outside, the inside was the complete opposite of the hotels Jonathan was used to. Not only was it as modern as they came—modular sofas and ottomans, white and gray everything with a smidgen of bright orange or blue and smooth, rounded front desks pushed to the side under the low part of the atrium—but as Jonathan walked across the gray tile, he was trying not to marvel at the giant art installations that could be seen from every floor, all the way up to the glass ceiling. It wasn’t just a hotel. It was a destination.
He’d barely made it to one of the three front desks when a woman with the nameplate Julie chirped out a scripted welcome. It was all he could do to keep what he hoped was a pleasant and very innocent smile on his face.
Be on the Lookout Page 16