And Elise didn’t know the meaning of the word discretion. She’d be dangerous to have near him … because even when the Rogans were all dead, they would have to deal with the Kincaids.
Apparently, in the world according to Jonathan Paxton, anyone who touched a hair on Lucy Kincaid’s head would die.
Right.
But for now, Hunt could live by Paxton’s rules because they had a mutually beneficial relationship. Hunt testified against Paxton’s personal hit man to protect his business interests, and Paxton helped Hunt get out of prison. And it was Hunt who came up with the plan to frame Sean Rogan for that whore Mona Hill’s murder. First, Mona deserved it for leaving Elise high and dry and getting her arrested in the first place. Second, Mona had betrayed him.
No one betrayed Jimmy Hunt.
Paxton’s plan had been more subtle, but without the added benefit of making Sean Rogan the most wanted man in Texas. The geek squad had been working on infiltrating his home security system with the goal of planting evidence of a major hack or some such thing, to get him arrested for espionage. But apparently Mr. Geek wasn’t all that smart—not as smart as Rogan, at any rate—because he couldn’t get inside his computer. At least not fast enough to satisfy Jonathan Paxton.
Though what the rush was, Jimmy didn’t know. According to rumors, Rogan had screwed Paxton over a couple of years ago. Why the rush to destroy him now?
In the end, Jimmy knew he had the better end of the deal. Paxton gave him the resources to go after Kane Rogan and Brad Donnelly. One was waiting for him so he could whack him personally, the other was already dead.
Mrs. Yancey came in with a phone. “You have a call, Mr. Hunt.”
He frowned. “Why are you telling me?”
“This is the emergency line, it’s safe.”
He didn’t know whether to trust her, but answered. “What?”
“Daddy?”
“Elise?”
She only called him Daddy when she knew he would get mad about something.
“What happened?”
“Well … it didn’t work.”
“What is going on?”
“Everything else worked exactly as I planned. Get Donnelly. Check. Get that FBI agent suspended. Check. Take care of loose ends. Check. Restraining order against the psychic fed. Check.”
Why Elise thought Lucy Kincaid was psychic, Jimmy couldn’t figure out. Something about how she could read Elise’s mind. Which was just bullshit, but he couldn’t seem to get that through Elise’s thick skull.
“What’s the problem? You killed Donnelly, right?”
“Well … no.”
Dammit! This was when Elise made him angry. “I gave you explicit instructions.”
“And I obeyed, mostly, except he’s fun. And he deserved to suffer for killing Nicole. I liked her. She was smart, even if she wasn’t fun. I was about to kill him, but that suspended agent came to my house. And he killed Donny. I liked Donny, he did anything I wanted.”
Donny was dead? That was not good news. Clara would be on the warpath.
“Elise, you need to leave San Antonio. Right now. Don’t talk to Clara. Don’t do anything—Donny was Clara’s brother. She’s going to take it out on you.”
“Oh, please. I’m not scared of her anymore. No loose ends, right?”
“What did you do, Elise?”
“It was me or her. Would you rather have Clara alive and me dead? Were you fucking her? I’m your daughter!”
She’d killed Clara. Not ideal, but better Clara than Elise.
“I have to take care of the bitch guard,” Elise said.
“She did her job.”
“And then she showed up at the hospital to see her fuck-buddy! I have people, Daddy, you always told me to have people in all the right places. Lucy can probably read her mind, too, and if she knows that bitch went to see her boyfriend, she’ll know everything, and the little bitch will roll. So I have to find her and take care of her.”
“No. It doesn’t matter, Elise. The FBI is going to figure out she’s involved with Sheffield, and that Sheffield put Rogan on the transfer orders. We have to assume that.”
“Which means doubly she needs to die. Because she’ll rat me out in a blink of an eye and then I’ll be on the run just like you.”
When was his kid ever going to learn? She was already going to be on the run because she lost Brad Donnelly!
“Elise, go to the safe house, as I told you, and stay out of sight. Donnelly is going to report this. What were you thinking? I told you to kill him.”
“I was going to. I was just having fun. Why are you being so mean to me?”
He took a deep breath. “I’m not, sweetie. I’m just worried because I’m your father. I need you to be safe.”
“I am, Daddy. I wish I could kill Lucy, though. I really will do it; I won’t play with her like Donnelly. Wham bam, dead.”
“Not now. But later. I promise, when everything dies down, you can do it.”
“You really promise?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll go.”
“Be safe.”
He ended the call. Thank God he didn’t tell Elise where he was or who had broken him out of prison. She was too wild, too impulsive, and while Jimmy Hunt wasn’t overly concerned about Jonathan Paxton, he was a tiny bit concerned about what he would do if he got really angry.
Elise was his daughter and he loved her. She was the only family he had left. He didn’t want her dead.
He finished his meal and his beer and Mrs. Yancey asked him if he’d like to freshen up. He would—it had been a long, exhausting day. She escorted him to a suite on the second floor.
When he was alone, he took out his burner phone and called one of his two men who were on site.
“Trevor, it’s Jimmy. You and Paul being treated well?”
“Yeah—we have this apartment over the garage and there’s a fucking full bar.”
“Don’t get drunk. Rest up, we’re leaving before dawn.”
Chapter Forty
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Lucy had Megan with her in the hotel suite, and Rick and Kate were both on speakerphone. She was brief, because how she came to the conclusion was not relevant, but she wanted them to at least know she wasn’t pulling this theory out of thin air. She went through the methodology of looking into Michael Thompson’s past and why it had seemed so familiar to her.
“And when I saw that Thompson had served with Sergio Russo in the Army, I knew why his MO was familiar. He, like Russo, lost a child to a sex offender. Jonathan Paxton feeds off the grief and despair of these lost men. He turns them into vigilantes.”
“Senator Paxton?” Kate asked.
“It’s exactly how he operates.”
“Lucy,” Rick said, “this is a leap. There’s no connection between Jimmy Hunt and Paxton—Paxton is a narcissist with a God complex who saw himself as judge, jury, and executioner. But he went after other criminals. Hunt is the epitome of everything Paxton hates about our system, and the reason he thought he had to take the law into his own hands.”
“True, but Paxton is blinded by his rage, twisted by his grief and guilt over his daughter’s murder. He worked with criminals in the past for what he saw as the greater good,” Lucy reminded him. “Do you know how many times he called me Monique?”
There was silence, because they all knew that Lucy bore a striking resemblance to Jonathan Paxton’s long-dead daughter.
“I know Jonathan didn’t go to prison,” Lucy said. “He cut a plea deal after his conspiracy to poison sex offenders in prison didn’t work.” She had been angry about the agreement, even though she understood the reasons. Paxton could have made a lot of people’s lives extremely difficult if he ever stood trial. It would have come out that he’d orchestrated a conspiracy that targeted sex offenders. He could have easily become a martyr, a leader in a vigilante movement that would destroy society. People would follow in his footsteps.
Lucy, more than a
nyone, knew that the system sometimes failed. That some evil people evaded justice; the system couldn’t catch or prosecute all of them. But without the system, they had nothing. No laws or punishment; no rules or morals. There would be a vacuum, and someone would fill it.
Their system, however flawed it was, was the best thing they had going for them. To protect the rights of the innocent, some of the guilty went free. They were not God; they couldn’t see all. They didn’t know everything.
Lucy believed in the system … even though the system, at this moment in time, thought her husband was a killer. Even when she knew that sometimes the law enforcers got it wrong.
“Well?” she said when no one spoke. “I’m not wrong.”
“Why?” Rick asked. “What you’re saying is incredible, to be honest. I’m not saying I disagree, but what would Paxton’s motive be? Put aside the hit man—because yes, that is his MO. He finds men who have lost someone they love and twists their grief into vigilante justice. That Thompson served in the Army with Russo—who is still a fugitive—convinces me this angle is viable. But what’s the connection to these victims? A drug dealer and a councilman who may have taken bribes? What’s the connection to Hunt?”
“I don’t know why Hunt. But I know why those victims. The teacher in San Antonio was caught with Rohypnol and Ecstasy. Two date rape drugs. Evidence gathered after his murder indicates that he sold these drugs primarily to high school students. His school had a thirty percent higher incident of reported rape and sexual assault than any other high school in Bexar County. Did he contribute to that? Very possibly. We would have to dig deeper there. Every single one of these victims was suspected of sex crimes. I don’t have evidence on each and every one, but Jonathan wouldn’t care about evidence, if he believed they were guilty. I could go case by case, but we’re on the clock here—I need you to trust me on this.”
“I believe you,” Kate said over the speaker, her voice odd. Lucy knew this case would be difficult for her. Her partner had been a victim to the same killer who killed Paxton’s daughter, Monique. She felt a kinship with Paxton on the one hand, and a hatred of him on the other because of how he’d used Lucy to justify his killing spree.
Rick said, “Send me everything you have. I’ll look at it immediately.”
Having Rick and Kate on her side was huge, but she still feared for Sean. Because she didn’t know why Paxton would want to frame Sean and then break him out of prison. Or why Paxton would use a convicted drug runner like Jimmy Hunt to do it.
“I’ll have a team in New York pay him a visit,” Rick said.
“He’s still living at his house?”
Rick hesitated. “He was after we reached the plea deal.”
“I need to talk to him,” Lucy said.
“We need to establish that he’s behind this first. While I see what you’re saying, I don’t see how he knows Hunt. Like you said, Hunt’s not the type of criminal he’d work with. And why would he go to these extreme lengths to get Sean?” Rick asked. “I’m playing devil’s advocate, because there are easier ways.”
“Yes, maybe, but this way puts a target on Sean’s back. He’s considered a killer. He then escapes and the surviving guard states that Sean killed his partner in cold blood. It would damage his reputation, even if proven innocent, and it hurts RCK and their business. Sean has the computer skills to facilitate the transfer in the first place, so on the surface it seems logical that he would do something like this.”
Kate interrupted. “I have news about how the transfer was done. The phone found in Sean’s cell didn’t have his prints on it, and it wasn’t used to hack into the system—though there was code in there that clearly was created to look like Sean had hacked in.”
“Explain,” Rick said.
“The code is a backdoor to get into the core system—so on the surface, it looks like Sean did it because the information was found in his cell. But when I reversed the trace, it was clear that the hack came from the Beaumont prison. I have it traced to the exact terminal and am waiting for security tapes to show who was at that terminal at the time the transfer was set. And it wasn’t hacked—the phone makes it appear that the system was hacked, and the code could have hacked the system if plugged directly into any computer connected to the network, but it didn’t. It was done in-house. But the key problem we have is that it could have been external, so we need to shut down that security risk ASAP.”
“What you’re saying,” Rick said, “is that someone with the brains to hack into the prison system put the code on the phone to make it appear Sean did it, but they didn’t actually break into the system to change the transfer orders.”
“Exactly. If anyone else analyzed the phone, they would believe it. Because it’s that good.”
“Is this something Sean is capable of doing?”
No one said anything.
“So yes,” Rick said.
“Sean didn’t,” Kate said.
“But the prosecutors will say he could have,” Rick said.
“My analysis is impeccable, Rick.”
“We need more.”
“Let me interrogate Officer Sheffield.”
“He just got out of surgery.”
“He’s lying,” Kate said. “Sean would never kill a cop in cold blood. In the back of the head? That’s not him.”
“I believe you. I’ve known Sean since he was a kid, I love him like a brother.”
For the first time, Lucy heard emotion in Rick’s voice. She’d been so angry earlier that he thought Sean could have killed Mona Hill, that she lost sight of the fact that Rick cared.
“But,” Rick said, “we have to find evidence before we confront Sheffield. Money. A threat. Blackmail. Whatever it is, find it, then talk to him.”
“I need a warrant to search his house, including his phone records and his computer.”
“I’ll get it. But what I really want to know is who the hell is as good a hacker as Sean?”
No one said anything. Kate was as good as Sean. There were members of the FBI cybercrime unit who were as good as Sean. But who was as good as Sean and willing to be an accessory to killing a cop and frame Sean for two murders?
Lucy couldn’t imagine.
She said, “Rick, when you confirm that Paxton is home, please let me talk to him.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I know your history with him, Lucy.”
“I’m the only person he won’t lie to.”
“I’ll think on it,” he said reluctantly. “I’ve already dispatched the team. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. In the meantime, Kate—you dig into Sheffield. Everything you can do until I get the warrant. Megan—you talk to Thompson. See if you can get him to talk, knowing what we know. I’ll clear it with the AUSA and get you in tonight. I’m going to contact the marshals who are in charge of the manhunt and tell them we have some new information. They’ll listen to me, I’ll convince them that Sean is a victim.”
“Director,” Lucy said when he was about to end the call, “Thompson isn’t going to talk.”
“You don’t know that. If we can get him to turn on Paxton, we might be able to offer a reduced sentence.”
“He’s not going to turn. You know Jonathan Paxton, he’s charismatic and charming and absolutely driven. The people who work for him will do anything to protect him. I guarantee that if Thompson thought the only way to protect Paxton was to kill himself, he’d kill himself. He’s not going to be manipulated.”
“I appreciate your analysis, but we have to try,” Rick said. “Thompson is dangerous, he won’t be back on the streets, but Paxton is even more dangerous because he can get people to do his bidding for him. We have to stop him, and I have no evidence against him. None. Honestly, I would never have even considered he was behind it except that you convinced me that the very tenuous connection between Thompson and Russo was suspicious. Getting a jury to believe it? I wouldn’t even be able to call in every favor at the Department of Justice to ge
t an AUSA to indict. We need more.”
Rick ended the call, and Kate also signed off.
Lucy looked at Megan. “I’m talking to Thompson with you.”
She didn’t say anything.
Lucy leaned forward. “Megan, if I’m right—and I know I am—Thompson is working for Paxton, and therefore he’ll know exactly who I am and why I’m important to Paxton. I can do this. I still don’t think he’ll turn against Paxton, but he might give us something we can use to find him.”
Megan smiled. “Well, Rick didn’t say you couldn’t go.”
* * *
Kate Donovan, warrant in hand, grabbed SSA Steven Pierce to join her to search Tim Sheffield’s house. Steven wasn’t pleased about being pulled out of the office, and while he wasn’t as gung-ho as the two Houston detectives about Sean’s guilt, he also wasn’t convinced that he was innocent.
Fortunately, Kate had a solid reputation and she had the ear of Rick Stockton, which helped, so Steven came with her.
“When are you getting the footage from Beaumont? That would help.”
“I sent people over to grab it,” Steven said. “I’ll know within the hour exactly who changed the transfer orders.”
Tim Sheffield lived in a modest home outside Beaumont. A car was in the driveway but it was registered to Sheffield.
He wasn’t married, according to his employer, but they preceded with caution. Knocked on the door.
“FBI, we have a warrant. We’re coming in.”
Kate didn’t expect an answer, but she heard footsteps.
Steven heard them, too. They both had their firearms ready because they didn’t know what to expect.
The door opened. Kate recognized the woman from a photo Lucy had sent.
“Erica Anderson?” Kate said.
“Yes. I have a lot to say, but I’m begging you—please protect me, protect Tim. We got in over our heads, I didn’t realize it at the time … I can’t imagine that he knew they were going to kill his partner. I can’t believe he would condone that.”
But she thought it was possible, Kate realized, based on her tone and body language.
“We have a warrant; we’re going to come in.”
Cold as Ice Page 30