by Laura Scott
She supposed that she should suggest that they bring in the police, the FBI, but she didn’t. She already knew what Liam’s response would be. As an LEO, she’d have been bound to report a kidnapping, but she was no longer a law enforcement officer and no longer had to abide by the rigid rules under which they operated.
Tension shimmered through the car, tension and that now-oppressive silence that made its own kind of noise. She tried to shake it off, but it clung like a bad smell.
Liam was an intelligent man who was in an impossible situation. If it were her child, what would she do? She honestly didn’t know. How could she? The love between a parent and a child was sacred. She’d always believed that, even with the less-than-perfect relationship she had with her own parents.
She longed to reassure him that everything would be all right, that they would get Jonah back unharmed, but she couldn’t in good faith make those promises. Right now, Liam needed her skills as an agent, not the feelings of a woman, but she was both, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to separate the two.
What was she supposed to do with those feelings? They were messy and unwieldy and altogether unwanted. Honesty forced her to admit that the last wasn’t totally true.
By the creases between his brows, she knew that in his mind Liam was already in the factory, confronting Reva and plotting how to take her, along with any henchmen she might have with her, down.
It didn’t help that she had the feeling he wanted to say something and then clamped his lips shut. When he finally spoke, it was a relief, though the words were rough and uneven. “We don’t know what we’ll be walking into. You don’t have to do this.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Sorry. Maybe I should just say thank you.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Thank you for that and for not saying we should have called the police.”
“I thought about it,” she admitted.
“But you didn’t. So, thanks.” The gruff tone was so filled with fear and pain that she wondered they both didn’t drown in it.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “Reineke may be okay, but he hasn’t exactly shown himself to be on our side.” She thought of ops with the ATF. “Also, the more people involved, the more things that can go wrong.”
Silence filled the car again.
They parked a distance from the factory and made their way through a heavily wooded forest.
Paige patted her vest. Flash-bangs. Flexicuffs. Several lengths of rope. A snack for Jonah. Her Glock was in the shoulder holster, her clutch piece tucked in one boot. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use any of the weapons, especially in front of Jonah.
The abandoned factory lived up to the reputation of such buildings. An eerie atmosphere surrounded it. Heavy steel doors and barred windows gave it a forbidding air. Desperately she searched for another plan, something that didn’t involve Liam walking into the factory alone. She’d find a back way in and locate Jonah.
She opened her mouth, intent on convincing him to let her go with him, when he put a finger to her lips.
“Get Jonah out. That’s all you need to do.” Hard lines bracketed his mouth. “Take care of yourself. There’s probably someone with him.”
“Let me go with you. We’ll take care of Reva and then find Jonah. Together.”
“I can take care of myself.” He gave a forced smile, then tapped his chest. “Delta, remember? Do you think I can’t take down one woman?”
She leaned in and touched her lips to his. “I’ll take care of Jonah. You do the same with yourself.”
“Count on it.” He hesitated. “If things go south...”
She didn’t give him the opportunity to finish. Instead, she stood on tiptoe to brush her lips over his. “Nothing’s going wrong. We’re bringing Jonah home.”
She gave him a thumbs-up, wishing she felt as confident as she pretended. Jonah’s life depended upon what she did next.
* * *
Liam walked into the factory without any attempt to conceal his entrance. If Reva was here, he wanted all her attention on him. The cavernous room was lit only by two naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling, giving off stingy streams of light.
He walked to the center of the room and said, “Might as well come on out, Reva. I know you’re here.” Automatically, he slipped into his Delta unit commander’s voice.
No answer.
Had he and Paige been wrong? They’d followed a hunch, a reasonable one, but it was a hunch all the same.
He tried again. “I’m not surprised you’re afraid to show yourself. Only a coward kidnaps an innocent child and then hides behind him.”
Reva appeared from behind a stack of wooden crates. “Not very smart, speaking to the person who holds your child that way.” She huffed out an annoyed breath. “You couldn’t have known it was me.”
Liam did his best to keep his focus on Reva rather than on the gun she held with such casual ease, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the .357 Magnum. With a short four-inch barrel, the old revolver was capable of punching a hole right through a man.
It wasn’t a small gun, but she held it with an effortlessness that spoke of familiarity.
She followed his gaze. “You like my little toy? It belonged to my father. He gave it to me when he and my mother sold me the house.” She shook her head at her own musings. “Enough of that. There’s no way you could have known it was me.”
“But I did.”
“How?” Annoyance was ripe in her voice. “Come on. Admit it. You were guessing.”
“You used the phrase easy-peasy on the phone. You’re the only one I know who says that.”
Chagrin crossed her face. “Two little words. That was careless on my part,” she said. “And I tried to be so careful.” A spiteful little smile touched her mouth as though she was reluctantly admiring a despised enemy’s cleverness.
Liam stared at her in amazement. “That’s what you’re upset about? What about killing three people and trying to kill Paige and me and kidnapping my son?”
She snapped her fingers, the gesture clearly dismissing the lives she’d taken. “Speaking of Paige, where is your partner? You two seemed joined at the hip. Never mind. My men will take care of her.”
Liam pushed back his fear for Paige and focused on what Reva was saying.
“I’m going places. I can’t afford to make careless mistakes like that.”
“You don’t call murder a ‘careless mistake’?”
“I call it a means to an end. What are the lives of three nobodies compared to mine? I’m going to make a difference in the state, then in the nation. Nothing’s going to stop me.”
Liam folded his arms across his chest. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Her smile was intolerably smug. “You? You won’t stop me, because you’ll be dead.”
“You’d kill me?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’ve tried hard enough. This time I’ll make sure.”
“What happened to you, Reva? You were a decent kid from a decent home. What went wrong?”
“I got smart.”
“That’s all you have to say. Why? Why kill our friends? Why try to kill me? You and I were friends.”
“You were Marie’s friend. Never mine.”
“You’re wrong.”
He needed to keep her attention on him and give Paige time enough to find Jonah. “The gas in your house? That was you.”
Reva gave a trilling laugh. “Of course. I turned off the safety valve and cut the line to the stove. Then all I had to do was fake being asleep and waking up to find my house filling with gas. I had to keep you from looking too closely at me. Becoming another victim was the easiest way to make you look in another direction.”
“You could have died.” Disbelief slic
ed through him at the risk she’d taken.
“I was safe enough. I called 911, hysterical and sobbing. Everybody bought it. Including you.”
Paige hadn’t, Liam thought. She’d questioned Reva’s surviving the incident from the first. He should have paid attention to her doubts, but he’d been unable to see the girl he’d known from so long ago as a murderer.
“You should have left it alone,” Reva said, her voice hard once more. “But, no, you had to keep digging.” Fury flashed in her eyes, spilled over in an angry spate of words. “I should have known you’d be a problem and taken care of you first. Once the blackmail stopped, I would have stopped killing people. There’d be no point in it. If you want to blame someone, blame whoever is blackmailing me. That’s the real culprit.”
“And the people you murdered are just so much collateral damage.”
“Of course. What else?” She brushed her hand through the air, dismissing killing three people. “Doesn’t matter now. You’re going to die, along with that son of yours and, of course, your little friend, Paige.”
“You’d kill a child?”
“It’s survival of the fittest. You have to be willing to do what’s necessary if you’re going to succeed. You were a big-time Delta operator. You should know that.”
“You’re sick, Reva. I wonder how I didn’t see it before.”
Irritation spiked in her voice. “What I am sick of is this tedious conversation.”
She shrugged, the motion lifting her dark hair in a bouncy fluff.
“At least tell me why. Why kill our friends?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? It was my fault that the bus went off the bridge that day.”
“Your fault?” Liam shook his head. “Pope fell asleep at the wheel.”
“I made him do it. Not on purpose. I wanted to stay around the school after the game. There was a boy on the other team who I wanted to notice me. So I put something in Pope’s water bottle that I thought would cause him to fall asleep while we were at the game. I never thought he wouldn’t use it until we were on our way back. By then, it was too late.”
Liam struggled to make sense of her words. “You put a sedative in his water bottle...all so we could stick around and you could get some boy to notice you?” Even as he said the words aloud, he could scarcely believe them.
“He was on the other team. We’d flirted a bit at other games. If I had time with him, I could have gotten him to ask me out. But no. Old Goat Pope had to drink a soda at the game. He never touched his water bottle until...until it was too late.”
“You could have said something, stopped him from drinking it.”
“What? Like, ‘Hey, Mr. Pope, I doctored your water bottle and you’re gonna take a nap real soon’? If I’d known what would happen...but I never dreamed he’d drive the bus right off the road and into the river. I was on the bus, too, you know.
“By the time it was over, it was too late. Those kids died. I couldn’t tell the truth then.”
“Okay. But why kill the survivors now?”
“I told you. I’m being blackmailed. It has to be one of the survivors, someone who saw me that day. I’ve paid out $275,000 so far. Another payment and I’ll be ruined. I won’t have enough money for my campaign, much less anything else.”
“Like fancy shoes,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just something Paige mentioned.”
“Ah, yes. Smart, smart Paige. She should have minded her own business. Like you.” Reva glanced about. “I didn’t expect she’d let you come here on your own. She must be trying to find that brat of yours.”
Liam didn’t bother responding to that. He needed to keep Reva’s attention on him. “Let me guess. The blackmail started about six weeks ago.” Paige had been right all along in her conviction that Sam was connected. He was busy putting together the pieces in his head. “You could have refused to pay. Let the truth come out. What you did was bad, but it wasn’t murder. Manslaughter maybe, but not murder.”
“I’d be ruined personally and politically. And there was nothing to be gained in letting everyone know what really happened. I can’t have it come out that I caused the bus accident. I can’t.” She said the last more to herself than to him, as though she’d had that same argument in the past, trying to convince herself of the rightness of her actions. She lifted her chin to stare at him.
Murderous rage flared in her eyes. Fear pulsed through him. Not for himself, but for Jonah and Paige.
“How about Calvin Pope? He would have been vindicated if it were proven that the accident wasn’t his fault.”
“Who cares about Old Goat Pope? Nobody ever liked him in the first place. Just as well he died when he did.”
“And his family?”
“What about them? His old lady was a shrew, and the son was weird. They never amounted to anything fifteen years ago, and they sure don’t now. You can’t compare them to what I’ve accomplished, to what I can do for the state. And beyond.”
But Liam wasn’t listening to her self-aggrandized visions and looked at her incredulously. “Is that your excuse for letting Pope take the rap and destroying five families?”
“Like I said, who cares?” Reva asked in a bored tone. “But now I have to do something with you. I was afraid you and that little friend of yours were getting too close, which is why I hired those first two idiots to take you out. They failed miserably.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned since I’ve been in politics, it’s that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She shook her head with feigned sadness. “The work ethic of today isn’t what it used to be.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re a hard man to kill, Liam.”
“Should I apologize?”
“No need. I’ll feel real regret at having to shoot you, but you haven’t left me any choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“Don’t be naive. You know everything. And how do I know that you weren’t the one blackmailing me in the first place?”
“You really believe that?”
“No. Probably not. You’re too much a Boy Scout for blackmail.”
“That didn’t stop you from trying to kill me.”
“I couldn’t take the risk of believing anyone innocent. Even you. I had to keep staging the accidents until the blackmail stopped. That’s the only way I’d know for sure that I got the right person. It’s too late to turn back now.” Her voice took on an almost pleading note. “You see that, don’t you? I didn’t have a choice.”
“Listen to yourself. You’re justifying murder just to keep your secret.” He didn’t bother concealing the contempt in his voice.
“That secret is the only thing standing in my way of getting out of this small-potatoes town and becoming somebody. I’m going to win a seat in the state legislature and from there...who knows? Maybe a congressional seat one day. And after that? There’s no limit to what I can do.”
Gone was the pleading.
In its place was a haughty arrogance, accompanied by a naked hunger for power. How had he ever thought of her as Marie’s harmless if annoying little sister? This was a woman convinced of her absolute right to do whatever she deemed necessary on her quest to achieve her goals, no matter who she had to kill to get there.
She aimed her gun at him. “You can buy yourself a little more time if you tell me what you have on me. It would really be a shame if I have to kill you right now.”
THIRTEEN
Paige found a rear entrance.
The back of the building was a rabbit warren of hallways leading to rooms filled with manufacturing machines, their hulks casting huge shadows, each providing a hiding place for a predator. The factory stirred up whirling, churning memories of when Ethan had been killed.
Her palms grew wet, her mouth dry.
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Three years of nightmares threatened to spill over and out. An inner voice shrieked at her to turn and run, but she held to her course. The only thing that kept her moving forward was that Liam was depending on her to find his son. She began the tedious process of checking each room until she heard sounds from a television coming from a room at the end of a hallway.
Approaching cautiously, she kept to the side of the hallway. The door to the room was partially open, and she saw two men tipped back in chairs, eating and watching TV. In the back of the room was Jonah on a cot, hands and feet bound. Fury rose in her, fury and a deep desire to make the men pay for their part in terrifying a little boy.
Jonah saw her, opened his mouth, but she put a finger to her lips. He nodded in understanding.
She approached as quietly as possible, then disabled the first man with a hard chop to the back of his neck.
The other man jumped up from his chair and spun around. He lunged toward her, reaching for her shoulder. She ducked under his arm and got behind him, grabbed his hand in a sophisticated joint lock, and then forced his hand back over his forearm in an aikido move she’d picked up in her close quarters battle training. She’d excelled at CQB and hand-to-hand combat and was grateful to have them in her arsenal now.
He yowled with pain as she twisted harder, bringing him to his knees. From there, it was easy enough to force him to the floor. She didn’t give him time to recover but was on him and pressed her thumbs to the vulnerable spot in his neck. It was lights out for him.
Quickly, she disarmed the men, tucked their weapons in her vest, then secured their hands behind their backs with the flexicuffs she’d brought with her and tied their ankles together with lengths of rope she took from her vest.
She crossed the room to Jonah. The little boy was as cute as his pictures promised. She knew he had to be frightened and approached him slowly. “Jonah, I’m a friend of your daddy’s,” she said and undid the ropes binding his hands and feet. She blinked back tears upon seeing the reddened areas where the ropes had bitten tender skin. “We’re here to take you home.”