“Deal. Whatcha got? My guess is Peter Pickering.”
“How’d you know?” Maggie asked.
“He flashed a gun at school when Quinton Elbers shoved him against a locker at school. I didn’t see it, but a couple of my friends did. Quinton deserved to get a little scare thrown his way. He’s such an asshole.”
“Halle, language,” Maggie said.
Halle rolled her eyes. “Fine. To quote Bear’s favorite descriptive word, he’s a douche. Is that better?”
“No, it’s not, young lady.”
“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Bear said. “Where can I find Mr. Pickering?”
Halle pressed her thin lips together and to the side. “He hangs out in that cave around Hastain with a few of the other stoners.”
“How the hell does he get all the way to Hastain?”
“Drives, I guess. Think he stays away from home as much as possible. I doubt you’d find him there.”
Bear cleaned out the last bit of rice from his bowl. “Yeah, I wouldn’t hang around there either if I lived with his mother. That woman is neck deep in the crazy pool.”
Halle hopped from the counter, her eyes wide and pleading. “Bear? When you find Peter, take it easy on him. His life’s pretty crappy and he’s actually a nice guy. Quinton can get under anybody’s skin.”
“I’ll try. He won’t shoot me, will he?”
“I’d be surprised if he knew which end of the gun to hold,” Halle said.
“We’ll start with the caves. You want to come, Jake?”
“Give me a minute. I need to talk to Maggie.”
Bear and Halle wandered to the living room, discussing Bear’s daughter, one of Halle’s best friends. Jake set his bowl on the faux granite counter and faced his fiancée.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you, too.” She kissed him, tugging on his bottom lip with her teeth. “It’s getting awfully lonely in bed at night by myself.”
Jake groaned. “I picked up those two gunrunners and this other thing kind of fell into my lap.”
“Who’s this woman and why’s she on the run?”
Jake took a drink from the beer. “Don’t know, yet. She’s wound tight and being pretty cryptic with her responses—typical for a battered woman.”
A smirk appeared. “This based on your extensive experience with battered women, Detective Caldwell?”
“Saw it enough with my mom that I recognize the signs.” Jake watched the smirk melt from her face.
“Oh, Jake, I’m sorry…”
“No, no. It’s fine. I might have turned down the job without more information, but she has her son with her. Kid is like six years old and cute as hell. He has a definite fear of his dad which worries me. But, if I can keep her safe for a few days until we find someplace for her to go and make a lot of bank doing it, it’s good for us.”
“When are you kicking off this gig?”
“Already did.” Jake ticked his head toward the east. “Got her and the kid stashed at the cabin.”
Her nostrils flared. “Your cabin? Why on earth would you put them there?”
“It’s out of the way, only a handful of people know about it and I can be close to you and Halle.”
Maggie’s eyes grew wide and hopeful. “No drama? You promise?”
“I promise.” Jake cupped her face and kissed her again. It was time to go to the cabin and question Angela. He’d made the “no drama” promise before and didn’t want to get caught lying again.
Chapter Fourteen
“You going after the Pickering kid now?” Jake asked, a box of unaddressed wedding invitations under one arm. He and Bear leaned against their respective vehicles, sucking in cool air as daylight faded to black.
Bear spit and assessed the darkening sky. “I’m going to go against my own advice and check his house first and hope to God I don’t have to listen to one of his mother’s drunken tirades. Ain’t in the mood for her shit tonight. I’m also not traipsing around in a dark cave looking for some kid armed with a .38.”
“You’re a wise man. Maybe I can help you out tomorrow if you don’t find him and can’t squeeze a couple deputies loose.”
Bear winked. “It’s a deal. You heading to the cabin?”
“Maggie isn’t real happy, but yeah. Smoothed it out a little by saying I’d address some invitations. I don’t know most of the people on the list and thought we were keeping this thing modest, but whatever floats her boat. It’s her day.”
Bear smacked Jake on the shoulder. “Can’t wait for you to be a full-fledged member of Club Misery. See you tomorrow. Call if you need anything.”
Bear climbed in his cruiser and backed down the long, gravel drive. Jake tossed the invitations in the truck and rolled toward the cabin—two miles of twists and turns, then a right at an unmarked dirt road running between two weather-beaten fence posts.
The light from the living room flung a faint fire glow on the pond’s surface as he pulled to the front. Angela’s dark head peeked around the corner of the window. Jake gave a wave, which she returned before disappearing. He nabbed the sack of groceries with the burner phone and headed inside.
Angela curled on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her, a copy of a Lee Child novel opened in her lap. Christopher sprawled on the other end of the couch, his hair sweeping across his closed eyes. Jake set the grocery bag in the kitchen and grabbed the burner phone.
“Wasn’t sure when you’d be back.” Angela suppressed a yawn. “I should take him to bed.”
“Here, let me.” Jake swept his arms under Christopher’s limp body and hoisted the kid to his chest. The boy wrapped his arms around Jake’s neck as Jake carried him to the back bedroom and one-armed the covers back. As he bent to lay the boy down, Christopher’s grip tightened.
“Monsters,” the boy mumbled.
“No monsters,” Jake whispered, setting Christopher’s head on the pillow. The boy let go, and when Jake drew back, his half-open eyes combed Jake’s face.
“Yes, there is.”
“Well, if there are monsters, they’re definitely not here, my man.”
Christopher’s head rolled side-to-side, exploring the shadows tossed about the tiny room from the light spilling in from the hallway. “How do you know?”
“Because I’m here. Monsters wouldn’t dare show their ugly mugs around here.” Jake brushed the kid’s hair back. His résumé with kids would be represented by a blank page, but Christopher sparked a paternal instinct. He thought of Maggie, and the possibility of doing this very thing with his own son someday seemed a bit less terrifying. “Now, let’s get you tucked in.”
Jake drew the covers to Christopher’s chin. He hadn’t tucked anyone in bed before, so he jabbed the comforter against the kid’s legs like Jake’s mom used to do for him and Nicky.
“Did your daddy tuck you in, Mr. Caldwell?”
Jake’s broad shoulders slumped. His father’s idea of tucking his kids in bed consisted of yelling at them to get him another beer so he didn’t have to move from his recliner. On a bad day, he’d send them on their way with a boot in the ass. The best days were when Stoney didn’t bother to come home.
“Sure he did,” Jake lied, trying to avoid bringing the kid any farther down than he already was. “Does yours?”
Christopher folded his little hands across his chest, index fingers pointed in a steeple. “Sometimes. Sometimes it was nice.”
“And other times?” The kid rolled to his side and stared at the light from the hallway. “You can talk to me, Christopher.”
“There’s something wrong with him. I don’t know what it is, but I see the bad man more and more.”
Jake’s brows drew together. “What do you mean about the bad man?”
Christopher chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t want to talk about it. Is that okay?”
“Sure, buddy.”
“Will you leave the door open a crack? I don’t like the dark.” The boy closed his
eyes and ended the conversation.
Given what the kid said about his dad, Jake wasn’t surprised. “Hey, fishing tomorrow. There’s some big, fat catfish waiting for you.”
Christopher offered a quick flash of teeth. Jake backed a few steps to the hallway and pulled the door halfway shut. It was the first time he’d seen the kid smile since he met him.
Chapter Fifteen
Back in the living room, Angela abandoned the book and gazed out the window into the black night.
“Thank you,” she said, her eyes hooded with sleepiness. “I’m surprised he went with you at all. He’s shy with strangers. You must be experienced.”
Jake fell into the recliner. “Far from it. My experience with little kids wouldn’t fill a thimble.”
“He feels safe with you. He has this uncanny ability to judge people. It’s weird, like he sees or smells something tipping him off.”
Jake scratched at a worn spot on the arm of the chair. “Well, let’s hope he doesn’t look too close.”
Angela cocked her head like a dog who heard a high-pitched noise. A strange grin curled her lips. “Now why would you say that? You seem perfectly nice to me.”
“I’m working on it.” He rested his elbows on his knees. Time to broach the subject she’d been dancing around since she called him. “Does this uncanny ability to see what lies deep within a person work with his father?”
Her grin fell away, and for a moment Jake was sorry he brought up the subject. He needed to know what kind of man he protected her from, but the way she flinched at the mere mention of her husband worried him.
“He’s not Christopher’s father,” she said. “We’ve been married for just under three years. His real father died in a car accident after Christopher’s first birthday.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
Her bottom lip quivered. “Yeah, we had a rough go for a while. Then I met Andrew, and everything was wonderful. He took care of us even though he travels all the time for work. When Christopher began calling him Dad, I couldn’t say anything. He’s the only dad the kid remembers.”
“Does he know Andrew isn’t his real father?”
She winced as if his question was a punch. “He’s seen pictures of his father, but it doesn’t quite register with him, you know?”
“So, we go from wonderful to here. What happened?”
“He’s different than I thought he was.” Her voice dropped, and she glimpsed toward the bedroom. “Can he hear us?”
“I left the door open a crack. Said he didn’t like the dark. We should be fine to talk, though.”
“That’s a new thing. The dark never bothered him before, but in the last couple of months…”
Jake waited for her to finish the sentence, but she locked her attention on the coffee table, wringing her hands. “You want a beer or glass of wine? I have both.”
“Got anything harder?”
“Some Crown Royal my buddy gave me. Haven’t even broken the seal yet.”
She blinked away the impending tears. “You mind? On the rocks would be great.”
Jake went to the kitchen and found the bottle of Crown at the back of a cabinet, threw a few ice cubes in a glass, and poured a couple fingers of amber liquid courage for her.
She swirled the glass a few times and gulped half the whiskey. “We had a fairy tale marriage until a couple months ago.”
“What happened?”
“In the last couple of months, he traveled even more than usual, which meant he was pretty much gone all the time.” Her voice shook. “When he was home, he was distant with a hair-trigger temper. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out what I did wrong because he sure wasn’t telling me. He said it wasn’t his job. I don’t think Christopher or I did anything different, but he snapped at us for the littlest things. I started noticing bruises on Christopher’s arm. I kept asking him where he got them, but he wouldn’t tell me.”
“But you know they were from your husband?”
“I suspected, though Andrew denied it. I actually wondered if he was having an affair.”
“What made you think that?”
She shifted on the couch, pulling her legs underneath her. “I read this article in Cosmo about the signs of an affair, and he fit the bill for many of them. He worked more hours, lots of supposed calls with overseas clients, and he insisted it was the only time these people could get away.”
“What’s he do?”
“Investment banker. Deals mostly in the international markets. I don’t understand it even when he tried to explain it to me.”
Jake dropped to a chair. “Maybe he’s going through a rough patch at work, and he doesn’t want to tell you.”
“I don’t think so. He would get a text, disappear into his study, and shut the door. I heard him talking through the door once, but I don’t think it was English. He’d come out and pretend everything was normal, but I could tell it wasn’t. Within twenty minutes, he’d find some excuse to go to the basement.”
“What’s in the basement?”
The tears welled again and when one burst through, Jake grabbed a box of tissues and handed her one.
“I didn’t know at first,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “He’d disappear for ten or fifteen minutes and come back up, play with Christopher and make small talk with me, but he was…distant the whole time. A week ago, I hid a baby monitor in his study and waited for him to disappear in there. Once he did, he talked about someone named Miroff, Niroff or something, and in a cold, metallic voice he said they wouldn’t be a problem to anyone ever again. I could, I don’t know, picture this evil grin by the way he said it, and the tone sent these icy chills down my spine. Does that make sense?”
Jake bobbed his head when she glanced his way. He didn’t want to interrupt her flow of information.
“Two days ago, when he went to work and I dropped off Christopher for a playdate with a friend, I went back to the house and tore the basement apart. I had to know why he kept going down there. That’s when I found it.”
Her eyes grew haunted by whatever image she retrieved from her memory bank.
“What’d you find?” Jake asked, voice low and calm. She teetered on the edge of telling him, but some terrifying barrier held her back.
“Behind the block in the wall, guns and a book…”
“What kind of book?”
“Red, tiny, like a journal. I thumbed through the pages, but whatever was written in there wasn’t English.”
Jake’s brow crinkled. “Your husband speak any other languages?”
“No, at least he’s never made any indication he could. But the worst part was when I found those pictures…”
“Pictures of what, Angela?”
Her jaw trembled, and she opened her mouth to speak when a floorboard creaked behind her. Christopher lurched down the hall like a zombie, dragging a worn and torn blanket embroidered with a blue elephant, his hooded eyes fighting a losing battle against sleep.
“Mommy? Will you come lay with me? I can’t sleep.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.” She scooped up her son with her strong arms and carried him to the bedroom, closing the door to a mere crack. Jake stood with his hands on his hips. What in the hell was in those basement pictures? Maybe she’d come back out after the boy fell asleep.
He grabbed a pile of the wedding invitations and the mailing list Maggie printed out for him. His handwriting wasn’t the best, but he managed to scrawl a couple dozen names and addresses of people he didn’t know before wandering to the bedroom to check on his guests. He pushed the bedroom door open, the light from the hall bathing the sleeping mother and son in gold. Angela spooned her son, a protective arm thrown across him.
“Guess the pictures will have to wait,” Jake muttered, pulling the door shut. He padded back to the living room. Angela’s purse dangled on the arm of the couch, a little black pocketbook with a gold clasp fixed in the open position. The angel on his shoulder whispered for him to leave it al
one, she’d tell him what she could in her own time. The devil on the other side told Jake to figure out who the hell she was before diving deeper into a mess he couldn’t get out of. Jake agreed with the devil on this one.
He flipped open the pocketbook. Two credit and one debit card in the name of Angela S. Connelly. A driver’s license with the same name and an Olathe address on the Kansas side of the city, thirty-two years old with a birthday coming up. One picture of Christopher, a couple of years old at the most, and a receipt for a caramel latte from Starbucks dated four days ago.
Jake grabbed a nearby envelope and scratched the particulars from Angela’s license to do a little background research before realizing he’d written the information on the back of one of the wedding envelopes. He hoped Maggie kept extras. If Angela wouldn’t tell him who her husband was, Jake would find out on his own.
Chapter Sixteen
Working his way down the list of Sokolov’s crew, the Wolf broke into Sean Mack’s second-floor apartment in North Kansas City, picking the lock with relative ease. Mack was one of the lynchpins of Sokolov’s plan. If the Wolf could wipe him out, it might cripple the entire operation.
He dug through every drawer, cabinet, shelf, and anything else serving as a hiding place. Nothing. The studio apartment was meticulous, like Mack suffered from OCD. A half-empty gallon of expired milk was the one thing betraying the thought. He ground his teeth in frustration.
The expired milk. Mack hadn’t been there for days. The Wolf moved to the ground floor of the building to the community mailboxes. He picked the lock for Mack’s apartment, the papers jammed inside confirming Mack’s absence. He thumbed through the junk mail and fliers before coming upon a bill for a storage unit at a nearby Saver Storage facility. Might be something. The Wolf stuffed the mail back in the box, re-engaged the lock and returned to his office.
The Wolf spent an eye-drooping hour weeding through Sean Mack’s work emails, finding nothing of interest in his inbox or trash folder. He moved to the sent folder, seeking anything Mack forwarded from his work account that would lead him to the man. Nothing. Mack’s last trail was the Saver Storage place. The Wolf spent several minutes hacking into the Saver Storage location’s database and finding Mack’s account, which was linked to the apartment address and included a cell phone number. Mack paid the rent on Unit 107 six months in advance.
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