Deadly Cargo

by Jodie Bailey

  Then this morning her sister Sally—who’d been driving to the now vacant farm with her new baby every few days to keep it up the best she could—had called to say that Jay had suddenly offered to get the farm ready to sell in exchange for letting him stay there. Her other sisters, who were all scattered elsewhere around the country, jumped at the proposal.

  But Leia—who was both the eldest sister and the odd one out, as usual—had furiously driven up from Toronto to immediately kick him off the property, only to end up blindfolded and kidnapped.

  If she ever saw Jay again, he had a whole lot to answer for.

  Lord, please help me settle my heart and mind. I can’t let myself get distracted thinking about him now. I need everything inside me focused on getting out of here alive.

  “Where is everybody?” The voice was male, loud and so close to Leia’s face she flinched.

  “There’s nobody here but me,” she said.

  As far as she knew. Her other two sisters, Rose and Quinn, lived on opposite ends of the country where they were busy scraping pennies together to throw everything into chasing their own dreams. Since it was almost midnight now, Leia didn’t expect Sally would arrive until six or seven in the morning. As for one of them being the intended target, with Leia’s jet-black hair and violet eyes it was utterly impossible anyone would mistake her for one of her three blonde younger sisters.

  There was the cat, too, but Moses didn’t live there so much as visited when he felt like it.

  “Look, if this is about Jay Brock,” she added, “we haven’t spoken in almost a year. And I don’t know anything about any kind of trouble he’s in.”

  Nobody answered. The texture changed under her feet. She was being walked across the carpet by the man with big hands, and the faint smell of ashes told her she was nearing the fireplace. Her father had made sure that, even back when they were little girls, they knew each room, hidden door and back passage of the sprawling and isolated farmhouse like the backs of their hands. They’d all been homeschooled until high school, and he’d drilled them with games and scavenger hunts until she knew the creak of every board like the veins pumping blood to her heart.

  Her dad had even taught them how to run through the house blindfolded.

  And as much as she resented it when she was young—considering her father quirky, bordering on paranoid—she prayed God would help her remember what he’d taught her.

  She closed her eyes, calmed her breath and tried to force herself to focus.

  By the sounds of footsteps and objects crashing, she guessed there were three intruders in total. The one with the loudest boots was now tossing the place, as if searching for something, while another with big hands steered her by the shoulders. The fact they’d taken her bag meant they now had her car keys, wallet and cell phone. Were they armed? If so, then with what? Her mind reeled with unanswered questions until they threatened to drown her ability to think.

  “What do you want?” Leia forced out the words over her trembling lips. “If you’re here to rob us, just take what you want and go. I’m telling you we don’t have much.”

  Just debts and a home in desperate need of repairs. If this wasn’t about Jay, then why were they here? If they were thieves, why target a remote farm thirty minutes from the closest town? Yes, the property was large, but they’d never had much. Their dad had never let them buy anything new he could teach them to make or get secondhand. Even now, all four of them were up to their ears in debt and struggling to scrape up enough money to finance their dreams.

  Then came a push on both shoulders at once, so quick and jarring she barely had time to brace her legs as she stumbled backward into a chair. Her body smacked against the wood. Her hands grabbed ahold of the arms, feeling the soft grain beneath her fingertips. She knew exactly where she was now. She was in her father’s favorite chair by the fire, where he used to sit and tell them made-up stories about four brave and strong princesses who would one day fight a terrifying foe.

  Looked like, for her, that day was now.

  Her limbs had started to shake, and she didn’t try to stop them. Better to let her kidnappers believe she was too scared to think, let alone preparing to fight back.

  “Now you’re going to tell me where I can find every single scrap of information in this house that can be traced to Vamana Enterprises,” the one who’d bellowed at her before barked.

  She decided to mentally dub him Loud Voice.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” she blurted out, which was true. Yes, she was vaguely aware of the mega-company that owned stadiums, restaurants and various other entertainment complexes across the country, including a mammoth one on Toronto’s waterfront. But she’d never had the money or inclination to set foot in one. She was vaguely aware from office gossip that the billionaire CEO Franklin Vamana had been fighting off a hostile takeover attempt from his younger sister, Esther, who herself ran a makeup empire called Indigo Iris. But the small legal aid law firm Leia worked at never came anywhere close to representing anyone as big or wealthy as either of them.

  “Well, you better start remembering fast,” Loud Voice said, “before things get nasty.”

  Or Leia could just get out of here instead. Faint echoes told her Loud Voice was a few feet in front of her. A creak on the floorboards and a thudding sound indicated that Stompy Boots was now yanking books off the shelf on the other side of the room. But the one who’d propelled her across the floor wasn’t touching her now, which meant there was still one criminal left for her senses to find.

  “Tie her to the chair,” Loud Voice said, “then come help me search.”

  A pair of beefy hands grabbed Leia’s left wrist. A loop of rope wrapped around it, fastening her to the arm of the chair. So that’s where Big Hands was. Leia’s jaw set. All right, time to get out of here.

  Father God, guide me now.

  “You have the wrong place!” she insisted. “There’s nothing like that here. I promise!”

  The rope tightened around her left wrist. Her right hand flew, hammering her fist into the man trying to restrain her before he could even tie the knot. Then she leaped to her feet, even as she heard Big Hands swearing in pain, and grabbed ahold of the chair they’d forced her to sit on and swung it around in front of her like a weapon. The rope fell free. The chair cracked hard against what she hoped was some part of Loud Voice’s body before crashing into what she guessed was Big Hands’s already throbbing head.

  Stunned silence fell, followed by swearing and Loud Voice’s command to “Get her!” But it was too late. Leia had already tossed the chair and started running.

  She pelted across the living room floor, still thwarted by the blindfold, and guided herself by the smell of the kitchen ahead, the feel of the floorboards beneath her and the sound of the summer rain striking the windows. Her fingers flitted along the books on the shelves until she felt the narrow gap between the third and fourth sets of shelves. She gasped a breath and slid through, pushing her body into the narrow space. A hand reached for her, yanking the fabric of her jacket. She pulled free from the grasp and squeezed into the even smaller space behind the row of shelves. Silent prayers of thanksgiving poured from her lips as she felt for the secret hatch in the wall, crawled through and tumbled into the pitch-black hidden passage behind it. The smell of old dust and fresh soap filled her senses. She shoved the panel closed again, pushing the padlock in place as she did, so no one could follow.

  Only then did she stop long enough to finally untie the blindfold and yank it from her face.

  A faint light flickered behind her as a warm hand touched her shoulder.

  “Hey, Leia.”

  * * *

  As an undercover officer of the Ontario Provincial Police’s cold-case homicide division, Jay should’ve known that Leia’s immediate reaction would be to rear around and try to punch anyone who snuck up behind her li
ke that. Or so he thought as he barely managed to duck out of the way of her approaching fist.

  She pulled her punch, just before her hand struck the wall in the exact spot his nose had been seconds before. Impressive. Instinctively he grabbed her hand before she could draw it back. But instead of pulling away, she grabbed his wrist in return and their hands locked in the grasp like two soldiers, with one trying to haul the other up to safety.

  “Nice punch,” he said.

  Her violet eyes flashed in the dim light of the cell phone that he’d sat in his breast pocket.

  “I also just escaped three intruders while blindfolded and partially tied to a chair,” she said. Her voice barely rose above a whisper, not that he expected whoever was trashing things on the other side of the wall could hear them.

  She hadn’t added the words no thanks to you, but they seemed to be implied.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get here faster,” he said. “I was in my camper behind the barn, noticed a light was on and came over. What’s going on?”

  “You expect me to believe you have no idea what’s happening?” Leia demanded. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re messed up in, but there’s no other reason I can think of why my family home would be under attack.”

  What could he possibly say to that? Like everything else he’d said to Leia since he’d first bumped into her in the barn last summer and felt his heart stop, what he’d just told her was entirely true, while leaving out almost everything that he actually wanted to tell her. Now, after over a year of carefully constructed conversations designed to keep from really telling her everything, even as he’d developed very inconvenient feelings for the fiery would-be lawyer, where would he even begin?

  It had started with the corpse of a cold-case John Doe that was discovered encased in the cement of a building foundation in downtown Toronto. It had been complete except for a single missing leg bone. The story had of course hit the news and reignited rumors of the “Phantom Killer,” who’d been responsible for the disappearance of almost a dozen people over thirty-five years ago. Then came a phone call to the tip line claiming Doe was a waiter who’d been murdered by billionaire CEO Franklin Vamana. The source turned out to be an elderly farmer, Walter Dukes. Walter claimed his late best friend had secretly witnessed the crime and there were more bodies to be found. Franklin had also apparently threatened this best friend that if she ever told anyone he was the Phantom Killer he’d murder both her and her family.

  But this friend had taken all the evidence needed to prove Franklin was the killer and hidden it somewhere in Walter’s farmhouse. No one in the department had been inclined to take Walter seriously. Who would, really? The Phantom Killer’s existence might’ve never been proven, but that hadn’t stopped a wealth of urban legend stories and myths from leaping up around it.

  But something about Jay’s first conversation with Walter had convinced him that, despite how age had addled his memories, Walter was telling the truth. Walter’s tip that this friend had anonymously reported the murder to Toronto police at the time had in fact panned out. An anonymous woman had indeed called the police tip line and left an extended message claiming Franklin was the Phantom Killer. But any investigation into it had been buried through lack of evidence and probably also corruption.

  So, Jay had agreed to Walter’s suggestion that he move onto the property undercover as a farmhand, while he helped Walter sort through both his muddled memories and belongings for anything this friend had hidden, as well as helping to keep the family safe.

  Maybe he’d just wanted to believe Walter’s story.

  Jay’s own mother had gone to her grave insisting that the Phantom Killer had murdered Jay’s father, instead of agreeing with the police department’s assessment that the recovering alcoholic had just relapsed again and run out on his wife and child. His supervisors hadn’t even considered it a serious enough possibility to keep Jay from taking this case.

  Developing deep and extremely unauthorized feelings for Leia had been just one of the nails in the coffin of the investigation that his supervisors had considered a wild-goose chase. Even though he’d successfully nipped those emotions in the bud before they’d cost him his career. If Walter had remembered this friend’s name, he wasn’t about to tell Jay, and nothing even remotely connected to Vamana was ever found. When Walter had died, the operation was called off. Then last week another cold-case John Doe corpse had been found encased in cement, again with one bone missing.

  Long story short, I’m trying to determine if one of the wealthiest men in the world is a cold-case serial killer. My only source was your late father, and he passed away insisting there was evidence on this farm.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he admitted.

  “Tell me those men didn’t just kidnap and blindfold me because of some trouble you’re in,” she said.

  “They didn’t,” he said. “That much I can promise. Did they say anything?”

  “They asked me where to find everything in this house that can be traced to Franklin Vamana.”

  Jay felt his heart stop in his chest. He’d been meticulously careful to keep the fact he was heading to the Dukes farm tonight need-to-know only. Seemed Walter had been right to worry that if he spoke to police Vamana would somehow find out and send hired mercenaries after his family.

  And I promised to protect them.

  “What did you say to them?” he asked.

  “That they’d come to the wrong place,” she said.

  He blew out a hard breath. So, despite the fact he’d urged Walter to tell his four daughters the truth before he died, it seemed that he’d stubbornly stuck to his plan to keep them in the dark until the very end. Why would he do that? What could be so terrible in there that he never wanted his daughters to find? He just prayed he found the files before they did. “How many hostiles are we dealing with?”

  “Three hostiles that I know of,” she said. “All in the living room.”

  More than he could apprehend himself, at least until he isolated each of them. Also, he couldn’t help but notice her lips had quirked at the word hostiles, like she was teasing him. So much for worrying she’d figured out he was a cop.

  “They took my phone along with my wallet and keys,” she added. “Tell me you called the police.”

  I am the police. Not that he was authorized to tell her that at the risk of compromising the investigation or any evidence it might turn up.

  “I don’t have a cell phone signal,” he admitted.

  “Must be the storm,” she said. “The tower goes down intermittently when the wind’s bad.”

  “I’ll keep checking,” he said. Even then, the closest cops were in the small town of Kilpatrick. Backup would take at least an hour to arrive. The question was what to do until then? They couldn’t hide in the hidden passage forever. “What do the intruders look like?”

  “No idea,” she said. “I was blindfolded. But going by handgrip and footsteps, at least two of them are pretty big. They could be dressed up as clowns or wearing gorilla masks for all I know.”

  Despite himself, he snorted. It was no wonder he’d initially fallen so hard for this woman, before he’d been smart enough to shut those feelings down. Yes, she was impossibly stubborn and strong-willed. But her sense of humor and bravery rivaled that of the best fellow officers he’d served with. There were far worse people to be stuck in a tight spot with, and he’d been in his share of them. Even if she’d never forgive him when she found out the truth.

  Now, to find a way out.

  “Well, here’s hoping it’s not clowns,” he said. Banging noises rose louder from the other side of the wall, like the intruders were trying to rip the mounted bookshelves clear off the studs. The secret hatch rattled futilely against the padlock. He stepped back and pulled Leia even deeper into the passage. “We’ve got to get out of here.”


  “And warn Sally,” she said. “She’ll be driving up in the morning, unless Mabel wakes up early and she thinks a drive will put her back to sleep.”

  That much he knew. Sally’s estranged husband, Vince, was a mechanic and amateur race-car driver who had a record for drag racing. But besides that, he had been eliminated as a suspect in connection with anything to do with Vamana or the Phantom Killer.

  They started down the hidden passage, back the way he’d come. Their shoulders bumped against each other.

  “Have you heard of the Phantom Killer?” he asked. “Almost a dozen people disappeared from downtown Toronto when I was a little kid and before you were born. Their bodies were never found.”

  “Vaguely,” she said. “My dad treated anything that happened in the big city like it was a distant and foreign world.”

  “Rumor is that Franklin Vamana is the killer,” he ventured.

  “Really?” She sounded genuinely surprised.

  “Did you know that before your father married your mother, he had a close friend who worked for Franklin Vamana?” he asked. “A woman. He said she was his best friend and they were so close he once drove through the night to save her life.”

  “What?” She stopped short. “No, he didn’t. Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts, and she was the closest person in the world to him. They were married a few months after graduation, and I showed up just shy of ten months later.”

  Yes, that was the story Walter had wanted his daughters to believe. Jay still had no idea why.

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t have another female best friend who he was that close to,” he said, “who worked in downtown Toronto at the time.”

  “I don’t know what you’re implying,” Leia said. “Or why you’re even bringing this up now. But that doesn’t make sense. My dad hated all cities and avoided them at all costs. You should’ve seen how he balked when we tried to talk him into even taking us to Niagara Falls when we were little. He never once mentioned having a friend who lived in Toronto. Let alone a best friend. In fact, Dad was always really opposed to my moving and working there. He was kind of paranoid about stuff like that. I mean, look—he built a house with hidden tunnels in it.”