Nanny Witness

by Hope White

  “From this height?” Warren asked. “In the rain? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Yes, yes and hopefully not. Jacob slid his arms through a safety harness and didn’t answer. He glanced back at the screen and his heart soared momentarily to see the figures had broken apart. Lord, just help her stay alive until I can get there.

  “I’m going to need you to lower me down,” Jacob said. He double-checked his walkie-talkie, phone and his service gun were all on his belt. “Rappel rope is fine. Though I’m suggesting you use the rescue ladder or basket to pull us back up. For now, just get me as close as you can, stay in my ear and point me in the right direction.”

  “It should be me,” Warren started. “You’re the one on infrared.”

  Maybe, but Jacob was also the one who’d gotten his harness on first.

  “There’s still a storm coming—” Kevin’s face was awash with fear “—and I’m still really low on fuel.”

  Right. That twenty minutes was probably closer to fifteen by now.

  “We’ll figure it out!” Jacob double-checked his clasps and opened the door. Wind and rain lashed at him. A deep breath of confidence filled his lungs. Nobody was ever going to die at a criminal’s hands as long as he had something to say about it. He cast one final glance at the outline of the woman below, now pelting through the trees with her attacker close on her heels.

  Stay strong. Don’t give up. I’m coming for you.

  * * *

  The blow from behind came so hard and suddenly that Grace Finch felt the air knocked from her lungs even before she hit the ground. For a moment, her body’s own natural instinct to freeze threatened to overwhelm her. Then she reared, kicking up hard with both legs and felt herself break free. She rolled and tried to get her feet beneath her before a swift punch to the temple knocked her back against the ground.

  The blunt and scarred face of Barry Cutter glared down at her, and Grace felt his entire rap sheet flash through her mind, just as clearly as if she’d been sitting at her crime reporter desk at Torchlight News, reading his bio in her news files. Bartholomew “Barry” Cutter, age fifty-four, convicted to fifty years in prison for the brutal murders of five women.

  Help me! Someone! Anyone! Please!

  A large hand with thick fingers grabbed her by the throat and pushed her down. The semi-automatic SIG he waved between her eyes looked police-issued. And suddenly she felt the journalist inside her wanting to ask him how he’d gotten there, what he was doing out of prison and if it had anything to do with the Search and Rescue helicopter she’d seen flying overhead. There was a major news story here, if she got out of here alive to tell it. She swallowed a breath and reminded herself that if Cutter wanted her dead, he’d have killed her by now. Then slowly she began to slide her right hand toward the stun gun in her jacket pocket.

  “Where’s your car?” Cutter snapped. She felt her mind filtering out the threats and curses that peppered his voice, listening only for facts. “Take me to your car. Now! You’re driving me out of here!”

  Didn’t he know where they were? Night was falling, and she’d spent the better part of the day getting this deep into the woods. Her car was at the entrance to the park, at least six hours of canoeing and portaging away. For that matter, how had he even gotten here?

  As for her, she’d been coerced here, lured here, out into the middle of nowhere by another convicted killer, Hal Turner, on the promise of finding information that would clear him of his crimes, prove he’d been set up by some shadowy cabal of senior cops and free Grace of the specter of blackmail he’d been holding over her life. Ever since she had risen as a star crime reporter, Turner had been blackmailing her and threatening to destroy her life and career by telling the world a truth she’d spent her entire life concealing.

  That Grace Finch was really Hal Turner’s biological daughter.

  That the country’s most prolific and award-winning crime reporter was really the child of the so-called dirty cop turned cop killer.

  In her business, reputation was everything. Her biological father was one of the most hated convicted killers in the country, especially as far as those in law enforcement were concerned. What if sources refused to talk to her because of who her father was? What if someone with a grudge against Turner decided to come after her? After all, he’d not only betrayed his badge and worked with organized crime, he’d then besmirched all of law enforcement with wild stories of a deep-seated conspiracy of criminal cops. No evidence had ever been found to back up his claims. What if she was fired from her job at Torchlight News and blackballed from the industry for keeping the truth about her identity secret? Even if Turner was somehow right—he had been set up by someone, and this evidence he’d sent Grace to find would prove it—how would anyone in her life ever trust her again for keeping her identity secret so long?

  Let alone forgive her.

  No, she’d worked too long and hard to build a life on her own terms to let it all be taken from her now.

  Not to mention her incredibly strong mother, and Mom’s kindhearted husband, Frank, who’d raised Grace as his own, both deserved better than to have their lives dragged through the mud.

  So she’d hiked and paddled into the woods in search of a secluded cabin where he’d claimed to have left evidence proving his innocence. It was a simple transaction. She’d publish the evidence, his lawyer and the courts would do their thing, Hal Turner would keep his mouth shut about the daughter no one knew he had and he’d disappear from her life for good.

  But she hadn’t found the cabin. Instead, a killer had found her.

  She’d been desperate. She’d been foolish. And now she was going to die.

  Cutter leaned closer, shifting some of his weight off her body. The stench of him filled her nostrils. “Don’t fight. Don’t scream. We’re just going to get in your car and take a nice ride to the American border and then I’m going to let you go.”

  No, he wouldn’t; he’d hurt her and he’d kill her, that much she knew with every fiber of her being. And she’d die fighting before she agreed to take him anywhere.

  The helicopter’s spotlight flashed above them, dragging her attention to the sky. A figure, tall and broad-shouldered, now dangled from underneath it, suspended from a rope like something out of an action movie. She blinked. Cutter looked up and swore.

  It was an unexpected distraction, but she’d take it. Her right hand dove into her jacket pocket, yanked out the stun gun, flicked it on and pressed it hard into his side. Cutter bellowed in pain. The gun fell from his hand. She kicked up, threw him off her and scooped up the gun. Then she stumbled to her feet and ran, pushing and pelting through the branches until she’d lost him in the trees.

  The helicopter light swung above her again like a searchlight, filtering through the leaves and illuminating the rock face ahead of her, and that’s when she saw the gap. It was narrow, like a slanted alley only about three feet wide. She ran for the gap in the rocks, slid her body inside and pressed herself against the wall. She heard the sound of branches breaking and a voice swearing as Cutter ran by her hiding spot. It was only then she realized her hands were shaking. Hot tears filled her eyes.

  God, if You’re even still listening to me, thank you so much that I’m still alive! Now, what do I do?

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d prayed. But somehow the fear pounding through her had poured out into the need to cry out to the God she’d long stopped talking to for help. She put her stun gun back into her jacket pocket, but kept the gun she’d taken off Cutter clutched tightly in her hand. Could she really shoot and kill a man if it came to it? If his face appeared at the entrance of her hiding place, did she really have what it took to look him in the eyes and pull the trigger?

  How much was she really her biological father’s daughter?

  No, no, she wouldn’t let herself think that way. Her father had ki
lled for his own selfish ends, not in self-defense. She was nothing like him. She never had been and never would be.

  Her head leaned back against the rock and her eyes closed as she listened to the sounds of the helicopter in the distance, wind brushing the trees, light rain hitting the rocks around her and a river rushing somewhere nearby. Maybe if she could get up to higher ground, she could find a way to signal the helicopter. Maybe she could even spot the cabin, run there and retrieve whatever Turner had left for her. But for now, she was on her own, with a phone that hadn’t been able to get a signal in hours and a killer looking for her.

  “Grace Miranda Finch!”

  Her heart froze mid-beat as suddenly Cutter bellowed her name.

  “Senior crime reporter!” His voice grew louder. Twigs snapped and branches cracked. It sounded like he was coming back through the woods, looking for her. “Torchlight News, Queen Street, Toronto. Born April third. Age thirty-six.”

  No! She grabbed her side as if suddenly realizing she was missing an organ. He had her wallet! She hadn’t even realized it had fallen from her pocket.

  But now he had her life, her address, her identity, he had—

  “Hal Turner,” Cutter read like a man announcing a public execution, “was convicted today to two consecutive life sentences...”

  He had the news clipping she’d cut from the paper at the age of fifteen about her father’s conviction and had kept folded small in her wallet ever since as a reminder to never stop working harder, aiming higher and pushing herself to be the best possible person she could be.

  “...along with two counts of first-degree murder, drug trafficking, bribery, corruption, breach of public trust...”

  Grace tuned Cutter out. She’d obsessively read every article about Turner when he’d first been arrested, hoping with all her heart that no one would ever uncover that the dirty cop had secretly fathered a daughter he barely saw and hardly knew with a twenty-two-year-old emergency room nurse he’d met at a crime scene and never deigned to give either his heart or home to. Turner had bailed long before Grace was born. She’d always had her mother’s last name, not his, and while he’d sporadically wanted to see her growing up, had insisted his name not be listed on her birth certificate. She’d never looked like him, not in ways that anybody had noticed, with the slender build and long black hair of her beautiful Afro-Caribbean Canadian mother instead of looking anything like her overweight German Canadian father, whose pale skin was frequently flushed red with anger. No one had ever seemed to suspect she was mixed race, especially after her mom and Frank, a fellow nurse and widower, had drawn close during the pregnancy and married when Grace was two. Gossipmongers speculated that Grace must have always been Frank’s, but her mom had consistently risen above others’ idle gossip.

  But Grace had obsessively followed every moment of the trial. She watched television for hours, flipping through news channels to find his face and then hid in the computer lab when she got into journalism school, scanning the wires for his name. What had she even been looking for? Clues to what would lead a man who’d sworn an oath to protect his community to instead cut deals with drug dealers? Whether there was any credence to the story his lawyer had spun—that his partner had been the real criminal, the deaths had really been a murder suicide and that her father had set the fire in a noble attempt to protect his former partner’s name?

  She’d been fourteen when he was arrested. She’d been there, in a restaurant-chain coffee shop, wondering why the father she’d barely seen had wanted to see her. His face had been white with fear and his hands had shaken so hard he could barely pick up his coffee cup. Then suddenly six police cars had pulled up outside. He’d leaped to his feet, told her to point the cops in the wrong direction, make up some story about where he’d gone and then quickly get to his apartment, destroy his computer and burn his files. Then he ran, leaving her to watch through the window with a gawking crowd of spectators and journalists as people in uniform chased him down the block. She hadn’t talked to the cops or gone to his apartment. Instead, she’d slipped out the back and gone home, the hair prickling at the back of her neck with every step, half expecting a journalist to stop her and ask her what she had been doing with him and who she was. But no one ever had. Seemed that for whatever reason, Turner had actually kept her existence a secret. The next time she saw her father’s face was his mug shot on the news.

  She hadn’t heard from Turner again until she was twenty-eight, when her name was syndicated in newspapers across the country and he needed money.

  “Listen to me, Grace Finch, wherever you’re hiding!” Cutter shouted, “You looking for Hal Turner? ’Cause I know him. He and I broke out together, and he’s real close by. He told me that he was coming here, looking for someone. I can take you right to him. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

  Her heart stopped. Her father had broken out of prison? Her father was here?

  The noise above her was so faint she hadn’t even realized someone else was there until the uniformed police officer dropped down into the crevice beside her. Her breath caught in her throat. Her lips parted. But before she could let out a sound, one strong hand clamped over her lips while the other grabbed her hand, closing over the gun and peeling her fingers away from the trigger. The officer pulled her to him so that her back was against his chest.

  “It’s okay, I’ve got you.” The voice in her ear was strong, warm and compelling, with just a hint of danger, filling her with a sense of reassurance that was as unexpected as it was unfamiliar. “I’m Detective Jacob Henry of the RCMP. I’m here to rescue you, and I’ll keep you safe. Do exactly what I say, and I’ll get you out of here alive.”

  Copyright © 2019 by Mags Storey

  ISBN-13: 9781488040528

  Nanny Witness

  Copyright © 2019 by Pat White

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