Latent Danger (On The Line Romantic Thriller Series Book 2)

by Lori Ryan

  Her eyes blazed. “He didn’t need to. Sawyer and I were different than what he’s got going on with those other girls.”

  Zach opened his mouth to press the issue, but the front door opened, and an officer moved to the side to let a tall woman in her fifties in. It couldn’t be Liz’s mom.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Zach stood. “And who are you?” He asked the question of the woman, but let his gaze slip to the officer who’d let her in.

  The woman squared off with him. “I’m Julia Tiede. I cook for the Gordon family and I live on the property. Why are their officers on the grounds? And what are you doing with poor Liz?”

  She looked past Zach to Liz and Zach turned to see the girl had transformed. She now wrapped her arms around herself, tears streaming down her face.

  The cook circled around Zach, to draw the girl into her arms. “What is this? One minute you’re protecting her from this killer and now you’re grilling her?”

  “Were you in the main house this afternoon when Detective O’Rourke arrived with Liz?” Zach asked.

  “Oh no,” she said, and her chin went up in defiance. “Neither of us is answering any more questions without the family attorney present.” She turned to Liz. “You don’t say another word to these men, Liz. I’ll call your parents’ lawyer.”

  “Fine,” Zach said, signaling to one of the officers to take Liz into custody. “We’ll go ahead and transport Ms. Gordon to the station in the meantime, and begin processing her.”

  “What? On what grounds?” Julia Tiede’s indignation was clear.

  Zach didn’t know if they could make a murder charge stick, but he was too far down this road to turn back. “Murder. Liz Gordon, you’re under arrest for the murders of Adrienne Edwards, Carrie Anthill, and Candice Jordan.”

  They took her from the room while the cook began to make calls.

  Zach spun and stalked down the large hallway that went from the front of the house through to the back. He hit the door and kept moving, letting out a grunt of frustration when he got to the yard. He looked out over the lawn and let loose with an almost animalistic cry.

  Where the hell was Shauna and was she even alive?

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The pain shooting through Shauna’s stomach was hot and searing. She’d been floating above the pain, watching herself from a distance, but she shot back into her body with a force that took the breath from her.

  When she felt the pain, she knew she had no chance of catching that breath anytime soon. Darkness surrounded her, and she wasn’t sure if it was because she was really in the dark, or if she was losing consciousness. She couldn’t seem to grasp onto the floating strings of thoughts in her brain.

  Part of her brain screamed at her to fight and the other part told her to give in and sleep, to let go and lose herself because coming to full consciousness would hurt too much.

  Her arms felt like lead and her feet didn’t seem to want to move. Shauna fought for what seemed like an eternity, but couldn’t make out whether she was tied up or her limbs just weren’t working. Her head was swamped in fog so thick she didn’t seem to be able to cut through it.

  That’s when it hit her. She was having trouble breathing, and it wasn’t just because of the pain. Something was covering her mouth and maybe part of her nose, too. She focused on slowing her breaths, taking long deep draughts of air, but it was no use. Panic took over as she started to feel the effects of her limited breathing and she closed her eyes, no longer able to fight it all. The pain, the fog, and the increasing doubt that this was something she could get herself out of.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Zach punched the bathroom wall again.

  “Feel better?” Ronan asked from his spot just inside the door.

  A growl was the only response Zach gave him. He didn’t feel at all better. Liz Gordon had remained silent since her attorney arrived and the prosecutor didn’t think they had enough to charge her on. They needed to find the rope or the lipstick, or some evidence that could tie Liz Gordon to the bodies of the dead girls.

  Worst of all—no not worse, the only thing that really mattered—was that they hadn’t found Shauna yet. She might be hurt or dead.

  His gut burned with even the thought of it, and Zach had to admit he’d never felt so damned helpless in his life.

  “How the hell could she have moved Shauna?” Zach asked quietly. Liz could have dragged the bodies of the other girls, especially if she wrapped them in a blanket like they suspected she had. But those girls were smaller than Shauna, and not nearly as muscular. Muscle was heavy. It would have taken more time than Liz had to drag Shauna any distance. Or at least he thought it would.

  “I don’t think she could. She’s tall, but she doesn’t seem like she’d have that kind of strength.”

  They had already checked to be sure Jonathan Sawyer hadn’t left his home. “She has to be working with someone else. If it isn’t Sawyer, who is it?”

  Ronan didn’t have any more answers than Zach did. “She couldn’t have moved her to another location unless she had help. She wouldn’t have had time. The cook said she left the house at five o’clock and Shauna was there when she left.”

  “Unless the cook is lying,” Zach said. “But, I gotta say, I don’t get the feeling she is. Not that I trust my judgment right now.”

  “I didn’t think she was lying, either, and she checks out. She has no criminal background,” Ronan said.

  The men stared at each other for a long time. They could hold Liz Gordon for twenty-four hours, but then they’d need to let her go. And if Shauna was injured or in danger, they might not have twenty-four hours. It was hell racing against a clock when you had no idea when the clock would run out.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Shauna awoke with a start, though her eyes found only pitch black when she did. It was the kind of darkness you could only achieve from a truly enclosed room, the kind without any cracks or crevices for light to enter.

  Flashes of memory came back to her. Only confused images and bits and pieces of time. The sound of her own breathing was harsh in her ears and she took the time to settle herself so she didn’t hyperventilate. Her breathing was obstructed. Tape. Heavy tape covered her mouth and part of her nose.

  She remembered pain. Searing, burning pain in her abdomen. It was gone now. Her limbs were numb and she knew without seeing them that she wouldn’t be able to move them when she tried. Her arms were secured behind her back and her legs were taped together at the ankles and knees.

  She thought she’d heard voices. Had there been people here? Had that been what pulled her out of her haze? She held still, listening. There was nothing.

  She began the slow work of moving her wrists and ankles to begin to ease the blood back into the limbs. The pain was instant and electrifying as the blood began to move and the nerve endings tried to come back online and engage. She almost laughed. If she thought the pain from a simple leg that had fallen asleep on a long car ride was bad, this went tenfold past that.

  She would need to wake her arms and legs up. If she could do that, she could get her hands free. Once she did that, it was a simple matter to free herself of her bindings. She just had to hope Liz Gordon didn’t return in the meantime because Shauna was in no shape for a fight with anyone, even a teenaged girl.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “What if Liz didn’t get her out of the house?” Zach turned and walked out of the bathroom, knowing Ronan would follow him.

  He went to the bullpen, unlocking his desk and grabbing his service weapon. Seeing him, Ronan did the same then proceeded through the steps of readying himself the same way Zach was.

  Zach took out the backup revolver he kept in his ankle holster and checked that, before slipping it into its space and grabbing his raid jacket he wore instead of his suit coat when they were raiding a suspect’s home. He put on his utility belt, checking for flashlight, cuffs, and ammunition before putting on his coat and
zipping it up. A large NHPD embossed on the back identified him as an officer.

  “Hey Reynolds!”

  Zach turned to see Cal coming toward him. He tipped his chin up in acknowledgement.

  Cal answered the signaled question. “The captain just released your suspect.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Zach yelled. His partner and Cal had the wherewithal not to warn him about his language.

  “Sorry, Zach. I heard he was getting calls from some people in pretty high places. They aren’t happy with you holding a teenaged girl who, up until a couple of hours ago, was a witness we were worried about keeping safe.” Cal looked like he truly was sorry.

  “We’ve got more than that,” Zach gritted out, even though it wasn’t Cal he needed to convince. “The timing of the uncle’s admission to the hospital and the fact Liz Gordon is knee deep in the current investigation speaks volumes. Not to mention, we’ve got a missing cop. What does he think? That Shauna just walked off the job to grab a fucking ice cream sundae?”

  “We headed back to the house?” Ronan asked when they’d made it into the elevator.

  “Going to stop and talk to Jonathan Sawyer. I want to know if there’s anything about that house he can tell us. Liz made it seem like there’d been something between them. Maybe he’s been there. Maybe he knows some of the secrets that family has clearly been keeping.”

  They were quiet as Ronan drove them out to the Sawyer house. Zach couldn’t have carried on a conversation if he tried. Tension had taken over his body. It thrummed in his veins and set his lungs burning with every breath.

  When they got close, Zach called in to have the station house let the officers watching Sawyer know they were coming. He tapped on the window of the car out front and showed the officer his badge.

  “The family inside?” he asked.

  The older man nodded. “All day.”

  Zach nodded and he and Ronan walked up the front walk. The Sawyer house was more modern than the Gordon home. Both were large estates with extensive grounds.

  The look Mr. Sawyer gave them when he answered the door was to be expected. Still, it took effort to suppress the urge to remind the man that his son had raped those girls. Regardless of whether he was involved in the murders or not, the guy was guilty of a crime those girls—

  Zach had almost had the thought that the girls would have to live with what Sawyer had done to them forever, but that wasn’t true. They were gone and there was nothing they could do to bring them back. Except for Hillary, they wouldn’t be living with anything.

  “Our lawyer isn’t here.” The statement was delivered with the kind of haughty tone that said the detectives should know better than to show up without any notice.

  “You’ve got one shot right now to convince us to put in a good word for your kid. To ask for some kind of leniency for the heinous crimes your son committed against those young women.” Zach raised a hand to stop the objection Mr. Sawyer had opened his mouth to make. “Save it. Your son’s still going to go to prison. You’re kidding yourself if you think you can avoid that. But we can do our best to make it easier for him. I’m not going to debate this with you. I’ll give you five minutes to think about it. Call your lawyer. Get his advice. Or don’t. I don’t care. In five minutes, I walk away.”

  “What do you want?” With the single question, Zach knew he had him. It was a good thing the guy had caved so quickly. If he made Zach wait the five minutes, he’d wasn’t sure how he’d have done it.

  “We need to talk to Jonathan about Liz Gordon.” He didn’t say more. Didn’t say they thought she had been responsible for killing the girls.

  Jonathan’s father looked over his shoulder to where his wife stood. Zach held his breath until he saw her nod, barely perceptible, but there.

  A few minutes later, they were sitting down across from Jonathan Sawyer. He’d been taken down a few notches by the past few days, but there was still that look in his eye like he thought maybe, just maybe, what he had done wasn’t so bad, really.

  Zach would like nothing more than to rid the boy of that belief, but now wasn’t the time. In fact, there wasn’t time for anything right now. No time to work his way into the questions or set the boy at ease. No time to dance around.

  “Sawyer, I need you to tell me if you’ve ever been in Liz’s house.” Zach took a leap and dove right in, making an assumption next. “When the two of you had sex, was it always in your clubhouse or did you go to her house sometimes?”

  Sawyer looked a little stunned, but Zach waved it off. “We’ve talked to Liz. We know you didn’t drug her, we know the sex was consensual, that’s not what this is about.”

  “Jonathan, just answer his questions honestly right now.” His mother’s tone said she was finished trying to hide what her son had done.

  “I went to her place once, but it creeped me the hell out.” Sawyer squirmed. “Place is like a haunted house or something.”

  “When you were there, what rooms did you spend time in?” Zach asked.

  “Only the basement. It’s where Liz hangs out. I don’t even think she goes upstairs to sleep most of the time now.”

  Zach had checked the basement. It was bare except for a few pieces of furniture and a giant unused fireplace. His mind flew to the giant furnace and for one split second, he had the horrifying thought that maybe she’d killed Shauna and put her in the furnace.

  He got his imagination under control. The furnace hadn’t been on and they would have smelled burning flesh if she’d done that. There was no mistaking that scent.

  He tried not to think about the fact that Liz would be walking into that house again any minute now. That if she could get to Shauna, if she hadn’t already killed her, she would now.

  “Can you think of any place on the property where Liz could hide someone?” Zach ignored the gasp from Mrs. Sawyer.

  “She said there were old tunnels inside the house once, but I don’t know how to get in there.”

  “Did she say anything else about them? Any detail? Maybe accessing them through the outside?”

  Sawyer shook his head. “She wanted to show me them, but I told her no. We only hooked up one time and then she latched onto me like she thought we’d date after that or something. The girl is fucking crazy just like the rest of her family.”

  “What do you mean?” Ronan asked.

  “The whole family is nuts. They locked that uncle away for years.”

  Mrs. Sawyer came forward. “The girl’s uncle was in a mental institution for a long time. Sad, really. I knew him growing up. He was always … awkward I guess you would say, but he was nice. He would talk to me in our garden. He was sweet. Then they took him away and when he came back,” she shivered, “it was horrible.”

  “I thought he died in the mental institution,” Zach said. He’d assumed if they performed a lobotomy the family would have kept him in the hospital.

  “No, they brought him home. It was only for a short time before he died, but it was awful. He would moan and scream sometimes. I saw him the day they sent him back to the hospital. They took him out in a wheelchair and it looked like they hadn’t fed him or bathed him in…” her voice died out and she shivered again like the memory was invading her body physically. “He died a few weeks later at the hospital. I think it was a stroke.”

  Zach looked to Mrs. Sawyer. “Do you know anything about the tunnels in the house? How we might get in there? We have a missing police officer, Mrs. Sawyer.”

  Her eyes darkened and she looked truly sympathetic. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. The house is old, that’s all I know. I never spent time there. If I saw Herschel, it was out in the gardens in the back. At the time, they were quite lavish. I would walk in them sometimes and he’d come out and talk to me.”

  It was then that Zach realized Mrs. Sawyer looked a lot like the first victims, the ones he suspected Herschel Kenworth had killed thirty years before. She was quite petite and blonde and still beautiful, despite her age.

&nb
sp; There wasn’t time to think about that. They needed to get back to the house to search it. They left with only the briefest of thank yous and decided to cut through the side hedges onto the Gordon property, without worrying about their car for the time being.

  Zach skidded to a halt when they hit the driveway. The police vehicles and crime scene units had all gone.

  “Shit!”

  Ronan didn’t ask why Zach was upset. They both knew what this meant. The scene had been released and Liz was likely back inside, probably with her lawyer. They’d both hoped to get into the house before that had happened.

  “Exigent circumstances,” Ronan said.

  “When the house has just been searched top to bottom by a team of officers and crime scene techs?” Zach asked. Despite the fact he knew the argument wouldn’t hold against the attorney he was willing to bet would be standing guard inside, he walked up the front steps.

  He’d figure out a way inside the house. He had to.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Shauna stilled as the silence that had surrounded her broke. She could hear voices and footsteps, but they were muffled. She listened for a minute to be sure they weren’t coming closer. They weren’t.

  Shauna’s arms ached with the way they stretched behind her and she felt sore beneath her underarms, like she’d been burned or cut there. She didn’t know how those injuries had happened or how serious they were. She felt like her head had been hit again and again and she thought she felt blood running down the side of her face, but she wasn’t sure. It could be sweat.

  The fact her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness at all told her there was no light coming into the small space she was in. She rolled to her side and rocked until she came up onto her knees. If Liz had taped her hands in front of her instead of behind her back, this would be a piece of cake. As it was, she had limited air and her hands were bound at a tight angle that gave her little leverage to snap the tape.