by Jami Alden
Danny put aside his anger, fear, and frustration over Caroline’s disappearance to take careful assessment of their reactions.
Through the stink of sweat, fear, and blood, he could smell the truth. He could cut their dicks off one by one, but that wouldn’t give him the answers he needed.
“Got the call, they told us to pick up the girl at the hotel to take her to the shoot,” the head goon said, now apparently in a talkative mood. “But Gates wasn’t there. He never is.”
“What hotel?” Danny pressed, scrambling for something, anything that might lead him to Caroline.
“The Motel Six off exit eight. It’s just an exchange point. I don’t know where they bring the girls from and I don’t ask. Usually we just make sure nothing fucks up the shoot and get the girl back to the hotel. But today the creeper didn’t show up, he just called to say you was sniffing around and we had to take you out. You ask me, he’s the one who has your woman.”
“The creeper?” Tiny hairs stood up on the back of his neck.
“Creepy dude who likes to watch the shoots,” Curtis said. “He told me he was a producer, but he just gets off on watching.”
“Who is this guy?”
“He said I could call him John Smith,” Curtis said.
A fake name if Danny had ever heard one.
He reached for the goon’s pants, which were still down around his thighs, ignoring the yells as he rooted around in the pockets. He quickly scrolled through the calls received list. Maybe he’d get a break and at least get a cell phone number to connect to John “Creeper” Smith.
Unknown Caller
Unknown Caller
Over and over again until the list of stored calls ran out. The list of outgoing calls had been cleared, and no names were stored in the address book. Same with the other two phones.
“How the fuck am I going to find her?” he asked the room at large.
He didn’t expect a small, wavering female voice to answer. “I think I know how to find Gates.”
“Why are you doing this, Patrick?” She still couldn’t quite believe what was happening, that she wouldn’t wake up and realize it was a very bizarre, very bad dream.
But the hard look in his eyes was real all right, as was the hard metal gun in his hand, currently pointing straight at her.
Marshall stood a little behind him, dressed more casually than Caroline had ever seen him in a fleece pullover and jeans. Still, the jeans sported a knife like crease and the pullover boasted an expensive designer label.
And what the hell was wrong with her that she was noticing details like that when Patrick was pointing a gun at her face?
“Why don’t you tell me, Caroline? Why don’t you tell me everything you know. Why you and Taggart were nosing around the Harmony House, and how you ended up on the set of Gates’s latest production?”
“Why does it matter what I know if you’re going to kill me anyway?”
She didn’t think Patrick’s stare could get any colder, but the reptilian smirk that pulled at his mouth sent a chill straight to her soul. “I can also keep you alive, wishing you were dead, for as long as I need to.”
Caroline swallowed back a surge of bile. She could see in his eyes he wasn’t bluffing. This man, a man she’d considered a friend for the last decade, was fully willing to torture her to death if necessary.
“Now, I need to know how much damage you’ve done,” Patrick said, and for the first time a flash of emotion flickered in his eyes. “If you’ve ruined everything or if I can still salvage something.”
“I’ve ruined everything?” Caroline scoffed. On some level she acknowledged how stupid it was to argue with someone holding a gun to her head, but the certainty that he was going to kill her regardless made her bold. “You ruined it yourself. You and James. Forcing girls like Emily Parrish to give up their babies for adoption—”
“Those poor girls were very well compensated, and the kids ended up a hell of a lot better off than if those teenage sluts had kept them. We did a great thing for everyone—”
“Like Emily Parrish? And Anne Taggart? What great thing ended up with them both dead and buried for the past eighteen years?”
“Anne never should have been harmed, but she couldn’t let it go. Just like you,” he sneered. “It was her own damn fault for following James up there. We couldn’t let her leave after she saw where we were keeping Emily.”
“So you and James killed her?”
“We did what we needed to do.” Why had she never seen the icy core that lay at his soul?
“And Emily?” Her voice thickened as she imagined the pregnant girl at the mercy of this man. This monster she’d never realized was lurking behind his genial facade.
“If Emily had been smarter, things would have gone differently. But instead she stupidly listened to Anne Taggart, and let her talk her into backing out of the deal. If she’d listened to us she would have walked away with a lot of money, enough to start a new life and have as many babies as she wanted. But we couldn’t risk her telling anyone the truth. We did what we had to do to protect everyone involved.”
Caroline swallowed back another surge of bile.
“Now tell me what else you found,” Patrick said, once again leveling the gun at her. “How much more do you know?”
She raised her chin. “Why does it matter? The police already know about Anne and Emily. And the Taggarts will make damn sure the truth comes out.”
Patrick’s smile was a vicious baring of teeth. “And right now the only one they can pin it on is James. Unless you found James’s so called insurance policy that tells a different story.”
Sweat beaded on his forehead and she could see the gun start to waver. He was scared. He had no idea what they knew or how many people knew it. For all he knew, her death was all the insurance he needed.
She thought of Danny, Toni, Ethan, and Derek. All the people who might be endangered if she told Patrick the truth.
She’d told herself she was done taking care of everyone else when she’d married James. I guess my martyr streak runs deeper than I thought.
“The only thing I ever found was Anne Taggart’s personal calendar,” she said, figuring she’d be more convincing telling a partial truth than an outright lie. “That’s what led us to the shelter and to Emily. But there was never any mention of you.” Not in the calendar anyway. She still had no idea what was on the flash drive they’d found. “The calendar is at my house, in James’s desk,” she lied. “You can get it yourself, and you’ll be in the clear.”
The blow to her cheek was stunning as much for its force as its unexpectedness. Pain exploded across her cheekbone as he hit her with his wide open palm.
“Don’t you lie to me, you little cunt.”
She heard him through the ringing in her head. She looked over at Marshall, who stood in the corner, eyes averted, as though if he didn’t look at her he could pretend it wasn’t happening.
“I know you found something!” Patrick roared. He grabbed her hair in his fist and pulled her to her knees. “How else did you find out we were filming! That sure as hell wasn’t in Anne Taggart’s day planner.”
Shit. She’d forgotten that little detail. “Danny won’t let up, you know. Killing me will have him on your ass so hard you won’t know what hit you. He—”
“He’s dead,” Marshall bit out. “The guys at the house took care of it.”
Caroline hung her head as pain exploded in her chest. She’d known it was likely. He was outnumbered. But she’d hoped…
She squeezed her eyes shut and remembered the feel of his shaking arms wrapping around you. Carrie, I need you. I never got over you.
All that week she’d been trying to protect herself from him, to not let him back into her heart. Now her heart burst into a million pieces as she faced the reality that he was gone, and even if she got out alive, they’d never have a second chance to get things right.
“I’m not telling you shit. Go ahead and kill me like yo
u killed Anne and Emily. Like you killed James. You’ve wanted me dead all along. Now finish it.”
“It’s not that easy anymore,” Patrick said, calmer now. “Marshall, go get them.”
A prick of fear permeated her haze of grief. Who, exactly, was “them.”
“Patrick, I don’t see what good this is going to do,” Marshall said, his voice low but not so low she couldn’t hear. “We should just do it and—”
“You don’t get it, do you? I need to know how much damage has been done, how far he went—”
“Just assume we’re fucked, okay?” Marshall bit out. “Gates will help us go underground—”
“You think I’ll just give up my wife, my family, if it’s not totally necessary? There are bigger things at stake here.”
A panicked note reverberated in Patrick’s voice. He was a man at the edge, trying desperately to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself, trying to convince himself his life could go back to normal. “Now go get them.”
“No.”
Patrick’s mouth fell open at Marshall’s refusal. “You don’t tell me no, you little shit.” Without warning he lifted his gun and fired. Marshall didn’t have time to move even a finger to his own gun before Patrick’s bullet caught him in the middle of the forehead.
Caroline’s cry of horror choked in her throat. She couldn’t make herself turn away from the gruesome sight of Marshall, dead, his blue eyes wide with shock as a thick crimson puddle formed under his head.
She barely heard Patrick mutter about doing something himself as he took Marshall’s gun from his waistband and left the stall. Left her alone with Marshall’s dead body.
He’d killed Danny. Maybe not with his own hand, but he might as well have. It tore at her guts to think of a fierce warrior like Danny being taken out by a slick weasel like Marshall. She was glad Marshall was dead. Would have been happier if it had been by her own hand.
Caroline squeezed herself into the corner, as far away as possible from the corpse. She had to think. There had to be some way out. She pulled at the bonds of the plastic ties, wincing as they cut into her wrists.
Before, she’d cavalierly thought about martyring herself. Now she saw the face of death in Marshall. Imagined it in Danny. Anne Taggart. Emily Parrish. Rachael Weller.
She wasn’t going to let that be her fate, too.
Caroline’s gaze darted around the stall, looking for anything she could use to cut the ties. Dust and hay were all she saw.
She looked at Marshall, his sightless stare aimed at the ceiling. Maybe he had a knife, or even a key. Swallowing back her revulsion, she scooted back over to him. Her bound hands ran clumsily over his pockets and found a lump in the right one. She managed to get two almost numb fingers in and felt the edge of a key.
The barn door was squealing, signaling Patrick’s return. Caroline’s fumbling grew more desperate.
“Patrick, what’s going on?”
Every muscle froze at the sound of the panicked, feminine voice.
Please no.
A child started to cry.
“Shh, Michael, it’s okay.”
Caroline sobbed as she tried to extract the keys from Marshall’s pocket.
The stall door slid open, and a rough hand grabbed her by the hair to pull her away from Marshall’s body. Patrick was back. And with him were Kate and Michael.
Kate’s face went white when she saw Marshall. She tried, too late, to keep Michael from seeing. His blue eyes went saucer wide and filled with tears.
“Now Caroline,” Patrick said, raising the gun so it pointed at the back of Michael’s head. “Let’s start this conversation over, and this time try being a little more cooperative.”
CHAPTER 19
“Are you sure it was this way?” Danny tried to keep the frustration out of his voice as he pulled onto the state route headed north. The last thing this poor girl needed was him biting her head off when she was his only hope of finding Caroline. He was an asshole for taking her with him instead of leaving her to be taken with the others by the police. It had quickly become apparent that she wasn’t able to tell him how to get to Gates, but she insisted that if she rode with him she would recognize landmarks.
He forced himself to travel at a few miles under the speed limit so Kaylee could focus on every detail and keep an eye out for anything familiar. Danny had little hope she’d remembered much of the trip in her drugged out haze, but, sixteen-year-old Kaylee was the only hope he had. Toni still hadn’t managed to pull any information off the flash drive and so far Derek could only trace the bank accounts back to James. Ethan, Alex Novascelic, and Ben Moreno were on their way to meet up with Danny to offer backup and get Kaylee to safety once they’d determined Caroline’s location.
“Yes,” she insisted. “I remember this road when Ericka first brought me out here.” He’d taken her back to the motel where the thugs had picked her up, as good a starting point as any. In the fifteen or so minutes it had taken to get to the motel Kaylee had told him a story that made his stomach churn and his blood run cold.
A story he might not have believed had he not discovered the truth about what had happened to his mother and why. James Medford and whoever he’d been working with had taken their operation to a new level of sinister sophistication.
A fucking baby factory. Danny had seen terrible things in some of the darkest corners of the planet, including girls younger than Kaylee kidnapped and forced into prostitution. But he’d never heard of girls, some illegal immigrants who came to the states on promises of good jobs and new opportunities, some runaways like Kaylee, being forcibly impregnated so wealthy infertile couples could adopt a custom ordered baby.
“Do the parents know?” Danny asked, struggling to imagine how any adoptive couple, no matter how desperate, could knowingly take part in such an exchange.
“I don’t know,” Kaylee said. “I only figured out what they were doing after my exam. Today was supposed to be—”
Danny didn’t need her to finish. “And they make money off of the…” he didn’t know what to call it, “by filming it and selling it as porn.”
Kaylee gave a shudder next to him, her coltish frame swallowed up by the oversize T-shirt and sweatpants he’d dug out of his gym bag. She sniffed and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “They make some of the girls do it a bunch of times with a bunch of different guys. One of the girls told me it’s better once you get pregnant, because you don’t have to have sex with anyone and they take good care of you until the baby comes.”
“You don’t have to worry about any of that now,” Danny strove for a reassuring tone, even though his helpless frustration mounted with every slowly passing mile.
Caroline.
Her name was like a drumbeat in his head, driving him forward. He couldn’t lose her again. He thought of his father, and finally understood his unceasing need to believe that his wife was alive, to cling to that last shred of hope that it wasn’t all over.
Caroline.
He struggled to contain his helpless rage. If he wanted to find her, he needed direction, and the only help he was getting was from the remarkably brave but slightly foggy-headed girl next to him.
“A couple more guys are going to be here soon, and as soon as we find Gates’s place, we’ll get you away from there where you’ll be safe.”
Kaylee nodded silently and stared intently out the window.
“Anything?”
“Not yet. I have a feeling we were on this road for a while.”
A familiar silver BMW appeared in Danny’s rearview mirror, tailed closely by a red Mustang. His cell phone rang a second later.
“I take it since you’re traveling at grandma speed she hasn’t zeroed in on the location yet,” Ethan said.
“Not yet. What did Toni find?”
“In a ten mile radius there are about thirty properties that could be described as ‘big old houses with what kinda looks like a barn,’” Ethan said, using Kaylee’s description o
f what Gates’s compound looked like from the outside. “But nothing registered to anyone named Gates or to Esteban Lucero. Not that we expected it to be that easy.”
In the meantime all Danny could do was travel slowly up State Route 12, followed closely by his brother and colleagues and hope something jogged Kaylee’s memory pretty damn quick.
“You have to let them go,” Caroline said. “Kate doesn’t know anything about what James was involved in, and Michael,” her sob caught in her throat as she looked at his sweet, terrified face as he pressed himself against his mother’s side.
“Tell me what I want to know and they won’t suffer,” Patrick said.
Kate let out a whimper as if she, too, absorbed his words.
“We found a floor safe,” Caroline said, all bets off as the words came spilling out. She was out of ideas, but maybe if she talked and stalled something would come to her. “There was a DVD. That’s how we found the movie shoot. I recognized the woman in the movie from when she was at our house.”
“What movie? What woman?” Kate asked, bewildered. “Someone tell me what’s going on here.”
“Goddamn her,” Patrick said. “That bitch was the beginning of the end.”
“Who was she?” Caroline asked.
Patrick shrugged. “Some Russian slut. Who cares? She escaped a couple days after she gave birth, and somehow she got hold of one of James’s business cards. The baby had already been transferred—”
“Don’t you mean sold to the highest bidder?” Caroline snapped.
“Transferred to her new family,” Patrick continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “James was an idiot. I told him to be more careful about bringing anything with him that gave any clue to his identity, but he never listened.”
“Selling babies?” Kate whispered. “Are you saying my dad—”
“Shut up, Kate,” Patrick snapped, pushing the barrel of the gun harder against Michael’s head for emphasis. “Your dad did what he had to do to keep you and your stepmother in high style. Just like I did what I had to do to provide for my family. Now tell me what else you found in that safe, Caroline!”
