The Paternity Promise

by Merline Lovelace

  Right, the less legalistic side of his mind sneered. Just as he could now infer why she hadn’t returned his calls.

  Well, there was one possible reason he could address right now. Cell phone in hand, he brought up the address book and hit Jamison’s number.

  “It’s Blake Dalton,” he said tersely. “I need an update on Petrie.”

  “Got a report a half hour ago,” the P.I. informed him. “I was just going to email it to you.”

  “Give me the gist.”

  “Hang on, let me pull it up. Okay, here it is. Electronic surveillance of Petrie’s residence showed him returning there yesterday afternoon at fourteen-thirty hours. My associate checked with his source in his highway patrol unit. Petrie and his partner testified in court in the morning. Reportedly, he felt queasy afterward, said he was coming down with something. He took the rest of the day off and called in for sick leave again this morning, saying he had a doctor’s appointment. Surveillance showed him leaving his residence in civilian clothes at oh-six-fifteen.”

  Blake’s eyes narrowed. “Pretty early for a doctor’s appointment.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. I’ve got my guy digging deeper.”

  “Call me as soon as… Wait. Back up a minute. You said Petrie testified in court yesterday morning?”

  “Right. On a drug-stop case that crossed state lines and involved the feds. I’ve got the specifics here if you…”

  “I don’t need the specifics. Just tell me which court.”

  “Bexar County, 73rd Judicial District,” Jamison reported after a moment. “Judge Honeywell presiding.”

  It might not mean anything. Honeywell heard dozens of cases every week. But the possibility, however remote, that Petrie might have picked up something about Grace from the judge or his assistant put the crimp back in Blake’s gut.

  “Call your associate in San Antonio. Tell him to put everything he’s got on this. I want him to know Petrie’s exact whereabouts, like fast.”

  “Will do.”

  He palmed the phone and was just turning to update the others when Alex’s intercom buzzed. Shifting Molly to his right arm, his twin reached for the phone. Blake felt a surge of hope that Patrice had forwarded a call from Grace to his brother’s office. That hope sank like a stone when Alex flashed him a quick frown.

  “Yes, I’ll take the call.” He jiggled Molly, waited a moment and identified himself. “This is Alex Dalton.”

  Blake cut across the office. He pressed against the front edge of Alex’s desk as the groove between his twin’s brows dug deeper.

  “Right. Thanks for calling.”

  “What?” Blake demanded before Alex had dropped the instrument back on the hook.

  “That was Helen Jasper, the woman who owns the boutique where Grace shopped this morning. She just went out for a late lunch break and spotted Grace’s car parked a couple doors down from her shop.”

  His voice was as grim as his face.

  “She looked in the Jag’s window. Said she could see the bags from her store spilling off the front passenger seat. Grace’s purse is on the floor with them.”

  * * *

  Delilah took Molly back to her house while her sons set out across town. Alex navigated, and Blake drove with a fierce concentration that was only minimally directed at the road. He tried to tell himself there were a number of reasons Grace might have left the Jag parked outside the boutique for so long. But none of reasons he dredged up explained her leaving her purse inside, in full view of anyone tempted to smash a window and empty it of wallet and credit cards.

  “There’s the boutique,” Alex said when Blake pulled into the parking lot of an upscale strip mall. “And there’s Grace’s Jag.”

  Blake screeched into a slot beside the midnight-blue sedan and jammed his own vehicle into Park. He carried a spare key to the Jag on his key ring and was aiming it to beep the locks when Alex put out a restraining hand.

  “There could be fingerprints or fibers or other evidence.”

  Like blood. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

  “Sure you want to contaminate the scene?”

  “I’ve driven this car dozens of times. My prints, clothing fibers and DNA are all over it, but I’ll be careful.”

  As it turned out, the doors weren’t locked. Blake used the underside of the handle to open one. The baby seat sat empty in the back with some of Molly’s toys scattered beside it. The front passenger seat held a jumble of shopping bags. Additional bags had obviously tumbled off the seat onto the floor. Grace’s purse lay half-buried amid the silver tissue paper and pale blue bags. Her cell phone was clearly visible in the purse’s side pocket.

  Jaw clenched, Blake moved to the rear of the vehicle and used the key to pop the trunk. His breath escaped in a hiss of sheer relief when he found it empty. Alex gave him a silent, sympathetic thump on the shoulder. Blake knew he’d imagined the worst, too, although the empty trunk provided only temporary respite from those grim scenarios.

  “I’ll call Harkins,” Alex said curtly.

  Phil Harkins was a friend as well as a supremely competent chief of police. Alex had his phone out when Blake yanked on his arm.

  “Wait!”

  He ducked under the raised trunk lid and came back up with a half-folded sheet of paper he’d missed on the first, anxious sweep. The message inside was scrawled in bold black ink.

  You took my wife. I took yours. If you want to see the bitch alive again, you’d better keep this between you and me. A rich prick like you shouldn’t have much trouble finding us. We’ll be waiting for you.

  Blake swore savagely and passed the note to Alex. His brother was still reading it when Blake’s cell phone pinged. He checked caller ID, saw it was Jamison and cut right to the chase.

  “What have you got?”

  “Petrie flew out of San Antonio on a oh-seven-ten flight direct to Oklahoma City. He landed at eight-twenty, picked up one checked bag and rented a black Chevy Traverse from Hertz, Oklahoma tag six-three-two-delta-hotel-eight.”

  “Does the rental have a vehicle-tracking device?” Blake bit out.

  “It does, but Hertz wouldn’t give me access to their system.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  He skimmed his contacts and pulled up Phil Harkins’s number. The DA was in his office, thank God.

  “Hey, pardner,” he said with the affable geniality he showed to everyone except the worst of the bottom feeders his office prosecuted. “How’s it hanging?”

  “I need a favor, Phil. Fast, with no questions asked.”

  “Shoot.”

  * * *

  Ten nerve-twisting minutes later, Harkins delivered.

  “Hertz just transmitted the GPS tracking data. Your boy departed the airport, drove to your neighborhood and cruised your street. Didn’t stop, but made a sharp U-turn at nine-fifty-four and drove to Nichols Hills.”

  Hell! He’d been following Grace. Blake was sure of it.

  “He idled a block from your mother’s place for eighteen minutes,” Harkins recited, “then drove to your present location, where he sat for almost two hours.”

  Watching Helen Jasper’s boutique. Waiting for Grace.

  “Do your people have a lock on him now?” Blake asked, his insides ice-cold.

  “Roger. He’s heading south on I-35, three miles from the Texas border.” Harkins hesitated. “I don’t know what you have going on here, but I can ask the Texas Highway Patrol to make a stop.”

  Blake couldn’t chance it. Petrie was a Texas state trooper. He could have his radio with him and be listening in on their net.

  “No, don’t alert the troopers. Just keep tracking him and let me know if he deviates from I-35.” He shot his brother a fast look. “I’ll be in the air.”

  Alex was punching the speed call number for his chief of air operations before Blake disconnected.

  “What have we got ready to go?” He listened then issued a terse instruction. “Top off the fuel tan
k on the Skylane. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Blake didn’t question the choice of a single-engine turboprop over one of Dalton International’s bigger, faster corporate jets. Alex could put the Skylane down in a cow pasture if he had to.

  * * *

  They were in the air less than a half hour later. Alex laid on max airspeed and made a swift calculation.

  “We should catch them between Austin and San Antonio…if that’s where the bastard’s headed.”

  Blake nodded, his eyes shielded by the sunglasses he’d put on to protect them from the unfiltered sunlight. He kept his narrowed, intent gaze trained on the wide ribbon of concrete cutting across the rolling hills and checkered fields below.

  Petrie was down there, a thousand feet below and almost two hours ahead, driving a black Chevy Traverse. Blake could only pray he’d stuck to his end of the deal and had Grace sitting alive and unhurt beside him.

  Fourteen

  Grace shifted in the bucket seat, biting down hard on her lip when the SUV jounced over a rut. With her arms cuffed behind her, the ache between her shoulder blades had magnified to sheer torture in the interminable hour since she’d regained consciousness.

  She turned her face to the window to hide a wince and searched for a landmark, any kind of a landmark. All she could see was a dense forest of stunted live oaks poking above an impenetrable wall of scrub. Refusing to give in to the desperation squeezing her chest like a vise, she faced front again and forced herself to speak coolly.

  “Where are we going?”

  Buzz-cut, tanned and clean-shaven, the outwardly all-American guy in the driver’s seat wrenched his gaze from the single-lane dirt road ahead and shot her a look of smiling malevolence.

  “I told you. You’ll know when we get there. Now unless you want to talk to me about that rich bastard who screwed my wife…”

  Grace set her jaw.

  “That’s okay, cuz. You’ll be squealing soon enough. Now shut the hell up. I don’t want to miss the turn.”

  This was how it had gone since Grace had come to, dizzy and nauseous and aching all over. Petrie had refused to tell her how he’d found her. Refused to do more than smile with amused contempt when Grace warned he wouldn’t get away with snatching her off the street.

  She knew without being told that kidnapping wasn’t all he intended. He was a cop. He wouldn’t leave a live victim to bring him down. She also knew he intended to use her as bait to get to Blake.

  She’d been so careful! How had he made the connection between Blake and Anne? No, not Anne! Hope! She had to think of her cousin as Hope again, use that name when referring to her, or she’d feed into the rage smoldering behind Petrie’s careful facade.

  Ten minutes later Grace caught a glimpse of blue water through the screen of trees. Five minutes more, and Petrie slowed to a near crawl, then turned onto an overgrown dirt track. Grace had no idea how he spotted the track. There was no mailbox, no scrap of cloth tied to a bush, nothing but two sunken ruts cutting through the heavy underbrush.

  Thorny vines and ranches scraped the SUV’s sides. He was doing one helluva number on the paint job, she thought with vicious satisfaction, then gritted her teeth as the SUV bounced over the ruts and white-hot needles stabbed into her aching shoulders. She wanted to sob with relief when the brush finally thinned and the dirt track gave onto a clearing that sloped down to a good-size lake.

  A cedar-shingled cabin sat at the top of the slope, well above the waterline. Cinder blocks supported a screened-in porch. Additional cinder blocks formed columns to hold up the roof that shaded the porch. Grace whipped her gaze from the cabin to tree-studded opposite shore and spotted two or three similar structures. Most looked as if they were boarded up. None was within screaming distance.

  Petrie pulled well off the track, killed the engine and got out. Leaving his door open, he extracted something from the floor behind his seat. A rifle case, Grace saw. Hand-tooled leather. Padded handle. Housing for the high-powered hunting rifle she’d seen him clean at his kitchen table more than once.

  The case terrified her. Not for herself. For Blake. He would come after her. Find her somehow. Walk right into Petrie’s gun sight.

  The terror spiked again when Petrie got out and propped the rifle against the fender before extracting a soft-sided pistol case from his door’s side bin. The case was half-zipped, providing easy access to the blue steel semiautomatic he slid out. It wasn’t his service weapon. Grace had seen his state-issued black leather holster and Sig Sauer often enough to recognize the difference. This had to be a throwaway, one of those weapons reportedly confiscated during traffic stops that somehow never made it into evidence logs. Untraceable to the man who now coolly ejected the magazine and checked to verify a round was chambered before snapping the magazine back in place and thumbing the safety lock.

  Just as coolly, he settled the pistol in the waistband of his jeans and picked up the rifle case. Grace’s heart was racing when he rounded the hood, yanked open the passenger door and popped her seat belt.

  “Let’s go.”

  He hooked a hand around her upper arm and dragged her out, firing the pain in her shoulders to white-hot agony. It took every ounce of will she had not to moan as he hauled her up to the cabin. The screen door screeched when Petrie pulled it open, then groped above the main door for the key he obviously knew was there.

  When he shoved Grace inside, the stink of old, dank blankets and used fishing tackle hit like a slap to the face. Grimacing, she inspected the dim interior. Bunk beds lined one wall. A rough-plank picnic table, a worn sofa with mismatched cushions and a lumpy armchair took up most of the remaining floorspace. The kitchen consisted of a counter with a sink, hot plate and half-size fridge. An unpainted door hung on its hinges at the far end of the room and gave a glimpse into a cubbyhole of a bathroom.

  “Nice place you got here,” Grace commented with a credible sneer.

  “Belongs to a friend of mine. He’s invited me up here a couple times to fish and drink. I know it offends your delicate sensibilities, but it’ll do fine for what I have in mind, cuz.”

  “Stop calling me that, you dog turd. You and I are in no way related, thank God.”

  “You always were the feisty one.”

  She didn’t like the slow, up-and-down look he gave her.

  “I might just have to train you to heel, like I did Hope.”

  “You want to bet that’s gonna happen?”

  The face her cousin had once rhapsodized about being so strong and stamped with character now radiated nothing but amused contempt.

  “We’ll see how full of piss and vinegar you are when I’m done with you.”

  Dragging her across the room, he spun her so she was nose to nose with the rolled-up mattress on one of the top bunks. She felt him working the cuffs on her left wrist, felt it spring free and the screaming agony when her arm dropped to her side. She knew she had only three or four seconds to whirl and claw and fight for her freedom, but before she could do more than curl her numbed fingers Petrie had spun her around again. In a quick move he snapped the free end of the cuff to the metal pole supporting the upper bunk. Steel rattled against steel as the cuff shimmied down the pole.

  “Make yourself comfortable, cuz. I figure we’ve got some time before the fun starts.”

  With unhurried calm, he placed the tooled leather case on the table, unzipped it and began to assemble his hunting rifle.

  Grace watched him, her arms dangling uselessly at her sides. They felt as though they’d parted company with her aching shoulders. When the blood finally pulsed back into them, she angled around as far as the cuff would allow and yanked at the rolled-up mattress on the lower bunk.

  “All right, Jack,” she said after she sank onto the dank ticking. “You may as well tell me. I know you’re itching to rub my face in it.”

  “How I found you, you mean? Or how I found out about my whore of a wife and the rich dick you married?”

  “Bot
h.”

  “Took some doing,” he admitted as he snapped the rifle’s bolt into place. “I’ve been searching ever since Hope walked out on me. Checking state and county court records, making calls to various police departments, screening NamUS—the National Missing Persons Data System,” he clarified gratuitously.

  Grace knew damned well what NamUS was. The data system was open to anyone with a computer. She’d screened it regularly herself for updates on her cousin.

  “It wasn’t until your marriage license popped in the Texas Vital Statistics database that I finally got a solid lead, though. I saw Judge Honeywell had married you and talked up his assistant. She gushed about what a handsome couple you’d made, how the judge and the Daltons went way back. I went right home from the courthouse and got on the computer.”

  He lifted his gaze, gave her a mocking smile.

  “Found plenty of coverage about the Daltons of Oklahoma City but didn’t see much mention of you. Made me think you were keeping a low profile for a reason, so I dug deeper and found a petition filed with the Oklahoma County clerk’s office to establish paternity of the infant referred to as Margaret ‘Molly’ Dalton.”

  The smile took a hard twist.

  “So I made some calls, cuz, and discovered a woman matching your description showed up at Dalton’s mama’s place almost the same day as the infant. I knew the kid wasn’t yours. I’d been watching you too close. So there could only be one reason why you’d take a leave of absence from your job to work as a nanny.”

  The mask slipped, releasing the fury behind it.

  “The brat is Hope’s, isn’t it? My whore of a wife had a kid by this guy Dalton, and noble, do-gooding Cousin Grace rushed to the rescue just like she always did.”

  “Jack…”

  “Shut up! Don’t even try to lie your way out of this. The kid’s birth certificate was included in the paternity petition. Didn’t take a genius to link her birth to the death certificate filed in the same California courthouse.”