by Dale Mayer
“Hey, it’s morning,” he said. “I don’t know what you want for breakfast, but chances are you’ll do better with more frequent small meals for a little bit yet. This will give you something to keep you going.”
“Never a wrong time for a cinnamon bun,” she said, with a smile. “Right?”
“They are one of my favorites,” he said. “So I tend to order them when I’m out.” He smiled and served her one.
She sat here quietly, working her way through the cinnamon bun and coffee. When she was done, she looked at her plate and then at him. “I thought I could last longer,” she said, “but I’m really tired again.” She used the table to help her stand and then slowly made her way back to the bed. By the time she dropped back down into bed, she felt a sense of relief at just being able to relax into the bedding.
As she watched, he got up, came around, and lifted her legs, then gently pulled the bedding out from under her and covered her up again. “Nap if you can,” he said.
She smiled, nodded, and said, “I’ll try.”
And she closed her eyes.
Killian wasn’t surprised Stacey was so tired. As soon as she drifted off, it was almost like a switch went on, and Hatch rolled over and looked at him, wide awake. “What time is it?”
“Almost seven,” he said.
“Wow. And it’s been peaceful?”
“It’s been peaceful,” he said, with a nod.
Hatch took one look at the coffee service and frowned.
“It’s still hot. Don’t worry,” Killian said.
Hatch hopped up and went to the bathroom. When he came back out, he poured himself a cup of coffee and snagged a cinnamon bun. “How long has she been out?” He motioned toward her bed.
“She went back down just before you got up,” he said. “She’s doing better. We cleaned the wound earlier. She’s … She’s holding up, but it’ll be a little bit before she’s well enough to travel.”
“Well, even that leg alone will be hard to mobilize in a plane. And having to sit with her knees bent the whole time will hurt like hell.”
“And that’s why we need her to gain a bit more strength,” he said. “Two days would make a big difference. Plus we can watch for infection.”
“Any information?”
“Nothing yet. I’m still racking my brain about the guy I put the tracker on.”
“What’s bugging you the most about him?”
“Not quite sure. His actions. His … vibe. Whatever it is just sits in the back of my brain, driving me crazy. I know that he had covered most of his face on purpose, and that alone raises my suspicions. At the same time, I just need more information, so we can find out who he is.”
“And what about the second guy who kidnapped her? He’s the one we need to really track down and to make sure he doesn’t come after her again.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve asked for the cameras off the ferries in the area. They have them for the terminals only. There’s talk of upgrading to all the car decks on the individual ferries but it hasn’t happened yet.”
“That’s a good idea, too bad they haven’t done it already,” Hatch said.
“She’s assuming it’s her husband, but she didn’t see him at any kidnapping event or hear him,” Killian said, with a frown. “He would have hired someone. And that’s troublesome too. We can’t know for sure it was her husband just yet. Right now I feel like, if we take her back to her dad, we’re just returning her to the same dangerous scenario.”
“That wouldn’t be good,” Hatch said. “So we better nip this in the bud right now, while she’s injured and can’t travel, and then, when we finally get her home again, she’ll be safe.”
“That’s my line of thinking, but we have two threads to tug. One from the original kidnapping, and one from the asshole who took advantage of the pickle she was in.”
“I can’t even imagine doing that,” Hatch said, looking up at him. “That’s like, you know, finding an injured puppy in the woods and, instead of helping it, just hurting it some more.”
“People are assholes. We know that,” Killian said quietly.
“Life is already too damn hard for any of this crap.”
“I’ll start with a full investigation into her husband,” Killian said. “Even she suspects him of the first crime.”
“And the husbands always make excellent targets,” Hatch said.
From the bed, Stacey corrected the men. “My ex… he may not have signed the papers yet but we are definitely no longer together, okay?”
Killian looked at her and asked, “How long were you married?”
“Eighteen months,” she said quietly, “and we were apart for a large amount of that time due to his travels. That was the only reason it lasted as long as it did.”
“Why the divorce?”
“He’s a sadist,” she said flatly. “He likes to see other people suffer. It starts with a little emotional abuse, a little mental abuse, and then it evolves into the physical abuse.”
Both men glared at her. “Did he beat you?”
She shrugged. “You know how it begins. A tough slap, a twisted wrist here, a shoulder squeeze that’s way too hard,” she said. “Somehow a sudden fall down a short flight of stairs. It was all the little things, until he got me accustomed to that. And then it built up. The slightly twisted wrist became a full-on sprain. The trip down a few stairs became a fall down eight or ten. The squeeze on the shoulder became a punch. The slap across the face became an uppercut to the jaw,” she said, glaring right back at them.
“I’m surprised you lasted that long.”
“I didn’t last very long after the last smack in the face,” she said. “It was easy enough to excuse away all the rest. But that time, he told me that he would teach me a lesson I’d never forget.”
“Of course,” Hatch said. “That’s how bullies always act.”
“Well, I couldn’t stand for it anymore. Up until then, I worried about my father’s reaction to this abuse, as Dad was a huge fan of Max.”
“How much interaction did your father have with him though?”
“Not enough,” she said. She slowly sat up, shuddering at the pain.
Immediately Killian walked over and said, “Just stay in bed. You have no place to go, nothing to do, just relax.”
She looked at him and then slowly sank back down again. “Just talking about that man,” she said, “gets my back up.”
“Then we don’t need to talk about him,” he said. “I’ll do a full investigation into where he was then and what he’s doing right now. I’m wondering just what we’ll find, if he has an alibi for the time frame when you were grabbed. You seem pretty sure he was responsible for the kidnapping one way or another.”
“He would have hired somebody,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “He’s a well-respected Wall Street investor. He has his own company. Everybody looks up to him. He’s that perfect suave male on the outside, but something wrong to the core is on the inside, and, no matter how close to him you are, you don’t see it until you’re right there, getting punched in the face.”
“Well, we’ll find it, if anything’s there,” he said.
“I hope you find something,” she said, dropping her head back onto the pillow.
He watched as she stared up at the ceiling, her hard face slowly turning vulnerable, almost ready to weep. He walked to the bed and reached down and grabbed her fingers and squeezed. “How about a fresh pot of coffee?”
She looked over at him. “Sure. And maybe some real food.”
“What? That cinnamon bun didn’t hold you?” he said in a joking manner. He walked back to the table where Hatch was working, snatched up his phone, and sent off a couple messages.
“I am feeling better though,” she said. “But it’s enough to make anybody sick to hear you talking about my ex.”
“I need his full name,” Hatch said, “the company name, and anything else you know.”
She immediately said
, “Max Edgewater. His company is Fulcrum Enterprises, and, when you’re ready, I’ll give you his social security number too.” With his nod, she gave that to them.
“Well, that’s helpful,” he said, after typing it into his laptop.
“Not really. It’ll only give you the surface stuff,” she said. “If you can get into my old house, Max’s home in Texas, that safe in his office would have a lot more interesting things in it.”
“What is it you think he was doing?”
“I have no idea,” she said, “but he certainly was busy with investments. Were they illegal? I have no way of knowing because it’s not my area of expertise.”
“When you split, did you get half?”
“Are you kidding?” she said, with a broken laugh. “Nobody gets half. He gets it all, or there is nothing.”
“Did you have anything going in?”
“I had a small savings account and my vehicle,” she said. “I ended up with my vehicle, and that was it.”
“What happened to your savings account?”
“Oh, he invested it under my name,” she said in a wry tone. “Only I found nothing in my name at the end of the day. So, when I walked, it was all his.”
“Nice,” he said. “You really, … ah, … found a winner, huh?”
“I think only losers are out there.”
“Anything else you can tell us, businesswise?”
“No,” she said. Then she stopped and added, “He has a good friend, James Dean.”
“What’s he like?”
“Almost as bad, maybe worse. They should be brothers,” she said bitterly. “He’s the type of guy who would sell his own mother into the sex slave market.” She gave Killian and Hatch a little bit more information on Dean, but it wasn’t a whole lot.
“Good enough,” Hatch said. “I’ve got enough to work with.”
“Good,” she said. “If you find something criminal, I wouldn’t be at all upset if you nailed their asses to the wall.”
“Including this James Dean person?”
“He’s just as bad as Max is,” she murmured. She shook herself, as if shaking off an ugly memory.
“Did he ever hit you?”
“James? No. Although once, after Max hit me, James told me that it was my fault.”
At that, both Hatch and Killian exchanged hard looks. “Sounds like they just egg each other on then,” Killian said. “It’s a good thing you’re out of that situation.”
“It is. I also had to walk away with nothing,” she said. “It was either that, or I wouldn’t walk away.”
“You really think he’d have killed you?”
“No, not necessarily, but I don’t think breaking both legs and paralyzing me would have been out of the question.”
“And yet I understand from your father that you took something as … as insurance of a sort?”
“Because I didn’t trust that Max would let me walk away,” she said quietly.
“But you realize that, by taking something, you may have started him on this path?”
“Quite possibly, yes,” she said. “It was a risk I had to take.”
“And you told Max about it?”
“Only after he heard it from my father.”
“What?”
She looked over and nodded. “You have to understand. My father is a gentleman—and a southern gentleman at that. He had me late in life, so he’s the age of some of my friends’ grandfathers. A handshake is all that’s required to move millions of dollars, and, when he says something, he means it. Plus, in his world, men don’t punch women. He couldn’t conceive of Max doing such a thing.”
“Ah, I get it, and he projected his personality and mind-set on your husband, not seeing the real Max.”
“Yes, so initially Dad was disappointed in my behavior,” she said, shifting in the bed, setting the pillows up behind her and getting more comfortable. “He blamed me.”
“For getting hit?” Killian’s voice rose, as he stared at her.
“Worse than that, I think he didn’t believe me. I didn’t show him the medical records, and I certainly didn’t go to him when I got hurt,” she said, staring at Killian. “But, when I told him that I had taken some insurance, he felt embarrassed that I would do such a thing.”
“Good Lord,” Hatch said, sitting back in his chair. “He really wasn’t there for you, was he?”
“No, and he definitely regrets that now, no doubt.”
“But does he truly believe that your ex would do this?”
“I’m not sure that he does. For all I know, he could still be thinking that I’m making it up or hoping that I’m wrong. But I’m not wrong. Dad is.”
Killian nodded. “And that abhorrent behavior is very hard for anybody with ethics to accept. But, in something like this, where it was his daughter at risk—ugh.”
“Exactly,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “And some of the insurance I told him about made him question it again.”
“What kind of insurance are we talking about?”
She looked at Killian. “I think Max is … dealing, dealing weapons out of Texas.”
Both men stared at her, now sitting on the bed opposite hers.
“Do you have anything to back that up?” he asked. “Because that’s not just let-me-walk-out-of-house-safely insurance, Stacey. That’s we’ll-shoot-you-dead-and-ask-questions-later kind of insurance.”
“I know that now,” she said. “But I didn’t know what I had, until I left.”
“You need to explain this a little bit better.”
“Okay. So, on my final day there, I was home alone, packing up the last of my things. Max wasn’t there, and I went through his office, trying to figure out where my savings money was,” she said. “He told me that I would never get it, that I’d never find it again because he’d moved it, and it was no longer under my name, reminding me what a fool I was for having signed it away with his paperwork.” With that, she added, “He didn’t have to tell me that of course. I was a fool and worse. I trusted my husband, and, well, you can see where that got me.”
“You lived and learned,” Hatch said. “Now get back to the weapons.”
“When I was in his office, I found notes on a notepad—about AK-47s, plus several different variations of handguns, a bunch of numbers—and ‘warehouse on Chelton Street’ was written there. It was clearly important.”
“And?”
“I took that notepad, the entire thing, not just the top page,” she said. “Then I started hunting, found a ledger in one of his drawers, a drawer that he normally kept locked, but I didn’t know that. He accused me of stealing something from a locked drawer, but it wasn’t locked. I didn’t break into anything. But this ledger was sitting on the top of that drawer. I was too scared to really do anything much, but, since several ledgers were there, I grabbed the one on the bottom, checked through it, thought a bunch of stuff in it might be of value, and basically ran. I couldn’t be at the house long. I had chosen my time frame so that he wouldn’t be home. I’d waited out on the street, until he left, and I wanted to be sure to get the hell out of there before he came back. So I was pretty pressured for time when I saw this, and I grabbed it all up and ran. Only later did I review some of the items listed.”
“And where is this insurance of yours?”
“That’s the only thing I did right,” she said. “I put it in a safe-deposit box in California.”
“That’s good news,” he said. “But you know that more people than just you want to see that now.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I needed to get out of this situation before I handed that off to anybody.”
“Well, if you’d handed it off to anybody in authority,” Hatch interjected, “then you might not still be in this situation because they would have picked up Max for arms dealing a long time ago.”
“Maybe, but Max could have still hired kidnappers from jail,” she said. “Even worse, he might never have been charged, much
less jailed. If the cops came sniffing around him, Max would have figured out exactly what had been taken and by whom,” she murmured. “And his problem would have been solved with a bullet through a window or something.”
“So what do you think this kidnapping is all about?”
“I think the problem is that he wants the documents back, and he doesn’t dare have me killed until he gets those from me.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he thinks that, if you’re killed, the matter dies anyway.”
“Maybe. I don’t know what my father might have said to him.”
“Well, perhaps we should find that out,” Killian said, and he tossed his phone to her.
She looked at it, then quickly dialed her father. She put it on speaker, as the two men remained on the other bed.
When her father answered, his voice still sounding a little tired and shaky, she said, “Dad?”
“Hey, baby,” he said. “Did you have a good night?”
“I did,” she said. “How about you?”
“It was okay,” he said. “I’m glad that you’re safe.”
Stacey frowned at the phone, then at the guys.
Something odd was in her father’s voice that made Killian lean forward. “Sir, are you okay?”
First came silence on the other end, and then he said, “Look after my daughter.” And he hung up.
She looked over at Killian in shock. “What happened?”
“He answered that phone under duress,” he said. “Your father is not alone.”
Chapter 5
Stacey stared at Killian in horror, bouncing out of bed, only to cry out as the pain slammed into her. She looked over at Hatch and Killian, but both of them were already on their phones. “Please help my father,” she said.
Killian nodded. “Already in progress.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “My father is very old.”
“I know, and he won’t handle the torture very well.”
“Torture! God no,” she said, aghast at the thought. She sat on the side of her bed, her hands shaking, and she thought about everything her father had been through to help her. The thought of him hurting and alone with a sadist like her husband was just too much. “Dear God,” she said. “Who can I call? Who is there to help?”
