A few more inches, and at least one hand would be free.
Henderson smiled again. “They wouldn’t.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I didn’t report it to the police.”
Keira tugged a little harder on the rope and feigned confusion. “Why not the police? Wouldn’t they be the best people to track it?”
“I’m afraid not.” His tone was patronizing. “If a wanted criminal is going to sell a thirty-million-dollar painting, it’s not going to be through the appropriate channels. The people I reported its theft to are the kind who monitor the darker side of things, Ms. Niles. People like your friend Drew.”
“Drew?” she repeated.
One final little yank, and Keira felt the rope drop behind her. Quickly, she tucked her feet together under the chair to cover up the dangling evidence.
“The wannabe art thief,” Henderson clarified.
“Well. That explains his wannabe expensive taste.” Keira forced a laugh as she tried to take a casual look around.
The vase in the center of the table.
It was big and painted blue and probably worth more than a month’s worth of rent. But it also looked breakable. Into small, sharp pieces, preferably.
She’d have to find out.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The house didn’t just rest on top of its little hill. It loomed. Forbidding and hideous in its austerity.
It was the biggest one on the block—the one that all of the other houses in the neighborhood were modeled after. It wasn’t that much older than its surrounding homes, but the lot was double the size. It was clearly designed not necessarily to stand out but to rule over.
Holly had told Graham that her mother had built the home, then given the rest of the property to her father to develop. A billion-dollar gift before the woman passed away and left everything else—the house, her fortune, her summer house overseas—to Holly herself.
Opulence.
It left a sour taste in Graham’s mouth. It was one of the reasons the police believed he’d killed her. Killed them. Holly had spent the money—nearly every penny—and Graham, who had grown used to the opulence, was thrown into a rage.
The only thing left was the money in trust for Sam. The only way for Graham to get to that was to get rid of both of them.
Graham’s jaw clenched involuntarily at the theory.
Money meant nothing to him. It never had, really. He’d gone into the medical field to help children who couldn’t help themselves. He’d married Holly to help Sam.
But he’d wound up helpless, and the day he’d walked in and found Holly’s body and Sam’s blood...it was seared painfully into his memory.
The sirens had been close before Graham heard them.
Too close.
He’d known he ought to get up, slip out of the house and pretend he hadn’t been there at all. That he hadn’t received the frantic phone call from Dave, hadn’t come home from the motel and hadn’t walked in on the devastating scene in the front hall of the home he’d shared with his wife and stepson.
Instead, he tore through the kitchen, bending down to open each low cupboard, calling out in a reassuring voice.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Where was the boy?
It was the only thing that stopped Graham from fleeing. He thought the boy had to be hiding somewhere, terrified. But where?
His heart had constricted as he moved past his wife’s still form again, taking the stairs two at a time and forcing himself not to look back.
He might not have loved the woman the way he should, but in a million years, he would never have wished for something like that.
You tried to revive Holly, he’d reminded himself. You really did. But you needed to find Sam.
She’d been gone long before he got there. Blood loss. Or the fall down the stairs. Even with his medical expertise, Graham couldn’t say what had ultimately killed her.
Sam.
A crushing anger pushed at the corners of Graham’s mind at what his stepson had witnessed.
He had to be a witness.
Graham couldn’t even begin to accept the idea that the boy might’ve met the same fate as Holly. He loved the boy too much. Like nothing else in the world.
“Sammy!” he’d called as he’d opened the boy’s bedroom door.
The usual assortment of Transformers and Lego and art supplies were strewn throughout the room. Graham saw none of them. The only thing that held his eye was the bed and the dark circle in the center of it.
No. Oh, no.
Graham knew blood when he saw it. It covered his hands and chest now, just as it covered his vision.
“Dr. Graham Calloway!” The cold, commanding voice had come from the doorway. “Hands where I can see them.”
Numb, Graham lifted his arms and placed his palms on his head and turned around slowly.
“They’re dead,” he’d said to the officer in blue. “Holly and Sam are dead. You’re too late.”
The later-damning statement was out before he could stop it. It was also the last thing he’d said in that house the last time he’d been inside.
Until now.
“Am I going to have to drag you in there?” Dave’s question forced Graham back to the present.
“No,” he replied, his voice betraying more than a hint of the overwhelming, emotional drainage he’d experienced on that day four years earlier.
“Let’s move, then.”
“Are you going to uncuff me first?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Level with me,” Graham said tiredly. “Are you taking me inside just to hand me straight over to Mike Ferguson, or are you taking me inside with any hope at all of saving the girl I love?”
The hesitation in the reply betrayed the truth even before the words did. “It has to be both.”
“That’s not even possible.”
Dave shot a worried glance up toward the house. “I didn’t have much of a choice here, Graham.”
“There’s always a choice.”
Dave’s face clouded with anger. “I know you think the past four years have been hard for you, and you only. But I lost something that day, too. Some things.”
Graham rattled his cuffs emphatically. “What do you think you lost, Dave? Your freedom?”
“As a matter of fact, I did lose my freedom. Every person on the force knew about our friendship. I’ve never been promoted, never been given a second look for anything.”
“You’re blaming that on me?”
“My entire career was stalled when Holly died.”
“Your entire career was stalled the second you started it, Dave,” Graham snapped. “If I hadn’t been there to bail you out of every bad thing you did, you’d be a two-bit criminal instead of a two-bit cop. Oh. Wait.”
The other man narrowed his eyes. “I’ve made some bad choices, but I’m trying to make the right one now.”
“By cuffing me?”
“If I don’t cuff you, we don’t get in. It’s as simple as that.”
“And what next? We get in there and you say you have to hand the keys to these cuffs to Ferguson because it’s just that simple? Will you hand him the gun he uses to shoot me, too, and then blame that on simplicity?” The last question came out at a near yell, and Graham took a breath and tried to calm himself. “I thought you loved her, too.”
“I did love her. Can we stop talking about this and go inside?”
Graham shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not until you explain to me why you turned on me. Why you’re helping the man who murdered Holly.”
“He’s not who you think he is.”
“Now you’re defending him? Dammit,
Dave. You loved her. In a way that I couldn’t. I never held that against you. I never even tried to stop it. So why do this?”
“It wasn’t like that with Holly and me,” Dave replied softly.
“You don’t have to lie about it.”
The other man exhaled loudly. “She was my sister.”
It was the last thing Graham expected to hear. “Your what?”
“My sister.”
“You don’t have a damned sister.”
“I don’t anymore. But I did.”
“Explain,” Graham ordered.
“I don’t think you really want to hear about it.”
It was true. Part of him didn’t want to hear. He didn’t want to know what Dave was using to justify his actions. He didn’t want to be asked to have any sympathetic feelings for anyone involved in Holly’s and Sam’s deaths. And he was sure that’s where Dave was going with this.
He pushed past the desire to shut down.
“Explain,” he repeated coldly.
Dave sighed again. “When my dad died, he left you cash for college. And even though you weren’t his kid, I got it. You had a bond and I respected that. But he left me a different kind of legacy, Graham. He left a letter, confessing that he wasn’t my real father at all, that my mother had an affair with a local politician. He didn’t tell me his name. And I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that I knew. But it ate me up. Every waking moment, I thought about it. About who he might be. You remember how I was when my father died.”
Graham did remember. He’d blamed the downward spiral on the senior Stark’s death. It had made sense.
“How did you find out it was Henry?” he asked.
“Not long after you met Holly, you introduced us, and...I just knew it was him. Something in his eyes, his stance. It reminded me of myself. And he didn’t even deny it when I confronted him.”
“So you did what, blackmail him?”
“Not at first. I just threatened him with a lawsuit. He threatened me back. He said he knew people who would make me wish not only that I wasn’t his biological son, but that I’d never been born at all. And I believed him. Completely.”
“So Holly was a weaker target?”
“Not exactly.”
Graham was growing impatient. “Stop being so taciturn, Dave. It’s not helping either of us.”
“Things got worse for me. The man I always thought of as my father was dead. The man who was my biological father threatened to kill me. So I did what I always did. I gambled away more money. I kept going until I owed my bookie tens of thousands. Until one of them—Mike Ferguson—sent someone after me.”
Graham’s anger reared its head again. “You knew him before he killed them? You—”
Dave cut him off. “I didn’t know him, Graham. I never even saw him. I owed him money. And I told you that you didn’t want to hear this.”
Graham gritted his teeth. “Go on.”
“The man he sent was named Drew Bryant, and he didn’t even ask me for the money I owed Ferguson. Instead, he told me he was my brother. Mine and Holly’s. Another affair, another son,” Dave said bitterly. “Henry took the term ‘sow your wild oats’ to an extreme, I guess. Drew convinced me that Henry owed us something. He’d been working for him and knew of a better way for us to get some money.”
Drew Bryant.
He couldn’t be Keira’s boyfriend-potential Drew.
But he has to be.
“No coincidences,” Graham muttered, then said a little more loudly, “After that, you went to Holly.”
“After that, we went to Holly,” Dave agreed. “She didn’t even hesitate. She started paying us right away. Took the cash out of the bank that same day.”
“And you were more than happy to take it.”
“I owed money, Graham. A lot of it.”
“So you thought it was okay to blackmail Holly?”
“We didn’t have to blackmail her. She gave me the money willingly. She was thrilled to have brothers.”
“You bankrupted her!”
“No. I paid my debt, thanked her, then didn’t take a cent more. I told Drew I was out, and he agreed. So I kept my nose to the ground and washed my hands clean of Mike Ferguson. I paid my own way for a year,” Dave explained. “But Drew kept taking money from her. I had no idea. Not until he came to me and told me she’d run out, and that he was planning on stealing the painting. I wanted to warn her. I was too late.”
Bile rose in the back of Graham’s throat. “Always about the money.”
Dave looked as though he was about to say something else, but the door to the house where Graham once lived swung open, and a well-dressed, furious-looking man stepped onto the front veranda. He motioned angrily at Dave and Graham.
“Do I need to drag you in now?” Dave asked, displeasure clear in his inquiry.
Graham stared at the man on the stoop.
“Is that him?” he asked roughly.
If it was—if that was the man responsible for Holly’s death—Graham wouldn’t have to be dragged in. Just the opposite. It took all of his self-restraint to not run at the man, knock him down and wrap his throat with the chain on the cuffs and demand answers. Under the coat, he flexed his hands.
“That’s Drew Bryant,” Dave said. “Holly’s brother, and mine.”
“Where’s Mike Ferguson?”
“Inside.”
They moved forward together, and when they reached the porch, Drew Bryant gave Graham a dismissive once-over.
“This is the husband?” he asked, his tone as derisive as his expression.
“You know it is,” Dave replied.
“I expected you to be more...impressive,” the other man said.
Likewise, Graham thought, but he made himself stay quiet, assessing in silence.
He wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t short, either. His clothes were nice and his hair was tidy, but there was nothing remarkable about him at all. Graham couldn’t see whatever it was that made Keira consider him boyfriend material, and he didn’t know if that was a relief or not.
“Ready?” Dave prodded.
“Let’s go,” Graham replied grimly.
He started to step to the door, but Dave put a hand on his shoulder and muttered darkly, “He’s not Mike Ferguson. But I bet you’re going to wish he was.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Keira waited until Henderson had immersed himself back in the crossword puzzle before she heaved herself to her feet and dove for the vase. Henderson reacted quickly, leaping up from his chair and pushing Keira away from her intended target. But her hand still managed to bump it, and she sent it rolling.
As the vase lumbered along, flashing blue on brown, Keira used the momentum given to her by Henderson’s shove to propel herself under the table. When the older man bent down to grab her, she kicked out one bare foot, smacking him solidly in the forehead. He fell to his knees, but came at her again immediately. She struck him once more, this time in the chin. When he lunged a third time, Keira grabbed ahold of two chair legs and forced them together with as much strength as she could muster. They put a temporary barrier between her and the man hell-bent on getting to her. When he tried to shove the chairs out of his way, Keira gave one of them a push. It clipped Henderson in the eye, and he finally fell back, his hand on his brow.
“Drew!” he hollered.
And Keira thumped the chair forward again, harder than before. This time, the blow was hard enough to send him flying. He righted himself and shot her a furious glare.
“You little—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was lost in the sound of the vase hitting the hardwood floor and shattering.
Keira covered her eyes as the shards flew around her. She counted to three in her head, hoping
that would give the porcelain enough time to settle, then opened her eyes in search of a big enough piece of vase to use as a weapon.
But Henderson was a step ahead of her. He already had a pointed chunk of porcelain gripped in one hand and was crawling toward Keira.
For a second, she was frozen to the spot, mesmerized by the gruesome sight in front of her.
Little pieces of blue flecked Henderson’s face and around each of them was a dot of crimson. A bigger slice had jabbed into his shoulder, and from that, a steady stream of blood oozed.
He paused on the other side of the chairs.
Move!
It only took Keira a heartbeat to obey the command in her head. She scurried back, hit the wall behind her, then moved left, bringing herself closer to the door.
Bits of blue porcelain scraped underneath her as she slid along the floor, and she ignored the way they dug at her.
Three more feet.
But Henderson was nearly on his feet again and almost as close to her as she was to the exit.
Keira snapped up a piece of broken vase and held it out in front of her as she grabbed the door frame and pulled herself up.
“You might as well drop it. I’m bigger than you and stronger than you. I’m not afraid of hurting you. And I will,” Henderson said, and Keira marveled that he somehow still managed to sound calm in spite of his threatening words. “I’m going to overpower you in seconds.”
“And you’re going to lose an eye in the process,” Keira retorted.
“We’ll see.”
As he jumped toward her, the French doors flew open, and Henderson took advantage of Keira’s momentary surprise. One of his arms closed around her, pinning her arms to her sides, and the other came up to press his own shard of sharp porcelain directly into her jugular.
* * *
GRAHAM STARED IN horror at the scene in front of him, the truth unfolding in his mind.
The gray-haired man—covered in abrasions and looking like a poorly aged thug—was absolutely someone he knew. Well. And he had Keira in a death grip and showed no signs of letting her go.
He’s inches away from cutting her throat.
“Henry...”
Trusting a Stranger Page 18
