Ultimate Fear (Book 2 Ultimate CORE) (CORE Series)

by Kristine Mason

  “I—I didn’t know what else to do with Chloe,” Heather wailed. “Don’t you understand? I know it was a horrible way to leave her, but I couldn’t let her go and I certainly couldn’t put her down.”

  “Put her down,” she repeated with a shake of her head. “Like one would do to a sick or dying animal. Priceless. So let me ask you this. Why? Why couldn’t you kill her?”

  She blinked. “Because murder is a sin.”

  “You murdered Missy.”

  “That was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her on the temple.”

  “But you cut into her. Didn’t you think she’d die from that?”

  “Women have C-sections all the time.”

  Jessica waved her hand around the room. “In a hospital, not on the kitchen floor with a dissecting kit and a carving knife as medical instruments. And you can’t tell me that leaving Chloe to die in that storage unit wasn’t your attempt at murder. You knew damn well she couldn’t survive in those conditions, which is why you had the fans in there. And because you knew this, and because of what you did to Missy, you are a murderer. And if Wayne—”

  “Don’t utter that man’s name in my presence again,” she shouted, her facing contorting with rage. “He’s dead. Even if he wasn’t, he’d be dead to me.”

  “You were married for over twenty years.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that the honeymoon is over?”

  “He tried to kill me. No matter how much I pray to God on the subject, I don’t know if I’ll ever find room in my heart to forgive him.” She looked away. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I—I think I need an attorney, after all.”

  “A good one.” She picked up her satchel and stood. “And I think your husband was trying to save you,” she added, turning off the recording device, then slipping it into her bag.

  “Save me?”

  “Heather, if you don’t get the death penalty, I guarantee you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.” She stepped away from the hospital bed. “It’s my understanding that female inmates frown upon those who’ve preyed on children.”

  “I told you I didn’t hurt any of my sons.”

  “No. You had your husband kill them for you.”

  “But he didn’t kill them,” she said with a small, smug smile.

  “Then maybe God was with your husband this whole time, and not you.” She moved toward the door and, with her hand on the handle, turned back to Heather. “You kidnapped four babies and took them over state lines. That’s a federal offense. I hope that you end up tried for the kidnappings and Missy’s murder in federal court. I also hope you get the death penalty. Not because I want you to die—that’d be too easy. See, most inmates on death row spend upward to twenty years before they’re executed. Which means you’ll be kept in a twelve by seven foot cell, twenty-three hours a day. What a life. Can you imagine spending the next twenty-plus years basically living in solitary confinement?”

  “God will be with me,” she shouted, her tone righteous.

  She moved back to the door, then opened it. “Keep telling yourself that.” She sent her a quick smile. “I’m off to see Chloe and her baby. I think God really was with Wayne. If not for your husband, that baby wouldn’t have survived. If you do end up sentenced to death, Chloe’s son will likely be just graduating from high school and leaving for college. There’s something to think about. And it looks like no matter what the sentence, you’ll have plenty of time for thinking.”

  Heather opened her mouth, but Jessica quickly left the room. For now, she needed to erase Heather, and all the bad that she’d done, from her mind and focus on the positive. Chloe had her baby back, and she couldn’t wait to see mother and son reunited.

  Chapter 21

  JESSICA ENTERED METROHEALTH Medical Center’s NICU. After signing in with the front desk, a nurse led her to where Chloe sat in a wheelchair, grinning at the tiny baby lying in the incubator. A man and woman, who she placed in their late forties to early fifties flanked Chloe. Her parents, she assumed, since they’d been notified of Chloe’s condition once she’d gain consciousness.

  “Hi, Detective,” Chloe said when she saw her approach. “Thanks for coming by.”

  “I told you I’d be back,” she responded, looking down at the baby. Chloe had been worried her parents wouldn’t make it to Chicago until late tonight. She was also concerned about being moved to a new hospital and being surrounded by judgmental doctors and nurses. The young girl’s horrible experience had definitely been a wake-up call. Chloe was embarrassed that she’d abused her body and threatened the health of the baby. When Chloe had told her this, Jessica had made it clear that she hadn’t approved, and that if it hadn’t been for what Chloe was put through, she would have loved to have charged her with child endangerment.

  Chloe had cried and sworn that she would never go back on drugs. Jessica wanted to believe her and truly hoped the girl would stay on track, but she still worried. Addiction wasn’t easy to overcome. Hopefully, with the support of her family, along with knowing she had more than one life to consider now, Chloe would make it and go on to live a clean and prosperous life.

  “You look great,” she said. Although Chloe’s face was still pale and dark circles underscored her eyes, her dark hair was no longer matted and greasy.

  “You have no idea how good it felt to take a shower. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had one.” She shook her head and smiled. “These are my parents, Mary Ann and Sam Young,” she said, reaching for their hands.

  Her mom kissed Chloe’s knuckles, while her dad bent and kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “We’re so grateful for all that you’ve done,” Mary Ann said, tears shimmering in her eyes. “Chloe told us about you and your husband, and how you dedicate your time to finding missing children. I’m so sorry about your daughter.”

  Jessica’s throat flexed and she looked to Chloe. After the young girl had detailed how she’d come to meet Heather and what had transpired from there, Jessica had filled her in on what had led them to Heather in the first place. She’d also told her about Sophia. “Thank you. I wanted Chloe to understand how lucky she is,” she said, and looked to Chloe. “Cases like yours don’t always end the way we hope. Count this as a blessing and do right by yourself and your son.”

  “We’ve already talked about that,” Sam said, and rested his hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

  Chloe looked up at her father. “Yeah, my parents are taking me back home. While I’m in drug rehab, they’re going to take care of Kaden.”

  Jessica grinned. “So you decided to stick with the name the NICU staff gave him? I love it.”

  “Me too. Kaden is a fighter. So am I. With my family, I know we’ll be able to get through anything.”

  “Have Kaden’s doctors said anything about when he might be released?”

  “They want to keep him for at least another week. In the meantime, I’m going to stay here and participate in the hospital’s outpatient rehab program. The nurses said, if I want, I’m welcome to crash in the NICU for as long as I need to.”

  “I’ve got a suite at the Marriott where Chloe can stay, too,” Mary Ann said. “I plan on staying until Chloe and Kaden can come home.”

  “I wish Dad could stay, too.”

  “Someone has to go home and get things ready,” her dad said.

  Mary Ann’s eyes welled with tears. “We haven’t changed Chloe’s room since she left,” she explained. “I just couldn’t bring myself—” She covered her mouth and began to cry.

  Considering what she’d gone through last night, Jessica understood.

  “Please don’t, Mom. I—I’m sorry. Please don’t cry. We’re coming home.”

  Sam moved behind Chloe’s wheelchair and hugged his wife. “In a couple of weeks, we’ll be a family again. While you ladies are spoiling my grandson, I’ll be turning the guest room into a nursery and,” he said, giving Chloe’s shoulder a light squeeze, “unless you still have Biebermania and are into vampires,
we’ll have to take Justin and Edward off the wall.”

  Chloe laughed. “Yeah, not so much. My tastes have changed since I was fifteen.”

  “Ah, my daughter’s become more sophisticated, then. Fair enough. Before I leave, I want colors picked out. When you come home, I want you to feel at home.”

  Regret and understanding suddenly hit Jessica with overwhelming force. She pictured Sophia’s room. Not the one designed for a nursery, but the little girl’s room Dante had created for their daughter. She stared at Chloe and her parents, and realized she owed her husband a huge apology. He’d changed Sophia’s room, not to spite her, but to make it more welcoming for when their daughter finally came home.

  Fighting back the tears, she looked to Kaden, who yawned, then opened his eyes.

  “Oh, look,” Mary Ann gushed. “He’s finally decided to wake up and meet us.”

  “He’s so beautiful, Mom,” Chloe said, and began to cry. “I—I don’t deserve him.”

  “We used to think the same thing about you and your brother.” Sam smiled. “Remember that first night we brought Chloe home?” he asked Mary Ann.

  She chuckled. “Absolutely. Your dad and I stood next to your crib and watched you sleep. After a while, your dad turned to me and said, ‘I can’t believe they let us take her home.’” She leaned down to study her grandson. “We were so worried we’d screw things up. In a way, I guess we did.”

  “You guys didn’t do anything wrong. I did,” Chloe said with vehemence. “If I have to spend the rest of my life proving that to you, I will. I don’t ever want to hurt you or myself again.”

  “You’ve been given a second chance.” Needing to leave and go to Dante, Jessica handed Chloe the card she’d bought for her and the baby. After her meeting with Heather, who was being treated at the same hospital Chloe had just been transferred from, she’d stopped at a drug store and bought a VISA gift card. The one hundred dollars wouldn’t go far, but it would buy plenty of diapers. “There’s no doubt in my mind that you’re truly blessed.”

  “Heather said the same thing.”

  Jessica cringed. “Please don’t lump me in with that woman. She’s—”

  “A crazy bitch?” Chloe looked to her mom and dad. “Sorry about the language.”

  “That’s okay, honey.” Her dad patted her shoulder. “Sometimes you gotta call ’em the way you see ’em.”

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Mary Ann asked.

  “She has a lot of charges against her. It’ll take a few days before everything is squared away, but once I learn something, I promise to let you all know.”

  “Thank you.” Chloe tapped the envelope on her lap. “What’s the card for?”

  “It’s not much. Just a little something from me and my husband, who I need to get home to.”

  “Well, thanks for stopping by. I hope you’ll come back soon.”

  “I will.” She grinned and glanced at Kaden. “I want to hold the baby.” On a sigh, she took a step back. “Take care.”

  “Detective, can I ask you something before you leave?” Chloe asked.

  Jessica stopped, and looked over her shoulder. “Sure.”

  “Do you believe God has a plan?”

  She turned and took a step forward. “I don’t know.”

  “Heather did. She told me that God leading her to me was all His design.” She shrugged. “She might be a crazy bitch, but she also might be right.”

  “How’s that?”

  “When I was alone in the storage unit, I kept thinking how someone had to stop Heather. That she could do this again to another woman. When I woke up today and realized I was okay and so was my baby, I wondered if Heather might be right and that maybe I was part of God’s design. That He put me in her path because He knew my son would stop her from ever hurting anyone else.” She half-laughed. “Now I sound crazy.”

  Heather and Wayne’s actions had touched so many lives. But if Sophia hadn’t been abducted, she wouldn’t have been combing through Rachel’s program or missing children websites. She wouldn’t have known about Quinn Joyce, the last boy they’d kidnapped. She wouldn’t have had Dante working with her on the investigation, which had forced them to face their problems and ultimately led to their reconciliation. And if they hadn’t been working on the investigation, and hadn’t been in Lamoni, Iowa, the night Missy Schneider had been murdered, they wouldn’t have connected Chloe back to Heather and Wayne. Chloe was right, though. In the end, her son had stopped Heather and Wayne.

  “Actually, you don’t sound crazy at all.” She walked over, then knelt in front of Chloe. “I don’t know the answers to why we come in contact with certain people, or why bad things happen to some of us, and good things to others.” The watercolor of Sophia and Dante filled her mind. “I’ve never subscribed to the idea that everything happens for a reason.” She blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. “But maybe sometimes we have to lose something to find what it is we’ve been really looking for.”

  She gave the girl’s hand a squeeze, then, after saying goodbye, she left. Dante should be home by now and she desperately needed to see him. Because of the way she’d handled Sophia’s abduction, she’d almost lost him once.

  And she refused to risk losing him again.

  *

  Dante sat on the concrete basement floor, staring at the open bins. The day he’d brought them to Sophia’s room had been one he hadn’t been looking forward to, but it had been necessary for his mental health. He’d grown tired of looking at the closed bedroom door and how it had embodied the loss of his child and his wife. When Jessica had left him, he’d worked hard to rid himself and the house of the negative energy that had been hovering over it like a thick black cloud. Six months before Sophia’s seventh birthday, he’d made up his mind to do something about the room. With a small cooler filled with ice and a six-pack of Budweiser, he’d opened the bedroom door, looked at the crib, at all the things that screamed baby, then realized what had to be done.

  Sophia wasn’t a baby anymore. She needed a big girl’s room.

  Only Jessica hadn’t agreed. He shook his head and smoothed his hand along a pair of his daughter’s pajamas. Yeah, he’d fucked up big time. He should have consulted Jessica first. He should have at least warned her. He’d planned to tell her about the room change, but things between them had been going so well, he’d wanted to wait.

  Now his wife was pissed off at him—again. On top of that, he had an equally pissed off boss.

  Thanks to him, Lola could have been killed last night.

  Footsteps from above had him looking to the rafters. He should close the bins and go upstairs and try to apologize to Jessica again. While a part of him wanted to, the other part said, to hell with it. He’d made it perfectly clear he hadn’t meant to hurt her. Instead of giving him a chance to explain, she’d made her mind up that he was the bad guy. She’d acted like she was the only one who hurt, and that was where she was dead wrong. He remembered painting Sophia’s room, hanging up the curtains and putting together the crib. Like Jessica, he cherished those memories, the anticipation, the nervous excitement, picturing what his daughter would look like lying in her crib all bundled up in one of her baby blankets. He loved those memories, but changing the room hadn’t made them disappear. They were still in his head and heart, just like Sophia and Jessica were. His two girls. The people he loved the most.

  The basement door creaked, then light spilled down the staircase and hit the cinderblock wall. Not wanting to hurt Jessica any more than he already had, he quickly closed the bins, then stacked them.

  “Dante?” she called.

  He picked up a small toolbox. “Down here,” he said, walking toward the bottom of the steps.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, and stopped a couple of steps before reaching him.

  He held up the toolbox. “Just grabbing this.”

  “Really?” She moved past him, then walked to where he’d stacked the bins. After removing the lid off the
top bin, she looked over her shoulder at him. “Are you sure you weren’t looking at Sophia’s clothes? Because when I closed these up and put them away yesterday, this bin was on the bottom.”

  “I might’ve.” He set the toolbox on the concrete. “Did you sleep with her pink dress?”

  She replaced the lid. “I might’ve,” she echoed, and moved toward him. “I wish you could have been there today when I interviewed Chloe and Heather. Everything okay at work?”

  “Yeah,” he lied. “Everything’s fine.”

  She stopped in front of him and took his hand. “You don’t look fine.”

  He glanced away. “How’d the interviews go?”

  “Good. I’ll tell you about them after you tell me what’s wrong.”

  He shrugged. “My wife hates me, Lola’s in the hospital and my boss is ready to can my ass. Oh, and I got to see a dead body this morning. So it’s been an all-around great—”

  “Lola’s in the hospital?” She squeezed his hand tight. “What happened? Is she okay?”

  “Because of me, she has a concussion and two broken ribs.”

  “What do you mean because of you?”

  “I left my trainee alone. I let her go checking into the storage companies by herself. Thanks to me, she had zero back up. And thanks to the five guys who jumped her, she had no time to call for help.”

  “Five— Oh, my God. Were they the guys you two have been looking for?”

  “Yep. The owner of the last storage company she stopped at had pulled her aside and told her he thought something shady was going on in one of his units. She went to check it out, started questioning the guys at the unit, nosed around and that’s when they went after her.”

  “Thank God she walked away with only a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. That could’ve been a lot worse. Why didn’t she call for back up before going to the unit?”