by Childs, Lisa
Chapter Five
A gasp had Jed’s muscles tightening in apprehension. That breath hadn’t come from the body; Marcus Leighton was dead. Jed had checked his pulse to confirm death. The man’s skin was already cold. And so was Jed’s blood—cold with dread.
He turned toward the door and found Erica watching him—her eyes as wide with shock and horror as Marcus’s. She obviously thought Jed had killed his lawyer. He shook his head in denial of the question she hadn’t even bothered to ask. She had just assumed his guilt, not even looking around as he had, for the real killer.
No one else was inside the building; it was just the two of them. And the dead man.
“He was shot.” Jed pointed to the hole in Leighton’s chest, burned through his blood-soaked shirt. He lifted his palms. “I don’t have a gun.”
With a trembling hand, Erica pointed to the one sitting across the desk from the body. Leighton must have been visiting with someone who’d pulled the Glock 9 mm gun on him, shot him and then left it on the desk next to the half-empty glass of liquor. So whoever had shot the lawyer was someone he had known well enough to drink around. Back in the frat house, Marcus had discovered that he was a cheap and sloppy drunk, and so he’d learned to only imbibe around people he could trust.
“You think Marcus handed me the gun to shoot him with?” He snorted at her suspicion. “Touch him. He’s already cold. I did not kill him.”
But the fact that she automatically thought he had shot Marcus told him what he needed to know: Erica would never trust that he wasn’t a killer. Maybe not even after he found the real killer…
It wasn’t Marcus.
He hadn’t sold out Jed to hide his own guilt. He’d just sold him out for money.
Jed gazed around the office with its mahogany paneled walls. Filing cabinets had been built right into the walls, beneath rows of shelves. Jed reached for one of the handles, grateful that he wore gloves—ones he’d found in the guard’s vehicle. He closed his fingers around a brass handle, pulling open a drawer to search for his records.
He pulled open drawer after drawer until he found the K section—or where the K section should have been. All the records under K were gone. Before he could search elsewhere in the office, a noise caught his attention.
His muscles tightened at the distant wail of a police car. Just like the last murder, this one was probably also a setup.
If the killer had called the police to report his crime, he hadn’t left any evidence for Jed to find. Undoubtedly there was nothing in the office that would lead back to the real culprit. Like last time, it would probably all lead to Jed.
He hurried toward the door where Erica had stayed in fear, probably of him more than the corpse. “We have to get out of here.”
Her hand still trembling, she gestured toward the body this time.
“He’s dead. He’s been dead for a while,” he reminded her. “We can’t help him.”
“But we can’t just leave him here like that,” she said, her voice cracking.“We can’t just leave. We need to call the police.”
“Someone’s already done that for us,” he pointed out as the sirens grew louder. And his heart pounded faster with fear and dread.
“If the cops catch us here, I’ll be a dead man, too,” he said. And he couldn’t promise that Erica wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire. “There’s a shoot-on-sight order out on me.”
* * *
SHOOT ON SIGHT…
The words echoed in Erica’s head. The police would kill Jed rather than try to apprehend him? They considered him that dangerous a criminal?
“Did you touch anything?” he asked, his hand gripping her arm as he pulled her through the reception area toward the front door.
She had left it open behind her, just as she had found it. “I didn’t touch anything…”
Because she’d had a bad feeling over all those lights being on at three in the morning. How long had Marcus been dead? Hours? Minutes?
She hadn’t checked the body to see if it was as cold as he had told her it was. She glanced back toward Marcus Leighton’s office, but it was too far away and Jed’s hand too tight around her arm for her to escape him and go back to check now.
Then he ushered her through the front door and into the passenger’s side of the van. He turned his head back and forth, his gaze scanning the street before he hurried around to the driver’s side. He opened the door and jammed the key in the ignition just as he settled onto the seat. “They’re getting close.”
Erica glanced back and noticed lights flickering in their rear window. Her neck snapped as Jed pressed hard on the accelerator and swerved around a corner. “You’re sure we shouldn’t have stayed, that we shouldn’t have explained what happened…”
He emitted a bitter chuckle. “I told you—shoot-on-sight. That doesn’t give a person any time for explanations.”
“But I could—”
“Either get shot with me,” he said, as he maneuvered the van around the tight curve of the freeway on-ramp, “or go to jail for aiding and abetting a fugitive.”
“Aiding and abetting?” The words chilled Erica’s blood, so that she was probably as cold as Marcus Leighton. And of course he would have been cold since his door had been left open, probably when his killer had fled.
“You aided and abetted because you didn’t call the police the minute I showed up at your apartment,” Jed explained.
With a shudder, she relived that first flash of terror and panic she’d had when she’d realized she had opened her door to Jedidiah Kleyn. “Like you would have let me reach for the phone…”
“It wasn’t as if I bound and gagged you,” he said. “You had access to your phone. You called your neighbor.”
“But you had convinced me of your innocence by then.” And it hadn’t even occurred to her to call the police when he had been standing over their daughter’s bed, watching her sleep. He had looked like a devoted father, not a dangerous escaped convict.
“You’re not so convinced anymore,” he said, and the bitter expression on his handsome face turned to one of hurt and disappointment.
Regret clutched at her. “Jed…”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you along,” he said, his voice gruff now with self-condemnation even though she hadn’t given him a choice.
But he could have driven off without her when he had gone out the fire escape. His van had been parked in the alley behind her house. Instead, he had waited for her and maybe not just for the lawyer’s address. Maybe he had wanted her to be there when Marcus Leighton took back all those things he’d told her that had convinced Erica of Jed’s guilt.
A dead man couldn’t take back his lies…
“But if I hadn’t brought you along,” Jed said, “and you heard about his murder, you would have been certain I’d done it.” He sighed. “So now you only have suspicions…”
She shook her head, finally pushing aside those initial knee-jerk doubts to make room for common sense. “I know you didn’t do it. I was only outside a few minutes before I followed you in, and I didn’t hear a shot.”
“The gun could have had a silencer,” he said, almost as if he wanted to keep her suspicious and fearful of him.
She didn’t have any more experience with guns than she did drugs. “Did it?”
“No,” he replied. “But I don’t think it matters much to you what I say. You can’t quite bring yourself to trust me.”
“Jed, I spent all these years thinking you were guilty of horrible crimes.” The murders had been the worst, but she had felt like a victim, too. She had loved him and believed he’d only used her to provide him with a false alibi.
“You spent all these years thinking that only because Marcus convinced you of my guilt,” he said, his voice so gruff with anger that she wondered, if Marcus hadn’t already been dead, would Jed have killed him?
She shuddered at the thought. “And now he’s dead and we’re fleeing the scene of the crime.�
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He glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think the police saw us pulling away. At least they’re not following us now.”
She turned toward the back window and checked for herself. There were no lights flashing behind them. At this hour, there weren’t any other vehicles on the highway. She expelled a breath of relief.
“Or they did see us and noted the plate number and they’ll be waiting for us when we go back to your place,” he warned her, stealing away her brief moment of relief. “Maybe we should go someplace else until we know for certain.”
Erica shuddered again at the thought of armed policemen waiting outside her building or, worse yet, inside her home. “I don’t care. I have to go home—to Isobel.”
She rarely left her daughter at all and only ever with Mrs. Osborn. If she didn’t return, her little girl might feel like Erica had as a child…abandoned and unwanted. Panic clutched at her lungs, stealing away her breath. “I—I have to see my daughter.”
Now.
“If they catch us together, you’ll lose her,” he said. “You’ll go to jail for aiding and abetting me, and she’ll go to whoever you appointed her guardian—”
“There’s no one…”
She had no idea where her parents were now or even if they were still alive. Until she’d had her daughter, the only real family she’d ever had was Aunt Eleanor. But the elderly woman had died just a few months after Isobel had been born, and she’d left Erica the modest estate in Miller’s Valley.
“Then child protective services will take Isobel and place her in a foster home,” he said, a muscle twitching in his cheek as he clenched his jaw—as if he battled his own concerns for a daughter he hadn’t even known he had.
Erica trembled with nerves, realizing her stubbornness could have cost her little girl the chance at any relationship with her father, as well as the relationship Isobel already had with her mother. Panic gripped her, and she fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. She should have called the police right away.
Maybe if she called them now, they wouldn’t press charges against her. Maybe she wouldn’t lose her little girl.
But if she called them and gave up his whereabouts, would they do as Jed had claimed—would they shoot on sight?
* * *
SHERIFF GRIFFIN YORK STARED through the bars at him with suspicion hardening eyes that were already shadowed with fatigue. “I don’t like that you got a call from your lawyer at this hour,” he said as he tested the cell door, as if to make certain that Jefferson James was really locked up.
“Breuker is working hard to represent me,” Jefferson replied with satisfaction. Of course, with what he was paying the man, Rick Breuker damn well better be working his ass off. But his attorney might not be the only person Jefferson needed to pay.
Sheriff York wouldn’t accept his money, but there were some other officers who weren’t as honorable as he was.
“You’re not going to get away with all the crimes you committed,” York advised him.
He chuckled at the man’s naïveté. He’d been surprised and disappointed that a man this young had won the election for sheriff of Blackwoods County. But York wouldn’t last in politics, since he had no idea what the real world was like. “You might be surprised…”
James was surprised. His lawyer, Rick Breuker, had called him with the news that the police had been dispatched to Kleyn’s lawyer’s office. And a dead body had been discovered.
Breuker, who had connections in law enforcement, believed the body belonged to the lawyer, Marcus Leighton. And Kleyn was the number-one suspect, proving wrong the DEA agent’s claims of the inmate’s innocence, as well as confirming how dangerous Kleyn was to anyone who crossed his path.
That shoot-on-sight order was certain to be carried out now. Kleyn wouldn’t be apprehended; he would be dead.
Soon.
Jefferson James had offered an unofficial reward for Kleyn’s demise to ensure the convict’s fate. And once the number-one witness for the prosecution was dead, the case against Jefferson was certain to fall apart. He wouldn’t be behind these bars much longer before York would be opening the door for James, not to take a phone call but to go home.
To his daughter…
Emily had yet to come visit him, but with the reporters hounding her, maybe she just didn’t dare leave the house. When Jefferson was freed, he would explain to her that it had all been a horrible misunderstanding. That the only thing he was really guilty of was loving her and wanting to provide for her…
The sheriff studied him through narrowed eyes. “You’re up to something…”
Maybe the guy wasn’t as naïve as Jefferson had thought. But it wouldn’t matter. By the time he figured out the plan, it would be too late for the sheriff to step in and play hero.
Nobody would be able to save Jedidiah Kleyn this time.
* * *
THE CONTINGENCY PLAN…
He had intended to destroy the files relating to Kleyn’s murder case, just as he had destroyed the lawyer who had ineffectually defended Jedidiah Kleyn so that he had been sentenced to prison for two lifetimes.
Because Marcus Leighton had been so incompetent, he hadn’t thought there would actually be anything of value in that file. He hadn’t thought that the man had had the balls to hold out on him. But Marcus had been keeping a secret, maybe out of guilt or maybe out of misplaced loyalty to Jed.
So he was glad that he’d been thorough, that he’d gone through every paper and scribbled note in the folder before torching it. He had found information in those case files that he could use to finally bring Jedidiah Kleyn to his knees.
War hadn’t hurt the man. Neither had prison. But now he knew what would.
Hurting his daughter. Losing her, before he’d ever gotten a chance to spend any time with her, would finally push Jedidiah Kleyn over the edge.
Then, at last, he would prove that the man everyone else had always treated like a superhero was really just a mere mortal.
And mortals died, like Jed would eventually die after he’d finally and sufficiently suffered.
Chapter Six
Betrayal.
It struck him again like a shiv in the chest. And the same woman was betraying him all over again. He closed his hand around hers, snapping her cell phone shut before she could punch in the last one of nine-one-one.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. Hadn’t she listened to a single warning he’d given her?
“Calling the cops, which is what I should have done the first moment I had the chance,” she said, her voice hoarse with self-disgust and fear.
“So much for not doubting me…”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe about your guilt or innocence of those murders,” she replied. “You were convicted. You were sentenced. And you escaped. You’re a fugitive.”
“And you’re going to turn me over to authorities,” he said, bitterness welling up inside him. He never should have started to trust her again.
“I have to,” she said, her voice cracking now with emotion and regret. “I can’t risk losing Isobel. Not even for you…”
His pulse leapt at the torment apparent in her pale blue eyes. “Not even for me?”
“I should have come forward,” she explained, “no matter what your lawyer said. I should have talked to the police then and told them about that night.”
“Yes, you should have,” he agreed. But now, knowing what she would have told them, he doubted it would have helped. He still would have spent the past three years in prison.
She held tight to her phone and tried to tug free of his grasp. “I need to talk to the police now.”
The van swerved slightly as he gripped the wheel with only one hand. But he didn’t let go, even though he glanced to the rearview to make sure no one followed them and had noticed the erratic driving. He didn’t need to get pulled over now, so close to Miller’s Valley and their daughter. “They’re not going to believe your story.”
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His stomach lurched, along with the van across the snow-slick road, when he realized that. He regained control of the vehicle, but that was all he could control of this situation. No matter what she said, it was too late for her to salvage another error in her judgment.
As he had warned her, she would get in trouble for helping him now. Erica would go to jail, and their daughter would go into protective custody with strangers.
Unless…
“Give me the phone,” he ordered her in the tone of voice that had always had fellow inmates cowering in fear of him.
