Julie blinked. “You’re the one who sent me the obituaries,” she whispered.
“And I was the anonymous caller. I was trying to warn you. So you could protect Dawn. Not that he would ever hurt her—he wouldn’t. You have to know he wouldn’t.”
“Who are Sirona and Tessa?” Dawn asked, having lost the thread of the story.
Julie looked at her. “Two other girls who escaped the compound with you and me that day.”
“And you think Mordecai…killed them?” Dawn asked. Her voice shook a little, even though she tried not to let it.
“No, of course he didn’t,” Ms. Marcum said with a quick glance back toward the door. “He wouldn’t have hurt them. I think they killed themselves when they were forced to face how deeply they’d betrayed him.”
“You’re still as deluded as you ever were, aren’t you, Lizzie?” Julie asked.
She shook her head. “You never understood him, Jewel. But I did. I knew, when I got the news that Dawn had been taken, that it had to be Mordecai. And I remembered all the promises he made to me about how he was going to establish a new church, with himself as the head of it. The new Messiah. And how he had this plantation house in Virginia that he’d bought and was having renovated. We would be a family, the three of us, Mordecai and me and our baby girl, and we’d live in our home at the highest point in Heaven, the only house on Pine Tree Lane. Number one. He said it was fitting. I remembered it all.”
In the distance, Dawn heard a sound. A siren. No, more than one. And as they grew louder, she saw Ms. Marcum and her mom exchange a look that chilled her to the bone.
“Oh, God,” Julie whispered. “God, not this, not again.” She gripped Ms. Marcum’s arm hard. “We have to get Dawn out of here, Lizzie. We have to do it now!”
“Lizzie! Sunny!” Mordecai’s voice rang through the hall as his feet pounded closer.
Mordecai burst into the room just as Lizzie slammed the back of her hand across Julie’s face. Dawn yelped in horror as Julie tumbled backward onto the bed. “I told you to get Sunny back to her bedroom, and I meant it!” Lizzie shouted. “Don’t cross me, Jewel.”
“You’ll pay for this, Lizzie. I was your friend once. I raised your child for you. God, how could you turn on me like this? Much less on her? Your own flesh and blood?” Julie’s words seethed with anger. Dawn trembled with the force of it. She’d never seen her mother this angry.
“You stole my child,” Ms. Marcum corrected. “But that’s over now.” She gripped Julie’s arm, and pulled her to her feet. “Come on.”
They all turned, and Ms. Marcum saw Mordecai, in the doorway, came up short, as if in surprise, then spoke to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t take them straight to the bedroom. It’s not a mistake I’ll make again.”
He stared at her, searching her eyes. “For a moment I thought you’d decided to run out on me. Leave me to die at the hands of the soldiers. Like last time.”
She went to him, pressed herself close to his body and slid her hands around his neck. The tears that rolled down her face were thick, and they left red streaks. “I didn’t mean to leave you, Mordecai, but to die with you. Just as I will now, today, if that’s what it takes to prove my love to you.”
He seemed to hesitate, then, finally, closed one arm around her waist and let her lips find his. She kissed him almost desperately. “I love you, Mordecai. I know you better than anyone else, I know the man you are inside, the man no one else can see. I’ve always known that man. I’ve always loved him.”
He ran a hand over her hair, clasped her nape, kissed her forehead. “No one ever loved me the way you do, Lizzie. God, I need you.”
“And I’m here.”
He nodded, gently pushing her aside, and that was when Dawn saw the gun in his other hand, as he waved it toward her mother. “Come on, you two. You need to go into the safe room, downstairs. It’s bulletproof, fireproof. You’ll be safe there. I promise.”
Dawn clung close to her mother and walked ahead of Lizzie and the madman, as sirens screamed and brakes squealed outside the house.
* * *
Sean felt as if he were reliving the nightmare that had haunted him all his life, only instead of crouching in the bushes outside a compound with a camera, he was crouching behind a boulder with a sizable bullethole in his chest. And instead of agents from the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms piling out of vehicles and taking up positions behind them, it was a selection of police. County Sheriff’s Department vehicles and Virginia State Police cruisers came to cockeyed stops alongside unmarked sedans that could have belonged to federal agents. No trucks full of soldiers in full body armor. Not this time. But the results probably wouldn’t be any different. The arrival of two ambulances on the fringes of the action confirmed his theory that they were expecting the worst.
He struggled out of his shirt, leaving on the ribbed tank style undershirt he wore beneath it, better to examine the bullet wound. He’d fully expected to be dead in short order when he’d felt the impact—like a sledgehammer to the chest. It hit him so hard his feet left the ground several heartbeats before his back slammed into it. Now, though, he saw that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
He tore a strip off his shirt and used it to dab away the blood until he could locate the hole, two inches below the collarbone on the right side of his chest. Far from the heart, thank God, and he didn’t think it had impacted a lung, either. At least, he seemed to be breathing okay. The pain was intense, but nothing like he would have imagined a bullet wound would feel. It burned, as if someone had taken a cattle brand to his chest. It had bled quite a lot, but he was still conscious, so he didn’t figure it was a life threatening loss. He wadded up another piece of his shirt and pressed it to the hole, wincing at the increased pain the pressure brought. Almost as an afterthought, he leaned forward, craning his neck to try to see his own back. He couldn’t see any blood back there. Then he picked up his shirt, wincing when he moved his right arm to do so, but forcing it. He held the shirt up and saw no blood anywhere on the back of it. No exit wound, then.
He told himself that was a good thing. He’d covered a lot of shootings, and he knew exit wounds tended to be bigger and bloodier than the neat round holes bullets made when they entered a human body. But part of his brain argued that only meant a sizzling hot bullet was still smoldering inside his chest somewhere, waiting to cause trouble.
He didn’t suppose it mattered much which part of his brain he listened to. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it either way.
He pressed his back to the boulder and levered himself to his feet, still holding the patch to his chest. Off to his right, in front of the sprawling mansion, the cars were lined up now. They’d shut off their infernal sirens, and most of the officers were standing on the driver’s sides of their vehicles, aiming weapons over the roofs in the general direction of the house. A man in a dark blue suit got a bullhorn out of a trunk. A blond woman gripped his arm and spoke emphatically. And then Sean recognized her. Cassie Jackson. All the way down here.
He drew a big breath and yelled, “Jax! Jax, over here!”
She frowned, turning and searching until she spotted him, and then her jaw dropped. She shot the suit a look, said something, pointed, and when the other guy nodded, she jumped into one of the cars, slammed it into Reverse and backed up, off the road and right up to the boulder. When she got out, she kept low and ran to the cover of the oversize rock.
“Jesus, what happened to you?”
“Mordecai Young happened. He has Julie inside, and probably Dawn, as well.”
“Let me see that.” She reached for the hand he held over the wound, but he backed away.
“Just get me over there where the action is, before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” she told him. “I made the locals promise to let me verify Dawn was up here before they put out the word, but they only kept that promise as long as it took me to leave the room. They had the entire freaking
cavalry on my tail, feds included, before I ever got here.” She pushed his hand aside and winced. “That’s a bullet wound.”
“No shit? I thought it was a beesting.” He got to his feet and ran to her car, got in the driver’s side. “You coming or not?”
She got in, and he shifted into gear and drove back to the crowd of vehicles and cops. He got out, and so did she.
“Who’s in charge here?” Sean asked.
“I am,” the guy in the suit said. “Special Agent Ken Phelps, FBI.”
“Congratulations. Listen, you’ve got two hostages in there, and a man who’d rather die than give up. If you push him, he’ll push back, and those hostages will end up dead.”
Phelps frowned at him. “And just who the hell are you?”
“MacKenzie. The only journalist who witnessed this the first time you feds botched it, at the Young Believers’ compound, sixteen years ago.”
“We have protocol in these kinds of situations, MacKenzie. We know what we’re doing.”
“Yeah, as you demonstrated so aptly back then.” He saw the man getting impatient, turning away, picking up his bullhorn. Sean put a hand on his arm. “Please, just listen to what I have to say. I know this guy.”
“Listen to him, Phelps. He’s trying to tell you the same thing I’ve been trying to tell you from the second you showed up,” Jax said. “This guy doesn’t respond to protocol, or to threats or to force. He’ll shoot back, and he’ll use those hostages in whatever way he has to.”
“It’s more than that,” Sean said. “He thinks he’s some kind of messiah. Probably believes dying in a hail of gunfire would fulfill his mission in life. And he would far rather let Dawn Jones die with him than let her go.”
Phelps frowned. “And just how do you know all this?”
“Because the woman who’s in there with him, Julie Jones, told me. And she knows because she was one of the girls with him at that compound during the raid.”
“Bullshit. No one survived that raid.”
“That’s what I thought, too. I’ve spent the sixteen years since believing it. Living with it. I was there, I could have done something to stop it, and instead I just kept quiet, crouched in the bushes to get a story, and let everyone in that compound die. But they didn’t. Julie Jones survived. And so did her daughter. And I’m not going to stand by quietly and let them get killed—not this time.”
The cop blinked, clearly stunned. Slowly he lowered the megaphone. “Okay. Okay. So you have some kind of insight into this guy’s mental state, I’ll grant you that. But we have limited options here. Do you know how many ATF agents died in that raid? Just what do you suggest we do?”
Sean lowered his head, shaking it slowly. “It’s too late for stealth.” Lifting his gaze, he locked it with Jax’s. “We have to get them out. Make sure they’re safe before a single shot is fired.”
“Someone has to go inside,” she said.
Sean nodded.
“Impossible,” Phelps argued. “We don’t even know where they are. The house is huge. Probably booby-trapped. We have no idea how many guns he has inside, how many people are in there. It’s too risky. Whoever we sent in would be a walking target, and we know from past experience, he won’t hesitate to take our people out.”
Sean nodded slowly. “I’ll go.”
“You’re wounded.”
He glanced down, saw the blood flowing from his wound. He’d eased off on the pressure. Again he looked to Jax. “You got a first aid kit or anything like that around here?”
She nodded, leaned into her car and pulled out a handset microphone, spoke into it. “I need a paramedic over here. Tell them to stay low.”
A second later, a man came running from one of the ambulances, carrying a white box in one hand. “Sit down, MacKenzie,” Jax said, then she nodded at the new arrival. “See if you can patch him up a little.”
“Make it quick.” Sean peeled off the bloody undershirt. The medic made a sympathetic face and opened his kit. While he worked to clean the wound with alcohol, which stung like hell, Sean stiffened against the pain and tried to think logically. “If you can get him talking, I might be able to slip in from the back,” he told Phelps.
“And get picked off by whatever sniper he has watching the perimeter? I don’t think so.”
“Better me than Julie or her daughter.”
The guy finished his work, taping a heavy patch over the gauze he’d packed into the bullet hole. It hurt like hell, but it had stopped bleeding. “Thanks,” Sean said. “Anyone got a shirt?”
“You’re not going in there, MacKenzie,” Phelps said.
“You wanna stop me, you’re gonna have to shoot me.”
“And I’m going with him,” Jax said.
Phelps stared at them for a long moment. Finally the agent turned and signaled a nearby uniform. “Get me an extra vest and a spare shirt if you can find one.” Then he faced Lieutenant Jackson again. “You get yourself killed, I’m gonna deny I ever approved this.”
“Understood,” Jax said. She reached into her car, pulled out a shotgun, handed it to Sean. “You might need this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Julie had spotted something in Lizzie’s eyes, or thought she had, just before Lizzie had hit her. It had seemed almost…apologetic. Now she was confused. Just whose side was Lizzie really on?
“Don’t. Don’t lock us in any room, Lizzie,” Julie said as Lizzie led them down the stairs and toward the rear of the house.
Lizzie looked at her sharply. “It will be safer there.”
“I don’t want to be trapped in another house that’s under siege. Not again. We have to get out.”
Lizzie looked behind them, fear in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered. “If he saw you trying to leave…”
“What’s back here? Is there a back door?” Julie hurried ahead, not waiting for an answer, and found her way to a kitchen that seemed to be at the very back of the house. There was a door, and she ran for it, reached for the knob.
“No, Jewel, the alarms!”
Julie froze with her hand inches from the door, for the first time noticing the lighted digital panel mounted on the wall beside it.
“He’ll know if you open the door. Jewel, there’s nothing out there but open lawn and the lake. He’ll never let you leave.”
Julie searched Lizzie’s face, not sure whether to believe her or not. Her hands trembling, Julie pushed the curtain aside and stared out at the rolling back lawn. It was a vast green expanse of open area between the house and the distant woods, which were the only hope of cover. Lizzie had been honest about that much, at least.
Then she saw something move in the trees and, squinting, stared harder. “Someone’s out there,” she whispered.
Dawn and Lizzie crowded close to her, staring out the window as four figures emerged from the trees and came running toward the house.
“My God, is that…?” Julie prayed she was seeing what she thought she was. But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
“It is, Mom. It’s Sean!”
Julie sagged in relief. “He’s all right,” she whispered. He wasn’t. She could see as he ran closer that he wasn’t. He held one arm oddly, bent at the elbow with the forearm clutched protectively across his chest, and his gait was uneven. Closer still, she noticed his color—stark and pale—and the lines of strain around his eyes. And then she couldn’t see details anymore through the veil of her tears. God, the power of what she felt when she saw him—it was irrational.
Three gunshots, short and rapid, shattered the stillness and tension, and the men outside hit the ground, facedown, halfway across the lawn.
She tried to see if they were hit or if they’d just hit the ground in an effort to avoid being shot. They didn’t seem to have fallen but to have flung themselves down, and they were now clinging to the skimpy cover of a tiny slope in the nearly flat lawn—which was barely any cover at all. She noticed long blond hair and realized they weren’t all
men. One of them was Lieutenant Jackson.
One of the men raised his head, and immediately another shot was fired.
“They’re pinned down,” Julie whispered. Then she moved away from the door and hurried through the house, her ankle so swollen by now that it was starting to go numb. It felt as if she were walking on a stump that wasn’t a part of her body. At least the pain had lessened. Dawn and Lizzie followed, both speaking at once, but Julie only ignored them and kept on going until she met Mordecai at the foot of the stairs with a rifle in his arms. He’d been about to go up, but he stopped when he saw her and shot a look at Lizzie.
“I told you—”
“I tried, Mordecai. There are two of them and only one of me. Give me a weapon, for God’s sake, so I can make them obey.”
He frowned deeply at her, shook his head side to side, just once, then started up the stairs. Julie grabbed his arm when he took the first step and yanked him around to face her as forcefully as she could.
“Just what are you going to do?” she demanded.
He lifted his brows. “I’m going to go upstairs, where I can get a better angle on those men cringing in the grass out there, so that I can send them to their maker.”
“Mordecai, don’t. My God, can’t you see it’s a lost cause? You’re surrounded by police, just like before. You’re out-gunned and outnumbered, and you have innocent people who are going to die—again—unless you do the right thing.”
He stared at Julie and, slowly, lifted a hand to cup her face. “You never did get it, did you, Jewel? Death is nothing to fear. How many times did I tell you that? It’s paradise.” He smiled gently, shifting his gaze to Dawn. “You’ll understand everything soon,” he said. “When we cross over together, the veils will be lifted from your mind, and you’ll see that everything I did was for you.”
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