Operation Nanny

by Paula Graves

  Was it possible that Lacey knew something about them that, for legal reasons, she hadn’t been able to report?

  He didn’t even recognize the last name—J.T. Swain. The name Swain sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Maybe he’d call Quinn and ask. If there was anybody who knew where all the bodies were buried, it was his boss at Campbell Cove Security.

  With a glance at his watch, he saw he’d been in the room for under ten minutes, all the time he was willing to leave Katie on her own, even with the toddler gates blocking her exit from the small entertainment parlor.

  He engaged the doorknob lock as he left the room, then took care with his lock-pick tools to relock the dead bolt without leaving any obvious pry marks. He disengaged the portable gates and settled on the sofa behind Katie, smiling back at her when she managed to drag her attention from the television screen long enough to flash him an adorable grin.

  She was a real heartbreaker, he thought, acutely aware of the tug of affection he felt every time he looked at her. After playing father to his younger siblings, he had been determined never to have children of his own. They were too much responsibility. Too fragile for him to dare to love. His own brother and sisters he’d loved because they were his family, but the more they’d come to depend on him for everything they needed, the more aware he’d become of just how easily one or more of them could be snatched away from him.

  This job as Katie’s nanny was never supposed to be a long-term situation. He was supposed to come here, assess the situation, provide Lacey Miles with the protection she had refused to hire for herself, and once the police found out who had killed her sister and brother-in-law, he’d be out of here, showing up for duty back in Kentucky at Campbell Cove Academy, where he’d be teaching combat tactics for civilians and law enforcement to advanced students at the school.

  He needed to put some emotional distance between himself and Katie and Lacey. It would be all too easy to let himself get so tangled up with them and the danger they were in that he wouldn’t be able to easily find his way out.

  Rubbing his forehead, where the first twinges of a tension headache were forming, he pulled out his phone and called Alexander Quinn. He quickly ran down Lacey’s list of prime suspects. “I get why al Adar is on the list,” he said quietly, keeping an eye on Katie to make sure she wasn’t paying attention, “but what do you know about the Whittiers or this J.T. Swain?”

  “The Whittiers—I’m not sure. I’d have to poke around, call in a few favors and see if I could separate fiction from fact. But I know someone who could put you in touch with someone who knows a whole hell of a lot about J.T. Swain.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He was a backwoods drug kingpin. Part of a family of redneck thugs headed by Jasper Swain before he was arrested and died in prison. J.T. was his nephew, the son of Swain’s sister Opal. His real name is Jamie Butler, but his mother convinced him to take the Swain name instead. Maybe she thought it would put him in a better position to take over the whole family business.”

  “A real stage mom, huh?”

  “She was a piece of work. Even her son must have thought so, since he killed her before he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Law enforcement has been looking for Swain for nearly five years now. He shot Opal and disappeared into the woods. Nobody’s admitted to seeing him since, although there’s folks in that part of Alabama who might be inclined to see him as a folk hero.” Quinn sounded disgruntled. “He’s a bad guy. And he had bomb-making experience.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ll call her bosses at the network, see why she might see him as a threat to her specifically. I suppose she might have done an investigative report on his story. It’s a pretty tantalizing mystery.”

  The sound of vehicle tires crunching up the gravel driveway drew Jim’s attention. He crossed to the front window in time to see Lacey’s car take the turn into the side parking area. “She’s back. I’ll email you the photos of her suspect list later. See if you can make anything out of them.”

  He turned to Katie. “Your aunt Lacey is home. Why don’t you come give her a hug?”

  Katie toddled over to Jim, lifting her arms to be picked up. He lifted her and pasted a smile on his face, wondering if he looked as guilty as he was starting to feel.

  When he’d agreed to take this job, it had seemed a worthy cause, even if he’d have to engage in a little deception. Lacey Miles was an independent, strong-willed woman who’d just lost her sister in a bombing that the police believed had been meant for her. Her bosses had wanted to supply full-time security to her, but she’d resisted, insisting that all a security entourage would accomplish was drawing more attention to her and putting her in even more danger.

  The suits at the network had disagreed. So they’d called Alexander Quinn at Campbell Cove Security, who’d apparently done some work for one of the top bosses. Quinn had made a call to Jim, who had just applied for the instructor job at the company’s civilian-and-law-enforcement training academy a couple of days earlier.

  “I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure how your experience as a child caregiver was ever going to come into play in your job,” Quinn had said with a grim laugh. “But it turns out, it’s the answer to a knotty problem.”

  Lacey Miles was in need of both security, which she refused to consider, and child care, which she was desperate to obtain. Jim Mercer was the perfect person to provide her with both.

  He just had to make sure she never knew that being a nanny was only half his job.

  But the problem with that was, he had to lie to her to keep her in the dark. And it was becoming harder and harder to justify those lies to himself.

  Chapter Nine

  Lacey felt completely drained, even though her meeting with Detective Bolling had lasted only a few minutes, as he had to be back on the road to DC for his task-force meeting that afternoon.

  It hadn’t been her blink-and-you’ll-miss it meeting with Bolling that had left her feeling so wrung out, however. She’d made the mistake of sticking one of the DVDs he’d handed over into the backseat DVD player in Marianne’s car, too impatient to wait for Katie’s naptime to start looking for the blue pickup truck.

  What a stupid, stupid mistake. She hadn’t made it five minutes into the video before she’d felt the urge to throw up. She’d thought her own memory of the night was painfully unfiltered, but the camera’s objectivity was brutal. It captured everything, all the images she’d been spared seeing that night.

  “Are you okay?” Jim asked, concern warm in his eyes when she refused his offer of a turkey sandwich for lunch.

  She couldn’t bear the kindness of his gaze, so she looked at Katie instead, her heart aching as she thought about what her niece had lost. At least she hadn’t been there, too. At least she had a chance at the life the car bomb had stolen from her parents.

  “I made the mistake of trying to watch one of the DVDs in the car,” she said bluntly. “I wasn’t prepared.”

  “I don’t know how you can prepare for something like that.”

  She let herself look at him then, just a brief bump of gazes. “No.”

  “Do you think you’ll want to eat later?”

  She shook her head, unsure she would ever want to eat again. “I should push through these disks.”

  “Let me put Katie down for her nap and I’ll help.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “I’m not as close to it as you are. And I’ve seen worse, believe me.”

  She was too drained to argue. He was probably right—his objectivity would be a benefit. And if he was there watching with her, maybe she could be stronger and more objective about the videos, too.

  While he coaxed Katie from her high chair, Lacey walked down the hall to the small room her brother-in-law had
turned into an office. She put the set of DVDs on the desk and headed back up the hall to Katie’s bedroom.

  Jim had settled her in the crib and stood beside her, giving her golden curls a brush. He looked up at Lacey with a smile.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Wead?” Katie asked, looking up at Jim.

  “You want to read to her this time?” Jim asked Lacey.

  After watching the video, she realized, the thing she needed most in the world was to cuddle Katie and remember that not everything she loved had been lost that night. Giving Jim a grateful smile, she settled in the rocking chair with Katie and picked up the book lying on the bedside table. “Mrs. Moon’s Lullaby,” she said aloud, peering at the cover. She’d never read this one before.

  “We bought it at a shop in town the other day,” Jim told her. “Katie loves it.”

  Lacey flipped the page and started reading about Mrs. Moon telling bedtime stories to the stars. It was a charming graphic poem and Jim was right—Katie loved it. By the end, Katie was yawning her way through the final lines, then babbled softly about the pirates, snowflakes and penguins all featured in Mrs. Moon’s tales until she fell asleep.

  Jim had waited at the door for Lacey, his expression sympathetic. “Feeling any better?” he asked quietly as he closed the door behind her and followed her down the hall to the office.

  “Yes, actually.” She sat at the desk in front of the large monitor of an all-in-one computer that had belonged to Toby and motioned for Jim to pull up a nearby chair. “Now I’m just going to have to suck it up and watch these things. Were you serious about helping me?”

  “Absolutely.” He sat beside her. “If you want, I can grab my laptop and look through these for a blue pickup truck while you see if anything in the videos catches your attention.”

  “That’s asking a lot of you,” she said, starting to regret asking him to help. “It’s not pretty.”

  He put his hand over hers, his palm warm and slightly rough against hers. Working hands, she thought, surprised. She hadn’t expected a nanny’s hands to be so calloused.

  She felt a little sexist, assuming he’d be soft. If she’d learned anything from the time she’d spent caring for Katie since her parents’ deaths, it was that child care was hard. It was rewarding but difficult. And to choose to do the job as a vocation surely required strength, stamina and a willingness to get your hands dirty.

  In no hurry to get to the videos again, she let her gaze slide up his body. The Marine Corps training still showed, from his sinewy, muscular arms to the sharp gaze that met hers when her roving eyes finally reached his face.

  He was still holding her hand, she realized, in no hurry to let go.

  “You don’t have to do this today.” His voice was gentle, and his fingers flexed over hers. “Take a day. Get it out of your head and start fresh.”

  She started to move her hand out from under his, but somehow, she ended up turning her palm upward to grip his hand. “I need to get this over with. Putting it off won’t make it any easier. It might just make it worse.”

  He ran his thumb lightly across the inside of her wrist. It was a gentle, almost thoughtless caress, but the touch detonated a string of tiny explosions along her nervous system.

  She was attracted to him. It was wrong on so many levels, and nothing she could ever let herself think of pursuing, but she couldn’t deny it anymore.

  He was handsome. He was strong and kind. And he smelled delicious, a heady blend of crisp soap and pure, masculine musk.

  He was watching her with a gaze that surely missed nothing, including her helpless attraction to him, but he didn’t move closer, didn’t press the advantage. Even though he could have. Even though she’d have probably rewarded the daring with a helpless response of her own.

  She made herself pull away, squaring her shoulders against her own weakness. “Katie won’t sleep that long. Let’s get as much done as we can.”

  “Okay. Let me grab my laptop.”

  The room seemed bigger and colder when he left, an uncomfortable reminder of how large a presence he was becoming in her life.

  It was the last thing she’d planned for, nothing she’d hoped for. It was a complication in a life already burdened by a heavy load of complexity.

  What the hell was she supposed to do with these unexpected feelings about Jim Mercer?”

  He came back into the room, filling the space he’d left before. Overfilling it, consuming all the air until Lacey felt as if she couldn’t draw a full breath. “Where do you want to start?”

  Struggling against the undertow of attraction, she pulled out a disk and put it in the computer’s DVD drive. “I’ve watched the first thirty minutes of this one. I think it’s probably a good idea to get to the part after the traffic starts slowing down for people to rubberneck the crime scene. That’s when I remember the truck showing up.”

  For the next hour, Lacey steeled herself against the images and sounds of the police video of her sister’s scene of death, trying hard not to give in and watch through her fingers as if she were a frightened child. But it was wrenching and difficult, every bit as difficult as it had been when she’d first stuck the DVD into the SUV’s backseat player.

  “There you are,” Jim murmured.

  Lacey paused the video she’d been watching and rolled the desk chair closer to where he sat. Sure enough, she spotted her own dark red trench coat on the left side of the video frame. She was pacing near the crime-scene tape, her cell phone to her ear. When her relentless pacing turned her video self to face the camera, Lacey saw a pale oval looking back at her, shock and strain lining her features.

  Sympathy rolled off Jim in waves, swamping her. She couldn’t allow herself to meet his eyes or she’d be lost.

  “Look for a limousine,” she murmured, keeping her gaze glued to the laptop screen. “The pickup truck comes shortly after that.”

  This was a different angle from the one in her dream, she realized as she spotted the limousine she’d dreamed about come into view. “That’s it,” she said.”

  Jim paused the video. “Can you make out the license-plate number?”

  She peered at the screen, but she couldn’t make out the number. “It’s not a governmental plate,” she said aloud. “I thought it would be.”

  “Is that a W?” He pointed to the blurry first letter of the plate. “And those could be two Ts together, couldn’t they?”

  Sudden excitement fluttered in her chest. Could the limousine belong to one of the Whittier brothers? They were both spending a lot of time in the capital these days, building their networks as they ran for two open seats in western Connecticut.

  “Does that say Whittier?” Jim asked.

  Something about his tone struck her as odd, but she was too excited by the prospect of a lead to give it any further thought. She’d gotten so focused on the blue pickup truck that the possibility of a different clue hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  If the limousine belonged to one of the Whittier brothers, it might mean that she was on the right track. Even though nobody, not even the most vehement of the Whittiers’ detractors, had suggested either of the brothers or their family might be involved in anything as criminal as murder, Lacey hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that the family’s ruthless pursuit of public office—and the power that came with it—might have no upper limits. The brothers might be all charisma and smiles, but their father and uncles hadn’t made their fortunes following all the rules. Attaining the sort of wealth and position the Whittier family had amassed over the past half century hadn’t happened without some brutal methods.

  Were the brothers or their political handlers just as willing to get blood on their hands?

  “You were right,” Jim said, his voice breaking into he
r thoughts. She saw he’d let the video run a few moments longer and had paused it on the image of a blue pickup truck. “There’s the truck.”

  She leaned closer. “It’s the same truck I saw the day I went to Frederick,” she said after closer study. “See the dent on the front panel on the driver’s side? I didn’t remember that, exactly, but I think that’s why I’ve felt so certain it was the same truck each time.”

  “It’s a Toyota Tacoma. Looks as if it’s had a bit of wear and tear, so I’d say it’s probably a few years old.”

  “I’ll call Detective Bolling.” Lacey reached for the phone.

  As she dialed Bolling’s number, Jim ran the video ahead a few frames, leaning toward the screen to peer at the images. “I can’t make out any numbers on the license plate. It looks as if there’s mud splattered across the plate, obscuring the numbers.”

  “Intentional?” she asked as she waited for Bolling to answer.

  “Hard to say.”

  “Bolling,” came the detective’s voice in her ear.

  “Detective Bolling, it’s Lacey Miles.” She told him what she’d found and included the time stamps on the video. “Was anyone recording license-plate numbers at the scene?”

  “Not specifically, but I can have the original video enhanced at the times you mentioned to see if we can clear anything up.” Bolling’s voice dipped a half octave with sympathy. “I know watching that footage can’t be easy for you.”

  “It’s not,” she admitted. “But I think it’s worth doing in the long run.”

  “Don’t push yourself too far,” Bolling warned. “Remember, we have a whole task force of people looking into the bombing.”

  “What about the Whittiers? Have you had any dealings with them?”