by Lacey Baker
“I found the safe you said held all your insurance documents and other important paperwork,” he told her, nodding behind him to the spot on the floor where he’d placed it when he came in.
The bags he put on the bed next to her. “These were some things that hadn’t been broken and weren’t damaged by the fire and smoke. Nikki’s dad said there was some extensive smoke damage throughout the entire building, but he thinks it’s salvageable. We can call the insurance company tomorrow morning and get them down here to start the claim process.”
He’d been talking really fast, hoping something in those bags would make her smile again. She pulled out two things, holding one in each hand, and looked up at Parker with tears in her eyes.
“You saved these for me?”
Parker stared down at the salt and pepper shakers—Dorothy’s ruby slipper and the Wicked Witch of the West’s black hat. He nodded. “Yeah, you said they were your favorites.”
Drew nodded. “They are.”
“I’m really sorry this happened,” Parker said the moment one tear slipped down her cheek. “If I could go back in time, I’d do so many things different, Drew. I would have listened to my supervisor. I would have gone back to Baltimore after I knew someone had tried to run me off the road. I wouldn’t have involved you at all.” He said the last quietly.
It was the truth. Of all the things Parker had done in his life, this one was what he most regretted. Not spending that night with Drew and having a baby develop from that union, but all the rest. Witnessing the Vezina murder, investigating when he was told to leave it alone, thinking he was invincible when a bullet could kill him just as easily as a Molotov cocktail thrown through the front window of Drew’s shop could have killed her.
“Regrets are useless,” she told him. “Totally useless and a waste of time. You did what you thought was right at the time. Now that you’ve told Ryan and Sheriff Farraway what’s going on, I’m sure they’ll catch Jared and put him under the jail for breaking into my place and then torching it, and they’ll find whoever is behind the attacks on you.”
“When you gave your statement to the sheriff at the hospital, you said Jared had been the one to break into your apartment. What makes you so sure it was Jared?” Parker asked, keeping his voice as level and as calm as possible.
Drew still held the shakers in her hands, rubbing her thumbs over each of them. “The baseball cap. I saw it the moment I stepped out of the bedroom,” she told him.
“But you didn’t actually see his face?” he prodded.
Drew looked at him, then frowned as she contemplated his question. “No. I didn’t actually see his face. I just saw the hat and I lifted my arms to swing the bat I was holding. Then he sprayed me and I went down. Wait a minute, how did Jared get out of jail? Carl said he was locking him up earlier that day. How could he have gotten out of jail and come right back to my place in the span of just hours?”
“Right,” Parker told her. “Jared’s fancy lawyer didn’t get here to post bail for him until the next morning. He was in jail the entire night of the explosion.”
The shakers slid slowly from her grasp, clanking together as they met on top of the sheet that covered her legs. “Then who was it? Who came into my apartment and touched my things and then blew up my flower shop?”
Parker took a deep breath then and reached for her hands. He held them both tightly, closing his eyes and silently giving thanks that she hadn’t pulled away from him.
“Jonah was just about to make his next circle around your block when a car sped past him. That same car almost hit Hoover King just a block away from city hall. Miracle of miracles was that Hoover remembered the license plate. He reported it to Jonah the next morning because he thought the sedan might be trying to horn in on his taxi business around town. Hoover’s description of the car matched the one Jonah remembered seeing, and he ran the tag.”
He paused, hating to have to say this about as much as he’d hated it when Kyle and Jonah had told him, Preston, and Ryan earlier today.
“The car’s registered to the Baltimore City Police Department. When Kyle called the station to find out who had signed the car out, he was given my name.”
“What?” she gasped. “You were not driving that car that night. You did not break into my house, then throw a bomb through the front window and speed off!”
Her voice grew louder with each word, it seemed, her cheeks flushed with the emotion rippling through her. Emotion that Parker wasn’t certain she would feel once he revealed these things to her. He’d thought she’d be disgusted and say she was leaving, say she didn’t want her child growing up around such a colossal jerk, not to mention a moving target that was now being framed.
“No. I didn’t. And lucky for me I have an alibi. Mr. Sylvester talked to me for at least forty-five minutes that night, and then Savannah saw me going into my bedroom just before midnight. Jonah called in the explosion at nine minutes after twelve. There’s no way I could have run from here to your place, tossed a bomb, then been back here in bed by twelve fifteen when Kyle called me to tell me about the explosion.”
“Right, but everyone already knew that, didn’t they? I mean, you weren’t really considered a suspect?”
She sounded incredulous, her eyes filling with growing concern.
“I don’t think anybody here thought I did anything wrong. But now that Kyle made that call, my supervisor back in Baltimore has been alerted to what’s going on. He told Kyle he would investigate my involvement in signing out the car and the Vezina murder.”
“There is no involvement, and he’s an idiot if he believes anything else! A big, stupid idiot!”
Parker couldn’t help smiling at the quick rise in temper she was showing at his defense. “Remind me to take you with me when I go before the review board.”
“Are they the ones that are going to give you your job back?”
And because Parker seriously doubted that he would get his job in Baltimore back, and because he was almost 85 percent positive that he didn’t want his job in Baltimore back, he could only look at Drew sorrowfully.
“What’s more important is that since the car is the property of the police department, it has a GPS tracker beneath the engine.”
“Great,” Drew said, letting out a sigh of relief. “That means you can track it, find out where it is, and go get the asshole that destroyed my shop.”
“Right, baby. That’s exactly what I plan to do tonight.”
* * *
Route 33 led out of Sweetland and directly into Easton. To the west was Queenstown and to the east, Cambridge. Parker had traveled in all directions more times than he could count. But tonight he drove in the back of one of two white SUVs with tinted windows and FBI agents in the driver’s seats. At his back he felt the weight of his nine-millimeter, its twin at his right ankle. His mood was grim as they traveled, his mind on Drew and how she’d looked after he’d showered and dressed before Preston came to pick him up.
She’d watched with interest as he’d strapped on his first weapon, then slipped the second behind his back, her breath hitching as he’d checked the clip and the safety first. He’d said everything he knew to reassure her, never having had to reassure anyone before when he set out on a case.
“I won’t be alone,” he’d told her as he sat beside her on the bed. “Ryan has a whole unit with him now, and Sheriff Farraway’s coming along. We’ve already notified the Easton police, even though this is solely an FBI investigation at this point.”
She’d nodded but hadn’t spoken.
He’d cupped her face in his hands then, leaning forward to kiss first her forehead, then the tip of her nose, and then her lips.
She’d sighed as he’d pulled back slightly.
“Come back,” she’d whispered.
There it was again, that tight clenching in his chest that made Parker feel almost like weeping. Instead he’d lowered his forehead to hers and closed his eyes. “I promise.”
�
��I love you,” she’d said in a voice so quiet, he’d almost thought he’d been hearing things.
His eyes had shot open, meeting hers as she’d looked back at him tentatively.
Parker had sighed, unable to use the excuse that he didn’t know what that clenching in his chest meant or that he simply wasn’t sure what this foreign emotion was he carried around for her. “I love you too, baby.”
That had been almost two hours ago, and Parker missed her already. He missed her scent, the way she looked at him when she was about to question something he did or said, and especially the way she looked at him when she said she loved him and he returned the words. He’d held her so tight before leaving that he’d thought he might crush her, and when he’d finally left the house he’d made Preston wait a few minutes before pulling off, praying with every bit of faith his grandmother had instilled in him that he would come back to her and his child.
“We’re here,” Preston’s composed tone announced.
Parker continued to stare out the window as the SUV came to a stop just off a dark road. Up ahead there were lights, a parking lot, and the motel where the sedan had been traced. He heard doors opening and closing quietly, watched through the window as the agents in the vehicle in front climbed out, Kevlar vests on, weapons already in hand. But Parker didn’t move.
“You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” Preston said, a hand on Parker’s shoulder.
Preston would stay in the SUV because he wasn’t a law enforcement officer. He could shoot and had a license to carry a concealed weapon, but he didn’t like gunfire much. Of course, none of that had stopped him from running into that abandoned house to save Heaven from her kidnappers. This time, Preston had been along to offer advice on how to preserve this case so that it wouldn’t fall through the legal cracks when it came time to prosecute.
“Right now BCPD considers you a suspect. You’re not an official investigator on this case,” Preston continued.
And those facts gave Parker an official reason not to go in. It gave him a valid excuse in case they all returned home and everyone asked what happened—he could report that he’d stayed in the vehicle with Preston. It was his way out.
There always seemed to be a way out for Parker, another choice that would be easier and likely less of a risk. But he never took it. Never even considered it. He did the dangerous things, took the highest risks, played the worst odds. But that was before Drew, before his unborn child’s life had been threatened, before the “happily ever after” in Sweetland looked so appealing to him.
“I’m going,” he said solemnly, and got out of the SUV. Ryan came up behind him instantly, as if the man had been waiting for him to step out of the vehicle.
“Stick close and let me or one of the other agents take him down. The more your name stays out of the official reports, the better chance you’ll have at keeping your job,” Ryan told him with a firm nod.
Parker shook his head. “All I care about is bringing this bastard down. Nothing else matters besides eliminating the threat to my family.”
With that they covered the ground from the vehicles to the side of the motel. Four agents had run across the parking lot, one standing with a thumbs-up next to a sedan that matched the description Jonah and Hoover had given. Two more agents went to the door of the room directly across from where the car was parked. The parking lot was basically empty except for another car that was closer to the front entrance. Add that to the fact that only this room had a light on, and they had a pretty good indication that this was where they would find the driver of the vehicle.
Once the two at the door gave the nod, Ryan and Parker ran with two other agents at their back to the door of the room. Ryan did a silent countdown with his fingers, then nodded as his hand went into a fist. The agent to the right of the door turned and kicked the door in. From that point on, there was a lot of shouting as the agents and Parker went into the room. Parker held his gun with both hands, arms raised, finger perfectly calm on the trigger, his eyes trained on the wall where the first two agents now held a man.
His face was pressed to the wall, his boxers wrinkled and crunched between his thighs. A white undershirt and socks completed his ensemble.
“Turn ’im around,” Ryan yelled.
And when they did, Parker felt the entire room spinning around him.
Chapter 22
“Will?” Parker finally managed, his throat dry with the one word. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Will Tinley was a fifteen-year veteran of the Baltimore City Police Department, and in the last two of those years he’d been Parker’s partner.
“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you, Cantrell?” asked Will, a six-foot-tall man with low-cut hair and a scar on his neck from where a suspect had taken a shot at him and barely missed killing him. “Even after the sergeant told you to back down, you just kept right on going. Always the hero,” he finished with a shake of his head.
Parker lowered his gun, closing his eyes to what he was now seeing as the reality of this situation. “Give him five minutes to tell me why he did this to me and to my family,” he said, barely banking the anger.
“Talk!” ordered the agent who had a death grip on Will’s arm, twisting it behind his back until the man cursed.
“It’s bigger than you can imagine. You think it’ll stop if you drag me away from here in cuffs? It won’t! They’ve got people everywhere, they’re gonna keep going no matter what.”
“Who?”
Will shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. They want you dead just like Vezina.”
“And they sent you to take care of that?” Parker asked, looking in disgust at the man he’d spent countless hours with.
“You’re lucky they sent me,” Will told him. Then he shook his head again, closing his eyes as his chest heaved. “I couldn’t kill you. No matter how much money was on the line, I just couldn’t do it. They’re gonna come for me now.”
“You’ll be in federal custody,” Parker told him.
“They’re everywhere, man. Every damned where! I didn’t want to get mixed up with them, but I couldn’t say no.”
“You could have. If you needed money, you could have come to me,” Parker told him, still trying to understand why all of this was happening.
Will was married, with twin eight-year-old daughters. He had a family and a career, he had it all. How had that man turned into this thin and pale creature he now stared at?
“You don’t have to hold me so tight, dude. I’m not trying to run. There’s nowhere for me to go. Nowhere they won’t find me,” Will said, his voice laced with defeat.
Ryan gave a nod and the two agents who had been holding Will released their hold on him but still stood close.
“Get dressed,” Ryan told Will. “Who is paying you? What do they want?”
Will shook his head as he was allowed to move to the bed, where pants and a T-shirt were lying as if he’d just taken them off. He pulled on the pants, looking at Ryan as he buttoned them.
“I guess it doesn’t matter now if I tell you everything I know. Is that what you’re hoping for?” Will asked.
“It’ll go a long way to helping you as far as jail time. We already have info on Witherspoon and parts of his organization. Maybe if you cooperate,” Ryan told him.
Will laughed. “If I cooperate, what?” He pulled his shirt over his head, then sat on the bed to put on his shoes. “You’ll give me a cleaner cell to live out the rest of my life in?”
Ryan didn’t reply.
Will looked over to Parker then, the two locking gazes, their entire history flashing before Parker’s eyes. The cases they’d handled and solved together, the cookouts Parker had attended at Will’s house. The smile on the face of Will’s wife, Beth, whenever Parker teased her about how sappy Will got when he talked about her. It made his temples throb.
“They will kill Beth and the girls. You know it and I know it,” Will said solemnly.
“W
e can protect them,” Parker offered. “Right, Ryan? They can all go into protective custody until this is over.”
“That’s right. Once we get back to the vehicle I can radio in for them to be picked up,” Ryan confirmed.
“And they live their lives in secret, hiding from everyone they know and love, all because of me.” Will shook his head and bent down to pick up his shoe. “I can’t let that happen. I just can’t.”
The next moments played out in horrific slow motion for Parker. As Will straightened from supposedly picking up the black tennis shoe that had been sitting right by his feet, Parker noticed the gun he’d retrieved instead.
“Gun!” one of the agents yelled, the sound a slurring of the one-syllable word.
Parker’s arm rose instinctively just as Will locked gazes with him once more.
“Tell Beth I love her. I always loved her,” Will said two seconds before he raised his arm, pointed the gun to his temple, and fired.
Parker jerked as if the bullet had somehow penetrated his body instead. He dropped his gun instantly, his heart beating a rhythm so fast that it drummed loudly in his ears. Around him there was cursing and movement and in moments the blare of police sirens and probably an EMT. People came in and out of the room, moving all about, talking, shaking their heads. None of which Parker acknowledged. He stood rooted to that spot, staring at the bed where the body of a man he’d once admired for his happiness and contentment lay dead.
* * *
“You couldn’t have stopped him,” Drew said, her voice quiet in the silence of the bedroom later that night.
Parker had returned to the inn, showered, and immediately climbed into bed, pulling Drew into his arms. He’d hugged her for a long time before finally explaining to her what had happened. Now, he simply kept his arms around her, while her head rested on his chest, the swell of her stomach grazing his thigh.
“He was in too deep, that’s what Ryan said as we drove home. He probably felt like this was the best solution rather than have a hit put out on him and his family. He died for them,” he told her with emotion still thick in his chest.
