“You’ll have to file a report and talk to the fire chief. Tomorrow’s soon enough. Come on. I’ll drive you back.”
She allowed him to show her into the squad car and drive the few blocks to her house. On the surface, her brain sifted through all the things she needed to do and how quickly they could be done. Underneath, she seethed uncontrollably.
Big K was responsible for this. She’d screwed herself good, revealing her existence and intentions. But he was a fool if he thought he’d scare her away. Instead, he’d given her one more reason to follow through. One more motive to kill him.
“You haven’t asked if we caught who did it,” Andrew observed.
She started, jerked out of her reverie. He was right, she hadn’t asked a single normal question. Cringing, she covered with, “I didn’t think you had any suspects, or you would have told me.” The obvious dawned on her. “You don’t think I hired someone, do you?”
Obvious, but ridiculous, and luckily Andrew agreed. “Do you have any ideas?” he asked.
She shook her head. Even if she wanted to tell him, it would take hours to explain, and he’d probably haul her to jail. Or the psych ward. “Thanks for coming to tell me. How did you know I was home?”
“Deputy spotted you coming into town. I tried your cell phone.”
She shrugged. “I forgot to turn it on after I left the hospital.” She opened the cruiser door as soon as Andrew stopped at the curb. “Thanks again. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
He started to lean over, maybe to catch her hand or arm, maybe just to say something, but changed his mind and straightened, nodding. He didn’t insist on following her inside, and she was grateful. Still, he waited until she’d closed the door behind her before driving off.
The first thing she did was search the house, wondering why they hadn’t torched it, too. She’d taken the hard drive with her this morning, and they had plenty of time to search her house again. Wouldn’t their message have been stronger if they’d destroyed everything she owned? Wouldn’t she be more vulnerable? Either they had other intentions, or they’d left something inside. But she found nothing—no bombs in the basement, or loosened gas lines, or anything deadly or harmful.
She didn’t feel any better.
Maybe that was their intention. Keep her on edge, wondering where the next swing would come from. Or maybe she still had something they wanted.
She should run. Hide. Drop everything. But that wasn’t responsible or practical, and it would leave her with no direction.
Because she had to, she made a list of all the people to contact and actions to take about the bakery and Brian’s care. Once that was done and uploaded to her cloud account so she could access it from anywhere, she turned to the object she’d tried to forget existed—until the moment Andrew had told her about the fire. After that, she couldn’t get it out of her head.
Missirian’s BlackBerry.
It had no password protection, which was so stupid she kept flicking around the apps, expecting to find something odd or cryptic to hint at a second, deeper layer. But there was nothing. Still certain she would hit a brick wall at some point, she started with the contacts list. And there it was. Not protection or encryption, and simpler than any code. All the contacts were listed by initials only. She could run the phone numbers, but he had over a hundred contacts in the list, and eighteen of them had the last initial K. None of those numbers came up in reverse lookup or Google. So she moved on.
E-mail was next, but he didn’t seem to have this unit automatically tied to an account, and it looked like he deleted everything as he read it. The deleted-mail folder was empty, and she didn’t have the tech savvy to retrieve anything else. Maybe Griff could, but he wasn’t here, and she refused to interrupt his sleep one more night.
She spent a good two hours digging around files, many of which were—finally—protected. Again, some tech savvy would come in handy right now. She didn’t know how to break passwords without guessing games or those cool devices they used on TV, the ones with the rotating number and letter combinations. Knowing nothing about Missirian, guessing seemed an inefficient way to go.
She flipped through innocuous-looking documents, forcing herself to pay attention to mundane details when her eyes glazed over and her mind wandered.
She stopped on a PDF invoice for auto parts, her finger hovering over the screen. Something here was off. She had no idea what the parts were, and there were no names anywhere. She scrolled up…and there it was. The address listed for Alpha Corporation wasn’t the house in The Charms. It was in Nassauga, Massachusetts.
Her body flared with a burning, joyful anger.
Gotcha, you bastard.
Of course, she’d thought so before, with The Charms and the boat and Chelsea. Each of those had been a step, but in her core, she knew this was the finish line.
After all Griff’s work, all the risks she’d taken, it had come down to luck. Missirian was careful and good at his job, but everyone made mistakes. There was no reason for this PDF to be on his BlackBerry. His oversight would be his employer’s downfall.
She’d never heard of Nassauga and quickly pulled it up on the computer. It wasn’t a town, but a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts. She found a promotional website and skimmed the information. Quaint, touristy but isolated, ideal for romantic getaways and day trips.
A zing of certainty went up her spine. This had to be it. There was a page about property and the ability for complete privacy due to development restrictions. The rocky terrain, both on and offshore, and the pattern of the ocean currents made boating to the island problematic, so…
A soft sound outside caught her attention. She lifted her head and froze, listening, from her seat at the kitchen table. Was that a voice? She started to rise, slowly, silently, as she strained to hear.
She was almost ready to dismiss the sound as her imagination when it came. The tinkling of glass, a low whump, and a crackle in the living room.
She rushed to the archway, but the living room was already half engulfed in fire.
“Bastards!” she shouted, squeezing the BlackBerry in her left hand. That was what they were waiting for. For her to be home and asleep so they could kill her.
Or flush her out.
No. Fucking. Way. If he thought he’d get rid of her this easily, he wasn’t paying attention. She was going to live.
And make him pay.
She whirled, but knew without looking they waited in the backyard for her to burst out the back door. She couldn’t escape that way, and the fire was raging too fast for her to stop it.
“Where, where, where?” She spun again, trying to think. The heat already had her sweating. The flames crept toward the hallway, threatening to cut off that route. Not that there was anywhere to go down there. The basement door in the hallway, the bathroom and bedrooms looking out on the front and backyards. All deadly traps of one sort or another.
She had to go up, and hope she could find somewhere safe to jump. She shoved the BlackBerry in her back pocket, turning it sideways to push it down as far as she could, and ran past the reaching flames. The hallway was already choked with smoke, and going up would only be worse, but the attic was her only chance. If she could get out one of those windows to the roof, she might be able to see an escape route.
She coughed and squinted, covering her face with one arm and reaching upward with the other, trying to find the ladder’s string pull by feel. It brushed her hand but she lost it, waving in empty air for too long before finding it again. This time she held on and pulled. The swollen wood didn’t want to release the ladder. She held her breath and grabbed with both hands, yanking, hanging with all her weight on the string, praying it wouldn’t snap.
Finally, with a long, protesting groan, the ladder pulled free and unfolded. She scrambled up and took precious moments to close it behind her, hoping the wood panel would keep the smoke and flames at bay a little longer.
The attic was more of a crawl spac
e, full of insulation between rafters with no floorboards, only a few plywood pieces around the access hole. She rested for a second on one of them, knowing she wasn’t any better off up here. She didn’t collect things, and never had to use the space for storage. So there were no old boxes to rummage through for rope or sheets or old flannel shirts or anything she could use to rappel down the outside of the house.
The air up here was still fairly clear, and she was away from the flames. She crawled quickly along two beams to the front dormer window and peered through the thick, wavy glass that was original to the house. The lawn looked empty, but a van was parked across the end of her driveway. She couldn’t tell if anyone was in it.
The window didn’t open. It had four small, heavy panes of old glass divided by solid strips of wood. The air in the room was warmer now, too, and she knew she was out of options. Gripping two rafters like a gymnast on parallel bars, she swung her legs and kicked at the window.
Her foot bounced right off. She kicked again, harder, to no effect, then moved closer to get more leverage and kicked again. And again. Her breath came shorter and her throat began to burn, and her barely healed knee protested the abuse. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw smoke curling through the crawl space.
She lowered her butt to a beam and rested, panting. If only she had something hard. A gun. A rock. Her only asset was the electricity she’d subconsciously collected.
She concentrated on channeling the energy into her legs. This time when she kicked, she pushed it out through the soles of her feet. The glass cracked, held together by the wood dividing the panes. She kicked a few more times, and most of the shards fell outward.
She felt an instant of cool air before the heated smokiness of the attic overwhelmed it. She peeked outside, keeping as much of herself hidden as possible, but there was still no one there. The van was motionless, and she saw no movement around the property. Above her, the roof overhung the window too far for her to climb onto it. Dammit.
She lifted one leg through the window and ducked her head and shoulders, holding on to the side of the window and preparing to hang. Luckily, she was facing the right direction to see a shadow move around the corner of the house, and froze. Too late. The person making the shadow spotted her and raised a hand. Was he the one who’d done this? Or just a concerned neighbor?
A second later the window below her and just to the right shattered. Flames shot through it, licking upward. She was running out of time from both directions. If she tried to drop to the ground, they’d be on her in a second. If she didn’t, she’d cook, or die of smoke inhalation.
There was no other way. She had to go the impossible route.
She grabbed the gutter above her, praying the previous owners had paid top dollar for secure anchoring. The metal creaked and sagged, but didn’t pull free. Her thumb screamed in protest. Gritting her teeth, heart racing, she slowly pulled the rest of her body out through the window and lowered her legs. The gutter sagged further and some of the nails strained, but it held. She couldn’t see the guy anymore.
She had to go to the left or burn in the fire coming through the window below. She shifted her hands, left then right, left then right, as fast as she could. Something crashed inside the house.
Almost to the corner. The drainpipe cut an angle to the roof, forming a triangle where she could get some leverage to climb up. She swung closer, closer, and stretched her left foot out to hook the triangle, but the position was wrong. She shifted closer and reached with her right foot. But then a hand wrapped around her left ankle and hauled hard. Three feet of gutter tore away from the roof, and Reese crashed to the ground, screaming.
Chapter Eleven
Pain seared her groin as the muscle pulled, spreading to her knee when her leg twisted in the heap they made on the grass.
But she was on top. She ignored the pain and struggled to her feet, her hands still gripping the edge of the gutter. She tossed it up, grabbed it like a baseball bat, and swung at the guy’s head. He threw up an arm to block it, yelling when she connected, hard. She swung again, clipping him in the shoulder and scraping along his neck. He went down on one knee, and she swung again, and again.
Why the hell didn’t she hear any sirens? It was late, but someone nearby must have smelled the smoke or heard the noise of the breaking windows or crackling flames.
By the same token, why wasn’t she surrounded by bad guys? She couldn’t believe only one man had been sent to take care of her. Only one, who now cowered on the ground at her feet, covering his head against her blows.
She ran, tossing the length of metal behind a bush in her neighbor’s yard. She didn’t waste time knocking on doors or yelling for help. She just sprinted to get away.
Her breathing was so loud she couldn’t hear if there were footsteps behind her, but she didn’t look back. She drew on all the months of jogging and poured on the speed, pounding toward downtown and people.
Should she go to the police station? She didn’t have any more evidence of who was responsible for the fires than she did for the plane crash. She doubted the torch had any traceable connection to Big K, even if the cops could find him. Plus she’d have to explain why someone was after her, and doing so without confessing to her own crimes would be difficult, if not impossible. But she’d spent too much time lying; she wanted it to stop. She could go to the police and not lie, which would make them arrest her, which would be like slapping a target on her back, her front, and the top of her head. Forget that.
She paused between two brick buildings to catch her breath and reconnoiter. She’d seen no one on the street, but the guy from her house could still be behind her.
She waited, trying to slow and soften her breathing. No footsteps. No huffing and puffing. Maybe he saw her duck in here and was trying to sneak up on her.
She peeked again. Still nothing. But instinct told her not to move. A moment later, her pursuer burst out of an alley across the street, kitty-corner to hers. She slid back into the shadows and watched him peer up the street, then back the way she’d come. He’d tried to circle around and cut her off, she realized. He cursed and slapped his leg, spinning twice more, still looking, then ran back down the street, probably thinking she’d been slower than he anticipated. Good. He could keep underestimating her. She touched the BlackBerry in her left back pocket, her wallet in the right, making sure they were both there.
They could all underestimate her.
She turned in the opposite direction, toward The Charms, walking fast but not running, considering where to go. The answer didn’t take long to come to her.
She’d go to the Alpine house. She doubted anyone had gone back there since the raid. Missirian and his goons wouldn’t use it, especially since they’d been engaged in other, more obvious, criminal activity in town. The FBI should be done with the house, too. Once they collected all the evidence they needed, it would be closed off.
No one would ever expect her to hide there.
She set off at a light jog, taking multiple streets to make sure no one was following her, and soon approached the wooded alley along the side of the house.
The gravel bore evidence of multiple vehicles driving onto and off the property. The gate was closed but not locked. She let herself in and warily studied the house and grounds, which were dark and silent. Nothing moved, not even the trees overhead. It was odd, not having D greet her as he had on all her early visits.
Not bothering to hide, she walked across the property and up to the front door. The handle was locked, but the wood frame was cracked, the latch plate loose. The door rattled when she tested it. With better leverage than in the attic, she only needed four solid kicks with her good leg to finish the damage. The door flew open, the latch plate clattering across the floor.
“Way to go, feebs,” she muttered. She closed the door behind her, turned—
And was attacked.
…
At first she thought someone was going for her throat, but the body that
leaped on her was too small and too heavy. She fell backward with a cry and crashed to the foyer floor, struggling to fend off the dog, her pounding heart trying to escape her chest.
She was soaking wet before she realized Ripper wasn’t trying to shred her throat or tear off her head. He was greeting her with joy.
“Oh, get off, D!” She pushed, but the Rottweiler splayed his legs on either side of her body and licked what he could reach of her face even more enthusiastically. She gave in and rubbed his ears and neck, squinching her eyes shut against the drool. Mess aside, it was nice to receive such uncomplicated, genuine affection. “All right, that’s enough. Blech.” She pushed, and he backed off, stubby tail waggling, tongue flapping. He bounced at her feet as she moved into the kitchen. “You’ve been neglected, haven’t you?” She pet him some more, feeling his ribs. She couldn’t believe the FBI had left him here. Even if he’d hidden or evaded them, they should have called animal control. “Let’s go see if there’s anything to feed you.”
She found dog food in the cupboard and filled a bowl, which he wolfed down in seconds then stood, panting and grinning with his tail wagging.
“I’ll give you more later. I don’t want you to get sick. Let’s explore now.”
She needed a phone. She wanted to call Griff, to let him know what had happened before he heard some other way. She craved the sound of his voice, something to ground her, to prove she had something left when the rest of her life had just been destroyed.
The dog padded along beside her as she searched the rooms. All of the downstairs rooms were furnished but had none of the clutter of being lived in. No books on end tables or newspapers on the floor, no papers stacked on the kitchen counter or shoved into drawers. No phones.
She went upstairs and looked in the film rooms. They’d been gutted, all the equipment gone. Even the beds had been stripped of sheets. A few empty DVD cases remained in the room she’d been in, and nicks and gouges in the door frame testified to the scuffle that had gone on there.
A Kiss of Revenge (Entangled Ignite) Page 18
