The Widow's Protector

by Stephanie Newton

  He bent over, gasping for breath.

  She pushed past him and ran for the tree line. Where were they? It didn’t matter. The woods had to be safer. Fifteen feet. Ten. She was almost there. She didn’t dare look back.

  His heavy footfalls came behind her. She stretched out her stride. Two feet.

  He grabbed her sweater and jerked her back, punching a fist into her fractured ribs, and throwing her to the ground.

  Fiona tried to breathe but she couldn’t seem to get any air in. He’d known instinctively exactly where to hit her to do the most damage. She curled into a ball to protect her ribs from more injury and tried not to cry.

  Maybe she would have another chance.

  He leaned over her. “Did you honestly think you would get away?”

  Fee glared at him. “Do you honestly think you’ll get away with this?”

  He shoved her shoulder to the ground with his booted foot and held her there, face-down, with his weight. She gasped in pain, gravel digging into the tender skin of her cheek.

  Nate leaned over and got close to her ear. She could smell the cinnamon on his breath. Her stomach turned. “Get off me.”

  He took rope and wrapped it around her wrists, cinching it tighter with every turn. “You can’t tell me what to do.” He tied it off and yanked her to her feet, putting his lips close to her ear. “You are going to regret running from me.”

  She barely registered the pinch of the syringe before her vision started to go.

  He’d drugged her. And as the world went black, her last thought was for Hunter and Sean. Her brave, sweet boy and the strong, serious man who had been her closest friend most of her life. Would she ever see them again?

  * * *

  Hunter started toward Fiona’s house, but something held him back. He turned around toward the rear entrance of The Reading Nook and retraced his steps. There was something he was missing.

  The lock hadn’t been picked. He turned slowly, one-hundred-eighty degrees. There, on the ground, a cracked and broken toothpick.

  Digging his cell phone from his pocket, he pulled up his contacts and called Douglas. When the police captain answered, he said, “Fiona’s neighbor saw you in the yard. Do you want me to meet you at the station?”

  Hunter drew in a breath, resisted punching the wall. “I’m not calling to turn myself in. I need your help, Douglas. I think something has happened to Fiona.”

  Douglas was quiet at first. Then, “Her house burned down. Isn’t that enough?”

  His gut clenched. He forced himself to take a breath. “Do you know yet if anyone was in the house?”

  “The firefighters are saying they think the house was empty. Why?” The noise behind Douglas’s words told Hunter that Douglas was at Fiona’s house. “Where is she? Hunter, I swear, if anything happened to her—”

  “Meet me behind The Reading Nook. I want to show you something. It may be nothing, but I can’t find Fiona and I’m getting a bad feeling.”

  He could hear Douglas breathing, deciding if he wanted to trust Hunter.

  “Douglas, come on. You’ve trusted me to have your back since we played baseball together in high school.”

  “Fine. Five minutes.”

  “Thanks.” A few seconds later, he saw Douglas picking his way through the emergency personnel. His phone rang again. He checked the caller ID.

  Thank You, God. Fiona.

  He pushed the button. “Fiona, where are you? Everyone is worried about you.”

  A mechanical voice said, “Fiona can’t come to the phone right now.”

  “Who is this?” Hunter demanded. Fear chasing dread through his veins, he had enough sense to press the record button on his phone.

  “It doesn’t matter who it is. What matters is that you’ll never find her in time. The countdown starts now. You have one hour. Maybe.”

  The connection clicked off and a picture message began to load.

  The message—a video—finished loading. Fiona’s face filled the tiny screen. He hit Play. The video zoomed out. She was tied to a chair in a one-room cabin. Her head rolled back, she wasn’t conscious. As the video panned the room, Hunter could see that every possible exit had been rigged with one of the detonator devices that had become so familiar over the course of this case.

  He’d never believed that old saying about blood running cold, but his heart nearly stopped when he saw her sitting there, at a madman’s mercy.

  “I’m going to get you out, Fiona. I promise, I will,” he whispered, closing his eyes. Could what had seemed so important just hours before really be so insignificant now? He couldn’t imagine his life without her. She was his friend, yes, but she was so much more.

  He looked up as he heard Douglas’s footsteps.

  “What’s going on, Hunter?”

  “Fiona’s been taken. And I think I know who has her.”

  * * *

  Fiona’s head rolled as she tried to lift it. The pounding in her skull increased. What happened? The last thing she remembered was running for the woods.

  She swallowed, her tongue and lips dry. She’d run for the tree line and he had tackled her. A tear trickled out from under her closed lids. He’d drugged her, injecting her with something that knocked her out.

  Don’t panic. Panic won’t help.

  Telling herself not to panic did about as much good as blowing on a forest fire. Which considering her circumstances was pretty ironic.

  She tried to move her arms but they wouldn’t budge. Her legs were stuck in place, too. She opened her eyes. Her wrists were tied to the wooden arms of a chair, duct taped, actually. She could assume her legs were, as well, though she couldn’t lean over far enough to see them.

  Her breath came in quick pants. She had to gain control. Her fear was what he wanted. How could he know that losing control would be the worst possible thing for her?

  She closed her eyes again and said out loud the Bible verse she’d learned as a child. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and love and a sound mind.”

  Looking up toward the ceiling she said, “Okay, God, I have a lot of love, for You, for my son, for…Hunter. I have a sound mind and I can use it. But I am powerless in this situation. The thing is, Father, I know You are not. You are in control, even in this situation, even when I am not.”

  Fiona wiggled the fingers on her right hand that were going numb. As she did, she realized that the chair underneath those fingers felt different. She looked down at it. And sucked in her breath. He’d taped a phone to the chair.

  She let out her breath very carefully. The temptation to call Hunter was almost overwhelming. Her fingers caressed the smooth buttons of the cell phone. It would be so easy to dial the number and press Send—but that was what Nate wanted her to do. Whatever Nate wanted her to do, she shouldn’t do.

  Oh, how she wanted to hear another person’s voice. She wouldn’t do it. She clenched her fingers into a fist and looked away. And realized that the phone under her fingers wasn’t the only phone in the room. It was one of many. They were placed strategically around the cabin, where she could see them. In the doors and windows, her escape routes.

  Each phone was connected to a detonator, like the one that she’d found in the office at her home, except unlike the one in her home, these were connected. If the phone rang, she would be trapped in a burning building.

  Forget not panicking.

  She began to scream.

  THIRTEEN

  Hunter pointed to the toothpick on the ground. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “What does a toothpick have to do with Fiona being missing?” Douglas walked over to it and crouched for a closer look. After a brief moment, he looked up. “Cinnamon?”

  Hunter nodded. “There’s another one in that alcove. Do you know anyone who has the ability to set these fires who chews on cinnamon toothpicks?”

  Douglas nodded slowly. “Merry said that Nate Santos was in the shop a week or so ago, flirting with Fiona.”
<
br />   “The pieces fit, but I don’t have any evidence. The only thing I have is this.” He played the recording and the video for Douglas, watching as Douglas’s face chiseled into marble.

  “He kidnapped my sister?” Douglas’s normally unflappable calm voice was low, lethal. He picked up his phone from its holder on his belt and called the dispatcher. “Deborah, get an all-points bulletin out on Nate Santos, driving a dark green Jeep 4x4. Approach with caution. Got it?”

  He hung up the phone. “I totally missed this. Even after you and the probie said you saw someone in the fire, I totally missed it.”

  “No one suspected him. There’s still no proof.” Hunter had enough self-recrimination for the entire town, but he had to be proactive. There was time later to think about what they could have, should have, done differently.

  “No proof, but it’s pretty obvious at this point.”

  Hunter pulled the notebook from his back pocket. “I’m going to get her back, Douglas. He thinks he’s destroyed all the evidence, but Fiona left this at Bridget’s, not at home.”

  With some reluctance, Hunter handed over the one piece of information he had to lead him to Nate Santos, but if he was going to get Fiona back, he needed Douglas’s help. “It was Jimmy’s. Fiona and I think he was gathering evidence against the arsonist. If he discovered that Nate was the arsonist, I believe it’s what got him killed.”

  Douglas pulled a small flashlight from his utility belt and flipped through the pages. “None of this makes any sense.”

  “There’s a map in there, but it’s only half a map. The words are just words. I don’t know if they’re code or if they really are just nonsense.”

  “Jimmy was careful.”

  “Not careful enough, apparently. What he knew got him killed.” And Hunter had been working beside Jimmy’s killer for two long years. He forced himself to put it out of his mind. He knew about Nate now. And now he could help Fiona.

  Douglas blew out a breath. “Okay, I’m going to call Nick Delfino, see if we can find any trail that will give us enough to get a search warrant for Nate’s town house. In the meantime I’ll get eyes on it, just in case.”

  “I’m going to Fiona’s to see if there’s anything salvageable. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” The way that place went up, it was doubtful. “Or maybe there was a fireproof safe.”

  Douglas’s blue eyes looked black in the dark street. “He’s not going to keep her alive long.”

  “He said we have an hour. I’m not going to let her die. Whatever it takes, I will get her back. I love your sister.” His chest hurt with the admission. He fought the need to explain. He’d been denying it to himself for so long.

  “I know you do.” Douglas didn’t smile, but the edges of his eyes crinkled up in wry amusement as he held out the notebook. “Call me if you find anything. And Hunter, be careful.”

  “I will. Hey, have Nick check property records. I know Nate lives in town, but maybe there’s family property somewhere. He can’t have taken her that far. She hasn’t been gone that long.”

  “Got it.” Douglas walked away, down the small street with his phone already at his ear.

  Hunter looked at the time on his cell phone. He had fifty-three minutes according to Nate’s timeline. She had to be somewhere nearby. But as he got closer to the burned shell of Fiona’s house he realized, she could be gone in the blink of an eye.

  * * *

  Fiona pulled her wrist toward her as far as it would go, trying in vain to stretch the duct tape that bound her to the chair. Tears had dried in itchy tracks on her face. Her left wrist hurt too badly to pull against the tape. Sprained, strained or whatever, the result was the same. She couldn’t move it.

  God, I’m scared. This is not me. I take charge. I don’t wait for things to happen to me, I make a plan, I check off a list. And then everything’s okay.

  But everything wasn’t okay. It might never be okay again. She rubbed the keypad of the phone. It was so tempting. Did anyone even know she was here?

  Did Hunter?

  For the first time, she thought about what would happen if she died here. She had regrets. She wouldn’t see her son grow up. Her precious baby boy. She wouldn’t see him lose his first tooth, play coach-pitch baseball, graduate from high school. Her lip began to tremble. She wouldn’t cry again.

  And Hunter.

  He was such an independent man, so strong. He had no idea how strong he was. How much everyone around him depended on that strength.

  But even Hunter needed love. He needed her. And if she died, he would never know just how much she loved him. She knew his real worth, as a friend. She wanted to prove to him that together, they could be so much more.

  If she pressed those buttons and called Hunter, it was possible that something bad would happen to her. If she didn’t, it was possible something bad might happen anyway. Maybe the phone wasn’t connected to anything at all. Maybe Nate put it there just to torture her. He was good at that, after all.

  Her hips ached from being in one position for hours. Her ribs had no relief from the pressure on her fractures. It was getting harder to breathe. She didn’t know how to be brave anymore.

  She pressed the numbers to Hunter’s cell phone, one by one.

  * * *

  Hunter walked forward to watch as the firefighters from C-shift raked through the debris of Fiona’s house. He had a bone-deep ache that nothing was going to remedy—nothing except finding Fiona and holding her and Sean safely in his arms.

  He was filled with the need to run, to tear things apart to find her. And he didn’t have the first clue where to start. Was he somehow failing her?

  There was very little left standing of Fiona’s house. A few blackened studs, a portion of a wall on the east side. Inexplicably, the kitchen door. He swallowed hard as he tried to block the memory of hundreds of cups of coffee at her kitchen table.

  He wouldn’t give up. Her life wasn’t in ashes. Her house was.

  He crossed his arms across his chest, the damp chill of a northeastern April settling into his bones. Five more minutes. If the guys from C-shift didn’t come up with something by then, he needed to find another way to find Fiona.

  He’d moved from working A-shift to captain of B-shift. C-shift was one group of guys that he’d never worked with regularly. It was hard identifying them, each in their turnouts and helmets with smoke swirling up and around them. Their chatter drifted back to where he was standing.

  There was Amos, the driver, hauling a soggy, charred mattress toward the growing pile in the front yard. Behind him was Tucker, the officer of C-shift, with the rake and a ready smile for Frankie, the only female in their department. The newest on their shift was at this moment sitting at the rear of the attack engine smoking a cigarette with Fiona’s cousin Danny, who should know better.

  So, who was the other guy?

  Their units rolled with four firefighters, cross-trained to fight fires and respond to medical emergencies. The fifth firefighter, distant from the others, had his shield over his face. As he caught Hunter’s glance, he shouldered a shovel and started walking away. There was no name on the bottom of his turnout coat.

  Without conscious thought, Hunter started walking toward him. He’d gotten within about ten feet when one of the others, Tucker maybe, shouted at him. “Reece, get out of the fire ground.”

  The firefighter he didn’t recognize didn’t turn around, just started running. Hunter took off after him. His target ran faster, the helmet flying off to reveal black curly hair.

  Nate Santos. “Stop, Nate!”

  Nate swung the shovel around to catch Hunter at the knees.

  Hunter jumped back, just in time, and ducked as Nate threw the shovel at him and ran.

  Keira stepped from the shadows into Nate’s path, her service weapon steady in her hands. “Don’t move, Nate. We’ve got you covered.”

  Nate froze, and slowly turned around to face Hunter, a smile spreading across his handsome face. “Do you really th
ink you can stop me?”

  Hunter held out his hands. “It’s over, Nate. Just tell us where she is.”

  Nate’s eyebrow twitched up in amusement. “Oh, Hunter, don’t you know by now that it’s never over ’til I say it’s over?” He stuck his hand in his pocket. “All it takes is the push of one button and she’s gone.”

  “Don’t move another inch, Nate.” Keira’s voice was rock steady. She circled around him to the side and her new partner came up from the other side, his weapon drawn.

  Nate pulled up his hand. As it cleared his pocket, Hunter could see the top of a cell phone.

  He stared at the phone. “Don’t do it, Nate.”

  The firefighter continued to pull the phone out of his pocket.

  The shot came from out of nowhere. Nate’s fingers convulsed around the phone, his eyes wide as he crumpled to the ground.

  “No!” Hunter ran to Nate, placing his fingers on the pulse point at his neck, knowing even before he did that it was too late. He was gone. The only person who knew where Fiona was being held.

  “Who fired that shot?” Keira whirled around, and a young state officer stepped from behind the neighbor’s house.

  He looked to be all of about nineteen years old. “I thought he was—I thought he was pulling a gun on you. The APB said approach with caution.”

  “How did you even get here?” Keira’s voice was weary.

  “I heard an all-points on the Jeep 4x4. I followed him here from the county.”

  “Next time, check with someone when you come into town. There were updates.” Keira took the young officer’s arm. “Come on, I’ll take you in. There’s going to be major paperwork on this one.”

  “Wait.” Hunter’s mind was only now processing the officer’s words. “You said you followed him into town? What road?”

  “I can show you.” The kid took a smartphone from his pocket and pulled up a GPS. “I picked him up about here.” He pointed to a place about a mile out of town.

  “That’s a starting point. Thanks.” It wasn’t much of one, but it was more than they had before.