by Brenda Novak
He got out and dragged her the last two steps, lifting her easily to her feet with one hand. He was strong, stronger than she’d expected for such a frumpy middle-aged man, and he didn’t release her. He kept firm hold of her and the knife.
“Can I help you pack?” Jasmine asked. “If we’ll be gone for a while, you might want to take some of your things.”
“Shut up and get a move on. We’re out of here.”
Jasmine searched desperately for other ways to detain him. There had to be a reason he was in such a hurry. Were the cops coming? “We’d only need a few minutes to collect some clothes and stuff. Or are we coming back?”
“If you don’t shut up, you won’t be going anywhere. You’ll die right here!” He dragged her into the living room—and then he froze. He was staring at the front door, which was standing open.
“Someone’s here,” he whispered. He brought the knife forward. In a moment that seemed to progress in slow motion, Jasmine knew this was it. Gruber was calling it quits. He was going to kill her and run.
Then the floor creaked behind them and just when she thought that knife would slit her throat, Gruber’s hand dropped.
She screamed and turned in time to see the point of a long knife go through his chest instead of her own and nearly crumpled to her knees. She would have, if not for the strong arms that went around her.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you,” Romain murmured in her ear. “Thank God, I’ve got you.”
She was crying and kissing him and telling him she loved him when the blast of a gun momentarily deafened her. She felt the bullet whiz past her shoulder, felt Romain jerk as it made impact with his body. The chest that had sheltered her, that had seemed so indestructible only a moment before was suddenly all too vulnerable as the motion threw him back. He stumbled into a wall, gasped and fell.
“No!” Jasmine screamed and turned in time to see Detective Huff aim his gun at her. His expression revealed no emotion beyond determination. He was detached, doing a job, cleaning up details.
She dove for the bedroom as the blast went off. She fully expected to be hit. But she felt no pain. She could think only of Romain, bleeding from the chest. Had the bullet entered his heart? Was he already dead?
Huff’s next shot hit Jasmine in the leg. Her foot felt as if it were on fire, but she managed to grab the knife Gruber had dropped as she rolled to the side, out of the doorway and out of sight.
She heard Huff curse and walk purposefully toward her. She also heard Romain trying to distract him. “Over…here…you…son of a bitch,” he groaned, and Jasmine knew she had about three seconds before he shot Romain again.
Jumping to her feet, she ignored the tremendous pain that seared her leg and used the door frame to slingshot herself forward. The sudden movement took Huff by surprise. She saw it in his eyes. He’d expected her to scramble for cover; he hadn’t expected a bold frontal attack.
He turned the gun at the last second, but it was too late. She was already hacking at him—striking him, too, but she didn’t know where. Desperation and adrenaline and white-hot anger sustained her. She would not lose Romain, would not allow Peccavi to cost them any more.
It wasn’t until Huff fell that she realized she’d stabbed him in the neck. Blood poured from the wound like a waterfall. Several other cuts bled, too, but they were superficial. She’d gotten lucky. If one of her wild blows hadn’t landed where it did, she would’ve been the one lying on the floor.
“You have sinned,” she said vehemently, shaking from reaction. And then Pearson Black arrived with the police.
* * *
A late-morning sun slanted through the crack in the drapes as Jasmine sat by Romain’s hospital bed, listening to the rhythmic beep of his heart monitor. A large white bandage encircled his chest, tubes ran all over his body, and his usually tanned and healthy-looking skin was pale beneath the fluorescent lights of the hospital room. The emergency doctor had given him six pints of blood and spent three hours in surgery, removing the bullet, which had lodged beneath his shoulder blade. Now it was a waiting game to see if he’d recover. Huff had missed Romain’s heart by a fraction of a centimeter, and Romain had nearly bled to death in the ambulance.
“Hey, how’re you doing?”
Jasmine turned to see Pearson in the doorway, holding two coffees in foam cups.
“I’m okay,” she murmured. The bullet she’d taken had only grazed her leg. She had a nice bandage to show for it. But she’d lied about being okay. She’d never been more terrified or worried in her life than she was right now, waiting to see whether Romain would live.
“He’ll be fine. The doctors are hopeful, aren’t they?”
“They aren’t making any promises.”
“They never make promises. They’re a cagey lot. But your man’s strong. He’ll pull through.”
Her man. She didn’t know if Romain felt the same way about her that she did about him, but it was a lost cause to pretend he wasn’t the most important thing in the world to her. “I hope so.”
“Huff’s dead.”
Jasmine nodded. She’d already heard. “Has anyone located Mrs. Moreau?”
“She called me.”
“Wasn’t she afraid you might turn her in?”
“That’s why she called. She wants to turn herself in. And she needed my help to make sure that a boy in her keeping made it back to his parents.”
“She had a child with her?”
“She took him before Huff could get him to adoptive parents and collect yet another paycheck.”
“How’d she get involved with Huff in the first place?” Jasmine asked. “She just…doesn’t seem the type.”
“Huff busted Gruber Coen for ‘performing lewd acts’ at a porn theater ten years ago, found out he was a truck driver for a lighting company and recruited him for his little sideline business. Gruber got Francis involved, and when Dustin’s medical bills began to mount up, Francis got his mother a job working for Huff. Soon Phillip was part of the ring, too. As long as they didn’t ask too many questions, it probably didn’t seem like a big deal to look after a few kids every night. And as the truth of what was really happening became more obvious, Beverly was in too deep to back out.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “That guy you found in the basement, Jack Lewis?”
“Yeah.”
“He used to work for Huff. He tried to get out and Huff shot him right there in Francis’s house. That taught them all a very powerful lesson.”
“That Huff wouldn’t be crossed.”
“Exactly.”
“How could Huff keep that many people busy?”
“It was a pretty big operation. Jack and a man named Roger were scouts. Huff paid for them to travel around and troll for kids. Other guys, like Gruber, Francis and Phillip, he sent to nab them once they’d been located. Bev and another woman—I can’t remember her name—helped out at the transfer house, taking care of the kids until they could be placed. He even had some prostitutes in his employ and they put out the word that he’d pay big bucks for a baby.”
“And he could afford all these people?”
“Some of them had outside jobs, like Francis, who was a delivery man, and Jack, who shuttled kids back and forth to after-school care. Others were strictly at his disposal, like Gruber—who quit his job driving a truck—and Phillip.”
“What got Huff involved in the first place?” she asked, trying to grasp the extent of Huff’s activities.
“His uncle’s an attorney. Bev thinks he gave Huff the idea, even threw him a few leads.”
“That’s how Huff came by his prospective clients? From leads?”
“Bev said Huff mentioned various attorneys who referred clients to him—people who didn’t qualify to adopt through legitimate agencies or wanted something very specific. Or didn’t want to wait the usual length of time it takes to get a child.”
“He had people putting in orders for certain types of children?” she asked in astonishment.
Jasmine shook her head. “What’d he do with all his money?”
“His wife isn’t sure, but she thinks he was putting it in offshore accounts for when he retired.”
“Was his wife aware of what her husband was doing?”
“Not at all. She’s devastated. She found out he was planning to dump her, which makes it even worse.”
Jasmine couldn’t even imagine what that kind of betrayal would feel like. “What’s she going to do?”
“What can she do? She’ll muddle through the best she can and see where her finances are when this is all over. She taught school for years. Maybe she’ll have to go back to it.”
Jasmine fiddled with the edge of the sheet on Romain’s bed. “What gets me is that Huff had children of his own, didn’t he?”
“Two grown boys.”
“How sad. They must be in total shock.”
“I’m sure they are. But you need to get some sleep,” Pearson said.
“I owe you an apology,” she told him. “I thought you were the bad guy.”
“Huff had the money to buy a lot of loyalty down at the station. It was easy for them to make me look like the bad guy. It was also easy for them to get rid of me.”
“Kozlowski wasn’t one of them, was he?”
“Yes. That’s the only man I know for sure, because he took Beverly’s call, yet he never filed a report.”
Jasmine wondered what Kozlowski would’ve done if he’d been on duty when she’d tried to contact him after finding Gruber Coen’s address. Had she phoned in just a few hours later, she probably would’ve spoken to the sergeant; she’d asked for him. Then he would have alerted Huff, and she would’ve died instead of the poor rookie. “Are you going to try and get back on the force?”
“I’d like to. After this, there’ll certainly be enough openings. And I’ve been humbled, grown up a lot. I hope they’ll take me.”
“It’d beat working nights in a parking lot,” she said with a smile.
“The chief is really trying to clean up the place. I think he’ll be willing to give me a second chance. He knows I didn’t tamper with the evidence on that case like Huff’s cronies said I did. That was just Huff’s way of getting me out of the picture.”
The hand holding the coffee he’d brought her was beginning to feel warm, which began to ease the terrible tension inside her. “I’m sorry that happened.”
“I take some responsibility for it. I shouldn’t have written that blog. Showing off like that allowed Huff to make me look like some kind of freak, so the whole evidence thing was easier to believe.”
Jasmine agreed that he’d helped them by writing what he had. “Why’d you do it?”
“I’m fascinated by the criminal mind, by deviant behavior.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I want to write a book someday.”
“You should do that.”
“We’ll see how it goes.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “I have something for you.”
Surprised, Jasmine shifted her chair away from the bed. “What is it?”
“Something Bev asked me to give you.” He handed it to her, and she saw her name written in a small flowing script. Inside, she found a letter.
Kimberly Lauren Stratford was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph William Glen of Charlottesville, Virginia, fifteen years ago, after six months in the transfer house. I cared for her myself. She was a good girl, a mild-mannered child who was told she’d been brought to an orphanage because her original family had been killed in a car accident. She asked about you often, insisted you couldn’t have been in the car, but with repetition, she began to believe it was true. At such a young age, she knew nothing but what adults told her, and we remained consistent in this regard so she’d be happy in her new situation. I don’t pretend to be proud of my actions. I don’t excuse them, either. It’s time you knew. As far as I’m aware, she’s still very much alive.
Alive! Tears filled Jasmine’s eyes at this last line. Gruber hadn’t killed her sister as he had Adele. Kimberly had been adopted into another family, a family in Virginia. She’d be twenty-four years old now. Had she graduated from college? Married and started a family?
Would she want to know that her old family still existed?
A movement in the bed drew Jasmine’s attention, and she watched, breathless, as Romain opened his eyes. “There you are,” he whispered, his voice weak but clear.
Jasmine set the letter aside. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been shot.” A half smile curved his lips.
“You’ll be okay,” she told him and squeezed his hand.
“I will be now that I know you’re safe.”
His eyelids drifted closed again, and Jasmine turned to Pearson Black, who stood at the foot of the bed. “Thank you for bringing me this,” she said, gesturing to the letter.
“Are you going to look her up? Your sister, I mean?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to—but I don’t want to bother her if she’d be happier as she is.”
“A lot’s happened. A lot of time has gone by. I don’t envy you the decision.” He patted her shoulder. “Good luck,” he said and left.
As the door closed behind him, Jasmine glanced at the television hanging over Romain’s bed. The volume was on low, but now that Pearson was gone, it was so quiet in the room she could hear a news announcer giving the top stories of the day. Gruber Coen’s picture flashed across the screen, and Jasmine listened more intently.
“…house contained a freezer, in which police discovered frozen body parts from at least four different victims. Not all of these victims have been identified, but Valerie Stabula, the suspect’s sister, was found dead in a concrete room beneath the master bedroom. This cell contained a television and a portable toilet. Although the police don’t yet know how many victims Gruber Coen tortured and murdered, it’s clear that he wasn’t the man his neighbors knew as quiet and harmless…”
“Quiet and harmless,” Jasmine murmured and suddenly felt an irrational urge to laugh.
EPILOGUE
“Are you going up?” Romain parked the truck and gave Jasmine’s shoulders a reassuring squeeze. In the three weeks he’d been out of the hospital, the color had returned to his face. The doctors said he should suffer no lasting effects from the shooting. They credited a strong constitution, but Jasmine knew his recovery had more to do with the fact that he was finally at peace with himself. The man who’d murdered Adele was dead; Romain had killed him in order to save Jasmine. But he hadn’t killed Moreau. On the basis of the news footage, Jasmine’s contact at the FBI had confirmed what Romain’s sister had always believed. Huff was the one who’d shot Moreau. Jasmine didn’t know for sure—no one did since Huff wasn’t around to explain—but she thought he’d done it to put an end to the questions and probing that Moreau’s shocking release would generate. The attention threatened his adoption ring. Getting rid of Moreau also satisfied Romain, who wasn’t likely to give up until he’d obtained justice. Huff had put closure—false closure—on something that was far from over, and Romain had taken the blame. It was perfect and it would’ve worked, if not for that package Gruber Coen had sent Jasmine.
“Jaz?” Romain prompted when she didn’t reach for the door handle. “Aren’t you going to the door?”
“I don’t know.” According to Beverly Moreau, Kimberly’s new name was Lisa Marie Glen. Armed with this information, Jasmine had been able to locate Lisa in Virginia, where her adoptive parents lived in a five-million-dollar mansion. Kimberly no longer lived there, but her own place was pretty impressive, Jasmine thought as she took in the Bostonian flavor of her sister’s small cottage. Ralph Lauren could’ve designed this house. Blue and white and nautical, it peeked out from behind an arched trellis flanked by rose bushes.
“This is the moment you’ve been waiting for,” Romain said.
But now that she’d found Kimberly, she couldn’t decide whether or
not to ring the bell. She was plagued by too many questions, the most disturbing of which always began with why. Why had her sister apparently accepted the story she’d been told? Why had she let go and never looked back? She’d known Jasmine was home when Gruber Coen came to the house. How could she have allowed Peccavi and the others to convince her that her real family was dead, to create a whole new identity for her?
“Come on,” Romain coaxed. “At least say hello. You tossed and turned all night. I know you won’t be satisfied until you see her.”
A flagstone path bisected a garden that was beautiful even in February and led to the arched wooden door of the house—tempting and yet, in its own way, daunting. “Maybe she’d rather not hear from me.”
“Or maybe you’re hurt and angry because she’s been living what appears to be a relatively normal life and never made any effort to contact you.”
He’d said what Jasmine had been trying not to face, but it was true. She knew it was small-minded, that she had no right to feel rejected. But she’d always imagined this meeting as some kind of rescue. She’d prayed and worked tirelessly, held on to hope even after most people would’ve given up. All because she was sure Kimberly needed someone to help her escape a man like Gruber Coen. Never did she consider that her sister could be happy. Or better off without her original family. That was a completely foreign concept.
“People adapt, Jaz. You know that.”
Of course she knew. They’d discussed the psychological explanation for such behavior. It wasn’t unusual for kidnap victims to feel some loyalty to their captors. But the personal side of the situation still tripped her up. Even if Kimberly, as a child, had accepted that her family was dead, hadn’t she grown curious in later years, remembered snatches of her early childhood and wondered? Maybe she hadn’t seen the episode of America’s Most Wanted, in which Jasmine had asked for information related to her disappearance. Then again, it was possible she’d seen it and chosen not to respond.
“It’s just so hard to believe she’s alive and well.”
“Everyone can use another friend,” he said. “You’re not here to take away what she’s already got. You’re here to let her know you never stopped loving her. How can that hurt?”
