by B. J Daniels
“Arlene’s under protective custody and doing fine,” the dispatcher said. “You might want to come over to the jail though.”
This surprised Nick. “Are you saying they caught the person who attacked Arlene?”
“One of the nurses caught her in the act. The deputy just took her down to the jail but he wanted me to let you know. It’s Violet, Arlene’s daughter.”
Nick couldn’t believe this. They already had the younger daughter locked up—and now her older sister?
“You aren’t going to believe some of the stuff she’s saying,” the dispatcher said. “I think you’d better get over here.”
* * *
AFTER LANEY HUNG UP from talking to her sister, she wiped her tears, angry with herself for crying, then threw herself into the physical labor of cleaning the kitchen until it shone.
Then she set about packing. She would drive to Billings and catch a flight home. She couldn’t bear the thought of staying here another night alone. She’d seen the expression on Nick’s face. He wouldn’t be coming back.
She’d packed light to come to Montana. Unlike Laci who had four suitcases and had apparently brought most everything she owned. It didn’t take long before Laney was ready to leave. She rolled her suitcase out to the porch and went back to make sure everything was turned off.
The sound of a vehicle set her heart racing. Her first thought, her most fervent wish, was that it would be Nick. He had tried to stay away but couldn’t. He felt just as she did.
She ran through the house, slamming open the screen door and stopping short on the porch. She’d been ready to throw herself into Nick’s arms. She didn’t know why he was so afraid of this thing between them. She didn’t care. As long as he didn’t keep running.
But the car wasn’t Nick’s. Nor was the man who got out of the car Nick.
Laney looked into the face of a man she’d never seen before and knew instinctively his would probably be the last face she ever saw as he pulled a gun from beneath his jacket and pointed it at her heart.
“Let’s step inside,” the man said, coming up the porch stairs and grabbing her arm before she could move. He held the barrel of the gun to her temple. “You and I need to talk about our mutual friend, Nicolas Giovanni.”
* * *
NICK FOUND TWO OF THE DEPUTIES in the interrogation room at the jail with Violet.
She was sitting at one end of the marred table looking as if she’d been invited to lunch rather than arrested for attempted murder.
He stepped into the room, and she looked up and smiled as if she’d been waiting for him. As far as he could tell she hadn’t shed a tear. “Violet.”
“Deputy Rogers,” she said in response as he took a seat at the opposite end of the table and glanced at the deputies. They both seemed to shrug as if they couldn’t quite believe this either.
“Want to tell me what’s going on, Violet?” Nick asked, keeping his voice as calm as she appeared.
She met his gaze. There was a determination in hers, a resolve. “I tried to kill my mother this morning. I’m sorry that I failed again.”
“So it wasn’t the first time, I take it?” he asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“I tried before to smother her in the hospital, but I got interrupted. That time I managed to get away by hiding in a storage closet. I wasn’t responsible for the other times we tried to kill her.”
We? He stared at her for a moment, then pulled out his notebook and pencil even though he could see that the deputies had been videotaping her responses. He just needed a moment and this gave him the time.
“You say you were not responsible for the other times ‘we’ tried to kill her?” he finally asked.
“Those times it was Charlotte and Bo,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Why don’t you tell me about those times,” he said.
And she did, starting with Maddie’s and Bo’s engagement party. It had been Charlotte’s idea to poison their mother at the party with a macaroon. Violet’s job had been to bake the cookie and make sure that only the poison cookie was left on the plate when Charlotte offered it to Arlene.
“So the macaroon was intended for your mother rather than Geraldine,” he said.
“I felt sorry for Geraldine. Charlotte said we’d done her a favor.” Violet shrugged.
“And Bo?”
“He didn’t really care that Geraldine died except that now we would have to come up with another plan for Mother,” she said.
“I meant, what part did Bo play in the other attempts on your mother’s life?”
“Oh,” she said. “He pushed Mother down the stairs. He pretended it was an accident. Mother forgave him of course. He was always her favorite.”
“I would think that would be a good reason why he wouldn’t want her dead,” Nick pointed out. He noticed that the deputies seemed to be in shock as they listened and he suspected they’d already heard most of this.
“Bo hated her as much as we did. He hated her hanging on him, making so much of him, he was embarrassed by it. He just wanted her to go away.” Violet’s tone was such that she could have been talking about the weather or what to make for dinner instead of cold-blooded murder.
“And the overdose?”
“That was Charlotte. She put the pills in Mother’s coffee.”
“Where was your father when all this was going on?” Nick had to ask.
“He works all the time. I think he does it so he doesn’t have to come in the house except to eat and sleep.”
Nick took off his hat and raked a hand through his hair. He had to get moving, but he was so shocked by this that he couldn’t help but ask the question that haunted him. “Why did you want your mother dead?”
“Me personally?” She met his gaze and smiled ruefully. “Do you really have to ask? She would have married me off to Jack the Ripper if she could have. And since she couldn’t marry me off to anyone, she made my life unbearable. I tried to find a husband just to get away from her but I couldn’t. No one wanted me.”
He heard the pain in her voice. “You know your sister has been arrested for assault,” Nick said and explained why.
For the first time, Violet’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know she was doing that.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t think anyone cared.”
Nick didn’t know what to say. He turned to one of the deputies. “Have you brought Bo Evans in yet?”
“We were waiting on word from you.”
“Pick him up and you’d better call the county attorney and let him know what’s going on.” Nick shifted his gaze from the deputy to Violet. “I’m sorry you felt you had no recourse but to kill your mother.”
She shrugged. “We did what we had to.”
“Your mother is still alive,” he said, not sure she knew that she and her siblings had failed yet another time.
Violet nodded. “At least for the moment.”
Nick felt a chill in the room as he picked up his notebook and pen and rose from his chair. He wanted to be anywhere but in this room with this woman.
In his office, he sat down, felt the photographs Laney had given him in his shirt pocket. He took them out and tossed them on the desk, sick from what he’d heard in the interrogation room. Even sicker when he thought of Laney and the way he’d left things with her.
He glanced at his watch. He had to get moving. He should be hightailing it out of town. Keller would be on his trail. Even with Geraldine S
haw’s murder solved and the after-hours bar assailant in jail, Nick felt he’d left too much undone.
One of the photographs caught his eye. He drew it closer. The snapshot was of Laney. She looked so beautiful. He wished he’d had the chance to dance with her that day.
Past Laney, he saw Charlotte caught in the act of taking something from her pocket and slipping it on the macaroon plate. Moments later Arlene would be offered the cookie, but Geraldine would take it before the murder weapon could reach the right victim. Life was so much chance. He shook his head and put down the photograph.
Soon all three of the Evans offspring would be in custody. He wondered how Arlene would take it. He suspected she would blame Violet. He used to hear cops debate whether it was the environment or the genes that eroded a family to the extent the kids were trying to kill one of their parents.
Hard to say. The bottom line was that as horrible as the Evanses were, they couldn’t hold a candle to a guy like Zak Keller, who’d grown up on the same street as Nick, practically living with Nick’s family.
Nick hurriedly unlocked the bottom drawer and took out his cell phone. Time to get the hell out of town. As he turned on the phone he saw that he had a message.
He played it and felt his blood run cold.
Chapter Thirteen
The man who called himself Zak Keller dragged Laney into the kitchen and shoved her down into a chair. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a surprisingly handsome face and a full head of sandy-blond hair cut in the latest style. He wore expensive clothing, looked like a businessman, even smelled good. On the surface, there appeared to be nothing dangerous about him.
Until you looked into his eyes.
Zak Keller’s were a colorless blue and totally devoid of emotion. Soulless eyes.
“Here’s the plan,” he said in a voice as smooth as any pricey attorney’s. “You’re going to call Nicolas. You tell him I’m here to see him and that if he doesn’t do exactly what I want him to, I’ll blow your brains out. Can you remember that?”
It wasn’t something she was likely to forget. Her heart pounded so hard it made her chest hurt. She was having trouble catching her breath and her mind was like a caged squirrel, running too fast, going nowhere. She knew she had to calm down, had to think.
She stared at the man, absolutely positive he meant every word he’d said about blowing her brains out. “I can remember that,” she said, surprised how calm she sounded.
He nodded and smiled at her. The smile of a shark just before it took a big bite.
Her logical mind argued that Zak Keller had the wrong man. She didn’t know a Nicolas Giovanni. She knew a Nick Rogers, a deputy sheriff with a kind heart, a shy man, a man who was running from something.
She’d thought that something was her.
But now she had a bad feeling it was something much more dangerous. It was Zak Keller.
She fought not to show just how terrified she was. Especially of that little voice in her head that said Nick Rogers was Nicolas Giovanni. Nick had said he was Italian but that hadn’t explained the last name Rogers. She’d seen the look on his face for that split second when he’d seemed to realize he’d given something away.
“You ready to make that call?” Zak Keller asked, glancing at his watch, then her.
“Yes,” she said, aware that whatever Nick had been covering up was deadly serious. Otherwise she wouldn’t have this man standing in her kitchen holding a gun on her, threatening to kill her.
“I left out one important point,” Zak Keller said as he handed her the phone. “If you try to warn anyone before you get Nicolas on the line, I will kill you. It doesn’t make any difference to me really. I just thought this way would be more fun for Nicolas. We understand each other?”
She nodded and took the phone. As she dialed the sheriff’s department number, he stepped closer and pressed the gun painfully into her temple, all the time smiling.
“Deputy Sheriff Nick Rogers please,” she said when the dispatcher answered. Her voice sounded too high to her but Zak Keller didn’t seem to notice.
“Just a moment.”
Laney could hear the extension ringing. The way Nick had torn out of her house this morning, he could be miles away by now. She recalled how upset he’d been to see his face on national television. What had he done that would make him so afraid of having his picture on the Internet, on national television? Something that had a killer after him.
She could feel the man standing over her growing impatient. He’d planned to use her, but clearly he would just as easily change that plan by killing her first and going after Nick alone if he had to.
“Hello?”
Laney almost wept with relief at the sound of Nick’s voice. “Nick.”
* * *
ONE LITTLE WORD. But Nick heard everything he’d feared in that one word. He’d been on his way out of the office, hurrying after discovering the message on the cell phone in the locked bottom drawer. He wasn’t sure what had made him turn back to answer the phone. Just a feeling...
“Laney, what—”
Zak Keller prodded her hard in the temple with the gun.
“I have a message for Nicolas Giovanni from Zak Keller,” she said as evenly as she could. “He says if you don’t do exactly what he wants, he is going to blow my brains out.”
Her words struck Nick like a punch. The pain seared through him, burning him to his soul. For a moment, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. His heart had stopped, his mind stunned by the horror of even the thought of Zak Keller near Laney.
“You there, Nicolas?” Keller asked and laughed as he took the phone.
“I’m here,” Nick said. He knew better than to demand that Keller let Laney go. Just as he knew better than to pretend she didn’t matter to him. Unfortunately, he knew how Keller operated.
“Good. It’s been too long. You’ve been a hard man to find.”
Nick said nothing, waiting, his heart in his throat at what Keller would do to Laney.
“You and I need to get together, don’t you think?”
“Only if Laney comes along,” Nick said.
Keller laughed. “She isn’t your usual type, my old friend. I thought you liked brunettes.”
“I take what I can get.”
Keller’s laugh this time said he didn’t buy Nick’s nonchalance when it came to Laney, making Nick wonder how long he’d been in the area and just what he knew.
“How’d you find me?” Nick asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Just curious.”
“Saw your picture on the Internet. It was the damnedest thing. It appeared you’d fallen in love,” Keller said. “You really are a fast worker, old buddy. You got a cell phone?”
He knew Nick did. “You want the number?” Nick asked, but figured Keller already had it.
“Sure.”
Nick rattled it off, wondering if Keller was even writing it down. If Keller already had the number then he’d taken out the one man Nick had trusted with his life. And now Nick had cost that man his life. Grief twisted inside him. How many more people had to die? But he knew the answer to that one. At least two.
“I’ll call you and let you know where to meet us,” Keller said. “But Nick, just in case you decide to do something stupid—”
The next thing Nick heard was Laney’s scream. Hot flames of anger seared away the grief and desolation as the phone went dead. Nick threw the phone across the room. He saw the dispatcher looking toward his office. He had to pull himself together.
But his brain was screaming: Keller has Laney. Keller has Laney. Nothing on this earth could be as bad as that.
* * *
LANEY SCUTTLED ACROSS the floor trying
to get away but Zak was on her, slamming her into the wall, slapping her again, making her cry out a second time.
Then smiling, he hung up on Nick.
“You can get up now,” he said, his voice suddenly so calm it sent ice through her veins. “We’re going for a little ride.”
She struggled to her feet, her hand going to her mouth and coming away bloody. The bastard had split her lip—just to get a rise out of Nick.
Anger took the edge off her terror. Her brain seemed to start functioning again. She didn’t want to go for a ride with him. If there was any way she could keep from getting into his car...
He had put the gun back into the holster as if he thought he no longer needed it and moved to replace the phone.
Her gaze took in the kitchen, seeing anything that she could use as a weapon. The knife rack was too far away. He’d be on her again before she could draw one, let alone use it on him, something she wasn’t completely sure she could do anyway. A canister would be too awkward. Just as the large mixer or the toaster.
She staggered to the edge of the kitchen counter and stopped. He half turned to glance back at her. She curled around herself, pretending to be more hurt than she was.
He turned his back to her again as he hung up the phone.
She grabbed the coffeepot from the coffeemaker. There was almost a full pot. She’d made it while she’d cleaned and got ready to leave and forgotten all about it. But the coffeemaker had kept it hot.
She moved swiftly, but he must have heard the pot scraping across the bottom of the coffeemaker. She was already running at him, the pot raised, when he spun around faster than she had anticipated.
She swung the pot with everything she had. His arm came up to block the blow. The pot shattered, sending hot coffee splattering across the kitchen—and the man.
He let out a bellow of pain and anger.
She never saw his other arm until it hit her, sending her sprawling backward across the room. She hit the wall; her head snapped back. Pain shot through her head just before everything went black.
* * *
NICK OPENED THE BOTTOM DRAWER of his desk, took out the cell and turned it on, then switched it with the phone on his belt that he’d been given when he’d taken the job.
