Agent to the Rescue (Special Agents At The Alter Book 3)

by Lisa Childs

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dalton cursed—mostly himself—for taking his gaze off her, even for a few minutes. He shouldn’t have trusted anyone else to protect her.

  “She must have remembered him,” Jared Bell said from the passenger seat of the SUV. “Or else why would she have left with him?”

  “Because he forced her,” Dalton suggested. “Maybe at gunpoint.”

  “He wasn’t armed,” Jared said. “I searched him before you two got to the post.”

  Dalton sped up. According to the troopers at the post, Elizabeth and the man had left only seconds before he had rushed out of the conference room.

  “He could have coerced her another way,” he said. “Or tricked her. But where the hell did he take her?” He slowed as he approached a winding road. It reminded him of the one on which he’d found her.

  “Down there,” Jared shouted. “I see a car parked off on the shoulder of the road.” Then he sighed. “But that’s not the rental Wilson was driving.”

  Dalton saw the car, too. It was another luxury vehicle—a two-seater sports model that would have been much faster than the rental; it would have easily overcome the rental. Dalton jerked the wheel and took the turn nearly on two wheels.

  Jared gripped the dash and cursed. “I heard about your driving.”

  Like his gang days, it was part of his notoriety in the Bureau. Until he had saved Elizabeth with those skills, he hadn’t taken much pride in them. Now he hoped he could use them to save her again.

  “There’s the rental,” Jared said.

  It lay in the ditch just in front of the parked vehicle. He slammed the SUV into Park and jumped out the driver’s door. A shot rang out, followed by the sound of tinkling glass.

  He was too late. Too damn late...

  He pulled his gun from his holster and hurried around the front of the SUV. Another shot rang out—this one shattering the side window of the SUV.

  “Bell?” he yelled, worried that the profiler had been hit.

  “I’m okay,” Jared yelled back.

  Another shot rang out, striking the hood dangerously close to where Dalton stood. The bullet dented and then ricocheted off the metal. He returned fire, shooting at the dark-clothed figure crouched in the ditch beside the turned-over sedan.

  Bullets ricocheted off the undercarriage of the car. The man fired back—so many shots that Dalton had to duck low or he would be hit for certain. More shots pinged off the hood and the bumper of the SUV—too close to where he crouched. When he dared to raise his head and look into the ditch again, the man was gone—probably into the woods on the other side of the road.

  Dalton hurried down the steep drop-off from the shoulder of the road and approached the car. Heat emanated from the exhaust yet; it hadn’t rolled over long ago. And it was still running.

  He crouched down, but he couldn’t see through the windshield. It had shattered—either from the crash or from the bullet that had bored a hole on the passenger’s side. His heart pounded hard and fast against his ribs. He edged around the car to the passenger’s side. The window was down and red hair spilled out into the weeds and dirt.

  He sucked in a sharp breath—as if someone had slugged him in the gut. “No...” he murmured. “No...”

  A few of the tresses moved. Maybe it was just the motion of the wind.

  But he called out to her, “Elizabeth? Elizabeth, are you okay?”

  Her hair moved, and a hand replaced the red strands—a pale-skinned hand. “Dalton?” Her voice cracked with fear and hope. “Dalton?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” he said.

  “Is he gone?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He’d gotten away again—which made Dalton feel almost physically ill. But not as ill as he’d been at the thought that he had lost her—really lost her. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt in the crash? Or shot?”

  The window eased down more, opening a bigger space. She reached both arms out.

  “Are you hurt?” Dalton asked again—before he moved her.

  “No,” she said. “He missed me. I don’t know how...there were so many shots...”

  Dalton shuddered. There had been so many shots, but maybe most of those had been at him—since he saw only that one shot through the windshield of the rental sedan. He gently grasped her arms and eased her out the window. Then he lifted her up and held her tightly in his arms.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. “Was he shooting at you, too? Because he turned away and was firing up at the road...”

  Agent Bell answered for him as he helped Tom Wilson out the driver’s side of the car. “I can’t believe Dalton didn’t get hit—so many shots came so close.”

  She shuddered in his arms. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  If he had been hit, he might not have noticed it—his adrenaline had been that high because he’d been so worried about her. He almost patted himself down to check for bullet wounds, but her hands were there, trailing over his chest, back and arms. Memories of the night before—of her caressing him—rushed over him. And his heart started pounding madly again.

  “I’m okay,” he said as he caught her hands and held them in his. At least he would be okay once she stopped touching him. “What about him?” he asked Jared as he held up a shaky Tom Wilson.

  “Not a scratch on him,” Jared replied with a pointed glance.

  He could have set it up—could have had his hired hit man waiting for an opportunity to kill Elizabeth and still make him look innocent.

  Anger coursed through Dalton. Through gritted teeth, he murmured, “Yet.”

  He led Elizabeth around the car, but he took one hand from her to shove Wilson back. “What the hell were you up to?” he demanded to know.

  The man blinked and stared up at him as if Dalton had clocked him. “What? What do you mean?”

  “I said you could talk to her—not take her out of the police post,” he reminded him. “She’s in danger—if you damn well haven’t figured that out. She could have been killed.”

  “I could have been killed, too,” Wilson pettishly added. And he was still shaking—maybe with shock, maybe with fear.

  Dalton was the person he needed to fear. “Doesn’t look like you were really in any danger—the shot was fired at her. The killer was trying to get to her.” He stepped forward and shoved the man again. “Is that how you planned it?”

  “What?” Wilson asked. “Planned what? Are you...”

  “Crazy?” The guy didn’t have the guts to utter the word. But Dalton had no such problem. He felt a little crazy—with anger at the moment. “I should have known your alibi was too convenient. You hired this guy to do your dirty work for you, and you tricked her into leaving with you to give him the opportunity.”

  Wilson shook his head. “It wasn’t my idea to leave. She insisted.”

  Dalton felt again as if he’d been sucker punched. He turned to her. “Really?”

  “It was my idea to leave,” she admitted.

  Why? Had she remembered her fiancé and been too embarrassed to face Dalton again?

  “Did either of you see the man who ran you off the road?” Agent Bell asked the question that Dalton should have asked—had he not been so damn angry over nearly losing her.

  “I didn’t see him,” Tom replied. “I must have hit my head when we crashed and blacked out for a minute.” He turned toward Elizabeth. “Did you see him?”

  She shuddered. “He had a hood pulled over his head, but when he walked up to the car to shoot...” She shuddered again. “I saw his face.”

  “Did you recognize him?” Tom anxiously asked her.

  “I don’t recognize you,” she reminded him. “How would I recognize him?”

  “But you remembered Kenneth and Patricia,” he said, and that pettiness was in his voice again, along with resentment.

  “Who are Kenneth and Patricia?” Dalton asked.

  “My friends,” she said, and her voice cracked. “My best friends. That’s why I had to leave.
I have to go to their house.”

  He understood. They were the only people she actually remembered from her past, so of course she would want to see them immediately. But he needed to see them, too—because they were the only people who could answer all the questions that Jared Bell’s thick file couldn’t. They were the only people who could tell him all about Elizabeth Schroeder.

  * * *

  “THANK YOU FOR bringing me here,” she told Dalton Reyes. He’d insisted on bringing her to the ER first, but the doctor had confirmed what she’d told him. She was fine. Or she would be once she saw Lizzie. Tom Wilson had had to give him the address because she hadn’t been able to, but she recognized the house as he drove the battered SUV up the long driveway to the two-story Victorian farmhouse with the wraparound porch.

  A Chicago girl like her, Patricia had always dreamed of raising her family in a house in the country with a wraparound porch. Kenneth had given her that dream. He’d had the house built to look old while being modern and safe for his girls.

  Dalton shut off the SUV and turned toward her. “You shouldn’t have left with Tom Wilson. You should have asked me to drive you.”

  Her face flamed with embarrassment over how impulsive she had been. “I know,” she said. “I know how much danger I’m in.” And if her stalker hadn’t driven Wilson off the road as quickly as he had, then he would have followed them right to this house that Kenneth Cunningham had thought so safe. “I’m sorry.”

  He touched her face, his fingertips skimming her cheek, and her skin heated even more—with desire. She had met her forgotten fiancé, but Dalton was still the only man she wanted.

  “I am not going to let you out of my sight again,” he warned her.

  Reassured rather than forewarned, she smiled, but then—remembering how close she’d come to getting killed again—her smile slid away. And she released a shaky sigh.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for saving my life yet again.”

  “I understand why you were in such a hurry to get here—to talk to people that you actually remember,” he said.

  “Oh...” He didn’t know that Kenneth and Patricia were gone. She would explain that later. Now that she was here, she didn’t want to wait another minute before going inside. “There’s someone else that I needed to see here,” she said as she shoved open the passenger’s door and jumped out.

  Despite the fact that she was running to the house, Dalton stayed with her every step—ever vigilant of her safety. She was so glad that he was here. That he would protect her and little Lizzie.

  She had barely opened the door when the toddler ran to her, squealing and crying with delight. Elizabeth swung the baby up into her arms and clutched her close. “There’s my little girl,” she murmured. “There you are...”

  “Mommmmmma,” the child stammered. “Mommmma...”

  “Momma?” Dalton repeated the word—his handsome face draining of color with his utter shock.

  He thought the child was hers. But since Kenneth’s and Patricia’s deaths, baby Lizzie had become hers—because she had promised them she would love her goddaughter like her own.

  Her eyes stinging with tears, she nodded. “She’s my little baby girl!” She pressed kisses against the little girl’s pudgy cheeks.

  A man stepped into the foyer. Like the little girl, he had curly dark hair. A pang struck her heart over how much he looked like Kenneth. But, along with Patricia, Kenneth was gone.

  She was actually relieved that for a few days she had been able to forget the devastating loss of her best friends. But guilt struck her that she had forgotten Lizzie, too.

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured to the little girl.

  “Was that you on the news?” the man asked. “Were you the one found in the trunk of a car? What the hell’s going on, Elizabeth?”

  “Yeah,” Dalton Reyes murmured. “What the hell’s going on, Elizabeth?”

  * * *

  HE PANTED FOR BREATH, his lungs still burning from his run through the woods. He’d had to do that too many times over the past few days. And for a man whose only exercise had been in a small prison yard for years, the physical exertion was too much.

  It didn’t help that Agent Reyes was as good a shot as he was a driver. His arm burned, blood oozing yet from the bullet hole in his shoulder. The bullet had gone straight through, but the wound kept bleeding. His shirt was saturated.

  Hopefully, nobody had noticed him bleeding. And if that pain wasn’t bad enough, he had another voice mail from his employer. Another diatribe about how badly he’d messed up.

  It wasn’t his fault. It was all Agent Dalton Reyes’s fault.

  But the worst part of that message was that the person wanted to meet with him. He took his gun from his jacket pocket and clutched it close to him. He knew he would need it—not just to kill the woman and the agent.

  But to kill the person who had hired him...because he had no doubt that person intended to kill him. This person was more ruthless than anyone he had ever met—in or out of prison.

  The only thing he knew for certain was that somebody was going to die tonight.

  He hoped like hell it wasn’t him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dalton had figured there was a fiancé—either dead or alive and trying to kill her. He hadn’t figured that she had a baby. How could she have forgotten a baby?

  “I’ll explain...what I remember,” Elizabeth promised, “after I get her down for her nap.” She carried the little girl toward a wide oak staircase leading to the second story.

  He nearly reached out to stop her. But a gray-haired woman stepped from behind the curly-haired man and hurried after her. “Miss Elizabeth, I was so worried about you. When you didn’t call to check on her, I knew I should have called the police—”

  And Dalton stopped that woman instead, pulling her up short with a hand on her arm before she could climb the stairs, too. Elizabeth stared down at the woman with the same expression with which she’d looked at her fiancé—as if she didn’t remember her.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” he asked. “Why didn’t you report her missing?”

  “Who are you?” the woman asked, her dark eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “FBI Special Agent Reyes,” he introduced himself.

  The woman gasped. “Is she still in danger?”

  He nodded. “The person who attacked her has not been caught. So, yes, she’s still in danger.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have come here, Elizabeth,” the curly-haired man told her.

  She didn’t even stop—just kept carrying the now-giggling toddler up the stairs.

  “She couldn’t stay away from the baby,” the woman admonished him.

  “Not even for little Lizzie’s safety?” the man asked.

  “Nobody followed us here,” Dalton assured him. “I will make sure they stay safe. But I need to know what the hell’s going on.”

  “She really has amnesia?” the man asked.

  He nodded. “Yes, but her memory is beginning to return. She remembered her friends—Kenneth and Patricia. She said they live here.”

  A little cry slipped through the woman’s lips, and the man shook his head. “Not anymore. Kenny and Patricia are dead.”

  Had Elizabeth remembered that yet?

  “What happened to them?” he asked, wondering if it was somehow related to what had happened to her. “Were they murdered?”

  The woman jerked her head in a quick nod. “Yes, yes...that is what Elizabeth believes.”

  The man pushed a hand through his curly hair. “It was a tragedy,” he said. “Kenny was my brother, and I just can’t understand what happened.”

  “What happened?” Dalton asked again.

  “It was a murder-suicide,” the man replied. “He killed her and then himself.”

  The woman began to cry, tears flowing down her face. “Kenneth loved her. He wouldn’t have.”

  “I think that’s why he did,” the man said. “So
that he would never lose her.”

  “Patricia wouldn’t have left him.”

  “Why don’t you go check on Elizabeth and the baby,” he suggested, as if annoyed with the woman’s interruptions.

  She hesitated, either waiting or maybe hoping for Dalton to stop her again, before she climbed the stairs to wherever Elizabeth had gone.

  “Marta and Elizabeth don’t want to accept it,” he said. “But my brother was an insanely jealous man. He was gone a lot for business. And he’d become certain that Patricia was having an affair.”

  Dalton was assigned to the organized crime division. He didn’t understand crimes of passion—or at least he hadn’t until he had been tempted to kill Tom Wilson for putting Elizabeth in danger. “You’re his brother?”

  “Gregory Cunningham,” the man finally introduced himself.

  “Did he tell you who he thought the other man was?”

  Gregory glanced up toward that ornate staircase, as if wondering if Elizabeth was listening. “Tom Wilson.”

  “Elizabeth’s fiancé?”

  “The man had an obvious crush on Patricia.”

  Dalton’s brow furrowed. “But he’s engaged to Elizabeth...” No man engaged to her had any reason to look at another woman.

  Gregory sighed. “And Elizabeth is...smart and driven. But Patricia...”

  “Patricia was magic,” Elizabeth said as she descended the stairs to join them. “She was beautiful and loving and loyal. It didn’t matter who had a crush on her...”

  It didn’t appear to matter to her that Tom Wilson might have.

  “...she would have never cheated on Kenneth,” she said. “And he knew that. He wouldn’t have hurt her or himself.”

  Gregory sighed. “Elizabeth, the police investigated. They ruled it a murder-suicide. You have to accept that. You have to accept that they’re gone.”

  She shook her head, and like Marta, tears streamed down her face. She had definitely remembered that her friends were gone, and she was suffering all over again.

  “I’ll call the investigating officer,” Dalton offered, because her tears had his gut tightening with dread and his own heart aching with her pain. “I’ll just double check.”