Evil Secrets Trilogy Boxed Set

by Vickie McKeehan

  As the boat rocked to the gentle sway of the sea, they lay in bed entwined in each other.

  “Feeling okay now?”

  She stretched catlike and purred, “Oh, Reese, surely an astute guy like you can tell I’m feeling much better than okay right now. You seem to have found all my—sensitive spots—several times over.”

  Chuckling, he tugged on her hair. “Always did strive for excellence in all the things I’m truly good at.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Geez, you might be cockier than the surgeons at the hospital and that’s going some.”

  “Hmm, gone out with many surgeons, have you?”

  Wary, she looked for any hint of jealousy in his eyes. Relieved when he seemed only curious, she said, “No, I don’t date doctors. You seem to forget I’ve only been on rotation for two months. The pressure’s been on me up to my eyeballs to get Mendenhall’s attention and approval. I was just getting comfortable with all of it when the wall known as Cade comes crashing down around me.”

  “Then I guess now would be an excellent time to reveal I got a text from Mendenhall when we were loading the boat.”

  She grabbed his arm. “And?”

  “The man was—impressed, maybe a little intimidated to know his newly suspended resident went out and got herself a lawyer.”

  Her lips curved. “You just love being right, don’t you? What else did he say?”

  “He moved up your appearance before the review board.”

  She let out a whoop and grabbed him around the neck. “You did it! How soon?”

  “Next week.”

  She gave him a long, mouthy kiss. “What happens next?”

  “We make absolutely certain you’re prepared for the Q & A and can explain this ridiculous situation with Cade as an annoyance and someone who has stalked you in the past.”

  Elation at the news had her leaning over him, hovering over his stellar rock-hard abs. “How are we doing on time?”

  “Oh, I think we have time to fit in another appreciation round.”

  Back on the mainland, success at locating Cade’s cell phone relied on nothing more than a clever phone App already integrated into the platform.

  Lucky for Trevor, Cade had purchased the latest technologically advanced cell phone on the market and with it had bought himself a little-known device that had been marketed to help you locate your phone in the event you misplaced it.

  The phone App made tracking his phone incredibly accurate and easy.

  Trevor finished the configuration in a matter of minutes.

  He didn’t intend to waste any more time.

  CHAPTER 16 Book 3

  Later that afternoon, Reese and Quinn moored the Sea Warrior in the San Madrid harbor and walked up the hill hand in hand to Crandall House.

  He figured he might as well enjoy the time he spent with Quinn since it might come to an abrupt end in less than twenty-four hours. Even though he still had time to convince her that meeting her father might offer an opportunity to get at answers she’d longed for, he didn’t hold out much hope.

  But despite her stubbornness, he refused to give up.

  Once they got closer to the house, Reese spotted the three men on guard duty standing just inside the perimeter of the property. These guys had been tasked to protect them all. At least he hoped that’s who they were. He noted they were dressed in khaki slacks and golf shirts but wore guns strapped to shoulder holsters.

  He didn’t recognize a single one of Jordan’s men.

  Sure enough, as he and Quinn approached, one of them held up a hand. “I need to see some ID.”

  Just as Reese reached in his back pocket for his wallet to take out his driver’s license, all hell broke loose.

  Gunfire erupted from a car moving north at a fast clip on the road in the direction of downtown. Reese pushed Quinn to the ground and fell on top of her. He looked around and saw all three of the guards pull their weapons to return fire. Shots whizzed by his head from every direction as the bodyguards took cover behind Jake’s Benz sitting in the circular gravel driveway.

  But in a matter of what seemed like five minutes, the hail of bullets suddenly stopped. Reese smelled burning rubber as he heard the squeal of tires on the road below the cliffs.

  When Reese was sure they were in the clear, he got to his feet and pulled Quinn upright. “You okay?”

  “I think so. This is getting to be a very annoying habit.”

  “Yeah. Anyone hurt?” Reese asked the three men who had risked their lives to keep them safe.

  “Got Rob in the shoulder.”

  Reese reached in his pocket for his iPhone, called nine-one-one. “I’ll get an ambulance here. Come on, Quinn, looks like you’re getting more action in suspended-mode than working in the ER.”

  “I don’t understand why the cops can’t catch these guys. They seemed to have never left San Madrid.” She mumbled some swearword before going over to the injured man, who by this time was down on the ground, holding his arm. She started ripping open his shirt to examine the wound. “Let’s get you in the house. No sense bleeding out here on the lawn waiting for the EMTs to show up.”

  About that time, the front door opened and everyone streamed outside.

  “That was Cade, wasn’t it?” Jake shouted as he ran over to Rob to help Quinn get him up and onto the porch.

  “Yep. Looks like Boyd won’t give up until Quinn and I are both dead.”

  Cade Boyd gunned the blue Chevy Tahoe and sped through San Madrid going a good sixty miles an hour. He spun the vehicle into a turn, heading back the other way to meet up with the Coast Highway. At the corner of Main, he slid through a four-way stop sign and kept on going.

  Sitting in the back seat, still gripping the semi-automatic AK47, Collin cackled like a crazy person. “Did you see that? Did you see them hit the dirt? I think I got that bastard,” Collin shrieked. “Woohoo! We did it. We shot the bastards!”

  Once on the PCH, Cade hit the gas as he accelerated to seventy-five. It was then he looked to his right and noticed, his cousin Scott Geller slumped in the passenger seat, his body leaning heavily against the door. The gun Scott had gripped during the shooting was now on the floorboard.

  Cade reached over and shook his cousin. “Hey, Scott, what’s wrong? Are you sick or something?”

  That got Collin’s attention. He crouched into the front seat and started trying to shake Scott awake. “Oh, man, he’s bleeding, Cade. Bad. We need to get him to the ER.”

  “Are you nuts? We can’t do that without explaining how he took a bullet.”

  “Then what’re we going to do? We could take him to the same doctor who treated my shoulder.”

  “You mean the one who spilled his guts to the first cop who decided to question him? The one who will testify for the district attorney at your hearing? Is that the one you want to call? Forget it. Scott knew the risks.”

  Collin fretted over that. “Then pull over so I can take a look at him.”

  “Not now, Collin. We just shot at five fucking people. We have to get as far away from this bumfuck town and find a place to ditch this Tahoe.”

  “How about we take him to Grant’s place? No one would look for us there.”

  “That’s clear across town. Besides, the entire fucking LAPD has been crawling up our asses for days, checking out anyone who knows us. They’ve surely checked out all of our friends by this time.”

  Collin started crying. “Everyone’s dying. They’re all dead. I’m sick of this, man. I’m out of here, Cade. This could’ve been you or me. I’m done with this. I’m heading down to Mexico.”

  “No! Goddamn it! You’re in this until I say you’re done. Stop that crying shit! We owe it to Connor to get those bastards, to get all of them and finish this thing out for good.”

  “We got them today. That’s enough. Now it’s time to get out of here. We use the money in the offshore accounts no one knows about. We get new identities, start over in Tahiti or someplace warm.”

  �
�Stop it! I know a place to go where no one will ever find us. A place that ensures we get back at Kit once and for all. That’s what you want, right?”

  “I guess.” It didn’t seem so important now that Scott was bleeding to death. “He’s stopped breathing, Cade. It looks like the bullet pierced a lung. There’s blood everywhere.”

  Cade sighed. “Collateral damage, bro. Collateral damage is part of war. And this is fucking war!”

  “Rob’s lucky it’s just a bullet graze to his shoulder. If they’d been better shots, I might be one man down and that would just piss me off even more right now,” Jordan said as everyone gathered in the Crandall House living room.

  Once they’d gotten the police out of their hair, they settled in for the meeting, hoping to put the shooting behind them, at least for the next hour or so until they could figure out the next step.

  “I think I’ve found your Mr. X. I got my hands on a classified file from the State Department.” Jordan glanced around the room. “Don’t ask. Anyway, Noah Parker had an associate he trained. And let’s be clear here, people. According to the file, Noah Parker was the best at what he did. He’d been an Army Ranger in Vietnam, a sniper, a damned good one.

  “But one day he gets captured by the Viet Cong, spends six years in captivity. Once the war’s over, he sort of disappears, goes off the radar until he re-enlists in the Army. But at some point he becomes a private contractor for the CIA.

  “Enter the associate. Together he and this guy took assignments all over the world, even worked under Presidents Reagan and the first Bush. It seems these two were a team and worked as such.”

  “Name?” Reese snapped out.

  “Trevor Dane. Got his start early as a petty enforcer for the IRA. When they were told to lay down their arms, Dane wanted out, saw an opportunity to get out of the nasty business he’d lived in for years and leave it behind once and for all so he could live in peace and quiet with his wife and child. The IRA saw it differently. To make their point, they went after him. Instead of killing him, they made the mistake of taking out his wife and daughter.”

  “Ohmygod,” Kit said. “That file didn’t happen to come with any photos of his wife and daughter, did it?”

  Jordan looked perplexed for about ten seconds and then replied, “As a matter of fact, there were no photos of either Parker or Dane. I have no idea what he looks like. That’s the way the CIA rolls or so I’m told. Why?”

  Kit glanced at Jake. “No reason. I was just curious.”

  “How did they kill the wife and daughter?” Quinn asked.

  “It had been raining. Skid marks on the road showed the car had been forced off onto a narrow shoulder and then forced over a cliff. They think the car exploded though before it ever hit the water, which indicates it might’ve been the result of a car bomb. No one really knows for certain. The thing is they only recovered the wife’s body. The little girl apparently drifted away in the water…” Jordan’s voice trailed off.

  “How horrible,” Quinn commented, as she too, glanced around the room at her friends, but her gaze stopped at Reese. “I guess everyone has a story, something horrible that happened to them in their past they’d like to forget. Losing his family like that, what happened to this Trevor Dane is not much different than what happened to Noah Parker and his parents.”

  Reese eyed her curiously, trying to figure out what was still going on in that head of hers. She’d been acting weird since they’d gotten back, growing even more distant than she’d been that morning on the boat.

  But for now, he forced himself to turn his attention back to Jordan. There was too much at stake to get distracted now.

  “So at some point, Noah Parker must’ve come back to L.A., uncovered what Alana and Jessica had done, realized they’d capitalized on his parents’ estate and decided payback was the only way,” Reese ascertained.

  “Ron Blake, the cold case detective at the sheriff’s department, told me that about ten years back a man came in and pleaded with them to re-open the Parker case. He talked to another detective, someone who has since retired. But Blake made a point to locate the detective who worked the case. He remembered the guy’s ridiculous theory though. The son accused the lawyers at BBG&G, his parent’s own lawyers, of being mixed up in their murders.” Jordan shook his head. “Nothing came of it. Of course, you know the detective didn’t pursue it.”

  “Well, if we don’t figure out how to get rid of the Nutty Brothers, eventually one or more of us will end up dead,” Reese commented.

  “Kit came close,” Quinn reminded them.

  Jake went white, remembering how scared he’d been the day Collin had taken Kit out of the house. “Dylan and I have already drained their numbered bank accounts, at least all that we could find,” Jake told them. “And when they discover we’ve emptied the Icelandic accounts as well, you’ll get more of a reaction than that drive-by earlier, which I’m certain was in retaliation for putting an end to their domestic cash flow.”

  “Imagine what they’ll do when they realize we also got to the stash of Krugerrands they had hidden in South Africa in a vault that belonged solely to Jessica Boyd. Once we found that stockpile, Jake paid a courier to go in, pick up the bags, and transport them to another location. The bags are still in Cape Town but under a different name,” Dylan added.

  “We’re making progress,” Jake assured them all. “But we’ve hit a snag working on moving property holdings.”

  “That’s a bit more complex and requires changing a slew of documents. Even online, we don’t do it right, miss a step and we risk leaving a paper trail they can track,” Dylan admitted. “But we’ll get there eventually.”

  “In the meantime,” Jordan stated. “I agree with Reese. If we don’t figure out how to end this, it’s only a matter of time before someone dies.”

  No one was more surprised than Collin when his brother turned the SUV off the PCH and headed into a wooded area full of hiking trails and canyons, popular with local nature lovers.

  Since they were less than ten miles from their own beloved Enclave, Collin remarked, “Is it smart to get this close to home?”

  “We need a place to get rid of Scott’s body. He’s no good to us like this,” Cade pointed out.

  “You’re going to dump him out here in the wilderness? I don’t believe you. That’s not right.”

  “Bury him. There’s a difference. You want a damned funeral, we’ll go that route on our own, have our own little private ceremony for him right here, perfect place, peaceful, nice. You know how he loved nature,” Cade snorted as the vehicle bumped along moving farther into the rugged canyons, unmarked trails.

  “What does that mean? Connor’s still down at the coroner’s in some cooler. We haven’t even had his service yet. Scott said…”

  “Look, I’ve been a little busy what with trying to get rid of Quinn and all to think about planning a memorial service for Connor. He’s gone. We’ve had how many funerals in the last six weeks?”

  “Too many.”

  “Exactly. I’m done with funerals for a while.”

  “We could pay a regular mortuary to deal with Scott. Pay ’em enough where they wouldn’t ask questions.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “There has to be a funeral home in town that won’t ask questions. This isn’t right, Cade. He’s our own blood, he’s…”

  “I know what he is. I don’t have time to listen to your whining now, Collin. Grow a pair. Do you not understand they’ve taken our fucking money? All of it. I tried to withdraw two hundred dollars from an account no one knew about and there was no money, not a cent left.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Those assholes are hackers. Isn’t it obvious? They’ve hacked into our accounts.”

  As Cade drove farther away from the main road and into remote terrain surrounded by rock formations and natural-forming gullies, Collin began to get even more creeped out than before. When he noticed the gate straight ahead padlocked wi
th a heavy chain, he squeaked out a question. “What is this place, Cade?

  “A little patch of land I like to call my own Eternal Gardens. He drew a key from his pocket. “Now do me a favor and unlock the gate so we can offer curb service.”

  Chill bumps ran along Collin’s arms. “You’re going to bury Scott out here?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Once the gate opened, Cade gunned the vehicle over an incline and into a clearing. The minute Cade brought the SUV to a stop and put the gear into PARK; he hopped out of the car. Opening the passenger side door, Cade took hold of his cousin’s shoulders, under the arms, and dragged his body out of the front seat.

  With a bob of his head, he motioned to Collin. “See that underbrush over there? Bring me one of the shovels I have hidden there. Get the other one for you.”

  “You have shovels out here?” Collin surveyed his surroundings, realized for the first time how isolated the area was. “What for? Wh…what are you gonna do?”

  “I’m taking care of Scott. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Collin swallowed hard, suddenly afraid of his own brother. The intense look on Cade’s face was one he’d never seen before.

  “Just get the goddamned shovels and help me.” He walked backward, dragging Scott over another hilly incline and down into a narrow ten by ten foot trench-like section between a grove of trees.

  After retrieving both shovels, Collin made his way into the thicker underbrush and met up with his brother in the neatly dugout furrow of ground. By this time Cade had let go of Scott and stood over what looked like a squared-off glade of freshly turned earth.

  Collin watched as his brother began to remove scrub California privet along with dead branches of hawthorn covering what looked like an already freshly dug grave.

  Before Collin could say a word, Cade mumbled, “Had this already dug for Quinn. It’ll be okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’ll dig another one just for you, baby, because I’m coming for you real soon, Quinn, real soon.”