Footsteps moved away from her. A door slammed. She reached for the tie around her neck. Her fingers trembled as she tried to undo the knot. Her pulse was racing. She expected someone to stop her at any moment.
But it felt like she was alone. It was very, very quiet. She didn't know how long that would last. This might be her only chance.
The knot was hard to budge and she almost cried in frustration, but she had so little air, she was afraid to use up what she might have left by sobbing into the fabric.
Finally, after minutes that felt like hours, she undid the knot which loosened the fabric, and she was able to pull it off her head.
She gulped in deep breaths of air as her gaze darted around the room. She had to blink several times to adjust her eyes to the night shadows.
She thought she might be in a basement. There were wooden stairs leading up to a door. Next to that were two big water heaters. There were empty crates tossed along one wall.
As her gaze ran around the room, she saw small windows near the ceiling that brought some light into the room, maybe from an outside streetlight. It was definitely getting dark outside now.
The floor she was on was concrete—chipped and dirty. There were some boxes across the room, but she didn't know if anything was inside.
She crawled onto her knees and then made it to her feet. She felt shaky and unstable, but she gathered her strength together. She needed to find a way out.
Moving across the room, she hoped to find some sort of weapon in the boxes, but the containers were empty. She tossed them aside. She wanted to scream in frustration, but would that make things worse?
A dozen questions ran through her mind.
Why was she here? Who had kidnapped her? How had they gotten into her apartment building? What did they want?
She could hear Dylan's voice in her head telling her to start thinking of answers instead of questions. She needed to problem solve. It didn't really matter who had brought her here or why. She just had to get out. She walked over to the crates, wondering if she could break them apart, use a jagged piece of wood as a weapon.
Her brain whirred with possibilities. Maybe she could crouch behind the stairs, find a way to get the jump on her kidnapper.
She wondered why they hadn't bound her hands, hadn't tied her to something. Maybe there really was no way out.
She walked up the steps and tried the door. It didn't budge even a hair when she tried to twist the handle.
Moving back down the stairs, she grabbed a crate and smashed it against the cement floor. It broke apart in several big pieces. It also made a great deal of noise. She held her breath for a long minute, wondering if someone would come back to see what she was doing, but nothing happened.
She took one of the pieces of wood and hit it against the ground again, trying to sharpen it into a point. It kind of worked, but she didn't have a lot of confidence that she could take down anyone with it.
She sat back on the floor and blew out a breath, trying to keep the fear at bay so she could keep thinking, stay focused on being strong and ready to defend herself. But inside she was terrified and wanted to burst into tears.
Don't give in, she told herself.
She could do this. She wasn't dead yet. Maybe there was a reason for that.
But what could they possibly want? She wasn't rich. Her mom had no money to speak of. And if this was about what she'd been investigating, then they probably wanted to shut her down, and the best way to do that was to get rid of her.
More fear ran through her.
Footsteps suddenly sounded overhead.
They were coming back.
She grabbed the piece of wood and jumped to her feet, holding her makeshift weapon behind her back. She moved closer to the stairs, hoping they wouldn't see her in the shadowy light.
The door opened. Her heart jumped into her chest.
A figure crossed the threshold. The man who had brought her down here?
But the man stumbled as someone shoved him from behind. He fell halfway down the stairs as the door slammed behind him.
For a split second, she thought it might be Dylan. He'd come after her, but he'd gotten caught, and they'd thrown him down here with her.
Then she saw the heavy coat, the baggy clothes, the graying hair, and she was suddenly terrified for another reason.
This was the man she had followed, the man she had seen outside Scott's wedding, the man who looked like her father.
"Who are you?" she asked, moving around to the bottom of the stairs, putting herself back in the light.
He straightened, lifting his head, his gaze finally meeting hers.
Oh, God! His face. His eyes. He was older, and he had changed, but he was also the same…
Twenty
"No. It can't be you," she said, shaking her head. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She'd been starved for oxygen. It was dark. This man was Neil Hawkins…or someone else…but he was not her father. He couldn't be.
He took a step down the stairs. "Tori," he said, a plea in his eyes.
She immediately backed up, shaking her head. "You're dead," she said flatly. "It's not you. It can't be you."
"It is me, Tori."
His voice brought a huge knot into her throat. Burning tears assaulted her eyes, but she wiped them away with one hand and raised the stick in her other hand, still not ready to believe what was right in front of her.
"I'm not going to hurt you, baby."
"I am not your baby. I don't even know who you are."
"I'm your father."
"You can't be. My father died. We buried him in a cemetery. He has a gravestone. We had a funeral. We grieved for him." She was shouting by the time she got to the end.
Every word had made his face go another shade of pale. His dark-blue eyes, so much like her own, stared back at her. "I'm sorry, Tori."
"What does that even mean?" she asked in bewilderment.
"I had to fake my death to protect you and your mother and Scott. They were going to kill you. They were going to kill all of us. There was no other way out."
"There had to be."
"There wasn't," he said flatly.
He moved down the stairs. He was still taller than her but only by about six inches now. And his face had aged. There were lines under his eyes and around his mouth. His hair was gray. He looked so much older than he had the last time she'd seen him.
"I—I don't understand," she said, taking another step back so there was at least two feet between them.
"I know you don't. I have a lot to explain."
"Yes, you do."
"You say you don't believe it's me, but is that really true? I thought maybe you had guessed after you saw me outside the wedding. You asked Jim questions about me."
"Yes, I did ask Jim, and he lied to my face."
"Jim was protecting me."
"Like Mitch?"
"Yes," he said heavily.
"So they both knew you were alive all these years?"
"They helped me fake my death."
"Well, of course they did. They had to. They were with you. Did you even go on a fishing trip down to the Caribbean?"
"We did. Everything was exactly as Mitch and Jim described, except the part where I died."
She looked at him in disbelief. "I can't believe it. How could either of them look us in the face and tell us so many lies? How could they hold me when I cried over you? How could they have hurt Mom the way they did?" She thought back to the first few terrible days, so many random moments becoming much more important now. "That's why Mitch told Mom he didn't want her to see your body, that it would be better if you were cremated before they brought you back. She was so off balance and devastated, she didn't fight it. Was there anything in the urn we buried?"
"Ashes from a fire."
"And the death certificate?"
"Paid for."
"Well, you thought of everything." She paused, another question coming into her head. "Did Joanie and
Elaine know?"
He gave a negative shake of his head. "No, we were afraid they'd tell your mother."
"What a huge secret to keep," she muttered. "I still can't believe Mitch and Jim could have acted so normally around us for so many years. They came to all my events. They saw how much I missed you, but they never veered from the story."
His eyes turned bleak. "They couldn't. They knew the stakes were too high. I asked them to look after you, Tori."
"But that was your job."
Her words struck a blow, and pain flashed through his eyes.
"I had no choice," he said.
"There's always a choice." It seemed unimaginable that he could be alive. "For seventeen years you've stayed in hiding, and there wasn't a time before now that you could show your face to me?"
"No. The men who were after me were still alive. I couldn't bet your life on the fact that they wouldn't still act if they realized I hadn't died."
She was suddenly reminded of where their reunion was taking place. "Do they know now? Where are we? Someone grabbed me outside my apartment. They put a bag over my head, and they put me in the trunk of a car. But we didn't drive for very long."
"We're in a building on Grant Street."
She sucked in a quick breath, knowing exactly where they were. "Where there used to be a print shop."
He raised an eyebrow in surprise. "How did you know that?"
"Because I've been looking into suspicious fires in the city after I almost got blown up in a residential hotel last week—the same hotel you went into but somehow escaped." Her gaze narrowed. "Did you shoot Robert Walker?"
"Yes," he said without apology. "I didn't know that was his name at the time. The building was supposed to be empty. He came at me with a gun, and I managed to get it away from him. I shot him, but I couldn't stop him from setting off the explosive. I barely made it out."
"Me, too."
He drew in a shaky breath. "I didn't know you were in the building, Tori, not until the next day. I thought you might have seen me watching you, but I never guessed you'd tail me to the building. Why would you do that? Especially if you didn't recognize me?"
"There was something about the way you looked at me, and I was doing a story on the homeless population and thought maybe you'd seen me at the encampment and had thought about trying to approach me but had second thoughts."
"You should never have followed a stranger into an empty building. Are you crazy?"
"Now you're the one who's angry?" she asked in amazement.
"You're right. This is all my fault."
"Damn straight it is. So who are the bad guys? Who threatened to kill the family? Who's the reason we're both locked in this room? If I'm going to die, I would like to know what I'm dying for."
"We're not going to die."
She would have believed him, if she hadn't seen the lie in his eyes. "We're not? Is someone coming to save us? Mitch and Jim, maybe?"
His lips tightened. "No, they're out of town. I sent them away. You were getting suspicious, and they didn't think they could lie to you anymore. I was hoping you'd let the police and fire department figure out who set the fire in the hotel and that you'd run into enough brick walls with your other questions that you'd give up."
"I don't quit because of a few obstacles, and if you'd stuck around for more of my life, you might know that about me," she said, hurt and rage racing through her.
"I know more than you think. I wasn't in your life, Tori, but I watched you from afar. I've seen what you've accomplished. I've read your work. You're an incredible writer—a far better journalist than I could ever be."
"That’s not true. And I don't believe you've read my work." She wanted to believe it, but there was too much pain coloring her thinking right now.
"I have. I can name every article. I had to leave you, Tori. But I couldn't not know what you were doing. I followed you on social media. I went to your graduations—high school and college. I watched your brother's baseball games. I was in the back of the church when he got married."
"I didn't see you there," she whispered, so many emotions running through her.
"I had on a wig, glasses, and a cap on my head. I came into the church as the ceremony started and left through the side door when it ended. I knew it was a risk, but I couldn't not be there when my son was getting married. Every year we've been apart has been more difficult than the last."
She gave him a long look, trying to judge if he was a really good liar or if he was telling the truth. As a child, she'd never considered that he could or would lie to her, but faking his death had changed all that.
"Where have you been all these years?" she asked.
"Roaming around the country, changing my name, my address, keeping out of sight for the most part, staying away from San Francisco except for special events."
"Like Scott's baseball games?"
"I only went to the play-offs."
"He knew you were there. He used to tell me he felt your presence. I was a little jealous of that, because I never felt you watching me."
"I was watching you, too. There were so many times I wanted to reach out to you, but I couldn't. Every time I thought about it, I remembered not just the threats I'd gotten, but what they'd already done."
"Like killing Henry Lowell's family?"
Shock widened his eyes. "You know about that?"
"I've been going through your old files this week. I saw the clipping someone sent you."
"I didn't realize I left it in the house. I should have been more careful about cleaning everything out, but things were moving fast back then. I didn't have a lot of time to tie up loose ends. I figured once I was dead, they'd leave you alone. And they did."
"After they searched your office files to make sure there was no one still working on the story," she said.
"Who told you that?"
"Hal Thatcher."
"You tracked down Hal?"
"Through Lindsay Vaxman. She's the one who gave me Hal's name. I didn't know you were alive, but I started to think maybe you'd been killed, that the fishing trip hadn't ended in accidental death. I even wonder if Mitch had killed you. I had to know what you'd been working on before you died."
"Why would you think that Mitch killed me?" he asked in surprise.
"Because Mitch was caught on a security camera leaving a warning note on my car."
"He was caught on camera?" her father echoed.
"Yes, he was."
"I can't believe it."
"That's what you can't believe?" she demanded.
"Sorry."
"So if Mitch and Jim are innocent, who was going to kill us seventeen years ago, and is it the same person who has locked us in this basement?" she asked. "I've pieced some of it together already. I know there's some kind of insurance and real-estate scheme going on."
"There is—a large, very profitable, and long-running scam, Tori. It started seventeen years ago. The biggest, richest, and most powerful men in this city were burning down buildings, collecting insurance, then winning bids for new construction and new sales opportunities on the back end. They hid their tracks through layers of corporations and by keeping their hands clean. They also had help from industry and political leaders, who were paid well for their trouble."
"Who was in charge?"
"The ringleader was Neil Lundgren. He was the one who created the circle of associates, who each had a job to do. Seventeen years ago, Lundgren inherited a large portfolio of real-estate in the city from his father, but many of the buildings were in run-down neighborhoods. The real-estate market wasn't hot back then. He couldn't sell them, and it would cost too much tear down and rebuild everything. Lundgren was friends with John Litton, a member of another prominent family, who had a similar problem. So they came up with a plan."
"They would torch the blighted buildings for each other, get the insurance money, and then rebuild," she said.
Admiration filled his eyes. "Exactly."
&nbs
p; "Who else was involved?"
"The mayor—Oscar Martinez. Lundgren and Martinez went to school together, and Lundgren donated a great deal of money to Martinez's campaign. Martinez would give Lundgren a heads-up on potential government building projects. Some were worth millions of dollars and some required redevelopment in the neighborhoods where Lundgren and Litton owned properties."
"They also had a partner in the fire department, didn't they?"
"Wallace Kruger. He had a gambling addiction and a lot of money problems."
"So they paid him to cover up the suspicious fires?"
"Yes. There were others involved, too. Litton had a brother in construction. He did a lot of work for them, too. They also made up dummy companies that no one could trace back to them."
"Okay, I think I've got it. They each used the other to keep their hands clean for the insurance payout, which then gave them money to rebuild and reinvest."
"And sometimes sell for quadruple the price of what the building would have been worth before the fire. The mayor liked the scam, because in an odd way they were cleaning up the city."
"How did you find out about it?"
"Henry Lowell. Henry had gone to school with Lundgren and Martinez. Over too much wine one night, Martinez told him he was worried about Lundgren's power and said something about selling his soul to the devil they both knew. Henry needed someone to start asking questions who wasn't as close to them as he was, so he brought me in." Her father's expression turned grim. "But Lundgren had spies everywhere. Someone betrayed me."
"Okay, back up. Everything you just told me happened a long time ago. You stayed dead and far away from here to protect us and to stay safe. What changed? Why did you come back? Why were you in that hotel?"
"I came back because the fires started up again. The scheme ended after Henry was killed and I disappeared. I think it got too hot for them, so they laid low. I watched the news over the next several years, looking for the pattern of fires to start up again. I thought I could somehow figure it out and find evidence from afar. I still wanted to put them away. But it was quiet for a long time. Martinez left politics after his term ended. Wallace Kruger retired from the fire department, so those allies were gone. Eight years ago, John Litton died of cancer. And then last year, Neil Lundgren passed away from a heart attack."
Once You're Mine Page 23
