What had I done? Had I just sent her to her death?
“It’s Rosalie’s brother-in-law. When you mentioned that Karma thought it might have been him, it bothered me. It made sense in a weird sort of way.” Hayden shook his head, the phone still stuck to the side of his face. “I saw him the night we made the notification. There was something about the way he looked at me that made me think there was something off about him. I thought he was just annoyed at the way we were upsetting his wife. But now ... I should have known it was him.”
“Why?”
Hayden shrugged. “I don’t know. But Karma is probably one of the only people who could positively identify him. Now that the body’s been found, he’ll want to wrap up all the loose ends.”
“But he couldn’t possibly know she’s in town, or where she is.”
Hayden barked the word now into the phone and hung up, his glance moving apologetically over me.
“We have a mole in the office. Someone put a virus in the computer systems and allowed an outside party to log in and find out where Kevin and his girl were during that whole murder investigation. I wouldn’t put it past someone doing the same thing to allow this man to know that Karma is on her way to a similar safe house in Houston.”
“But why? Why would someone do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it Waverly?”
Hayden’s face darkened just at the thought. But he didn’t answer.
We arrived at the airport. I put in a call to the hotel the moment we were on the plane, anxiously waiting as the phone rang some fifteen hundred miles away. When it was answered, I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.
“Connect me to the presidential suite, please.”
The phone rang again and continued to ring for more than a minute. Then the operator’s voice again.
“I’m sorry, sir, that room isn’t picking up.”
“Could you send security up there to check on the guest, please?”
“Sir, we don’t normally—”
“I realize that, but this is a special circumstance. Please send security up.”
Again I waited anxiously, picturing Karma in the bathtub or doing some other ordinary thing that would keep her from answering the phone. She was fine. I was panicking for no good reason.
But then the line was once again answered, this time by a man.
“Sir, I’m afraid there was no one in the presidential suite when we went in. Is this an emergency? Should I call the police?”
I caught Hayden’s eye and shook my head. He took the phone and began barking orders, commanding a sort of authority I knew I never would. When he disconnected and handed the phone back, he rested his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ve sent Peter and Amelia over there. If there’s anything to be seen, they’ll see it.”
I didn’t know what to say. All I could think was that the man had Karma and I was letting her down. I’d promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to her, but I’d failed.
The flight was just under two hours. Hayden got several calls in that time, but he never really said much beyond patting me on the arm and assuring me that everything was under control. When we landed, a police cruiser was waiting on the tarmac next to the SUV Megan was driving.
“Do they know anything?” I demanded of the woman who owned the company I worked for. I’d never said so many words directly to her before.
“Not yet.”
I brushed past her, but a big, burly cop stood in my way.
“We have a few questions, Mr. Thomasson.”
“I’d rather go out looking for Rosalie.”
“They’re here to help, Kasey.”
I shook my head, but the cop wasn’t going to move.
“What?” I demanded. “Would you want to be answering questions if your woman was missing?”
A touch of compassion crossed the man’s face, but he continued to refuse to move. I sighed, crossing my arms over my chest as I stood face to face with him.
“Do you have a picture of the missing woman?”
“Have you checked out Adam Price’s house yet?”
“We have. No one was there.”
“What about Rosalie Matthias’ apartment?”
The cop’s eyebrows rose. “We haven’t.”
“Why the fuck not? He would have had access. It would make sense for him to go there.”
The cop glanced at Megan like he was the one who worked for her. I turned and consulted Megan and Hayden with just a glance. It was an idea none of them had thought of.
“For Christ’s sake!”
I brushed past the cop and he let me go this time. The apartment was across town, not far from her sister’s house. I could probably be there before the cops figured out how to start their cars.
Megan grabbed my arm just as I was about to move around her SUV. I went to shrug her off, but then remembered who she was in the last second. She held out her car keys.
“Let me go with you.”
I nodded and we both climbed into the SUV, me behind the wheel. Hayden got in the back and I threw it into gear, skidding out of the airport and across three lanes of traffic to a symphony of blaring horns. Thank God for a semi-photographic memory.
I could recall what was written in the report Hayden had handed me himself regarding Rosalie Matthias. I could see the address in my mind’s eye, along with the map I’d looked up while I was trying to stay awake on the flight to California several days ago. I knew exactly where I was going.
We pulled up outside the building, blocking in half a dozen cars as I squealed to a stop. The apartment was on the first floor of the first building, a necessity to appease the obsessive compulsive component of Rosalie’s illness. I had my gun in my hand, a bullet waiting in the chamber, before I even recalled taking it out of the holster at my ankle. The door was closed and there didn’t appear to be anything happening behind the uncovered window. However, I wasn’t taking any chances.
I kicked the door four times before it burst inward, slamming with dry wall-damaging force. I moved cautiously across the kitchen and into the living room, aware of Hayden moving just as cautiously behind me. The living room was clean, the bathroom clean. I pushed open the door of the bedroom and expected resistance. Instead, what I got was a woman screaming and coming after me with a curling iron in her hands.
I grabbed her wrist, barely stopping my finger from pulling back on the trigger of my gun in response to the sudden movement. She cried out, trying to wrench free. I dropped the gun and pushed her back against the wall, slamming her wrists several times against the door jamb between bedroom and bathroom before she finally released the curling iron.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I’m Rita Matthias. This is my sister’s place.”
“Why are you here?” Hayden asked.
She spotted him, her eyes jumping from him to me before she finally relaxed and stopped fighting me. “I was packing up Rosalie’s things.”
“Where’s your husband?”
Confusion shown bright in her eyes. “What do you mean? He should be at work.”
Hayden shook his head. “He called in sick.”
Rita frowned. “He went to work. I saw him leave the house.”
“He didn’t. He went to a hotel downtown and kidnapped a woman we stashed there.”
Rita shook her head ferociously. “Not my Adam.”
“We have reason to believe Adam kidnapped Rosalie from the hotel where she was staying.”
“No!”
Rita jerked her arms away from my tenuous hold. I stepped back and watched her move into the living room, following only after Hayden went after her. She was pacing the length of the room, her movements clearly agitated.
“Why would Adam do such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” Hayden said, pulling a photograph out of his back pocket. I caught a glimpse of it, seeing Rosalie’s body as
she was the one and only time I ever saw her. “But we have reason to believe he was involved in this.”
Rita cried out when she realized what the photograph was. She tried to turn away, but Hayden grabbed her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and forced her to look at the picture. In spite of his dominance, there was something oddly compassionate about the gesture. This man knew pain.
“Someone tortured your sister for weeks before they killed her. Made her endure hours and hours of tattooing. Do you know what that must have been like, not just the tattoos, but the needle they used? Wasn’t Rosalie deathly afraid of needles?”
Rita began to cry, her knees going weak. She leaned hard against Hayden’s chest, trying to look anywhere but at that photograph.
“Where is your husband, Rita?”
“I don’t know.”
The words came out in something like a scream. If it weren’t for the fact that this woman’s husband might, at that very moment, be in the process of killing the only woman I had even considered I might be falling in love with, I would have felt bad for her. Her grief was genuine.
“He’s got another girl, Rita. How are you going to feel if he does this to another innocent woman?”
She shook her head. “There’s no way Adam did that. He wasn’t gone long enough to do that.”
“But he was gone during the time period that Rosalie disappeared?”
“Yes,” she said, tears choking her voice.
Hayden moved the photograph so she couldn’t see it, but he continued to hold her.
“How long was he gone?”
“Two days.”
“And did he leave again?”
She shook her head. “He was on a business trip. That’s all.”
Hayden glanced at me. “He has a partner.”
“Where might he have taken her?” I demanded. “Where might he have gone?”
Rita shook her head, tears still streaming down her face. But then she froze, her eyes slowly moving up to mine.
“There’s a storage place down the street from his office. I saw a receipt for payment on a locker there. I asked him and he denied having it, but I saw the receipt.”
I didn’t stop to ask any more questions. Every second we delayed might be a second Karma didn’t have to waste.
I ran out of the apartment and found Megan behind the wheel, waiting. There was excitement in her eyes when she saw me coming.
I barked an address, recalling the address of Adam’s place of business from the file. Megan took off, driving almost as recklessly as I had done.
I was impressed.
I leaned forward in the front passenger seat, urging the car to move as fast as possible, for all the traffic to just disappear, and for Karma to be okay. I kept trying to remind myself we’d only met a few days ago, but my heart didn’t give a shit. It already knew that I couldn’t be as happy as I’d been these last forty-eight hours with Karma.
I spotted the storage place on the left. We were in the far right lane. I pointed and Megan cut across traffic, nearly causing a collision between a four door sedan and a taxi. We hit the driveway too fast and the SUV left the pavement for a second. Then Megan slid to a stop just inches from the business office.
“You can’t park there!” the overweight, balding manager called as I jumped out of the vehicle.
“I need to know which unit Adam Price rents.”
“I can’t give that information—”
Megan walked up behind the guy, calm as could be, and pressed a gun against his back.
“This could be a matter of life or death,” she said pleasantly, sounding like a mom discussing class snacks with her kid’s teacher. “Tell us which unit it is.”
The man looked at me as if he was trying to get some sympathy, then headed to the desk, searching through a large book. A second later he said, “210.”
We didn’t even try to tell him not to call the police. It would be helpful, really, if he did.
I ran down the aisles, searching each unit for the right number. When I got to it, the door was already open.
Adam Price himself was sitting on a chair just to the right of the open door, almost as if he’d been waiting for us to arrive.
“I couldn’t do it,” he announced.
“Do what?”
He simply gestured inside. Lying inside on the cold, concrete ground, was Karma, her hands bound behind her back with thick cable ties, her mouth covered with a thick cloth tied too tight—and quite needlessly, since she was unconscious—around her head. I knelt beside her and automatically searched for a pulse. I couldn’t feel it at first, then realized I had my fingers on the wrong spot.
“Well?” Megan demanded.
“She’s alive.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Adam Price repeated.
And that’s when I saw the hypodermic needle lying on the floor beside her.
It was still full.
Chapter 23
Hayden
“He was being blackmailed,” the cop explained. Another cop, another city.
“Blackmailed how?”
“Someone sent him an envelope at his place of business that held several photographs of him with a young woman. I guess he’d had a fling while away at some sort of conference. He knew that his wife would leave him if she saw them, so he agreed to do what the man asked of him.”
“And that was?” Megan asked.
Getting information from this guy was like pulling teeth.
“He wanted him to fly to California and escort his sister-in-law from a motel in Smyer to a house in San Diego. He gave us the address, but our counterparts in San Diego said that the place has long since been cleaned out. They weren’t even able to get fingerprints. Not even off of the damn toilet handle. That’s the one place most criminals forget to wipe down.”
I leaned back against the wall, processing this information.
“Adam Price flew to California, picked up his sister-in-law, and delivered her into the hands of her killer?”
“He didn’t know that that was what he was doing. He thought he was delivering her to a friend, someone who would help her get back on her meds.”
“Why would someone blackmail him into doing that?”
The cop shrugged. “We all tell ourselves lies in order to live with our worst deeds.”
“You’re telling us he had no idea what he’d done?” Megan asked. “What about when his wife began to panic, pestering the police to do something?”
“He thought it would all turn out okay. And when it didn’t, when you notified his wife of her sister’s death, he got another phone call. They told him that he had to tie up loose ends and get rid of Karma Myers. But when it came right down to it, he couldn’t do it.”
“So he only kidnaps and delivers women to their deaths, he doesn’t actually kill them.”
I knew I sounded ugly and bitter, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d convinced myself that we were going to find the killer, but we were no closer to finding him than we’d been a yesterday.
“He has no idea who this person is.”
“None.”
“What about the blackmail? Does he still have the envelope?”
“He does. Our forensic team is looking it over as we speak.”
“Maybe that’ll come up with something,” Megan suggested.
But I doubted it. This guy was good. He’d covered his tracks every step of the way. And he was coming close.
Unless he planned on hitting the small towns around the bases where I’d served while with the SEALs, his next target would be here. Houston. This was the next place I’d called home.
Who would he target? Would it be someone I cared for? Would it be someone close to me? Or would he continue torturing innocents, leaving messages for me to attempt to interpret?
Who was this guy?
“Thank you for your help,” Megan said to the cop even as she watched me with deep concern etched into her intelligent forehead. She took my arm and l
ed the way out, holding on to me all the way to the car.
“What’s going on, Hayden?”
“Just working a case.”
“This is more than a case to you. I can see it.”
“Someone called this guy and gave him information gleaned from our computer system. This is the second time someone almost got hurt because of a virus on our system.”
“But we’re aware of it and we’re trying to fix it.”
“This shouldn’t have happened. We should have had it fixed already.”
“We’re working on it.”
“If Sam were here—”
“But she’s not here, Hayden. She hasn’t been here for five years.” She pressed a hand to my chest, right over my heart. “I know it’s difficult, but you have to move on. And Waverly ... why don’t you give her a chance? Why do you keep fighting her? She’s a good person.”
“She’s a great person,” I corrected. “I can’t, Megan. I just can’t.”
Megan studied my face for a long moment, that concern only growing more permanently etched into her forehead. I kissed her forehead, a platonic kiss that was meant to convey understanding.
“I’m fine, Megan. I’m just pissed that this could happen to us, that’s all.”
She patted my face with affection. “Shit happens, kid. We learn to live with it.”
“I suppose so.”
But there was some shit we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, live with.
I would find this guy and I would make him pay for what he was doing.
Chapter 24
Kasey
Her eyes began to flutter, her fingers moving slightly against mine. I leaned toward her, wanting to be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. When she finally did, those baby blues slowly focusing on me, she smiled.
“I knew you’d find me.”
I leaned in even closer and kissed the tip of her nose.
“I told you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“And you always keep your promises.”
“I try.”
Her smile widened even as her eyes closed again.
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