by Julie Miller
Dread sank like a rock in the pit of his stomach. Betty didn’t proofread everything. “Where’s the deputy commissioner now?”
“At the press conference, I’m assuming.”
“What press conference?” It wasn’t on the books, but Betty still knew about it. “What’s it about?”
“The commissioner’s announcing a new development in the Baby Jane Doe case.”
Oh, no, sweetheart. Don’t go public. Not yet.
“Where’s the conference?”
“She called me this morning to bring her her spare suit from work. She’ll be at St. Luke’s hospital until her son gets out of surgery to repair his spleen, or something like that. I imagine they’ll broadcast from there.”
Damn, damn, damn. The hospital would be swarming with cops to support Shauna and Seth. But it wouldn’t be enough protection. Not if he was there. And no one would ever suspect. Not even Shauna.
Eli pulled out his phone to call her. But she didn’t pick up. How could he warn her if she wouldn’t take his damn call?
“Give me the suit. I’ll deliver it.”
“I don’t think so.” Eli sat back down in her chair and tossed some papers into the air. “Fine. Fine.” She waved him out of her seat and led him into Shauna’s office. “I’ll need the time to clean up after you’ve destroyed everything here, anyway.”
SHAUNA TAPPED her watch. It was almost 9:00 a.m. Where was Betty with her clothes? The reporters would be gathering by now down in the lobby.
“Shauna, please. You’ve been up all night with Seth. You’re exhausted. And quite frankly, you look it. You’re about to break the biggest story of the year. Please…as a colleague, if you won’t let me be your friend…” Funny, how Michael could mix criticism with contempt and still make it sound as though he was doing her a favor. “Let me handle this press conference. If they badger you for details about Donnell Gibbs’s release, you might inadvertently tip your hand to this new evidence you’ve found.”
Shauna paced the empty hospital room down the hall from Seth’s. After a successful surgery, her son needed his sleep to recover. She’d known this conversation with Michael wouldn’t be pretty. So she’d left Sarah to watch over her brother while Seth’s partner, Cooper Bellamy, guarded the door. Austin waited in the hallway outside for a chance to visit the next time Seth was awake.
“It’s not open for discussion. My decision stands. It needs to be my face on the front page when we do this. My family is the one under attack. If Yours Truly wants me, I’m going to make it easy for him. He is not going to hurt my son or daughter or anyone I care about again.”
“Like Detective Masterson?”
“Give it a rest, Michael.”
“He’s done this to you, hasn’t he? Turned you against me.”
Shauna threw up her hands and walked away from his accusatory eyes. “There was never anything between us, Michael. There was never going to be anything between us.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass who you screw at night, Shauna.”
“Excuse me?” She whirled around, shocked to hear that much bile, even with the recent deterioration of their once-solid friendship. “This conversation is over.”
When she slipped around him to leave, he pinched her arm in a painful grasp and dragged her back to the center of the room. “No. It’s not.”
“Let go of me.” Knowing brute strength couldn’t overpower him, Shauna twisted in his grip. But Michael knew all the moves, too, and if anything, his hold on her tightened hard enough to dig into muscle and bone. “Ow! Dammit, what are you doing?”
Michael jerked her against him, dipping his mouth against her ear. “What I care about, Commissioner…” He spat the word like a curse. “Is that you have my job.”
Despite the heat of his body brushing against hers, Shauna shivered.
“So, unless you’re going downstairs to announce your resignation, there will be no press conference for you.”
“Like hell I will. This is about professional jealousy?”
“I can’t be jealous of someone I despise.”
He pushed her away long enough to pull out his phone and place a call. When it picked up, he uttered a single word. “Now.”
Unarmed, alone and overpowered, Shauna didn’t waste any time hanging around to decipher Michael’s code. “Fire!” She hollered the one word she figured would get a response, no matter who heard, jammed her foot into his instep and elbowed him in the gut. Once. Twice. When his grip popped open, she ran. “Fire! Fire!”
“Shut up, you bitch!”
She reached the door, but Michael was right behind her. He grabbed her collar, then slammed her forward into the solid wood, stunning her into a moment of dizzy silence. Before she could shake off the pain radiating through her skull, he’d pulled his handcuffs off his belt and bound her wrists behind her.
Then, with his hand muffling her screams, he lifted her and threw her onto the nearest bed. When he turned away to pick up a bundle of gauze and a bottle off the tray table, Shauna rolled her legs off the opposite side. But without the use of her hands, it was impossible to stop her slide to the floor, and damned awkward to climb back to her feet. “I didn’t respond to your threats when you sent them like an anonymous coward. I won’t respond to this one.”
“Then I’m sorry, Shauna. Dear, dear Shauna. But you’re about to be unavoidably—and permanently—detained.” He circled the bed and jerked her to her feet. He covered her scream with the pungent gauze, and as the room swam out of focus, she realized it was some kind of knockout drug. Something that made her hallucinate.
As her knees buckled, a black hospital orderly came into the room. Help me. She thought she said the words, but couldn’t hear any sound.
Wait, he was the waiter from the Union Café. No, one of the hostages from the bank robbery. Oh, God, no. LaTrese Pittmon.
He caught her as she fell, picked her up as if she weighed nothing and laid her on the bed. Then they covered her up, put an oxygen mask over her face, with nothing but the toxic fumes to breathe.
“Powell’s in the ambulance at the emergency entrance. You know what to do.” Michael gave the order. The bed moved. Too doped up to do more than listen, Shauna cringed inside her head when he touched her face. “You wouldn’t acknowledge your own shortcomings. You wouldn’t scare away. Edward said he wanted someone who could heal the department when he named his successor. It should have been me. I’m the one who got Donnell Gibbs to confess. I’m the one who made that task force and all of KCPD look like heroes again.”
So what? He’d recruited Gibbs through his connection to Pittmon? How did Michael know either man? And Powell was driving the ambulance? Richard Powell?
Pieces of the diverse puzzle began to fall into place. But Shauna was fading. She might be dying. And the elevator took her farther and farther away from her family, her friends, the cops who could protect her. It took her farther away from Eli—with the intense looks and passionate kisses and big, lonely heart.
I want us, he’d said.
Now, there never would be.
After Pittmon and Powell loaded her onto the ambulance, Michael climbed in for one last message. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head. I’ll handle the press conference for you. And I promise, in a couple of weeks, when your body’s found—my eulogy for you will be very moving.”
THE FESTIVITIES had started early.
Eli strode through the lobby of St. Luke’s Hospital, with Dwight Powers and a special friend in a bullet-proof vest following behind him. His detour to the district attorney’s office and jail had cost him precious time. But it was the fastest and clearest way to give Shauna the answers she needed.
Perfect. There were dozens of reporters, and plenty of television cameras and microphones to catch the show for the six o’clock news.
Dwight pulled Donnell Gibbs up between them. “You ready to run the gauntlet?”
Eli grabbed Gibbs’s other arm, intending to protect him as well as
encourage him to speak the truth. He nodded. “I always did love a good fight.”
Dwight grinned. “I knew there was something I liked about you.”
Eli snatched Rebecca Page by the arm as they pushed past her. “Here’s the scoop we promised.”
At the front of the room, once the gasps and gossip and flashing lights had subsided—once Michael Garner stopped basking in the limelight and prattling on about Commissioner Cartwright’s weakened state after the senseless beating of her son—Eli introduced Donnell Gibbs to the crowd and asked him one question.
“Do you see the man you told me about?”
The tiny black man could only stare at the floor and tremble for a moment. But then he looked at Eli and smiled timidly. Then he looked at the podium at the front of the room and pointed. “He’s the man who told me how to say I killed that little girl.”
ST. LUKE’S finally had to be cleared so that medical personnel and patients could move freely through the lobby. Newswires were buzzing about the arrest of Deputy Commissioner Michael Garner. Impeding a police investigation, planting evidence, coercion, accessory to murder—and that was just what Eli had been able to prove in one week. Give him some time, and he’d nail the bastard for terrorizing Shauna as well.
Just like Joe—he should have seen it. The greed in his eyes, the lust for power—the attitude that the world owed him something special for doing the same job that hundreds of good, honest men and women did every day.
Once he found the right suspect, the pieces had fallen into place. Over the years, Michael had worked a number of cases. A drug arrest here. A spousal abuse case there. He’d manipulated some investigations so that lighter charges were made. And he’d often directed the lucky recipients of probation instead of prison to a stay at the Boatman Clinic. In return, they provided useful services when he needed them.
He should be celebrating this with Shauna, Eli thought. At the very least, he wanted to tell her that he’d been good as his word. He’d uncovered Yours Truly playing by his own set of rules.
As much as she loved her children, Eli didn’t believe that garbage from Garner about Shauna being too overcome with grief and personal worry to be able to do her job. Something was wrong. Seriously wrong.
Cooper Bellamy tried to keep Eli out of Seth Cartwright’s room, but Sarah hurried to the door and opened it. Seth turned his head on his pillow—he was pale, bruised and swollen—but the tough-guy attitude was still intact. “What the hell’s he doing here?”
“Where’s your mother?” Eli asked.
Sarah touched his sleeve. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Did you watch the press conference?”
She shook her head. “Seth was asleep. What’s going on?”
“Michael Garner’s been arrested.”
“What?”
There was no time to answer all the questions. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Geez, Eli, you’re scaring me.”
Seth tried to push himself up on the bed. “If you’ve done anything to hurt her—”
“Hey—I love your mother. You better find some way to get your head around that, tough guy, because if I can find a way to make it work with her, I will.”
“Wow.” Sarah’s sigh was just like her mother’s. “You know, she likes you, too.”
Like was a pretty mild word to explain the gut-wrenching fear that something had happened to Shauna that Eli wouldn’t be able to protect her from or make right for her. Maybe, for the first time, he truly understood why the rules of protocol had been written in the first place. The law be damned. He couldn’t put it ahead of Shauna if she was in danger. She might be strong enough to play her role and do the right thing despite her feelings, but he wasn’t. He’d lost too much in life—his parents, the love and innocence of his baby sister, his partner—and his ability to trust himself, to trust that he was a good man who could do a little good in this world.
He wasn’t going to lose her.
“Your mother?” Eli repeated, making the urgency of the situation completely clear. “If we can’t account for her, then she’s in danger.”
“Ah, hell.” Seth issued a warning that held a hint of acceptance in it as well. “You’d better be as good at tracking down the truth as Mom says you are. She left right before I dozed off—about an hour ago. Said she was going to prep her speech.”
“Prep her speech? What does that mean?”
Sarah answered. “It means she’s goes off to find a room by herself to practice what she wants to say.”
When Eli found the room at the end of the hall with the missing bed and the blood on the door, he knew he had to find her.
And Michael Garner was going to show him the way.
Chapter Thirteen
Shauna had come to more than an hour ago, and she supposed that if she hadn’t been trained as a negotiator and public spokesperson, she’d have run out of things to say about fifty-nine minutes ago. And she’d be dead.
She didn’t suppose this shabby excuse for an apartment that reeked of chemicals and sweat was her final destination, either. If LaTrese and Powell had their way, they’d have shot her and dumped her out of the ambulance and been done with her. But apparently, Michael had brainwashed them very carefully. Preying on the weakness of their drug addictions, and no doubt using some of the torturous devices around the room—like the metal collar now clamped around her neck—he’d very carefully constructed a crime.
And he’d selected her as his victim.
His killers—Powell and Pittmon.
The method and place of execution were a mystery she was in no particular hurry to solve. But it must involve a phone call or some other sign that these two were waiting for.
Why had Richard Powell killed his two accomplices at the bank? Because he was “following orders.” Why had Gibbs confessed to Baby Jane’s murder? Because he believed the “story” Michael had taught him was real.
So what had Pittmon been trained for?
Shauna had a sickening feeling that she already knew.
“So, LaTrese—” she started. They’d moved to first names about ten minutes ago. “I understand you had a relationship with one of the nurses at the Boatman Clinic. Daphne Hughes?”
“Yeah, Daph and I had a thing.” The blank look in his eyes was similar to the look she’d seen in Donnell’s. He might not even remember what he’d done two years ago. “She wasn’t too bright, but she was good in the sack.”
“Did you get her pregnant?”
LaTrese threw up his hands and backed away. “I ain’t no daddy. Those things make too much noise. They cost too much money.”
But Shauna was so sure. “What was the baby’s name?”
“Makayla.” His chin jerked up. He knew he’d been duped. He snatched the chain connected to Shauna’s neck and dragged her off her feet. “I ain’t no daddy. She ain’t my little girl.”
“That’s because she’s dead, isn’t she?” Shauna coughed the words through the constriction at her throat. She was dangling, hanging. If Pittmon didn’t release her, she’d be dead soon enough, anyway. But she wasn’t going to die without knowing the truth. “What happened? She cry too loud? Did you shake her too much? Hit her too hard?”
“No!” The chain caught beneath her chin and dragged her higher.
Powell cursed at them from the mouse-infested futon where he’d propped up his swollen leg. “Shut up! Both of you! I can’t think!” He massaged the knee Eli’s bullet had shattered with the butt of his own gun. “Why doesn’t he call?”
“We could just get rid of her.”
“No! It’s a perfect crime. We’ll get away with it if we do it right.”
Shauna struggled to breathe. “The perfect crime is what Michael is getting away with.” She coughed, but it only dug the ring in further. “He’s framed you two for murdering me. He’ll walk free. You’ll take the…rap.” It was the last word she had air for.
Pittmon shook her like a fish on a
string. Had he killed his own daughter that way? Jane Doe? Makayla?
Eli, where are you?
The telephone rang and Pittmon dropped her to the floor. Shauna collapsed in a heap, sucking in deep breaths through the bruised muscles of her throat.
“Get it!” Pittmon crossed the room to snatch the phone from Powell’s hand when the crippled man didn’t do it fast enough. “It’s got to be him.”
“Back off. I’ll answer.” Powell flipped open the phone. “Yeah.” He listened for a moment, his icy eyes narrowing with confusion. “But that isn’t what you said before! That isn’t how it’s supposed to play out!” Clearly agitated by the message on the other end of the line, Powell tried to argue. “But we were only supposed to be here long enough to switch out vehicles. Where the hell is Pittmon’s car?”
Shauna laughed to get their attention. “This isn’t the first plan that hasn’t gone right, is it, Powell? You weren’t supposed to get shot at that robbery, were you? You hadn’t counted on Eli Master—”
“Shut her up!”
Shauna scrambled like a crab to escape Pittmon’s charging fist. The first glancing blow knocked her to the floor. The second blow never came.
“Police! Open up!”
A battering ram smashed through the door and both men reached for their guns.
Eli crashed through before the S.W.A.T. team. He dove to the floor and rolled. “Drop it!”
The exchange of fire was brief. Eli took out Richard Powell before he even got off a shot. Shauna kicked out, knocking Pittmon off his feet. His shot went wide and the big man went down, wounded, before the special team swarmed in and secured his weapon and his fists.
